… today, and I’m not talking about anyone from … "you aren’t still doing that, are you?" – ed.
First time since the end of January in fact, the morning of my operation. But then I couldn’t have a shower with my soluble stitches in place. I had the clearance from my surgeon on Monday but what with one thing and another, it wasn’t until this evening that I had one, while my pizza was cooking.
That’s right. It seems that Thursday night is pizza night in Sauret-Besserve, and so I made my own. Tomato, mushrooms and onion with tomato sauce, vegan cheese and herbs. And it was delicious too. So much so that there’s none left for lunch (which is just as well, for I’m not here for lunch).
During the night, I was having rather a fitful series of voyages halfway around the world. The first part featured me as some kind of sheriff or marshal (I’ve clearly been watching far too many westerns before I go to sleep) and I was keeping an eye on a bunch of drunken factory workers dressed as either Indians or baddies who were on the way to the seaside but there were three hours or more of the train travel before we got there and someone needed to keep an eye on these people to make sure that they weren’t up to no good. But at this point, I awoke rather dramatically so I didn’t see how this was going to develop.
But never mind – I was soon back to sleep and found myself in Canada for some reason or another. I was at Rachel’s and Darren’s and the first night that I was there the bottle of gas in the gas heater ran out. And was I cold! I had no heat, no hot water and nowhere to make any coffee in the morning. But then I remembered that there was a bottle of gas in the verandah – like I have at home – so I went to fetch that and couple it up. But before I could do that, I was interrupted by someone like Sherlock Holmes, with Doctor Watson and a third man. This was round about the time of the disappearance of Holmes, and Watson was struggling on his own to solve a couple of cases, but he wasn’t making any headway. But Holmes returned and we had the meeting between Watson and Holmes-in-disguise, with Watson fainting and having to be put to bed. Holmes then started to shave off his whiskers, which clogged my yellow-and-white razor. but this part of everything was filled with some delightful anachronisms (like the black-and-white Sherlock Holmes films of the 30s) with record players, LP records, plastic macs and so on in this scene of Sherlock Holmes. But then I started to talk to Darren about this gas again and Rachel was saying that it doesn’t matter now because look how the temperature has gone up.
After the obligatory walk down the corridor, I went off to Mid-Wales where I was driving along this road – on the right as it happens on a dual carriageway, and in the distance was this enormous rain cloud. I was in my car and had just been overtaken by this huge lorry, who clearly couldn’t care less about conditions on the road. The road was soaking wet and he was splashing spray everywhere and at times you just couldn’t see anything.We drove down this hill with the lorry sending spray everywhere and soaking the pedestrians and policemen gesticulating at the driver. We ended up in one of these big mid-Wales towns (but nothing like any Mid-Wales town that I ever knew) and by this time I was driving a Van-Hool Alizee coach of the late 1980s, the type that I used to drive when I worked for Shearings but which was white with no writing. There were a variety of ways out of this town – at the junction there were five roads out. One of them, a diagonally left-of-straight-on, went under a railway bridge and up a hill, round a right-hand bend and then higher up to a set of traffic lights. That was the way that I went. Just after the bend parked on the left in a restricted area was a purple mark I Escort van with a “four plus two” 1963 number plate (which, seeing as how they weren’t made until 1967 was something quite surprising), and next to it was an old 105E Anglia. I was wanting to stop and take photos of them but there wasn’t anywhere to stop, we were climbing up the hill and there was all kinds of traffic queues. I thought that I would never get to the top of the bank at this rate, stuck here in this enormous traffic queue for the lights to get out of town.
After breakfast, I carried on with my Canada 2015 notes. I’ve finished the dictaphone notes for September and I’m now incorporating the blog notes into the text. That might take a few days as there are quite a lot of those. So far, I’m on that place where I camped overnight about an hour and a half from Happy Valley-Goose Bay (but travelling backwards).
So in a few minutes’ time, a nice clean me will go for a walk and then I’ll be off to bed. I have to be up at 07:00 tomorrow ready for my early morning drive to the hospital at Montlucon. I am not looking forward to that.
