… clean me … "well, clean anyway" – ed … tonight, going to sleep in a nice clean bed tonight. It’s Tuesday, so that’s shower day, and while I was hosing myself down, my faithful cleaner gave my bed a good going over and changed the bedding.
Actually, it’s quite nice to be in that position, because these days, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, showering is something that I find extremely difficult these days. And so I’m only allowed to have a shower when she’s here to watch over me. I’m not allowed to have one when I’m on my own in case I fall.
But anyway, be that as it may, last night, having abandoned my notes halfway through, it was still after 22:30 when I went to bed. I awoke twice during the night, but I have no idea what time it was – I couldn’t be bothered to look. And in any case, I was back asleep quickly enough.
When the alarm went off at 06:29, I was definitely asleep. And I was certainly in no mood to leave the bed. It was quite a struggle to coax myself out of bed and sit on the edge, never mind stand up and go to the bathroom.
Eventually, though, I made it into the bathroom and managed to organise myself into something like, ready to face the day, and then I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out what had gone on during the night.
This dream does have some kind of basis in fact – not about the van and not about wanting to go to bed, but about a former friend and a friendship that came to a shuddering halt. Although, as usual, it’s one of those stories that the World is not yet ready to hear.
But being out and about with no sleep is not unusual. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall Back about fifteen years ago, I was in Cambridge. I had to drive to Gloucestershire to pick up a trailer, then to North Lancashire to pick up a mini digger, and then all the way down to central France – a working “day” of thirty-five hours with the only sleep being the couple of hours on the cross-Channel ferry. I couldn’t do it now.
The nurse turned up as usual and sorted out my legs and feet. While he was working, he was chatting about Welsh football, which I thought was rather strange.
After he left, I could make my breakfast and read some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.
Actually, I didn’t read that much of it today. He started to talk about the Batalha Monastery in Portugal, and that was something of which I knew nothing at all. Consequently, I set off to find out about it. Apparently its construction was ordered by King John I of Portugal as fulfilment of a vow that he had made before a battle in which his small army decisively defeated a very much larger Castilian and French army and assured Portugal’s independence.
Back in here, I began the knotty problem of this soundtrack, where I had to dispose of about one and a half minutes of something, but I know not what, in order to make enough room for a decent introduction.
By the time that I’d finished, I’d actually disposed of two and a half minutes, which makes it even better. But it didn’t ‘arf take some time to do. I managed to save some time by trimming out some of the applause. That involved trying to mate the “before the trim” endings with the “after the trim” starting points, and that took a great deal of time and effort, and yet it still didn’t take out enough.
The next step, therefore, was to listen to the long and pointless guitar and bass at the start of one of the tracks. With a constant beat running through it, I could take out a lot of that and simply mate up the beats. But when you have a choice of ten beats, it’s not that easy. And, after about an hour and a half and once you do find the correct beat, that’s when you find that the drummer’s timing at the “after the trim” point isn’t the same as at the “before the trim” point, so they don’t overlap. And that’s when it really does become difficult because the two parts don’t overlay.
Eventually, though, after much binding in the marsh, I managed to solve the problem to some kind of suitable degree, using an awful lot of “Silence” mode. And when I played it back just now, you couldn’t hear the join.
By now, my cleaner was here doing her stuff. She organised the bathroom for me and I went for my shower. While I was in there, she was tidying up my bedroom and changing the bedding.
Once more, I was able to go into the shower, shower and come out without help again. That’s definite progress, right enough.
After my cleaner left, I began to think about what I needed to write for the introduction for the programme, and by the time that I was ready to knock off, all of the notes had been written – all three minutes and four seconds worth of them. There will still be some editing to do, I reckon.
Tea tonight was non-existent. I wasn’t in the mood, so I simply had a handful of biscuits, and now I’m thinking of going to bed, ready to begin the next radio programme tomorrow.
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about silence … "well, one of us has" – ed … a woman in church whispered to her husband "I’ve just broken wind silently. It’s one of those “silent but deadly” ones. What do you think I should do?"
"If I were you" said her husband, "the first thing that I would do would be to switch your hearing aid back on."
