… not sitting in a rainbow, and not sitting in my nice, new apartment, but sitting in my mouse-infested hovel in Paris with all kinds of tubes and pipes attached and plugged into me, in the middle of a session of chemotherapy.

Consequently, if this entry stops abruptly, you will know that I have been overwhelmed with side-effects.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … nice, tidy apartment, still apparently without internet so I am told, I finished writing my notes rather later than usual, what with one thing and another, and with not being able to do anything else on the internet and still seething with rage, I went to bed.

And it was after midnight too.

During the night, I remember one or two little moments of consciousness, but I slept all the way through until the alarm went off – at 06:00 this morning. And it was the most glorious night that I have had for ages. I really felt at home in that bedroom.

Opening the shutters and breathing in the fresh air first thing in the morning reminded me very much of 1970, 16 years of age and on my student exchange in Burgundy, opening the shutters of my little room over that bar in Chasselas up in the mountains at the back of Macon. Ohh, happy days!

Or they would have been, but I was totally unprepared for that trip. Coming from a tiny rural village, I had no perception of what the outside World was like, even less about what a foreign country was like. I was far too shy and nervous to make the most of it.

As Ernest Borgnine (I think) said in THE WILD BUNCH, "What I don’t know about, I sure as hell am gonna learn", and so I did. And I’m still learning, every day.

As Hugh Latimer once famously said to Bishop Ridley, that voyage lit "such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.". And it hasn’t either, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. 600 or 700 miles from the North Pole in 2018 at 64 years of age, and still wishing to push onwards.

After a lovely wash in my beautiful sink in my wonderful bathroom, I went into the kitchen to make some sandwiches for my trip. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I think that the food in the hospital is dreadful … "for the benefit of anyone from Avranches reading this, on 8th May 2025 our hero wrote to the hospital about it and there was subsequent correspondence, but nothing ever changed." – ed … so I am obliged to take my own food supplies to keep the lupus from the porte, as they said in Ancient Rome.

With plenty of time on my hands, I began to re-arrange the food in the kitchen and in the fridge. The new fridge-freezer is huge but even so, there is still not enough room to put everything in the freezer – my permanent gripe, it seems.

Having packed my backpack, I was sitting having a breather when the Hound of the Baskervilles breezed in, dragging his master behind him. We had a chat while my friend … "the master, not the Hound" – ed … drank a coffee. I never eat or drink before I go to Paris. With a four-hour drive, I work on the principle that what doesn’t go in won’t want to come out during the journey.

My friend brought down the washing-up equipment so I could clean up after the meal last night, and just as I finished, the nurse burst in. He had a quick look around the apartment and it passed muster, so he patched me up and cleared off.

The plumber was next, and he brought with him his account. I had to go to lie down in a darkened room for ten minutes to recover. It was expensive, but he has done an excellent job and I am well-impressed. I really did strike it lucky with my plumber and joiner. Not so the electrician though, because the internet plug that he fitted doesn’t seem to work.

Until the taxi arrived, I busied myself stacking the pile of books onto the bookcases to make the place look a little less cluttered.

It was the senior driver who came for me today. We had a really quick run to Paris, punctuated by a stop at his depot to fuel up the car.

The road to Paris was also punctuated by a whole series of different messages with a huge variety of different people, as well as a ‘phone call from the dialysis centre. They want to come round to inspect my new abode, presumably to ensure that I’m not living in insalubrious circumstances. Mind you, at the rate that these hospital appointments are coming, I shall hardly be living there at all.

There were just a few slight interruptions at Caen and on the edge of Paris, but apart from that, it was quite fluid and we were here twelve minutes early, and everyone else was at lunch.

They put me in the room that I share with the mouse, and after the induction session, they left me to my own devices for a while.

That was the cue to put on line yesterday’s complete blog entry, and then I went deep into the bowels of my coding that I wrote for the operation of my websites (all of the underlying coding for my web pages was hand-written by me) and looked at the visitors.

Sure enough, as I suspected, last night I had two readers from Avranches searching through my blog, another one just down the road from Avranches in Brittany and three from disguised locations but with French IP addresses. So the vultures are flapping their wings in the trees, waiting for the wounded wildebeest to drop to his knees.

Alors, je vais vous dire quelque chose. Il y a un bouton au fond de la page à la main droite. Si vous avez lu quelque chose que vous n’appreciez pas, appuyerez sur le bouton et vous allez trouver une boîte de communication. Plutôt que faire des plaintes anonymes, m’en ecriviez directement afin d’exprimer votre mécontentement. Quand j’écris quelque chose, je mets mon non en dessous. Il n’y a aucun raison pourquoi vous ne pourriez pas faire la même chose.

The Professor who is dealing with my case came to see me. He had heard that I no longer wanted to come to Paris so we had a lengthy chat about it. In the end he agreed to have a chat with the people at Rennes and also St-Lô where there is apparently an outstation of the Neurological Department of the University Hospital of Caen.

Since then, tea has been, and so has the chemotherapy. So now I’m off to lie down while I still can, ready for Round Three tomorrow. The taxi has been booked for 13:00 so it had all better be finished by then and I had better to be on form to be able to travel home, even if the internet still isn’t working.

But seeing as we have been talking about plumbers … "well, one of us has" – ed … in Crewe in the 1960s, someone went to the Rolls-Royce factory to buy a new car. He paid his deposit and was told that he could pick it up exactly ten years from the day.
"Would that be the morning or the afternoon?" he asked.
"It’s in ten years time" said the salesman. "Does it make a difference?"
"Actually, it does" replied the customer. "We have a water leak in our house and the plumber will be coming that morning to fix it."