Tag Archives: crash out

Saturday 26th March 2016 – I’VE NOT GONE OUT …

… for any tea tonight. I’m not feeling like it.

I had a good breakfast this morning and then went for a walk to the supermarket to buy the stuff for lunch. After a lunch (which was rather late as I wasn’t all that hungry) I went for a long walk along the prom southwards towards Vlissingen. That tired me out and so that was that.

I’d been on a good wander around during the night too and travelled miles. I started off being involved with a young English girl (and I know who she is but I just can’t think for the moment) who owned a jet aeroplane like a flight trainer that had been built in 1962. She had bought it at an Air Force liquidation sale with the aim of restoring it but she had fallen into the clutches of some evil English guy. Her aeroplane was stored in his hangar and the body had been taken off the chassis (it really is an astonishing aeroplane!) ready for restoration. He was annoyed intently with her because of the fact that she was now seeking her independence, but seeking her independence she was. We all thus dashed off to this hangar at this small airfield and managed to recover the chassis from the hangar and were pushing it onto the airstrip. As an aside, I was amazed at how corroded it was, especially around the body mounting points and I remember thinking that I wouldn’t want to go very far off the ground on that. But we had to – we had to bolt the body onto it and all clamber inside so that we could fly away. As we were moving the chassis, the man turned up. I was all for cracking on, doing everything for ourselves but he wanted to help us by holding open the gate while we pushed the chassis out. However the girl started to talk to the guy and began to discuss all of her future projects with him so he was there giving her all kinds of advice which was based on his own self-interest and not on anyone else’s. I could see that this girl was starting to waver again and I reckoned that we would never ever get away at this rate. The discussion then turned to stories about other planes that were lying abandoned on other airfields all over France and throughout the world and it soon became clear that this was how she had acquired this aeroplane. But we needed to hurry up before she swayed completely, but no matter what I said and how I encouraged her, I couldn’t get her to hurry. And I couldn’t get her to slip out of the clutches of this other guy. I could see her ending up by putting this chassis back into the hangar before much longer and going back off with him. How I wished that she would get a move on.
In this little bit we featured three girls, one of whom was my elder sister and another was my youngest sister. I was running some kind of Health-visiting team in Northern Austria and they had come to join it, working as Health visitors. It was very difficult work so I couldn’t understand why they had come, and my youngest sister had the worst round of them all. And then we had the 06:30 alarm of my neighbour in the next room and that, I’m afraid, was that.

But really, I’d had a bad night. it was like being back just after my operation and the severe compression in my chest that prevented me from settling down. I suppose that I should be worried about this but I’m not really. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life, no matter how long it might be, wrapped up in cotton wool.

I was about to go for an early breakfast when a friend of mine appeared on line for a chat. Consequently it was gone 09:00 when I made it down to breakfast and that may account in part for my lack of hunger this evening. As usual, we had an excellent breakfast with plenty of juice and coffee as well as some lovely Dutch bread and strawberry jam.

commonwealth war grave cemetery zoutelande nethrlandsOn the way to the supermarket (where the coffee machine is still “defekt”) I went past the cemetery and there is a Commonwealth War Grave in there.

I meant to go in to have a look at it on the way back, but what with the savage, biting wind that we were having, it slipped my mind.

It could be a victim of the Battle of the Schelde that liberated the area in November 1944, or a body washed up from the sea from maybe a naval operation or a downed aeroplane – or maybe even someone from the First World War – a victim of the sea or an internment victim (hundreds of British soldiers were interned in the Netherlands from 1914 to 1918, having fled there from the Germans after the Fall of Antwerp)

In fact, a search on the Commonwealth War Graves site discloses that it is the grave of a Flying Officer, a navigator of 239 Squadron RAFVR who was killed in January 1944.

239 Squadron was equipped with Mosquitos and flew night-time operations within the bomber stream to hunt down and attack German night-fighters that were targeting the bombe

valkenhof hotel zoutelande netherlandsIt occurs to me that I haven’t yet posted a photo of my hotel, the Valkenhof. It’s a bit pricey as I’ve said before, but it is Easter weekend and the place is crowded.

My little room is one of the three in the annex to the side and it’s that window just there underneath the pointy roof. No, I have no real complaints about the place and as I have said before, you definitely win with the breakfasts.

strandcafé beachside pie hut zoutelande netherlandsYesterday, I’d seen a strandcafé away in the distance to the south and so this afternoon I braved the savage wind to go for a good walk in that direction to see what the possibilities were.

It took me ages too because I wasn’t really up to much. This is definitely proving to be too much for me but I’ll gamely struggle on as the sea air will only do me good, and this is why I’m here.

bunker two atlantic wall zoutelande netherlandsOne thing that I shouldn’t have done, I suppose, was to walk right up to the top of a huge sand-dune.

That certainly ook a lot out of me but it was well-worth the effort because the view from up here was absolutely stunning and I regretted not having the Nikon D5000 in working order. Away in the distance is the town of Zoutelande, so you can see how far I’ve walked, and you can also see the storm clouds gathering out there in the North Sea.

bunker two atlantic wall zoutelande netherlandsBut there was a good reason for coming all the way up here and I’m glad that I did, because there are a couple of bunkers that relate to World War II, relics of the Atlantic Wall.

The big Commando raid on Dieppe in August 1942 was, from the British point of view, a huge fiasco but it had one very important side-effect in that it frightened the Germans to death. As a result, millions of Reichsmarks and tens of thousands of men and tens of thousands of tons of vital war materials were diverted from the German war effort in order to build huge concrete fortifications all along the Occupied coast from Norway to the Bay of Biscay between 1942 and 1944, and weren’t properly finished when the invasion took place.

Here, these two huge bunkers guard the entrance to the Wester-Schelde and the port of Antwerp and are now a museum, although it goes without saying that it was closed today.

beach huts zoutelande netherlandsI had my coffee, taking my time in case a ship came past (but I was out of luck) and then walked slowly back along the beach to my hotel.

One thing that caught my eye was this row of beach huts. From what I can tell, people rent (or own) them and store their beach material in them. Then they sit around their beach hut on deck chairs (even on a devastatingly-windy day like today) surrounded by windbreaks and sit and absorb whatever sunlight lught be about.

So now that’s all I’m doing. I’ll have another early night and try to have an early breakfasT

I hope that I feel better tomorrow.

0

Friday 25th March 2016 – NO COMPLAINTS FROM ME!

Yes, this hotel might be expensive but it is Easter weekend, my little room is quite comfortable and the breakfasts are superb. They certainly know how to make coffee in this place. The bread is superb too and if I were to eat animal products, there is enough meat and cheese on offer to satisfy the most energetic appetite.

I could wish for a more comfortable chair though, but that’s just a small complaint.

The bed is quite comfortable too, but I’m not very comfortable in it. I’m sensing that my blood count is going down, and I’m starting to have attacks of cramp again as I explained the other day.

It’s not stopping me going on my nocturnal rambles though. I had travelled to Australia last night to some kind of house where there was a father and a young son. There was only one bed in the house and they shared it, and I had to go and awaken them. I wasn’t able to do that and so I had the idea of switching on the printer and leaving messages everywhere for them. Whoever it was in charge of the printer said that this would never work and to leave it with him – he’d see to it. And so he pressed a combination of key characters on the printer and this caused the printer to emit a high-pitched whine. This succeeded in awakening these two people and they sat upright, puzzled by the noise (which we found quite funny). The discussion turned to this bed and how they each had their own side of the bed and each had their own way of sleeping. In fact, it was all very reminiscent of life 100-odd years ago where travellers would arrive at inns and not only be expected to share rooms, but to share beds with complete strangers. One of the Hercule Poirot short stories recounts how, even in the late 1930s, Japp and Hastings were obliged to share a bed in a hotel somewhere in rural England.
From here we became involved with Royalty with the future Charles IV and with Rebekah Wade, disgraced former editor of the former News of the World. it actually concerns the birth of the baby who would become Charles IV and how Wade was doing her best to suppress the news because it didn’t suit her newspaper’s agenda. There were all kinds of goings on, with places being set on fire, places where people lived who might give evidence in support of the existence of the the birth. Many people attributed these antics to Wade and her clique although she was making out that it was someone else behind it all (I think that I ought to stress that this is what happened in a dream that I am recounting and I make no accusation or allegation about anything that might or might not have happened or will subsequently happen in real life) – places which for the most part belonged to people who were trying to publicise this birth. While this was all going on, I was in a relationship with Lorna so I had all of that to contend with too. My transport at this time was a single-decker bus of the 1930s that I had borrowed from somewhere and was in a deplorable state, falling to bits, but nevertheless it was all that I had and so I had to drive it. There was only one way to drive it and that was with loads of revs and rapid gear-changes, just like a sports car. And I needed to as well, if I were to forestall what these opponents to the birth of Charles IV had in mind. We had to keep one step ahead of them and let them chase after us. It was all so thoroughly weird.

When I came back from breakfast, there was the maid making my room. I went for a walk while she finished but I didn’t go far as I had forgotten to pack my sou’wester, oilskins and waders. But there’s a small supermarket around the corner where I bought a baguette, some wheat biscuits and some more Raak Campagne Pils.

coast and beach zouteland netherlands scheldt estuaryThe weather did clear up later and so I went for a walk along the promenade. Like most places in the Netherlands, the coastline is protected by a very high embankment following the disastrous sea-floods of 31st January and 1st February 1953.

This area was quite badly affected by the floods and as a result, the sea wall is about 40 feet high on the landward side.

coast and beach zouteland netherlands scheldt estuaryI’m going the other way though, heading north-west along the coast. I’ve seen a strandcafé – a beachside pie hut – in the distance and I reckon that that would be as good a place as any to stop for a pre-prandial coffee.

I need a coffee too because there’s a biting wind that is really uncomfortable. But at least, if you look to the far right of the photograph, you’ll see some blue sky being blown in from the north.

ship coast and beach zouteland netherlands scheldt estuaryAnd as to why I’ve come to spend a few days at Zoutelande, then you need to look no further than this photo, taken from inside the strandcafé.

The deep shipping channel is only about 200 yards offshore and ships sailing up and down the Schelde pass this close to the shore. I was hoping to catch a 300,000 tonne oil tanker or maybe a 50,000 tonne container ship, but this will have to do for the present. We’ll see what happens at a later date.

zoutelande netherlandsFrom up here, there’s a good view of the town and you can see what I mean about the height of the sea defences. They really are impressive and it does bring home to you the fact that much of the Netherlands is actually below sea level.

But it’s a nice town and I discovered a big supermarket on the edge of the place where I stocked up with some more stuff, including some banana-flavoured Vitamin B12 drink and some gelatine-free spongy sweets. There was a coffee machine here too but it was marked “defekt”

vv de meuwen football ground zouteland netherlandsThere’s a football ground here too and so I made a note and dashed home to make enquiries about some footy this weekend. But no luck on that point – all of Dutch amateur football is postponed for the Easter weekend so I’ll have to go without yet again!

But it was a nice football ground, quite modern and clean. It would have been a good place to come to watch a match. Still, you can’t have everything.

windmill zoutelande netherlandsYou can’t feature anything about the Netherlands and not include a windmill in there.

There’s a beautiful windmill in the town and as I was going past it back to the hotel, my route took me past it. It was whizzing round like the clappers in the wind that we were having and I’ll post a little video of it in early course.

And just to add to the Dutch flavour in this photograph, you can see some tulips in the foreground too – or are they daffodils? I dunno, but it all looks very Dutch to me.

I went back to Caliburn after that, did some tidying up in the back, and then came back to eat my butty.

I crashed out for an hour or so and then went on with some paperwork. Later on in the evening, I went for a walk and found another pizza place where I had a mushroom pizza. I’ve still not found a fritkot in the town and I’ll be running out of vegan cheese at this rate.

0

Sunday 20th March 2016 – JUST IN CASE ANYONE IS WONDERING …

… the big patch of oil right by where I park Caliburn is due to the fact that I didn’t notice that there was a hole in the filler neck of my oil container when I was topping him up this morning. I seem to have ended up with more oil on the floor than in Caliburn’s engine. But he’s been topped up with water too, windscreen wiper liquid, all kinds of things.

I also washed and scrubbed all of the camping gear too so that that’s all ready. And apart from the coffee, I also seem to have forgotten the matches too. But at least I can buy them en route somewhere, I suppose.

So after a memorable night, memorable in the sense that I don’t remember anything about it, except for somewhere there was a girl of about 4 or 5 and another one, dressed in red and white, aged about 12 in it somewhere, that’s my lot. I was up yet again before the alarm clock and after breakfast, prepared myself, Caliburn and Strawberry Moose for the departure. All of my paperwork is on board as well, and I’ll let the new doctor sort out what he wants from all of this.

And after lunch, which was more home-made mushroom soup (made of real home-made mushrooms of course), we set off into the mist, rather like the boy who took his girlfriend out into the fog and mist.

chateau de puy guillon vernusse allier france. Letting The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav do her work, we followed a merry, mazy ramble through the Auvergne countryside towards the expressway at Montmarault, passing by the Chateau de Puy Guillon at Vernusse, somewhere that I have certainly never seen before.

Impressive it certainly is and well-worth a photo even if the battery in the Nikon D5000 was flat so that I had to use the camera on the phone.

And you can see what I mean about the mist as well.

Once I joined the expressway, the rest of the route was without a problem and everything went according to plan, although having left the SatNav on “shortest distance” rather than changing it to “quickest route” did show me parts of Fontainebleu that I have certainly never seen before. I fuelled up as usual at the cheap fuel station at Melun and then took the Francilienne as far as the N2 where I headed off in the direction of Soissons.

This was where the fun started because, having determined not to stop until I’d passed the rear of Charles de Gaulle airport, I then couldn’t find a hotel, astonishing as it might seem. That’s not quite correct – I drove three times around Villers-Cotterets following signs to hotels that clearly only existed in the minds of the signwriters, and found a place that was nominally a three-star hotel but looked like a chateau and would have been outside my price range.

Soissons wasn’t much better either. I found all of the post hotels, like the Campanile and so on, but nothing in my price range at all but a few miles outside the town, in a place called Crouy, I found a modern type of hotel, the New Access Hotel, advertising rooms at €35:00 plus breakfast €5:00. Full of foreboding, but tired and fed up and in the dark, I went and signed in.

As I feared, it was an old Formule One, clearly sold off by Accor as it needed renovation and wasn’t worth the money spending on it, and now run by an Indian family, as most of these places all over the western world seem to be. We discussed meals and it seemed that there was a pizza delivery service nearby, so I placed my order (there was a microwave so adding my own cheese would be no problem) and went to my room.

Despite half an hour trying, I couldn’t get the heating to work and it was cold. And then the plug was so tight up against the wall that I couldn’t plug in the laptop or the battery charger for the Nikon D5000. And then I realised that I’d been there an hour and my pizza hadn’t come.

So off I trotted downstairs and saw the daughter of the hotel owners. I told her about the pizza, so she asked me if I wanted to call them to remind them. I had a better idea. “You call them and cancel it. I’ll go and find something else” – having passed a kebab and pizza place just down the road.

I passed the pizza delivery driver on the access road but it was too late by then – my tail was up. And I had the last laugh too because it turned out that where I went to was the same place as where the pizza had been ordered from, and there was a free salad included to all take-away customers, and the salad would have made a meal on its own.

So back at Ice-Station Zebra and I refused a shower in the communal facilities. I ate my pizza and salad and with no electricity to charge up the laptop (I should have done that in Caliburn on the way up) I crawled fully-clothed under the covers, kicked out the bed-bugs and settled down for the night.

0

Monday 14th March 2016 – WELL THAT’S ME TOTALLY P155ED OFF!

I had my blood test at the hospital this morning, and the blood count has gone down yet again to 8.1. And that’s despite having a blood transfusion the other day. The operation that I had to go through 6 or 7 weeks ago has clearly done no good whatever and I might just as well have saved myself the agony.

The thing that gets me though is that no-one in the hospital seems to care. Here they are, messing about with allergy tests for a different medication to deal with the immunity issues following the removal of the spleen, and on Friday I’m in hospital for a scan on my lung to see where this blood clot (the one in my lung that I picked up in hospital) has got to.

But as to my underlying illness and the causes of it, and any potential solution – not a word!

What made me even more depressed about all of this is that while I was sitting in the allergy clinic with all of these patches and injections and so on, I was editing all of the photos that I took in Montreal and sorting out all of the notes that relate thereto. And then I got to thinking about just how much I enjoyed the city and how much I felt at home there. And then I reached a conclusion.

And that is that seeing as how no-one cares, then I don’t either. if nothing definite comes out of my visit to Leuven next week and they can’t sort something out, then I’m on the next plane to Montreal. I’ll find a quiet room in a house somewhere around the Cote des Neiges, which really is my favourite part of Montreal, and let nature take its course.

I can’t go on like this. it’s nothing short of purgatory for me to have to go through all of what I’m going through and for no good purpose either. I may as well not be here and be somewhere else instead, whether in this world, the New World or even the next world.

What didn’t help matters very much was that I had another one of those comfortable, reassuring dreams where everything went according to plan, our hero got the girl and we both walked off together into the sunset and all of that – something that never ever happened to me in real life and how I wished that it had.

I was back playing in my rock group from the 1970s again and we were totally unrehearsed – we hadn’t played together for years and we were featuring in a venue somewhere. This was downstairs in a basement somewhere, rather like Enoch’s in Crewe used to be, and we weren’t even sure what numbers we were going to play, never mind how we were going to play them. This went on and we didn’t have all that much idea about what we were going to do. We spent so much time discussing and debating it that we weren’t actually getting anything done. There were quite a few of our friends there, including one particular girl whom I fancied and who I was trying to impress, who were coming to see us and so we HAD to be organised. Came the afternoon of the gig and we decided that we would have a rehearsal. I headed off towards the rehearsal room, carrying my bass guitar and there was some girl, whom I had seen vaguely back in the past but I hadn’t particularly noticed very much, came over to me and asked me if my guitar was a Gibson SG. I told her to count the strings, which she did, and agreed that there were just four of them. And so I told her that it was in fact a Gibson EB3. We started to talk about bass guitars and musical instruments, and she said that she had a mandolin with four strings on it. Of course – a mandolin – that brings back Lindisfarne and “Road to Kingdom Come” and “No Time to Lose”, all of that kind of thing. We ended up having quite a chat about this kind of thing, and she said that she could actually play some Lindisfarne music on the mandolin. It’s always been my ambition to play in a folk-rock group like Lindisfarne so I egged her on to go and fetch her mandolin,which she did and we had a brief jam session. After that, we wandered off together hand in hand. As I said earlier, this was another one of these comfortable situations and I wish that I could remember who she was, or even what she looked like – rather different from the Girl from Worleston the other night whose face is still vividly fixed in my mind. Anyway, off we went, hand in hand and there were a few people loitering in the vicinity who noticed the pair of us together like that and gave a little smile to each other. We walked to a rocky wall where there were a few seating areas set into it at various levels – just flat, grassy areas. I invited her to sit down with me but she said that she had other things to do and didn’t have the time. I continued to encourage her to sit down, she continued to be doubtful and it was at this moment that I woke up rather dramatically and shattered the illusion, much to my dismay.
After the usual crawl down the corridor I ended up at the football – Nantwich Town in fact. And while Nantwich Town might have a new ground, down on Kingsley Fields, this match wasn’t being played there. And neither was it being played on their old ground at Jackson Avenue either, but in the street in London Road right more-or-less outside Churche’s Mansions. I was watching the game, with about 4 or 5 others (huge crowds they have in Nantwich), a couple of girls and a couple of kids, having a kick-around with the balls.There was a really strong, swirling wind blowing that was creating havoc and on one occasion, much to my surprise, I actually caught the match ball one-handed, swerving around in the wind as it went out of play and that was really impressive. For the rest of it, the conditions were really difficult and catching the ball, even a simple catch, was really difficult if not impossible. We were actually watching this at the back of a river and the house rear yards backed right onto it. One small boy was climbing over the back wall and the wooden fence on top and lost his footing, sliding straight down into the river and emerging all covered in green slime. That certainly looked unhealthy! All of these houses had basements that were well below the level of the water but were somehow really dry. I wouldn’t have liked to have lived down in there, although there were people quite happily doing so. There were two teenage girls watching this football match and they lived in one of the houses. At half-time they went back to their house where the mother was cleaning the room of one of these girls, and one of the girsl asked the other what she would like for breakfast. The other replied that she would like one round of cheese on toast with half a packet of crisps and a coffee. I said “breakfast? It’s getting on for 10:30 and most of us had eaten breakfast long before this match kicked off”. But anyway, the first girl dragged a big metal wood-stove out from a corner into the middle of her little basement room ready to fill it and light it to make the toast and put the kettle on. They asked me what I would like to which I replied that I’d had my breakfast a long time ago, but I’ll have a cup of coffee with them. They next asked me what coffee I wanted and what mug I wanted and I thought that they weren’t half making life complicated when all that I wanted was a simple cup of coffee.

But anyway, enough of this. I was up early enough, breakfasted and on the road by 07:40. And what a beautiful morning it was too. I was in Montlucon at the hospital by 08:30 and in the comfy chair by the power point at 08:40 too.

I had the blood test, as I mentioned, and then had the drain fitted, and then injected and patched with all kinds of things. My companion from the other day was there too and we had quite a chat. And while I might have won the “mine’s bigger than yours” competition by having the largest lump on my arm, I felt really sorry for her with all of the tests that she was going through and the mess that they had made of her arm. In consolation, I let her have my mid-morning cake to cheer her up.

We had quite a few moments of humour too, including when one of the others asked if she could leave the room to use the bathroom.
“You’re supposed to raise your hand” I retorted.
“Just like school” said someone else.
At least, despite everything else, there’s a good feeling of cameraderie there in that clinic and the nurse is a really good sport too, which is good.

But the bad side of this is that I’ve had a few adverse reactions so I need to come in again. I explained my situation, all of my hospital appointments and my visit to Belgium and as a result, exceptionally, they can fit me in provisionally at 09:00 on Thursday.

I mentioned that at this rate I ought to be looking for an apartment here in the vicinity of the hospital and asked the young girl here with me whether she had a spare bed in her room. She said she did, but her mother wouldn’t like it. I asked “who cares about your mother?” which made everyone smile, but didn’t have the desired effect.

Not that I expected it to either, but there you go.

As for the blood test though, it’s on the limit of the blood transfusion level, but that’s not good enough for me. I’m off to Leuven next week – 800-odd kilometres by road – and I need to be on my best form for the journey. So what I’ve done is to change my little one-hour appointment back at the allergy clinic from tomorrow to Wednesday at 09:00 seeing as how there was a space, and then went up to the day-hospital and persuaded them to take me in straight afterwards for a blood transfusion. That way, then at least I’ll be in something-like reasonable health to undertake the journey. Coming back won’t be too much of a problem as I don’t have a time-limit for that so if I’m tiring out, I can take a good rest and carry on later.

But as I also said earlier, I’m thoroughly depressed by the way that all of this is panning out. I’m thoroughly hating the past, hating the present and hating the future too.

To cheer myself up, I went to Carrefour and the Flunch to have a plate of chips and vegetables but that was a waste of time as they were stone-cold. Liz had given me a little shopping list that involved going to Grande Frais and the Carrefour so I bought the necessary and looked for something else to cheer me up but there wan’t anything there that took my fancy. That’s always the case when you’re in the middle of a black depression – nothing will pull you out of the pit.

Back home – for only an hour as Liz wanted the shopping by 16:00 – I still couldn’t find my copy of Paint Shop Pro or anything else that I needed. But there was a little issue that the water in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater was off the temperature scale. I had to drain off 5 litres of the water and put 5 litres of cold water into it. I’ve also plugged the fridge into the main circuit so that it’ll now be working 24 hours per day. I’ll have to do something because with no-one there drawing any current, there’s tons of surplus electricity and it’s all dumped into the hot water.

Yes, 41 amps of surplus energy was being generated when I arrived and the cables to the immersion heater element were stone-cold – a far cry from 6 months ago when they overheated at half of that and I had to rewire everything. All of this, the temperature in the water and the amps that the cables are currently … "ohh! Very good!" – ed … handling just goes to show how much current was being lost by the rubbishy cables that I had been using. Decent cables, even half the diameter, properly crimped and soldered, is definitely the way to go and I wish that my soldering techniques would improve.

However, if things continue like this, my soldering techniques won’t be an issue.

I stopped for diesel on the way back and also to the pharmacie at Pionsat for the next lot of anti-biotic prescriptions (which wouldn’t have been necessary except for this spenectomie, and what a waste … "you’ve done that already" – ed … and then back to Liz and Terry’s.

After tea, which was a stir-fry with the stuff that I had bought earlier, I said “sod it!” and went to bed. I’ve had enough disappointments for one day. I’d already crashed out for half an hour on the sofa and it was beyond me to keep on going – not when I wasn’t in the mood to go on fighting.

Tomorrow is another day. Let’s see how we get on with that. Not any better, I bet.

I’ll leave you all to sit and read this rubbish – all 2322 words of it.

And serve you all right too!

0

Sunday 13th March 2016 – PHEW!

When was the last time that I was up and about and eating breakfast long before the alarm went off? And on a Sunday too! And what has surprised me more than anything else is that after all of the travels that I was on last night, that I managed to make it back here in time.

But start as you mean to go on. And before you start, I perhaps ought to warm you that the sum total of my travels last night comes to something about 2200 words.

You have been warned.

I started off last night by falling asleep watching a film on the laptop last night and it wasn’t long after that at all before I was on the road. It started off at first as if I hadn’t done a great deal because I’d been away with a group of people. There was a timetable for us and on the first day we had to inspect half a dozen countries and on the second day another half-dozen, on the third, yet another half-dozen and so on. This didn’t leave me much time to be going off on a nocturnal ramble but then I found myself in Chester. I don’t know exactly where I was living but it was on top of a bunk-bed somewhere and this was quite a long way off the ground and difficult to climb on to. There had been a young girl that I had quite fancied in the past when I was younger, and so had a few of my friends, but she had started to go out with a boy who was older than us and quite a bit older than her. There was some kind of correspondence that had taken place between the two of them, and one of these letters had fallen into my hands. I was busy parcelling up this letter into a brown envelope and trying to write a letter to one of these friends of mine to tell him about this letter. Obviously the contents of this letter were interesting and I reckoned that it was worth a couple of quid for me to give him this letter to read and I could buy myself a pint of beer. The difficulty that I was having was to make my letter sound sufficiently encouraging and interesting to make him part with the money and it was taking me hours to think of the ideal form of wording.
The next port of call started off to be quite amusing. I was out and about with a dwarf and we were trying to book ourselves into a hotel. While we were there at the reception desk, a message came downstairs to the effect that a woman in one of the rooms required a companion. Of course, the ears of the dwarf and I pricked immediately up, imagining full well what might have been meant by that and so as soon as we had finished registering ourselves into our room, we shot off to the room that had been mentioned. In the room we found a girl who was totally surprised by our intrusion because that wasn’t the kind of companion that she meant. She wanted a companion to talk to and confide in. All three of us were taken by surprise at what had just unfolded. The dwarf then left the room to go back down to reception and arrange a room for himself I started to chat to this girl and it seemed that she was intending to stay not for just one night but until the middle of next week and so I jokingly suggested that I could check myself into her room for a couple of nights and see how it goes. I slid quietly into her bed (it was a big double-bed)while she was adjusting her hair and her night attire and she didn’t seem to mind at all.
I’m clearly going to have to keep up these injections and anti-allergy patches and so on if this is the kind of thing that happens to me during the night. I’ve never had this kind of luck when I’ve been on my travels in real life.
Anyway, after all of this, I made a guest appearance as Sherlock Holmes (not for the first time just recently either) in the case of a girl who had been murdered. There were five people who had been arrested in connection with this and the newspapers were making ever such a fuss about all of this, how there was some really rough street in Leicester (why Leicester?) where all of the criminals seem to live and how this case was connected with this. But it turned out that only one of these five people was connected with this street
I next found myself out and about with Terry and Liz, but it wasn’t Liz but my friend Helena from when she was quite young (and making her debut in these voyages too). We’d all been for a drive out and had stopped somewhere in the salubrious surroundings of somewhere that looked like a gent’s restroom and changing rooms for a sports ground, but somewhere that had clearly seen better days and was creosoted rather like an outdoor toilet of the 1950s. We were all hot and sweaty, having been for a really good walk and we were all thirsty. Terry produced a tangerine for himself and Liz (or Helena) said that she was going to have something else and no-one asked me what I wanted. This depressed me a little, but then Helena produced an orange, a really nice juicy one, peeled it and gave it to me, which I thought was really nice. She asked me to save her a segment, which of course I was only too happy to do. While we were here, we were listening to the radio. Speaking was Mike Harris, the chairman of the TNS football club. The club used to play at a ground in the village of Llansantffraid but had moved up the road to the old army football stadium at Park Hall near Oswestry. He’d offered to sell the ground to the local community on some kind of share basis, £10 per share. This was of course about 10 years ago and property prices had risen dramatically since then and now the local council was trying to buy the ground at the price that Mike Harris had asked for it 10 years ago, presumably to sell on for redevelopment and make a profit based on today’s values. It goes without saying that Mike Harris was not at all willing to sell it under those terms and conditions, and this discussion was the basis of the radio programme that was being broadcast. What was interesting about all of this is that from where we were, we could see the old football ground across the valley behind a shopping precinct in the distance (which incidentally bears no resemblance whatever to the actual site or situation of the ground). I immediately dashed to the car to fetch my camera because what was going through my mind was that if this broadcast was live, everyone would be down at the football ground right now and the ground would therefore be open. After all, the old ground at Llansantffraid is one of the places that I’ve yet to visit while I’ve been on my travels around the various Welsh football grounds (this is in fact actually the case). The others saw my camera and wondered what I was going to do, and so I explained. But I had to go to the bathroom first, and this was when I awoke – right at that moment, because I actually did have to go to the bathroom. And once more, I found all of my bedclothes all over the floor. Rushing to the car for the camera must have been the reason for that.
After the bathroom break, which was actually the Easter break for me, I found myself back at work. The first thing that happened was that one of my colleagues said “hello” to me, which took me completely by surprise. And all of the new vehicles had arrived – new white vans of various shapes and sizes (and “H”-registered too, which was something of a complete surprise). We were to swap our vehicles for the new ones but I couldn’t find the one that had been allocated to me, and I couldn’t find a place to park my own either as the car park was full. So I went back to my desk and started to chat to Anne-Marie, a chat that went on for ages while I was trying to do some work. And someone had put a pile of files on my desk with all kinds of post in there dating back to 12 months and even more, all kinds of legal stuff and so on, a problem that I solved in the good old-fashioned and well-tried way of simply “losing” the post somewhere inside the file and filing the file away on the filing racks, where they would be lost for quite some time. Once Anne-Marie had wandered off, I went to take my coffee things back but I couldn’t leave the office by the front as it was all closed in with windows rather like the front end of the upper deck of a double-decker bus. Walking back up the other end I came upon Anne-Marie and her two friends Caroline and Theresa, lounging about on one of the side-on seats that you find over the rear wheel of the lower deck of a double-deck Lodekka type bus. I said “hiya, girls”to them but they all turned their backs to me which I thought was rather impolite. What had I done now? So downstairs with my coffee things, I found myself out on the edge of a cricket ground where a match was due to be played sometime soon, somewhere out towards Stafford. There was a huge discussion taking place about this match and about the players. I hadn’t been selected (I don’t think that I expected to be) but it seemed that a couple of footballers from FC Pionsat St Hilaire, Gregory amongst them, were going to be playing and the person who was organising it, none other than Mark Dawson, was urging the rest of the team to welcome them. Mark had been waving around a yard brush which had a plastic handle, but people had been stubbing out their cigarettes on it and burning the handle, so I took it from Mark and put it back up against the wall. “It wasn’t me” said Mark. “I don’t smoke”. I replied that I knew that he didn’t, but nevertheless it was marked and so I put it out of everyone’s way. There was someone else there with a Velocette Venom which had become the subject of some discussion. The owner said that it had cost £129 new but now it’s worth about £66,000. The bike was being pushed around and so I put it up on a piece of hard-standing right by this little building where we were congregating. Someone said that we had been told not to park motorbikes up there but I replied that it was OK because it had its centre-stand up on a paving slab. From here I was heading off onwards down south past Stafford and I noticed that Mark didn’t have transport and so expecting him to be heading now for the cricket pavilion, I asked him if he wanted a lift. I was in my big old Senator so I opened the door for him and he told me to drop him off near the town hall in Stoke on Trent, about 10 miles away through the traffic in the opposite direction and that will cost me a couple of hours in time. But a promise is a promise so I bit my lip and set off.
And I still haven’t finished yet either. Because all of this ramble about me being at work seemed to have started off with me being on a wide-bodied jet aeroplane (and I do mean “wide” – it was rather like a cinema auditorium). I seemed to be the first on board so I chose my seat in the central part but against the aisle, and put my black fleece there. There were four air hostesses in a bunch over on the other side in the aisle and they waved me over, so leaving my jacket behind, I went over to see what they wanted. “Ohh, come over here and sit by us” they said. “Why? What’s up?” I asked. “Am I the only passenger on the aeroplane?” “Ohh no” they replied. “But you’re first on so you can sit here if you like”. And so I went and fetched my jacket, and then came back to sit by these air hostesses. I’d boarded this plane by chance, really, just looking to get away for a few days and this was the first plane in. It was flying out to the Channel Islands somewhere on this Friday late afternoon and was coming back on Sunday evening, which suited me fine for a short break.
No wonder it was a surprise to find me up and about so early this morning after all of that.

So with all of this effort I had another day of sitting and vegetating. I mean – it took me all morning just to type up my notes from through the night.

But this afternoon, I finished all of the notes from September 2015 and I’ll soon be ready to start on the ones for August. And then, I have 2014 to do. Then, I can take the 2013 notes and merge all of them together in the appropriate places. It’s not going to be something that will be over in a day or so.

But with it being Sunday, Liz has been cooking. For lunch, we had home-made mushroom soup (made with real home-made mushrooms of course), followed by vegan carrot-cake for our afternoon snack, and then for tea we had home-made nut roast followed by home-made vegan chocolate chip ice-cream. As I have said before … "and you’ll say again" – ed … whenever (if ever) I’m fit enough to leave here, I’ll immediately try to find something else wrong with me.

And so on that note, I’ll leave you all. I’m not even going for a walk because I need the early night as I’m off to Montlucon and the hospital early in the morning and I’ll be doing more than enough walking while I’m there.

And if you’ve managed to read down this far then congratulations because it’s a mere 2474 words, a new record posting for a blog entry, and by a country mile as well.

Good night!

0

Saturday 12th March 2016 – BLIMEY! WHAT A NIGHT!

I don’t know what it was that they put in all of those injections that they gave me yesterday, but saying that I had a disturbed night last night was something of an understatement. In fact, when the alarm went off, I found that all of the bed clothes were all over the floor. And in trying to get out of bed, I fell right on my nether regions. Clearly, something was going on.

And despite being crashed out in bed long before 20:15, I didn’t need to make a trip down the corridor despite having such a fitful night. Instead, I was off on some of the most astonishing voyages that I have had to date. I’m sure that all of these injections and medicaments that I’m taking are responsible for the greater part of what is going on in my head during the night.

We started off back in Crewe, in West Street yet again but at the town end by the Jet garage. Someone had sent me a panoramic photo of the area and you could see just how bad the area was, with abandoned houses and demolition sites all around, particularly in the area between West Street and Richard Moon Street. It goes to show just what a horrible place Crewe is – something ironically that I had been discussing with Terry and Liz during the evening. I was down at that end of town because I’d had a message from Cecile that contained a file but my telephone wouldn’t open it, so I went down there because she had a flat down there where she lived with her mother. So walking down the street, I came across Cecile and I went in to see them and we had a good chat, not about anything in particular. Cecile had been given some money by her mother, some of which was Belgian money including a 20-franc piece which she had put on one side to make an emergency phone call if necessary if she needed help, which just goes to show how far behind the times Cecile’s mother was because you couldn’t even buy a cup of coffee with that in Belgium these days. But it turned out that Cecile’s mum hadn’t given just a couple of hundred Belgian francs in notes to Cecile, but also a couple of hundred Euros in notes too. I had a brief glance and it looked to me as if there were at least 500 Euros in there. Cecile’s mum had a huge stuffed gorilla which she was cuddling. I made the remark that I should have brought Strawberry Moose around for her to cuddle because he was missing her. Or maybe, they should both come round to my house to see him because Strawberry Moose is missing Cecile’s mother. Cecile’s mother interjected to say “well, give him a big kiss from me” and that sort of thing. At that point, I left the apartment to continue my travels.
These took me to the far north of Alaska or Canada with someone who started out to be Rachel (but it wasn’t her) and we were off driving somewhere and ended up in this town. Where we parked was on some kind of concrete quayside by a river that was running through an open culvert and which was a non-fishing river, and another car pulled up alongside up. In this car was a family consisting of a man and presumably his wife, with a daughter in her early teens and an older son. This “Rachel” girl and I had gone there to do a few shady deals which involved a couple of people belonging to the local ethnic group and these people had now spiked our guns, so we needed to be much more discreet. These native people needed to leave us and travel into the centre of the town, and so chose to travel by canoe down this river, their canoe being was fitted with an outrigger. It was important that this family didn’t see the canoe with its occupants, but the boy saw them. He started to say something about them not having the right to be in there, seeing as how it’s a non-fishing river, but the father tried to reassure him, saying that maybe they were just voyagers, but the boy thought that this was strange. He made the point that dawn was only just breaking and so if they had set out from a neighbouring village, they would have had to have set out in the pitch-darkness and that would have been impossible down the river in the canoe. This led to something of an argument. I ended up going for a walk with the mother of this party and we went for a good stroll around. she told me about the issues that she was having with her son – he was 18 and at college but was bone-idle. We were trying to access the internet but we couldn’t make a connection – all we had was a long length of telephone cable instead of an ethernet connection. Plugging in the telephone cable, we couldn’t make a connection. This was annoying the boy who complained that he needed to access the internet, but I asked him how he expected to access the internet without the correct cable. Despite that, he still carried on complaining. This woman was saying that he really was a spoilt child. At this moment, the girl appeared. There was a little bit of sun and so she went out to sit in it in a short-sleeved tee-shirt and jeans. We had a laugh, and said that we expected her to be in a bikini in a minute or two. The woman and I then set off to walk back to the car, through a crowd of people that were milling around on the pavement. One of them was one of my niece’s daughters. She wasn’t expecting me to be there so as I walked past, I gave her a cheeky wave, causing her to burst out laughing. She started to call me “dad” and say things like “how’s my son?” We had quite a laugh about that. But this woman was still going on about her son. I had half a mind to say that this is what happens when you spoil your son far too much and don’t impose any controls on him. Kids should be taught to fight for what they want, not to be given everything regardless. But I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
By now, I was back at Montreal airport, employed as a taxi driver, although I was living in Rope Lane in Shavington. We had been having huge discussions about how quickly we should be moving passengers on from there, how to recognise quickly the ones who are looking for a taxi and so on. We needed one full-time driver from 06:00 to 18:00 and another from 18:00 until 06:00, with others coming on for 12-hour shifts at 07:00, 07:30 and every half hour until about 10:00, and then part-timers taking over for short shifts until the very early hours when the airport quietened down. People who are on their own or clearly looking lost, we need to approach them and at least find out their names and find out if they are waiting for anyone, and at least rule them out of our work. It would help to identify our potential customers so much quicker. The daughter of my niece was still with us and this is one thing that we had notice about her – she was waiting for a fare and there were a couple of people loitering around, so we asked her who they were (“I don’t know”) and what they wanted (“I don’t know”). It was these kinds of situations that we needed to avoid. And so the next morning, it was time for work. I was in the airport waiting for a fare and a big man came up, wearing a kind-of cowboy hat rather like the fat bad-tempered man on Carry On Cruising. He wanted to go to the brewery in Montreal so we walked round to where I had parked my car, but it wasn’t there! We tried another two or three places of where I might possible have parked it and it wasn’t there either. I had to go back to the house to find the other driver and get him to take this fare. All of this had made a total nonsense of my ideas about being quickly away from the airport. Now I had to go to look for my car. The other driver had parked his car in the marketplace but I was sure that I had looked in there for mine, but nevertheless I had to go back there and look. All of these fine plans that I had had about improving our business, and I couldn’t even find my own car.
I then went off to a railway station somewhere – a private railway station on one of these council-funded lines. We were waiting for a train and there was chronic under-funding as you might expect with anything involving British Rail and Local Government. The Flying Scotsman was there, not only pulling freight trains but then going off to do some shunting in the absence of any British Rail shunter or any more-suitable locomotive in the yard.

The alarm broke the spell of all of this and I ended up downstairs via the bedroom floor.

I spent most of the morning typing up the notes of last night’s voyages – all … gulp … 1572 words of it. And then after lunch I carried on with merging in the blog notes to the voyage around North America in September 2015. I say “North America” because I’m now in the USA, Burlington, Vermont, to be precise, where I was in early September.

And apart from that, I’ve not done anything at all. Just taken it easy.

And thinking about life and all of that as I reflect on the news that someone so gifted and talented in his life as Keith Emerson was should find something so wrong in his life that he should choose to end it by a gunshot to the head. If that’s not enough to make anyone ban the sale of firearms, I don’t know what is.

0

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

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

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

Ohh no she didn’t!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so are we” said terry.

0

Monday 22nd February 2016 – I CRASHED OUT …

… for a couple of hours this afternoon. And I’ve absolutely no idea why. It’s not as if I’ve been up to very much, is it, just sitting here waiting for Godot or whatever.

Mind you, I have had a day that’s been hectic in certain respects. For a start, in this urge to clean out the dictaphone and bring this up to date, I’ve not only finished the notes for the voyage to Canada in 2015 (which I think that I might have finished off yesterday) I’ve also dealt with the trip to central France in August last year, the one to Germany and the Czech Republic in June, and I’ve cracked on pretty well with the trip to Canada in 2014, the notes of which were lost when the previous laptop crashed.

You can see that it’s been a pretty hectic day all in all, at least from that point of view.

Having a blood test thins morning didn’t help matters either. That takes it out of me too, in more ways than one. Quite frankly, I don’t see the point of them giving me all of this blood if they are simply going to take it out bit by bit.

But it was during the night that, as usual, everything happened. and I do have to say that it’s rather sad right now that I have to have any excitement in my life by vicarious means.

We started off last night on the most amazing nostalgia trip. Memory Land had nothing on this. It was back in my school days and I’d started to go to school in a really scruffy, oily pair of green shorts (I actually had a pair of these too) and and equally scruffy light grey tee-shirt. It all makes a change from the school uniform that we had to wear back in those days. After school, we set off home and it was raining. I had an old, short kind of raincoat thing that I was wearing to keep the rain off. A group of us decided for some reason or other to go home a different way and we ended up wherever we were intending to be a good five minutes before the others arrived. We didn’t know this at the time but it soon became clear. There was a rather large stationary Ford Pinto engine there that performed some task or other at the place where we were, and I was having a look at it. I noticed that some of the spark plug leads had been caught up underneath it and trapped. This told me that the other kids hadn’t arrived yet otherwise they would have noticed it and sorted out the leads. Another thing that I noticed was that the cam belt adjuster had become slackened off and the belt was twisted. Someone had evidently tried to turn over the motor and that had upset the valve timing as the belt was sliding around over the top pulley on the end of the camshaft on the cylinder head. I needed my tools to adjust it and set it correctly but before I could go to fetch them, the other kids turned up. I told them not to touch the engine under any circumstances until I’d adjusted it (ohh! The nostalgic delights of changing cam belts on Ford Pinto engines! If I ever had a quid for every one of those I’d done in the 70s and 80s I would be dictating this to a couple of floozies sitting on my knee in the Caribbean somewhere). While I was adjusting and setting the cam belt and the valve timing, a couple of girls from the “latecomers” came over for a chat. One of them was very, very young (not even in school uniform – she was blond-haired, wearing a blue and white checked summer dress with a very pale blue blouse) and I had a little chat with her. The other girl then came over to join in. She was probably in year 3 or 4 of the Grammar School where I went, and I would be in year 6 or 7 (7 was the final year at out school). She lived in Worleston, so she said, and had shoulder-length dark red (almost brown) hair and a lovely smile, and I’m sure that I know who she is but I just can’t think who. We had a chat that started off just being something general and then slowly developed into something more personal. She asked me what “A” levels I was doing and so I told her that I was studying Geography, History and English (I actually studied Geography, History and Economics, as well as both parts of the “General Paper” which was an option). She told me that she was very interested in journalism because that was what her father did. She collected photographs and autographs, and started going through her collection of photographs with me. There were many photographs of lifeguards at the beach and also older ones of old Victorian women, so we started to make a few jokes that today would be considered in rather poor taste (not that that ever would bother me of course – I can’t remember now who it was who said it but I’m a fervent subscriber to the comment that “nothing is ever in bad taste if it is funny”) such as “I bet that she’s felt the cold hand of death on her shoulder by now”. We ended up having quite a laugh about this.
The bizarre thing about this – or maybe it isn’t so bizarre – is that while I was on this little voyage, I was feeling quite warm and comfortable. Chatting to this girl was very pleasant and it made me realise that during my school days -and later on – what I had missed out on was a nice comfortable companion with whom I could relax like this. None of my girlfriends at school would ever have fitted into this little scenario, and much as I liked Nerina, it’s fair to say that we weren’t ever “accomplices” in this sense. I’ve been noticing that we do occasionally have little nostalgic nights like this and I was all for turning the clock back 45 years and going off to track down this girl with the dark red hair. It’s not as if Worleston is a big place, after all and with a farmer who is a journalist, they aren’t likely to be part of the dispersed farming community out there. The “Royal Oak” would be the place to start, or maybe the church, where the Reverend Lillicrap (and I am not making this up) used to hold sway.
After the usual semi-somnambulistic stroll down the corridor, I was back at school again. This time though, it wasn’t anything like as pleasant. I’d been charged with an offence that was rather disreputable and as a result I’d withdrawn from my usual social circle (not that I ever had much of one) and was living in my car on a cliff-top somewhere. I would merely change into my school uniform to go to school and then change back into civvies as soon as I could afterwards. I only kept in some kind of social contact with one friend (someone with whom I am still in touch these days), and that was because I could rely on him and he believed in my innocence. As a result, any indiscretion that I might (or might not) have committed had not reached the ears of anyone else and I was defending the court case entirely on my own. But this all was about to change when he told me that his wife (and he mentioned her name – and she is in fact his sister in real life) had somehow heard about the events, and forbidden him to keep in touch with me. I asked him if he intended to take any notice, to which he replied that he had to. He admitted that, although no-one else knew this, she controlled him quite closely, even weighing him every day to make sure that he wasn’t eating any sweets or anything else to which he wasn’t entitled. I found this all hard to believe and when I saw her bright yellow vehicle right across the headland, heading slowly towards where I was parked up, I waved at her and that caused a major eruption amongst all people concerned.

So after all of that, it was back into the land of the living. And I had to make my own bed and open my own curtains because we were having visitors today and Liz had a day of teaching. Perhaps it was that which wore me out so much.

But counting through the boxes of injections, there is about half of them left. I wish that they would hurry up and get it over with.

And I’d like to have my blood test results too. They STILL haven’t come. And I want to go off for an early night and a decent sleep. It’s a long way to Worleston in the dark.

0

Friday 22nd January 2016 – MY LITTLE 3D EMPIRE MADE THE NEWS …

… during the night. Someone was using my 3D Characters and settings to make some kind of party-political broadcasts in the real world. He said that he could name ten or so names of people who were up to no good in society. We of course said “such as?”, but when he replied, he named just three names which just goes to show how much rubbish is being spoken today. We can all think of three people without being prompted and he was trying to impress us with his knowledge and … err … exaggeration.
After this, we had Nerina putting in yet another appearance on our nightly voyages. We were still married, still together and we had a small child of about 18 months. We were both in the offices of the European Union doing something there. We had parked the car in the underground car park and we were on level 25, which was well-underground. We had had a good wander around the building and Nerina had gone off for a coffee in the small coffee bar there. I’d had to do something else and ended up being considerably delayed so I had to run like the wind down the stairs into this cafe but couldn’t see Nerina at all. But who was there was one of a family from Shavington (who on earth were they?), one of three boys, who gave me an estimate for the supply of some champagne and I was taken aback by this because it was one of the other brothers who was dealing with this. He was talking to me as if I knew what was going on, which I didn’t really, and anyway I was more interested in where Nerina might be. Suddenly, he clicked. “Ohh yes, it’s my other brother who should have brought you this, isn’t it? But he’s having to drive the tractor because the third brother is ill, so he’s given all of the paperwork to me”. At this moment, Nerina put in her appearance. She’d been in the ladies’, and on coming out she didn’t see me and so went straight off upstairs. I had to separate myself from these boys who were being quite friendly (and I was enjoying them being friendly too) to go off after Nerina. She had come out on the wrong level on the car park, 2 levels further down, and had to walk back up to the car again. When I caught up with her, we got into the car adnd I asked her what the plan was for the evening. She replied that she intended to go out and get drunk. I could see that she was totally fed up about something.Trying to cheer her up, I asked her to tell me exactly what she wanted really to do. “The weekend is yours!”. By now, Nerina had transformed herself into Liz’s daughter Kit. she was really, realy depressed and I felt like saying “why don’t we wait until Friday and you come up north from London and then we’ll go on to your family home in the North-East. I’ll run you back on Sunday evening”. Somehow, though, I couldn’t make the words come out. Anyway, we ended up going to see some friends of mine who ran a junk shop. There were all kinds of things there in the shop, including a set of ancient scales for weighing a baby. Tomake it work, you put the baby on the scales and thenjumped up and down on the floor to make it vibrate. It was something like an amusement ride for the baby so that was what we were doing with ours. Whilst all of this was going on, I was stroking their young black cat – a really friendly black cat. But then I noticed a really large and fresh flea bite on the cat, just above its eye. didn’t want to stay there after seeing that, especially with the baby there. The child wasn’t to happy about having to leave its game, and Ket was unhappy because I wouldn’t tell her why we need to go. And these people were unhappy too because we were having a good time and I especially enjoyed their company.
I was off to Finland later, with a guy from Stoke on Trent who once was a very good friend of mine. We’d been out in the wilderness and come back down the dusty road to rejoin the main road (something like the road junction at the back of Baie Comeau in Quebec where Highway 389 joins Highway 138). We turned left there and a couple of hundred metres further on, we needed to turn right at another major road junction by a fuel station. There was an enormous – and I do mean enormous – traffic queue here turning right as if there was some kind of road accident or other obstruction blocking the way. We were waiting for hours to move and in the end, we became thoroughly fed up and did a U-turn to go the other way. We found some fuel, because we needed it, and then returned to the road junction. Even though we had been away for ages, we found ourselves right behind exactly the same vehicles – a big silver tanker and a caravan come to mind. They hadn’t moved an inch. However, just as we pulled up behind them, the vehicles all started to move off. We turned round the corner and almost immediately had to stop at some traffic lights. We were in the third lane, with the vehicles that were going to be turning left 100 metres further on (it’s drive-on-the-rght in Finland of course). THis was however the wrong lane – we needed to be right over on the right-hand side of the road. I wound down the window on my side (apaprently I was passenger) and put out my right hand to indicate that we intended to pull out and muscle into the traffic on the inside. When the lights changed and everyone started to move off, there was no-one on the inside of us and no car within 50 yards of us. Plenty of room for us, I thought, so I told him to put his foot down and we can go. He was much more timid than that however, saying that there were too many cars. I would have gone, and so would many others, but the result of all of this hesitation was that we lost our place. There wasn’t room for ages and so we ended up sitting there. He wouldn’t carry on to the left either, do a U-turn up the side road and come back to the main road either so we just sat there, our right-hand indicator on, waiting for a space. And of course, the inevitable happened. A car coming up behind us, seeing the green traffic light, put his foot down, not realising what we were doing, and ploughed straight into the back of us.

So that’s enough travelling for one day, in my opinion. And I don’t know where it all came from either because I had a bad night’s sleep too – not going to sleep until very late and being disturbed by all kinds of things. In fact, when I went downstairs, I crashed out, slumped over the kitchen table until the nurse arrived.

Liz and Terry went off to do the shopping after breakfast, and I carried on building my 3D set for my practical work. You may remember that this course requires me to build a 3D bedroom and fit it out as far as is practical to go so that the occupant of the room can be clearly defined by the objects on view. I’ve worked out a stunner, which I’ll show you in due course. I’ve taken 160 snapshots from different camera angles, with the camera in the ceiling and slowly spiralling down to ground level, and what I need now to find is a free mvoie-maker program to turn them all into a short 10-second film. And my ending is a killer, even though I say it myself.

I’d run out of muesli too, so Liz bought me the stuff that I need, for I make my own. Porridge oats,, corn flakes, all bran, sunflower seeds, almonds, dessicated coconut, trail mix and whatever else happens to be around the house. The best way to start the day (if the blood-man comes on time).

After lunch I sat and vegetated for a while. I really don’t remember too much of what happened. I’m clearly not feeling myself these days which is just as well because it’s a disgusting habit anyway. But to bring me round, not only did Liz make a coffee but we had some more vegan Christmas cake too, and I’m all in favour of that.

I was in bed early too – by 20:30 too. Not one of my better days, this one. I’ve so much to do before Wednesday so I beed to get myself into gear. I’m not going to make any progress at all like this.

0

Wednesday 20th January 2016 – I HAD YET ANOTHER BAD NIGHT …

… last night. I was still awake at 01:00 and nowhere near going to sleep, although I must have done at some point because at 02:45 I was awake again and off down the corridor.

Between falling asleep the first time and going off down the corridor, nothing much happened. Or, at least, if it did, I know nothing about it. But between then and the next time that I woke up – round about 06:30, an enormous amount had been going on – to such an extent that I dictated almost 7 minutes of notes.

And this, dear reader, is what you have to sit through for the next few minutes or so.

We started off driving through a town somewhere – turning right at a set of traffic lights just before the centre. Once we’d turned, we noticed a big sports field on the left where there was a huge bowling competition taking place. All around the town and on the bus (because I was upstairs in a double-decker) there were people who all had little white lions (like the old Egg Marketing Board stamps) stamped on their body. The jacks had been stamped with the white lions and the marks on the bodies were where the people had been holding the jacks against themselves. A little farther on was a left turning where we swung around into the town centre and where were all of the shops. Just along this street was a branch of Woolworth’s (shows you just how old this all was) where we were heading but today it happened to be closed. Nevertheless, I found my way in and went for a wander around, particularly on the upper floors, having for some reason been separated from the others with whom I’d been travelling. But I was captured, and held as a kind of prisoner (during this part, I was actually a spectator, watching myself being restrained and tied up). The person who had imprisoned me had a heavy pole, something like a foot-length piece of sawn-off scaffolding tube and his intention was to use it to beat my head into a pulp. But thinking quickly, I said “hang on – isn’t that someone pulling up outside the building?”. He wandered over to the window to see and as he passed, even though I was still tied up, I managed to grab hold of the metal pole, wrestle it from his grasp with one quick movement and slosh him on the back of the head with it. I could then make good my escape.
We then descended into things that resembled even more like James Bond activities and I was partnered in these activities by a young girl who has featured a couple of times on my voyages. She was wearing a heavy dark blue hooded cloak something similar to Little Red Riding Hood’s cloak but with a much more pointed hood and which put her face well into the shadows, but I knew that it was she. I’d been searching through this house and ended up being accosted, and was being interrogated. I had to think quickly of a way to escape from this predicament. There was a an old vintage car in this room so I was thinking that if I could bolt some bolts though the holes in the sills so that the threads were protruding, and coat the exposed threads with a deadly poison, I could somehow contrive to have these people back up against the car, bang their legs on the exposed threads which would then inject the deadly poison into their bloodstream and that would be curtains for them (how I was going to do all of this whilst under constant surveillance didn’t appear to worry me, apparently). But while I was trying to work out all of this at the same time as answering all of these questions, I looked up into a dark corner of the room on top of the car but just underneath the ceiling, and there was the pointy blue hood and the dark shadowy face. I said out loud to the person interrogating me that it’s a shame that the girl (mentioning her name) wasn’t here with me because she would soon make short work of him – once he had backed up against the car, she would give him a real headache. His response was “don’t be silly – of course she isn’t here”. Of course, my little speech was to give the girl a clue as to what to do. It goes without saying that sooner or later, the guy in charge was leaning against the car, his elbow resting on the car bonnet while he was talking, and of course the inevitable happened. This girl wielded the scaffolding pipe (we still had that) to great effect. It was the matter of seconds to overwhelm the others and the girl and I made good our getaway.
I was back home after that and I had emptied out my van. There were all kinds of papers that needed to be sorted out, which I was doing. I’d left in the van a few books on submarines to read while I was on my travels but when I was going through all of these papers there was yet more stuff on submarines that should have stayed behind. One thing that I found was a rare postage stamp, a fidelity card for something, and a copy of a message – a parody of the “England expects” message issued by Karl Dönitz to his submariners on the eve of the surrender in 1945. I tucked this message into the plastic cover on the inside of my dairy thinking that I’d deal with this later. But with this rare postage stamp and fidelity card, I took them round to the girl who had accompanied me on my James Bond adventures. I knocked on the door and her mother (but it wasn’t her mother) answered the door, so I explained why I had called and asked if daughter was in. Daughter came bounding down the stairs with a huge smile on her face to collect these items. In exchange, her mother and granny (who was also there) gave me the post that they had been collecting for me in my absence and also a pile of used stamps. I was looking for Indian stamps as Bill had been looking for 50 rupees-worth to send off an application for something or other – and it didn’t matter if the stamps were used and franked or not.

From here I went down to breakfast and my injection, and afterwards carried on with some work on the laptop. But Terry said after awhile that “none of this is getting the work done” and proposed to go out and cut the rest of the wood that we hadn’t finished yesterday.

Working yesterday had worn me out but I can’t be an ungrateful guest, so I went out to help. I was there for another hour and a half or so and then we came in for coffee, having picked up some bread from the boulanger who came round today.

After coffee, Terry went out to carry on, but I was done for and that was my lot. I carried on with what I had been doing beforehand and then prepared everything for lunch.

Terry went out after lunch to price up a job and I stayed behind – I’m not up to all of this yet. I had a doze and then played around with my 3D program, had a doze and then did a pile more of my animation course. I’ve now finished week three (minus the practical work) and I’ve now started week four. I go into hospital next Wednesday and I want it finished by then.

Liz made a quiche for tea and I had an individual one, made with a kind of cheesy garlic and herb paste, together with baked potato and a kind of coleslaw salad. Really beautiful it was too. I do have to say that the food here is thoroughly excellent and I shall be very sorry to leave.

Now I’m relaxing, and then I’m off for an early night. I need one after yesterday’s and today’s efforts and the bad night that I had had last night.

And no 3D characters and no family members and no taxis in my voyage last night? I wonder where they all went.

And I wonder who will turn up tonight to accompany me on my travels.

0

Sunday 10th January 2016 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S MAGNUM OPUS …

… I suppose you are expecting something similar today. But Sunday is a day of rest and so if you think that I’m going to be working as hard as I did yesterday, typing out another 2200-odd words, then you are mistaken. You’ll have to make do with a mere 1556.

Mind you, Terry was back at work again this morning. Still a small leak from the stoptap under the sink. That’s down to a worn tap and the turning on and off yesterday has aggravated the wear. Being Sunday of course it’s not possible to find a replacement and so Terry resolved the issue simply by turning the tap fully-open, as tight as he could make it with a couple of spanners, and the metal-to-metal contact has done the trick. It means of course that you can’t now switch it off, but it won’t leak until the next trip to Brico Depot when he can buy a replacement.

Apart from that, I’ve been doing some of my 3D Animation course, although I can’t find the enthusiasm for this like I did with my course on Hadrian’s Wall, and on one of the support sites for the 3D program that I use, there’s also been a mega-sale for items that would fit a couple of my characters and seeing that I didn’t manage to treat myself to a Christmas present this year I treated my characters to a couple of new outfits. It’s an ill-wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good, even a 3D model character or two.

We had an excellent tea too. I’ve been having food fantasies again (I’m not sure why because I’m anything but starving being here right now), this time about boiled potatoes, broccoli and vegan pie. I’d even bought a head of broccoli last time that I was out at the shops. And sure enough, Liz conjured up something magnificent, consisting of vegan pie, boiled potatoes and broccoli. It really was a superb meal and I enjoyed every mouthful.

As for my nocturnal rambles, I suppose that you are waiting for something quite stunning, following the incredible rambles of the last few days. It’s not quite as dramatic as that because I imagine that whatever part of me goes off on these journeys is as exhausted as I am. But last night was certainly different.

I remember quite clearly going to bed, I remember switching off the laptop, but the next thing that I remember was waking up at 04:50 with the bedroom light still burning brightly. I must have been absolutely shattered to crash out just like that.

But I do remember quite a lot about my journey last night and, seeing as how at 05:00 I was wide awake after a trip down the corridor, I sat down to type it out.

I was in Belgium, in my old Vauxhall Senator, parked in Brussels in one of these large squares in front of a big building or monument with steps leading up to it. I’d rigged up some kind of temporary curtain out of a grey plastic sheet so that I could have some privacy in there while I had a doze but it wasn’t very effective. In fact, it was only when I installed myself in the back seat and pushed the surplus plastic over the back of the front seat that I was anything like comfortable. But from here I ended up in a police holding cell there, along with about 20 other young people of both sexes. It appeared that I’d been in a car with a girl called Annick (whose family name began with “C”) and she’d been driving but somehow in the confusion, I’d been arrested instead. After a while an officer came into the cell and said that he’d been in contact with as many family members as possible for all of the different people in the cell and that bail had been arranged for most people. When he called out their names, they would be taken out to sign the papers and then they could leave. And so gradually our ranks thinned out. And then some older woman came in and called out “Annick C….”. I explained that it was probably me, and explained the circumstances, so she crossed out Annick’s name and wrote mine down instead. I said to the girl standing next to me, a very tall, thin young blonde girl, very nervous, that it’s worrying when even a junior member of a foreign Police Force knows my name and my identity well enough to write it down without even asking me to give it. Clearly, I’m well-known to the Police in Brussels. And we ended up chatting, with her telling me that it was her first time ever being arrested and in a police cell. So I gave her some reassuring talk. An older man put his head around the door and called “Annick C…”, to which I once more replied that it was probably me, so he told me to come along. I gave this girl the “thumbs-up” sign to encourage her and set off with this old guy. He was clearly British, with a working-class Northern England accent so I asked him what he was doing here and how come he’d found employment in a foreign police force. He explained that he’d come over, ended up driving a bus full of children with behavioural issues, and “then we’d lost touch with each other”. He clearly seemed to know who I was but I had no idea about him. He took me into an office – a really big office with a huge table, about half a tennis court in size. I was to sit at one end and there was someone else at the other end. There was a small pedestal fan on a filing cabinet there, making a terrible racket so I asked if I could turn it off. “It’s my office” he growled.”Fair enough” I answered, “but I can hardly hear you”. He walked over to me and said “what would you do if I did this?” and gave me a huge kiss on the mouth, so I pushed him away and asked him whether he meant that for “Annick C…”. His response to that was to call someone else in, a big man in a pork pie hat, who proceeded to put my head in a head lock. I had realised by now that the purpose of this noisy fan was to flood the room microphones so that the police misbehaviour and the screams of the victims would be drowned out on the tape recording of the interview (this is a typical Belgian police tactic), but this headlock was puzzling me. It wasn’t hurting me at all or causing me any discomfort whatsoever, and I didn’t see the point of it.

So having finished dictating my notes, I snuggled back under the quilt and I was off again. This time, my father was there (my nocturnal rambles are becoming much more like a family reunion and that’s a frightening thought, if ever there was one) with his annoying habit of calling everyone insulting names. Anyway, I’d had enough of this so the next time he did it, I smashed a bottle across the back of his head and killed him. I found a large wicker basket, lined it with a large plastic bin liner, stuffed him into it and filled it with water. And then I hid it in the corner of the garage of an office where I worked. I disposed of his two dog leads (why would he have two dog leads?) anywhere about the place. As luck would have it, I found an identity document – not his but someone else’s – which resembles nothing like an actual identity document, and carefully scribbled out the owner’s identity details, making sure that I left just enough visible so that a really good investigator could read, with some effort, the identity, and then hid it near the body. Of course, eventually the body was discovered by some woman and the police were called. I was rather worried, wondering it I ought to have done so much more to hide the body and wondering if the identity card ploy had been careless, but I reckoned overall that it would run the police up a blind alley for a good while. I would have run much more of a risk by trying to dispose of the body just after I’d done the deadly deed.

I can’t believe the number of family members who have appeared quite recently in my nocturnal rambles. There were all kinds of issues in our family over the years. We weren’t really a family at all but, just like the family in the superb Frank Sinatra film Tony Rome, a “bunch of people living under the same roof” and in the end we made the decision that, like the Knights of the Round Table in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, we would go our separate ways. It was the most intelligent way to put an end to all of the difficulties that we were facing.

Since then, I haven’t spent any time thinking about them and they, doubtless, have returned the compliment and so what’s going on with them playing major supporting roles in my rambles?

Weird!

0

Wednesday 6th January 2016 – WE WENT OUT …

… this morning – all the way to Montel de Gelat. and all for no good purpose too.

I’d had to arrange an inspection of a fosse septique – a septic tank on behalf of Terry for some project that Terry had on the go, and this was for this morning at 11:30. And so we duly presented ourselves at the premises.

And waited

And waited.

Terry had forgotten his mobile phone and I didn’t have mine either, so in the end Terry went back home for his phone and the phone number of the person who should be visiting, leaving me in possession of the field for the moment.

It was absolutely taters out there, with a high wind blowing like crazy and I was frozen to the marrow. In fact, I spent my time sitting on a small electric radiator. But I made a friend and had company all the time I was there. A young ginger moggy came across for a stroke and, of course, strokes are second only to food in a cat’s order of importance.

When Terry returned with the necessary, the matter quickly resolved itself. It appears that the former owner lived in the Creuse and so he had the phone number of the Inspector for the Creuse region. To reach the property where we were, you have indeed to leave the Puy-de-Dome and enter the Creuse and turn immediately right, but the land straddles the border of the two departments and the property itself is actually back in the Puy de Dome. I hadn’t seen the postcode of the property until today, and I could see that the postcode began with 63 – the Puy de Dome’s number.

Anyway, the inspector had realised that too this morning. It’s out of his area so he’s not authorised to inspect it. He had left a message on the phone but of course, we didn’t have it with us.

So back here for soup for lunch and then in accordance with my usual agenda, I crashed out on the sofa for an hour or so. And that’s no surprise because I was exhausted after last night’s adventures.

In fact, last night’s voyage was so special and so well-detailed that I sat bolt-upright at about 03:30 to dictate it into my machine. And finding the batteries in there to be flat, I sat down and typed it out then and there, so that I wouldn’t forget it.

I was back in Crewe again, back with Nerina, back running my taxi business and I’d just moved house. I was busy trying to fit the stereo and the chests of drawers and the like all round the walls of one of the rooms in which I was living, but there wasn’t enough room so I was going to have to stack them some how one on top of another. I ended up with one of my huge hi-fi speakers (the ones that I had bought from a guy in Tunstall in 1992) stuck on top of something else in a corner behind the armchair. That would never do but it was the best that I could manage right now. Nerina came home from work in Stockport and told me to stop what I was doing as there was much more to do that was more important. In fact we ended up in West Street with Paul, one of my former drivers, going to the chippy for meat pies and chips. They weren’t particularly generous with the chips so I gave mine to Nerina, who expressed surprise at my generosity where food was involved. “Never mind” I replied. “Here we are in West Street with two more chippies within 100 yards. I’ll buy myself another portion”. So I went into the next chippy for two large portions of chips and gave one of those away to someone, but I was depressed that my “large portion of chips” turned out to be a very tiny portion of chips and a tub of baked beans. We carried on walking past the desolation of the south side of West Street (it was all being demolished at that time) and Nerina told me about a confrontation that she had had with a bailiff. It was over some money allegedly owed in Stockport but she had had a statement from Stockport Metropolitan Council to say that she had overpaid by £0:02. The bailiff accused her of having forged the letter and said that he was going to come round and “sort her out” with threats of physical violence. We ended up on the Elm Drive estate, having added to our entourage the guy who married my younger sister (twice in two nights?) walking back towards town, discussing the merits of the two pubs on the estate, the one on the roundabout (which of course isn’t there) and “the Brunel” (which is actually the Royal Scot but which was a white-stuccoed pub, nothing like the Royal Scot, and the real Brunel Arms is in, would you believe, West Street, where we have just been) down a side street. I said that when I lived in Elm Drive (which I did, for a short while) I went to the pubs out on Sydney Road which was dangerous for coming back because they switched off the street lights and we were always walking into things. Further on down Elm Drive, towards the town end, we went to the home of the girl who answered the telephone, and she joined our little party. We told her that if the phone rang, we didn’t have a car available for half an hour (which was rather pointless as she wouldn’t reach our house to answer the phone before we did). We turned into Middlewich Street and walked down the hill to the railway bridge at the bottom near Henry Street. Here in a triangle of waste land in between the railway line and the new road were a few vehicles parked up of which two interested us. One was a Volvo B10M coach with an Alizee body, M-reg (as in 1994) and carrying the name of a dance troupe, parked up just before the railway bridge in fact, and an old Volkswagen or Mercedes van dark blue with a white top and looking as if it had stood for years. There were crowds of people across the new road, milling around as if they were waiting to get into a night club, so we reckoned that we had better get a move on and get home to do some work – it was already 20:30 and the night was drifting away. But we were then embroiled in a (friendly) dispute about the quickest way to reach home. I was all for the short cut up Meredith Street but each one of us had his own favourite way to go.

And all of this goes to show that it’s nothing to do with Liz’s cooking, despite what I have said recently, because I had nothing whatever to eat yesterday that had any connection whatever with Liz’s culinary delights.

But as an aside, back in the mid-late 1970s (a good few years before I met Nerina) we would indeed go for these mega-rambles around Crewe on a Saturday night. Crewe used to have some really decent pubs (neither of the two pubs mentioned came into this category, by the way) but they were scattered right across the town. We’d inevitably visit three or four, having a quiet pint in each, but most of our time would be spent on foot walking for miles around the town, and a visit to a local chippy en route would be always on the agenda. Good beer, convivial company (there would be three, four or five of us), excellent food (because in those days the chippies in Crewe were really good).

A really good night out. There wouldn’t be the slightest hint of misbehaviour because whatever alcohol we had consumed in one pub, we would walk off with travelling to the next one. And, strangely enough, all of the walking that we were doing would keep us really fit.

Those were the days of innocence really. You couldn’t do it now of course. Firstly, half of the pubs have closed down. Secondly, the chippies have changed ownership and I’ve yet to find a Chinese chippy that can cut and fry chips like an old-fashioned English chippy (although the popularity of Chinese chippies these days shows that I’m clearly in a minority). Thirdly, and sadly, British society has changed for the worse. People no longer know how to drink responsibly. The aim seems to be to drink as much as possible in the shortest space of time and as a result, I’ve seen loads of reports about town-centres being no-go areas after 21:00. Not that I would know too much about that these days, and to be honest I have no intention of finding out.

But why am I becoming all nostalgic? I could understand it if it had been during my waking hours but there’s clearly something happening in my subconscious that’s bringing all of this to the fore.

So having woken up from my snooze this afternoon I made a start on my Animation course but I didn’t get far. I’m not as energetic as I used to be. We had tea and after a while I went off to bed – another early night.

I really can’t last the pace but it’s hardly surprising today. This mega-ramble around Crewe last night has totally worn me out.

0

5th January 2016 – BACK IN HOSPITAL

I told you yesterday that I had been summoned to the day ward today for a blood transfusion, so after at 7:00 am alarm and breakfast, I was off. There wasn’t much on the roads – at least as far as Montlucon – so I was lucky to arrive early and finding yet another good spec for Caliburn, right outside the hospital building.

And I’d remembered to take the second bank card too so that I could stop off at the bank on the way in. And now the Fighting Fund is looking a little healthier.

It was a good job that I arrived earlier at the hospital too because they were … errr … somewhat under pressure. I was lucky in being the first to arrive, for I could have the pick of the chairs in the day ward – right in the corner by the window by the power point. The others weren’t so lucky and to give you some idea of what was going on, our little ward for two people ended up with five of us in it – two on the beds, two in armchairs and one on a trolley. Maybe they REALLY couldn’t have fitted me in yesterday.

Putting the drain in my arm was another complicated manoeuvre that didn’t do me too much good and I can still feel it now.

We did have a stroke of luck though. Just after I arrived, the woman in charge of the kitchens came up to our ward to chat to the staff there just as they were counting heads for lunch. Hearing that I was “difficult”, she came over to chat to me about my vegan diet and, much to my surprise, at lunchtime I ended up with couscous, chards in sauce and a portion of lentil salad. It just goes to show what can be accomplished if you happen to fall in with the correct people.

Another surprising thing was that the blood was already there waiting for me. But it was freezing cold, so to warm it up I had to stick it up my jumper (and I bet that you think that I am joking too – the old traditional methods are much more effective than anything that modern science can come up with). And that meant that by 13:30 I was all done and dusted, and they threw me out.

Not too far though. I had to go up to the ward where I will be confined during my surgery, to pick up a letter from my surgeon. Of course, it goes without saying that it wasn’t ready (half a day is far too short a notice for a civil service secretary) but it did give me an opportunity to spy out the land while I was there. And I’ll tell you something – there are a few nurses up there who can sooth my fevered brow any time they like! There have to be some compensations for being seriously ill.

On the road again, I went round to Amaranthe to pick up some vegan cheese, only to find that it was closed for stocktaking, and to Leader Price to buy some Cheddar for Terry, but was sold out in both the branches that I visited.

I had more luck at the Clinique St Francois where I was finally able to pay my bill for the blood tests. And I’ll tell you what – I’m glad that I’m not having my operation there. The back wall of their clinic is the side wall of the local cemetery. I suppose that it’s quite handy for discreetly disposing of the surgical failures – a quick heave over the wall in the middle of the night – although it must be a discouraging view for the patients in the rooms at the back.

At Pionsat I picked up my outstanding medication, and so I went off to blag my way into the doctor’s for the injections that I need to have done to bolster my immune system (once the spleen goes, I’ll be relying on those to keep me going) but it appears than Bane of Britain has forgotten to bring the prescription with him.

But here’s a thing. Diesel at the Carrefour in Montlucon is currently 104.9 centimes. At the Intermarché in Pionsat, it’s just 99.9. It’s the first time that I’ve ever seen it cheaper there. Of course, I took the opportunity to fuel up – it’s over 100kms round trip to Montlucon and back even if I don’t go anywhere else, and that soon gets through a tank of diesel in Caliburn whose maximum range is about 750 kms or so. It’s a good job that I don’t have Strider here, who is much more thirsty and struggles to do 450 kms.

Back here I crashed out. I wasn’t up to anything at all. No food, no drink – nothing. Just like in the bad old days in mid-November. I had my injection and then crawled off to bed at some ridiculously early hour – even more ridiculous than the 20:00 of late.

Talking of bed, I’ve forgotten to tell you about last night’s adventures. I bet that you were counting your blessings, thinking that you had escaped from it all.

Not so lucky, are you then?

Anyway, last night was yet another night where there was so much going on and yet I can only remember a small amount of it. Going to bed at 20:00 or thereabouts just recently is certainly doing something for me.

We started off back at a house that I clearly recognised, but which I can’t now recall. I’d been somewhere in a car (and I can’t now recall which car) and by the time that I returned, the car was full of rubbish and totally untidy, not an unusual occurrence of course. I needed to empty the car completely before the long-suffering Nerina came back to witness the disorder, and my brother (what’s he doing here again?) came along to give me a pile of gratuitous advice. Nerina did indeed turn up, and sooner than expected too, but her car was in an even worse state than mine although that didn’t deter her from making a few acid comments.
I then moved on to another house where I was living with my family, although I don’t recognise this house at all. It was crammed with people and, furthermore, we’d let a room to three young men, a French guy (someone whom I’ve known for years but who bore more than a passing resemblance to a guy whom I know in Germany), the guy who married my youngest sister and a third guy, who may well have been the brother of the second. This had involved shuffling around the rest of the inhabitants and it was certainly causing a whole pile of confusion. It started off with me having to help a young boy of about 5 years old feed himself but that wasn’t working. He was being difficult about it and so I had to go up to the room where he had been sleeping to fetch something. He was one of the people who had been shuffled around but I had forgotten this, so I barged straight into the room where these other three people were. Back downstairs, by the time this boy had finished his meal, I reckoned that it was time for him to go to bed but he wasn’t convinced. There was only one clock in the house that was anything like reliable, and that was the bedroom where he had been sleeping. So up I went to check and, forgetting about the change of rooms, barged yet again straight into the room where these three guys were, without knocking. I was full of profuse apologies, to which they replied “it’s not a problem – it wasn’t as if we were doing anything”. My response was that knocking was a form of politeness (a comment that has a strange parallel with an event that occurred in “real time” a couple of days ago). Anyway, the young boy was correct – it was only 18:30 and far from being his bed time. It was however dinner time for the grown-ups and all of the family was there tucking in. And a few minutes later we were joined by our friends from upstairs who had to fight their way into the table as our family gives no quarter when it comes to sticking our snouts in the trough.

But all of this is really bizarre. There are several people making little cameo appearances in my night-time rambles. There are some to whom I’ve given no thought whatever for probably the last 45 years (if I ever gave them any thought back then), some people who wouldn’t give me the time of day in real life (and boy, could I tell you some stories about that), some people whose actions on the second plane totally contradict their actions on the first plane, and some people who remain totally true to type no matter on what plane of existence they are.

But never mind. As I have said before, and I’ll say again … "and again and again and again" – ed … my nocturnal rambles are much more exciting that what is going on currently in my real life, and that’s not something to be rejected.

I just wish that it was me doing the casting, choosing the characters who could take part in it. I’d have a much more exciting cast than this current lot (one or two people excepted).

0

Monday 21st December 2015 – WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT!

Last night, I had the worst night that I have ever ever had.

I told you that I went to bed as early as 20:00, watched a film and by 21:15 I was tucked up nicely in bed dozing off to sleep. But at 22:30 I was awake again, with a chronic indigestion – or, at least, what I thought was indigestion. And as time rolled on, the pain became worse and worse, spreading right across my stomach behind the lower part of my ribcage.

It wasn’t long before I was doubled up in agony – I say “doubled up” but that’s not really true as there was not a single position (that I found anyway) that was better than any other as far as the pain went. Within the space of an hour I was driven out of my attic into the bathroom where the proximity of the sink to the porcelain horse was very useful and was put to good use.

And that, dear reader, was where I stayed for a good hour or so even though it did nothing to diminish the agony. So back in the attic again, but 10 minutes later I was back in the bathroom.

This was clearly going nowhere (except into the bathroom) and so I ended up making sure that the route from the living room to the bathroom in the cellar was free, and then I settled down on the really comfortable sofa in the living room.

By about 03:30, having made several trips to the bathroom, the pain slowly began to subside. I remember it being 04:00 and then the next thing that I remember was it being 06:45 and the pain had gone. The alarm at 07:45 brought me to my senses (such as they are) and that was that. The worst night that I have ever had.

I had my blood test at about 08:30 and signed up to a scheme whereby I could receive my results by e-mail. Sure enough, at 17:30 they were there. The blood count has gone down further to 7.7. I was expecting a phone call from the hospital to call me back in, and although I did receive a call, it was to tell me that my Wednesday appointment has been put back to 16:30. Never mind, I’ll discuss my blood situation then.

strawberry moose sauret besserve puy de dome franceAfter breakfast, we had to hunt for Strawberry Moose again.

Today, he was in the sun lounge painting Christmas decorations. And it does have to be said that he seems to have more paint, glitter and Christmas stars on himself than he did on the decorations that he was painting.

Still, he gets full marks for trying.

Everyone went to the shops this morning, except for Terry and Yours Truly. We had a very relaxed morning watching the cricket in Australia. We had our usual argument too. Terry is all for this modern “slash and run” cricket whereas I’m much for the good old days of Geoff Boycott taking three days to score 20 runs.

We had a late lunch when everyone returned, and then I decided that I was going to do something that I detest – only doing it in the direst emergencies – and that was to go back to bed. And there I stayed until tea time.

The nurse has told me to talk to my GP about my blood results but I’m waiting until Wednesday at the hospital. The GP can’t tell me any more than I know already and all that she can do is to refer me to the hospital. And that won’t be any quicker than doing it myself on Wednesday.

story time strawberry moose sauret besserve puy de dome franceBedtime for the little ones came at about 20:00 and you can’t have bedtime without having story time first. It goes without saying that Strawberry Moose wanted to be involved in story time too.

We’ve ended up being nice and peaceful this evening, with nothing much going on except to sample Liz’s home-made blueberry biscuits – vegan of course. Just for a change, I’m not tired but then again that’s no surprise seeing as how I had a good three hours sleep this afternoon.

But it doesn’t matter what time that I go to bed, I still have to be up at 07:45 for my anti-coagulant injection, and I’m getting quite fed up of this.

-1

Thursday 17th December 2015 – ANYONE WOULD THINK …

… that it was me doing the tiling today, not Terry. Half an hour after lunch I was well out of it – two trips to Terry’s van and back with some stuff for here had finished me off. And back here, I was crashed out on the sofa at 18:00 and in bed by 19:15.

I’ve clearly seen better days – that’s for sure.

But a lot of this could be put down to the efforts that I had made during my nocturnal ramblings. I’d started off with something like a huge contemporary discussion about the qualities of different Roman emperors – and I can’t remember now with whom I was having this discussion. But from there I drove back (it’s good, this time-travel lark) to Stoke on Trent. None of the usual Clayhead characters out in an appearance unfortunately, but I do remember at a roundabout (it might have been one of the newish ones at Longton) I was confused by the exits, took the wrong one, and ended up on the road to Tunstall (a fictitious road of course but one that has featured on my travels before). It then occurred to me that there was one of these old-time sweet shops (just like there is in Longton) somewhere on this road and so I kept my eyes open for it. I ended up walking through this decrepit shopping centre-type of place to try to find it, to the accompaniment of jeers from several people lounging around – and what was that all about?
But back home I ended up chaperoning a young Shirley Temple-type of girl (as if I’d ever be asked to chaperone anyone of the female sex?) who was taking part in a singing competition that was to last all of the weekend. I asked her what would happen if she had to wait right at the end of the competition before it was her turn to sing, to which she replied that there were tons of things that we could do while we were waiting – have a party, go to the zoo, read stories.

No wonder I was exhausted!

So after my blood sample and a painful breakfast, we went off to Pionsat and the bank. I need to build up the fighting fund with all of this going on. Shopping at Intermarche was next, and there we met Clare, Julie and Anne who were off to Clermont-Ferrand for a fun day out. I fuelled up Terry’s van, seeing as how I had some money for once, bought my stuff for lunch and then shot off to the house for the tiling

When we arrived, the batteries were fully-charged already and the water temperature in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load for the surplus charge was slowly rising. That tells you everything that you need to know about the weather that we have been having just recently.

We had a visitor too! In the jungle that is Lieneke’s field opposite my front door we had a sanglier – a wild boar. We couldn’t actually see it but we could hear it grunting away and see all of the shrubs and bushes moving around as it prowled its way around. Magnificent beasts, these sangliers – I remember being up on my scaffolding when I was pointing the eastern wall and watching those two herds approaching each other and the eventual confrontation.

And while Terry carried on with the tiling, I did some desultory tidying-up. But my heart wasn’t in it and I couldn’t even cut straight today. In some respects I was glad when Terry decided to call it a day.

We’re a long way from finishing (I like the “we” bit, don’t you?) but the most difficult bits have been done. And I know that I promised you all a photo but Terry closed up the house while I was outside washing off the tools, so you’ll have to wait until next time.

And now back here, I’m in bed having an early night but I dozed off for an hour, woke up, and now I can’t go back to sleep again.

This looks as if it’s going to become a regular feature. I wish it didn’t, though, and I could have a decent 8-hours sleep.

-1