… from Normandy where everyone is celebrating the 80th Anniversary of the Débarquement or “Normandy Landings” of 80 years ago and all of the Résistants, those who were continuing the struggle ever since the Fall of France and even one or two Résistants de la dernière heure, as those who waited until the very last moment to join the struggle once they saw which way the wind was blowing are contemptuously called, were out in the streets continuing the battle face-to-face with the enemy.

Well, almost everyone. One or two of them were stuck in here tending to me.

Do you know those funny turns that I have occasionally when I cease to function? I had another one of those this afternoon and that, regrettably, was that. A couple of nurses helped me to bad and one of them stayed for a while to keep an eye on me

That’s rather more than happened last night. Having been at 22:20 to remind me that she’ll be back in 10 minutes to put me to bed, the night-nurse forgot me.

At 23:40 I gave up the wait and tried to put myself to bed but gave up the struggle after a while and had to press the emergency bell so that she would come and untangle me from the mass of tubes and cables that there are around here and around me.

Eventually she came and sorted me out, and I was able to go to bed.

We followed the usual pattern. For a couple of hours I had a reasonable sleep and then round about 01:40 the cacophony began. Any sleep after that can be best described as “intermittent” .

At about 06:30 the night nurse stuck her head in to make sure that I hadn’t died during her shift. She can’t go home and leave an empty cadaver for her friends to clean up
"No blood test?" I asked. "Nope"
"No diabetes test?" I asked. "Nope"
So what’s happening here then?

They even brought me breakfast before the bed-bath, and that’s an innovation. Delicious it was too, but I don’t see the sense of giving me a diabetes test while I’m munching on a jam butty. A figure of 3.48 (norms are between 0.85 and 1.20) can’t be helpful to anyone.

It was eventually the bed-bath and it was the student nurse who drew the short straw today. She’s older than the usual run of students, probably re-training after a career elsewhere, judging by her mass of tattoos, as a hit-woman for a Chinese Tong

She set out to give me an in-depth scrub.
"There’s no need to be ‘maniac’ about my cleaning" I told her
"Don’t worry" she replied. "I’m a maniac for other things" and gave me a conspiratorial nudge and wink.

Well, I’ll be …. I’m not sure what bus she’s waiting for but my last bus left a good couple of years ago. You might in fact say that life on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR was the desperate last stand of the few remaining troops of a dying Empire

My cute specialist came to see me a little later, at a rather inconvenient and embarrassing moment when I was occupied making myself even lighter than the scales had indicated 10 minutes earlier.
"You’ve lost another 3 kilos" she said with a smile
"Yes" I replied. "But it’s not as a result of your treatment" and then I launched into a tirade about the (lack of) food in this place.

What followed was a long discussion about the differences between a hospital and a 5-star hotel but in the end she agreed to see what she could do. "Afer all, it is 2024, even in France" she conceded.

However, in the middle of all that, she told me that my last series of results are “optimistic” (she obviously hadn’t seen the diabetes test at that point) and if the next 24 hours are equally positive, they’ll unplug me completely from everything (hopefully not my computer).

And if they still continue to be positive I can go home on Saturday.

"I’ll still try to cancel your appointment on Monday" she said. "You’ll need to rest after being in here like this."

Rest? Rest be badgered. Who can rest when there’s a nurse who comes here every morning at 08:30? And in any case, I’ll be cooking. Plates of pasta in tomato sauce with steamed veg, taco rolls with rice and veg, leftover curries with garlic naan, vegan pizzas, vegan pies with potato and gravy.

And that’s just Saturday!

When I was younger I read dozens of books about prisoners in prison camps in World War II spending all their time drooling about what they would eat as soon as they returned home at the end of their captivity. Who’d have thought that 80 years later, on the 80th anniversary of the Débarquement I’d be doing the same thing?

After she left, I transcribed the dictaphone notes. The police raided our house last night. I was the only one who was not in bed so of course I bore the brunt of the interrogation. They wanted to know about some correspondence I’d been having on behalf of my brother and another company . I certainly wasn’t going to give them anything like that that might incriminate me so I had to hold them off for a while. In the end I agreed to search through my papers to see if I had anything that might correspond with what they were looking for. I left the police downstairs and went upstairs to search through my papers. A few suspicious noises came from one of the bedrooms so the police rushed upstairs thinking that I was burning papers. Instead they found my brother and his wife in what could only be described as a “compromising position” that the News of the Screws would have loved to have seen. They made their sarcastic and caustic remarks and in the best traditions of the aforementioned newspaper, “made their excuses and left”, and I went to carry on with my search. In the end they asked about certain other evidence, one of which was a pair of bathing trunks. I recognised a pair of bathing trunks that corresponded with that description. They were in my bother’s room so I had to go back to disturb him to look for these bathing trunks. His room was quite frankly in a dreadful mess. When I found the bathing trunks he said “you don’t want to pick those up without washing them”. He explained to me a few things about them and I replied “I suppose that I better had wash them” . That was what I was doing, washing a pair of bathing trunks.

“A dreadful mess” is actually a pretty good description of our lives and our habitations, that’s for sure. Most of you learned to tidy up by your mothers saying “now put your things away” when you were small, and showing you how. However firstly, our mother was never there and secondly, we never ever had any possessions to put away when we were small.

That latter bit is probably why I have collection mania and live in a mess, and why I have had to spend all this time trying to fight it.

Later on last night I was with Mickey Gee and all that lot from South Wales. I was being questioned but I didn’t really understand the questions so I had a great deal of difficulty with the answers. There was a panel of people there. Several of them were kids. The answers that I was giving made me think that I was in the wrong programme because they didn’t seem to correspond at all with what was happening with this panel. There was an older guy there who seemed to monopolise everything. It seemed that this programme was ending up to be a little bit all about him instead of the contestants. Everything about this particular panel game seemed to be wrong. Nothing seemed to fit. I’d been away from home for a long time and was slowly on my way. I was thinking that this panel game was making me worse rather than making me better because I’m starting to become so stressed out about it.

And weren’t those the days? Of LLanelli and Mickey Gee, Micky Jones, Martin and Georgie Ace, Deke Leonard, Clive John, Ray Williams, Ray Phillips? I should have moved to Llanelli when I was at the crossroads in my life, but I chose a different path and that path led me here. And into this hospital too where the food is positively awful

Maybe I should have gone to Llanelli.

But being stressed out in normal daytime operation is a habitual state of affairs. Sleep is supposed to be about rest and relaxation, but what good is it if I’m being stressed out even as I sleep?

Meanwhile, in other news, the food at lunchtime was light-years of improvements away from previous meals. I don’t know what my specialist said but whoever she said it to sent me the first protein – a bulghour salad for starters – that I think that I’ve eaten since I’ve been here.

And how I enjoyed it too.

The rest of the meal was an improvement too, I’m happy to say. Let’s see if it continues.

This afternoon I was sitting down reading an article on the Messerschmitt Me410 and the Junkers JU88 when I had one of my attacks and locked up, totally unable to function.

For a change I pressed the emergency button and eventually a couple of nurses came by to help me into bed where I lay totally comatose until the smell of the teatime soup awoke me when the tray was placed under my nose.

Ahhhh! Bistro!

The rest of the food was an improvement on yesterday too (not that it could have been any worse) – a plate of potato and carrot. No protein, but it looks like baby steps forward.

Later on I spoke to one of the nurses who had come to rescue me earlier. They had taken my blood pressure in mid-crisis and it had struggled up to a mere 8.0. She thinks that it’s one of the medicaments (and she pointed to one of them pumping away into me) that’s responsible. It’s notorious for reducing the blood pressure, so she said, so they have reduced the dose.

And so that’s that then. Now we know. It actually does tie in with what we know about the changes of medication and this loss of function.

That’s everything for tonight then. I’ll curl up and go to sleep if they let me.

But before I do, I’ll just ask you to stop for a minute and spare a thought for everyone, soldiers and civilians of both sides, who found themselves on or near the Normandy beaches 80 years ago today and all of whom without question, no matter who they were and whose side they were on, must have wished that they were somewhere else instead

Many places still bear the scars of what happened. St-Lô will never be the same again with its breezeblock cathedral and human remains are, as we know, still even today being washed up on the beaches.

Thanks to them, I can dream about my Saturday night meal. Life would have been much more difficult without their sacrifice.