… my neck in paperwork again. Ahhh! The good old days!

And not only am I up to my neck, I’m miles behind where I ought to be thanks to a
recalcitrant printer than only works when it feels like it and a Credit Agricole website ditto.

As well as that, I’m supposed to be completing my on-line registration for the hospital on Tuesday but the hospital website doesn’t recognise my “Withdrawal Agreement” carte de séjour and when I’ve finally managed to make their mobile app work on my ‘phone, it tells me that I don’t have an appointment.

So in the end I’m not much further forward than I was before I started. It all has rather a familiar ring about it.

Last night had a pretty familiar ring about it too, with not going to bed until long after I ought to have done. Nevertheless, I didn’t mind too much because I’d been dictating and that’s another pile of stuff all saved ready for editing. It was nice and quiet for an hour or so outside so I could crack on.

One thing that I did though was to change the microphone, and that seems to have made a difference to the quality of the recording. Two identical mikes, yet the quality is so different. It’s quite surprising.

The one big advantage of going to bed at that kind of “late” is that I don’t need much rocking

And so there I was, dead to the World until all of about … errr … 06:15.

But I didn’t make “that” mistake again. I curled back up under the bedclothes and there I remained until 08:00 when the alarm went off and I fell out of bed

There’s not much time to hang about on a Sunday morning as the nurse will be here at 08:30 (or thereabouts) so a quick scrub up in the bathroom was all that I had time to do.

Isabelle brought the sunshine with her when she came. She soon had the plasters on my legs sorted out and my puttees on my legs. But these wounds are still weeping and I despair. When are they likely to stop?

We had time to talk about my general condition. She seems to have noticed an improvement, although it doesn’t seem like it.

She thinks that this fatigue might be due to the fact that my kidneys are struggling so much to work that they are exhausting my metabolism, or words to that effect.

Basically, despite what I might think, it’s a physical tiredness due to te effort that is going into my kidneys. And she’s a nurse, so I suppose that she knows more about these things than I do.

After she left I had breakfast of cornflakes, toast, coffee and grapefruit juice and sat and relaxed for a while, reading my book on the siting and location of early Medieval churches

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. We were doing something with a music studio at work. I was actually some kind of huissier or “messenger” on the top floor. I went down to the canteen to fetch a coffee. It was crowded in there and you couldn’t hear a word that someone was saying. I had to fight my way into the queue to pick up a coffee. Eventually after t’d battered him a couple of times I said to the guy behind me “I’m not hurting you, am I? I’m really sorry”. He mouthed something back at me but I didn’t have a clue what it was because I couldn’t hear him so I just smiled, thanked him and walked away but I thought “I wonder what it was that he said. Whether it was polite or whether it was difficult or whether he wanted me to sit down and talk”. I’d no idea. But I took my coffee and began to climb all the steps back to the office. One or two of my workmates kept on coming downstairs going for their coffee. They kept asking me “who is this coffee for?”. I replied that it was for me. They looked with some kind of astonishment as if “what would I be doing with a coffee at this time of morning?”. But I checked the time and it was only 09:05 so it would be correct. We were waiting for something important to happen in the office but I can’t remember now whether it was a group or a piece of music but we were all waiting there for this but it all seemed to be tremendously important and was going to change all of our lives and all of our routines

Nothing like that ever happens to me these days. Wouldn’t it be nice if something were to come along and change my life and my routine. It’s pretty monotonous right now. When I was working, it was quite lively, but then in a building of 2,000 people and each one waiting for something earth-shattering to happen, a simple event could trigger a chain reaction that would reverberate around the building in no time flat. It would be like a snowball of excitement, gathering its own momentum. And I was convinced that there were people who would spend the whole day walking around with a tray of coffee and not doing any work whatsoever

I was driving some kind of bus or motorhome in the Midwest USA. We were going through these small towns. There was one where we had to climb a hill in this town. This hill was tree-lined with all the old Nineteenth-Century saloons and so on to the side of it. I thought to myself “this is really mid-west America here. This is typical USA. We kept on climbing up this hill and I thought that we’d never have enough steam to make it but eventually whatever I was driving managed to climb to the top. I found that we were on some kind of dirt track instead of the main road. I followed the dirt track for a while and it came to a castle where there was a notice from someone asking for partners for table-tennis so it was quite obvious to me that I was in the wrong street somehow. I had to stop and try to think how I was going to return to the main road because continuing to drive down this track was clearly out of the question

On my travels around States like Wyoming and South Dakota I came across plenty of towns like this. I remember in 2018 being in a town that proudly advertised “Population – 9”, and every one of those 9 people came out onto their porch to watch me drive through the place.

Some of the day has been spent editing some of the radio notes that I dictated last night. There are now two full programs completed and third is just missing the final track. I would have finished it and even done the fourth program except that the fatigue caught up with me and I was out like a light for an hour or two this afternoon.

And then I’ve been trying to print off a sheaf of paperwork but when the printer doesn’t work the website does and vice versa. And then there’s trying to make sense of this mobile app that tells me that I have no appointment lined up

There was however time to make tonight’s pizza. And a good one it was too. I’ve no idea what happened but for the first time ever the oven cooked it correctly. That’s a first.

What’s also going to be a first, at least for a long time, is an early night. I seem to have finished earlier than usual and I don’t know why.

But all of this technology and its accompanying issues makes me hanker for the old days. I didn’t have this trouble in Crewe.

But then again, whilst in Crewe they may actually have tablets for their own personal use, they also have the hammers and chisels that they use to carve their hieroglyphics on them