Tag Archives: baked potatoes

Saturday 4th October 2025 – WHAT A DREADFUL …

… twenty-four hours this has been.

Round about 02:30 this morning, the wind started to blow up. By about 04:00, we were having gusts of over 100 kph and it’s not let up since.

And seeing as I now live at the front of the building, I’m having the lot rattling against my windows, and I’d forgotten just how noisy a howling gale can be.

It was looking quite good though earlier in the evening. I’d finished my work a good while before 23:00 and I’d climbed into bed with an air of optimism … "makes a change from a hot water bottle" – ed … hoping to have a decent sleep for once.

Once in bed, I was asleep quite quickly, but it didn’t last. I awoke as the wind began to rise, and although I fell asleep again shortly afterwards, by about 04:00 I was awake and had given up all hope of going back to sleep.

Having said that, at one point I did actually go back to sleep but I was wide awake again at 06:00 and at that point, I arose from the Dead and headed off for a wash and shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon.

After the medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night and if I had been able to persuade one (or more) of my favourite young ladies to put in an appearance.

I was doing something with some kind of newspaper. There had been some issues with a couple of women over something, that were not connected to the newspaper at all. I’d actually witnessed something so I was ready to make a statement before the police, but this newspaper launched a big personal attack on me, basically to say that if I were to go before the police and make some kind of statement, then they had plenty of statements that they could make about me. I wasn’t sure what they meant, and in any case, that was a wicked thing to say. However, I decided that I’d publish in my newspaper these letters that I’d received, in the headlines, and that way, I could control them without any kind of problem. But the offence concerned related to offences against a certain man. They mentioned his name but I can’t remember it now.

The centre of France was rather lawless with people with objections making up the rules as they went along. I had four litres of milk on hand at Virlet but I was told by a troop, one of Barber’s troops, to empty it all away because somehow lying unattended on a battlefield could be extremely dangerous, so they extracted this promise from me. But it made life difficult because every time I was coming to the hoarder, and the hoarding was at the top of the list, I was stopped and thoroughly searched. But my ankle right at the time who was resigned was never searched, and neither was the bass guitarist woman who actually played together in the concert drive. It seemed to be that they were just targeting me and no-one else in this.

As I mentioned the other day, sometimes I have no recollection whatever of some of my dreams, and these two certainly fit in to that category. I can’t remember anything at all about them. But did you like the archaic use of the word “before” in the first dream?

We were in Crewe last night and we were planning on setting up some kind of radio post in a motel there. So we checked the equipment that we had. We had the radio, of course, and we had a suppressor to act as an aerial and a few other things like that. Someone else brought with him another receiver so that we could boost the power, and then we set off. We turned from Gresty Road into Davenport Avenue, and there were the two new houses on the corner. There was a third one in the far corner, a small detached house, with access into the garden of one of the houses next door. I explained that this was bought by the family to house one of their daughters who had grown up. She lived there but she had communication and shared facilities with her family. We walked past one of these signboards where the American President had several of his statements and his Truth Social account, and every time you wrote something in this book on this table, one of his Truth Social things sprung up. The one that I noticed was “only half the water on the earth is due to water”. We saw some of the comments and some of them were hilarious. We were thinking that we hope that this book will be available in a thousand years time to show the people just how stupid the current times were. Then we went to set up in our hotel but for some reason, every time the radio was plugged in, it kept on screeching. Changing the amplitude of the aerial didn’t seem to help. The person with us said that he couldn’t possibly couple up his radio to this network with this noise happening. We’d have to try to think of a way to overcome it but that was going to be complicated.

When our family moved from Shavington in 1970, we settled in Davenport Avenue in a house right on the corner with Gresty Road. I know the patch of land on which the new houses were built. Furthermore, I reckon that I know the girl referred to in the dream. She and her family lived in one of the houses in Gresty Road just before you turn in to Davenport Avenue.

As for the American President and the stupid current times, I try to keep politics off these pages but someone clinically insane in charge of the most powerful country in the World, another madman trying to turn the clock back to 1940, and another group of people committing a genocide of a magnitude that the World hasn’t seen for 1400 years, all of which while the rest of the World looks hopelessly and helplessly on, I’m glad that I shan’t be around to see how it all transpires.

Finally, I’d been doing some things around this stately home for some reason or another. I’d begun to chat to the daughter of the owners. She was in my opinion a very nice girl, not the kind of girl that you would normally meet when you are dealing with the aristocracy. We began to see each other on a very informal basis. One day, I was round at their house early one morning to take her to work but there was a commotion somewhere. I rushed to see what it was, and at first I thought that it was the Lord and his son who were being attacked. However, they were sitting there quite nonchalantly, not having heard anything. Then we heard some screams coming from across the lawn. In another wing of the house, the butler or whatever was trying to defend it from some burglars. The burglars came running out, we rushed over, and there was the mess. Once we’d tidied it up, I happened to notice that there was a film playing on the video recorder, one of the INSPECTOR HORNLEIGH FILMS so I stood and watched it for a few minutes; Then I thought that I had to take this girl to work, so I tried to stop the video recorder, but I couldn’t see the “stop” button or a “pause” button so after a few minutes, I ejected the cassette and then I went upstairs. The girl was waiting for me, and she was not very happy. She said that if we had gone as soon as I had turned up, which was what she wanted to do, she would have been at work for six minutes already. I could only apologise, but I felt that it wasn’t going to be enough. But one thing that I noticed was her perfume. She had on this lovely perfume and that’s something else that I can still smell it now, this perfume.

It beats me where this one has come from too. But the Inspector Hornleigh films, the vastly underrated Gordon Harker with his sidekick, a very young Alistair Sim, are amongst my all-time favourite black-and-white films.

And the perfume was gorgeous too.

Isabelle the Nurse blew in with the wind, sorted out my legs and then blew out again, so I could make breakfast and read some more of BATTLES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

The American Army is half-starved, unclothed, unpaid and near mutiny. But even so, the British still refuse to sally out of their camps to press home an advantage. It’s as if they have given up all hope and are waiting for a miracle. It makes very depressing reading.

Our author, Colonel Carrington, is however also hilarious. He has a complete and utter failure to recognise irony when he sees it. He tells us that General Greene detached General Morgan to, inter alia "collect provisions and forage, form magazines, prevent plundering, etc."

Maybe someone ought to explain to Colonel Carrington that the difference between "collect(ing) provisions and forage" and "plundering" is “who is doing it?”. When an army is plundering, it’s called "collecting provisions" but when a starving private soldier is collecting provisions, it’s called "plundering."

Back in here, I carried on with my notes for this radio programme and it’s now all finished, ready for dictating if I’m up early tomorrow. But I probably won’t be. I’m really exhausted after today and the bad night last night.

My faithful cleaner was late to come and apply the anaesthetic, and shortly after she left, there was a knock at the window. I thought that it was the taxi coming early but it was in fact the tenant of one of the holiday homes in the building who had locked himself out. I could have done without that.

The taxi was late again and in the howling gale, it took me ten minutes to walk to the car, hanging on grimly to my crutches and the driver. It was no fun at all.

There was someone else to pick up too, out in the back of beyond, so all in all we were horribly late arriving.

They put me in a different room today, but I had no peace. The low blood pressure alarm went off every half-hour and the nurses came a-running, poor things. Not that it did any good though.

For a change, I was reading about the battlefield clearances ofter World War I, the hunt for bodies and the consolidation of smaller cemeteries into larger ones. It made some quite gruesome reading and I’ll probably be having nightmares about it in the very near future.

Bodies are still being discovered in Flanders Field, on the Somme and elsewhere even today. As recently as eighteen years ago, a mass grave was discovered with about two hundred and fifty Australian soldiers in it.

As seems to be the case these days, I was left to be the last to be unplugged. Consequently, I was once more horribly late returning home.

My faithful cleaner and the driver had to help me to the apartment, in view of the wind, and I was glad to be back inside, even if it is cold right now.

Tea was a baked potato with a burger on a bun, and once more, even though I cooked a smaller portion, I left food on my plate. This is not very much fun at all. There’s definitely something wrong somewhere.

But that’s to worry about tomorrow. Right now, I’m off to bed. Sunday is a lie-in until 08:00 of course, but we’ll have to wait and see. If this wind keeps up, it will be most unlikely.

And seeing as we have been talking about the archaic use of the word "before" … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of once upon a time when I uttered an expletive in front of some rather posh lady.
A short while later, her husband came to see me. "how dare you swear before my wife?"
"I’m terribly sorry" I replied. "I had no idea that she wanted to go first."

Saturday 27th September 2025 – THIS HEALTH ISSUE …

… that I mentioned the other day is still continuing. I’m feeling absolutely wasted right now and wish that I could just climb into bed and go to sleep, and forget about everything.

What makes it worse is that I had another decent sleep last night. I might not have been in bed so early but I managed to sleep right the way through until the alarm went off. There had been a couple of times during the night when I remember tossing and turning about, but I managed to go back to sleep again quite quickly afterwards.

As usual, it took a while for me to raise myself from the Dead but I picked up my bed and walked to the bathroom for a good wash and scrub up, and even a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant today.

After the medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone, and I was surprised by how much there was to hear. It was late in the afternoon and I needed to have a bath, so I decided to go into work where I usually had a bath at the time. I arrived there and it was just like at school, with many of my colleagues and classmates hanging around there trying to do some work. As I walked in, I overheard someone asking about STRAWBERRY MOOSE – did anyone know where he was. I piped up to say that I had him, which made everyone realise that I’d arrived at last. I went to sit by my bed, which was already being filled with water, but one of my classmates came over and he climbed into my bath. He stood there up to his feet. We had a little chat, and then I pulled out the plug, saying “right, you have to go now because I’m having a bath”. He moaned and groaned and then left. There were some clothes on my bed which were now soaking wet so I asked “whose are these?”. My brother piped up, saying that they were his. When he came to see them, he had a moan too about them being wet. He said that I’d done it deliberately. I told him that if I had had the time to arrive here, sort out a few things, fill the bed with water and then drain it all out again in the time that I’d actually been here, I must be doing really, really well. He took his clothes away with something of a moan. I began to chat to the little girl in the bed next to her, but as I turned my back and turned round a minute or two later, my brother was bringing a mortmain bag over, the kind of thing into which you put bodies that have died in a hospital. I wondered what had happened to that girl in the minute that my back had been turned. I thought that I’d wait until my brother has packed her in and then gone away until I could open the bag again to have a look to make sure in fact that she is still dead.

Mortmain is a French term that was common in post-Conquest England. It literally means “dead hand” of course but in those days, it was used to describe the type of holding that a body such as the Church would have, holding properties that were not governed by the usual laws of inheritance. So whatever its significance might be when discussing the death of a girl in the bed next to me, I really don’t know.

However, that’s how my friend Marianne died. I sat by her side for almost six months, watching her fade away as the cancer spread. But I was called away from her bedside to answer a telephone call. There was no-one on the line and when I returned to her side, she had died in that minute.

As for the rest of this dream, apart from the appearance of one of my family, the rest is meaningless. But then again, you expected that.

Later on, I’d been out for a ride on a little 50cc moped. I’d gone out towards Wrexham way, and I’d kept on meeting all of the little mini service buses coming back as I was riding. I travelled so far, and then I turned back. I was listening to a news report about one of the buses while I was busy chasing one on the bike. It was talking about someone who had taken a series of photos of the interior of what was said to be one of their buses and was using them in a campaign about some kind of ill child. Although the interior in the photos resembled very much one of their buses, the people who owned the buses were convinced that it was not one of theirs and wondered what had been going on with this coach trip with this disabled person on board. Gradually, I ended up behind another person on a motorbike. It was interesting because with the two motorbikes limited to 30 mph, I was passing him in certain places and he was passing me in certain places, but on an uphill stretch he managed to pull away from me. At a certain point, we came across a car that was on fire. It looked as if it was at the bottom of Gresty Road at the foot of the hill on the way up to Gresty. It was blazing away. We heard on the news that they were asking for the person’s relatives, to ask where this person was. Someone suggested that he was in the Cheshire Cheese in Gresty, although they called it Caws Sir Gaer of course in Welsh. But this car that was blazing, it had some flashing orange lights on the roof. They weren’t horizontal like many flashing lights but there were two of them set vertically, these banks of orange lights, and it looked totally strange to me.

Apart from the dream in Welsh, this dream didn’t mean all that much to me either. Consequently, seeing as I have been playing around with Artificial Intelligence recently, I asked an AI Bot what it had to say about it. Its reply was "Dreams about cars on fire often suggest turbulence or transformation in your drive, path, or personal ambitions. The exact meaning depends on your emotions in the dream and what’s happening in your life, but it typically signals strong feelings or changes needing attention. If the dreams recur or feel disturbing, consider exploring what real-life worries or transitions might be influencing your subconscious.".

Exploring my subconscious is a job for this psychiatrist person, so we’ll leave it to whoever pulls the short straw. However, these dream analysts don’t mean all that much because the whole point of this project when it started twenty-five years ago was that dreams couldn’t be analysed like this.

Finally, I was with my niece last night and her husband. We were doing something to the brakes of one of my cars, and we found that we needed a certain nut to hold on the brake pipe into the brake calliper. He had a few cars lying around so we went and went to take one off one of them. Of course, with the flared end on the brake pipe, we couldn’t pass the nut over the end. After a few minutes pondering over this, we began to reassemble it. I thought that my niece’s husband could post over from Canada the parts that I needed at some time if I were to ask him. While we were trying to reassemble this brake pipe into the car, the owner turned up. My niece gave him some story about checking it over for its annual safety check and that we’d be finished soon, but I couldn’t make this nut start up onto the threads on the calliper onto where it would fasten, no matter how I tried. I thought that for a simple job like this, it’s going to take me hours.

My niece will, hopefully, be here in a few weeks, but I doubt if she’ll be bringing with her any brake parts. Tinkering about with cars, though, was something that we did quite often over in Canada and, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … how I wish that I was over there now.

The nurse came early this morning. He gave me the last one of this series of injections, sorted out my feet and legs, and then cleared off, leaving me to make breakfast and read some more of BATTLES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

The British have succeeded now in dislodging the Americans from their best defensive positions on Long Island and are preparing to inflict upon them a vital disaster. However, as in the American retreat from Québec, the British are far too slow to follow up and press home their victory against demoralised and disorganised part-time soldiers.

Back in here, there were the highlights of last night’s game between Y Bala and TNS, and Llanelli and Hwlffordd. It goes without saying that TNS beat Y Bala, but Llanelli beat Hwlffordd, pushed the latter down into the bottom position and climbed out of the relegation zone, something that looked most unlikely three weeks ago.

My cleaner came along and sorted me out as usual, and for once, the taxi was early. However, it was to no avail because firstly, we had to pick up another passenger, and secondly, the patient connected before me had so many difficulties being connected – even the doctor was called -that they kept me hanging on.

13:30 was when I arrived, and it was 14:20 when I was finally connected up.

It was about an hour later that I crashed out, and then I was groggy for quite some time afterwards. It was a tough day there, all in all.

Luckily, I was uncoupled straight away and my taxi driver was waiting too, so I wasn’t all that late returning home.

My faithful cleaner was waiting for me as usual and helped me into the apartment where, after she had gone, I crashed out again. For fifteen minutes, this time.

Tea was baked potato, salad and breadcrumbed quorn fillet, and now I’m off to bed, thoroughly wasted and totally fed up. I hope that I feel better tomorrow.

But seeing as we have been talking about the American defeat on Long Island … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of the American Generals spotted some of his rearguard digging a trench instead of covering the retreat.
"What’s going on here?" he asked
"Well, sir" explained one of the privates "it’s a last-ditch attempt to stop the enemy."

Saturday 13th September 2025 – JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT …

… last night, I suddenly awoke, with another one of these quite dramatic awakenings.

And about five seconds after I awoke, I received a message on the telephone. It really was an astonishing coincidence, almost as if awakening five seconds before the message was in anticipation of its arrival.

It wasn’t all that much beforehand that I’d actually come to bed, after another one of the slow, depressing evenings that I seem to be having these days. And I was so tired, yet again, that I must have gone off quite rapidly to sleep. It’s a shame that I couldn’t have remained asleep, though, but then that’s what usually happens.

It took an age to go back to sleep too, but once I’d slipped into the arms of Morpheus, there I stayed until the alarm sounded. And that woke me up quite dramatically too, I can tell you.

At that moment, we were back in World War I when the Germans were storming a trench full of Greek soldiers. They had launched a few shells into a few Greek pill-boxes and stormed the trenches. There were piles of dead people around, so they went through, identified the wounded and shot them on the spot. There was one person who was a British officer leading a Greek troop. They questioned him about a few different things but as he didn’t have the correct answers to what they wanted, they shot him too. But we were working somewhere behind the lines, watching a captive balloon or Zeppelin or something that had escaped from its moorings and was flying at a very low height around the edge of the cliffs. We were worried that it would collide with the church steeple, so we were trying to work out a way, if we could, of diverting it away because if we were to fire at it, it would explode and that would make more damage. In the meantime, we had been repairing a few watches and things like that. We actually had one working, but then we decided that we weren’t happy so we dismantled it to have another attempt. At this moment, the girls came along and looked at what we were doing. They couldn’t understand why we had decided to do it a second time. I was talking to one of the guys about new technology and how powerful it was. He was saying that how he wished that he had bought a new 2GB memory stick while their prices were low, because a new 2GB one these days would cost $64. I replied that a 64GB one would only cost $2, the way that technology is going these days.

There’s a bit of everything in there. The bit about colliding with the steeple relates to a discussion that I had the other day with one of the taxi drivers, when we were watching the Nazguls flying around near the spire of the Eglise Notre Dame de Lihou. As for the rest, it seems to relate to little snippets of conversation that I’ve had now and again with different people.

After the bathroom and the medication, I came back in here to transcribe the dictaphone notes, but as you have already read them, I needn’t have bothered mentioning it.

The nurse was next, still in his cheerful mood, and then it was breakfast and a new book.

While I was reading COLONEL CARRINGTON’S TESTIMONY, I noticed that he had written several others and so I began today to read his BATTLE MAPS AND CHARTS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that IN 2013 and 2014 I roamed up and down the Hudson Valley in Upstate New York visiting the sites of the battles of the Revolutionary War and also of the Seven Years War of 1756-1763, including the site of Fort William Henry, the fort that featured prominently in Fenimore Cooper’s LAST OF THE MOHICANS

One of the places that I visited in 2013 was Fort Ticonderoga, and I noticed from Carrington’s description of the siege of the fort that "The Americans neglected to fortify Sugar Loaf Hill", a prominent eminence overlooking the fort, ⁣strong>"deeming it inaccessible.".

You probably noticed just now that STRAWBERRY MOOSE and I walked quite comfortably to the top, and so did several other people. And there’s still a British cannon up there that the British Army managed to drag up the hill.

After breakfast, I came in here to begin a new radio programme, and in fact I’m currently working on two of them right now because, halfway through choosing the music for one, I realised that I’d missed one. Still, variety is the spice of life.

When my faithful cleaner came down to apply my anaesthetic cream, she brought with her my electronic drum kit. That was a one-day wonder, that was. I bought it as a challenge, something to do during lockdown, but my legs gave out before I was able to master it.

It was the boss who came to fetch me today and we had quite a quick drive down to Avranches. I was connected up quite quickly too and then I could concentrate on Y Barri v Y Bala.

Y Bala had only conceded four goals all season up to date, but Y Barri doubled that total with comparative ease and could (and should) have had a bagful more except for the inspired performance of former Salford City goalkeeper Joel Torrance.

It was nevertheless an exciting game and you can see the highlights HERE if you are of such a mind.

Although I finished my dialysis earlier than usual, I had to wait to be unplugged, and then finally the boss brought me back in the most astonishing rainstorm that was engulfing Avranches.

Ironically, it wasn’t raining at Granville when I returned. It was a nice, leisurely walk back to my apartment in the howling gale, which has now been blowing for several days.

For a change, Tea tonight was a burger with baked potato – one of those luxury burgers that are really delicious. And now, I’m off to bed in the hope of a good lie-in tomorrow. I need one after all of this.

But I forgot to mention my ‘phone message from during the night. It reads "(we) will see you Friday November 7 for a few days fly back on November 11.". This visit from Canada looks as if it may well be happening.

But seeing as we have been talking about Ticonderoga and The Last of the Mohicans … "well, one of us has" – ed … it was at Ticonderoga where I told my famous story to one of the American tour guides.
Sent on a spying mission by Colonel Munro to find out about the French forces in Fort Ticonderoga, Hawkeye and Chingachgook approach the fort very carefully
"How many soldiers do you think there are in the fort?" asked Hawkeye.
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground. "About 300" he replied
"And how many cannon?"
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground again. "About 30"
"And how many horses?"
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground yet again. "About 60"
"And how many native allies?"
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground once more. "About 200"
"That’s incredible" said Hawkeye. "Can you tell all that by just lying down and listening to the ground?"
"Ohh no" replied Chingachgook. "If I lie down here like this and turn my head so that my ear is to the ground just like this, I can see right underneath the gates of the fort"
The response of the tour guide was "that’s incredible! I never knew that Hawkeye and Chingachgook came to Ticonderoga. I shall have to amend the tourist leaflets."
Which just goes to show, as Alfred Hitchcock and Kenneth Williams once famously said, "it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners."

Saturday 6th September 2025 – WE HAVE A …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday 9th August 2025 – TODAY’S DIALYSIS SESSION …

… was slightly less painful than that of Thursday. Not by much though, it has to be said. I’m still quite dissatisfied as to how things are developing with all of this but there doesn’t seem to be very much that I, or anyone else for that matter, can do about it.

What probably didn’t help was that I was in a bad mood, and I was also desperately tired. I’d had another bad night last night.

At first though, it looked as if it was going to be quite good. I’d finished tea early and for some reason (maybe because I was rather more focused than usual) I didn’t take all that long to write up my notes.

By the time that I’d taken the statistics and backed up the computer it was only 22:30 and how nice it was to be in bed at that time for a change. And I was asleep quite quickly too.

However, it wasn’t to last. Round about 03:10 I awoke, and that was that. I couldn’t go back to sleep again. There I lay, vegetating in bed until about 05:00 when I gave it up as a bad job.

When the alarm went off at 06:29, I was already in the bathroom having a good wash. And that was after dictating the radio notes that I’d written the other day, and I’d already begun to edit them too.

After I’d washed and taken the morning’s medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Last night I was having my bath changed for a shower. My care assistant was a young girl. I was living in some kind of apartment in one of these big United States plantation houses of the Nineteenth Century, a type of thing like that, made of wood, very light. The bath was one of these freestanding units on feet, but I was having it taken out to be replaced by a shower. They hadn’t actually started work yet but this girl and I were discussing it. She was looking out of the window saying how she would love to be able to go out there and sit down in the sun, and abandon her job and the people for whom she was caring. Then she calmed down a little and said that when the shower room is done, there would be plenty of room in the bathroom. She could sit in there and admire the weather and the view because it was bound to be really nice in there in the sun.

There’s quite a bit in there that is relevant to what is going on in my life right now. And I have had that very same conversation, or one very much like it, with someone just recently. I’m surprised that it’s preying on my mind though.

Later on, I must have stepped back into that dream. My cleaner said that she wanted to go to sit out in the sun but I told her that when the bathroom had been finished it would be lovely in there and there would be much more room to move about. She could sit in the bathroom which would be just as pleasant, in order to admire the views

There is actually no window in my bathroom so you won’t be able to see very much outside. But there will be plenty of room in there, once I can find someone to take away the old bath that’s still in there. It’s advertised on the internet as to be taken away for free but as yet, there are no takers.

Isabelle the Nurse was late again … "although nothing like as late as yesterday" – ed … and as well as dealing with my legs, she had a look at the catheter in my chest and changed the dressing. And that made me squirm just to think about it.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of THE OLD ROAD.

Yesterday, I mentioned that his flamboyant style of writing was irritating me. But it’s not just his style of writing. What do you make of these two sentences, quite literally one immediately after the other? "The Old Road, as the reader has already seen, never during its course turns a sharp corner. It has to do so at Canterbury because it has been following a course upon the north bank of the Stour,".

He goes on to say "The Old Road falls, as we shall see, into Watling Street, a mile before the city, and enters the ecclesiastical capital by a sharp corner, comparable to the sharp corner at Headbourne Worthy in the exit from Winchester.".

Personally, I don’t know what it was that he was drinking but I could do with a drink of it myself.

There are however a few moments of extreme levity. After spending the night sleeping in an inn at Alresford, "next morning before daybreak, when we had satisfied the police who had arrested us upon suspicion of I know not what crime, we took the hill again and rejoined the Old Road."

After breakfast, I came in here and edited the radio notes right the way through to the end. And here I had a disaster. I was convinced that I had edited the music and had that been the case, I would have been just seven seconds over. However, it turned out that I hadn’t, and I was 48 seconds under when I had finished.

Not even I can pad out that much time, so I began to rewrite them.

Not that I progressed very far though, because my cleaner came along to fit my anaesthetic patches and to serve up a disgusting drink.

When I was ready, we went downstairs and began to unpack the boxes that I had packed the other day that my cleaner took down. She began to fill the CD and DVD shelves while I carried on sorting out the kitchen with the things that had come down.

The driver who came to pick me up was a couple of minutes late today and by that time I’d almost finished what I was doing. We had a quick drive down to Avranches in the beautiful August sunshine.

At the dialysis centre, we had another problem. They wanted to put me in the bed on which the mattress had collapsed, so I dug my heels in. Today though, the team on duty in the room consisted of Julie the Cook and Océane, and they swapped the bed over for another empty one.

Not that that one was all that much better either. I mustn’t be assembled correctly or something like that. What with the pain in my arm from the connection and the pain in my hip from the bed, by the time that the session finished, I was in a right old mess. I’d managed a sleep at first, but not for long. And in the end I had to abandon work as I was in too much agony to carry on.

The taxi was already waiting when the session finished, but it took the girls a good fifteen minutes to come to deal with me when my machine timed out, so I was no earlier coming home than I might otherwise have been.

My cleaner and I stayed downstairs for twenty minutes finishing off what we had started earlier and we also sorted out a few more things too. Now we have plenty more boxes for me to fill ready for Monday.

Just four more trips back up the stairs before I’m down there for good. And that’s just as well because I had a real struggle on the stairs tonight and I won’t be able to do it at all very soon. My cleaner has said that for her Friday session, she’ll work downstairs and have the place looking fine for when the removal begins, which was nice of her.

Tea tonight was a baked potato, vegan salad and breaded quorn fillet, and now I’m off to bed because I’m thoroughly wasted and I just want to sleep.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the police … "well, one of us has" – ed … Percy Penguin once asked me "are you a policeman?"
"No, I’m not, petal" I replied. "Why do you ask?"
"Every time that I see your name in the local newspaper" she said "it’s always about you helping the police with their enquiries."

Saturday 2nd August 2025 – TODAY’S DIALYSIS SESSION …

… was totally horrible.

Not so much the session but the aftermath. I was totally drained, totally exhausted and I felt as if the end of the World had come. When BILBO BAGGINS said "I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.", I knew exactly what he meant.

It wasn’t as if I’d had a particularly early start either. Although it was quite late by the time I finished my notes, the stats and the back-up, I slept all the way right through without moving until 06:20 – nine minutes before the alarm.

So while you admire a couple of photos of my freshly-painted living room, once more in a colour rather brighter than that which I had chosen, and with the curtain rail over the door in the wrong place, I shall tell you about my day.

When I awoke, I really was feeling rotten but a Herculean effort saw me sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet on the floor when the alarm went off at 06:29

But it didn’t galvanise me into action though. It classes as an early start because I was out of bed and with my feet in contact with the floor when the alarm went off, but that’s how it stayed for a good fifteen minutes.

Eventually, I managed to drag myself in some kind of undignified fashion into the bathroom where I had a good wash and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and I also hand-washed some clothes. With not having many clothes, I try to keep on top of things when I can.

In the kitchen, I dealt with the medication and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Jordan Davies had left Greenock Morton last night and had signed for a football club in Wales. His arrival was heralded by the club and they made a big issue out of it with headlines in the local paper etc. However, when he was on his way to the football ground to be greeted by the chairman etc, he was involved in a car crash and was killed. That was really the end of all of that. All of the celebrations were cancelled and it ended up being something of a really damp squib of an affair.

It’s no surprise that they would have cancelled the celebrations after that. However, this dream is a combination of two different things.

Actually, Jordan Davies has left Greenock Morton and yesterday he signed for Colwyn Bay AFC in the JD Cymru League. But the part about death in transit refers to Emiliano Sala, whose aeroplane crashed as he was flying from Nantes to play for Cardiff City in 2019.

Isabelle the Nurse came in a little later to deal with my injection, the last in this series, and to sort out my legs. There are all kinds of events taking place in the town tomorrow so she told me that she has no idea what time she will arrive.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

We’re still in Westminster, discussing inter alia the enormous list of famous and important people buried in Westminster Abbey.

But it’s John Stow’s little personal remarks that are so interesting and amusing. When he is talking about the raising of funds to rebuilt St Margaret’s Church, he tells us about King Henry III banning all trade in merchandise for fifteen days, which the citizens were obliged to redeem by paying the King two thousand pounds of silver because of the King "devising how to extort money from the citizens of London."

That’s nothing compared to his remarks concerning the revised works of Geoffrey Chaucer which were "twice increased through mine own painful labours" and "again beautified with notes by me." Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that if it weren’t for my own overwhelming modesty, I would be perfect, but not even I would write quite like that.

Still, if you have a trumpet, you may as well blow it.

As a matter of a more serious nature, he talks about the Great London Floods of 1236 and 1242. In the former flood, the Palace of Westminster was flooded and "men did row with wherries in the midst of the hall, being forced to ride to their chambers.". In the latter, "in the great hall of Westminster men took their horses because the water ran over it."

Back in here, I had some things to find to take downstairs and then I sorted out the photos from Thursday (which you have seen just now) and do it quickly too because my cleaner was coming early.

After she’d fitted my anaesthetic patches we measured all of the furniture in the living room, took one of the CD and DVD columns with us, and went downstairs with some masking tape to mark on the floor exactly where all of the furniture will go in the living room downstairs.

That’s important because the Saturday and the Monday afternoon, I’ll have dialysis and then on the Tuesday and Wednesday I’ll be having chemotherapy in Paris so anyone who will be here to help me will need to know where to put everything if I’m not here.

The chief driver of the taxi company turned up to collect me, and he was early too so it’s just as well that I was ready.

We arrived at Avranches much earlier than planned, and so as usual I had to wait an age to be seen and plugged it. At least, I had good company because Alexi looked after me today.

At first, I was really drowsy, due in no small measure to the fact that my blood pressure dropped to 7.7/5.6, which is about the lowest that it has been.

Once I’d recovered, I spent most of the afternoon trying to find a series of books called “The Paston Letters” – a book containing all of the correspondence issued by the Paston family in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century.

These six volumes are extremely important because firstly, they give an eyewitness report of the Wars of the Roses, as seen by the ordinary man in the street who suffered so much, and secondly, they cover the period of the evolution of the English language from Medieval English to Early Modern English and the official codification and standardisation of the language following the invention of William Caxton’s printing press.

As usual, having arrived early, I was late being disconnected and then I had to wait ten minutes for the taxi. Even then, the driver had another passenger to drop off at Brehal up the coast and she wanted to take him first, which annoyed me greatly but there wasn’t much that I could do about it.

Consequently, I was just as late coming home as I might otherwise have been had I left here late.

Climbing the stairs in my weakened state was awful and when I made it into here I had to sit down for half an hour to recover before I could make tea.

So a baked potato, vegan salad and breadcrumbed quorn slice later, I’m off to bed, totally wasted after all of my exertions. I really need to be downstairs as quickly as possible because I can’t keep on going like this. It’s awful.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the floods … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of the time of the Great Flood of Crewe a while back.
When the Municipal Buildings were flooded, they decided that they would take advantage of the situation and play a game of water polo.
"Was it a success?" I asked.
"Not really" came the reply. "Most of the horses drowned."

Saturday 26th July 2025 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… when the alarm went off at 06:29 this morning, I was still flat out, fast asleep in bed. And that’s something that hasn’t happened too often recently.

What I put it down to was the miserable night (if you can call it a night) that I’d had the night before when I’d had just about two and a half hours’ sleep, and odd cat-nap during the day. In fact, looking back on it, I’m surprised that I kept on going for as long as I did yesterday without too many signs of fatigue later in the day.

It wasn’t as if it had been a very late night either. I wasn’t sure what time it was when I finished my notes, the stats and the back-up, but it can’t have been many minutes after 23:00, if at all. And once again, I was asleep almost straight away, so tired was I.

But when I awoke this morning, once more I was drenched in sweat as all of this chemotherapy stuff that they pumped into me in Paris slowly fights its way out of my body. This is not a pleasant situation in which to be.

It was a struggle to leave the bed before the second alarm but I managed it, and then headed off to the bathroom for a good wash and shave, in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant at the dialysis centre.

Once more, it was quite a leisurely start to the day and it was about 07:40 by the time that I finally finished my medication and made it back into here.

Once I was settled down at my desk, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was at a match between Ayr United and Morton last night. At first, Morton had no kitchen. They had positioned a couple of players in the kitchen area to defend the space but it wasn’t very easy without any furniture in there at all. They were conceding ground regularly. Then the furniture began to arrive and they began to assert themselves much more strongly as the trainers took more charge of the players, gave them more instructions and told the fans basically to no longer try to coach the team so that they would be able to manage and do a better job of it. The place where this was taking place was called “Canada Hall” – a huge one-storey building on top of a tunnel under which the railway ran. It belonged to the tunnel. There were all kinds of jokes going around talking about what would happen if it were to change its name to another railway company in another particular set of circumstances.

There was something else though about animals and pets in this dream but I can’t remember anything particular about that.

It’s no surprise that I can’t remember anything about the above because when I was transcribing these notes, I had no recollection of ever having dictated them. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I am in fact usually asleep when I dictate these notes. However, when I’m typing them out, a light usually switches on in the back of my mind with a tiny spark of recollection, but there was nothing whatever about any of the foregoing.

Later on, I was with Nerina last night and she was wearing the dark blue anorak that she had bought in Luxembourg when we were on our honeymoon. We’d been wandering around together as usual and ended up in some kind of military auction. We were going through some of the goods that were on sale there, having a laugh and a joke about things like “lots of half a ton of gentleman’s battle dress blouses” etc. We couldn’t really see what kind of use a large lot like that would be to everyone. But just as this dream was becoming exciting, the alarm went off and I awoke. But from what I remember, we’d been walking through the countryside on the edge of this town in order to reach this car boot sale and we’d seemed to be fairly happy, although I’m not quite sure why. I can remember us crossing a big, main road. One thing that I’d noticed though was that we’d been on the road for several weeks and I was wearing these jeans that were quite dirty and stained. I wasn’t looking very respectable at all

The only times that Nerina and I would ever be able to relax would be on holiday. We’d wait until September when all the brats would be back at school, and then take off across the Channel, drifting aimlessly around Western Europe from one cheap village hotel to another, eating local food, drinking local wine and generally chilling. Nerina had a map that indicated scenic routes (a green stripe along the side of the road, the thicker the more scenic) and she’d guide the car along as I drove. We neither knew nor cared where we were or where we were going.

They were good times and we had several good stories to tell. In one tiny village in Brittany we had the cheapest wine on the menu – a litre of house red – with our main course. For the dessert we had, as usual, the cheese board.
"Do you know what would go really nicely with this cheese" she said.
"Tell me" I replied
"Another bottle of that wine" she answered.

On the way back to the hotel I had to walk her around the village for two hours to stop her giggling.

The nurse was early once more this morning. He forgot the heat treatment on my knee, which isn’t really important, and didn’t take too long sorting out my legs He soon cleared off and left me in peace.

Once I’d made my breakfast, I sat down to eat it and to read MY BOOK.

We’re still roaming around the churches of London intra-muros and I’m thoroughly impressed by the number of bodies said to be interred in the old Grey friars Church and in the old St Paul’s. I’m surprised that they could fit them all in, what with so many recorded by John Stow.

He also quotes the Charter of St Paul’s, granted by William The Conqueror. "to all his well-beloved French and English people, greeting. Know ye that I do give unto God and the Church of St Paule of London and the rectors and scruitors of the same, in all their lands which the church hath, with borough and without, sack and sock, thole and theam, infangthefe and grithbriche, and all the rights that into them christendome byrath, on morth sprake and on unright hamed, and on unright work, of all that bishoprick on mine land and on each other man’s land. For I will that the church in all things be as free as I would my soul to be in the day of judgement".

He’s also talking about St Paul’s School again, and it’s a veritable tonic for today’s teachers who believe themselves overworked with twenty-five kids. He tells us that the school has been created "for one hundred and fifty-three poor men’s children … for which he appointed one master, one surmaster or usher and a chaplain."

After breakfast I packed a few more boxes with kitchen stuff ready to take downstairs. There are six now waiting to be emptied and we’ll do that this evening when I return from dialysis.

Back in here, I went a-searching for more music for another project and was still hard at it when my faithful cleaner turned up to fit my anaesthetic patches.

When she finished, she took down the boxes while I made my way slowly and gingerly downstairs to my new home. The aim was to begin to unpack but a neighbour came along for an inspection and chat, and then the boss of the taxi company turned up early so we accomplished nothing. However, I might have recruited a couple more volunteers into the moving plan – quite useful since we’ve already had one fall by the wayside.

We were early arriving at the dialysis centre but once more they took their time connecting me. I’m not sure what I’ve done to upset them but once more I was put into the little room at the end – the “naughty corner”.

They left me pretty much alone, except for when my machine gave out an error message. And I crashed out for twenty minutes too. I must have been really tired today.

When my time was up, it took them an age to see to me and as a result, I was no earlier that I might otherwise have been. But at some point, they had run a resistance current through me, recalculated my dry weight, reset the machine, and now I’m the lightest weight that I have been for probably 15 years.

Much as I enjoy the new svelte, slimline me, if I continue to lose weight like this, it’s going to start to become worrying

Late returning home, we had time to unpack the boxes nevertheless, although I’m going to have to sort everything out again when I’m down there permanently and put it away much more tidily.

It was another desperate struggle up the stairs. I could manage two steps before I needed help. This chemotherapy is sending me backwards instead of forwards. Throughout the day, I’d noticed an improvement in my health, but just these two steps were enough to knock me right back.

After my cleaner left, I had a disgusting drink break and then made tea. Baked potato, vegan salad and breaded quorn fillet and not very much of it. I’m not hungry and in any case, I couldn’t stomach it tonight.

So now I’m off to bed. The alarm is set, as usual on a Sunday these days, at 08:00 and wouldn’t it be nice to actually be asleep from now until then with no disturbances?

But before we go, seeing as we have been talking about Nerina and her map … "well, one of us has" – ed … we were driving along one road and I asked her "is this supposed to be a pretty road?"
"Ohh yes" she replied confidently
"Where are we?" I asked
"Somewhere along here" she said, indicating a line on the map with her finger
"That line there" I said, "that’s a canal!"

Saturday 19th July 2025 – I HAVE BEGUN …

… to move my things downstairs.

Just a few things from the kitchen for the moment – nothing at all exciting, but nevertheless, it’s progress of some kind, having some of my possessions in some of the drawers downstairs.

What I have decided, with my faithful cleaner’s co-operation, is that every time she goes downstairs, she will take with her a box of things to put in the apartment. And then each time that I come back from dialysis, I will sort them out, put them somewhere and then bring the empty boxes back upstairs ready for the next load

But my kitchen really is magnificent. I am even more impressed with it than I was with my galvanised steel dustbin. I can’t wait to move in there for good … "the apartment, not the galvanised steel dustbin." – ed …

Mind you, the benefits of sleeping up here in my comfortable bed can’t be ignored either. I could certainly do with as much of that as I could have too.

Last night wasn’t early enough to enjoy it. As usual, I dillied and dallied and dallied and dillied, lost my way and didn’t know where to roam as I tried to concentrate on writing up my notes, but with not much success. It was almost midnight when I finally crawled into my stinking pit.

However, once in bed, I fell asleep extremely quickly. I didn’t even have time to start, never mind finish my bedtime mantra before I was away with the fairies, although not in any fashion that would excite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine.

For a change, I slept right through until all of 06:27, and then it was a mad scramble to put my feet on the floor before the alarm went off, and I wasn’t convinced that I actually managed it.

In the bathroom, I had a good wash and scrub up, and then I filled the washing machine and switched it on. For a change, everything went into it without too much of a crush. There were no clothes left over at all.

After a slow start to the day with the medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There was a group of us down on the Auvergne. One of the people was the old British guy who died in 2013. Someone was talking about him having taken all different kinds of medication. The side effects of one particular one that he had taken was that it made his hair grow which of course was something that he really liked because he had started to lose his hair several years ago and was trying many different things for it to come back. The quite accidental secondary effects of something incidental was really quite a surprise to him.

It was a shame about him. His fate was what made me decide to come to live in civilisation instead of in the mountains. In that really severe winter of 2012-2013 when we had snow from 25th October to 27th May, he had a bad fall and lay for several days on the floor of his house undiscovered for almost a week when he suffered from hypothermia and never really recovered.

Strangely enough, the first time that I took Cécile out on a date was to his funeral. The first time that she took me out on a date was to the court at Riom where she had been summoned to give evidence against a defendant (and it wasn’t me). No-one could ever accuse us of having boring dates.

There was also something happening too about football matches, about a footballer going back to the club from which he had been signed and how the crowds of people there appreciated his return and how much he was looking forward to playing for the team again after having left in January early this year.

That’s a true story too. In the January transfer window, one of the fastest centre-forwards in Wales was signed by a well-heeled opponent, simply, I suspect, to stop him competing against them and his teal threatening them. They hardly played him and signed several other centre-forwards, I’ve no idea why, and so the subject of our story has returned this last week to the club from whence he came

Finally, I was in my new kitchen again, trying to work out how to bake a cake or something like that. Of course I needed first of all to find everything, which was in a totally different place to how it had been. Secondly, it was a case of how long it would take now that I have a decent oven instead of my old hit-and-miss thing. But even after thinking about that for a couple of minutes, I was still wandering around looking for the clothing for the club’s striker

It’s nice to be in my kitchen at last, even if it is in a dream. But it will be quite a problem trying to find things when I’m finally settled, and it will be an even bigger problem to work out all of the revised cooking times now that there’s a decent oven that (hopefully) will work properly.

Isabelle the Nurse was running late today so she didn’t have much time to hang around. She applied my heat treatment, dealt with my legs and then cleared off. I could then press on and make breakfast, and then read some more of MY BOOK.

We are still wandering around the churches of London today. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday we had a very strange transfer of property for the sum of "one rose at Midsummer, to him and to his heirs for all services, if the same were demanded.".

The strange property transactions are continuing today. He tells us of a property that changed hands for a fee "paying yearly one clove of Gereflowers at Easter, and to the prior and convent of St Mary Overy, six shillings.".

He also talks about someone called William Fitz Osbert, the leader of a large gang of rioters, who holed up in the steeple of St Mary Bow church until he was smoked out when someone lit a fire at the base of the steeple underneath him. He was stabbed in the ensuing melee and captured, subsequent to which he was drawn to a scaffold and hanged.

Stow clearly didn’t like him. He comments that "such was the end of this deceiver, a man of evil life, a secret murderer, a filthy fornicator, a polluter of concubines and (amongst his other detestable facts) a false accuser of his elder brother."

Now come on, Mr Stow, don’t mince your words. Tell us what you really think.

After breakfast, I came in here to assemble the “Sunday Woodstock” radio programme. And it’s now all complete at long last. However, it runs out at about one hour and ten minutes, so it looks as if two songs are going to be filed under CS. I have a good idea which ones they might be, and I can deal with them tomorrow.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I’m quite impressed by how the three programmes have turned out.

My cleaner turned up to fit my anaesthetic patches and we discussed our (or, rather, my) plans for moving and she fell in with them so we made a brief start before the ambulance came.

It was driven today by the boss, and he had already picked up the woman who travels with me so we had a very interesting chat all the way down there.

At Avranches, the bad news was that they had to carry out a few tests on me before they could plug me in. Consequently, I wasn’t plugged in until 14:40 – which meant being unplugged and compressed ready to leave at 18:00.

None of the doctors came to bother me so I was left to my own devices, and one of the things that I did was to listen to my radio programme to see if there were any errors. I picked up one, and I can soon edit that.

Once I was released, it was a very weary me who made his way to the taxi, and it was 19:15 when I returned home. Having to sort out some things that my cleaner had taken downstairs meant that it was nearer 19:45 when I finally made it back here.

Vegan salad, baked potatoes and veggie balls were on the menu tonight but I wasn’t all that hungry. I was glad to be back in here.

Hopefully, I can have a good sleep tonight and feel more refreshed tomorrow. It’s really dragging these days, this health issue, and I wish that it was over.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about William Fitz Osbert … "well, one of us has" – ed … during his interrogation concerning his actions and subsequent arrest, he was asked "were you stabbed in the fracas?"
"Ohh no" he replied "it was actually in the right shoulder, nowhere near there."

Saturday 12th July 2025 – HERE WE GO …

… again.

For once, the taxi came early and the other passenger who travels with me on Thursday and Saturday was already on board.

For once, we arrived quite early

For once, they were ready and waiting

For once, I was coupled up quite quickly and quite early

For once, it was only a three-and-a-half hour session

For once, as the session slowly drew to a close, I was looking forward to an early escape and return home

And so regular readers of this rubbish will recall exactly what happens next in circumstances like this.

In fact, it was a pretty miserable day all round, what with one thing and another, and I wonder when I might be able to step off this treadmill.

Despite my best efforts, last night was another late night when once more I failed miserably to make any impression upon the idea of having an early night.

This pain in my chest was also playing havoc with me. I couldn’t cough and I couldn’t sneeze because I was in total agony every time I tried to expand my lungs. I’ve no idea what’s happening now.

Anyway, I settled down in my lovely clean bed thanks to my faithful cleaner … "huh?" – ed … Yes, I suppose that I’d better explain. It wasn’t she who settled me down in my lovely clean bed, but in the afternoon she had changed the bedding as part of the plan to make my bedroom/office/recording studio look nice, clean and comfortable, as indeed it proved to be.

It didn’t take long to go off to sleep either, however, when I awoke, it was still dark. I tried to go back to sleep but I wasn’t able to do so, and so I gave some serious thought to raising myself from the Dead. However, a glance at the time on my ‘phone dissuaded me. 03:10 is far too early to be up and about, even if I can’t sleep.

Consequently, I decided to lie there semi-comatose until a more realistic time, but the next thing that I remember was the alarm going off at 06:29. Bane of Britain has struck again, asleep when the alarm went off.

When I awoke, I was dreaming about something to do with the Welsh Premier League and Y Bala FC. As usual, it evaporated so quickly from my mind before I could take hold of the dictaphone.

It’s not difficult to guess what it might be, though. Having failed to qualify for Europe for a couple of years now, the money has run out, the budget has been slashed, and according to the FAW’s squad lists, at least twelve of their star players, more than an entire team, have voted with their feet. As far as I can tell, to date they have signed just four, and none of them would be what I would call “significant” signings.

Over the past few years we’ve seen several clubs in the same position and it’s usually always ended in tears and involving relegation. But the future of Y Bala looks more bleak than all of the others right now and I reckon that unless they pull something magical out of the free transfers elsewhere, it’s going to be a very long and hard season.

It took a while to come to my senses yet again and to unstrap the ice pack, with which I went to sleep, from my right knee. And with the pain still wreaking havoc in my chest, I went off to the bathroom for a wash and shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon.

While I was in the bathroom, I set the washing machine off. With loads of bedding and everything else, there were probably about three machines-worth but one will suffice for now, with the bedding and the hospital stuff seeing that I might be back for chemotherapy in ten days time.

The kitchen was another really slow, leisurely affair while I took my time with the medication. I just couldn’t find the motivation today. As I said earlier, it was a pretty miserable day all round.

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

Nerina and I had to go to see a sports scientist kind of person for my knee. We were sitting in the waiting room and we heard him sawing a child’s foot to even off the bone. We could hear her screaming and it was absolutely horrible. Then we had to go into the room and it was freezing cold so the first thing that I did was to light the gas fire. Nerina was busy arranging everything and tidying it up. She made some kind of remark to me about why I wasn’t helping. I replied “I can’t possibly help because I’m so slow to move around these days on my crutches and you are very much quicker than me in doing everything”. However, she wasn’t very happy with that kind of answer.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it’s not my usual habit to post distressing dreams like this. Some of you will be eating your tea right now, others will be turning the page, and I will be feeling extremely uncomfortable. In fact, I can’t understand why I did post it because “distressing” really is the correct word to describe it.

And why this kind of dream should occur when Nerina is there, I don’t know that either, but Nerina and I ended up just as we would end up after coming back from holiday

However, there was something in there about a group of musicians being on tour. They had a Volkswagen Microbus and there were so many of them that half of their group, the smaller ones, were sleeping on the floor with a series of camp beds above them. That was where the elder ones slept, all inside this VW caravan. The heat generated by these people must have been intense and the smell of bodies overpowering. I seem to remember it heading towards Barry Town in order to be there for the special day a week next weekend when hopefully the gates might be hung.

As for what this may be about, it’s a pretty good description of that trip I mentioned a few months ago when a group of people piled into a J4 van in Crewe in 1973 and drove all the way down to the Windsor Free Festival, blowing a tyre and almost overturning on the way, while my friend from the Wirral and I went down a different way on a Triumph 350cc motorbike.

The nurse turned up early yet again. He applied this heat treatment to my knee and dealt with my legs, after which he left. I could then push on with breakfast and read MY BOOK.

Our author has been talking about the various “Undershafts” in London, and explains how the name came about, "because that of old time, every year on May-day in the morning, it was used that an high or long shaft or May-pole was set up there … which shaft … was higher than the church steeple."

He goes on to describe how it was stored "laid along over the doors and under the pentises of one row of houses" and mentions its ignominious end when the curate of St Katherine’s Christ Church denounced it as idolatrous and "whereon it had rested two-and-thirty years, they sawed it in pieces, every man taking as his share so much that had lain over his door".

After breakfast I took the washing from the machine and hung it up in the living room window to dry. And that’s a task that’s becoming harder and harder as time goes by.

There were things to do after that and I was in the middle of doing them when my faithful cleaner turned up to fit my anaesthetic patches.

She was still here chatting when the taxi arrived and so I descended to the vehicle and we cleared off into a glorious, hot summer’s day. Far too nice to go to dialysis.

At the beginning, I spoke about some of the events at dialysis today, but one thing that I haven’t mentioned is that the connection was the most painful that I have had for a very, very long time and I was in agony throughout the entire session.

The je m’en foutiste doctor came to see me during the afternoon. I told him about my complaints so he put his stethoscope to my chest and totally ignored my knee yet again.

There was plenty of work for me to do and I was advancing quite well, looking forward to a really early finish with just ten minutes to go, when another patient had a crisis and all of the nurses went a-running. And I was simply left there, sitting like Piffy on a rock while the nurses dealt with the emergency.

Eventually, Sarah came back to deal with me and to unplug me, for which I was heartily relieved. Mind you, she dropped the pipe and there is now blood all over my shirt. The good news is that I am now below my “inactive” weight which suits me fine.

In the hallway my co-passenger and I waited for the taxi. And waited. And waited. Twenty-five minutes later, he turned up.

It’s the busiest weekend of the year this weekend, and we’d seen the enormous queues on the motorway as we came down. There had been plenty of breakdowns in the afternoon and as the taxi company holds the contract with the Highways Authority for dealing with repatriations, they had a whole pile of vehicles out of the area, so those who remained were rushed off their feet.

Consequently, we were no earlier coming home than we might otherwise have been.

My cleaner was waiting for me and watched as I struggled upstairs, and then I collapsed into a chair, totally worn out.

Tea was a breadcrumbed quorn fillet with salad and baked potato, all very nice, but I struggled to eat it tonight. My appetite still hasn’t come back and it’s only ten or so days to my next chemotherapy.

But I’ll worry about that another time. Right now, I’m going to bed and I can’t say that I’m sorry.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Nerina … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone once asked me "what did you like especially about Nerina?"
"I liked the fact" I said "that she could see both sides to every argument."
"Could she really?" he asked.
"Indeed she could" I said. "Both sides – her side and the wrong one."

Friday 27th June 2025 – I AM ACHING …

… and breaking and I don’t kno … errr … in just about everywhere that it is possible to ache, and i’m feeling dreadful.

In LORD OF THE RINGS Frodo Baggins said that he felt "all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread."

And the way that I feel today, I know exactly what he meant and how he must have been feeling.

He went on to say "That can’t be right. I need a change, or something". And he was right – it can’t be right. I need a change, but how on earth do you manage to do that when you can’t walk or drive and every two or three days you need to go for a painful three-and-a-half hour session of dialysis.

There have been three things that have triggered off this current depression .

The fact that I am aching all over, absolutely everywhere and it’s becoming a nightmare to move
That the creatinine amount on my bloodstream has only reduced to 406 after nine months of dialysis (the critical limit is about 80).
Speaking to the nice receptionist at the taxi company this afternoon, the doctor dealing with my chemotherapy has asked for authorisation for no fewer than FIFTEEN trips to Paris and back

One of these trips and one of these sessions is more than enough. I am simply not going to survive another fourteen of them. And if next time I have the same kind of interaction with certain members of staff that I had this time, it will be the last time for sure. As has been attributed without positive proof to many theatrical personalities, "I’m too old, I’m too tired and I’m too talented to care" any more.

There is at least a positive side to all of this in that with another fourteen trips to Paris in the pipeline, the taxi company will be doing its best to keep on my good side.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, I was in bed long before 20:00 last night, curled up under the covers and dead to the World.

At one point I do have some vague memory of the Hound of the Baskervilles yowling and barking some little yelps during the night, obviously having some sweet dreams himself, but that’s about it. I eventually awoke at 4:42, drenched in sweat yet again which was rather unfortunate as I still had on my day clothes, as I discovered.

By 4:52 I was already at the desk writing out the notes from yesterday and it took me quite a while to do so, firstly because there was so much to write and secondly because it was so hard to motivate myself, as usual.

Once the notes were finished, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Later on … "later on from when?" – ed … I was being ill and so I decided that I was going to go home. My cleaner decided to come with me. There were quite a few of us in the car. We arrived at Davenport Avenvue and we all piled out. I went straight upstairs and my cleaner followed. Where these other people were staying was in one of the bedrooms and I pointed it out to them. I noticed that someone had painted the bathroom door and it looked really nice. I went into my bedroom, which was right down at the end of some kind of kinked corridor as at the hospital in Paris just now where I prepared myself ready to go to bed. As I climbed into bed, my cleaner came in. She was in her night attire too. She handed my ‘phone to me, saying that she didn’t know how these people had found my number – or her number … fell asleep here … So anyway, as I was about to climb into bed she handed me the telephone and said “I don’t know how these people have my ‘phone number”. I took it and answered, and it was the dialysis centre saying that they needed to have a talk with me about this afternoon. I waited and waited and waited but they didn’t answer at all so in the end I hung up. My cleaner told me that it wasn’t a very intelligent thing to do, to hang up on the dialysis centre but I said that I didn’t want to hang around in my nightclothes for very long at all. I wanted to be in bed.

And that is exactly how I’m feeling right now. I couldn’t care less about the dialysis centre, I couldn’t care less about the chemotherapy, I couldn’t care less about anything any more. I just want to go to bed and sleep.

Did I dictate the dream about my brother coming up to stay with me … "no you didn’t" – ed … We were talking about doing something or going somewhere so I asked him if I needed a car. He said that he needed one for the Sunday and to drop off a few other things on the Saturday. I thought that I’d arrange to hire a sports car for the weekend and we’d have some fun with it. We began to make our plans about where we were going and what we were doing but we had to wait around for a while for some reason or other. The next thing that I knew was that I found myself in bed. My brother was asleep in a bed in the same room, and when he awoke, he told me that he’d been vomiting through the night so I had to go to fetch some kitchen towels or something to clean things up. I asked him how he was and he replied that he was feeling much better but nevertheless, our plans were going to be changing. Because of this, I had a feeling that if I didn’t begin to exercise myself and have things done today we’d end up without a car at the weekend and that would be complicated

This isn’t like our family at all. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we are well-known for not being willing to share so much as a bus shelter in the middle of a monsoon with each other.

There was another dream too about being in Montréal. I was there with Nerina and we were talking to someone who was telling us certain things but I can’t remember now, but I remember saying that this is the fault with non-urban people, that they have a different outlook and a different approach to life. They can’t see things in the same way as everyone else, to which they agreed. I told Nerina about the woman whom I’d met in Labrador back in 2010 and with whom I’d kept in contact for a while until she moved to Toronto and I can’t remember any more about this particular dream.

One place to which I never took Nerina was to Montreal. I talked to her once about going to North America but she wasn’t impressed so I never mentioned it again. Canada was actually my preferred destination as a bolt-hole when my past began to catch up with me but Diplomatic Immunity in Belgium was a pretty good choice when that job came up. I still preen myself with pride … "show-off!" – ed … when I think that there were seventy-eight of us who sat that first exam in London for just one vacancy.

A friend of mine had a job as a house painter, to paint someone’s house. The house was in Ightfield, near Whitchurch. He asked me if I’d run him for his second day of work. I’d had a really bad night of sleep but nevertheless, when he came round at something like 08:00 on a Sunday, I took him out there. We found the house, so we pulled up outside it. It was a very narrow road. he took about five minutes to try to exit the van, saying that it was all muddy where we had stopped so in the end I had to move into the middle of the road and let him out there to fetch all of his things. Of course, with the road being narrow and me being in the middle of the road, a big lorry appeared so I had to move off quite quickly and swing into a side street to look for a parking place. There was a pub, so I drove into the pub. There were loads of people in there. I backed up against the pub wall on the inside, and climbed out of the van on my crutches and went to fetch the key to lock the doors. I suddenly realised that i’d left the keys in the back door. I’d backed the van right up against the wall so I couldn’t reach the key and I couldn’t start the van to move it because of course the key was in the back door. I was scratching my head thinking “how am I going to find my way out of this one? I seem to have made a huge mess of parking this van up. What was I going to do now?”.

Astute readers will be asking themselves the same question that I did when I transcribed the notes for this particular dream. Namely “if you drove the van into the pub and backed it up against the wall, you must have used an ignition key that is not stuck in the back door of the van, so why don’t you use that?”.

By about 7:30 everyone else had arisen from the Dead so we all gathered in the kitchen and had coffee and a chat. And my friend showed me a lovely ‘photo of an invalid scooter with a Kawasaki 900cc 4-cylinder transverse engine. I was sorely tempted until I noticed in the comments that someone was trying to work on fitting a V8 engine in one. I’ll wait and see how that pans out.

The nurse came round as usual, and if ever proof were needed that he doesn’t listen to a word that anyone says, we had
"How are you today? Was it OK at dialysis?"
"Not at all. My fever reached 38°C, coagulated the blood in the needles and they had to stop the session."
"And did you sleep well?"

After he left, we had breakfast and then set to work. We emptied the big glass-fronted wardrobe by the door that blocks the draughts. We turned it round to face the room and took several photos.

There is no place for it in the new apartment so it’s being sold. My friend, who has known me and my habits for sixty years told me to “put it online right now or else it will never be sold” so I advertised that and the kitchen units that I never used after buying them a few years ago. You can see the adverts HERE.

After all of that, we sat and chatted for quite a while and then my faithful cleaner came along and chased us out of the apartment while she did her stuff. We went downstairs and changed over the doors on the new fridge-freezer.

And that was an engineering job too, not at all simple. The two of us figured it out in the end because in some places the destructions were not at all clear. It took an age to do it and, as usual, we ended up with a screw left over.

After that, we went for a walk outside but by now the Black Dog was beginning to make its appearance. I was tired, I was aching and I was beginning to feel dreadful again.

Climbing back up these stairs was a Herculean effort and once I’d sat down, I had a really hard time standing up again. Tea was baked potatoes with a mixture of leftovers from out of the fridge with a sachet of vegan mince thrown in. And you can tell that I’m not feeling well at all because I’m still off my food. I didn’t feel like very much at all.

Now it’s bedtime and I just want to go to sleep. I don’t care about anything else any more, but I do know that I won’t be able to manage another fourteen of these chemotherapy sessions at this rate. I was looking back at my blog entries from when the Mapthera began, and it didn’t look very positive. I was hospitalised on several occasions after a dosage. And I was younger and fitter then, too.

But seeing as we have been talking about painters … "well, one of us has" – ed … my painter friend was asked to go and put two coats of light green all-weather matt paint on the porch at some rich person’s house.
When the guy cane back, he asked my friend "have you finished that paint job?"
"Yes I have" He replied. "But it’s not a porch, it’s a Ferrari".

Monday 23rd June 2025 – I HAD A …

… special visitor during the night last night – someone who hasn’t been to see me for quite some considerable time.

But more of that anon. This time tomorrow I shall be … well … not sitting in a rainbow, but sitting in a hospital bed in Paris where they will be starting this Rituximab cancer treatment.

Or, rather, restarting it, because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that was the product (or Mabthera, a generic thereof) that they gave me right at the beginning back in February 2016 after the chemotherapy failed.

And it worked at that moment too. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I was unable to walk and so ill that I had to live with friends because I was unable to cope by myself, yet six months later I was in Canada. I’m not expecting the same miracles this time, but any little help and relief that it might give me will be most welcome.

And in other news, it looks as if this apartment move will be taking place during the week of 18th-25th of August. That seems to be when the usual suspects are collecting themselves together, and I’m recruiting further volunteers if anyone else would like to join in. All are welcome and I do not practise any kind of discrimination at all. I hate everyone equally, regardless of race, creed, colour or sexual orientation.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, had I exerted myself last night I could have been in bed well before 23:00 but as usual, dillying and dallying about, it was about 23:30 when I finally crawled in underneath the covers.

When I awoke at 05:20 I was somewhere about in the dialysis centre but whatever it was that I was doing evaporated from my mind immediately … "not that there’s much in there to hold it in" – ed … which is just as well because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I don’t like to dwell on that place when I’m not there. It’s bad enough that I do when I am.

The first task that I undertook when I finally settled down at the desk (at … errr … 05:50) was to listen to the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night. And, as I said earlier, I had a special visitor come to see me. There was a group of us in a house somewhere and who should come in but our old friend (or mine, anyway), Zero. And what a long time it’s been since she last put in an appearance. I wanted to say “hello” to her but she walked right through the front of the house all the way to the stairs. I pretended to chase after, and she saw me, let out a squeal and ran upstairs. Her mother said something about going to frighten her away and that I had to look after her at that end of the room. My brother was upstairs in his room at the time and I could hear him and Zero talking to each other. I thought “how am I going to look after Zero at this end of the room if she has already gone upstairs?”. I thought in any case that he was supposed to be busy doing some things that he needed to do rather than sit around talking, but apparently not.

So here we go again. Zero having far more sense than to hang around chatting to me, and a member of my family turning up in my nocturnal rambles to spoil all my fun. I thought that we’d put all of that behind us, but apparently not. Presumably, some psychiatrist somewhere would come out with a few interesting remarks about this kind of situation, but it would all be news to me. There’s no other logical explanation for it, although whatever logic would have to do with what went on in my head during the night would also be news to me.

Round about 07:00 everyone else began to surface so I went for a good wash and scrub up ready for dialysis and Emilie the Cute Consultant, although I forgot to shave. And then we sat around waiting for Isabelle the Nurse to come to see me.

Almost as soon as she left, the taxi came round to take me to the Medical Centre to see the doctor about my heart.

At first, I saw his assistant who coupled me up to an echograph machine with a rapidity that took me quite by surprise.
"That’s not the first time that you’ve done this, is it?"
"Oh no" she replied. "Only a few thousand times.".

When she’d finished, she took me into the doctor’s room where he gave me a thorough examination.
"It’s not your heart that’s causing your problems" he said. "That’s working fine."

And that’s just as well because it’s only my heart that is keeping me going. With my low blood count and low blood pressure, my heart is having to beat about twice as fast as anyone else’s. Anyone’s heart can do that for a while, but mine’s been doing it for almost ten years. When it gives out, I’ll be gone in an instant.

But at least he found my heart and I still have one. I’ve not turned into a Conservative yet.

"Where’s all your paperwork?" he asked.
"No-one told me to bring any" I replied. "The dialysis centre arranged this appointment. I imagined that they would have sent you whatever you needed"
"You should always bring all of your medical paperwork with you when you come" he said
"I’ll remember that" I replied. "Do you know where I can hire a fork-lift truck?"

But as Kenneth Williams and Alfred Hitchcock once said, "it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners."

Back here (in the rain) I was halfway through eating breakfast when the ‘phone rang.
"What are you doing tomorrow?" a voice asked
"Not a lot" I replied.
"Good. Come to Paris and we’ll start the Rituximab"

So there we are. Now a frantic ringing-round to book taxis and obtain permission from the Securité Sociale.

My cleaner turned up as usual to fit my anaesthetic patches and then we waited around for a while. As the weather was now back to sunshine, we went downstairs to wait outside.

The taxi was bang on time with our other passenger already in, and we shot off to Avranches at the Speed of Light, me with my eyes closed. It’s not very often I feel nervous as a passenger these days.

And as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … there’s no point being ten minutes early anywhere if you have to spend that ten minutes washing your underwear.

When we arrived there were three ambulances ahead of us unloading the horizontal patients so I knew how this would pan out. And when one of those ahead in the queue had a crisis and everyone had to rush to help, I knew that that was that.

Having a trainee didn’t improve my morale much, and my 13:30 arrival turned into a 14:30 coupling up.

The doctor came round to see me to ask me how I was.
"OK at the moment but it won’t be for much longer if you keep on prescribing me these" and I showed him one of the boxes of tablets that I’d been prescribed on Saturday, a product that contained lactose.
"And your doctor moaned at me a few weeks ago when I had that attack of pancreatitis"

He didn’t stay very long after that.

The dietician came to see me too, to ask how I was getting on with the disgusting drink that she prescribed for me.

When I told her that I was taking it as instructed, she replied "Good" and renewed the prescription for another three months. I should have said nothing.

Julie the Cook was back from her holidays and she had ten minutes to come to sit on my bed for a chat, which was nice. She’s a really nice, bubbly, cheerful girl and always has a smile on her face. She can also perch on my bed any time she likes.

When I was uncoupled, I went out to the taxi but we had to wait (and wait, and wait) for another passenger who needs a lot of assistance. And who is dropped off first so it was at 19:37 when we finally arrived home.

My adjustable stool had arrived this afternoon and so things are looking much more positive downstairs. The stool will certainly ease my cooking issues, as I can now sit down while I’m at the worktop cooking, and take the weight off my knees.

Tea tonight was baked potato, salad in balsamic vinegar and a mix of falafel and veggie balls. It was delicious as usual.

Tomorrow I have bags to pack, sandwiches to make and food to rustle up, seeing as I don’t know how long I’ll be staying. They say that I’ll be back on Wednesday, but we shall see. I’m really grateful that my friend is here to deal with the kitchen that will (hopefully) arrive.

But first, I’m off to bed in the hope that Zero will come back.

Seeing as we have been talking about the doctor’s surgery just now … "well, one of us has" – ed … the patient before me was complaining about having a very sore throat
"Right" said the doctor. "Go over to the window, stick your thumbs in your ears and stick out your tongue as far as you can."
"Will that make me feel better?" asked the patient
"Oh no" replied the doctor. "My wife’s standing on the pavement outside."

Friday 13th June 2025 – IT HAS BEEN …

… a quiet day today.

It was quiet last night too. I didn’t stay up for all that long after finishing my notes. However, it was rather later than I anticipated when I went to bed. Everyone in the apartment had been asleep for quite a while by the time that I finally crawled in underneath the covers.

Once more, it took me a while to go off to sleep but once I was asleep, there I stayed until about 05:30. Not that I was up and about straight away though. It must have taken me another twenty minutes before I finally plucked up the courage to leave the bed.

With everyone still fast asleep, I began the morning by listening to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I’d been to hospital last night and I’d had some brain surgery carried out on my head. It had involved penetrating the skull. As a result I was lying there in bed with the extension cable wrapped around me and the plug on the end of that was resting on my stomach. At first I thought that it might have been the Hound of the Barnevilles … "he means ‘Baskervilles’" – ed … but that was still asleep on the floor by the fire so it can’t have been him so I wondered what animal of that nature was trying to crawl all over me while I was asleep.

The Hound of the Baskervilles was actually sleeping on the floor when I stuck my head in earlier. But dreaming about hospital again is pretty depressing. I want to forget all about that and relax during the night instead of ending up worrying just as much as I do during the day about my hospital visits.

Later on, I was with two people. We’d been on a very long trek from across some kind of territory. There was also a boy involved in this somehow. The woman was the mother of this child. I was with these two men, hiking away, walking through this rough land. We were having to climb up and down all kinds of obstacles and it seemed as if we were twenty years walking through this way. Eventually we came to a spot where we had to climb down a really, really long descent like off a clifftop. It was all muddy. We finally made it down to the bottom where we could say goodbye. Meanwhile, this woman and her son were somewhere about and I ended up doing something with this child, having a collection of possessions or something. This woman, I had this big silver or chrome ball, really heavy. I went up to her and said “I know what it is tomorrow” because I’d been told that it was her birthday. I was about to present her with this ball when she said “yes, it’s Grand Prix day tomorrow” which surprised me. But there was something in this dream about a tube of ointment but I can’t remember where it fitted in.

This dream reminded me very much of East Africa, not that I have ever been there of course, but how I would imagine it to be. However, it seems to have its basis in our Welsh lesson on Tuesday, when we were reading a book about a woman and her son who were the sole survivors of a cataclysm and they had to learn self-sufficiency and autonomy quite rapidly if they were going to survive.

Everyone seemed to come alive round about 07:00 so I went back into the living room to see how they were doing. My friend rustled up some coffee, I rustled up the orange juice and we had a very slow start to the day while I sorted out my medication.

The nurse burst into the apartment at about 08:30 and the reaction of the Hound of the Baskervilles will make sure that he won’t ever enter like that anywhere else ever again.

It had evidently put the wind up him because he was in and out of here in what must be a new World Record time, and we could set about making breakfast.

Later on, we came in here and spent quite a while talking about recording issues, fixing a few faults on a few recording machines and working out how to use an old digital mixing desk that has been lying around here for several years.

That was something that I’m glad we did, because we managed to make it work reasonably well, although the audio output is very low, even when the gain is set to maximum. One thing that we did find out though is that one of my microphones doesn’t work. No wonder that I’ve been having recording issues with it on one of the other machines that I have. All that it must have been picking up must have come from the external microphone.

While the Hound of the Baskervilles went for a walk, I sorted out my LeClerc order and sent it off ready for delivery later this afternoon.

We’re low on bread again so this afternoon I prepared some dough for a loaf and also for four bread rolls. We’re planning to have two tonight with burgers that I have ordered, and the other two will be for the broccoli stalk soup that I’m going to make on Sunday afternoon, seeing as I’ve ordered a broccoli head this afternoon.

When the order showed up I had one kilo of carrots and a broccoli head to wash, dice and blanch ready for freezing and that took longer than I would have liked. And while it was all preparing itself, I put away some of the things.

Not all of them, because I was feeling the strain this afternoon. I could only work in ten-minute spells and then I had to go to sit down for half an hour to recover. I was really feeling the strain and frustration this afternoon.

Tea was one of these nice burgers in a bread roll with baked potato and a vegan salad, followed by strawberries and cream (yes, we had a Leclerc order this afternoon). And it really was delicious too.

Tomorrow for tea we have aubergines so I might make an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit with pasta, followed by yet more strawberries.

However, that’s tomorrow. Tonight, I’m off to bed ready for dialysis tomorrow, I don’t think

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about brain surgery and the like … "well, one of us has" – ed … It reminds me of the time after one of my car accidents when I was sent to the hospital for a brain scan.
At first, I was rather worried but half an hour later the doctor did his best to reassure me.
"Don’t worry" he replied. "We’ve examined the x-rays and we’ve found nothing."

Saturday 7th June 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone again last night. That is, of course, extremely depressing from my point of view, but ss I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … if you don’t go to bed until 01:00 and you’re wide-awake again at 04:40, you haven’t really had all that much time to go anywhere.

It’s still quite disappointing though, because I enjoyed my nocturnal rambles, even if I did keep on falling over members of my family, and I wish that they would start up (the dreams, not the family) soon.

Last night I dillied and dallied through my notes and a few other things and, as I wasn’t feeling in the least bit tired, I found a few other things to do to waste some time. In the end, though, I called it a night – or a morning – and staggered off to bed.

As usual, I fell asleep quite quickly but as I said just now, it wasn’t for long. I checked the ‘phone when I awoke and it was 04:40 – far too early to raise myself from the Dead so I loitered around, trying to go back to sleep but in the end, gave it up as a bad job

The first thing that I did was, as I promised, to take advantage of the peace and quiet of the early morning and dictate the radio notes that I’d written the other day. That will save me some time on Saturday night

The bathroom was next. I had a good wash and scrub up, and even a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and then went into the kitchen to sort out the medication.

Back here, I sat down and in a mad fit of enthusiasm (and God alone knows where that came from) I began to edit the radio notes that I’d dictated earlier.

The sound on my recorder is back to being all over the place and it took an age to adjust the controls so that I had something passable without sounding as if I had been dictating with my head stuck inside a bucket.

Isabelle the Nurse came along as usual, and she noticed that I had another weeping oedema, and how I am fed up with all of this too. I really did think that I’d seen the back of all of these problems, but apparently not.

After she left, I made some breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK. Today, we’ve arrived at York where our author has spent several pages extolling poetically the virtues of the city and the area without mentioning once anything to do with medieval Military Architecture.

But that’s the story of this book, really. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it seems to be a guide book for the benefit of the more-informed tourist rather than, as I was hoping, a serious treatise and discussion on the important aspects of Medieval Military Architecture

Back in here, I carried on with the editing of the radio notes and by the time that my cleaner put her sooty foot in the door to sort out my anaesthetic patches, I’d just about finished them. Tomorrow, I’ll assemble the programme.

After my cleaner left, I didn’t have long to wait for the taxi, and even though we had another passenger to pick up, we arrived at the dialysis centre early.

The problem was though that so did everyone else, and they weren’t ready for us. And when they let us in I found that I’d been moved to the bed the farthest away from the entrance. As I’m slow when it comes to moving about, I was the last in bed and so the last to be coupled up.

When they came to deal with me, I told them about the oedemas and although the doctor didn’t come to see me, he recommended that they reduce my dry weight and increase the fluid extraction. I’ll go along with that until they start talking about this “four hours” and “four sessions” again. I’ve had quite enough of that kind of talk.

Today I was in a little room all on my own and no-one came to bother me. I should have been revising my Welsh but instead I drifted in and out of sleep for most of the afternoon. I really was feeling quite exhausted after my very short night’s sleep.

At the end of the session I had to wait for a while for the taxi to show up so we were just as late arriving back home as we would have been had we set out late for the outward trip.

At the building I went into the new apartment to do some more measuring of distances that I needed. One thing that I really did notice was how much easier it is to go into there rather than to struggle up all of these stairs. That’s one thing to which I shall really be looking forward when I finally do make it downstairs permanently – none of these 39 Steps or whatever they are to struggle up here.

However, that’s not for right now. I still had to struggle back up here and sort myself out.

Tea tonight was a vegan salad with baked potato and falafel, followed by ginger cake and soya dessert. The vegan salad was laced with some home-made vegan garlic mayonnaise that I made yesterday but forgot to mention. And it really is excellent.

So right now, I’m off to bed. I was planning on finishing off the radio programme but I’m still quite tired so a good night’s sleep will do me good. But if I can’t sleep or if I awaken early, I can always deal with the radio programme too.

Something else that I have to do tomorrow is to sort out my apartment – plan what I need and talk to the people who are involved in all of this. I need to push on rapidly.

But seeing as we have been talking about home-made mayonnaise… "well, one of us has" – ed … I was talking to someone about making my own mayonnaise.
"That’s supposed to be a rather religious experience isn’t it?" she asked
"Not that I know about it" I replied
"Someone wrote a hymn about it though, didn’t they?"
"I’m sure that they didn’t" I answered
"Yes they did" she insisted. "It goes something like ♬ ‘mayonnaise have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord’ ♬ "

Saturday 31st May 2025 – AS I SHOULD …

… have expected (because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it’s par for the course), this idea of changing my dialysis to the mornings was just a brief, ephemeral illusion.

When I arrived there this afternoon, I told them that my cleaner and I had had a lengthy discussion and decided that it was a much more practical arrangement for us, only to be told "it’s OK – we’ve found another solution now."

What with everything through which I have gone over the past few years, I’m convinced that the medical service (everywhere in the World, not just here) fails to understand that we are not pawns on a chessboard that can be moved here and there at will or at a whim. We are human beings, with lives of our own to fulfil and (in my case at least) my own life and activities have a much higher priority that anything that the hospital can conjure up.

So, as you can probably tell, I was in a bad mood today.

There isn’t any special reason for that either. Although it wasn’t early when I went to bed, it wasn’t all that late either. I was asleep quite quickly too, and there I stayed, totally flat out, until about 05:50.

It took something of an effort to raise myself from the Dead but when the alarm went off at 07:00 I’d sorted myself out in the bathroom, washed the clothes that needed washing and was on my way to the kitchen for my medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There was a group of us from school again hanging around together. One of them was a girl from Shavington who went to Nuthurst, the exclusive private primary school in Nantwich. We were talking about the maths classes, discussing in particular these pyramid graph things that we used to do, describing how we used to do them and talking about one or two examples. This girl was saying that during one or two of her maths classes she became carried away and began to make one of these pyramid graph things for the pills but by the time she reached about the third row she just put the downward shafts and wrote underneath “lots and lots”. There was also something about someone whose idea of a pyramid graph was that if he had something like a small party and a big party he would just draw simply one line between the two elements and that would be his pyramid graph.

There’s a story about that girl too, but that’s another one that the World is not yet ready to hear

One thing that I, and, presumably, regular readers of this rubbish will recall is that just recently there has been a whole spate of these stories that the World is not yet ready to hear, coming into my subconscious mind during the night. There’s definitely an undercurrent of something, and I wish that I knew what it was. Maybe is simply a story of regrets for my wasted, mis-spent youth. But on the other hand, it’s certainly not wasted or mis-spent because everything about it was what brought me here. As Paul Peña once famously wrote and Steve Miller famously sang, YOU KNOW YOU GOTTA GO THROUGH HELL BEFORE YOU GET TO HEAVEN

Later on, I was in Congleton with the guitarist and drummer with whom I used to play. We were going somewhere in my van and we reached a house. I left the van and said that I’d be back in a minute, and wandered off. Then I came back and we climbed into the van and went to the next place. I said again “I’ll be back in a minute”, left the van and went into the drive. There was a woman there smoking a cigarette. I asked her a question and she just gave me a strange look, so I asked it to her again. She just smiled and gave me a very non-committal answer so I’ve no idea what was the matter with her. I went round to the back of the house and knocked onto the door. I could hear someone say that there was someone at the door. At that moment a big tabby cat stuck its head through the window so I went to stroke it. Then some young guy came to the door. I told him that my guitarist wanted to see him. He grabbed his cigarettes, came outside and went down to the van. We ended up then in another house. His response was that he was really comfortable with the idea that people from the street could come and go into their house at any time they liked. When the guitarist came back from wherever he had been, they began to talk. The drummer joined in with the conversation. I felt that I was being isolated here and I’d no idea why. In the end I simply sat down and waited for everything to finish.

When that group came to an end back in the Winter of 1976, my intuition told me that I actually was being slowly isolated and edged out, which was a shame. And then I had a load of other preoccupations that stopped me from pressing on. For the next couple of summers I lived in my van with the winter spent in that squat. It was not a very happy time and it took me a while to sort myself out – a task that is still not finished 50 or so years further on.

The nurse was on time today for a change, and we had the usual banal chatter about nothing of any importance whatsoever.

After he left I could make my breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK. We didn’t stay long at Scarborough, and we’ve now arrived at Skenfrith Castle, which is in that fine old English county of … errr … Monmouthshire.

And here we go again. On page 469 he tells us that "there is a sort of recess, which may have been the kitchen fireplace, the cooking being usually, in these towers, carried on in an upper floor".

Meanwhile, on page 471, he tells us that "The history of Skenfrith is obscure, but it is evident that it was built simply to contain a small garrison, and not at all as a private residence. The area contains no trace of hall, chapel, or kitchen."

Don’t you wish that he’d make up his mind?

Back in here, I’ve been chatting to plumbers. I posted an advertisement on one of these traders’ websites for someone to take away the bath and tile around where the bath used to be. I’ve had a few enquiries and I spent most of the morning following them up. We’ll see where this takes me.

My cleaner turned up, bang on time, to fit my anaesthetic patches and it was such a lovely day that we went outside to stand in the sunshine until the taxi arrived. And we took full advantage of the nice weather, because the taxi didn’t arrive until 13:05.

It was a nice, sunny drive down to Avranches and, to my surprise, I was seen quite quickly too. And only three and a half hours today which is good news. The less-than-good news is that the ice-cold spray that they recommended didn’t seem to do me much good and one of the pins hurt like Hades all through the session.

Early on, for about fifteen minutes, I crashed out but I soon got to grips with myself and pressed on to revise my Welsh, seeing as I’ll be in Paris on Tuesday instead of at my lesson. But it’s hard going when I’m wracked with pain like that. I really can’t concentrate.

Eventually I was let out and the same driver who brought me took me home in the sun and warmth. My cleaner was waiting for me and it was just as well, because it was a very, very weary me who climbed up these stairs. I shall really be glad to be downstairs and can cut out all of this.

Back in here I collapsed into a chair for a while and then eventually went to make tea. Falafel, baked potato and salad followed by ginger cake and soya dessert.

So right now, I’ll dictate my radio notes and go to bed, in the (vain) hope of having a nice, long sleep. It’s been a while since the last one and in principle, it’s a lie-in tomorrow.

But seeing as we have been talking about pyramids … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of a story that Frankie Howerd used to tell.
During World War II he used to say that he served in Egypt and on one occasion he was taken in an aeroplane to see the pyramids.
Halfway round the circuit, the plane was hit by a gust of wind. It turned upside-down and Frankie fell out.
The pilot recovered control and performed a circuit around to see if he could see anything, when suddenly there was a “thud” and Frankie was back in his seat.
"What the …" uttered the pilot
"Don’t you worry about it" said Frankie. "The point on that pyramid is sharper than it looks"

Saturday 10th May 2025 – GUESS WHO …

… forgot to switch the alarms back on this morning? That’s right. Bane of Britain has triumphed again.

Consequently I had a nice, long sleep until all of 07:31 when I suddenly awoke with one of these dramatic awakenings that I have every now and again. It was nice, bright sunlight outside so I immediately guessed that there was something wrong, so I glanced at the time.

And after another late night last night a really good sleep probably did me some good too. I was exhausted after the journey back and by the time that I’d finished my meal and was back in here I wasn’t fit for very much.

Nevertheless I wrote the notes and performed some of the backing- up and then crawled off to bed at about 23:40 or something. I was asleep quite quickly and, for a change, I was dead to the World throughout the entire night. I remember nothing whatever until I awoke at 07:31.

Once I’d realised exactly what time it was I dashed … "errr … quite" – ed … into the bathroom for a good wash and scrub up, and sorted out the washing. Far too much to put in one machine so I just put the important things into the washing machine and set it off on its routine.

In the kitchen I had my medication, forgetting the vitamin D and the vitamin B12 that the hospital wants me to take and then back in here I was just about to check the dictaphone when Isabelle the Nurse turned up.

She admired the huge plaster on my leg and read the prescription attentively. She made a list of what she needed and ticked off what we had, indicated on the hospital’s prescription what she needed, and then issued instructions as to what else she needed, promising to write a prescription for tomorrow.

After that, it was breakfast. And then I read more of MY BOOK. Except that I didn’t. I was side-tracked yet again, firstly reading about the curious antics of Ranulf Flambard, the treasurer of William Rufus and imprisoned by Henry I, only to become the first-ever prisoner known to have escaped from the Tower of London, and then of the downfall and subsequent resurgence of William de Forz and the siege and subsequent capture of Castle Bytham by Henry III.

You can probably understand why I was no good at being a University Student. I was always wandering off down alleyways that led me far away from my course syllabus.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There was something last night about a ferry – a small one like one of the ones that they have here in Granville that go out to the Ile de Chausey. In some kind of tempest or hurricane it had been badly damaged. The ferry company had one of their previous ferries – it was sitting on a plinth outside their office. What they did was to take the boat off the plinth and put it in the water and began to use that. The damaged one, they hauled it out of the water and put it on the plinth. The owners of the company decided that they would give it a thorough overhaul and repair it. Then they would check it every three years for any kind of deterioration and keep on repairing it if it needed it so that if something similar happened again they could take the one off the plinth and drop that in the water and it would be ready to go without any problems whatsoever

There was a similar story about the “Gate Guardians”, the Spitfires and Hurricanes that stood on plinths outside former World War II airfields. When we were kids, on our way to North Wales, we always noticed the one at Hawarden Airfield. However, when the film BATTLE OF BRITAIN was proposed, all of the Gate Guardians were rounded up and where it was possible to do so, were put back into the air.

There was also something about being in hospital and a nurse doing something to me which impressed me so I said something. She replied that she was only a student nurse, which surprised me. I wonder who she was. I’ve had several student nurses attending to me in the past

After that? I had some e-mails to write. There is a mountain of correspondence here going back weeks that I really must answer. However, I must have let the time slip away with me because my cleaner turned up to fit my anaesthetic patches when I was nowhere near ready.

She turned up, but the taxi didn’t. After waiting half an hour, I ‘phoned them up. "Ohh merde!" said the dispatcher in a voice loud enough that even my cleaner heard it. "I’ll find another vehicle for you".

We decided to go outside and wait, and we had a lovely forty minutes under the sun until an ambulance turned up. I hate them – it’s quite a fight for me to put myself inside – but if it’s the only vehicle available I can’t complain.

It was driven by the driver who took me to Paris. She told me that they had been on the autoroute not far from St-Lô when the call had come through. No wonder that it had taken so long to arrive. I told her that I didn’t understand any of this – after all, the taxi company had brought me back from Paris yesterday so they knew that I was at home.

Hours late at the dialysis centre, and what made it even worse was that it was a three-and-a-half hour session today. Had the taxi been on time, I could have had a very pleasant late afternoon back at my place.

The consolation was that I had Lexi and Océane dealing with me today. All of the nurses there are wonderful but as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … Lexi really does have the most delicate touch.

Who cares whether or not the coupling-up was painful? After Tuesday afternoon and the muscular biopsy, nothing else is painful. I had plenty of work to do, apart from sitting there watching the blood pressure slowly sink through the floor to a rather dangerous 88.

Emilie the Cute Consultant was there too, but she remained stoically in her little glass cage. If she wanted something, she sent one of the girls for it. It’s a shame that she’s no longer speaking to me after my revolt the other week.

This evening, I was the last one there so they were both dealing with me. While Lexi was compressing me, Océane was inspecting my feet. I told them that I had delayed my arrival on purpose so as to have the undivided attention of both of them.

The taxi was waiting for me to bring me home and we had a very silent drive back. My cleaner was waiting and she watched and helped a little while I struggled up the stairs. She’d been to the chemist’s to buy what was needed and had bought a lettuce and some potatoes for me.

After she left, I made tea. Baked potato, salad and breaded quorn fillet followed by chocolate cake and almond soya dessert.

Now that I’ve finished my notes, I have some dictating to do and then I’m off to bed. I have plenty of work to do tomorrow, and there’s footy too – Caernarfon v Cardiff Metro, the winner going on to meet Hwlffordd to compete for the vital third European spot, accompanying TNS and Penybont.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about student nurses … "well, one of us has" – ed … regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m not made correctly and taking a blood sample from me is not easy.
Nevertheless, I always encourage the student nurses to have a go. After all, they have to learn somewhere.
One of them was having so much difficulty that I told her "cheer up! If I leave this hospital alive, you won’t need to sit your exams. You will have earned your diploma by default."

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: baked potatoes

Saturday 4th October 2025 – WHAT A DREADFUL …

Saturday 27th September 2025 – THIS HEALTH ISSUE …

Saturday 13th September 2025 – JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT …

Saturday 6th September 2025 – WE HAVE A …

Saturday 9th August 2025 – TODAY’S DIALYSIS SESSION …

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Saturday 26th July 2025 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

Saturday 19th July 2025 – I HAVE BEGUN …

Saturday 12th July 2025 – HERE WE GO …

Friday 27th June 2025 – I AM ACHING …

Monday 23rd June 2025 – I HAD A …

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Saturday 7th June 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

Saturday 31st May 2025 – AS I SHOULD …

Saturday 10th May 2025 – GUESS WHO …

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