… this horrible anti-potassium stuff here too. The nice bubbly nurse has just this minute been by and dumped a ladle full of it into a glass and said “here, drink this”.

My potassium is quite high, that’s for sure, but I’m surprised that it’s taken them this long to find out. And at least, late in the evening, it’s not too bad if I fall asleep and have hallucinations.

In fact, if the truth is told, I could have done with some last night because I didn’t have much sleep at all. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m quite a light sleeper and the slightest noise awakens me. Ad I’m not sure what it was last night. It wasn’t the staff disturbing me, that’s for sure

By about 05:30 I gave up the struggle and that was that – and on a Sunday morning too. Who would have thought it?

At 06:30 I had another blood test and they gave me a curious orange drink that tasted of lemon

"What was that?" I asked
"A laxative" replied the nurse.

But don’t worry. I had my revenge. Ohhh yes! So much so that they sent the second laxative back to the store later.

So most of the day I’ve been reliving the past, listening to Bruce Springsteen, as well as writing out the dictaphone notes

I was trekking towards the North Pole with a party of people. At the end of the night I’d sit around the end of the bed of a woman who was travelling with us. When she dropped off to sleep, what would then happen without her knowledge was that two guys from another party would come across, borrow two chairs and the three of us would sit around the bed with her in it and talk about all kinds of different events and different things while she was asleep in the middle. I’d be at her head and the two guys would be sitting at her feet on some chairs that they’d borrowed from somewhere else.

Nothing as exciting as that ever happened to me when trekking towards the North Pole. We reached 700 miles from the North Pole, standing on the Greenland Ice Cap at the Brother John Glacier and then we were having a yoga session in a snowbank in a blizzard on Philpot’s Island off the coast of Ellesmere Island (and God knows what would have happened had a polar bear come to join in) but that was about it.

What I’d done later on was to go through the front door of someone’s house and up their stairs. I was talking to a couple of their kids and was about to climb out of the window on the roof when the householder spotted me and began to make an issue out of it. I explained that they were living on an old Roman trackway. This was a Roman established right-of-way and if they were to look at the Deeds of their house they’d find that the Deeds of their house accorded passage for people to do just as I was doing. Of course they didn’t believe it and began to make quite an issue out of it. Quite a crowd gathered. Then people realised that there were in fact some Roman remains in a field not too far away and there was some kind of old church or something that no-one knew what it was. They began to put two and two together and realised that in fact the Romans had been in this area and it was very likely that there was a road. Of course the householder was very disappointed by this and still refused to believe everything but more and more people began to believe it. I ended up with quite a crowd, giving them a lecture on the Romans. They all seemed to receive it quite enthusiastically although one person whom I knew came up to me to tell me that I was always finding good and unusual ways to drum up business.

There are several true stories of this kind of thing, careless drawing-up of deeds in the housing explosion of the 1920s and 30s and the “back to the land” movement of later years discovering that some had been built on ancient Rights of Way so we have hikers nonchalantly walking through people’s kitchens

By the way, anyone care to guess the subject of the book that I’m reading right now?

And me, drawing a crowd?

And then I was running my taxis. We were doing reasonably well but I had a lot of trouble retaining staff. People would come and leave quite rapidly and it continued. I had a hard core of regular staff and a lot of casual people. We were doing the paperwork, a couple of us. My mother had left outside a huge pile of papers that she’d been sorting so I had to go out and bring them in before the wind blew them away and before the neighbours began to complain about the untidiness. I was laughing and joking with one of my workers while I was doing it. There was one of the young girls there helping too. This worker with me asked the girl “are you happy here?” which I thought was something of a provocative statement. They had a long discussion. In the end I asked the worker what came of the discussion with the young girl. She said “people don’t like your attitude at the moment”. I replied “well, yes but don’t they now that I’m dying? Don’t they know that naturally my mind is elsewhere focused on other things, all that kind of thing when you’re dying? A lot of things are just quite simply left to find their own way”.

Staff always was the big issue. It was a very itinerant business with plenty of comings and goings, and for all kinds of reasons too.

But the nicest part of the day was the visit of Hans, Jackie and Alison. The girls were setting off on the start of their trek home so they came o say “goodbye”. Fancy coming all of this way and spending it as hospital visitors.

Anyway, as long as they don’t mind sleeping on my sofa they are welcome back any time. If Hans and the Hound of the Baskervilles can manage to sleep on it, so can anyone else.

And on the subject of the latter, my cleaner tells me that she’s fallen in love with him.

It’s a good job actually that they came by today because they bought food supplies. And I needed them too because tonight’s tea was soup and lettuce. I traded the vanilla yoghurt for some bread and the crisps that the Terrible Trio bought me disappeared as an after-meal snack

Anyway, right now, I’m off to bed as soon as my stomach stops rumbling. I’ve not moved from the chair by the window all day. Firstly, because of the gorgeous sun we’ve had and the beautiful sunset that I’m watching.

And secondly, because the chair serves another purpose. That will teach them to give me a laxative.

It’s probably the talk that I overheard yesterday that’s done it. They were saying something like "if he doesn’t produce soon we’ll have to give him a suppository"
A friend of mine was once given a suppository to take to help him cure his piles
"Did it work?" I asked him
"Not at all" he replied. "In fact, for all the good it did me, I may as well have shoved it up my *rs*"

That is probably what has scared the s*** out of me.