Tag Archives: maiden castle

Monday 15th December 2025 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S NICE …

… lie-in, it was back to the daily grind and an 06:29 start this morning. And that’s what I call disappointing because I enjoyed myself yesterday, even if Isabelle the Nurse didn’t bring me coffee in bed.

To make matters worse, it wasn’t an early night last night either. I’m still stuck in this dilatory, time-wasting mood where I just can’t seem to advance at all. By the time that I’d finished everything that needed finishing, it was 23:30 and I still wasn’t in bed.

Once in bed, though, I slept flat-out until the alarm went off and I could have gone back to bed to do it all again afterwards. It took me a good few minutes to summon up the energy to leave the bed and toddle off into the bathroom, where I even had a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant.

In the kitchen, I made myself a hot ginger, lemon and honey drink to take with my medication, and then I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone. I was back on the taxis again and I was trying to make myself better organized, so I began to do some kind of tidying up of the yard. We had a crashed Ford Cortina down there and I wanted that brought round to somewhere else so that it would be easier for me to take parts from it. For some reason, no-one was particularly interested in helping me. We had a couple of other newer vehicles, one of which was a Cavalier diesel. The carpets in the front were rather worn, so I ordered a new front half section. I wanted to fit that in at some time but the car was out working, so it wasn’t possible right at that particular moment, so I decided to go back outside again. Nerina was there and she said that she’d come with me. She was working for me, but she was making it quite clear without any subtlety at all that she was interested in entering a relationship with me. I was rather cautious because this was the kind of thing that could lead to a disaster at some point, so I was very noncommittal. We went outside, and I said to Nerina “I’ll tell you something – that if we do ever get together, I’ve decided something extremely important” but she took no notice. I must have said it four times as we walked down to the bottom of the garden but she took no notice at all. Down at the bottom of the garden, the crashed Cortina had gone. I asked Nerina about it, and she said that she’d lent it to another taxi driver who was just starting up in business. I wasn’t really pleased about that because I didn’t want my crashed cars to be going around on the road, least of all with someone else not associated with me. I asked her how much she’d agreed for a rental. She replied “nothing at all”. I thought that that was an absurd situation, with one of my crashed cars being driven around by another taxi operator, and at the same time, we’re not taking anything out of it except the hassle of losing whatever good reputation we would otherwise have.

This taxi-driving is rapidly becoming an obsession with me, isn’t it? But it’s true to say that there were one or two crashed Cortinas around where I was. We’d pick them up for peanuts, some for even nothing at all, and then I’d break them for the spare parts. I still have a few bits and pieces lying around on the farm, including an engine that I rebuilt but which threw a con-rod on its first time out. There’s also a matching 2000cc engine and auto gearbox for a Cortina 2000E. The big ends have gone in the engine, and so the car (also down on the farm) has a 1600cc manual set-up in it right now. But the car, the engine and the auto box, all with matching numbers, are probably worth a fortune these days – but not as much as the 2000E estate that’s in my barn down there.

Isabelle the Nurse came along as usual, and I told her how disappointed I was about the lack of coffee yesterday morning. In reply, she told me to clear off.

After she left, I made my breakfast and read some more of Thomas Codrington’s ROMAN ROADS IN BRITAIN.

Our author seems to have become sidetracked just now. We’ve been having an exploration of the Iron Age hillforts in Dorset, such as Maiden Castle and the Badbury Ring. Interestingly, though, he makes reference to an Iron Age barrow and how the Roman road-builders put their road right through it. So much for respecting the culture of the original inhabitants, hey?

After breakfast, I had a few things to do and then I began to work on my Welsh homework. And this batch is difficult because it concerns the part of the course that I missed when I was at Rennes the other week. I won’t be doing much celebrating when this lot comes back.

My cleaner was late arriving to apply my anaesthetic but it didn’t matter too much, because the taxi was late arriving. And then we had to go back to the Centre Normandy because the driver had forgotten his telephone. As a result, we were late arriving at dialysis and, as usual, I was last to be coupled up

The doctor came to see how I was, and I took the opportunity to talk to him as to why the latest medication isn’t on the list of long-term medication. He assured me that it was, and he even showed me a duplicate where it was clearly so labelled. So, what are they playing at in the pharmacy?

After that, everyone left me alone, except Julie the Cook, who showed me some photos of her latest creations. I shall miss her when she’s gone.

Having had on the outward trip the guy who thinks that he runs the show, on the way back, I had my favourite Belgian taxi driver. She wasn’t very happy, as she had just witnessed a serious accident on the motorway and she needed to talk. And so we talked all the way home, but you could tell that this was preying on her mind.

My faithful cleaner was waiting to escort me into the building, and I noticed that there were now lights on in my old apartment. Someone has finally moved in.

Tea was the other half of last night’s pizza, and once it had been warmed up, it tasted even nicer than yesterday. The fruitcake and the last of the chocolate soya dessert were nice too.

Right now though, falling asleep at my desk, I’m going to bed. It’s the last Welsh course of the year tomorrow so I want to be on form for it, although it’s a hopeless task, I reckon.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the pharmacy … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of the time when I came home from work and found Nerina in tears.
"Whatever is the matter, dear?" I asked
"It’s the pharmacist " she said. "You’ve no idea how rude he has been to me today."
So off I went to have a few words with him about it.
"Don’t blame me!" he said. "Your wife asked me how a rectal thermometer worked, and all I did was to tell her! "

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Friday 7th February 2025 – IT’S BEEN A …

… slightly better day today (only slightly). I haven’t managed to crash out and not only have I actually done some work, I’ve actually felt like doing it too, rather than having to grit my teeth and force myself.

But then this is bewildering, because when I’m here I don’t feel as if I’m about to crash out (and that’s a change since last Summer) and yet when I’m in the dialysis centre, as soon as the machine starts off, I’m away with the fairies (and hopefully not in a manner that invite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine).

What I’ll have to do when I’m there on Saturday is to make enquiries to see if it’s a normal situation. I’m sure that it isn’t though. There are nine beds in our ward and I’m the only one who seems to crash out.

So after I’d finished my notes last night I had to do the backing-up, and then do it again because I’d forgotten to back up onto the USB key on the keyring, the one that I use to transfer data between the big office computer and the travelling laptop.

So rather later than usual I headed off to bed, where I fell asleep almost immediately

Once more, I awoke bolt-upright at 06:15 and by the time that the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already sorting myself out in the bathroom.

Into the kitchen next for the medication and then back in here to find out where I’d been during the night. I was at the Power River last night, by the motel in which I stayed IN 2019 where we saw (or where you will see when I upload the photos) the remains of those Conestoga (or were they Studebaker?) covered wagons – real “prairie schooners”. I’ve no idea what I was doing there though because, as usual, as soon as I reached for the dictaphone the whole dream evaporated and that was, unfortunately, that.

The Powder River really was lovely though – typical Wyoming and Montana “dust bowl” country full of historical battlefields from where the Native Americans were desperately trying to cling on to their traditional way of life. History around every bend. I drove down the valley on my way from Wounded Knee – the site of (almost) the final confrontation between the Native Americans and the European American military – and Fort Phil Kearny, where the Native Americans wiped out a patrol of 81 soldiers let by Captain William Fetterman. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we walked all over the site where Fetterman and his troops met their end, and even blagged our way onto a coach trip going around the various sites of confrontation in the area.

But this isn’t doing me much good, is it? I’m becoming all nostalgic and broody about travelling, going back to North America, finishing off my tour of the old wagon route across the USA in the 1840s, all the things that I didn’t do when I was there before and said that I would do some other time.

Some hope.

The nurse came around early again today. The first question he asked me was "have you ever been to Montréal?". Not much I have, and he knows it well enough.

So he asked me all kinds of questions about the city

"Are you planning on going there?" I asked
"Yes, maybe in three or four years" he replied
"Well, you shouldn’t have any trouble" I replied. "The nursing profession is one of the professions that receives maximum points on the immigration scale"
"I won’t be going as a nurse" he answered. "I’ll be finding something else to do"

Well, I always said that his heart wasn’t in his job

After he left, I made my breakfast and then carried on reading MY NEW BOOK.

We’re having a really good discussion about contour forts with several examples used as illustrations. And when you see that people in recent times consider that Iron Age forts with four rings of concentric walls, ditches in between of fifteen feet deep, covering twenty and thirty acres, perimeters of 2 miles, all that kind of thing were but “status symbols” of authority when they were living hand-to-mouth and barely had the time to cultivate their crops and herd their beasts, it defies all logic.

It’s also just how amazing the date of “between 400-450BC” crops up in the conversation when we talk about building these forts or refurbishing old Neolithic ones. That date corresponds with what is believed to be the arrival of the Celtic race who came to suppress and overwhelm the Belgae. The similarity of dates can’t be a coincidence. Building status symbols when they were in the process of being invaded (the Belgae) or trying (the Celts) to overwhelm an existing race of inhabitants. I need a lot more convincing that the modern reviewers have offered so far.

In a modern report on Maiden Castle, a hillfort in Dorset, we are told that "Hoards of carefully selected sling stones have been found at" each entrance, "One area of the cemetery featured burials of 14 people who had died in violent circumstances including one body with a Roman catapult bolt in its back", and then goes on to say "there is little archaeological evidence to support … that the hill fort was attacked by the Romans"

The author of this modern report that I read makes the point that "although 14 bodies in the cemetery exhibited signs of a violent death, there is no evidence that they died at Maiden Castle", a comment which, if T Rice Holmes had read it, would have provoked an explosion. The idea that someone would find a dead body killed by a Roman bolt and then carry it however many miles and then right up a steep hill into the fort in order to bury it surely can’t be a serious proposition. And in any case “absence of evidence” is a completely different affair than “evidence of absence”

So abandoning yet another good rant for the moment, I came back in here and for much of the day I’ve been working. I’ve chosen 10 tracks for the next radio programme, edited them, remixed them, paired them and the segued them, and then I’ve been writing the notes. I’ve almost finished too. Another hour or so will see it all done tomorrow morning, I reckon.

There were the usual interruptions – lunch, the cleaner, my mid-afternoon break etc. but those are only to be expected. Apart from that, it’s been another quiet day where although I worked hard, I could have worked even harder.

But I’ll worry about that tomorrow because I’m off to bed.

But seeing as we have been talking about Broadus … "well, one of us has" – ed … the town was founded in 1900 after the massacre at Wounded Knee had removed the last of the native Americans from the area
But in the dying days of the old West an American cowboy turned up at the saloon, totally stark naked, on a native American palomino horse.
"What on earth happened to you?" asked the innkeeper
"My horse died about 30 miles away so I set out to walk here" began the cowboy.
"Then this native American girl rode up on her horse. She said ‘cowboy take off your shirt’ so I took off my shirt
Then she said ‘now cowboy take off your pants’ so I took off my pants
Then she said ‘now cowboy, take off my shift’ so I took off her shift
Then she climbed down off her horse, lay on the ground and said ‘OK cowboy, now go to town’ so here I am!"

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Friday 13th September 2024 – ANOTHER HORRIBLY LATE …

… night tonight.

Staying up watching the football when I ought to be sleeping. When will it ever end?

But I look at it this way. It’s so hard to concentrate in Ice Station Zebra when I’m plugged into their machine, and so sleep seems to be the obvious option, especially if nice people like Roxanne come to visit me while I’m there.

So in that case, why bother to sleep during the night?

It would be a different matter, I suppose, if Castor, Zero or TOTGA were to come to keep me company but these days that seems to be a very remote possibility, regrettably.

Last night was rather a late night, although not so late as I need to worry. I made it into bed before midnight and there I stayed, fast asleep, until about … errr … 06:00.

And just like yesterday, I lay there vegetating and unable to go back to sleep until 06:45 when I gave up any attempt to sleep and heaved myself out of my stinking pit, a good 15 minutes before the alarm went off.

In the bathroom I gave myself the usual good scrub down and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone. We were back on this boring road again in Italy which went through the Front Line right past where our division is resting after a heavy attack and had heavy casualties. The leading unit which sustained most of the casualties is the one that’s being rounded up for yet another task so it seemed to be total chaos and mismanagement.

Which boring road? And why “again”? Have I been down here before? We had one of these dreams a couple of days ago so do I mean that, or is there something missing.

In fact I’m convinced that there’s something missing. For I stepped back into that dream … "which dream?" – ed … later on and remember telling someone that I felt that I had a target attached to the top of my head with a sign pointing to it saying “attack me here” because I seem to collect all of the attack from everywhere for everything that I do. We had a discussion and she was telling me about the British Prime Minister who is of Pakistani origin whose surname is a long and complicated one because of where he was born and who his parents were etc. Before he was elected he was campaigning saying that he was going to end this surname thing for overseas people and they’d all have to adopt a traditional British method and that would be that. Somehow since he’s been Prime Minister he’s forgotten all about that. He was asked by a journalist about it and he told her that his surname, if you break it down into its component parts, part of it says that his surname is “With A Gun” in Urdu or Pakistani or whatever language and the British Government or Civil Service had to veto the idea of him changing his name because it didn’t want him to adopt that as his surname. I said to whoever it was with me that she complained at times about me coming out sometimes with some tall stories that I insist are true but surely this one is really taking the biscuit, isn’t it

Yes, receiving the blame for everything that went wrong was the usual state of affairs in our family. I often felt as if I should have a target painted over my head. And politicians failing to do what they promised in their election campaigns? Now, there’s a novel idea, isn’t it? But I can understand what they mean about these names. When you have worked (as Alison and I did) with people called Randy Poe and Clay Shedd you lose all faith in parents and their ability to embarrass their offspring.

Isabelle the nurse came along and was in “chat” mode again. She had a good gossip but didn’t have much to say for herself. She asked how the dialysis went but as a former hospital nurse, she ought to know, surely. And I’m still here, alive, even if not kicking.

After she left I made my breakfast and read my book. We’re exploring Maiden Castle near Dorchester today, but that’s so well-known and has been for centuries. Nevertheless, Sir Mortimer Wheeler carried out an excavation in the 1930s and there was another one 50 years or so later. Both excavations led to very substantial and detailed reports that are available on-line so I downloaded them for later reading.

Next task was my LeClerc order.

We’re running low on supplies here again so I went through the LeClerc site and filled out my order. Strangely enough, now that I’d brought the European Burger Mountain under control, they had vegan burgers on special offer. So we’re back at the mountain again.

Lunch was a cheese butty on fresh bread. The bread that I baked yesterday was excellent and while I haven’t tried the jam roly-poly, it looks perfect and I can’t wait to tuck in.

Isabelle the nurse saw it on the worktop and asked me for the recipe, so I’ll do that for her. But right now it’s sliced up into bits and put in a box in the fridge.

This afternoon, when I’ve not been asleep I’ve been busy.

The blood test results are in from after the dialysis and the Creatinine has dropped to 273 from 413. Several other figures have shown substantial reductions too but I still feel just as tired and listless as before.

But despite waves of sleep I keep on going when I could and firstly, I’ve been classifying videos. I’m trying to find the ones of 2017 in Canada and the USA and then the ones of Central Europe on my various trips out. I need to organise my files much better than I do.

Secondly there is my trip to Jersey two years ago and while my cleaner was here, I’ve been doing some more work on that. Of the hundred or so photos that I took, I’ve written the notes for … errr … ten so far. At this rate it’ll be another 100 years before they are done.

My order from LeClerc turned up so I put everything away. There are no carrots to deal with this time, which was nice. I have enough for the next few weeks.

Tea was a rushed vegan salad with chips and vegan nuggets followed by the last of the apple crumble.

Rushed because there was football on the internet, Y Drenewydd v Cardiff Metropolitan.

And what a dreadful match that was. It finished 2-1 to Y Drenewydd but it really was one of those games where both sides should have lost.

Cardiff Met, who were leading the table at one stage earlier in the season, were awful and didn’t really play until the final 5 minutes of each half. I’ve no idea what was going on with them. And Y Drenewydd weren’t much better.

And the game was a good old return to the 60s with scything tackles, shoves in the back, all kinds of stuff that the referee let go but which would have received a red card anywhere else

So horribly late as usual these days, I’m off to bed

But all of this baking reminds me of the fun we used to have with those tinned sponge puddings and tinned meat puddings. and how there would always be, at the beginning of the acdaemic year, students at University, living on their own for the first time, would always be in the Accident department at hospital.
"I don’t understand it" they would say. "I followed the instructions to the letter"
"Which instructions?" would ask the nurse
"Here on this blasted sponge pudding that I’m trying to cook" would be the reply "Here where it says ‘pierce tin and stand in boiling water for 10 minutes’"

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