Tag Archives: eric hall

Saturday 6th September 2025 – WE HAVE A …

… water leak here in the apartment, as I found out when I went into the bathroom after the washing machine finished its cycle to take out the washing.

It’s actually nothing serious really. It seems to be the waste water evacuation pipe underneath the sink unit – the only pipe in the whole apartment that it’s not possible to pressure-test. But that in itself is some kind of blessing because the water isn’t under pressure.

Still, that all that I needed today because I’ve not had a very good day at all.

For some reason or other, I was horribly late finishing my tea last night and consequently, I was late, very late, in going to bed.

Although I fell asleep quite quickly, I awoke pretty soon afterwards and then I couldn’t go back to sleep. I was lying there for hours, wondering whether or not it might be worth abandoning all thoughts of sleep and leaving the bed instead.

However, I did doze off for about half an hour or so, and awoke again at about 06:10n when I decided that I would in fact throw caution, and the bedclothes, to the wind and leave the bed.

In the bathroom, I had a good scrub up and shave etc just in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant today, and then I loaded up the washing machine. It was a good job that I checked the water feed because it hadn’t been turned on. It would have been a strange wash had there been no water going into the machine.

After the medication I came back in here and listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. We had some kind of file set up about some kind of village with all of the plans etc in it. What I was trying to do was to work out the story behind this village by reference to the plans. It involved going through all kinds of files looking for all kinds of papers and going through all of the different surveys over the years. There were notes about something, a plan, and notes about something else that was covered by a different plan and there were probably ten different chapters. What I was trying to do was to assemble something just by using one set of plans without mixing them. That way, it would be much less complicated. Everyone thought that it was a strange way to go about doing it but this was how I wanted to do it and how I thought it would be best. It meant disturbing quite a few people with different parts of the file but in the end, I managed to do it and find all the papers that I wanted and slowly stitch them together to assemble this plan so that in the end I could write my report about the history of this village. I knew that it was going to be extremely interesting when I’d finished. However, it turned out that this village was a model, not a real village at all. It was really some kind of paperwork exercise but there were lots of other people involved in this situation too.

This has a bearing on MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES where we have spent some considerable time discussing Saxon villages and their evolution over time during the five hundred or so years that the Saxons had ascendancy over the south and east of England.

In the middle of it all, we were in Gresty Road by the YMCA place. Something that I wanted was in the garden of one of the houses of the Claughton Avenue estate opposite so the girl with me set out to cross the road. She went into the wrong gate so I had to go over the road to direct her to the correct gate but she managed to work it all out, picked up what we needed and we met at the correct gate again ready to go back across. However, there was a three-legged grey tabby cat on the side of the Claughton Avenue estate side. It was waiting for a gap in the traffic to cross. It hopped across on its three legs to halfway across the road and then just lay down and stretched out in the sun. I thought that that was extremely dangerous. The cat wasn’t going to last much longer if it did that.

Where this fits in, I really don’t know. It doesn’t relate to anything to which I can relate.

Finally, I was working in Chester and had to go off with one of the employees of the company. On the way back we went past a yard that looked as if it was a derelict railway marshalling yard siding and engine storage place. I noticed that one of the co-ordinates for this description a short distance further on was 53°15″ West … "he means ‘North’" – ed … but I couldn’t read the North … "he means ‘West’" – ed … co-ordinate. I thought that when I return home, I’ll have a look on the map to see where it is. Back in Chester again, I’d been off with a woman who worked in the area. She’d taken me down to her house which was at the back of Watergate Street, a really posh, nice house. On the way back, we came up Watergate street. I remember saying to her that right at the top there was a really nice bakery. She said that she knew the one that I meant but it had been closed down for a long time. Then the giuy who had taken me out earlier took me out again. It was early in the morning just after we’d signed in. We had to go round and pick up all these things that we had ordered for clients of the business. There were things like model cars and things like that from a particular shop. From another shop, it was a very expensive croissant and cake, and the baker signed his name on top with a soldering iron and molten syrup. It looked really impressive. The baker asked me if I needed anything but I replied “no, I’m only here to carry the stuff”. The baker turned round to the guy with me and said “well, in that case you should make him some kind of present”. As we were walking back past the first shop that we had visited, we noticed a display box with cars in it, a little round cardboard thing, very fancy. The guy asked if that should have been given to him in the previous load. The owner looked at his notes and said that it was. The guy said that he was glad that he came back this way to look. At the bottom of Watergate Street by the by-pass I had to climb into a lorry, an old Bedford TK. Climbing in there, being handicapped, was almost impossible. Several people tried to help me but I couldn’t manage it. The guy said that if I were to walk a little further on, there were some steps where I could climb in. In the end, I managed to haul myself in by hanging on to one of the mirrors and hanging on to something that was bolted to the roof. Then we set off. There was much more to it than this and I wish that I could remember it.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I lived and worked in Chester for two years after leaving school. It was a very happy time, even though I had no money and was living in run-down bedsits. However, I learned a lot and made some good friends, although they seem to be among the people who have dropped off the radar over the last few years which is a shame.

There was a really nice bakery at the top of Watergate Street when I lived in the city. It sold beautiful Austrian pastries and when I could afford, which wasn’t often, I would treat myself.

The rest of the dream is rather confusing, although incidentally, 53°15′ North is the geographical co-ordinate of inter alia Tarporley in Cheshire, midway between Nantwich and Chester on a route that I know very, very well indeed.

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in and breezed out again, giving me another dire warning about accepting the dialysis at home; And then I could push on and read the rest of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES, which is now finished.

The final points that we have been discussing in the survey of the land, and I was astonished by just how accurate the Roman measurements were. The Domesday Survey, based on the Roman measurements, shows Middlesex as having 181718 Acres. The Ordnance Survey land measurements that are quoted by our author puts the total acreage at 181706. The Roman figures are astonishingly accurate and shows just how advanced for their time the surveyors were.

After breakfast, I sorted out the washing and then sorted out the bathroom, and then I wrote to the plumber to inform him.

My cleaner turned up to fit my anaesthetic and then after she left I tidied up some more in the living room while I waited for the taxi, which was late today.

Once more, I was the only passenger, and as I was the last to arrive, I was dealt with straight away. However, it was still late.

There was football this afternoon, Cardiff Metro V Colwyn Bay. And the Bay were rampant, winning 4-1. It actually was an exciting game for a change and I enjoyed watching it.

After the football, my lack of sleep caught up with me and I crashed out for twenty minutes, which did me some good.

Emilie the Cute Consultant was there today but she doesn’t love me any more. She didn’t come to see me at all, and when I left I said “see you Monday” twice to her but she didn’t respond.

Back here, I had a relax for a while and then made tea, a breaded quorn fillet with vegan salad and baked potato. I didn’t feel much like food so it was only a very small meal.

The pain in my foot has started again tonight. It’s now down in my toe which is a change, but it hurts even more.

But on this point, I’ve had enough and I’m off to bed. A good sleep tonight, if I’m lucky, will do me some good.

However, seeing as we have been talking about geographical co-ordinates … "well, one of us has" – ed … a good forty years ago, a nudist camp opened in quite a secluded spot in North Staffordshire .
They were hovever bothered by a helicopter from the nearby RAF flying school that hovered overhead.
Afraid that their location would be exposed by the helicopter pilot, they wrote an angry letter to the commandant of the school. He then posted a note in the pilots’ briefing room "pilots should be reminded not to hover over the nudist camp, situate at (so many)°N and (so many) °W "

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Friday 5th September 2025 – I HAVE HAD …

… a lovely afternoon this afternoon in the company of friends, and it’s not very often that I can say that. Or, at least, not often enough.

Back in 1970 when I was 16 I went on a student exchange and ended up in a small village in the Burgundy Hills at the back of Macon, and the poor boy went to stay with my family in the UK.

What with me living a very nomadic existence after that, we lost touch but A CASUAL ENCOUNTER WITH ONE OF HIS RELATIVES rekindled things and we’ve kept in touch ever since.

Anyway, the last few days, they’ve been camping in the area and today, in between all of my medical appointments, we managed to meet up and see each other for the first time for a couple of years.

While I was at dialysis yesterday, he and his wife sent me a photo of themselves outside the building here so they had found where I lived, and they arranged to call here today.

That gave me something to anticipate eagerly last night, because these days there’s not all that much in the way of eager anticipation. I could certainly do with more of it because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any.

Especially when I was feeling as ill as I was last night. Apart from the pain in my shoulder, I was feeling quite awful everywhere else and flat-out tired to boot.

Despite finishing my notes early last night, somehow the time evaporated afterwards and it was after 23:00 when I finally crawled into bed, tired out, in agony and totally fed up.

When I awoke, it was 03:30 and once more, I couldn’t go back to sleep no matter how hard I tried. I was all for leaving the bed after an hour or so of trying, but I thought that I’d give it five more minutes.

The next thing that I remember, it was 06:18, eleven minutes before the alarm. I had apparently gone back to sleep at some point. But seeing the time, I thought that I’d better leave the bed quite quickly and claim an “early start”.

After sorting myself out in the bathroom I went for my medication, and then afterwards I spent a very pleasant twenty minutes … "I don’t think" – ed … tidying some more of the kitchen.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was with some friends again. We went to some kind of luxury hotel for breakfast one morning. The place was crowded and we had a struggle to find a seat. I ended up having to perch between the two seats of my two friends. I went to find some soya milk for my cereal. One of the waitresses said that they had some soya milk and it should be on the table at the back. I looked, but it wasn’t there so she replied that someone must have borrowed it. I walked around the table looking for the soya milk and saw a bottle on someone’s table, but as soon as I started to look at it to see if it was soya milk, the guy grabbed hold of it and put it on the floor between his legs. In the end, I went back to see one of the waitresses. She said that she would try to find me some more. There was no vegan butter either so I had to have my toast with jam on it. But by the time I finally returned to my seat, still without the soya milk, everyone else had been finished but I’d had no coffee, no cereal, no toast or anything. I was perched in between these two seats. I thought to myself that for a five-star hotel, this is absolutely awful. But while we were sitting there, some kind of Reverend or Vicar came up to talk to one of the girls with us. It turned out to be her brother. They were doing something with a car. The Priest or Vicar handed her the keys, saying that their mother had said to just leave it around somewhere and it will all be sorted out but it’ll need the keys for it.

In the past, I’ve stayed in five-star hotels where vegan alternatives don’t exist, and where I’ve met some of the most arrogant people on the planet. I’m much more comfortable and at my ease in steerage than I am up on the First-Class promenade.

Later on, I was talking to a former friend of mine from Stoke-upon-Trent. He was talking about my van, saying that someone had seen me and I was driving too fast, recklessly, all of this kind of thing. He gave some kind of fanciful description of a route that I was supposed to have driven around the town that this other guy had seen. I said that I don’t recognise that at all, and didn’t believe that it was me. He had a really good moan about the state of my van, about how when I first had it, I used to really look after it. I was by this time pretty much fed up because I didn’t recognise the journey that he was talking about, I didn’t recognise the state of the van etc. This kind of thing is really getting on my nerves now.

There’s a long story behind this former friend of mine. One of the nicest, most helpful people on the planet, his character totally changed with the medication that he was obliged to take after a serious motorcycle accident. There were several occasions when I ended up in some quite uncomfortable situations and in the end I had to stop going round there. I had enough of my own problems with which to deal without having to deal with the consequences of someone else’s.

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in, early for once. She was in chat mode once more and we spent a lively five minutes discussing this and that while she saw to my legs, and then she wandered off again, leaving me to make breakfast and to read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.

In the past, I’ve often talked about the Local Government Act of 1888 that eliminated the hundreds, if not thousands of enclaves, counter-enclaves and even counter-counter enclaves of different Counties embedded within the borders of other Counties, speculating that the previous County boundaries an enclaves corresponded in many cases with ancient Bishoprics and Church lands.

Our author tells us that certainly in the case of Middlesex, the County boundary corresponded with the boundary of the Middle Saxons after the defeat of the West Saxons at the Battle of Fethanleah in AD584 but before the subsequent peace treaties in the Seventh Century. He goes on to quote from another author that the origins of these enclaves etc was during the reconversion of Britain to Christianity where "a lord had a parcel of land detached from the main of his estate, but not sufficient for a parish of itself, it was natural for him to endow his newly erected church with the tithe of those disjointed lands.".

This morning, I spent some time tidying up my office, rethreading cables etc, tidying boxes, putting things away and so on. But I’m really disappointed in how long it takes me to do even the simplest thing these days. It’s really depressing. Even picking up a box from the floor these days is almost beyond my capabilities.

After a disgusting drink break, my faithful cleaner appeared and set about today’s task of tidying up everything that I had not been able to do, but she was interrupted by the arrival of my friends.

They are Honda Goldwing owners and members of the Goldwing Owners’ Club. There’s a big annual reunion of the Goldwing Club up at Ouistreham near Caen, so they came from near Macon on the Goldwing to camp around here for a few days to see the area and to visit me before moving on to Ouistreham.

We had a good chat about all kinds of things, which was really nice. I don’t meet people anything like as often as I would like and I hardly talk to anyone these days. We ended up being here for hours drinking coffee and idly chatting.

After they left, I made tea – vegan nuggets, salad and air-fried chips.

Now it’s quite late, as usual, and I’m off to bed. Dialysis tomorrow afternoon, but I have washing to do in the morning which will be exciting. I’ve not had the washing machine going down here yet and I still don’t know where I’m going to put the clothes to dry. But as “It’s A Beautiful Day” once said, IT’LL ALL WORK OUT IN BOOMLAND

It better had, anyway.

But seeing as we have been talking about my student exchange visit, one of my sisters asked me afterwards "does their family say a prayer before they eat their meal like we do over here?"
"Ohh no" I replied. "His mother is a good cook."

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Thursday 4th September 2025 – I AM HAVING …

… another bad day today. I’ve pulled a muscle or something in my left shoulder and it’s aching like Hades. I’m having trouble eating, typing, all kinds of things and preventing me from doing all kinds of things.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, my painkiller is called “sleep” and I’ll be crawling underneath the covers before long, whether I finish this posting or not, in the hope that it passes during the night.

But not if it’s anything like last night, because I had another really late night, quite a way after midnight. I don’t know where the time goes but I just don’t seem to be able to push on with any sense of urgency.

Anyway, once in bed, it took an age to go off to sleep again, but I ended up being awake at 05:10. Try as I might, I couldn’t go back to sleep – or, at least, I thought that I couldn’t, but the next thing that I knew was the alarm going off at 06:29 so I suppose that I must have done.

It took a while for me to leave the bed yet again and go into the bathroom where I had a really good wash and shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant today, although that’s most unlikely because since my explosive discussion the other week with her boss, she’s keeping a more-than-respectable distance.

Once again, it was a very slow start to the day, what with the medication too. It was 07:50 when I came back in here, although some of that was probably due to putting away the crockery and cutlery from the last few days.

There was plenty of stuff on the dictaphone, but Isabelle the Nurse caught me right in the middle of it all. She breezed into the apartment, sorted out my legs, gave me another dire warning about accepting this offer of “dialysis at home”, and then breezed out even quicker than she came in.

Breakfast was next, and reading some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.

Today, we are discussing Anglo-Saxon Charters, and how you can tell family trees and orders of importance in Saxon regal families by the order and the way that the signer and the witnesses to the signature are listed on the document.

There were loads of Charters signed in Anglo-Saxon times, some as early as 675AD, and it’s astonishing how many of them have managed to have been retained intact despite all of the upheaval and turmoil that has taken place since they were signed.

We’ve also begun to discuss assemblies, folk-moots and all of that kind of thing during the Anglo-Saxon period, and with men being bound in groups of ten to answer for any of their number who became delinquent. It’s all quite fascinating stuff.

Back in here, I carried on with the dictaphone and eventually managed to finish it. I was back driving taxis again. I had an ordinary saloon car. One of the cars being used as a taxi was some kind of convertible that looked really nice and futuristic but I didn’t have the chance to drive it. Owing to some kind of confusion I ended up not picking up a passenger who was destined to come to me, who went to the car behind which was this sports car. It was a woman with two children, two girls, and I thought “how I would have liked to have taken her for a drive and had a chat” but I was there, stuck in the rank without moving. Later on, I was in the sports car for the very first time but it seemed that everyone, all the public, was ignoring me and I was sitting there waiting. Then someone from our office came over to say that there was a job to be done. He climbed into the car with me and we went to pick up this couple to drop them off somewhere else. I thought that this convertible was really nice, a lovely thing to have in the summer. We dropped everyone off and then we went back to the office. The guy with me told the dispatcher but she said that it wasn’t supposed to have been done until 07:00 tomorrow but we couldn’t understand why it had been confused like this. The guy said that that probably explains why the passengers were feeling rather miserable and wouldn’t talk very much.

As far as a convertible goes, I have yet to meet any Council that will license one as a taxi. Someone once gave me a Cortina MkIII with a full roll-back canvas sunroof but the Council wouldn’t license it so in the end I broke it for spares. As for sitting there being ignored, that seems to be the story of my life.

Later on, I was in Newfoundland again last night, but it was not the Newfoundland that I knew. There was a large fishing port there and someone had the idea of running a car ferry across from there to Europe, so we went for a good look around the port. It was a small port, so we weren’t sure how they were going to fit a large ferry into it. We had a walk around all the same and saw the arrangements, which were very primitive to say the least. There was someone there talking to everyone, a visitor. They offered him a free hot chocolate, saying that this is a thing that they can do while they are in the harbour. I had to go to rewire some switches, but this was extremely complicated because the switches were rusty. I was putting the pins into the switch and then putting the contacts on which, on reflection, I thought was the wrong way round. I should have put the pins into the contacts and then pushed them in. When I decided to change it and do it the other way, I couldn’t get the pins out. I thought that if I couldn’t get the pins out, I’m not going to be able to put the contacts on it. Eventually we were ready to leave so I climbed on board a bus. I’d taken a magazine with me from somewhere, and I’d read it so I put it in the magazine net under my seat. Someone came up to me and asked me if he could borrow it. Later on, when I was walking around the streets outside, I came across the workmen mending the road. I asked them what time they were knocking off and they replied “about 12:00 for lunch”. However, I wanted to know what time they finished. They said that they usually finish at about 17:00 but they didn’t think that they would still be here by then. They would have finished and gone to another site. I asked them at what time they thought they might be finished here this afternoon but the guy couldn’t really give me an idea. He thought in the end that maybe they would spend half the afternoon here and half the afternoon on the other site, which wasn’t really as helpful as I was hoping.

It’s a little-known fact that there is actually A CAR FERRY OF SORTS BETWEEN EUROPE AND THE REST OF THE WORLD and at one stage I was making some serious enquiries about shipping vehicles over to North America. I actually ENCOUNTERED ONE OF THEIR CLIENTS on the Saguenay Ferry on the Forgotten Coast of Québec.

Then there was the issue of the Fleet Data Recorder. Thanks to the little video that I sent the Head Office yesterday, they have worked out that there’s a fault in the equipment so I had all kinds of incident reports to fill in. The upshot is that they will send me some new equipment to replace that which is defective.

For the rest of the morning, I was doing some more sorting out of boxes. Things are starting to look a bit more like home here, but I still can’t find whatever I need. I suppose that this will be a very long process of sorting myself out, but the way that I feel right now, I won’t ever finish it.

My faithful cleaner was late coming to sort out my anaesthetic, which was cutting things fine as the taxi company had sent me a message to say that they would be early. Once more though, my cleaner stayed chatting until it arrived.

The reason that the taxi was early was because there were two other passengers to pick up, and they lived right out in the back of beyond. I really am seeing parts of Normandy that I never knew existed.

The taxi was late dropping me off at dialysis but it wasn’t as ridiculous as on Monday. I was seen quickly, connected up, and disconnected quite smartly at the end of the session.

The downsides were that firstly, the internet wasn’t working today, pretty sad when I wanted to use the time to organise my shopping, and with a late start, it was a late finish.

It was during the dialysis that my aches and pains began and by the time that I was back home, I really was in no mood for anything.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry, of which about half of it went into the bin. I really wasn’t in the mood for anything. And washing-up was agony too.

So now, I’m off to bed where I intend to sleep for forty years. Crashing out for fifteen minutes at dialysis doesn’t seem to have done me much good at all.

But seeing as we have been talking about cars and suchlike crossing the Atlantic … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of 2010 when, just after the Trans-Labrador Highway, a muddy morass of a dirt-track, opened, I drove all round it IN A CHRYSLER PT CRUISER.
Right near the end, I encountered a very nice woman, whom I met on a few other occasions (but that’s another story) subsequently. She looked at the car and said "did you drive the Trans-Labrador Highway in THAT?"
"Ohh, it’s not the car, it’s the driver that counts" I replied. "And for my next trick, I shall be crossing the Atlantic on a motorbike"

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Wednesday 3rd September 2025 – WHEN THE ALARM …

… went off at 06:29, I was already sitting on the edge of the bed – and had been for ten minutes – trying to summon up the force, the energy and the courage to leave the bed.

Well, in fact, the alarm didn’t go off at all. I switched it off when I rolled out from under the covers, but you get the idea.

It was quite astonishing that I was up so early because it was a horribly late night. Feeling rather depressed and miserable, a concert by the Phil Beer Band came onto the playlist and there are several songs on there that seem to affect me like that and I really don’t know why.

However, I’ll always make time for the group to play THE BORDER SONG and, as you might expect, when you want to go to bed and there’s a concert of one hour and forty-three minutes, that’s the song that they always play to close the show, so you have to wait up.

Once in bed though, I was soon asleep and although I was tired, I awoke on two or three occasions. When I awoke just after 06:00 this morning, I couldn’t go back to sleep again and for twenty-odd minutes, there didn’t seem to be much point so I forced myself out of bed.

After I’d had a good wash and clean up, I went for the medication and then, changing the habits of a lifetime, I quickly tidied up the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. Isabelle the Nurse starts her round today and I expect that she’ll want to examine the apartment.

Back in here, while I waited, I listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night and, more importantly, who had come with me. And to my surprise and delight, I’d had a special visitor last night.

There was a group of us going off again. I first of all had to go to collect one of the girls who had a shop in High Street in Crewe. So she locked up her shop and had to go to the nightclub next door for the keys, but then found that there was a light on further back in the shop so she had to run down there to switch it off and then run back to hand in the keys. Meanwhile, my brother went across the road and fetched Zero. She was coming with me. Eventually, we all gathered in the car park and climbed into the van that I had. There were a couple of girls sitting in the front and I was driving. Zero was sitting right behind me, leaning over my shoulder. As we were driving, I made the remark that she looked rather like a parrot sitting on my shoulder, to which she replied in a bad temper that she wasn’t a parrot at all. I asked her what she was to which she replied “a bad-tempered, rude-mouthed girl” which made me laugh. After we had been driving a couple of years … "don’t you mean ‘hours’?" – ed … we pulled up at the side of the road to sleep for a few hours. I curled up in the back and Zero came to curl up next to me.

So after having mentioned yesterday one of my special young ladies, another one came to see me last night. And what’s more, she curled up next to me in the back of the van and for once, my family didn’t intervene. But the story about curling up in the back of the van with a young lady reminds me of another occasion that is much more recent, and just about as ethereal as curling up with Zero.

Nevertheless, I’m not going to complain at all.

When Isabelle the Nurse came in, she inspected the apartment and promptly fell in love with it. I’m not surprised, because I love my little apartment too. She sorted out my legs and then we discussed this “dialysis at home”. She gave me a very stern warning against it, for a variety of reasons.

Apparently, the people at dialysis describe it in one way that makes it sound attractive, but Isabelle described the same procedure in a totally different way that made it totally unattractive to someone as nesh as me.

And that reminded me of my first introduction to propaganda. When I used to drive taxis, I would always drive at night and the BBC would finish its broadcasts at 02:00 with a news bulletin.

Turning the dial slightly, you would then pick up the English language broadcasts of Radio Free Bulgaria that would start at 02:00 with a news bulletin. They would say the same news, but by changing the stress and the pronunciation, they could make it sound exactly the opposite to the BBC.

So the same news, told the same way but with different stresses and emphases to make it portray the opposite viewpoint. Who was right?

After Isabelle left, I made breakfast and read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.

We’re now discussing the Saxon overrunning of Middlesex, with a highly fanciful account of the invasion that is backed up by almost no evidence whatsoever. Our author seems to like this flights of fantasy into unrecorded territory.

Modern research seems to discount almost all of his theories in this respect, but then again, modern research also seems to discount or deny the ethnic cleansing of the Romano-British population by the Saxons. However, ss I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the sudden and dramatic end of writing, of ironworking, of urban dwelling and of many other skills and habits cannot really be attributed to anything else. We have the classic example of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, the Killing Fields and the “Back To The Land” movement in this respect.

After breakfast, I changed the habits of a lifetime and began to tidy up. Having spent hours trying to find certain herbs and spices yesterday, that was the focal point of my attack and eventually, I’d managed to sort them out as I would like them to be.

There were a few other things too but I didn’t go too mad in this respect. However, I am having difficulty finding things, like the power pack to drive the little Roland bass cube for example.

There was a disgusting drink break of course and then I came in here to deal with a problem concerning the data senders for the fleet monitor, the transmissions for which are not being received at the Head Office in Denmark. The warning lights seem to be flashing as normal, so I took a one-minute video of the senders and the flashing lights.

There followed an interruption by the usual Wednesday visit by my cleaner. First thing that we did was to sort out all the bedding and I found a quilt cover and sheet that I didn’t know that I had.

She arranged the shower for me and I went and had a really good soak too. You’ve no idea how nice it is to have a lovely, warm shower in a lovely shower cubicle. But it’s rather precarious and I need to sort out the handrails so that I can have a much better purchase for pulling myself into the cubicle.

After my cleaner left, I came back in here and crashed out in one of those sudden, dramatic crashes that I have sometimes. I was out of it for an hour or so, which was disappointing, but even more disappointing was that when I awoke, I didn’t know where I was or what time of day it was, and I was half-expecting to go for breakfast at that point.

Not that that’s any surprise. I don’t know where I am or what day of the week it is even when I’m wide awake.

At that point, Rosemary ‘phoned me for a chat. Just a short one today, only one hour and thirty-six minutes. It’s nice to chat to people like that and thanks to these internet chat applications, it’s all free too.

One of the things that we discussed was how good friends seem suddenly to drop off the radar and you never seem to hear from them again after a while. That’s something else that is perfectly true. Having said that of course, I still have a friend and a former girlfriend from Grammar School with whom I’m regularly in touch

Tea tonight was a taco roll with rice and veg, and now that I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed, late as usual. Tomorrow, it’s dialysis and I’m not looking forward to that at all.

But seeing as we have been talking about propaganda … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of the greatest exponents of the art of propaganda was General Hindenburg of the Imperial German Army, who claimed all of the credit for the battles in Eastern Europe that destroyed the Russian Army in 1914, much to the disgust of General Hoffman who had actually led the German troops into battle.
Years later, Hoffman used to take official visitors around the battlefields there, and he would always point out three particular farmhouses.
Of the first one, he would say "here is the place where our Glorious Leader slept before the battle"
And of the second one, he would say "here is the place where our Glorious Leader slept after the battle"
But of the third one, he would say "here is the place where our Glorious Leader slept during the battle"

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Tuesday 2nd September 2025 – SO HERE I AM …

… back at my desk well over an hour later than I ought to be, but I simply couldn’t get going this afternoon and evening.

I’ve had one of those days when I have done a lot of work but accomplished nothing at all and such enthusiasm that I still possess these days drained away as I watched it.

Having read again my rather intemperate and incendiary notes from last night, and read a few more of recent times, I can see that I’ve been sliding deep into the black pit again, and I’m not the only one to have noticed, as you’ll find out as you read on.

Not that it’s any surprise, of course. This time seven years ago, we were wandering aimlessly around the High Arctic of Canada looking for our ship that was icebound somewhere trying to work its way through the North West Passage.

And six years ago today, I was on the point of stepping ashore at the end of our famous traverse of the North-West Passage, having just spent three lovely evenings and nights in the company of a certain young lady who at one time figured frequently during my nocturnal rambles but has been conspicuous by her absence for much longer than I like.

All of this is enough to try the patience of a saint, and believe me, I’m no saint at all and never will be.

Last night was also a late night, although not as late as this one will be. After having finished my incoherent rant and been through the usual end-of-day routine, I went to bed, still seething with anger.

It was a very long night last night and it felt as if I hadn’t been to sleep at all, so wound up was I. When the alarm went off at 06:29, I was already sitting on the edge of the bed, having given up any thought of sleep a long time before.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t wind myself up to go and it took an age before I ended up in the bathroom. In the kitchen, I’d run out of more medication so I had to wander off in search of the aforementioned in my faithful cleaner’s lovely little box.

It wasn’t true that I’d had a night without sleep, because I found some notes on the dictaphone and I really can’t remember dictating them. A group of us was off to Germany, three or four of us. We ended up meeting a friend who lived on an island in the mouth of the river at Bremen. After we’d settled ourselves down, we thought that we’d go for a trip to Bremen so we dashed out of the house, climbed aboard the little train that was there but found that the train was going the wrong way. It reached the far side of the island and we could see part of the city way across the estuary there but that wasn’t where we wanted to be so we had to stay on this little train and go back across the island to the far side. However, the river was so wide that the ferry crossing was about two hours and it was already about 21:00 so we decided that perhaps we would save that for the morning so we all went off to find something to eat locally. Our friend who lived on there was packing her son off on a school trip and had lots of his things that she’d cleared out that she was going to sell. What she had planned to do was to give them to the school so the school could sell them on as a way of raising funds. She asked me if I wanted to go to have a look but I couldn’t think of a good reason to do that at the moment. Then we began to start making plans. There was a huge boxing match taking place down in southern Germany in a town not too far from the Czech border and we were all planning to go. I thought that I may as well go too, but why don’t we find a hotel in the Czech Republic so that we can say that we have done something different while we were there. We were busily sorting that out when suddenly one of my friends arrived. I’d told him ages ago about buying a motorbike, and he had turned up on a big 500cc motorbike and said “I have your motorbike outside”. I thought that this is going to become really complicated because I’ve come here in the van. How do I take this motorcycle home? This is the wrong time because we are all setting off in a minute for this boxing match. I could see that the friends with whom I had come to this island weren’t at all keen on this guy being here. I thought that this is going to create some kind of wrong atmosphere and I don’t want this to happen but I couldn’t think of how to avoid it.

Leaving aside the fact that Bremen isn’t situated at the mouth of a river, and even so, there’s no island in any mouth of any river in Germany that corresponds to this description, it was quite a dramatic dream. It’s been an age since I’VE BEEN TO THE CZECH REPUBLIC and it’s easy to understand why I’m feeling depressed when I keep on encountering things that I used to do with pleasure but am no longer able to do.

And that includes riding a motorcycle. My last motorcycle was a CZ175 but I had loads of fun on my old CX500 when I moved to Brussels. I really was at one point quite recently thinking about having another one but I was overtaken by events.

The nurse caught me in mid-transcription and sorted out my feet. He thinks that there are no oedemas in my legs, so maybe the situation at dialysis isn’t as desperate as I was thinking. I still think that I’ll be there for four hours though, which will fill me full of dismay.

As he left, I thanked him and wished him a good rest for his week off. It was nice to see him in such a better humour since his holiday.

Once he’d gone, I could make breakfast and read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.

We’re now well into our discussion of Roman land division and the settlement of the individual parcels of land, and how the system of the occupation of the land that the Romans installed lasted until the Enclosure Acts of the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries, and how the actual physical division of the land under Roman law lasted until the passing of the Local Government Act 1888.

However, our author implies that travelling the main roads must have been a bagful of fun back in Roman times. He quotes the author JWE Conybeare who tells us that "Intercourse was easy between the various districts, for along every great road a series of posting stations, each with its stud of relays, was available for the service of travellers.”". I’m not sure exactly what service the travellers would have obtained from the stud of relays, but I’m sure that the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine could tell us.

Back in here, I made a determined attempt to finish the installation of the office and although it took me all the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon, it’s now all up and running. I have all of the back-up drives and the array working … "hip hip array" – ed … and we have music again too, which is good news. I can’t stand the quiet – it drives me mad.

My faithful cleaner came down later with another pile of vegan cheese and also a pile of the yeast that I like and which has been out of s for a while. She was followed by one of the nurses from dialysis who inspected my apartment to make sure that I was living in sanitary conditions and who then proceeded to talk to me about dialysis at home.

That would be good if it worked, but merely talking about the procedure made my stomach churn and my muscles tense up. However, I did take advantage of her by making her give my faithful cleaner a thorough course in dialysis implants and how and where to apply the anaesthetic cream. That was worth its weight in gold, that course of instruction.

However, she did say something that surprised me. She asked me if I’d considered seeing the service’s psychologist. I haven’t, but I can’t see what good a psychologist would do. I’m dying, I know that, and I’m resigned to it. It’s difficult sometimes to come to terms with it but I can’t see how a psychologist would help me in that respect. And in any case, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I’d hate to be the person who would draw the short straw and have to probe the depths of my subconscious mind.

After everyone left, I came back here where I regrettably crashed out for an hour. That’s disappointing, but with the wretched night that I had had last night, it’s not surprising.

For one reason or another, I was really late going for tea, stuffed peppers etc, so consequently I’m late going to bed. I can’t wait to be under the covers though because, once more, I’m exhausted. A good night’s sleep will do me good.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the lack of motivation … "well, one of us has" – ed … the nurse from dialysis asked me "what happened to your famous ‘get up and go’ then?"
"By the looks of things, it’s got up and gone a long time ago." I replied.

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Monday 1st September 2025 – I AM ABSOLUTELY SICK …

… tired and totally fed up with this dialysis nonsense, and if there’s much more of it, I’m going to write my wills (because there will be three), call a halt to it and let nature take its course.

One of the doctors told me a few weeks ago that if I were to stop the dialysis, I wouldn’t last out the week. But at least I would have a week to myself without being dragged around from one medical appointment to another and totally inconvenienced in the process.

The taxi was early today – 12:45 instead of 13:15, and we arrived at dialysis at 13:20. So there I was, looking for an early start, a quick “in and out” and back home early for once. But ohhhh! Cruel, wicked fate! How you (and I suspect some human agency too) conspired to thwart my plans. And in spades too.

The way things went last night, I might have expected some problems today. Despite my best efforts, it was 23:40 when I finally crawled into bed, much later than I had been planning. But once in bed, I had a really good sleep for a change.

When the alarm went off at 06:29, I was actually on the point of throwing off the covers. Not actually out of bed though. And leaving the bed was not as simple as it might have sounded. It was a desperate struggle to beat the second alarm.

In the bathroom, I had a good wash, shave and clean up in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant … "if anyone from the dialysis centre finds this objectionable, may we ask why you have invaded Our Hero’s private life by hunting him down on the internet, in defiance of the Patients’ Charter?" – ed… and then in the kitchen I had my medication.

Some of the medication in the drawer in the table had run out so I had to go to the supplies. And what a marvellous surprise. I’ve moaned and moaned about the medication all over my apartment, making it look like a Chemist’s shop and depressing me no end but my lovely cleaner has fitted out a cardboard box, complete with little curtains, to store everything. That’s one of the nicest things that anyone has done for me.

Once more, I’d hardly come back in here before the nurse arrived. Once more, he was in a really chatty, sociable mood and I hope that he stays like this because it makes things so much nicer.

After he left, I made breakfast and read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.

Our author is now well into his stride about Roman surveying, and I’ve been having to rack my brains from my Primary School days in the early 1960s about rods, poles, perches, chains and furlongs. I suspect that tomorrow we’ll be discussing bushels and peck, and the difference between avoirdupois and troy weight.

However, it’s his comments that are the most interesting. When discussing the longevity of the Roman system of land division, he observes that "it is manifest that neither the rude Saxons nor their Norman successors were capable of designing or carrying out such a big undertaking."

It makes me wonder what the Saxons must have been doing, and did the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine know about it?

He also talks about the erection of wayside shrines at the intersections of Roman field trackways, and how Pope Gregory encouraged Christian missionaries to adopt these wayside shrines and convert them to Holy Christian places.

Anyone who has wandered around rural France as much as we have will have noticed statues of the saints at many intersections of rural trackways.

Another thing that he mentions is that on "Rogation days, when priests with the Cross went in procession round their parochia, and certain Gospels were read in the wild field among the corn and grass, so that wicked spirits which infest the air might be laid low to the extent that the corn may remain unharmed."

The ceremony of the Beating of the Bounds and of well-dressing is still carried on today in parts of the UK.

After breakfast, I came back in here to spend a brief fifteen minutes finishing off the connecting up of my office and all of the computer peripherals, and when my cleaner came to sort out my anaesthetic cream two and more hours later, I was still in here trying to sort it out.

No matter what I have tried, I can’t make one of the external back-up drives fire up. I’ve changed cables and everything, but the warning light is far paler than the warning light on another one and the computer won’t read it. I shall have to keep on trying. Everything else works fine.

Once my cleaner had dealt with my arm, she began to chat. And was still chatting when the taxi came. I really am flavour of the month around here these days.

There was only me in the car with the driver today – a nice young guy who has taken me to Paris before – and we had a good chat. But the fun came to an end when we arrived at dialysis because we arrived at the same time as seven other people.

Not only that, they weren’t ready in the wards so we had to wait. And when the doors were opened, it was a mad stampede to the beds. My bed was the farthest possible away from the door, as you might expect, and because I am the slowest, I was last to arrive.

It was not surprising that I would therefore be the last to be connected, but 14:30 – well over an hour after I had arrived – is really taking the mickey.

There was plenty of room to manoeuvre with the weight loss so I asked the nurse to wind it up so that I’d have a head start for Thursday, but for all the good it did, I may as well have saved my breath.

Once everything was under way I had a brief doze … "he means ‘half an hour of deep sleep’" – ed … and then I was in no mood to do any work. I really am over-tired these days.

Even worse, the chef de service came by, and said that one of the other doctors had made some remarks the other day about my overall health and how I seemed to be suffering under the strain of dialysis. And so, he cut right down to a minimum the amount of fluid extraction.

And the final straw – despite all my entreaties, he left me 700 grams short, which means almost inevitably that I’ll be stuck here for four hours on Thursday. People could be forgiven for believing that he’s deliberately setting me up in an act of revenge for my letter to his Head Office.

So the ridiculously low extraction came to an end at 18:00 precisely, but I wasn’t unplugged and attended to until 18:25. It was 18:50 when I finally walked out of the dialysis centre – the poor taxi driver had been awaiting me for over half an hour.

To cap it all, we had to drive right across Avranches to the private clinic to pick up someone else and run them to Granville, where they were dropped off first.

It was 19:40 when I finally came back here, as if I don’t have anything else to do, and I was totally seething. I really am fed up with all of this. I was away from home for almost seven hours for a three-and-a-half hour session and that is totally unacceptable.

If I don’t calm down soon, I’ll be the one blowing a gasket.

Tea was a quick pasta with chick peas and veg, and then I had the dictaphone notes to transcribe. I can’t remember who I was with but I was wandering around somewhere like Stoke-upon-Trent last night with someone. We came across a car that was for sale, a red Morris 1000 traveller and whoever I was with was trying to make up her mind whether to buy it or not. I couldn’t see how it would fit in with our plans but it was a nice vehicle all the same. We met a few other people wandering around there too and we had a talk with them. The next thing that I remember about this was that we were in Nantwich, having a look at the water pumps there and the system to distribute the town water. They were at the back of the Swine Market, at the back of one of the shops. We were talking about how they were installed and the controversy about digging up all of the streets, stopping the traffic from circulating for months but that’s all that I remember about this dream.

Nerina and I went to see a Morris Traveller once. It was for sale at a giveaway price because one of the spring hangers had torn out of the chassis. I would have had it and welded it up, but she decided against it, which was a shame. I’m not sure why we ended up in Nantwich though. In those days, Stoke-upon-Trent would have been much more likely.

So still fuming, still seething, I’m off to bed. I hope that I will have calmed down by the morning although I doubt it. But I’ll be interested to see how my dreams are tonight. However, knowing my luck, there won’t be any at all.

One thing that I am going to do at the dialysis clinic though next time, is to watch very carefully how the nurses operate the machines. And then, when their backs are turned, I can adjust my machine myself to how I would like it to be. Then we can watch the sparks fly!

But seeing as we have been talking about religion and Priests … "well, one of us has" – ed … a priest and a couple of parishioners were standing on a road with a sign saying "The End Is Nigh. Turn Round. Retrace Your Steps Before It’s Too Late"
However, a car drives past, with the occupants hurling abuse at the Priest and his parishioners.
Next moment the Priest and his parishioners hear a loud “splash”.
One of the parishioners turns to the Priest and says "Yes, I reckoned that a simple ‘Bridge Washed Away’ sign would have been a better idea"

0

Sunday 31st August 2025 – AFTER YESTERDAY EVENING’S …

… drama, I suppose that I had better take a calmer look at things. We can’t do with having that kind of emotion day after day.

So last night, in the middle of what can be best described as “a bilious attack”, I left the desk and fell into bed. It was all of 22:10 as well, and you don’t have a finish much earlier than that every day of the week.

Once in bed, I was out like a light. I really was exhausted, and it’s been a very long time since I’ve felt like that too.

When I awoke, it was still dark, but I couldn’t go back to sleep so I really thought about going back to sleep. However, one glance at the time persuaded me to stay in bed. It was 01:24 and, much as I like to be an early riser, that kind of thing is ridiculous.

At some point I must have gone back to sleep again because I remember awakening a couple of times during the night. However, at 06:26 exactly (my body clock is working really well these days) I awoke again, and at that point I decided to leave the bed, even though it’s Sunday and I’m entitled to stay in bed until 07:59 or thereabouts.

Saying that I would be leaving the bed is one thing. Actually leaving it for real is something completely different and it was a real struggle into the bathroom. I decided against having a wash as I really wasn’t in the mood, but everything else that I needed to do took quite some considerable time.

So did the medication this morning, and then I had the disagreeable task of doing last night’s washing up. One thing that I really detest is waking in the morning to find a heap of dirty crockery awaiting me but I really was in no kind of state last night.

After all of that, I was hardly back in here when the nurse arrived. He sorted out my legs, did his accounts and then cleared off, and I could make breakfast and read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.

Our author is laying the ground … "groan" – ed … for a chapter on the Roman surveying of Middlesex. I’m really looking forward to that because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we discussed Roman surveying or urban areas during one of my University modules, and I even built some Roman surveying equipment such as a GROMA.

Back in here later, there were the dictaphone notes to review. Back in the 18th Century there was a Native American raid on a village somewhere in North America. The residents succeeded in fighting off the invasion and killed several of the Native Americans. There was bound to be some kind of enquiry about it, and the settlers were concerned about what would actually come out in this, so the organised a collection of all of the arms that were in the possession of people. The aim was to try to find somewhere to hide them until the investigation was over. My plan was to put them in a coffin and bury it in the churchyard with the victims of the incident, then it could be dug up when the enquiry is over. However, for some reason, people seem to be reluctant about that idea.

Attacks by the Native Americans on settler communities on the frontier were commonplace in the 18th Century and there were terrible stories of atrocities – on both sides, it has to be said. But the burial of firearms in a coffin in the graveyard relates to an actual event in a village in north-east France just before the arrival of the Germans during their rapid advance of summer 1914.

Did I dictate the dream about me being with the old Ford Escort estate … "no you didn’t" – ed … My friend from Munich was there and he had borrowed it for a couple of days. He had taken my collection of small solar panels and installed them on the vehicle while he was borrowing it. When I went back to pick it up, he’d taken the panels off. I asked him how it went, and he replied that it was extremely good because he’s had a figure of 35 Kilowatts of electricity generated while he’d been borrowing the vehicle. I asked him where he’d installed them, and he pointed to the kind-of ladder rack on the back. He said that he had put them on there and they seemed to work fine. I had the panels and I had another attempt at installing them on there. It was complicated because the mounting blocks that I’d designed for it were fouling the nuts that held the ladder rack on. We had to be very careful about how we fitted everything. I thought in the end that rather than use a rubber sheet underneath the panels, I’d mount them on a sheet of wood or something that would be covered in the rubber sheet. That way, it would be much more solid and the mounting blocks would work better. We were there for quite a while, trying to fit these solar panels back on. He said that in the meantime, I’d lost two more of my volunteer drivers for this scheme. He said that Old man Sinclair was one. I said that I’d never really expected him to take part in it anyway. I said that I suspected that the other one would have been that little Jackie. he agreed that it was she who was the second, so I wasn’t really all that disappointed by those two because I didn’t think that it was likely that they’d take part.

It was the old Escort van that had the ladder rack, bot the estate that I had when I was with Laurence and Roxanne. And of course, the solar panels are on the roof of the Transit. But why Jimmy Clitheroe’s grandfather would be involved in this dream, and also “Little Jackie”, a girl whom I knew in Crewe in 1982/3, I really don’t know.

After that, I began the task of writing up last night’s notes and eventually, after quite a long while, I managed to post them on line, so you can all find out about my horrible day yesterday.

And so it was time for a footfest. There were the highlights of the rest of the games in the JD Cymru League, and afterwards there were the highlights of Stirling Albion v Stranraer. Stranraer had about 90% of the play and had a hatful of shots at the Stirling goal, but failed to make any of them count. Stirling only had one meaningful shot on goal, so I shall leave you to decide what the final score might have been.

There were bread and pizza to make later on too. The bread is cooked magnificently, and the pizza was one of the best that I have ever made. My new oven is marvellous and I am almost as impressed as I was with my stainless steel dustbin.

But right now, I’m going to bed ready for dialysis tomorrow, I don’t think. I really could do with a week off. But right now, all I want to do is to sleep. I might be feeling better but I’m still dog-tired.

But seeing as we have been talking about how ill I was last night … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of that church in Neston where we went once for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.
At the entrance to the church was a box marked "For The Sick" and next to it was a note – "This Box Is Restricted To Monetary Donations Only."

0

Saturday 30th August 2025 (… continued …) – SO STARTING AGAIN …

… after the adventures reported in the previous entry, Saturday has not been a very good day for me, for a whole variety of reasons, and I’m glad that it’s over.

It started off with me still being at my desk working at some ridiculous time like 00:40, and long after that too. But you know how it is … "No. How is it?" – ed … Once you start something, it’s very difficult to stop it, and trying to download about 50GB of Artificial Intelligence data software is not the work of five minutes.

That was something that was going on and on and on, and I didn’t want to stop it and start again. I was working on the theory that if I’m really tired during the day, I can always have a good sleep at dialysis in the afternoon. In the end though, it was starting to become ridiculous so I simply switched off the screen, left the computer working away to itself and went to bed.

Despite the very late night, I was awake again a few minutes before the alarm went off but, as you might expect, it was something of a struggle to persuade myself to leave the bed and have a good wash, shave and clean up in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant … "if anyone from the dialysis centre finds this remark objectionable, my we ask why you have invaded Our Hero’s private life, in defiance of the Patients’ Charter, by hunting him down on the internet?" – ed…

After the medication, I ended up back in here, a good hour after having left the bed, and listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There was a Roman empress or the wife of a Roman emperor or the wife of a British governor who visited the office of one of the native tribes in England for some kind of interview, but things went so badly that the woman took out a dagger and slashed all of the horsehair-filled seats that were in the room, causing a lot of damage, so the tribal leaders tried to contact the Roman legions who would pay for the damage, but of course they wouldn’t and everything was left up in the air with a very bitter taste in the mouths of the British people and the tribe concerned.

Quite recently, I’ve been reading quite a lot about different Roman Emperors, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and there was also something going on in my mind yesterday about car seats. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that several years ago in Québec we went to visit the RIVIERE DES VASES which was where the eel grass, used to stuff car seats in the early days of motoring, was harvested and the discussion had turned round to horsehair seats in the UK

The nurse came in at his usual time today and caught me working at my desk, so he took my blood pressure here at my desk. He reckoned that it would be a much more accurate reading if I remained sitting here rather than standing up and going into the other room.

He sorted out my legs too, then after he left, I could make my breakfast and read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.

This morning, I didn’t go very far into the book because I went off on a tangent, following the trail of the Roman armies as they wandered peripatetically around what today is Scotland. There was also a little trail to follow about the collapse of the “Hen Gogledd” culture as the Romans pushed from the South and the Picts pushed down from the North, events recited in the Heroic Welsh ballad Y GODODIN.

After breakfast, I came back in here to see how the Artificial Intelligence downloads had gone. By the looks of things, everything was complete, but it’s going to take a good while to sort out. And after all of that, when everything is ready, I’ll probably find that I would have been much better off with Natural Stupidity because, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … Artificial Intelligence is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

However, having said that, it’s an old principle of computer programming, drummed into us when we were messing around with Machine Code at Night School in the mid-seventies, that the only equation in computing on which you can rely is GI = GO, which stands for “Garbage In” = “Garbage Out”, and it’s probably fair to say that … errr … “confusion” in a computer program is inevitably the fault of the person who has programmed it.

Once more, my faithful cleaner caught me unawares as she came to put the anaesthetic cream onto my arm, and she stayed for quite a while chatting. I’m not sure why I seem to be the “Flavour of the Month” right now. However, our chat was interrupted by the arrival of the taxi so we went outside to meet it.

Unusually, I was the only passenger in the car today, so I asked the driver about the lovely lady who usually accompanies me. However, he had no news of her, so we travelled alone.

For once, I was early arriving, but as usual, I was one of the last to be connected, which was a shame. And as I expected, for the first half-hour I was away with the fairies, although not in any fashion that would be of interest to the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine. When I came back into the Land of the Living, I didn’t really do all that much.

The doctor came to see me and I told her the story of the injections. She thought too that I’d be much better off going back to the old series of injections rather than this new one that had so upset my body.

Eventually, they came to unplug me after, for once, having had a full session of three and a half hours without a crisis of any kind. However, the woman in the next bed was not so lucky and they had to unplug her after an hour or so. When she’d recovered, she was whipped off to hospital for observation

Earlier on, I had asked one of the nurses if she knew why the lady who usually accompanies me on Thursdays and Saturdays was not present today. She had checked up during the course of the afternoon and while she was compressing me, she told me, to my deep shock, that she had died yesterday.

When I’d seen her on Thursday, I noticed that she didn’t seem to be herself, but to hear that she had died the following day was the last thing that I expected to hear.

On the way out, they weighed me as usual, and I am now the lightest that I have been for quite some considerable time. I can see that this is not going to end well, but I can’t think of what to do about it, with the lack of appetite and everything that I eat tasting heavily of salt since the chemotherapy began.

The taxi was waiting for me when I left, but there was another passenger who needed to be dropped off in Avranches, so what with all that had gone on today, I was far later arriving back home than I otherwise might have been, which was annoying. There was a rainstorm too that was rather annoying.

My faithful cleaner was waiting for me and she sorted me out quite quickly. She’d also brought two of the guitars downstairs, which was nice. The others will follow in due course.

After she had left, there was football on the internet. The game between Hwlffordd and Caernarfon had started half an hour ago but the advantage of being on the internet is that you can wind it back to the start.

Mind you, it wasn’t a very interesting match. For some reason, all of the liveliness and energy that had seen Caernarfon go to the top of the table and score a bagful of goals so far this season seemed to have disappeared and it was a very lethargic performance. Hwlffordd gave a workmanlike performance but didn’t set the game alight either.

A 1-1 draw was probably a fair result, and I have seen far, far better matches than this one. If Caernarfon wish to stay at the top of the table, they will have to play much better than this. However, perennial champions TNS dropped another two points with a tame draw down south at Barry Town and Penybont, who have shown some class and character over the last two or three seasons, were surprisingly beaten at home by Connah’s Quay Nomads.

At half-time, I paused the game and went to make some tea – pasta and veg with chick peas. And it was a big mistake because what with the nausea that I have been feeling these last few days, I ended up in some kind of severe difficulty. In the end, as soon as the football finished, I typed a terse note and went straight to bed.

Tomorrow is another day and we’ll see how we feel. My cure for everything at the moment is to go to bed and sleep it off.

But seeing as we have been talking about my poor fellow traveller … "well, one of us has" – ed … I told my faithful cleaner about her death. After all, she had met her a couple of times.
"How many of your fellow passengers have now passed away over the last year?" she asked.
"Three" I replied "and a fourth one now has to come by ambulance".
"You’ll do everything you possibly can to have a car to yourself, won’t you?" she said.

0

Friday 29th August 2025 – I HAD FORGOTTEN …

… all about the wind outside here.

When I lived on the first floor, I was at the back of the building and so my only encounters with the wind were on the rare occasions when I went outside the door – or couldn’t, because the wind was so strong that we couldn’t open the front door so I would have to go out of the back.

However, last night, I remembered all about it.

The wind had begun to rise as I was on my way home last night but I hadn’t really taken much notice. However, by the time I’d finished my notes and was preparing for bed, it was blowing quite hard, and then I realised that being in the front, overlooking the cliffs and the sea to the right, is not necessarily always a great advantage and that there are after all, some drawbacks.

But last night, I was so tired. I fell asleep a couple of times while I was writing my notes and no fewer than three times when I was … errr … contemplating the state of the nation. I was glad to make it into bed, when I fell asleep almost immediately.

And there I lay until all off … errr … 05:29. For once just recently, I awoke earlier than the alarm, and I was seriously contemplating raising myself from the Dead, but the next thing that I remember was the alarm going off at 06:29, so I must have gone back to sleep.

It was a real struggle yet again to find the energy and enthusiasm to leave the bed and sort myself out. Yet again, it was over an hour, all told, before I ended up back in here after the medication.

First thing was of course to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Last night, I was doing something with some kind of radio equipment, I can’t remember what, when a couple of my friends turned up. They weren’t going to stay for long so it was necessary to clear the sofa of everything so that they could sit down. One of them volunteered to put all of the clothes away even though there wasn’t room for them anywhere. In the end, they both managed to sit down. Later, after they had left, I had to look for the clothes again. They had been rolled up in bundles and put on the stairs, each bundle, and several had been put into other places. One had been hung inside a CD cupboard, with the CDs from the shelves in that particular column being merged into other shelves in columns elsewhere. I was thinking that that probably means that I have to sort all of these out into alphabetical order again.

That’s a task that I still have to do, because the records, CDs and DVDs seem to be in any old kind of disorder, and sticking the clothes back into places where they don’t belong is also something quite relevant at the moment.

Later on, I was on a Plaxton Elite coach, driving it, taking a load of English kids back to boarding school. When I went to join it, it was crammed full of children and I couldn’t understand at first what was happening. It turned out that these kids were all French refugees who had fled France during the invasion by the Germans in 1940 and were being taken to some kind of hostel. I was charged with distributing all the food around. That became extremely complicated as people were moving around, and I didn’t know who had had some food and who hadn’t. There were all these giant biscuit things that I was distributing. Every now and again someone would raise their hand and ask for some more food. If I had some, I would take them half of one of these biscuits. Earlier, I’d been talking to a couple of boys about how comfortable it is to be going back to school. When I met them on the bus at that moment, I asked them what they thought of it now but they didn’t say very much. There was a mass of clothing on one of the seats right by where these two boys were sitting. I asked them what it was and they replied that it was a little French girl who was asleep. In the end, this began to become more and more confusing as I was awaiting the signal to leave and handing out these biscuits. I thought that at one moment that these biscuits will run out and what am I going to do then?

It would be a good dream to be driving a Plaxton Elite in wartime, seeing as they weren’t introduced until about 1968. And once again, in a dream, I’m worrying about something that might never happen, and that seems to be a recurring theme these days.

The nurse came as usual, armed with his blood pressure tester, and once he had taken one of the measures of the three that he was supposed to take, his batteries went flat … "in the machine, not in him" – ed …

After he left, I could make breakfast and read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.

Once more, it’s hard to understand the thought patterns of our author, Montagu Sharpe. He’s spent several pages bewailing the loss of artefacts from the period, salvaged by all and sundry without any record being kept, yet on page 37 he tells us that when he spoke to the person who had discovered and uprooted the Ancient British stakes that guarded the ford across the Thames at Brentford, "He kindly gave me several specimens which I have since passed on to Museums and to interested persons.".

He goes on to add that "from the inner portions various articles as mementoes have been made".

A little earlier though, on page 32, he has a crisis of T Rice Holmesque proportions when examining some notes by JS Maitland on Caesar’s crossing of the Thames. He tells us that "Maitland, in his “History of London,” places Caesar’s passage of the Thames at Chelsea" and continues by saying "All that Maitland seems to have done in 1732 in support of his theory was to take a boat to sound the river for shallow places, and thirty yards west of Chelsea College found the “channel N.E. to S.W. was not more than 4 feet 7 inches deep.” ! ! He made no quest for the remains of the stakes which Caesar says lined both the bed and bank of the Thames, which have in great numbers been so found, guarding the great ford of the river at Brentford,"

That’s not what I would call a respectable academic criticism of Maitland’s theories.

After breakfast, I had a couple of ‘phone calls to make. The nurse is writing up his accounts for the end of the month and needs the prescription for the injection that he gave me on Monday. And so I telephoned the hospital at Paris. I tried on several occasions, but they didn’t answer the ‘phone, which is no good at all for an emergency helpline.

In the end, I e-mailed them, only to have it returned as my professor is on holiday. I had to resend it to his assistant.

But that gave me an idea. It was Monday when I had this new injection, and it was about Monday that my problems of nausea and dizziness began.

Accordingly, I rang the dialysis clinic, but once more, it took several attempts before I was able to speak to the doctor who saw me on Thursday. I explained to her that I’d had a new injection, and she confirmed that side effects of dizziness and nausea are quite common with this new injection.

My cleaner turned up early in the afternoon to do her stuff, and we had the nurse back at 16:00 to take the afternoon’s blood pressure, with new batteries this time.

After he left, the President of the Residents’ Committee came down to inspect the apartment. She loves it so I thanked her for giving me the tip about it going up for sale. Without her, I would never have managed to purchase it. She brought me a yellow tea towel, to match the walls, as a housewarming present. That was really nice of her to do so.

The rest of the day has been spent playing around with some Artificial Intelligence. So far, I’ve managed to run two Artificial Intelligence chatbots into endless loops, which goes to show, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that Artificial Intelligence is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

Something else that I’ve found is an Artificial Intelligence server that downloads to your own computer. Even as we speak, I’m having a play around with that and downloading it, to see whether I can program it to be more random than it actually seems to be. It takes about 50GB of space, so I’ll be here for ever doing that.

Tea tonight was vegan nuggets with salad and chips, and now I’m off to bed, long after midnight but I’ve been dealing with all kinds of things this evening that have run me up a variety of blind alleys. And I’ll have the howling gale outside to blow me to sleep.

But seeing as we have been talking about Artificial Intelligence … "well, one of us has" – ed … I remember an old Andy Capp cartoon that featured two men struggling unsuccessfully to move a large computer through a small door.
"No problem" said Andy Capp. "Just plug it in and let it work it out for itself."

0

Thursday 28th August 2025 – YET ANOTHER MORNING …

… when I slept right the way through until the alarm at 06:29. And once more, I had no end of a struggle to leave the bed prior to the alarm going off.

Last night wasn’t however as late as some have been just recently. I was actually, for once, in bed prior to midnight although it does have to be said that there can’t have been much in it.

Once in bed, I was asleep quite quickly and that’s all that I remember of anything until 06:29 when the alarm went off. It’s not very often that I sleep as soundly as that.

It took me an age to make myself ready this morning too. What with having a good wash, scrub up and shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, I went into the kitchen for my medication and didn’t come out again until 07:41 precisely. That was what I would call a “slow start”.

Yes, and “Emilie the Cute Consultant” … while I was waiting for my Doppler examination yesterday, with nothing better to do, I found a copy of the “Patients’ Charter” and read it. I do strange things like that every now and again.

Article 11 states that "a person who has been hospitalised has the right to express his observations on his treatment and on his reception." Consequently, if I have received an “over-generous” welcome from a member of staff, I shall say so, whether or not the doctor in charge of the service blows a gasket.

Even more importantly, Article 9 says that "every hospitalised person has the right to have his private life respected." It continues by saying that such a person "has the right to confidentiality respect of his …" communications.

Therefore, if the chef de service doesn’t like what I’m writing, I shall want to know why someone has been disrespecting my private life by hunting me down on the internet and reading my communications.

Frankly, I’m not in the least bothered about who tracks me down on the internet and who reads anything that I have written. But as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … if you have seen something that displeases you, no matter how you found it, there’s a “contact” button on the bottom right.

But if you are reading this and you aren’t supposed to, no matter what the reason, you only have yourself to blame.

Back in here, I listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. At some point during the night, I was at Aberystwyth watching Aberystwyth Town playing in the JD Cymru South League following their relegation from the Premier League. It was a completely new side with all their old favourites missing. It just wasn’t the same kind of team that it was before. Several of their former players who had left in the summer were there but seemed not to become involved or take any kind of side during anything that was going on. That was a disappointment again.

Amongst the players whom I recognised in the stand was Louis Bradford, Aberystwyth’s former centre-half, but also Alec Mudimu, someone who has no connection at all with Aberystwyth. He’s a Zimbabwe international defender who played in the JD Cymru League previously with Cefn Druids and after a spell playing in Eastern Europe, signed for Y Fflint the other day.

The nurse came at the usual time for a change today, and once more, he was full of jovial good humour. I really don’t know from where it’s coming, but I hope that he keeps it up. He’s a much more agreeable person when he’s in this kind of mood.

After he left, I made breakfast and read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.

Our author is still setting the scene but he’s now moved on to talk about hunting. And in the middle of his discourse, he stops to paint a very illuminating but fanciful account of a fictional hunt involving Cunobelinus and his “daughter” Helena, a personage just as fictitious as Montagu Sharpe’s description.

Sharpe talks about the wild "animals turned by the long line of bank and hedge now known as Grimm’s dyke, blindly rushing towards these outstretched leafy arms," of the hunting trap. And then he loses the plot completely as he talks about the "blast from a long bronze carnyx, the sportsmen scatter to their places, and with weapons ready".

Would anyone like to guess what might happen to a herd of wild animals if someone in their vicinity were to blow a note on a solid bronze anything?

Really, this kind of writing has no place in what is supposed to be a genuine and serious historical account.

Back in here, I had a few things to do but time caught up with me quite rapidly and my cleaner arrived to sort out my anaesthetic patches. After she’d finished, we had a very long chat and then she left me to await the taxi to take me to dialysis.

It was late coming this afternoon and the other passenger in the car with me had the air of being extremely unhappy. We were late arriving at Avranches and as you might expect, I was the last to be plugged in.

To make matters worse, having had the session interrupted on Monday, I had so much liquid to lose that I had to stay for four hours. And the internet was down all day too, which really put the tin hat on it.

Océane was looking after me today, which was nice. The first needle, I felt a sensation when she pierced the skin but that was all. As for the second, the one that gives me problems, I didn’t even realise that she’d injected me, so good was the puncture. She can do it again like that and I’ll be happy. And once she had finished, I crashed out for a whole forty-five minutes

The doctor came to see me at one point. They had had the report from the hospital. The implant is definitely faulty and they are discussing whether to repair it or replace it. That was not what I wanted to hear.

During the session, the blood pressure alarm kept sounding as my blood pressure dropped. With twenty minutes to go, it was down to just about eight so at that point, Océane stopped the session. She’s already seen me in a coma once and doesn’t want to see it again.

She raised the bottom of the bed to give my blood pressure the space to recover, and when my pressure was stable at 9.5 she uncoupled me. The doctor gave me a prescription for the nurse to monitor my blood pressure for the next couple of days.

The taxi driver was waiting for me, last out of the building as I was, and she brought me home. My faithful cleaner was awaiting me and what a relief it was to come back into my apartment without those wretched 25 steps.

After a good while to recover, I made tea – a leftover curry. And now I’m off to bed, exhausted once again. I don’t know what’s the matter with me these last few days.

But seeing as we have been talking about hunting … "well, one of us has" – ed … two guys are out hunting in the forests of Maine when they are attacked by a black bear. One of them escapes but the other one is badly mauled.
Eventually, the one who escapes goes back to his friend and sees the bloody mass on the floor.
Taking up his ‘phone, he ‘phones 911."My friend has just been badly mauled by a black bear. I think that he’s dead"
"Really?" asks the dispatcher. "Can you make sure?"
On the other end of the ‘phone, the dispatcher hears a “BANG”
"I’m really sure now" says the surviving hunter. "What do I do next?"

0

Wednesday 27th August 2025 – AND ONCE AGAIN …

… when the alarm went off at 06:29, I was still fast asleep.

It’s no surprise really, for when you don’t go to bed until after 00:30, there really isn’t all that much time for sleeping. It is, however, disappointing to say the least. I was hoping that this series of very early starts would go on and on and on.

Yes, it was after 00:30 when I finally went to bed last night. I know that what with one thing and another, it was a late night but I hadn’t realised that it was that late until I checked the time.

Once in bed, though, I remember nothing at all. I must have gone to sleep quite quickly and stayed there until the alarm. Being as tired as I have been over this last week or so since chemotherapy, the good (well, for me, anyway) sleep probably did me some good.

Mind you, I didn’t feel like leaving the bed when the alarm went off. Once again, for two pins I would have gone back to bed. I had a real struggle to leave the bed before the second alarm went off.

It really was a slow start to the morning. It took an age to sort myself out in the bathroom and I didn’t rush to take my medication. It was about 07:40 when I finally made it back into here.

First thing that I did was to check the dictaphone, “just in case”. I was travelling miles in my sleep but I can hardly remember anything of it because the alarm awoke me yet again. However, I do remember that on one occasion I was going back into a place where I worked, trying to smuggle out a textbook or instruction book or something so that I could do some work at home on the Thursday or Friday and have the book back in the office for Monday morning. I also remember doing something with a sheet of newspaper, rolling it up into some kind of spiral like the kind of thing that you’d make if you were lighting a fire. That’s all that I remember about what was going on during the night.

And isn’t that disappointing too? Having a really interesting dream, only to find it evaporate away like that.

The nurse was early again and he was once more in a spirit of amiability. I hope that this keeps up, rather than his usual depressive state

After he left, it was breakfast time. However, I had hardly started it, never mind finished it, when there was a ring on the doorbell. I’m not sure that I mentioned yesterday that the dialysis centre wants me to go for a Doppler examination on the implant in my arm. It had been arranged for 09:30 this morning here in Granville, so I wasn’t expecting the taxi at 08:45.

We arrived at the hospital at 09:05, in plenty of time for my appointment at 09:30, so it goes without saying that I wasn’t seen until a little after 10:00. My taxi driver had already been once to pick me back up but she found me sitting there waiting to be called.

The doctor who performed the examination was someone whom I have met on several occasions in the past. A small lady of “a certain age”, she would make a very good companion to my favourite taxi driver, for she is another one who gives a running commentary of “a certain kind” while she is working. Those two working together would make a wonderful combination.

She had me there for well over half an hour, and the result is exactly as I knew it to be before we even talked about going – namely, there’s a fault in my implant right where the second needle goes, and the fault has been there for months, exactly as I said that it had.

That is the responsibility of the clinic that tried its best to rob me of €1667 or thereabouts last summer, and for which I had to fight over four months for it to be returned. I am now awaiting the formal report before I decide my next move.

However, I shall be having words with the doctors at the dialysis centre too. I’ve been complaining about this implant for months, and no-one has done anything about it. It’s a shame that I had to write to the dialysis centre’s head office so that something could be done, and despite the objections of the chef de service who, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, took great exception to my letter, my letter has produced some kind of results.

When I left the radiology booth, my poor taxi driver was still awaiting me. I felt terribly sorry for her but there wasn’t all that much that I could do about it.

It was 10:55 when I arrived back here and I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that was that it was lovely just to walk back all on my own across the courtyard to the front door, into the building and straight into my new apartment without having to worry about how I’m going to climb 25 stairs.

First thing that I did when I was back here was to reheat my porridge and coffee in the microwave and then finish my breakfast, at long last.

The second thing was to say hello to my faithful cleaner who came in carrying an urgent letter. And so it’s official that Tuesday 16th September I go to Rennes for my next session of chemotherapy.

It looks as if it’s just for the day too. Plenty of mention about what I need to bring, but nothing at all about an “overnight bag”. Of course, I’ll telephone to check. However, if it is just a day visit, that will cause a few other problems because I don’t think that I’ll be in much of a state to travel afterwards, if the previous sessions have been anything to go by.

Much of the afternoon has been spent beginning to unpack my office and installing my external drives. There’s a lot to do in this respect and it will take a while to do it all.

However, the good news is that I have had my first shower. And it was gorgeous too. It worked just as I wanted it to and I was so impressed. However, climbing in and out of the shower is difficult. The step up is just a little too high for me.

But I have a solution to that. Lying around here are all kinds of offcuts of scrap wood from the kitchen, and if I put two or three together and screw them so that they don’t move, they would make a nice step up of half-height and so I should be able to manage the ascent so much better.

What kind of state am I in these days?

Later on, we had another foot-fest. I’d missed the match between Stranraer and Clyde at the weekend, and last night Stranraer had taken on Glasgow Rangers Youth in the Scottish League Cup.

The match at the weekend was a tame 1-1 draw but last night’s match was … errr … interesting, to say the least. Stranraer won 4-1 but, big Stranraer fan that I am, their third goal was scored from the softest ever penalty award that I have ever seen which in 99 games out of 100 would have been waved away, and as for the fourth goal, you can show me that again as many times as you like and from every kind of angle too, and I will still say that the Stranraer forward was half a mile offside.

However, Stranraer has in the past been on the wrong end of several dubious decisions in the past so I suppose that things eventually even themselves out.

Tea tonight was an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit out of the freezer with pasta and vegetables, and in a return to normality after the upheaval of the last week or so, I read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES by Montagu Sharpe.

Sharpe has been discussing the Iron-Age occupation of Middlesex by the various Celtic tribes and that has led me on a chase around cyberspace for buried treasure. Quite literally too, because the subject of buried hoards from the Iron Age came into the discussion.

Of course, I went off on a side-track and in the words of Fridtjof Nansen, "the more extensive my studies became, the more riddles I perceived – riddle after riddle led to new riddles and this drew me on."

And that, dear reader, is the answer to why it takes me so long to write up my notes, and why my Degree studies were not as they ought to have been. I am side-tracked far too easily by things that, to me at least, are much more interesting than whatever I am supposed to be doing.

So late once more, even though at one stage it promised to be quite early, I’m off to bed, wondering if I’ll have another “lie-in” until the alarm goes off.

But despite my having the first decent meal tonight since before chemotherapy, it’s been something of a bad day. On several occasions, I’ve felt my head spinning round and I’ve had to hold on to something to stop me falling. I’ve still not recovered from chemotherapy, I reckon, and I have no idea for how long this is going to continue.

But seeing as we have been talking about Fridtjof Nansen … "well, one of us has" – ed … he is of course famous for his epic hike across Greenland in 1888. During his trek he came across an Inuit building one of these little round houses out of ice blocks.
"What do you call this building?" asked Nansen
"It’s an ig" replied the Inuit
"Don’t you mean ‘igloo’?" asked Nansen
"Oh no" replied the Inuit. "There’s no plumbing up here on the Greenland Ice Cap."

0

Tuesday 26th August 2025 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since I’ve felt as ill as I have today?

And how long is it since I’ve been to bed well before 23:00 (21:56 was when last night’s notes were published) and slept right through until the alarm sounded at 06:29?

Yes, it has been a day of all kinds of records, some of them unwelcome, and I hope that things improve quite rapidly as I can’t go on like this.

Last night, though, I was in all kinds of states. I was feeling nauseous, my head was spinning round and I was absolutely flat-out tired. I dashed through my notes and staggered through my preparations for the night, and then fell into bed.

During the night, I remember nothing at all, and no-one was more surprised than me to still be asleep when the alarm went off. It’s been an age since that has happened. It took me a while to stagger to my feet too – for two pins I’d have gone back to bed – and even longer to go to sort myself out in the bathroom.

Once I was ready, which took a lot longer than it ought, I went into the kitchen to take my morning medication. I must try to return to my old routine now that everything is calming down. I’ve forgotten the medication more times than I care to remember just recently.

There was a task that remained uncompleted from when I was taken ill at dialysis yesterday. I was in the middle of splitting a music soundtrack, and I’d only completed “less than half” of it. There’s no time like the present so I had a good go at that to finish it off.

The nurse interrupted me with his visit, and I do have to say that since he’s come back from his holiday, he’s become quite likeable as he was when I first met him. He was disappointed that the Hound of the Baskervilles has left though.

Breakfast was next, and it was nice to have an unhurried, leisurely meal looking out of the window at the World as it walked by. Much as I liked the view from upstairs, outside here on the ground floor is much more animated.

Back in here, I can’t remember what I did next. It wasn’t to go through my usual routine of seeing what had gone on during the night and transcribing the dictaphone notes, that’s for sure. It was probably something to do with trying to find some of the things that I need that have been put into boxes, there to remain, probably forever.

There were a few people online with whom I wanted to chat, so that passed some time as well.

After lunch, I had a foot-fest. There had been a whole series of matches in the J D Cymru League yesterday and I had purposefully refrained from reading about them because the live match would have been when I was on my way home, so I wanted to watch it all in one go as if it were a live game.

So this afternoon I had Connah’s Quay Nomads v Y Fflint from yesterday afternoon. And having watched Llanelli throw away a 2-goal lead to go down 4-2 to Llansawel the other day, this time it was the turn of Y Fflint to throw away a 2-goal lead, to go down 3-2.

For the first half, Connah’s Quay were awful and Y Fflint made it look easy. But at half-time, the Nomads made no fewer than four substitutions, the first time that I have ever seen so many changes at half-time by one club. It obviously worked, because they stormed away throughout the second half.

There were also all of the highlights of the other matches, including Colwyn Bay’s impressive 1-1 draw against perennial champions TNS. After four matches, Caernarfon are currently leading the table, and it’s been a very long time since that has happened.

What with one thing and another, I’d almost forgotten the dictaphone notes. They were next on the list and the massive “War And Peace” from the previous night is now online. I’ve no idea what must have been going on during the other night, but there are tons of stuff, and it’s well-worth a read.

Having done that, I could then turn my attention to last night’s notes. At some point during the night I dreamed that my cleaner came down with a whole load of stuff that had been sitting around and about the apartment, and threatened me under pain of dire retribution to start to move anything around. However, I was in bed at the time and certainly didn’t feel like getting up so I didn’t say anything. I just left her to go about doing it. But after a good half-hour or so, I had a look at the time. It was 02:26 so it must have been a dream that I had had, probably because I couldn’t see any changes to any of the piles in here. So now I have to try to go back to sleep and hope that I can manage it before all my staff desert it all for the goldfields.

Firstly, I can’t remember awakening at 02:26. And then we’ve had dreams within dreams before now, and I always find them to be an interesting phenomenon. Finally, the incident about the staff deserting for the goldfields reminds me of a VERY AMUSING INCIDENT ONCE WHEN I WAS IN LABRADOR. Who will ever forget "Gold Strike at Bear Creek"?

Later on, we’d moved into some new digs. I was sitting there, comfortably thinking that when we all go out on Tuesday, I would go and buy a motorbike for myself. That way, I could travel to and from work and everywhere I want to go much more easily. Of course, my brother thought that the idea was silly. He said that it would be two weeks before I fell off it, or something like that. However, I decided that that was what I would do. In the end, I ended up having a discussion with the landlady of where we were staying. She talked about different things, and I happened to mention that I might go back on the buses. She said that that was a huge jump up from driving a car. Did I think that I’d be safe? Did I think that I wouldn’t have any problems? Etc. I told her that I used to drive for Shearings, which lit up her eyes. She said “ohh, well you’ll probably remember me then”. Just as she was about to say why, the alarm went off.

Apart from my family sticking the oar in, imagine these days still being asleep when the alarm went off. Had I been awake, I would have missed this little voyage.

All through the day, I had been feeling nauseous, my head had been spinning and by the late afternoon, my vision had become blurred and I could hardly see what I was doing. I couldn’t find the force to stand up and I wasn’t feeling at all hungry, even though I’d eaten nothing since breakfast.

However, I forced myself into the kitchen, later than usual, and made a bowl of pasta and vegetables with one of the vegan burgers that I have. I didn’t feel like eating it but if I don’t make an effort, I’m going to be seriously ill one of these days … "as if you aren’t already" – ed …

Standing up afterwards, my head was spinning around and I could barely find the energy to stay standing upright, crutches or not.

But now that I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed, horribly late.

But seeing as we have been talking about the saloon in CARRY ON COWBOY … "well, one of us has" – ed … in the same saloon, the local preacher came in to preach to the cowboys about the evils of the demon drink.
"Would you like a whisky first?" asked the bartender.
"No evil liquor should ever touch my lips" roared the preacher. "I would rather spend the night in a brothel with a woman of ill-repute!"
At that, several cowboys dashed up to the bar and handed back their whiskies to the bartender.
"Why are you doing this?" asked the aforementioned.
"Well" replied the cowboys "we didn’t realise that we had a choice."

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Monday 25th August 2025 – I HAVE HAD…

… another malaise – or “funny turn” – at dialysis this afternoon. And what a state I was in too. For a good while they had to switch off the machine.

It surely must be the after-effects of the chemotherapy, because I can’t think of what else it might be. After all, I had what for me would have been a good night’s sleep last night.

When I finished all of my notes etc last night, it was about 23:20 but as seems to be the case these days, I fell asleep at my desk yet again and it was at about 23:50 when I tore myself away and went to the bathroom. When I finally crawled into bed, it was just slightly after midnight.

It didn’t take long to go to sleep, but I awoke at about 04:10. I was seriously toying with the idea of raising myself from the Dead at that point, but instead I went back to sleep and finally awoke at 06:20, just a few minutes before the alarm. Six or so hours’ sleep is quite good going these days.

The Hound of the Baskervilles and his master were already awake, and they went off for a walk while I tried my best to organise myself.

When they came back, we had a coffee and a good chat, and then my friend began to pack while I made myself some breakfast.

The nurse had been round earlier and, for a change, he was quite sociable. He gave me this new injection, which may well be a contributory factor to this malaise, and then he cleared off.

My guests left at about 10:00, and then I had plenty of things that needed doing. So much so that I forgot to transcribe the dictaphone notes. There are plenty on there, so you’ll need to look further down the page.

My cleaner turned up to fit my anaesthetic cream, which we are trying instead of the patches. She did her best to organise me, but I was already not feeling too well so that was a waste of her effort unfortunately.

The car down to Avranches was full today, and it was driven by one of the chatty females who wants to take me to an axe-throwing session (we have some strange pastimes around here). I’m almost tempted to go, except that I can’t stand up straight these days.

At the dialysis clinic, I was stuck once more in a room on my own, where I was attended by one of the more … errr … “senior” members of the nursing fraternity. She had lived in London in the past, and wanted to practise her English.

There wasn’t very much water to remove today, mainly due to the fact that I’m not eating much these days, but I persuaded her to wind up the machine to take out more so that I have a head start for next time.

There were plenty of things to do, but after a couple of hours, I began to feel ill. My head began to spin, my eyes blurred over, I had a dreadful pain in my right shin and I began to sweat profusely.

They put me flat on my back with my legs in the air and put an ice pack on my head. That didn’t seem to calm me down, but I managed to doze off for an hour or so, which was probably the best thing to do

When it was time to go, I was left pretty much to my own devices. The good news though was that it was my favourite taxi driver who brought me home, and we had a good chat about her house-moving project next week.

My faithful cleaner and the neighbour had been helping me move were waiting for me. But by now I was wasted and couldn’t really function. They left me alone and eventually, I managed to make some food. However, you can tell that I’m ill because I left some of it, and it’s not like me to leave food on the plate, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Eventually, I managed to catch up with the dictaphone notes, of which there were more than just a few. I must have had a really mobile night. I was out in the street in a cul-de-sac somewhere and set up on a very low stage right at the end of it was a rock group whose singer played trumpet, saxophone, flute, a bassist, a couple of guitarists, a keyboard player and a drummer. They were doing all the songs that I knew. One of the songs was Hawkwind’s CHILDREN OF THE SUN. Their version of it was absolutely terrific, and the bass line was just how I would have played the bass line to that song too. We were all having a really good time watching them, and the musicians were dancing around. One of them, one of the guitarists, was dancing with the crowd and collided with me but I just smiled and let him carry on. It was a tremendous concert. At the end, they happened to mention that two of their musicians were taking the day off at the weekend for some reason or other and they were going to be rather short-handed for a gig on Saturday night. I wondered whether it was worthwhile my going over to introduce myself to see if they wanted a bassist for a couple of nights, looking for a change to go out and about and go back on the stage.

As it happens, I know where this cul-de-sac is. It’s just round the corner from where I lived in Gainsborough Road in Crewe. And I also know the track “Children of the Sun” and I would indeed play the bass line in a different way to Hawkwind. Also, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, once I settled here I began to relearn the bass guitar and six-string guitar. It was all flooding back to me and I was really enjoying myself and giving serious thought to going back on the road. I even bought a 200-watt bass combo amp. However, losing the mobility in my legs, not being able to stand up, and having this implant in my arm means that I won’t ever play the guitar again.

At another moment, I was down in Hampshire, on my way back to the cross-channel port ready to go home. However, I had someone else to see but I can’t remember who it was. Someone with whom I was talking happened to mention that they were looking forward to seeing me, and I remember replying that I wasn’t looking forward to seeing them. It turned out that I had 400 miles to go in order to reach the ports so I had to leave quite quickly and there wouldn’t be much time to see anyone because 400 miles on French roads in a day is fine but 400 miles on UK roads could be problematic so there wouldn’t be a minute to spare to go to see anyone in my opinion. I didn’t know how I was going to fit this extra visit in.

400 miles from Hampshire to a Channel Port? The only port that might fit that description in any way at all is Rosyth, from where there used to be a ferry that sailed to Zeebrugge, although it’s been cancelled for years. Strangely, my friend and I were talking the other day about this ferry crossing.

Later on, I was out in a minibus last night with someone else. We were dropping off TV decoders at different places. At one place, right out in the countryside, we had to wait until someone came along with a car. It was a woman with a tiny, tiny daughter. She came to pick up the TV decoder and she began to tell us about this car park where we were waiting. I can remember it being a gravel place at the side of the road but these days, it had been modernised and made to look much nicer although I thought personally that it was a waste of money. This little daughter was running around somewhere very close to the side of the road. I thought that this was extremely dangerous and would cause a great many problems if she wasn’t careful. We were discussing this situation, the driver and me, saying that we’ll never have this job finished by 16:00 at the rate that things were going, so I was trying to think of a way to speed it up.

Later on, I was with a little girl who was my daughter. For some reason, I didn’t have a partner and the girl didn’t have a mother. We were going to a party so she was dressed in a little lilac party frock. We went in, and everyone looked at us. We eventually found a place to sit down. The two of us were chatting to each other. I could hear one or two whispers that people were thinking that maybe it’s wrong for a guy to have a daughter without having a partner there as well, but we didn’t really care all that much. Then my niece appeared. She asked me later if that place was going to be my local from now on, the place where we had that party. I told her that I’d been here before and I know what it’s like. I’ve had a few games of snooker here but it’s rather far out here from home so I don’t really know.

Something else that’s bizarre is the story of the lilac party dress. The nearest thing that I ever had to a daughter was Roxanne, whom I looked after for three years. When her mother and I separated, Roxanne had left some things in the apartment that we had. There were her communion dress, her bridesmaid’s dress and the clothes that she wore on the night of the wedding that she attended. There were also some other items and two extremely large dolls, one of which was almost as big as she was, and I can’t bring myself to give any of them away, sad creature that I am. When my faithful cleaner was sorting out my old suitcases, she came across the party dresses for the two dolls (you can’t go to a party all dressed up yourself and not take your dolls, dressed up too!) and one of them is a lilac party frock.

The story about being a man on his own with a daughter is probably something to do with the fact that I got on better with Roxanne than I did with her mother, and I was sadder about her having to leave than her mother leaving.

Then we moved on from there and I was with this young Italian girl. We were talking about all kinds of different things, having a really interesting chat. Then she took me off into a corner of this car park where we had been with the minibus earlier. There were half a dozen graves there. She pointed out one and said that it was her little brother, then she pointed out another and said that that was her mother. She said that she had had a lot of difficulty coping with the death of her mother because she was so young. I felt really sad for her and put my arm around her to console her, and we began to walk back to the town. She told me, to my surprise, that I was a really nice person, which I didn’t think very much, and she told me that I ought to moderate my language because it is rather coarse, and I ought to take more care of myself etc, my dress and so on, because she said that the two of us might actually make a very nice couple at some point, which pleased me immensely because I liked this girl. We carried on chatting until we came out of one of the back entries on Nantwich Road ready to go down Edleston Road into town. This was another one of these dreams that felt so comfortable and felt so relaxed. I haven’t had one of these dreams for months that had this calm, comfortable and relaxed feelings.

As I said in my dream, I’ve not had one of these dreams for ages. As for Italian people, I love them and all of their emotions. When I first met Nerina, I found it very difficult to come to terms with the emotional side that she presumably inherited from her mother, but having worked with a bunch of Italians in Brussels later on, I just wish that I had met Nerina ten or fifteen years later. But you can’t turn the clock back, no matter how hard you try.

It’s true too that I suppose that I don’t take enough care of myself and my personal appearance, and it’s true that some of my speech is … well … quite emotional. However, you can take the man out of Crewe but you can’t take Crewe out of the man.

So having struggled to do the washing up, I’m off to bed, even though it’s quite early. I can’t keep on going any more this evening, so I hope that I’ll feel better tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about feeling out-of-sorts … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of the time that I was at Balmoral talking to a serving wench, when suddenly she burst out in uncontrollable laughter.
"What’s the matter, girl?" asked the Queen. "Are you feeling hysterical?"
"Och no, Ma’am" replied the girl. "He’s feeling mine!"

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Sunday 24th August 2025 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… evening that was last night. I can’t think of a time when I have been as tired as I was last night. In fact, I can’t remember whether it was three or four times that I fell asleep while I was writing my notes. One thing was sure though, and that was that I fell into bed almost immediately afterwards and that was that.

It wasn’t as if I had done anything special to warrant it last night either. And I’d had a nice, relaxing if painful session at dialysis too. It must be the after-effects of the chemotherapy that I had on Tuesday and Wednesday, I suppose. That does quite a few strange things, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Anyway, once in bed, there I stayed. I knew nothing about anything at all until all of … errr … 06:50. And it took twenty minutes for me to raise myself from the Dead. This might sound late to some people, seeing as the alarm is usually set for 06:29, but in fact Sunday is my Day of Rest and the alarm doesn’t go off until 07:59, so it’s still an early start.

First thing was to go to sort myself out in my nice new bathroom, and then I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There was one dream about the hospital and the taxis, and dialysis, all of that, but I had rather a rude awakening and the moment that I basically went to grab hold of the dictaphone, the dream evaporated and I could remember nothing whatsoever except a very little of how it began and what was involved in it. It was a huge disappointment when it happens like this.

It’s obviously preying on my mind, all of this, and it’s no surprise. Over the past twelve months or so, I’ve become a slave to the medical service and I can’t see any way out of it, except to go out horizontally. There is no cure in sight, nor is there ever likely to be, and I shall have to just keep on trudging wearily on until I meet the inevitable.

Although I didn’t dictate it, I have a vague memory of being upstairs, looking at the old apartment and how clean and tidy it was, even down to the polished glass in the old oven. And there was someone there saying “you aren’t really dreaming, you know” or “this isn’t a dream, you know” – something like that. There was also a vague recollection of having to go downstairs, and that I’d taken half a dozen steps to the top of the stairs before I realised that I didn’t have my crutches, and I had to send someone to fetch them.

As it happens, I have been specifically banned from entering the apartment upstairs, on pain of suffering the wrath of my faithful cleaner who has done her best to tidy up after me And I am not alone in that interdiction, because a similar ban has been also placed upon the Hound of the Baskervilles.

Interestingly, how many times is that now that I have been dreaming of going somewhere without my crutches? I hope that this is a positive premonition once I start to have my treatment in Rennes. We can but hope.

Eventually, the sleeping beauties on the sofa crawled back to life and I was looking forward to a coffee but the Hound of the Baskervilles had urgent business to which he needed to attend so he dragged his master off outside.

But not before the nurse had taken us unawares yet again. Not quite as early as yesterday, but still early enough. And once more he didn’t hang around.

While I was waiting for everyone to come back, I attended to the erection of the antenna for the maritime data recorder. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I maintain and operate the maritime data recorder for the Port of Granville, a radio transceiver that tracks the movements of the boats and ships in and out of the port and sends them to a Worldwide central control database receiver in Denmark.

When we had all collected in the kitchen, we had a coffee and a chat, and when they went out again, I attended to the assembly of the hi-fi unit. That involved drilling a couple more holes in the rear and the side of the shelf unit so that I could pass the cables through. It didn’t take too long, and we celebrated our success by eating breakfast accompanied by music.

After breakfast, my friend went to empty out the van while I tidied away the tools that I had been using, but we didn’t get very far because the girls turned up. They checked the books to make sure that I hadn’t rearranged them, and then we sat around for a while and had a really good chat as they are going home this afternoon.

Everyone went off later for a late lunch so I came in here to sit down and relax for an hour or so. I needed it.

When my friend came back, having stuck the girls onto the train, I began the baking exercise – a loaf of bread, and a pizza for tea.

Firstly, my new adjustable stool really is the business. Adjusted to the maximum height, sitting down to knead the dough is totally painless. The stool was an excellent purchase.

Secondly, the oven is wicked. Even with the baking time reduced from 55 minutes to 30 minutes, it still burned the top of the bread. It’s now a glorious dark brown instead of the insipid white of the old table-top oven.

As for the pizza, I cooked it for 15 minutes instead of 25 minutes, and even so, it still burned the edge. Nevertheless, it was delicious.

There was a mountain of washing-up to do and that took an age, but now I’m finished. I’ve written my notes and I’m off to bed in a minute. Tomorrow, the Hound of the Baskervilles and his master are leaving, so I’ll be on my own. There are still plenty of things to do, but they will have to be done some other time, and I don’t think that we’ll be able to take the solar panel off the roof of the van, which is a shame.

You can’t win a coconut every time.

But seeing as we have been talking about the new oven and its cooking capabilities … "well, one of us has" – ed … I was thinking that my mother would really be at home with my new oven.
Back many years ago, I remember telling a friend "my mother treats me like a God"
"Why’s that?" he asked.
"Well, every time we came home from school, my mother served me up a burnt offering."

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Sunday 17th August 2025 – GUESS WHO …

… fell down the stairs this morning? I must admit that I have been wondering how long it has been going to be before I had a calamity like that. Anyway, I need wonder no longer.

It looked as if it might have been a good day today too. Last night, although I didn’t actually make it to bed before 23:00, there wasn’t much in it and was reasonably happy for once with that.

And not only that, I was asleep quite quickly, and there I stayed until 07:09 precisely, although I do have a few vague memories of awakening at some point during the night.

07:09 may well be after the usual alarm time of 06:29, but it’s a Sunday when the alarm goes off at 07:59, so I suppose that it qualifies as an early start. But whichever way you look at it, it’s not far short at all of eight hours sleep, and when was the last time that I managed that?

Movement from the comfortable sofa in the living room told me that my friend was awake, so he made coffee while I went to have a good scrub up. And we were still drinking coffee and putting the World to rights when the nurse came.

The Hound of the Baskervilles was quite quiet about it today so the nurse could go about his business without any barking or growling (from the Hound, not from any of us) and after he left, the Hound dragged his master off for walkies.

While they were out, I transcribed the dictaphone notes from the night. I was in some kind of class for doing something like 3D design. Before the class began, there was a knock at the door. When I opened it, there was a young girl, speaking with a Scouse accent, like a certain girl whom I knew in Winsford. She came in and we had quite a chat, then it ended up with the two of us flirting around for a short while. However, I couldn’t stay as I had to go to this class. In this class, we were all in bed just like in the hospital and we were being taught like that. After the tutor had done three or four examples, she moved over to the far side and saw this girl in one of the beds. She told the girl that she couldn’t stay there because she needed the bed. And so I beckoned the girl over to mine. She came in, and the lesson carried on like that. At the end, we had to empty away all our waste so I emptied mine into a pile that another woman had been creating just as everyone else had done, although I’m sure that it wasn’t correct. I made myself a coffee, and then this girl appeared again. I thought “I suppose that I’d better make a coffee for her too”.

What a moment to awaken – here I am with a nice young girl (because that girl from Winsford really did exist. She worked on Saturdays at the big supermarket and she was really nice. I made a point of doing my shopping then and there and she came round to my house once or twice) and just as things are about to become interesting, even exciting, my subconscious drags me right out of the situation. There can’t be too many things more disappointing than that.

But as for learning 3D design, I did study a course on Open Learn about animated 3D film making. When I had more time back in the old days, I used to do quite a lot with a 3D program, but I’ve not done anything constructive or significant with it for years. By now, I’ve probably forgotten all that I knew.

There is no prize for guessing where these hospital beds might have been situated either. That is certainly becoming an obsession with me these days, which is hardly a surprise.

When everyone came back, we made breakfast and continued to chat for a while, but moving house doesn’t do itself, more is the pity.

The first thing that we did was to strip the contents out of one of the book-cases and stack them away in boxes. We then had a look at dismantling the book-case but I must have been deadly serious when I assembled them because this book-case was never ever going to come apart.

In the end, my friend took the fifth CD column downstairs and then began to move downstairs the boxes that we had just packed. I tried to go downstairs on my own, with the result that I have mentioned a little earlier.

It wasn’t all twenty-five stairs that had the privilege of feeling my arm and shoulder as I passed by, but as Nick Gravenites sang, FOUR FLOORS OR FORTY, AIN’T NO DIFFERENCE WHEN YOU’RE FALLING DOWN.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t raise myself up and neither could my friend. In the end, we had to drag my faithful cleaner out of her cosy Sunday morning to help me rise to my feet, bruised and shaken but not hurt all that much.

By now, we had quite a crowd gathered so I gave people a guided tour of my new abode, and then my cleaner helped my friend bring down the book-case, without dismantling it, and a neighbour carried some boxes down.

The first thing that I did was to pack the CDs and DVDs in the correct order, and there were so many that it took quite a while. Then I started to fill the book-case with the books that we had taken out upstairs.

After three hours on my feet though, I was totally wasted and couldn’t do any more at all. I had to sit down for an hour, but still wasn’t feeling up to much so in the end, we decided to call a halt to the proceedings.

The tiredness had a lot to do with it, but what didn’t help is that all over the floor, there are still piles of stuff that the plumber uses. If he finishes tomorrow, the room will be much less cluttered and everything will be easier – I hope.

But we’ve certainly learned a lot today, the most important fact being that we aren’t twenty-one any more, no matter what we think.

Coming back up here was an adventure in itself, and once I’d sat down, there was where I stayed for quite some considerable time. I really couldn’t move.

Eventually I summoned up the courage to stand up and made a loaf of bread and a pizza. The pizza was excellent, with the base nice and crispy for once.

However, I am really looking forward to my new oven next weekend, wondering how that will work out. My table-top oven up here is quite inaccurate. The cooking time and the temperature are extremely variable. I’m hoping for much better results from my new oven, with cooking time much closer to the time in the recipes.

So having finished my notes, I’m off to bed. Tomorrow, I’ll be dismantling the office and my recording studio, and while I’m at dialysis, people will (hopefully) begin to take it all downstairs. The bedroom downstairs is totally empty and the plumber doesn’t need to go in there, so it should be easy to put things safe, tidy and ready in there. Mind you, you’ve heard all that before.

But before I go, huge congratulations to my great little niece (or little great niece), Hannah, who FINISHED THIRD IN THE NATIONAL TRACTOR-PULLING CHAMPIONSHIPS OF THE USA at Bowling Green, Ohio, the other day. A perfect straight line pull too.

One way or another, and for various reasons, there is quite a lot of talent in our family.

But seeing as we have been talking about tractor pulling … "well, one of us has" – ed … it’s an extremely noisy sport.
Once, when I was photographing a tractor pull at Clinton, Maine, standing about three feet from the starting line, one of the marshals shouted over to me "how can you stand so close to that racket?"
I replied "pardon?"

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