… is that I can go home tomorrow. The car to pick me up has been arranged for 14:30 but if the last time that I was here is anything to go by, it’ll be long after midnight before I arrive back home.

My cleaner contacted me too. As I won’t be back until late, would I like her to fetch my Friday shopping for me?

As I have said before, the solidarity amongst the residents of my building is something that I’ve never ever encountered before.

The bad news is that it has not been confirmed that it is indeed the carcinogenic protein that has entered my nervous system.

That means that unfortunately the end is nigh because it will slowly creep through my body, including what’s left of my brain. And they did warn me right at the beginning of all of this that the end will not be very pleasant.

To be on the safe side, I gave my doctor a bit of lip this afternoon. In fact, she cut out a sample of the nerves in my lip to examine it – to see how far the cancer is advancing. If it’s that far up my body it won’t be long.

And I have made an executive decision – and as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, an executive decision is a decision where if the person making the decision makes the wrong decision, he is executed.

And the decision is that seeing as I can now barely walk, and I’m entitled to transport to any hospital up to 500 kms from my home, I have decided regrettably to end my association with Leuven and transfer my papers here. I really can’t struggle around on the train any more these days

In all honesty I don’t think that I’m very far off having to have a carer. It’s a shame that Percy Penguin can’t drive. 30 years of working in an Old People’s Home will have prepared her for whatever she might encounter with me but it’s no good if she can’t take me to the shops.

Meanwhile back at the ran … errr … hospital I had a bad night last night. It took me an age to go off to sleep, for a reason that I really don’t know

At least there was no blood test at 05:20 this morning but they did awaken me at 07:10 for something and again at 08:50 when they brought breakfast. So once more I had breakfast in bed.

After having a really good wash I sat down and listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There was something about changing one of my appointments around because of this therapy thing. I managed to do it absolutely fine. It wasn’t until the Tuesday when we were talking about my Welsh lesson that I realised that I’d promised to go on behalf of the class to some kind of meeting or conference on the Tuesday afternoon. Of course, that was now out of the question. I began to think about what I was going to do about it and how I was going to solve this problem.

There was something else too about being round at a girl’s bungalow. It was a girl whom I knew from school and a few of her friends. It involved going up a ladder onto the roof and doing certain things. I noticed while they were up there that part of the roof hadn’t been slated properly. There was someone else with me so I sent him up the ladder and gave him instructions as to how to do the roofing. In the end all the girls came down except the one whom I knew. She was still up there so I threw her a small pot of white paint and a brush and she painted some kind of slogan on the roof. She ended up with more paint on her than on the roof but never mind. When she came down, she reached as far as the edge of the roof and realised that her bra had come undone. She was having to fiddle around with it and fasten herself back in etc and hope that no-one else would notice before she came down the ladder. I noticed that her bra was a red tartan one. Eventually she managed to put it n beneath her clothes. As she came down she turned to me to ask if I’d sorted out the roof for her. I told her that someone had been up to realign the slates. She said that it didn’t look correct. I replied “no it doesn’t but that’s probably because you have the wrong slates. It’s certainly all properly realigned now”. She then began to talk about a few other jobs she needed doing like putting an electric junction box in the wall etc.

When we were living in Shavington there was a path that led to Willaston that went over the railway. The kids around there had all kinds of fun scrawling incorrect messages on the zebra so the controllers of the zebra decided that they would no longer stop there. It had already messed up all of my timetables before and it was going to do it again. One of the boys and I had this plan that we’d tackle this mess of graffiti by me climbing into the back of the truck and asking a pile of questions while this cat was crawling up my leg onto my lap. It took a long time to arrange this kind of meeting and it was as if she knew what most of it was about. She’d been talking for about 0.7 days even though I couldn’t walk and the cats were stuck in and the doctor had said so much about it and the kids couldn’t concentrate on doing their homework without thinking about the mill.

Usually, although I’m dictating while I’m asleep, when I come to transcribe the notes I can recall little bits of what’s been going on that ring a bell with me from the night. However for that one, I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of that one and it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever – not that many of my nocturnal travels actually do.

So back into the night and we’d all gone round to someone’s house in our family to watch a football match, Arsenal against some European side. We were all there watching this game in the living room. Just then my father pulled up in a van. We heard that he might be coming but he hadn’t been there at the start. As we watched, he just parked up outside. I opened the door and asked him “why don’t you reverse the van up the drive?”. He made some remark about how he couldn’t reverse like many other people. Then he opened the door and my mother and 6 or 7 other people swarmed out. We all said that it was totally stupid bringing that many people in this little van. They all came into the house and we had to explain to them how the wiring system works because we had special plugs for the television. While we were looking at the TV plugs we noticed that the wallpaper on one of the walls was becoming really damp. We all settled down – or at least, they settled down taking everyone else’s chair. When we came back in there was nowhere really for us to sit. There was just one seat so I said to one of the girls “you’d better sit in that seat because you’ll be comfortable there” because her seat had been occupied by my father’s sister’s husband. He had a reputation for chasing after the girls. She felt extremely uncomfortable when she saw him sitting in her seat.

When the nurse awoke me I was talking about gardening. We had all kinds of fruit trees, plants and so on and we’d been transplanting them. The girl with me had taken a couple of apple trees and planted them outside. A few hours later she brought one of them in to plant inside the house again, saying that it wasn’t doing very well outside and had caught some kind of disease or something. I was looking at one of the flowering plants in a pot. It hadn’t done very much for a couple of years but I noticed that now it had about half a dozen flowers on it and a couple more were forming. I told her about them but she was too busy at that moment to come to have a look.

For much of the day I was left on my own and was able to pile on with selecting the music for future radio programmes. In fact I’m now at 25th October 2024 but there are several gaps in there. I have to think about what music I’m going to play for my Hawkfest and to commemorate the first Isle of Wight Festival.

There were the usual nurses coming to and from and I had the usual gaggle of doctors come to see me, and that was when they told me the bad news. But they tell me that there are all kinds of follow-up action to come, some to be undertaken here and some that can be undertaken closer to home.

And so I’m going to be very busy in the near future, and the local ambulance service is going to be making a lot of money out of my health insurance providers. In case you don’t know, here in France they have what they call VSLs – Voitures Sanitaires Légères – that are like taxis but equipped to take people who aren’t mobile to their hospital appointments etc.

This afternoon the doctor came back with a friend. They wanted to take a sample of my lip tissue with a piece of my nervous system. So they injected my lip with a local anaesthetic and then attacked it with a scalpel. It took three attempts before they actually ended up with a nerve.

They did tell me that if I didn’t want the lip thing they could take a sample of grease from somewhere else but that would involve a surgical intervention. But sod that for a game of soldiers.

Importantly, while they were doing that I missed my coffee so I had to go out and hunt it down. They didn’t want to give it to me because of what I’d just been through but I insisted.

After tea I began to write my notes but a nurse came to see me to tell me that I must be à jeun tomorrow morning as I’m having something done to me at 12:00 for which I have to have an empty stomach.

But that fasting starts at 06:00 so as she’s coming to put a needle in me at 05:30 I persuaded her to bring me some bread jam and coffee. I’m not going without a meal.

So right now I’d better go to bed and make myself ready for tomorrow morning. I’m not looking forward to the needle, I’m not looking forward to whatever it it that they are going to do to me, but it will be nice to be back home.