… that I’m not very well at all right now.

In a few minutes, I’ll be going to bed, without any tea. If I’m off my food, then things are really bad, but I’m just not hungry.

As well as that, I’ve suddenly gone freezing cold all over, which is a surprise because the heater in my room is belting the heat out.

In fact, whatever I seem to have caught, I’ve had it for a few days now and it was even worse last night. I’d managed to write out about half of my notes before an uncontrollable wave of fatigue swept over me. I was away with the fairies for about twenty minutes and when I awoke, I just couldn’t go on.

In the end, I gave up and crawled into bed, and that was that.

When I awoke, it was 03:35. I wasn’t expecting that. I’d been so tired that I was expecting to sleep for a hundred years. What was worse was that I couldn’t go back to sleep. I ended up tossing and turning about in bed for hours. When I next looked at the clock, it was 05:25 so I thought that I’d heave myself out of bed in ten minutes and start work.

Whatever happened after that, I’m not at all sure but when I had a quick glance at the clock, it was 08:25. Apparently I’d gone back to sleep again after all of that.

The next thing was Isabelle the Nurse shaking me awake. I’d gone back to sleep yet again, but not for very long that time.

After she had left, it took a good while to heave myself out of bed. And after the bathroom, I went into the kitchen, where I looked at the clock on the microwave. It was 09:30. That’s rather a late time to start my day.

For breakfast, I made my full meal that I should have had on Boxing Day, with porridge, coffee, baked beans on toast, sausage, hash browns and more toast with mushroom pate. It was all totally delicious, although I could do with finding some better beans than these haricots lingots to make my baked beans.

While I was eating, I was doing some more reading. Not of my book right now, but of Roman military architecture. And here’s something fascinating – with their trebuchets, as well as hurling stones and rocks, they would also hurl hollowed-out logs filled with charcoal. These made really good incendiary devices for setting fire to the wooden houses in fortified villages.

Back in here, I finished off yesterday’s notes and now they are online. And it was really depressing having to read through them to see how ill I was becoming, as I suspect that reading through these will be.

But having done that, I went to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was on the taxis last night, and I had two cars, a yellow MkIII and a green MkIII.I was sitting in the office and another girl was sitting on the sofa in there. The girl who was working the radio was a nice, quiet girl, and I really liked her. We’d established some kind of unofficial relationship which I hoped would actually lead to something. For some reason, this other girl was extremely jealous and how she showed it was by, while we were sitting there, putting her hands on me, putting her arm around me, etc. In the end, I went to sit on the floor because I didn’t really want to upset the other girl. It was all extremely uncomfortable. There was much more to it than that too but I seem to have forgotten what it was.

It’s a shame that I’d forgotten some of this dream. However, it’s perfectly true to say that at one stage I did have a yellow MkIII – VBH742N and a green MkIII – PGJ362P. Cortinas, of course. There was also a blue one – LND9P before I moved onto MkIVs, of which there were more than I care to remember.

I was up in the Austrian Alps last night. I was running some kind of business at the side of the road by a great big lake. I was discussing the general situation with one or two people, one of whom was a musician with Crosby, Stills and Nash. We’d lived by this lake for years and we decided to drag it to see what was in it. There were hundreds and hundreds of glass bottles so we set about raking them out. We had quite a pile that we could send off for recycling. While we were in there, we struck something like a large motor vehicle. I had a look down, and it was a coach, or was it a bus? But it was something like that, a large passenger-carrying vehicle. We set about trying to drag that out. I was surprised because we were talking about vehicles that were in the bottoms of lakes in the Alps. I was saying that coaches generally have a body type number so-and-so and buses generally have a type designation so-and-so, one of which was EA but I can’t remember the others. So we hauled this bus or coach out as well and that went off for recycling. I was saying that I was astonished because usually, with coaches, they would all be recovered immediately. It was only the odd bus or two that you’d find still in there in the lake, although I knew personally of where there was at least one coach still in a lake somewhere up here. I carried on fishing out the bottles and could see my tabby cat walking around the edge of the lake, actually in the water but around the edge of the lake, heading towards an island or a lump of mud. When I’d finished, I had three or four bottles left and I didn’t know what to do with them so quite simply, I filled them with water and threw them back.

This reminds me of the stories of all of those missing German gold bars that disappeared at the end of World War II. They were believed to have been sunk in Lake Toplitz along with a huge amount of counterfeit British banknotes that the Germans intended to use to undermine the British economy.

The money was actually found in the lake, but the gold was not, although conspiracy theorists will say otherwise. Mind you, there’s also a conspiracy theory that says that there’s a flying saucer in the lake.

Of all the cats that I’ve ever owned, I’ve never had a tabby cat so I don’t know why I’d dream about having one.

There was football on the internet afterwards, Stranraer away at Annan Athletic. The unbeaten run goes on, but they could and should have done much better than to draw 2-2.

After that, I unfortunately fell asleep, and for a good while too. What is happening to me?

It took me a good while to recover after that, but once I was back in the Land of the Living, I finished off the radio notes and then dictated them, along with the notes for the joining track for the previous programme.

Earlier on, I’d taken some of the frozen pizza dough from a good while ago out of the freezer and it had been defrosting. When I went to look at it, it was certainly past its best and so it went into the bin. The rest of the frozen dough in the freezer then followed it because I don’t think that it will be any better.

The rest of the day was spent editing the notes that I’d dictated just now. The joining track was added in to the two halves of the earlier programme, along with the edited text, and that’s now complete.

There was time to do some editing on the notes for the following programme and I’m about a quarter of the way through. I’ll do the rest whenever.

Right now though, this quite ill, quite depressed me is going to go to bed, even if it is only 21:00. I’ve had quite enough of today and I really want to pull through into a better state of health. Sleep has always been my favourite medicine for that and a lot more won’t go amiss.

But seeing as we have been talking about Stranraer FC … "well, one of us has" – ed … they are one of the few football clubs in Scotland that doesn’t have a women’s football team.
When I asked manager Chris Aitken why, he replied "we had eleven women sign up, but they all flatly refused to wear the same outfit as each other. "