Tag Archives: tidying up

Wednesday 19th July 2023 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

… day today that’s best forgotten. In fact, I’m actually so surprised that I’ve accomplished as much as I have.

But start as you mean to go on. I was actually up and about (well, sort-of) before the alarm went off. I’d had such a disturbing dream that it actually awoke me and I ended up sitting bolt-upright.

After the medication and checking my mails and messages it took me a while to come to my senses – after all, I have so few left these days that it takes a while to find them, I suppose.

Anyway, once I was there or thereabouts I pushed on with the medical receipts. It was quite a struggle because there were so many, but eventually they were all done and dusted. Just one more lot to send off but I’ll wait until Friday when I’ll have bought this next month’s batch of Aranesp.

The next thing that needed doing was to fill in this form about my disability. That was a whole rainforest of paperwork that I needed to complete, and as well as that, I had to print off some stuff from the computer, like copies of Identity cards and electricity bills and the like.

But going through these forms, I’m surprised at what I’m entitled to claim. There’s no doubt that the elderly and infirm are much better off here than in the UK.

However, it goes without saying that I’m not claiming for much because I don’t really need it. If I can have a parking pass and a public transport ticket that will suit me fine. My medical expenses are taken care of because I’m classed as long-term permanently seriously ill

Ending up with a pile of paperwork like this, that led to some tidying up in here. And that’s not like me at all, is it? I suppose that I ought to be more focused on things like this but it isn’t easy.

A little later I had a shower, and then while the cleaner was here I organised the music for the next radio programme, paired it all off and then actually wrote out all of the notes. And that took me an age because I fell asleep in the middle of doing it. And fell asleep definitively too.

At some point or other I managed to transcribe the dictaphone notes. There were a couple of people who were being besieged, rather like Murdoch and Lamb (I actually mean Murdoch and Guyler) of the Men From The Ministry. When they began to run away from their hiding place they found that their enemy’s ship was anchored no more than a couple of feet away. They tried to dodge into a building just as the ship opened fire. It practically obliterated the building in which they were trying to hide but they managed to go inside what was left of it. another point-blank broadside brought them back out of the building again and they were obliged to surrender.

There was also a film about 2 guys who were playing cricket. Their team wasn’t particularly good but they were doing really well. There was a break and these 2 guys disappeared and no-one knew where they had gone. The people who ran the club were devastated because they were the only 2 who were doing any good. Then it turned out that someone checked the contents of a dustbin lorry. There had been a film that had taken place there about some dwarf warning the population about the dangers of eating when there were seagulls about. One of the guys missing from this group was a dwarf as well. There were 2 people talking about the perils of being in a boat who resembled 2 of the persons from this group who were missing so speculation was that they’d all been caught out doing something that they shouldn’t be doing and were arrested. They were now having part of their punishment which was to talk out loud on the radio about these things that they shouldn’t do

I was in bed last night really hot and felt the urge to spread myself right out to make the greatest surface possible so that I could transpire better but for some unknown reason I was really worried about disturbing whoever it was who was asleep on the other half of the bed. Eventually after quite a while I realised that there wasn’t anyone asleep there and that I’d just imagined there being someone else there in bed with me at the time

Finally, I’d been staying in an Air B&B somewhere and was due to leave. The final account had been e-mailed to me to pay. Someone looked at it and told me “do you know that you have to pay 11,000 (whatever the local currency is) for your stay in that place? That works out at £2,000 per week”. It was only a single room in a small house. I was astonished by that, so much so that I actually awoke

And after last night’s escapades I managed to have some food tonight. Plenty of stuffing left so I had a taco roll, the one that I should have had last night. I know that my meals are all very samey but they are all very nice regardless.

Tomorrow, with all of my work done, I can finally have a day working on Canada 2017. But as usual, something will be bound to crop up to disturb me. I mustn’t forget to order the Aranesp either. When I go into town on Friday to pick it up I can post all of my letters.

There’s enough there to keep me out of mischief for a while.

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Monday 17th July 2023 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… miserable day today. I’ve spent most of the afternoon flat out fast asleep on the chair in the office.

What’s even worse about this today is that I haven’t actually done anything or been anywhere. I have difficulty understanding why it would be when I’ve been out for a walk, but crashing out definitively like this when nothing at all is going on is even more of a mystery.

The night was rather turbulent though and I spent a lot of time tossing and turning around. When the alarm went off though I was flat out in the Land of Nod, away on a really interesting voyage but as soon as the alarm went off it evaporated completely and I can remember nothing at all about it.

Staggering out of bed I had my medication and then checked my mails and messages until the nurse arrived.

She gave me my injection and after she left I came in here to see what had been going on during the night. I was on some kind of school expedition to the South Pole. I had to tell everyone about it. When I began to talk the first thing that I noticed was that the chair on which I’d been putting my legs had disappeared so I had nowhere for them to be. I had to have a look and someone had moved them across my cabin to somewhere else

Some children had then gone into a maze and had somehow come between a mother bear and her babies. The Mother bear was naturally upset and was advancing towards the children who were retreating but of course coming closer to the bear cubs. In the end someone lifted up the children and put them on top of the maze so that the bear could go past to its baby. When the bear reached its cub it took the cub in its mouth and jumped up on top of the maze to where the children were. Everyone was fearing the worst but the bear was actually quite polite and pleased and made it known that it was really just thanking people for their consideration in getting out of the way.

When I awoke I found that I’d been doing something with an empty house that we’d taken over on behalf of the University. We’d been brushing out the stuff and cleaning it getting ready for an exhibition of the planets. My colleague went and had STRAWBERRY MOOSE involved, his handling was such as to stop him becoming dirty in case he soiled the seats or something. We had to put everyone into hand pumps to have this job finished because the quarry and doesn’t, or things like that. You never knew what was going to happen next.

And if you can make any sense at all out of that final note then please let me know because I can’t understand it at all.

Much of the day has been spent dealing with paperwork.

With having lost my physiotherapist I need to recruit another one so I have to find the prescription. I gave it to the previous guy but wondered if I’d kept a copy.

Despite having a good search around on the computer I couldn’t find one so I started to go through the paperwork in the Medical folder.

There were tons of stuff in there that I really ought to send off in order to claim my expenses, so I started to sort it all out into date order. Once I’d done that (and that took longer than it ought to have done too) I began to scan it in to the computer.

That’s a project that is going to take a while too. There were the usual breaks for my morning coffee and fruit bun (which is delicious by the way) and lunchtime fruit, and then of course I crashed out definitively for several hours

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper – the last one from out of the freezer. And it cooked really well too, 20 minutes at 160°C in the air fryer.

There’s plenty of stuffing left so it may well be another chili sin carné on Wednesday.

With the bedroom looking like a total tip wit al of these papers floating around, I’m going to bed and leaving everything in a mess.

Tomorrow, if I wake up, I’ll be finishing off my scanning and then maybe submitting my claim for reimbursement. I’ve run out of Aranesp too so I mustn’t forgt on Thursday to phone up the chemist and order some more. That’ll mean that I’ll have to go into town on friday and that will probably do me good.

But I’ll worry about that tomorrow. I have enough to worry about right now.

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Thursday 29th June 2023 – I’D BEEN OUT …

… last night walking in the countryside and seen a car that was being pushed about by this enormous ginger cat, really enormous, probably bigger than the car. I watched it for a while then carried on walking. I came across a grey tabby, a normal-sized one. I began to stroke it and it seemed quite friendly so I asked it where its food was. It led me round to someone’s front door where there were a couple of empty bowls. I said “that’s why you’re friendly then is it? You have no food out”. I was giving it a good stroke when the alarm went off and awoke me.

As it happens, i’m surprised that I was in such a deep sleep because for some of the night I was in total agony.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I was out at the hops the other week I had a searing pain in my left leg followed by a heavy fall. While I was in bed I had exactly the same thing, and not once but twice. That was what I call agony.

When the physio came round this afternoon I told him about it but he was at something of a loss to explain it. But that’s no surprise really, I suppose.

But meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bedroom I fell out of the bed when the alarm went off and went to perform my ablutions. And after the medication I came back in here to carry on with some work.

And I’ve been a very busy boy today and accomplished tons of stuff.

First thing was to go through and sort out the European Paper Mountain that has been building up, and file everything away. Not before time either because some of this stuff really did have whiskers on it.

Next thing was to do the accounts. Not only do I have to pay the cleaner but I have to do the paperwork that goes with it. I forgot last month so there was two months worth of that to do.

Next step was to fill in a form that my Belgian bank needed, and then to scan it and send it off. While I was at it I came across a couple of e-mails that I’d received and hadn’t answered so that was the next task.

While we’re on the subject of forms filling in … “well, one of us is” – ed … there was a form that the French Government needed. I could do it by going into my “personal space” but I don’t have an access key so I had to telephone them.

And when I finally made contact I was number 24 in the queue so I sat down to read “War and Peace”.

Eventually I spoke to a human and we did the necessary on the telephone. He reminded me that there was a payment outstanding so that was the next task, followed by a shower as the physiotherapist would be coming.

There was probably much more than that too, but I finished off by enrolling on my Welsh course for next year. Level one of the “Advanced” course, although it doesn’t seem much like it. I hope that all this stuff for which I’ve signed up throughout the Summer actually does me some good.

Right now I really don’t have any idea about what’s going on. I’m working on the principle that if you throw enough whatsit onto a wherever, some of it might stick. But that’s no way to run a business.

There was some more stuff on the dictaphone too from during the night. I was driving a coach for a local coach firm in Crewe for whom I did some work at one time during the winter when there was no work at SHearings. It’s the first time that I’ve driven a coach for nearly 30 years. I had to do a whole series of pickups around different places in Crewe. I suddenly realised that it’s 30 years since I’ve lived in Crewe. I don’t know where one or two places are and all the road layouts changed so what I might possibly have done years ago in order to go to the various places will all be different now. I don’t have a clue how I was going to do it. I got into the coach and drove it through the Flag Lane area and down Broad Street. When I reached the top of broad Street I had to do a right-left shunt into one of the streets there but I suddenly realised that it probably would have been better if I’d gone the other way but it’s a bit too late now. In the middle of all of this the owner’s wife called me up on the radio to ask me how long I’d be before I arrived at the pickup point. I was obviously later than I should have been. I just told her “a couple of minutes” but this was starting to become extremely uncomfortable one way or another with all of this that I didn’t know and hadn’t done for years.

After that I was in Brussels last night with a couple of people. One of them had a friend who worked for the European institutions. We were driving around the city. On the way back I pointed down the street towards the Parc Leopold, explaining that that was where the Parc Leopold was and where her friend worked. As we drove a little further on we went over into an area that was supposed to be Schaerbeek but wasn’t. I pointed out the beautiful Town Hall, which amazed them. We headed on back for my apartment.

At some point or other I’d become an MP and theyw ere discussing the thing that I’d done in my constituency. I explained that I’d been away for a couple of weeks but before I went I ordered a pile of tickets for some of them to visit the Parliament. I’d been to the bank to organise some money. I should really go to pick it up but at the moment I’ve only just come back and need to regroup my strength before I go out to do something like that.

Later on I was walking down a street somewhere last night. There were shops and everything, a new parade of shops set at 45° on to the road further down towards the end. I was on my way down there and noticed that one of these shops was full of old motorcycles that had been recovered from barns etc and were up for sale. I was just about to stop for a good look when I had a really bad attack of cramp in the left calf again that awoke me. Yes, fancy that! Just as I get to the interesting bit.

As it happens, I miss my motorbike. When I came to Belgium I had a little Honda Vision scooter and at one time a big Honda CX500. I enjoyed driving that around the countryside in Northern Europe and one thing going through my mind was to buy another one at some time.

I have a CZ 175 down on the farm but it’s not really suitable for what I had in mind. But now even that is out of the question.

While I was rummaging around in the Land That Time Forg … errr … the fridge, I noticed some soya, carrot and lentil burgers that the dinosaurs must have left behind. One of those with some rice, veg and a pile of very thick onion gravy made a lovely tea tonight.

That’s one thing that you can say about round here – no matter how tough things might be, there’s always some good food to eat.

Tomorrow if I’m feeling better I’ll walk into town for a bit of food and post off the cheque that I wrote out today. And then in the afternoon I have the meeting of the owners of this building. I must make sure that my 250/10,000th of this building is adequately represented.

So I’d better have an early night. Here’s hoping that I can actually have a good night’s sleep for a change.

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Tuesday 23rd May 2023 – REMEMBER YESTERDAY …

… when I said that I was feeling that my injections weren’t doing what they used to do?

You probably won’t believe this, but I promise you that it happened. But this afternoon I had a phone call from the hospital in Leuven.
“Over the last two weeks we’ve been examining your medical results from your last visit to the hospital. We’ve noticed several anomalies in the tests and so we want you to have your Aranesp injections every week instead of every fortnight starting from next Monday, and for your doctor at home to have blood tests taken every four weeks to control the results”

Things are obviously heating up around here now. So whatever will happen next?

Actually, I know what didn’t happen. And that was that it was today, not Thursday, that I should have had my appointment with the nerve specialist but I mixed up the dates. So I’ll have to contact him tomorrow too and rearrange the appointment.

It’s been one of those days where not all that much has gone right. For a start, I didn’t beat the alarm this morning. I’d had a late night but even so, it’s not very often that I sleep right through until the alarm. But at least, I awoke in bed rather than on top of it.

And then I couldn’t get going. It took an age to finally come round into the Land of the Living and start to prepare for my Welsh lesson.

And then we had a tragedy. The college at Mold doesn’t have much money so we’ve been making do with whatever on-line video conferencing has been available. And the one that we used until recently revoked all of the free licences so we had to go elsewhere.

The only free video-conferencing that they could find is one that’s very resource-hungry and it won’t run on any of the portable computers around here (there are, for various reasons, five of those that work at the moment, including the one that I bought in desperation in North Dakota in 2019).

However, luckily, ages ago I’d bought a cheap webcam so I had to configure all of that and run it off the big desktop machine, something that I didn’t want to do.

And then to configure a microphone to run directly off the computer because everything here usually runs through various mixer desks

In the end I missed half of the lesson with all of this messing around but at least it worked. And once the lesson was up and running it passed off quite well too.

This afternoon, sorting out a few things that I needed to do, I came across a football match that I’d missed from 2 years ago, Caernarfon Town v Barry Town in a Europa Cup playoff match. So despite everything else going on, I took a couple of hours off to watch it.

And in news that will surprise almost everyone (because it certainly surprised me) I carried on with what I started last week and did some more rearranging of the bedroom. It’s starting to look a bit more like home now, which is always nice.

After a good session on the guitars, I had a listen to the dictaphone. Despite being stark out during the night there was some stuff on there from a little voyage. There was some kind of case going on about a large company where there was some manipulation about to take place with the shareholding in respect of a battle over who had control. Whilst I didn’t fully understand the implications of what was happening, it all sounded extremely suspicious to me. When I was looking through some paperwork I found that the company had been brought to the attention of the authorities on another occasion in respect of something or other underhand and was undergoing investigation. I thought that I should make a report of this conversation and pass it through to whoever it was who was investigating it but as I couldn’t grasp the implications of it and couldn’t really understand much of what was taking place, it was very difficult to write a note. I thought that the more I keep it waiting while I make up my mind what to write, the more distant this is going to be and the more I’m going to forget. It’s not going to help anyone by me waiting for too long. I need to pull myself together and write something down immediately

After the ‘phone call from the hospital and missing my nerve specialist, the physiotherapist came round. He gave me a really good workout – the longest session that we have had so far and I was exhausted at the end of it.

Tea was a taco roll with rice and veg, but the cooking session isn’t over by any means. There’s not very much in the way of leftovers for a curry tomorrow night so as I have plenty of tofu and some lentils, I’ve set the slow cooker on the go.

The lentils are being cleaned right now and as soon as I’ve finished this, I’ll take them out of the slow cooker and rinse them, and then put them back in with the spinach-flavoured tofu that I have and a load of spices, and leave it all to marinade in the slow cooker until tomorrow evening

That should make a really good curry, and I do have to admit that I’m in the right kind of mood for one of those.

In fact, anything to distract me because I’m not very happy about the idea of doubling the dose of Aranesp. It’s the medicine of last resort and there’s a warning that it is “recommended for patients with chronic kidney failure or cancer to use the lowest possible dose”.

Over the last year or so I’ve gone from 20mg a week to 60mg a week to keep me going and I’m not sure where you can go after all of this.

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Friday 19th May 2023 – AT LONG LAST …

… the internet is back up and running, as you might have noticed.

What has apparently happened, as the technician who came round just after lunch told me, was that there was a short-circuit in one of the apartments that had fused the main installation in the building.

They had repaired the installation but the short circuit persisted so they had to disconnect the circuit and gradually reinstate it apartment by apartment until they could find out which one it was.

Of course, it was in one of the apartments that is a “second home” for someone from Paris who wasn’t here so it couldn’t be fixed until they’d contacted the apartment owner and found a keyholder so they could go in, and of course it was in the circuit before mine which meant that I was disconnected while all of this was going on.

Whether that’s the case or not, I don’t know. But it will explain why the connection flickered on a couple of times quite briefly during all of this.

But every cloud has a silver lining, and it’s a real ill wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good. It gave me an opportunity to catch up on a mountain of outstanding work, which isn’t all done but it’s still progress, and also, because the technicians were coming to check my installation, it meant that I had to tidy up the bedroom. I even had the vacuum cleaner going for a while.

And while I was tidying up, I found the missing spare battery for the NIKON D3000 that I lost a long time (as in several years) ago. It had fallen underneath one of my bookcase units.

So how did I celebrate everything? Well, while I was in town this afternoon I treated myself to an ice cream. I felt that I deserved it.

Especially after last night. I was so engrossed in a couple of tasks that it was long after midnight when I finally crawled into bed. And when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was stark out. It was an effort to haul myself up out of bed before the second alarm went off five minutes later.

Mind you, after the distance that I travelled durning the night, I was surprised that I made it back in time for the alarm. At one point I was living with a group of Mexicans from 100 or so years ago, the time of the Revolution. We were living on the margins. We weren’t actually revolutionaries or criminals. I can’t remember most of this but there was one part where we were in a cave and there was some kind of event taking place concerning someone who had made a promise that he’d pay to have his wine crop blessed and fruitful but hadn’t done so. And so they held him to submitting his youngest daughter, who was 10, to be sacrificed. He had to fill in all this form to state about her etc and that he was willing for her to go and that he recognised that he was in default for not having thanked whoever it was properly for promoting the fruitfulness of his crops

Did I mention the story … “no you didn’t” – ed … about the 2 girls who had tried to buy some wine from an off-licence to get a teacher at school into trouble? The server recognised them and wouldn’t sell it to them. He had his revenge quite accidentally. It was the school outing and he’d forgotten to tell the parents of one of these girls. She hadn’t gone to school that day – she was paying truant. She thought that everyone else would be at school and cover for her but of course not being there on a day when there were so few students her absence was noticed and someone complained to her parents. When this all came out, the shopkeeper had forgotten to tell the parents about the trip as well, he said “don’t forget that I remember you from the day when you were in my shop so be careful not to make a fuss. You can see why karma has caught up with you”.

And then I had to go to meet someone in the centre of London so Aunt Mary had given me a book, an ancient book about Civil Engineering that she wanted to sell and have some money. All of the booksellers were around Angel Bridge Railway Station. I arrived at the Metro and the guy in the ticket office saw me coming. He had a ticket all ready. I asked for a return too but he replied “no. This is a weekend ticket and you can use it any time like but you’ll have to hurry. The train is in”. I took the ticket, paid for it and dashed downstairs but missed the train, found that I was on the wrong platform, walk back up halfway and enquire of the guard or look at the sign to find myself on the correct platform ready to go. But there was something else in this dream about someone being pregnant. They were discussing the pregnancy and talking about gifts that they should buy. One of the girls was very upset that someone else had been chosen to buy the nappies etc because she said that she didn’t have all that much money. That would have been an ideal present for her bearing in mind her shortage of money.

And we’ve had quite a few dreams when I’ve been wandering around the Underground in London, haven’t we?

Finally I had to go to do some research on Emerson Lake and Palmer. I found someone who had some information on them who lived in London so I went down. She was a bus conductor on the buses. Rummaging around in her office I came across a book that was an assembly of photocopied press cuttings going back all the way to 1967, news articles and everything. It was an absolute goldmine and I was enthralled reading it. It mentioned a whole load of clubs and places in London that you could see from the window of this woman’s house. I was there making notes. When she came up onto the top deck of the bus to show someone some damage that needed to be repaired I told her about the book and told her that on no account was she to let it out of her sight. It’s something that she really ought to keep for posterity. When I finished I was going back downstairs to her house. They were talking about a car going for an MoT. I thought “I’m not doing anything this afternoon so I can take it”. I put the book in my rucksack hoping that no-one noticed and went round to see about this car. It turned out to be a pedal car for children. I thought “this is strange” but I’d already offered now so I’ll have to go. I asked her where I’d go. She replied “turn out of here, go up the hill to the roundabout and it’s the 5th street on the right down there”. I was trying to make a mental note of this but it sounded like more than 5 minutes away but I was already committed now so I’d have to go and do it. This book of press cuttings is a little gold mine. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, especially in a dream.

After the medication I came here and slowly unwound myself and then attacked another project. A while ago I’d found the soundtrack of an obscure German rock band that had performed at one of the Hawkfests some time ago.

Back in those days technology wasn’t what it is today and this was full of holes from a worn recording tape. Using the techniques that I’d been practising just recently about “cutting in” pieces of music from elsewhere in the track, I set about repairing the holes. It wasn’t easy, but I managed in the end to make something quite presentable and you’d never find the joins. Even I was impressed.

There was a break for coffee and a fruit bun and I do have to say that the fruit buns that I made in the week are excellent. And as for the biscuits, that I have yet to mention, they have really worked and are even better than the chocolate ones that I made a while back

By now it wasn’t far off lunchtime so seeing as I was expecting visitors I started to prepare for a shower but bang on the dot Rosemary rang me for one of our marathon chats.

Just as she finished, Christian from the radio came round for the radio programme that will be broadcast this weekend. We had a drink and chat, and he told me about a local musician who is looking for a bassist. That piqued my interest, as you can imagine. It’s quite lonely here sitting in my bedroom playing with myself.

As soon as he left, the technician came round and checked that everything was working properly, and once he’d gone I could finally have my shower.

It was a painful walk into town to find some mushrooms for my salad tonight, and whet there were were pretty grim. Mind you they had some of those small peppers so I bought a couple for future use.

Next stop was the estate agent to drop off this paperwork, and then the long painful walk back up the hill to home, punctuated by a call at the new ice cream parlour that’s just opened

Back here I cleaned the peppers and put them in the freezer, and finally the physiotherapist turned up. His “marathon session” turned out to be 20 minutes but he had me working quite hard. I was glad when he left and I could have my hot chocolate and delicious ginger oatmeal biscuits.

And then , regrettably, I crashed out for about an hour.

Liz awoke me and we had a chat on the internet (now that I have an internet on which to chat) for a while and then I ended up with a late tea. Chips and mini sausage rolls cooked in the air fryer with a salad.

The mini sausage rolls are starting to run out now so I’m going to have to search for a vegan savoury stuffing so that I can make my own. Puff pastry is quite time-consuming and difficult to make so I might have to by a roll of ready-made stuff and use that.

So shopping to morrow, so I’d better have an early night. I’ll pop into Noz and see what there is there on offer. I could do with a change of diet. I’m still wading my way through the asparagus tips that they had but there are bound to be other exciting things.

Mustn’t forget the vegan yoghurt either. I’ve run out of that and it makes a lovely addition to my leftover curries. Things are definitely looking up around here.

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Tuesday 16th May 2023 – IF YOU CAN …

… read this, then normal service has been resumed and we have our internet back. Round about 08:00 this morning when I was trying to do something interesting, the internet went “phut”.

Having contacted the Internet provider, they informed me that there was a “technical issue” and it will be out until at least Wednesday morning. As a gesture, they have offered us 200mb of mobile internet per day via our smartphones, but have you ever tried to type out on a smartphone keyboard the rubbish that I churn out?

Anyway, I had another more reasonable night last night and that makes quite a change. It’s a shame that I was rather busy and ended up not going to bed until later than I intended. It would have been quite nice to have had a longer more reasonable night.

And that’s not all either. I awoke bolt-upright at about 06:25 and couldn’t go back to sleep. Consequently, when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up and about.

with the internet crashing out, I wasn’t able to do anything of the things that I needed to do and so in the end I transcribed the notes on the dictaphone from the night. I was with 2 friends at some point. We were driving somewhere down a narrow lane. As we continued a cement mixer came towards us. For some reason he had a change of opinion and decided to perform a U-turn and return the way that he had come. He stopped and reversed off to the side of the road ready to pull back round the other way but the bank of the road gave way underneath him and the lorry fell over on its side. We dashed over there. When we arrived he was busy extricating himself from the wreck. We asked him if he was OK. he replied “yes, there’s no problem”. We then wanted to know if there was anything that we could do but he couldn’t think of anything that needed doing. He could quite happily arrange all of that himself. To be on the safe side I took his phone number and gave him mine. I said that I’d phone him in half an hour and se what he was up to. where this happened was near a railway line. Just as we were talking a 4-4-2 tank engine fitted with condensing apparatus went past on the railway line obviously pulling an old London Underground train. We climbed back into our van and set off. These 2 people with me, 1 was a guy and 1 was a girl. They were a couple. I know who they are but I just can’t think who.

There was a group of us going into the house. We’d been out shopping, buying stuff. As we went in, one of the people noticed that my shoelaces were undone so he bent down to tie them for me. Of course I had a lot of trouble with my legs. Where he put his hand was right on one of my sore spots. I told him to stop, that he was hurting but he couldn’t understand and carried on trying to tie my laces. I was going berserk. I told him that I had cancer. He replied that I must be imagining the pain. For some reason it became a very complicated thing. In the end we went in. He was sulking somewhat. He asked “what about that think we were going to do if we had the part?”. I replied “I don’t have it but I know that it’s in here. It can’t be anywhere else”. He sat down and looked at his watch and made a note of the date and time, sitting there with his arms folded waiting for it to be produced.

With not much to do until my Welsh lesson, I did some revision, However, the trouble is that with having a teflon brain, nothing sticks to it and I needn’t have bothered really. My memory issues are quite annoying. And it’s strange – I can remember the words of some kind of extremely obscure rock song from the mid-60s but ask me why I wanted to go into the kitchen 5 minutes ago.

Trying to have a Welsh lesson on a smartphone isn’t easy either but it went so much better than I expected, and far better than when I tried it in Canada back in October.

Once the lesson was over, I had a really big baking session.

There is now another pile of fruit buns, most of which are in the freezer waiting for another day, and there’s a mountain of lovely biscuits. And I DO mean “lovely”, because I sampled them.

It’s the basic 4/8/10 recipe (sugar, vegan butter and flour) with vanilla essence, fleur d’orange, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking powder and yeast.

Added to that was some diced fresh ginger and then some honey, and several tablespoons of oatmeal to restore the consistency after the addition of the honey.

You won’t find me telling you about times and temperatures because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, my oven is pretty much hit-and-miss and nothing is consistent. Here in this apartment, it’s all done by trial and error.

While I was waiting for everything to happen I sorted through my collection of herbs and spices. And just like the bathroom stuff at the weekend, I found that I’d actually bought the spices that I needed when I was there on a previous occasion and had forgotten about them.

Ahh well! See my bit about “memory” above.

The rest of the day has been spent dealing with the dictaphone notes from when I was in hospital. The coughing, spluttering and rasping throat were difficult to decipher so I hadn’t really touched them until I would feel more like it, so I had a bash today, with nothing better to do.

There are still plenty more to go at of course – this isn’t something that will be done in 5 minutes, or even in the next week or so. It’s taken me 6 months to reach this point.

When the physiotherapist came round, I was actually … errr … relaxing, so he awoke me. But he needn’t have bothered because my neighbour in this building, whon he also sees, has had a bad fall and he’ll be spending all of his time with her.

How many sessions is this that he’s missed with me just recently?

Tea was a lovely taco roll with rice, using some of the stuffing left over from yesterday. There’s still a bit left so I’ll have a leftover curry tomorrow, with one of my naan breads from out of the freezer.

Looking back (and forward) to my meals just recently and my cooking and baking, things are definitely taking a turn for the better around here. Living down on the farm was enjoyable when I was fit and healthy, but cooking was somewhat limited and for obvious reasons too. Things are so much better here and when I eventually have a real and proper kitchen things will be even better.

But that’s something about which to worry on another occasion. Right now, I have things to do before going to bed. And with a bit of luck, the internet might be back up tomorrow and I catch up with whatever needs doing.

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Monday 15th May 2023 – AFTER ALL THAT …

…I said last night about my radio programme, I did actually finish it today, and before tea too.

Mind you, it was a case of “only just”. There wasn’t all that much time left.

As I said yesterday, the trip to and from Leuven is really tiring and trying to do it in three days instead of four (missing out on my day of recovery following my treatment) is just contributing to the problems.

However, knowing that the walk from the hospital back to the station is possible, the shorter walk to and from the old place where I used to stay will become theoretically possible. The major issue though is that it’s far away from places to go to eat, and even farther from the shops if I wanted to buy my own food.

However, there’s bound to be a solution somehow, I reckon.

Anyway, when the alarm went off this morning at 07:00 I was stark out and isn’t that a change? In fact, by the looks of things I must have had a good night. I can’t really remember too much in the way of disturbances.

After the medication I made a start on the radio programme. But I wasn’t really in the mood and there seemed to be plenty of distractions to divert me from the job at hand.

One of them, which will come as a huge surprise to many people, is that I rearranged things in the bathroom.

Having gone overboard at the weekend stocking up on bathroom products that I didn’t really need because I’d stocked up the last time that they’d had a sale, I was running out of place to put them. And so that was a nice little job for a while.

And I do stress the word “little”. The way things are at the moment, I can only work for about 10 minutes and then I have to go to sit down for an hour to catch my breath.

No physiotherapist today. he sent me a message to say that he’ll be coming on Tuesday and Friday this week. That’s despite me saying to him that I’d like him to come on the same days and at the same time all the time. I can’t do with this continual disruption. Of course, I didn’t get the message until I’d had a shower and a good clean-up, but I don’t suppose that prettying myself up is a bad idea.

Another thing that I’ll have to do tomorrow, straight after my Welsh lesson, is to bake some more biscuits. I used the last ones today. I have plenty of fresh ginger and plenty of honey, so I might go for some kind of honey and oatmeal biscuits. But I don’t think that anything will be as good as those chocolate biscuits that I made a while back. They were special.

So with the radio programme finished, I had a listen to the dictaphone. But that was rather disappointing. There was something to do with a calendar and some cats last night but that’s really all that I remember. I can’t remember a thing apart from that.

And then I was on my travels again later on and that evaporated too as soon as I took hold of the dictaphone. I’m really not doing very well at the moment remembering all of these and I’m really puzzled as to whether any of my favourite companions have been coming to see me and slipping away without me remembering. Wouldn’t that be a tragedy?.

Finally, I’d heard a noise outside my apartment so I went out to see. There was a small kitten in the gutter, a tortoiseshell kitten that was crying. It looked as if it had been abandoned and was starving. I went over to look at at and while I was looking at it, another one appeared. A group of people assembled. They said that they hadn’t noticed these kittens around before. I went to go back into my apartment but noticed that I’d left the front door open. I walked in and could see kitten footmarks in the hall. I followed them into the living room. These 2 kittens had come inside and had started to make themselves comfortable. I couldn’t grab hold of them and put them outside so I had to sit down and ponder my next move. One of them came to sit on me and began to purr. I thought to myself “it looks as if I’ve acquired a couple of cats, doesn’t it?”.

One of the plans that I have for my new apartment is to think about whether I can have a cat. If I’m not going on any more mega-voyages to North America and not going so often to Leuven, it’s something that wouldn’t be impossible.

But the amount of time that my subconscious has been dwelling on the question of cats, maybe there will be one or two here sooner rather than later. Some people whom I know in the USA have a Serval, an African savannah cat, and that would be something really interesting to have around the area. Have you seen the size of them? It would scare the tourists and holidaymakers to death.

Tea was a stuffed pepper, the pepper coming from out of the freezer again. But in the air fryer at a lower temperature but for a longer iime, the stuffing wasn’t cooked sufficiently. I’m going to have to spend more time working on this to do it properly. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

But that’s enough for tonight. I’m off to bed, later rather than earlier, and I’ll probably dream about cats again, I dunno. It would be nice to have some kind of company round here seeing as I don’t go out very often these days, and cats certainly aren’t demanding.

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Tuesday 25th April 2023 – MY CHOCOLATE BISCUITS …

… are absolutely delicious. I’m well impressed with how they have turned out.

It’s a simple biscuit recipe of sugar, butter and flour in a ratio of 4:8:10. And then I ground up some almonds in a whizzer, added some vanilla and some of that concentrated orange essence and off we went.

And when it was all mixed together I added in a few tablespoons of cocoa powder and mixed it in. And then I rolled it out and cut it into small squares.

When they were baked, there was one that was distorted so I tasted it and I really do think that I’ve hit the jackpot with that. I’m tempted, when I have time, to make some chocolate-flavoured buttercream and make some bourbon-like sandwich biscuits. They should be extraordinary.

But that’s for maybe tomorrow. I’m more interested at the moment about what happened today.

As usual it started off pretty badly. Once again I took ages to go off to sleep. And I was wide awake again at 03:30. However I did manage to go back to sleep at one point because the alarm awoke me at 07:00.

It was a struggle to leave the bed but I managed to beat the second alarm, and after the medication, mails and messages I prepared for my Welsh lesson.

Once again there weren’t all that many of us there but nevertheless it passed off quite well and I was surprised about how much of the comprehension exercise I managed to complete. I actually had all of the questions correct but there was one where I’d guessed the answer from what I heard.

After my lunchtime fruit I had a baking session.

There wasn’t just the biscuits but also a pile of fruit buns. I’d run out of fruit bread this morning so I need to stock up. And they came out quite nicely too. I’ll definitely make some more of those. Some have gone into the bread tin and the rest have gone into the freezer where they can be pulled out as and when required.

While I was waiting for everything to bake or cook or to rise up I tidied out the food shelves in the kitchen to make sure that I knew what I had. Some stuff found its way into the bin. It was stuff that I’d bought from NOZ and I was surprised that the sell-by date was in 2020. It wouldn’t have been so bad had they been in tins but they were in fact in glass bottles.

A pile of stuff found its way into the bins outside too. The bag with the glass and plastic was overflowing so a little walk around outside would do me good.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too from the night. Not very much though. I’d joined the Army last night. I was obviously not cut out for the basic training. We’d all started, checked in and found out where we were sleeping. Next morning we had all the stupid army routine then we all had to assemble to go off on a bus somewhere. The sergeant in charge was reminding us to do this and do that but of course we hadn’t done it because we didn’t know and no-one had said. He said “turn your room keys in now because you should have all your possessions with you”. Most of the platoon had left their coats in their room so he was haranguing everyone. We all had to go back. I said “I’m sorry sarge” but at least I had a smile from him which I suppose was something or other.

With the time that was left I was editing down the final batch of notes that I have recorded for one of the radio programmes. It’s not finished yet of course because I wasn’t as focused as I might have been. Things are going to start to become complicated from now on because I’m now reaching the stage where I’ll be changing the format and content of my programmes.

Tea tonight was a delicious taco roll, and there’s enough stuffing left over to go into a nice curry tomorrow, with naan bread and yoghurt.

And while we’re on the subject of tomorrow … “well, one of us is” – ed … I’m off to sign for my new apartment tomorrow morning. It’ll be a while before I move in because I have to give the tenant three months notice to leave and then I want to have the bathroom and the kitchen done.

So whatever, I’m going to have my work cut out once it all goes through.

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Saturday 8th April 2023 – THAT WAS DISAPPOINTING

There I was this evening settled down in front of the internet to watch Y Fflint play Caernarfon Town. Y Fflint deep in trouble at the wrong end of the table and Caernarfon only a few points ahead desperate not to be dragged into a relegation scrap themselves.

It took just 90 seconds for Jean-Louis Akpa-Akpro, the Côte d’Ivoire international centre-forward to put Y Fflint 1-0 ahead. And after 9 minutes they went 2-0 up and we were going to be in for a cracking match that would promise everything as Caernarfon would have to throw the kitchen sink at them to get anything from this game.

But then what can only be described as an “incident” off the field which led to stewards, paramedics and the police being summoned led to the players being led from the pitch. After a delay of 45 minutes, the maximum allowed by rules, and the game still not being restarted, the match was abandoned.

There will doubtless be some repercussions about all of that. It was extremely disappointing.

Just like my night, really.

My clean and tidy bed was quite comfy and I nestled down in there quite early. I even managed to go to sleep quite quickly too but it didn’t last. In fact, when the alarm went off at 07:30 I was already up and about. I’d long-since abandoned the idea of going back to sleep.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I set the washing machine off on a cycle (a very clever machine, mine) only to discover later that I’d forgotten a pillow case (but that’s another story) and then hit the streets, carefully dodging the crane that was outside the door repairing someone’ window surround on the top floor.

Noz came up with nothing except for a small hard-backed spiral-bound notebook that has now been pressed into service as a recipe book, and LeClerc was pretty much the same, although I found that I’d forgotten my vegan biscuits.

But never mind. That’s what the internet is for and I’m sure that i’ll be able to find a few good recipes there.

As I said yesterday, I went off with just one crutch which worked sort-of, but I still don’t have enough force in my left leg (never mind the right) to haul myself up a tall kerb. Back to two crutches it is then.

Back here, Liz told me that my web hosting sites were down so I had to chase that up. It appears that there had been an upgrade to the server during the night and instead of switching the main server back on, they’d switched off the back-up server instead, or something like that.

Having put away the frozen stuff and the cool stuff, I made some coffee and cheese on toast and had a very late breakfast / early lunch.

This afternoon I sorted out my paperwork and filed away a pile of stuff so the place is looking a little tidier. I’m going to try to do some stuff every day to reduce somewhat the amount of stuff I have to take with me when I finally move.

And then I turned my attention to the dictaphone. Despite the miserable night there was plenty of movement. At one point I was walking down the street on some kind of 1930s council house estate. There were all kinds of people at the window. I don’t know why they were there or what they were doing but you could see them there, and their shadows etc because it was late at night. It was something really weird.

And then I was with people who had gone out for a walk. They were staying in Yorkshire and were walking down some of these old stone-walled country lanes. They’d all gone their separate ways but met up again. I was watching them. Suddenly my whole perspective of view changed. It began to be a telephoto view as if I was miles and miles away. It was just zooming out all the time. I tried to bring myself back to the point of view where I could see them or to advance in little stages so that I could catch up with them again in stages but no matter where I was, my viewpoint ended up being miles away from where they were. I couldn’t bring myself back to be with them. I wasn’t with them physically. It was some distance from me standing there basically in the background as a spirit I suppose watching them

Later on I was with a rock group last night, either Semisonic or From Good Homes. A girl singer had not long joined them. She needed something doing to the roof of her house so someone from the group had arranged for her to have some slates. She went to pick them up but there was an argument about them. Considering that these slates were costing her nothing she should have kept quiet and just taken them. Instead she got into an argument that started the Gods sending thunderbolts at each other and the people taking part in this play.

Finally I was with the brother of a girl friend of mine from school who was with his wife. He was farming near Nantwich but had to go somewhere up in the mountains to bring back a trailer. I said that I’d go with him. We’d been camping out somewhere at this festival at first. I’d been there with another girl, whoever she might have been. I’d put our tent up. I was assembling something. I turned round to my wife and said “can you give me a screw” that brought everyone nearby to fits of laughter. When the festival finished we met up with this guy and went to pick up this trailer. I can’t remember what vehicle we were in but he was in a Land Rover. He said that one the way he’d drop off a box of stuff at someone. We set off through the mountains and eventually arrived where we had to be with this trailer. Then he realised that he hadn’t stopped to drop off this thing. He arranged that when he’d return home he’d post it. We coupled up this trailer to the Land Rover and set off back to Nantwich. It was a huge thing and was towing a trailer itself. How he was doing it with a Land Rover was anyone’s guess. Eventually we were back in Nantwich and went round to see his childhood home (which it wasn’t). It was being renovated and work was being done on it. He began to talk. He had the Land Rover, one of these Japanese pickups, a Volvo saloon and was thinking about selling maybe the Land Rover. He also had a Transit van by this time, not a Land Rover. He’d had the Transit from new, a brown swb one. He said that his wife didn’t understand why he still had it and he was thinking of selling it. I saod that the vehicle I would have sold could have been the Volvo saloon. Everything else was the right kind of vehicle to keep when you are working on a farm. He wasn’t convinced. He was talking about either moving back into the college or moving house into the area to do something differently. We talked about farming but at this point I fell back into sleep and all you can hear is me yawning.

Having dictated the text for the next couple of radio programmes I settled down for the football but as I mentioned just now, that was rather a disappointing waste of time.

Tea tonight was more of those baby roast potatoes with a salad. I’d taken some stuff out of the freezer that I thought was small breaded quorn fillets but was in actual fact some small falafel discs. But they were nice anyway and the air fryer does do a nice job on stuff like this.

So now I’m going to bed. It’s a Day of Rest tomorrow but if it’s anything like last Sunday there won’t be much rest for me. But I’ll track down some biscuit recipes and see if I can’t have a little baking session.

It will be interesting to say the least.

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Tuesday 7th March 2023 – MY LEFTOVER CURRY …

… tonight was absolutely delicious.

Half a small courgette, a pile of mushrooms, some garlic, some chick peas and an onion and there we go. Lots of nice spices (I still have some left even though I was unable to buy any on my last trip to Leuven) and it was delicious. But I must remember to put the toilet paper in the fridge tonight because I was rather heavy-handed with the chili.

Anyway, last night was rather better from a sleep point of view. Not by much, I have to say, but I did manage to fall asleep comfortably at some point.

We had some travels last night, but I didn’t go all that far. I was in the Army, in World War I. I was in a front-line trench during an artillery bombardment. Suddenly the whistle blew and we charged out of the trench. My regiment was the Cheshire Regiment. For some reason the NCOs and officers wanted us to follow the Hampshire Regiment but once I passed through the barbed wire into No-Man’s Land (and I will never ever forget the University ) I came across a group of North Staffords. I followed them. It was probably lucky that I did because from what I understood the regiment I should have been with was massacred yet we of the North Staffords were able to find some kind of shelter in the lee of a hill where we could build a trench to occupy. That way we were at least spared for the moment from artillery fire.

When the alarm went off at 07:30 I was deep in the arms of Morpheus so I awoke with a start. It all took me by surprise.

But anyway I was up and out of bed straight away and after the medication and checking my mails and messages I started to revise my Welsh ready for the lesson.

However there was an interruption. The bank telephoned me to invite me to bring forward our appointment to tomorrow. One day here and there doesn’t make much difference in the great scheme of things so I agreed. I shall hobble down into town on my crutches and see what happens, passing by the chemist on the way..

We were very few at the lesson today so it’s always hard work in these circumstances. However, once again it passed off fairly well. I don’t know whether it’s my preparation that’s paying dividends or whether things are becoming easier or whether my brain is functioning better, but things might be looking up.

After the lesson I had a shower and a good clean-up. And it was much easier climbing into the bath for my shower. I remember how awful it was when I came back here in December. I’m not going to pretend that things are now back to normal but I don’t have to put any thought into climbing into the bath.

And to your surprise, and certainly to mine, I did some tidying up later. There have been all kinds of papers lying around here but the bin across the road has been full for a while. But my paper bin was now well overflowing so I gathered it all up and took it down there.

Somehow I managed to fit it all into the paper bin and it made the apartment look so much better, and I profited by bringing back the last of the shopping that was hanging around in Caliburn.

The physiotherapist was impressed with my progress. He’s going to design an exercise programme for me to follow to make sure that I work hard at my leg muscles. And he didn’t bat an eyelid when I told him that I intended to walk to the bank tomorrow. He just warned me to use both crutches.

The rest of the day has been spent pairing off all of the music for the next radio programme and making a start on writing the notes. I’m not working very hard, I have to admit, but I’m making slow progress

The curry was, as I said, absolutely delicious and after that I ended up having a lengthy chat with someone who lives in Virlet who has tracked me down via my social network. We had a lot to say to each other and we’ll be working a few things out in due course

Right now though I’m off to bed. I have a lot to do tomorrow apart from my little trek into town. And I’m actually looking forward to that one way or another. It would be nice though if there were a café half-way up the hill where I could stop for a coffee. That would make things much easier but I don’t suppose you can have everything.

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Thursday 2nd February 2023 – I’VE BEEN TIDYING …

… out the freezer this morning.

Not that I’ve made any more room in it but I’ve managed to sort out everything and put it where I wanted it to be. I’ve not finished yet either though because I’m convinced that I can do even better than this and I might even have another go tomorrow to see what I can do.

I’m still convinced that a bigger freezer might have been a better idea, but then I would only have filled it even fuller of stuff and I wouldn’t have been any better off afterwards.

There had to be something to do to keep me busy today because the physiotherapist didn’t come this afternoon. He sent me a text message this morning to tell me that something had cropped up and he had to cancel all of his appointments for today. So If I remember, before I go to bed I’ll go for a walk up and down the stairs to see how I cope. I have to do some exercise.

Especially as I spent much of the afternoon curled up asleep on the chair in the bedroom. Coupled with the previous night or two where I didn’t have too much sleep I suppose that things have caught up with me. Last night was rather later than usual, what with one thing and another, and I suppose that that tipped me over the edge. And I’d been doing so well too. I hadn’t crashed out during the day for a while.

Going off on a few travels too during the night might have had something to do with it. I’m not sure what was going on with this particular dream but at one point there was a girl and a cat. The girl was sitting on the edge of something or other. I asked “how would it be if I were to jump over you and land down there in front of you?” to which she made some kind of non-committal comment. I had a look and the drop down wasn’t half as much as I thought it would be although it was still something considerable. I just took 2 or 3 steps, lauched myself and jumped over her and landed below at her feet. Someone said something about some other guy who had tried this somewhere else and had injured whoever it was who was sitting down. It had caused an awful lot of problems. I was lucky to get away with this without doing any damage

There was something else too about going off to see someone in Caliburn. I was told to fetch some chips back with me too, nice and hot. On the way out I noticed that they were putting the fish and chip caravan in place on Place Godal so I thought that I’d stop and pick some up. When I glanced at the time it was only 17:00 so I thought that I’d go to see this other person first and pick up the chips on the way back. I drove out of the car park that I’d just reversed into and carried on driving.

Later on, back in the dream about going to fetch the chips but it was too early as I said, and the chip van had only just arrived so I went off to do whatever else it was that I had to do, to see someone. I was early at his place too and the gates wouldn’t open. He had electric gates. On the way back I had to come straight home but I understood for some reason that I was to alight at Cammell Laird’s and walk through the town. When we arrived at Cammell Laird’s there was a group of people outside the ship company offices there. One of them was wearing a brown suit and a sheep jacket. She saw me knock. It was a quick knock today rather than a long usual one. She saw me knock and came after me to chase me away from the building.

Finally I’d been invited to a meeting on behalf of the employees to a management meeting of all the higher-ups. There had been another meeting a month or so ago that had been quite controversial because there had been a lot of anti-feminist sentiment and debate and discussion so no woman had gone to this particular one. I was there, and someone was using it as a vehicle to complain all about FIFA’s restrictive practice in broadcasting football matches etc. I asked the question “how does FIFA differ from UEFA and the national football associations?”. All I was met with was a pile of bluster so I burst out laughing. That embarrassed the person who was speaking. After the meeting I went back to the office. Someone was climbing up the stairs. He had one of these 3D masks on. He was taking his time trying to climb up so I tried go past him but he wouldn’t let me go past. All he did was to complain about other people trying to push him along. Then he cleared off. I had to go down to a storeroom to fetch something. There was some issue about some chocolate that was in there. Some woman had been let down over this chocolate and needed someone to go. I said that I would. It was a low concrete corridor with Christmas trees down it. I set off, very careful not to bang my head on the concrete beams.

That wasn’t everything either. While I was asleep during the afternoon I was at work in an office. In my desk drawer I had a barbie doll hidden and when I went to add a second I found that my drawer was open and that the doll was on clear view to everyone who cared to look. I grabbed some fruit to lunch and thought that I’d go and sit on a chair outside in the hallway to eat it. When I went outside I found that there was a girl whom I liked sitting at the reception, a girl who has featured in these pages before. I quite liked her but I didn’t want to give herthe impression that I was stalking her so I pretended to do something somewhere else that involved a trip down the corridor and then I went back to my desk inside the other room.

After the medication and checking my messages (and still no reply to my reminder to the solicitor about the documents that I need) I spend a pleasant hour or two with the freezer. Rinsing out the drawers to dispose of the build-up of ice made something of a difference and makes them look cleaner. I can actually see what’s in there now much better than I could before.

So apart from having a good sleep, I’ve also been writing up the notes for the next series of radio programmes. Not that I’ve done very much because there’s always something that crops up to distract me when I’m trying to work.

It’s true that I’m having a very hard time concentrating these days but news about what’s happening in Labrador about the controversial fall-out from the Muskrat Falls hydro-electric project is enough to distract anyone who has an interest in it. In fact, the whole issue of the development of Hydro-electric power going back to the 1950s in Labrador is so controversial that this is just one more raccoon skin on the wall.

But finally the First-Nation Innu of the region have had enough. In the words of Peter Penashue, the chief Innu negotiator, the next stage of the development, “the Gull Island hydroelectric project, is dead on arrival”. The project, that should have realised $5,000,000 per annum for the Innu community in Central Labrador for the loss of their traditional hunting grounds, has been reduced to just a small fraction of that “because of substantial cost overruns”. Had this been anywhere else in Canada, the compensation figures would have been ring-fenced

And it’s crazy cost overruns too. When I first went to Labrador the road was NOTHING MORE THAN A 1800-KILOMETRE FARM TRACK. Over the years that I’ve been travelling north the highway has been metalled, every last inch of it, and for no good purpose either. But that’s typical of what’s going on out there just to appease NALCOR, the contractors, and Valard, the builders of the project.

Tea tonight was veggie balls with pasta and veg in tomato sauce. And it was quite delicious too. But tomorrow I’m going off on the bus to the supermarket in town and amongst the stuff that I’ll buy will be some salad stuff. I’ve become quite accustomed now for salad with my potatoes and burgers.

A nice burger on a bap with salad and chips fried in the air fryer sounds like a nice tea for tomorrow night.

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Wednesday 4th January 2023 – MY SHEPHERD’S PIE …

… was absolutely delicious this evening. With the left-over pie filling from Christmas, the left-over mushrooms from the weekend and topped with potato mashed in milk and butter( vegan, of course), and not to mention made with real shepherds, it was really nice with vegetables and gravy.

This is going to be something that I’ll have to work on for the future – although I doubt that it will be every day that I have a mugful of lentil and tofu pie-filling lying around left over from a previous project.

It was much better than the sleep that I had last night, that’s for sure. I have a problem with an ingrowing toenail on my left foot and last night it began to play up – to such an extent that I had first to take off my elastic stocking and seeing that it didn’t resolve the problem, to take off the plaster that was protecting the toe.

That didn’t seem to help very much either, but at some point I managed to doze off into sleep. I ended up with the guys off The Navy Lark, Pertwee, Johnson and someone else. It was my birthday so I’d been round to see if they would come out with me but for some unknown reason the 2 girls didn’t realise that it was my birthday, they were busy or they didn’t want to come or something so in the end it was just the 4 of us. Just as we were leaving Pertwee’s apartment the telephone rang so we nipped back upstairs to see if it was anything for him. No it wasn’t, and nothing to do with any of us. They asked me where I’d like to go so I suggested that in the Chaussée de Wavre down the road there was a good Italian restaurant. Actually there were 2 but I meant a different one. They said “yes, let’s go there”. We walked down the Boulevard towards the Chaussée de Wavre and suddenly ended up in a restaurant, just the 4 of us, no-one else. The place was empty but it looked really nice, nice paintwork, curtains, tablecloths etc, very much the pastoral Italian place. I thought that if the food’s as nice as this place looks we should be OK here. We settled down at a table where there were 4 chairs by a fire.

When the alarm went off at 07:30 I was already awake but I wasn’t in much of a mood to leave the bed. I missed the second alarm too but when the third one went off at 08:00 I was actually up and about. High time that I showed willing.

Once I’d managed to come round into the Land of the Living, whenever that was, I made a start on tidying up in here. I was hard at it too and managed not only to put everything away and file away the pile of papers that had accumulated over the last few months, I wrote a couple of letters that were necessary – a couple of bills had come in at some point and I’d overlooked them.

All of that was enough to make me crash out for half an hour and I didn’t feel any regret because it does look so much better in the bedroom and I won’t be afraid or embarrassed to let people see inside here. In the run up to going away I had rubbish just about everywhere and nothing had improved since I’d been back. Quite the contrary, in fact.

My freidnly neighbourhood cleaner came round at 14:30 and spent an hour here. And she accomplished far more in the apartment in an hour than I have accomplished in all the time that I’ve lived here. She found tons of stuff that I’d missed as well and that was good news. I did wonder where half the stuff in this apartment had gone.

So it’s looking quite nice in the place at the moment. And as she catches up with the arrears it’ll look even nicer. I can’t wait for this place to look as if someone lives here.

Just now I mentioned tea. It really was nice and as I said yesterday, I ought to spend more time looking after myself properly as far as food goes.

And while I was at at, I had another look at my shopping list. I’ve decided that Friday afternoon is when I’ll send off my order to the supermarket and see how I get on with that. I’ll probably order a delivery every couple of weeks and in the meantime ask my cleaner if she’ll pick up some mushrooms for me on the weeks when I don’t pass an order. That was I can keep on top of everything.

And who knows? At some point I might even have another go at going to the shops myself if my walking improves. You never know.

But that’s for later. Right now, much later than I was hoping, I’m off to bed. Whether I sleep or not is another thing because I now have a pain in the other foot. It’s non-stop, isn’t it?

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Tuesday 3rd January 2023 – I’M NOT SURE …

… whether I’m imagining this but I seem to be moving just a little easier today.

Getting into and out of the bath in order to have a shower didn’t take me as long as it has done in the recent past, but whether that’s because I’ve found a new way to do it or whether it really is easier is something that I haven’t quite worked out.

If it’s anything to do with the amount of rest that I’ve been having just recently, then that might explain something because it was at about 10:45 when I finally arose from the dead today. A little earlier than yesterday of course but seeing that I was actually in bed over 90 minutes earlier, then it’s nothing really that’s worth raising the roof.

Some stuff on the dictaphone too from during the night. The most astonishing thing during the night was like a deltaplane. There were probably 10 or 12 people underneath it pedalling away to get up some speed. All these people cycling, they were in a kind-of foot-forward position, 10 or 12 of them in a V-shape underneath this wing, really low down. Suddenly the rear end lifted off the ground, they went up this ramp and over the sea wall. The thing actually took off and flew. I was there with my camera trying to take photos of it but for some unknown reason the shutter wouldn’t click and I couldn’t take a photo of this most extraordinary thing that was going on during the night.

And then I was in Bangor in North Wales. There was a hurrican blowing absolutely everything about. I was waiting there for the Shearings coaches to turn up to see whether they needed a driver for something or other. There was someone there with a couple of pieces of paper and I noticed that he put one down but it blew away. Eventually I ran after it and caught it. I was actually addressed to me and concerned a coach trip that I’d taken a couple of weeks earlier where I’d had to collect some money off people. I’d collected the money but I couldn’t remember what I’d actually done with it. It was a huge piece of old dot-matrix computer print-out stuff that had been heavily edited and tippexed out or felt-penned out and overwritten, everything, listing the people, how much they should have paid etc. I seemed to remember that what I’d collected had been nothing like as complicated as this. But this wasn’t the right time to read this with all of the confusion etc so I folded it up and put it in my jacket pocket thinking that I’d find a quieter moment when I could concentrate, have another read of it and see what I could sort out and whether I could make head or tail of it.

Apart from having a shower today, I’ve tidied up the bathroom as well. Some stuff has been thrown away and if I could make it comfortably out to the rubbish bins more stuff would be gone too but that will have to wait.

However, having done the bedroom (after a fashion) yesterday and the bathroom today, whatever will I accomplish tomorrow?

The physiotherapist came round this afternoon too and put me through my paces. He seems to think that there’s a slight improvement too in how I’m moving about and has given me a few more tips and hints. Nevertheless, one swallow doesn’t make a summer and I’ve a feeling that if things are ever to improve (which is not certain) it’s going to be a long, long time.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with the left-over stuffing from yesterday. And tomorrow I’m going to have a curry made with the leftovers of everything that is in the fridge. High time that normal service is resumed around here. And then I can get on with ordering what I need for the next round of stuff.

Just one more slice of my Christmas cake to finish as well. That’s for tomorrow of course so I’ll then have to think about what to do next. I have some fruit buns in the freezer that will need defrosting and I’ll also have a think about baking some more bread as I’ve run out of that too and I’m not in a position to go out and buy a tasty baguette for the weekend – one of my rare luxuries.

With all of the foregoing, I can see that I need to begin to organise myself. I can’t sit around and mope and do nothing, even if I don’t feel like doing anything special. I still have to eat and I ought to devote more time to making myself some nice stuff.

But ohhh: For a decent oven instead of the one that I have here. That would make a nice difference.

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Monday 2nd January 2023 – I’M HAVING ANOTHER …

… late night tonight.

Not as late as it was last night and hopefully not as late a start as … errr … 11:30 this morning when I finally crawled out of bed, but I’m still not in any rush and I’m not really tired either.

And ?I’ve no idea why that might be because this afternoon I vacuumed the bedroom – the first time that i’ve done that for quite a while.

And if that might sound like a surprise, it certainly was as far as I was concerned because I had no idea just how tiring it was to do that. It didn’t take me long to do it, but I had to have a good sit down afterwards, and for quite a while too.

But I digress for the moment. There was tons of stuff on the dictaphone from last night. And surprisingly, several of my little voyages followed on one from another. There was a Carry On film going on last night. Most of the actors of the Carry On team had been arrested by some kind of Greek people going back to traditional times. Charles Hawtrey dressed as a Roman centurion was sent to rescue them. He landed ashore and walked up this valley with all these people lying in wait to capture him. When they leapt out from behind a rock they had the masks and sacks over their own heads rather than putting them over his head, so wondering why they never succeeded in being able to capture him. Of course he was taken aback and burst out laughing while these people were groping around trying to find out what had gone wrong.

Then later on there were these little girls about 8 or 9 dressed up in some kind of green and yellow dress like elves or something, dancing around this kiddies’ playground place where I was standing

And next time it was a similar scene with similar girls except that they were dressed in blue for the next time they ambushed another girl

Back here again and there was another bunch of similarly dressed kids, young girls in elvish clothes in Crewe somewhere round about North Street, somewhere like that, again dancing around on the station this time. And if anyone is wondering, which I’m sure they are, the railway station there was only there for three years – from 1837 to 1840. And yes, that is almost 200 years ago, not that I would remember it.

We still haven’t finished here yet. There was a small boy, about 3 or so, on the petrol station on North Street on the corner of Underwood Lane with another boy, a little older. They had all of these dancers as miniatures on white leather leads. He was holding a bunch of these leads. As I came out he held the leads up to me to show me what he’d caught

As for the final bit, I’m not quite sure what that was all about. But all of that on North Street was really impressively real, especially when it came to going to the Post Office with all of the dancers but I can’t remember much about that but it certainly seemed real to me.

There was a ‘phone call from Leuven this afternoon, but they hung up before I could actually answer the call which was just as well. I wasn’t in any mood to speak to them. And there was also a ‘phone call from the chemists about the bill that I haven’t paid. I shall have to get on with that, and quickly too

But really, that was all of the excitement. All of the Christmas food has now been eaten except for the last few crumbs of the Christmas cake, such as it was. The next two days will see the end of that and then I shall have to bake a loaf of bread.

That reminds me that I need to order some flour, and so I’ll need to send off my order for food from the supermarket. I shall have to do that on Friday too. So I shall have to have a further think just in case there is anything else that I might have forgotten. At €9:95 a delivery, I can’t afford to be doing this every day.

Tea was a stuffed pepper with some really nice stuffing. Not as nice as the stuffing that I made with kidney beans and I shall have to remember that for whenever I have no mushrooms, because that was really something special.

And now I’m off to bed. No alarm, because it’s late and I need to do my best to catch up with whatever it is that’s wearing me out. The physiotherapist is coming tomorrow and Thursday, the cleaner on Wednesday, so I need to have another think about doing some more cleaning so that the place looks at least respectable.

Not that “respectable” is a phrase that anyone might usually associate with me, but here we are.

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Tuesday 27th December 2022 – I HAVE BEEN …

… a little more motivated today.

Not by very much, I have to say, but at least I’ve managed to do a couple of things today.

Not that you would have thought so the way the morning unfolded because I spent more of it in bed than I ought to have done. No chance whatever of me leaving the bed when the alarm went off at 07:30. It was much more like 09:00 when I finally broke surface today.

Mind you, that’s not a surprise judging by the amount of travelling that I did during the night. I was running some kind of school but it wasn’t a boarding school, it was a front for something else. However it was such fun having this boarding school teaching the kids English etc that it actually became the principal occupation rather than whatever it was that we were intending to do. We taught the boys and girls poetry. We had a couple of them write out poems. I had to go to print them so I sent one boy down to the printer while I printed them off so he could bring them back. For some unknown reason I couldn’t remember the key combination to print and the screen was too far away for me to read. It took me ages to remember the CTRL+P shortcut to make these things print off

Later on, I stepped back into this dream, took the school up again and these pupils there. One of the pupils had to write out a poem so I let him do it. He was comfortably over the limit of words but it sounded so good that I tried to have him write another. His parents were away with the British Civil Service so he was staying at our boarding school. He sat down to write a second one but was shot in the rigging as he did so and all his possessions that he’d found had all been wiped out and broken

Then later still I was back in there yet again. We were checking photos of these kids at this school. There was one of a boy and girl. They each had a sticker in their ear. One had a green sticker, one had a red sticker in it. The girl’s said “gaffer” or “boss” and I can’t remember the boy’s but it implied that the girl was in charge and he was just her servant or something.

And now for something completely different. When I went into the shed after having been out for a day or two I found this motorbike and sidecar in there. It was an old fore-and-aft V-twin that somehow I had an impression that it was a BMW although it wasn’t. I was trying hard to identify it but but I couldn’t see any maker’s name on it at all. It was black and quite old, probably from the 60s and looked as if Laurent and Xavier had dropped it off on me. It was really the most impressive beast that I’d ever seen. I’d been talking to them about motor bikes a few days ago. I’d no idea how come this had appeared in my shed but it was an unidentified V-twin fore-and-aft. Everything about it said BMW but there was no plate on the engine or on the frame or tank to say what it might be. It was completely blank.

After that I was with a boy and a girl. We ended up at a cottage. There was a huge pile of Mary’s paperwork. While the boy and girl were sitting in front of the fire keeping warm I was going through the paperwork finding all kinds of things. I sorted out as much as I could but there was still a big pile of unsorted stuff. It was 03:00 and I said that I had to go. I said to these two “whatever you do, you mustn’t leave until the fire had gone right down because we don’t want the place burning down”. They agreed to stay. I couldn’t find my guitars. They thought that they had been taken by someone else into the hall so I had to hunt around for them at the very last minute before leaving. It was about 03:15 before I was finally ready to go.

Surprisingly, I stepped back into this dream too. One of the things that we found in these papers was a document dated April 1940, a handbook for farmers issued by the Farmers’ Union. For a start, the back pages were in Dutch so it was intended for an audience of Dutch farmers coming to settle in Nantwich. It included articles like “love your slave” and all kinds of outdated stuff like that which even for the 1940s was extremely near the knuckle. I read it out to these people with me and they were astonished. Then it became time for me to go and do a couple of deliveries and then I’d been told that I could go home after that so I prepared myself to go. But this document was astonishing, 1940 as well and aimed for everyone in the Farmers Union in the Nantwich area.

Once I’d finally managed to drag myself round into the Land of the Living, the first thing that I had to do was to deal with the questionnaire that I had been sent yesterday.

That involved printing it out, completing it, scanning it, scouring around for the supporting documents and then sending off everything. By e-mail of course because I can’t walk down into town and the Post Office.

You’d be surprised how long all of that took to do as well. Nothing is as easy or as straightforward as it might be and I have a variety of good and valid reasons why my information is not as easy or as straightforward as anyone else’s.

Next stop was the bathroom and a shower. And you have no idea how difficult it’s becoming to climb into the bath in order to take a shower. This can’t go on for much longer and something certainly needs to happen in order that I can deal with this, and quite soon too.

There is plenty of rubbish that has accumulated around here and that needed to go to the bins across the road. It was a nice sunny day, if a little windy, so I decided to have a bash. It was a little easier to head that way but I was soon exhausted and the rest of the trip was a nightmare. But I made it in the end.

On the way back I passed by Caliburn and wound him up. He struggled into life so I let him run for a while. While he was ticking over I disconnected all of the ancillary electrical circuits that I wired in when I bought him. I want to see if the battery will charge better with it all disconnected.

We had a few bright sparks while I was doing it, and shame as it is to say it, a job that would usually take me just 2 or 3 minutes with no complications whatever took me half an hour.

The woman who lives upstairs who does cleaning too was in the corridor so I mentioned to her that I’ll be needing her services in due course. She’ll make arrangements to come to see me.

Back in here I sent off that incendiary letter that I’d written a few days ago, mentioning in passing that I’m not going for my appointments next week. Half an hour to the bins is longer than it used to take me to walk to the station. How on earth can I make it as far as Leuven, and on a Bank Holiday too?

The physiotherapist came round later and gave me a little work-out. He thinks that he might have found something and gave me a few instructions about massaging a muscle in my upper thigh.

Tea tonight, power cuts included, was a little different. Stuffed pepper with veg and rice but with no mushrooms I tried a small tin of kidney beans. It certainly made a difference, and a pleasant one too. I’ll try this again.

But I’m running short of onions now and that’s fatal. It looks as if another struggle to the Carrefour is on the agenda at some point.

However that’s for again. Right now I’m going to go to bed for (hopefully) some pleasant dreams. Tomorrow is a day with nothing planned so I might go round to see my neighbour and pay her for the shopping that she did for me last week. I need to pay my debts.

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