Wednesday 11th February 2026 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S DISASTER …

… I had quite a productive day today, although you would never have thought so.

It didn’t take as long as it might have done to finish off everything, and I was in bed by about 22:45. However, despite the rumoured efficacy of this cough medicine that I’m taking just before going to bed, it took an age for me to actually go off to sleep.

And then, when I did, I awoke on several occasions, mainly due to the stabbing pain in my foot, and at one stage was even thinking about leaving the bed, but I soon dismissed that silly idea from my head.

When the alarm went off, I was fast asleep, and regrettably, I went back to sleep again, only to be awoken by the repeater alarm four minutes later. That’s something of a disaster, isn’t it?

It took an age to leave the bed too and I ended up running quite late this morning in consequence.

The first port of call was the bathroom, and then there was the kitchen to make my hot lemon, honey and ginger drink and to take my medication. And with all of this stuff for the cough, there’s quite a pile of it.

Back in here, I listened to the dictaphone and found, to my surprise, that there was something on there from when I crashed out yesterday afternoon. So that’s now transcribed and in place.

And then there was the rest of it.

The second hillfort and its manager from Bangor have been found guilty of murdering someone in the city. It’s a hillfort that hasn’t been discovered for all that long, and as yet, it hasn’t really been searched or examined by anyone. As I say, there’s much more than this but I can’t remember it now, unfortunately.

No prizes for guessing from where this discussion about hillforts has come. And Bangor relates to a few visits I made there almost fifty years ago now. But I would have loved to know how it would have ended.

I was at work when one of the chauffeurs, a Danish guy or a Swedish guy, came over to me to ask me if I’d go to look at his car, so I did. When we crawled underneath, I could see that there was an exhaust pipe or silencer that had been cut into by a wire stay that holds part of the body rigid, and it needed replacing. He had a replacement so we agreed that we’d go to do it. He threw his tools into the back of the car and he went to ask one of the security guys where we could go. He told us that if we went down one of the exits near to where his office was, we’d come out in the countryside somewhere. We went that way and found ourselves in some kind of park. The view of our office was impressive, and I remember sitting there one night before I started the job after I’d been offered it, looking at the lighting and everything. We found a place to park, and I crawled underneath. I was convinced that the silencer was in the wrong place but I couldn’t see how else it would go. I asked for a screwdriver to dismantle it but they didn’t have one in their box except a big, awkward, clumsy one. At that moment, I’d wished that I’d brought my tools with me. I told him that I thought that this silencer was in the wrong place but he replied that when it had been somewhere else, I’d criticised the installers for not doing the job correctly, something that I couldn’t remember, but the silencer, in its current place, had been cut into by the wire stay. The screw that retained it needed tightening up because it was loose and the silencer was flopping around, but apart from that, I couldn’t see how I was going to make things any better with the way that they were with the way that the silencer had been installed.

If I had a penny for every car under which I’d crawled in the past, I’d be typing these notes from the deck of a yacht in the Bahamas with floozies throwing grapes into my mouth.

But the silencer being wrongly installed does have a parallel – a “professional” installed a new exhaust on a car that my brother owned, and ever since then the handbrake didn’t work. When I looked underneath it, I saw that this “professional” had fitted the exhaust in the wrong place and it was blocking the handbrake cable.

There was also something about a press announcement about Mark Carney having concluded a trade agreement with Sweden, the third agreement with a first-rate European Union country.

Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England, is now Canada’s prime minister and he actually has been on a few trade missions around the World with the aim of finding a new market for all of the products that the USA buys.

The nurse turned up, in a hurry again so he didn’t stay long. When he’d gone, I could read some more of Mortimer Wheeler’s MAIDEN CASTLE .

We’ve finished pottery and have gone onto bones. And if his autopsies are correct (and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be), many of the deceased in the “War Cemetery” do show signs of battle injury and hasty burial. One woman looks as if she’s had her hands tied behind her back and been executed.

There’s more talk about climate change too. He says that "The presence of Arianta arbustorum is important. During the damp period of the Early Bronze Age this species was common on the chalk hills of the south. With the incoming of drier conditions in the Middle Bronze Age this species became less common".

Back in here, I reviewed the radio programme that I should have sent off on Monday and sent it off today instead. And then I turned my attention to the current radio programme.

In the end, I found all of the music that I needed. It’s all now reformatted, remixed, re-edited, paired and segued, and I’ve even written all of the notes for it, except of course for the joining track.

There was an interruption for the guy who was coming to install the fibre-optic cable, except that he didn’t come.

Apparently, he told his head office that I was out, although I was glued to the window at the relevant time period. So I complained. And one thing that the technician doesn’t know is that his vehicle has a tracker installed in it, so when he returns to the office, he will have to explain why his van was parked up at the port outside a crèpe restaurant for one hour and thirty-eight minutes.

When I’d finished the radio notes, I had one or two rather urgent things to do, and then I went back into the kitchen to make some bread rolls and my leek, potato and mushroom soup.

It was totally delicious and there’s enough soup and bread rolls left over for tomorrow’s tea too.

Not right now, though, because I’m off to bed, ready to fight the good fight tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Bank of England … "well, one of us has" – ed … there used to be a Bank of Crewe many years ago.
One day, a forger from Crewe went in and asked "can you change this eighteen-pound note, please? "
"Certainly" replied the cashier. "What would you like? Two nines or three sixes?"

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