… last night, talking about having an early night and hoping to have a lie in until the later time of 07:59 when the Sunday alarm goes off.

There’s nothing like a bit of optimism, is there?

Firstly, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall and probably expect, the early night didn’t happen. I’m not sure what went on, but I found myself at 23:00 still sitting at my desk working. However, I didn’t stay there for long. An early night I was determined to have and although it was not as early as I would have liked, I downed tools and cleared off.

Just as the last couple of days, I fell asleep quite quickly, thinking of having a really good sleep of eight hours at least.

Consequently, no-one was more disappointed than me to find that when I awoke, it was all of 04:10. I could well have done without that.

Refusing to give in, I curled up and did my best to go back to sleep again. And it worked too, at least for a while. 06:05 was still far too early to be awake again, and this time I couldn’t go back to sleep. When the water heater switched off at 06:20, I was already having a ride on the porcelain horse.

After a good wash, I went into the kitchen for the medication and then came back in here to find out where I’d been during the night. I dreamed that I was parachuting last night, taking some kind of course of something or other that wasn’t parachuting but parachuting was included in it. We went up in an aeroplane to quite a height and I leaped out. Eventually, I managed to touch down onto the ground, far quicker than I was intending to land, but it was a quite accurate landing and I was impressed. Someone came over and asked me how it was. I replied “to be quite honest, I was freezing. The wind was cutting through my jeans and I ought to have worn some kind of windproof trouser underneath to stop that”. Then I was thinking about going to do it again, working out that if maybe I were to pull on this guy rope here and that guy rope there, I’d be able to direct the parachute and land much more appropriately, much closer to the target and be able to steer the parachute and land pretty much where I liked.

There is absolutely no danger whatever of me ever leaping from a ‘plane wearing a parachute. And I certainly wouldn’t do it a second time. I’ll take all of my chances on solid ground, thanks. But it would be just like me, when I’m falling headlong towards the ground, to be thinking of a way to improve the system or its accuracy.

Later on, I’d been associated with a football club somewhere and our team had been promoted from the bottom division to the third at long last. The manager of one of the other teams in the club came over. He was surprised. He asked if it were true that we had been promoted. I replied that it was. He answered “God! Because I’m short of players for Sunday”. It was for a game in St Niklaas in Vlaanderen against The Old Irish. We had a chat and it turned out that one of my friends was playing in it, so I replied “go on then. You can put me down as a substitute if you like” although I really wasn’t interested in playing all that competitively. So off we went on the Sunday to the field to have a look around. There were plenty of people swarming around, including one woman who had a dog and a cat, each on a lead and was taking them for a walk. I had a chat with the woman and the cat. Her husband usually took the cat for a walk but he was away for a few days so she was doing it. The cat usually went in a certain direction but there was something going on there and she didn’t want to take it this time. The more I looked around, the more I saw that there was going to be an auto-cross in the middle of this field after the football match so I thought that this was going to be a really nice day to have out as long as I don’t actually go onto the football field.

Back in the Auvergne, I was associated with a football team – the 3rd XI of FC Pionsat St Hilaire, who were one of the worst teams in the local pyramid in the Puy de Dôme and always finished near the bottom of the lowest division. And I do have to hold up my hand and admit that my involvement was completely by default – none of the other committee members wanted to run the team and I happened to admire the players for continuing to turn out week after week so I took on the task.

However, there is plenty of mileage in this dream apart from that. Leaving aside the fact that this seemed to take place in Vlaanderen, although I might not be interested in playing, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that there have in the past been rafts of dreams where I’ve turned out for a local football club and some of those dreams are far too real for my liking.

As it happened, I did have a friend who played for the club, and I also know a man who really does take his cat for a walk in the evening.

When the nurse turned up, the first thing that he wanted was my health card. He’s off on holiday on Monday night so he needs to bring his accounts up-to-date. Once he’d sorted out his paperwork, he attended to my legs and then cleared off to continue his rounds.

After he left, I began to make my breakfast but I didn’t get very far because the kitchen fitter came and I had to throw him the key to the front door seeing as the electric door lock on the front door doesn’t seem to work.

When he turned up here, I gave him my instructions and he wandered off downstairs to begin. I could go back to making my breakfast, only to find that my toast had burned.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of MY BOOK.

We started off in the quaintly-named Bladder Street, wherein he makes mention of several local "tippling houses." I shall have to remember that little phrase the next time that I want to make reference to the local boozer.

He also tells us about Allhallows Church in Bread Street where "two priests of this church fell at variance, that the one drew the blood of the other …. the priests were committed to prison … and being enjoined penance, went before a general procession bare-headed, bare-footed and bare-legged, before the children, with beads and books in their hands, from Paules, through Cheape, Cornehill etc."

It’s a real shame that modern-day clerical transgressors aren’t subjected to the same humiliation.

After breakfast, I sorted out more things and put them into boxes ready for my faithful cleaner to take downstairs whenever she’s next passing.

Back in here again, there was football and I watched with no little amount of amusement as Stranraer, near the bottom of the fourth tier, beat hated local rivals Queen of the South, championship contenders one division higher up.

Watching the players of the team from Dumfries totally lose their cool in the final five minutes as they panicked to the core when Stranraer unleashed their lightning-quick young centre-forward and had a player sent off, several others booked for professional fouls and for fighting was one of the funniest things that I have seen for quite a while

By now it was time to start work and the first thing was to sort out all of the music that has accumulated over the last couple of years but has not been classified. That took much longer than I would have liked.

Eventually, it was finished and I could then find the final piece of music and write the notes for it, which I can dictate when I next have an early start so that I can finish this radio programme and move on.

There was a break in all of this while I made my pizza base, and when it had arisen, I baked an excellent pizza which tasted delicious.

Just as I was getting my fork stuck in it, the kitchen fitter came up to say that he was leaving. He showed me the photos of the new, nicely-painted bedroom and it really does look wonderful. That room is now finished, except for the curtains, and I shall be organising those in very early course.

When I’m down there tomorrow, I’ll take some photos of it to show you, and I hope that you’ll all be as impressed as I am.

So now that my pizza is eaten and my notes are written, I’ll take the stats, do the back-up and then go to bead. It’s dialysis tomorrow, and how I am not looking forward to that. But then two days off and I can pack a whole pile of stuff ready to move downstairs not that things down there are drawing to a close.

But seeing as we have been talking about the painter in the bedroom … "well, one of us has" – ed … before he bought the paint, he said "the bedroom here looks the same size as the one downstairs. When you painted it, how many tins of paint did you buy?"
"Actually, I bought three" I told him
When he finished this evening, he came up to me and said "I bought three tins of paint, but when I’d finished, I had one tin left over"
"What a coincidence!" I exclaimed. "So did I!"