Tag Archives: penybont

Saturday 8th February 2025 – I HAVE HAD …

… just about enough of this dialysis.

These four-hour sessions didn’t last long. Today, they gave me four and a half hours, and they still haven’t extracted all of the water from me that they ought to have extracted. So how long is it going to be when I go back on Monday?

One thing’s for certain though, and that is that if they keep on pumping the stuff out of me at this rate, I’ll be pushing up the daisies quicker than I think.

Ordinarily I would have complained, except that the doctor on duty was the miserable one who hates his job and loves his patients even less. I imagine that I would have been sent away with a flea in my ear had I gone to see him

In fact, it’s true to say that I am having as much luck with the senior hospital staff as I am about going to bed early because for no particular reason last night it was another late night by the time that I’d finished everything. It was a very weary me who staggered into bed at about 00:30 this morning.

And even though I was fast asleep straight away and didn’t move for the whole night, at 05:35 I sat dramatically upright, wide awake. I’ve no idea what awoke me either because I couldn’t hear any noise.

Try as I might, I could not go back to sleep and in the end gave it up as a bad job. When the alarm went off at 07:00 I was having a good scrub in the bathroom, followed by a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant.

Once I was ready, I filled the washing machine with all of the clothes that remained and se it off on its cycle (a very clever machine, mine) and then went into the kitchen for my medication, remembering not to take the anti-potassium stuff and not the sunlight pills either

Back in here I began to transcribe the dictaphone notes but there were so many that I hadn’t finished by the time that the nurse came.

There were the usual banal questions and then I wished him a very happy holiday. It’s his turn to go skiing now. Isabelle should be back tomorrow.

Breakfast was next, and then I read MY NEW BOOK.

We’re still moving on with our discussion of contour forts and he gives a few example of them. With regard to several of them he makes the pertinent observation that "the fortress seems to be too large to have been defended by any force which it could shelter."

That is of course perfectly true but it’s a moot point because if the defenders are not likely to be very numerous, neither are the attackers, so the defenders wouldn’t have to defend all of the perimeter. Instead, they would just concentrate on the point where the attackers are launching their particular offensive

No-one has any idea of the population of Britain in 500BC but it can’t have been more than half a million, so it’s not as if you could gather a large army at one place and at one time.

Back in here I finished off the dictaphone notes. I was in the living room of a semi-detached house. I’d been off with this girl and her parents weren’t very happy. We’d had a confrontation when I’d brought her home. We had managed to pass over the confrontation and we were saying goodbye to each other in the hall when the dream faded away

Apart from the fact that there I was, just about to Get The Girl and the dream dies, there’s a great deal more to this dream that anyone would imagine or realise, and I would care to admit. And parents being unhappy was just about par for the course back in those days.

There was also something about the ceremonial exchange of keys for a car that I ended up buying from a garage. The exchange was something that was reproduced in India at the same times. If you were buying something in India you would have to step back for thirty seconds so to convince everyone that it was OK. It was during that period that the recourse would take place, that the former wife of a friend of mine, would come along and do something instead of whatever her name was and me.

So who is “whatever her name was”? And why can’t I remember the first part of this dream? f there’s a girl involved, I ought not to go around forgetting or missing out..

I was out with a friend and we were wandering around a fairground. There were two of us, a guy and a girl. We walked around this fairground and ended up in a place where we could have a hot snack. One of my friends wanted a hot snack so we went round there but the hot snack place was closed. There was a tape across it. We ended up having a coffee. The coffees were tiny, a tiny expresso type of thing and they had to be drunk in the cafeteria on the first floor. ….battery flat .. So we bought a coffee and we had to go up the stairs to drink it to the café. There was a spiral staircase, very tight, very steep and I couldn’t walk up it so we were there with these coffees wondering what to do

So who were my friends? Do I have any?

Then I was with a group of gendarmes. We were going somewhere to pick up something and we had to go there very quietly but we suddenly discovered that something had gone wrong. When we looked at one of the objects that we had that we’d bought at this café we could see the maker’s name. That suddenly rang a bell with one of the gendarmes. He told the others, who suddenly realised what it was. We all piled into the car and we drove. It was driving through Crewe down a few of the side streets. We came in to the bottom end of Delamere Street. We drove down to the bottom. We were looking for a number something like 148 but there weren’t that many houses in that street, not at all, so we didn’t know or I didn’t know where this was going to be. They identified a house – at least, the guy in charge did – that was nowhere near that number and he said to the driver “park a little further down the street” so we did . Someone exited the car and there was some kind of commotion outside so I left the car to go to see. The guy who had exited the car was helping a pedestrian stand up who had been knocked down. I suddenly realised that our car was driving forward. I shouted to “put the brake on” but no-one paid any attention to it. It kept on rolling forward and forward and forward. Suddenly it stopped. I shouted “for God’s sake put the brake on!”. Someone in the car said “well, it was on, but we didn’t know what was going on”. I said “you were rolling forward and you knocked someone down!”. Anyway one of the gendarmes went up to the house. He had a key in his pocket and unlocked it. He walked in and we followed him. It was a filthy, disgusting, untidy house. I have never seen or smelled anything like this . It was full of cats. At first though there was nothing. There was no-one to be seen and he walked around shouting. In the end he walked through this curtain that was hanging over the doorway into what was the kitchen. It was filthy and disgusting, and smelly. There were these cats everywhere. Suddenly two girls appeared. One was about twelve and the other was about nine. The younger one was blonde, the elder one was dark. I suddenly realised where we were because I’d sent birthday presents to these kids. They were the family of one of these gendarmes. They were trying to make some coffee, he was asking them where such-and-such was but they didn’t know. He was looking around for papers and came across some papers about two matching pieces of furniture. He said “this might explain the mystery because they were bequeathed to the two of us and it looks as if the guy has just taken one which he thinks might be his share but we were so totally in the dark and totally bewildered about this.

The house is still clear to me even now. If anyone knows Crewe, it’s just before where the old white single-storey buildings and the belisha beacons and zebra crossing used to be. But the stench in that house was so strong I could actually smell it at the time. Apart from that, it was just like a sketch out of one of the GENDARME DE ST TROPEZ films.

And finally we had a nightmare. I’m not sure where this fitted in anywhere but at one point I dreamed that my cleaner went to take off my plasters and found that one of my puncture holes was still leaking after all this time. There was blood everywhere all over this plaster and all over my lower arm

That really is my worst nightmare of all of this and I shall hate the day when it happens

After typing out my notes, I crashed out, believe it or not. Never mind about being upset about crashing out, I can’t believe that I crashed out so early on in the day. I might at least have had the decency to have waited until I was on my bed in the dialysis centre.

Once I awoke though, I finished off the notes of the next radio programme and was busy involved in doing a few other things when the cleaner turned up. I told her about my nightmare and prepared her to be standing by just in case … .

The taxi was late again, but not as late as it might have been. Just me as a passenger with a friendly, peasant driver and we had a nice drive down to the centre.

For a change, I was first to be seen and that boded ill for the rest of the day. And it hurt just as much as it had on previous days.

There was football on the internet too – TNS v Penybont, 1st v second. At one time Penybont were pushing for the Championship but they have fallen away quite badly just recently, and were well-beaten by TNS, even with TNS playing the final 10 minutes with just 10 players.

One of the nurses came by with the bad news about the extension to the session (the doctor, I suppose, didn’t have the nerve) and so at the end I was the last out of the centre. I mentioned my nightmare to the nurse who unplugged me so she put extra plaster strips on my dressing.

And with the taxi having to drop off someone at Avranches, it was miserably late when I arrived home, tired, fed up and completely exhausted.

You have no idea how much a dialysis session takes out of me, never mind a four-and-half-hour session.

Tea was a burger on a bap with salad and baked potato followed by apple cake and soya dessert, and that’s it for tonight. I’ll dictate my notes and then I’m off to bed. Quite frankly, I don’t have the courage or the energy to do anything else.

The secret of these increased dialysis sessions was explained to me later. Apparently one of the doctors (I’ll leave you to guess) is fed up of me chatting her up all the time
She told the girls to increase the suction time to take more water out at each session
"Isn’t that dangerous?" asked one of the nurses
"Who cares?" answered the doctor."If we extract at a rate of 5 kilos per session, in 16 sessions he’ll be gone completely."

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Saturday 1st February 2025 – I REALLY MUST SHUT …

… up and stop moaning about this dialysis. If I were to tell you that we had another four painful hours of life coupled up to the machine you would very soon become as fed up as I am about the whole affair. I really can’t believe that everyone else suffers as much as I do about all of this.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

After I’d finished my notes last night I had a few things to do and once more it was quite late by the time that I finally went off to bed. Not that I’m bothered too much. Times have changed these last few months.

Once in bed thought, it was totally painless. I didn’t feel a thing for the whole six hours or so until the alarm went off the following morning.

And that was an effort to leave the bed before the second alarm. I’m having to push myself along as best as I can at the moment and hope that I can keep on going. It’s now my shoulders and my back that are giving me major problems

In the bathroom I had a good wash and scrub up, with a shave and plenty of deodorant in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant. And then I attacked the washing.

“Attacked” is the correct word too. There were piles of it. So much so that even with the washing machine loaded to the brim, there was still plenty that wouldn’t fit in which will have to wait for another time. This is becoming ridiculous.

In the kitchen I had all of my medication, not forgetting the Vitamin D supplement, and then I had to tidy up the empty shopping bags that were lying around all over the place.

It’s not been a very happy morning so far, has it?

If the nurse had turned up two minutes earlier he would have caught me in flagrante delicto. I’d just finished tidying up when he came. Of course he had to do his “cocorico” after Friday’s rugby, but that doesn’t bother me. I have no interest whatever in the game, except to say that it’s a sport played by men with odd-shaped balls.

He was in and out in a few seconds today. he didn’t stay around at all. That suits me fine and I could make breakfast and read my book.

We’re reaching the conclusion and it is as I suspected – a great deal of construction done quite rapidly around 400-380BC, periods of calm, increase in wealth and a relax in tension, followed by spells of more rapid overhauling of the forts until, in the words of the writers, "this is now an architecture of intimidation …. alongside a ‘deliberate closing down’ of the wider agricultural landscape, including animal slaughter"

Not just animal slaughter either. There’s evidence of warfare, such as heaps of slingshot pellets in readiness by the gates, and also, regrettably, piles of skeletons of men, women and children, clearly victims of a battle, cast into a pit.

This all started with some iron relics that were found in a caravan. And they have now identified them as a convex bowl on a spike that would be thrust into a tree-trunk to act as the pivot for a gate, sitting in a corresponding concave bowl set in a sill-beam in the floor.

That’s not all either. to stop the tree-trunk from splitting, a couple of iron bands were heated and strapped around the end of the tree-trunk. They would shrink and contract the wood, and the spike would be rammed home, with the bands preventing the wood from splitting

And if that’s not clever for Iron-Age engineering 2500 years ago, I don’t know what is.

Controversy has at last reared its ugly head. But it’s expressed in a much more scholarly way than T Rice Holmes ever did. The authors tell us "It seems worth stating here that there are so many problems with Avery’s (1993, App. A, 146 ff.) understanding of Varley’s work that it is in some ways safer simply not to consult Avery "

Back in here, first task was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was with Steve Knightley at a concert. He was organising one of these entertainments. It was a shame because there was only about a dozen people attending them. I’d been on the stage during one of his songs to do something so during a pause he was doing an entertainment having half a dozen people up on the stage for something like a quiz. He looked at me and said “you’ve just been up, haven’t you?”. He couldn’t find enough people to make up the team that he wanted on the stage. They were about to ask him the prize to start to answer the questions. Someone asked him “what are the prizes?”. He ummed and ahhed and didn’t say anything. Then he took all the people off the stage before the quiz had started and then led them out into the car park. We walked through the car park. Someone worked out that “ohh the first prize is marriage” to which one of the women said ” it can’t be that. I’m already married”. And then she looked at Steve Knightley and said “unless there’s a nice, gallant man who is going to arrange it for me”. We walked down to the far side of the car park and there were four or five cars parked down there. I recognised mine, and there was a Black Tulip BMC 1100-type of car. His was an Austin A40, a dirty green metallic and the whole of the bottom was rusting away. The wheels were rusting. He told me that he was a concrete examiner during the day. I thought that he’d been driving the car through the concrete. He said “yes, it needs something doing to the paintwork to stop it rusting further” he said. Why do’t you come down on Friday and do it for me?”. I thought “he lives the other side of Bristol”. He said “oh by the way my wife likes to have her one flat tyre each week so she’s probably have that while you’re down there”. I thought “well, I don’t suppose that I’m doing anything on Friday but even so ..”

Even though I remember nothing whatsoever of this dream, I can see the car park and see my car. It was a black Ford Consul MkI, a car that I have never owned, but would have given my right arm to have had at the time. Steve Knightley is much more well-known for being one third of the group “A Show Of Hands” whom I have never seen live but I have several of their concerts sent to me by a friend who works at a folk festival. He would really be quite good as a game show host I reckon. Judging by the cars though, this was set in the early 1970s when life was so much different. I’m not saying “better” because TB, rickets and waking up to ice on the bedroom window in the morning wasn’t good at any moment in history.

Next stop was to finish off the radio notes from yesterday. They are all done and dusted now ready to be dictated. It didn’t take me too long. But there are quite a few that need dictating tonight so I have better hurry up and finish my notes.

When the cleaner poked her head into the apartment I was backing up the computer, so once more that fell by the wayside. I’ll do this full back-up onto the travelling laptop yet.

She put the patches on my arm and then I had to wait for my driver so I tidied up in the kitchen.

It was my favourite driver today, so we had the whole running commentary, complete with gesticulations, all the way down to Avranches. And at Avranches we had the usual painful procedure that’s enough to drive me wild.

Once installed though, I could settle down to watch the football. Penybont v Hwlfforth is a match of second v third, with both teams keen for points – Penybont to stay clutching on to the coat-tails of TNS and for Hwlfforth to fight off Caernarfon for the coveted third place.

But I’m not sure what game I was watching because, apart from the fact that its quality can best be described as “agricultural”, I don’t think that either goalkeeper had any serious work to do. The match finished 0-0, with both sides lucky to get nil and if they are still playing now I reckon the score would still be 0-0.

The rest of the time at the hospital I spent backing up the computer, with still a long way to go. But when the buzzer goes off and the girls come to disconnect me, I just want to go home.

They guy who brought me back was the one who, I reckon, has some part in running the affair. We had a little chat on the way home and he dropped me off in the capable hands of my cleaner.

Now that the stair handrails have been fixed I strode personfully up all twenty-five steps to my door, and then collapsed inside.

Tea was a burger on a bap with vegan salad and baked potato, followed by apple cake and caramel soya dessert. Life doesn’t get much better than that And now that I’ve written my notes I’ll dictate the notes for the radio programmes and then go to bed.

But seeing as we have been talking about Steve Knightly and his small crowd … "well, one of us has" – ed … it made me smile. I once told someone that I played in several one-man shows
"I thought that there were three people in your two most famous groups" she replied
"Indeed there were" I replied. "but when I talk about a “one man show” I’m usually referring to the size of the audience"

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Tuesday 31st December 2024 – BY THE TIME …

… that you lot read this, the old year will have gone out and it’ll be a new year. For many people it will be a new beginning too, but for many others it will be more of the same old routine.

25 years ago today we were eagerly awaiting the Millennium. I’d given an interview on Belgian TV (in Flemish, of course) a few days earlier and on New Year’s Eve I was sitting in a bar in a motel in a small town on an island off the coast of New Jersey.

We were partying, of course. I was wearing a hat to which I had tied a helium balloon. I’d tied the hat to me all the same with just enough string so that the hat, by virtue of the balloon, was floating an inch or so above my head and it looked really cool.

The Continental USA has five time zones and so we celebrated New Year for New York, then for Chicago, then for Denver, then for San Francisco, and finally for Anchorage.

Once we had celebrated New Year in Anchorage, we all trundled off to the all-night petrol station and convenience store down the road where we bought a big tub of ice cream and with a spoon each, we tucked in. Then a couple of us walked down to the beach and waited for the dawn to break and for all of the hope that we wanted it to bring.

But look at me now, 25 years later. Never mind crossing the Atlantic, I’m struggling to cross my bedroom and my best hope for the New Year is that they can somehow resolve the issue of this painful dialysis.

How the Mighty have fallen.

So if I have any advice for anyone in this coming year it is "if you feel like doing something, do it now, right now, before it’s too late. Because you become much more ill and infirm much quicker than you think."

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, I stayed up last night, loitering around for my own pleasure reading a few web pages about this and that, although not about “the other” of course. That boat sailed a long time ago.

It was 01:00 when I finally crawled into bed and then I slept the Sleep of the Dead until the alarm awoke me. I hadn’t moved at all during the night.

When I awoke though I was in the middle of an exciting dream but the moment I went to reach for the dictaphone it all evaporated, every last drop of thought and that is really a tragedy. I only hope that it didn’t involve Castor, TOTGA or Zero.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and sorted myself out, and then came back in here to wait for Isabelle the Nurse.

While I was waiting, I had a listen to the dictaphone to see if there was anything on it from the night. I was in work again. It was one of the very last days of work before Christmas so we weren’t doing very much. We were sitting around, talking and playing some kind of game that went on round and round the building. after lunch, I was late back. There were already six or seven people in this group. Our boss was there, the big boss of the building. He told us that we may as well continue this game and he’d actually like to play it with us too, so he joined in. Just then, his ‘phone rang so he answered it. It was a woman, asking for permission to be in late tomorrow because her husband worked at Knorr and they were doing something at 09:00. He replied that that wasn’t a problem. Then what he said was that he had a whole host of adverts that he’d cut out of the papers and he was going to ring round and speak to everyone to find out who they were, what they were doing and whether we knew all about them. I had something of a thought myself because my ‘phone number was also in that lot. He made a start and I could see that he was coming closer to my number in this pile. I’d worked out what I was going to say, and that was that this was just simply a way that I could use as an aide-memoire to make sure that I’d filled in all my forms on time and sent them in, and that would be really all.

Whatever was going on in that dream, I can’t think of how it relates to anything that I might know, especially why Knorr should feature in it so prominently. But then nothing in my dreams ever makes sense – just like in real life, I suppose.

Later on, we’d been playing football in a 5-a side football tournament. We were waiting for our final matches to start. My brother told me that his match was in a couple of minutes. I said something like “so is my final match”. We went to our various respective areas of this field. I played my game and when I came back I couldn’t find my brother. I searched and searched but with no luck so in the end I went home. Being back home, first of all I was shouted at for being late and then shouted at for losing my brother but I told the story of the final games and I still don’t think that they believed me but they were becoming completely agitated. Just then we heard the front door downstairs open. We thought “is this him?” I looked out of the door and down the stairs. It was my old black cat. She sat at the bottom of the stairs miaowing for a couple of minutes. I kept on talking to her. In the end she ran up the wall and across into our room. I picked her up, stroked her and took her back into the room where my parents were. They seemed more relieved to see the cat than any news about my brother

This is what I call “unlikely”. There would be no chance whatever of my brother ever playing football. And being shouted at was nothing compared to what would have happened had I lost my brother somewhere.

It was interesting watching my old black cat climb up the wall but she is the only member of my family whom I would be pleased to see. Why the others keep on appearing so often is something that completely defeats me and I wish that they’d move out of my head and make room for some others to appear.

Isabelle was late today. First day back so I imagine that she had all of the blood tests and injections to do. But she was her usual chatty self and she complimented me on being the only person up here to have some kind of Christmas decoration visible to the public.

After she left I made breakfast, and that was when I discovered that I’d run out of bread and had forgotten to make any more yesterday evening. And so I had to have a quick breadmaking session first.

While I was waiting for the dough to rise I had breakfast and read MY BOOK.

Today we are discussing housing, coinage and religion but it is the “religion” bit that is the most interesting, and not for the more obvious reasons either.

It’s long-been a mystery to me why so many Welsh words seem to come from the Latin, even though the words describe some vital item that surely must have existed and had a name prior to the coming of the Romans. Anyway our author tells us, in an aside, that "Celtic religion, in so far as it was descended from the religion of the undivided Aryan stock, was fundamentally one with the religions of Italy and Greece ; and we might expect that it would resemble most closely the religion of the Italians, to whose tongue Celtic was most nearly akin."

There is a variety of early Italian languages, like Etruscan and Umbrian to name but two, that preceded the Latin language. And if the root of these words in common usage was derived from words in one of these early Italian languages that later influenced the Latin language, that would explain everything.

It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. The word for a snake in Welsh is neidr which sounds uncannily like “adder” and a river in Welsh is afon, pronounced “Avon”, so you can see that Modern English has been influenced by words from an ancient Celtic language. Why wouldn’t this work with any other languages?

After breakfast I carried on making the bread and by the time that I finished, I had the best loaf that I have ever made and I was really impressed with that. While it was baking I tidied up around the kitchen and regrettably, dropped and broke one of my best glass storage jars

Then I had to check the radio programme that I’ll be sending off later. And this is that mega-complicated one that took me weeks of thought and work to make. But listening to it, it really does work and there’s a pile of good stuff in it.

It features someone who was born in 1892 and probably never ever met a rock musician in his life but he’s an important personage in the story of rock music, and it’s well-worth a listen. So tune in to LE BOUQUET GRANVILLAIS on Friday or Saturday at 21:00 CET, 20:00 UK time, 15:00 Toronto time.

There was an unexpected visit today. The woman who is President of the Residents’ Committee and who helped me so much with the purchase of the apartment downstairs came to see how I was. She stayed for an hour or so too chatting away. And she was another one who admired my Christmas lights, so I had a moan to her about the lack of festive spirit shown by everyone else.

For lunch I tried one of my new flapjack slices and this batch is the best that I have ever made too. Pushing the mixture down tightly into the baking tray with a potato masher is definitely the way to go here.

My cleaner turned up today instead of tomorrow and helped me into the shower. And once more, it really was lovely. Only five months to go until I can move downstairs and have a real shower.

While I was showering she was cleaning so there’s a nice clean apartment and a nice clean me in nice clean clothes. How long all of that will last, I really don’t know.

Football was on next – Penybont v Cardiff Metropolitan, and once again at the vital moment Penybont threw away a two-goal lead. They went from 2-0 to 2-3 against TNS a few weeks ago and tonight, they went from 2-0 to 2-2. They have now been knocked off the top of the table.

A match played in a howling gale was always going to be a lottery but the Met, playing with the wind and a 6’4″ centre-forward in the second half managed the conditions much better and had Penybont under the cosh for most of the last 45 minutes.

If Penybont have any aspirations in challenging TNS at the top, they are going to have to look at the question of concentration much more closely. They can’t let matches slip out of their grasp like this.

Tea tonight was the last of the frozen wellingtons with a big pile of veg and gravy, followed by Christmas pudding and custard. But as for the veg, the roast potatoes and roast Butternut squash went down really well.

There are some leeks left so at the weekend, it may well be leek soup for lunch. There’s some butternut squash soup in the fridge for tomorrow.

So now I’m going to loiter around for a while before going to bed. Isabelle isn’t coming so I can lie in.
"I’ll give you a ring to see how you are tomorrow morning" she said instead
"No you won’t" I replied. "I’ll be in bed"
"I’ll leave it late then" she said. "About 11:30"
"No you won’t. I’ll still be in bed then!"

Anyway, just before I go, latest news from Bridgend in that Penybont FC’s dog walking service has collapsed.
"Why is that?" I asked my informant
"They have lost all of their contracts"
"What happened?"
"Apparently no-one is letting them take their dogs for a walk, seeing as how they are totally incapable of hanging on to a lead."

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Friday 4th October 2024 – IT’S GOING TO …

… be another late night tonight.

In fact it’s going to be a rather long day because not only is it going to be a late night, it was an early morning too. When the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already just about to begin to make the bread after having had a good wash.

Then again, it was an early night last night. Somehow I managed to have everything finished by 22:30 and it wasn’t many minutes later that I actually climbed into bed.

Once in there, it didn’t take me long to go off into the Land of Nod. All in all, it’s about time that I had a night like that

It was about 06:00 when I awoke again and couldn’t go back to sleep no matter how I tried so in the end I gave it up as a bad job, climbed out of bed and went off for a good scrub down.

Having finished that I went into the kitchen, scrubbed down the worktop and began to make the bread. I decided against trying to make some bread rolls, for the rather prosaic reason is that there’s no room in the freezer to stock them and it’s pretty pointless making just one.

But once again, the dough didn’t rise as much as I would like. That’s bizarre because the pizza dough goes up like a lift so there’s nothing wrong with my technique. All that I can think of is that it’s the flour. This stuff is the special bread flour, while the pizza dough is made of the cheapest plain flour, so that’s quite strange.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out what was going on during the night. It wasn’t as exciting as last night unfortunately. I was sure that I had just been spotted by the police as I was driving using my ‘phone at the same time so that’s one point on my licence and a fine that I could well do without. Even worse, I hadn’t been paying my mobile ‘phone bills for a while so the ‘phone company is now going to start to chase after me. And then the car didn’t have any tax or MoT so I had a feeling that the book was now going to be thrown at me and they would be intent upon making me suffer for this. I sat down and thought about how I could clear all of the bills and all of the backlog but it would be the end of April before I had any money available and that’s a long time to wait and I didn’t think that anyone in these kinds of organisations would wait that long. As I was walking through Belgium … "Brussels actually" – ed … around the Inner Ring near the old theatre that had been boarded up I was thinking about all of this and wondering whether the fines from the traffic police or the fines about the mobile ‘phone would come first and how they would all affect my driving licence. I reckoned that I would be in for a very bad six months before things would ever improve

Fortunately most of my transgressions occurred before the days of mobile ‘phones, ANPR and computerised police forces. I would have been totally out-of-place and totally unprepared for the modern World. When I think back to how we used to behave back in the late 60s and early 70s, I’m reminded of Daniel Gooch and his "whatever would be said of that mode of proceeding today?"

But it’s a shame that I didn’t meet that girl from last night again. That reminds me of Lee Jackson singing YOU WOULD GIVE A SMALL FORTUNE TO GET BACK IN YOUR DREAMS

The nurse was in a good humour again this morning and was in chat mode again, although he didn’t say anything important . Mind you, he gave me some instructions about more supplies that we need. We seem to be running low yet again

After he left I gave the bread its second kneading and then went to make breakfast and carry on reading the REPORT OF THE EXCAVATION of the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Holborough.

We’ve finished our examination of early Anglo-Saxon grave goods with specific reference to pot-hangers, and moved on to pathology lessons, having a master class on skulls with specific reference to dentistry. There’s no doubt that if I could absorb all of this book I’d be an expert on Anglo Saxon physical history. It’s one of the most fascinating books that I’ve ever read.

After putting the bread in the oven I came back in here and started work.

Today I’ve been a very busy boy. I’ve cracked on and completed all of the notes for the next radio programme. That burst of energy took me completely by surprise.

And there was a couple of pauses too. Firstly, I had to take the bread out of the oven when it was finished. It’s not perfect but it does look really good, that’s for sure.

Rosemary rang me up for a chat. Just a small one today – one hour and thirty-four minutes

Then there was a leisurely lunch – cheese, tomato and cucumber sandwiches on fresh, soft, delicious bread followed by a pile of fruit. The bread really was nice.

The cleaner came down too and had a good blitz through the apartment. Now it looks as if someone actually lives here, which is always nice

My afternoon hot chocolate was rather late today, and back in here I rather regrettably crashed out while I was doing something else. Only for about 20 minutes though, so I can’t complain too much. A few weeks ago it would have been for a couple of hours.

Tea was a rather rushed chips, salad and vegan nuggets. Rushed because we had football – Penybont v Barry Town

After their famous victory against TNS, Penybont somehow managed to lose against Llansawel, the bottom club in their following game, and when they went 1-0 down early in this game I thought “here we go again”

But whatever Rhys Griffiths put in their half-time cuppa, I wouldn’t mind a swig of it because they ran out 4-1 winners in the end. And we were treated to some of the finest goals that you would ever see

The standard of football was excellent – over the last couple of seasons we are really seeing an improvement in quality – and Penybont were the better team. But 4-1 is something of an exaggeration because Barry were much better than that.

And once more, this was another game where both I and the commentators thought that the referee must be refereeing a completely different game to the one that we were watching.

So right now I’m going to go to bed. I want a good sleep as tomorrow I have two lots of radio notes to dictate so it’ll be a late night.

But the match tonight made me feel rather sorry for Barry Town who deserved much better than to lose by three goals. It reminded me of Harry Carpenter trying his best to console Ken Norton after he had been badly beaten in a boxing match by Mohammad Ali
"Cheer up, Ken" he said. "Without you, it wouldn’t have been much of a fight".

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Friday 20th September 2024 – MY SPOTTED DICK …

… rose up really well this morning.

But that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about my baking instead.

And so as I had a loaf of bread to bake and there would be half an oven going begging and the supplies of jam roly-poly are diminishing, I thought that I’d experiment.

The other day I mentioned a spotted dick when I was talking about vegan oil-cakes and so I decided that quite literally the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I’d bash one out

Thinking about it though, I could have bashed it out much earlier than I did because I was wide awake this morning at about 03:15.

Last night I was in bed early once again planning on making the most of having finished everything early, but it never worked out like that.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that a couple of nights following the dialysis have been difficult, and the night sweats that I used to have when my cancer was raging have also come back.

But last night I had everything in spades – wide awake early and the sweat pouring off me in buckets. They measured me with an echograph at the hospital and said that I had six litres of water in me. I bet that I don’t have that much now.

And so it was really difficult to go off to sleep and although I was drifting in and out of some kind of sleep, I saw 06:45 come round on the clock and then 07:00

When the alarm went off the first thing that I did was to go and make some dough for bread. I gave it a good working-over too because I wasn’t very happy with the last lot of bread that I made.

Then into the bathroom to organise myself and have a really good wash. And to wash a pair of the elasticated socks because the nurse wants to try those on me instead of the puttees.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And to my surprise I found that I’d travelled quite some distance too. A new junior manager started. He was quite a nice friendly young guy. We used to have some quite interesting chats. He was in charge of the motor pool so I’d made arrangements to borrow the modelling clay that we used for repairing dents for the cars so that someone could try a piece and I could order it because where they were living the prices were so extortionate that they were looking for ways of economising. This manager also had a list of clients whose files he was working. several of those people were quite interesting so I told him that I was going to photocopy it for taking home with me during the summer because there were a couple of names on there of people with whom I’d like to keep in contact. He was rather dubious about this but in the end agreed for me to do so. We were the last people out of the office on that Friday night. Getting everything together took much longer than I thought it would. By the time that I’d finished it was rather late. Then he told me that when he came back from holiday he didn’t have all that much longer to remain in our office and was going off to somewhere else. I thought that that was really sad because he was the first person in that place with whom I’d managed to create some kind of rapport

Once upon a time I did work with a really nice trainee junior manager. He was a keen snooker fanatic and there was a snooker club just down the road so at lunchtimes we’d go and bash off a couple of frames. He was writing a book in his spare time. I wonder if he ever finished it.

And then I had to go to Bangor University. There were some files that I wanted and someone had to sort them out for me. They were rather reluctant to do so but in the end they gave me the files. Then I heard a voice in the distance whisper “and keep an eye on him”. There was a mirror on the wall. I had a look in it and could see a man who looked like a policeman gesturing to two other men who were probably also policemen. I felt that they were on the point of following me to see what I would be doing with these files. Then we were at a railway station. There was a film being filmed although I didn’t realise that it was a film at first, about a Chinese girl and her boyfriend who were supposedly heading off from the interior to the city to spend a different life there. They were having the usual regrets about parting etc. Suddenly the girl announced that she had tickets not for the city but to actually go to the USA. They were off to the USA instead. The film then cut to the girl standing outside the window of the lottery office with some kind of wistful air on her face. I thought that if ever there was a moment to end a film it should have been there with that shot with that look on that girl’s face but for some reason the cameras kept turning and filming some further pointless action that totally spoiled the entire dramatic effect. I thought that they’d really missed an opportunity with letting the film roll on after that particular shot.

So it seems that I’m adding film-directing to my nocturnal curriculum vitae. I wish that I’d been able to do all of this when I was awake and could earn a living by doing it.

But the University story is familiar. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I once went to Cambridge University to raid their library to look at some papers that had been bequeathed to them. But no such luck. “We give priority to our own students” said the registrar “and it’s only when one of those has had the opportunity to look at them that they will be released into the public domain for other researchers to examine”. And they’ve had the letters and papers there under lock and key waiting for one of their students to examine them since they were bequeathed in … errr … 1869. It’s positively indecent, this incestuous academia. God alone knows what other papers there are lurking in their archives and what tales they could tell us?

And Bangor University? I had a girlfriend who went to Bangor University and if the group in which I was playing didn’t have any bookings I’d spend my weekends in Bangor. My old J4 van didn’t ‘arf clock up the miles.

So finally I’d been out with my girlfriend. We were on our way home and were looking in the newsagent’s window at different things, looking at some of these head-dummies that they use for displaying wigs etc. There were a few with very elongated necks for displaying polo-necked jumpers. We thought that they looked horrible and thought of a few people who resembled them. On the way back past a newsagent’s we saw a bust of a clown and of course made the usual politician remarks then carried on walking home. At one point I was sure that I’d taken two steps without using my crutches but I didn’t say anything. We arrived home, I undressed and went to bed. There was a cup of lukewarm tea so I began to drink it but my partner told me to wait. She was in the kitchen fetching me some medicine. Afterwards when I was drinking the tea she said “come over here. You have to be looking at this (…fell asleep here …) so she went over to check the computer before coming to bed. She said “God! Come here! You have to see this!” so I left the bed and walked over towards the computer but suddenly stopped and said “do you notice something?”. She replied “yes. You’ve just taken two steps without your crutches” so that was twice on that evening that I’ve managed to walk without my crutches.

That was only a dream though. I tried in real life to walk without my crutches but no such luck. I can’t even move, never mind walk. But who was the girlfriend? I can’t believe that I was in a situation like that and I didn’t pick up the girl’s name. How depressing is that?

When the nurse came round he sorted out my legs and fitted the clean socks that I’d found. We’ll see how that goes for the next few days. Last night I’d put the puttees in to soak and they’ll have a good clean over the next few days.

The nurse didn’t stay long. He’d soon cleared off and I went to check the bread. It had risen really well and I was quite pleased with that. I gave it a second kneading and put it in the mould, and while it was doing its stuff I made a basic oil cake with a couple of handfuls of raisins.

It’s not exactly a sponge cake, but it’s the nearest thing that I can make for a spotted dick with the facilities that I have

Our book this morning was talking about religion in Roman times and he makes a few very interesting points.

One of which was that Christians owed their loyalty to their faith above that of their Emperor and if they had to choose one if the two ever came into conflict, they would choose their faith.

There was an parallel with that, which I noticed immediately. Catholics were until comparatively modern times not allowed to hold a Government position or work in the Civil Service.

The reason was that they owed their authority to the Pope. And the Pope could excommunicate a King or even summon up an army to depose him. And in a case of confrontation, a Catholic would have been obliged to support the Pope rather than his monarch. They were not prepared to “abjure the temporal and spiritual authority of the pope” as required by Law.

When breakfast was over I put the bread and cake in the oven to bake and went to undertake part two of my tasks for the day.

The bedding has needed changing for a few days but I’ve been hoping somehow, somewhere, to be able to take a shower. That’s not going to happen but after last night the bedding needs to be changed and the quilt aired. After all, it was a glorious sunny day with a nice stiff breeze

That took longer than expected but at least I could clamber easier over the bed. Something is working somewhere. And while I was at it, I gave what little hair I have left a good wash.

When the oven stopped I checked the stuff in i. The bread was cooked nicely but the spotted dick, although it had risen nicely with the baking powder in it, was only half-done. I gave it another 20 minutes. I only have a table-top oven which is rather “hit and miss”. In view of its shortcomings I’d bought a fitted oven from a friend who was remodelling his kitchen and I wish that I’d brought it up here from the van while I still could.

After lunch, cheese and tomato sandwiches on nice, fresh bread, I did some work.

One of the concerts that I have “in stock” I identified and found that it fell on a day in which I’ll be broadcasting a programme in the near future. So why not have a concert “anniversary edition”?

The concert itself is almost an hour and a half long so I’d been listening to it all morning on repeat play to try to identify which tracks I could edit out. And that wasn’t easy because I liked them all.

Eventually though I’d edited it down to about 57 minutes, which means three minutes of speech which is 11 lines of text.

So now the concert runs together seamlessly and you can’t hear the joins where bits have been cut out, and I’m halfway through writing the text

The cleaner came round and we went through the medicine shelf, made a list of what is running low and she went off to the pharmacy. Another good job done. She also fitted the new quilt cover on the quilt – in a fashion that took seconds and I was so impressed.

Tea tonight was a rushed chips with nuggets and salad. Delicious as usual

And rushed because we had football, Penybont v TNS

And history was made tonight because for the first time EVER, in front of a four-figure crowd, Penybont managed to defeat TNS. And that’s TNS’s first league defeat for almost 18 months

Of course, one swallow doesn’t make a summer but Penybont were surprisingly good and well worth their win

Now I’m off to bed, late as usual because of the football.

And I won’t have much sleep tonight because that strange, stabbing pain that I used to have in my right foot? It’s now reappeared in my right ankle and this will keep me awake all night. You can be sure of that.

But that dream about walking home with a girl reminds me of one night in Nantwich late on a Friday evening (and anyone who has been around Nantwich late on a Friday evening will know what I mean) in the days of my youth I stumbled upon the young sister of a friend of mine hurrying home
"Would you like me to walk you home?" I asked. "Keep you safe from all the drunks and layabouts?"
She looked at me. "Frankly Eric" she said "I’d feel safer with the drunks and layabouts"

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Sunday 11th August 2024 – SO MUCH FOR …

… my idea of going to bed at “a reasonable time” last night.

"The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men gang aft agley an’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain for promis’d joy" as the famous Robbie Burns once said.

However, it wasn’t grief and pain that came my way, but blood. And buckets of it too. In the distance and time that it had taken me to walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, I’d knocked my legs somehow and there was blood pumping just about everywhere

Even as I look, there’s a trail of drops of blood leading from my chair to where the big plasters are. And even one of those wasn’t enough to stop or even slow down the bleeding

However, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, this is what happens when you have all of these blood-thinning products. It’s becoming a rather regular feature, which is regrettable.

So instead of lying down on my nice comfortable bed, there I was, sitting on a chair with a collection of plasters and bandages on an impossible task waiting for the blood to congeal.

For an incident that took place at about 23:45, it was long after 01:00 when I finally went to bed.

Once in bed, I slept all the way through to the alarm going off at 08:00. I don’t think that I moved a single muscle all night.

When the alarm went off I staggered into the bathroom and that’s where the nurse caught me. He’d come early and I hadn’t had time to wash, never mind change my clothes (and I still haven’t)

He talked a little about his holiday but otherwise didn’t have too much to say for himself and was soon gone. I could sit down to breakfast and to read my book. We’re talking about the dismantling of the narrow-gauge railway that ran to Wallace in Montana, a event that took place in 1895. That railway didn’t last all that long.

Back in here afterwards I transcribed the dictaphone notes from the night. I’m not sure what I was doing last night but I was with a group of people. There was something going on about a medical issue. We were all being treated one-by-one for some kind of illness, taking it in turns to go to hospital. One of the girls went in quite carefree and happy and we all seemed to make a note “well she’s going to have a good time there in the hospital. They’ll love her”. There was a little old lady who went in. We had to go to her cottage to collect her things in order to send them to the hospital where she would be staying. I was actually at her house collecting her things together ready to go when the alarm went off.

It reminds me of my neighbour. Someone pretty soon will have to come to her apartment and collect her things if she really is going to live in a Home. I always think that for that to happen is a pretty sad state of affairs. From what I know about these Homes, it’s just a place where the elderly go and just wait to die. There’s no dignity or humanity in any of them.

There was football on the internet afterwards – Clyde v Stranraer in the Scottish Fourth Tier. And it was one of those games where Stranraer had 99% of the play, hit the woodwork and did absolutely everything except score, whereas Clyde just had one attack upfield and a lucky ricochet was enough for a sucker punch and send everyone in the crowd home shaking their heads.

Afterwards I made a start on editing the radio notes that I’d dictated before going to bed.

The first lot I had to do again. Somehow I’d managed to miss the first ten seconds of my dictating and I’ve no idea how on earth I did that.

And then I had to re-edit and remix the eleventh track because for some reason it had become mixed up with a pile of dictated notes. I’ve no idea how I managed to do that, but it really was a mess.

As a result, I’d only finished the two “additional tracks” prior to lunch. And it was a very late lunch at that.

Back in here after lunch I sat down – and the next thing that I remember, it was 16:30. I’d been stark out for over two hours and hadn’t felt a thing. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d gone to sleep. But while I was crashed out I was having a whole series of really exciting dreams but as I awoke the hole lot simply evaporated and I remembered nothing. How sad is that?

For half an hour I bashed away at some more radio notes and then went into the kitchen to make my bread for the week. And in a fit of mad enthusiasm, while the dough was proofing, I made a chocolate cake

While the cake was settling down and the dough was rising I rolled out the pizza dough for tea tonight. I’d taken the last lot out of the freezer just after lunch and it had been defrosting all afternoon.

There was football on the internet. Llansawel’s first game for over 25 years in the Premier League, and against Penybont too.

LLansawel had kept the core of their promotion-winning team and, as we know, there’s an enormous gulf between the Premier League and the second tier. It was quite evident and the score, 2-0 to Penybont, surprised no-one.

However, it was really good to watch a proper footballing duel between Llansawel’s veteran centre-forward Luke Bowen and Penybont’s centre-half, Dan Jefferies. A proper aerial combat of the type that reminded me of watching football back in the 1960s and early 70s

So having seen everyone of importance in the league already after just the first game, it’s going to be a long, hard season for Aberystwyth, Llansawel and FFlint. Those clubs are going to need to find some quality from somewhere, and quickly too.

The dough for tonight’s pizza was perfection itself. It had risen beautifully and was really light. And as usual, the toppings (mushroom, onion and olives with cheese, tomato sauce and cherry tomatoes, was second to none.

The batch of dough that I made where I forgot to add the oil has turned out to be the best that I have ever cooked.

The bread is fine too and my chocolate, orange and coconut cake looks delicious and I can’t wait to try that as of tomorrow afternoon when it’s cooled properly.

So right now I’m off to bed. I have three weeks of Welsh Summer School starting tomorrow at 10:30. Time that I was going to bed.

But before I go, Clayton Green has signed for Penybont from relegated Pontypridd United. He was playing today but his wife wasn’t there to watch the game. She was in church down the road where the vicar noticed her.
He turned to his verger and asked "is that Fanny Green on the front pew over there?"
"No Vicar" replied the verger. "It’s just the way the sunlight comes through the stained-glass window"

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Saturday 18th May 2024 – THEY’VE DONE IT!

After all of this bad news and negativity that’s been going around and about just recently, it’s nice to have some good news to report for a change

But anyway it’s a pleasure to report that in the close season this year it will be the turn of the Cofi Army to hit the road out Europe way as Caernarfon Town swept aside Penybont for that discretional place in European club competition in front of a massive crowd that must in modern times at least be a club record

Last night I’d gone to bed, later than I would have liked of course, full of eager anticipation for this game.

Wales has traditionally three spots in European competition, one spot in the Champions League and two spots in the Europa League.

These spots are traditionally won by TNS, COnnah’s Quay Nomads and Bala Town but every so often there’s a fourth discretionary place awarded and then there’s a play-off between clubs between 4th and 7th

This is the “real” cup final because it gives the lesser clubs something to play for and an opportunity to sample the delights of European football

But for me, for some reason last night was quite turbulent. I went to bed in the “old” way which caused me no pain at all which was nice, but I kept tossing and turning, and couldn’t really settle down to sleep.

Nevertheless I must have gone to sleep at some point because I was dead to the world when the alarm went off. I fell out of bed, switched off the alarm and headed for the bathroom

One good wash and change of clothes later I was in the dining area taking my medication and then setting out the room as the nurse likes it.

He didn’t have much to say when he came and was soon gone. But then I had a problem – I couldn’t rise out of the chair on which I was sitting. I knew that it was going to be a bad day today.

Once I managed to rise to my feet, after a great battle, I began to make my broccoli stalk soup. I put a great deal of effort, not to mention a pot of soya yoghurt, into it and it was really delicious today with freshly ground black pepper and fresh home-made bread.

Nevertheless, I still fell asleep drinking a mug of strong coffee. It must be one of the pills that I’m taking that’s doing this.

Eventually I pulled myself around and went into the bedroom to check my messages and mails. And it seems that I have to go to the hospital in Paris on June 12 for a check-up and hopefully receive he results of my stay there the other week. They’ll have loads of news for me, and I bet that it’ll all be bad

Judging by the amount of stuff on the dictaphone the night must have been disturbed. In my version of “The Horror of War” or whatever it was called, when the Americans tried to make good their getaway in World War I from the prison camp they would actually succeed. Some would go to ground amongst the native population and some would head west looking for a front line to dodge behind. I don’t think that they would be still there sitting there in bed and waiting for something to happen to them if they had already broken out and made arrangements for where to go. It would be most unlikely that they would be just sitting there. They would be up there somewhere doing something and trying to be involved in the action and get away from their captivity.

And then I’d been doing something in Brussels. That involved staying in someone’s house while all this was done. It was some kind of work in the street but on the last day I decided that this would be it and I’d go home on the last train so I had to do what I was doing then come back to where I was living, change and then go back in the rain to give the final orders and then go straight to the station to catch the train home. As I was washing and putting on my clean clothes there were all kinds of disturbances. The girl who lived there came in to me to ask me if I’d show the owner of the house how to make an apple pie. I thought that this was the last thing that I needed at this time of night. I wanted to be off but the quicker that I did it, the quicker I’d be finished so I went over to see what he’d done. He’d done the pastry in a strange way. He’s cut it into eighths but in the circular way round do there wasn’t a bottom or top, just like eight slices of pie crust. Of course they had all to be joined together and the filling had to go in, the top had to go on. I thought to myself that the people were making this thing much more complicated than it ought to be but that was just how things used to go. No-one seemed to know just how to do anything ordinary and straightforward. It all had to be so complicated.

And that’s another story of my life, isn’t it? If there’s a simple way of doing something and a complicated way of doing it, you can bet your life which one anyone would choose when I’m involved. Even I’m not immune from this myself

I was in this big German prisoner-of-war camp in Russia weeding the garden and the band suddenly began to play the national anthem. It took me a few minutes to cotton on to what was happening nut suddenly I realised that it was the German national anthem and that meant that they were planning an escape. I wasn’t sure who was escaping but I learnt later on that 20 guys from hut two had escaped. For some reason I was held responsible for it. Whilst no real punitive action was taken against me I was treated like a prisoner, being shackled, by being … indistinct … I felt in the end it probably wouldn’t have ended up better for me had I tried to escape with the others rather than stay behind. I certainly couldn’t have been worse-treated once they left. And then one of the members playing the second time, I was supposed to either sing some songs or write some songs, the songs that shouldn’t have music and they turned out to be tracks off the album that were played to basically accompany the escape. Most of them were not good at all

Back in this dream again, the composer was well-known but he was not in the camp, he was dead so I took it that this was the signal for an escape. I was puzzled why I hadn’t been told about it seeing that I was one of the leaders of the camp from the prisoners’ point of view. Anyway everyone was immediately confined to bed. I saw my moment and escaped. Schopenhauser or whoever wrote it originally had chosen a different moment to escape but I chose that one. In the end I ended up down in the south of Germany where this girl tried to persuade me to help her paint her toenails red but I was unable to do so … fell asleep here …

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I don’t actually “fall asleep” because I’m already asleep when I’m dictating. What happens is that the disctaphone goes silent and eventually you hear deep rhythmic breahinf and occasional snoring.

But what’s going on with this obsession with prison camps tonight then?

Our nurse went to the local council tip during the night to throw away all of her incriminating paperwork. On the way her little brown Clio was involved in an accident with a couple of guys. It wasn’t particularly badly damaged or anything like that but it made her reflect for a couple of minutes and led to something of an argument before she agreed to invite the guys to her house one day when she wouldn’t be there. So she went there and threw away all of her paperwork. Then she was talking about this and that as if she’d already spoken to the female guards about it. They’d had some kind of friendly interaction but it didn’t sound right by the way that this dream was going. I think that she was trying to avoid all kinds of interaction while she disposed of this incriminating … fell asleep here …

“Si” is the French way of contradicting someone so this dentist woman or whatever she was started to use it to correct members of her team and then their team had been exposed to the Germans and they should make ready for a rather rapid flight before the Germans came along to arrest them.

Some of the stuff about which I dream really is bizarre for sure and quite often there’s no logical explanation for it. I often wonder what goes on in the depths of my subconscious.

Rosemary had left a message for me to call her so I gave her a “quick” ring – “quick’ being 56 minutes this afternoon while we put the World to rights as usual

And then it was the football.

For a town with a population of less than 10,000, a crowd of over 2,000 is immense but they were there singing away and cheering on their team

And their team rewarded them by roaring into a three-goal lead in the first 35 minutes with some beautiful play down the wings that tore the Penybont defence to shreds

Penybont pulled one back right at the death and quite right too as they played the more classy football. We had the usual chaos in the Caernarfon defence that we have had for several seasons too but they rode their luck

At the end of the game the fans flooded onto the pitch and the party began. For a club that was on the verge of extinction and in the third tier of football 15 years ago, the devotion of the fans, the most passionate in Europe, saved the club and they now have their reward

If you want to see the highlights of the game THEY ARE HERE

But as I said earlier, it’s this discretionary fourth place that has permitted all kinds of Welsh Clubs to sample European football, even Cefn Druids from the second tier one year.

After this I fell asleep for a while until tea time, and then baked potatoes, salad and one of my favourite quorn fillets.

But I broke another plate when I dropped a jar of pickled onions onto it. Luckily not one of my dinner service plates, but it’s still very bad news. I don’t know what’s the matter with me right now.

Right now though I’m off to bed. Tomorrow is another day and, I hope, a better one

And just be glad that Penybont didn’t play Their new signing. That guy who is half man, half horse
… "and who is he" – ed …
Why, their new centaur-forward of course.

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11th May 2024 – I’VE HAD A …

… footfest this afternoon. It’s the semi-finals of the play-offs to decide which Welsh team will take the fourth place allotted to Wales in European Club competition in the forthcoming season.

TNS will go into the Champions League, hoping to qualify for the group stages at long last

Connah’s Quay and Y Bala will go into the Europa League by virtue of finishing second and third, and another place in the Europa League due to Wales will be awarded to the winner of the playoffs

And so we started off with Y Drenewydd v Penybont followed by Caernarfon v Cardiff Metro.

As you might expect, I was quite looking forward to it all. And for the first time since I can’t remember, I was actually in bed before 23:00. And that’s not something that happens all that often these days. I could have been in bed much earlier than I was too but with all of the aches and pains that I was carrying, it was really difficult to actually get into bed.

With having this early night, I was looking forward to a long, undisturbed sleep but it wasn’t to be. It was a really disturbed, turbulent night.

There was another phantom alarm call and I forget how many of these we’ve had just recently. I’ve no idea what’s going on with them – where they are coming from and what they are doing – but it’s certainly confusing.

When the real alarm went off I found that it was easier to move out of bed. Many of the aches and pains had gone and the pain in my hip had reduced a little and I could lift my leg more.

So now that I was out of bed I went to the bathroom and then into the dining area for my medication.

Having done that I set out the room for the nurse and came in here to see what’s happening in the big wide world. But as any student of history will tell you, the news today is just the same things happening to different people in different places at different times.

After the nurse had gone, having given me a shopping list of items needed, I came in here for a relax. And then I listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I had another niece last night. It was a non-existent niece, someone small and petite. She sat and we chatted for ages about her course and the future. When she was ready to go I asked her where she was staying. She hadn’t booked anywhere so I told her that my settee was really comfortable and she was welcome to stay on it. She wondered how any other person was going to stay there because there were two nieces wandering around and how I was going to distinguish which was which too. That was easy because one had a tie with a small emblem on it. The other one had a tie with a big emblem on it so I could distinguish them by that. I could see that this was going to be complicated but it didn’t seem to bother me on the ground that it’s all going to work out normally anyway. Then we had someone coming, brandishing a gun and being obnoxious. I don’t know what he wanted or anything like that but he totally disrupted everything that we were trying to do.

That’s nothing new. Whenever I was trying to do something back in the old days, there would always be someone coming along being obnoxious and trying to disrupt whatever it was that I was doing. And if there was a young girl involved anywhere, you could bet your life that they’d be down in droves to put le baton dans la roue as they say around here.

Then at one point a girl was pouring some new information into my travelling laptop. I was very concerned so I awoke to try to stop her but just at the point where it became liquid memory she began to pour the liquid memory I had to shout at her to make her stop and I really did shout as well. I washed hem and got ready and ended up back in bed until the alarm

Yes, I really did shout in the middle of my sleep. It’s a good job that these walls are 1m20 of solid granite or whatever would the neighbours have said?

Then we finished off with this complicated story about addition and subtraction over the numbers. I had quite a batch to do which I did mainly right and managed to ensure my team’s presence in the Scottish League 2 next season

And that reminds me – we have the first leg of the playoffs between Stranraer of Scottish League 2 and East Kilbride of the Scottish Lowland League at some point this weekend.

And then I had a message. There’s an “issue” simmering in the UK that’s been simmering away for almost 30 years. I think that I’ve mentioned this before. It’s now erupted and like Pandora’s Box, once the lid is off then that’s it.

There’s a considerable amount of work that needs to be done that should really have been done 40 years ago but it wasn’t, and the events of the last 28 years haven’t helped. So if you see me loitering on Boots Corner any time, you’ll know why I’m there.

After this I crashed out – from 10:00 until 11:50. Dead to the World as well. But not that I’m complaining this time because I saw Zero. While I was asleep this morning I was with a former friend. I’d finally managed to persuade him to come to see me with the intentions of thrashing out some programme about repairing all these cars that I have. I’d walked down this track through this forest and encountered Zero playing in a school playground so we’d chatted but that was all. I pushed on and came across my former friend and we began to chat. I was going to tell him that I had £90:000 for the programme but we never reached that far in the discussion. We had several bikes ad had to move them by moving two, dropping them down, running back for two more and advancing lie this. At one point I had to run back miles because the exhaust had dropped off a motor bike we were moving. While I was up on top of this grassy bank my former friend came back to see what I was doing so I showed him. He was furious. “this is jus attention to detail” he raged and urged me to hurry up. By now this grassy bank had changed into a roof with a chimney and some dormer windows and I couldn’t work out how to descend. I thought that manoeuvring by holding on to the chimney and pivoting round by hanging on to the edge of the dormer window would be my best bet but the window opened and I was left dangling in thin air with no prospect whatever of improving my position.

It was really nice to see Zero of course but this “no prospect of improving my position” sounds like how my finances will be in a few months after the news that I received earlier.

By now, breakfast had become lunch so I fuelled up with food and then settled down to watch the football.

Y Drenewydd finished 4th in the league and Penybont 7th so the game was held at Drenewydd. But home advantage counted for nothing as they were swept aside by what can only be described as a Penybont masterclass.

The game finished 5-0 for Penybont and believe me – Y Drenewydd were lucky to get nil. They were awful. It wasn’t just that Penybont were so good but that Y Drenewydd offered nothing at all

The other game between 5th and 6th and played at Caernarfon in front of a massive crowd was much more exciting.

Caernarfon roared down the left flank with a combination of Louis LLoyd and Morgan Owen more times than you can mention but the final ball was always either too short of too long.

On the other hand the Met soaked up the pressure and tried to hit on the breakaway and had three excellent chances to score but couldn’t find the target.

The game was drifting to a 0-0 draw and penalties when Marc Williams drilled a powerful shot through a crowd of players into the net

And as Cardiff Metro were throwing everything forward to try to equalise in the closing stages a breakaway involving Sion Bradley and Adam Davies saw Davies score a second for the Cofis

So the final next weekend will be between Caernarfon and Penybont and played at Caernarfon.

And then, dear reader, I crashed out again. And for an hour or so too.

Tea tonight was one of my breaded quorn fillets with baked potato and salad. I know that it’s monotonous, but it’s also delicious.

So that’s all that I’m doing tonight. I’m going to try to be in bed early and see if Zero will come back into my dreams.

And I’ll tell her "I dreamed about you this morning"
"Did you?" she’ll reply.
"No" I’ll answer. "You wouldn’t let me".

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Saturday 6th April 2024 – TODAY WAS ONE …

… of the worst days that I have had for quite a while.

In fact, it’s a day that harks back to the bad old days of winter 2015-16 when I was struggling to come to terms with this illness, or over the summer of 2015 when I’d moved to live in Leuven

It’s a combination of two factors really.
Firstly those stabbing pains that I have nin the sole of the foot returned yesterday and gradually worsened as the day wore on and accelerated through the night.
Secondly I was wide-awake at about 04:30 and there was no hope whatever of going back to sleep.

It totally beats me as to what would have awaken me, and awoken me to such an extent that I couldn’t go back to sleep, even at that time. It must be something quite considerable and important, so I’m surprised that I don’t know what it is.

What I was going to say was that I didn’t have a clue, but I doubt whether there would be many people who would disagree with that diagnosis.

And as it happens, I do have a clue about what time I went to bed last night, and it was late yet again, which is even more surprising considering how early I awoke.

But doing all this paperwork and making all these notes really does take its time and I’m surprised that I’m ever ready to go to bed.

So having settled down to go to sleep I was soon awake again, drifting into alternate fits of wakefulness and sleepiness, but always being awake nevertheless.

And that didn’t stop my imagination working because even though I was in this semi-wakefulness I was still off on my travels.

When the alarm went off at 07:00 I’d already been up and about for 15 minutes and was on the point of finishing dressing and going for a wash.

Not before checking the blood pressure though. 16.1/9.9, which compares with last night’s figure of 16.4/10.1 – pretty much the same by the looks of things.

After shovelling down the piles of medication I arranged the room for the nurse and then tidied up the knives and forks etc from the previous evening. If I’m having house guests, which looks pretty much like it in the near future, I need to learn some new habits.

Rather like the man in church praying to God – "Oh God give me patience! And hurry!"

When the nurse came round he plastered me up again but said that this will be the last of them as the foot has healed so well.

As it happens, I think that the foot has certainly healed but not as well as he thinks. Still, he’s the nurse, I’m not.

After he left I made a start on the dictaphone notes from the night and from the morning when I was half-awake. And apart from what seems to be the usual fact these days of getting up, getting dressed and ready to leave the bed but only in my subconscious mind (as far as I know), also later on there was a phantom doorbell to say that the nurse had arrived. That was at 03:00 and so it was extremely unlikely, but nevertheless I found myself getting out of bed for that as well. I’ve no idea what’s going on with me at the moment. This is crazy.

What this next dream was about was a woman who was visiting the doctor’s for some reason. He gave her an examination . Then someone like Ingrid came along. Because she was more ill he gave her the more profound examination and had to make sure that she was supported by enough orderlies but she could withstand the pressure that he was going to apply. It was all to do with rolling balls Up and down the body to find weak points. Obviously he’d roll them quite hard and then feel the resistance, to see where the body was in need of reinforcement

And before anyone says anything about it, I shall say myself that that particular dream sounds like a right load of balls. It’s an interesting concept though and I bet that there’s plenty of mileage in an idea like that if I were to take it to some of the more obscure clubs in Soho

In fact I could probably make a small fortune from clubs like that for the rights to the unexpurgated version of this blog

And then while I was lying there half-asleep Nerina and I were at a port somewhere on our way to cross the Channel to go to a party at a friend’s house. We didn’t have any preparations at all – we didn’t have a GPS to find out where it was, we didn’t have any accommodation booked for Nerina or anything like that. We were going to simply improvise and make it all up on the spot. So we boarded the ferry and I went to look out of the window but they were all misty and steamy so I asked the purser if he had any car windscreen wipers. He chuntered but had a really good search, chuntering all the time. Eventually he came up with a pair and handed them to me, which I thought was nice. I could sit down then and look out of the window to admire the shipping like I usually do.

And this brings back many happy memories of me being invited to a party and setting out to go there, and suddenly realising that I had no idea of the address or where the person lived. I drove around in circles for quite a while before in the end I gave up and went home.

As Kenneth Williams once so famously said, "I’m often taken aback by my own brilliance". It’s the kind of thing that only I can do.

Meanwhile back at the ran … errr … bed, this thing about Normandy involved the Normandy group on Social Network. In the end we’d sacked all of our advisers and dealt with everything on a question and answer basis amongst ourselves. That even included the vets. Everything there on the group seemed to be going much better since we no longer had advisers and people were resolving their own problems like this

In my case though I’ve simply sacked my Social Network. It’s becoming less and less of a Social Network and more and more a vehicle for adverts and publicity. If I wanted to see “sponsored links” and “suggested for you” articles I’d look for them. I don’t want them thrust into my face at the expense of stuff that I want to see.

So I went for my coffee and cheese on toast for breakfast and despite two really strong mugs full of coffee I crashed out quite completely and absolutely, and for a good couple of hours too.

And Nerina came to visit me again, but it wasn’t a very pleasant meeting so I’m not going to transcribe the notes. With all of these problems I’ve been told to do all that I can to avoid unpleasantness.

In fact, this illness has made a whole new person of me.

What I can say about it though was that the dream was building up to a ‘phone call, and sure enough, I had one too, and a real one. It was the delivery man with the rest of my Amazon order.

This afternoon, I really felt like death. It was the worst that I have felt for quite some considerable time.

Margaret Thatcher once famously said something like "anyone can do a good day’s work when they want to. To be successful, you have to do a good day’s work when you don’t want to" and I’ve ploughed nevertheless through some radio notes and a pile of Welsh homework when all that I wanted to do was to go back to sleep.

There was football on the Internet later, Aberystwyth v Penybont. Penybont are far too good a team to be involved in a relegation scrap where they are right now, but Aberystwyth are down near the bottom for a good reason.

And that was how it went on. Aberystwyth started well and had a couple of chances but faded quite quickly and Penybont took control.

A 3-0 win was probably about right but Aberystwyth will rue the errors that they made. However it’s not easy playing football in a monsoon like they had this afternoon during the game.

Tea was baked potato and salad with one of the delicious breaded quorn fillets that I like, and that’s it for the day. I’m off to bed, with an alarm for tomorrow as the nurse will be round.

And tomorrow afternoon I have biscuits to make as I have now run out of supplies.

But before I go, talking about obscure clubs in Soho and unexpurgated versions of writings reminds me of a former girlfriend who worked at the local library on Saturdays and who has featured on these pages on more than just a few occasions.
She was asked to order a pile of books so she was going through the list, and one title caught her eye
"What’s this book here?" she asked
"It’s called ‘Ferry across the River Kwai’" explained her supervisor
"But is that title right?" she asked. "I’m sure that it should be called something else"
"It’s all right" said the supervisor. "Don’t worry. It’s simply the unabridged version of the story"

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Saturday 3nd March 2023 – I’M FED UP …

… of falling asleep during the day and not having anything done.

Fighting off wave after wave of sleep while trying to watch the football, I ended up crashing out for several hours later on and I’ve even crashed out while typing these notes.

It beats me what’s responsible for it. One of these medicines, that’s for sure, but which one? But all I can say is that I’m glad that I don’t drive any more, because this would be driving me up the wall.

It was another late night last night, simply because of the highlights of the football for the evening being posted. Connah’s Quay’s defeat at Bala means that TNS would be handed the championship yet again if they win against Cardiff Metro this afternoon.

So on that sombre note I wandered off to bed, later than usual, and settled down for a good night’s sleep.

When the alarm went off and awoke me, I was dreaming about people wearing different clothes, being in different epochs that they chose. I could just imagine the scene when awakening, asking for a pair of 1950s undies, something like that. Think of how confusing it would be for people. But there are many people who don’t want to live in the modern world today

And I for one, entangled in the technological jungle, think fondly of my past life in Crewe where we didn’t have these new-fangled inventions like the wheel to bother us and where the most exciting thing that happened was when that tree fell down in 1847 and people still talk about it now.

They have these blue plaques on some houses that say something like “between 1903 and 1926 this house was inhabited by no-one of any importance”.

First thing this morning was to check the blood pressure. 15.4/8.5 this morning, compared to 13.0/8.3 last night. So something during the night must have wound me up. I shall have to go back and see.

It’s nice though to see it generally falling. They were quite worried about that at one time. Mind you, I wish that I knew how to control it without medication.

On that note I staggered into the kitchen for another helping of medication

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night, apart from discussing historical underclothes of course. This is where my Wing for the Air Force has been split up and the daughter of one of the pilots, a young girl probably 7 or 8, has been kidnapped somewhere between Iceland and Greenland. It was the patrol’s light-hearted way of doing things that had enabled this to happen Now, their next job was to try to find this little girl even though they had these transatlantic patrols to maintain all the time every so many hours they were out flying over the ocean

This sounds as if it might relate to part of the novel that I’ll never ever write now, where I had my anti-submarine patrols bases in Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, the Caribbean, Brazil and the Azores fighting the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943.

Later on I stepped back into that dream again afterwards … "which dream?" – ed … but there was another part of this dream that was based in an office where I worked. I’d applied for some annual leave but it was over a busy period. The annual leave was about my health issues. On one particular afternoon I was being confirmed into some kind of religion or other ready for my eventual death but when the boss called me in he talked to me about the possibility of promotion, how I needed to show that I was a firm, loyal and committed member of his team in order to be promoted. Feeling that it was rather late now for me to change my ways I basically mentioned to him what was happening and asked him what I could do about it to ensure that I’d be promoted, which event should I abandoned, which postpone, which cancel, what should I do with something else so that my cancelling it with some kind of higher position in the league or in a higher division would be a much better option for everyone than me going off and being treated for my health issues.

Then I had a dream about being in the Air Force with people in the front line, forming this special squadron that must be provisioned properly when requested. Bomber Command tried to hoist onto it a raid that was out of their jurisdiction – involving bombing somewhere south of Crewe and flattening it. The senior officers objected. In the end senior officers were put into the plane but had to board it in senior order or near enough. In the lower ranks what they did was to quite simply transfer everyone to shore-going establishments where there were no provisions to attack anything.
Then the dream changed later on. I was back in it when it was 3 officers who were on their way to the camp which was in the middle of Shropshire, lost in a backstreet somewhere. They asked me about it and I told them where it was, but decided to follow them just in case they weren’t who they said they were and were up to no good. It was a good job that I did because I noticed a couple of things that brought my attention to them.

Why would anyone want to bomb anywhere south of Crewe and flatten it? In my opinion, Crewe would be an ideal target for all of that. During the “Baedecker Raids” a stick of bombs fell on Crewe and caused £14,000,000 of improvements and we could do with a few more of that type of thing.

The town centre right now looks like Dresden after an Allied air raid and I shudder to think of what they’ll erect in place of the bus station and the shops that were there. As the current King Charles said a while back, "You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe. When it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble"

What beats me about the current plans for the town centre are firstly, why are they building the multi-storey car park first when there is nothing for anyone parking there to see or do in the town centre? And secondly, why are they building shops there when they couldn’t find tenants for the shops that were there just now?

But as long as they build a new bus station complete with public convenience. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I passed my Biology “O” level with flying colours thanks to the helpful drawings on the walls of the gentleman’s rest room and I want others to have the same chance as I had.

Having dealt with all of that I had a few things to do and then I went for my lovely cheese on toast. It would be nicer if the bread would rise more, but I really must work harder than I do with it. But “gently” is the word, don’t fight it. Pretend that I’m massaging Zero’s clavicles.

What I’ve been doing today, when I’ve not been asleep, is going through that mass of stuff that I sorted out last night and splitting it up into tracks. I’ve not done much, because I’ve been asleep for quite a while today, to my bitter regret.

There’s a few done, but I really could have done with doing a few more.

Football on the internet, as I said today. TNS v Cardiff Metro. A win for TNS would see them win the championship with about 8 games to spare, which out of a 32-game season is some impressive going.

And as expected, they swept the Met aside in a canter and strolled to an easy 4-0 victory. And it should have been many more than that.

There’s no stopping TNS on the domestic front these days, but how I wish that they would transfer this form into Europe and win a few games there

Many people say that the dominance of TNS is killing the game, but the fact is that it’s the fans who are the winners because in the race to try to keep up with TNS, the quality of teams, matches and facilities has come on in leaps and bounds, so everyone is a winner.

But while we’re on the subject of football and winners, THIS ONE is the kind of game that I like. Where one club is pushing and pushing forward with wave after wave of attack and fail to produce anything, whereas the other team goes racing away downfield in a breakaway and score a goal from their only attack.

Tea tonight was another one of these breaded quorn filets that I like, with salad and baked potatoes. And the potatoes were so nice that I baked another one.

Rice pudding for afters too, and I can’t complain at all.

Tomorrow I have some hummus to make, and also some fruit buns as I’m running out of those. That should keep me busy for an hour or so while I’m making my pizza, I suppose. There is some pizza dough left – I checked.

But the hummus will be nice, one batch with chilis and the other with olives and I’ve forgotten the sun-dried tomatoes again. I’m not sure what I have that will go with olives in a hummus.

Garlic, obviously. That goes without saying. never any danger whatever of vampires coming around here with the amount of garlic that I use.

When I was at Castle Dracula in Romania that time in the early 1990s I actually met a vampire there. We had a race together and it was neck and neck all the way.

But seriously, when we were kids the neighbour’s boy told us that he’d been reading a book where someone killed a vampire with a stake.

"That’s nothing!" we retorted. "Our mother could do that with her egg and chips"

They are actually running a remake of Bram Stoker’s DRACULA so I shall take myself away and carry on reading it while I wait for everything to quieten down so that i can dictate my radio notes.

It’s one of these books that has already been reworked to correspond with the New World Order and stars a trans-sexual cross-dressing vampire. Known, as you might expect, as Count Dragula.

I’ll get my coat.

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Saturday 10th February 2024 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… miserable night with very little sleep.

How many is this now just recently? I’m feeling like death right now.

Just for a change I was in bed at a respectable time and went to sleep quite quickly – but not for long.

It wasn’t the burning sensation but instead an agonising pain in both my ankles. It was a real killer. Every time I moved and the bedding touched the sore points on the ankles the pain drove me through the roof

Strangely enough, when the alarm went off and my ankles were still wracked with pain, I was afraid of standing up. But somehow standing up seemed to ease the pain and that surprised me. I wandered off into the kitchen to take my medication with a sigh of relief.

Back in here I had plenty of things to do before I could look at the dictaphone. And to my surprise there was actually something on it from the night. The night can’t have been as bad as I thought. “The Mole”, a Welsh poem, was written by someone with the aim of aiding people with Educational difficulties by learning French but it didn’t have a great deal of support. In some places the Government disliked it and many other organisations disliked it too because they said that it showed disabled people in the wrong batch by segregating them into groups run by them or not but that’s a complete red herring because the whole point is that everyone joins in and gains something from it.

Well, that’s what I said. And you don’t expect me to make any sense out of it, do you?

Rosemary rang up with a quick question. And it was a quick question too – only 52 minutes today. One of our shorter ‘phone calls. She was going out for afternoon tea with a couple who had just come back from Australia so I told her that they might have brought her back a kangaroo seeing that Australia is overrun with kangaroos right now.

During our conversation I told her about the earliest European explorers to go into the interior, and they took a native guide from the coast with them
They saw a strange animal bouncing around and so they asked their native guide what it was.
He replied "kangaroo" so they captured one, put it in a crate, labelled it “kangaroo” and sent it back to Europe where anthropologists officially called it “kangaroo”, by which name it’s been known ever since throughout the world.
So the explorers went back into the interior with their native guide and they saw a strange tree. "What’s that tree called?" they asked the native guide
He replied "kangaroo"
"Don’t be silly" answered the chief explorer. "You told us that the bouncing animal was called a kangaroo. How can the tree be a kangaroo? What’s it called?"
"Kangaroo" he insisted.
The explorers dragged the native guide back to the coast and to his chief. They told him the story of the tree and demanded an explanation.
The chief burst out laughing. "In our language" he said "”kangaroo” means “I don’t know”."

The rest of the day has been spent with some sound tracks, converting them to a format that I can use and then chopping them up into the bits that I want.

But it wasn’t easy. Being exhausted as I am I crashed out two or three times in the middle of something exciting, and I reckon that there will be a few more times before I can go to bed.

And during one of these spells, I was off on my travels. That will give you an idea of how deep the sleep was. I was with a group of people, several of whom I knew and a few who were quite young. Thee was something organised at the local church and one of the women and I Had been up quite late making food for the event. On our way there one of the small children said “I used to go to Sunday School, didn’t I?”. So we arrived there and that child was shocked to see how people were going in. She piped up “when you go into church you’re supposed to go in quietly and kneel down” in the shocked kind of voice and tone that only a young child can do. Everyone looked at her so I said “we’re all going to have a lecture now about going into church” in a light-hearted was but everyone still looked daggers at us. After the lecture or whatever it was, it was the buffet. And I’ve never seen food disappear so quickly. When I arrived there was very little left. I said in a loud voice to the woman with whom I’d come “what time late at night were we up to making this food?” in attempt to try to shock and embarrass everyone but she replied in a horrified tone “you don’t talk about things like that”. Some woman looked sympathetically at me so I replied “don’t worry. I can always go outside and wait until the event is over. It doesn’t bother me”.

As if you’d really get me into a church. Fair enough, I went into plenty with Marianne but that was out of friendship and respect. I’ve also been in plenty as a tourist too.

However in the UK, the first time that I went into church, someone stuck me in a pool of water. The second time, someone attached me to a strange woman. The next time that I go into a church will be over my dead body.

As for Nerina being strange though, that’s certainly not the truth. If we hadn’t both been under such stress and if I hadn’t been in such a dark place, things might well have been different. As I once said to my niece in Canada, it wasn’t until I met a couple of other girls on a more personal level that I realised how lucky I might have been when I had Nerina.

On another subject that cropped up in that dream, I remember being in a meeting in Toronto in Canada and they announced at the end that there was a buffet.

Seeing a few of my friends on the podium I stopped to chat to them so I was late joining the queue for the food. And when those of us near the end of the queue arrived at the front, the buffet had been totally stripped of food. Yet some people early in the queue had their plates piled high with sandwiches.

What I did was to shrug my shoulders and walk down to the nearest “Subway” and have a sandwich there.

Something else that interrupted me was the football on the internet. In fact I was asleep when the match between Penybont and Y Barri kicked off so I missed the first 25 minutes of it but luckily it was streamed via a recording site so I could go back to the start.

Penybont are having a strange season. For all of their experience and organisation, they are having a wretched season and are in danger of being sucked into the relegation battle.

On the other hand, Y Barri might be low down in the table but as a newly-promoted side and with such a gulf between the Premier League and the feeder leagues, they are coping better than some have expected.

THE MATCH seemed to reflect the situation. Penybont were much more organised but Y Barri played with more flair and improvisation.

The result at the final whistle was probably about fair, I suppose.

Penybont’s Chris Venables was sent off yet again for another stupid off-the-ball incident, and I really don’t understand it. He’s one of the better and more articulate players in the league and could easily be a regular in the “C” International side, yet the problem would be to keep him on the pitch for the whole 90 minutes.

There’s far too much of this niggly off-the-ball stuff in the league and I do wish that some of the players would grow up.

Tea tonight was one of the breaded quorn fillets that I like, now that I’ve had a Leclerc delivery, along with vegan salad and delicious baked potato started in the microwave and finished in the air fryer. And it was so nice that I went and baked myself another potato afterwards.

Now, I have a few notes to dictate before I go to bed, but I’m not sure how I’m going to do it. It’s Carnaval weekend, there are hordes of motor caravans parked on the public carpark outside and crowds are going back and forth singing and making a noise.

For the weekend half of the town join in the celebrations with gusto along with the other 150,000 people who attend here as visitors. As for the other half of the town though, they all make themselves scarce and head for the hills.

For people who don’t want to be here but can’t get away, the constant noise and sound of the entertainment can be quite overwhelming.

In fact, as my hero the Irish politician Boyle Roche once remarked, even "little children who could neither walk nor talk were running about in the streets cursing their Maker"

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Saturday 11th November 2023 – THINGS TODAY WERE …

… somewhat different from yesterday.

in fact it was the morning when I was crashed out on my chair. And I was totally out of it too. I find it very hard to believe that yesterday took so much out of me.

Admittedly I was later in bed that I would have liked to be, but I was determined to dictate the notes that I’d been preparing for a future radio programme. They were all done and dusted and I crawled into bed.

When the alarm went off this morning I have to say that I have never felt less like moving – at least, not for a good while anyway. But I did make it to my feet before the second alarm went off and I staggered into the kitchen for my medication.

Back in here I settled down to do some work but ended up drifting in and out of sleep for much of the morning and I really didn’t feel like anything at all.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from the night. I’d been invited to a wedding in Nantwich so I set off. As I pulled up outside the church there were all these people milling around with huge banners and floral decorations etc. It looked like a really sumptuous wedding. All the people with the banners went inside and I hung around outside. I had a good look round but didn’t recognise anyone. After a while I mentioned to someone “I hope that I’m attending the correct wedding”. They didn’t really say anything. Just at that moment a group of people appeared carrying a huge tray above their heads, full of beer. They swooped down onto the outside of the church and began to put the tray down so that everyone outside could have a drink. I thought that this is not like the kind of wedding that I would ordinarily attend, that’s for sure.

I didn’t mention that going to that wedding I actually walked some of the way, and walked some of the way without crutches. That astonished me, even in the dream.

There was a story about two people, a man and a woman, working in a kitchen. For some reason the man misunderstood a comment made by the woman. As a result the situation in that kitchen became extremely uncomfortable for a while. There was a lot more to it than this but it was another one of these dreams that disappeared the moment that I reached for the dictaphone.

However I don’t need to know how this ended. I know all about misunderstandings like this

Finally last night I was with a girl whom I knew for a while in Brussels, living in an apartment somewhere. She had go out out to sell some kind of Employee Management software database to a company. I tagged along with her. When she began her discussion the elderly woman in charge of the situation was extremely aggressive. My friend was talking about this product and the woman said “it’s not something that you have to use every day, is it?”. My friend was there patiently explaining “it’s a dispute-management system, yes, but it has lots of underlying parts to it. You only need the disputes part infrequently but everything else is important”. She replied “we’ll strip that out for a start”. The discussion continued and the woman found that it was based on Word-Perfect. “We can strip that out too”. I remembered smiling at 2 girls sitting at a nearby desk looking as horrified as I was. I whispered to them “I think that I’d have been long gone from here at this point”. My friend kept going patiently and the woman kept interrupting her. Every time Nicole tried to insist on speaking the woman went “interrupting me! How rude!” even though she was the one doing al the interrupting. I thought that I would never ever make a career in sales because I wouldn’t have put up with this kind of comment for a minute.

Following that I made a start on editing the radio notes that I’d dictated last night. It was a very slow process, for reasons that I mentioned a little earlier, but the programme is now finished and ready for broadcast on … errr … 7th June 2024.

With plenty of time on hand despite the fatigue I carried on editing the blog entries from last autumn. I managed to do a pile of them, and I’m now having a good drive around various Ford agents in Eastern Canada trying to find a sunroof to fit the only Ford Flex that was ever imported into Europe.

It’s quite true that I sometimes end up with doing some most unusual tasks.

There was some football on the internet later. It’s Welsh Cup weekend and the match that was featured for live commentary was Llanelli v Penybont.

Llanelli have a good history in Welsh club football but unfortunately it is nothing but history. There have been some very hard times down in South West Wales but the club is slowly rising back up the pyramid and is currently leading the Southern pool of the Second Division

Penybont on the other hand is a fully-established Premier League club that qualified for Europe this season.

The gap between the Premier League and the Second Division is immense under any circumstances, as clubs like Flint, Airbus and Afan Lido will testify over the past few years so no-one was under any illusions.

And that was how the game started, with Penybont rampaging forward. Consequently everyone was taken completely by surprised when Ethan Cann’s brilliant finish out of nothing from the edge of the penalty area put Llanelli ahead.

By half-time however Penybont had restored sanity and were 2-1 to the good.

A brilliant point-blank save by Scott Coughlin in the Llanelli goad right from the second-half kick-off kept them in the game and then up popped Ethan Cann again with one of the best goals that you’ll ever see from a Second-Division player.

Even more surprisingly, Llanelli went ahead later, only for Penybont to equalise in the dying seconds of normal time.

We ended up with a penalty shot-out in which Scott Coughlin was once again the hero as a couple of excellent saves saw the Second Division side through to the next round, totally against the run of play and totally against the odds.

Tea tonight was a baked potato cooked in the air fryer, with a vegan salad and one of those breaded quorn fillets that I like so much.

And it seems that I’ve cracked the system of baking potatoes with the air fryer. First, give them a couple of minutes in the microwave to cook the interior. That worked really well

So tomorrow I can have a day off. I’ve done all of my work.

All that remains to be done is to make my fruit buns for the next fortnight. For a change I have everything that I need so they should turn out really well, I hope.

But in the meantime I’ve been reading up on what I need to make my Christmas cake and Christmas pudding. The Christmas cake that I made 2 years ago turned out really well and I’m keen to make another one.

A Christmas pudding will be a new experience but Jackie told me what steamer to buy and sent me a recipe for a vegan pudding. One or two things I’m short of but I’ll order what I can and invent the rest.

When I was in Canada last year I was lucky because I found some brandy and some rum essence and that should give my Christmas baking a lift. I’ve no mixed spice but my friend in Munich thinks that he might be able to find some German gingerbread spice and that might actually work too.

One thing that I mustn’t forget to do though it to check my marzipan and make sure that that works too. I didn’t use it last year, with recovering from my hospital efforts so I hope that it’s still good.

if not, I shall have to think of a Plan B.

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Saturday 30th September 2023 – I HAVE MADE …

… an executive decision, and for the benefit of new readers, an executive decision is a decision that if it turns out to be the wrong one, the person making it is executed.

Anyway, I went to LeClerc this morning to do my shopping. The drive there was horrendous because I can’t now work the brake sufficiently in Caliburn, and the left foot is struggling now to work the clutch.

Not only that, I didn’t have the power to climb back into the cab after my shopping.

When I returned here, I found that my usual parking place had been taken. The only other parking place up against a kerb that was free was right across on the far side of the car park. Consequently my shopping trolley and most of my purchases are still in the back.

Luckily, having had an idea that I might find things difficult, I’d taken a backpack with me so at least I could manage to bring the frozen and chilled food upstairs.

Coming back up the stairs, I did something else that I have never done. The lifts here are on the half-landing so I staggered (and I DO mean “staggered”) up as far as the first half-landing and took the lift up to the next one, and then walked down to my front door.

So in other words, what this means is that I am no longer going to drive. That is, not until I can find a car that works with hand controls only.

Meanwhile, back in the apartment, when the alarm went off I was reading a letter from a company to someone else about a lock-up garage that they were renting and for some reason they hadn’t paid their instalments. There was a family waiting to take it over so what were they planning to do with it. I don’t know why I’d had this copy but it immediately made me interested so I was busy sending it off to our company secretary to see what they could do about it.

So I crawled to my feet and wandered off into the bathroom. And then round about 08:40 I struggled down the stairs with my shopping trolley as far as Caliburn, and then the excitement began.

At LeClerc they had nothing exciting, but I found some vegan camembert-type cheese on sale on special offer so I treated myself to it for a change.

When I finally made it back here, I put away whatever it was that I’d managed to bring upstairs, and then made myself some cheese on toast and a pot of very hot, strong coffee.

Not that it did me much good, because I crashed out on my chair – and no surprise either because I was totally exhausted.

Later on I had a listen to the rest of the dictaphone notes. A group of us was going camping. One of my friends – it might have been a girl – had been to work so I said that I’d pick her up at about 01:30. I set my alarm for about 01:15 and went to bed. When the alarm went off I arose but I had so much to do that 15 minutes was going to be far too optimistic to accomplish it. Meantime I’d been collecting stuff to take with us. One of the things was like a stake that you drove into the ground and you added more stakes to it until it was quite tall and then a basketball hoop. It was extremely high off the ground like this but what my interest was that if I had some kind of long cloth I could make some kind of really nice wind protector for my tent or for when I’m sitting down on the beach, by sewing loops in it and putting each individual stake through each pair of loops to hold it. It was all packed in a big canvas bag like a tent bag so at the moment it was going to be quite easy to manoeuvre. Then I had my dishes to wash, things like that, and that was going to take me ages

And then I went to see my Aunt in London, and I had a woman and daughter with me, who might have been Laurence and Roxanne. We had to go so Roxanne carried STRAWBERRY MOOSE. We walked down from this big building where she lived to where I’d parked the car which was in some kind of extremely steep, muddy car park. I was right at the top so we didn’t have far to walk at all. We piled in and said our goodbyes. I had a packet of digestive biscuits. I made some remark about having made them specially. My aunt said “don’t be silly, Eric. You’ve bought them from a shop to eat on your journey home”. We rolled the car, which was my red Cortina estate, down to the bottom of the hill ready to set off. I remembered something that I had to take back so I left the two of them and the car there and ran all the way back up again. Really, what I wanted to do was to say goodnight to my aunt privately and to ask her about any situation going on that I ought to know. She anticipated this and came down. We met at the entrance to her building after I’d run back up the car park. It was quite an emotional reunion considering, and then we began to chat.

There was also something about some rocky fields and stone walls but I can’t remember anything more than that about it

There was football on the Internet this afternoon – Connah’s Quay Nomads v Penybont, played in a monsoon in a swamp in the Welsh Premier League – second v third.

And despite the conditions, it was an entertaining game with plenty of skill, really enjoyable to watch. And for 60 minutes or so Connah’s Quay roared into a 3-0 lead.

But then, a strange thing happened. Henry Jones, one of the best players in the league when he chooses to be, had been on the bench for Penybont and at the hour mark, Rhys Griffiths sent him on to play.

And a couple of minutes later we had two of the most bizarre substitutions that I had ever seen. I’ve no idea what must have been going through Neil Gibson’s mind but two of his best players, Harry Franklin and one of my favourites, Jack Kenny, who had been running the Penybont defence ragged, were then replaced.

As a result, 15 minutes later the score was now 3-2 and Penybont were going all out for an equaliser. A breakaway at the end of 90 minutes led to a fourth goal for Connah’s Quay but it could have been so, so different.

However, some of the substitutions that one or two of these managers make sometimes totally baffles me.

Tea tonight was a burger on a bap with salad and chips. And it was really delicious too yet again. I seem to be making good progress with my meals these days and I’m eating well, which is always good news.

So now having had a nice relaxing evening, I’m off to bed, to have sweet dreams and think about how my car-less life is going to pan out in the future.

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Tuesday 29th August 2023 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… one of those dreams that really ought to be turned into a film. One that went on for ever and ever during the night.

It’s a pity that I can’t remember word-for-word exactly what went on during these voyages because if I could and I could write it all down I’d be sitting on a fortune in royalties.

But at least it explains why I had another miserable night where I struggled to wake up this morning. Beat the first alarm I did, but I would have liked not to.

After the medication and checking my mails and messages I had to let the nurse into the building. He’s coming to check up on my neighbour again.

Most of the day has been spent sorting out the paperwork and filling in forms for the hospital. You’ve really no idea of the stuff that they need, and then I had to track it all down.

There was also the issue of trying to find out exactly where I ought to be going. I don’t think that I’ve ever encountered a hospital as large as this one. The building where I needed to be took some tracking down.

As it happens, it’s right across the road from where there’s a Metro station on a direct line from Paris Montparnasse. That means that if whoever it is who comes to meet me fails to do so, I can make my way there on my own in a reasonable fashion.

While I was sorting everything out, the hospital actually rang me. They asked if I could come any earlier for my appointment. I replied that allowing for trains and connections, I should be able to be there earlier, but who knows how the transport will pan out?

Something else that I did today was to go one step further than Dave Crosby. Probably because I had the flu for Christmas I wasn’t feeling up to par and it increased my paranoia, like looking in my mirror and seeing a police car.

And then I attacked the dictaphone nots. I was watching Morton play last night. They were absolutely awful and turned over quite easily by the team against whom they were playing. Everyone was in a state of shock. On the climb back up to the steps of the Supporters dressing room the supporters were saying all kinds of things about how they didn’t believe the result of what was happening. One guy just sat on a step right by the door totally speechless. It was difficult to pass him to go in so I left him and went for a walk around the grandstands. When I came back he was still there so I said some platitude like “come on guy, let’s go inside. We’re not doing any good sitting here” and took him inside the Supporters room where he sat down and began this really huge inquisition about what was going wrong with the team.

I had the dream that I mentioned just now – another one of these enormous dreams about a film last night. We were in the USA, me, my friend from South Carolina and another girl. He went off somehere and I arranged to meet him at LIDL, somewhere like that. The the girl and I, we were in Shrewsbury or Chester at the time discussing the commercialisation of the port at Chester. That was my task. She was a student who was interested in developments on the waterfront for artistic purposes. I explained the river and canal network in Cheshire and how we intended to bring it all together so commercial freight would end up in Chester and distributed by the rivers and canals to the towns, and how their produce would come to Chester and be exported on sea-going ships. This chat went on for ages. In the end I sent her off after my friend and arranged to meet at LIDL where I’d do my shopping. I turned up at LIDL but the place was tiny. I couldn’t move around in it. I was so fed up that I decided that I’d take the bus into town to do my shopping there. Off I went, but I suddenly realised that I’d arranged to meet everyone at LIDL, I didn’t have my shopping bag or my money and I was on a bus into the centre of town. There was a discussion in which i was interested about developments in workshops and safety systems for electrics. I explained that in my father’s workshop he had a system of push bars against all the machinery. If he tripped and fell, he’d fall against a push bar, that would hinge with the force of his body and cut off the power. Everyone was interested in the design of this so I was talking about it when my friend came along and we met by accident. We ended up talking about this system. I asked him where the girl was. He said that she hadn’t turned up and he hadn’t met her. From there, there was a meeting taking place to do with abortion. The guy running it was clearly in favour of abortion and there was a group there trying their best to manipulate the results and figures to reveal statistics in a different fashion who were anti-abortionists. It turned out that this girl was actually there, one of the anti-abortionists who was involved in working on these figures. This led to a confrontation right at the end. The guy who was promoting this meeting and the idea of abortion was her father. They had a confrontation in the middle of the hall. That’s how my film finished. It was another one of these long ones that went on for hours and was so realistic again.

Later on I was back in that dream. I’d been taken to a restaurant as some kind of gesture to compensate me for what had happened to me at that meeting. The guy was making crèpes and showed me how he made them. I had the idea to roll them out even thinner, which I did. We cooked them quickly and they curled up into a kind-of ball. He coated a couple with ice cream and chocolate and a couple more with fruit. We chatted about his crèpes. I was sitting there talking to my friend, I don’t know who it was. My friend was asking me if I’d seen a survey in the handbook that needed to be filled in. I said that I’d seen it at a glance so he told me to have another look because it was full of things about environmental concerns and how a school had been built to trap everyone in a certain valley so that their children would go to this elementary school. It was turning into some kind of environmental and ecological disaster. There was another school where in order to make life more healthy for children they’d bulldozed absolutely everything around it. They’d made a time-lapse photo of all of the demolition that went on around the school. It really was the most extraordinary thing because it looked as if you could see the whole demolition process taking place from space at an extraordinary rapid rate of knots. It looked frightening how they’d simply bulldozed whole neighbourhoods of houses to make an environmental haven for these children. I wasn’t surprised that everyone was so upset about all of this

And then later on I was back in this dream again, something to do with serving orange juice but I can’t remember it now. But nevertheless, it was all extremely exciting, everything that flowed from this dream.

Tea tonight was my taco roll with some of the leftover stuffing. Quite nice again too, it was. Quite delicious and even better after having marinaded overnight in the herbs and spices. There’s a little left which I’ll be adding to a curry on Thursday.

Then we had the football, Penybont v Cardiff Metropolitan. For the first half hour it was played at 100mph but gradually Penybont asserted themselves.

They played some really nice and stylish football at times and had some wretched luck, with the woodwork and the Met’s keeper Alex Lang making a couple of dramatic interventions.

The Met had a couple of moments too but nether side managed to score the important goal to break the deadlock.

But I felt really sorry for the Met’s centre-forward Tom Vincent. Having been booked earlier, he was booked again and thus sent off for kicking Billy Borge in the head. But it was extremely harsh because Borge dived in for a ball at thigh-height that Vincent was attempting to play. Borge shouldn’t have had his head in there at all. If anyone’s play was dangerous, I’d have said that it was his.

So now I’m off to bed, ready to fight the good fight around the SNCF and Paris tomorrow. I’m not looking forward to this trip at all but I’ll have to do the best that I can. It might not solve anything but it won’t solve anything at all if I don’t go.

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Thursday 13th July 2023 – NOW THAT’S WHAT I …

… call a much better football match.

In the Europa League Penybont who finished 3rd in the Welsh Premier League last season were playing Santa Coloma from Andorra.

Santa Coloma were the obvious favourites with 4 Andorran internationals in their side and their football was quite attractive but Penybont were full of grit and determination. What Santa Coloma had in skill, Penybont matched them toe to toe with a more physical style and never ever looked second-best even for a moment.

The match was played in a fiercely competitive but totally fair manner, which makes a big change, and the final score of 1-1 was about right.

Considering that these two teams are quite low down the club rankings in the overall scheme of things, it was an excellent advert for European football and it’s a shame that one of these clubs will be eliminated after the second leg in Andorra next week.

At least the football makes up for my rather depressing night. For practically the whole of the night I was wracked with attacks of cramp, and in both my legs too. That was what I call miserable.

However I must have gone to sleep at some point because there’s some stuff on the dictaphone and also because when the alarm went off I was miles away in the next world somewhere and it was quite a shock to be awoken.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages, first thing that I did was to transcribe the dictaphone notes from the night. I was reading a story in a newspaper or magazine about a Welsh pirate. While I was doing so I dropped a toilet roll. It fell down towards the deck of the boat but I couldn’t catch it. I began to look for it but couldn’t see it. Every time that I seemed to be within touching distance of it, it moved position and went further away again. I thought to myself that this is stupid. Here I am reading something complicated like this from the 16th Century without any problems at all but I can’t manage to control an errant toilet roll on board the ship on which I’m travelling.

I’d been round to the home of a friend from school but I’m sure it was actually the home of someone else. We were going to be doing something but it turned out that there was a football match on the TV. He had it on so I settled down to watch it. I could see that he was frustrated but I wasn’t sure what were his actual plans. he hadn’t really suggested anything. Everything was really going wrong apart from feeling a kind of atmosphere coming from him. He’d asked me to go down to the shops to buy some stamps which I had but while he was sulking he’d gone out for a while and come back. Then he started to stick some stamps on these envelopes. I said that I didn’t realise that he’d been out to buy them himself because he didn’t think that I’d bought them so I produced them. I had the feeling that this whole evening was going totally wrong from start to finish. It was one of those evenings that I wanted to be over as quickly as possible and we can start again some other time.

Then there was something about having some complimentary tickets on the railway. There was a special series of Bank Holidays and I had these complimentary tickets. The railways were working anyway so I thought that I’d go down to the ticket barrier to see one of their clerks there to see whether he knew anyone going through who might want to buy them from me. When I arrived there all of the barriers these days were automated. There was no-one to whom I could talk about my complimentary tickets for these four days of special Bank Holiday.

Next thing was to finish off the notes for the radio programme. I forgot yesterday to do the ones that I’d planned to do then so I ended up doing two lots this morning and that’s that, all ready for dictating. I might even do that tomorrow.

The rest of the time was spent revising for my lesson today. That actually went quite well too so I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting better or whether it’s because I haven’t had time to forget anything yet. Tomorrow is the last day and then there’s a couple of weeks off before I undertake this mega-course.

And if I don’t know it by the end of that, then I never will.

Yesterday, I mentioned that we have fallen behind with what we were supposed to be doing, and I’ve found out how we’re going to be catching up. He asked us to do a mountain of work after the lesson ended. That took up the remainder of the afternoon.

With the football being on, I ended up with an early tea. Fried rice with some of those Chinses thingies that I bought from Noz a few weeks ago. They were quite nice, although nothing particular to write home about. It makes a different meal, and it was done quite quickly too which was just as well.

And there was a change in my habits for tea. I vowed when I moved here that I would only eat my meal sitting at the table in the dining room. Try to be a little civilised for a change. But today it was on a tray on my knee at the computer watching the football. Maybe I should have had pie and chips.

Tomorrow I was going to nip out early and go for a quick run into town for a little shopping. But it’s a Bank Holiday here, the shops are closed and there are no buses. That’s upset my plans.

So sausage, beans and chips, I reckon. That should make a nice change. But I’m beginning to run low on proper, real baked beans. I shall have to organise some supplies from somewhere. Anyone fancy a little run out?

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