Tag Archives: bad night

Wednesday 8th March 2023 – MY LITTLE WALK …

… into town this morning was quite a success, all things considered.

In fact, despite walking much farther than I have ever walked in one go, I managed to do it without any complications or difficulties and I was quite impressed.

Much more impressed than I was with my night of trying to go off to sleep. That was something of a disaster because it took me hours to drop off and I was wide awake again at 04:45. That’s the kind of thing that fills me with dismay.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too so I must have had a deep sleep at some point. I was with Zero’s father (but not Zero unfortunately) last night walking around this industrial estate somewhere. We’d actually been in our office and had seen something on a TV programme from the USA about chaos in an Australian chat room on the internet. The Americans were going on about how there were all these wonderful innovations coming from Australia that had yet to hit the USA such as video conferencing etc. Of course, as we were walking around we were talking about how we’ve been saying that we’ve been having all of this for 20 years in the UK. There were vehicles parked everywhere on this industrial estate on the grass verges and all over the place. We’d heard a story of someone who had been taken seriously ill there. There were some paramedics tending to him. We were wandering vaguely that way to see what we could do. There were some women lorry drivers parked on a car park doing something on the internet and having a blazing row about someone doing something or other. We just kept on walking and talking.

After the medication I checked my mails and messages and then had a few things to do here and there before setting out for town, like doing some photocopying and writing an important letter.

It was cold, windy and threatening rain but all the same it was quite a nice walk. Despite the crutches it took me less time than the time before to make it to the chemists where I picked up the product that I need for my hospital visit next week.

They agreed to dispense the prescription that I’d received at Leuven, but only insofar as they could because the trade names are different for the products and while some are easy to translate, others are not and they don’t want to make a mistake.

Some of the stuff wasn’t in stock so they had to order it. And that means another trip into town tomorrow. That should be exciting.

After that, I staggered on to the bank. When the final Act of Purchase is signed for this apartment that I’m buying, I’ll need to have an insurance policy in force to cover my liability. The bank deals with my insurance policies and the more that I have, the greater a discount I receive so I may as well get them to do it.

All in all I was there for an hour and a half. Actually signing the forms for the insurance took about 10 minutes but the rest of the time was spent having the hard sell worked upon me for more stuff that I don’t need. I couldn’t help but bring to my mind the lyrics of PRETTY BOY FLOYD and
“As through this life you travel
You’ll meet some funny men.
Some rob you with a six-gun
And some with a fountain pen.”

It was too late to do anything much by the time that the interview finished so I posted the letter and then headed for home. There’s a new spices shop opened in town and I wanted to go for a look around but not during lunch break. As Maréchal Foch once said when he was appointed to command a French Army during World War I “I only require two things. A free hand to deal with the Army as I think fit, and two hours for lunch” and nothing in France has changed.

It was 13:00 by the time that I returned here – a three-hour round trip. The first thing that I did was to have lunch. I ‘d been given a coffee down at the Bank but that’s not enough for a growing boy like me. And I do have to say that my fruit buns are delicious.

The second thing that I did was to make the place a little more presentable so that the cleaner wouldn’t have a heart attack. And I’d locked the door to the apartment on coming back through force of habit so she had to phone me up to get me to open the door.

While she was here I wrote out the notes for the radio programme that I’d been preparing and they are mostly complete. I just want to rewrite the final one so that it makes a nice lead-in to the end of the programme.

Another thing that I did today was to make the final payment for the apartment that I’ll be purchasing. That involved sorting out a few things in Belgium. I had hoped to do that over the counter when I was in Belgium last week but what with not being kicked out of the hospital until it was far too late, that was that.

But it’s all paid for now and I’m just waiting for the solicitor to extricate his digit and bring the papers up to date. But I do have to say that I’m glad that I hung on to the balance of the sale price of my old apartment in Belgium and didn’t fritter it away.

Tea tonight was a burger on a bap with a salad. And for a change, seeing as I had some vegan sliced cheese, I made my burger into a cheeseburger and that was delicious with a baked potato done in the air fryer.

So tomorrow I’m heading back into town to pick up the rest of the medication. I have noticed that the muscles on my legs are thickening out again so all of this moving about is doing me good. I shall have to do more of it, if only I could summon up the energy.

So let’s see what the hospital at Avranches can come up with next week. I don’t think that I’ll actually pick up my bed and walk, but almost anything will be an improvement to how things are right now.

Monday 6th March 2023 – JUST FOR A …

… change, I had something different for tea tonight.

With not having gone to either Carrefour or LeClerc this week I didn’t have any of the small cheap peppers that I usually buy. At LIDL they just had the monster-size ones that would do me for a week so I decided to pass on those.

However my friend Esi in Brussels had posted the other day the details of her favourite quick meal – a courgette cut in half, cooked for 3 minutes in the microwave, layered with some cheese and then put back in for another 2 minutes.

The other week I’d found some melting fondant vegan cheese in LeClerc and I’d bought some. So instead of the peppers I bought a courgette at LIDL and went to have a go with that.

It sounded a little bland to me so I coated it in tarragon and black pepper before cooking it and made some pasta and veg in a spicy sauce to accompany it, and it was actually quite delicious.

Furthermore, there’s another half of the courgette waiting for some other time, but I’m thinking along the lines of making a curry with that and the left-over mushrooms.

That is, if I wake up tomorrow because I didn’t have much sleep last night and I’ll need all that I can get. I was in bed quite early ready for my early start today, but I didn’t get much sleep. It took an age to drop off to sleep what with one thing and another and then I kept on waking up.

Mind you, when the alarm went off at 06:00 I was in a deep sleep so somethign must have happened at some time to make me drop off at some point.

Having checked the mails and the messages and the like, and having had my medication, I attacked the radio programme that I’d recorded yesterday. I edited it, joined it up together, added the final track, dictated the final speech, added it in and then edited all down to one hour exactly. It didn’t really take all that long.

And then I had a listen to the one that I’ll be sending off for broadcasting this weekend to make sure that it was complete and had no faults.

It won’t be long before I have to think about what I’m going to do for my 200th broadcast. I’ll need to do something special for that, I reckon. For my 100th I did a rock festival of a dozen live concerts but I won’t be doing that this time, I reckon. I’ll have to think of something else.

Once I’d finished that, I had a few phone calls to make. And as a result I have an appointment at the bank on Thursday morning and the visiting nurse is going to come to see me on Monday and restart the injections.

There’s some other stuff that needs to be done for this visit to the hospital in 10 days time and that involves a trip to the pharmacy. I’m hoping too that they will accept the Belgian prescriptions that I have. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that by the time that I’d finished at the hospital last week, the chemist was closed.

Anyway, I’ll find out the answer to that question on Thursday morning because I’ll drop in there on my way to the bank. Yes, I’m planning, for my sins, to actually walk there. Let’s hope that I can walk back too.

And apparently I’m supposed to have another appointment at Leuven on Monday but it’s out of the question that I’m going. I need to telephone them and ask them to postpone the appointment. I have asked them on many occasions to schedule all of my appointments on the same or adjacent days to save on the travelling and I’ve no idea why they wouldn’t do it, especially when they have plenty of time in advance to arrange it.

With all of that out of the way, I’ve been dealing with more radio stuff. Choosing another pile of music for another radio programme in the near future, and then tidying up a few of the databases that I keep. I’m constantly revising then as experience leads me on to change my way of working, to add new features into the programmes and to revise the basis on which I make them.

In fact, I could have done much more than I did but unfortunately I … errr … had a little repose during the afternoon. Not that that’s any surprise.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone again from last night, so I must have gone off to sleep at some point. There was a dream that I didn’t understand at all. It was something to do with travelling around etc. I ended up somehow talking to a girl who was with us on this trip. I had to go to the doctor’s. We went to the doctor’s surgery. Much of what he was doing was done in the open air in public. he was interviewing these people, giving out remedies and prescriptions. I was hoping that I’d have the chance after everyone had gone to go and have a talk to him, tell him about my symptoms, have an injection in the right leg to ease the muscle pain that I have and take it from there but for some unknown reason closing this meeting seemed to take for ever

Later on I was back home asleep when the alarm went off in my dream. It awoke me so I dived out of bed and dashed over to where the phone was but I couldn’t see it there at all. I wondered what was happening. I had a search but couldn’t find it. In the end I had a look and it was only 01:42 or 42 past the day and at this point I fell asleep and I apologise for doubting the word of Percy Penguin (who doesn’t appear half as often in these pages as she deserves) who used to complain that I snored when we slept together and I always denied it and that was easily what was happening to me. I was fast asleep. Sure enough when I looked at the watch it was 01:42 and I fell asleep in the middle of dictating it.

So if you can make any sense of that, then good luck to you.

Finally there was something going on with our Welsh class at some point during the night where we all had to be on call to do something over the weekend for 4 days, Friday – Monday. We were allocated 3 hours each. Everyone was complaining about the time that they were given. Mine was from 11:00 to 14:00 which would seriously disrupt my plans. We started to have a bit of a discussion about it.

There was something else happening as well but I’ve no idea what that was. I was in the middle of a dream and the alarm went off at 06:00 and awoke me. Everything in this respect simply melted away out of my head immediately.

Tea, as I mentioned, was delicious. I’ll have to remember this meal again. It was quick and simple, and quite tasty too. I hope that LeClerc will continue to stock the cheese because that’s the thing that will improve my diet.

Tomorrow I have a Welsh lesson so I need an early night so that I can be ready, fit and able to actually concentrate on some preparation and organise myself so much better.

The physiotherapist will be here tomorrow too and he’ll want to know how I got on on my travels, so I’ll have to have a shower too. I must be at my best for visitors.

Sunday 5th March 2023 – MY VEGAN PIZZA …

… this evening was probably the best that I have ever made.

Not only was it cooked to perfection, it tasted absolutely delicious as well. And I can’t think what it was that I did differently to make it so nice because it was made exactly the same way as every other one that I’ve made just recently

Mind you, I did have plenty of time to make it because I was up and out of bed astonishingly early for a Sunday.

It was round about midnight when I went to bed and I couldn’t sleep for ages. I’ve been without my medication for several days and with restarting yesterday, I’ve started on the side-effects already as my body becomes accustomed to them again. and so I was itching all over like nobody’s business for ages.

When I awoke, I noticed the time. And it was ony 08:00. That’s just ridiculous for a Sunday. I tried my best to go back to bed but I gave up at about 09:30 and arose from the dead.

For the first part of the morning I didn’t do all that much. There was plenty of time to spare.

A little later I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There were 4 of us sitting at a table in a restaurant – me, the woman with me who might have been Rosemary or even my friend from Montréal, another woman and another guy. We were having a meal. I was having a plate of vegetables. For some reason it was taking me a long time to eat it. Everyone else had finished a while before me. We were talking about various things. It turned out that the other woman at the table was the carer of the father of the woman with me. She was talking about things that everyone would know. The subject of food came up. I mentioned some kind of salmon that we’d had once in New York that swam around in the underwater rivers and had apparently come from somewhere down in the South-West of the USA in this underwater river all the way to New York. As I was eating I asked the woman with me to explain it but she went on a story about water leaks, how no-one ever fixed them because water was a common commodity and they didn’t want to cut off the supply in order to repair the leaks, hence the water leaking everywhere. That wasn’t the story that I wanted to tell. The other woman talked about how she had to pay £6:00 every 3 days to buy a bus pass to take this woman’s father out for whatever he needed doing. I mentioned that in Granville public transport is free (which it is and I’m surprised that I could remember that when I’m asleep) so we had a chat about this. But all the time that we were talking, of course I wasn’t eating. The meal was taking for ever to disappear. In the end it was becoming quite embarrassing, the time that it was taking to finish my meal, too busy talking about everything else.

My curried leek and potato soup was delicious today. I finished the last of it for lunch and it made quite a nice change from porridge. And soaking my bread in soup instead of toasting it and smothering it in vegan butter made a nice change too.

This afternoon I made a batch of fruit buns and they tuned out to be really nice by the look of things. I can’t wait to start sampling them tomorrow – the first one anyway.

And while the dough was rising I made a batch of pizza dough. When I had my food delivered when I was really ill, they sent me a different kind of flour. I made the pizza dough with it and it came out really smooth. I’ll have to keep an eye open for more of this flour in due course.

It rose quite nicely too. I divided it up into three batches, put two in the freezer and rolled out the other one onto the pizza tray to let it prove. So while the fruit buns were cooking later on I assembled the pizza and that followed the buns into the oven once they had baked. Probably the oven being stinking hot might have helped the cooking process but it won’t explain the taste.

For the rest of the day I wrote out the notes for the radio programme that I’ll be preparing tomorrow, and even find time to dictate them. In fact I had to dictate them twice because for some reason I forgot to switch on “RECORD” for the first time. I’ll edit that tomorrow morning after I get up.

But not right now. Although it’s early, I’ve already crashed out once today and with a really early start tomorrow I need to be at my best.

And I have to telephone the bank and the visiting nurse tomorrow. Things are moving rapidly here and I have to make sure that I’m on target to complete what I need to do. Time and tide wait for no man.

Saturday 4th March 2023 – MY CURRIED LEEK …

… and potato soup today was delicious.

In a large saucepan I fried an onion in olive oil until it was almost black, and then tipped in some minced garlic, two chopped small leeks, four small diced potatoes, half a teaspoon of nutmeg, half a teaspoon of cumin and a good dollop of ground black pepper, and fried all of that.

Then I covered it with water, added a vegetable stock cube and left it to simmer for twenty minutes.

Finally, I added some soya cream and whizzed it all up into a purée.

Totally delicious and furthermore, there’s enough left over for tomorrow lunchtime too. I’ll have it with the other half of the crusty baguette that I bought this morning.

While we’re on the subject of this morning … “well, one of us is” – ed … this was another morning when I arose from the dead before the alarm went off. I forget how many consecutive days this is now.

Mind you, it was another miserable night when I had a lot of difficulty going to sleep. My sleeping issues are really causing me a few problems right now.

But anyway, after my medication I went off to the shops – LIDL in fact this morning – and did a rather complete shop. It worked out to be quite expensive too, and for no good reason. There wasn’t much that I bought that wasn’t on the “usual” list.

Back here I made myself a nice strong coffee and then made my soup. Delicious as I said previously.

That gave me time to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There was quite a lot of stuff on there going back to when I was in Belgium just now and one of these days I’ll transcribe it. But last night there was something going on about some photos. It led to doing some green-screening overlaps with a girl of about 5 years old

Later on I was watching the football again tonight while I was asleep. The Man of the Match was awarded to a player who didn’t even play in the real game.

Finally, we’d demolished part of an old building and had gone to rebuild it. We suddenly realised that certain key elements were missing. We had to scavenge through the pile of rubbish to try to find these missing bricks and special tiles etc. We found 1 or 2 but a couple were eluding us and this pile was enormous. There was a small girl there jumping up and down insisting that something particular was exactly what we wanted. We couldn’t understand what it was she was meaning. We were actually looking for some roofing tiles that had on them pictures of girls who had been martyrs for some reason or other and been sanctified. This girl insisted so much that in the end someone picked up this tube and unrolled it. Sure enough it was a picture of a girl on a lead tile. It wasn’t the girl we wanted but it was from the right place and the right era so the one that we wanted had to be somewhere in the immediate vicinity unless we’d scattered them much further than we thought. We had to carry on searching. It was strange that she had tried to insist that where we were was what we wanted yet for some reason or other we hadn’t paid any attention at all and she turned out to be although not right, pretty close to it.

That wasn’t all that went on last night either, but whatever else there is, you really don’t want to hear it. Not if you’re eating a meal right now.

And we’re on the subject of football … “well, one of us is” – ed … there was more football on the internet after lunch. The other Welsh Cup semi-final between TNS and Penybont.

This was actually a better game than last nights, with much more skill and not quite as much thunder. TNS were always on top in this game but Penybont kept them at bay for most of the game. However two moments of madness leading to two defensive errors in the Penybont defence just before half-time and that was regrettably that.

It’s hard enough to get a result against TNS as it is, without handing them two goals on a plate.

Later on this afternoon I went back out to Caliburn to bring in some more shopping. I tried an experiment by going out with just one crutch instead of two.

It was easier to carry the shopping but I was quite unsteady on my feet and I can understand now why the physiotherapist insists on me using both crutches. However I had been moving around so much easier this morning after all of the exercise I’ve just had, so it was worthwhile having a try.

Tea tonight was a breaded quorn fillet with a delicious salad and some potatoes baked in the air fryer. And once again the air fryer came up with the goods. I’m now toying with the idea of trying to find some kind of container that I can put into is to that I can roast vegetables in there. I’m really getting the hang of this, I think.

As I said a few days ago, I’m determined to have a try at baking a cake in there too when I can find a cake mould that will fit in there. Exciting times ahead, I reckon.

But that’s for later. Tonight I’m off to bed and hoping for a good lie-in to recover from my exertions. There’s some pizza dough to make tomorrow as well as some fruit buns for the rest of the week. And so it’s not going to be a relaxing day tomorrow. I’ll be busy.

Still, high time I did some work.

Tuesday 21st February 2023 – MY VEGAN PANCAKES …

… worked really well today and I was impressed with how they turned out.

They weren’t as tasty as I would have liked. They could have done with more sugar and vanilla seasoning than I put in them and perhaps something more than brown sugar and soya cream to liven them up but there was nothing whatever wrong with the principle and the consistency.

The actual making of them and how they turn out was as close to perfect as I could make them and so I am not in the least downhearted. Quite the reverse in fact and I’ll remember this for another time.

But after the events of last night I’m considerably downhearted because it was yet another miserable night and I took a whole age to go off to sleep. I didn’t go all that far on my travels either so I can’t understand why I was so tired this morning.

Mind you, I was awake long before the alarm went off and at 07:30 when the alarm went off I was actually up and about, not having been able to go back to sleep.

After the medication it took me a while to gather my wits together and then I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I was on board a British warship last night. We’d engaged the enemy and been badly shot up. It was clear to everyone that we were sinking. Although the Germans had stopped firing at us – we thought that the Germans had enough problems of their own – we suddenly realised that the ship had been at rest for 10 minutes or so. The captain was furious. If he had known that he would have ordered an evacuation and we could all have taken to the boats. We wouldn’t have been in this pretty helpless situation. Eventually another ship turned up to rescue us and the boat. It managed to takt hold of the boat by passing a cable through a couple of the portholes and through the portholes of its own ship so that it would hold the hulk of our ship upright and could then sail away. When we were back on dry land there was some important material that needed moving. I was detailed with someone else. It was all in this huge holdall that the 2 of us had to carry. Of course I couldn’t carry it down the steps because my legs weren’t strong enough. I had to insist to the guy with me that we dropped it on the floor step by step so that I could go down. When I was on the lower step pull the bag down one stair behind us. He didn’t quite understand and I was in agony going down these stairs. As we got onto the pavement an ancient Japanese pickup pulled up, as rotten as a pear in purple. Someone said that someone called Dickinson was driving it. We couldn’t work out what he wanted and why he’d stopped right alongside our house where we were with this huge holdall. That was where we’d need to put our car so we could put this holdall in it and drive away. We wondered what he was doing and why he was doing it.

Later on I made a start on my pancakes. It took a while to make them because I was careful to sieve the flour to eliminate the lumps and to mix up the sodium bicarbonate. With 150 grammes of flour and 200 ml of soya milk together with all of the other bits and pieces it made 4 reasonably-sized pancakes so that filled a little hole in my stomach.

The rest of the day has been spent choosing the music for future radio programmes. Not that I’ll be preparing them this week but I’ve decided that I want to work on having a stock of music ready for whenever it’s going to be necessary.

No physiotherapist today because of Carnaval so I’ve had the afternoon off. and I’ve been doing something that I haven’t done for years, and that is to play around with a bit of greenscreening – superimposing images onto backgrounds. I’m not very good at it because my hands aren’t steady enough but occasionally one works out and they look quite impressive when they do.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with rice, and with plenty of stuffing left over there will be a delicious leftover curry tomorrow for tea with all of the stuff that’s hanging around in the fridge.

But that’s tomorrow. Right now though I’m off to bed. Tomorrow I have a bit of tidying up to do because the cleaner will be here and I have to try to make the place look some kind of basically respectable.

And I’ve been invited out for coffee tomorrow afternoon too and that will be quite nice. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall telling me that I need to get out more.

Monday 20th February 2023 – AND IN WHAT IS …

… turning out to be a desperate run of dreadful nights, last night was probably about when I reached the nadir.

Although I was in bed quite early bearing in mind my 06:00 start, there was no possibility of going to sleep.

Hordes of people swarming up and down the street outside at all kinds of hours on their way back to the caravanettes parked on the car parks around here. Even at 05:00 they were still coming back from whatever was going on down in the town.

And when I did manage to go off to sleep at some strange time of night, I went on so many travels that I’m surprised that I ever made it back home again afterwards. A girl from school came to see me last night. I can’t remember who she is now. We were both learning Welsh together. During the lesson she’d been exhibiting photos and writing captions for them. We had a translation to do and our teacher was wondering why it took us so long. I explained to the girl first of all that we have to identify the words and then translate them and then arrange them into some kind of lucid sentence. I showed her 3 or 4 books that I’d bought recently that didn’t seem to help me at all with any grammar or any vocabulary. I remember one that I showed her and said “that was 50p wasted wasn’t it?”. We had a bit of a laugh. She said “I don’t think the teacher understands exactly how difficult it is for non-native speakers to grasp the principles of a foreign language”. I wish that I could remember who she was.

There was someone else at some point trying to import a Moldavian diesel engine for a project that he was building that had been interrupted by the war. He described everything that he had to do, such as take out Moldovan nationality etc. But as I started to dictate this I had the stabbing pains in my foot again so I missed an awful lot of most of what he was saying. I know that it was an incredibly complicated procedure.

This next one was a dream where many students at a school in a class had to find a Will because someone had allegedly died. They found a Will but after investigation it turned out that it didn’t belong to that person at all. There was also a tv remote there that wouldn’t change the television. They found out in the end that it was the wrong remote. There were all kinds of strange things going on about removal and substitution of documents and things. These students turned out the classroom but couldn’t find what they were looking for so they started hunting down through the school. I made a few suggestions. I doubted that the document had been destroyed because it had value other than for what they were trying to use it etc. It was a really weird supernatural kind of dream involving all these children and went on for what seemed like hours while they searched for everything and tried to make sense of what was going on with these substitutions

And later we were back in that dream again. There was something about the discovery of a motorbike in the forest and something to do with the casserole lid off the huge casserole frying pan. I can’t remember what was going on in this second part of the dream very well either.

Then I had a garage somewhere on the Pointe du Roc where the zigzags are that climb up the hill. A little yard on the right where you can park 3 cars. It wasn’t very convenient but that was where I was. In this particular dream i’m left the carpark outside this particular building. There was a police car there dealing with a pedestrian and another vehicle. I went off in the Senator, discussing with someone about the yard, saying that it was very small but it was all that was available etc. When I came back into the car park the policeman was still there but one of these guys was wandering around. I asked him what the policeman was doing. He replied that he was waiting for someone else to come. I was wondering what was happening about this with the policeman being outside our building trying to sort out whatever was happening.

And we’re still going onwards. It was late at night. I had to go to do some shopping. The only place was the petrol station so I did some shopping there, a few bits and pieces. I didn’t think much of the pears. They also had banana bread but it was sold in packs of 10 or 20 loaves which was far too many for me. I collected what I wanted. To check out you had to go to a window and hold up your products while she scanned them. I asked her if she found it extremely difficult, which she did because she was never sure if she’d scanned everything that the customer had. I moaned about the bananas and this bread. In the end I cashed out and started to go home.

Finally I was in my apartment building. It was a completely different building and a completely different apartment than this, much more modern. I had to go down and out again. When I came back I lost my way. I couldn’t remember where the lift was. Eventually I found it and went upstairs. I suddenly remembered that I had Marianne’s apartment that she’d left to me. I’d started to decorate it a while back but had somehow run out of energy. That was still waiting to be worked on. I could be doing that instead of messing around. Then it was the Annual General Meeting of the House Owners’ Association. There had been arguments about people weairing striped shirts and a few other things so there was a huge rebellion at this meeting. Everyone was coming along to overthrow some of the ridiculous rules about what you could and couldn’t do. It was so busy that I put my coffee down on this seat and couldn’t find it again because there were so many people all around. I was chatting to someone about my coffee. They said that I should be careful because I’m likely to be sued if it burns someone. I remember having to go to fetch endless cups of coffee because I was so thirsty. I had about 3 or 4 cups of coffee during this meeting.

How about that lot for a series of nocturnal rambles?

The crowds going past here at 05:00 awoke me (I must have been asleep at that point) and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t go back to sleep. So by the time the alarm went off at 06:00 I was up and about, medicated and working on the radio programmes to finish them off and get them out of the way.

And when I’d finished them I made a start on choosing the music for the next radio programme or two but at some point I dozed off to sleep again, which was no surprise given how much sleep I didn’t have during the night. I was away with the fairies for about an hour or so and I was surprised that it wasn’t for any longer.

However, before I dozed off I managed to have my toast and coffee for a late breakfast. And I do have to say that the break that I baked in the air fryer on Sunday, although it wasn’t as aerated as it might have been, was absolute perfection. The best that I have ever made, I reckon. I was really proud of that.

There’s another bread roll as well but I’ll be having it on Wednesday because tomorrow I’m going to have a bash at making pancakes for breakfast and see how they work out.

So with the music for one programme chosen, remixed and paired off already I turned my attention to the dictaphone notes, and that wasn’t the work of five minutes, as you can tell. It took quite a while to type them all out. But what was interesting was that no-one from my family came to visit me in all of that.

But there again, neither did any of my favourite characters and that’s a disappointment. Still, you can’t have everything. Mind you, I wish that I knew who that girl was. The name “Simpson” rang a bell but I can’t remember any girl with that surname whom I might have known at school.

Tea tonight was another stuffed pepper. Quite delicious as well. I’m getting to be quite good at making the stuffing for these. It was only a small one, so I was rather glad that I’d had some soup with pasta at lunchtime. It had been a very long day today and I was actually quite hungry.

There are a couple of things that I have to do right now and then I’m off to bed. To dream about making pancakes and hoping that they turn out as well as I would like them to.

But before I go to bed, I’ll just leave you with a woman who has just posted in a “Shipping” group on my Social Network that her father worked for Cunard. I replied that my father put a great deal of effort into his work as well.

Wednesday 15th February 2023 – WHAT A WONDERFUL …

… left-over curry that was for tea tonight. There was some stuffing left over from the stuffed peppers, a few mushrooms and sweetcorn from the weekend salad, a few fresh mushrooms and a small potato all fried together with an onion and garlic and some soya cream. A handful of rice and frozen veg made it into something special.

The next couple of curries should be OK but I’m running low on some of the spices that I use. I can see that I’m going to have to go shopping if ever I make it back to Leuven, whenever that might be. I can’t find a decent source of spices around here unfortunately.

Anyway, it’ll give me something to think about when I go to bed tonight. I spent far too much time thinking rather than sleeping last night and I expected to regret it, especially when I fell out of bed before the alarm went off, simply because I couldn’t go back to sleep having awoken earlier.

And there was plenty of time during the night to spend thinking too because it was what I would call a “difficult” night. I was in bed much earlier than usual, having finished all that I intended to do quite a bit earlier than I expected, so I decided to make the most of it.

It took a while to go off to sleep though, not that it bothered me too much, and once I was properly asleep I went off on a little travel. There was a group of us who knew each other from our school days. We’d come together, 6 of us, and we reckoned that we’d form a group and go off to perform some kind of series of concerts somewhere. 5 of us assembled but the 5th one was missing so we had to go into Crewe to find him. We suspected that he would be at a railway workers’ social club because he worked on the railway. We went there and I left everyone in the car park while I went in. I asked after him but he wasn’t there. Another one of my friends from school was. He came over. He was extremely upset because he’d read something that I’d written where there was a quote attributed to my father. He was furious that I was putting his words into the mouths of others. I told him in no uncertain terms that if I’d attributed a quote to someone, it’s because that person had said it. It’s extremely possible that in similar circumstances on similar subjects 2 people whom I know are likely to have the same kind of comment in reply.

It was a most unpleasant encounter, so much so that it awoke me. And it was from then on that it all went downhill. I’ve really no idea why such a dream, about nothing very much in particular, should be so disturbing.

But lying awake made me think about other things too and there ended up being all kinds of things churning around in my mind, more of which anon.

However, I must have gone back to sleep on a couple of occasions because I was off on my travels again. And who should come to join me on my perambulations but Zero? What a lovely surprise that was. I was round at her parent’s last night. I’m not quite sure what I was doing. She was there and she had 2 friends her own age round. They were outside in the dark playing housewives, all sitting around a plastic table pretending to drink tea. I was watching them through the window. 1 of the girls took hold of Zero and asked her if she could have a blueberry ice cream with some kind of syrup on it. For some unknown reason Zero was reluctant to make it. The girl was rather unhappy about that idea. She thought that Zero should go and make this ice cream for her.

Then later on I’m not sure whether I stepped back into this dream or whether I had some kind of flashback, but we were back on the subject of Zero’s unhappy family again. I was at home and her brother asked if I would go round to see their father. I told him that I couldn’t because I had plenty of things to do myself. I was busy. In the end I nipped out really early at about 06:00 in the gold Cortina estate. When I arrived there was no-one about so I just sat outside and waited. Then they all got up and started to have a party. I waited until the father came out so I could see him but his son walked past. He said “I thought you said that you couldn’t come”. I explained that I’d managed to find a little time. We wandered off. I thought that he would go to fetch his father but instead his father came out and wandered off doing something else. I could see him in the mirror.

And finally there was something else about something going on in a shopping arcade where there was a post office and post box and films. I wanted to go along to photograph this post office but it was pitch-black. There were all these people walking around there running around. I took the camera but it had to be on a time exposure. I had to hold the camera at a strange angle and press the button then wait for about 20 seconds without moving. Of course trying to push the button with this camera at this awkward angle removed the perspective that I wanted because the camera moved. I had then to quickly try to re-find the perspective that I wanted and wait for the film to take. of course it was a very long exposure being so dark and everyone was moving around. I couldn’t get them out of the way of the lens. I tried 3 or 4 times and had this really difficult struggle to actually make the button work and hold the camera straight, stop the camera moving, keep the people out of the way. None of the photos that I was taking were coming out properly.

So with all of that going on, I must have had some kind of sleep at some point. Especially if I managed to conjure up Zero after all this time. What with TOTGA the other night, all I need now is for Castor to put in an appearance.

After the medication and checking my mails and messages I had a few things to do. Like chosing the music for the next round of radio programmes. That involved going through the playlists and tidying them up because over the last few weeks I’ve decided to do things in a different direction.

That means doing some kind of major adjustment to the … errr … 6 playlists that I maintain. With over 1200 albums and 300 artists I’ve split the playlist into 6 with different artists in each one so that I don’t play the same groups too often.

But going back to what I was saying earlier about things going round in my head, one of the things that I was pondering was this question of paying for the apartment. I had a feeling that all of this was about to go pear-shaped so I spent several hours thinking of a cunning plan.

Sure enough, the company charged with dealing with the transfer rang me again today and came up with yet more demands for information. And in the end after much debate and discussion and having thought of a Plan B, I ended up telling them to clear off.

In the past, I’ve said that my bank in the UK is a regular favourite for the title of “worst bank in the world”. But right now, I’m firmly in their hands with their wicked exchange rate, their stupid daily limit and all of that, and it’ll take me forever to transfer the money over at an absurd cost. But the quicker I start, the quicker I’ll finish and the first daily amount has gone off today.

But as we have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … there’s no such thing as a recession. What there is instead is a whole load of money floating around waiting to be spent and no-one can be bothered to put the work in to go out and collect it.

And that reminds me – still no replies about that work I want doing. It’s unbelievable.

The cleaner came here for an hour as usual and made the place look a lot nicer. It’s a good plan having her here. And she took out all of the rubbish which was nice of her. That was a good decision.

So having sorted out allthe music, paired off the music for one lot (and I’ll pair off the other lot tomorrow morning) and had my nice tea, And having written my notes, I’m going to bed.

So who’ll come to see me tonight? It must be Castor’s turn of course, but “I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams”. I reckon that it’s going to be more like some member or other of my family.

Sunday 12th February 2023 – I HAD A …

… go at making some bread in the air fryer this afternoon. A couple of small bread rolls.

And it wasn’t actually a success. Not because the air fryer didn’t do what it was supposed to do – in fact it seems to have baked them quite nicely – but because the dough didn’t rise very much at all, and I’ve no idea why that would be.

It’s true to say that the bread that I normally bake in a conventional oven doesn’t rise very much either even though I follow the recipes carefully and knead the dough for quite a while. I just think that the air fryer is simply amplifying the defects in whatever it is that I’m doing when I’m trying to make bread.

But I won’t give up. I’ll try again at some other time and see if there’s any improvement.

After all, the batch of pizza dough that I made today was delicious and did everything that it was supposed to. Tonight’s pizza was delicious and there are two more lumps that are now in the freezer that I hope will be just as nice for the next couple of weekends.

So what I might do is instead of using 500 grams of flour, I’ll use 600 grams and see if the extra 100 grams would make some nice bread rolls instead.

But that’s for another time. Right now I’m more concerned with what happened today.

Last night I was in bed at a realistic time but once more I had the stabbing pains in my legs and feet that awoke me on a couple of occasions. In fact, I could have been up and out of bed at 07:00 or thereabouts this morning but on a Sunday? You must be joking! 10:30 is much more like a reasonable time to stagger out of bed into the kitchen on a Sunday.

There was quite a bit of stuff on the dictaphone from during the night. At one point I was supposed to be going on holiday. I hadn’t packed anything and there was about half an hour before my plane so I grabbed hold of my suitcase and began to throw stuff into it. I couldn’t find half of the stuff that I needed so in the end I gave it up as a bad job and went to work instead thinking that when I return home I can pack and be ready for the next morning to go again. Next morning the situation was the same. The house was an absolute tip with stuff everywhere. I hadn’t cleaned it. Again, I couldn’t find half of the things that I needed. I thought that I can’t possibly leave the house in this kind of condition. The cats needed feeding. 2 boys came. They were talking about the pads that cricketers wear and what sizes they are. I tried to explain to them that the more proficient you are the bigger pads you have but for some reason they didn’t seem to quite understand. Then they said that they would feed the cats for me etc. I said that it’s my job and I have to do it anyway so I’ll go to torture the poor devils with this horrible food that I give them. They tried to insist that they could do it but I just wasn’t getting anywhere with this stuff that I needed to pack. Rosemary had long gone. I thought “this is it, really. My journey may as well be cancelled”. At one point I found what I thought was a stash of all the stuff that I needed but when I began to rummage through it, it was all old stuff, single gloves etc none of which would be any good for what I wanted at all.

And then I was still searching for this missing button. It was nearly time for me to go to work so I was hunting around quickly. I came across a load of dried cat’s food that the cats hadn’t eaten. I opened the door and shouted. One of the cats came in but the other was really taking its time about it. I gave them some food anyway. Then a fuel tanker pulled up at the petrol station. The driver was wandering around doing a few things. Then he climbed back into the cab ready to leave. I thought to myself that I ought to be leaving soon too because of all the things that I had to do and I still hadn’t found what I was looking for.

There was also something happening about some kids’ entertainment that was taking place while I was fuelling up a motor scooter with fuel but I awoke in the middle of this and it immediately evaporated. I couldn’t remember anything more.

A short while later I had to create a new department for doing a certain kind of work as a support for someone famous and well-known in political circles. I had to write out a little speech to set everything out and then make some comments about it. Having written out what I thought was important, I went through and wrote in pencil over the top. The pencil wouldn’t show through very well. By now I’d gone to do this work outside and was sitting in a nice, comfortable place by a bit of a lawn where a group of small children was having a party. I decided that what I really needed was a fine-point red felt-tip pen that could write over the top of what I’d written. It wouldn’t obscure what was underneath but you could see my comments over the top quite clearly. I told these 2 girls that I’d left my papers there and that i’d be back in a moment. I ran back to my office to try to find one. Then there was something of a gap in whatever was happening. It merged into something much later where there was my new boss and probably one of his assistants discussing particular American politicians in some not-very-welcome or friendly terms. I suppose that I should have taken part in this discussion but I was far more interested in guarding my tongue so I didn’t say anything out-of-place but in the meantime listening carefully to what they were saying so that I could work out which way the wind was blowing and what was the lie of the land if I was going to be working with them

Once I’d gathered up my wits (which, seeing how few wits I have these days, takes much longer than it ought) and had some food and coffee, I made a start on one of the two radio programmes that I’ll be preparing tomorrow. And I did so well that apart from the final track and the speech that goes with it, one of the programmes is finished already.

It won’t take me long to finish that and then I can start on the second one. That shouldn’t take too long either because the text is already written and dictated. I dictated them before I went to bed last night in a mad fit of enthusiasm.

Apart from that, I did the baking that I mentioned, and my pizza for tea really was delicious. Cooked to perfection, which is a surprise given the inconsistencies of my table-top oven. I can’t wait to have a decent one up and running in due course but that will have to wait until the new apartment, whenever that will be.

So right now I’m off to bed for an early night ready for an early start in the morning. Dreaming of making bread in the air fryer, I suppose, but that’s not going to be anythign sustainable because it’s only a small air fryer and probably three bread rools is about the limit of what can fit in there.

But at least it works, and it opens all kinds of new doors for me, as I suspected that it would. What’s going to be next on the air-frying menu?

Wednesday 1st February 2023 – I’VE JUST BEEN …

… crashed out on the chair in the bedroom. Not actually asleep but in some kind of cataleptic trance. I could hear the radio playing in the background but for a good 20 minutes or so I was totally unable to move.

It’s probably something to do with tiredness and that’s no surprise at all. I ended up last night – or rather, this morning – not going to bed until about 02:30. I started something before I went to bed and was somehow swept up in the excitement, such as it was.

And no-one was more surprised than me – not even you, I bet – that I was able to haul myself out of bed when the alarm went off at 07:30. And I kept on going al day as well.

After the medication and so on, I had a few things to do. Like bake my fruit buns. And I do have to say that they are the best that I have made – I had one with my coffee. I think that I’ve got the hang of them right now, although I wish that the dough would rise more than it does.

Most of the rest of the day has been spent sorting out the music for the next batch of radio programmes. It’s not like me to go around getting ahead of myself but one lot of music is done and paired off, and I’m halfway through pairing off the music for the second one.

However, I had to grind to a halt as I had other fish to fry. In fact, while I was listening to the one that I’d intended to send off, I heard myself going on about a musician who had died since I recorded it. Consequently I had to rewrite that bit, record and edit it, and then filter it in. And as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … it takes longer to edit a programme like that than it does to record it in the first place.

The cleaner came round too and had a good go at the place. She cleaned all of the air vents today which probably means that it’ll be a little cooler but smell nicer.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from last night too. I was with someone. We were living with someone on the edge of Paris. She’d been arrested in some kind of demonstration in Lyon so she was going to demonstrate against her arrest. She asked me if I’d drive her so we got into the car, a C15 van, and set out. We hadn’t been driving very long before I asked “are we actually going to Lyon?”. She replied “yes”. I then asked had she thought about what would happen if she were arrested again. She said “yes” and was quite prepared for everything. She intended to be true to herself and would feel pretty bad if she weren’t. We carried on driving. We stopped at a place for lunch, a pub. She decided that she wanted turkey, and they served me with turkey as well. There was someone else there whom we knew so the 3 of us were there eating turkey. She was talking about spells – how she’d like to go inside one of these spells and disappear off into the realms of darkness. She went up to the counter for something. When she came back she told us that she’d told the people at the counter what they had said and she told them what she wanted to do with this magic spell and this turkey. They had said that some Tory would probably come along and make sure that you stay there. We were eating this turkey and I suddenly realised that I was vegan and it was making me really ill. I had to stop and she was disappointed. I said that I wasn’t going to eat any more otherwise I’d be really ill. At that point a family came in, mother, father and a young girl. They looked around for a table and found one but there were no chairs. There were 3 of us and 4 chairs so the guy with us took our other chair and took it over to them to sit down so that they would at least have one seat.

Tonight’s leftover curry was delicious. It seems that my cooking is improving these days. I’ve no idea what I’m doing that is different or whether it’s my taste buds but the stuff looks much better and is much more tasty. But I’m hoping that when I eventually move into this new apartment with its nice kitchen and new appliances, it’ll be even better. A good oven will be a huge step up and I can’t wait for that.

But right now that’s for worrying about tomorrow because even though I’m not tired and it’s later than usual, I’m going off to bed. The physiotherapist will be here tomorrow afternoon so I suppose that I ought to make a start on trying some of these exercises otherwise I won’t ever improve.

Monday 30th January 2023 – I’VE FINALLY FINISHED …

… these radio programmes that I’ve been trying to do since Thursday.

Much to my own surprise, and probably yours too, I was up and out of bed quite quickly when the alarm went off at 06:00. And after I’d taken my medication etc, I was soon back at my desk.

Mind you I only wish that I’d shown as much energy and enthusiasm working though as I had in leaving the bed. I was quite easily distracted unfortunately and what with one thing and another (and once you start, you’d be surprised at how many other things there are) it was just about midday when I was finally finished.

Mind you, these two that have have finished today are pretty good ones and the choice of music is quite impressive.

This afternoon I was intending to make the necessary arrangements about organising some kind of payment in respect of this apartment. But the solicitor who’s handling the sale STILL hasn’t sent me the information that I need to complete the forms that I’ve been sent. From what I’ve seen and experienced, he’s even worse than me at postponing everything until beyond the last moment. It’s not a very good advertisement for a solicitor, that’s for sure.

However, not that I’m short of a few things to do. For a start, I had to pay my cleaner. She’s not doing this job for nothing. That didn’t take me too long. She’d worked out for herself how many hours she’d worked and what was her hourly rate. I just had simply to fill in an on-line form and that was that.

And then there was the dictaphone. I’d had a dreadful night, tossing and turning all over the place. But even so, I’d been off for quite a few rambles during the night. I was making tea at one point. I was looking around for a tin of vegetables but couldn’t find one in my cupboard. In the end I had the cupboard out with almost everything moved so I could have a good look through. I found lots of stuff that I’d missed but I couldn’t find any vegetables. Suddenly I remembered that a few weeks ago I’d bought a couple of tins of really expensive peas and carrots that had been on sale at Noz at some ridiculously cheap price. I knew where they were so I went to look for those instead.

Later on I’d been wandering around some town somewhere. I can’t remember where now. It was where I was living and I was working as a sort-of odd job delivery person. One Saturday morning I had a few things to deliver. I had to go round to the house of one of my old taxi clients to pick up the facade of a piece of wooden furniture to take to somewhere else. While I was there I picked up a piece of chipboard that I’d had for years that I’d wanted for another project. I was roller-skating down this hill to a road junction and suddenly remembered that I didn’t know how to stop. In my anxiety I fell over. I picked myself up, picked up the facade of this piece of furniture and set off again. After I’d gone about 200 yards I suddenly realised that I’d left my piece of chipboard in the middle of the road. I was quite attached to this piece of chipboard for some reason. It had followed me around in a variety of moves so I went back to find it. I picked it up and came back again. I could hear some kind of arguing between a mother and two children. I recognised the voices as yet more people whom I’d taken on the taxis years ago. I glanced over the hedge as I went past. It was indeed this family but in the intervening years they had put on a lot of weight and were scarcely recognisable. While I was setting off again I was thinking that with walking to Chester that I’d done the other night, why didn’t I go on roller skates? That would only have taken me half the time, I reckon, and for a lot less energy too. “I shall have to look further into this travelling to places on roller skates” I thought.

As well as that I’d been in London somewhere. I had to go out to the East End. I’d picked up a printer on the way. For some reason it was much later than usual so I was running out of time. In the end I booked a room at a hotel out there so I could finish my journey next morning. On the way back I was walking and ended up in this countryside with these fields and hills somewhere in North London. There were some kids playing around. I suddenly realised that I didn’t have the printer with me. I had to make a detour somewhere else to pick up the printer. Then it wouldn’t all fit in the box. I realised that I had to dismantle it because I’d assembled it when I’d bought it. Then I could just about fit it into the box. I set off and was going past this row of terraced cottages. I had something to do in the back garden of one of them. I ended up borrowing a drill and a large bit. As I walked away from there they told me that I needed to be careful when I left. I walked away and ended up going down this alleyway out into the lane from where I’d come. I suddenly realised that the sun was over on my right which meant that I must have been walking back east again. I had to stop and have a think. Someone caught up with me and asked if I’d borrowed a drill from such and such a place. I replied “yes” so he asked if he could take it back as he needed it. I showed him the drill. He replied “that’s not exactly what he was looking for”. Then I thought that I’d pack everything into my rucksack that I was carrying. It was rather pointless having an empty backpack and my hands full of stuff. The first thing I noticed in my backpack was my bag of money. I thought “why was that in there when it’s going to be completely inaccessible. It should be in my pocket”. While I was arranging everything these 2 girls came up as well and started to talk to me about something or other. When the first one finished the second one said to me in a foreign accent that she wanted to talk to me about napalm. I didn’t know exactly what she meant by this. She said that she’d written to me a few months ago, which I didn’t remember. She asked me where I was living so I replied “in Normandy”. She asked “are you travelling?”. I replied “no” which stunned her for a moment. I turned round to the boy and whispered “if anyone else asks me another silly question I’ll go berserk”.

Finally, I had ended up with an orange somehow and had to take it back to the market stall to have my money back on it. Then I noticed that they had a net of 6 oranges for €2:00 so I was going to ask if I could swap and pay the difference. It took me a few minutes to be served. When the stall holder came up to see me he was extremely cheerful and laughing. He told me to speak very slowly so I could understand him. I wasn’t sure whether he was actually taking the mickey out of my accent or not

Talking about the radio programmes, which I was earlier, it’s going very soon to be the 200th programme that I will have prepared. For my 100th, I did a special series of concerts. But this time I’m going to be doing something quite different and that involves a lot of work. Consequently I made a start this afternoon and that’s what I’ve been doing for the rest of the day.

Of course, you’re all dying to find out what it will be but you’re going to have to wait a couple of months before you find out.

In between all of this I took Caliburn out for a spin. He’s going to the garage tomorrow to have this electrical fault checked over and I wanted to make sure that he would start. It was something of a struggle into life but off he went all the same. I hope that tomorrow he’ll start just the same.

Tea tonight was another delicious stuffed pepper with rice and veg. I’ve got the hang of this stuffing now and there’s plenty left over for a taco roll tomorrow evening.

While we’re on the subject of tomorrow … “well, one of us is” – ed … I’m going to be extremely busy. I have a Welsh lesson that needs preparation, then a quick run with Caliburn to the garage and back on the bus, then the physiotherapist. As well as that, I have some fruit buns to make as the last one will disappear at some point tomorrow.

In that case I suppose that I’d better go to bed. Despite having a bad night and being up early, I’ve managed not to fall asleep during the day today. I don’t want to fall asleep in the middle of my Welsh lesson or miss Caliburn’s rendezvous.

Sunday 22nd January 2023 – I REMEMBER SAYING …

… yesterday that I was worried about having a good night’s sleep last night.

Well, I needn’t have wasted my time writing any of that because we had another one of those nights where I didn’t have much sleep at all.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago I had a night when I spent most of it fighting a stabbing pain in the sole of my right foot. Last night it was a stabbing pain in the heel of my left foot that went on for most of the night and kept me awake.

That’s a susprise because most of the issues that I’m having with my legs are in my right leg so a pain like that in the left leg is rather worrying.

At some point in the night – or rather, the morning because I definitely saw 07:40 on the fitbit – I did manage to fall asleep and so I wasn’t particularly concerned about not leaving the bed at 11:30. And I expected to be totally wasted too but I’ve managed to keep on going throughout the day.

The way that things were this morning, I didn’t do anything before my brunch, but afterwards the first thing that I did was to transcribe the dictaphone notes. Surprisingly, I had actually managed to go on a couple of voyages during the morning. I was trapped in a fire at some point. The people with me couldn’t actually extricate me from this building so they ran to fetch help. Eventually I was rescued and taken away but my gluteus maximus had burned off so I was going to be quite handicapped. Eventually my friends caught up with me and came to see me. One of them asked how I was so I explained what had happened to me. They were surprised by the way that I was telling this story. They thought that it should be much more serious although they didn’t want me to take out the seriousness on them. I couldn’t understand what was the point of the discussion. There was something in this dream to do with money. I’d had a lot of money that had all been paid to me in pennies. It was for music – albums and things like that. I thought that the only way I could dispose of it now was to change it all in taxis for pound notes etc or else take it to the bank. If I took it to the bank the bank would just put the money in my account and wouldn’t give it to me, so again I didn’t know what to do about these huge piles of coins that I had.

And then I found myself dictating this dream into my hand again while I was asleep. I was on board a ship. We’d been there for 2 weeks and were leaving. It was the final day. There was a girl whom I’d been chatting up while I’d been on board the ship with pretty much no success at all. On the last day when I went to sit down for breakfast someone was actually in my place. There was a place next to this girl so I thought “right, I’ll go and sit there and she’ll have to like it seeing as it’s the last meal anyway”. I put down my stuff next to her on the table and asked “does anyone want anything for breakfast?” because I only had a small breakfast and we were entitled to 5 different things. She said that she wanted something else so I said “yes, I can fetch that for you”. Someone else said that they wanted something. In the meantime I started to chat to this girl about breakfast etc. She didn’t seem in the least bit hostile or standoffish as she had done during the rest of this holiday so I wondered what was happening now.

Later on I was with a girl round at the home of my friend near Macon. I don’t know who the girl was, which was a shame. I had the Luton Transit, another van that might have been Caliburn and I had to get them both home. I also had a motorbike so the idea was to find a plank, put the motorbike up the plank into the back of one of the vans, drive the van home, get the motorbike out, come back the next day on the motorbike, pick up the other van, put the motorbike in the back and drive that back. That seems a pretty logical way to go about it but there was that much stuff in the back of the 2 vans that we had to think again. Then I saw that he was busy trying to put the motorbike into a trailer as if he was going to lend me the trailer. The trailer had been parked outside for years and as he put the motorbike in the trailer collapsed. He was sitting there looking at this trailer. I was wondering what was going to happen next and so was he. I still couldn’t get over the idea that simply tidying up the van to put the bike in it was the best way forward but it seemed to me that everyone was trying to complicate this thing rather unnecessarily.

With it being Sunday today it’s pizza day but I’ve no pizza dough left over so I had to make some more. And this batch turned out quite well too. Two lumps of it have gone into the freezer for the next couple of weeks and the third lump was left to proof.

When it was ready, I rolled it out and put it on the pizza tray to proof again so that I could assemble the pizza. And then I could cook it and eat it.

It was actually quite delicious too and I’ll make some more like that if I can work out what I did that worked so well.

While I was waiting around for things to happen I was finishing off the notes for the radio programme that I should have done on Thursday and then half of the notes for the one I’ll be doing tomorrow. I’m going to see if I can do both programmes tomorrow, always assuming that I can tear myself out of bed at 06:00 tomorrow.

So that reminds me – if I’m going to have an early start I need to have an early finish and so I’m off to bed. I’m surprised that I’ve kept on going for as long as I have today bearing in mind my awful night.

Tuesday 17th January 2023 – THIS SOCIAL SERVICES …

… visitor who came to see me after lunch wasn’t really of all that much help. She had a chat with me, handed me a brochure and a few notes, and then left again. And so I’m no further forwrd than I was before.

What I was actually hoping was to have been placed on some kind of “at risk” register because I’m not under too many illusions that I’m ever going to be much better than I am and I’m sure that things will continue to deteriorate. I would have expected there to have been some kind of register of people living alone who are suffering from serious illness.

And so it looks as if I shall have to make my own arrangements to secure my own future.

That’s quite the normal situation and so it’s not a big deal from my point of view, but it’s still a disappointment all the same.

Last night was a disappointment as well. I didn’t go to bed particularly early but even so it took me a whole age to go off to sleep. I was certainly still awake at 01:30 or so when I checked the time.

But I did doze off at some point, only to become embroiled in yet another altercation with members of my family. I was busy working on the computer doing something with an old-world programme. My brother just walked up to my desk, opened a drawer, took out my packet of sweets and walked off with it. I ran after him, grabbed hold of it, put it back in my drawer and slammed it shut. He went off telling his mother that I’d pinched his sweets so my mother told me to give them back to him straight away. I told her “what are you on about? I bought these on Saturday night and put them in my drawer” so she had a shouting match with him. I was trying to work out this old program that I used to use years ago but it wasn’t working very well. I was sure that I ought to be doing much better with this than I was but there were just so many distractions.

It beats me why they keep on showing up during my nocturnal voyages. I have many more things that are much more important than worrying about them.

The Welsh lesson with something of a disappointment. Although I was up quite quickly when the alarm rang (for a change) I wasn’t in all that much of a mood to do any revision today. I worked my way through some stuff in order to prepare myself but I didn’t feel much like it and I could have done much better.

After the Social Services had been for a visit I sat down to choose some music for the next series of radio programmes until the physiotherapist came round. he was quite pleased with the progress that I seem to have been making and he’s given me some more hints and tips. That’s nore stuff to work on for the next while.

Tea tonight was a delicious taco roll, and there’s still some stuffing that’s left over. That’s the cue for a nice left-over curry tomorrow to keep me out of mischief. I hope that it will turn out to be as good as the last couple that I have made because it seems that I have the hang of them now.

Tomorrow the cleaner is coming round so I’ll have to spend an hour or so tidying up the place in the morning to make it look nice. Then I’ll have to go for a play with Caliburn and mak sure that he starts ready for a trip out next week.

If not, I’ll have to think of a Plan B because I have an appointment that I can’t afford to miss.

Monday 16th January 2023 – AND IN OTHER …

… exciting news today, when the alarm went off at 06:00 this morning I was busy adding the final touches to the radio programme that I was planning to prepare today.

Despite having gone to bed at the early time of 22:00 last night, at 02:28 I was still wide-awake and unable to go to sleep.

A short while later, still wide awake, I arose from the dead, made myself a coffee and by 03:00 I was sitting at the computer working on the radio programme. There’s no point pretending that I’m trying to sleep.

So by the time the alarms went off I was up and running and raring to go, so the first place I went to was the bathroom where I had a shower. I was hoping that maybe the nurse would come round and inject me and I need to be something like clean.

With no sign of the nurse though, by about 10:30 I was pretty well gone with the wind and I went to bed, where I slept for a couple of hours. I went off ona little wander here and there while I was asleep. I was somewhere in the country. There was a neighbour who was bad-tempered like the one who lives in Virlet. I was wandering around outside and saw that he had a lot of animals there. I walked that way to see what they were. He had a really vicious sheepdog thing that snarled and growled at me, pulled on his lead so I turned round and walked away from there

Rosemary had sent me a message while I was asleep so we had a good chat for a while once I awoke, and then I went for some more coffee and some food. It’s been a long day already.

During the afternoon I was extremely busy. There were some issues with my property in Canada that needed attention so I had an exchange of e-mails with the Provincial Government in New Brunswick. It’s nice to see someone who is quick and efficient.

Another thing that I’ve been doing is to shuffle some money around from one place to another. I have a feeling that I’m going to need to lay my hands on some money at some point in the future and as I’ve not touched my holiday fund since I went to the High Arctic in 2019 I need to bring it closer to home.

That’s not as easy as it might sound either and I had to rely on Rosemary to give me a little hand with one or two things. I’ve also had to send out a pile of e-mails to shake some people up and tell them to extricate their digits too.

One of my plans was to go outside to see how Caliburn is doing. But we’re in the middle of a hurricane right now. Just after 06:00 this morning a gust of wind of 162 kph was recorded. I made it outside with some rubbish to put into the bin but that was all that I was going to do because the wind was still roaring and quite literally it was blowing me over. I’m not as strong on my feet as I might be and I was nearly bowled over a couple of times so I came back in. I’ll have to have another go at some other time.

Tea tonight was a delicious stuffed pepper, with plenty of stuffing left over for my taco roll tomorrow. But with a Welsh lesson, the Social Services coming round to see me and then the physiotherapist, will I actually have time to eat it?

Monday 9th January 2023 – IF I WERE …

… to tell you that my radio programme was finished, up and running by 07:30 this morning, you’ll probably be quite astonished, and wondering what on earth was going on.

The fact is though that it was bad news that brought all of this about, not good news.

As is usual on a Sunday evening I was in bed by 22:00 ready for a nice long sleep until the alarm at 06:00. I fell asleep quite quickly too but by the time that 01:00 came around I was wide awake again.

After that, I just couldn’t make myself comfortable, tossing and turning around trying to make myself comfortable but without success.

Round about 03:30 I had to wander off for a stroll along the parapet, and I made an executive decision (and for the benefit of new readers, an executive decision is a decision that if it is incorrect, the person making it is executed) that now that I’m up, I’m staying up. And I attacked the radio programme.

When I’d finished I had some cornflakes and coffee and then made a start on doing some work for a change. And I kept it up for a couple of hours too, much to my surprise.

Round about 10:30 I couldn’t keep going and gave up, going back to bed.

Having dozed off for a short while, an endless stream of phone calls kept me awake. It culminated with a ‘phone call from my doctor saying that he would be coming to see me “within the hour”.

That was enough to rouse me from wherever I was, and I went and had a quick shower and clean-up ready for my visit. I don’t mind being reasonably unkempt when I’m here on my own but with visitors, it’s different.

When he came we had a good chat and he’s sending me off to have one of these electrical tests where they check the flow of electricity down my nerves. He asked me if I’d had one before and while it’s true to say that I have, I told him that I hadn’t.

The reason for my “economy with the truth” is that when it was done before, it was done in Leuven and the report was printed in Flemish which my doctor didn’t understand. From this laboratory here in granville, the report will be in French which is far better.

Secondly, if I have it done here, any follow-up will be done here or hereabouts too and as I can’t make it to Leuven, then local treatment has to be an advantage, especially as I’m entitled to free transport.

Thirdly, a second opinion is always worth having, to make sure that everyone is working from the same page. My doctor seems to have the right kind of idea about my treatment anyway as he seems to be recommending the same as they did at Leuven.

After he left, then armed with a taxi voucher I rang up an ambulance service and booked a car to take me to my consultation on the 20th. If it’s free I may as well take advantage of it.

So next week I have the Social Services coming to see me on Tuesday and then the appointment on the Friday – things are moving quite rapidly around here. I wish that one or two other things would hurry up though.

There was quite a bit of stuff on the dictaphone too so I sat down this afternoon and transcribed it all. Yesterday’s notes are now updated and then I turned my attention to today’s. Some friends pf mine had played in a rock opera about Christmas. There was a professional performance of it taking place somewhere so I decided that I’d go along to see it. I bumped into someone whom I knew there. he was there with his wife and a couple of daughters. We all ended up sitting together but as the programme continued these 2 girls started to shout comments from the crowd up to the stage. This started to become quite embarrassing. He told the 2 girls to go and sit somewhere else if they were going to do that, so they did. It didn’t stop them so in the end he went and rounded up everyone and they sat in another row behind where I was sitting. This still carried on and it was probably one of the most embarrassing moments of my life being there listening to all of this going on. I want to go and chat to the bassist afterwards but I thought that I couldn’t do that as he would associate me with these other people. Why the rest of the crowd didn’t say anything or turf these people out I really don’t know

Later on I was in a big house last night full of people, children and a couple of adults. The place was so untidy with all of these children in there. I’d been stroking a cat, then another one came up to me. I couldn’t see it properly but I picked it up and stroked it. The way that it was behaving, I was absolutely convinced that it was my old black cat. I was stroking it for 10 or 15 minutes, then I walked into a room where there was a light on. It wasn’t my black cat at all but a big ginger cat. I’d no idea how come I’d makde a mistake about this. I put the cat down. One of the women who was in charge of the house just kept on bringing more things into the room with these children. The place was becoming really out of control. I had a feeling somewhere that this place was on the Isle of Thanet somewhere near Margate or Ramsgate, somewhere like that but I don’t know.

Rosemary and I had a quick chat this evening too, and then I went for tea. A stuffed pepper with rice and, for a change these days, vegetables. It was quite nice too and I’ll get to enjoy it even more as there is quite a lot left over. There will be a taco roll tomorrow of course and then I’ll have to make a left-over curry with the remains on Wednesday.

Now though, I’m off to bed. I have a Welsh lesson tomorrow followed by the physiotherapist to I need to be on form. I really could do with a good sleep but that’s not always possible, especially these days. And tomorrow I can’t go back to sleep so I’ll have to keep on going as best as I can.

That should be quite interesting.

Sunday 8th January 2023 – JUST BECAUSE I …

… didn’t leave my bed until about 11:00 this morning doesn’t mean that I had a really good sleep. Even if I was in bed by 22:30.

It didn’t take me long to go to sleep; that’s for sure, but by 01:00 I was wide awake again. I was sill wide-awake at 05:00 too. Four hours of tossing and turning and wishing that I was somewhere else, without any success whatsoever.

However at some point I did manage to go back to sleep again because 10:30 came round rather quickly after that.

Once I’d finally hauled myself out of bed I had a chat on-line with a couple of people and then paired off the music for the radio programme that I’ll be preparing tomorrow. It’s high time that I got back into the habit of working again.

Brunch was cornflakes and toast with the last of the mushroom paté from Christmas, and then for a couple of hours I had a little relax where I did nothing at all. It is Sunday, after all, so I’m entitled to have a Day of Rest, even if I have had more than my fair share of those just recently.

Later on, in the absence of anything better to do, I began to write out the notes for the radio programme and I’ve done about half of them right now. What I should have done was to transcribe the dictaphone notes, but I forgot until much later. During the night I was rooting around in the cupboard and came across a giant cat tree built on the base of a rocking chair. My mother was dismissive of it but I took it out all the same, assembled it and put it in the corner of the room. The young male kitten was straight in there fighting his way through everything ready to climb up and into it. The older female found another way in. There they were, both in this cat tree like kings and queens. By now it was Nerina with me. She made some kind of remark but I thought that the cats were clearly enjoying this. They have as much right to live here as we do. If they can have some pleasure out of this thing that’s been in a cupboard then so much the better.

And then I was on the taxis last night. There was usually a job to take where we had to go to Liverpool to pick up some documents to bring back. But this particular night there had been a fire and the job had been cancelled. Then it turned out that one of my distant relatives had died and the funeral was taking place at about 04:00 at Wardle. I wasn’t going to do anything – I ended up sitting through most of the night chatting to Nerina who was in bed. We were discussing everything but it was time for me to go. I’d taken a previous job to Liverpool and had to drop a guy off at one of the railway stations there. She asked me if I knew where the railway station was, if I’d found it. I replied yes because I knew where most of the railway stations were. I laughed and said that it’s a good job that I didn’t have these documents to pick up, wasn’t it? otherwise I’d have been in Liverpool and back again and then gone straight out to Wardle to the funeral. It seemed a really strange and weird time to have a funeral at 04:00 in the pitch-dark. It was raining outside – it really wasn’t the right kind of weather. I’d asked Nerina on a couple of occasions to see whether it wasn’t really 16:00 but she was quite adamant that it was 04:00 so I went to the bathroom and prepared to leave.

I was also off on a road trip in mid-west USA but it was nothing like the mid-west that I knew. I had the camera with me. I came across a small town where there was a lot of building work and road-widening. I thought “hang on – I’ve been here before. I’m sure I have”. As I drove into the centre I wondered whether or not this was the place where I fuelled up once many years ago. I parked the car, got out and went for a walk round to see if there was any interesting things to photograph. I came across buildings with strange statues on the roofs and abandoned buildings from the 18th and 19th Centuries. Then I realised that I didn’t have my camera with me so I couldn’t take a photo anyway. I wondered whether I should go back to the car, fetch the camera, look for this petrol station to see if it really was here and then start again taking a few photos. Maybe go back outside to where the roadworks were and take a photo of that.

Then later we were kitting out an aeroplane to fly out on a commercial run between the UK and mainland Europe. I was busy trying to peel off some kind of old radio from somewhere and install it into this aeroplane. The pilot was watching me intently as I delicately tried to cut everything and unpeel the track bars etc, asking me quite a few questions, none of which were particularly important. In the end I took it off. He seemed to be so pleased. I gave it to him and told him to refit it.

At one point I was wandering around a square in London. It was all to do with the economy and finance, the history of the coffee houses of London in the 18th Century etc. We talked about how Italian banks would buy security and buy each other to stop themselves being the subject of hostile takeovers etc, how business was flowing out of this square now to businesses that were set up on its periphery and outside in the main streets.
Tea tonight was a pizza and I didn’t really enjoy it which was a surprise. It tasted rather differently than some that I’ve made in the past and I’m wondering if it’s maybe the dough that hasn’t kept so well in the freezer.

So with a 06:00 start in the morning, I’m going to go to bed. Hopefully I’ll fall asleep just as quickly as I did last night but that I’ll sleep through until the alarm goes off. With having done some of the notes for tomorrow I’m hoping that it will be rather a quick programme but there is always something that comes up to disturb me.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: bad night

Wednesday 8th March 2023 – MY LITTLE WALK …

Monday 6th March 2023 – JUST FOR A …

Sunday 5th March 2023 – MY VEGAN PIZZA …

Saturday 4th March 2023 – MY CURRIED LEEK …

Tuesday 21st February 2023 – MY VEGAN PANCAKES …

Monday 20th February 2023 – AND IN WHAT IS …

Wednesday 15th February 2023 – WHAT A WONDERFUL …

Sunday 12th February 2023 – I HAD A …

Wednesday 1st February 2023 – I’VE JUST BEEN …

Monday 30th January 2023 – I’VE FINALLY FINISHED …

Sunday 22nd January 2023 – I REMEMBER SAYING …

Monday 16th January 2023 – AND IN OTHER …

Monday 9th January 2023 – IF I WERE …

Sunday 8th January 2023 – JUST BECAUSE I …

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