This was the sight that greeted me this morning.
Well, actually, no it wasn’t. When I came downstairs, it was dark. Too dark to take a photo with the camera on the phone and I had to wait until it was lighter. By that time, some of the snow had melted and so it didn’t look quite like this, but still it’s the first snow that I have seen this winter.
It’s not actually the first snow of the winter, but when we had that, I was incarcerated in the hospital and never managed to see it.
The nurse managed to remember to come this morning, which was just as well because it was blood test day and I couldn’t have my breakfast until afterwards.
Once the nurse had gone and I had had breakfast, I didn’t do too much at all. Watched the first day of the 3rd Test with Terry and did some more of my animation course.
For tea, I made myself a pizza with peppers, mushrooms and olives, covered by grated vegan cheese. And I remembered to put the herbs on too. It didn’t half taste nice. And then I had a really early night – at just 19:45.
I had to go out to Caliburn though before retiring – to lift the wiper arms so that the blades aren’t touching the screen and to fetch my thermal mug, as I have an early start tomorrow. They’ve had my blood test results and despite the two pochettes that I had on Tuesday, my blood count has barely struggled up to 8.0. It’s clear that I’m starting to lose this fight and they have called me in to the hospital tomorrow for more blood.
As for anything else, members of my family are continuing to feature quite regularly in my nocturnal travels, and I still seem to be stuck in not merely a time-warp but a place-warp too, back in my old stamping grounds of my younger days. There’s clearly something significant, if not ominous, about all of this.
I started out last night by watching a film – one of these types of surreal horror film of the 1970s which centred around quite a few events. There was a girl aged about 9, rather a large girl, all covered in blood and gore. Anyway, there was a pile of us, all young kids, all living in a big house with a big bedroom. We all had our bed and that was about it – nothing else, and beds were crammed into the room everywhere with hardly any place to walk in between. We’d been doing something or other and I’d come back to crash out on the sofa. Also on this sofa were two jewel boxes that belonged to my mother and she asked for them back. My older sister however replied that she couldn’t get them back as I was asleep right there. At that, I woke up and asked her why she hadn’t reached in to get them? It wasn’t as if there was any big deal about this instead of making all of this comedy about everything. I crawled off into the bedroom and into my bed which was along the long wall. My parents came in and the whole thing erupted. There were all kinds of nightmare characters in these beds, we’d seen highlights in flashbacks from this film, rather like in Catch-22. My parents then went into a second bedroom where there were loads of kids, all of whom had the faces of gorillas and hippopotamuses and so on – astonishingly surreal. And the doctor had said something to this young girl – telling her to keep herself very clean and take care of her body.
From there, we moved on to another party designed to say goodbye to my niece and her husband, who had come over from Canada specifically for the party so that we could say goodbye to them! There were so many people milling around that we had to apportion them into all kinds of different vehicles. In the end they shot off to wherever it was that they were going for this meal, that was starting at 13:30. However I had a lot to do so I knew that I would be late, and I ended up at Alvaston Hall (or at least, what I reckoned last night was Alvaston Hall). When I finished, I had to get over to where this meal was taking place and for once in my life I had to take a taxi. At Alvaston Hall there were loads of people and loads of cars, but not a single taxi loitering in the vicinity. However, I noticed that at the table having lunch were three taxi drivers who I knew and who worked for a small company in Crewe. I went over to them to ask if any of them fancied a fare over to wherever this meal was taking place. They however insisted on their lunch-hour, so I asked them what time they had started. They replied “12:00” – which made no sense at all to me (even in a nocturnal ramble where nothing usually makes any sense) seeing as it was now 13:30. I asked them how long they would be, to which they said a half-hour or so. Totally crazy, but I was wondering that if I called someone out from Crewe, it would take that long for them to reach Alvaston Hall anyway. I then managed to lay my hands on a car, an old one of the type of the 1920s, and I planned to go off in that. However a group of young environmental campaigners was protesting against it. Of course, I was sympathetic with their aims but I was also in a hurry so when I made to drive off, they started to spray it with water and foam. I chased them all off but one young guy was really spoiling for a fight and was so insistent that in the end I had him on the ground and tied his hair to the railings in the best Vinny Jones fashion. “Get out of that without moving!” I then quickly cleaned the car, but when I opened the glove box, a pile of rusty water and old rusty Printed Circuit Boards fell out. One of these environmental protesters was there watching me do all of this – a young girl with blond curly hair, a green jumper and light brown slacks. We ended up having a rather heated dispute. She started to leave so I followed her to continue our argument and we ended up passing through the foyer of this 1950s-type glass and concrete conference centre and outside on the concourse. She didn’t make too much of an effort to escape so our argument continued, and suddenly, for no good reason, I put my arms around her in a rather passionate embrace. She offered me no resistance whatever – in fact she was rather encouraging.
I then found myself briefly in Italy with someone else and loitering around somewhere in the street. There was a young girl selling ice-cream from a mobile trolley so I went over there, took a cornet, filled it up with Neapolitan ice cream and stuck it back in the cornet holder. This girl didn’t make half a much of a fuss as I would have imagined.
It’s all still happening, isn’t it?
