… that was today. It was easily the worst day of my life so far.
The time was getting on for midnight last night when I finally crawled into bed and threw the quilt over my head. I was soon asleep as well, which was good news. Not so good was the news that at some point, I had to go for a ride on the porcelain horse, but back in bed later, I was soon asleep.
It was at about 08:00 when I awoke, but that’s far too early for a Sunday. I checked the time and then threw the covers back over me.
The next thing that I remember was Isabelle the Nurse pulling the quilt off my feet and legs and then going to work. She was in full chat mode this morning, but I was in no mood for any of that. I just wanted to sleep. 08:30 had no interest for me this morning.
When I finally awoke, it was 10:33, and I decided that this would be the best time for me to leave the bed. Mind you, it was 11:00 when I finally made it into the kitchen. There were the croissants yesterday that needed brushing with milk and then baking.
While they were baking, I was busy making my breakfast – porridge and coffee – and when the croissants were finally baked, I stuck two on my plate and then went to sit down and eat it. While I was eating my breakfast, I was reading some more of EBURACUM OR YORK UNDER THE ROMANS by C Wellbeloved.
He’s moving on now and is beginning to discuss religion in Roman York. Someone has discovered a shrine of Mithreas and so we are having an interesting discussion on Mithraeism at the moment.
That leads to a brief flurry of writing to help clarify a couple of issues.
Now back on my feet, I head for the bedroom and office. It’s only 12:13 and that’s a reasonable time to start work. First task is to transcribe the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night.
The number of times I’ve done that. When I lived in Gainsborough Road, a young lad asked me to look over his car, a Ford Cortina. I gave it a good looking over and fixed a few things on it, and he drove off.
He came back later, absolutely delighted, saying "it passed, it passed, first attempt too. How much do I owe you?"
"Actually, I don’t like taking money. prefer an exchange of services. What do you do for a living?"
"I’m a landscape gardener" he replied.
After that, I never had a better-looking garden. His car needed a lot of work and maintenance.
After that, I had a lot of work to do, including dozing off regularly and being confused about where I was and what I was doing. And it was becoming worse and worse, but at 16:00, I remembered that I had to go outside for my hundred paces
Here is a shot taken from my 100 paces turn-round, depicting the building across the road from where we live. I’ve no idea what it used to be, but today, it’s apartments just like this building is.
When I arrived, there were still two apartments for sale. I contacted the agents, but they never replied, so I came here as a tenant and had to wait almost seven years until my ideal apartment was put up for sale.
When I finally settled in down here, I was really grateful that I’d bough here because access into and out of this apartment is quite easy
Back in here, I began to make the pizza base but I was feeling more and more tired and more and more ill. By the time the pizza base needed its second kneading and its rolling out, I was on a different planet somewhere else in the sky. I unrolled the pizza base and rolled it out and put it on its tray. But that was that, all I was going to do.
So I wrote a terse note on my blog and climbed into bed. It wasn’t even 19:00 but I didn’t care. I was going to bed, and that was all that counted.
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about going to dleep … "well, one of us has" – ed … some girl I know said that she always goes to sleep with the lights on.
"What does your boyfriend think?" I asked her
"He says it’s pretty weird, but I don’t know why. It’s just my size, and it makes a great hat!"
