Tag Archives: late night

Monday 8th December 2025 – MY GINGER CAKE …

… or, rather, what was left of it has found its way into the bin this evening. It seems to have developed one or two suspicious stains that were worthy of further examination, and the further examination was not positive.

That’s quite a disappointment because I was enjoying eating it. But you learn from your errors, and one thing that I have learned is that I’ll cook it at a higher temperature for longer, and lower down in the oven too.

All in all, it’s not really been a very good twenty-four hours. As is usual these days, it took me an age to finish off what I needed to do last night and it was long after 23:30 when I finally crawled into bed. I was absolutely exhausted and had fallen asleep once or twice writing out my notes.

As for what happened after that, I remember very little, except that for some reason, I was freezing cold. I’ve no idea if it was really the case (it was quite a mild night, apparently) or whether I dreamed it. In any case, when the alarm went off at 06:29, I was flat out, dead to the World.

It took quite a while for me to come to my senses and force myself to my feet, but I did eventually manage to stagger into the bathroom and then into the kitchen for my medication and my hot ginger, honey and lemon drink

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I’d given up coach-driving for health reasons, but my brother was driving a coach. He asked Nerina if she would go with him on a European tour as a hostess. She refused, and he couldn’t find anyone else, so with a great deal of reluctance, I said that I’d go. We loaded the coach with people and set off. But he has getting the coach all dirty inside and no-one was cleaning it. He wasn’t very good with the passengers, and he decided that, when we came to a town in Germany while we were on our way somewhere else, instead of going around the bypass, he’d go through the town centre. Unfortunately, it was Carnaval so we were trapped in this town centre for quite some considerable time. He was arguing about all kinds of things, and in the end I decided that I’d had enough and that I was going to drive. However, he’d parked the coach somehow inside another coach, and trying to manoeuvre it out of there was extremely complicated. First of all, he had to tell me which were the panels in order to pull the driving seat out into its traditional place instead of sitting on the front bumper. When he’d done that, I had to reverse the coach out of this complicated parking space inside another coach. I found that I didn’t have the force to work the brake pedal correctly so as I was driving backwards down this very narrow area, the coach was running away with me. Luckily, I managed to control it without hitting anything, but it was a very, very close thing. All of the passengers alighted to give me a better chance of driving it out of the door of this coach. However, it was on a slope, and as I wasn’t concentrating particularly, the coach rolled forward and we had to start all over again. Eventually, I had the coach on the street, and I found that the coach was better going forward for me, so I thought that I’d go forward around the block and back to pick up these people. However, I missed the turning to turn right around the block. I ended up carrying straight on and under the flyover that carried the bypass around the town. I thought that I was really lost now, so I parked the coach. All of the water on the front stove was boiling away, about five different pots of it so I had to work out which controls controlled the gas for those particular hobs and try to turn them down. While I was doing this, I found some tools embedded in the ashes. I thought that I’d take those out later when I’d sorted out all of this. In the meantime, someone else came over and began to talk to me. He asked me about my PSV badge and pointed to one hanging on the wall, an old, rusty one. He said that he thought that it was mine, but mine was in a water-stained leather holder that was next to it. I told him that that was mine. By this time, I was completely fed up. I couldn’t drive the coach any more, I couldn’t control the brakes, so I decided that the best thing that I could do was to walk away, let my brother find the coach and let him carry on on his own.

Driving coaches certainly makes a change from driving taxis these days, but I could have done without any of my family members involved in it. But the dream seems to be one big mass of a mess with all kinds of surreal and unusual events taking place. It’s enough to make me wonder what on earth was going on in my head last night.

The nurse turned up early again and he was soon gone. He starts his week’s break today so I imagine that he’s in a rush to finish his rounds and clear off. And once he’d cleared off, I could make breakfast and read some more of Thomas Codrington’s ROMAN ROADS IN BRITAIN.

But seeing as we have been talking about breakfast … "well, one of us has" – ed … I didn’t have any vegan butter for my toast, having used all of what was left for my vegan Christmas pudding. Luckily, I had some strawberry jam left over from when I marzipanned my cake, so that had to do.

Ohh, how I suffer.

Thomas Codrington has been leading us out of East Anglia today along the Icknield Way into the West Country. We’ve been passing a series of dykes in Cambridgeshire that were presumably built by the early Anglo-Saxons to defend their territory before they pushed west. We cab gather that these dykes are later than the Roman period because late-issue Roman coins have been found underneath a couple of the dykes but on the top of the original layer of ground.

Back in here, I had a few things to do and then I revised some of my Welsh for the lesson tomorrow. I’m trying to push ahead whenever and wherever I can.

My cleaner turned up as usual to apply my anaesthetic, and then I had to wait for the taxi, which was late today. We had to go to Sartilly to pick up someone else too, so I was quite late arriving.

Today, I was put into the little room with three other patients. One of the nurses was new (to this branch) and didn’t know where anything was, so it took an age to be coupled up. Luckily though, they left me alone afterwards and I could amuse myself as I wished.

The new nurse was assigned to uncouple me too, so, as usual, we had some more lengthy delays while she sorted out everything that she needed.

It was my favourite taxi driver who brought me home tonight, so we had a really good chat. She also brought me through the town centre to see the Christmas lights. However, this year they are something of a disappointment.

Back here, my faithful cleaner helped me in. I sat on the chair in the kitchen for a while and then made my tea, although really I did nothing more than warm up the half-pizza left over from yesterday, followed by soya dessert with a couple of biscuits. I’m really disappointed about my ginger cake, so I’ll have to make another cake on Wednesday. Anyone any ideas for the ingredients?

Right now, though, I’m off to bed. I’m exhausted and I’ve already almost fallen asleep about half a dozen times since I’ve been sitting here. I’ve no idea why I’m so tired these days. There’s definitely something not right with how I’m feeling.

But seeing as we have been talking about my health issues and not baking until Wednesday … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of one occasion when Nerina was sitting in the kitchen bot doing very much when I came home from a coach-driving job.
"Is tea ready?" I asked.
"No, it isn’t" she replied.
"What’s up?" I asked.
"The kitchen is closed, due to illness and fatigue" she replied
"How do you mean? "
"Just that I’m sick and tired of cooking."

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Sunday 7th December 2025 – WHEN I WENT …

… to bed last night, I was looking forward to a really good sleep and a nice lie-in until the nurse arrives and shakes me awake at about 08:45.

And I deserved it too. What with the football running late and my own lack of effort and motivation, it was quite late – long after midnight – when I finally crawled off to bed. It seemed to take an age to finish off everything that needed finishing.

But cruel fate intervened last night, as it so often does. Firstly, it was another one of those nights where it didn’t seem as if I’d been to sleep at all. I just seemed to be lying there in a kind of semi-conscious daze throughout the night.

Secondly, round about 06:00, I was wide-awake and it was totally impossible to go back to sleep, no matter how much I tried. Round about 06:50, I gave it up as a bad job and left the bed.

Being up and about at that time on a Sunday morning, I took full advantage and dictated all of the outstanding radio notes. Unfortunately, not being able to see clearly at that time of the morning, I made something of a mess of them and they will take a good while to sort out.

After the usual visit to the bathroom, I wandered off into the kitchen to make my hot ginger, honey and lemon drink and to take my morning medication, and it was there in the kitchen that the nurse found me.

He was quite upset that I hadn’t taken advantage of the bed, and to be honest, so was I, but it can’t be helped. Anyway, he sorted out my legs and was soon gone.

Once he’d left, I could make my breakfast (including the last of my homemade croissants) and read some more of Thomas Codrington’s ROMAN ROADS IN BRITAIN.

Today, he is talking about a road that leads to Berwick-upon-Tweed but notes that "it is between 50 and 60 miles long, and no part of it appears to be mentioned in the Itinerary of Antonine." – the Iter Britanniarum.

Most people these days date the Iter Britanniarum to the reign of Caracalla on the grounds that many of the roads that are described within did not exist in Antonine’s time. So if the Iter Britanniarum really was prepared in the time of Caracalla, this road here must be a really late addition to the road network

He also talks about Chew Green, right on the border between England and Scotland. There, he tells us that "there is a complication of camps. A camp, 330 yards square, is overlapped by another camp, 330 yards by 200 yards, and encloses three smaller camps, one of which, about 110 yards square, is more strongly entrenched than the others. ".

Of course, with a description like that, I had to go for a look. And THIS WAS WHAT I FOUND. It’s another magnificent sight. You’ll see the modern track running from north-northwest to south-southeast. If you look slightly to the west of it, north of the fort with all of the defences, you can make out the track of the Roman road.

Back in here, I had the dictaphone notes to transcribe. And once more, I was surprised at how much there was to transcribe. In this dream, I’d hired a new cleaner. I was showing her around the place and telling her what I would like to have done. I mentioned to her that I had two kittens and they spent a lot of time asleep, and if they were asleep, the best thing to do was to leave them where they are and not touch them. Just let them sleep until they awaken. That was as far as I went into this dream.

God help me if I ever have to hire a new cleaner. I am really lucky with the one whom I have, and I shall be lost without her. Yes, and I would love to have a cat, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed ….

There were three of us, and we were having to trek to this mountain that was in the distance. It was really snowy and a deep winter but we were on our journey. I was the smallest of the three so I was the one at the back while the two others were wading through the snow to make a trail. We passed into a forest and we could see the mountain, ohh, a hundred miles away in the distance, but we continued on our trek. At one point we came across a firefly that was buzzing around in our tracks. We thought that if it is going to report to its maker or whatever, then we would be in difficulty. However, it buzzed around us for a short while and we could push on. We then arrived in Crewe, but by this time, there were two of us and a girl. We climbed down into Earle Street near where Tiko’s used to be, and there was a Native American going past on his horse. We asked him if he ever went out to the Navajo country. He replied that he didn’t. We mentioned something about looking for a guide, but he gave us a very long lecture about white men pushing into his territory, how his people had had enough and how they were going to go on the warpath. This girl made a few comments to him in what was apparently his native language. He listened to her but it didn’t mollify his stance anyway. Later on, we learned that he had in fact gone onto the warpath and was busy devastating the homes and ranches of many settlers out there in what was formerly his hunting ground.

This was like a trek in LORD OF THE RINGS when everyone was going on a quest. But presumably, the Native American has to do with what I was reading the other week.

And then, I was living in Brussels and after all of the money that I’d spent on my kitchen and my nice apartment, my landlord was giving me notice to leave. That was extremely depressing. As it happened, the telephone rang so I had to go out and do some taxi work. At one point, I found myself not too far away from the free newspaper offices where they had all kinds of adverts, so I decided to go there and talk to someone to see what they had for apartments to let. Luckily, there was a parking space outside so I went in. The first thing that the guy asked me for was the number and reference, which I didn’t have. He said that if I hadn’t booked an appointment over the ‘phone, I couldn’t be seen, so I left. I picked up a couple of passengers after that. They wanted to go to various hotels around the city. The first one, I had a rough idea where it was but I almost ended up driving past it. The second one, I managed to drop the people off outside the door, and then I went back for my breakfast. While I was squeezing my lemon, a girl came in. She said something like “that’s my lemon squeezer.” I replied that I thought that it was mine, so we had a discussion about the lemon squeezer. Then, the two people from the hotel came in. I was talking about going back out after I’d had my breakfast, but they were surprised. They didn’t realise that I worked all day. They just thought that I worked an eight-hour shift or something. Then, a couple more people came in. They were musicians on their way to a performance in Germany. They had a video of themselves pulling up at some hotel in Germany and having to unload everything out of the car, including a bike, when it came to going into their room, and how the corridors were so small and winding that they damaged the walls and they damaged their equipment and they damaged their possessions as they found their room. I don’t know if I dictated … "no, you didn’t" – ed … but right at the end of that dream about the hotel and taxiing and Brussels, I was trying to write a note for a friend of mine, asking if she was coming up to see me, to bring me a copy of the “Vlan” and if she could make sure that I had a copy of the “Vlan” every week when it came out.

This ties in with a dream that I had a while ago about living in Brussels and having two apartments. However, I owned both of those. At one time though, I was thinking of fitting out the kitchen upstairs, and I’m glad that I didn’t; otherwise, I would have lost all of my investment when I moved downstairs.

It must have been an interesting discussion, arguing about a lemon squeezer. And here we are, taxiing again. What’s going on here?

Back in my comfortable office chair, there were the highlights of Stranraer v Stirling Albion to watch. And how the score ended up 3-2 to Stranraer, I really don’t know. Stranraer hit the woodwork half a dozen times, had half a dozen shots cleared off the line, and the Stirling Albion keeper was in outstanding form, saving another dozen or so point-blank efforts.

As for Stirling Albion, they had just two shots on target …

After a disgusting drinks break, I began to edit one of the sets of radio notes, but I found a problem – the left-hand track was eight seconds shorter than the right. It seems that it stopped recording for a short while in mid-stream. It took quite a bit of cutting and pasting in order to add exactly the right amount of speech back in and to synchronise it.

There wasn’t much time to do it either, because I had to knock off and make a start on my Christmas pudding. It took all afternoon to prepare it, too. Then I had to steam it for over three hours in a pan of boiling water.

While it was steaming, I made my pizza. And it was another really delicious one. And once again, I could only manage half of it. It’s worrying, actually, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed …. When I had my appetite, I was eating about two hundred and fifty grammes- worth of base, with all of the associated toppings. These days, I’m managing about eighty grammes of base, less than one-third.

So right now, I’m off to bed. Dialysis tomorrow, and I don’t feel at all like it, but then, that’s par for the course, isn’t it?

But seeing as we have been talking about the Roman camps at Chew Green … "well, one of us has" – ed … during the excavation of the site, they found two skeletons together in the same grave. They were totally undamaged, and there were no weapons or armour among the grave goods.
"It looks as if they didn’t die fighting" said the chief archaeologist. "Not even amongst themselves in their grave."
"Ah well" said his assistant"they haven’t got the guts, have they?"

0

Wednesday 26th November 2025 – AND ONCE AGAIN …

… I crashed out in the chair in my office during the late afternoon.

That’s something that I really must stop because it’s really driving me insane, all of this. I’m not managing to complete anything that I set out to do.

Part of it is probably due to the late night that I had. I can’t keep these early nights going for any consistent length of time. By the time that I’d finished everything that I needed to do at the end of the evening and crawled into my nice, clean bed, it was well after 23:30.

Add to that, the fact that for a couple of hours, I was totally unable to go to sleep might also have had something to do with it. I lay there tossing and turning and trying to make myself comfortable, but to no avail.

Eventually though, I must have gone to sleep because I remember waking up. I lay there, half-awake, for a little while and then checked the time. It was 06:28, one minute before the alarm but not before it enough to be able to be sitting upright with my feet on the floor when the alarm went off and claim an early start.

Instead, I just lay there waiting.

Eventually, I managed to force myself out of bed and went off into the bathroom.

Next stop was the kitchen, where I made my hot lemon, honey and ginger drink to wash down my medication. And then back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was with TOTGA and her daughter, her son and her slightly older daughter. We’d all gone to the seaside. TOTGA was sitting there thinking that maybe she would like an ice-cream so daughter and I went for a walk. We had a chat, and it turned out that her elder sister had had some kind of accident a few months ago and it was something that was recurring. When I asked where she was, her sister replied that she was in hospital again and her mother was off doing something else, she didn’t quite know where. We walked along together down the seafront and it began to be cold and rainy somewhat. She pointed to an ice-cream stall halfway up a set of steps so we climbed up these steps and went into the ice cream stall. There were lots of people milling around and they all recognised the girl. Anyway, we bought three cornets. I noticed that mine didn’t have a flake in it and hers had two and her mother’s had one. Then we walked as if we were heading back home. We came to a place in the street where she wanted to cross the road so we had to worry. She went in and I found that it was a health food shop. She was wondering if they had any of these products – she wanted some breakfast nuts, something like that. We had a look around, still holding these ice-creams and she found what she thought might be fine. She explained that her brother was looking for these and had not been able to find them anywhere else. But at the ice-cream stall, everyone knew the girl and they were all talking about her, whether she was coming back to work there again. However, I was certain that she was far too young to be working in a place like that, even on a Saturday.

So welcome back, TOTGA, even if it was only for a short while. It’s been a while since you’ve featured on these pages. However, instead of two daughters and a son, it’s two sons and a daughter, but let’s not go letting the facts stand in the way of a good dream… "perish the thought" – ed …

The idea of walking around the town with melting ice-creams is a bizarre one, but the conjuring trick with the flakes is the kind of thing that Zero would be more likely to do, rather than TOTGA’s daughter.

Later on, Nerina and I had been driving taxis last night and it had been a slow, slow day. We’d done about three or four jobs, that’s all, and were sitting at the side of the road in a lay-by having a chat. Someone came over with a big parcel and we thought that this might be a fare but it wasn’t. It was just someone chatting to a neighbour. In the end, Nerina decided that she’d go back to the rank. Before she did, someone in a blue uniform came over. He said that he wanted to book a taxi for 04:00, but it was only a short trip. I said to Nerina “ladies first” so she began to note the details. However, she said “we already have this job” when she looked at the paperwork. “It’s down for 03:55”. The guy apologised and then needed some help to be pushed onto the bus that turned up, because the bus was crowded and there wasn’t very much room on there for anyone else.

Strangely enough, the subject of taxis has been something that has featured quite considerably elsewhere in very recent times. But things would help if I stopped trying to remember the things that I did forty years later and how I could improve on them if I were to do it all again, something that I have absolutely no intention of doing.

Isabelle the Nurse drifted in, dressed for an Arctic winter. Apparently, it was minus 2°C when she set out on her rounds this morning and she had to scrape the ice off her windscreen. “Winter is acumen in, lhude singe Rudolph” and all of that.

She gave me my injection, sorted out my feet and then drifted out again to brave the Arctic temperatures. I made breakfast and read some more of ROMAN ROADS IN BRITAIN.

In fact, I didn’t read all that much of it. I ended up being sidetracked into the Iter Britanniarum – the guidebook said to have been prepared for the Emperor Augustus although it’s suggested that it was the Emperor Caracalla who was its sponsor, seeing that it includes much that was not in existence in the time of Augustus.

It’s like the kind of thing that we had in the distant past, a kind of “RAC Handbook” listing Roman roads, wayside stations, inns and the like. I’ve been following Codrington’s book and using the Iter Britanniarum to plot where the wayside stations might be. If one considers that a Roman mile – a mille passum – was actually one thousand double paces, and is equivalent to about 0.92 of a modern mile, the distances given in the Iter Britanniarum are surprisingly accurate.

Back in here, I had things to do and then I began to edit the rest of the radio notes that I’d dictated the other day.

Later on, I knocked off in order to prepare for the Centre de Ré-education. The taxi was late coming to pick me up and I missed the first ten minutes of my session with the occupational therapist.

Not that I missed much, because despite spending a week searching, he couldn’t find anything more practical than the system that we were using. However, he did suggest a liberal usage of anti-slip tape. On the other hand, I prefer four good stainless steel screws myself.

My second session was with my physiotherapist and she worked me quite hard today, forcing my legs into all kinds of impossible positions. I was so exhausted after this session that I couldn’t lift myself up off the bench.

And that was all today. They had cancelled my next two sessions! But let’s not be carried away by this because there are stil four, and sometimes five sessions for the next couple of visits.

One of these visits though is to see my doctor, when I shall tell her how I’m feeling.

It was another desperate struggle to the taxi to bring me home, and another desperate struggle to come into the apartment. I really don’t know how I would manage if my faithful cleaner were not there to help me.

Back in the apartment, I collapsed into a chair for half an hour, trying to summon up the energy to move, and then I moved into the office where, regrettably, I fell asleep.

Once I’d awoken, I completed the radio programme but I’m a few seconds short. I shall have to re-dictate something to include a few more notes in order to make the commentary rather longer.

Tea tonight was rice with vegetables and a vegan burger, followed by ginger cake and a mandarine … "PERSONdarine" – ed … and lemon soya dessert. It really is nice too.

So now, I’m off to bed. I’ve done enough for today and I have the delights of dialysis tomorrow. Let’s see what my water retention is like, then I hope that they won’t want me to come in on Saturday.

But seeing as we have been talking about ice-cream … "well, one of us has" – ed … Crewe was very famous for its ice-cream vans, made by SC Cummins and Co. They were exported all around the World, but even so, there were always plenty plying the streets of the town.
One day, out at Queen’s Park, a girl from Crewe went up to an ice-cream van there and asked for a chocolate ice-cream cornet
"I’m sorry" replied the salesman. "I’m out of chocolate ice-cream"
"But I want chocolate" she insisted.
"I’m sorry" replied the salesman.
"But sorry is no good! I want chocolate!"
"Look" said the salesman, exasperated. "If you took the ‘s’ out of ‘strawberry’, what would you have?"
"trawberry" replied the girl
"And if you took the ‘p’ out of ‘pistachio’? "
"Istachio " she replied.
"And if you took the ‘f’ out of chocolate?"
"But there’s no ‘f’ in chocolate!"
"And isn’t that what I’ve been trying to tell you for the last ten minutes?"

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Sunday 9th November 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone this morning.

Not that it’s any surprise, because if you don’t go to bed until after 02:00, what do you expect?

And for the first time in I don’t know how many months, I slept right through to the alarm, which, on a Sunday and it being a Day of Rest, doesn’t go off until 07:59.

Last night, after we’d finished eating, we stayed around talking about old times for what seemed like hours, and it was almost 01:00 when my visitors decided to toddle off to their digs. Hardly surprising, because they had had a very long day, with jet-lag and all of that.

Once they had left, I came back in here to write my notes and then, totally exhausted, I hit the sack and that was that.

When the alarm awoke me, it was a real struggle to force myself out of the bed? And it would have to be a day on which the nurse came early. He caught me in flagrante delicto in the bathroom and I had to come out without having a wash.

After he left, I tidied up in the kitchen and put away some of the crockery that I’d washed, and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone.

As I had said just now, there was nothing there, so instead I had a mini-footfest. We had the highlights of the other JD Cymru League matches from yesterday, and then a much-improved Stranraer grinding out a well-deserved point against league leaders Clyde.

Stranraer are now up to fourth from bottom – something that was looking extremely unlikely this time last month when they were rooted to the bottom of the table.

My visitors turned up some time later, having had the benefit of a lie-in. We ate breakfast together and chatted for a while. Then they decided that, because it was such a lovely day, they would go for a walk around the headland. And why not?

While they were away, I made a broccoli stalk soup ready for lunch and baked some fresh bread rolls. Then I came back in here and finished off editing the radio notes.

However, while I was editing them, I suddenly had a flash of inspiration about how I could finish the programme. This means re-writing the notes for a couple of songs, adding in a new song and shuffling the order around. It shan’t take me long to do that, the next time that I have an early start … "famous last words" – ed …

At some point, I also crashed out. And for about twenty minutes too.

My visitors turned up again at about 15:30. They had been for a walk around the headland and then gone down via the port into the town for a look around. There, they found a tea shop selling some gorgeous cakes, and the rest is history. I put the broccoli stalk soup into the fridge for my tea tomorrow night.

While we chatted, I prepared a pizza for tea. It was a mega-pizza, that’s for sure, and everyone liked it so much that not a single crumb remained. That was a really good pizza.

And one thing that it proved was that the new aluminium biscuit tray that fits onto the racks in the oven works a treat, although it’s really hot when you take it out.

Everyone decided to have an early night tonight so after they left, I washed up and put all of the uneaten food into the fridge. Tomorrow, I’ll be transferring it into containers to freeze. It’s a good job that I have two freezers around here otherwise I’d never have the room.

So now that everything is finished, I’m off to bed ready for an early start. My visitors have intimated that they intend to have a lie-in and if I didn’t have the nurse coming round, so would I.

But seeing as we have been talking about pizzas … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once had a girl from Crewe round at my house one Sunday night, and I baked a pizza.
"How would you like your pizza sliced?" I asked her. "Six slices or eight?"
"You’d better cut it in six slices" she replied. "I don’t think that I could manage eight."

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Monday 27th October 2025 – IN A CHANGE …

… from the usual programme these days, when the alarm went off this morning at 06:29, I was fast asleep in bed.

Not that it’s any surprise because, what with one thing and another … "and once you make a start, you have no idea how many other things there are" – ed … it was 00:50 when I finally crawled into bed. And it’s a long time since I have been that late going to bed, that’s for sure

Whatever these other things were, I really have no idea because I wasn’t doing anything that I don’t normally do. It’s true that I was late back from tea, but not all that late I just seem to have run out of time here and there for no good reason.

Surprisingly, after that ridiculously early start, I wasn’t at all tired. I could have stayed up for much longer than I did but there’s no point in pushing your luck for no good reason. However, I didn’t go to sleep all that quickly last night … "he means ‘this morning’" – ed …

When the alarm went off, I was absolutely out of it and it took a good few minutes to work out what was going on. However, I did manage to be sitting on the edge of the bed when the second alarm went off, so I can’t complain about that.

In the bathroom, I had a good wash and shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant at dialysis, and then I went into the kitchen for the medication. While I was at it, I cut the new loaf in half, wrapped them and put them into the stock in the freezer.

The bread was followed by the croissants. When the current half-loaf that I am toasting is finished, I’ll resurrect the croissants and see how they have come out. If they are inedible, I’ll abandon the project. If however they are worth eating, I’ll send my faithful cleaner off to Leclerc for some more puff pastry and make some more for my guests next weekend.

No sooner had I come back in here when the nurse arrived – ridiculously early again. He’s off on his week’s break this evening so I imagine that he wants to finish his rounds as early as possible.

After he left, I made breakfast and then came back in here to transcribe the dictaphone notes. And I was surprised that there were some, considering how deeply I must have slept. There was a group of us who set off on a kind of hike. It had been part of some kind of exercise where everyone had to walk around or run around this circuit. It was extremely complicated, with climbing exercises, running exercises and all kinds of different things. The first part of this, or should I say, the first one of this, went OK. I wax one of the people who had to wait on a street corner for the parties to arrive. When this had happened in the previous version of this, it was someone else who was doing it and I was one of the people who was running, so I had a good idea of what to do. However, it was in darkness – it was pitch-black. You couldn’t see anything and you were really doing this kind of thing by intuition. It didn’t seem to work very well. The next time, we set off. There was about eight of us in this group, but I didn’t really fit in with the others but I went with them all the same. Coming across a field, we were all carrying wire baskets full of fruit and vegetables. And coming across the field, there was one of the songs by Man being played, and I was singing it. They were all wondering what it was. We were going past some kind of courtyard with all these old buildings in it. We were walking through this courtyard and there were all lights on in the odd individual buildings. Someone made some kind of comment, and I pointed to the doorway right at the very end of the row on one side of this courtyard, and I said that they were the most famous toilets in rock music. When we reached the end of this courtyard, we had to climb out and onto the street. This involved going through some large kind of wire – metal grilled compound or something. We had to put down our baskets to climb up, pick up our baskets. I was the last one out, and I realised that someone had my basket and left theirs behind, so we had to sort out the baskets. Then we came to the city walls, which were the big city walls with a tiny gap in between them – two concentric walls. I again had to pass my basket up to the people who were up on top of the walls. Then I had to hoist myself up in a most undignified way by leaping up, catching the sides with my elbows and using my feet to walk the lower part of my body up, hooking it over the top of the walls and then somehow pulling the upper half of my body up. There were some other people sitting on the walls, a group of girls. They were impressed, so I smiled at them but the other guys with me made some kind of ribald comments. Then we were talking about the next stage of the journey. Some guy seemed to be extremely cocky about it so I said to one of the others “wait until we are further on. It’s his daughter who is doing the sentry duty on the street corner and she won’t take any nonsense from him”.

This is reminiscent of the dream that I had several days ago when I was crawling underneath fences and through hedges. And the … errr … restrooms reminded me of those in the woodworking block at Grammar School.

The rest of it, though, is quite meaningless as far as I can tell, and I’ve no idea why we would be walking around carrying those wire supermarket shopping baskets.

With all of that out of the way, I set out to pay a couple of bills. However, I’ll be badgered if I can’t find them. I had them in my hand a few days ago and put them somewhere, but wherever I might have put them, I don’t have an idea.

Instead, I tried to contact the tax office for a duplicate or to see if they would accept a payment on-line, but trying to contact them is impossible. Despite there being a helpline number, all it does is route you to a series of recorded messages and is of nu use whatsoever.

The bank was even worse, because they aren’t open today, recovering from having to work on Saturday mornings. I shall have to contact them again.

As for the hospital at Rennes, I needed to contact them too. They have given me an appointment for chemotherapy on Wednesday 12th November, but that’s no good because the follow-up will be on the Thursday and I’m in dialysis.

Eventually I managed to speak to them and they changed it to Tuesday 18th November. I believe that, barring accidents, that will be the last chemotherapy until I’ve had my six-monthly check-up in Paris in February.

All of that, would you believe, took me up to midday when my faithful cleaner arrived. She sorted out my anaesthetic and then left me to await the taxi.

For a change, it was bang on time so I braved the howling gale to go outside while I waited for the driver to bring the car round. Being new, he didn’t know where to park so he had ended up on the public car park.

There was another passenger in the car, a lively old woman, and we had an exciting chat all the way to Avranches. Bizarrely, she has exactly the same illness that I have, with very similar symptoms.

Being early leaving, I was early arriving and to my surprise, I only had to wait ten minutes before I was coupled up. That is the first for quite a while.

They left me pretty much alone today, although the doctor came to see me. Not Emilie the Cute Consultant, even though she was there and talked to everyone else but me. She clearly doesn’t love me any more.

Instead, I had the chef de service. I’m obviously being watched quite closely these days. But he brought me some good news. Firstly, I can abandon another one of my pills for a while and see how I get on.

Secondly, he plans to try a few sessions of just three hours instead of three and a half if the liquid level will permit it. The machine is limited to about 850 millilitres per hour.

The taxi arrived for me just a couple of minutes after I had finished, and wasn’t it nice to be back home early? Even if it was well dark by then.

There was even time for half an hour of relaxing before I went for tea.

Tonight, I had mashed potatoes and vegan sausage with vegetables in a cheese sauce. And that made a nice change, even if it did taste of salt … "there wasn’t even a grain of salt added" – ed …

So now, I’m off to bed. There’s a day off tomorrow as my Welsh class is on half-term. I shall ring up the bank and then crack on with a radio programme or two, to see how far I can go.

But seeing as we have been talking about medieval city walls … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of the time a friend of mine went to see the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem
"How did you get on?" I asked her.
"Actually, it was quite embarrassing" she replied. "Thousands and thousands of people there, and I was the only one who had brought a harpoon."

0

Monday 8th September 2025 – WHAT A DAY …

… this has been. It’s been another one where almost everything that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong and I’m beginning to become totally fed up with days like this.

It all began to go wrong last night when I seemed once again to take hours to do the simplest of things. It ended up, from an optimistic start, being quite late yet again. It wasn’t far short of midnight when I finished everything that I had to do.

As the programmer for the water heater was due to fire up at midnight, I waited around to make sure that it did. And it was just as well that I waited around for it because, in fact, it didn’t start up. It took me an age to work out how to fire it up manually (and I still don’t understand how I managed it) and it was after 00:30 when I finally crawled into bed.

It was quite a turbulent night yet again with more long periods when I was unable to sleep, but when the alarm went off at 06:29 it caught me unawares, deep in the Land of Nod. And it’s been a good while since that has happened.

After breakfast, I came back in here to see where I’d been during the night. We were in West Street in Crewe, a group of us. We were again packing ready to go away. At the same time, a big box came and I had to unpack it. It was my Fender Jazz bass and amp. I picked it up and began to play, but realised that I could no longer play. I didn’t know how to. I was racking my brains about how I was going to start to play the bass. After a while, Nerina came up to me and said “we’re leaving in five minutes. You have to get a move on!”. I started quickly to pack everything away, and Nerina said that she was going for a shower, however the other girl with us had begun to pack and I had to give her a hand, and either put my boxes into a big box with handles or else cut handles into the sides of my own for easy manoeuvre. But then I noticed the moon. It was huge tonight, it was very close and was completely full. Away in the distance, I could see the sun that was quite full too. I thought that we would have a lovely sky tonight. But back inside the office of the service station where we were packing, the girl who was packing my stuff, I asked her how she was. She said that she was struggling to fit my things in. I had a look in the hold of the ship. The first thing that I noticed was an old pool table. I asked why it was there, why can’t we move it? She said that it weighs a ton. It was an old-style table and no-one can lift it. “We’ve asked the Council if they would lift it but they need an authorisation and my authorisation” she said “has expired a long time ago”.

So I’m going away yet again. This has become a regular theme just recently, and it must be my body telling me something. The Fender bass is another issue that I need to resolve. The bass and amp are currently languishing in Canada and they need to be brought over here quite soon before I forget. As for the ship’s hold, that is self-explanatory. If I’m going anywhere, there is inevitably a passage on board a boat somewhere.

At another point, we were walking down Chestnut Avenue in Shavington, looking at the new houses. I mentioned that the houses on one side of the street were built on the rubbish dump. Someone else pointed out that the houses on the other side of the street were built on a hill slope, but one that was secured with special material like a net. It was the best material that we had ever seen. So we had a look in the driveways of one of the houses. In one of them, on the side that had been netted, we actually saw a piece of net sticking out of the ground so we had a good look at it.

These hare hardly new houses in Chestnut Avenue. I remember them being built in the early 1960s on the field in which we played and over the brook into which we fell with monotonous regularity.

When the alarm went off, I was talking to a girlfriend of mine about another girl with whom I’d been in a relationship. But the moment that I changed apartment to buy a bigger apartment maybe for us all to move into, she suddenly developed cold feet and our relationship immediately fizzled out. But that’s all that I remember about that because the alarm went off.

Nothing new in this either. It’s something that has happened on a couple of occasions in the past.

Isabelle the Nurse came in to deal with my legs, and she gave me yet another dire warning about the dialysis at home issue. I promised her that I’d mention it today at dialysis, promising that I’d refuse it.

After she left, I made my breakfast and read some more of ADVENTURES ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER.

Our author has arrived on shore and is busy setting up camps and trading posts. He describes the cruel and savage reprisals that took place during the inter-native conflicts, acts that defy description. And he also recounts his experiences in the forests with wild beasts when he becomes separated from his party for a couple of weeks.

It’s full of stories like that, all described with immaculate care and attention.

Back in here, the plumber had set me a few tasks to check the pipework, and that occupied me for quite a while. I had to break off because my cleaner arrived to apply my anaesthetic cream.

She was late arriving today so naturally, the taxi was early – although not before I’d fallen asleep for five minutes, sitting on my chair waiting.

There were three passengers all told, including me, with the driver, and we had to drop off one of them on the way. However, we arrived quite early and I had high hopes of being connected quite quickly.

And so I was, but one of the needles had missed its aim and had pierced me, making me suffer the most indescribable agony. It had to be replanted, and it wasn’t much better.

While I was lying there, I organised my shopping list for tomorrow. There’s some new vegan produce available and I’m determined to try it to see what it’s like.

The doctor came to see me, and amongst one of the things that I wanted to mention was that I intend to refuse the “dialysis at home”.

My explanation was that I’d spoken to people like the visiting nurses and they had strongly counselled against it. His response was "they don’t know what they are talking about".

That was, I thought, a very strange response seeing that one of the nurses was actually a nurse in the dialysis clinic in St Malo. However, that cut no ice at all. Instead, I carried on with my shopping list and, regrettably, crashed out again.

It took the nurses an age, unfortunately, to unplug me and compress the punctures, and when I boarded the taxi, I was told that not only was the closure of the autoroute this month responsible for a long nose-to-tail traffic jam through Avranches, a road accident at Marcey on one of the deviation routes had bottled that up too and it was chaos.

To rub salt into the wound, we had to go to the clinic at Avranches to pick up someone else. Going there, through the backstreets, wasn’t too bad but coming back was a nightmare. By the time that we reached the dialysis centre on our way back from the clinic, we’d already been on the road for over an hour.

So from one of the potentially earliest departures that I might have had, it was probably the latest ever that I returned home, totally fed up.

For tea, I just scratched something together quickly. I was going to make something interesting, but not at this time of night. For some reason that I can’t explain, I’m exhausted and so I’m off to bed. I’ve had enough for today.

But seeing as we have been talking about the wild beasts in the forests of North America … "well, one of us has" – ed … the amount of alcohol that they used to swig down while hunting was phenomenal.
That’s a characteristic of North American hunting that exists even today.
I was once with a group of hunters in the forests of Maine and it went something like this –
BANG! – "I got a deer"
BANG! – "I got a bear"
BANG! – "I got a moose"
BANG! – "Oh, sorry. You OK, Bob? Well, never mind. Throw him on the pickup anyway. No-one will notice the difference"

0

Thursday 4th September 2025 – I AM HAVING …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wednesday 3rd September 2025 – WHEN THE ALARM …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tuesday 2nd September 2025 – SO HERE I AM …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thursday 14th August 2025 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day at dialysis that was! Everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong and it wasn’t until 19:45 that I finally made it back here.

It had all gone wrong a long time before that, though. Once more, another night where I failed miserably to beat my curfew time of 23:00, mainly due to prevarication and lack of motivation, and I really need to do something about that. Over the last eighteen months or so I seem to have lost the will and there’s nothing that I can do that seems to recapture it.

At least, once I go to bed, I don’t stay awake for long. I’m away quite quickly, which is at least an improvement on how things used to be. But in some kind of weird compensation, I seem to awaken quite early and quite easily.

It was 02:45 when I awoke for the first time, and try as I might, I couldn’t go back to sleep at first. I reckoned at one stage that I may as well leave the bed and do something constructive, but as I was trying to summon up the energy, I must have gone back to sleep.

And then a strange thing happened. For the first time since I don’t know when, I was still asleep when the alarm went off at 06:29. I must have been really tired last night, because I was completely out of it all at that moment.

It took a good few minutes for me to gather up my senses, which is a surprise seeing how few I have these days, but I still managed to beat the second alarm – but only just.

After a good scrub up and the morning medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I’d gone to Paris for the weekend. On the Sunday morning I awoke and went down to the metro station to buy a metro pass. I then set out for a little walk. I walked down alongside the River Seine for a while and then decided to catch the metro. I climbed onto the metro and headed south along the river. I suddenly then had a horrible sensation that I’d left my keys in the metro station when I bought my ticket. So what was I going to do? I had to leave the metro and then run all the way back, all the way down the banks of the Seine, all the way to the metro station where I had been. I remember thinking that I don’t have my crutches here. How am I doing this? When I reached the metro station, I had to climb into my car and drive out into the suburbs or something. I drove out, and it was quite a fast drive with people not really obeying the speed limit at all. When I reached where I was supposed to be, I found that everyone from work had assembled there. One of the people gave me my suit that was in one of these plastic suit cover things on a hanger. I mentioned to him about my keys so he opened the plastic suit container thing and pulled out my keys. Of course I was extremely relieved about this and I thanked him, but then everyone began to take the mickey out of me. Although I knew that it was done in good nature, I wasn’t really in the kind of mood to be teased at that moment again. It was more a great big sigh of relief.

These days I seem to spend a lot of time wandering around without my crutches. If only it were true! But why would I be walking around Paris? That’s something that I certainly can’t do these days, not that I would want to, because Paris isn’t my favourite European city. The last time that I had a good walk around Paris was about three years ago with a certain young lady who figures every now and again in these pages. I don’t know why my colleagues from work would be there either, but that’s another story.

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in as usual, and as well as dealing with my legs, she removed the plaster from my catheter, without giving me an opportunity to express my opinion on the matter. She’s probably right to do so, but it’s still going to be uncomfortable for me if I see it.

Once she’d left, I could make breakfast and read some more of THE DIARIES OF SIR DANIEL GOOCH.

Today, we’ve been treated to a very lengthy and involved discussion about fishing in 2400 fathoms (14400 feet) of sea with a couple of grappling hooks for the broken end of a transatlantic telegraph cable so that they could haul it up, splice a new length in it and lay it as a second cable from Valencia to Heart’s Content.

He also spends some time talking about the shipping that went past them as they fished for the cable. And in those days, there was so much marine traffic and so many different companies sailing the Atlantic. When we sailed the Atlantic in 2019, we met just one ship after leaving the Orkney Islands behind us until we were in the Davis Strait off the west coast of Greenland.

After breakfast, I did some more packing for a while and then came back in here to begin work on the next radio programme. And just five minutes convinced me that this is going to be a real mess. I’ll be lucky to salvage anything at all out of it.

And seeing as we have been talking about the radio, don’t forget that this weekend features my series of Woodstock programmes. I hope that you’ll all listen to it, even if you can’t understand French. After all, it took ages to prepare and involved an enormous amount of research. I was really happy about how it all turned out.

You can hear the broadcasts HERE at 21:00 Central European Time, 20:00 UK Time and 15:00 Toronto Time on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and even download them for later perusal.

My cleaner turned up a little later than usual to fit my anaesthetic patches, and then we went downstairs where I had a good chat with the plumber. Judging by what remains to be done, it looks as if he might be finished by Monday night if he works tomorrow, which is a Bank Holiday around here.

The taxi was late arriving but the driver put her foot down and we weren’t too late arriving in Avranches. But the doctor wanted to inspect the fitting in my arm, and then the nurse found that one of the patches had missed the fitting so it hurt like Hades, and the needle that goes in there missed the fitting too, so they were talking about doing it again. But wiser counsel prevailed and they fitted a “Y” branch on the one that was working.

They also found that I’d gained quite a lot of weight this last couple of days and so I had to stay for four hours. And to add insult to injury, they put me in the bed that is the most uncomfortable.

Having arrived at 13:45, it was 14:45 when the treatment actually began. And as I said earlier, s late as 19:45 when I returned home.

We had a quick look in to see where the plumber had reached this afternoon. He had made good progress while I was at dialysis. The plasterboard walling is all done and he’s applied the first layer of jointing compound. He has everything that he needs to repair the floor and to tile everywhere. It’s looking really impressive and will look even better when it’s finished

Coming back upstairs was a nightmare, and shan’t I be glad to no longer have to do it? I was exhausted and it took me a good half hour to recover enough breath to make a quick tea. Nothing exotic at all – I wasn’t in the mood.

So I’m off to bed now, wondering if I’ll have another sleep like last night or whether I’ll be back to the “four hours per night” lark.

But seeing as we have been talking about shipping … "well, one of us has" – ed … Nerina and I met a couple of people on a ferry once and had a really interesting chat with them.
"My husband is a sea-captain" said the woman. "He works for Cunard."
"My husband runs a taxi business" replied Nerina. "He puts a great deal of effort and energy into his work too."

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Saturday 28th June 2025 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about this weight gain thing on Thursday.

The doctor seemed to think that there was something dramatically wrong with my metabolism that had caused the weight gain, and wanted me to come in early today for a four-and-a-half hour session to try to bring it under control.

On the other hand, I don’t know what she was expecting, but if you have 2 litres of chemotherapy fluid pumped into you, then your weight will naturally increase, but nature will take care of that over time. That was my opinion.

Anyway, what do I know about it all? I’m just a mere patient, so I bowed to her superior wisdom. I didn’t have any choice.

But anyway, last night, what with one thing and another, and once you make a start you have no idea how many other things there are, it was almost 01:00 when I finally made it into bed. It was not a very successful night either, because I spent much of what there was, tossing and turning about trying to make myself comfortable

Round about 05:42 I gave up the struggle to go back to sleep. There was this disgusting taste in my mouth (it’s still there by the way) and, as usual, I was feeling quite dreadful. It took about ten minutes to rise to my feet and had I had my way, it would have taken a lot longer.

The first thing to do was to transcribe the dictaphone notes from last night. I was back in Paris last night, preparing myself for another session of dialysis at the hospital. Fortunately the dream didn’t last long because I managed to awaken quite quickly but it really would have been my nightmare, I suppose if it had gone very further but luckily I awoke before the dream had progressed very much into it

Then I was preparing to go to dialysis again. I had organised my session for 12:00 so the taxi came and picked me up to run me down to the centre. There, sitting in the trees was a parrot that was clutching one of my large peppers. I thought to myself that I’d hoped that I’d ordered some peppers from the supermarket this week so that I’d still have some for next week

Finally, I was back in dialysis yet again. They were going to couple me up to the machine. My body weight was quite light there but they had this huge, heavy ball of things. I had a feel of it and it was really heavy and they told me that this was the amount of water that they had to take out of me today. It was enormous. Once again it was at that moment when I awoke.

There isn’t anything of the foregoing – the trip to Paris, the dialysis, the pepper from the supermarket, the rapid panic-awakenings to cancel out the dreams; that needs any explanation at all. Neither does the fact that it’s all preying on my mind when I’m supposed to be asleep and relaxing.

It seemed to be a rather late awakening for everyone this morning. Almost 08:00 when I heard signs of stirring coming from the kitchen, so I staggered off to the bathroom for a wash and brush up.

As you might expect at moments like this, the nurse arrived early today. He caught me in flagrante delicto and had to wait around for a few minutes while I finished whatever I was doing.

After he left, we had a coffee and then I made a little breakfast. I would ordinarily have done without this morning seeing how I was feeling, but they would only go berserk at the dialysis centre when they check my diabetes level.

One thing that I wanted to do was to write out my letter of notice for this apartment. I know that I said that I wouldn’t run the risk of the one downstairs not being finished. However, as I said yesterday, I can’t go on much longer like this, and I’ve lived in worse circumstances than what there would be down there, even with no kitchen. I’ll manage much better down there as things are rather than continue to struggle on trying to climb up here.

All of this called for more coffee (well, I didn’t) and a chat until my faithful cleaner came, earlier than usual because of my extended appointment, to fit my patches and to have a chat.

At 12:30 we went downstairs to meet the taxi driver, whom we met at the foot of the stairs just as he was about to come up, so we were away quite quickly. We picked up our other usual Saturday passenger and then I slept all the way down to Avranches. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … sleep is my “doliprane”.

For a change, I was one of the first to be coupled up. It was Anaïs and Océane who dealt with me today and Océane held my hand again. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I don’t know what she is after, but I don’t have it any more.

But I’m not going to complain under any circumstances. She can hold my hand as much as she likes … "and so can Anaïs, Alexi, Julie the Cook, Justine, Héloise, Amandine etc etc" – ed …

When they weighed me, they found that there was just 1.8kg to lose today, well within my three-and-a-half hour limit.
"But the doctor said four and a half" said Océane.
"The doctor doesn’t know what she’s talking about " I replied.

In the end, we agreed on a compromise of four hours.

However, when the doctor in charge came round, he took one look at the figures and reduced the time to three and a half hours.

This meant that I would have been able to be home early, and had the taxi been there instead of twenty minutes late, I would have been. Instead, we had to fight our way through all of the crowds going to the start of the town’s 10km road race just round the corner from here.

It was another struggle up to my little apartment, but at least my friend made me some tea, which was very nice.

We had a play with this recording desk afterwards, and then I sat down to write my notes for the day.

Now that they are done, I’m off to bed, and I can’t say that I’m not sorry. I’m still suffering the effects of the chemotherapy and I’m going to have to do something about it.

But seeing as we have been talking about losing weight … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of a girl from Crewe whom I knew who wanted to lose weight.
The dietician told her "it’s simple really – just eat normally for two days, skip a day and then eat for two days, skip a day and so on"
After a couple of weeks the dietician sees the girl from Crewe and asks "how’s it going?"
"I had to stop" replied the girl from Crewe
"Why was that?" asked the dietician
"On the sixth day I wore out the rope."

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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’ ♬ "

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Thursday 1st May 2025 – WHEN I WAS SMALL …

… and Christmas trees were tall
We used to love while others used to play
Don’t ask me why, but time has passed us by
Someone else moved in from far away

Now we are tall and Christmas trees are small
And you don’t ask the time of day
But you and I, our love will never die
But guess we’ll cry come FIRST OF MAY

Happy Journée International de Travail – the “International Day of Work”, a day in which, with absolutely no sense of irony whatever, everyone celebrates work by taking a day off.

That is, of course, except the nurses and staff at the dialysis centre who were hard at it today. And hard it was too, because I have a head spinning round at I don’t know what speed, I’m feeling nauseous and I’m rather groggy on my feet. I shall be going to bed as soon as I finish these notes.

It’s probably something to do with another late night. It was after 00:30 when I finally crawled into bed after I’d finished everything. And I was asleep quite quickly too.

During the night I awoke several times but I was fast asleep when the alarm went off this morning.

No-one ever felt less like leaving the bed than me this morning but I struggled to my feet and staggered off to sort myself out.

After a wash and shave (after all, I may meet Emilie the Cute Consultant) I went off to take my medication. And then back in here for the dictaphone notes.

And a special visitor came to see me during the night. Welcome back, Zero. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you! In the dream I can’t remember too much about this but there was certainly something about her being there. I’d had another dream during this particular dream, about Emilie the Cute Consultant who was there. She’d been treating me for something or other that meant that I had to stay over. There were all kinds of things that needed doing and I had to stay over in hospital. One of them was to do some kind of cleaning process. I was going to be heavily involved in that for some reason but I can’t remember where the border lay between the “dream within the dream” and the “dream”. At some point the idea was Zero was there so I was hoping that it would work out that Zero would be staying on too so that while I was doing the cleaning she would be there. I was desperately trying to negotiate myself onto some kind of work rota that would involve me actually doing the work when I knew that Zero was going to be present so that I could talk to her. But this was proving to be extremely complicated because every time I tried to approach Zero to talk to her, something happened and she kept on moving two steps away. I was trying all through this dream to end up next to her to speak to her, to end up on the same shift that would work when she was going to be present but it never seemed to happen. There always seemed to be something that was coming along to stand in my way again

More and more than ever before I’m convinced that it’s my subconscious that is keeping me apart from making a fool of myself over all of these young ladies during the night. It obviously knows something that I don’t know, but I’m not going to let that worry me. I shall live for the moment and cling on to whatever crumbs of comfort I can catch.

And next time anyone hears me bewail the fact that I never seem to step back into a dream involving any of my special young ladies, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, make sure to remind me that last night, Zero appeared again later on. It was her birthday and she was quite a young woman round about this time. I was wondering what had become of her, whether she was married, whether she had had children, everything like that. I was musing over this when the dream ended.

It often makes me wonder in reality where she is, what she’s doing, whether she’s married, whether she has kids. I mean, another one of my favourite young ladies is a grandmother these days. But whatever Zero is doing now, I hope that her life is happier than it was when I knew her. I felt really sorry for her back then, but there was nothing that I could do to help.

Later on, a friend of mine was managing a project for some young people and was finding it very difficult to go ahead. He said that the trouble with the younger people today was that they are so naïve. They are open to believe almost anything that someone tells them. “It’s making my life really difficult to bring them into the real World for any particular kind of project that they are trying to deal with”.

That’s something that I have noticed quite frequently these days.

The nurse came earlier than usual and we had a good chat. I told him that I’d missed his friend at that builders’ place yesterday. He didn’t know why but he imagines that she’ll be in contact with me. However, I have had another thought in this respect.

After he left, I made breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK. Having passed by a few smaller piles, we’re now at the Tower of London and discussing William the Conqueror’s arrival on the scene and the beginning of the construction.

It’s likely that he will have a lot to say on the subject as it’s one of the most important places in the Capital. But seeing as its history is well-known, I would be surprised if we were to learn anything new.

Back in here I made a start on programme 260403. I’ve not gone very far but even making a start is some kind of progress, I suppose. I doubt if anything will be finished for dictating on Saturday night but I do have some unedited notes that need attention on Sunday.

My cleaner turned up as usual, but my taxi didn’t. After she had fitted my patches we waited and waited. In the end I telephoned. "We thought that you were still in hospital" said the despatcher.

Whoops! I knew that there was something that I had forgotten to do on Tuesday morning. That was what they call an omelette sur le visage moment.

The young garrulous driver turned up and the three of us (there was another passenger in the car) had a lively, chatty voyage all the way down to Avranches.

Today’s nurses were Océane, Amandine and Alexi. I really like Alexi – she has a very soft touch and it’s like being stroked rather than being handled. Mind you, they all have their little speciality and I like them all. I really do think that the nurses who work in dialysis here have been hand-picked for their charm. Even the Nursing Auxis are lovely.

The coupling-up was comparatively painless which was nice, and then I had plenty to do. I’m making a list of tasks to do downstairs and it’s growing longer by the minute.

Liz contacted me too, asking if it was convenient to chat – we’d had a brief on-line discussion this morning. It’s difficult to talk in dialysis so she’s going to contact me tomorrow.

Starting late, I was finished late, even though it was only three and a half hours today. I managed it without a crisis but as I mentioned earlier, the low blood pressure is knocking me out right now

The garrulous driver who took me brought me back, and we chatted all the way home. My cleaner was waiting and watched as I staggered up the stairs., rather worse for wear.

Tea was a delicious leftover curry, but no naan. And there was so much left over that there’s enough for two more meals in the future. Having emptied some stuff from the freezer, it’s filling up.

So now, much earlier than usual, I’m off to bed, hoping that Zero will come to see me again and that I wake up feeling much better than I do now.

One thing that I learned today is that my dialysis session is arranged for 08:00 on Monday, so I’ll be leaving here at 07:00. Which means leaving my bed at about 05:30 if I’m going to eat anything before I go.

But seeing as we have been talking about the Journée International de Travail … "well, one of us has" – ed … Nerina once told me "I’m totally fed up with all of the sexual harassment that I have while I’m doing my work"
"Well," I told her, "if you don’t like it, the answer is to give up this working from home and go back to the office."

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Wednesday 30th April 2025 – I HAVE HAD …

… another wonderful day out today. And I’ve been shopping today again too. It was really pleasant to hit the streets again and I enjoyed it tremendously.

And that’s even after the lack of sleep that I had last night.

In fact, it was after 01:30 when I finally hit the sack. I was quite wound up after all of my efforts yesterday and couldn’t settle down. Instead, I found a few things t do on the computer and had a wander around in cyberspace doing a bit of this and a bit of that. As for “a bit of the other”, I managed to restrain myself.

When I finally made it into bed, I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned for quite some considerable time.

However, I must have dropped off to sleep at some point because BILLY COTTON awoke me at 07:00.

Surprisingly, I wasn’t as tired as I might have been. I made it into the bathroom and sorted myself out, as far as it is possible to do so, and then went into the kitchen for my medication.

There was a beautiful draught of air coming through the open window (I’d left it open all night). And as I sat there, the sun rose from behind the church and immediately the current of air became warm. I was only there ten minutes too.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night, and the answer was a predictable “nowhere”, given the amount of sleep that I had had.

The nurse was in full chat mode and for a change it was quite interesting. He also mentioned another one of his friends who had some kind of connection with a building company. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I know all about his friends.

While we’re on the subject of friends … "well, one of us is" – ed … my friend turned up shortly afterwards and we had a good chat as we waited for the builder to show up (late, as usual, but we expected that).

When he turned up, we found that he was quite efficient, quite frank and quite easy to talk to. He made me fully aware (however, I already knew) that there would be no guarantee or promise that his company could start work within my deadline. It was that that impressed me the most.

He’s arranged for an appointment on 3rd June (when I should have possession) to measure up and talk to his contractors. And it can’t be done any quicker than that.

After he left we had breakfast and continued our discussion for a while, tearing apart all kinds of ideas and plans for downstairs.

Eventually, we decided to make the most of the lovely weather and went out to the car – or, rather, we went outside and my friend went and brought the car to me.

Our first stop was at Donville-les-Bains. The branch of my bank there is much easier to access and parking is easier so I went in and drew out some cash – the first time since I can’t remember when. Not that I need it, because I do have an emergency supply here in the apartment and I haven’t spent any in ages – but it’s always handy to have around “just in case”. And I won’t have many other opportunities.

After we left, we went down the hill to the seafront and had a very, very leisurely drive along the coast as we chatted about old times. We saw some wonderful sights, and made quite a few U-turns as our path led up into various dead ends.

We decided to go to Coutances for lunch and my Artificial Intelligence search engine made several suggestions as to where a vegan could eat.

However, I don’t know what France has come to these days.

When Marechal Foch took over overall command of the French Army in 1918 it is said that he said that he only had two conditions – "a free hand with the Army, and two hours for lunch". We arrived in Coutances well before 14:00 only to find that every single restaurant that we tried had closed its kitchen at 13:30

We ended up at the LeClerc supermarket where we grabbed some “Tricatel” food, thanks to a couple of nice serving wenches who took their time closing at 14:30 so that we could just about have time to be served.

On the way back home we stopped at Noz, my first time since October 2023 where I struck lucky with some fabric softener, some coffee, some noodles and a pile of frozen vegan food.

Leaving Noz, we drove slap bang past the place that my nurse had mentioned, so we went in anyway. His friend wasn’t there but a helpful girl gave me several pointers and arranged an appointment for someone to come to see me. There’s no harm in it, I suppose.

On our arrival home, we found that my faithful cleaner had been to LeClerc in Granville and had found my pyjamas as well as more of those curry patties that we had bought yesterday.

For tea I had lasagna out of the freezer, making space to put in everything that we had bought. It’s not ‘arf crowded in there but it all went in, right enough.

Our chat, reminiscing about old times, continued for ages. He showed me some photos of our project in the UK – the “before” and the “after”. The “after” is so impressive and looks wonderful and we will soon be ready to start Stage Two of our project but the “before” photos are horrifying and I was genuinely appalled.

Eventually he left to go back to his hotel ready for an early night as he has to set off for back home at 05:30 tomorrow morning. We had a lovely two days together, going to places, catching up on old times and discussing new times, but what kind of state is this to be in when someone has to drive all the way from Newport in Shropshire to take me to the shops?

Now that I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed, later than usual yet again. Dialysis tomorrow and I’m not looking forward to it at all. I wonder if there will be any more feedback from my rebellion on Monday

We shall see.

But seeing as we have been talking about going down a few dead ends … "well, one of us has" – ed … I am reminded of a report on male sterility that was published a few years ago.
A newspaper had laid its hand on the article and the headlines the next day were "Male Sterility – a dead end?"

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