… slightly cooler today than yesterday. In fact, the temperature barely struggled up to 41.5°C, according to the thermometer sender outside, and that’s impressive. Inside my room, with the windows wide open and the fan going full-tilt, it was barely 29°C at one point.
Yes, we’ve had worse than that.
Not that any of it did me much good.
As I mentioned in my last post, I was in bed just after 20:00, hoping for an early night and a good sleep, but some hopes!
It was too hot to sleep without the fan and too noisy to sleep with the fan, and so in the end, after much binding in the marsh, I decided that the coolness was the way to go. I lay awake all night, and I mean “all night”, too, listening to the fan and watching the light coming round the edges of the shutters, changing from light to dark and then slowly back to light again.
At round about 02:00, I had another mega-coughing fit which led to several bouts of vomiting, so many that in fact I lost count. It’s becoming really bad, this. Let’s see what the doctor’s prescription can do about this later.
When the alarm went off, I went in search of my clothes that had somehow become scattered around the apartment and then went to start work, such as I felt like doing.
There was no need to check the dictaphone for dreams. If you can’t go to sleep, you can’t dream. And it was probably the effect of this new family who appeared from nowhere working on my farm and driving my old Kubota B-1220 tractor that put me off everything.
Never mind, though, there were still plenty of other things to do to take me up to Isabelle the Nurse’s arrival time so I wasn’t bored.
When she turned up, she insisted on treating me in my bedroom which was the wrong thing to do. And she appeared in her short skirt and tee-shirt in concession to the weather, which was already at 30°C outside.
She talked about nothing very much, and after she left, I began to think about breakfast but instead saw this lovely, long, comfortable bed. That decided it for me – I switched the alarm on for 11:15 and hit the hay.
And dream? Didn’t I just dream. Hordes of hallucinations fleeting across my brain from right to left, far too many to notice and to record. From just trying to save one, I ended up with none at all and that was rather desperate.
For some reason, I was up at about 11:00 and at that point began to make a very desultory start on yesterday’s notes. Here and there, doing bits and pieces while I could in between bouts of falling asleep. But eventually, it was the sleep that won.
My faithful cleaner awoke me when she arrived. It’s shower day today of course, and I can’t postpone it yet again. I’ll be picked up on radar everywhere I go, so I reluctantly headed that way. And it was much less difficult than I imagined and I felt like a new man afterwards.
She helped me out and I dried myself and found some new clothes to wear. This is more like it.
After she left, I carried on with yesterday’s notes and now they are on line, at long last.
But then I had some very bad news from Canada.
My faithful sidekick Cujo the Killer Cat crossed the Rainbow Bridge last night. She was adopted as a tiny kitten twenty-odd years ago and even when I last saw her, three or so years ago, she was in the best of health, teaching the new kitten to hunt and catch mice.
However, her age finally caught up with her yesterday, and that was a real shame. She might have been quite violent and aggressive with the local wildlife, but I always found her cute and sweet.
Once I’d digested the news, I went back to bed for a couple of hours. I was that tired again. This has been a horrible day all together.
But now I’m awake again, but not for long. I’ll sort out my evening medication and then I’m going back to bed, and I don’t care. I’ve had no food either but I’d rather be asleep than eating anything. If I have a good sleep tonight, I’ll feel so much better.
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about showers … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once sent Nerina to a health farm for a week, where she had one of these super-duper showers.
The next day, she rang me to tell me about it. "You, know, it was amazing. I’m feeling a new woman after that."
"Feeling a new woman?" I mused. "It’s funny you should mention that …"
