… I suppose you are expecting something similar today. But Sunday is a day of rest and so if you think that I’m going to be working as hard as I did yesterday, typing out another 2200-odd words, then you are mistaken. You’ll have to make do with a mere 1556.

Mind you, Terry was back at work again this morning. Still a small leak from the stoptap under the sink. That’s down to a worn tap and the turning on and off yesterday has aggravated the wear. Being Sunday of course it’s not possible to find a replacement and so Terry resolved the issue simply by turning the tap fully-open, as tight as he could make it with a couple of spanners, and the metal-to-metal contact has done the trick. It means of course that you can’t now switch it off, but it won’t leak until the next trip to Brico Depot when he can buy a replacement.

Apart from that, I’ve been doing some of my 3D Animation course, although I can’t find the enthusiasm for this like I did with my course on Hadrian’s Wall, and on one of the support sites for the 3D program that I use, there’s also been a mega-sale for items that would fit a couple of my characters and seeing that I didn’t manage to treat myself to a Christmas present this year I treated my characters to a couple of new outfits. It’s an ill-wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good, even a 3D model character or two.

We had an excellent tea too. I’ve been having food fantasies again (I’m not sure why because I’m anything but starving being here right now), this time about boiled potatoes, broccoli and vegan pie. I’d even bought a head of broccoli last time that I was out at the shops. And sure enough, Liz conjured up something magnificent, consisting of vegan pie, boiled potatoes and broccoli. It really was a superb meal and I enjoyed every mouthful.

As for my nocturnal rambles, I suppose that you are waiting for something quite stunning, following the incredible rambles of the last few days. It’s not quite as dramatic as that because I imagine that whatever part of me goes off on these journeys is as exhausted as I am. But last night was certainly different.

I remember quite clearly going to bed, I remember switching off the laptop, but the next thing that I remember was waking up at 04:50 with the bedroom light still burning brightly. I must have been absolutely shattered to crash out just like that.

But I do remember quite a lot about my journey last night and, seeing as how at 05:00 I was wide awake after a trip down the corridor, I sat down to type it out.

I was in Belgium, in my old Vauxhall Senator, parked in Brussels in one of these large squares in front of a big building or monument with steps leading up to it. I’d rigged up some kind of temporary curtain out of a grey plastic sheet so that I could have some privacy in there while I had a doze but it wasn’t very effective. In fact, it was only when I installed myself in the back seat and pushed the surplus plastic over the back of the front seat that I was anything like comfortable. But from here I ended up in a police holding cell there, along with about 20 other young people of both sexes. It appeared that I’d been in a car with a girl called Annick (whose family name began with “C”) and she’d been driving but somehow in the confusion, I’d been arrested instead. After a while an officer came into the cell and said that he’d been in contact with as many family members as possible for all of the different people in the cell and that bail had been arranged for most people. When he called out their names, they would be taken out to sign the papers and then they could leave. And so gradually our ranks thinned out. And then some older woman came in and called out “Annick C….”. I explained that it was probably me, and explained the circumstances, so she crossed out Annick’s name and wrote mine down instead. I said to the girl standing next to me, a very tall, thin young blonde girl, very nervous, that it’s worrying when even a junior member of a foreign Police Force knows my name and my identity well enough to write it down without even asking me to give it. Clearly, I’m well-known to the Police in Brussels. And we ended up chatting, with her telling me that it was her first time ever being arrested and in a police cell. So I gave her some reassuring talk. An older man put his head around the door and called “Annick C…”, to which I once more replied that it was probably me, so he told me to come along. I gave this girl the “thumbs-up” sign to encourage her and set off with this old guy. He was clearly British, with a working-class Northern England accent so I asked him what he was doing here and how come he’d found employment in a foreign police force. He explained that he’d come over, ended up driving a bus full of children with behavioural issues, and “then we’d lost touch with each other”. He clearly seemed to know who I was but I had no idea about him. He took me into an office – a really big office with a huge table, about half a tennis court in size. I was to sit at one end and there was someone else at the other end. There was a small pedestal fan on a filing cabinet there, making a terrible racket so I asked if I could turn it off. “It’s my office” he growled.”Fair enough” I answered, “but I can hardly hear you”. He walked over to me and said “what would you do if I did this?” and gave me a huge kiss on the mouth, so I pushed him away and asked him whether he meant that for “Annick C…”. His response to that was to call someone else in, a big man in a pork pie hat, who proceeded to put my head in a head lock. I had realised by now that the purpose of this noisy fan was to flood the room microphones so that the police misbehaviour and the screams of the victims would be drowned out on the tape recording of the interview (this is a typical Belgian police tactic), but this headlock was puzzling me. It wasn’t hurting me at all or causing me any discomfort whatsoever, and I didn’t see the point of it.

So having finished dictating my notes, I snuggled back under the quilt and I was off again. This time, my father was there (my nocturnal rambles are becoming much more like a family reunion and that’s a frightening thought, if ever there was one) with his annoying habit of calling everyone insulting names. Anyway, I’d had enough of this so the next time he did it, I smashed a bottle across the back of his head and killed him. I found a large wicker basket, lined it with a large plastic bin liner, stuffed him into it and filled it with water. And then I hid it in the corner of the garage of an office where I worked. I disposed of his two dog leads (why would he have two dog leads?) anywhere about the place. As luck would have it, I found an identity document – not his but someone else’s – which resembles nothing like an actual identity document, and carefully scribbled out the owner’s identity details, making sure that I left just enough visible so that a really good investigator could read, with some effort, the identity, and then hid it near the body. Of course, eventually the body was discovered by some woman and the police were called. I was rather worried, wondering it I ought to have done so much more to hide the body and wondering if the identity card ploy had been careless, but I reckoned overall that it would run the police up a blind alley for a good while. I would have run much more of a risk by trying to dispose of the body just after I’d done the deadly deed.

I can’t believe the number of family members who have appeared quite recently in my nocturnal rambles. There were all kinds of issues in our family over the years. We weren’t really a family at all but, just like the family in the superb Frank Sinatra film Tony Rome, a “bunch of people living under the same roof” and in the end we made the decision that, like the Knights of the Round Table in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, we would go our separate ways. It was the most intelligent way to put an end to all of the difficulties that we were facing.

Since then, I haven’t spent any time thinking about them and they, doubtless, have returned the compliment and so what’s going on with them playing major supporting roles in my rambles?

Weird!

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