… what happened today, but today was just like any ordinary day might have been, say, two or three years ago, and it’s astonishing how quickly things can turn round after the disaster that was yesterday.
By the time that I went to bed last night, things weren’t actually quite as bad as they had seemed to be during the day. Mind you, they couldn’t have been any worse, could they?
It was about 21:30 when I closed everything down in here, and it was about half an hour later, maybe, when I finally crawled into bed. It took a couple of minutes to make myself comfortable, and then I was asleep quite quickly afterwards.
Some time later, I found myself awake again. I’ve no idea what time because I couldn’t be bothered to look and “found myself awake” because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I seem to be doing that quite regularly these days, and it’s a completely different feeling than “waking up”. I’ve no idea what’s happening here at all.
For a while, I was drifting in and out of that twilight world in no-man’s land where I’m neither awake nor asleep, and even if I weren’t, I would still have no clue as to whether I’m awake or whether I’m asleep.
At a certain moment, I looked at the time. 05:55. We had the usual internal discussion about whether I ought to get up, claim an early start and start to work, or whether I ought to simply try to go to sleep for the next half an hour or so.
In the end, I decided that I may as well go back to sleep if I could, so I turned over into my “easy sleep” position in the bed. And I must have gone to sleep because when the alarm went off to awaken me, I remember thinking “that was NEVER half an hour”.
We had the usual ten-minute delay while I worked up the courage, energy and enthusiasm to go to the bathroom to sort myself out, and then, back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.
That was pretty much a waste of time, but at least it shows me that I must have been in a really deep sleep last night, much deeper than normal.
There were plenty of other things to be done this morning, so I set to work, but I was interrupted by the nurse who came by at 08:02. Has he ever been that early before?
We talked about dialysis and the weather as he applied the cream and did his stuff to my feet, ankles and calves. After he left, I could make my breakfast.
One thing that I didn’t do was to read some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman. Yesterday, I’d been considerably side-tracked by places mentioned in Freeman’s book and ended up roaming all around the countryside, looking at different places.
Just before knocking off, it had led me to, believe it or not, the “Zeppelin”, “Gotha” and “Giant” German bombing raids on the UK in World War I, and today, I carried on reading the articles on this subject while I was eating.
Eventually, back in here, I finished off doing what I had been doing before breakfast. And when that had been done, I turned my attention to this radio programme on which I’d been working.
Firstly, though, round about midday we had the rainstorm to end all rainstorms. It had been a grey day yesterday, but that had nothing on how it was today. At least, all the farmers will be pleased, even if the tourists won’t be.
So returning to the radio programme, I had to download some music, and that takes longer because my favourite supplier of music has … errr … burnt down and a huge number of discs has been lost.
Eventually, I managed to find what I needed, and it’s now all downloaded, the tracks I want have been selected, and the ten that I want for now have all been reformatted, chosen, paired and segued. I’ve even started to write some of the notes for them.
My cleaner put her sooty foot in the apartment too. She came to bring me the medication that she’d bought from the chemists as I seem to be running out of a lot of it right now. We ended up having a chat and then she wandered off on her travels. I noticed that not only had the rain stopped, but it was bright, warm sunshine out there so I opened my window to let some fresh air in.
When I’d finished what I was doing on the radio programme, I went to make tea. Tonight, it was pasta and various vegetables tossed in a cheese sauce with tarragon and chives. And delicious it was too. And the final two slices of the first half of the home-made fruit bread that I’d made ten or so days ago. Now I shall have to fetch the other half out of the freezer.
So back in here, I wrote out my notes for today, and now, once I’ve checked the stats, done the backup, etc., I’ll be off to bed and hope that these gale-force winds will drop and let me sleep. It’s horribly later than usual but yet I’m not even remotely tired. What on earth is going on here?
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the chemists … "well, one of us has" – ed … while my cleaner was in the chemist’s just now, a man came in and went up to the other counter and asked "a packet of condoms, please."
The chemist gave him a packet and asked "do you need a bag?"
The man replied "there’s one at home in bed. That’s why I need the condoms"
