Tag Archives: mandy_m

Tuesday 13th September 2016 – AND I DID TOO!

Last night I was saying that I hoped that I would have a good night last night.

And what actually happened was that I went almost straight to sleep and there I stayed, without moving even once, until 05:40. That’s about 7 hours sleep straight through and it’s been a long time since I’ve had a sleep like that.

And not only that,I was on my travels. And quite significant they were too. I remember having a long and involved chat with someone with whom I’ve been speaking at length on the internet just recently – she put in an appearance – and I was also dealing with wind turbine issues at home. The small Rutland WG901 had lost its tail in a high wind and the bearings had seized, causing it to smoke as it tried to rotate. By some incredible feat of gymnastics up the top of a ladder I managed to remove it and replace it with the spare Air 403. Although I hadn’t anchored the mast correctly (and I’ve yet to understand at all why there where two masts) the turbine went round, but the guide light on the charging panel changed from green to orange. A closer inspection showed that the voltage across the battery system was a mere 9.0 volts rather than the 12.7 that it was supposed to be, so there was clearly something wrong. Leaving the fridge running while I was away couldn’t have accounted for that.

But anyway, enough of that. I eventually headed for breakfast and then Rachel and I set out for the tyre depot where I was going to work on Strider – but it didn’t quite work out like that, as indeed you might expect, given the way that things have been going just now.

As well as all of the stuff that had been booked in to be fixed, there had been a breakdown on the Trans-Canada Highway and a holidaymaker from Ontario had limped in to the place with a rather sick car first thing this morning.

It’s only natural that the folding stuff takes priority over any other kind of arrangement and so what with that, and a steady stream of other work that came in, very little was done on Strider before lunch. Rachel and I went off to the restaurant here for lunch, and I had home fries with onions, peppers and mushrooms and a side order of baked beans. I treated Rachel and her friend to lunch, seeing as how Rachel has been treating me to meals for the last week or so and then we headed back.

By this time someone else, driving casually past the tyre depot, suddenly remembered that their car needed a safety inspection so that was another unscheduled job that needed attention. But we eventually managed to get around to Strider and finish the work and perform the safety check.

Of course he passed and so I could go down to Service New Brunswick in Florenceville to have him licensed. And now he’s fighting fit and ready for the road, which is good news, especially as I fuelled him right up. Petrol doesn’t keep like it used to and there’s been nothing put in since the last lot in October last year, so some fresh stuff wouldn’t go amiss. I made sure that there wasn’t much in the tank when I laid him up, so that there would be a full tank at the earliest available opportunity.

Having done that, the next stop was Great Satan. Documentation rules for visiting the USA have changed quite considerably over the last year or so and I needed to know whether I was in order or whether I had to find some more paperwork. But a very friendly (and doesn’t that make a very pleasant change!) couple of US border guards went through the documents that I had, and nothing more was required. I was issued with my entry permit on the spot.

Back at the tyre depot I helped Darren replace some track rod ends on an old Ford saloon that was in for a safety inspection. Had this been the UK, the bodywork would have been a long way short of passing but this is not the UK and we have seen on these pages some examples of what is considered acceptable over here. It wasn’t the worst that we have seen, and not by a long way either.

We all came home after this and as soon as we entered the house I crashed out for well over an hour. I’m definitely not as young as I used to be, am I?

But now that I’m awake again, I’m making plans. Tomorrow with a bit of luck I’ll be off to the seaside. I want to relax in the sun and hear the crash of the surf.

Sunday 11th September 2016 – IT’S SUNDAY …

… and that can only mean one thing.

Well, two things really while we are here in the bosom of our family, but let’s take them one by one.

Firstly, it means “no alarm clock”. We can have a lie-in. But that wasn’t much use today seeing as how Yours Truly was wide awake (well, sort-of, anyway) at 04:28. Yes, my night was nothing like as good as the previous one and that filled me with a pile of regret, didn’t it? And it got me thinking too, which is always a dangerous thing to be doing. There has been many a night when I haven’t even been in bed by 04:28. Ohh how my life has changed!

But at least I could crack on with a few things that needed doing and try my best to bring things up-to-date, as well as having a couple of nice chats with friends on-line.

As dawn broke, all that I could say was that I was glad that I didn’t have plans to go anywhere. Someone has stolen the sun and the blue sky and it was all damp, grey and miserable outside.

And as the morning wore on, I could safely say that things didn’t stay like this for long. By about 08:00 I decided to close my eyes a little to give them some rest, and the next thing that I remember was that it was about 10:30. Now isn’t that more like a Sunday?

What awoke me was Rachel clattering away in the kitchen, and that brings me round nicely to the second thing that comes to mind on a Sunday, and that is the legendary Taylor Sunday Brunch. People travel for thousands of miles to attend one of these and quite rightly too because Rachel does everyone proud. Even for a vegan like me there was beans on toast and grilled potato slices with onions and carrots, apart from the usual breakfast items. And if you are a carnivore, there’s no limit to the stuff that’s put on the table to satisfy your appetite.

I mentioned the weather a little earlier, and how miserable it was looking. And so we had a change during the late morning. The most incredible torrential downpour suddenly hit us and the place was transformed into a lake in just seconds.

A short while later we had a thunderstorm with lightning and all kinds of stuff. It was definitely the hammer of the Gods that was coming down on us this morning.

As a result, all plans for today were cancelled and we just sat around and did family things. And it’s a long time since I’ve done any of that, isn’t it?

I reckoned that during the afternoon I might go and have a little snooze, but that was ruled out because the bed was already occupied by something black and furry. The weather was so miserable that not even Cujo the Killer Cat fancied going outside.

Towards late afternoon the weather did improve. We had the sun back, but there was a cool wind blowing with it, so it does look as if the weather is turning here and autumn will be on its way any time now.

Darren and I took advantage of the weather by doing some work here. There’s a three-ton Chevrolet lorry here – the same on that I drove down to Maine the other year – and the oil seals have gone in the back axle. Darren wants to overhaul it and fit new seals and bearings so we reversed it into the garage and started to strip it down. That kept us busy until tea-time.

After tea, Rachel baked a cake for a party that she was giving on Tuesday night so I lent a hand. And then after watching a little television (actually it was a big television but I watched it for a short time) I called it a day and came to bed.

It’s hard to believe just how tired you become when you don’t do very much at all.

Thursday 11th August 2016 – NOW HERE’S A THING!

Yes, having had blood counts recently of 9.4, 10.0 and 10.5, today’s blood count is … 11.9. And that’s without any medication whatever. It compares with the “normal” figure of between 13.0 and 15.0, and the count that I had when I was first diagnosed with lymphoma – namely 3.8.

In fact, the hospital was so impressed that the doctor refused to give me the blood stimulator that I have every visit, and I was thrown out without having even a pretence whatsoever of medication.

This is astonishing, as far as I’m concerned. And so is the hospital. The doctor has said that I’ll have just two more sessions of Mapthera and that will be that. The next session will be next Thursday – and they will keep me in hospital overnight to check for side-effects – and again three weeks after that, and then I’ll be done. If things go according to plan, I’ll just need a regular follow-up to check my immunity situation and that my blood count is holding up.

And this is causing me no amount of issues. Had I still had my spleen and my immune system, I’d be half-way home by now so you’ve no idea just how depressed I am by that. I’ve said before that it’s not going to be the lymphoma that will kill me but something that I will pick up that I can’t fight off. I can’t even vent my spleen about that.

And not only that, the time scale is all wrong. They don’t know how often I will need following up and the second helping of Mapthera coincides with the date that I leave here. So do I risk renting a studio for 10 months and waste the money by being allowed to go back to France? Or do I bank on going home and then have to come back every week or fortnight at whatever the expense of the journey might be?

But nevertheless, it’s a major step forward and you’ve no idea just how pleased I am by my news today.

Last night I had another miserable night – still awake at 02:00. I was up though at 07:30 for breakfast (and still no muesli) and even had time to go for a shower before setting off for the hospital – on foot af course because I’m feeling better. I picked up my injection, but didn’t need it so the hospital nurse took it back to the apothecary.

But as for the nurse who saw me, she was quite brutal with my catheter and I can still feel the pain even now. Ohh for Tara – the pretty little nurse on the ward where I stayed who was so gentle with me.

Back here in time for lunch (and yet another brisk walk in the rain) and then after a good chat with Liz I crashed out for an hour or two – properly too. I was well away.

Tonight, I finished off the pastries and potatoes and veg and it tasted just as nice as last night. I shall have to look into the idea of making my own vegan pies some time.

So tonight I’ll try – yet again – to have an early night. And hope that I’ll be on my travels again. I was off during the night and I was in the company of the girl who has been described on many occasions as “The One That Got Away”. She didn’t get away last night either – we were planning on visiting the north coast of Norway or Russia, but ended up on a snowy island like Svalbard where we spent most of the night encountering polar bears. And it was another night where I awoke in the middle of it all to go off down the corridor and then went back to bed, and to sleep, right at the very position where I had left off my ramble. That’s been happening a few times just recently.

But Ironically, just as last time she featured in a nocturnal ramble, there she was on the internet having sent me a message just about the time that all of this was going on. This clearly signified something, but I’ve no idea what it might be.

Thursday 4th August 2016 – BACK IN MY LITTLE ROOM …

… I had a reasonably comfortable day.

I managed without any tea when I returned last night although I polished off a packet of Alison’s crisps. And then I was in bed reasonably early afterwards.

And comfortable the bed is too. I only had to leave it once, and I was well away for most of the night. 06:50 was when I eventually saw the light of day – which makes a change not to be awoken by the cacophony of bells across the road. It really was a pleasant, comfortable sleep.

There was no rush for breakfast. It was about 08:00 when I finally made it into the kitchen, having had a nice relaxing lie-in. And then you can guess what I did for the rest of the morning. That’s right – absolutely badger all. I didn’t do a tap and quite right too. I made the most of my comfortable chair here and that was that.

At about 13:00 I nudged myself into action and headed into town seeing as how there’s not a lot of food in
the place, and nothing whatever for lunch. I spent about €11:00 in the Delhaize stocking up and then €14:00 in the newsagents because my bus ticket is running out. Here in Leuven you can buy a 10-trip ticket for €14:00 – each ticket gives you up to one hours worth of travel on the De Lijn buses with as many connections as you care to make. It’s really good value.

After lunch, I had a chat with Liz and with someone else and then I … errr … went off with the fairies for a couple of hours. I’d had quite a brisk walk into town and back, the first time that I’ve been anywhere quite like that for a few weeks and it took it right out of me. I was absolutely stark out too, and for a couple of hours – you could have had an earthquake or something and nothing would have awoken me. I went off on my travels too during this particular period but you are probably eating your meal or something and I don’t want to put you off.

Despite my little sleep, I still wasn’t feeling up to much after I awoke, but I forced myself to go and make tea. Kidney beans, olives, mixed veg and boulghour, with pasta and tomato sauce. And there’s enough for tomorrow too. It’s the best that I could do without making too much effort. And it was then that I realised that I’d left behind in the hospital fridge the food that Alison had bought me. I’ll have to nip back for that tomorrow before someone else liberates it.

So now I’m going to have an early night and watch a film. I deserve a good relax tonight. And even though this place isn’t ideal by any means, it’s nice to be back. I missed my little room.

Saturday 30th July 2016 – MORE OF THE SAME.

That’s the best way to describe last night. Almost exactly the same as every other night just recently – going to sleep quite late and being interrupted on regular occasions through the night. But at least I didn’t have to lie half-asleep listening to a room-mate snoring or talking to himself in his sleep. I enjoyed being on my own.

As usual, the best part of the sleep that I had was the bit between 06:00 and being awoken by the nurse at 07:40. I really was in a tremendously deep sleep just then and she had quite a task to wake me up.

And no surprise either. I’ve talked quite often about a girl whom I call “the one that got away” and she once more featured quite prominently in my little nocturnal ramble last night. And she didn’t get away last night – ohhh no, not ‘arf she didn’t! What was even more interesting is that I had to leave my bed to go to walk the parapet somewhere during the middle of this ramble, and when I returned to bed and went back to sleep, I found that I had stepped back right into the very position from where I had stepped out. This is something that’s happened to me quite a few times now – it’s not such a rare occurrence as you might think.

The irony of all of this is that after I had had breakfast, I switched on the laptop to find that I had been left a message by the afore-mentioned, and right almost at the time that she was appearing over here during the night. And it was something of a cry for help too. We ended up spending most of the morning having a lengthy chat. It seems that mine isn’t the only subconscious that’s pulling in the waves from 500 miles away. As you ought to know by now, I fully believe in the existence of the transmission and reception of human thought waves and over the years, I’ve had many interesting encounters and first-hand experiences with the phenomenon.

After lunch, I crashed out. And I was away with the fairies for a good couple of hours too. I did manage to awaken in time for tea, which I followed up with some of the strawberries that Alison had brought me the other day. And very delicious they were too.

So now, even though it’s early, I’m going to have an early night. I probably won’t be able to sleep very much but never mind – I can always catch up with my sleep during the day.

Yes, my life is rather upside-down right now, isn’t it?

Friday 22nd July 2016 – HAVING HAD THAT GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP …

… the other night, I paid for it last night, that’s for sure.

I was lying there all through the night and I remember every minute of it. It was the most uncomfortable night that I’ve had for quite a while. And when I finally stepped out of bed and had a good look in the mirror, I looked about 90 (instead of my usual 85). What a horrible sight.

Mind you, I must have dropped off at some point during the night because I was up on the Arctic Highway along the Mackenzie River in northern Canada, driving a top-of-the-range 4×4 vehicle heading north, with the odd car or two coming back the other way. But I wasn’t alone for there was a woman and her young daughter aged about 8 or 9 with me. The daughter was wearing a black shell suit with twin white stripes and a petrol blue tee-shirt. She had to change her tee shirt to a pink one and couldn’t manage to do it and so I had to help her, even though I was driving this expensive vehicle along some of these dreadful mud-and-gravel roads.

I had a late breakfast, and that was really the highlight of my day. I didn’t set foot for a minute outside the door of the building. In fact, as the afternoon wore on I started to feel worse and worse and this wasn’t helped by learning that someone whom I vaguely know and who is suffering from lymphoma died yesterday, quite suddenly, of unforeseen complications and another friend of mine lost his wife quite suddenly and unexpectedly. It’s as if the Hand of Death is slowly enveloping me and it’s a very uncomfortable feeling.

I was in bed by 17:00 and although I couldn’t really sleep it’s still the best way to deal with my issues right now and I’m glad that I’m in my own room where I can stay like this in a semi-vegetative state.

At midnight exactly we had the most astonishing thunderstorm followed by a torrential downpour. That woke me up and I couldn’t go back to sleep afterwards. For a good couple of hours I was wide awake and feeling a little better – to such an extent that I went into the bathroom at one point and washed some of my undies. Can’t have me going about all smelly now, can we … "well, it’s never bothered you before" – ed.

Yes, I am feeling a little better now so I hope that I can have a really good night’s sleep for what is left of the night. I deserve it.

Thursday 26th May 2016 – IT’S HARD …

… to think of what I’ve done today.

I know that my night last night was nothing like as good as last night. I didn’t drop off to sleep so early and I was awake by 04:00, much to my dismay. In fact, round about 15:00, I dropped off to sleep and was awoken at 17:00 by a nurse gently shaking my leg to tell me that my tea had arrived.

Another thing that I do remember about the night was that a girl who has been described in these pages as “the one that got away” came to visit me at some point.

So what have I done today then?

The answer is, basically, nothing. The doctor came to see me again and she examined me. She says that they will make a decision today about my chemotherapy (although, if they have done, I don’t know what it is) and she offered me an endoscopy to look into my stomach – something that I turned down flat as you might expect.

The dietician came along too. He told me that he’s going to prescribe a certain high-carbohydrate drink for me that has 300 calories per serving, and he would be back shortly after 14:00 with the first instalment. He didn’t put in an appearance either so I don’t know much more about that.

And really, nothing much more.

I have to take my stomach pills twice a day now, so I have been informed, because I still have the nausea, but the problem at the other end seems to have subsided, at least for the moment. Mind you, as we all know with chemotherapy, it won’t be long before it’s back.

Anyway, that’s your lot. I hope that tomorrow will be more exciting.

Wednesday 11th May 2016 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… I had something of a better night last night, falling asleep in the middle of a film at 22:15 and managing just one wander down the alleyway. I’d done some tossing and turning while I was in bed but nothing like as much as recently, and by 05:45 I was pretty much awake. 07:00 saw me with a coffee and a laptop, doing some work, and when was the previous time that you had ever heard of this?

It gave me an opportunity to write down where I’d been during the night before I forgot most of it (an experience that has been far too common this last week or so), and here we go.

There was a bunch of us in the Lion and Swan (the Boddingtons pub in West Street, Crewe) and it was after hours so all of the doors were locked. There was a banging from the window and someone from outside asking “I’m looking for a job. Is there any work available?”. The landlady went out to see and it turned out that it was some man, an Irish guy, who was doing the rounds trying to find work. The landlady made a few enquiries and found out that this person was under some kind of obligation to stay in Ireland and she was wondering whether the relevant people knew that he was now turning up in Crewe looking for work as if he intended to stay here.
From there, I rambled off into some James Bond-esque kind of adventure (we’ve been doing a bit of this just recently) involving some person who had gone missing. This involved a search of several places, some of which were quite impressive houses of the type that you would only find in Mayfair, but searched they were just the same. One of these houses was occupied by some kind of dowager-type of woman who dressed in keeping with her status and property and she allowed the search to take place but at one point, she simply disappeared. The hero made an inspection and discovered that there seemed to be a false panel in the wall and he reasoned that she had slipped behind it. He simply loitered in the vicinity because he was sure that she would reappear. And sure enough, she slipped out from behind the panel (where there was a stairway leading to a secret part of the house). As her head came into view he hit her so had in the face that the term “a glass jaw” was never ever more appropriate because you could hear the crash and tinkle right the way through the house.

While I was down at the kettle making my coffee, I noticed that we seem to have had a bird-strike during the night. I don’t remember seeing this outline on the window yesterday. And this looks very much owl-like if you ask me, poor thing.

But this brings me back to something else that I have been saying for 20 years. There are some foolish, misguided people who object to wind turbines on the grounds that birds fly into the blades and die. And there are other foolish and misguided people who object to wind turbines on the grounds that they make too much noise. But I’ve always wondered about if they make so much noise, why do birds fly into them? One would have thought that the birds would have heard the noise (and felt the turbulence too). But here, we have “living” proof that glass window panes are very harmful to the health of birds. Do these people then refuse to fit glass windows into their houses, or are they the typical, usual NIMBY hypocrites?

I think we should be told.

Once breakfast was out of the way, I needed to go off and organise my baguette for lunch. This involved, as usual, a trek of about 100 miles to the Spar shop at Lubbeek because there doesn’t appear to be anywhere closer

This is the baguette here, and those of you with eagle eyes will notice the weight of the baguette on the label because it’s going to be quite important in a very short minute.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that Belgium is “special” and Belgian maths are no different in this respect.

And so here’s a question – if a whole baguette weighs 250 grams, how much do you think half a baguette weighs?

And now check your answer with the weight shown in this photo just here and see if you are correct according to Belgian mathematics. How did you get on?

And so apart from that, I’ve been bashing out the blog – or, at least, the month of April 2011 – to make it conform to the new in-house standards. This has been quite a complicated month to do, and for a couple of reasons too.

Firstly I had to completely revise several entries for that month. Some entries were done in haste and would benefit from a complete revision. Not only that, a couple of them were quite important, if not significant, and so it was quite important that they were as complete and coherent as possible with as many photos as possible too.

Secondly, some blog entries didn’t exist. Back in the older days of this blog, if I were on the road I would blog whenever I had the opportunity, incorporating two, three, or sometimes many, many days into one entry. More recently though, I’ve been blogging every night (or sometimes, first thing the following morning) and if there was no internet access , I’d save them as text files and add them individually at the next opportunity. This is how I want my blog to be and so I’ve had to revise a pile of entries in order to reflect the “day-to-day” nature of the blog.

All of that has taken me all of the day, believe it or not, and I’ve not long finished. I did however have a little cheat and crashed out for over an hour at 16:00. And while I was “away”, I was watching a film, Carry on Christmas (and I don’t mean the cameo TV programmes but what passed as a real full-length feature film) in the company of the girl who has been described on these pages as “the one that got away”.

I spoke to Liz on the internet for ages too, and had a repeat of the delicious tea that I had last night – and it tasted even better too.

So tonight I’ll have an early night, watch a film, and prepare for an early start again tomorrow.

Nighty-night!

Tuesday 19th April 2016 – LAST NIGHT …

… as predicted, I settled down to watch one of my Inspector Hornleigh films. And, as anyone who has been a regular reader of this rubbish for any length of time would have predicted, I fell asleep before the end. The film was still running and it was a scream from one of the performers that awoke me, right near the end. I was in half a mind to go back to where I fell asleep and watch the film from that point but instead, I turned off the laptop and went back to sleep. That seemed to be a much better idea.

It seems that last night’s subject was cats – or, at least, it was during the early part of the night. I was back at Vine Tree Avenue again and everyone had come round to see me – all kinds of the usual suspects whom you have seen making appearances in these nocturnal rambles – and everyone brought a cat with them. All of the cats were put in the hall while we had a little “do” and then when the evening was over, I opened the door between the kitchen and the hall and all of the cats came in. All kinds of cats there were, all different colours, and to my surprise we hadn’t had a single moment of squabbling like you get when you usually put a bunch of cats (or children) together.
Talking of children, I was in Neston a little later with the daughter of a friend, and we were looking for my cats (whatever they might be doing in Neston I really have no idea). We managed to find three of them but Tuppence was being stubborn (like she sometimes was) and this young girl made some kind of comment about her.
I don’t know what it was that woke me so dramatically at 04:30 but I was soon back to sleep, and I’d moved back to Crewe by now. Up near the Liberal Club in fact. And I was parading with the Home Guard, Captain Mainwaring’s platoon in fact, and the issue of the gun cropped up. For those of you who don’t know the film, there’s a scene in there where an elderly man turns up on parade with a shotgun, the only weapon the troop has, and Mainwaring insists that he should have it. I’ve always thought that that was rather a silly decision, not the least reason being that because he would have been the only person with a gun, he would have been the only person firing at the Germans, so they would naturally fire back at him and that would remove the head of command from the Home Guard troops (with Mainwaring, that wouldn’t have been much of a loss, but there you go). Anyway, last night, there I was, and there the subject cropped up again. I suggested making the owner of the gun a Lance-Corporal, giving him two privates to assist him (all of which would have enhanced his ego and brought him on board) and thus forming a ready-made light artillery section whenever more substantial weapons appeared on the scene. I’d seen some builders and they had a stack of about two dozen trenching shovels – very thin-bladed shovels on long pole handles – and I’d fancied liberating one of those for use on the farm. But here I was on parade with a three-metre pole with a spoon on the end (with no idea what I would do with this). I was sent off to patrol around the corner of Richard Moon Street (which bore no resemblance whatever to the real Richard Moon Street) and down there was an ancient garage that I had never seen before. It had a bodyshell of an old Lotus Elan and the bodyshell of an old 105E Ford Anglia, both white, both covered with dust and green mould from standing for so long and both on sale at £100. Behind them was what remained of an old Mark II Ford Zodiac, yellow, and which was also for sale. But this place was a treasure trove. There were the remains of a 1920s hand-cranked petrol pump and all kinds of things like that, all overgrown and abandoned and I would have loved to have spent a day or two going through everything that was here.

But then the shower down the corridor woke me up again. 06:35 this time, so it looks as if these early-risers are in for the duration. So much so that when I went down the corridor for breakfast, there were just two of us there. Judging by the amount of bread left in the bread container, everyone else had been and gone already.

Back in my room, I had a nice relaxing morning not doing all that much but as the time drew on, I went and had a good shower and changed my clothes. I need to look my best (and smell my best too) for the Social Services department.

I went off on foot to the fritkot as I fancied chips for lunch. When I arrived, they were just closing even though it was still 5 minutes to 2. But I persuaded them to make me a portion, which they did, and then, seeing as it was a nice day, I took my courage in both hands and set off to walk to the hospital.

And I made it too, despite it being uphill all the way, and I was early too. That gave me enough time to have a drink, which I reckoned that I deserved too.

But the Social Services weren’t really all that helpful, in the sense that they haven’t really come up with something definite as yet. They’ll be “in touch” but they could be in touch anyway without me having to go all that way there. There is however some talk about a place in a … would you believe … monastery, just as I predicted. I hope that they have a good laundry where I can get rid of some of my dirty habits, but they need to improve the monotonous food. Regular readers of this rubbish know that there are only two brothers who work in the kitchen of a monastery – the chip monk and the fish friar.

Once I’d organised that, I went off to the Day Hospital to find out when my next appointment is – and it’s on Thursday – this Thursday – at 10:30. It’s a good job that I went to enquire.

Caliburn was next, and I moved him around the car park and rescued the shampoo and the toothpaste. I’ll have more stuff here than I will at home at this rate. And then, seeing as the afternoon was even nicer, I walked back here, all the way. And I know that I have done it too, but then this time last week I had difficulty walking to the bathroom so it’s a major step forward and I can be quite pleased with myself. It’s not quite a 10-mile hike around Montreal but I’m getting there.

Tonight for tea, I had a vegetable stir-fry with rice. A huge helping for just €5:00. And now I’m ready for bed.

But I did watch an interesting film that I found on the laptop. It’s a story about logging in Russia and they had all of the lorries doing things like driving along rivers with huge bow waves swamping the bonnets, and with the cabs almost totally under water. It’s frightening stuff and puts into perspective how easy the road is around Labrador, especially now that they are improving it.

So I have a day off tomorrow. I’ll be taking it easy I reckon because that walk is making me ache all over. Still, I’m proud of what I managed to do today.

Friday 11th March 2016 – JUST IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING …

… what happened last night with me not posting my blog, the answer was that by the time 20:15 came around, I was already tucked up in bed and out like a light. Crashing out was certainly the word – I had gone completely.

But then again, I’d had a hectic day – and one that had started not long after I had gone to sleep. And furthermore, it all started with yet another appearance by a girl who has been described on these pages as “the one that got away”. But for the second time in succession, she didn’t get away from my evil clutches last night.

Ohh no she didn’t!

I’d been out yet again in Nantwich, having been for a really good wander all around the Crewe Road End – Millstone Lane area of the town, having a good look at all of the houses and so on. And all of the area behind the houses on Millstone Lane, between there and The Crofts, had been cleared away, flattened and rolled out ready for a new housing estate to be built there. Even Flash Meakin’s hovel had gone. I wandered over there to make a brief inspection but the builders tried to chase me away. However, it was common land and so I had every right to be there, and I made sure that they knew it. And there I stayed. Having made my inspection, I wandered off to continue my travels and this is where I bumped into the aforementioned young lady. She was living on The Crescent apparently and so she invited me in for a coffee. We had a really good chat about old times and then she invited me to stay for dinner. So I prepared all of the vegetables and she cooked the food – a risotto it was. I was given a choice about what I wanted for dessert – beans on toast was mentioned (this is why I enjoy so much going on these nocturnal rambles – they are totally surreal) but of course I had some completely different ideas about what I wanted to have for afters. But I settled on a banana, which I suppose is rather symbolic. But then her young daughter came in and was telling us about how she had been threatened by some young boy who had somehow found his way into the house. She had been in the attic and had gone out onto the roof to see what was making a noise, and he had sneaked in behind her. When she came downstairs he surprised her. She was shocked and so the police were called and he was carted off, even though he insisted that he’d only done it for a dare. He ended up with 30 days inside and was ostracised by all of his friends. In the meantime, the two of us were carrying on chatting and the conversation came round to what was happening in the evening. I invited her to the cinema and her daughter thought that this was a really good idea. But her elder boy looked rather worried as if he was afraid of having his mum taken away from him. But there was no doubt that she was really keen to go to the cinema with me and I was of course just as keen to take her.

Yes, it’s a shame that things like this don’t happen to me in real life.

The alarm went off before I’d reached the exciting bit and it left me wondering about what would have happened had I been able to sleep in until the usual time of 07:45 instead of this wretchedly-early time of 07:00. I was feeling as if I’d been cheated out of 45 minutes of wishful thinking, but there we are, I suppose.

I was on the road by 07:40 and at the hospital at 08:35, managing to pinch the next-to-last parking space on the car park. The allergy clinic is weird, with just a half-dozen or so of comfortable seats, and with le being the first arrival, I had the pick of the chairs – right by the door by the power point. I had some kind of pattern drawn in biro on my arm, with initials and numbers, and then injected and some kind of fluid rubbed in. One or two of them flared up quite dramatically and the nurse measured them with some kind of hole gauge.

The nurse then found a sheet of something that resembled an aluminium-backed piece of bubble-wrap, peeled off the sticky front of it, stuck it to my back and then burst the bubbles so that, presumably, the product in each bubble would interact with my skin. I have to leave this on until Monday.

But if I think that I’m hard done-to, what happened to me was nothing to what happened to the young girl next to me. They drew some kind of chess-board on her arm and she had a huge number of injections, a couple of which flared up like nothing that I have ever seen before. One of them was starting to look like something out of Quatermass’s Experiment.

I felt so sorry for her that I let her have my cake that came with our mid-morning coffee. And then I invited her for a game of draughts on her arm.

One thing though that surprised me was that each one of us, on entering the room, had a drain put in our arms. Not that that was surprising, the surprising bit was that they didn’t use it for anything. Rather a waste of effort to me. But at least the nurse who did it had “the touch”. I hardly felt a thing.

But my results were such that I have to come back for a full morning on Monday, and an hour or so on Tuesday. And as for my Monday-morning blood test, the nurse will do it then and there as long as I remember to take my prescription with me.

We were thrown out at 12:00 and I went down to the Amaranthe. I bought some more vegan cheese and some mixed seeds, as well as a couple of hundred grams of muesli biscuits. I think that I deserved a little treat. But the Amaranthe is now selling Mozzarella-like vegan cheese (and this is progress, considering that even 18 months ago they didn’t stock any at all), although I didn’t buy any to try as it looked to be tainted. I’ll pick some up next time maybe.

Lunch was a plate of chips and vegetables at the Flunch, and then I went around the Carrefour and the Auchan for some shopping. There were no loose porridge oats, but the Auchan “own-brand” packaged oats were a reasonable price so I bought a few packets of those. I can’t be without my muesli now, can I?

I went home afterwards for a relax and to look for some more stuff that I forgot the other day. I still can’t find my Paint-Shop Pro disk but I did manage to find my dash-cam. I’ve also copied all of the dictaphone notes onto a rewritable DVD and onto a back-up drive, one thing that I’ve been meaning to do ever since I finished transcribing them.

I went to the pharmacie in St Gervais on the ay back here. I needed to pick up the medication that I ordered. The good news about this is that a month’s supply of the new injections only cost half of the price of the current lot, and then of course it’s only going to be once a day too. So that’s something like progress anyway. I shan’t be struggling quite as much for finances.

But the bad news about it is that the other injection that I need to take with me to the hospital next Friday – it’s more like an injection for a cow or a horse, judging by the size of the box. I don’t like the idea of that.

I also forgot to ask for some more boxes for my empty needles, and then I also realised that I hadn’t been to pick up my paperwork from the Archives at the hospital either. It clearly wasn’t my day. And on leaving the town, someone in a small silver saloon of which the registration number began CZ flashed his lights and waved at me. I wish that I know who it was.

Chips were on the menu back here, so that’s twice today. Not that I am complaining of course, because we have real malt vinegar here. And then I crawled off to bed – I didn’t even go out for my walk, but then that’s no big deal because I’d walked enough (at least, for my present state of health) today.

And with this patch-thing on my back, I’m glad that I had a shower yesterday.

And so are we” said terry.

Thursday 25th February 2016 – IN WHICH OUR HERO FINALLY GETS THE GIRL

And we aren’t talking about the Girl from Worleston either, but someone else completely.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall a girl who has featured a few times in my nocturnal rambles. She and I had something of a close encounter (but nothing like as close as I would have liked it to have been) over a period of a couple of years a good while back and ever since then she’s been described as “The One That Got Away”.

But she didn’t get away last night.

I was back in Nantwich, at the top end of Welsh Row right by King’s Lane, which was the back entry into our school. Up Welsh Row, hand in hand with a boy of her acquaintance, came the young lady concerned. They were both wearing the school uniform of my old school (which is surprising because the girl didn’t go there, and I don’t have a clue who the boy was). When they reached where I was standing, we started to have quite a chat, a laugh and a joke. I was teasing them both, particularly this girl, because something had happened in her past that related to a pile of younger children. I was therefore talking about her “15 children”, implying that she was their mother (which would of course have been absolutely impossible) and quite naturally, the subject of her “16th child” drifted into the conversation (well, it’s quite natural in any kind of conversation in which I’m involved). At first, she was not willing to participate in all of this teasing but as the conversation wore on she became more relaxed and joined in the fun. From here, we all ended up heading back into town. As we set off, the boy and girl were still hand-in-hand but by the time that we had crossed the River Weaver Bridge and up towards the Swine Market, the situation between the girl and Yours Truly had become such that the boy had disappeared and it was me walking hand-in-hand with her. We turned into Beam Street towards the bus station and the further down that we walked, the more evident it had become that we were now a “couple”. Turning into Market Street, we passed in front of the Civic Hall and who should come out of there but Mrs Hayes, the school secretary (although of course, it wasn’t her at all) and she gave us a really long, cold, withering stare. And so we continued onwards, down and round the corner into Churchyardside, passing all kinds of other people who knew us and who were noticing what was going on between us. There were crowds and crowds of people milling around outside the church – apparently there was some kind of service going on there and such was the size of the attendance that people had to assemble in the shops opposite the square and were being sent over to the church on batches of 100. By time we realised what was going on, we thought “well, sod it! Enough people have already seen us together so that the word of our new relationship will have already spread like wildfire around the school no matter what we were to do from here on” and so we walked off hand-in-hand into the sunse … errr … shop across the square. All very nice and homely, it was.

But last night, I managed to watch the first of the “Inspector Hornleigh” films. And I must be mistaken when I say that it’s never been broadcast on British television because, sure enough, every 17 minutes or so we have the “revolving checkerboard” in the top right-hand corner that was put in by ITV to indicate that the commercial break would be along in 15 seconds and sure enough, you can tell from watching the film closely that the commercial breaks have been edited out. The quality too is very suggestive of VHS video, so it looks as if it’s been downloaded fom ITV onto a good-quality video recorder and then edited.

The film itself, the first-ever collaboration between Harker and Sim, doesn’t have the rapport that developed between them in the later films and Harker himself hasn’t developed the quick repartee and master of disguise that became his trademark in the later films. But there were certainly some priceless moments in the film –
Chancellor of the Exchequer – “members of the public shouldn’t go around robbing the Chancellor of the Exchequer with impunity like this!”
Harker – “quite right. It’s usually the other way around!”.

What with one thing and another, I had a really good night last night and you have absolutely no idea just how hard it was to pull myself out of my stinking pit this morning. I was well-away in the land of the fairies.

And after breakfast I was once more distracted because the site of the 3D program that I use was having a sale of items at $0:80 a throw so I spent the morning having a really good trawl through it. After all, I haven’t bought myself a birthday present yet.

This afternoon, in a totally new departure from my current existence, I went out and about. To St Gervais in fact. Liz’s new spectacles had arrived but a couple of things about them needed to be sorted out so I had to go with Terry as interpreter. And it was snowing there too. I know that it’s forecast for tonight here, and al of the way through to next Thursday too, but St Gervais, which is 100 metres higher up, is starting early.

This afternoon, I pushed on with the dictaphone notes for Canada 2014. I’ve made a considerable amount of progress too – so much so that I’m almost back to the point where I entered the USA from Canada in early September. If I can keep this up at this rate, I’ll be finished within a week and won’t I be happy?

I’ve made myself a pizza tonight and there’s enough left for lunch tomorrow. These big pizza sheets that Liz prefers to the round ones that I like do have their advantages.

Anyway, I’ve done enough for today. I’m going to have yet another early night and watch the second Inspector Hornleigh film.

And then, I wonder where I’ll end up tonight. And more interestingly, who will be coming with me?

Monday 4th January 2016 – SO NOW WE KNOW!

28th January is the day that is set aside for my operation. I need to come into the hospital the day before, at 09:00, so that I can have a major blood transfusion prior to the operation. And I can guess why.

But as for the rest of the details of the operation, my card is marked ne veut pas recevoir des informations – “doesn’t want to have any further information”. Yes, what is going to happen is going to happen regardless of whatever they tell me about it, and if they start to tell me about it, I’ll just spend the next three or four weeks losing sleep worrying. Frankly, I’d prefer to be walking calmly across the car park, to be clouted from behind by a pick-axe handle and wake up to find that the job has been done.

As it is, I’ll be spending at least a week in hospital afterwards while I recover – if I do – and that’s something that ought to worry all of you a great deal because if it does all go wrong, then I’m going to come back and haunt the lot of you. Especially if you are a female reader. I wouldn’t mind putting the willies up quite a few young ladies of the female sex and I have a list already prepared.

We can start with a young lady who has featured on these pages before. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my mentioning a girl described as “the one that got away” from my evil clutches 20-odd years ago. She’s put in an appearance or two on these pages since then, and there she was again last night. I can’t remember where I was going or what I was doing for the first part of last night’s journey, but she was certainly there and her card will be amongst the first to be marked.
But after a nocturnal ramble down the corridor to the porcelain horse and back into the arms of Morpheus, I had a different partner in crime and I can’t now remember who it was. But whoever it was, we were also in the company of a couple of regulars from the Carry-On team, Sid James and Joan Sims included. We were somewhere up the north -west coast of Spain near the cape, whatever it is called, where one turns into the Bay of Biscay. The cape is a kind of headland that shelters a bay to the north-east and there was a big run-down house overlooking the bay, with a big sandy beach, rather like a cross between the setting in And Then There Were None and the old house in Carry On Regardless. Everyone was planning on going down there for a couple of days so my companion and I decided that we would seed the house with all kinds of practical jokes. This worked in spades and we certainly succeeded in putting the willies up the rest of our company.

From there, I waited for the nurse who was to take the blood sample and then I could have breakfast, followed by a nice hot shower. I must make myself all clean and tidy for the hospital after all.

At Pionsat I went to the pharmacy for the next round of prescriptions and then to the Intermarche for some bread and tomatoes, and then off to my house to inspect the property and see what else was going on. It was cold in my attic too, although not as cold as it might have been.

Back on the road I headed for Montlucon and tracked down the office where I need to go to pay for my blood tests. They’ve sent me a reminder. I didn’t stop and go in because there was nowhere in the vicinity to park and I didn’t have the time to walk any great distance. I went off to the Hospital for my interview with the surgeon and it was really busy – I found possibly the last parking place on the overflow car park.

The surgeon who will be operating on me is only a young girl (which is more an indictment of just how much I have aged than any criticism of her) and we had quite a chat, much of which was in Flemish. There has been quite a commentary on these pages about a certain hospital, the Universiteit Ziekenhuis van Leuven in Flanders – a hospital that has received several good remarks in its favour, and guess where this surgeon did her training? That’s right, the Universiteit Ziekenhuis van Leuven. And so it looks like I’m going to have the best of both worlds. I’m sure that if I ask her nicely, she’ll bring me a plate of fritjes.

In fact, I had quite a chat about my diet with one of the nurses there. She suggested a food hamper too.

In a desperate effort to kill two birds with one stone, I went up to the oncology department to see if they had received my blood results. Apparently not, so they rang up to enquire. Just 7.7, a decline of 0.3 in just 2 days. This is starting to become silly.

I do need to have a blood transfusion, according to them, so I explained about my 100km round trip to the hospital, explaining how it was wearing me out. But to no avail. They couldn’t do me now, sir. I’ll have to come back tomorrow. I went to the Carrefour and did some shopping instead.

We had a minor disaster on the way back. I’m using my Belgian bank account as a kind of fighting fund, but when I went to draw some cash out (there’s a branch here in Montlucon) I found to my dismay that my card expired at the end of December. That’s going to halt me full in my stride, without a doubt. I need to do something about this.

Vegan vegetable lasagne for tea (Liz’s gorgeous cooking is the one positive side of being ill, no doubt about that) and then another early night. I can’t keep it up like I used to, and having to go back to Montlucon means that I need another 07:00 start – never mind 07:45.

I shan’t be sorry when all of this is over, regardless of the outcome.

Tuesday 21st July 2015 – I PASSED …

… the inspection today. Rosemary came by and gave the place her seal of approval.

And so she should have, too. I was awake long before the alarm went off, having my breakfast by the time it finally did, and then, fortified by a pot of strong coffee, I attacked the house.

The attic is tidier now then it has ever been since I have been living in it and there is no doubt about that. The rubbish has been taken out and the composting bin emptied and cleaned.

The bedroom had a good clean-around too and I even managed to bring a little order into the chaos that is the ground floor where I’ve been working. All the tools have been put away, the floor has been swept with all of the sawdust now in a tidy pile, and there are pathways through the tulips where one can tiptoe without breaking one’s neck falling over something.

I even managed to give some attention to the shower room, and I emptied and cleaned out the beichstuhl, even though it didn’t need it, but one can never be too considerate to one’s guests.

All in all, Rosemary was impressed and awarded me half a melon, which went down a treat for pudding this evening. She arrived at 14:00 and was here until 18:25 – some flying visit! I treated myself to a shower too, although I had to wait until 19:45 and the water had cooled down to a delightful 38.5°C – the temperature at 18:26 was a mere 42.0°C – not far off the highest that it has ever been.

I don’t mind visitors as long as I know that they are coming. It’s a good opportunity and incentive for me to tidy up and clean the place. And it does need it sometimes. I ought to pay much more attention to my accommodation.

But I’m surprised that I had the energy to do all of that this morning, seeing as I had been on my travels again. I was in a Ford Cortina estate (they aren’t half featuring quite regularly in my nocturnal ramblings these days) and testing the handbrake by the simple expedient of rolling backwards down a hill on this new housing estate and pulling on the lever. Of course, in this case the handbrake didn’t work and the car gathered speed. The houses at the bottom loomed up rather too rapidly for my liking and so I did a handbrake turn (with no handbrake, of course!) to pull up parallel to the kerb. A tabby kitten came out of the house right by where I was stopped and so I started to stroke it. Then the cat’s owner came out to see what was happening, and it was none other than a girl who has been previously described in these pages as “the one that got away”. Anyway, she invited me in for a coffee and we had a really good nostalgic chat about old times.

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Thursday 5th March 2015 – I DIDN’T QUITE MANAGE …

… to complete as much as I intended to do on the wardrobe today. I had the usual issues of working hard but making not much progress.

It took all morning to hang the two doors that I had made yesterday. Mind you, I spent some of the time having a good search around looking to see if I had any hinges lying around anywhere. I eventually found three in the barn. I must have bought those for some long-forgotten project, but they weren’t much good as they were left-hand hinges and too big in any case.

However I did find half a hinge in the house and this made a pair (or at least it will do when I find the other half) with a hinge that I had already, so I could at least do that. It also means that I don’t have to go on a shopping expedition to Montlucon on Saturday.

After lunch, I made the final door and for a change, I had a play with the cheap chop-saw that I bought agesa couple of years ago in the sales at Cheze in St Eloy-les-Mines. This did an excellent job, although it needs two cuts to cut the width of a floorboard (which is annoying) but never mind. I’ll be doing the floorboards with this.

While I was on my travels around, I tried to see if I could find the Ryobi portable router that I bought in the USA in 2012 but I’ve no idea where that might be. Not a trace.

The final door needed trimming down but once I’d done that it was quite a good fit and it’s all come out quite well.

all of the doors need trimming off of course, so I measured everything up ready to cut them down tomorrow. That ook me nicely up to 18:30 when I called it a day

During the night I was on my travels again, back in Crewe. We were living back in Davenport Avenue and there was quite a crowd of us there. We all had cars and the place was totally cluttered up with vehicles. Anyway, I went on the bus up Gresty Road and South Street and the bus turned right into Nantwich Road, towards the station. I realised that I should have alighted at the corner so I urgently rang the bell. The driver went to stop but of course there’s nowhere along there to stop (the bus was clearly driving on the right-hand side of the road) so the driver said that he would swing round into Pedley Street and come back round into Nantwich Road to drop me off. I told him not to bother as I was going to Pedley Street anyway, so I alighted then and there and went to a house where I cooked my pizza and chips. I somehow managed to burn my chips although my pizza wasn’t anything like nearly cooked. So I abandoned my tea that and went outside where I bumped into my friend Mandy, and we had quite a chat about the good old days.

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Sunday 21 July 2013 – AND AM I ALL PACKED?

Am I ‘eck as like.

No surprise there, is there?

I had a lie-in until about 09:20 and by that time it was far too hot to do anything much. Records have tumbled today and I can’t think how often it is that I have had to put cold water into the solar shower to cool it down to an acceptable temperature of about 37°C.

For yes, I did have my first (and probably only) solar shower of the year this evening, and gorgeous it was too – well-worth waiting for.

Mind you I almost didn’t manage to take it – there sunning itself on the concrete pad right almost where I was planning to stand was a whacking great snake – the first real snake that I’ve seen at my house, although I’ve seen plenty elsewhere.

He p155ed off pretty sharp-ish when he saw me and disappeared into the woodpile, right next to where the ladder is. I got to thinking of myself that it was a shame that I didn’t have a couple of friends, some counters and a pair of dice.

And if you want to know what kind of snake he was, at the speed at which he disappeared, he was definitely a calculator. That’s right – a calculator is a very fast adder.

Still, Caliburn is emptied and there’s a pile of stuff in it.

Not all I need to take all of it but there’s a slight change of plan. I’m not leaving right after the radio shows. It’s going to be even hotter tomorrow so it’ll be wicked on the road. I’m coming back here and I’ll leave at about 19:00 when it cools down.

Trying to print off the radio stuff, and nothing worked. It’s not gathering in the paper and so I’ll need to strip it down and find out why. But I never have any luck with printers. There’s dozens round here that don’t function as they are supposed to do.

Luckily Liz came to the rescue with some stuff (and a nice tea and some ginger cake for which I am always grateful) when I was down there rehearsing the radio shows and I’ll have to get Radio Tartasse to do the rest tomorrow.

Now as you know, every now and again I write down my dreams on here.

Many years ago when I was at Uni I helped out as one of a few guinea-pigs for someone who was doing research into dreams. We had to record our dreams and submit them to this guy who was using them as material for his thesis.

Even though the project ended years ago I still keep it up to a certain degree because it was so interesting and now it’s become something of a habit.

I don’t record all of my dreams because without the equipment that we had, it’s difficult to do so, and so I only record the ones that I remember really well. And last night’s was a corker, it really was.

Back in the 1980s when I had my taxi business in Crewe I had a young girl working for me on Saturdays. She stayed for a couple of years and then left to go to college.

She kept in touch with Nerina and me and there was talk at one point that she might come to lodge with us for a while as home conditions were difficult.

Anyway, to cut a long story short … “Hooray” – ed … Nerina and I separated a few years later and I was preparing to emigrate, and I bumped into Nerina. She asked me how I was and we had a little chat about this and that.

One thing that she said quite surprised me. “I’m surprised that you didn’t get …. to move in with you”.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you must have known that she had a big crush on you”.
Rather like Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Williams in Carry On Loving“Surely you must have felt it?”
“Felt it? I never got anywhere near it”.
I didn’t, as it happened, and it was rather late in the day to tell me, I thought.

A good few years or so years later I did encounter … again – now separated from her husband and with a young baby in tow.

I was just about to go off New York for a holiday and, on a whim, I invited her along. But it was far too short notice and it didn’t happen, and I always regard her as “the one that got away” – the lucky girl.

Anyway, last night, here she was. We were in Sydney, Australia, together as a couple, talking to someone about their cats, and a taxi driver stuck his head around the door and said that it was time to go. So we went outside to get into his taxi, a big modern silver Opel with a huge scrape all the way down the side and with a floor made of wooden pallets. He took us back to our home and when he dropped us off, I noticed that the letter box outside had been knocked off its pedestal and bent. So there I was fixing it and putting it back into position so I could post this huge pile of brown envelopes, but … told me that the postman had passed while I was fixing the letter box and it was now too late.

I’ve never had a dream as realistic as this – so realistic that in the middle of it and I had to get up to go for a Gypsy’s downstairs in the bathroom, when I returned to bed and went back to sleep, the dream carried on from where it left off.

It was totally astonishing and I would love to know what has been going on in the back of my mind somewhere that has made it come up with all of this. It’s quite unnerving for some reason and has put me right off my stroke. I shan’t be feeling myself for a good week or so …“and quite right too” – ed

Surreal was not the word.

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EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality