Tag Archives: Nerina Hall

Thursday 23rd November 2023 – HAVING SAID …

… the other day that I was thinking about getting up before the alarm went off, I actually managed to make it out of bed this morning before the alarm went off.

A few months ago I went through a phase of early rising, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but just recently it’s been just a distant memory.

Mind you, at one point I didn’t think that I’d ever go to sleep, never mind awaken. For several hours starting shortly after going to be I was wracked by attacks of cramp, one after another after another.

But something must have awoken me this morning and I’ve no idea what it was but I couldn’t go back to sleep afterwards. So I spend 15 or 20 minutes doing some exercises in bed with the elastic strap with which I sleep, wrapped round my ankles, and then I raised myself from the dead.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone. And considering that it was a short night, it was quite a lively one. There were some huge problems about confrontations between the Government, the University and the Students’ Association. The Students Union magazine that was sent round for that month had dozens and dozens of cases in it where students claimed that they had been provoked by the Government or University into a whole variety of things. As members of the Executive Committee we had to sit and examine these cases. I was on my way to a meeting, walking through a street where all these ragged children were playing around telling each other jokes etc. When they were running around they were leaving their shoes all over the place. I had a couple of particular pairs of shoes that I’d encountered and had been playing football with them up and down the street as I was walking. One of the kids noticed and began to chase after me, making a few remarks. I was distracted because there was another instance taking place right before my eyes of the goings-on between the Government, the University and one of the students. I was in a hurry to go along and actually witness it first-hand so I couldn’t stop and sort out this boy’s shoes for him.

And that brought back a few memories from the time that the Minister of Education was invited by the University to address the student body, and being forewarned by one of our “moles on various committees” we laid an ambush with STRAWBERRY MOOSE and the Minister fled. Such was Strawberry Moose’s fame in those days.

But of course, Strawberry Moose had the final say, as you might expect.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bedroom I was going off by road to the far north of Canada. We set off in a big double-decker express coach. I had my huge suitcase with STRAWBERRY MOOSE in it. I handed it to the driver, boarded and found a seat. There were a few other people sitting near me and we had a chat every now and again but I spent a lot of time dozing off. We eventually pulled into a service area with a restaurant etc where we had to alight because this was where our different buses came in to take us further on our way. I alighted from the back along with these other people whom I’d met. The driver began to take the cases out of the coach. We were checking times with each other and discussing our plans etc. One of the girls with us asked where the restaurant was. I said “it’s behind you” … "ohh no it isn’t" – ed … so she turned round. Of course by this time the bus had gone so you could actually see the service area. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have my case and the bus has gone. It’s dark and I could hardly see anything on this motorway service area. I certainly can’t remember my case being taken off the bus and now he’s disappeared.

And later I was with a girl who might have been Roxanne. She wanted to know if she could borrow my big Bosch hammer drill to drill a hole through a piece of wood. We had a look at the wood and saw how thick it was. We ended up having to tape a couple of drill bits together. I put them in the drill and was busy giving her a lesson on how to drill wood and how to drill deep lengths etc.

Nerina and I had had some friends round at one point – another couple. We were chatting away and it was becoming quite late. I said something to Nerina about going to bed. It caught her unawares and she sked me exactly what I meant. I explained that I was having to go to the bathroom so if she was planning on going to bed at some point in the near future I’d switch on her electric blanket for her so that her bed would be nice and warm. I switched it on and the evening carried on. I wandered off to do something. later on I went upstairs and she was there in bed with the bedclothes thrown back. I asked if the bed was warm enough. She replied that it was too warm. I asked why she hadn’t switched off the electric blanket but she didn’t say very much. We ended up having a lengthy discussion about Christmas and birthday presents.

Later on there were 3 of us. We were having a virtual tour on the internet of Yeovil, getting into a virtual car and on one of these map sites having a street view out of the town. We decided that it looked fairly sophisticated so we found another way back into the city. I went a strange way because I said that it’s one way of seeing what’s in people’s gardens. We came across a nouse where behind a tarpaulin were dozens and dozens of police motorbikes all with white fairings. They were a model that I hadn’t seen before so I imagined that they had been imported from somewhere obscure and were slowly being prepared for sale. This visual programme was incredible. We ended up on the very top of a hill really high up looking over this really beautiful valley with a river and viaduct in the distance etc. We climbed out of the car to look and the car just accelerated away on its own down the hill. I could feel the wind whistling through my hair as Nerina, this other guy, another couple of people and I stood there watching it. All 5 of us seemed to go at the same time. The woman of this other couple completely forgot who she was with and took my hand as we walked away which of course had everyone bursting out into laughter.

The last time that I was in Yeovil was with Sue from Swindon. I moved her from Brussels when I had my Luton Transit and we saw each other a few times after that if I happened to be in the UK. We celebrated the Solstice together at Avebury one year but like most things involving the UK it petered out.

Thinking about it, I was in the UK for half a day in 2013 to pick up a lorry-load of slates to deliver to the South of France and Rosemary and I went in Aberdeen in 2019 to pick up THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR instead of flying to Greenland to meet it there, and they are the only times that I’ve been in the UK since 2011. And, to be quite honest, I’ve no intention of ever returning.

Having finished the dictaphone notes I carried on with the radio programme and that’s now finished and up and running, ready for broadcast on … errr … 5th July next year.

In between all of that, I had my coffee and bread-and-butter pudding and phoned the garage to talk about Caliburn and his controle technique. He actually has a vacancy and he’ll send someone round “shortly” to pick him up. And Caliburn will soon be 17 too.

The lift engineer who came to chat with me was a woman – not that that’s a surprise in itself these days – but I wouldn’t go doing any lift engineering in the clothes that she was wearing. And she was wearing enough perfume to pole-axe a bactrian camel. It reminded me of the story about the guy spreading white powder outside his front gate and his neighbout asked him why.
"It’s to keep Polar Bears off my cabbages" he replied.
"But there are no Polar bears within 5,000 miles of this place"
"Powerful stuff, isn’t it?"

This afternoon I’ve been sorting out more of my Canada 2022 photos and I’m now about to board my train in Moncton ready to travel back to Montréal. And what a journey that was.

As well as that I’ve been going through one of the backup drives checking duplicates and disposing of yet more.

Tea tonight was steamed veg and veggie balls in vegan cheese sauce, delicious as usual. Tomorrow’s tea with have to be sausage and beans, not salad, as I’m not going shopping in the morning. At some point the garage might come by for Caliburn and I’ll probably be out at the shops or something so I’ll stay at home and wait, which will mean that he won’t come.

But I’ve plenty of other things that will keep me out of mischief. At some point I’m even going to soak my fruit ready for Christmas baking and that’s the kind of thing that will be exciting.

My first ever Christmas cake a couple of years ago, coached on the internet by Hannah from Batley, was a resounding success but I put that down to beginner’s luck. And in any case Hannah is no longer in our Welsh group so I’ll be on my own for this one.

But I learnt a lot last time. Here’s hoping that I can remember it.

Tuesday 21st November 2023 – MEANWHILE, IN THE ….

… Social Services office –
Social Services Officer – "Do you have any problems with your hearing?"
Our Hero – "Pardon?"

Yes, I’ve been up to my ears in interviews today

And believe it or not, I prepared well for it today by crashing out on several occasions. Not that I’m sure that I know why because last night was one of the better nights’ sleeps that I’ve had quite recently, and I can’t remember very much of what was going on during the night.

When the alarm went off I staggered to my feet and went in search of my medication. A fine way to start the day.

Back in here afterwards I had a few letters to write and some information to pull together ready for people whom I’m likely to meet during the course of the day.

Once I’d prepared my papers I had a listen to the dictaphone notes and to my surprise and delight I was joined, at different times of course, by a couple of my favourite companions. And what a shame that I didn’t remember all that much about it. First out of the block was Zero, whose birthday it apparently was last night and there had been a big party. I’d been staying there for a few days and the morning after we decided that we’d make a start on tidying up. There were some things needed from the shop so they asked me if I would go to fetch them. The car there was a Chrysler Neon so I took it and drove away to the shops to do the shopping. Their driveway was between two pillars of brick and was fairly narrow but on the way back I just drove past and reversed in as I would normally do anywhere else. As we were walking in Zero’s mother said something about tidying up but I didn’t quite understand it – I didn’t quite hear what she said – so I sad to Zero “yes, go and put all the balloons in the cellar and jump around in there”. Her mother looked at me and said “that’s a much better idea than mine”. I was surprised because I thought that that was what she’d actually said but she must have said something different that I didn’t hear correctly. In the house when I went in there were loads of people sleeping around on sofas etc, dogs and cats etc everywhere. Apparently Zero had had a rabbit for her birthday and was playing with it somewhere.

As for the rabbit, I’m not quite sure where that fitted in, but I remember hiring a Chrysler Neon on a couple of occasions when I was in the USA 25 or so years ago and for a basic uncomplicated saloon car it was quite a pleasant vehicle

And then later on I was with Percy Penguin too. She’d finished work and gone home but she contacted me to ask me to come to pick her up. I thought that I’d go along to see what was the matter with her. When I pulled up she said nothing but just got into the car with a very depressed look on her face. After a couple of minutes she began to tell me her problems with her father – how when they go away on holiday he just lies in bed all day and doesn’t do anything. You could never force him out to do things etc. He’d completely lost interest in life and it was weighing down heavily on everyone. I set off to go for a drive with her and let her talk but for some reason, 2 or 3 times we ended up back outside her house and leaving again as if she kept on changing her mind then changing it again. We drove for a while as she told me all about these things. In the end we came into Shavington. There was some kind of fair there so we went for a walk around and came across some kind of craft fair that was proposing exhibitions and workshops. One was to make your own teddy bear and was on Wednesday at 17:30. I was explaining it to a father who was looking for some information for his daughter and noticed that Percy Penguin was listening too. I explained all about it to her. In the end we agreed that it was a shame that she knew no-one on Shavington because she could have gone there after work to wait until this course started, done the course and I would have taken her home after I returned from work. After a while of this she said that she wanted to go home. I asked why, if I could persuade her to stay out, but she said that she hadn’t yet done her homework for the week. I had the feeling that was an excuse rather than anything else but in the end I ended up taking her home.

Now there was someone who doesn’t feature half as often in these pages as she deserves. Her simple, uncomplicated, undemanding nature helped me through quite a few really stressful periods that I went through at one time or another and I wish that there were more people like her in this world.

Having transcribed the dictaphone notes I sat down to revise my Welsh ready for today’s lesson but regrettably I had the first of a couple of sessions today where I was away with the fairies for a while.

Armed with my coffee and my slice of bread-and-butter pudding I went for my lesson, which passed well enough although I’m convinced that I’m miles off the pace with this course. I just can’t concentrate on what I’m supposed to be doing.

However, as for my bread-and-butter pudding, it’s really turned out quite well and I’m very pleased with it. However it tastes quite differently from the bread-and-butter pudding that my mother used to make when we were kids, but that’s probably a good thing because my mother was not well-known for her culinary prowess.

In fact I had to wait until I met Nerina before I really began to eat well. And that’s no real surprise – anyone brought up by an Italian mother is bound to be at the top of the game in that respect and I was rather spoilt.

After I’d had a good wash and clean-up the car came for me and we set off for the Centre de Re-education where Severine put me through my paces. She told me that my sessions last week were cancelled because the ergotherapist had damaged her leg and was off work – not exactly the best recommendation for a Centre de Re-education.

With no ergotherapist I had to loiter around for a while before my appointment with the Social Services. She didn’t really have very much to tell me that I didn’t already know but she took copious notes which might serve some kind of purpose in the near future, I suppose.

Back here I had my hot chocolate and chocolate biscuits and then began the task of taking the inventory of what I have in store here.

And within a matter of a handful of seconds I came across 2kg of flour that I’d overlooked and also a tin of custard powder that I must have bought in the English shop in Belgium at some point when I was living in Leuven.

After about half an hour or so I was probably about a tenth of the way through the shelves but I’d already found enough room to store the food processor and its accessories. I’ll have another half-hour at it tomorrow when I’ll probably discover the 10 lost tribes of Israel, Lord Lucan and Martin Bormann.

Here and there when I’ve not been asleep I’ve been making a start on the next radio programme. The music has now been paired off and I’m halfway through writing the notes. I’ll finish that off tomorrow and dictate them tomorrow night. I have no visit to the Centre de Re-education on Thursday but the engineer is coming.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with some of the stuffing from yesterday. And there’s plenty left to make a leftover curry for Wednesday night. There’s still some naan bread dough left in the freezer.

As well as everything else I’ve had the acoustic guitar out again for a good while. I’m not sure why because I don’t think that I’ll ever play again in public but I suppose that nevertheless I ought to do my best to press on regardless.

Having finished my notes I’m going to have my hot drink and then go to bed. I probably won’t sleep much tonight with having had several goes at it already but I’ll do my best. And I’ll wonder about who will come along to visit me tonight.

Sunday 19th November 2023 – IF I EVER FIND …

… out who it was who rang my doorbell this morning at 09:30, “harsh words” will be said. I was just on the point of tidying the kitchen and putting things away when someone rang the front door bell and awoke me. Who does a thing like that at 09:30 on a Sunday morning? I just stuck my head under the bedclothes and presumably they went away. However I couldn’t go to sleep again after that. It really annoyed me

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m happy (well, I’m not, actually, but that’s by the way) to raise myself from the dead at any time you like but Sunday is a Day Of Rest when there’s never an alarm and I’m quite content to lie in bed for as long as it takes until I’m ready to show a leg. And anyone who gets in my way and interrupts me will know all about it.

But that’s not the worst of it.

As it happens I did manage to go back to sleep at some point but at 10:15 the doorbell went again.

This time I staggered across the apartment as Nature intended ready to give someone a piece of my mind but there was no-one on the other end of the parlophone.

There was no point in going back to bed after that so I had my medication and, exceptionally, I made myself a mug of strong instant coffee

It took a while, as it usually does these days, to come round into the Land of the Living and then I sat down to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I’d been producing a play. Admittedly it wasn’t very good but it was part of street entertainment. The idea was that there would be 4 different versions of this play taking place simultaneously and the actors would begin to walk from the far end of each street until they arrived simultaneously in the centre of the Square in the town centre. Of course, doing something on that kind of scale in a small town there won’t be any kind of experienced actors so if you did find any experienced actors you’d ration them out between the different performances to make sure that one of the streets didn’t have more quality than the others. It was all quite hit-and-miss, the kind of thing that was destined to fail but you would give it a go. The actors set off and slowly advanced into the town centre down their respective streets to meet up in the middle. There was one woman who was really outraged because she considered that her street had a couple of second-rate actors playing important roles whereas the neighbouring street had a couple of professional, experienced actors playing the same roles. She was incensed. What annoyed me more than anything was that from where she was standing to watch it she could actually see two performances, the one with the average actors and that with the better actors in the leading role so she really had no grounds to complain. Nevertheless she was extremely angry and vituperative about it.

That reminds me of something that happened 10 years ago when I was in Munich. I was at some kind of party with some theatrical types and busy chatting to a young Italian girl who was with a travelling theatre company. She was telling me that she was going to produce her first ever play – either Hamlet or “The Scottish Play”, I can’t remember now.
She asked me "how would you produce the play?"
"Do you know the play well?"
"Yes I do" she responded.
"Have you read it?" I asked
"Yes I have" she answered
"When you read it, do you visualise in your mind and your imagination what is going on, or do you simply look at the words?"
"I can imagine and visualise it" she answered.
"Well, that’s how you produce it – so that it turns out exactly how you imagine it to be. It’s all your own work – no-one else’s so do it how YOU see it and not how anyone else wants you to see it, otherwise there’s no point in you being the producer"

And half an hour later "how would you produce the play?"

Later on during the night I was talking to the lorry driver with whom I was talking in a dream a couple of nights ago. He was telling me that every Sunday he had to go to the fuel depot at Y Fflint to load up his lorry ready for the week’s work. But because it was a Bank Holiday just about everywhere was filling up so there was an enormous queue. He wasn’t attended to until late at night which meant that he had no drivers’ hours left to go home. He slept at the side of the road in his cab then spent the next week delivering, running later and later because with the effects of Covid it took much more time to unload and prepare anything. Instead of being home for Friday he ended up coming off the road and going straight to the tanker depot to refuel for the next week’s work without even seeing his home and having to sleep in his cab for the night again. He went at the height of Covid for several weeks without even seeing his own home and family.

Finally I was staying with some people in Arizona, in a big house on the edge of town. There was just the boy of the house and me there – the family was away. No-one had said anything about food and by now I was starving. I’d brought some bread rolls with me in the car so I said that I’d make a sandwich. Did he want anything? He replied no so I went off and fetched whatever I had, which wasn’t very much. later on in the afternoon as it began to go dark I went for a walk. I could tell by plaques on various places around the town that it had been created in 1918 as a watering point along the railway. Someone had built a church but it was all ripped out and modernised in 1933. There were several stories. One of the strangest things was that at the side of the Town Hall was what might have been a memorial of a 1950s convertible that had been involved in a really heavy front-end smash. There were 3 children standing by the car so I wondered if they had been killed in the accident and the memorial was to them. The most interesting thing was when I went down a side street I ended up in some kind of gallery that was all ornate carved wood like something out of a Gothic cathedral. There were people milling around and one or two people were talking to me. I was standing by a waste paper bin blocking it. Some woman asked me to move so we had a little chat. I pointed out to her a ghastly luminous human head floating down the gallery. As I went round the corner I came across a cat show with about 20 or 30 cats in baskets. I went over to stroke them and some woman made a remark to someone else about “that’s the guy who’s staying with such-and-such a family at the moment”

After lunch I made the pizza for the next batch of pizza and I do have to say that the dough came out the best that I have made for some considerable time.

While it was busy proofing I began the bread and butter pudding.

The recipe included eggs so I had a go with Liz’s patent baking-soda-and-vinegar replacement. And the result was something like Lance Percival experienced in CARRY ON CRUISING

Nevertheless it went into the oven well enough and baked quite nicely. I decided in the end to bake it in a low, wide dish in the conventional oven so that it will cook more evenly

As yet I haven’t tasted it but if it’s anything as nice as the uncooked mixture tasted before I baked it, it’ll be phenomenal.

And having ordered some dry figs in the week from LeClerc, I found three unopened packets in my baking box. I really must make a proper and thorough inventory of exactly what I have in here.

In between everything I edited the radio notes that I’d dictated last night and I completed the programme. I’ll be ready to start the next one tomorrow.

There was a visitor too. One of my neighbours came round to talk to me about cars with hand controls.

The pizza was absolutely delicious again, and now that I’ve written my notes I’m off to bed once I’ve had a drink of honey, blackcurrant and lemon

So who will put in an appearance tonight? At some point during the night I had a vague recollection that Nerina was there or thereabouts. I’ve no objection to her coming to visit me during the night because, after all, I did invite her to share my life for better or for worse.

However I do wish that everyone else in my family would clear off and leave me alone. I put as much distance between them and me in the real world as I possibly can and so I take a great deal of objection to them pursuing me around in the ether during the night.

Wednesday 15th November 2023 – ALL MY SESSIONS …

… at the Centre de Re-education were cancelled today, and cancelled tomorrow as well. No-one has told me why but I suggest that Severine has been overcome after a couple of sessions of massaging my feet.

She’s not the first, of course. I remember when Nerina wanted us to have one of these Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs.
"What will it eat?" I asked
"The same food as us" she replied
"And where will it live?"
"In the house with us" she answered
"And where will it sleep?" I asked
"On the bed with us and the cats" she answered it
"And what about the smell?" I asked
"The pig will get used to it" she said. "The cats and I had to".

So with no physical training today, I’ve been very busy.

And not just during the day either. I was quite busy during the night too. There was something about a rock group having produced a follow-up album to one that was a great success. There was something to do with 9 minutes in this follow-up which made the disk less attractive to anyone who wanted to buy it. A discussion was going around about how the recording society was really compromising this album in respect of this particular 9 minutes and something needed to be done for the group to reassert itself. But it was like one of these dreams where I walked into the middle of something that was already going on and then walked out again before it finished. I can’t remember any more than that but it was well under way when I first became involved in it

We were back with this group again later, when they had gone to ground over something to do with this 9 minutes. While they were doing it they discovered some music that had been registered by someone who had been there a couple of years earlier and which had been totally overlooked. Now they were saying that this piece of music might make all the difference about how their new album is going to progress.

There was something going on last night about food prices. Prices were starting to go through the roof. People were beginning to stock up. One of the issues was cat food which had begun to be really expensive. Someone in the house where I was living gave me a voucher for 4 tins and asked me to go to the Co-op. As I did, one of the cats ran to the door and ran outside. I had to grab it and bring it back inside the house before I could set off. That had me thinking about walking to the Co-op. I was after all quite ill but was still going along doing all of this, going to the hospital, still doing as much as I could. I remember my father when his wife was ill, how he basically dropped everything and just stayed at home, ostensibly to look after her but I suspected that it was a kind-of fatigue that enters your body once you are old and you just don’t want to do anything any more. I couldn’t understand why it was that so many people seemed to give up hope as soon as they have some kind of severe illness and allow the illness to sweep them away etc instead of standing back up and fighting.

This is pretty much similar to several conversations that I’d had in the past. With most people, if you aren’t feeling too good today you can always leave the task until tomorrow when you’ll be feeling better. Anyone with a terminal illness will tell you that if you aren’t feeling too good today you can’t leave it because you know that tomorrow you’ll be feeling worse. You have to press on regardless.

It’s surprising how an illness like that can change your life for the better, because it keeps on driving you forward.

When I was on the taxis in Crewe I saw dozens of people who had worked all their lives to the sound of the factory hooter and had died a few months after retirement because they didn’t know what to do and so had sunk into a fit of lethargic depression that proved to be terminal.

Mind you, Crewe is rather like that. It’s the kind of place that when the Luftwaffe dropped a stick of bombs across the town during one of the “Baedecker Raids” in 1941, they caused £14,000,000 worth of improvements. It’s the kind of town that sucks your soul out of you and I’d had my fill of it long before I actually left.

There was a competition on the internet a while back for people to submit the most depressing photograph or slogan that they had ever seen. The winner, by a country mile, was a banner seen at a football match that said
“Born in Crewe – Live in Crewe – Die in Crewe”

On the subject of football, during the night I remember something about being at a football ground last night for a football match. It was a windy evening and I was carrying these large pieces of plastic that I’d picked up as littler. I opened my arms and legs in a form of St Andrews’s cross with the plastic as a form of background, just for a bit of fun I suppose, when a gust of wind hit me. It caught the plastic and blew the plastic and me all the way across the ground into a wooden bench seat on the far side which broke into several pieces. I remember thinking to myself that it seems to me that I’m just being dogged around by all kinds of misfortune and bad luck at the moment. Everything that I’m touching seems to be going wrong.

Nothing new there.

I remember thinking, in connection with the last dream, that I’d much rather wait a couple of weeks and have what I want at a price that I could afford rather than going out and buying the first thing that I saw that would do the job but was probably 5 times more expensive than it actually ought to be.

And then I was in Virlet last night down on the farm. In the neighbourhood all running around was a load of little kids, probably 8 or 9, something like that. A few of them were girls and one of them seemed to be pretty much attached to me, which was rather sweet and reminded me of someone who appears occasionally during my nocturnal rambles and makes me go all broody thinking about the daughter whom I always wanted, which I didn’t actually realise until I had a daughter for 3 years. Anyway I took out my bike and decided that I’d cycle to Montlucon to go to the shops. It was night but I reckoned that I’d be there by the time that it was morning and the shops would be open. I set out. The front light was working but the rear wasn’t, but that’s never bothered me before. The father of these kids said something about the rear light but I pretended not to notice. I cycled off and ended up in Longton. I went into a butcher’s shop. Who should also walk in but Zero’s father. I can’t remember now what I ordered. It was something like a meat faggot (it must have been a dream). I asked how much and he told me so I paid it and took it. I could see that Zero’s father was intending on doing something with her, buying something, but I couldn’t make out what was going on in his mind. I got back on the bike and set off. I went to inspect the roadworks along the road out of Stoke on Trent. Just as it was becoming light I was cycling into Stockport which had been one of my planned destinations.

But fancy that – Zero hovering around somewhere on the periphery of my voyages last night and I didn’t manage to see her. Mind you, with one or two things that did unfold during the night and which you really don’t need to know if you are eating your tea, maybe it’s just as well that I didn’t.

So today I’ve finished off the notes for the radio programme on which I’ve been working, and then I’ve tidied up the Radio directory on the big computer.

After that, I carried on with editing the photos from Canada 2022. Right now, STRAWBERRY MOOSE, Strider and I are on our way to Woodstock to do our shopping for our stay.

Before we set out though, we had to give Strider a thorough cleaning because with having stood idle for three years it looked as if someone had been growing potatoes in him.

And it’s a good job that we cleaned him out because we needed the space. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, by the time we got to Woodstock we were half a million strong.

There were also several interruptions as we went on our way around. The cleaner came, of course, but she brought with her a letter inviting me to a hospital appointment in the cardiac unit in Paris on 24th April next year.

And then an hour later, they rang me up to ask me to go for another consultation, this time with the haematology department. They wanted me to come next Wednesday and interesting as it might be, it’s not really practical to make the arrangements that quickly.

So instead, we agreed on 1at December – 2 weeks or so’s time. That should give me enough time to arrange transport.

This will presumably be when they will let me know whether they will take on my case from Leuven. Much as I love going to Leuven and meeting my friends there, I just can’t cope with the travelling.

Tea was a leftover curry lengthened with supplies from the European Potato Mountain. And I was right about the garlic butter on my naan bread. Every time I breathe out, I burn another 2 layers of paint off the wall.

So having done that, I’ll make myself a drink, dictate the radio notes and then go to bed for an early night. We’ll see how much work I can do tomorrow, but I also have to order food, so blanching and freezing carrots will interrupt my flow.

But the sooner we start, the sooner we finish. We have to make the most of our couple of unexpected days off.

Monday 13th November 2023 – ONE THING THAT …

… can actually be said for today was that no-one came along to interrupt me. And it’s not every day that that happens.

Not that it made a great deal of difference because for about an hour at some point during the morning I was off in the Arms of Morpheus.

What I blame it on was another bad night. Not that there was all that much going on during the hours of darkness but I was awake for quite some time – unable to go back to sleep once I awoke.

And that happened a couple of times too.

It was another slow start to the day, characterised by the length of time that it took to actually find my feet. I beat the second alarm of course, but it didn’t feel like it all that much.

After the medication and checking my mails I had a listen to the dictaphone. At one point I awoke in the middle of the night and found myself saying “on the dream in the the” a few times, one after the other and I can’t think what on earth it was that I was supposed to be saying or doing, or why.

Later on we were in the north-east of Manchester for a football match between Rochdale and Oldham Athletic. There was something that happened on a street corner somewhere which ended up with a young girl being pushed or falling under the wheels of a vehicle passing by on the road and was killed. I can’t remember any more about why she was there or what she was doing

And then I’d been doing some kind of course where every week I’d receive some kind of loose-leaf notes to put into a binder. Being my usual self I’d not filed them away in the binder for several weeks. Now I had them all confused and mixed up. To my surprise there was no indication on each of the pages to exactly which week it belongs so apart from the font which was different on one or two examples there was really no way of being able to sort the pages back out into the correct order. I did have a look to see if there were any printers’ codes at the foot of the documents on each page but that didn’t seem to be of any particular help either so I was sitting there scratching my head wondering what I was going to do about it.

At another point I went round visiting someone on the Coleridge Way estate in Crewe – a woman but not Nerina. We’d been discussing some things that had been going on at night school where we attended. For some reason things were running really early so I thought that I’d go for a walk. I ended up losing my way. I left the estate a long time ago and was roaming around on top of a moor with these old, tiny Victorian semi-detached houses. I went down one street which was a cul-de-sac to the end where there was a garage. I went in and there were all kinds of books, CDs and DVDs there. I picked up an armful and began to leave. I kept on dropping them and to my surprise I could actually kneel down on one knee, pick them up and stand up again. While I was looking around for a carrier bag or something in which to put them the guy came back. I recognised him from night school so I said “those books and things about which you told me, I’ve come to pick them up”. I could see the look of bewilderment on his face but I stood there and brazened it out. he made a few remarks but I didn’t pay much attention. After I’d said hello to his wife and sister or someone I set off, only to find that I was even more lost than I was before I’d come across this house. I didn’t know where I was or how I was going to go down to this housing estate. It seemed as if I’d been gone for hours and it was going dark now.

And finally I was in Chester preparing to go to night school but I didn’t feel like it. No-one else whom I knew was planning to go. Instead I went for a wander and ended up walking down a huge corridor going through these gym classrooms etc. When I reached one particular window there was a group of people looking outside. There was a golf course and quite a few people had set up their tents around the tees. The wind was so strong that some of them were being blown away. I explained to a girl there that everything is possible in Saudi Arabia these days. These people have tents with remote controls. Every time that they move onto the next hole they press a button and their tent follows them. Someone burst out laughing. It was the guy with her who happened to be the guy who was also going to night school who had given me those books and DVDs etc for Cécile to which I’d helped myself the other day. He asked about them and I said that they were still in my car. I hadn’t seen her yet. I explained to the girl about the situation. He produced another book that he said that I’d forgotten. I said that I’d add it to the rest of the stuff.

That part of the dream reminded me of the time that Beebee Daniels told me that Ben Lyon, her husband, used to always take her with him when he went to play golf. When asked why she replied “whenever he hit his ball into a bunker I would have to make camp”.

But the bit about the remote control reminded me of a story that I once told IN TROIS RIVIÈRES IN QUÉBÉC when someone asked me to explain the lack of success of Manchester United after Alex Ferguson left. I explained that at Old Trafford the goals were on wheels and when Ferguson retired he took the remote control with him.

But as Kenneth Williams and Alfred Hitchcock once famously remarked, “it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners”

Of course, I won’t ever forget the story that I told to that American tourist information officer at Fort Ticonderoga when STRAWBERRY MOOSE and I worked our way up the Hudson Valley all those years ago visiting all the sites of the Seven Years War and the Revolutionary War.

I told him about the time that Hawkeye and Chingachgook were around there on a spying expedition for the British
How many soldiers do you see in the fort?" asked Hawkeye.
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground. About 300" he replied
And how many cannon?"
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground again. About 30"
And how many horses?"
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground yet again. About 60"
And how many native allies?"
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground once more. About 200"
That’s incredible" said Hawkeye. Can you tell all that by just lying down and listening to the ground?"
Ohh no" replied Chingachgook. If I lie down here like this and turn my head so that my ear is to the ground just like this, I can see right underneath the gates of the fort"

When I finished my little story the Tourist Officer looked at me. "Do you know? That’s astonishing. I never ever knew that Hawkeye and Chingachgook came to Ticonderoga. I’ll remember that story and add it in to the next revision of our guide."

Regular readers of this rubbish from our University Days will recall the astonishing story of Colin Lusk and his “Understanding Irony” course that he marketed in the USA.

There have been a few chats on line today. Liz and I had a good chat about molasses, golden syrup and treacle. And Jackie sent me some moral support from Köln.

People have often asked why I don’t send much moral support to people and the answer is, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that “moral” is not a word that is usually associated with any support that I would ever send anyone.

So, what work have I been up to today?

Firstly, I had to make some garlic butter seeing as I have now run out. And I’ll tell you something for nothing – and that is that if I put some of this on my garlic bread, I won’t have to worry about werewolves and vampires coming to visit me.

And then, having finished writing my notes about my voyage to Canada last year, I’ve made a start on editing the photos. And when they are finished I’ll add them in. Right now I’m struggling up the Matapedia Valley away from the St Lawrence and going over the Alleghenies to the Baie des Chaleurs.

There aren’t all that many photos as there usually are – certainly nothing at all like the 6,000 photos that I took in my four months in the High Arctic in 2019 and which I still haven’t finished editing – and for several reasons really.

The first is that I was struggling to stand upright and some of the photos are extremely blurred accordingly because I didn’t have the strength to hold the camera steady

And secondly, For the greater part of the time I was far too ill to go out anywhere.

In between everything I made a start on writing the notes for the next series of radio programmes and I’m now about a third of the way through it. It won’t be finished tomorrow because apart from having my Welsh lesson and my visit to the Centre de Re-education, I have a appointment with these people from these Autonomy people so I need to prepare some paperwork.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg. And having prepared the stuffing as I usually do, there wasn’t enough as there usually is. I think that I might have forgotten an ingredient but I can’t for the life of me think what it might be.

Having finished my notes I might even have an early night ready for tomorrow. And hope that I can make the most of it.

But what with them coming to talk to me and the ergotherapist coming to visit me, things are moving rapidly. I only wish that I was.

Wednesday 8th November 2023 – I HAVE JUST …

… heaved a rather large stone into a swimming pool. And I shall now sit back and wait for the ripples to reach the shore

What has prompted this is that I am in receipt of “certain information” that suggests that things are not as they are supposed to be or intended to represent. And it might put someone in a rather uncomfortable position if what I have heard is true.

But how long is it since one of my many “moles on various committees” has come up with some goods? At one time 15 or 20 years ago it was almost an everyday occurrence but it’s been a good while since everything on that front quietened down.

It would have been nice for last night to have quietened down somewhat but instead it was yet another quite mobile night with plenty of things going on.

But nevertheless I staggered to my feet as the alarm went off but it wouldn’t be correct to say that I was actually awake. It took quite a while for me to make a start on anything.

Once I’d come back round into the Land of the Living, I started to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I was out on a World War I battlefield that was still undergoing some kind of hostilities. I wanted to meet a certain person in order to make a film about their life. When I knocked on the door of the room where they were suspected to be, no-one actually came to the door at first. It took quite some knocking in the end to arouse someone to come along and talk to me. I then went back to my studio and began to assemble some kind of model out of twigs, bark etc so that it looked like a hut that was in the middle of trenches. I then had to sew it. It was very difficult to sew the bark around some of the twigs. I must have pricked myself with a needle about a dozen times and I hadn’t even finished the first series of stitches. I could see that instead of being something fairly simple and straightforward this was going to turn into a complete and utter mess. I just didn’t have the control in my fingers to sew this hut together correctly.

And then I was writing the story of a suspicious death that many people thought at first was murder. A woman had murdered some guy when she was young. When she was finally confronted with this she became completely hysterical and accused the person accusing her of being implicated in the incident which was quite clearly not the case because his voice was different, his style of behaviour was different etc. The woman became quite hysterical. Just at that moment I had a really bad attack of cramp in my left leg, a bad one of the type that I’ve not had for a while that awoke me and everything disappeared.

Going back later to the dream of the woman who was suspected of having killed that person when she was younger there was a variety of reasons why that might have happened. It was suspected that the person doing the interviewing had suddenly as if by accident hit on the correct explanation and that was what had caused the woman such a great deal of concern.

There were still plenty of questions going through my mind about that murder last night such as why did Miss B change role with Miss G, and quite a few others. At one stage I was heading across a main road towards a bus stop when I noticed that the bus stop was indicating that the bus was going to Bollington which was nowhere near where I wanted to go so I had to think if it might pass a railway station that would bring me home but I couldn’t think of it. I walked across this really wide grass verge at a road junction and found myself walking down a canal towpath. I had to go up a very steep slope over a bridge and found myself hundreds of feet above ground level looking down thinking that somehow I had to be down there so that I could carry on. This was when I had the dream flash back about this woman or girl and the murder

We’d had a few people staying last night and when I awoke the place was an absolute mess. I’d never seen such an untidy place in my life. There was all kinds of stuff, half-eaten food everywhere. In an effort to clear up I ended up throwing away a huge lump of cheese that I hadn’t seen under some waste paper on the worktop. That made me quite angry. I was always taught that you never took to your plate any more than you intended to use. I had a really good moan at everyone who stayed last night. When I went back into the kitchen Nerina was in there busy tidying away everything. I asked her why because I was in the middle of doing it. She said that it was because I sounded so annoyed. I replied “that’s never changed anything between us in the past. There’s no need to do it just because we have guests and show off”. This led to a continual discussion with all this going on. Then she began to pull the wallpaper off the bedroom wall. Some of the plaster was loose and it was dropping off onto the floor. I had to stop her doing it because it was make dust absolutely everywhere, in the bed, all over the place. She said “we could always plaster this aftenoon”. I said “plastering’s not something that you do in 5 minutes. It’s a whole project that needs a lot of thinking out” but she carried on pulling stuff off the shelves etc. In the end I was quite angry, so angry that I awoke.

Can you imagine that? I don’t mind (well, I do, actually) being stressed out by things that actually happen in real life but finding myself stressed out for real by the goings-on during the night Is rather difficult to accept and it certainly can’t be good for my mental health. Whatever happened to those nice dreams that I used to have when Castor, TOTGA and Zero would to visit me, or when I was having that series of really pleasant dreams about a girl whom I met (in a dream as it happens and never in real life, unfortunately) at school?

Eventually I went back to sleep and I had to go to pick up some taxi drivers at the end of their shift last night. When I found them they were all sitting around outside under some blankets in the frost, a group of about 7 of them. There was someone else who wanted a fare but I told him that he’d have to wait while I took these people home. 4 women got into my car and said “Pratchett’s Row”. Off I set. I was having brain-fade because I couldn’t think where it was for a moment One of the girls began to mess around with the meter which I’d already switched on so I told her to pack it in. For some reason I ended up in the demolition area at the bottom of West Street. To get there we’d had to drive through the snow, watching all these cyclists falling over on the ice etc. It suddenly occurred to me “is it Pratchett’s Row in Nantwich?”. The sarcastic girl replied “unless you know another Pratchett’s Row anywhere else then yes it’s the one in Nantwich”. I couldn’t understand why I was having all this brain-fade. As the car was going down the street I noticed its reflection in a plate-glass window that I only had one headlight working. I thought that this is going to be a recipe for disaster – I can feel it in all my bones at the moment.

So during the course of the day, apart from crashing out (which I have done a couple of times today), while the cleaner was here I finished off the writing of the notes for the next radio programme, which I’ll be dictating before I go to bed, and then I’ve paired off all of the music for the next programme and some of the music for the programme after that.

Yesterday, the car that came to pick me up to take me home was 90 minutes late. Today to pick me up, it was 45 minutes early. It seems that I just can’t win.

But at the Centre de Re-education I had a massage again from Severine and a 30-minute chat with an ergotherapist who discussed my living arrangements and how I look after myself … "very poorly" – ed … when I’m at home.

It’s correct to say that she also does home visits and as I have a prescription for such a visit we had a chat about that. But tomorrow she’s going to be giving me a few tests and depending on the results, she’ll be giving me exercises and handy tips to make the most of whatever autonomy I have left.

Back here I carried on working in between sleeping off my efforts and then I went for tea. A leftover curry lengthened with a potato from the European Potato Mountain and a naan bread from my supply of dough from the freezer.

So now I’ll finish off my notes, dictate my radio stuff and then sit back to wait for the whatsit to hit the wherever.

We are living in interesting times.

Sunday 5th November 2023 – MY CHOCOLATE AND COCONUT …

… biscuits with a hint of orange flavouring are absolutely excellent and I’ll make some more like that another time too.

And I’m glad that something went right today because not much else did.

For a start, I had another miserable night and it wasn’t until 11:30 this morning when I finally left the bed. I did mention last night that I needed a really good sleep.

Actually, I was in bed rather later than intended last night. After I’d dictated my radio notes I was on the point of going to bed when Alison came on line for a chat. And while I was chatting to Alison, my niece in Canada appeared too.

It’s really quite strange, this telepathy thing. I’d just been typing in my notes about making biscuits when up popped my niece – “here’s a lovely biscuit recipe that I found”.

And if I’d have had any peanut butter and maple syrup I’d have made them today instead.

It’s not the first time by a long way that there has been such telepathy. Nerina and I certainly had it and I’ve experienced it with other people too.

So after I awoke this morning, I had a listen to the dictaphone. And there was a huge pile of stuff on there, including a recurring dream that appeared a few times during the night. There was a party going on at someone’s house and a game of cards had been organised – a game of bridge. I’ve no interest in a game of bridge so while they crafted a scorecard to keep a late arrival happy I pretended to be dummy and that suited me fine. They wrote up the scores bearing in mind the fact that I hadn’t played, to which I had no objection. While they were playing I was wandering around. People were chatting about their medication. I noticed that one of the people here had a huge pile of medication but it was just a big lump of stuff so I sat down and began to sort it out into different types. I ended up in the end with a range going right across the table of all different types of medication. I tried my best to have it arranged in “morning, noon and night” too. I can’t remember now any more about this but it was another one of these dreams that went on for ages.

And then there was a big group of us. We’d been out somewhere and were on our way home. I was in BILL BADGER my old A60 van. We pulled up at a motel to stop there for the night. We ended up sleeping in a variety of rooms, 2 each to a room. I had someone whom I didn’t really know who seemed to be a reasonable guy, an older guy, rural type. The discussion came round to talking about ghosts and spirits. Just then I went into the bathroom but the sudden noise in the bathroom which was connected to the next room made the occupants in that room jump wo we had quite an exchange of conversation about spirits and ghosts etc. When I came back into my bedroom there had been some kind of issue about keys. I didn’t actually have my keys with me. I was convinced that I’d left them in the ignition but when I’d looked earlier they weren’t there. I remembered that I’d changed my trousers so the keys were in the pockets of the dirty ones. Now I wanted one of my mint sweets that were in the van. I found my keys, and with more teasing about ghosts being out there waiting etc I set out. When I reached the van what there was was a huge baker’s oven, the type with probably about 6 shelves. For some reason I opened one of the shelves. It was packed full of all kinds of strange food, a type that I hadn’t seen before, wrapped in portions. I was scratching my head wondering “what’s all this food about? What is it? Who is it for?”. I’d seen nothing like this in the past.

But that did remind me of an interesting court case where a woman was put on trial for having obtaining money by false pretences. She had been holding “seances” to attract visiting souls and charging fees for attendance, whereas the “visiting souls” were actually her friends pretending.
One of the witnesses gave his occupation as “Customs and Excise Officer”
“Testing spirits?” asked prosecuting counsel
“Yes” replied the witness “but not the type of spirits that we are discussing at the moment”.

There was something going on in a house about preparing for an operation. What first caught my eye was a row of cats all spread out across the top of the back of a settee watching a TV programme. The discussion came round to this operation. I volunteered to be one of the first to be treated, on the grounds that the quicker you start, the quicker you finish. That’s not like me at all. Usually I wait until the last minute before volunteering for something like that, especially something rather groovy and here I fell asleep)

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I am actually asleep when I’m dictating my notes, but in cases like this, when I refer to “falling asleep” what I mean is that everything suddenly goes quiet and then I can hear myself snoring.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed another group of us had gone out for a meal, a sort-of pizza evening. All 8 of us were sitting round a table. They began to bring out the slices of pizza. Depending on what pizza you ordered, you ended up with 1, 2 or 3 slices before anyone else was served. Some people were well on their way with their meal but others hadn’t even begun. The conversation came round to houses. I was talking about my house but I hadn’t realised that everyone else was from the UK. They began to ask me questions about my house. I explained as best as I could but it was just making the situation more confused. In the end someone turned round and said “I thought that you lived in France”. I replied “I do” which puzzled everyone even more. In the meantime my meal still hadn’t arrived. There was some kind of greasy-type things, crackers that were being passed around. I grabbed a box of those, sat down and began to eat them because by this time I was starving and I wasn’t sure when I’d receive my pizza. The conversation carried on and I began to talk about my little apartment in Granville.

One thing that I had forgotten about the previous dream was that we were staying the previous night in someone’s house before this meal. It was a Sunday morning and I’d left the bed to go to the bathroom. Just then my bedroom door opened. It was the woman of the place where I was staying, wondering if I was OK. I asked her what the problem was. She replied “it’s 16:00 and you’ve been asleep for 14 hours”. I explained about Sundays, how they are Days of Rest etc but I don’t think that she took it seriously. She was extremely concerned that I hadn’t shown any sign of life until just now. I think that she was rather offended that I’d chosen to spend all my time in bed asleep instead of coming down to mix with everyone else in the house at some reasonable point.

I was back in the dream about the pizzas later on. everyone else had gone to visit one of these 19th Century workingmen’s villages of the type built by philanthropists to house the employees in their factories. This was a village out in the countryside. After the factory had closed down years ago the village had fallen into ruin. Gradually people had been slowly restoring it. A group of us went. I remember having my breakfast with a family with 2 children, talking to them. Then I went off for a wander around the village on my own. It really was quite interesting because the original buildings were marked with the fact and buildings subsequently built mere marked as being later editions. It was clear that although a lot of it was in very poor condition some of it had been rebuilt quite nicely. There was an enormous amount of potential in this place. I began to wonder whether there might be some kind of small cottage for me to buy. By now I was actually running, pushing some kind of trolley in an effort to keep fit. I overtook the people with whom I’d had breakfast but I carried on running around the village like this looking at the shops – there was a good array of shops, even a fish and chip shop – and looking at the stone buildings. I was absolutely enthralled by the whole place and the possibilities that existed here.

At one point while I was wandering around that village I came across a car accident. 2 cars had collided. One of them looked quite bad but I’m sure that it wasn’t as badly damages as it looked so I began to measure things up to see whether it was safe to be on the road. The father of the 2 children began to ask me “why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do that?” but the wife kept interrupting him saying “leave him alone to deal with it. It looked as if he knows more of what he’s doing than you do” which offended her husband quite a lot.

Of the vehicle that had come off worst in the accident I’d had part of the floor up, measuring the chassis for deflection. The guy asked in an exasperated tone why I was actually doing that. His wife told him again to keep quiet and let me continue with my work as I clearly seemed to know what I was doing

That took me right up to and beyond lunchtime so my porridge and cheese on toast was rather late today.

This afternoon I made a start on one of the radio programmes and then wandered off to make my biscuits. However, just after I’d sorted out the ingredients Ingrid telephoned me.

It was Ingrid’s birthday yesterday so I’d telephoned her but she was busy so she called me back today. And we had a Rosemaryesque chat that went on for 68 minutes, mainly about our illnesses.

The chats that Ingrid and I have are actually really quite interesting. We usually start off in French until someone can’t remember a word and then we switch to another language and we end up usually rotating through English, French, Dutch (Ingrid) and Flemish (me), quite often one person speaking in one language and the other replying in a different one.

Dutch and Flemish are very similar languages by the way, and if you know one you’ll understand the other, in the same way that a Londoner will understand Scots English and vice versa

Actually Ingrid was one of my two choices to come with me to this wedding in Michigan next weekend – the other being Rosemary after our success in the Arctic in 2019. But of the only two people who might be free, they are both too unfit to travel.

And that’s a shame because even though I’m not supposed to say it, it’s my favourite relative who is marrying and I would move heaven and earth to be there with her. But I can’t go on my own – my week in Belgium in September proved that.

So back at the biscuits. And a standard mix of 10/8/4 of flour and oats/butter and coconut oil/sugar with a generous helping of ground almonds, desiccated coconut, orange essence and vanilla essence and there we were.

While all of this was going on I’d had a dollop of pizza dough defrosting and when it was ready I made myself a pizza. Delicious as usual but I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I run out of my vegan cheese.

In between everything I finished off one of the radio programmes and so the first task tomorrow will be to finish off the second one, and then start the next after that.

The nurse should be coming tomorrow too in order to discuss my Covid injection with me. So I’d better hurry up and go to bed. I’ll have to have a good wash before he comes too. But at the moment, the shower is out of bounds.

And I’ve only just realised something – and that is that I must have just come in here out of the kitchen without using my crutches. Fancy that!

Wednesday 1st November 2023 – THERE WON’T BE MANY …

… people having much sleep tonight. And there’s a police patrol out on top of the cliffs just outside the front door making sure that no-one goes too close to the edge.

We are currently being battered by one of the fiercest storms that I’ve encountered so far, and seeing that this is the windiest corner in France, that’s saying something. It’s absolutely raging outside.

There wasn’t much in the way of sleep last night either.

It was rather later than usual when I went to bed and despite it being another turbulent night, I was actually up and about by 06:20. I couldn’t sleep at all.

Of course, being up and about is one thing. Being awake is something else completely and it took me quite a while to come to my senses. And that’s a surprise, seeing how few senses I have these days.

Once I’d livened up, after my morning coffee, I went tidying up. My bedroom is now looking a lot better than it did earlier. There were books and papers all over the place but now I can actually see some work surface.

In the kitchen and the dining area too. It’s been a couple of weeks since the cleaner has been and so the place is in a bit of a mess. You’ve no idea how difficult it is to perform even the simplest of tasks around here.

One thing that I did today was to switch on the heating. I’ve put it off for a couple of days because I wanted to see November in before I switched it on, and I was desperately clinging on towards the end.

Just now I mentioned the turbulent night. There were tons of stuff on the dictaphone. I started off with a girl whom I knew from Nerina’s office but I can’t remember very much at all about what was happening in it. I seem to have forgotten it all. I do remember suddenly realising that it was a Tuesday night. I’d been off sick for several days and if I didn’t go back into work in the morning I’d be in all kinds of serious trouble. I needed to get a grip, get my things together and head back into work in the morning.

Later on I wanted to sit down and write a letter about the apartment downstairs, how I thought that I ought to be moving into it. There were so many hoops and so on through which I had to jump that it was extremely complicated and needed a great deal of thought before I could sit down and write out a letter about it, making sure that the letter said everything that needed to be said without actually causing any problems for the recipient.

And then my brother and I were at it again last night … "again" sigh – ed. We’d had something to do and he wasn’t at all happy about it. I just couldn’t care less. I carried on going on my way anyway. We ended up in this building that had an Indian restaurant in it. I had a job there as a delivery driver. He’d been hanging on behind me as usual. I prepared everything and went out through the door into the street. For ages nothing happened so I had a patrol around the building to see whether there was anything else happening in there or anything else I could be doing because I needed to be earning some money. In the end I went back into the restaurant. My brother, who had now become some kind of girl Was actually preparing meals. He was moaning, complaining and shouting all the time about what he was having to do and how he didn’t want to do it etc, how he didn’t even like waiting on tables. The proprietor said “yes, I didn’t tell you about the waiting on tables bit but you knew everything else” but that didn’t stop him having a really good moan about everything. He was really unhappy about what was going on.

Meanwhile, I’d had an engine out of one of the Cortinas and had taken it to pieces to have a good look. I’d reassembled the block and sump and put them in position and had all the ancillaries like the manifolds, camshaft etc all there ready to go in. Nerina came round to have a look to see what I was doing. I showed her how the engine worked, what bits were where and what they did. She put her hand in there and touched something. She said “oh it’s loose”. I explained that everything there has to go in under tension – you can’t put one piece in, tighten it up completely, then put another bit in. You had to put all them pieces in together and tighten them up bit by bit while it all goes into tension – it’s all tightened up together slowly. She asked if I’d done anything to the engine. I replied “nothing, except to scratch the name on one of the pistons. This vehicle has done 300,000 miles and there isn’t a sign or wear in the bores, anywhere. I’d never seen an engine quite like this”. We were putting it all together. Also in the garage was an Austin A30 or A35. Some young person came into the garage to look around and saw the Austin. They noticed that the way that the grille and headlights were arranged made it look as if it was smiling and said “of look! This car’s really cute! It really likes me”.

But never mind that – last time I rebuild an engine from scratch in a Cortina it sheared off a big end cap from a con-rod while I was going down a dual carriageway at a rapid rate of knots

And finally a little girl came to see me in hospital. She was all of these “My Little Pony” humanoid figures lying around so she went over to look at them. Later on she began to play with some of them. I told her that she could choose one to play with because it had some work to do in the hospital and it was very important that it was ready when it was required to perform this particular task of work.

While we’re on the subject of letters, there’s a very important letter that I had to write today. I’ve not sent it off yet because, due to its nature, I want someone else to read it first. And so I’m going for coffee with the President of the Residents’ Committee tomorrow afternoon.

While the cleaner was here I finished off the notes for the radio programme, paired off the music for the next one and then wrote half of the notes for that one too. I’ll finish off those over the next couple of days and then dictate them late on Saturday night, assuming that the gale has subsided by them.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry and it was one of the best that I have made. The leftover stuffing needed lengthening, and as 5kg of potatoes was cheaper than 2.5 kg so that I now have the European Potato Mountain in my apartment, I lengthened it with a potato.

Into the mix was some soya yogurt to make it nice and creamy like a korma, and I took from the freezer some of the naan dough that I’d made a couple of weeks ago and had a garlic naan with it.

So I’m off to bed now, with my head stuck firmly under the quilt until tomorrow. And then we’ll see what people think about this letter that I’ve written. I’ve always worked on the principle that “if you don’t ask, you don’t get” and asking costs nothing anyway.

It might even be beneficial, and that would be something!

Sunday 29th October 2023 – NOT ONCE, NOT TWICE …

… but three times I’ve gone to walk out of the kitchen without my crutches.

Not that I got very far of course, but the fact that I actually found myself doing it must mean that I’m feeling that there’s a sign of improvement, whether there’s a real improvement or not.

Last night in bed was a real improvement. Or, at least, it would have been but no fewer than three people pinged me at some point during the morning while I was asleep.

And it must have been early too because I was actually up and about this morning at 08:50. That’s taking into account the changing of the hour too They must have been busy out at Stonehenge last night moving all those stones around.

After the medication I checked the mails and messages, replied to a few of them and then checked the dictaphone to find out if I’d been anywhere during the night. A friend of mine had been having problems at home and had been sent home for a few weeks. I’d driven him. After I’d left him I was wandering around somewhere. I bumped into a woman and we began to chat. She mentioned that her son too was having problems. They considered that he was spending far too much time at his music than at his studies and that the past couple of weeks his group had played 7 gigs. Basically she said that the members of the group were pretty broke and needed the money. I replied “we could all do with that. I’d play 7 gigs in a fortnight if I were to have the chance”. She said something like “do you think you would?”. I replied “I’m no better than many and probably as bad as most”.

And then it was a Thursday. There was just one more day of work before the office closed for the summer. The boss had already been in to me to give me a couple of questions that needed asking. One was “was our employee on long-term sick leave likely to come tomorrow?” and “would a certain rock group be playing? Would anyone else be playing?. There were several others. I had that much on my plate that at the moment I hadn’t actually asked the question. 10 minutes before it was time to go home he came along and interrupted me again, asking me the same questions. I replied that at the moment I hadn’t found out. He asked me what I thought. I replied that what I thought was pretty much irrelevant. He said “the important thing to know is whether this girl is going to come in and whether this rock group is going to be playing”. I replied “you asked me that a little earlier but I haven’t actually done it yet. There’s still 10 minutes before we go home and if you continue asking me these kinds of questions and keep interrupting what I’m doing while I’m working we’ll never find the answer because I’ll be going home without the task being done.

Nerina came home from work later and said that she’d had a puncture in her car. It entered into my head but for some reason, like many other things, it was pushed to the back. Next morning when we were both going to work, for some reason we went in one of the Cortinas. We had an argument on the way. I was trying to read a letter and she was hovering over me with a jug of water. I snapped at her and she asked why. I said “it’s important, this letter, and you’re spilling water on it”. As usual it led to a dispute. We arrived at work and were sitting in the foyer going through all of the correspondence we’d had that morning. I suddenly realised that I should have been at my desk a long time before this. As we packed up our stuff ready to go to our respective offices she said “at least you have something that I would like to have and you’re lucky to have it” etc. I asked what it was and she replied “you have 4 good tyres on your car”. I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t changed the tyre over on her car. I asked “why didn’t you remind me?”. She made some remark like she was always having to remind me to do things. I explained that I had so much going on that it was very difficult. “You need to sit on top of me to make me do these things at the moment rather than just tell me and let it drift away”. But things never worked out how they were supposed to work out.

Actually, that’s not as far-fetched as it might seem. I had a bad car accident late one night while I was taxi-driving and the bracket that holds the seat belt to the central pillar of the car was driven into the back of my skull. Even now, I still have the depressed fracture and it plays havoc with my memory. It must have been wild back in 1987.

“I can’t remember who I was with now” I dictated, which somehow seemed quite apposite considering that we’ve just been talking about my fractured skull. But whoever it was, it might have been Laurence or it might have been Cécile but could equally have been anyone else. We were living in a typical chaotic, untidy apartment. Something had happened about our old family home. I had the keys to it. A tenant who was in there moved out so we went down to see it. First of all there was an issue that the Post Office was no longer delivering. An old man in the neighbourhood was trying to arrange for all post to be delivered to him so that he could set himself up as a postman. We went into the house and met the landlord. There were quite a few things in the house that I didn’t recognise eg. there was a parlophone door-entry type phone on the wall by the chimney. I said “that’s new, isn’t it?”. One of the women said “it’s nothing to do with the landlord. That was something private that the occupier put in. We had a lengthy discussion about the house with the landlord and a few of the neighbours who were inside. At the same time we’d actually bought a house or apartment and we were going to have to move. It was something like the 28th of May we’d have to hand in our notice within a couple of days before the end of the month or we’d be stuck in our rented apartment for another month. But up to that date my partner (whoever it was) and I had never spent even one moment discussing our plans about moving. I had a feeling that this was something else that was all going to end in total chaos.

Later on I ended up having a video chat with someone. We’d already had a lengthy text chat but then it evolved into a video chat. And this new camera that I bought a few weeks ago really is good. I’m very happy with that.

And a chat that I had yesterday with someone whose interactions with me usually take place in the hours of darkness when I’m asleep also picked up during the day too.

There was no more pizza dough left so I made another batch of that this afternoon. Two lots ended up in the freezer and a third ended up on a pizza tray. What with having to order my flour on-line now, I can’t obtain the flour that I like and have to make do with what I can get.

Nevertheless, the dough, even if it was rather more sticky than usual, did work out very well and made a really nice pizza.

For the last few weeks I’ve been reading a book THE OLD STRAIGHT TRACK by Alfred Watkins. He was the man who laid down the theory of ley lines in the 1920s which since then has been brought into disrepute by the antics of various Esoteric Movements.

Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating account of all kinds of ancient and medieval mounds, ruins and trackways along the border between England and Wales, even if you don’t accept the ley lines theory.

As well as that though, it’s now brought me into an even more interesting one, EARTHWORKS OF ENGLAND and while I’ve not yet read it, I’m quite looking forward to settling down with a nice mug of hot chocolate in a quiet corner with some home-made biscuits and the book.

So tomorrow I have to arrange for Caliburn to go for his Controle Technique and then start to organise myself ready for this series of Re-education courses starting on Tuesday for 20 days.

That sounds exciting, and it can’t make things any worse than they are now.

Wednesday 25th October 2023 – I’VE HAD SOME …

… good news today, and some bad news.

The good news is that the Social Services have agreed to pay for my transport. That’s a great weight off my mind for sure.

The bad news is that it seems from the blood test results recently that not only is my red blood count dropping rapidly now that I’m no longer taking the Aranesp, but that the count of my platelets is dropping rapidly too.

12 months ago it was at about 275 units. Today it’s 115. The critical limit is 100 units.

The doctor from Belgium came to see me and to give me the bad news. In her opinion the carcinogenic protein is now attacking the platelets. It’s obviously not satisfied with attacking my red blood cells, heart, kidneys and nervous system

She’s no haematologist but at least, being from Brussels she can read Flemish so she’s much more of an idea as to what is going on at Leuven without me having to do my best to interpret, so tomorrow she’s going to see the haematologist to “have a chat” about me.

Whatever that means, we’ll soon find out.

This morning I was awoken by a nurse who came to take a blood sample – at 05:20. That was the last thing that I wanted. But to my surprise she did it first go. And that’s just as well because my arms are covered in Sticking plaster.

After that I couldn’t go back to sleep so in the end I gave it up. Mind you, I still had breakfast in bed. The food here is somewhat … errr … indifferent but two bread rolls, a pile of jam and a big bowl of hot black coffee is a good way to start the day.

First thing that I did was to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I was involved in some kind of project with the radio and the programmes. The Social Services etc wondered why they were played when they did. Someone explained that that was when they had a good audience. The plan was that after my death they intended to continue to broadcast the programmes just to keep things going over and to prolong the radio station;

Later on Nerina and I had an appointment with a local bank manager at 12:00. We set off on foot and on our way round we picked up a few bits and pieces of shopping and carried on to the bank’s office. When we arrived we rang the bell but no-one answered the door so we rang again. Eventually someone came and wanted to know what we were doing; We explained that we had an appointment so we were ushered in and kept to one side. A few minutes later someone came back and said “yes, you can go upstairs. Go into that room there, slide the ladder up and you can climb up to the next floor. We went in there and there was one of the strangest arrangements that I’ve ever seen. There was indeed a ladder there and four steps hanging down from the ceiling. The ladder was extensible and you would push it up to join up with these steps. It was narrow, rickety and looked completely unsafe to me. I held it steady while Nerina tried to climb but she couldn’t get up. I knew full well that I wasn’t going to get up. After several tries Nerina decided that she couldn’t go up there. I agreed with her because this was the biggest Health and Safety violation that I’ve ever seen. We went back to where this secretary person was. She was busy typing. We explained that we couldn’t go up the ladder. She sighed and went off to try to find someone else again. We had a good look round and found several interesting papers about different things that had been prepared in duplicate or in multiple copies. There were piles of these documents lying around. One was about a certain man whom I knew from North America who had died. He was said to have been the biggest promoter of Rugby League in the UK and of summer sport. It bewildered me why this stuff was here. Eventually a man came back with a couple of items that he must have taken from our shopping bag. He asked us if we recognised these items. We explained that we’d bought them on the way to the bank. He asked which shops we’d gone to to buy them. We explained and that obviously satisfied him because then he invited us into the office and up some proper stairs onto a landing where there was a corridor that led outside but without a roof and then up another set of stairs in another building until we finally reached his office.

Finally I was in my yellow Cortina last night driving through Shavington. I suddenly realised that I had the wrong numberplate on the front of the car. I’d bought the correct numberplate to fit on but I hadn’t done it at that moment so I pulled up at the side of the road, lifted up the car so the automatic jack clicked in and then went to fetch the numberplate out of the back. But then I noticed that screwed to the rear was a numberplate from New Zealand0… "South Africa actually" – ed … and I suddenly realised that I’d had this car registered in New Zealand so the front numberplate that I was going to fit on wouldn’t be any good. I’d have to have another one made. I went round to the front and a postman pulled up on one of these little Mobylettes, had a good look tat what I was doing and then rode off into his drive. I then picked up the front of the car and dropped it off the jack onto the ground and it just rolled off on its own, backwards across the road, did a spectacular spin round and shot off down the pavement. People just stood there looking at it and no-one made an effort to stop it. It ran into the back of someone’s car. I had to go round and apologise, and explain everything. They all found it hard to believe but that was certainly the case of what happened. I had to apologise for the accident.

With no tests or examinations scheduled today I planned on having a shower – and I don’t ‘arf need it.

However each time I prepared myself to go, someone came to delay or interrupt me. It wasn’t until 15:45 that I staggered into the shower.

Luckily, here it’s a walk-in wet room so I was quite at my ease and I really enjoyed myself. It made such a change to actually be in a shower.

While I was at it, I made a few phone calls. Firstly to tell the taxi company that my transport has been approved and secondly to book the vehicles to take me to the sessions at the Centre de Re-Education.

And then I had to telephone the ergotherapist to cancel our appointment next Thursday afternoon. He thinks that there’ an ergotherapist at the Centre de Re-Education and maybe they could help me. If not, I should recontact him for another appointment.

In between everything I’ve been attacking the radio programmes. I’ve chosen the music for another three of them. I’m trying to make the best use possible of my time while I’m here to give me a running start.

It also seems that I’ve been in great demand today. Rosemary rang me up and we had another one of our mega-discussions. And then I’ve had discussions on the internet with half a dozen people, or maybe even more. I lost count at a certain moment.

So now that I’ve had my tea and written my notes I’m off to bed. I’d like to have a running start with that too if they are going to wake me up at 05:20 for another blood test.

But what will be the outcome of this meeting tomorrow? One or two people have told me that I should be looking at it with trepidation but actually I’m not. I’m under no illusions whatsoever about the inevitable outcome of this illness and I’m fully prepared for it.

However it shows signs of optimism. They have found something, and they are intending to do something about it. You can’t wish for any more than that.

Tuesday 24th October 2023 – THEY STILL HAVEN’T …

… fitted this needle into me. I think that they really have abandoned all hope of giving me this infusion.

Instead, this morning they gave me another lumbar puncture and that has been that.

Last night I had one of the best night’s sleeps that I’ve had for a considerable length of time. I was in bed at 20:00 because it was that cold and, underneath the blankets I listened to the old-time radio

It was about midnight when I awoke to find the radio still going so I switched it off and went back to sleep. And that was that until about 07:50 when a nurse awoke me to take my temperature and blood pressure

When breakfast came I was still in bed and I really can’t remember the last time that I had breakfast in bed. It made a lovely change from the usual.

While I was washing a nurse came in and stuck a couple of freezing patches on my back. That of course can only mean on thing – a lumbar puncture. They are totally horrible things and so I wasn’t looking forward to that.

First task while I was waiting for things to happen was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was in the UK at some point. It was round about the time of the death of my aunt. We were making a lot of preparation for various things. We met the family of her late husband Michael. We spoke to them about various things. They were involved in some kind of career where to have a psychiatrist or an analyst was compulsory. We had a really good chat about that. They happened to mention that they had a son who lived near Warrington. Of course, that’s my neck of the woods so before I come back to Europe I decided that I’d go to see this guy. I set out but stopped to listen to the 09:00 news. I noticed that the clock in the car was wrong. After the news I set out to drive but couldn’t think for a moment of how to go to Warrington. I had to scratch my head to think of which back roads and country lanes would be the best and I ended up going round the back of Haslington. I couldn’t help thinking that I wasn’t dressed for the occasion. I was in some kind of grey fleecy trousers, sports trousers or something. We eventually met. He was a guy in his 40s, a very big, strong type of person with a wife and a few kids. We began to talk. He was really mocking his relative about the idea of having a psychoanalyst. He thought that it was a stupid arrangement, perpetuated by North American trend-setters and totally unnecessary these days.

And then I was out with a former friend of mine, somewhere and were coming down the motorway. Something happened to the car. I think that it wanted some fuel. It was a strange kind of car so we called in and had to find the fuel filler. It was in the engine behind the right-hand headlight. We had to pull the headlight forward to reach the fuel filler. It was an extremely complicated affair. My friend fuelled up while I went for a wander around. I ended up at the hire car depots. In a waste bin there was a pile of stuff that obviously people had bought and thrown away, one of which was a 25-litre fuel carrier. I went over to my friend to ask if it was of any use to him. He replied “yes” so I went to fetch it but there was a hole in it so I put it back. In the meantime some guy from the service area came over to me to ask if I was a mechanic. I replied “yes” so he went over to my friend. They ended up having an argument because apparently only licensed mechanics are allowed to work on cars on this site. Of course my friend was having none of this and told the guy exactly what he thought. In the end the guy slunk off with a flea in his ear.

There was also something about a house that Nerina and I went to see. It was a bungalow that had some kind of front garden, a drive all the way down the side of the house and then a back garden. There was a sign up at the parking space at the side of the house that said “scrap cars here”. I noticed that there were a couple of old car axles lying around so I thought that this would be a great place to buy because if he’d been scrapping cars here there would be some kind of inherited rights. I could quite happily mess around in the drive, put up a car port and a fence between me and the neighbour, and Nerina would have a nice tidy garden at the back anyway. We went to look at it. IN the back in the garden he had a whole pile of axles. There was a load of asbestos brake dust. Somehow he’d rigged up two kinds of hubs as pulleys and he explained how he removed brake shoes with them. This was beginning to interest me more and more. I was hoping that Nerina would be interested in the bungalow itself and impressed enough to want to buy it.

I ended up going back into that dream about Michael’s family. It was a Sunday morning, we were all there and having a lie-in in bed. Round about 10:00 a film came up on the screen, one of these films line “American Grafitti” or similar. I watched it but must have fallen asleep again because I awoke with a start a short while later. In the meantime Nerina came into my room panicking. “Have you seen the time?”. I thought that with the film starting at 10:00 it was probably about 10:10 or 10:15 but in fact it was 12:35 and we’d slept all the way through the morning. There was so much work to do and we were supposed to be visiting somewhere else but Nerina and I didn’t have time and we’d have to leave but there was all this panic going on about getting things ready, going here and going there and having left the bed so late so late this morning

And when the nurse awoke me this morning Nerina and I were doing something with kittens but it all went completely out of my head as soon as I sat up.

Actually, there’s quite a story about kittens. When Tuppence was getting old we decided that we’d have another cat to keep her company, but it was definitely “no kittens”.

Anyway, the cat of someone whom I knew had just given birth and out of politeness I went to see the offspring. This tiny all-grey kitten crawled up my leg and curled up on my lap while I was drinking a cup of tea, and of course, that was that. You don’t choose a cat – the cat chooses you.

So having explained things to Nerina, I finally persuaded her to go to look at it to see what she thought of it. When she came back she told me “there was this tiny all-ginger kitten that climbed up my leg and sat on my lap …”

And that was how Sooty and Sweep came to live with us.

But I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that the world is far too small for my liking. The doctor who came to perform my lumbar puncture told me that she came from Belgium. She was born in Mons but came to live in Brussels as a child.

She told me the school that she attended, and it was the one just down the road from where I used to live in Jette She actually knew the complex of buildings where I lived.

So while I was lying down recovering from the lumbar puncture my neighbour who is still in Paris came to see me and it was quite awkward talking while I was lying down.

After lunch and a coffee (that I had to ask for three times before I received it) I was visited by the chief doctor and a whole pile of interns. She asked me loads of questions about all kinds of things.

The doctor from Belgium was with them and she understood Flemish so she was able to read all of the reports that I’d had from Leuven. Luckily the hospital has computerised all of its records for its patients, and you are able to access all of yours by inserting a special code. So I gave her my phone and told her to get on with it.

That was all of the official visits that I had today. There was the usual stream of nurses and the like coming and going but when I wasn’t asleep I managed to choose the music for the next couple of radio programmes, and I’ll be using the rest of the time here selecting more and more.

There were also several phone calls to deal with. The first was from the Mayor of Virlet. There’s some tidying up that needs to be done at my property and was I in any fit state to do it?

Of course I’m not and that was what he thought. So would I be willing to pay someone for half a day’s work to do it on my behalf?

Actually it’s far cheaper for me to do that than spend money travelling down there when I can’t even drive right now, so of course it was the obvious answer. I told him that next time there’s anything to do down there, not to hesitate to engage someone to do it again.

And then there was the Centre de Re-Education in Granville. That’s where handicapped people go in order to learn how to cope with everyday life taking into account their disabilities. Would I like 20 consecutive half-day afternoons starting on Tuesday next week?

Do bears go to the toilet in the woods?

Tea was the usual kind of industrial institutionalised factory food but I have to eat it because there’s nothing else. Luckily my neighbour brought me some bananas which was very nice of her.

So I’m going to go to bed now. It’s quite early but there’s nothing else to do and I can be quite comfortable under the blankets listening to the old-time radio.

And I wonder what they have in store for me tomorrow.

Thursday 19th October 2023 – IT GOES WITHOUT …

… saying that last night was just as bad as the others that I’ve been having just recently. Having a nightmare at about 03:00 didn’t help matters any.

Anyway, as a result it was another difficult crawl out of bed when the alarm went off

What surprised me though is that I seem to be moving rather better than I was a couple of days ago – to such an extent that I actually managed to walk 14 paces without grabbing hold of any support, and that’s an improvement over the last few weeks.

So I made it into the living room and had my medication. Then I came back in here and checked my mails and messages. There wasn’t anything exciting in the mail this morning – no letters or messages from any Health Insurance people. Time is running out.

Once I’d come round into the Land of the Living I transcribed the dictaphone notes. There was a review of what needed to be done in the garden, tasks performed, items bought, etc to prepare it. From there we went on to a football match which Morton won 4-0 which was to the disadvantage of Oldham Athletic. Someone was saying that it’s a shame that Morton’s new manager didn’t score a goal. Someone pointed out that he did in fact score a penalty earlier on in the match. When we had a look to see who it was I saw that it was one of the existing players but I couldn’t remember now who it was.

So later on, back to where we were before. One of the Morton players had pushed this guy who was his manager, pushed him around in a wheelchair during part of the match, pushing him around to show him off to the team or vice versa, something like that.

I was in a dream later with Nerina. She was going off to do a taxi job and I was preparing the cars ready to go out. One of the estates didn’t have an MoT on it. We’d let it expire while we’d been away. We had to go to check it over to make sure that it was OK. I was taking out the radios etc ready. I decided that I’d go through the diary, check on all the big jobs that we usually do and go through for when they were ready for renewal to see if that would give me a clue about how I could manage the car MoTs better. Nerina was going out to do a couple of jobs so she was confused about what was going to be happening to the radio in the office if I was outside fixing all the cars.

There was also something else, as I mentioned earlier, but you don’t really want to know about that.

This morning I’ve been sorting out paperwork and making another assault on a different target. They actually replied too, telling me that I had the wrong address. But at least they posted the correct one so I could redirect my correspondence.

They also provided a phone number that I could ring, so if no-one has contacted me by mid-morning tomorrow I’ll phone them.

There’s also a personal profile that I need to create for the French Government’s healthcare site so I spent some time doing that. It might be too late for that to be of any use but you never know.

All in all, it took me an age to do everything this morning.

This afternoon I finished off pairing the music for the third radio programme in this batch that I’ve just done and then I wrote out all the notes.

Before I go to bed later I’ll dictate the notes for the first one. I did four one after the other last time and I was exhausted by the end so I’ll do one at a time over the next few days.

My neighbour gave me the phone number of her ergotherapist. She told me that she was very impressed with the one who came to see her so I may as well try to have an appointment with the same one. He wasn’t in but his secretary took a message.

My cleaner came by too to bring me a letter. It’s good news from the Belgian Social Security – I’ve had a pay-rise for my pension. Whatever am I going to do with this extra €1:02 a month?

Tea tonight was an attack on the European Burger Mountain in my fridge, with pasta and veg and the rest of that vegan pesto from the other day. Pretty basic, but pretty nice.

So when I’ve dictated the radio notes, I’m off to bed. Tomorrow I’ll be shopping and then I imagine that I’ll be panicking about this trip on Monday, making a raft of phone calls and eventually, I imagine, making a phone call to book a train.

It’ll be a blooming miracle if this taxi thing comes off.

Tuesday 17th October 2023 – THIS TRIP TO PARIS …

…is becoming more and more complicated as each day passes.

My cleaner took the paper to the Health Insurance people for stamping. However, because it’s more than a certain amount it needs to be pre-approved by their head office.

"You should have your reply in 15 days" said the clerk to my cleaner.

And I travel on Monday.

But be that as it may, I ended up having another miserable night. What with a raging thirst and the stabbing pains back in the sole of my right foot, I was pretty much fed up of how the night went.

However even though I saw 06:40 come round, I was flat out asleep when the alarm went off at 07:00. And as you might expect, it wasn’t exactly easy to leave my stinking pit.

Anyway, there I was. And after I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages, I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I’d been to a Remembrance Day parade. There were whole choirs of people including soldiers and civilians singing the Eric Bogle song NO MAN’S LAND two or three or four times consecutively, one after the other. I’ve no idea why because there’s nothing else that I remember

And then Nerina and I had been on holiday and had just come home. We’d slowly started to unpack. I couldn’t find half the things that I’d taken with me, CDs, that kind of thing and I was going round in circles. Nerina decided that she’d go to bed and I suddenly got it in my head that I’d go home. I left our house and began to walk on my crutches down West Street in Crewe. A train pulled up but it pulled up further down the platform than it usually would and a tram came in right behind it. By the time I reached the train to board it, it pulled away and left me standing there. Then I looked at my ticket and found that it was for travelling in the opposite direction, not out towards Nantwich. I stopped for a think and decided that I’d head back into the town centre. It was a wet evening but somehow very nice. I walked into the town centre, which became part of the old Brussels town centre. I couldn’t find a chip shop that was open. There were all these wonderful smells from barbecues, food stands and the brewery was creating quite an odour as it was working. I was aimlessly wandering around taking it all in. Then I wondered why it was that I was thinking that I was heading home because I was actually living with Nerina. My home was there. I thought that I’d set out back and wander back towards home. I noticed that by now I wasn’t using my crutches. I was going slowly but I seemed to be walking much better and didn’t need them. I was totally at a loss as to what was happening. I was going down these stone steps at the back of the town centre etc. Although my right leg was hurting it was still keeping me upright. I remember thinking that it’s a beautiful evening out here in the town centre just wandering around, looking around, taking in all the smells and sights. Maybe the two of us ought to come out and do this kind of thing more often

Later on I was with Nerina again. We were wandering around a shopping street somewhere in a tourist area in a city like Bruges. For some reason we became separated and I was on my own. There was something like a tiny kiddy’s tricycle that you’d sit on and push along with your feet. Someone disabled was using it. I found another, sat on it and began to push myself along the street on it. It was really interesting because there was a whole new perspective of views that you could imagine that a small child would have when it was being hustled along by its parents. I was taking it all in and slowly going down the street. Suddenly I heard her call in the distance, wondering where I’d got to. I thought “never mind. She’s heading in the right direction. She’ll catch me up quite quickly. I just carried on pushing myself along through the crowds on this kiddy’s scooter.

Having done that, I had to fight off a huge wave of sleep and then sit down and prepare for my Welsh lesson.

And to my surprise, the Welsh lesson went really well and I actually enjoyed it. That makes quite a change, the way things have been just recently.

Once the lesson was over, I had to wait for the doctor’s office to open and then I could telephone him. I spoke to his secretary and explained the issue with the Health Insurance. She promised that she would tackle them herself and let me know how things develop.

Next issue was to see about a vehicle to take me. My idea is that if I wait until I have confirmation that the cost is taken in charge, there will probably be no vehicle available. If I book one now and, if the cost won’t be reimbursed, I can always cancel it.

And cancelled it will be, if it’s not reimbursed. I only wanted to borrow the vehicle for half a day, not to buy it.

But there is another plan going through my head about this trip, and it will involve the collection of a mass of paperwork and a phone call to Italy.

More of this anon.

For what remained of the afternoon I chose some more music for the next couple of radio programmes and paired off the music for one of them.

After tea, which was a taco roll with rice and veg, there was football. Y Barri v Pontypridd

This was a typical lower-table derby match – at least, during the first half – with a few moments that could best be described as “warm”.

In the second half the game came to life and there were actually some moments of sublime skill. Y Barri’s opening goal, scored by Harrison Bright, was one of the best that I’ve seen for a while.

In the end Y Barri won 2-0 and if it hadn’t been for Wales under-21 goalkeeper George Ratcliffe in the Ponty goal, they could have had a hatful.

Y Barri’s centre-forward Kayne McLaggon is one of the best attackers that I’ve seen in Wales and he would have been able to take on the best if he ever had had some decent service. He’s been carrying their attack for years – up until this season.

A few years ago I saw a few games in the WPL where a young centre-forward called Ollie Hulbert played on loan for Cardiff Metro from Bristol Rovers and he impressed me very much. Y Barri signed him this summer and I reckon that once he and McLaggon work themselves out, and when they finally have some luck, they’ll be an unstoppable force up front.

So later than usual, I’m off to bed. I have a lot to do tomorrow so I need to be on form. I hope that I have a better night than last night.

Monday 16th October 2023 – MEANWHILE, ON THE …

… telephone –
Our Hero "I have to travel to the hospital in Paris and the doctor has given me an authorisation for transport"
Health Assurance Official "you need to bring the form in here so that we can stamp it"
Our Hero "if I were able to bring the authorisation into your office, I wouldn’t be needing the authorisation"

You can’t make up stories like that.

And so it’s been another day when I’ve done almost nothing at all.

There was plenty of stuff on the dictaphone from the night too and strangely, I don’t remember some of it. Although I’m asleep when I’m dictating the notes, when I’m transcribing them there’s some kind of lightbulb that goes on in my head about most of them.

But last night there were a few that meant nothing at all to me when I came to listen to them.

When the alarm went off this morning I staggered out of bed and went off to take my medication. And then I came back here.

It took a while for me to come round into some kind of working mode, but my relaxation had been interrupted by the doorbell. The nurse had come to see my neighbour but she didn’t open the front door for him so I was obliged to stagger to the door in here to press the switch.

When I finally felt more like it, I had a listen to the dictaphone. Nerina had gone to the hospital to have an operation to have an operation on a cancer or something. Everyone else had disappeared and I was at home on my own. I’d been in Canada, dealing with the fall-out of a ferry that had sunk in one of the big rivers there. There was a great deal of talk about conspiracy theories regarding it, how it was time-expired and couldn’t find insurance for it etc. Whoever it was who was also with us then came back and handed me an envelope. I’d asked them to bring me £1000 cash back from the bank so they brought it back for me. It was all wrapped up in a little packet and they thought “why has the bank gone to this length with this money?”. I asked about Nerina and explained that there was a phone call that she needed to make but I’d left the details back downstairs. Then this person began to talk to me about a British aircraft carrier, “Eagle” that had also sunk in mysterious circumstances. That person seemed to think too that there was a problem with insurance etc, how it was a faulty build etc, how sinking was probably the best answer for it as far as the Navy was concerned. This conversation went on at some length. I explained that there was talk of this ferry, that suddenly the insurance offer had increased from several hundred thousands to¨£3,000,000. The person said that the same thing had happened with “Eagle” but that was done under the counter in a pub or café. I began to ask about Nerina and her operation, how she was doing.

In fact Nerina did once go into hospital back all those years ago and I did go to see her – but not for long. I have a horror of operations, tubes, pipes and all that kind of thing and if I had stuck around I’d have found myself in the next bed.

What I’m going through when I go to hospital is my worst nightmare. They are all well aware that the staff isn’t allowed to discuss operations with me and when I went two years ago to have the carcinogenic bit cut out of my kidneys no-one said anything. They came, pushed me out of my room to downstairs and stuck a gas mask over my face and that was all I knew about the entire proceedings

It’s one of the reasons why I never wanted children – because I’d be expected to be in the delivery room and there would be no way on this earth that that would ever happen. Of course, it’s always possible to be excused attendance but it’s the kind of thing that would be thrown back at you in any kind of dispute. And quite frankly, there are enough reasons to moan at me and complain about me without actually going looking for them.

Later on there was a group of us doing some things around the Crewe area. One was my brother and the other was a girl whom I knew when I lived in Chester. We had to go to some shops for some medication from the chemist and something else. We climbed into my car and drove. At a certain moment going up the street a woman appeared on a bike on the wrong side of the road. I didn’t see her until the last moment. I swerved to miss her. I hit the tyre on the kerb and burst it. I went for a slow limp to somewhere where I could change it but then another tyre burst. I thought “this is no good”. There was some stuff that we needed in the car so I was trying to group it all together in a bag. It was extremely difficult. My brother was making his usual remarks so in the end I gave him the bag and said “here, you carry it”. We set off but they began to wander off in the wrong direction. I said “if we go to the chemist’s in Bedford Street we’re only a couple of hundred yards away from Nantwich Road. If that chemist doesn’t have everything there are 2 or 3 chemists there. The other thing we need can also be bought from a shop there too”. We set off to walk down Bedford Street. I was talking to this girl about the area where she lived in Chester. I told her that I thought that the pub “The Beehive” had now become something else but she didn’t know. I asked where she lived, if she still lived in Chester. She said no, that she lived in Scapa Flow. We ended up taking a short cut through a building. I said to my brother “how do you fancy a nice cheap flat in Edinburgh,” because it was very cheap and it wasn’t really all that bad for the money. We went through this flat and out of the front door into the street.

And then a few of us were talking about my sister’s van. She had a Morris 1000 van and was having a few transformations done to it. When it was finished it looked like a pest on wheels. She would go round the shops with it until one night we stole it and hid it. One night we were down at a pub and she was out in a car. She came past and tried to attract our attention. We thought that we’d better disperse. We scattered and a couple of us ended up in Queen’s Drive in Nantwich where we were being overtaken by a film – a ship thing had passed which was this Morris 1000 van covered in brambles and weeds etc. There was something too about asking my sister the old question of days, the 21st, 24th and a couple of other occasions in that month. She found out the dates wrote them down on a piece of paper and stick them against the bridge behind my headboard in the dark.

Finally I had to go to Whitchurch to see a member of my father’s family. A letter had been delivered to my house for one of them. It was now 04:00 and we were finishing off the taxi work so I set off to deliver it. When I arrived at where I thought they lived I couldn’t identify the house. I saw something that might have been it and began to prowl around. In one of the outbuildings I found the bodyshell of an ancient 1950s Standard Vanguard Vignale … "actually a Phase I" – ed. There was also a set of number-plates on the floor written in Latin alphabet and then in Arabic. I wondered what they’d been doing with the number-plates off a Turkish lorry at one time. As I walked out of the barn I bumped straight into the guy. I came up with some kind of feeble excuse and handed him a letter. He seemed to be extremely delighted. I suddenly realised that it was his taxi wages that I was giving him. We had quite a chat. He asked me if we’d been busy on the taxis. I replied “very busy. I’ve not had my tea yet” and dawn was breaking the following morning”. Then I set out for home. As I was trying to put the key into the ignition some car tried to squeeze through the gap where I was parked. I told her to be a little patient but she snapped at me. When I set off I was driving on the wrong side of the road for a while. When I ended up in Whitchurch I was now on a bike. There was a cyclist in front of me moaning and complaining that I wasn’t in the correct lane, I was too close to him, all that kind of nonsense. He and I had a few words then I carried on heading for home.

Later on, the doctor came round to see how I was doing.

He gave me the famous bon de transport to go to Paris, another one for when these sessions at the Centre de Réeducation begin. Then there’s a prescription for something to help me in and out of the bath (not a student nurse, unfortunately) and finally, a prescription for an ergo-therapist.

An ergotherapist is one of those people who come to study your lifestyle and habits, and suggests ways and items that might improve your quality of life.

If he examines my lifestyle and habits he’ll have a hell of a shock.

Next step was to arrange the purchase of this IMac. I’ve decided that I’m going to buy it because at the very least it’ll replace the laptop that I’m using in the dining room to watch DVDs when I’m having my tea.

There was another visitor too. My cleaner came to see me and brought me my post. She’d heard about my story with the transport authorisation and as she’s going to the veg market tomorrow morning at Yquelon she can drop my form off as she’s passing, and also pick up my bathroom thing.

We went through a pile of stuff too about these chairlifts and tomorrow I’ll be ordering brochures.

Tea was later than usual – stuffed pepper and pasta. Just as nice as usual. So now I’m going to bed.

But I’m sickening for something again. This evening I’ve developed a really raging thirst and that’s always a sign that something is going on in my body. A collapse in health usually follows and what’s sad is that there isn’t much health left to collapse.

But if the Health Assurance people do agree to pay for my trip in a taxi to the hospital, that will be an enormous weight of my mind. I’m not looking forward to the trip if I have to go by train.

Saturday 7th October 2023 – HAVING HAD MY …

… first of what will probably be many Saturdays without going to the supermarket, I’ve been quite busy again nevertheless.

It actually all got off to a good start too with me being up and about before the alarm went off. Not by much, I have to say, but all the same it was still an early start.

And yes, there will still be an alarm on a Saturday morning. I have to keep up a routine otherwise I’ll just melt away into oblivion.

After the medication it took me a while to come round into the Land of the Living and then I transcribed the dictaphone notes from the night. There was some kind of dream about an old couple who had a young baby living with them. They were all living in squalid circumstances. Some man came along to try to take the baby away to give it a cleaner existence but he had to be extremely careful in the way he approached and tackled it. If the grandparents thought that the baby was being taken away for ever then they wouldn’t be quite so co-operative in letting him come in and see the baby. This evolved into my being at my sister’s old house in Gresty Road. I had to leave there and go home. It was a 7-hour drive. The bathroom was really insalubrious and I hated that end of the house so I wasn’t going to go there to have a wash. I’d wait until I’d reached home if I could. All of the stuff that I needed to pack into Caliburn which otherwise would have to go out of the back through the bathroom and down the fire escape and out through the back yard to where the car was parked wasn’t going to happen. I’d have to take it out of the front. I’d need to fetch Caliburn round to the front but there was no waiting or no parking there. I’d be interrupting everyone and risking a parking ticket by doing that. While I was thinking about what I was going to do I found a huge, enormous box of Quality Street chocolates so I took a large handful and went and sat to eat them. I realised that I couldn’t wait because with an extremely long journey, the longer it too to sort myself out the longer it would take to reach home. I really wanted to be on the road as quickly as possible.

And later I was in a pop group playing drums last night. I only had a really cheap beyond-basic kit but I didn’t do too badly and I could keep the beat of the songs. We were sitting there rehearsing once and there was another drummer there. he began to play some kind of drum beat music and I joined in. Much to my surprise it was quite accurate. The guitarist joined in, playing a guitar piece that I recognised but I can’t name it. The guitarist said that he was playing this particular track because it was one that he’d like to work out. By now I was playing the guitar but I wasn’t at all confident in the idea that I’d be able to master this song to a sufficient standard to be able to perform on stage.

Nerina and I were then running our business last night, going through the cars cleaning them from top to bottom to within an inch of their lives etc, having them really sorted out. Another taxi driver from a different company came round to see what we were doing and for a chat. It slipped out in the conversation that I’d won a contract with a major motor vehicle repair place in Northwich. He asked whether that was the place that dealt with rebuilding cars after accidents or after they’d been out on lease. I replied “as a matter of fact it is but I’m far more interested in their military vehicles”. he said “you mean training vehicles?”. I replied “no. I mean vehicles that have been used by Generals being chauffeured around etc”. We were busy washing one of the cars at that point. When we scraped away the years of grime and washed it we found that one of the doors was distorted and there was paint of a different colour on it. We wondered how that was happening. In the meantime Nerina was having trouble with a jug of warm water. She shouted so I went in to see what she was doing and to juggle with this huge jug of hot water. The other driver said that he’d like to see me for a while sometime if I could spare him the time. he wanted to talk to me about his business. I didn’t really understand what he meant by that but I’ll talk to anyone so I said that I’d let him know when I was free, something like that.

After that four of us were going off to watch car racing somewhere. We stopped off at a motorway service station to have a coffee. Here we bumped into my friend from Munich on his way there so we had a really lengthy chat with him and talked about his plans. We then went back to our motor bikes. It really was a beautiful afternoon made for motorbiking. We thought that it would be lovely to be out on the road in this beautiful weather. We could have a nice leisurely ride up the drive of the place where this hotel had been built.

At another point I was sitting on a beach somewhere and a vendor came round selling mugs of hot coffee. I’m not sure why I wanted a hot coffee in the middle of summer but it was £1:30 so he poured me a mug of coffee. While I went through my pocket for the money he wandered off somewhere. Just then I heard a voice behind so I said “£1:30” but it was in fact a man asking me if I’d seen his wife. Of course I hadn’t so I said “no” so he wandered off. The coffee vendor came back. He stood there for quite some time waiting for me to sort out my money while I had it in my hand. parked right opposite me was a Standard 10 which had a Canterbury registration number so I must have been in Kent at that particular time.

Finally, there were several of us wandering around the London Underground, some of us who knew each other well and one girl who didn’t. When we arrived at a main underground station we found all the doors locked and we were effectively locked inside. I saw a door open and someone emerge so I went to grab the door before it closed so that we could leave but it turned out to be the door of the gents’. We all then decided to make for the main-line platforms and go home that way, my group going one way on one train and our lone friend another way on another. We all agreed to meet here at some other time. I asked “whereabouts here,” and someone else replied “here – on this spot”.

As you can see, it was quite a mobile night and I didn’t have much sleep at all. It’s no surprise therefore that I fell asleep again at some point later in the morning. And for an hour or so as well.

But I also spent a lot of time this morning making a start on updating the blog entries. I hadn’t added the dreams that took place when I was in Leuven just now so I edited all of those and brought them up to date.

This afternoon I wrote out the notes for the music that I selected yesterday for another radio programme. They are now complete and tonight before I go to bed I’ll dictate as many of them as I can.

It’s the kind of thing that has to be done late at night because there’s too much noise outside during the day with traffic going past and buses idling at the bus stop.

There was football on the internet later on early in the evening – Pontypridd v Hwlffordd in the Welsh Premier League.

It was a proper basement battle that in the first half was quite agricultural and Pontypridd were well on top. Hwlffordd improved quite considerably in the second half but the sending off of Tyreese Owen for two yellow cards put paid to any hopes of a revival, even if they did have a couple of excellent chances.

The final score was 2-0 for Pontypridd and that was probably about right. It’s difficult to explain what has happened down in south-west Wales. Hwlffordd did really well in the latter half of last season and performed quite well in Europe, but the fire has gone right out.

Tea tonight was salad and chips and one of those vegetable burgers of which I bought a supply a while back at Noz, along with a vegan salad. Of course, with Noz being off the agenda now I’m not sure what I’ll be doing when the stockpiled stuff from there runs out.

So now that I’ve finished my notes I’ll dictate the radio notes and then go to bed. A nice lie-in tomorrow will do me god so I hope that it actually works.

EPIC HALL

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