… evening with a visitor who has come all this way to see me.

The youngest daughter of my niece from Canada stuck her head in to say “hello” this evening as she passed by on her peripatetic perambulations.

One thing that I’ve always tried to instil into youngsters is the importance of doing something different, as every student’s CV is identical these days, with the same courses, the same pastimes, the same interests and so on.

Foreign travel is one of the ways to go and some universities offer foreign exchange student programmes. After Liz (“that” Liz, not “this” Liz) died I made sure that her daughter was accepted onto a foreign exchange programme in 2010 and I actually took her to her University in Ontario from London.

St Francis-Xavier University in Antigonish has one too and my niece’s middle daughter ended up in Madrid but the youngest one was accepted onto an exchange in Edinburgh and she’s been there since Christmas.

She’s off to visit Mont St Michel and the Christian Dior museum tomorrow so she thought that she’d catch an earlier ‘plane and come to see me

Even though it’s only – quite literally – a flying visit, there was a lot of preparation to do and as a result I was in bed quite late last night

It was another peaceful night where I completely lost track of time, and no-one was more surprised than me when the alarm went off. Anyway I hauled myself out of bed and headed for the bathroom, and then into the dining area for the medication.

Having done that I arranged the dining area for the nurse but for some reason she was late coming today and I had to hang around for a while. None of this “not quite dressed” lark of Sunday when he came early.

After she’d finally arrived, changed my dressing, fitted my puttees and cleared off I could come in here and revise for my Welsh lesson. And then armed with my coffee and flapjack I joined in the lesson.

The lesson was like the curate’s egg – good and bad in parts. I was quite happy with some of the stuff that I did but disappointed with other parts. I put it all down to my failing memory but I forgot to mention that.

At the end of the lesson the first thing that I did was to make the dough for a loaf. I wasn’t sure whether my great little niece (or is she my little great niece?) would want to take advantage of my comfortable sofa and if so, we’d need something for breakfast

Then I came in here while the dough was proofing so that I could transcribe the dictaphone notes. I’d been arrested for something that I’d said but managed to talk my way out of it. Then I was arrested a second time that happened to be during a period when I was having a dance with another girl. She thought that me being arrested was funny. I had a key in my hand but lost it. It fell down and became mixed up in the bed. The soldiers who arrested me wanted the key and access to one of the store cupboards and were surprised that I was playing difficult, although I wasn’t – it was simply because they didn’t believe that I’d dropped things. Anyway they wanted to carry me off to the castle where presumably I’d be tortured, although they didn’t say what or why it was that I was going. I was simply arrested and bullied out of any kind of sympathetic position.

Then I was with a former work colleague. Again, it was a similar kind of situation. There was some kind of rack of calculations in the formula on it that these people wanted but I had. I wasn’t going to hand it over so someone came down to interrogate me and maybe arrest me but they didn’t cart me off. They had a full search of everywhere and then they left. Id been standing in a very peculiar position, sort-of propped up with a support behind me. My ex-colleague made some kind of remark such as “had I ever been an italic cursor?” or something so we laughed. I explained that there were all kinds of photos of me and maybe we ought to have a look. I noticed when we were talking that he actually had that paper in his hand. I wondered why he’d never admitted having it and never shown it to whoever it was who was interrogating me.

That’s not how things usually work, is it? Normally people will take every conceivable step to drop me into the soup at every possible moment.

Later on I stepped back into that dream, and in it the girl had taken away the bottle … "which bottle?" – ed … to wash it. She then brought it back, saw me being man-handled, threw away the bottle and hid the formula

And that’s most unlike people I know too.

By now the dough had risen and so after a second working-over I put it into the oven to bake while I made my hot chocolate.

The bread baked deliciously. It rose up like a lift and it is quite soft and fluffy. We’ll call this one a success.

While I was waiting for my visitor I finished off the radio notes for the programme that I started the other day and then began to select the music for the next one.

And then having fought her way through the underground system in Paris she turned up.

It’s hard to believe that when I held her in my arms back in that winter of 2003 when I was in Canada she was such a tiny little new-born thing. She’ll be 21 soon and it’s hard to believe that the time has gone by so fast.

She’s not stopping though. She didn’t know how ill I was and didn’t want to put any strain on any facilities that I might be having, which was very nice and thoughtful

We had lots to talk about – after all I haven’t seen her since I drifted by her house after my return from the High Arctic in 2019 – and it was nice to catch up with the latest news from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia

She’s quite confident that she’ll pass her current year and will go back to St F-X for her final year and receive “the Ring”. Alumni of St Francis Xavier receive a special ring to wear and it’s apparently the equivalent of a Canadian Freemasonry handshake.

Of course, over the last 20-odd years there have been loads of jokes about people going “My preccccccc – ious” whenever the subject of the St F-X ring has been mentioned and that’s not really any surprise.

It was quite late when she left but nevertheless I made my taco roll with rice and veg for tea and it was just as nice for being late.

So now I’m going off to bed and make some investigations about that huge bloodstain that appeared on my pillow overnight. It looks as if someone has butchered a pig on there, there’s so much blood.

But it’s nice to see a member of my family here where I live. One of my nieces from Crewe came over in 1994 and then two of my three little great-nieces from Canada have been to see me. And would you believe – that’s the only contact that I’ve had with any member of my family since I left to live on the mainland of Europe

They were much more loyal than that when we all lived together. One of my sisters once told me "some boy at my school told me that you weren’t fit to live with pigs"
"Ohhh really?" I asked. "What did you say?"
"Oh I stood up for you" she replied. "I said that you were"