This streaming head-cold that I seem to have acquired during my stay at hospital is, if anything, worsening. It’s most uncomfortable, to say, the least, and I keep on waking up every half-hour or so with the most awful congestion.
This is interrupting my sleeping patterns quite dreadfully, not that they were anything much to write home about beforehand but now they are even worse. As a result, I’m just having patchworks of nocturnal voyages and waking up just as something interesting is about to happen.
For example, during the night I was off on so many nocturnal rambles that it was hard to keep track of them. You may laugh about the old joke about being a traveller in ladies’ underwear but that’s exactly how I started out last night and what’s more, I was travelling through the “wild west”. I was almost immediately held up, in good old western fashion, by a couple of desperadoes. One of these was, would you believe, carrying a baby. As this hold-up progressed, some corrosive liquid was spilt and this went all over the arms of the guy holding the baby. He was there panicking, holding this baby, while his arms were being attacked by this liquid.
I was being some kind of manager for a tower block on some kind of housing estate in either East Ham or West Ham. One of the families living here was a black family and as the parents were ill, I was obliged to make lunch for the four children. I decided on something quick and simple – beans on toast. Each child received two rounds of buttered toast and a scoop of baked beans. But for some strange reason, I couldn’t get the cooking to synchronise. I ended up burning the beans and the toast was cold. The two elder kids came in off their own bat to have their lunch leaving me to deal with the two younger ones. I had to shout down the corridor from my flat to theirs to tell them to come. But there was a man walking past and he was clearly some kind of official who was running the place. He stuck his head into their apartment and started to lecture their mother about something or other. In the meantime, I was calling these two kids and eventually the elder one came, so I sent him back to fetch his younger brother but this disturbed the man who was trying to tell the mother something. He had a couple of words to say to me about it so I replied in kind. But one thing that was going through my mind was that I needed four bowls (why not plates?) for these kids and I only had three white ones and one yellow one. I was wondering about any possible argument about which kid should have the yellow one.
We then went on to the local church hall where some kind of kids concert was taking place. I turned up as it had almost finished and the kids were all sitting on the floor around the counter of the bar or buffet. I nipped behind the bar and found a couple of biscuits to eat, for I was hungry. While I was there, one of the women told me where to go to sit down so I grabbed my biscuits and went off to sit on the floor where indicated, right at the end of the queue. As I took my place, a girl came up to me and told me that I need to sit at the other end of the queue, so I explained that the woman in charge had told me to come and sit here. Anyway, we ended up having quite a chat about this particular event
From the East End of London I ended up in the North-East of England at a terrace of miners’ cottages somewhere on a cliff overlooking the sea. These houses, although terraced houses, were actually in pairs of a similar style, with the next pair being quite different, and so on. One of the miners here becomes bankrupt and surrenders himself to the authorities to take charge of his bankruptcy, and being rudely awakened at this point, that was all of that.
Once more back into the arms of Morpheus, I ended up now on a train heading back from London. It was a big express kind of thing, a locomotive pulling a rake of carriages, and it pulled into Crewe station, which is where I wanted to alight. The train usually had a long wait at the station so I hopped off, leaving everything behind – my coat, my luggage, my laptop. I’d been sitting in a seat, one of a block of four, and this was where most of my luggage was to be found, but I’d moved with the laptop across the aisle to a seat with a table so that I could work from there. The train arrived at quarter-to the hour and was due to leave at ten past the hour so I had plenty of time to stretch my legs before gathering up my possessions and leaving. I went into the station buffet looking out of the window and the train suddenly pulled out, at ten minutes to the hour! There was no announcement at all. I wasn’t quick enough to leave the building otherwise I would have made a sprint for an open door, as many other people were doing. Now, all my possessions were streaming off northwards and I was only in the clothes that I was standing up in, plus some money in the pouch that I wear around my neck when I’m travelling. I had to wander off and try to find the station manager or someone in the lost property office to lodge a complaint about my possessions and to see if they could be intercepted by an official on the train or at the next station, before someone else redeemed them unofficially, and permanently.
It’s hardly surprising that after all of that, I wasn’t up to too much. Terry went out to cut some wood for an hour or two during a break in the weather (because it has been cold here, that’s for sure) and left me to my own devices but I wasn’t in the mood for getting into much mischief. I just sat and vegetated instead.
That was really the story of my day too. It’s too cold to do very much, no-one goes out unless they need to and so I’ll be staying here on the sofa.
Well, not tomorrow afternoon because I’m back at the hospital for yet more tests and examinations. I’m not at all sure why they didn’t carry out all of these tests while I was there because in my condition, still with my stitches, a round-trip of 100kms on some bad minor roads is not doing me any good at all. At the moment I might be taking one pace forward, but then I’m immediately taking two paces backwards and I won’t ever improve at this rate.
