Saturday 29th July 2023 – JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT …

… that it was safe to go back into the water, along came Len Fairclough.

And just when I thought that I was slowly pulling myself out of this quite depressing run of bad nights, there I go again

There’s not really much point in going to bed early if I can’t go off to sleep. And even when I do manage to go to sleep, if I’m waking up every five minutes it’s pretty pointless.

There are always sleeping pills of course, and this has been discussed before, but as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, my little voyages during the night are much more interesting and exciting than anything that ever happens to me during the day.

Life would be much less interesting if I never remembered where I went after dark.

When the alarm went off I was fast asleep and it really was quite an effort for me to haul myself out of bed.

It was even more of an effort to haul myself out of the apartment to go to the shops.

There wasn’t any point going to Noz because they had nothing there that I needed. It’s not all that often that I come away with nothing

LeClerc wasn’t all that much better either. There was nothing there of any interest today. They had one last box of falafel left so I threw that in my trolley to put in the freezer with the others. I don’t really need them but they are only on sale quite rarely so I stock up when I can.

Thinking on though, there are only three meals that I have that aren’t planned in advance. So now I have the falafel, sausages, sausage rolls, some Chinese whatsits, burgers, breaded quorn fillets, curries and once there’s some more room in the freezer there will be some vegan pie.

There’s enough in there to keep me going for a good while. I don’t have to worry too much about food.

Back here I had my cheese on toast and I hadn’t even finished my coffee before I crashed out. I was gone away with the fairies for hours and I felt absolutely dreadful afterwards.

Once I was awake again it took an age to gather up my wits, and then I had a listen to the dictaphone. I had a kind of manservant last night. I was going somewhere so I asked him to prepare some kind of meal that I could take with me. When I went to pick things up I couldn’t exactly tell what it was. It looked as if it was a curry. He said “no, it’s a green bean thing”. I had a look. I could see that it was enormous, what he’d cooked. It was in a vacuum-packed plastic bag thing. There looked enough in there for a couple of meals. It looked really interesting to take with me.

And then I was out on the Labrador coast last night trapping furs and animals. I was doing OK but felt that the agent guy whatever his name was was taking advantage of the power that he had over the people. A TV crew came to interview him and what he was doing there. It turns out that he was leaving after just a couple of years in his post and going somewhere. This was another dream with lots more to it than this but I can’t remember now.

Next I had to go to Manchester for work. As I was passing the railway company offices I thought that I’d call in there to book a ticket on the train. I went in there and they began to look through the timetable and wrote out an itinerary which was to leave Crewe, go to Chester, Chester-Liverpool, Liverpool-Manchester. The return was an express back at about 20:00. I thought “how is this possible? Why aren’t you booking a ticket for me on the local stopping train direct?”. The replied “you can’t buy that ticket from here at the railway offices, only the long-distance tickets you can have”. We had a really lengthy discussion about what were my plans, what I usually did etc. In the end they insisted and gave me this piece of paper with my itinerary on it. I realised that I had to return back to my office to pick up my possessions and return for the train. I only had 15 minutes to do that before the train leaves. I looked at the ticket and it wasn’t actually a ticket but a simple itinerary and told me that I had to call at the ticket office to pick up and pay for the ticket. I thought “I’m never going to be back here on that train in 15 minutes”. Back at my office I then had to enter a lift to go upstairs. There was a queue for the lift and it seemed to take ages. When I left the lift I was nearly knocked over by my boss. That led to some kind of discussion. All the time, time was ticking away. I could see that this was just going to be totally out of the question and absolutely impossible.

Back in that dream again about the railway tickets. We all climbed into the lift to leave the building. The first thing that I noticed was a CA Bedford ice cream van registered in Turkey. As the lift was going down I asked one of the guys if I could take a photo of it. He replied that it was his girlfriend’s so we had a big discussion about caravans. I told him about the two that I had down in the Auvergne and how I’d scrapped them. When I went to take a photo with my telephone it wouldn’t work. The one that I took with the big camera came out blurred and indistinct so I had to run to the car, give my things to someone to pack away and run back to the building to try to take another photo of it again. There was a dog there that I wanted to photograph too. All the while, time was just disappearing and I would never catch this train.

At one moment I was walking down a footpath with someone but as soon as I awoke all of it disappeared and I can’t remember anything more about that other than walking down the footpath with someone.

I was back in that dream about the railway again. We were all cramming into the lift ready to go back down again. I can’t remember now what happened once we were in the lift but again it was something else that went on for quite some time. All the time, time was just ebbing away and it was going to be impossible to pick up this ticket and be on this train at 09:00 or whatever.

What was left of the day was spent out on the Trans Labrador Highway back in 2017 making my way towards Goose Bay

Tea tonight was chips (now that I have some potatoes) and a breaded quorn fillet with salad and quite enjoyable it was too, as usual. Meals are quite nice around here these days.

Having now written my notes I’m going to dictate the radio stuff and then go to bed. If I’m lucky I might even have a decent sleep, but that’s really not all that likely. Tomorrow I have some pizza dough to make as I’ve now run out, but I have the digestive biscuits to keep me going.

So why knows? Maybe I might even find something else to do too, if I can stay awake long enough to do it.

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