Tag Archives: bad night

Saturday 29th April 2023 – THAT WAS EMBARRASSING

It’s cup final weekend in Wales at the moment. The Welsh Cup is being played tomorrow between TNS and Y Bala, but today at lunchtime we had the final of the Welsh Amateur Cup between Trethomas Bluebirds and Denbigh Town and this evening, the 2nd Division Cup between Barry Town and Colwyn Bay.

It was the latter game to which I’m referring right now. Barry had won the southern division and Colwyn Bay the northern, having had some really impressive runs all the way to the league titles. Colwyn Bay for example had only lost once this season and Barry twice, and they have both been promoted to the Welsh Premier League next season.

They both had reached the final of the cup competition at something of a canter and so we were all expecting a real humdinger of a match this evening.

However, for reasons that have no place being discussed here, Colwyn Bay sent out their youth team to face a Barry Town team in full cry. And the result was rather predictable. Even strolling around at a leisurely pace with no sense of urgency at all, they still had far, far too much in the tank for Colwyn Bay.

The other match finished 2-1 for Trethomas and the scoreline was an understatement because in all honesty Trethomas should have been down the road and out of sight a long time before the final whistle. But at least it was entertainment and not punishment.

While we’re on the subject of punishment … “” – ed … I actually had a better night last night for a while. I was fast asleep quite quickly, and doesn’t that make a change? However, I was back wide awake again at 04:20 and I spent the next couple of hours tossing and turning about.

Mind you, I didn’t beat the alarm this morning. At some point after 06:30 I must have dropped off to sleep because I was flat out asleep when the alarm went off at 07:00 and I had a struggle to beat the second alarm.

Anyway, once I organised myself Caliburn and I set sail for the shops.

First port of call was at Noz where I didn’t buy anything special. I did however buy a new pizza tray. I had to butcher my old one to make it fit into this little oven and I’ll need a proper one for the new oven, whenever I might actually install it. So seeing as they had a stock at a silly price I bought one.

That’s the thing with a shop like Noz. It sells all kinds of end-of-ranges, bankrupt stock, that kind of thing, so if you see something you buy it, even if you don’t need it yet because when you do need it, they won’t have it.

Leclerc came up with nothing at all of any interest so I headed for home, where I had a chat with a neighbour on the doorstep. I seem to be flavour of the month right now.

After a coffee and a cheese on toast there was time to transcribe the dictaphone notes. This is only part of a dream last night . I had to do something about my family and this involved involving my brother. I had to go to find him. I knew where he was, in his dormitory, so I crossed over the road and stood at the bottom of the stairs. I looked up to the dormitory and shouted. There were a few people walking around there but he didn’t come. I shouted again but he still didn’t come. In the end I gave up and decided to do something different on my own and walked away. As I walked down the stairs to go out of the building I bumped into him. he asked about something or other. I replied that I’d shouted twice and he hadn’t come so I was just going to leave it. The dream carried on from there but I can’t remember any more now

There was something else about me having a couple of cats as well. I’d built some play activities for them, one of which was something extremely tall. Someone made a pun about it saying “that’s a bit over the top isn’t it, that one?”.

And finally there was a cricket or football match taking place somewhere outside town one afternoon. I set out to walk there to see what was happening. As I drew closer I could see a group of people there wearing crash helmets. I thought “this is strange”. I suddenly realised that I didn’t have my camera with me. I thought “that’s disappointing but I don’t have time to go home to pick it up and come back again”. When I arrived at this field, a while before this match was due to start, there were these kids playing a kind of ice hockey. There was someone there who bore a strong resemblance to Nigel Garbage throwing a puck up in the air. These kids were practising hitting it. One kid hit the puck and it flew past me. I put out my hand instinctively and almost caught it. I thought “I wonder if they are looking for a goalkeeper … “net minder” – ed. We made ourselves ready for what was going to happen. One thing was quite strange – all through this dream I had a feeling that Zero was there. I couldn’t see her and had no evidence to suppose that she was. There was just this really uncomfortable feeling that she was there in this dream somewhere and I think it was that that awoke me

Earlier on I mentioned the Welsh Amateur Cup. This is for clubs who don’t qualify for the professional cup. There were 250 clubs who participated and in the end it came down to two clubs from the 3rd tier – Denbigh from the 3rd tier north-west and Trethomas from – I think – the 3rd tier south-west.

Both clubs are third in their respective leagues so we were expecting a tough match. However it was nothing like it. As I side, the score might have been close but the play wasn’t and Trethomas made really heavy weather of what should have been a simple task.

As for the second match, well, I’m not going to say anything because I imagine that there will be quite enough said about that elsewhere.

The rest of the day has been spent, would you believe, working on the photos from 2019. It’s been ages since I’ve edited those so I carried on with a few more today. We’re still in Peel Sound right now somewhere in between Somerset Island and Prince of Wales Island heading for my Appointment with Destiny on one of the days that is missing from my blog .

One day I’ll have to write up those missing days.

Tea tonight was chips – not frozen chips because they were quite expensive and they had normal potatoes at a good price. Plenty of rather elderly burgers in breadcrumbs in the freezer so two small ones bit the dust today with the chips and a delicious salad. Over the next few weeks I’ll have to dispose of a pile more, and then give serious consideration to make a start on making them.

But it’s late now – early morning in fact – and I can’t sleep. I’ll feel like death in the morning but having done my radio programme for next week I’m not bothered if I sleep all day really.

As long as I don’t miss TNS v Y Bala. I know what the score will be already but we have to go through the motions, I suppose.

Friday 28th April 2023 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day I’ve had today. I’ve actually spent most of it asleep.

And that’s no surprise because I had another miserable night. Apart from the fact that I took an absolute age to go off to sleep again, I awoke at about 04:20 and just lay there vegetating for ages.

The alarm goes off at 07:00 these days and at 06:55 I found the energy (I’m not sure where from) to haul myself out of bed to beat the alarm. And that was probably the most energetic thing that I did.

The nurse came round as planned and took my blood sample. She had to take three goes before she could extract any blood from me. This is becoming ridiculous. I really am beginning to hate all of this.

It took me a while to come round into the Land of the Living enough to book all of my transport arrangements for my trip to Leuven. To my dismay my Old Fogey’s Railcard has expired and I’m having to pay full price for my travel, and I’m not ‘arf noticing the difference.

There are several factors contributing to the extra expense, apart from the absence of railcard

I’m coming home on a Friday, not a Saturday
I’m not taking the cheap route via Lille because I can’t walk quickly enough between one railway station and the other. Lille Flandres and Lille Europe are situated a good 10 minutes away from each other for a fit person. God knows how I’ll cope on my crutches if I tried that
The two cheap morning trains from Brussels, at 07:13 and 07:43, are fully booked and there are no seats available

And as for the last couple of times, I’m not staying at my usual hidey-hole either. It’s a long walk from the station and also if I want anything to eat it’s a long walk to the shops. There’s an Ibis Budget at the back of the station where I’ve stayed a few times, and that’s where I’ll be hanging my hat.

It took ages to sort everything out though. I went to pay with my Belgian bank account only to find that the app has to be upgraded. That took an age and when it had finally installed itself correctly the order had timed out and I had to start again.

And then there were issues with the SNCF app. That needed upgrading too and now that it’s done, it won’t open on my old phone. I’ve had to do everything off the computer and I’ll need to print out my tickets.

This afternoon the first thing that I did was to have a shower. I was feeling quite cold and I don’t know why and I thought that a shower would warm me up.

While I was in the bathroom I went one step further than David Crosby, gave in an inch to fear and cut my hair. Probably because I had the flu for Christmas, I reckon.

Back in here I fell asleep yet again, and that was that for quite considerable time. And when I awoke I really felt so miserable. It took for ever for me to pull myself together. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’ve been doing so well just recently.

There was time to listen to the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night. At one point I was asleep but awake in a kind of dream watching something happen in front of my eyes on the road while I was standing behind a hedge on the edge. It turned out to be a scene from a sequel to a well-known film – a kind-of Lord Of The Rings or The Hobbit or something. It turned out to be a kind-of trailer for a brief film where the producer shows his top-20 moments from his top favourite sequels to well-known films of that nature. We were there watching bits from The Hobbit, Harry Potter, this kind of film until he finally came round to his n° 1. everyone was praying that it wasn’t a certain scene but I didn’t get to see what it was because I awoke just as it was about to start the final scene. Just my luck

Did I dictate the dream … “no, you didn’t” – ed … about being on the taxis last night, having worked really hard with some really long hours. There was a lot of work to do around the Market Drayton area. One of the drivers phoned the people concerned and asked if we were still on for this work. They replied “yes” so he set off to Market Drayton. The way he went was down towards Woore and then across the old road to Knighton, that way. A way that I know well from my perambulations around that area in my youth. We were talking about some other people, Nerina and I, who we knew who had bought some kind of place out there. I had a couple of hours to spare so someone dropped me off at a little sweetshop-type of place. I went in and the guy said “you want upstairs”. I went up these incredibly steep stairs and found myself in this beautiful clean, tidy apartment. It was where one of my taxi drivers and his wife lived. They certainly weren’t the type to have had somewhere that was absolutely spotless. I was intending to try to ask if I could have a bath but when I saw how neat and tidy their house was I had second thoughts because I didn’t really want to mess it up.

And then one of my drivers had been out doing taxi jobs in Northern Ireland with my brother. They’d been away for a while. The guy who had organised it all came back and said that he would refuse to work with my brother again. He began to write out a whole list of everything that went wrong including my brother throwing some mushroom fried rice at him. I had to go off to do something. By the time I came back there was an enormous list. Part of the list was showing that everything in Northern Ireland had increased in price and how much was the increase. This list was enormous, on several pages. The guy in charge of everything said “I think that I’ve decided that I’m going to stop doing the cable car work from now on”. Another guy – a driver – rummaged through his bag and began to pull out things saying “I don’t need this, do I? I don’t need that now, do I?”. Something was strange about what he was pulling out so we had a look at it. It was actually the mirror arm of a car. Why he’d have one of those spare I really don’t know. In the end everyone calmed down and that left me and another driver to do the work for the night. I could see that there was going to be a lot of sorting out that needed to be done over the next couple of days to try to keep everyone happy again and try to stimulate some more business without running into some ridiculous costs.

By the looks of things I’ve been spending a lot of time back on the taxis just recently. And it’s not wishful thinking, I promise you that. For a while it was good fun and quite an enjoyable job but it eventually took on a life of its own and swept us all along in the momentum.

Tea tonight wasn’t as nice as it might have been and I don’t know why. The potatoes didn’t really make nice chips, I suppose, and the sausage rolls somehow didn’t inspire me all that much. My salad was nice though and I’ll have another one of those tomorrow.

Shopping is on the cards so I’ll buy some more spuds for chips for tea tomorrow but the freezer now has some room in it and I’m wondering whether a bag of frozen chips might be a better idea in this case. I shall have to look into that.

There’s more frozen stuff that’s been in the freezer since the Dawn of Time too and I’ll empty a few more bits and pieces to have with my chips and salad tomorrow. But right now I’m off to bed. It’s been a horrible day as I said earlier and the best thing to do is to forget about it and start again tomorrow

It’s been said quite often that no amount of alteration can sometimes change something that’s clearly not working, and it’s better to forget it and start again. I suppose that that’s probably why I have a younger brother.

Thursday 27th April 2023 – WE ARE HAVING …

… a disaster.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that Alison and I have a favourite restaurant in Leuven where we usually end up in the middle of our walk around the town. She passed by there earlier this evening for a portion of the beautiful sweet potatoes, only to find that it’s closed down definitively.

We started to go there because another vegan restaurant that we used, “The Loving Hut”, closed down a few years ago. We’ll now have to look for somewhere else, always assuming that there IS somewhere else to go.

We shall have to make further enquiries.

Further enquiries too about my sleeping issues because it was yet another depressing night when I took an absolute age to go off to sleep.

And once more, I awoke in the middle of the night and spend a miserable couple of hours trying to go back to sleep. However at one point I must have dozed off because I sat bolt upright wide-awake (well, sort-of) at 06:59, a minute before the alarm went off, so I fell out of bed just for the sake of saying that I beat the alarm once again.

When I was checking my mails and messages I found out what had awoken me. It was the nurse sending me a message to say that he’d miscalculated and it’s tomorrow when he needs to come to take my blood sample.

Once I’d organised myself this morning and awoken properly I bashed out another radio programme from the stuff that I had lying around. I’m getting nicely ahead of myself now, but it will all go pear-shaped of course because someone whose virtues I’ll be extolling will drop dead just before the programme will be broadcast.

And that reminds me. Some of the more legendary figures of the rock world are reaching the kind of age when fate will overtake them. I suppose that when I have time I really ought to prepare a couple of programmes that relate to people like Bob Dylan and keep them on the back-burner “just in case”.

It was while I was on my way to la Haye-Pesnel in Caliburn yesterday that I thought of a really good idea for a programme in this respect. What provoked the was when Spirit came onto Caliburn’s playlist and played “All Along The Watchtower”.

This afternoon I had a ‘phone call. Would I like a lift to town?

It was raining outside quite heavily and although I did have things to do, I didn’t fancy walking down there in this so I grabbed a lift. A couple of my neighbours were going off to the shops.

They threw me out in the town centre and I went to the letting agency. That’s a good place to start, I reckon, with my quest to gain vacant possession of my new apartment. However, there was only a receptionist there. The agent was out on a mission.

She took my details and said that the agent will call me back. And, as you might imagine, I’m still waiting. I’m also still waiting for the return phone call from my visit to the property management company yesterday. I have a rather uneasy feeling that I’m going to end up with a bunch of je m’en foutists.

That’s a beautiful French expression. Je m’en fous is rather a vulgar French way of saying “I couldn’t care less” (I’m sure that you can think of an English equivalent, but this is a family website) and so a je m’en foutist is an employee who is only interested in collecting his salary and doing as little as possible to actually earn it.

It was 15:05 when I went in, and by 15:10 I was back out again. The rain had quietened down considerably so I decided to walk back. It didn’t take me long and I didn’t have to stop for breath too often. But one thing that I noticed was that trying to squeeze into the back of the neighbour’s car, my right leg wasn’t comfortable whatsoever – not one little bit.

Back here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was in the middle of having a dream but I awoke (that was the time in the middle of the night). The dream evaporated completely and everything went except for a vision that I had about coffee in Malta or Cyprus that cost £3:00 per ounce. That’s all that I can remember about it.

Again this next one is another one of which I can only remember bits. I was at a talent contest last night. There was a couple of girls singing in Inuit. One was an older girl and the other was a younger girl. What happened now I forget, but later on someone else at this concert contacted me. They had a house to let in Greenland. They were quite fed up of the type of tenant they were having. They tended to be the younger, trendy type of person and they wanted someone more traditional. It turned out that they were writing the adverts in the newspaper in Inuktitut, the more modern style of Inuit language for people looking for lets. I suggested that she write the adverts in Sisu, the more traditional type of language, and that way it would be the more traditional type of person who would understand the advert and would make more of an effort to reply to rent it. She thought that that was a good idea. She turned over in bed and squashed me. She said “I’m hitting you, am I? It’s most uncomfortable lying here in bed with all these people” but this was the way of life up there and we just had to accept it. I walked out to Caliburn. He was up on a jack for some reason. I noticed that one of his rear tyres had a bald patch. That was strange. It had only done 8000 kms, these tyres. Most of the tyres were in really good condition but just this one bald patch. It started to worry me for it meant that there was something wrong somewhere with Caliburn’s suspension or brakes. I needed to try to sort it out but there was this expensive tyre that had just gone to waste.

After that I made some hot chocolate and had a few of my delicious chocolate biscuits – and then I rather regrettably fell asleep for a while.

As for tea tonight, I couldn’t think of what to have. In the end I settled for steamed vegetables with falafel in a vegan cheese sauce.

That was really delicious yet again, but I have to say that this other type of vegan cheese is nothing like as tasty as the vegan Cheshire Cheese. Even though the Cheshire Cheese is much more expensive, I think that I’ll be sticking with that in future.

Tomorrow the nurse is coming to take my blood sample, and then I don’t have anything planned for several days, except the football over the weekend of course. I’ll have to start to plan for my trip to Leuven though because that’s important. It seems that all kinds of things are unravelling right now.

And who knows? I might even have someone return one of my phone calls about the visits that I’ve made. If that happens, there won’t be any notes tomorrow night. I’ll have passed out from the shock.

Wednesday 26th April 2023 – THE DEED IS DONE

After this morning’s efforts I’m now the proud owner of another property. All signed, sealed, delivered and paid-for

But when I’m able to move into it is another story completely. There’s a strict procedure to follow and, surprisingly, it’s not the duty of a solicitor to perform it. It needs to be undertaken by a huissier, which is, I suppose, a cross between a bailiff and a Clerk of the Court. So I need to make further enquiries.

But the timetable that I had laid out in my head is looking … errr … optimistic.

The solicitor tells me that the letting of the property is undertaken by a management agent – the same management agent who manages the communal affairs of this building – so that’s obviously the best place to start. In fact, on the way home I stopped off at their offices to talk to the managing agent but she was busy. They said that she would call me back this afternoon but it’s now 21:30 and I’m still waiting.

There was plenty of waiting around during the night too because it was yet another bad night. At some point I did go off to sleep but I did awaken at about 04:00 for several hours but dozed off again. I awoke about 5 minutes before the alarm went off so I fell out of bed with the idea that at least I could say that I beat the alarm again, but I didn’t feel much like it.

After the medication I went for a shower and then Caliburn and I headed for the hills and the notaire‘s office at la Haye Pesnel.

09:30 was the time of our meeting and to my surprise, I only had to wait 10 minutes today beyond that time. That makes a change. Nice guy though he is, he usually works to his own convenience and not that of his clients.

he explained the reason to me why completion took so long. This building is officially an Ancient Monument, built in 1668 and registered on the French list of Historic Places.

There are all kinds of things that need to be investigated in this case. It’s not easy tracing the official history of a building and finding the deeds of a property that old when there’s been a Revolution and a couple of World Wars that have destroyed all kinds of archives. For example, the Public Records Office in St-Lô, the capital of this département, were destroyed by the Americans in a bombing raid in June 1944 and I bet that the Revolutionnaires had a bit of a bonfire too.

That’s the least of the problems that the notaire faced. Because it’s a listed building the Government has first dibs and so it can’t be sold to a private person until the Government has been offered it and sent a formal refusal.

And so once the sale can actually go ahead, the change of ownership (even if, in my case, I only own 250/10000 of the property) has to be notified to the Register of Historic Buildings and a list of permitted and forbidden alterations and activities has to be prepared.

The notaire certainly earned his money.

Liz thinks that it’s appropriate that I’ve bought a slice of French history. I told her that it’s appropriate because I’m something of an ancient monument myself.

In case you don’t know, where I live is part of a huge old military barracks complex built by the French in the 17th Century to protect the coast of Normandy from raids by the British forces based in the Channel Islands in the turmoil that followed the 30 Years War.

It was occupied by the French Army until 1988 when it was abandoned and fell into disrepair. The huge dormitory building is now the local High School, the canteen is now the Young Workers’ Hostel, the Officers’ Quarters is now the public rooms and Council offices and the other two buildings that were the barracks offices have been converted into small apartments.

When I moved here, it was as a tenant, with the aim that I can have a look around the town and see if I could find somewhere nice to live with the money left over from the sale of my apartment in Brussels, but I love it here up on the rock with the sea on three sides in this magnificent building and my really nice neighbours.

As I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed …this is the first place in the whole of my life where I’ve actually felt “at home” so I didn’t want to move away. I’ve had to wait patiently for something to come up for sale that I could afford.

Of course I’m not in my new place yet, and it will be quite a while before I am as well, but I’m one step further on down the road.

Ordinarily I would have qualms about putting a tenant out on the streets but a rented apartment has to be offered to a sitting tenant first, and so she’s had a couple of bites at the cherry and turned them down. And in any case, I can always put her in touch with the landlord of my current apartment if she needs somewhere else to go.

Anyway, retournons à nos moutons as they say around here.

When I left the notaire I went to the management agent but she was unavailable, so I went across the road to LeClerc for a bit of shopping.

Back here I had a coffee and some cheese on toast from the air fryer, and then I went to see the President of the Residents’ Committee to thank her for everything that she did. It was a tip-off from her that put on on the scent of the new apartment and I shall be forever grateful.

The cleaner had been and gone while I was away chatting so I made some hot chocolate and armed with some of my delicious chocolate biscuits, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was living in a caravan somewhere in a field. When I returned home my brother was there. He’d found his way in and was going through my record collection. I went to throw him out but he put up a bit of resistance. In the end I had to phone the police. At that point he left but he took several of my albums with him. I had to follow him to find out where he was going and what he was going to be doing. The police weren’t a great deal of help which I thought was unfortunate. In the end I walked back from Crewe (we were in Crewe at the time by now) to my caravan. All along the path were loads of dead foxes. It was very difficult to say whether they had been dead before or dead since or whether someone had moved them. I really didn’t know what I was going to expect when I returned to my caravan. When I opened the door I couldn’t see whether anything had changed or not. It was one of these dreams that awoke me bolt-upright and I couldn’t go back to sleep for ages afterwards.

And then I was part of an investigating team inspecting a battlefield in Normandy during the war. We were looking at a damaged American tank. We examined some of the bullets that had hit it. They turned out to be American. Part of the job of our unit was to investigate American or Allied weapons that had fallen into the hands of the Axis so we were interested in these bullets. We managed to find one that was almost intact. Somewhere near the battlefield was another unit that was involved in discipline etc that had a female civilian judge in charge of it. I went with my officer down there. We presented ourselves to this woman and explained what we had found. She wanted to know our interest. We said what we were doing. Our job was to trace this equipment to find out whether it had been equipment that had the Germans had captured, whether it was equipment that had been sent to the Soviet Union on Lend-Lease or whether it was something much more sinister than that, an American soldier firing on his own side. A guy with this woman judge immediately went on the offensive to some kind of absurd and ridiculous degree that embarrassed everyone there in this room. It made the situation completely uncomfortable. We had to explain that finding the answer to these kinds of questions was very important for a variety of reasons but he was still carried away on this emotional tide.

And while I was on my travels later on, someone had contacted me to go to meet them somewhere. I got back into Caliburn and set off. I noticed that Caliburn was running low on diesel. I thought that I knew where the diesel station was but by the time that I’d arrive it would be after 19:00 and it would be closed. It was in a very rural area so what would I do? As I drove down this road I came to 2 petrol stations, one on either side of the road, that I’d forgotten about. Problem solved. I pulled in there and fuelled up. I went in there to have a coffee too. You chose a mixer cup and they mixed your coffee and poured it into a goblet to give to you. I said that I’d go to the van for my thermal mug. When I reached Caliburn it was surrounded by people eating sandwiches etc so I had to fight my way in. I took my thermal mug but it was full of rubbish so I had to start to remove it. Some wouldn’t come out. It was a really difficult job to extract this rubbish. When I returned to the coffee counter the woman saw me. She asked “rubbish?” and found a waste bin to throw it into. I gave her my mug but I must have been distracted because I stood there and she was serving other people. There was an issue with someone’s card. She had to ring up about it. I asked “is that my card?” and she replied “no, you’re good to go”. Just then the guy she was ringing up managed to get through. He said something about Cheadle Hulme. I said “are we that close to Manchester”? She replied “that’s not that close to Manchester, is it?”.

I’ve forgotten most of this final dream. There was a couple of teenagers, a boy and girl, who were doing ice-dancing. Their routine wasn’t particularly adventurous but you could see that they were quite relaxed. They knew their stuff and quite enjoyed it. The next couple came on, a much older man with a girl probably about 6 or 7. You could see that she was terrified as they went through their routine. It was as if this guy was dancing with a plank of wood. They tried a few adventurous things and it must have been a horrible thing to do because you could see that this girl was scared to death. She was as rigid as a board as he was trying to hold her and twirl her around in the air. We thought “this isn’t any good whatsoever. They are never going anywhere like that”

And then I crashed out. The events of the day have been far too much for me, I reckon.

Tea tonight was a delicious left-over curry with naan bread. That’s the last of that batch and I do have to say that it was a total success. I shall definitely have to make much more of that, and quite right too

So that’s enough for today. I’m off to bed. I have the nurse coming to take a blood sample tomorrow morning so I shall have to be fighting-fit and hope that he won’t be looking in vain to find a vein in my arm. I’m fed up of being a dartboard.

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.

Monday 24th April 2023 – THAT WAS DIFFICULT!

With nothing much better to do today, I decided that I’d do this radio programme about the 14th July.

It wasn’t easy because I had all of the music, including the very, very last track already in my mind so I had to make sure that the speech fitted all of the gaps in between the music. I know that with the way that I speak, 300 characters of text is the equivalent of 17 seconds of speech so I can make sure that I’m always somewhere in the right kind of area, but that doesn’t take into account the fact that song lengths are often not as published and there’s quite often a silence at the beginning or end. And so it can quite often be rather hit-and-miss, especially if my maths aren’t up to much.

So no-one was more surprised than me to find myself almost a minute short of where I needed to be.

Luckily, when I’d been preparing the programme I’d made a reserve selection of appropriate songs of various lengths and so with a little judicious editing I managed to fit in Lindisfarne’s “Bring Down The Government” with some explanatory text.

It still wasn’t right though and I ended up having to re-dictate a couple of speeches and then do yet more editing. What with one thing and another (and once you get started you’d be surprised at how many other things there are) it was 21:00 when I finally finished.

It was some real good fortune that I actually felt like doing it too because I had another wretched night. I was in bed reasonably early but once again it took me an age to go off to sleep. I awoke again at 04:15 and couldn’t go back to sleep. I watched the dawn slowly rise but I must have gone back to sleep at some point because when the alarm went off at 07:00 it was a real shock to the system.

With the nurse coming today to give me my injection I had to have a shower otherwise he wouldn’t have come in through the door. So of course he has to come quite early today while I’m still soaking myself. That was rather embarrassing.

And he has to come back on Thursday to take a blood sample, so later on this week I’ll be doing another dartboard impression. At this rate I’ll be more comfortable sleeping on a bed of nails but I bet that someone would tell me to fakir off.

Next task that interrupted me was the dictaphone, to see where I’d been last night. Nothing like what I’d been up to on previous nights but then again it wasn’t as if I’d had much sleep. I was out with Steve Winwood last night for some strange reason. There was talk of forming a group but nothing ever came of it. We went to an Indian restaurant somewhere, one that I’d been told was good. As I didn’t know how to go to it, it was in a completely different town, we had to go all around the houses. We arrived and they began to serve us. It was a very strict place. Everything was very formal. We ordered our starters and he went to go to the bathroom. Someone on another table obviously recognised him and asked him what numbers he was going to perform with his new band. He mentioned a few songs and then walked off. I could hear him talking to someone in the distance but I couldn’t see him, going on about the restaurant and how he didn’t expect such a posh, formal place etc. One of the things that I asked him was that I read somewhere that the very first chord he ever played on a guitar was Dflat. I asked him why. He said that it sounded good. I asked if it was the opening chord maybe to a song. he made a very non-commital reply to that which I thought was bizarre.

Later on a group of us was walking up a mountain pass. At the side of the road there were 4 or 5 cars that were parked. Then there was a very sharp bend. Round this bend coming towards us was a cattle wagon, a big heavy thing that was fully-loaded. he took the bend really wide because of his length and almost knocked the wall down into the valley then drove straight into the back of one of these vehicles. he didn’t stop. He kept on trying to push this vehicle forward into all the others to push them to give him more room to turn. Someone shouted “camera” so I took out my camera and began to take a couple of photos. It was only then that he stopped and got out to inspect the damage. By now he’s transformed into a yellow school bus. 3 people came with a huge bag and had to clamber onto the roof at the back of the coach in order to put the bag on the roof rack. Another girl appeared. She went round to the front and said to the driver something like “I was on this bus yesterday and I think that I might have left something on board”. This was probably the most surreal thing that I’d ever witnessed

And then, in between everything else, I dealt with the radio programme.

Tea was a delicious stuffed pepper. And what I did was to turn down the air fryer 20° and to cook it twice as long as I did last week. That cooked it to perfection.

Plenty of stuffing left over for a taco roll tomorrow and for a leftover curry on Wednesday. That’s what i’m looking forward to more than anything because, of course, I have a naan bread awaiting me. I’m really impressed with the naan breads that I made and I’ll make another batch of them.

What I’ll have to do though is to remember that the dough expands considerably so instead of making the batch into three lumps, I’ll have to make it into four or even five.

But never mind – it’s still delicious.

Tomorrow I have my Welsh lesson so I need to be on form, and then on Wednesday I go to sign the purchase agreement for my new apartment.

And then the fun will begin.

Sunday 23rd April 2023 – THAT WAS A …

… horrible day today.

With it being Sunday it’s supposed to be a day of rest during which I can lie in bed for as long as I want.

Certainly much longer than 09:30, but by that time this morning I had given up trying to go back to sleep. I’d awoken about an hour earlier and was just lying there tossing and turning to no good purpose.

So after the medication and checking my mails and messages I didn’t do very much at all for a while. Being up and about is one thing but actually being active is something else completely.

Once I’d finally joined the Land of the Living I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I had a cat, a ginger cat last night. As I was going somewhere I took the cat with me in its carrier. We boarded the ship, I parked the car and took the carrier with me ready to go into the lounge. That meant climbing up a row of steps to the top deck so I threw the carrier up to the top so that I could pull myself up with both hands but the wind caught it and blew it over the side. That was the last that I saw of it, carrier and all. The cat was gone. A couple of minutes later there was a similar situation but this time with the laptop. I was doing almost exactly the same thing and that went over the side too

There were also 2 old women living together. I don’t know why but it was night-time and I was sleeping there. We heard a strange kind of noise so we listened. We couldn’t work out what it was so we ignored it. About half an hour later we heard the noise again. We came to the conclusion that it was one of these old women. We awoke the other one and had her go into her sister’s room to find out what was happening. From there the dream jumped to me at the doctor’s, arguing with him to try to have him come out. He was being extremely unco-operative. In the end we persuaded him to come to this girl’s house. We jumped again and it was in a court. It could have been a coroner’s court. Whoever was presiding asked the doctor the question “if he had reacted 10 minutes earlier would the deceased had still been alive?”. He had to admit “yes, she would have been”.

We were also out on the taxis last night. I was at my little workshop. I had someone with me and we had to leave so I went to get into a MkIII Cortina estate that was there. I put the key in and turned it but there were no lights on the dashboard. I said “God! Don’t tell me that the battery is flat. We’ll be stuck here for ever with everyone being busy”. Just then the ‘phone rang. It was Margaret. She asked “is there no dashboard light on the MkIV a problem?”. Whoever was with me explained to her that if there’s no battery or alternator connected you won’t have a light anyway but there’s no reason why the car won’t start. She tried it and it started so she went off to do her jobs. We hung up the ‘phone, I turned the key and the MkIII estate fired up and we set off.

And then I was with my friends from the Wirral. We were going to look at some houses that were damaged by fire or something and just left. We decided to go to have a look at them. There was another old woman living there who had a rather depressing kitchen and people had offered to help her improve it. She kept on turning them down and wasn’t very nice about it either. We came to these houses. The husband was in his Land Rover. Just then as we were on our way to go around the block to look at the back someone in a taxi that had been dressed up as a Carnival float reversed it out of a side street into the road and he just drove straight into the rear of it. This was his 4th accident in 2 weeks that I knew that he had been involved in but he wasn’t bothered in the slightest. I would have despaired if there had been so many for me. What he needed to have done was to have stopped and he could have avoided it. We managed to see one of the houses that had been fire-damaged. He was going on about how £12,000 to repair it was probably an exaggeration. He thought that it could be done for half. I couldn’t understand why the thought that because it may not have needed £12,000 but it wasn’t going to be far off to put this place right. It was simply not going to be saving thousands.

Later I was working in an office with John Cale, but which John Cale I don’t know. John Cale of Velvet Underground or John Cale the mate of Eric Clapton? We were working for an insurance company. Every now and again when the pressure of work became too much, we’d stop. He’d bring in some coffee and I’d bring in some biscuits and we’d have a little 10-minute coffee break. Anyone passing by at that moment could come in for a coffee and chat. management didn’t like it. They felt that we were wasting time. We explained that a morale-building exercise like this was doing us good. The funny thing about it was that this particular dream I dreamt in Welsh, so seeing as Velvet Underground’s John Cale was born in Garnant, it may well have been him.

I had exactly the same dream about an hour later. This time it was still John Cale but which one again? It was again in Welsh. I remember the ugly call and walked out when my grandfather became ill. I said that we’re invited for coffee and biscuits. They replied some kind of sarcastic comment that I didn’t have the time to mess around while they were paying me

I ended up on a holiday. We were coming back and had to unpack. That was the awkward bit because Caliburn was so full of stuff that in the end I had to reverse him out of the garage into the street and start to unload that way. I was talking to Jimmy Page. The subject of “Stairway To Heaven” came up. We ended up having a jam – me on bass and him on guitar. We had a lead guitar solo right at the very end of “Stairway” that went on for probably 20 minutes. It was the most incredible thing that I’ve ever heard. Strangely enough Jimmy Page said that he didn’t like it all that much but I thought that it was magnificent. When I awoke I wished that I could remember how it went because I really enjoyed playing that. However, it wasn’t “Stairway to Heaven” because when I awoke I was playing another Led Zeppelin song going round in my head but I forgot which one it was straight away.

Some of the rest of the day has been spent completing another radio programme. I’m now well ahead of where I want to be. I try to be about 6 months, or 25 programmes, ahead of where I am at the moment but tomorrow I’ll be sending off programme 176 and today I was completing programme 208.

That’s a good plan because if I end up stuck in hospital again like I did last autumn or if I go off on another long voyage, or if the worst ever comes to the worst then I’ll be covered for quite a while.

It’s all quite surprising really because I didn’t expect to be still going after all this time. I remember the hospital telling me back in 2017 when I talked about leaving Leuven and finding another place to live that I’d be wasting my time and money buying an apartment. That didn’t age well, did it?

The rest of the afternoon was spent flat-out on a chair. There can’t have been too much sleep during the night with all of that travelling around that I did and my early start in the morning so it’s not any surprise. It’s still quite dismal though. I wish that I could have a decent sleep at some point, with a few of my favourite visitors coming to see me.

And that reminds me. The final track that I chose for the radio programme that I prepared today was AIRPORT by my old partner in crime from my days stamping around Manchester in the mid-70s.
“Already it’s too late, you’re through the boarding-gate
And walking on the tarmac.
Already you are free, already you’ve left me
And cannot bear to look back, can you?”
And she didn’t look back either. How long is it now since Castor has put in an appearance during one of my nocturnal voyages?

Tea tonight was another pizza of course, and once again it really was an excellent pizza with putting the tomatoes on last and using that expensive grated vegan Cheshire Cheese.

So now I’m off to bed. With having prepared a couple of radio programmes this last week I don’t need to do any work for the radio tomorrow so I’m leaving the alarm set for 07:00 instead of 06:00 and I’ll have a little extra sleep, if I can.

The nurse is coming tomorrow morning to give me my injection so I’d better have a shower at some point early in the morning before he arrives. And I’ll have to tell him about the blood test that I need to have later in the week so he can come round and do the necessary.

So, see you in the morning.

Saturday 22nd April 2023 – I HAVE SEEN …

… some of the best, most exciting football over the last week or so that I have seen for the whole of my life. And I’ve seen plenty of matches in the past.

When you desperately need to win in order to have any chance at all of avoiding relegation and you go 1-0 down after 60 seconds to A GOAL LIKE THIS then you know that you are right up against it.

But then YOU EQUALISE only to find that you GO BEHIND AGAIN just a few minutes later.

And the game drifts on into the second half and you are 2-1 down, only for the MOST EXTRAORDINARY THING to happen. I’m surprised that the crossbar was still intact after Sam Litchfield’s header.

So deep into stoppage time with just seconds left to play. You couldn’t write A FINISH LIKE THIS because no-one would believe it. What a way to avoid relegation!

As I said the other day, I’ve really found out what it means to be gripping the edge of your seat tightly as events have unfolded.

But you have to feel sorry for Y Fflint. They have played some good football at times and I liked what I saw but silly errors at the back have been their undoing all season. And they just couldn’t get the ball forward often enough to Simmonds and Akpa-Akpro to counter the mistakes in defence.

While we’re talking about mistakes … “well, one of us is” – ed … I’m not sure what mistakes I made this morning but when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was sitting at my desk drinking coffee and dictating radio notes.

In fact I’d been awake since 04:20 and I gave up going back to sleep an hour later, and that was that.

Making the most of the peace and quiet at that time of the morning I dictated no fewer than three sets of radio notes and they are all loaded up. And in between everything else that happened I made a complete radio programme. That means that I can have a day off on Monday.

A lot of things did actually happen today. At 09:15 I nipped out into town on my crutches and ended up at the Carrefour supermarket in the town centre. I bought some mushrooms and they also had a net of those small-sized peppers, 2 for €0:99 that I like for making my stuffed peppers.

Even though there’s a pepper still in the freezer I bought a net of peppers because at LeClerc these days they only seem to have giant ones and I’m not an American.

The walk back up the hill was tiring and it took a while to make it home. But a strong coffee and some cheese on toast done in the air fryer soon revived me.

Next stop was to transcribe the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night. There were several bits and pieces last night as if they came out of a Harry Potter film. One part was a group of kids in a room shouting abuse at another group of kids walking past. Across the road was a religious group from a local church who thought that the abuse was directed at them. They complained to the headmaster so there was an identity parade to identify the culprits. Everyone was wearing false glasses and moustaches etc to try to hide from this Christian group

Later on one of the adults burst into one of the kids’ dormitories saying something like “just come here a moment to do this” waking everyone up and was met with a torrent of abuse including from me for I was fast asleep. It awoke me with a start too.

Later still one of the cleaning staff stole Harry Potter’s ring and that was complicated.

By the way, can you guess which film I’m watching at the moment while I eat my evening meal?

After the football I finished off the radio programme but that took much longer than it ought to have done because the early start to the day caught up with me during the late afternoon, as I thought that it might.

Tea tonight was a really delicious burger on a bun with chips from the air fryer and a lovely salad. As I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … my diet these days is showing a vast improvement.

And while we’re on the subject of burgers … “well, one of us is” – ed … when I was at Aldi they had some cheap hamburger presses for sale so I bought one. For only €2:99 they do three sizes and that’s fine by me because I’m collecting a few recipes these days for things like not only burgers but hash browns and so on. A hamburger press doing different sizes is just what I want.

And while I remember, in the cookery sale at Noz yesterday they had some ready-ground nut power so I bought 300 grammes of it. Nutburgers will now be back on the menu in early course. I have some gram flour in a jar somewhere and I’d buy more oats if I only would remember.

But all that’s for another time. I’ve just finished another marathon phone call to Rosemary and despite my sleep this afternoon I’m pretty tired so I’m off to bed.

Nothing to do tomorrow as I have some biscuits and some fruit bread left and there’s some pizza dough in the freezer too. But I’m sure that I can find plenty of things to do to keep me out of mischief. I’m too old for that kind of nonsense these days.

Friday 21st April 2023 – SO THAT IS …

… that!

Hospital week is over and I can press on with more exciting things, like planning my hospital trip to Leuven next month.

But not this afternoon because while I didn’t actually crash out when I returned home, I wasn’t in much of a state to do anything.

It’s the bad night that I blame for all of that. In bed fairly early, what with one thing and another (and once you start, you’ll be surprised just how many other things there are), and then I couldn’t sleep for ages.

It was at 06:20 when I awoke and it wasn’t all that long before I was up and about. But then it’s not surprise that I couldn’t sleep all that well with the needle in my right hand and the pretty awful pain in my left arm. I was totally fed up.

Last night I couldn’t even undress and this morning I couldn’t wash properly either so all in all I was in a right mess by the time that Caliburn and I hit the road.

The Day Hospital at Avranches was really busy. There were four of us in a room set up for two and it was the same in the other rooms there with people coming and going quite rapidly. Only one bottle for me today so I didn’t have to hang around all that long.

The sad part about it was that thy couldn’t take any blood from the needle that they’d left in me overnight so they had to stick another one in my and now I know how a dartboard must feel.

But I’m totally fed up so I spoke to the head nurse and told her that if I really do have to come back, I want a catheter port putting in. She saw the damage that they have done to my arms over the last few days and agreed.

But I have to have a blood test next Friday and discuss the results with the nerve specialist here in Granville and he’ll tell me what the score will be. I suspect that I’ll be back in Avranches before too long.

From the hospital I headed off into town. I wanted to look around the shops and I ended up going to Noz, Aldi, Lidl and LeClerc. And I’m glad that I did because both Noz and Aldi were having baking days and there were lots of little stuff that were worth picking up for my baking activities.

Aldi also had some of that lemonade in those flip-top bottles that I like for when I make ginger beer. It’s bizarre really. The empty bottles cost €1:95 each and yet if you buy them filled with lemonade the complete outfit, both bottle and pop, comes to €1:60.

That’s something that I’m still trying to work out.

Back here I could only bring up half of the stuff but not to worry. I’d bought 2kg of carrots so I washed, diced and blanched them and when they were cooled down and dried off, I bagged them and put them in the freezer.

It should have been hot chocolate time but instead I had a coffee and went to bring up the rest of the shopping. Then I came in here and transcribed the dictaphone notes. Someone was planning on coming round to see me so I began to tidy up the apartment. I’d nearly finished doing what I wanted to do when I heard a doorbell ring. It wasn’t mine though but somewhere else in the building. They weren’t ringing mine so I made sure that it wasn’t them by waiting for another minute in case the bell on my door rang. When it didn’t I went back into the living room and began to read a book of short stories co-written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning while I waited for my visitor to put in an appearance. And I’m impressed that I could recall her name when I’m alseep

Then there’s an old type of claw-foot bath in this apartment somewhere. Someone goes for his shower by standing in the bath but there are no shower curtains so the water goes everywhere and soaks the OSB wooden floor and begins to make a mess of it. But the floor totally fails to match the rest of the apartment because it’s something very contemporary, modern and clean rather than old-fashioned like the rest of the apartment. The question came up of what happens during the rain. Someone said that they had actually seem people outside in the rain weeding the path. That sounded like something ordinary people wouldn’t do so I wondered if this place was actually some kind of prison or reform school for boys rather than a place where you go to seek help etc.

After that there was a new department store opening in New York something like Bloomingdale’s. Some woman owned it. She’d been bothered by a couple of visitors who were hinting at all kinds of things. It came out that she had a rather disreputable past and they threatened to expose her if she didn’t pay them a lot of money. As well as involving the Police because they could only do certain things legitimately, we could do other things not quite so legitimately. I recruited a couple of friends to come along. We laid a trap. Someone else involved in this was a big friend of this woman refused to step down and wanted to be involved. We had to have a meeting to divide up the roles again. We set the trap to catch the blackmailers and caught them red-handed. It was really like something out of an Eliot Ness story, this dream and was extremely interesting.

Did I dictate this dream … “no you didn’t” – ed … about the guy who was involved in some kind of sport with girls of about 4 and 5 years old?. I can’t remember very much about the dream but he had all kinds of trophies on his wall.

Later on I awoke and found myself making a radio programme pairing off a couple of tracks and splicing them together as I normally would.

Finally I was in Stoke on Trent last night on a council estate something like Abbey Hulton. I was ferreting around in someone’s back garden looking for something when they happened to come out and saw me. He asked me what I was doing so I came out with some lame excuse that he accepted. He invited me in for some food so I went in for a chat. We talked about working hours. He had some neighbours in and we talked about it. I was saying that I went to the University 30 hours per week in the afternoon but worked at B&Q to earn some money and did 40 hours per week there. That was 70 hours per week and they considered that to be a lot. They invited me to stay the night so I did. I waited until everyone else had gone to sleep then I got up to go out of the house to the back garden to carry on with what I’d been doing when they discovered me. I was making far too much noise moving a waste paper bin around. They guy of the house hadn’t actually gone to bed. He was making himself a meal late at night. I was worried in case he’d come out and catch me again at what I was doing.

That’s not all that was going on during the night but you don’t really want to know about the rest, especially if you’re eating your tea. But it’s no surprised that I’m exhausted after all of that. But Stoke on Trent and no Zero? Whatever next?

For what was left of this afternoon I didn’t do very much at all. I was trying to track down a Canadian folk singer from the 1960s called Daisy Debolt who was a big friend of Giorgio Gomelski and Strawberry Studios in Stockport. I did find that unfortunately she died of cancer in 2011 but I did manage to track down a couple of albums that she recorded with her boyfriend at the time, Allan Fraser, who was a big pal of Joni Mitchell and Buffy St Marie.

She was actually quite an amazing person. She spent one summer living in a grass hut in Canada growing all her own food and was quite an inspiration to many people.

Tea tonight was falafel and chips done to perfection in the air fryer with a lovely salad and I enjoyed every morsel of it. Tomorrow I’ll be having a burger on a bap with chips, I reckon.

But that’s tomorrow. I’ll have to nip down the road as well at some point for some mushrooms – the ones in Lidl looked awful and I forgot to buy some from LeClerc. Right now though I’m exhausted and I’m going to bed. I shan’t be doing much this weekend as I need to recover after all of the excitement.

It’s quite true to say that this week has taken a lot out of me and I’m far from being well. I’m not expecting too much to come from this hospital treatment that I’ve had and maybe the effort that I’m putting in is outweighing the effect of the treatment that I’m having. I’m not enjoying these needles one little bit.

But I’m relieved that they are taking it seriously and making an effort, which is more than you can say about some people. Let’s see what the next few weeks will bring me.

Tuesday 18th April 2023 – TODAY AT THE …

… hospital was even quicker than yesterday.

For a start, I didn’t have to sign in. Then I knew where I was going, and they didn’t have to weigh me or give me an electrogram.

And with the catheter already being in my arm, I didn’t need to have one fitted, so it was simply a case of giving me the medication.

Consequently I was in there at 08:45 and on my way home by 11:30. I even managed to catch the second half of my Welsh class.

Not that I felt much like it because I had another horrible night. And for some reason or other I awoke bolt-upright in the middle of a dream at 06:59 exactly so I fell out of bed immediately, just so that I can say that I actually did beat the alarm once again.

But not by very much.

It’s not possible to have a shower with my arm swathed in bandages so I had a good stand-up wash and then Caliburn and I headed for the hills.

The people at Avranches are really quite nice and pleasant. They have a good sense of humour too which always helps.

Back here afterwards I had a strong coffee and some of my fruit bread toasted with plenty of butter and then joined my Welsh class. Surprisingly it all passed off quite well and I was surprised.

After the lesson I sat down and listened to the dictaphone. And just look at where I went to during the night. It’s really no wonder that I was feeling so exhausted this morning. I started off in my apartment making breakfast. I put the beans on and a few other bits and pieces. Then I went into the bathroom to fetch some sliced bread from the freezer. I must have had the bread out previously and forgotten to put it back because it was just sitting on the shelf looking moth-eaten as if rats had been eating it. Of course there are no rats or mice anywhere in my apartment. I took 3 slices that looked really sad and put them down on top of the worktop. A huge pile of ants were suddenly disturbed from somewhere and started to scurry round all over the bread. That lot went immediately into the bin. Before that I forgot to say that when I went to go into the bathroom I couldn’t see a thing. I had to play around with the fuses in the wall to switch the fuse back on that control the lights at that end of the apartment. After the mess of the bread I went back into the kitchen. The beans were burning, the toast was smoking as if some bread from before was stuck in there and was on fire. It was all becoming a right mess with everything being burnt and I had nothing to eat.

And then I repeated the same dream pretty much again – about the bread and the kitchen etc being on fire and being eaten by ants and so on that I had earlier. I step back into dreams fairly often but to actually repeat one is rather strange.

Later on some Italian couple involved in some secret society had upset some group of Londoners. We’re going back into the days of Sherlock Holmes. He was investigating this. The Italian man had had an encounter with these four men just after he left home that turned very ugly. They then went to the woman’s house, rang the door and made her answer by taunting her on the doorstep. Sherlock Holmes had crept around the back and rang the bell at the back. The woman had to leave the people at the front and go to the back where she promptly fainted into the arms of Holmes. He quite simply set about the four of her attackers with a hatchet. Three of them he attacked but the fourth one took him by surprise with a pitchfork. He was lucky that he wasn’t badly hurt with the pitchfork but stood his ground and demolished these four guys with his small axe

Break into a stranger’s house and have a huge fight with him and then leave as a kind of pre-emptive strike against something and that really is exactly what I dictated. It’s as if I’ve missed something off the front). But in one particular house I noticed that he had all the ice trays in the freezer of water filling up but they were stacked one on top of another so as they froze they were gradually rising up being pushed out by the frozen water underneath them. I thought “what a good space-saving idea this is”.

The next one is payday. I just received my money and I was dancing about quite happily to some music on the computer. There was mush more to it than this but I can’t remember the rest of it at all.

Then we had 2 iguanas fighting in a hospital. They ended up right by a patient but suddenly a blast of cold air through the air vents on the floor sent them up in the air a little bit and stopped them from fighting. Everyone who was watching them was really amazed at this.

I’d also been away in Canada with a few friends. One of them was Alison. We’d had a much better time than usual because we’d learnt to have better value out of our time than we had done in the past. Then it was time to go back to school. I arrived rather later than I intended but there was still very few people there. I bumped into that girl Liz – not Liz Fox but the other one, her friend who was also called Liz but whose name I can’t now remember after all these years but I can see her vividly. I wanted to have a talk to her but she said “hello” and walked past. I could hear a couple of people gossiping about her from when she was at Primary School. There was some kind of discussion going on about someone. My friend from the Scottish Borders was there involved in this. The guy who was doing most of the talking saw me listening and trying to work out who was the subject. He passed me a Government report of a tribunal. The name wasn’t published but I could see from a lot of the evidence that I had a good idea who it was but I couldn’t put a name to it. I carried on reading it. I could see after a while that he was starting to become impatient. I ended up back in my classroom. A couple of girls came in. They began to talk. We mentioned vaguely the trip that I’d been on. I explained that it was really good but I didn’t go into any detail about it. We began to discuss something else. While we were there someone pulled up in a car. He made a really bad job of parking, left the car and staggered off. We could see that he was totally drunk. I asked who he was. They told me his name. We watched him. Someone said that he had left his 2 kids at home cooking. I’d never seen anyone so drunk as this and still standing on their 2 feet. There was lots more to this too but I can’t remember it now either.

Every now and again a dream comes up that reminds me of my school days and all of the wasted opportunities that I let slip through my fingers while I was there. The first part of that dream was another one that brought back quite a few “if only …” moments and how things really ought to have been so different.

Finally Nerina and I were having one of our big disputes last night. It led to me planning on leaving. I started to prepare my stuff. That meant going home which was a long way so I needed to make sure that I had everything. I couldn’t find the CD that I’d bought so I began to search for it everywhere. After a while Nerina came home. I asked her if she knew where it was. She told me to listen and I could hear a CD playing in the distance. I didn’t recognise it at first but eventually I worked out that it was Steve Winwood singing. That was the one that I wanted. She’d been recording it. She said that it had finished recording so she took it out and gave it back to me. I carried on packing. She was sitting on the sofa. I began to pass her things. There were these 4 oven gloves. I threw them to her and 1 hit her, 2 landed right in front of her and the other landed exactly where I wanted it to be, on the back of the settee behind her. It led to some kind of good-natured discussion after that. I reminded her of the time that she was baking a cake and it all went wrong. She threw it at the wall and I teased her about it and she began to smile. I said that it’s a shame that things changed in our relationship. Again there was much more to it than this that I can’t remember. At one point I was walking down Coleridge Way. There was an argument between 2 lorries, one a cement mixer. It went past the other lorry bu actually driving up on the kerb and scattering the pedestrians. Then it came back and did it again. When I reached where it was there were several pedestrians including a couple of kids lying on the pavement covered in blood as if they’d been struck by this cement mixer. It really was a strange dream.

It’s also another wasted opportunity too but I can really understand that regardless of anything else, she wouldn’t have thought it a wise idea to throw everything up and come off into the great wide-open world with someone like me, married or not.

The rest of the day has been spent finishing off some notes for a radio programme that’s half-completed, and then I made a very brief start on pairing off some music for the next radio programme. I’ll do some more of that tomorrow if I have another short day at the hospital. I know that it won’t be a short day on Thursday because I’ve already been told that the neurologist there is going to put me through my paces on Thursday afternoon.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with rice and veg. And I’m not sure what happened but my rice and veg were cooked to perfection tonight. I wish that it would turn out like that every time.

There’s plenty of my delicious stuffing left so it’ll be an excellent leftover curry tomorrow. There’s plenty of soya yoghurt to add to it instead of the soya cream and I have some naan bread dough in the freezer that I’ll have to take out of the freezer before I go to the hospital.

It sounds as if it might be a really good curry tomorrow and I hope that it is, especially as I seem to have got the hang of this naan bread.

And having found a good menu on the internet for vegan hash browns, I’ll be moving my meals into further uncharted territory in early course.

Monday 17th April 2023 – MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE …

… hospital, they only kept me there for a couple of hours. I was expecting it to be all day.

When I arrived, I signed in and then went to the Day Ward. The nurse weighed me (and my weight is still slowly sinking down towards my best target weight) and gave me an electrocardiagram. They found that I had a heart which is good news as it proves that I’m not a Conservative.

They fitted a drain into me (which will stay in for the entire week) and then gave me a couple of bottles of intravenous drip.

That is in some respects disappointing. They gave me tons of that stuff while I was in hospital in Belgium and it didn’t seem to do me all that much good. I was expecting that they would be doing something else to help me overcome these issues that I’m having.

Still, I’m not turning down any treatment. I’ll take all that I can get if they think that it’ll do any good. And in any case, if it doesn’t work out I’ll be well-placed to receive more treatment of a different kind. I have to start at the beginning.

The intravenous drip was finished by 11:45 and then I was kicked out on my way home.

In some respects (but not in others) I was glad that it didn’t take all that long because I wanted to get home. I’d had another bad night, just when I thought that I’d got over those. In fact, setting the alarm at 07:00 counted for nothing because I was already up and about by then, having been awake for quite a while.

There was time to grab a shower before hitting the road. After all, I have to make myself look beautiful.

Once they threw me out I headed for home, a coffee and some corn flakes. I was hungry. But before I could come back into the apartment I was ambushed by a couple of neighbours and we had a chat for a while.

Once I’d organised my food, I had a bake-in. After all, I’ll need some food for lunch if I’m going to be back home at this time every day this week. So now I have a fruit and nut loaf along with a big pile of fruit and nut biscuits. And they are all delicious because I sampled them.

Biscuits seem to be quite easy to make really. There’s a base recipe of sugar, butter and flour in a ratio of 4/8/10 and then you add whatever flavouring you like. I found this afternoon that if you add a banana you deduct half the weight of the banana from the weight of the butter.

It’s also got me thinking about cocoa powder. I bet that I could make some nice chocolate biscuits with some of that creamed into the vegan butter.

Once again the air fryer was pressed into play because there were too many biscuits for the shelf in the oven. The air fryer bakes them quite nicely, but I can’t wait to have a bigger oven.

The effort was far too much for me though and once I’d settled down in my comfy chair I crashed out for well over an hour. I was clearly well out of everything after my exertions.

One reason why I was so tired, I reckon, was because of the kind of night that I’d had. Despite not being in bed for all that long, I’d been out on a considerable number of little voyages during the night that had kept me going. There was something to do with being on board a ship and fishing but I can’t really remember what that was. There was a boy who came up to me after I’d been giving a talk, a foreign boy whom I knew. He asked me in broken English “is it wrong to influence a judge?”. I asked “in what way? What do you mean?”. He replied “if I want her to come to bed with me”. I replied ” of course it’s not in that situation. Tell me about it”. He told me a little. I said “the best way to start is that people like to be talked about so you need to compliment her. Say how nice she looks. But don’t go too much overboard. If you do that it all sounds very false”.

And then I had to go off to work one morning. Another boy in the house had had an accident. He was in the Turkish baths steaming it off. Apparently he was far too ill to go anywhere. There was all kinds of discussion about who should do what when and where. Who needs a lift to work etc. I said “I’m quite happy to go and say goodbye to him and walk in to work”. In the end after a lengthy discussion this woman who might have been my mother I dunno said that she would go to clean out the Turkish bath when I’d finished saying goodbye before I went to work. One or two other people were there as well who had to leave. Generally it was total chaos that morning with all of this happening.

There was a family where there were several daughters. Daughter n°1 wanted to marry but her mother was totally opposed to her choice of husband so she even arranged with the preacher not to turn up at the wedding so she wouldn’t be able to marry him. Luckily she managed to find some other kind of itinerant preacher who married them. This was the story of the family gossip when everyone was together to celebrate the 35th anniversary of their marriage that her mother had thought wouldn’t last a week. They wanted her to be like her sister who as far as they were concerned married the perfect husband but the husband was away from home visiting his wife’s family when he received a text message from his wife, daughter n°2, that said “come home darling. I miss you. I have something for you that I want you to have”. It all sounded romantic so he dashed home only to find that he was given his divorce papers because she’d found out that he’d been cheating on her throughout all of her marriage.

I was back running another taxi business later on. I had some black Vauxhall Transcontinentals working for me. They had been in really bad condition when I’d bought them all quite old but I’d welded them up and they were quite good vehicles. I liked them very much. I was going off shift and cleaning my car out. It was absolutely filthy with bottles of pop and everything all over it. It was a real mess and it had taken ages for me to tidy it up. Then someone came over for a chat. I asked “do you want to see something funny?”. I showed him a paper that I’d received from a garage about this vehicle’s MoT along with some things that had failed it. He asked me “what did I do?”. I said “I took it to another garage because I didn’t believe half of what was written on this note”. He asked what they did and I answered that they charged me 30p to fix something and it passed. I shan’t be going to that first garage again.

There was another dream about a vicar in a church. In his parish some horrible crimes had been committed. The police investigation had gone on and on for ever. One day one of the parishioners, a very respectable upright man, came into church to look for the priest, presumably wanting a talk or maybe even wanting confession. The priest was down in the cellar sawing so he started to climb up. Just as he reached the top a couple of policemen pounced on the man, handcuffed him and dragged him off as if it was he, a most respectable family man, had been the one committing all these horrible crimes.

There was also something about a couple of twins whose parents were divorced. At the time they were living with their father. He’d taken them into work on a very quiet day because he had things to do there. While they were there some fellow employee kidnapped one of them. In fact he kidnapped them both but when a chase began he couldn’t carry them both so he dropped one and ran with the other. There was a big chase all the way through the factory. It went on for ages and he made his way out into the open heading for the car park. He was attacked by another employee and knocked unconscious. It was only then that the little girl realised that there was something wrong. There was a big discussion afterwards about this guy. He had previous convictions for all kinds of weird things. They wondered why a company like that had actually employed someone with his kind of history. His wife wasn’t surprised at all about her husband grabbing hold of this little girl and running away with her. That was a surprising thing as well that she treated it as something quite normal I suppose.

That’s not everything either. I was also out with a few people whom I know but you really don’t want to know how that particular story unfolded, especially if it’s tea time where you are.

While we’re on the subject of tea … “well, one of us is” – ed … I forgot to wind the heat back up in the air fryer after I’d baked my biscuits. Consequently the stuffed pepper that I’d baked from frozen hadn’t baked all the way through. The top hadn’t burnt, which was good news, but the bottom could have done with another 20° of heat.

Still, you can’t win a coconut every time and one of the things about making mistakes is that if you are lucky and have a good memory you can learn from them. I’ll have to try my best to do so.

So even though it’s early and I’m not all that tired after my sleep this afternoon, I’m going to bed. A good relax will do me good and we’ll see how things get on tomorrow. I’m hoping for a longer day at the hospital tomorrow with more treatment but I probably won’t get it.

But one thing that I’ve noticed from a map of Avranches is that all of the important shops are within staggering distance of each other. If I get away early on Friday I might do a lap around the shops there on Friday afternoon and see what they have to offer that might be different than what I can find in Granville.

That should be interesting.

Friday 14th April 2023 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… delicious evening meal tonight.

While I was going through the freezer the other day I came across some small kidney bean burgers that have been there since the Dawn Of Time.

Two of them, there were, but there are none left now because as part of my programme to go through and slowly empty the freezer, they went into the air fryer with the diced potatoes and were eaten alongside a nice salad.

It won’t be long now before I can get back to baking pies again. A nice vegan pie like I used to make, when I had room in the freezer, would be lovely for tea for a few nights in the near future. We’re getting there.

Something else that I had that I’ve also had before was a bad night when I struggled to go to sleep and then awoke and some kind of silly hour of the morning.

Not another 04:45 start, but I was certainly out of bed well before the alarm at 07:30.

And that reminds me. Next week I have to set the alarm for 07:00 for my week at the hospital, so I’m reckoning that I’ll leave it set at that instead of 07:30, but compromise by not having an early start on a Monday.

The reason why I had such an early start was that I could dictate the radio notes in peace and quiet before the traffic started up and the kids passed by on their way to school, but I seem to be managing right now by doing it very late on a Saturday night.

After the medication I had a nice shower, sorted out some clothes and then did a little tidying up ready for the physiotherapist. He had my lying on the floor with my back on a rolling pin and I had to roll up and down. The idea is to ease off some of the tense and tight nerves in my back.

Surprisingly, I was able to stand up after lying on my back on the floor, and if that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.

He’s very pleased with how things are going, and I have to say that so am I. I hope that it keeps up. I’m regularly doing all the exercises that he’s programmed for me and the stuff that I’ve bought, like the weights and the elastic straps, are doing me a lot of good.

After he left (and he was here for ages) I went through the paperwork, downloaded and printed off what I need for the hospital. There’s a French Government site for health services and everyone has a folder there, so I uploaded some details there too while I was at it.

Having done that, I made a start on a radio programme, the notes for which I dictated the other day. It was a slow laborious process because I was side-tracked here and there along the way, but in the end it’s completed. That’s good news because it’s the one that I should have been doing on Monday but, of course, I’m not here.

Having said that, I’ve not been all here for quite a while, have I?

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too from the night. We’d been to Glasgow to try to find a festival that was taking place where some friend of my father was playing with his group. We eventually tracked it down in Paisley (but it wasn’t in Paisley really). I had a good look round. There were 3 different companies of stewards there, Pye itself in dark blue clothing, another company and a 3rd in a kind of black and white tartan. We made a few notes and then came home. Later on my father asked me to move this boy’s father. He wanted to speak to him but he was busy. I rang and eventually got through. Father by this time was in the middle of a heated argument so I continued making some small talk but didn’t really say much. The subject of this festival came up. The father passed the telephone to his son and we had a lengthy chat about the events at this festival, who was there who we saw, what clothing everyone was wearing etc

At one point I was in Oak Street in Crewe. There was something about some boy who had died. Someone had thrown a wreath into the brook that runs at the back there. I’d been working on something – I’m not quite sure what it was. My father was with someone else. When we finished I wanted to go into the barn to fetch something but they were standing in the way. I had to ask them to move. Then I couldn’t get into the barn because of all the stuff that was there. I wanted to go in there to do some tidying up but it would be really difficult to get what I wanted from the barn with that much stuff in it.

The family is back again and has been, here and there, over the last couple of days. But it would be nice if one of my preferred companions would show a leg here and there every now and again.

Tea was, as I said, quite delicious again. I really am eating well right now which is excellent news. But don’t worry about the kidney bean burger supply being exhausted because someone posted a recipe today for falafel burgers that I am determined to try one of these days. And if the recipe works for chick peas, no reason why it won’t work for kidney beans.

Tomorrow I’m shopping, and I’ve created quite a little list. Supplies are slowly winding down again and I ought to be thinking about stocking up. While it’s nice (and sometimes necessary, as December last year proved when I couldn’t go shopping for five weeks) to have a stock of food on hand, it’s also nice to recycle through it. I seem to have let things drag a little with the freezer.

So another early night again. Let’s hope that I can make the most of it.

Thursday 13th April 2023 – THE VISITING NURSE …

… came round this morning to take my blood sample, and I was surprised. After all, he’d tried one of my biscuits when he was here on Monday, and he’s still alive. They must be quite good so I’ll have to make some more of them.

Mind you, he wasn’t so good at taking the blood sample from me. I ended up looking and feeling like a dart board. And to add insult to injury, he said that he hadn’t managed to fill all of the three tubes that were required but he hoped that there would be enough for the analysis.

When he turned up, at 08:40 this morning, I was really pleased because I was starving. And so would you have been too had you been up since 04:45 this morning. I’d awoken a long time before that too but just couldn’t go back to sleep.

And so with an early start like that I took full advantage of the peace and quiet by dictating some of the backlog of notes that i’d been accumulating.

While I was on my travels around the internet checking up on a few things that I’d written I happened to notice that the first Hawkfest – Space-rock festivals promoted by Hawkwind to try to recapture the spirit of the early rock festivals of the late 60s and 70s – started on a 19th July some time 20-odd years ago.

By pure coincidence that’s a Friday next year.

One thing that I’ve wanted to do is to dedicate a whole programme to just one group and while that’s not really feasible, I have quite a collection of music from obscure space-rock bands who came to whatever prominence they had thanks to an appearance at a Hawkfest, so I think that I’ll have my own Hawkfest on 19th July next year, if I’m still here

A couple of hours of spacerock would be really nice, but I’ll have to find out who has the recording rights to Nik Turner’s performances with his old group “Children Of The Sun” after he died last year.

Once the nurse had gone, I had a bowl of cornflakes and then set out for town in the rain to pick up my Aranesp. It didn’t take me long to go there and come back, although I was quite exhausted when I arrived back home.

One thing that I didn’t have to do though was to go to the post office. NIkon got back to me this morning to tell me that the old NIKON D5000 can’t be repaired. It’s not been made for years and parts are no longer available.

Considering that I bought it in June 2010 I’m not really surprised, but it would have been nice to have kept it going for longer.

So what do I do now? Mirrorless seems to be all the rage but as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we don’t seem to have much luck with the NIKON 1 J5. It’s not strong enough to withstand shocks and being smaller than a conventional camera, the moving parts are smaller, lighter and much more delicate.

Having said that, I do persevere with the Nikon 1 because it fits quite nicely in a pocket and being lightweight, I can carry it around quite easily when I’m doing something else. The quality is surprisingly good but only within its limits and I’m expecting it to do much more than it’s capable of doing.

Armed with my cheese on toast and a coffee I came back in here to carry on working but I just couldn’t keep going and by 13:00 I was back in bed asleep. And that’s no surprise either.

Not that I was there for long, though. The laboratory rang me to say that they needed more blood. Caliburn came to the rescue and we went off there.

Surprisingly, the nurse there found my blood straight away with no drama and it didn’t take long to sort out.

The laboratory is just over the road from But, the electrical houseware supplier, so I went over there. I need a built-in microwave oven to go in the units that I bought in Germany last summer that I’ll be installing in the new apartment.

Another thing that I want is a big fridge-freezer seeing as there’s a nice space there in the kitchen, and so I reckoned that I’d go there for a good look around.

Back here I had my hot chocolate and finished off the last of my home-made biscuits while I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I was dictating out the music (do I mean the text?) last night and had it all arranged. The speech had been edited and I was intending to snip it into sections ready to assemble but for some unknown reason I forgot how to do it. I was sitting there for ages looking at the database that I keep, wondering about what I was supposed to be doing to assemble it all to make a proper radio programme. The way it was laid out on the database it just didn’t look right to me at all.

Later on, our mother was keeping us prisoner in our house. We couldn’t go out. We worked out where she’d hidden the key. While we were doing that someone else had worked out a way by which he could open the door but it was long and complicated. he waited until our mother had got up, left her bed and gone out and he began to creep downstairs. Of course we knew that mother would have left her key in her bedroom so we said “you want the third door”. He made a gesture, one, two, three, and started to go downstairs again. We said “no, Clive, the third door” but he carried on downstairs. He didn’t understand that we wanted him to go to the third door on this floor which was my mother’s room where he could find the key just sitting there.

At another point I had plenty of things to do but it was lunchtime and I was being friendly to my colleagues. We were standing around talking and I could see my lunch hour fading away rapidly. But then she invited us up to the 1st floor to have a look at the furniture that she was making in this warehouse. We said that we’d go. Before we reached the stairs she took us to a wall. She pressed a button and a panel rose up. There was an old fireplace that had been bricked up. She asked us to smell by it. We couldn’t smell anything at first but as she closed it there was a smell of varnish. I told her about it. We went upstairs. She had tons of furniture up there including a gorgeous collection of kitchens. We had a good look around here. I thought that there was some lovely stuff. The quality was undeniable but it wasn’t exactly my taste. I ended up spending a lot of time looking at everything to see if there was anything there that really caught my eye.

Tea tonight was beautiful – yet again. That vegan Cheshire cheese that I found in LeClerc a few weeks ago melts really well and with the new dairy thickener that I found there the other day, my cheese sauce was the best that I’ve ever made.

Consequently, steamed vegetables and falafel balls in a vegan cheese sauce it was. I’ll certainly have more of that some other time too. I’m really pleased that the supply of vegan food in mainstream French shops seems to be growing all the time. And not before time either.

So tomorrow I have the physiotherapist coming round in the morning to put me through my paces. I need to be at my best because I have some working-out to do ready to go off to the hospital next week for treatment.

So an early night it is. Here’s hoping that it’s not an early morning.

Wednesday 12th April 2023 – MY HOME-MADE …

… garlic naan was delicious. And what’s even better is that there are two more balls of dough in the freezer for further use for the next batch of leftover curries. And shock! Horror! I didn’t use the air fryer but stuck the naan in the wok to cook when I’d finished cooking the curry.

The leftover curry tonight was even better than usual too. The naan bread recipe called for just half a pot of soya yoghurt so instead of soya cream, I added the remains of the pot to my curry and that definitely gave it a certain je ne sais quoi that it didn’t have before.

The fact is that gradually I’m working on my diet and my meals and I’m having some really good stuff. My diet is improving in leaps and bounds and that can only be good news.

It’s better news that what happened during the night. That’s certainly true. I was late going to bed and when the alarm went off at 07:30 I was already sitting down here working. I’d been up since 06:00 and awake for more than an hour before that. It was quite a dreadful night.

Anyway I went for a shower and then set off to walk to the doctor’s, with both my crutches. I almost had a fall going down the steps to the Place Pelley but I managed to hang on and made it the rest of the way.

The doctor was extremely pleased to see me and he said so. He also said that when he saw me for the first time after I came back from Canada via the hospital he was extremely worried and wasn’t sure at all that I would pull through.

Not the first time that I’ve heard that either. I had a friend once who told me that he had been at death’s door but the hospital pulled him through.

After the doctor threw me out, armed with a pile of prescriptions, I went first to the little Carrefour and then round to the pharmacy. Outside, I met the friendly neighbourhood itinerant street dweller and we had quite a chat.

The chemist has to order in my Aranesp so that’s another trip down into town tomorrow. And I’m slowly warming to the idea of going to Leuven next by train regardless of the struggle through Paris because right now I seem to be managing to walk fairly well, all things considered, on my crutches and I’m hoping for an improvement after my week next week at the hospital.

What underlined that was the walk back home afterwards. I made it all the way back here without having to stop to catch my breath and it’s been an age since I’ve been able to do that. Things are looking up.

While i’d been in town I’d bought a crusty baguette so I made some cheese on toast for a late breakfast, especially now that I can actually buy vegan cheese in the big supermarkets. It’s not just my cooking that’s looking up but the supply of ingredients too.

Tons of stuff on the dictaphone too from during the night despite how short it was. I was driving a taxi last night. I had my little company going but all kinds of issues were going on. I ended up with just one car doing a few bits and pieces here and there. I was fed up with trying to organise everything and do everything. It ended up in Court for some reason or other. It was all very depressing last night.

And then I was in a house with someone. She was going to have a bath. She had left me alone in the living room. I’d seen all of her plants. She had some books on plants.

There was also a dream about a big female cat like Chloe (the cervil). She’d had kittens and one of them wasn’t very well. It had a respiratory issue. She brought the kitten to me to presumably take to the vet. I took the kitten and her too at the same time.

Later on I stepped back into one of these dreams again about a girl whom I’d been dating. Her parents began to accept me as some kind of fixture. She told me that Robert had rung up to talk to me. She thought that this was my father. I explained that this was Percy Penguin’s father. I couldn’t understand why he would want to get in touch with me. Her mother didn’t say very much and wandered away so I talked to this girl who by now had become Percy Penguin. She was saying that she’s being treated much better at home now because she’s been spending more time with them and more time looking after the pets and animals which has made har parents quite grateful. Maybe my new favoured position has something to do with all of that.

When I awoke later on (whatever that’s supposed to mean) I was with this girl again. I don’t know what’s happening here now.

That’s not everything that happened during the night by the way, but you really don’t want to know about the rest of it.

The cleaner came round this afternoon and we had a good chat while I wrote out some notes for one of my radio programmes. But then I crashed out – good and proper too – for at least an hour so I didn’t do as much as I would have liked. But I still managed to find the time to make some dough for the delicious naan bread.

having talked about my curry earlier, I’m just going to do a little more work and then I’ll head for bed. No lie-in tomorrow of course because I’m having a blood test and I have to have had nothing to eat. So right now I’m finishing off the last of the special chocolate that I bought for myself for Easter and then I’ll be going to bed.

But after crashing out like I did today I probably won’t have much of a sleep tonight either. Still, a good walk into town should wear me out enough and I’ll be fit for nothing when the physio comes round on Friday morning.

It’s all go around here, isn’t it?

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.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: bad night

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Monday 17th April 2023 – MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE …

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Saturday 8th April 2023 – THAT WAS DISAPPOINTING

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