… miserable day today.
Not that you would have thought so from the way that things began, because when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was actually up and about already.
After the medication and checking the mails and messages I sat down to work through the Welsh lesson that we would be doing today. But once again, the Teflon brain made its appearance and nothing seemed to stick to it today.
It’s something that is becoming more and more of a daily occurrence, this. It makes me feel rather like Homer Simpson and “every time I learn something new, it pushes out something old”.
It reminds me of a discussion that I had with someone the other day on a Social Network group where I could remember the name of a family who lived in a certain house in village where I lived as a child, over 50 years ago.
“That’s pretty good going” said the woman to whom I was talking.
“That’s as maybe” I replied “but ask me why I walked into the kitchen 5 minutes ago”.
Anyway, the lesson itself was pretty dismal. I couldn’t remember anything and my head was full of spaghetti instead of any coherent thought. I was glad, if not relieved, when it was finished.
What didn’t help was the fact that I was desperately fighting off a wave of sleep. That’s the kind of thing that you can only do for so long and then at some point this afternoon I succumbed.
Out like a light too, and for quite a while. It was quite depressing today.
There’s a pretty good reason though why I was feeling so awful, as I found out when I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I was at home on my own. Everyone else had gone out. I put my phone on charge and was sitting doing a few things here and there. The place was quite untidy. Eventually I took hold of the telephone to check that it was charged and opened the door into the corridor, but opened it really quickly so as to frighten anyone who might possibly have been loitering around outside. There was no-one there so I made my way down the corridor and began to go down the stairs. I heard the front door open so I quickly dashed down to the bottom to turn the lights on to make it look as if I was working down there. I came back up. It was my mother who was for some reason quite angry saying something like I hadn’t spoken to her since she left to go out earlier. I replied that that’s hardly surprising because she wasn’t here. She was out.
Later on I was out in Labrador again, wandering around an old fishing village inspecting what remained there or traditional activities. The harbour was there of course but everything else was closed or run down or depleted. The place was looking really sad and sorry for itself. I hardly recognised it from its heyday when it was in the photos in a lot of the newspapers etc at the time.
Did I dictate the one about going on a coach trip … “no you didn’t” – ed. There had been snow in the mountains. We were staying somewhere for a couple of nights. We were having lots of problems with the snow but it stopped. I thought that this would be the moment to try to leave this valley, up into the mountains and out the other side. We sent the passengers off in a coach. Apparently the conditions were so bad in the mountains that the coach became stuck in the snow. I had to walk all the way after it, rescue the passengers and bring them back down the valley by walking. It took several days to do this. I managed to chivvy them up into being a little enthusiastic about it but it was clearly not going to work and there would be loads of complaints. In the end we managed to struggle back to the hotel where we’d been. I just hoped that the landlord hadn’t re-let the beds so that people had a place to go back to rest while we thought of another plan. Someone said to me that they knew that I’d tried my best but that I certainly wasn’t any expert. I replied that I’m certainly the first to admit that I have an awful lot to learn about everything.
Then we were back in Labrador. There had been a table lamp set up on a table there that over the years had melted a hole in the top of the television. You could travel in and out of this hole and broadcast yourself to wherever you wanted to go so I went to Labrador and had a look around. I found that the Europeans were packing up and making ready to move off somewhere else. These items said something about having flights back to the local people but I thought that it was more like that the company had exploited the area for all that it was worth. Now there was nothing whatever left of the interest so they were disposing of the evidence basically by giving it to the Inuit and hoing that the Inuit would clean it up.
Later still I was with another driver from Shearings spending the night in a Bed-and-Breakfast in Welsh Row, Nantwich. While we were out in the evening we came to this Australian group of older people who were quite intoxicated and in a bad temper. They were looking for some fish and chips. I don’t know why my friend did it but he rounded them up and told them to follow us and come to have some chips at the pub. I thought it strange because it was the last thing that I wanted to do, to be associated with people like this. They followed up and walked past 2 or 3 fish and chip shops. They were protesting. In the end they came to our pub. We went up to our room for the night. You could hear these Australians whining and moaning at the bar. Next morning I awoke. It was 09:20 and we had to be on the road at 10:30. I thought we’d have to hurry. My friend had been up and out once. I heard someone talking about a Mausolina. I asked him what it was. He replied that it was something that was petit, petit, petit, petit as in “small”. I thought that i’d better dress quickly and see if there’s any food. I don’t want to talk about these Australians because I had a feeling that things hadn’t gone very well with them last night and I didn’t want to stir the pot.
And finally I was a pilot on board an HMS sailing ship that had put into Labrador. We’d left the ship and went for an explore in a settlement on the coast that was formerly some kind of European colony. I can’t remember very much at all of this from here on.
It seems that I’m spending a lot of time in Labrador during the night. It’s probably the effect of wading through all of these notes that I wrote or am trying to write about my trip there in 2017. And I need to push on with that.
Today though I’ve been wading through the working files on the computer and deleted or moved, would you believe, 60GB of data from the working drive – something that I should have done a long time ago. Despite how awful I was feeling, that was some pretty good work today.
The physiotherapist came round today and we went for a walk outside. I told him that things are going downhill as far as my mobility goes and he’s going to have a think about what he can do try and pump me up to keep going. But right now it’s quite a struggle to move around.
Tea tonight was a taco roll with some of the stuffing that was left over. There’s still plenty for a chili sin carné tomorrow with some kidney beans added in.
While we’re on the subject of Welsh lessons … “well, one of us is ” – ed … regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I was thinking about doing 2 Welsh courses next year. One course as the successor to the one that I’m doing now and another to retake the current course.
What has happened though is that I noticed a three-week crash course on a full-time basis offered by the Gwent College of Further Education. I’ve undertaken a few courses with them in the past and quite enjoyed them, so I’ve signed up for this one.
That will keep me out of mischief for the month of August, so with the one-week Summer Revision School in July and three weeks in August to do the course again, if I haven’t grasped it by then, then I never will.
All I need now is to wind up my brain, but that’s a pretty hopeless cause these days. I’m losing my braincells at a rather rapid rate of knots. All I have left are my marbles but I’ll be losing them before too long.
