… today that I haven’t done in an absolute age.
Or, more to the point, I haven’t done something, the first time for an age, that I would usually do.
And that is that I haven’t been to the shops today. In fact, I’ve not even et foot out of the apartment.
After I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages I did a quick lap around the kitchen to see what I needed today. I came up with bananas, pears, and that was about that.
As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m not feeling myself right now, which is just as well, so there’s no point exerting myself for no good reason. Consequently I decided that I would stay in.
What was strange about that though was that for the first time for a while I’d had a decent sleep. Not a great deal of stuff on the dictaphone so I transcribed it in no time at all. There was a famous actor on board a ship last night, someone like Long John Baldry or like that. He was recounting his adventures on board this ship in some rather graphic detail. There was a lesson to be given over the ship’s radio so he went off to gather together his things to prepare for this lesson in his cabin. I was preparing for it too because I was planning on taking it but I awoke before it actually started off.
One of my old bosses was living in a retirement home in Alsager somewhere later on. He’d ordered a huge supply of American TVs because you could still receive some of the pay-for-view programmes for free on them. They slung them in the back of my red Cortina estate and I had to take them. I didn’t know exactly where I was going but I knew that a woman with whom I used to work lived there so I went to see her. She was in the middle of entertaining some neighbours but she managed to get rid of them. In the end she pointed out the retirement community where the guy lived with his wife. I went round there and eventually managed to find my way in. Some young girl on crutches pointed me to a member of staff. They did all of the enquiries and came back out with a guy with whom I used to work. We had a good chat about everything, what we’d been doing in the past. Then we went to unload the car. The car was miles away from this Old People’s Home, I’ve no idea why it was so far away. He asked me all kinds of questions so I told him about the paperwork and the way that you can claim Income Tax relief on these purchases etc. It was anextremely complicated discussion. In the end we came to where my car was. He began to help me to unload it into a day-by-day set of equipment. He told me that he’d have them sent up and installed. It wasn’t until I was driving away that I was wondering whether these were actually on the American electricity system or the European one in which case they’ll all need resetting. I didn’t think about that, although I’m i’m impressed that I could think about it even in a dream, and by now it was far too late because the guy had taken away all the TVs and gone
There was no bread for my mid-morning cheese on toast, but that’s not a problem when I have some flour, some yeast and an air fryer. Just a simple bit of bread thrown together and it worked well enough, only I mustn’t cook the next one so long, and I must also remember to turn it over halfway through.
But that’s why we have an air fryer – it’s all trial and error and hit and miss and if you don’t make mistakes how are you supposed to learn from them?
The rest of the day has been spent wading through a pile of directories going through, sorting out duplicates, deleting or discarding half the stuff that I found and all that kind of thing. I’ve no idea how many GB of memory I’ve freed up today but it’s certainly ding its job.
All of the operating system and the program files are (or will be by the time that you read this) on the 1TB SSD and if you aren’t into solid state hard drive I recommend that you have a go. Loading up is lightning-fast and saving is instant instead of the usual couple of second pause.
All of the active data files are on a 4TB hard drive that’s in the casing and there’s room for another one, which I’ll be installing in early course and which I’ll use for images.
Then there’s the array of several hard drives that I use for all kinds of back-ups and that works quite well. So let’s have three cheers for that … “hip hip array!” – ed.
Tea tonight was a few nuggets of breadcrumbed soya that I bought weeks ago from Noz. A good buy that. I had some salad with it and the last of some very sorry-looking potatoes that I diced and cooked in the air fryer.
But I’ve had a bad attack of nostalgia again today. When I was photographing the music festival in Fredericton back in 2014 I came across a group that IMPRESSED ME VERY, VERY MUCH.
When Liz and I were running Radio Anglais back in the old days I used to receive press releases from the Festival and they would send me every year a CD with a track from each of the groups that would be playing there that year, so I’d know who to look out for.
Anyway, around on the playlist tonight came THIS SONG. It’s one of the most beautiful songs that I’ve heard for years and always comes round on the playlist when I’m feeling really depressed and all it does is just heave me deeper into the pit
I remember singing it to someone a few years ago when it really was “a cold one” that particular night at about 02:30 in Coronation Gulf. It just reminds me too much of Canada and the High Arctic and all of that that went with it.
It’s almost 4 years to the day that I set out to cross the Atlantic by sea The artist Samuel Gurney Cresswell said “a voyage to the High Arctic ought to make anyone a wiser and better man” but it didn’t work for me.
To quote from the songI TOTALLED MY LIFE
SO I’M GONNA FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO DO
‘CAUSE IF I EVER WAS SAY TO YOU
ALL OF THE THINGS THAT YOU WANTED ME TO
I’D HAVE TO FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO DO,
So Mother Mary won’t you come sing a song for me
And make it last all damn night
‘Cause you know I can’t hang on to see
When this noose pulls me so tight
