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Monday 9th March 2026 – WHATEVER COULD HAVE …

… gone wrong at dialysis today did in fact go wrong. And in spades too! I tell you, I’m totally fed up with all of this, and for two pins, I’d pack it all in and do something else with my time than keep on putting up with it.

In fact, things started to go wrong last night when I fell asleep … errr … riding the porcelain horse before going to bed. As if I don’t have enough trouble trying to be in bed at some reasonable time, last night ended up being completely unreasonable.

As seems to be the case these days, I was asleep quite quickly. However, at some point in the morning before the alarm went off, I awoke. I’ve no idea what time it must have been, because regardless, I had absolutely no intention of leaving the bed at that moment. Not even the combined efforts of Kate Bush and Jenny Agutter could have tempted me out of bed this morning.

In fact, I must have gone back to sleep at some point because the alarm at 06:29 awoke me from my slumbers. And once again, we had a real struggle to rise from our comfy bed and face the World.

After a good wash and shave (not that there’s much point in the latter these days seeing as Emilie the Cute Consultant is keeping her distance), I headed off into the kitchen for my morning hot drink and medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out what had gone on during the night.

I was driving somewhere down the Devon and Cornwall peninsula on the coast. As I came round a corner, I could see, way out to sea, three enormous freighters or passenger liners heading out towards the Atlantic. I decided to chase them for a minute and look for a car park somewhere where I could take some photos of them. The first car park that I found, the view wasn’t particularly good. I had to climb up onto a rather large rock where the view was slightly better, but I still couldn’t take a really good photo of these ships – or not as good as I might have had from the vehicle a few miles back. Suddenly, I heard a voice behind me saying “it’s Mr Hall, isn’t it?”. I turned round, and there were two people whom I knew from university. They came over for a chat, and I fell off this rock, but I managed in the end to pick myself up. It turns out that they were staying in the hotel that was behind me. They were telling me about a whole series of new rules at university that basically cut down a lot of the jokes and a lot of the fun that we used to have there. I told them about the ships, and they said that there was a really good viewpoint inside the hotel, so I followed them in. We were talking about luggage labels – how it seems that if you go to an airport and you already have a luggage label on your suitcase, every other airport to which you go for the rest of your life with that suitcase, the suitcase will have a label from the landing crew, but it wouldn’t necessarily have a label if there wasn’t one in the first place. We were talking about good ways to dispose of a body, which was to put it into a suitcase and send it off on a flight somewhere. We went in, but I couldn’t find a way in to this viewpoint. It was one of these traditional hotels with lots of people walking around and very small rooms, but they showed me the way in, which I hadn’t realised was an access, which was through a staff door, and then you could open another set of doors once inside there, and there was a hidden corridor that went all the way down alongside the rooms. I was thinking that if I go down there, at long last I may have a photo of these ships, and that was what I was hoping for in the beginning.

The last time that I was driving down there was back in the 1980s when I took a coach tour that way, but I can’t remember seeing any ships.

The hotel reminds me of where we used to stay when we went to the university for meetings, and the idea that they would change all of the rules to stop people having fun is about par from the course. Even STRAWBERRY MOOSE ended up being expelled after he taunted a British government minister.

The thing about luggage labels seems to have come out of nowhere, though.

There was also something about a Dutch rock musician who had died. He had this Gibson SG guitar, but there was some kind of issue with it, but that’s really all that I remember of that particular dream.

As this dream didn’t really end, I can’t really say anything about this.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up as usual, with a big cheesy grin on her face as it’s her last day before her week’s rest. She even had time for a little chat before leaving to finish off her round.

Once she’d gone, I could make breakfast and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

Today, we’re discussing the Frankish Duke of Athens and his successors. The first Duke seems to have been able to build up a prosperous territory out of the ruins of the conquest, but as usual, it seems that his heirs went about and managed to undo everything that he had created.

Back in here, I had a radio programme to review and then to send off ready for broadcast this weekend, and after a few more tasks that needed attention, I spent the rest of the morning revising my Welsh ready for tomorrow and checking over the homework that I then sent off for marking.

At 12:00, I knocked off and went to sort myself out for dialysis. my faithful cleaner turned up as usual to sort out the anaesthetic and we discussed my idea of moving all of the medication – to such an extent that I forgot my disgusting drink before leaving.

The taxi turned up early for me, and we had to go off to Sartilly to pick up another passenger. We arrived at dialysis early, 13:40 to be precise, and I staggered off to my bed and waited to be seen.

And waited … and waited … and waited …

Sometimes I find it difficult to understand what goes through the head of the planning department at the dialysis centre. Who in their right minds would put two trainee nurses in a room of eight patients without the guiding hand of someone more experienced?

It was 14:50 when I was finally plugged in, in total agony with one of the pins. And I wasn’t the only one who suffered this afternoon either. And at least I was left pretty much alone after that.

The doctor came to see me and asked if he could do anything for me. "How about making me better?" I asked. He didn’t stay long after that.

As I mentioned the other day, they have decreased my dry weight and are taking out the excess water bit by bit. At least, that was the plan. But today, they took out a whopping 2,000 grammes. I’m not sure if that’s all of it, but I’m now down to below my ideal non-active weight. Since I’ve been having dialysis, I’ve lost 8,000 grammes in total, but much of that is down to not eating so much.

When my session of three and a half hours was over, I waited to be unplugged. And waited … and waited … and waited, while the two nurses cleaned up the empty machines from the other people who had left.

Eventually, one of them wandered over. "Has it finished already?" she asked.

"Yes, and for quite a while too" I replied.

"But surely … ohhh! It’s only three and a half hours, not four!" and she carried on cleaning the other machines.

Eventually, I was unplugged, and as I was preparing to leave, she suddenly remembered that she should have taken a blood sample. So here we go again.

It was 19:00 when I was finally ready to leave and 19:10 when the taxi arrived. “That’s what time it was booked for” said the driver, and I could believe him.

Consequently, it was 19:50 when I returned home, having left at 12:50 for a session of three and a half hours. And I bet that the senior doctor, who follows these pages and tries to pull me up if I say anything bad about the service, will have “missed” this entry and nothing will happen about it. But it’s really getting on my nerves.

Tea tonight was the rest of last night’s pizza with birthday cake and home-made ice cream for pudding. And now I’m off to bed, hoping for a better day tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about ships … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of my friends told me that in the High Arctic, they once encountered a ghost ship.
"How did you know that it was a ghost ship?" I asked
"There was only a skeleton crew on board"

Thursday 5th March 2026 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since I first told them at dialysis that I’d cut down dramatically on the food that I ate?

It all started after a couple of sessions of chemotherapy when all of the food began to taste of nothing but salt, so let’s say “August 2025”.

Anyway, as usual, no-one took any notice of anything that I had to say, and so little by little, the quantity of liquid to be extracted from my body has diminished and diminished. Today, for example, it was just 200 grammes – a far cry from twelve months ago when they were extracting well over 2,000 grammes at each session.

But today, we have finally had a reaction. When the figure of just 200 grammes came up, they fetched the electricity resistance meter to measure the water in my body, and they came up with a staggering 3,800 grammes. In other words, since they last used the meter on me, and I really can’t remember when it was, I’ve lost 3,600 grammes in weight.

What they have been doing is calculating the liquids to be removed based on the previous “dry weight”.

If you had asked maybe a year ago, losing 3,800 grammes of water in a dialysis session would have been OK, but not having had that much to remove for quite a while, my body wouldn’t withstand the shock all at once. And so they are going to remove an extra 1,000 grammes per session until I catch up with where I ought to be.

But what a performance! No wonder I’ve been feeling so tired just recently.

Anyway, I digress … "again" – ed …

Last night, I managed to be in bed before 23:30. But only just, as it was 23:15 when I finally crawled under the covers. Not as early as I would have liked, because I’m trying to be in bed before 22:30 to give me eight hours’ sleep, but most of the time, that proves to be an unrealistic target.

So once in bed, it didn’t take long to go off to sleep, and while I remember waking up a couple of times, I was soon back to sleep again. And there I stayed until the alarm went off at 06:29.

Eventually, I managed to stagger off to the bathroom where I had a good scrub-up and a shave – I’m not sure why because Emilie the Cute Consultant doesn’t love me any more – and then I went off for my hot drink and medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

We were living in some kind of house with people of every nationality in it. My room was just across from where the Russians were. Every time that I went out, I had to take my crutches from against the wall and they used to bang on the latch of the Russian door. I’m sure that they were annoyed by it, but this was happening every time. We’d been using our rooms as kinds of sales places for selling our national products. Books were one of the most important things and I’d been having book fairs in my room, but on this particular occasion, I picked up my crutches and they banged on the latch of this door, and someone came to the door to see what was happening. It wasn’t anyone from the Russians but it was a friend of mine from the UK. I went in and apologised, but I could see that the Russians were in one part of the room and someone else, much younger, was trying to sell a book to an ordinary person. It seemed that there had been an evolution in how trading was taking place for books and I hadn’t noticed. Then, they began to talk about this other book, and the person, or the victim, I suppose, couldn’t seem to find it so I pointed it out to him. It was above his head on a shelf, but it took him a good few minutes to realise that. There was also something else about other people there who were needing some kind of help when it came to buying and selling books. They were sitting more like passengers in a motorcycle combination, which was at the side of everything rather than behind it.

This is another dream that seems to have come out of nowhere at all. There’s nothing in this dream that seems to relate to anything that I’ve been doing or thinking just recently.

Having said that, though, I did spend about ten minutes last night trying to remember some of the Russian that I used to know and practising a few of the words that I used to know.

Isabelle the nurse was very late arriving today, so I had made a start on the next radio programme while I was waiting. And when she finally did turn up, she was in such a rush that she couldn’t hang around and was soon gone.

That enabled me to make my breakfast and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

The Frankish Crusaders have now arrived in Greece and are busily dividing up the country between the leaders of the Crusade, creating small duchies that alienated the local population and led the locals to make some rather strange alliances in order to try to drive the Franks out – something that created a period of disorder for a couple of centuries.

Back in here, I carried on choosing the music for the next radio programme. Some of it took some finding too, but it’s now all collected, remixed, reformatted, re-edited, paired and segued, and the notes started. Where has all this energy come from?

My cleaner turned up as usual to apply the anaesthetic to my arm, and then the taxi turned up, early again. Mind you, there were two other people to pick up on the way, so we weren’t any earlier arriving.

And I was really impressed by the number of flowers that have appeared by the roadside these last few days. It’s all looking impressively beautiful out there now.

At the dialysis session, we had the pantomime, as I mentioned earlier, and then I was left pretty much alone to complete my shopping list.

There was, as usual, a delay in unplugging me from the machine, and by the time that the nurse had finished compressing my arm, the taxi driver was here. He wasn’t particularly chatty, so we had something of a silent voyage home.

And isn’t it nice to be back home in the daylight?

My cleaner was waiting for me and she helped me into the apartment.

Tea tonight was going to be a vegetable korma out of the freezer, but while I was rummaging around in the freezer, I came across an aubergine and kidney-bean whatsit dated, would you believe, November 2023. I decided to eat that before it walked out of the freezer on its own

So right now, I’m off to bed, ready for a good radioing morning tomorrow. I have my shopping list to send off and a pile of washing to do. I hope that I remember to do them all.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the stuff in my freezer … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of my friends once said that she had problems taking something out of her freezer.
"Why was that?" I asked
"Because every time I opened the freezer door, something in there reached out and closed it again"

Monday 2nd March 2026 – ANOTHER EXCITING DAY …

… at dialysis, I don’t think. If I’m not careful, I shall die of boredom in there. As if I don’t have enough to do with my time as it is, and when you only have one hand that you can use because the other one is pinned to the side of the bed, it all becomes extremely complicated.

Having been going there for as long as I have, I can see why most of the patients in there just curl up and go to sleep.

Actually, that’s how I felt today, and I almost did fall asleep too, but then again, I had a very good reason to do so.

Last night, it wasn’t quite so late as it has been in the past. By the time that I finished everything that needed doing and crawled into my stinking pit, it was 23:20. Still much later than I would have liked, of course, but still earlier than some have been just recently.

What was the killer, though, was that I awoke at 05:20. And it was a case of leaving the bed at that moment too, without even five minutes to let the bedroom stop spinning around.

While I was up and about, I went for a wash and shave and to dress, and then I came back in here because it was far too early to go for my medication.

Instead, I took advantage of the early start and dictated the radio notes that I’d prepared since the last time that I’d had an early start. There were seven lots of programmes all told, and that was a Herculean effort to dictate them all and then upload them to the computer, but I’m glad that they are all done now and I’m up-to-date from that point of view.

Once I’d finished, I went off into the kitchen for my hot drink and medication, and then I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out what I’d been up to during the night.

I was driving my taxi again last night, and there was something going on in the town centre, so I was there. I must have taken away about twenty fares. One of the very early ones was to go from the town centre with a girl whom I knew who worked in a restaurant there and drop her off at home down the West End. But every other single trip involved a trip down Gresty Road, and I couldn’t understand why everyone seemed to be heading that way. On the way back, on the corner where the Crewe Alex ground is, there was a huge church with lots of tourists milling around there. There were two or three taxis that were waiting there for fares in amongst the crowds, and there was some kind of official, like a tourist guide or something, amongst them. As I kept on going back there to the town centre, I kept on going into a kind of room. At one point, back in this room were some of the people whom I’d taken quite early on in the day, so we had a joke about the trip down the West End because that girl was back there too. I said “I’d have to take a photograph of you,” but she misunderstood it because she was a foreigner, and wondered what on earth kind of photograph I was thinking of. At one stage, I had to go into a different room. I was carrying something. The reason why was that I needed some kind of authority from someone senior, and I knew that the small rooms where the senior people hang out were down this corridor. And out of another room towards the room where I was standing came someone with whom I used to work years ago. We went into his room, and he said “I suppose that you’re going to come out with some kind of comment about photos too, aren’t you?”. Then I suddenly realised that this guy had commented on some photos on a social network, and his comments would not have been the kind that would have been approved today, although thirty or forty years ago, there would have been no remark made. I replied “oh no, but they were rather indiscreet, weren’t they?” to which he just gave a shrug.

This is one problem with living and working in a foreign language. Quite often, you might understand the words but not the actual meaning of the phrase, and this can lead to all kinds of double-entendres and misunderstandings.

But here I am again, driving taxis around Crewe and bumping into old work colleagues. And it’s true about how the UK, and probably many other countries in the Western World, have become more sanitised, and the kind of risqué or oblique comments that we used to use in the past suddenly became banned overnight – round about 1991 and 1992 when we began to have these “political correctness” lessons in the workplace. I remember that a lot of my more humorous cassette tapes that I used on the coaches were completely outlawed

There was also a dream about being down in the Isle of Thanet on holiday. I was walking along the beach, looking up at the promenade thinking “wouldn’t it be great if they dredged this out and they had ships coming along here to moor and anchor right up against the promenade? Then, my mother was talking to my father about the houses in the area. They were alternately grey and white, but we didn’t really know why. We went to visit someone whom we knew, who lived in one of these grey and white wooden wattle-and-daub type of cottage. We went into the kitchen, and I vaguely remember the kitchen from years ago and it looked different to me. She said “yes, there have been one or two changes here. Can you think of what’s missing?”. For some unknown reason, and I don’t know why, I mentioned a bookcase. She looked surprised, and she said “there used to be a bookcase just here”, pointing to an empty space on the wall, “but that’s long gone, and you’ve never seen it. It’s been long gone before you first ever came to this cottage”.

Firstly, there are several places in the World where different colours of houses represent different ethnic groups. Hungary and southwestern Newfoundland spring straight away to my mind, and I seem to recall that Romania does too, or used to.

As for the Isle of Thanet, though, my mother had distant relatives there and every summer, we’d go down there to stay with a great aunt or something, Dolly, Gertie or Mabel. On the Friday night after school broke up, our father would come home from work, we’d all pile into his van and drive through the night and next day down to either Birchington or Hamstreet.

He’d have a few hours’ sleep and then drive back Saturday night and Sunday, ready to start work again on Monday, and that was no picnic in the days before motorways and in a 1937 Fordson van with a three-speed gearbox.

And then he’d come back down for the final two weeks of our school holidays.

Incidentally, many years ago, I went down there myself for a good look around and to visit the places where we used to go. With the M6, M1, M25 and M2, the journey from Crewe to Birchington took just under four hours.

The nurse turned up as usual and was in a chatty mood, hardly surprising because he’s on his week’s break as of this evening. He didn’t stay long, and I could push on, make my breakfast and read my new book, ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

Our author is coming to the close of the period of the Roman occupation, so naturally we’re discussing the religious disputes and also the gathering clouds on the horizon as Alaric and his Huns, various Visigoths and a few Ostrogoths are heading towards Athens and the other Greek cities.

The next few years look to be fairly bleak from a Greek point of view.

Back in here, I reviewed a radio programme that will be broadcast this weekend and, satisfied with how it runs, I sent it off for inclusion in the broadcasting stream. There were a few other things to do, and then I made a start on the next radio programme. All of the music has been chosen and prepared, and I’ve made a start on pairing and segueing it.

My cleaner turned up to apply the anaesthetic to my arm, and then I had to wait for the taxi. He was more-or-less on time but there were two other passengers to pick up, and as one of them was late for her appointment, we had to drop her off first and I ended up being the last to be dropped off.

At the dialysis clinic, it was one of the new nurses who attended to me. She’d had a very bad experience on Thursday connecting me, what with the machine breaking down and all that, so naturally she was extremely nervous today. I tried to encourage her but even so, it wasn’t far short of 15:00 when I was finally connected.

Nothing exciting happened there today apart from that, but the doctor came to see me to see if everything had been OK over the weekend. What could I say? Nothing ever changes around here.

Eventually, hours late, I was unplugged, but at least the taxi was already here. It was the young chatty driver who came for me, although I would quite happily have swapped for my favourite lady driver who had come for someone else. But anyway, we had a good chat on the way home.

My faithful cleaner was waiting for me when I arrived, and she helped me into the apartment.

After she left, I warmed up my half-pizza from yesterday and for a change, I had a small baked potato with it. It was followed by an apricot half and home-made ice cream.

So right now, I’m off to bed, ready to catch up on the sleep that I missed last night.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about double entendres … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone once asked me if I’d heard the story about the girl from Crewe who went into a pub and asked for a double-entendre.
"No, I hadn’t" I replied. "What happened?"
"The barman gave her one."

Thursday 26th February 2026 – TOTAL, ABSOLUTE CHAOS …

… at dialysis today. Everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong and I had one of the latest departures that I have ever had. Consequently, I am running hours late, and it’s debatable whether I’ll finish my notes or not before I have to retire.

Last night wasn’t much better either. Despite having no tea, except for a slice of cake, I still couldn’t manage to complete everything at a reasonable time, and it was about 23:00 when I finally settled down in bed.

One thing that can be said, though, is that I stayed asleep until just after 06:00.

At that time, I suppose that I could have forced myself into an early start, but I soon put that silly idea out of my head and waited for the alarm to sound. And although I sat up quite promptly with my feet on the floor when the alarm went off, that was as far as I went for at least ten minutes.

Eventually, in the bathroom, I had a good wash and a shave. I’m not sure why, seeing as Emilie the Cute Consultant no longer loves me, and then I went into the kitchen for my hot drink and medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was in bed, having a lie-in one morning when a girl on crutches came into my room. She was being quite offensive about me still being in bed, saying that I had to get up and have breakfast etc. However, I had no plans to leave the bed for quite a while yet, but she became so insistent that in the end, I left the bed. The first thing that I did was to take one of her crutches, dismantle it and throw all of the different pieces off to different corners of the room. Then, I took the other one, dismantled that, and did the same again. And then I went back to bed.

What a rotten dream! I must really have been in a bad mood that morning. But it did remind me of Jethro Tull and –
"REMEMBERING MORNINGS, SHILLINGS SPENT,
MADE NO SENSE TO LEAVE THE BED.
THE BAD OLD DAYS THEY CAME AND WENT
GIVING WAY TO FRUITFUL YEARS"
– a song that includes one of Martin Barre’s best-ever solos that sends a shiver down my spine each time I hear it; it’s so good. And Glenn Cornick on bass, the best bassist that Jethro Tull ever had, playing one of his best-ever bass lines. I can listen to this track time and time again.

Later on, I had to go to drive somewhere. I said to a girl in my apartment that I’d be back later. We discussed food, and I said that I’d make something when I came back, to which she seemed to agree, so I wondered if she was going to be staying there by the time that I returned. However, I was absolutely overwhelmed by hunger at that point and on my way out to wherever it was that I had to go, I stopped at a supermarket and went in. I noticed that they had hot cross buns at half price – not hot cross buns but currant buns at half price, these packets of four – so I picked up a packet and one or two other things. I thought that this would keep me going until I returned

When I used to go wandering around the UK for weeks on end, back in the past, sleeping in the van, breakfast would almost always be a pack of fruit buns, a pack of hot cross buns or a malt loaf. Fruit buns at half price would be my paradise.

There was also something about football matches. In South Wales, some team had qualified for promotion to the next layer, from the third tier to the second. A girl who was with me who had something to do with this football club had to go to a meeting to discuss promotion, so I went with her. However, it seemed that the situation was simply being decided by choice, and when she arrived, most of the teams had already chosen where they were going to be. The only spots available for this particular team involved some considerable travelling distance, which made her quite disappointed and it led to some kind of discussion about people going to see football matches on public transport, someone saying that public transport and the connections were so bad that it took three hours for them to go to see their local football team by going on the bus. I reminded them of a football club in the north where a bus used to arrive fifteen minutes before kick-off, which gave everyone a good chance to go, but had been retimed just recently and was now at fifteen minutes past kick-off, which meant that no-one could go at all. This girl was still talking about this promotion, and she saw someone who appeared to be the secretary of this organisation who was packing things into her car boot as if she was going on a car boot sale. She asked a few questions but didn’t receive any kind of sensible answer, and that led to me making a comment that this looks like the quality of the organisation of this particular football league; it’s not a surprise that it all seems to be in such a mess. The woman with this car and the stuff in the boot was very, very unhelpful and didn’t seem to be interested at all in what she was supposed to be doing. She was more interested in packing her stuff for this car boot sale.

Judging by what happened in the dream, it was from the fourth tier to the third, and it would have been just like the Football Association of Wales twenty years ago to be more interested in organising a car boot sale than a football league. As well as that, the story about the bus timetable changing brings back a memory of a dream that we had a long time ago about a match on the border in North-East Wales.

There was another dream too, but the World isn’t ready to hear it, especially round about when everyone is eating his meal.

The nurse was late today, for a change, so he didn’t hang around. He was soon in and out, leaving me to breakfast and MAIDEN CASTLE EXCAVATIONS AND FIELD SURVEY 1985-6 by Niall Sharples.

We’re approaching the end, and it won’t be long before we’re in the summary, which should be interesting. However, I couldn’t pass by a remark such as "It has been argued (J Evans, Rouse, and Sharpies 1989) that, because of the socially dangerous nature of the ritual activities that would have taken place in this enclosure, such enclosures would be situated away from the settlement area."

This all sounds extremely interesting, and I wonder why these activities might be considered to be dangerous. Whatever must have been involved?

One thing that he does mention, which I found extremely interesting, is that during the Middle Iron Age, as the reconstruction and remodelling of Maiden Castle advanced, other hillforts in the area declined or were abandoned. Is this maybe a sign that the occupants of Maiden Castle had managed to impose themselves upon the settlers elsewhere and forced them to abandon their defensive sites?

There’s evidence that the style and quality of pottery changed round about this period too. Is this indicative of new arrivals bringing with them a different culture from elsewhere?

Back in here, there were things to do and then in a mad fit of enthusiasm, I attacked some radio notes that needed editing. Not only are they done, but the two halves of the programme are assembled. All it needs now is the joining track and the notes to go with it.

My cleaner turned up as usual to help me with my anaesthetic and then I had to await the taxi to take me to dialysis. And with just me today, we arrived at dialysis at 13:50.

Nevertheless, with several people arriving all at once, I was late receiving attention. And then the connection failed. This meant that they had to unplug me, compress the punctures in my arm, reload and recalibrate the machine and then plug me back in. By now, the anaesthetic had worn off and the cold spray can only do so much.

That was bad, but the guy in the next bed, his system simply stopped functioning. It took an age and three nurses to deal with his problems and then he had to restart too.

As a result, even though it was 18:35 when I was finally unplugged, there were still one or two people waiting patiently for their sessions to finish.

The taxi was waiting for me when I’d finished, but even so, it was 19:40 when I arrived back home. And I treated myself to an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit from the freezer, followed by fiery ginger cake and custard for afters.

Right now, though, I’m off to bed. But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about nurses … "well, one of us has" – ed … the receptionist telephoned the dialysis unit to say that the Invisible Man needed an urgent appointment.
"We have no room for him here" said the administrator. "Send him to the ICU."

Monday 23rd February 2026 – I AGAIN FELL …

… asleep in a most embarrassing situation earlier this evening. So we’ll have to see how far we go with these notes right now before I throw in the towel and head for the hills.

It’s something that is very difficult to explain because last night, I had probably the deepest sleep that I have had for many a long time.

Not that it was early, though. It was another night where I struggled to make progress and once more, it was round about 23:30 when I finally finished everything and was able to crawl into bed.

But once in bed, I remember nothing, absolutely nothing at all, and when the alarm went off at 06:29 as usual, I was in such a deep sleep that I could quite easily have slept through it. It took a surprising amount of effort to reach out over my head to the bedside table to find the ‘phone

It took just as much effort to haul myself upright and sit on the edge of the bed with my feet on the floor before the second alarm, and there I sat for quite a few minutes, waiting for the bedroom to stop spinning around my head and for me to find the effort to stand up.

After a visit to the bathroom for a good scrub up and a shave, I headed off into the kitchen for the hot drink and medication. Then back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I had been during the night.

There was some guy called Peter McTurk. He’d been found wandering around the streets of Rome as a street child and had been adopted by some rich American woman who had managed to bring him back into society and teach him all kinds of different things relating to civilisation. He’d settled down quite nicely. In 1917 he’d begun to play with a rock band and later on, went on to have his own group in which I was the bassist. This group had a great deal of success, even though it was only something like a high school band. I remember a kind of four-wheeled trolley that you’d push, with a flat bed on it, and it used to take all of our equipment as we were moving about from place to place and unloading the van to go into halls etc. We didn’t have a great deal. One person who figured in it was my girlfriend at the time, but I can’t remember very much more after this.

Fancy having a girlfriend in a dream and not remembering anything about it! That’s a real disappointment.

However, it must have been fun playing in a rock band in 1917. Can you imagine it?

I had another dream similar to the one the other night … "it was earlier this evening" – ed … about playing in that rock group. We had all kinds of rehearsals, things like that, but I can’t remember very much about it from last night, unfortunately.

At one time, we used to have recurring dreams quite often. However, they were never the kind of recurring dreams that I would have liked to have had. For this one, for example, I can’t even remember if the mythical girlfriend from the first instalment put in another appearance.

Isabelle the Nurse put in her usual appearance to sort out my legs and feet. She had a few moments to chat, but it looks as if I won’t see the photos of Carnaval until she’s back on duty in a week’s time or so. She’s working tomorrow, but as it’s her last day before her break, she’ll be in quite a rush.

Once she’d left, I made breakfast. Porridge, toast and black coffee as usual. And while I was eating, I was reading some more of MAIDEN CASTLE EXCAVATIONS AND FIELD SURVEY 1985-6 by Niall Sharples.

We’re still discussing pottery, and our author is rather puzzled as to why early Iron Age pottery pans are still being found in layers that relate to the close of the Iron Age. The fact that by the end of the Iron Age, there is little pottery from outside the local area suggests that the area was isolated by this time, but this is even more puzzling, bearing in mind that wine jars from southern Spain dating to this period have been recovered and that in earlier iron Age periods, pottery has been found that has evidently travelled some considerable distance

It seems that there are tons of mileage to be explored when considering the considerable remains of pottery that he and his team uncovered at the site.

But while I was in the kitchen, I checked on my cake. Putting it in the fridge did the trick and the filling cream did solidify again. However, not all of it remains in between the two layers of the cake. The cake on its plate looks like a rather large island in the middle of a small frozen lake.

Still, not to worry. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I never make any mistakes. I just learn a lot of lessons, and some of them are expensive.

And that reminds me. Seeing as we have been talking about my cake … "well, one of us has" – ed … I have received a few requests from readers. Most of them are physically impossible, of course, but one was for the recipe for the cream filling.

So here goes –

150 g vegan cream cheese or thick coconut yoghurt. I used 100 g of plain soya yoghurt with 50 g of coconut oil
75 g vegan butter
200–250 g icing sugar – depending on how thick you would like it
chopped ginger to taste
powdered ginger to taste
2 tablespoons of syrup or maple syrup
A pinch of salt
cinnamon, nutmeg, orange, lemon to taste.

whisk up the vegan butter until it goes all fluffy
add the yoghurt and whisk until mixed (not too much or it will separate)
sift in the icing sugar, salt, ground ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, orange, lemon, then whisk until it goes as thick as you would like it
add in the chopped ginger and syrup, and stir well in
leave in the fridge for half an hour to go really cold.

Back in here, I had things to do. And then I reviewed this week’s radio programme and sent it off. Following that, I reviewed my Welsh for tomorrow and, in whatever time was left, made a start on the next radio programme.

My cleaner turned up as usual to apply my anaesthetic, and after she left, I waited for my taxi.

There wasn’t long to wait because today, she was early again. There was someone else to pick up in Granville and another person in Sartilly, but even so, we were still early arriving at dialysis.

It wasn’t possible to find a bed to which I had to walk further than the one in which they installed me today. And once there, I had to wait no fewer than forty minutes for them to come to see me. And then it was to couple me up to an electric machine first to check my dry weight. I had to wait even longer for the session to start.

Once installed, they left me pretty much to my own devices. The duty doctor (not Emilie the Cute Consultant) came to see me.

"Is there anything I can do for you today?" he asked.

"No, thank you" I replied, and carried on reading.

When the session came to an end, the nurse dealing with me found everything else to do except to unplug me. I had to wait an eternity to be liberated. And then the taxi driver had to go to the depot to fuel up the car and collect some paperwork so I was horribly late returning home

Tea tonight was the other half of last night’s pizza with tinned apricots and vegan sorbet, which was just as delicious as always. But tomorrow, I’m going to treat myself to some custard for tea. I know that it’s banned for me, but I don’t care.

So right now, having survived falling asleep on the way back to the office and having kept on going to the end, I’ll finish off everything and go to bed ready for exciting times tomorrow;

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about my cake again … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone mentioned about it being cooked on the top and not as well cooked at the bottom.
"What did it say in the instructions about putting it into the oven?" she asked.
"Nothing much" I said. "Just ‘put into the oven at 180°’"
"Well, there you are!" she exclaimed. "Put it in the oven at 180°. That means ‘turn it upside-down’."

Thursday 19th February 2026 – HAVING JUST FALLEN …

… asleep while … errr … riding the porcelain horse after tea, it remains to be seen how much of these notes I actually finish before I crash out on the bed.

But anyway, we may as well make a start and see how we go.

But seeing as we have been talking about making a start … "well, one of us has" – ed … making a finish last night wasn’t very good. I’ve no idea what happened, but things seemed to drag and drag, and it was practically 00:00 to all intents and purposes when I finally went to bed. That kind of thing is no good at all.

And once in bed, it took a while to go off to sleep, but eventually I was deep in the Land of Nod and there I stayed until all of … errr … 06:15.

Funnily enough, I awoke with the feeling that the alarm had gone off, and I was almost ready to leave the bed. Of course it hadn’t, but it took me a good minute or two to realise it.

When it finally did go off, I threw back the bedcovers immediately, but that, of course, is not the same as saying that I left the bed. In fact, what with one thing and another … "and until you make a start, you have no idea just how many other things there are" – ed … I was actually later than usual going for my morning scrub.

And I forgot to have a shave too, as I realised later. No wonder Emilie the Cute Consultant doesn’t love me any more.

In the kitchen, I made my hot drink and took my medication, and then came back in here to find out where I’d been during the night.

And to my dismay, I found that I hadn’t been anywhere at all. That was extremely disappointing because, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … going off on my little voyages during the night is about the only excitement that I have these days.

Still, there were plenty of other things to do to keep me out of mischief until Isabelle the Nurse arrived.

She was late this morning too. Apparently, an earlier patient had required a lot of attention, so she had to stay with him for a while. She couldn’t hang around here either, and was soon back out on her travels around the rest of her circuit.

That meant that I could push on with making breakfast and reading some more of MAIDEN CASTLE EXCAVATIONS AND FIELD SURVEY 1985-6 by Niall Sharples.

Today, we’re discussing bones. And interestingly, some skulls that Wheeler and his team had identified as being from domestic cattle have been identified by Sharples and his team as skulls of the aurochs, a kind of wild cow that became extinct in the UK round about 1200 BC.

Another matter of note is that they observe that the bones of dogs seem to have been butchered and defleshed, as if dog was part of the diet during the Iron Age.

It’s interesting to note that several bones of the more traditional animals, particularly sheep, suggest that malnutrition was present amongst them at this time. So maybe, despite what I was saying yesterday about farming, there was some kind of dietary crisis at some point that led to people eating their dogs.

Back in here, I caught up with my Welsh revision and then turned my attention to the next radio programme. All of the music has now been selected, reformatted, remixed and re-edited, and some of it has been paired and segued. I’ll finish the rest tomorrow morning and then write the notes.

My cleaner turned up as usual to help me with the anaesthetic, and while she was at it, she went through the medication. I’m running low and it’s the time that I need to stock up on supplies. We made a list of what’s needed and she told me that she’d sally forth this afternoon to the chemist’s to fetch the supplies.

Once she’d gone, I had to wait for the taxi to arrive. It was late today, after being so early on Monday, and what with closed roads, flooding everywhere and so on, we didn’t make up any time at all, and I was quite late arriving at dialysis.

Today, we were given a lecture by someone about our bodies in relation to the dialysis procedure, what’s not working, what the machine does, what we must do and what we mustn’t do, all that kind of thing

Not that I really wanted to know, and as if I didn’t have anything better to do with my time, but when someone is standing in the middle of the room speaking, it’s very hard not to listen.

But meanwhile, in other news, they tell me that I’m changing rooms as of Monday and going into one of the big rooms. Apparently, there are too many of us who need too much attention in the small room, where there is only one nurse on duty.

What with starting late, I ended up finishing late. And then we had to drop someone else off in Avranches before I could go home. But at least I was able to see the devastation cause by all of the flooding at Avranches where the river at the foot of the town has burst its banks and flooded everywhere

It’s quite tragic, all of this. There are houses under water just down the road from the dialysis centre, and the little shopping centre by the railway station is also submerged. The shopkeepers can’t open the doors of the shops, with all of the weight against them.

And the rain is predicted to fall, and fall, and fall. It’s a really good job that the tides aren’t all that high at the moment; otherwise there would be many more problems. Luckily, we are perched on top of a cliff well above sea level here, so if we are flooded, then the World has a really serious problem.

The wind back here as I arrived was such that, like earlier when I was leaving, I had to be dropped off at the back of the building. There’s an alley reserved for fire engines and the rescue service right behind the building, so the taxi drivers can reverse down it and drop me off right outside the fire escape at the back.

My cleaner helped me into the apartment and then after she left, I made tea. I had a hankering for cauliflower cheese, I don’t know why, so I made vegetables (including cauliflower) in a vegan cheese sauce and had a couple of small vegan sausages. It was delicious.

So having made it all the way down to the end of my notes, I’m off to bed ready for a hard day’s work tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the chemist’s … "well, one of us has" – ed … my cleaner came back with most of the supplies, and she’ll bring the rest when she comes on Friday afternoon.
She told me, though, that there had been a man in the chemist’s when she was there.
He asked the assistant "Do you have any painkillers? I have this really dreadful pain"
"Certainly, sir" replied the chemist. "Whereabouts is it?"
"How on earth would I know?" asked the man. "It’s your chemist’s, not mine."

Monday 16th February 2026 – JUST FOR ONCE …

… things seemed to go my way at dialysis and I was back home by 18:20 – a good fifty or so minutes earlier than usual. And if it were like that every session, it wouldn’t be so bad at all.

Mind you, it was rather embarrassing. When the taxi came for me, a good twenty-five minutes early, I was … errr … busy riding the porcelain horse and the driver had to wait a few minutes for me.

In fact, I’ve had many a worse twenty-four-hour period than this last one, that’s for sure.

Things brightened up a little last night, for once. For a change, I managed to complete everything that I needed to complete without being drawn too far out of my way by some kind of distraction, and I was actually in bed just before 22:30, and I wish that I could do that more often.

And once in bed, I was asleep quite quickly, and although I had one or two vague recollections of being less-than-asleep at certain points during the night, I was still flat-out when the alarm went off at 06:29.

As is usual these days, though, it took me a good while to summon up the force to stagger off into the bathroom, where eventually I had a good wash and shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and then I headed off into the kitchen.

After the hot drink and medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was living in a different apartment building and the one to which I’d moved was much more modern than this. But when someone was cleaning away at the electricity supply there was a breakdown, a complete nervous breakdown … fell asleep here … and in this apartment building, we found that there were extra rooms behind the technical room. Apparently, we should have one of these rooms each, presumably for storage, but no one had known about this. The people who owned my apartment before I did had probably lived here on and off five hundred metres before the present tew could make his objection.

Whatever this was about, I have no idea. It’s hardly surprising that I was in a deep sleep in the middle of it because it makes very little sense at all.

We’d started back at school and we’d only been there a couple of days when we found out that there was to be a huge reorganisation. Of course, we had no idea what this reorganisation was all about or why it was even necessary and there were all kinds of speculation and rumours floating around. In the end, we were called into our class assemblies and we were introduced to two new students. One was someone who lived in New York and the other one – we didn’t really catch where he came from – but it turned out that they were being trained in espionage duties and were to work on the Communist Party in Eastern Europe. But while we were waiting to be spoken to and the speculation was going on, I made quite a few witty comments, in particular in the question of a discussion about keeping your own petrol tanker lorry as a way of hedging against inflation, and the teacher asked me where I’d picked all these up. I replied “well, I had a strange father”. Anyway, these two guys, they didn’t really fit in, and they disappeared quite soon. But someone said that she saw one of them in prison in Den Haag. Apparently, he’d been collecting all of the information and feeding it back to the Russians. There was also a story about a boy in our class who lived in a motor caravan. He’d been given notice to quit practically the same day, so he was digging his heels in, making the field something like his own with his car tyre ruts and so on until he could find a compromise with the girls in the girls’ fields who were playing hockey during the winter.

The part about training for espionage relates to a book that I’ve been reading on and off about the creation of the British Secret Service, and the schoolboy living in a mobile home is presumably a reference to a John Le Carré book that I read years ago about a teacher at a public school who was living in a caravan at the back of the school playing field.

However, there was not much likelihood of our school having a huge reorganisation during the period when I was there. Steeped in tradition going back centuries.

There were a couple of other dreams too, but you don’t need to know about them, except that in one of them, I was still working a couple of years after retirement age, something that seems to be a regular occurrence in a dream these days.

The nurse turned up as usual but he didn’t stay long. He had his blood kit with him so I imagine that he must have had a queue of patients at his office waiting to give blood samples.

Once he’d left, I could make breakfast and read some more of MAIDEN CASTLE EXCAVATIONS AND FIELD SURVEY 1985-6 by Niall Sharples.

Not that I advanced very far, though. I came across an interesting report that told us that last year, advances in radiocarbon dating techniques revealed that the battle-scarred dead in what Mortimer Wheeler called “the War Cemetery” didn’t all relate to one incident. It seems to show that there were at least three, and maybe more distinct phases of warfare, only one of which might possibly fit in with Wheeler’s theory of a Roman attack.

Incidentally, the new report doesn’t fit in completely with Sharples’ interpretation either. Nevertheless, he’s not above taking another sly dig at Wheeler, commenting that he was making "a subjective impression which conveniently suited the historical interpretation applied to the evidence."

Back in here, I revised my Welsh, even though there’s no lesson tomorrow, and then began to track down the music for the next radio programme.

My cleaner turned up as usual to apply my anaesthetic, and as I mentioned earlier, the taxi was really early to come to fetch me for dialysis.

The wind outside was such that I had to leave by the back door, where the cars can pull up right outside the building in the alley reserved for the fire brigade. That’s much more convenient for me than being bowled over by a gale-force wind.

We had to pick up someone else along the way but even so, I arrived at dialysis at 13:25. There was quite a queue of cars but luckily I was in the small room with only four beds, of which three (including mine) were occupied.

The nurse was busy finishing off the first arrival when I went in, but the lady who was second wanted more time to prepare so I was seen straight away, which was nice. There was no time for me to apply the ice pack, but I didn’t care. The sooner I start, the sooner I finish, even if it was one of my favourite nurses.

Once I was up and running, I was left pretty much alone, although the doctor on duty turned up to see me just as I was about to be unplugged. Of course, I wasn’t going to stay around to talk.

The taxi was waiting for me, which was also nice, so I was back here really early.

But once more, there’s chaos in the building. Yet another proprietor, fed up with the inability of the House committee to organise this fibre optic installation, has gone ahead and had his walls drilled, even though, in a historic building such as this one, it’s streng verboten. I decided to throw some oil onto the flames by writing to the committee. It probably won’t galvanise them into action, but we can live in hope.

Tea tonight was the rest of the pizza, followed by jam roly-poly and vegan sorbet. That will keep the lupus from the porte for a while, as they might have said in Ancient Rome.

So right now, I’m off to bed, early, I hope. A good sleep will do me some good if I can manage it, but this decent twenty-four-hour spell can only last so long.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the nurse and his blood-sample kit … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of back in the old days in Transylvania –
"Blood samples should be taken at the office between 08:30 and 09:30. If you are unable to attend, please let us know and we will send a bat."

Thursday 12th February 2026 – IT WAS HARD …

… today at dialysis. For some reason, there was more liquid to drain off than usual and as a result, I suffered quite a lot, particularly towards the end.

Mind you, things have been building up to this for a while now. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve not been feeling too well just recently, and while the last couple of days might have been better, it doesn’t take much to knock me back to the start again.

Last night, for example, I was on course for an early night and I actually worked quite hard to achieve it, but even so, it was just after 23:00 before my notes went online, and with everything else, it was after 23:30 when I finally went to bed. And it shouldn’t have been like that at all.

And despite the howling gale and torrential rainstorm that was going on outside, I managed to go to sleep quite quickly and I don’t believe that I moved a muscle until the alarm went off at 06:29.

Having been woken up by BILLY COTTON’S RAUCOUS RATTLE, it was another struggle to leave the bed and head off into the bathroom for a good wash and a shave. Mind you, I’ve given up all hope of any of the doctors coming to see me, but you have to go through the motions all the same.

In the kitchen, I made my hot drink and took my medication, and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was at work and it turned out that they were starting up a new group of people for something or other. The guy who was in charge decided that the person who was earmarked to do the job at first wouldn’t be able to cope so he nominated me to do it. I had to go to the office in Chester, and when I complained, they said “never mind. You’ll still be home in half an hour, won’t you?” which, of course, is nonsense. In the end, I arrived at Chester, relieved the guy who was doing this job and went into the office. There were two people there in bed, as if they were hospital patients. One of them was chatty enough and told me everything but the other one said nothing. I had to ask him directly if he was an Oxford United supporter. Then I made some remark about wondering how his treatment went. The girl who was my assistant asked him outright, but he didn’t reply to that either. I thought that I could see this being a really interesting and riveting group of which to be in charge.

So here I am, back at work again despite having been close to the retirement age in a considerable number of dreams. But I did work in Chester for two years between 1972 and 1974. I loved the city and would have been happy to return.

The hospital situation needs no explanation, but what’s all this about Oxford United?

The nurse was early again and he didn’t stay long at all. He had his big medical bag with him today so I suspect that he’s off on quite a few additional travels today.

It meant that I could make breakfast and read some more of Mortimer Wheeler’s MAIDEN CASTLE .

In fact, read all of it because it’s now finished. The final pages show a huge series of photographs that clearly show the hurried nature of the burials in the War Cemetery, and also a series of photos that show the massive nature of the work that he and his colleagues had carried out.

What they have done is phenomenal, and you would never ever believe the scale of the work that they undertook.

Back in here later, I had an important letter to write and then for the rest of the morning, I began to prepare for the next radio programme. I even managed to choose half of the music too. This is something else that I hope that I will finish tomorrow because I really need to have a weekend off.

My faithful cleaner turned up as usual to apply my anaesthetic, and then I had to await the taxi. The driver was early again today, but seeing as we had to go to Sartilly to pick up someone else, we weren’t all that early arriving.

My sooty food was put into the premises at about 13:50, but I had to wait until 14:25 before I was all plugged in and running. And after that, apart from the nurse asking me if I was OK and also the coffee coming round, I was left to my own devices.

As I said earlier, there was more liquid to be removed this time, so they wound up the machine a little. And by the time that I’d finished, the pain had come back in my foot, and as well as that, I was so exhausted that I crashed out for half an hour.

The taxi was waiting for me so we had a good drive back, listening to a podcast of THE HOBBIT

Incidentally, throughout these pages, you’ll see links to Amazon products appearing every now and again. Being a Sales Associate of Amazon, I receive a small commission on goods sold via my links. It costs you nothing at all extra, but helps defray … "part of the" – ed … cost of my not-insubstantial web-hosting fees.

There are also links on the sidebar for AMAZON UK, AMAZON USA and, since the recent “troubles”, AMAZON CANADA for the use of my numerous Canadian visitors. As I said, I am extremely grateful when someone uses them to make a purchase

My cleaner helped me into the building and after she left, I warmed up the leftover soup from yesterday.

However, I couldn’t eat it all tonight, and another pile of food ended up in the bin. I was doing quite well with meals until then. It looks as if I’m having a relapse.

But anyway, I’ll worry about that tomorrow because right now, I’m off to bed.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the hobbit … "well, one of us has" – ed … I was telling a friend of mine that I’d given up reading Tolkien’s books just before going to bed.
"Why was that?" she asked. "Was it becoming too much of a bad hobbit?"
"Well" I replied, "it was certainly hobbit-forming".

Monday 9th February 2026 – AFTER LAST NIGHT’S …

… little excitement, things are back to normal now, or, at least, as normal as they can be. Mind you, I’m not ruling out crashing out once more before I finish today’s notes.

As to what happened yesterday, I really don’t know. I was actually feeling quite perky but then, all of a sudden, this dramatic wave of fatigue came out of nowhere and swamped me completely. Three times, I’d gone off with the fairies … "although not in a manner that would excite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine" – ed … and I simply couldn’t carry on.

At that moment, bed was the best place to be, and so off I went.

It didn’t take long for me to go off to sleep, but I’m sure that you are aware of what happened next. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … and I’ll leave you lot to fill in the rest of the sentence.

So there I was, at 04:00, wondering what to do next. I tried to go off to sleep but to no avail, and at 05:30 I was up and about.

Off I staggered into the bathroom and from there into the kitchen, even though it was so early, where I made my hot drink and took my medicine.

Back in here, determined not to waste the morning, I dictated the outstanding notes that had built up over the last week or so for a couple or three radio programmes.

Well, almost, anyway. As I was dictating the third and last set, the ZOOM H8 stopped recording, and I hadn’t noticed until I’d finished dictating.

Consequently, I re-dictated the notes and once more, it stopped without me noticing until I’d finished this lot.

Subsequent enquiry revealed that the memory was full. I needed to upload the contents of the memory onto one of the backup discs, and do you have any idea how long it takes to upload 64 GB of data?

While it was being busy, I made a start on finishing off last night’s notes, and now they are online for you to peruse.

Isabelle the Nurse interrupted me in mid-flight and I had to wander off to have my feet and legs receive her tender ministrations. It’s her last day today for a week so she was quite happy.

In fact, she’s off for eight days because she and her friends have a float at Carnaval and they will be parading on Tuesday.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of Mortimer Wheeler’s MAIDEN CASTLE .

He’s still discussing pottery, and not just pottery discovered at Maiden Castle but all over Europe. While it’s nice to have the scene well and truly set, it can be overdone and we can drown in a wealth of unnecessary detail.

Once breakfast was over, I came back in here and finished off my notes and then transcribed the dictaphone notes.

There was a Jewish family summoned into the town from out in the countryside. They didn’t really know why but they were obliged to come all the same. One family set out to arrive but the eldest son had to stay somewhere along the road with one of their vehicles that had developed a flat tyre but the rest of the family arrived. The father, who was a little suspicious of the sons noticed some kind of army convoy around in the city and as it set off, he decided to follow it to see where it went. But somewhere in the middle of this, there was something about being in a library where there were all these books on different medicines. It was interesting to note that of all of the different recipes, there was only one company that made its recipes completely open to the public. They were for the three medications that I used to take regularly back in the past so I took the recipes and went to have a read of them. Then this family decided to go out and they had to leave a glass of water behind, so what they did was to drop a couple of drops of ink into it and it went a horrible light brown colour, so they left it. When they returned to the apartment later, they couldn’t find their butler. They had to search for him. Suddenly, they found him sitting on the sofa disguised as a pile of old rags. They asked him for an explanation, and he said that seeing as they hadn’t invited him to go out with them earlier, he took a couple of hours off to go to the local museum but the museum was closed so he came home and dressed up in the hope of giving everyone a really good surprise and a good laugh.

As to where this came from, I have no idea. It doesn’t seem to relate to anything that I’ve been discussing, except, of course, the three medications.

When I’d finished that, I had a few things to do and then I prepared for my Welsh course tomorrow. It does no harm to try to forge ahead while I still can.

My cleaner turned up to apply the anaesthetic on my arm, and after she left, I waited for the taxi.

And I didn’t have to wait long either. He was ten minutes early and he already had one passenger on board. We stopped off at Sartilly to pick up another passenger who travels with me sometimes, and we arrived at dialysis a good twenty minutes early.

Now here’s a thing. Even twenty minutes early, I was last to arrive in the room but another woman, having arrived before me, was still applying an ice pack in preparation, so she let me go first. It’s very rare that that happens, and I appreciated it a great deal.

The doctor came to see me too. He wanted to discuss my cough which, having gone away while I was on antibiotics, is now back again. After some kind of chat, he prescribed yet another course of antibiotics and a couple of other medicaments. After that, they left me pretty much alone.

Having been connected early, I was unplugged early too and the taxi was waiting for me, so I was actually home early. But with the howling gale and driving rain, I was dropped off at the fire escape round the back.

My faithful cleaner helped me inside and after she left I had a few other things to do, and then I went and warmed up my half-pizza, which was followed by fruitcake and soya dessert.

Right now, though, I know that it’s early but I’m off to bed. A good sleep will do me good with my Welsh course tomorrow, but whether or not I actually have a good sleep remains to be seen. Still, if I’m up early, I can always finish off the dictation.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Carnival… "well, one of us has" – ed … one year, they were giving helicopter rides at €10:00 per person.
The pilot was an ex-Air Force pilot and he told the passengers "if you manage ten minutes without screaming, I’ll give you €100:00."
He puts on a show to end all shows and all of the passengers were screaming, except for one little old man who was totally silent.
When they landed, he gave the man €100:00 and said "that was astonishing. You’re the first person whom I’ve ever taken who managed not to scream. How did you do it?"
"It was actually really difficult" replied the man. "I was going to say something when my wife fell out, but €100:00, it’s €100:00."

Thursday 5th February 2026 – FOR THE FIRST …

… time since I don’t know when, I was actually feeling hungry this afternoon. So much so that I had a decent meal for tea tonight and still felt as if I could eat some more.

One swallow doesn’t make a summer, of course, but I’ll be interested to see if this return of my appetite keeps on going. We’ll probably find out at teatime tomorrow evening when sausage, chips and baked beans with cheese will be on the menu.

There wasn’t a hint of this last night. I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but last night’s tea was just a handful of crackers with cheese spread followed by a few biscuits. I wasn’t in the mood at all.

Nevertheless, I was still hours late going to bed. It was round about 23:30 when I finally crawled underneath the covers. And there I lay without moving until about … errr … 02:05. After that, it was a very fitful night, lying awake, dozing off, dropping off to sleep, waking up again. At one point, I was convinced that the alarm had gone off and made ready to leave the bed, but it was only 04:20.

When the alarm finally did go off, I was actually awake, although you wouldn’t have thought so. It was another long, desperate struggle to rise to my feet and head off into the bathroom. A good wash and a shave, in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and then I went off into the kitchen for my hot drink and medication.

Back in here, the first thing that I did was to transcribe the dictaphone notes from the previous day. And now, they are online and raring to go. I didn’t have much time to do those from last night because Isabelle the Nurse appeared. She sorted out my legs and feet and then headed off on her rounds.

Mind you, she did confirm a piece of news that I’d heard at the cardiologist’s yesterday, and that is that my cardiologist will be heading off to pastures new fairly shortly. That will mean that there’s no cardiologist between Caen and Rennes unless someone takes over his office.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of Mortimer Wheeler’s MAIDEN CASTLE . And at page seventy-nine, we finally reach the end of this meandering, rambling preamble. He’s now starting to examine the different layers in the ditches and the pits on the site to try to identify the times of the different periods of occupation.

Back in here, I finished off transcribing last night’s dictaphone notes.

During a dream last night, my aunt had been murdered by her husband. He’d been taken away and his children practically left on their own. There was some issue about the food that the children were eating. They had been eating practically anything without any organisation and were having all kinds of illnesses because of the diet and not eating the necessary products, minerals, vitamins etc. My eldest sister said something that she couldn’t understand why the kids didn’t eat more healthy food etc. I told her that she’s a girl, she’s done cookery and home economics, things like that, and the chances are that my aunt’s children haven’t done anything like that at all. From there, the discussion turned round to some kind of film where there had been some young girls who had been responsible for providing meals etc. There was a girl starring in this film, but they did a flashback to some time in the past where the girl playing that rôle was her sister. This ended up with the kids cooking some chips, adding a little salt to one portion, and in the next room, they added rather a lot more salt to the portion that they made in there. The funny thing is that I awoke at that moment and thought that the chips were real because I could smell them. I was going to look for them as soon as I awoke and probably eat them.

My aunt (my father’s sister) committed suicide thirty-odd years ago and her husband, from whom she was divorced, died of cancer, leaving the whole tribe of cousins orphaned, some of them still quite young. And it’s true that, coming from a rural agricultural background, they didn’t have the same opportunities that we had. Although I never did see eye-to-eye with my parents and was glad to leave home and never go back, I won’t ever deny that my mother fought for us to have a decent education, and we could all read and write long before we started school.

But those chips – I can still smell them now even though it was in a dream, and they did smell delicious.

We were in Colditz prison and two prisoners had made an attempt to escape, but they had been intercepted. One of them had been captured but the other two had put up a fight and were both injured. Somehow, the one who had been captured managed to break free and he ran. He managed to pick up this other prisoner and they both jumped down, holding on, shot down this chute and disappeared. There was a huge hue and cry about all of this. Several other prisoners took the opportunity to go to ground, that is, hiding within the prison so that the prison officers would think that they’d escaped. From there, they could work on tunnels and things without being missed during roll calls. They managed to barricade themselves into an old assembly hall. From there, they were living and organising things to do that needed doing that the others couldn’t do. It came fairly close to the time for them to escape, but they had been discovered by one of the prison officers. He’d taken two of the prisoners to his commandant who told him to take them to the General overseeing the region, so he took them on the train. The General overseeing the region was extremely unhappy with this prison officer because of the fact that these prisoners had been missing for ages. He prepared a document ordering him to be transferred from the prison service to the Eastern Front, which broke the heart of this officer when he was talking to the prisoners of everything that he’d planned to do. The prisoners quite simply took the order which the General hadn’t stamped – he’d signed it but not stamped – and said that only the prisoners knew about this document now, and there’s no reason why the General should want to know anything further about it. The prisoners would basically keep quiet about the document if the officer would. They went back to the prison, and the officers went to hide in this ice rink again – this hall place again – and the officer went back to his work. Now, the prisoners had a hold over this officer with this document. It became time, almost time to leave. One of the prisoners said that he wasn’t going to bother watering his plants because he wouldn’t be back. I decided that I’d water all mine, so I took the bucket. But one of my friends from Canada was there, and he insisted on having the bucket first to water some of his. After a big argument, I let him take it. Then he brought it back and I had a race against time then to fill the bucket with water, run to my plants and water them, come back and keep on going. The tap wasn’t very fast, but someone showed me a faster one. I was running back and to, watering my plants.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that WE WENT TO COLDITZ CASTLE back in May 2015 and had a good wander around.

It is actually true that in several prison camps in World War II, some prisoners would “go to ground” within the prison, and for a variety of reasons too. Firstly, the Germans would spend thousands of fruitless man-hours searching the surrounding countryside and that would keep soldiers away from the battle zones.

Secondly, they could spend their time digging tunnels and forging documents without the risk of being interrupted for a snap roll-call or barracks search.

The usual procedure was to look for two prisoners who looked alike. One would “go to ground”, and then they would swap over occasionally to allow the grounded one to have some fresh air and sunlight.

There were also many, many cases of the prison officers and the prisoners collaborating with each other against the Army High Command and the Gestapo.

The part about plants is interesting. It reminds me of the late 1970s when everyone had a house that, inside, looked like a Vietnamese rainforest with all the tropical plants. And where did my Canadian friend come from?

We were in London last night. It wasn’t the London modern but the London of two thousand years ago AD. The Romans had captured the leader of the British Army and he was crying on the British Army to restrain, but they were determined to go ahead to rescue him. They built about four platforms about a mile inland from the river to which they could shoot over the walls. They had their batter away through the stand-up album period but at the end they were still trying to persuade this guy to come down from his turret. In the end they launched a whole barrage of sweet presents at the prisoner and forced him to come down, where he was captured … fell asleep here …

This, of course, is pretty meaningless and it’s no surprise that I fell asleep in the middle of it. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m actually asleep when I’m dictating. So when I say that “I fell asleep”, what I mean is that there’s a silence and then you can hear my deep breathing.

The rest of the morning was spent writing the radio notes that I should have done yesterday, and they are now almost finished.

My faithful cleaner turned up to apply my anaesthetic and then we had a good chat for a while.

The taxi was early today and the driver was Speedy Gonzales. It was a wild ride down to Champeaux to pick up my fellow passenger and we arrived at the dialysis centre half an hour early.

And this is where it all went wrong.

Today, I was in a room with eight beds, manned … "PERSONned" – ed … by just one trained nurse and two new starters. Consequently, everything went at a snail’s pace. The new starter who eventually dealt with me missed her aim with the second and they had to fetch the electrograph to check and to identify the correct location. So she had to take the needle out and reinsert a fresh one elsewhere in my forearm.

Not that I’m complaining, though. I ended up being surrounded by a bunch of my favourite nurses and one of them couldn’t resist a stroke of my shoulder. If that’s the reward for the new starter missing her aim, she can miss her aim every session and I won’t say a word.

After that, they left me pretty much alone to fill out my shopping list. But the doctor on duty clearly doesn’t love me any more. She came into the room, saw most of the people, but didn’t come to see me. And when she wanted something, she sent a nurse on an errand to ask me instead of coming herself

When they finally unplugged me and threw me out, the taxi driver was waiting. And although he didn’t say a single word to me and the other passenger all the way home, he drove just like the one who had brought me and we were home in no time.

My faithful cleaner helped me indoors through the rainstorm and we continued our chat from lunchtime. In the end, we had quite a laugh as she told me a story that I couldn’t possibly repeat on these pages without causing offence

After she left, I made tea. My friend in Munich told me the other day about a vegetable curry with mashed potatoes that he had made for tea, and so I decided to make one. Sprouts, cauliflower, carrots, peas, broccoli out of the freezer in a home-made curry sauce with soya yoghurt, and plenty of bulghour and quinoa for protein, all with potatoes mashed in vegan butter and soya milk. It was delicious, and I could eat it again.

It was followed by the last of those apricots with mango sorbet, and I could eat that again too.

So having finished my notes, I’ll be off to bed as soon as THE BOY WHO WOULDN’T HOE CORN finishes.

But before we go, seeing as we have been talking about causing offence … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of someone in Crewe who was in Court charged with causing criminal damage to someone’s garden.
"First offence?" asked the judge.
"Oh no" replied the prosecuting counsel. "First he did a gate and then a greenhouse. A fence was third."

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 – THEY SAY THAT …

… wiser counsel comes overnight. And that’s certainly true in my case, especially last night. And that’s because I had plenty of time to consider it.

Going to bed at about 22:00 is all very well, but as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s a pretty pointless exercise if you wake up at … errr … 01:05.

Last night though, I really was ill. Not in a medical sense, I suppose (even though I am, of course), but my morale had dropped through the floor and it was carrying on sinking. There’s only one place to be when that happens, so I dashed through my notes at an incredible rate of knots, finished off everything else as quickly as possible and then headed for the hills.

It didn’t take long to go to sleep, because I really was wasted. However, as I said just now, I didn’t stay asleep for long.

So there I was, tossing and turning for hours, trying to find a comfortable position without much success, but I must have eventually fallen asleep because some company or other sent me a text message at 04:25 and that awoke me.

Nevertheless, I did manage to go back to sleep and there I was when the alarm went off.

As usual, it took an age to summon up the courage and the strength to go to the bathroom, and then I came in here. No medication this morning.

The first thing that I did was to transcribe the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night.

I had some Welsh homework outstanding, and the tutor came to see me – a male tutor, this particular one. I explained that I’d had that many medical appointments recently that it was difficult for me to find the time to do several things that I wanted to do, including the Welsh homework. But I was surprised that he was hardly sympathetic at all. He said “you seem to be putting much less effort into your course just recently”, to which I replied that I was putting most of my effort into my medical issues and it can’t really be helped. He told me that he’d give me until Monday and that would be the final cut-off for the homework period. I had to sort out all of my paperwork after he’d left. I took some bread and cheese and things and went to sit in my van with the paperwork out, but I just couldn’t concentrate at all, time was dragging on and I hadn’t even begun to make any progress. Some of my friends were back in the building and wondered where the butter had gone. No-one knew exactly where it was so I said that I had it. They came over and brought me a little note or something to get well, which was nice of them, but I was just sitting there and couldn’t really function and was doing absolutely nothing whatsoever towards this homework.

This is the story of my life, isn’t it? Being paralysed with inaction when I should be doing things. I can go for weeks like this and then have a sudden burst of energy during which I not only catch up with everything but actually soar ahead.

Round about 07:45, I decided that I’d better go into the kitchen to wait for Isabelle the Nurse who should arrive at any moment. Instead, though, it was the taxi driver who had come early, so I had to quickly put on my shoes and stuff my socks into my pocket.

Halfway across the courtyard we met Isabelle the Nurse. She was on time, but with the taxi being early, she was confounded. And so we ended up with the undignified spectacle of me sitting in the car, feet outstretched outside in the cold and rain with Isabelle the Nurse oiling my bare feet and sorting out my socks while the taxi driver, a passenger that she had picked up earlier and a whole crowd of people waiting for the 08:10 bus looked on with interest and amazement.

You can’t say that I don’t live an interesting life.

So Part One of today’s adventures began, with a trip down to Avranches. We dropped off the other passenger at the clinic and then my driver took me to the hospital. She found a wheelchair for me, and then we played “hunt the doctor” until we finally found her.

This doctor, I think she’s wonderful. She’s a tiny woman of “a certain age”, and while she’s examining your arm and your dialysis implant, she’s complaining all the time about the standard of work that the surgeon did and a lot more besides. Just like my favourite taxi driver, she puts a lot of ambience and atmosphere into her work and I think that it’s great. Today, though, she was rather restrained and I was somewhat disappointed.

It was the same driver who brought me home, although there was someone else to drop off along the way. The driver had to help me into the apartment because my faithful cleaner was with one of her other clients this morning.

Back in here, I grabbed a quick bowl of porridge and a mug of coffee and then headed off for my Welsh lesson, arriving rather later than I intended.

One thing about the lesson, though, was that it went really, really well and I was quite impressed. Spending a couple of hours over the weekend reading through the notes and checking the vocabulary seems to be paying dividends with my course, although I wish that I could remember it afterwards. That’s the problem with having a Teflon brain – nothing sticks to it at all.

So Part One of my day was at Avranches. Part Two was my Welsh course. Part Three was my shower. My faithful cleaner turned up and organised the bathroom for me so that I could have a nice, hot soak. And I needed it too. And I felt much better afterwards, that’s for sure. I wish that I could shower more often, but I’m not allowed to do it unsupervised.

However, all this might change. The handles and restraining bars to be installed in the shower arrived a couple of weeks ago and with them, I’m much more independent. My cleaner and I decided that on Friday, we’ll go round the apartment to make a list of things that need doing, and then I’ll contact the carpenter to see if he’s available.

If anyone else who has visited the apartment can think of anything that I ought to have done, don’t hesitate to let me know because this will be the only chance to do it.

But meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … shower, I suddenly realised that I’d been trying to walk out of the bathroom without my crutches. If only …

Part Four of my day came later. That was at about 16:30 when my favourite taxi driver came to pick me up for an appointment with the heart specialist down in the town. That was quite a hike to his office too but I managed it, just about.

He was running behind time too, so I had to wait for quite a while, all the time standing up because, with no armrests on his chairs in the waiting room, I can’t stand up afterwards. And that’s an interesting fact – since I’ve become disabled, I’m seeing the World in a totally different light than I ever did before.

Eventually, he saw me and gave me a good going-over. And apparently, there’s an improvement since the last time that he examined me. Everyone is worried, and I’ve been having these tests since the announcement that the chemotherapy has failed. It’s nice to have some good news for a change, even though it doesn’t explain why I’m so out of breath these days.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … with a lower red blood count than usual, my heart is having to work correspondingly faster to pump enough oxygen around my body. Even so, there’s no circulation in my feet (hence the daily visits of the nurse, to massage them and rub oil in) and at times, there’s a loss of circulation in my fingers. But as long as the heart can keep up with the pressure, I can keep on going (in that respect, but maybe not in others).

When the taxi dropped me off, my cleaner helped me into the apartment and sorted me out.

In between all of that, I’d been working on the next radio programme. I’d managed to collect all of the music that I need, reformat, remix and re-edit it, pair it off and segue it ready for me to write the notes tomorrow. I’m trying to break the back of at least two every week so that I can build up a pile in advance for when the inevitable happens. I intend to live on, long after I’ve begun to push up the daisies.

For the very first time since I don’t know when, I managed a full meal today. It’s probably due to all of the exercise that I’d had with all of these medical appointments, running here, there and everywhere. I had the leftover Chinese food, from when I tried unsuccessfully to make those spring rolls, in a stir-fry with noodles. And it was delicious too, if rather salty (but then again, everything that I eat tastes of salt since the chemotherapy).

My neighbour, when she came to visit the other day, had brought me some fruit – they might have been apricots – so I had a few with some of that vegan sorbet that I’d ordered for Christmas. And that was quite lovely too. So much so that I’m seriously contemplating ordering a few tins of fruit for pudding in the future, especially as I now have some custard powder.

Back in here, I started to write up my notes, but the effort was far too much for me after everything that I’d done today, the early start, the two medical visits, the shower etc. I fell asleep twice before I’d even finished the first paragraph and even then what I’d written was a load of gibberish anyway … "so what’s new?" – ed … so I called it a night and crawled into bed. I can finish it off in the morning.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the heart specialist … "well, one of us has" – ed … while he was running his machine over my chest, I asked him "have you found my heart, doctor?"
"Oh yes" he replied. "It’s still there."
"Thank heavens for that!" I said, relieved. "I’ve not turned into a Conservative yet."

Monday 2nd February 2026 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

… tough afternoon today, and being at dialysis hasn’t helped one little bit.

What also probably didn’t help was that, once again, I remained stuck to my chair last night for ages and couldn’t sort myself out and go to bed. As a result, it was yet another late night, long after 23:30, and being as tired as I am right now, it’s all becoming far too complicated for me.

Once in bed, though, I was asleep quite quickly, and I remember nothing whatever until the alarm went off at 06:29 as usual.

It took an age to sort myself out and head to the bathroom but after a good wash and shave, I could head into the kitchen for the hot drink and medication, including the last of this course of five days of antibiotics.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was driving my taxi last night. I’d just started to be self-employed so I was looking for as much work as possible to set myself off. A message came through on the radio to tell me that there were two people to pick up in Crewe to take somewhere at 06:30. But the following morning was a Sunday, so would I be able to do it? Even though I wasn’t particularly keen, the idea that there was a job like that to do made me feel that I would be able to do it. While I was speaking on the radio, a car pulled up alongside. It was the postwoman and she gave me a parcel. I hadn’t been expecting a parcel but I took it anyway. What I’d been doing while I’d been waiting for things to happen was that I was trying to make some tea. I’d been washing a load of really dirty vegetables and I now had four clean carrots, so I was going to make some kind of stew. I had dirty water, vegetable peelings and diced vegetables all over the place, and someone gave me a parcel, the postwoman. I put it down on a worktop where it became all wet, and then opened it. There were four solar-powered racing cars in there, each with its own track, and it was nothing that I knew anything of. However, I remember my mother talking about something like this so I called her up on the radio and asked her. She said that it was indeed something that she had been waiting for and could I bring it round some time? I wondered when it would be best to bring it round because she usually had piles of grandchildren hanging around and I imagined that she didn’t want her grandchildren to know about this parcel arriving.

Apart from the fact that I’m back driving a taxi again, there’s quite a lot of mileage in this dream. For example, my friend in Munich and I were talking yesterday about solar power and also about curried vegetables, and in Mortimer Wheeler’s MAIDEN CASTLE, part of the preamble that I mentioned the other day was a discussion about the cursus — the weird Neolithic structures that resemble something like an ancient racecourse.

And as usual, my family puts in an appearance.

The nurse breezed in quite early today, and he was soon gone, leaving me to make my breakfast and read some more of my book.

Mortimer Wheeler is reaching an interesting stage in his opening discussion. He notes that in the beginning, there were some reasonably substantial defences around Maiden Castle, but after a period that he estimates to be about fifty years, the defences are allowed to decay, although the site is still occupied. This seems to suggest that once the inhabitants were settled in, they were living at peace.

However, all of a sudden, there’s a hasty reconstruction of the defences, as if the situation has changed and warfare has broken out somewhere in the vicinity. And from then on, the defences are improved and improved with some massive, impressive defensive walls and ditches, enough to stifle any invader’s attack. And there are whole hoards of sling-stones discovered, tens and tens of thousands, cached at important points along the defences as if the defenders were prepared for a massive siege and attack.

After breakfast, I came in here again. There were a few things to do and then I revised my Welsh, seeing as I’m going to be out early tomorrow morning.

Rosemary sent me a message or two today to ask me a couple of questions. I forgot to mention yesterday that she had also ‘phoned me for a “quick chat” which, while not one of our usual length, was only supposed to be “just a quick question”.

My cleaner turned up to sort out my anaesthetic and then I had to wait for the taxi. The driver was early today because there were two other people to pick up, one in Granville and the other one in Donville-les-Bains.

The driver dropped me off first, and for a change, I was quite early. However, it counted for nothing because with a trainee nurse and no fewer that two trainee nursing assistants, I had to wait forty minutes before I was plugged in.

It was while I was waiting that I felt my morale disintegrating. And after a couple of hours of dialysis, I had another one of these fits that I have where I cease to function and just sit there, staring into space. This time, though, I closed my eyes and hoped to doze off, but that didn’t happen.

But you can tell that things aren’t going my way. We had a “satisfaction survey” to complete and when I read mine back after I’d filled it in, I noticed that what I had written was full of doom and gloom and pessimism. Still, I suppose that this is normal these days. The spark seems to have gone out, and gone for good too.

The taxi driver was waiting for me when I finished. It was the young, chatty guy and at least, he cheers me up when he’s driving. It was pouring down with rain and blowing a gale … "yet again" – ed … so he dropped me off at the back of the building where my faithful cleaner was waiting to open the fire escape so that I could come in that way. It’s much less of a distance to walk.

After my cleaner had sorted me out, I warmed up the half-pizza that was left over from yesterday and ate that. And now, early as it may be, I’m going to bed. I’ve had enough for today.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Rosemary … "well, one of us has" – ed … she ended our little chat by saying "you are a real treasure".
And I quite agree with her. The way that I’m feeling right now, I really ought to be buried on a desert island somewhere.

Monday 26th January 2026 – AS I SUSPECTED …

… when they weighed me at dialysis this afternoon and calculated the figure against the dry weight figure the last time that they calculated it, there were just 19 grammes to remove today.

Telling them that I’ve eaten next-to-nothing this last week or so cuts absolutely no ice with them. Their calculations must be correct, and that’s all that counts. It’s a far cry from the days when they were taking out 2,500 grammes three times per week.

Last night, though, as I said, I did manage to eat something, even if it was only half a small pizza. And I still managed later to end up being late finishing off everything. Nothing that I seem to do makes any difference.

So it was not far short of 23:00 when I went to bed, and once again, it seemed to take forever to go off to sleep.

Even then, I remember it being something of a turbulent night, not being able to settle down. However, I was asleep when the alarm went off at 06:29.

Isabelle the Nurse told me to stay in bed this morning but, with so much to do, I left the bed … "eventually" – ed … and headed off into the bathroom. And I do have to say that I was feeling rather better than I had just recently.

In the kitchen, I sorted out my hot drink and medication, and then came back in here to see where I’d been during the night.

On a eu un deuxième .. – what am I doing, talking in French? We had a second lockdown and everyone was confined to home again. The first couple of days, it didn’t bother me at all and I had plenty of things to keep me occupied. But after a while, I began to feel that I had cabin fever, so I thought that I’d take advantage of the calm by going out for a walk. So I left my house, which was a little terraced house in a pedestrian area and began to walk towards the village square. The first thing that I noticed was a hairdresser’s, with the bust of a woman in a window, with some long, flowing hair on it and a sign “with sadness after 109 years”. However, the hair didn’t resemble at all anything of any woman of that kind of age and even in the 1960s when this style had been the rage, that woman would still have been well over forty and that didn’t look right at all to me. There was another terraced house with a white stucco front and no window, with newspaper cuttings on the front. While I was reading these newspaper cuttings, a couple more people came past so I ended up following them, only to be sidetracked again by some more press cuttings pasted on the end wall of a house as we turned the corner. Having turned this corner, I walked about another hundred yards and found myself in the village square. Across in the corner was a building that I recognised. Although it looked like the village hall, it was in fact the local supermarket. People were queueing to go in, with several people loitering in the vicinity, looking as if they couldn’t make up their minds whether to join the queue or not. I was debating whether to join the queue, to go into the supermarket just for a walk around and maybe pick up a packet of biscuits just for some comfort food when suddenly an enormous dogfight broke out between two big dogs. Neither of the owners of these two dogs could seem to control it. In the meantime, there was a radio broadcast about some event that had taken place. It was on the Saturday in September, a week before the cup final involving Seraing. But there would be no cup final taking place in September – the new season should be well under way so I wondered just what this news broadcast on the radio was all about.

This reminds me of the first lockdown. I had a medical appointment that morning so had to go out, and I’ve never seen the town so deserted. I was half-expecting a tumbleweed to roll out of an alley. And do you remember having to queue to be allowed into a shop?

But leaving aside the question of a cup final in September, there would be no chance of Seraing competing in it. It’s one of the professional football clubs in Liège, although its fortunes have been such that it’s played in the amateur leagues on several occasions just recently. As for Seraing itself, it’s the home of the old Cockerill-Sambre steel mill, and it’s probably the grimiest, dirtiest industrial place that I have ever known

We were coming back from the Auvergne towards Brussels and we ended up going round the bypass of some small town or village in the middle of Burgundy. I pointed out one or two buildings to my companion as we were going past, and I was surprised that I hadn’t driven through the centre, because the centre was extremely old and decayed but was really mysterious and weird at the same time. It was a town that I really loved. At some point, a group of us, who were together by now, stopped and being accompanied by one or two other people, walked through the town and came to some kind of bar or café. My companion made as if to go into the bar so I opened the door for her. However, she stood there at the door and glared at me with some kind of really evil look in her face so I made a laughing remark that “some people don’t like having the door open for them these days”. The guy who was with us gave my companion €2:00 and asked him to buy her a can of pop. She went in, still glaring at me, ordered two small bottles of some kind of alcoholic spirit and another drink. As soon as she had these bottles, the ripped the tops off and drank them both at the same time, followed quite quickly by this glass of beer or whatever it was. I had to remind her about the can of pop, which she eventually bought, and we made our way back. I carried on walking and ended up in the town centre of this really large city. I was on my own and that began to suit me much better because I’d seen a side of my companion that I didn’t wish to see. I began to walk, but then I had some kind of epileptic fit and was bouncing around on all fours on a patch of grass at the side of a pavement. One or two people came over to see that I was OK. One of them was this companion, and she made some kind of crazy remark about taking the wrong acid, but all that I wanted to do was to be there and calm down and let this fit pass, then gradually be able to get up and carry on with my walk. I was in no mood for company at that moment.

We’ve been to this small town or village before, in a previous dream quite some time ago. It’s not actually a real town, although when I was asleep, I was convinced that it was. “It was a town that I really loved”, probably because I’m “extremely old and decayed” too.

And what was going on with my companion was really strange and unnerving, especially when I had this epileptic fit.

I was back somewhere around the centre of France last night. I was in another small town. When I parked the car, I had a walk around the town to find out where the strongest radio signal was. It turned out to be right outside this doctor’s surgery place so I went in there to sit down, thinking that this would be a good place to wait in case anyone wants me on the radio. There were a couple of other people in there. The doctor came out and instead of inviting them into his room, he began to give them a medical examination right in front of me. I thought that this was totally wrong. He tried to make me move so that this patient could lie down where my chair was so I told him that there was another chair over there that he could use. He took this woman over to this other chair. All the time that I was sitting there with this mug of coffee and a young girl came in. She was looking for a place to sit so I asked her to sit next to me, and we began to chat. At that moment, my brother came in and he began to make some really sarcastic comments about me and what I was doing and why I was chatting to this girl. In the end, I just stood up, picked up my mug of hot coffee and threw some of it into his face. Everyone stopped and looked, including my brother, but I just sat down and carried on talking. After a while he came over and apologised but I took absolutely no notice whatsoever and carried on with what I was doing. Then, this girl and I decided that we’d go for a walk together. I found out then that the reason why she’d come into the doctor’s surgery was also because of the strongest radio signal. We went for this walk and it went just around this particular area where the radio signal was. But shortly later, we found ourselves out of the town, sitting down in a lay-by. We were having something of a picnic. My brother came up again and dropped some kind of map on the table. He said that the next day, he was going on a tour around the power stations of Yorkshire, and mentioned one or two. I pretended to be interested, but I wasn’t really, and carried on talking to this girl. After a while, we decided that we’d both get on my motorbike and head back into town and make plans to do something extremely similar the next day

So not only do I Get the Girl last night, I manage to put the family in its place too. That’s a rare event for a dream and I wish that I could do it more often.

The bit about the medical examination in the public waiting room of the doctor’s surgery is interesting, and I would love to know the significance of it.

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in on her last day before her week’s break. She took my temperature, and it’s now down to normal. She wasn’t impressed when I told her that I hadn’t taken the doliprane, but I stuck to my guns all the same.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE.

It’s not just pottery where the developments have been quite surprising. Talking about wheelwrights for example, he tells us that "at the bottom of Pit LXX, which, from its pottery, had evidently belonged to the later period, lay the remains of a large wheel. It had been, on the whole, coarser and heavier than the wheels found in Pit XXIII,"

It really is surprising, this. Two possible explanations may be that the potters and wheelwrights had so much work that they were obliged to recruit less-trained assistants or, chillingly, some kind of cataclysm in the Western Empire had seen the wiping out of the skilled craftsmen, leaving their untrained assistants behind.

There are probably a dozen other explanations too.

Back in here, I had a radio programme to review before I sent it off, and then my Welsh homework followed it into the “out” box.

Finally, I could revise my Welsh but here wasn’t much time.

My faithful cleaner turned up to apply my anaesthetic, followed by a neighbour who was also having a lot of trouble trying to have a fibre-optic connection installed.

There wasn’t much I could do for him, and after my cleaner left, I awaited the taxi.

It was early for once, but it made no difference as we had other people to pick up and drop off, so we were still pretty much at the same time as usual.

Here, I had my discussion about the weight. They were pretty much unmoved by my pleading, although in the end I managed to have it increased to 300 grammes – not a lot but nevertheless …

They left me pretty much alone today, although Emilie the Cute Consultant came to give me a prescription for these antibiotics – the original, presumably, being lost.

The taxi was waiting for me when I finished and, after dropping off someone in Sartilly, we came home. My faithful cleaner was waiting for me and she helped me into the apartment. After she left, I warmed up the other half-pizza and ate it, even if I didn’t feel like it. And now, I’m off to bed. I’m absolutely exhausted and I’ve fallen asleep twice already

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about pleading … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once asked a friend why my pleading never seemed to work.
"Let’s face it" he said. "You’re such a miserable pleader."

Thursday 22nd January 2026 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day it’s been today.

And for a change, I’m not going to start with “As I have said before …” because you are probably just as fed up of reading it as I am of typing it and as I am of it happening.

But I really was quite ill yesterday. As I mentioned, it was some time shortly after 20:00 (and had I not fallen asleep in the chair after I’d finished my notes, it might well have been not so long after 20:00 too) when I climbed into bed, fully clothed, threw the bedding over me and went straight to sleep.

And there I stayed until all of … errr … 02:30.

After that, I lay there, trying to make myself as comfortable as possible and, if possible, go back to sleep but, I thought, without much success. However, it certainly wasn’t four hours later when the alarm went off at 06:29, so at some point, I must have dozed off to sleep for a couple of hours without realising it.

It took quite a while, much longer than it ought, to extricate myself from underneath the covers, and then I staggered into the bathroom. At least, I was feeling a little better than I was last night.

In the kitchen, I made my hot drink and took my medication, and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was in the USA last night and had ended up in a motel where I was waiting for my friends to arrive. The receptionist was a rather simple boy who couldn’t speak very well and I had a great deal of difficulty understanding him. There was an old black-and-white film on the television about a group of people, men and women, who were escaping from somewhere. One or two of them were caught and were rescued. The film was probably from the early 1930s and it was an interesting one so I was trying to watch it but this boy kept on interrupting me. He mentioned something and I said “well, that’s pretty small beer really” to which he said “yes, we have nine of those”. Then he had to open the door for the stairs up to the rooms to let a dog out but the dog came down, looked around, and went back upstairs again so he closed it. At some point, I’d left the motel and ended up in Montreal. I went to look at this huge basilica that was built of brick and was going to photograph it but I couldn’t find a place to park the car. Everywhere was “no parking” and there were one or two police patrols so I thought that I would have to come back and do this on foot again, but I couldn’t think when I’d be able to. I drove a little out of town to try to find a place to see if I could have a good view with a telephoto lens but I noticed that time was running on so I had to abandon that idea too. Then I was walking back to the railway station. The streets were crowded and I was trying to watch this film as I was walking but the film kept on freezing and when it began to move again, it had actually finished. It was really disappointing for me that I’d missed the end. But outside one of the big stores in Montreal was a guy with a barrow with all kinds of things on it from the store such as pencils, paper, writing pads, sweets and everything. As I walked past, I thought that maybe I’d buy a bag of sweets or something to take with me on the train. I thought that I had five minutes so I nipped into the store. It was something like Woolworth’s or British Home Stores. Despite a good search, I couldn’t find where all of the sweets were and I began to feel rather disappointed that I’d have nothing to take with me on the train.

There’s a story about a motel in Flagstaff, Arizona, where I stayed in 2002, that relates to this, but the World isn’t ready to hear it and I doubt if it ever will be. As for the basilica, the big brick-built basilica is actually the Basilique Nationale du Sacré-Cœur at Koekelberg on the northern edge of Brussels and although the view of it and its situation that I had in this dream is nothing like its actual situation, it’s very similar to its situation in a dream that I had a few months ago.

I’d been to Manchester with my niece’s eldest daughter. We’d been roaming around the different TV studios. We’d seen several performances being recorded and we’d even seen a football match taking place in one of the studios there between Llanelli and Y Barri. On the way back, we bumped into one of my father’s friends from Winsford who asked us if we’d had a good time, what we’d done and where we’d been. I noticed that gradually he was separating my niece’s daughter from me and having a very intimate chat with her at the other end of the street. I wondered what was happening between the two of them and what was going on.

This is a kind of situation that I could easily imagine, had it been a different girl (not a daughter of my niece) and a different friend of my father. But the indoor football match is “interesting”, to say the least. There are very few full-size indoor stadia in the World, and certainly none in the JD Cymru League.

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in as usual to sort out my legs. She was her usual chatty self but didn’t stay long. I could then go on to make breakfast and read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE

James Curle is still telling us about pottery – it seems that there’s a long way to go in this. And I’ve learned two interesting facts about Roman pottery –
Firstly, pottery from the earlier period of the occupation at Trimontium (up to, say, 120 AD) is of better quality than the later period (from, say, 140 AD until 180 AD). That’s unusual. You’d expect it to be the reverse.
Secondly, even in 1909, the examination and cataloguing of Roman pottery had reached such an intense degree that even without the potter’s stamp on his wares, they were able in many cases to identify the potter, his workshop and even the period during which he was working.

Back in here, I had a few things to do and then I made a start on writing the notes for the next radio programme. But I had noticed that my health was starting to slip back again and my cough, which had calmed down for a moment, had now returned with a vengeance.

My cleaner turned up as usual to apply my anaesthetic, and after she left, I waited for the taxi to take me to dialysis, all the time feeling weaker and weaker.

It was actually quite a struggle to walk to the car and even more of a struggle at the other end to walk to my bed. By now, I was freezing cold and eventually, they were obliged to bring me a blanket.

That made very little difference, so they took my temperature – thirty-seven point seven degrees. The nurse telephoned the doctor, who told her to check it again in an hour.

After an hour, during which I became even worse, she checked the temperature again. This time, it was thirty-eight point four degrees. She telephoned the doctor again and Emilie the Cute Consultant came a-running.

She performed various examinations (including a Covid test, which was negative) and took several samples and said that she’d let me have the results tomorrow and that she’d send any prescription necessary directly to my chemist.

When the taxi came for me, I could barely walk out to it. It was a most undignified stagger. However, I made sure that the driver wore a face mask because I don’t want to infect her with whatever I’ve caught. When I sent my message to my cleaner giving her an idea of when I’d be back, I told her to wear a face mask too.

While I was at it, I sent a message to Isabelle the Nurse to tell her to wear a mask when she calls tomorrow. I don’t want her to spread my viruses around her patients.

When I arrived back here, it was 19:20, and by 19:25, I was in bed, fully-clothed yet again. There was just time to take off my shoes, but no time (or desire) to make any food. Once in bed, my cleaner threw the quilt over me and went on her way, and I went straight to sleep.

Round about 23:30, I awoke, and thought that it might be a good idea if I were to post an entry to say that at least, I’m still alive. Alison must have read it quite quickly because we ended up having a little chat about our health problems. She has a few of her own right now. We’re all growing old and it’s sad.

After that, I settled down again and waited to go back to sleep.

But before I doze off again, seeing as we have been talking about face masks … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once asked someone why it was that doctors and nurses always wear face masks around the hospital.
"Is it to prevent the spread of infection?" they asked.
"Oh no" I replied. "It’s that if ever they make a mistake or do something wrong, you can’t identify them and bring them into Court."

Thursday 15th January 2026 – I’M FED UP …

… of all of this, that’s for sure.

This afternoon, I arrived at the dialysis centre at 13:50. I was finally plugged in at … errr … 15:10. That’s one hour and twenty minutes that I had to hang around like Piffy on a Rock. As if I don’t have anything better to do than to wait on their convenience.

That’s how it has been today, one thing after another after another. It started off last night when I ended up going late for tea and not actually finishing until 23:30 or thereabouts everything that I needed to do.

With this racking cough that is still not improving and a nose that’s flowing like a stream in full flood, I didn’t really have all that much of a good sleep either. I did in fact go to sleep rather quickly, but I kept on waking throughout the night with a desperate desire to cough.

When the alarm went off, it was a desperate struggle to leave the bed and it took me quite a while to summon up the energy and make an effort to go to the bathroom, where I had a good wash and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant.

After the hot drink and the medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out what had gone on during the night.

I was in the hospital again. I’d been staying there for a while and they had changed my mattress around so that it would have sides of even wear rather than all going to be bogged down on one side. However, as soon as I changed my position to the other side of the bed, it was like being in a different bed and I ended up with a second lot of flowers, which was not what I expected. I didn’t really know what to do and how to react to this kind of thing, and especially the two deliveries of flowers, one for each side of the bed, that I’d had. That was becoming complicated.

That’s the problem with my mattress here. I turned it once, but now both sides are worn and it really does need replacing. As for the hospital and the flowers, I wonder what they are doing here.

Later on, I was driving my taxi around Shavington in the Basford neighbourhood, I suppose. There was something about a couple of red roses in the middle of the road. I’ve no idea why, and that’s all that I remember of this particular dream, unfortunately.

So I’m back to driving taxis again. I’ve not done that for a week or so. But flowers yet again. There’s definitely something happening today with those.

And then there was a third dream. It was about a university meeting, and there were hundreds, if not a couple of thousand, people there milling around. They were talking about plans for the forthcoming year etc., and then we had to go along and choose a place to stay on a student exchange for two weeks. They had all kinds of guides to help you choose, notebooks and music etc. I went straight over there and began to liberate all of the RUNRIG cassettes because where I was hoping to go was that I’d heard that there was an exchange to the Outer Hebrides or to an island almost out as far as the High Arctic. I was determined to be on that regardless. Once I’d collected all of these cassettes, I wandered round but couldn’t find any tutors. I asked a couple of people but no-one else could find them. They had all disappeared, so I wondered what was going to happen next – we needed to be allocated rooms, we needed to be fed etc. Then I suddenly realised that I’d been walking around without my crutches so I went back to where I’d been sitting. The girl who had been sitting next to me was there so I gave her a wave and said to her “you’re in trouble”. She asked why, and I explained that it was for letting me walk around here like this without my crutches. We had a little comment about it. Then I saw that the food was arriving so I went, but it was only the dessert. I couldn’t really see any vegan desserts so I had to hope that what I’d chosen was a dessert. Then the main course arrived, but it didn’t look very healthy. It was mashed potatoes and a kind of meat stew, something like that. It was strange that they had put the dessert first and the main course second. I couldn’t help it – I was nibbling away at my dessert rather than helping myself to a main course. I noticed that there was a vegetarian option but no vegan option. Everyone seemed to be taking lumps out of the vegetarian one rather than the vegan. There was also a starter there that was placed in the third position but that had nothing but cheese on it. There was no vegan cheese either. I couldn’t help but nibble on my dessert instead of trying to organise a main course. I was beginning to feel extremely frustrated by this time – not being able to find a tutor, not being able to register my choice of student exchange, not having any real meal to eat, and finding myself automatically nibbling on a dessert first. This wasn’t the kind of situation that I was hoping for.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have visited this island in the past during a nocturnal ramble. It doesn’t have a name but it’s right out of place, where it was during that previous dream.

But how many times is this that I’ve dreamed of walking without my crutches? It’s probably a good dozen or so. And then having one of these attacks of uncertainty that I have sometimes during the night. But dreaming about food is an unusual twist to this.

The nurse turned up early again and sorted out my legs. He didn’t stay long and I could push on and make breakfast. And to read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE.

James Curle has now started his excavations but is still setting the scene. He has, however, now worked out that the reason that the Roman fort wasn’t put in the most logical place, as I mentioned yesterday, was that there are the remains of a huge Roman camp there. and he’ll be excavating that in due course.

After breakfast, I gave in an inch to fear and went one better than David Crosby. Probably because, having had the ‘flu for Christmas, I’m not feeling up to par and it just increases my paranoia, like looking at my mirror and seeing a police car.

Back in here, there was post to deal with, a package that needed returning and a few other bits and pieces. Once I’d done that, I began to do some more work on the radio programme that I’d started the other day.

There wasn’t much time to do very much but nevertheless, I made a certain amount of progress before my cleaner came in to apply the anaesthetic on my arm. While she was here, she busied herself with a few small tasks about the place, seeing as she hadn’t been here on Tuesday, and then she wandered off, leaving me to wait for the taxi. I came back in here to carry on with the radio programme.

The taxi was a couple of minutes late coming for me, and then we had to drive out to the back of beyond to “rescue the perishing” – pick up someone else and take him to dialysis too. Consequently, we were several minutes late arriving.

Once I’d weighed myself, I installed myself in my bed and waited. And waited.

There was another new girl there today being given instruction by one of the experienced nurses. Consequently everything was done by the book with procedures rigorously obeyed. On top of that, another one of the patients, already plugged in, had a crisis so everyone downed tools and rushed to her aid.

The delay was such that the afternoon coffee was served long before I was even plugged in, so I had to sit and look at it while I waited.

Eventually it was my turn to be plugged in and, once more, it was all done by the book. As a result, it was 15:10 when my machine was finally switched on and running. I’d been waiting one hour and twenty minutes. To add insult to injury, the internet there was down so there wasn’t a great deal I could do, except to drink my now-cold coffee and read a few papers about ancient roads.

Actually, that was quite interesting because the author contends that roads such as “Dere Street”, once north of the Roman outpost camps north of Hadrian’s Wall, are not Roman at all but ancient prehistoric trackways used by the Romans. He contends that they do not show the typical characteristics of Roman roads, and they aren’t mentioned in the Iter Britanniarum.

He seems however not to have considered that if the Iter Britanniarum had not been written during the reign of Antoninus Pius but later, as several people suspect, it’s likely that the Antonine Wall between the Clyde and the Forth had been abandoned by the time the Iter Britanniarum was written, and so there wouldn’t be any Romans likely to be going beyond the outpost forts so there would be no need for a route guide for those roads.

During the session, the new nurse kept on asking me if I was OK, not that it made any difference, and although Emilie the Cute Consultant was the doctor on duty today, she sent a messenger to ask me how it went in Paris. I replied that it was as expected – there had been a deterioration in my condition – and I expected that once the news reached her, she would come dashing to my side to soothe my fevered brow. But she clearly doesn’t love me any more.

Eventually, they unplugged me, totally by the book of course, and by then it was 18:50. I’d been there for five hours for a session of three-and-a-half. As if I don’t have anything better to do with my time. Luckily, my chauffeur was waiting and she drove me home quite rapidly.

It beats me what’s going on there at times, because it always seems to be that no matter what time I arrive and in what order, I’m almost always the last to be connected and it really is getting on my wick.

There was a howling gale again and a driving rainstorm outside when we arrived so I was dropped off at the back outside the fire escape where there are only three or four paces to walk into the building. And being helped by my faithful cleaner, it was quite a comfortable walk.

After my cleaner left, I made tea, horribly late again after all of this. Rice and veg with a taco roll full of spicy Mexican beans and mushrooms. However, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have done because I fell asleep three times while I was trying to eat.

Back in here, I made a start on the notes for the day but having fallen asleep twice while trying to type and seeing that what I was writing was a load of gibberish … "nothing new there" – ed … I threw in the towel and went to bed.

But seeing as we have been talking about cutting our hair … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of once being at work when I absented myself for half an hour and the boss wondered where I had been.
"Having my hair cut" I replied
"What? In the company’s time?"
"Well, it grew in the company’s time, didn’t it?"
"It didn’t all grow in the company’s time"
"Well, I’ve not had all of it cut off!"

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: avranches

Monday 9th March 2026 – WHATEVER COULD HAVE …

Thursday 5th March 2026 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Monday 2nd March 2026 – ANOTHER EXCITING DAY …

Thursday 26th February 2026 – TOTAL, ABSOLUTE CHAOS …

Monday 23rd February 2026 – I AGAIN FELL …

Thursday 19th February 2026 – HAVING JUST FALLEN …

Monday 16th February 2026 – JUST FOR ONCE …

Thursday 12th February 2026 – IT WAS HARD …

Monday 9th February 2026 – AFTER LAST NIGHT’S …

Thursday 5th February 2026 – FOR THE FIRST …

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 – THEY SAY THAT …

Monday 2nd February 2026 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

Monday 26th January 2026 – AS I SUSPECTED …

Thursday 22nd January 2026 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

Thursday 15th January 2026 – I’M FED UP …

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