… IS GOING THE RIGHT WAY FOR A SMACKED BOTTOM AND I DON’T CARE WHO KNOWS IT.

She’ll know all about it though when I see her next. When I took the travelling laptop out of my bag when I arrived home from dialysis, "where’s the power lead?". One of the nurses had packed my bag for me while I was being weighed, hadn’t she?

It goes without saying that it’s my own fault for not checking but even so, I have every right to be annoyed by it. If I have another power lead for it around here, then all well and good but I’m not convinced that I have. I shall have to turn out a cupboard or two tomorrow morning.

It’s strange really that all these little things that come along seem to have such a dramatic effect. It’s like that old kiddies’ poem FOR WANT OF A NAIL.

The dramatic effect that relates to going to bed early is that it has been abandoned. It was another 00:30 night last night when I suppose, had I exerted myself, I could have been in bed much earlier. But after I’d finished writing my notes and backing up the computer I loitered around for a while, not really doing all that much.

Once in bed though, I was asleep quite quickly. And there I lay without moving until the alarm went off. I was away on my travels at that point but everything immediately evaporated.

Anyway, I was out of bed quite quickly for a change and then headed off to the bathroom for a wash and scrub up, a shave and a wash of the undies so that I’m all clean for dialysis this afternoon

In the kitchen I remembered to take my medicine this morning, seeing as I had apparently forgotten yesterday – both lots – and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out what went on during the night. I fell asleep as soon as I went to bed and was dreaming about doing some 3D modelling with people and objects but when I awoke a little later it had all disappeared.

Not that I remember awakening, as I mentioned earlier. I hope that whatever it was, it didn’t involve Castor, TOTGA, Zero or Moonchild.

And then I was somewhere in some village and had to put a huge flower pot outside on the street corner. Having manoeuvred it outside, the only way that I could manoeuvre it down the street was by going underneath it, raising up part of the roof with the back of my head and walking with the flower pot pivoting on the ground on just one part of the circle of the base. And so I set off like that. There were a few other people in the street. There was one woman putting the rubbish out, another one putting something else out, some kind of street furniture that she put out in front of the house opposite across the road. I carried on walking with this flower pot thing in a peculiar hunched-up position. I came to the restaurant on the corner and a little girl disappeared inside. I had a look in the window but couldn’t see her. After I dropped off the trousers to this …fell asleep here… I took a piece of cloth that was similar, I suppose, to what she was wearing and I forget what I did with it. I went into the restaurant. There was a girl whom I knew there who was sitting talking to another girl whom I also knew. I wondered what they were talking about

There aren’t half some strange goings-on when I’m asleep, that’s for sure. That particular dream seems to relate to nothing at all. But there’s too much of this falling asleep and dreams evaporating. I really do hope that I’m not missing anything exciting.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up earlier than usual today. Seeing as it’s her final day before her rest I had half-expected her to be snowed under with blood tests and injections before her oppo takes over tomorrow.

She brought me some very bad news about another patient of hers with whom I have travelled to dialysis. He won’t be going there again, unfortunately. That’s two of my fellow passengers who have disappeared and I’ve only been going six months. It’s the fate that awaits every single one of us, I suppose.

After she left I made breakfast and BEGAN TO read MY NEW BOOK.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a year or so ago we read THE DAWN OF ASTRONOMY by Sir Norman Lockyer, in which he discusses the alignment of Egyptian temples and pyramids with the stars, the moon and the sun.

His follow-up book applies the same principles to Stonehenge and other early British monuments and it sounds as if it’s going to be totally fascinating.

So far though, we’re having a basic lesson in the principles of astronomy, to set the scene, and that’s interesting too. So much so that I checked the book list and noticed that he had written a book called ELEMENTARY LESSONS IN ASTRONOMY. It goes without saying that I’ve tracked down a copy and downloaded it to my reading list for later perusal.

Back in here I did half of my homework for my Welsh lesson. I’ll do the other half next week. It couldn’t be finished off today because it involves something that we are going to be doing in class tomorrow.

My cleaner turned up on time to fit my anaesthetic patches and we chatted for a while before she wandered off again. I waited for the taxi which was late today.

It was a chatty female driver who had taken me before and we had an entertaining drive down to Avranches. Several of us arrived at the same time and so I had to wait.

Coupling up was relatively painless today and then I was left alone for quite a while. I could revise my Welsh, update the computer from the back-up and I can’t remember what I did after that. It can’t have been important.

What interrupted my train of thought was a whole list of items. My cleaner contacted me to say that they won’t serve me with any more patches. The clinic has changed it to cream only. And so I had a dispute with the doctor about that and he rewrote my prescription.

The nurse brought me some papers for the optician’s on Thursday morning and then my machine began to play up

Other news is that they have reset my target weight and I’m now going to be (hopefully) 1kg lighter, and that suits me fine. It seems that the water retention is still there but my underlying weight is reducing. In fact I’m only 1.5kg above my “non-athletic weight” these days if I could lose the water.

After I’d been uncoupled I had to wait a few minutes for the taxi and a very taciturn driver brought me home. This was when I discovered the problem with the travelling laptop cable.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg followed by date bread and soya dessert. And now it’s bedtime ready for my Welsh lesson tomorrow.

But seeing as we are talking about packing … "well, one of us is" – ed … it reminds me about the visit of the auditors to the parachute-packing company.
He was going through the books and asked "in which account do you note the parachutes that have been returned due to incorrect packing?"
"We don’t" said the cashier. "I’ve worked here for forty years and in all that time no-one has ever brought one back to say that it didn’t work correctly."