… was totally horrible.
Not so much the session but the aftermath. I was totally drained, totally exhausted and I felt as if the end of the World had come. When BILBO BAGGINS
It wasn’t as if I’d had a particularly early start either. Although it was quite late by the time I finished my notes, the stats and the back-up, I slept all the way right through without moving until 06:20 – nine minutes before the alarm.
So while you admire a couple of photos of my freshly-painted living room, once more in a colour rather brighter than that which I had chosen, and with the curtain rail over the door in the wrong place, I shall tell you about my day.
When I awoke, I really was feeling rotten but a Herculean effort saw me sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet on the floor when the alarm went off at 06:29
But it didn’t galvanise me into action though. It classes as an early start because I was out of bed and with my feet in contact with the floor when the alarm went off, but that’s how it stayed for a good fifteen minutes.
Eventually, I managed to drag myself in some kind of undignified fashion into the bathroom where I had a good wash and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and I also hand-washed some clothes. With not having many clothes, I try to keep on top of things when I can.
In the kitchen, I dealt with the medication and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Jordan Davies had left Greenock Morton last night and had signed for a football club in Wales. His arrival was heralded by the club and they made a big issue out of it with headlines in the local paper etc. However, when he was on his way to the football ground to be greeted by the chairman etc, he was involved in a car crash and was killed. That was really the end of all of that. All of the celebrations were cancelled and it ended up being something of a really damp squib of an affair.
It’s no surprise that they would have cancelled the celebrations after that. However, this dream is a combination of two different things.
Actually, Jordan Davies has left Greenock Morton and yesterday he signed for Colwyn Bay AFC in the JD Cymru League. But the part about death in transit refers to Emiliano Sala, whose aeroplane crashed as he was flying from Nantes to play for Cardiff City in 2019.
Isabelle the Nurse came in a little later to deal with my injection, the last in this series, and to sort out my legs. There are all kinds of events taking place in the town tomorrow so she told me that she has no idea what time she will arrive.
After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.
We’re still in Westminster, discussing inter alia the enormous list of famous and important people buried in Westminster Abbey.
But it’s John Stow’s little personal remarks that are so interesting and amusing. When he is talking about the raising of funds to rebuilt St Margaret’s Church, he tells us about King Henry III banning all trade in merchandise for fifteen days, which the citizens were obliged to redeem by paying the King two thousand pounds of silver because of the King "devising how to extort money from the citizens of London."
That’s nothing compared to his remarks concerning the revised works of Geoffrey Chaucer which were "twice increased through mine own painful labours" and "again beautified with notes by me." Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that if it weren’t for my own overwhelming modesty, I would be perfect, but not even I would write quite like that.
Still, if you have a trumpet, you may as well blow it.
As a matter of a more serious nature, he talks about the Great London Floods of 1236 and 1242. In the former flood, the Palace of Westminster was flooded and "men did row with wherries in the midst of the hall, being forced to ride to their chambers.". In the latter, "in the great hall of Westminster men took their horses because the water ran over it."
Back in here, I had some things to find to take downstairs and then I sorted out the photos from Thursday (which you have seen just now) and do it quickly too because my cleaner was coming early.
After she’d fitted my anaesthetic patches we measured all of the furniture in the living room, took one of the CD and DVD columns with us, and went downstairs with some masking tape to mark on the floor exactly where all of the furniture will go in the living room downstairs.
That’s important because the Saturday and the Monday afternoon, I’ll have dialysis and then on the Tuesday and Wednesday I’ll be having chemotherapy in Paris so anyone who will be here to help me will need to know where to put everything if I’m not here.
The chief driver of the taxi company turned up to collect me, and he was early too so it’s just as well that I was ready.
We arrived at Avranches much earlier than planned, and so as usual I had to wait an age to be seen and plugged it. At least, I had good company because Alexi looked after me today.
At first, I was really drowsy, due in no small measure to the fact that my blood pressure dropped to 7.7/5.6, which is about the lowest that it has been.
Once I’d recovered, I spent most of the afternoon trying to find a series of books called “The Paston Letters” – a book containing all of the correspondence issued by the Paston family in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century.
These six volumes are extremely important because firstly, they give an eyewitness report of the Wars of the Roses, as seen by the ordinary man in the street who suffered so much, and secondly, they cover the period of the evolution of the English language from Medieval English to Early Modern English and the official codification and standardisation of the language following the invention of William Caxton’s printing press.
As usual, having arrived early, I was late being disconnected and then I had to wait ten minutes for the taxi. Even then, the driver had another passenger to drop off at Brehal up the coast and she wanted to take him first, which annoyed me greatly but there wasn’t much that I could do about it.
Consequently, I was just as late coming home as I might otherwise have been had I left here late.
Climbing the stairs in my weakened state was awful and when I made it into here I had to sit down for half an hour to recover before I could make tea.
So a baked potato, vegan salad and breadcrumbed quorn slice later, I’m off to bed, totally wasted after all of my exertions. I really need to be downstairs as quickly as possible because I can’t keep on going like this. It’s awful.
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the floods … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of the time of the Great Flood of Crewe a while back.
When the Municipal Buildings were flooded, they decided that they would take advantage of the situation and play a game of water polo.
"Was it a success?" I asked.
"Not really" came the reply. "Most of the horses drowned."
