… Day of Rest officially, but no longer these days for me. What with a nurse turning up at 08:30 every morning 7 days per week, I can no longer have the rest to which I was accustomed.
No longer lying abed until ridiculous o’clock, no longer lounging around in a dressing gown and not very much else.
There was an episode of “Gunsmoke”, the famous American radio programme where one of the actors said "Sunday is the one day of the week a man can get up at noon and sit around with his boots off without anybody hollering at him about it" and whoever it was, I had a strong affinity with him.
However, let’s look on the bright side. That extra three hours in the morning eats back into those 18 hours per week that I lose at the Dialysis Clinic. It’s an ill-wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good.
And whatever ill winds that were about last night blew me into bed at a reasonable time. Although I couldn’t make 23:00, it was still before 24:00.
And I’d dictated the notes for one radio programme and also the commentary for the concert that I’ll be broadcasting in due course too so I was quite impressed.
Even better, with the pain in my foot having subsided I could fall asleep with no problems, and so I did. And quite quickly too. No-one and nothing disturbed me until about 06:00 either, and it’s been a long time since I’ve had six hours of undisturbed sleep.
No danger of my leaving my nice clean pit at that time of morning though. I curled up under the bedclothes and went back to sleep.
When the alarm went off I crawled into the bathroom and had a good wash and scrub up ready for the nurse.
When he arrived I asked him about this dramatically increased dose.
The story about this is that for many years I’ve been taking a certain medication that has some side effects so they have been very careful, giving me the minimal dose, and even stopping it altogether at one stage, which led to other problems.
Back in the Summer they put me back on it, an increased dose. The doctor told me that he was worried about this increased dose and thought long and hard about increasing it.
But yesterday, I was given by another doctor a prescription that doubled the dose. So is it in error?
It took several goes with the nurse until in the end, frustrated by his prevarication, I asked him outright "so you aren’t going to answer me then?"
He replied "if the doctor prescribed it, then that’s what you have to take" and told me some cock-and-bull story about how much one of his other patients took.
He really is getting on my wick right now.
After he left I made breakfast and then settled down with a new book, WANDERINGS OF AN ANTIQUARY; CHIEFLY UPON THE TRACES OF THE ROMANS IN BRITAIN
This book, published in … err … 1854, is an account of a peripatetic and keen amateur concerning his travels to various sites that had their origins in Roman or early Saxon days
Being such an early work, it’s bound to be confusing compared to what has been discovered since but that makes it all the more interesting because we can see things from a completely different perspective.
Even then, he was worried about the effects of the “urban sprawl” upon many interesting rural sites and the need to save them, long before there was an official Government body like English Heritage. Everything depended on the generosity of the local landowner.
The first chapter concerns his trips around the slag heaps of the Roman iron smelting works in the Forest of Dean. He made the point that so imperfect were the Roman smelting techniques that even in the mid nineteenth Century there were companies that were exploiting the slag, or “scowle” and re-smelting it.
Incidentally, the Roman smelting works had foot-operated bellows, so he says. I bet you didn’t know that.
Back in here, I listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was in Nantwich and due to go back to Crewe but I’d already changed my bus ticket once and it was now coming up to 09:00 and I didn’t think that I’d be ready to catch the 09:00 bus so I wanted to come on the 09:15 instead so I ran like hell to the bus station and arrived there before and said that for some reason I want to cancel it and go on the next one but the filling in of the forms was so complicated that I nearly missed that one too. The guy in the ticket office was so confused as to why I wanted to cancel the bus ticket for a bus that I thought that I couldn’t catch even though I arrived in his office well on time to fill in a form to cancel it. I noticed too that my address was “Winsford” at that time, 330 New Road Winsford, but I was in such haste that it looked like another address completely on the form so this would certainly be a puzzle when it arrives at Head Office.
My dreams really are confusing at times. Can you imagine going into the bus station office at 08:55 to change your bus ticket for the 09:15 bus because you’ll be too late for the 09:00 one! And then taking so long to fill out the form that you’d miss the 09:15 too. Especially when there was no office on Nantwich Bus Station.
Stranraer FC was next and they were away at Forfar Athletic. And from 1-0 up and cruising comfortably, they once again rose to the occasion and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. With two moments of madness in defence.
And we had another one of our famous “let’s play it out from the back” moments, and you can see the inevitable result on STRAWBERRY MOOSE’S TIKTOK ACCOUNT
Yes, the World’s most famous Moose is going into multi-media. We’ll be working on his past travels around North America. There are dozens of his videos, especially of his Arctic travels, and it’s high time that he did something with them.
Over the next few days we’ll be having a trial run with a video or two but we opened his account with the video that I mentioned above.
After my salad butty for lunch I knuckled down and did some work. And rather slower than I would have liked, I ended up with two radio programmes, one the normal one and the other the concert that will be broadcast on Friday and Saturday far in the future.
And I do have to say that the concert will be well-worth the price of the admission alone because it’s excellent. I don’t know how I came by it. It must be one from the deceased son of a friend, but his group wasn’t the supporting act that night.
Alison was on-line for a while, sunning herself on the beach somewhere exotic so we “exchanged pleasantries”. And what wouldn’t I give to go somewhere like that? Anywhere, in fact? That is, apart from this blasted dialysis place.
At lunchtime I’d taken some dough from the freezer and it had been defrosting. later this afternoon I kneaded it and rolled it out, and when I’d finished working I assembled and baked it.
It’s not a legendary one like one or two have been just recently, but it was still good nevertheless.
So now I’m going to do some Welsh homework and then go off to bed.
But while there might not have been a ticket office on Nantwich Bus Station, there was a street map.
It was one of those maps with the little lights on it, and if you pressed, say, the “car parks” button, little lights would light up on the map to show you where the car parks were.
There were about twenty buttons altogether, with things like “public toilets”, “chemists”, all that kind of thing
There was also a big arrow pointing to the centre of the map that said "you are here"
And someone, a legendary hero in my schoolboy mind, suffering clearly from pangs of anguish, had written underneath in big black letters "Yes! But where are all the f@#king buses?"
Strangely enough, I can still feel his pain even today, 60-odd years later.
