Despite everything that they could throw at me here at the Land of Grey and Pink and despite their best efforts, the medical staff has not been able to finish me off. And that’s enough to make everyone groan with despair.

And it wasn’t without trying, that’s for sure, as you will discover as you read on.

But anyway, last night after I had finished my notes I had a wash and scrub up and went to bed. What I like about being here is that I don’t have to switch off the computer. In bed, with the headphones on, listening to a “Traffic” concert is surely the way forward at times like this.

And waking up a couple of hours later listening to the closing bars of a “Treacherous Orchestra” concert and wondering where the time went.

After that I slept right the way through, which is no surprise after my last 48 hours. It was 08:10 when I opened my eyes, which was not bad. I thought that I might raise myself from the Dead in a minute or two. It’s nice having a little lie-in with no itinerant nurse buzzing at the door.

However, “the best-laid plans of mice and men …” and all of that. Instead, I went back to sleep again, and dreamed that I was with a group of children. We had some kind of word puzzle where we had to guess seven words going downwards on one line and seven words going down on another line, with some kind of line going across each group of seven that made the name of a flower so that the flower was two words of seven letters each. We were thinking abut this and I came up with one of the words going down that related to “a pig being slaughtered” which was “Blücher”, the German General but we were sitting there puzzling over the rest when a group of nurses appeared through the door and I awoke

And how impressed was I that not only could I come up with the word “Blücher” in a dream, it even has seven letters if you use the traditional spelling and not this depressing, modernised universal spelling where umlauts and character signs like that are replaced by additional letters. They are taking all of the individuality out of the World and making everything the same and that’s a horrible thought.

There really were nurses who came to see me too. They came to do the usual nursey morning things like taking my blood pressure, temperature and so on. I asked them the time and it was 08:30 – that dream didn’t take more than 20 minutes yet it seemed like a couple of hours.

While they were here the nursing auxiliary brought me my breakfast so I decided to have breakfast in bed – an unaccustomed luxury. And when the nursing leader asked me if I needed anything else, and I replied "how about a couple of you disporting yourselves on the edge of my bed tossing grapes into my mouth and feeding me with caviar and champagne?" I was told in no uncertain terms to clear off.

After breakfast I hauled myself out of bed and staggered off into the bathroom for a wash. And while in there the student nurse came in. She couldn’t see me in my room so she called out "are you in the bathroom?"

Just for a change I shouted "No. I’m playing hide-and-seek. Count to 100 and then come and find me". However, some of these young people have a vastly underdeveloped sense of humour.

Back in here, when everyone had gone, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d gone during the night. And to my surprise, despite the negligible amount of sleep that I’d had the night before, there was actually something on it from then. First task was therefore to transcribe it and add it in to yesterday’s notes so if you missed it, you’ll need to look again.

Having done that, I turned my attention to last night. I was on a trip again somewhere. There was a young Ukrainian girl there who was taking part in a trip for some reason. She had long blond hair in pigtails. I was chatting with a group of men discussing a Ukrainian dance troupe that had toured the UK. One of the men said that he had wanted to go to see it but he’d been ill and was terribly disappointed because he was looking forward to seeing the pretty girls with blond hair, to which the Ukrainian girl laughed. I said that I’d actually managed to see it, and for that reason too, which made her laugh even more. Anyway, later on, she was wandering around looking for a place to sit, and came to sit by my bed. We had quite a lengthy chat which was the envy of the other two guys. The three of us in the end had something of a laugh about this kind of situation. She came back again and was standing in between the beds of the three of us so I patted the mattress as if inviting her to come to sit down. In the end she produced another girl, a swarthy dark-haired girl who was also Ukrainian. She came and sat down by me. I thought “what is this girl up to now? What’s happening at the moment?”

Now this blond-haired Ukrainian girl – could she be a symbol of this new Romanian doctor? And sitting on the bed like Emilie the Cute Consultant used to do in summer is all of this proposing a symbolic replacement? It has to be symbolic because there’s certainly not anything like this happening in real life. Anyway, I made a mental note to go for a cold shower before I find myself carried away during the coming night.

And later on, we were discussing the demise of a famous blues musician talking to his female singer. She was describing how members of his group left him one by one. She was the last one to leave, and the reason that she stayed so long was because she actually loved him. That was the first news that we had had about something like this.

There doesn’t seem to be anything that I recall that relates to any of this, although I’ve seen some women stay by their husbands despite some extraordinary mistreatment.

A little later, one of the porters, not my musician friend, came to fetch me to push me through the labyrinth underground to the neurology centre.

There was a twenty-minute wait before I was seen, but once on the bed, the doctor told me "you remember that this is rather disagreeable. It will probably hurt you"

"Not a problem" I replied. "I have a lumbar puncture shortly. This electric treatment will be a bagatelle."

What happens is that they prod my muscles with electrodes and measure the twitches as my muscles respond. Depending on the amount of current, the distance that it has to travel and the amount of response that my muscles make, they can tell how my condition is deteriorating by comparing the results with my previous visits.

He wasn’t wrong about it hurting, but neither am I when I talk about the ponction lumbaire .

From what he could see from his cursory glance at the figures, my talk of an improvement is an illusion. If the results show anything, it shows a slight deterioration but nothing of any significance. Any improvement that I might have noticed might be due to exercising my muscles a little more than before.

That’s bad news really, but it is only to be expected. I would like them to work miracles and have me out and about, running again like I used to a couple of years ago, but I have to be realistic.

Back out in the reception area I had to wait fifteen minutes for my porter to come and push me back to my building, ward and bed. While that might seem a long time, but it’s nothing at all compared to the woman who was also waiting there. She’d travelled an hour and a half in a VSL (voiture sanitaire légère or “taxi for ill people” such as I use) on a “wait and return” – but the taxi has left her and gone home, as she found out when she went outside.

Strangely enough, it was the receptionist who was much more agitated about the whole affair than the woman, and so we were entertained during our wait by a real and proper Gallic emotional meltdown that for us, was fun to watch.

Back here, it was lunchtime. So having filled in a form to say that I’m vegan and that I have an allergy to animal fats, today’s meal included a mushroom omelette and a slice of cheese. Here we go again! Nothing whatever will change in a French Institution.

This afternoon, I had the ponction lombaire.

There was quite a crowd around here but they had it all organised. The cute little Romanian doctor put the anaesthetic patches on my back just after lunch and everyone assembled at 15:00 to watch the fun.

They had me, as usual, hunched up around a pillow, they slipped a mask over my face, pumped me full of that gas that they use on young teenage girls when they give birth, and the nurse with the English surname talked soothing words to me while my little Romanian went around the back.

When she had come to visit me yesterday I’d told her that I didn’t want to know anything about the details or the procedure, and true to my word, she didn’t say a thing. Just once or twice I felt a jolt in the spinal column but no-one was more surprised than me when she told me that she had finished. I hadn’t even realised that she’d started

To thank her, I told her that she could ponction my lumbaire any time she likes and next time I need a lumbar puncture, I’m going to hunt her down, so she’d better go for her next posting to somewhere exotic.

They brought me a coffee and then told me to lie down on the bed for an hour or so to relax.

Five minutes after they had left my neighbour appeared. She has business in Paris so she took an hour out to come to see me. She brought me some bananas and oranges which was nice of her. I didn’t tell her that I’m not allowed bananas. Instead, I shall gloriously devour them when no-one is looking and tant pis for the potassium results.

After my neighbour left I lay there for a while and then arose from the Dead to carry on work.

Now that I can no longer play the acoustic guitar because of this implant in my arm (and I wish that they had told me that before they did it) and the 5-string fretless bass is too heavy for me, and the Gibson EB3 is too valuable, and the short-scale Fender bass is still in Canada, I’m going to try to learn a couple of different instruments.

There are two instruments that you find very rarely in rock music but in the right hands can be just sooooooo devastating. I’ve always loved them and so I’m going to treat myself for my birthday. So I’ll have a bash and hope that it works out.

My drumming – the project during lockdown – failed miserably because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I lost the use of my legs. Here’s hoping that these new projects are more successful.

Tonight’s tea was much more correct than lunchtime’s dinner which was good news, but we did have a medical issue that required the summoning of a nurse and then a doctor but the issue resolved itself in dramatic fashion just as the doctor arrived.

Incidentally, she’s from Poland and she’s doing a “foreign placement” too. From what I have seen already, Brexit has walloped the NHS with all of these Eastern European doctors now gaining their foreign experience in France rather than the UK. This doctor would certainly have preferred the UK, so she told me, had she been allowed to go.

So that’s all of my news tonight. Tomorrow morning I have the biopsy (God help me) and there’s a staff meeting to discuss my situation at midday; They’ll compare notes and results, and it’s likely that I’ll be going home tomorrow early evening if they are positive. If not, then who knows?

But seeing as we are talking about Blücher … "well, one of us is" – ed … he was the General who led the Prussian Army to victory in the Napoleonic Wars. He also had a one-track mind and after attending the Oxford Peace Banquet, on his way home climbed to the top of St Paul’s Cathedral and on viewing London, exclaimed "What a place to plunder"

Another completely humourless Prussian (OK, so Blücher was actually born in Rostock) was Otto von Bismarck, who also oversaw a defeat of France, this time in 1870-71 and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few years ago we visited the site of the battle of Sedan and the horseshoe bend in the River Meuse where the French prisoners were kept.

He has gone down in history for his famous quote, to which I have clung, through all these years which, crudely translated by Yours Truly (and if there’s anything crude involved, then in the words of the late, great Bob Doney, “I’m your man”), is "I never believe any rumour until it has been officially denied by the Government"

And how right is that?