… strikes again:

Sitting here all morning fuming because the plumber hadn’t shown up, I eventually decided to re-read the message that he had sent me at the beginning of last week.

And sure enough, there in black and white, is written “a week on Monday” – i.e. the 11th August.

Here I am, having been fretting all day for nothing at all.

Even worse, in the mad rush to order what I needed and ended up with what I could buy at short notice rather than what I would like, it turns out that I had plenty of time to shop around and make an online order. Still, it’s too late to fret about it now.

And seeing as we have been talking about it being too late … "well, one of us has" – ed … it was too late last night when I finally went to bed last night. After my marathon lie-in on Sunday, I wasn’t all that tired, which is no surprise

Mind you, I was asleep quite quickly and there I stayed, flat out, until all of … errr … 04:10.

At that point I could easily have left the bed but I decided once more to loiter around for a while. The next thing that I knew, it was 05:45 and so at that point I decided to leave the bed. Not that I managed it straight away – it took me a good few minutes to summon up the courage to leave the bed.

The first thing that I did was to go back to yesterday’s entry and add in the dictaphone notes that I had forgotten to include last night.

After a good scrub up and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, I went to sort out the medication and then I came back in here to find out what was on the dictaphone from the night. I was in an apartment in the rue de Villedieu. Looking out of the window I could see someone going past with a pile of books and records so I wondered what was happening. As I opened the door, a paper that had been on my desk blew out and I had to run after it but the faster I ran, the faster it blew in front of me. It took me quite a while, up to the hospital roundabout in fact, before I was able to catch it and stamp on it. By this time, the people with all these books and records had disappeared. I was chatting to a friend about this and we had no idea of what was going on. A few days later, I was walking down by the old cemetery and in the corner at the bottom where all of the records of the cemetery and the burials of the town had been kept, it was now an office for an auto-electrical company. I was wandering around a little more and came across a guy who used to supply sand into the cemetery. I asked him if he knew what was happening. He replied that the books and records department had been closed in May. I thought that this was the reason why the books and records had been moved, but to where have they gone? No-one at all seemed to know. They had disappeared off the face of the earth. I thought that if the company had closed down, that might be the reason why there was no football on Sunday morning, maybe because the commentators who accessed all of the records for their broadcasts, they had decided to move on too although it would be extremely unlikely.

This reminds me of an incident in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, in 1992 where the disposal of a pile of records led to an extremely unfortunate crisis that had still not resolved itself when I left for the European mainland. It was one of those events that would have the most enormous repercussions but we’ll leave it at that, for fear of incriminating certain people.

Later on, I stepped back into that dream. We were talking about the ancient martial art of Terzhik which involved a way of entering through the window of some kind of sacred or special place. This is what had started off on this series of dreams by thinking that I had seen someone coming through the window into the records office. However, I didn’t spend long dreaming of this because I awoke with a start again halfway through.

As for any martial art called Terzhik, I doubt very much that there is such a thing. But people coming in through the window is a concern that I need to address when I’m on the ground floor, knowing how suddenly and how profoundly I can crash out.

While we were tidying up, my cleaner came across a video that I hadn’t seen. It talked about the Welsh migrations during the Industrial Revolution when hundreds of thousands of people left their homes on the farms and in the mountains to go to work in the coal mines and in the big cities. I hadn’t seen this before so I sat down to watch it. It was extremely interesting, talking about the lines of emigration up the Conwy valley and places like that. It went on to talk about the migrations from the South to the North in 1913 when the Wrexham coal mines open – that would seem to be when my grandmother moved from Penrhiwceiber in South Wales up to Wrexham. It showed all kinds of interesting things like the contemporary carriages and the rock-strew routes that they used to take, how their carriages were broken down along the way and had to be repaired so a whole new breed of carriage repairers had to be set up in mid-Wales. It talked about the cemeteries being vacated, bodies being removed and being found just about everywhere because there was no possible way to bury them anywhere else. It was just reaching the interesting part when I awoke.

Rural depopulation is something that has been going on since the start of the Industrial Revolution but in Wales, with the dramatic rise of heavy industry, the process was much more intense and many villages lost a huge amount of their population. In 1871, Penrhiwceiber wasn’t even listed in the census, yet in 1909 there were over 4,000 people working in the coal mines there As for the roads in mid-Wales, they are not much better than those that I saw in my dream. The problem in a lack of investment – neither the Welsh Assembly nor Central Government believes that there’s anything north of the “Heads of the Valleys” except sheep and druids.

There was another part of a dream somewhere but I can’t remember where it fitted in, but I’d gone for a walk and had gone almost as far as Nantwich before I realised that I had set out without my crutches. I wondered how that was possible and, more importantly, once I realised, how was I going to return home?

Wherever this fits in, I have no idea. But it’s not the first time that I’ve dreamed that I’ve been walking without my crutches. But I’d love to know how I returned home once I’d realised.

Isabelle was late this morning and she didn’t stay long, just enough time to sort out my legs and then she was away. I could then make breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

Our author has pressed on today and is now discussing the chronology of the Bishops of London.

He has quite a few comments to make about some of the Bishops, but he reserves his most incendiary vitriol for Eustachius de Fauconbridge, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who was made bishop in 1221. He says that while Fauconbridge "was giving Holy orders, a great tempest of wind and rain annoyed so many who came thither whereof it was gathered how highly God was displeased with such as came to receive orders, to the end that they might live a more easy life of the stipend appointed to the churchmen, giving themselves to banqueting, and so with unclean and filthy bodies (but more unclean souls) presume to minister unto God, the author of purity and cleanness."

Back in here, still fuming over the non-arrival of the plumber (I hadn’t re-read the message at this point) I drafted an advert onto one of these Chamber of Commerce sites to see if I couldn’t find another one.

While I was at it, I put some more things online for sale and, in the case of the old bathroom fittings, to give away. There is still plenty more to be sold.

When my cleaner had finished applying my anaesthetic patches, we collected some more things together, photographed another piece of furniture, and then took downstairs the things that we had assembled.

Once I was down there, I put things away, mainly in the new bathroom unit, and then began to rearrange and reorder the food in the kitchen cabinets. There’s now much more space in there, which is good.

When it was 13:00 we went outside in the sun to await the taxi, but it was half an hour late. Not that I was complaining, because it was a gorgeous afternoon and I was enjoying the fresh air.

There was another passenger in the car and the driver spent all of the time talking to her. No-one said a word to me. I settled down in the back of the car and had a nice rest.

At dialysis I was put in a small room with three other people. It was a nice, comfortable bed with nice surroundings so I didn’t do much this afternoon. I simply relaxed and enjoyed the nice view.

And who should come to chat to me but Emilie the Cute Consultant. We discussed the issues about chemotherapy, and an in-depth discussion it was too. In the end she promised to ring Paris to explain in greater detail the issues that I’m having, and suggest that I go to Rennes for any subsequent treatment. It would be lovely if she could persuade them

With being late arriving, I was late leaving but we made good time on the way home. Back here, we measured the windows in the apartment downstairs so that I could order some curtains, and my faithful cleaner has struck lucky. Some of the shelves in the fridge here are broken and I would have to order some new ones as replacements before I go, but someone has dumped over in the rubbish bay a fridge the same size as mine and she was able to rescue a couple of shelves, which is wonderful.

It was another long, weary climb up here and I had to sit down for twenty minutes to recover before I could make tea.

We’re back in our usual routine as of today, with stuffed pepper, and enough stuffing left over for a couple of days. It’s only a small mix of stuffing too, but I’m really not in all that much of a mood to eat a great deal right now.

So tomorrow, there is plenty to do so I’m going to go to bed, late as it is. And here’s hoping for a good sleep because despite the events of Sunday morning, I really need it.

But seeing as we have been talking about the cemetery here in Granville … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone from Crewe came here years ago and was astonished by the number of graves in it for such a small town.
"Do people die here often then?" he asked the gravedigger.
"Ohh no!" replied the gravedigger. "Only the once."