Tag Archives: physiotherapist

Thursday 15th June 2023 – IF I EVER LAY …

… my hands on whoever rang my doorbell at some stupid time of the morning, like 04:00 or something like that, they won’t ever do it again.

What made matter worse was that despite what I’d said yesterday, I didn’t go to bed until quite late. Much later than usual in fact.

And when I did, I couldn’t sleep for ages afterwards. And then we had all that nonsense.

At least, I thought that it was the doorbell because that’s exactly what it sounded like. But there was always the possibility that I’d dreamt it. I’m not ruling that out.

And strange as it may seem, I was up early too. When the alarm went off I was sitting on the edge of the bed looking for my clothes. That was something I hadn’t done for a good few days.

After the medication I had another slow start to the day and it wasn’t until I’d had my mid-morning coffee and fruit bun that I was able to start work – that is, when I wasn’t curled up asleep on the chair.

And by the time that I knocked off I was in Paradise River poring over the diaries of George Cartwright, who in 1775 was the first European known to have visited the area and ” sent the people on shore to build the wharf on a point which I named Paradise”.

However what intrigues me is Carl Rafn’s “Antiquities Americanae” from 1846. I’ve been poring over them as well.

Rafn was the first scholar to take seriously the Norse Sagas of the visits to Vinland and his translations refer to a visit by Thorvald to an area and who was so pleased with this place, that he exclaimed “This is beautiful and here I should like well to fix my dwelling”

Thorvald describes in great detail the area where he is and it corresponds pretty much with what I see on a map when I look at Sandwich Bay. In fact, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I was near there I went out in a small boat to look at the geographical features along the coast there.

Rafn though made several miscalculations and ended up putting the Norse ashore in Massachusetts, something that confused people for 70 years.

Firstly, he calculated the distance that a Norse longboat would sail in an hour, multiplied that by 24 and then by the number of days to arrive at their destination.

However, in my opinion, it’s out of the question that, experienced sailors as they were, they would have sailed into unfamiliar waters and kept going through the hours of darkness. They would almost certainly have heaved to until daylight.

Secondly, Rafn calculated the distances based on the speed of a longboat. However the Sagas state that they bought a boat from a trader who put in to Erik the Red’s camp at Brattahlid.

It wasn’t until they carried out some excavations at Roskilde in the early 1960s that they came across a Norse trading vessel, or Knǿrr and that has completely different sailing characteristics

The physiotherapist came round this afternoon and had me walking up and down the stairs. And it’s difficult, that’s for sure. Nothing like as good as it was two weeks ago and that’s a real disappointment. I thought that I was making decent progress until that latest fall.

But still, no matter how bad I’m feeling, there are always people worse off than me.

With him coming I went and had a shower. And while I was at it I went one better than Dave Crosby. probably because I had the ‘flu for Christmas and it was increasing my paranoia. Sill, I’m not giving in an inch to fear because I promised myself this year – I feel like I owe it to someone.

This evening I was stuck for an idea for tea. But having a rummage around I came across some vegan bolognaise sauce with soya mince that I’d completely forgotten. The expiry date on the jar was about 100 years ago but in for a penny in for a pound and it was actually quite nice.

There’s half a jar left so I’ll have that next week with some more pasta and veg.

But a tragedy here – I’ve run out of brussels sprouts now after all of that pile I bought and froze at Christmas. I mustn’t forget to buy some more at the weekend, but I have a feeling that ready-frozen ones might have to do.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from the night. Whenever whoever it was rang my doorbell, if that’s what it was, I was in Canada again, down at the end of a headland looking out to sea where there was another island. There was some kind of pond there. We’d measured it and it was 10kms across and ever so deep. There were all kinds of grids around, all marked with yellow paint as if there was something going to happen to them. There was talk about this island joining up with the part of Canada where we were. That would have happened much earlier had there not decided to be a vote on it. We made some kind of remark about how people complained that it was democratic where we were and not democratic on the island yet the agreement to unite had been taken by the mainland without any kind of vote at all yet the people on the island had been allowed to have a vote on it. We thought that to be extremely ironic.

Later on I was doing something for some kind of investigation. We had to go to Edinburgh so I went on the back of someone’s motorcycle. When we arrived in Edinburgh I couldn’t remember my way. Nothing in Edinburgh looked like anything that I ever knew. We became confused at a road junction on this motorbike and ended up on the pavement trying to work out our way. There were all kinds of people hanging around. The driver of the motorbike said “put your feet up on the pedals and hang on tight. These people don’t look very safe to me”. We set off still going the wrong way and came to an old house. We went in but couldn’t find what we wanted and lost our way again. We ended up back in a Government library with all kinds of old documents. We described this house to someone. he came up with several suggestions and showed us photos but none seemed to resemble this particular house, situated set back from the road on a corner by a railway line with a statue in front. While we were there we started to go through their records for something else. I found loads of interesting things like squardrom flying books from World War I. The papers we wanted we couldn’t find. They kept bringing us files telling us that these were the correct ones but none of the references matched. But I was having a whale of a time going through here reading all the old notebooks, pencils and Court reporters’ books. I thought that I could have moved in and lived here with all of this but none of this was actually finding the information that they wanted. He kept on coming up with stuff that he said was the correct reference but when I looked at it, it was nothing like the information that we wanted.

So now I really am going to bed. But I’ll change the bedding first now that I’m all clean and tidy. It’ll be nice to have some clean bedding. I really ought to change it more often than I do. Usually it walks into the linen basket on its own so I need to organise myself better than I do.

But not much hope of that. As Guildenstern said in “Hamlet” “dreams indeed are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream”

But as an anonymous writer once said about the father of George Cartwright whom we discussed earlier,
He had a genius for encountering difficulties

0

Friday 9th June 2023 – I HAVEN’T ‘ARF …

… done a lot today. And I don’t know where all this energy has come from.

It certainly didn’t come from any rest that I might have had because I didn’t have very much of that. I spent most of the night tossing and turning and trying to make myself comfortable

Even worse, there was nothing on the dictaphone. That was really disappointing. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I have said in the past … “and on more than one occasion too” – ed … that what goes on during the night is usually much more exciting than anything that ever happens to me during the day.

However, when the alarm went off I was deep in the depths of sleep and once more, it took quite an effort to raise myself from the dead.

After the meds and checking the mails and messages I sat down to work.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, Friday is usually the day that I walk into town for a little shopping. But not today because I really didn’t feel very much at all like it.

So what have I been doing today then?

I’ve been in Newfoundland again on my Canada 2017 journey. This morning I was hunting down stuff about the first commercial transatlantic flights with the Sikorsky S42; Boeing 314 Clipper and the Short Empire flying boats.

And then discussing the submarine and aircraft battles off the coast of Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St Lawrence.

Another name cropped up too – that of Sidney Cotton, inventor of the Sidcot flying suit in World War I and the guy who was responsible for the first aerial surveys of Newfoundland.

And in the late 1930s when he was joyriding in his aeroplane over Central Europe with his succession of teenage female “friends”, it transpired when Frederick Winterbottom published the memoirs of MI6 in 1974 that Cotton was secretly taking aerial photographs of every German military installation he could find.

As an aside, Winterbottom’s book is one of the most interesting that i’ve ever read. It was he who told the world about Turing and Ultra, and explained that the reason why its existence was never disclosed until then was that one country, believed to be Albania, was still using it thinking that it was unbreakable.

This afternoon I’ve been clambering over the wreckage of a 440-tonne steamer in the Strait of Belle Isle. There are plenty of wrecks along that coast and on our travels we’ve seen plenty.

They could never take away the scrap because there were no roads in that part of the world until comparatively recently. Newfoundland and Labrador didn’t actually become part of Canada until 1949. Prior to that they were a British colony and starved of resources just like any other colony.

The most interesting wreck on that coast that we saw though is that of HMS Raleigh. That was a cruiser that ran aground at Point Amour in 1922 and sat on the rocks for 4 years as a hazard. In the end they decided to remove it by force and calculated how much explosive they would need to break it into pieces and remove it by sea.

However they forgot about the ammunition still on board and as a result there are bits of her scattered all over the cliffs and the grass on top

That was where I met that lady who looked at the car I’d come in and asked me“have you just driven around the Trans-Labrador Highway in THA?”

And I replied “It’s not the car that counts, it’s the driver. And for my next journey I’m going to cross the Atlantic on a motor bike.”

However, as Kenneth Williams and Alfred Hitchcock will tell you, “it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners”.

The physiotherapist came to see me this afternoon. He’s spoken to the nerve specialist whom I’m to see in a few days time. And it is as I suspected – that the problems are more-than-likely caused by the cancer that is slowly eating its way through my body and there’s not much that anyone can do about it.

And so I’ll just have to grin and bear it

Tea tonight was sausage, beans and chips. And what started that off was when I was going through my notes about Canada 2017, I spent that particular night in a wooden hut on a hillside where there was a microwave, and I had some potatoes, sausage and beans in the back of Strider to I treated myself. And that set my mouth a-watering.

Most of that trip was spent with the slow cooker and porridge for breakfast, whatever I could find for lunch, and pasta, a tin of mixed vey and a tin of soup also in the slow cooker in the evening. Slow cookers don’t draw much current so an inverter wired into Strider’s alternator heated up the cooker when needed.

Tomorrow I’m going to be brave, even though I don’t feel like it, and go to see what is about in the shops. I’ll just go to LeClerc I reckon, not to Noz as I don’t want to fall over on the car park again.

And then I’ll carry on with my notes. If I keep going like this I should be across the Strait of Belle Isle on the elderly MV Apollo, which is now beneath the waves in the Gulf of St Lawrence, but I’ll be somewhere up the coast of Labrador.

If I’m lucky

0

Thursday 8th June 2023 – I’VE JUST HAD …

… quite possibly the nicest tea that I’ve ever had – at least, that I’ve made myself.

Steamed vegetables in a cheese sauce with vegan meatballs, it was. And for the vegetables there was a small handful each of potatoes peas carrots, runner beans, sprouts, cauliflower and broccoli, cooked to absolute perfection with some dried mint in the steamer

There’s no doubt whatever though that the pièce de résistance was the broccoli that I froze the other day. It was a hundred times better than any frozen broccoli that I have ever bought from a shop

So when there’s more room in the freezer I’ll buy some cauliflower and freeze that too and see if that makes a difference. I’ve already commented in the past that the sprouts and carrots that I have frozen in the past are much better than any shop-frozen ones have ever been

The vegan fondant cheese that I put in my bechamel sauce was delicious too along with the fresh-ground black pepper and tarragon.

There’s no doubt in my mind that my cooking is slowly improving.

Which is more than can be said for my sleep. When the alarm went off this morning I really was deep in the arms of Morpheus and I had to struggle to my feet. But that was probably because I didn’t go to bed until long after midnight, being stuck in at my travel notes from 2017.

And that’s what i’ve been doing today, bashing out yet more stuff.

This morning I was dealing with the “Arrow Air” crash at Gander Lake, reading the Canadian Air Investigation Board reports where the investigators argued about the causes of the crash to such extent that the Board was wound up and a new organisation created.

This afternoon though I was hunting down stuff relating to the Newfoundland Railway, at one time in its heyday the longest narrow-gauge network in the World but which was closed down overnight in the 1980s during Canada’s ruthless savaging of its railway network that made Beeching look like a guardian angel.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my misadventures trying to go to see my niece just now. There’s actually a railway station at the back of her office that would have been ideal of course but that line was closed in 1989 when the Canadian Pacific slashed its entire network east of Montreal.

There is now only one passenger train east of Québec City and that’s the train that I caught. It goes down to the coast at Halifax and runs every Preston Guild.

The physiotherapist came round today, and he says that he’ll be here tomorrow. He tells me that he’s quite concerned about the way that things are developing, and to be honest, so am I. But there’s not much that I can do about it. At least I had a shower before he came so that I would smell nice.

And after he went I crashed out for half an hour. I must admit that I was feeling dreadful for a while

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too from the night. Morton were playing in a football match, a Cup Final of some description. They had gone 1-0 up but towards the end of the game the opposition equalised. They were pressing forward and the keeper, Brian Schwake, made a really good and dramatic save with just seconds to play. he gathered the ball, kicked it downfield straight away and Jai Quitongo running down the field reached the ball and took it into the opposing penalty area to score past the keeper. As a result Morton won their first Cup competition for quite some considerable time. And no-one is more surprised that me that I can remember the names of Morton’s right-winger and on-loan Livingston goalkeeper when I’m asleep.

Not so much luck with this next one though. There was another dream somewhere about a few of us out walking. The girl with us was handicapped. Someone had to explain to one of the little boys what that actually meant and what the implications were but I can’t remember any more of this.

My delicious tea I’ve already mentioned, so now I might even have an early night. Tomorrow I’m carrying on with my little voyage around Newfoundland.

Amongst the places I’ll be visiting will be the site of where the very first commercial Transatlantic flights across the North Atlantic landed (well, they didn’t actually “land” but you’ll see what I mean when you eventually read the notes) in the late 1930s and also where the very first action of World War II on the American continent took place.

There’s no doubt that I was certainly getting around back in those days. Strider and STRAWBERRY MOOSE did me proud.

0

Tuesday 6th June 2023 – THERE WAS A LITTLE …

… more improvement through the night and for a change I had a better sleep than I’ve had for a few days.

It was 06:00 when I awoke and when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up and about.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I revised for my Welsh lesson. And much to my surprise the lesson went quite well and I surprised myself with one or two things that I remembered that even impressed me.

But I think that I’ve reached a decision about my studies next year.

Having spent the first three months of the year in Canada or in hospital and so not being able to follow the course properly and as a result, deciding not to take the exam this year, I’m going to enrol in the next year’s course anyway but I’m going to find a way to retake this year.

There’s a Wednesday evening class that Coleg Cambria runs on-line from their College at Mold, but Coleg Cambria in Gwent also runs on-line courses and I’ve been to a few of their weekend and Summer schools. They might have something too

The difficulty is that the language in North Wales is different in many respects from that in South Wales.

A quick look at any map of Wales will see quite easily the line that’s drawn across the centre that represents the valleys of the Severn and the Mawddwy rivers. That’s the traditional route for invaders and occupiers.

Ever since the arrival of the Romans the country has effectively been split into two and the language has evolved differently in each part. With my grandmother coming from The Maelor I’m a northerner and say things like “rwan” instead of “nawr”, “efo” instead of “gyda” and “pres” instead of “arian”.

And that reminds me. If I do sign up to repeat the course in Gwent I’ll have to buy another course book. I won’t be able to use the one that I have.

For the rest of the day I’ve been working on my Canada 2017 voyage.

At St John’s I went to see my friend and we went for a meal together. And next morning I went off to Harbour Grace.

That’s one of the most interesting towns in the whole of Newfoundland. Apart from being a port and the centre of piracy in the early 17th Century, it’s the site of the terminus of the first railway line in Newfoundland and there’s an abandoned ship of several thousand tonnes that’s over 100 years old sitting on a sandbank offshore.

Much more interestingly though, there’s an airstrip above the town which was the site of the take-off of several of the earliest Transatlantic flights.

Amelia Earhart flew from there to become the first woman to pilot a plane across the Atlantic, and Brock and Schlee took off from there on one of the legs of their flight that became the first to circumnavigate the earth. All in all, 20 Transatlantic flights took off from there of which 9 of them failed to make it to their destination.

The physiotherapist came round this afternoon too. he thinks that i’ve twisted my ankle and that’s the cause of the problem.

He gave my ankle a massage and said that seeing as he’s in the building tomorrow he’ll look in and see how I am doing.

There was plenty of stuff on the dictaphone from the night. There was a group of Americans working with us in what was my old school in one of the classrooms. For some reason they finished what it was that they were doing but the rest of us were still working. What I did was to pick up a handful of cards, go through them to try to find one or two that they could take with them and go to the library to write some research notes on topics on a couple of these cards

Then I was monitoring a lion for some reason although I was doing it on the quiet. There was a public watchman and there was me. One day the public watchman left to go to the shops for something. Someone else came by in his car. He parked up and from my little observation spot he went to the video camera and changed some of the settings, presumably so that it would record different things. When he did that he reset the times and went off again. I was wondering what he was doing, thinking that it’s a good job that I was here. The guy was then back in the area somehow. I didn’t see him but his sheepdog came bounding off the road and through the rocks on the side of the lake. From where I was sitting the other side of the lake I could see the lion lurking among the rocks. As the dog bounded past the rocks with the lion, the lion bounded out and began to give chase.

Dorothée, my little friend from Montréal, put in an appearance last night. She sent us a voice message. When we listened to it the first thing that went through our head was that it was someone breaking wind. I wanted to send her a message saying “next time don’t eat quite so many beans” but for some unknown reason the touchscreen on my phone wasn’t working. I couldn’t activate the reply function or the reply box to this particular message. I was there for ages trying to push the screen to make it accept.

It’s been quite a while since she last put in an appearance during the night. Probably the last time that I saw her in any shape or form was in the flesh when she and I went for a coffee together when I was in Montréal in September.

Someone else who put in an appearance last night was Zero, and it’s been a while since she’s come to see me during the night, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. She invited me to take her to the shops last night and of course I agreed.

But I sat up wide-awake at that point, obviously from shock. What a moment to wake up, just as I was about to ride off into the sunset with her.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with some of the left-over stuffing from yesterday. It was delicious too. And with the stuffing that remains I’ll add that to one of the half-portions of curry in the freezer.

So I’ll have to make some more naan bread tomorrow. That last lot was delicious and if I can make some more like that I’ll be extremely happy. I’m getting to be quite domesticated these days.

0

Thursday 1st June 2023 – MY LASAGNE …

… for tea tonight was actually quite good.

There’s room for improvement of course but bearing in mind that this is the first one that I’ve made since I was living in Reyers more than 25 years ago, it was by no means disappointing.

There wasn’t enough filling, but that’s a minor problem. There’s enough food left nevertheless to make two more meals so it’s just as well that it worked.

What I did was to put some lentils in the slow cooker and slowly bring them to the boil. Then they were rinsed and put back in with clean water and some basil, oregano and tarragon. Mind you, I almost forgot to rinse them and had to leave my comfortable bed to do that.

Later on this afternoon I added some bulghour and later still, because there was still plenty of water, I added some porridge oats to soak it up and stiffen the mix.

At teatime I fried an onion and garlic with more of the herbs, added my mix from the slow cooker and some tomato concentrate, then layered alternate layers of pasta sheet and my cooked mix, topped it off with a thick cheese sauce and baked it in the oven, and away we went.

During the night I went away too. So much so that for a change just recently I wasn’t up before the alarm. It awoke me with a start when it went off but I didn’t hang around at all in bed.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I had a listen to the dictaphone notes. And I really Had been away. Back at Hogwarts at one point too during the night with HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE seeing the kids at their dance. Ron had split up from Lavender Brown. There was another girl there who was sulking for some reason or other. Ron went to ask her to dance but she replied “they aren’t playing our tune”. All her friends told him to leave her alone. Just then the music started to play it so a couple of people went to dance her and missed. She moved away. I don’t know what happened to Ron and this girl then but Hermione was there dancing with someone whom I didn’t know when the dance floor collapsed. They carried on dancing and it looked as if they would dance into the ladies’ lavatory. Someone just coming out of the door said to hermione “do you want some paper as well?”. It all was very strange.

Back in Harry Potter again later and there was something about spying on someone’s house. It was very difficult to do. There was a fallen tree with its branches and we had to hide ourselves in the fallen tree’s branches to do it. We piled into a car and set out to drive. There was a lot of traffic and I was weaving in and out of it and almost had a collision with someone. They went in front of me and put their brakes on to slow down so I did too. We had a slow drive with all the traffic on the road. We came to Barbridge where there was a fallen tree in the middle of the road. I said to the others “lock your doors and hang on because this is a trap” thinking that someone had cut down the tree for it to fall across the road to stop us and ambush us when we left the vehicle to see what was happening.

Later still I’d seen an AC Cobra for sale in the local newspaper so Laurence and I went round to see it with Roxanne. It was somewhere off nantwich Road in Crewe so we eventually managed to find the house. We walked straight into the house without knocking. We found the car in a downstairs room covered by a blanket. First of all my taxi detector wouldn’t work. Then I realised that an AC Cobra wouldn’t have been a taxi anyway. Found the guy and his wife sitting in a room next door, not in the least perturbed by the fact that we were in their house. We went back into the room and began to look around at this vehicle. He told me that he wanted £30,000 for it, which I thought was cheap. But that turned out to be the deposit to take it for a test drive – it was really £250,000. There was no way that I could afford that. I pretended that I was interested and got down to look underneath it. It was quite badly rotten around the edges. I thought to myself “he’s asking for a lot of money for something in this kind of condition. Even if I were to buy it, I didn’t have the mobility to crawl around underneath it with welding tackle etc these days. There’s no way that I could consider this vehicle” but I wasn’t going to tell him that until I’d had a good look around to find out what else was wrong.

I was back in this dream again later on and we were leaving. Down at the bus station was a bus going to Mold. We were saying our goodbyes but the driver prepared to close the doors. This woman and I ran to the door and scrambled aboard. We had a look for the guy who was with us but he wasn’t on board. By now the bus had set off. I thought “never mind. We’re on here and Roxanne is on here”. I asked for two and a half to Mold. he smiled and said “I’m not going to Mold”. “Well, take us to wherever you’re going”. He gave me two and a half tickets which came to 11/-. The first thing that I did was seeing as I had some money ready I said that I’d give him the shilling but it was a £10 note. Then I had a 10/- note for him. He looked at me and asked “is that correct?”. I suddenly realised that I’d done, took the £10 note back and gave him 1/-. I went to sit down and to worry about contacting the other guy later. There were 2 boys on the bus who made some kind fo remark about me handing over a £10 note and how did I spot it from that distance? I replied “when you reach a certain age you don’t look at the money, you can smell the difference between the notes.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent on Day Two of my 2017 trip to North America and the page is practically finished. However, we did hit an obstruction.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that one thing always leads to another, and once you start, you’ll be surprised just how many other things there are.

The subject of Marguerite de Bourgeoys cropped up on that web page.

She was a big friend of Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, the founder of Montreal and she was on one of the very first emigrant voyages to Nouvelle France where she occupied herself with spiritual works and the welfare of the filles du roi, the young girls from orphanages who were sent out to become brides for the soldiers who remained there to settle after having been discharged from the army.

They both came from Troyes which was on my shuttle route between Virlet and Brussels so on the very last time that I drove the route, instead of doing it overnight as I usually did, I took a whole week and visited every place of interest that I could find along the way.

One of the places that I visited was the family home of the Chomedeys and I found all of my photos. But seeing as Troyes is such a beautiful old town I took dozens of photos of many old house and I couldn’t remember which one was his.

No trace of the notes that I made, which was a surprise – especially as they were written up from the following day all the way back to Virlet.

In the end, I had to dive back into the bowels of the back-up disk and find the dictaphone recordings from the journey and re-transcribe the notes for the relevant day and mate them to the photos.

That’s another project that I’ll have to do one of these days. The road between the Belgian border at Rocroi and down to Nevers is one of the most beautiful and historic in all of France. I had a plan that when I was stuck for something to do (whenever that might be) I’d pick a long road like that, explore it thoroughly and write a book about it.

The TRANS LABRADOR HIGHWAY was done in 2010, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall and I’m doing Version 2.0 even as we speak.

After that, I wrote a pile of stuff about Lanouiller and de Bécancour’s CHEMIN DU ROY between Montreal and the city of Québec and all the way down the “Forgotten Coast” as far as it’s possible to go.

The road between Rocroi and Nevers was to be the third of the trilogy but ill-health and feeling sorry for myself somehow conspired to get in the way of all of my plans.

Someone else for whom I was feeling sorry for was the physiotherapist. He came by at 17:00 to tell me that he’s busy and will be back at 19:30. That was a major inconvenience, disrupting my evening like that and I made sure that he knew.

Rosemary phoned me at lunchtime and we had another one of our marathon chats that go on for ever. She’s being swept up by the turn of events and it’s not easy for “a stranger in a strange land” to deal with some of the things that go on. It’s not something that bothers me too much because I couldn’t care less, but Rosemary is much more sensible and focused than I ever am.

After she hung up, I went for a shower to clean myself up ready for His Nibs to come round and put me through my paces

As I mentioned earlier, tea was delicious. And now that I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed.

Tomorrow I have to nip into town which will do me good. And then I have to carry on with Canada 2017 and sort out the mess that will be Trans-Labrador Highway Version 2.0

So once I finish that I’ll have to do Rocroi-Nevers next, then carry on with the Arctic stuff, go back and carry on with the Emigrant Trails stuff, organise the Grand Banks trips and probably 1000 other things too.

Never mind anything else – I’m far too busy to die right now.

0

Tuesday 30th May 2023 – HAVING SAID THAT …

… I wouldn’t do any Harry Potter impersonations last night, I ended up in a swimming costume last night. It had taken ages to actually make it fit and to put it on properly. For some reason I began to have a panic attack while I was wearing it. I couldn’t understand why because there was nothing out of the ordinary or unusual at all about it.

That make a change, doesn’t it? Panic attacks when I’m asleep don’t happen all that often. I can only recall a dozen or so in total.

And while we’re on the subject of dreams … “well, one of us is” – ed … while I was going through the back-up disk a week or so ago, I came across all of the notes that I’d made when this project first started. Right back in 2000, as it happens. It’ll be interesting to see who was featuring in the voyages back in those days and what were the interesting topics that came to mind.

This morning was another morning when I was awake and up and about before the alarm went off. Well, maybe I ought to says “awake” in inverted commas because while the spirit was willing, the flesh was somewhat weaker.

Once I’d had the medication and checked the mails and messages I had a listen to the dictaphone because there was some other stuff on there too. I obtained a part-time job working in a library last night. I just turned up on the Monday evening when I was supposed to be there . There was a girl at the counter so I introduced myself. She asked me if I’d be comfortable stamping the books when they were either returned or handed out. I smiled and laughed “I could just about manage that, I reckon”, put my stuff down and went round behind the desk to sit there and start work.

And then later on I stepped back into that dream back in the library. I was extremely busy and having to organise some girl’s research etc. As well as that I was swamped with phone calls of people making other kinds of enquiries.

Most of the rest of the day has been spent sorting through the photos from my journey around North America in 2017. It’s going to take an age to sort them all out, and that’s before I even think about writing the notes.

Today I’ve sailed the Gulf of St Lawrence, been to see my friend in St Johns, driven all the way across Newfoundland and across Labrador, and I’m currently in a motel on the edge of the city of Québec which I still think is THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CITY IN NORTH AMERICA – but that’s probably because it’s the most “European-medieval” city on the continent

And that reminds me. I wrote my magnum opus on the city of Québec in 2012 and I’ve been there several times since then. So I must have tons more notes and photos that need adding in.

The high winds that we had yesterday had dropped this morning so I sorted out the glass and plastic rubbish ready to take out. So evidently, once everything was sorted out and ready to go, the wind got up again. Just gale force today though, not hurricane force like yesterday so I decided to brave it.

It’s not easy because I’m not steady on my feet even with crutches and the bags of rubbish acted as sails that blew me around the front of the building. It was quite a struggle to go there, empty my stuff and then stagger back.

The physiotherapist came round this evening too. He’s beginning to be concerned that the progress that I made over the early part of the year has now ground to a halt and that there are no signs of further improvement

He’s not the only one. I was quite pleased about how things were going and I was optimistic that I could pick up my bed and walk before too long. But it doesn’t seem to be going to end like that at all.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with some of the left-over stuffing from yesterday, accompanied by rice and veg. And as usual, the stuffing improves when left overnight.

There’s still some stuffing left but not a great deal. But last week I made some curry and froze it in half-portions and I’ll add the leftover stuffing into one of those along with anything else that’s lingering in the fridge

And I must remember to put some lentils in the slow cooker when I go to bed tomorrow. I’m going to have a bash at making a lasagne on Thursday and I need some stuff to go with the pasta and cheese sauce.

Yes, a cheese sauce. Now that I can find a reasonable supply of vegan cheese I intend to make the most of it

0

Tuesday 23rd May 2023 – REMEMBER YESTERDAY …

… when I said that I was feeling that my injections weren’t doing what they used to do?

You probably won’t believe this, but I promise you that it happened. But this afternoon I had a phone call from the hospital in Leuven.
“Over the last two weeks we’ve been examining your medical results from your last visit to the hospital. We’ve noticed several anomalies in the tests and so we want you to have your Aranesp injections every week instead of every fortnight starting from next Monday, and for your doctor at home to have blood tests taken every four weeks to control the results”

Things are obviously heating up around here now. So whatever will happen next?

Actually, I know what didn’t happen. And that was that it was today, not Thursday, that I should have had my appointment with the nerve specialist but I mixed up the dates. So I’ll have to contact him tomorrow too and rearrange the appointment.

It’s been one of those days where not all that much has gone right. For a start, I didn’t beat the alarm this morning. I’d had a late night but even so, it’s not very often that I sleep right through until the alarm. But at least, I awoke in bed rather than on top of it.

And then I couldn’t get going. It took an age to finally come round into the Land of the Living and start to prepare for my Welsh lesson.

And then we had a tragedy. The college at Mold doesn’t have much money so we’ve been making do with whatever on-line video conferencing has been available. And the one that we used until recently revoked all of the free licences so we had to go elsewhere.

The only free video-conferencing that they could find is one that’s very resource-hungry and it won’t run on any of the portable computers around here (there are, for various reasons, five of those that work at the moment, including the one that I bought in desperation in North Dakota in 2019).

However, luckily, ages ago I’d bought a cheap webcam so I had to configure all of that and run it off the big desktop machine, something that I didn’t want to do.

And then to configure a microphone to run directly off the computer because everything here usually runs through various mixer desks

In the end I missed half of the lesson with all of this messing around but at least it worked. And once the lesson was up and running it passed off quite well too.

This afternoon, sorting out a few things that I needed to do, I came across a football match that I’d missed from 2 years ago, Caernarfon Town v Barry Town in a Europa Cup playoff match. So despite everything else going on, I took a couple of hours off to watch it.

And in news that will surprise almost everyone (because it certainly surprised me) I carried on with what I started last week and did some more rearranging of the bedroom. It’s starting to look a bit more like home now, which is always nice.

After a good session on the guitars, I had a listen to the dictaphone. Despite being stark out during the night there was some stuff on there from a little voyage. There was some kind of case going on about a large company where there was some manipulation about to take place with the shareholding in respect of a battle over who had control. Whilst I didn’t fully understand the implications of what was happening, it all sounded extremely suspicious to me. When I was looking through some paperwork I found that the company had been brought to the attention of the authorities on another occasion in respect of something or other underhand and was undergoing investigation. I thought that I should make a report of this conversation and pass it through to whoever it was who was investigating it but as I couldn’t grasp the implications of it and couldn’t really understand much of what was taking place, it was very difficult to write a note. I thought that the more I keep it waiting while I make up my mind what to write, the more distant this is going to be and the more I’m going to forget. It’s not going to help anyone by me waiting for too long. I need to pull myself together and write something down immediately

After the ‘phone call from the hospital and missing my nerve specialist, the physiotherapist came round. He gave me a really good workout – the longest session that we have had so far and I was exhausted at the end of it.

Tea was a taco roll with rice and veg, but the cooking session isn’t over by any means. There’s not very much in the way of leftovers for a curry tomorrow night so as I have plenty of tofu and some lentils, I’ve set the slow cooker on the go.

The lentils are being cleaned right now and as soon as I’ve finished this, I’ll take them out of the slow cooker and rinse them, and then put them back in with the spinach-flavoured tofu that I have and a load of spices, and leave it all to marinade in the slow cooker until tomorrow evening

That should make a really good curry, and I do have to admit that I’m in the right kind of mood for one of those.

In fact, anything to distract me because I’m not very happy about the idea of doubling the dose of Aranesp. It’s the medicine of last resort and there’s a warning that it is “recommended for patients with chronic kidney failure or cancer to use the lowest possible dose”.

Over the last year or so I’ve gone from 20mg a week to 60mg a week to keep me going and I’m not sure where you can go after all of this.

0

Friday 19th May 2023 – AT LONG LAST …

… the internet is back up and running, as you might have noticed.

What has apparently happened, as the technician who came round just after lunch told me, was that there was a short-circuit in one of the apartments that had fused the main installation in the building.

They had repaired the installation but the short circuit persisted so they had to disconnect the circuit and gradually reinstate it apartment by apartment until they could find out which one it was.

Of course, it was in one of the apartments that is a “second home” for someone from Paris who wasn’t here so it couldn’t be fixed until they’d contacted the apartment owner and found a keyholder so they could go in, and of course it was in the circuit before mine which meant that I was disconnected while all of this was going on.

Whether that’s the case or not, I don’t know. But it will explain why the connection flickered on a couple of times quite briefly during all of this.

But every cloud has a silver lining, and it’s a real ill wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good. It gave me an opportunity to catch up on a mountain of outstanding work, which isn’t all done but it’s still progress, and also, because the technicians were coming to check my installation, it meant that I had to tidy up the bedroom. I even had the vacuum cleaner going for a while.

And while I was tidying up, I found the missing spare battery for the NIKON D3000 that I lost a long time (as in several years) ago. It had fallen underneath one of my bookcase units.

So how did I celebrate everything? Well, while I was in town this afternoon I treated myself to an ice cream. I felt that I deserved it.

Especially after last night. I was so engrossed in a couple of tasks that it was long after midnight when I finally crawled into bed. And when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was stark out. It was an effort to haul myself up out of bed before the second alarm went off five minutes later.

Mind you, after the distance that I travelled durning the night, I was surprised that I made it back in time for the alarm. At one point I was living with a group of Mexicans from 100 or so years ago, the time of the Revolution. We were living on the margins. We weren’t actually revolutionaries or criminals. I can’t remember most of this but there was one part where we were in a cave and there was some kind of event taking place concerning someone who had made a promise that he’d pay to have his wine crop blessed and fruitful but hadn’t done so. And so they held him to submitting his youngest daughter, who was 10, to be sacrificed. He had to fill in all this form to state about her etc and that he was willing for her to go and that he recognised that he was in default for not having thanked whoever it was properly for promoting the fruitfulness of his crops

Did I mention the story … “no you didn’t” – ed … about the 2 girls who had tried to buy some wine from an off-licence to get a teacher at school into trouble? The server recognised them and wouldn’t sell it to them. He had his revenge quite accidentally. It was the school outing and he’d forgotten to tell the parents of one of these girls. She hadn’t gone to school that day – she was paying truant. She thought that everyone else would be at school and cover for her but of course not being there on a day when there were so few students her absence was noticed and someone complained to her parents. When this all came out, the shopkeeper had forgotten to tell the parents about the trip as well, he said “don’t forget that I remember you from the day when you were in my shop so be careful not to make a fuss. You can see why karma has caught up with you”.

And then I had to go to meet someone in the centre of London so Aunt Mary had given me a book, an ancient book about Civil Engineering that she wanted to sell and have some money. All of the booksellers were around Angel Bridge Railway Station. I arrived at the Metro and the guy in the ticket office saw me coming. He had a ticket all ready. I asked for a return too but he replied “no. This is a weekend ticket and you can use it any time like but you’ll have to hurry. The train is in”. I took the ticket, paid for it and dashed downstairs but missed the train, found that I was on the wrong platform, walk back up halfway and enquire of the guard or look at the sign to find myself on the correct platform ready to go. But there was something else in this dream about someone being pregnant. They were discussing the pregnancy and talking about gifts that they should buy. One of the girls was very upset that someone else had been chosen to buy the nappies etc because she said that she didn’t have all that much money. That would have been an ideal present for her bearing in mind her shortage of money.

And we’ve had quite a few dreams when I’ve been wandering around the Underground in London, haven’t we?

Finally I had to go to do some research on Emerson Lake and Palmer. I found someone who had some information on them who lived in London so I went down. She was a bus conductor on the buses. Rummaging around in her office I came across a book that was an assembly of photocopied press cuttings going back all the way to 1967, news articles and everything. It was an absolute goldmine and I was enthralled reading it. It mentioned a whole load of clubs and places in London that you could see from the window of this woman’s house. I was there making notes. When she came up onto the top deck of the bus to show someone some damage that needed to be repaired I told her about the book and told her that on no account was she to let it out of her sight. It’s something that she really ought to keep for posterity. When I finished I was going back downstairs to her house. They were talking about a car going for an MoT. I thought “I’m not doing anything this afternoon so I can take it”. I put the book in my rucksack hoping that no-one noticed and went round to see about this car. It turned out to be a pedal car for children. I thought “this is strange” but I’d already offered now so I’ll have to go. I asked her where I’d go. She replied “turn out of here, go up the hill to the roundabout and it’s the 5th street on the right down there”. I was trying to make a mental note of this but it sounded like more than 5 minutes away but I was already committed now so I’d have to go and do it. This book of press cuttings is a little gold mine. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, especially in a dream.

After the medication I came here and slowly unwound myself and then attacked another project. A while ago I’d found the soundtrack of an obscure German rock band that had performed at one of the Hawkfests some time ago.

Back in those days technology wasn’t what it is today and this was full of holes from a worn recording tape. Using the techniques that I’d been practising just recently about “cutting in” pieces of music from elsewhere in the track, I set about repairing the holes. It wasn’t easy, but I managed in the end to make something quite presentable and you’d never find the joins. Even I was impressed.

There was a break for coffee and a fruit bun and I do have to say that the fruit buns that I made in the week are excellent. And as for the biscuits, that I have yet to mention, they have really worked and are even better than the chocolate ones that I made a while back

By now it wasn’t far off lunchtime so seeing as I was expecting visitors I started to prepare for a shower but bang on the dot Rosemary rang me for one of our marathon chats.

Just as she finished, Christian from the radio came round for the radio programme that will be broadcast this weekend. We had a drink and chat, and he told me about a local musician who is looking for a bassist. That piqued my interest, as you can imagine. It’s quite lonely here sitting in my bedroom playing with myself.

As soon as he left, the technician came round and checked that everything was working properly, and once he’d gone I could finally have my shower.

It was a painful walk into town to find some mushrooms for my salad tonight, and whet there were were pretty grim. Mind you they had some of those small peppers so I bought a couple for future use.

Next stop was the estate agent to drop off this paperwork, and then the long painful walk back up the hill to home, punctuated by a call at the new ice cream parlour that’s just opened

Back here I cleaned the peppers and put them in the freezer, and finally the physiotherapist turned up. His “marathon session” turned out to be 20 minutes but he had me working quite hard. I was glad when he left and I could have my hot chocolate and delicious ginger oatmeal biscuits.

And then , regrettably, I crashed out for about an hour.

Liz awoke me and we had a chat on the internet (now that I have an internet on which to chat) for a while and then I ended up with a late tea. Chips and mini sausage rolls cooked in the air fryer with a salad.

The mini sausage rolls are starting to run out now so I’m going to have to search for a vegan savoury stuffing so that I can make my own. Puff pastry is quite time-consuming and difficult to make so I might have to by a roll of ready-made stuff and use that.

So shopping to morrow, so I’d better have an early night. I’ll pop into Noz and see what there is there on offer. I could do with a change of diet. I’m still wading my way through the asparagus tips that they had but there are bound to be other exciting things.

Mustn’t forget the vegan yoghurt either. I’ve run out of that and it makes a lovely addition to my leftover curries. Things are definitely looking up around here.

0

Tuesday 16th May 2023 – IF YOU CAN …

… read this, then normal service has been resumed and we have our internet back. Round about 08:00 this morning when I was trying to do something interesting, the internet went “phut”.

Having contacted the Internet provider, they informed me that there was a “technical issue” and it will be out until at least Wednesday morning. As a gesture, they have offered us 200mb of mobile internet per day via our smartphones, but have you ever tried to type out on a smartphone keyboard the rubbish that I churn out?

Anyway, I had another more reasonable night last night and that makes quite a change. It’s a shame that I was rather busy and ended up not going to bed until later than I intended. It would have been quite nice to have had a longer more reasonable night.

And that’s not all either. I awoke bolt-upright at about 06:25 and couldn’t go back to sleep. Consequently, when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up and about.

with the internet crashing out, I wasn’t able to do anything of the things that I needed to do and so in the end I transcribed the notes on the dictaphone from the night. I was with 2 friends at some point. We were driving somewhere down a narrow lane. As we continued a cement mixer came towards us. For some reason he had a change of opinion and decided to perform a U-turn and return the way that he had come. He stopped and reversed off to the side of the road ready to pull back round the other way but the bank of the road gave way underneath him and the lorry fell over on its side. We dashed over there. When we arrived he was busy extricating himself from the wreck. We asked him if he was OK. he replied “yes, there’s no problem”. We then wanted to know if there was anything that we could do but he couldn’t think of anything that needed doing. He could quite happily arrange all of that himself. To be on the safe side I took his phone number and gave him mine. I said that I’d phone him in half an hour and se what he was up to. where this happened was near a railway line. Just as we were talking a 4-4-2 tank engine fitted with condensing apparatus went past on the railway line obviously pulling an old London Underground train. We climbed back into our van and set off. These 2 people with me, 1 was a guy and 1 was a girl. They were a couple. I know who they are but I just can’t think who.

There was a group of us going into the house. We’d been out shopping, buying stuff. As we went in, one of the people noticed that my shoelaces were undone so he bent down to tie them for me. Of course I had a lot of trouble with my legs. Where he put his hand was right on one of my sore spots. I told him to stop, that he was hurting but he couldn’t understand and carried on trying to tie my laces. I was going berserk. I told him that I had cancer. He replied that I must be imagining the pain. For some reason it became a very complicated thing. In the end we went in. He was sulking somewhat. He asked “what about that think we were going to do if we had the part?”. I replied “I don’t have it but I know that it’s in here. It can’t be anywhere else”. He sat down and looked at his watch and made a note of the date and time, sitting there with his arms folded waiting for it to be produced.

With not much to do until my Welsh lesson, I did some revision, However, the trouble is that with having a teflon brain, nothing sticks to it and I needn’t have bothered really. My memory issues are quite annoying. And it’s strange – I can remember the words of some kind of extremely obscure rock song from the mid-60s but ask me why I wanted to go into the kitchen 5 minutes ago.

Trying to have a Welsh lesson on a smartphone isn’t easy either but it went so much better than I expected, and far better than when I tried it in Canada back in October.

Once the lesson was over, I had a really big baking session.

There is now another pile of fruit buns, most of which are in the freezer waiting for another day, and there’s a mountain of lovely biscuits. And I DO mean “lovely”, because I sampled them.

It’s the basic 4/8/10 recipe (sugar, vegan butter and flour) with vanilla essence, fleur d’orange, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking powder and yeast.

Added to that was some diced fresh ginger and then some honey, and several tablespoons of oatmeal to restore the consistency after the addition of the honey.

You won’t find me telling you about times and temperatures because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, my oven is pretty much hit-and-miss and nothing is consistent. Here in this apartment, it’s all done by trial and error.

While I was waiting for everything to happen I sorted through my collection of herbs and spices. And just like the bathroom stuff at the weekend, I found that I’d actually bought the spices that I needed when I was there on a previous occasion and had forgotten about them.

Ahh well! See my bit about “memory” above.

The rest of the day has been spent dealing with the dictaphone notes from when I was in hospital. The coughing, spluttering and rasping throat were difficult to decipher so I hadn’t really touched them until I would feel more like it, so I had a bash today, with nothing better to do.

There are still plenty more to go at of course – this isn’t something that will be done in 5 minutes, or even in the next week or so. It’s taken me 6 months to reach this point.

When the physiotherapist came round, I was actually … errr … relaxing, so he awoke me. But he needn’t have bothered because my neighbour in this building, whon he also sees, has had a bad fall and he’ll be spending all of his time with her.

How many sessions is this that he’s missed with me just recently?

Tea was a lovely taco roll with rice, using some of the stuffing left over from yesterday. There’s still a bit left so I’ll have a leftover curry tomorrow, with one of my naan breads from out of the freezer.

Looking back (and forward) to my meals just recently and my cooking and baking, things are definitely taking a turn for the better around here. Living down on the farm was enjoyable when I was fit and healthy, but cooking was somewhat limited and for obvious reasons too. Things are so much better here and when I eventually have a real and proper kitchen things will be even better.

But that’s something about which to worry on another occasion. Right now, I have things to do before going to bed. And with a bit of luck, the internet might be back up tomorrow and I catch up with whatever needs doing.

0

Tuesday 2nd May 2023 – TODAY WAS A …

… day that I really want to forget.

Not that there was all that much to forget because it was what I would call a very short day today.

Last night however was a lot longer. Bright sunlight streaming in through the windows, birds chirping around outside and kids on their way to school and I hadn’t gone to bed yet. 07:10 and I was still up and about.

That’ll teach me to have an unscheduled lie-in on a Monday morning.

It was some time later than that that I finally went off to bed, with the alarm set for 13:00 just in case I happened to fall asleep deeper than I was expecting.

However that was a waste of time because although I did end up going to sleep at some point it was only for a couple of hours. I was back awake again at 10:00 and at 12:00 I’d given up any thought whatever of going off to sleep. And that was that.

After what might have been a breakfast or was probably more like a lunch, I had a listen to the dictaphone. There was something going on while I was asleep certainly but when I awoke it completely evaporated and I couldn’t remember anything at all about it. I certainly knew that I’d been away somewhere.

Next step was to listen to the radio programme that I was to send off for broadcasting this coming weekend.

It was one that I’d prepared last September before going off on my voyage to eternity, one of the batch when something must have happened to the tone controls because there was just far too much bass on it and it sounded really muffled.

Having spent a while trying to edit it, I gave up and redid it. It sounds much better now.

There was an interruption when the physiotherapist called. He had a look at my right leg, checked on my exercises and then that was that. he wasn’t here long. But I wasn’t happy when he went into my bedroom to grab a pillow. I don’t like people wandering around in my apartment like that.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with rice and veg, all very nice and tasty. There’s not a lot left over for a curry tomorrow night so I might have to lengthen it out with a potato or something.

And while we’re on the subject of tomorrow … “well, one of us is” – ed … I’m having to have a bake-in. I’ve run out of my delicious chocolate biscuits, run out of naan bread, and I also used the last of the pizza bases on Sunday too.

Nice as my chocolate biscuits were, I’ll have to think of a new type of biscuit to make. I should have bought some fresh ginger at the weekend but there’s always some sort of stuff lying around that I can use as flavouring in a regular 4/8/10 mixture.

But the naan bread will be interesting. I shall have fun with another batch of those.

0

Friday 14th April 2023 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… delicious evening meal tonight.

While I was going through the freezer the other day I came across some small kidney bean burgers that have been there since the Dawn Of Time.

Two of them, there were, but there are none left now because as part of my programme to go through and slowly empty the freezer, they went into the air fryer with the diced potatoes and were eaten alongside a nice salad.

It won’t be long now before I can get back to baking pies again. A nice vegan pie like I used to make, when I had room in the freezer, would be lovely for tea for a few nights in the near future. We’re getting there.

Something else that I had that I’ve also had before was a bad night when I struggled to go to sleep and then awoke and some kind of silly hour of the morning.

Not another 04:45 start, but I was certainly out of bed well before the alarm at 07:30.

And that reminds me. Next week I have to set the alarm for 07:00 for my week at the hospital, so I’m reckoning that I’ll leave it set at that instead of 07:30, but compromise by not having an early start on a Monday.

The reason why I had such an early start was that I could dictate the radio notes in peace and quiet before the traffic started up and the kids passed by on their way to school, but I seem to be managing right now by doing it very late on a Saturday night.

After the medication I had a nice shower, sorted out some clothes and then did a little tidying up ready for the physiotherapist. He had my lying on the floor with my back on a rolling pin and I had to roll up and down. The idea is to ease off some of the tense and tight nerves in my back.

Surprisingly, I was able to stand up after lying on my back on the floor, and if that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.

He’s very pleased with how things are going, and I have to say that so am I. I hope that it keeps up. I’m regularly doing all the exercises that he’s programmed for me and the stuff that I’ve bought, like the weights and the elastic straps, are doing me a lot of good.

After he left (and he was here for ages) I went through the paperwork, downloaded and printed off what I need for the hospital. There’s a French Government site for health services and everyone has a folder there, so I uploaded some details there too while I was at it.

Having done that, I made a start on a radio programme, the notes for which I dictated the other day. It was a slow laborious process because I was side-tracked here and there along the way, but in the end it’s completed. That’s good news because it’s the one that I should have been doing on Monday but, of course, I’m not here.

Having said that, I’ve not been all here for quite a while, have I?

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too from the night. We’d been to Glasgow to try to find a festival that was taking place where some friend of my father was playing with his group. We eventually tracked it down in Paisley (but it wasn’t in Paisley really). I had a good look round. There were 3 different companies of stewards there, Pye itself in dark blue clothing, another company and a 3rd in a kind of black and white tartan. We made a few notes and then came home. Later on my father asked me to move this boy’s father. He wanted to speak to him but he was busy. I rang and eventually got through. Father by this time was in the middle of a heated argument so I continued making some small talk but didn’t really say much. The subject of this festival came up. The father passed the telephone to his son and we had a lengthy chat about the events at this festival, who was there who we saw, what clothing everyone was wearing etc

At one point I was in Oak Street in Crewe. There was something about some boy who had died. Someone had thrown a wreath into the brook that runs at the back there. I’d been working on something – I’m not quite sure what it was. My father was with someone else. When we finished I wanted to go into the barn to fetch something but they were standing in the way. I had to ask them to move. Then I couldn’t get into the barn because of all the stuff that was there. I wanted to go in there to do some tidying up but it would be really difficult to get what I wanted from the barn with that much stuff in it.

The family is back again and has been, here and there, over the last couple of days. But it would be nice if one of my preferred companions would show a leg here and there every now and again.

Tea was, as I said, quite delicious again. I really am eating well right now which is excellent news. But don’t worry about the kidney bean burger supply being exhausted because someone posted a recipe today for falafel burgers that I am determined to try one of these days. And if the recipe works for chick peas, no reason why it won’t work for kidney beans.

Tomorrow I’m shopping, and I’ve created quite a little list. Supplies are slowly winding down again and I ought to be thinking about stocking up. While it’s nice (and sometimes necessary, as December last year proved when I couldn’t go shopping for five weeks) to have a stock of food on hand, it’s also nice to recycle through it. I seem to have let things drag a little with the freezer.

So another early night again. Let’s hope that I can make the most of it.

0

Friday 7th April 2023 – A CALAMITY!

Yes, we have had a calamity here today.

Last night after tea I took out some of the hot cross buns from the freezer and left them to thaw out.

This morning when I looked at them, they were all dry and crumbly and there were traces of a green mould. And so they, and all of the others in the freezer have gone into the bin. What a waste and I was so looking forward to eating them too.

That’s really beyond disappointing because the freezer has been jam-packed with stuff, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, to such an extent that I’ve been turning away some really good offers. Had they not been in there, I could have done so much more.

Still, no use crying over spilt milk.

And no need to ask what I was going to do now. The internet is our friend in these circumstances and within about 5 minutes I’d found a recipe for vegan hot cross buns. And, apart from some dried mixed peel, I had all of the ingredients, even some orange concentrate

They even had a dinky little cross on top. I don’t have an icing piping bag but a plastic bag with the corner cut off made an acceptable substitute

They weren’t a particular success because I couldn’t make the dough rise, and while it was proofing it cracked (probably too dry). But toasted with some nice hot butter they tasted just like hot cross buns should, and it’s the taste that matters after all.

But when one has a calamity, the pendulum usually swings the other way at some point, but never as quickly for me as it did this afternoon. And in less than three weeks time I shall be back on the property-owning ladder because I’m signing for my new place on the 26th of April at 09:30 in the forenoon.

So with three months required to give the tenant notice to leave and then some time to install a shower and a decent kitchen, I might even be in there before the end of the summer. And I can’t say that I’ll be sorry.

As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … I rented this apartment when I first came here 6 years ago so that I would have a base to look round and find somewhere in the neighbourhood that I liked. But I love this building, its situation and my neighbours so much that I had no desire to leave, so I stayed on as a tenant until something came available to buy at a price that I could afford

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is that I was bemoaning the fact that I wouldn’t be able to have a lie-in this morning because even though it’s a Bank Holiday, I had the physiotherapist coming round.

But I needn’t have wasted my time complaining because when the alarm went off this morning at 07:30, I was already up and about.

In fact, I’d been awake since not long after 06:00 and I could have left the bed at any moment after that because trying to go back to sleep was a waste of time. But eventually I lifted myself up and out and set about today’s tasks.

After the medication and checking my mails and messages, I went to have a shower and get myself all nicely cleaned up

The physiotherapist had me running through my paces with the stuff that i’d bought last weekend. He thinks that I have bought stuff that is too powerful for me and that’s rather depressing news. Not because he thinks that I’ve wasted my money because he thinks that I can no longer mutt the custard, as Doctor Spooner would have said.

As kenneth Williams once famously said when the starring roles that he used to receive begn to run out “what you’re offering doesn’t stretch me. I’m used to enormous parts”. And that’s the same with me. I should be pushing myself onwards and upwards, not slowly sinking downwards. Neil Young once said “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” and that’s my philosophy too.

Back here after he had gone, that was when I noticed the catastrophe that was the hot cross buns. And so the rest of the morning was spent making half a dozen of those to keep me going over Easter.

In between while the dough was doing its stuff I was changing the bedding so that I’ll have a nice, clean comfortable bed to sleep in tonight, the first time for a while, and also having a very long chat that went on throughout the day on and off with Liz.

This afternoon I finished off the French Revolution stuff and I’m now well advanced on my space exploration theme, although bearing in mind the different time zones it’s likely that I’ll have to settle for the 20th July as being the date recognised as that of the first landing on the moon which won’t come round on a Friday for several years.

There have also been chats with Alison on the internet and Rosemary on the phone and also with a neighbour who invited me round for a coffee on Monday. I have been in demand today.

In between all of this I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. This first bit was another dream where I’d forgotten most of it. There was some kind of celebration to take place for D-Day that involved travelling on an aeroplane. We were going to fly over all these places that figured prominently in the early days of the battle on the anniversary of these events. I boarded the aeroplane but unbeknown to me one of my rabbits had boarded too. I didn’t find out until we were in the air. I had to scavenge round for something to keep them in. When we landed and were at people’s houses I had to find someone who had a cage that I could borrow so that I could put a rabbit in that so it would be much safer to carry. But there was much, much more to it than this but I just can’t remember it.

And then I was in an office. Someone wanted to make his room less affected by direct sunlight. he asked my advice whether he should paint one of his windows over in black. I suggested that he did it white in a nice stripy arrangement. He wondered what I meant by that. I explained that you take a wide brush and just go across from left to right and right to left but only one way. Do all the brushstrokes the same way. He went off so I had a quick look in later on. It looked quite nice what he’d done. Then I had to go to see the boss. I couldn’t think of a good excuse to go to see him. I went in and thought for a minute. I said “I’m thinking of applying for a holiday”. He asked why so I told him that I had a Cortina that I wanted to take out the engine and gearbox to put a different engine and gearbox in. That would involve a little work. It was aon old MkIII Cortina estate that needed much more work than that but that was what I said to him. We had a little chat about it and I left without agreeing anything conclusive. Then I found myself trying to work out someone’s income tax. Some guy’s wife was a teacher somewhere in the Three Bridges Council area. And when I was dictating these notes I realised that i’d been working it out wrongly in my sleep. I was taking away his wife’s income from his instead of adding it on. I can’t understand why I did that.

Tea tonight was a salad and some of those veggie balls from out of the freezer. I was intending to have chips with it but my bag of potatoes is mostly full of potatoes that are too small so I chopped them into small squares to make little baby roast potatoes.

To prepare them, I mixed them with some oil and herbs in a pyrex bowl and then tipped them into that little metal colander that I’d bought the other week. The holes in the colander let the hot air percolate through much better and cooked them to perfection.

It was a really nice tea and I’ll do the same with the potatoes tomorrow with my breaded quorn fillets

So in a moment I’ll be off to bed. It’s early but I’m going shopping tomorrow. In principle I feel as if I ought to be going without my crutches but that’s being rather optimistic. I’ll take one with me, I reckon, to see how I do.

One thing that I want to buy is a soya yoghurt. I found a recipe for making naam bread while I was wandering around and I wonder what that would be like done in the air fryer to eat with my leftover curry.

Another thing that I can but is some more frozen food now that there’s some space in the freezer. What a calamity that was about those hot cross buns, but every cloud has a silver lining, I suppose.

0

Friday 31st March 2023 – MY SAUSAGE …

… chips and beans for tea was delicious. Now that I have some melting vegan cheese, and more importantly, now I know where I can find some more without any effort, I added some cheese to the beans while they were cooking and that made an impressive difference.

The air fryer struck again. Cooked my sausage and chips to perfection. And later on, seeing as I found some more frozen apple pie in the freezer, it defrosted and crisped up my slice of apple pie.

And rummaging around in my box of cooking accessories, I found a shallow porcelain pie dish tested for use in the oven that fits nicely in the basket of the air fryer.

Things are looking up!

There are several other things that also seem to be looking up too.

Firstly, I had another better night of sleep. I was late going to bed and it was a real struggle to awaken but I even managed to beat the first alarm this morning, never mind the second one.

That’s a surprise in itself because although it wasn’t anything as like as restless as it has been in the recent past, I still put in a god few miles while I was asleep. The subject of Lonnie Donegan came up in a discussion between me and several other people. It brought out the fact that after he’d finished with a musical career he’d gone into the motor trade. He’d bought a ruined garage somewhere and had started to work from it. I was hoping that there might have been something going here for me but no-one said anything so I made a few enquiries of my own. I was pointed in the direction of where he might be. I turned up there and it was an ice speedway race taking place on an ice rink somewhere in south London. He was actually racing in it and won, which of course cheered everyone. Then there was something about music. One of the guys in it was called Kenny Driscoll whom I know from “Lone Star”. We were talking about some kind of jazz group that was involving him and someone else well-known was looking for an over-dub guitarist for making albums of the live concerts they were doing

There was something else involving music but I can’t remember very much of this except that it involved some kind of guitarist who was fleeing from justice. They had him surrounded. It went on from there but I can’t remember very much but one of the tracks on the album that he was recording was called “A State of Bohemia”. Someone interpreted it to mean that they were living some kind of uncomplicated life. It was really quite funny because they didn’t know, although most people did, that Bohemia was the name of an ancient State in Central Europe now part of the Czech Republic (and I’m impressed that I knew that in the middle of a dream) but there is lots more to this dream than this but I can’t remember it

And then I was driving taxis in a new town last night. It was a town about which Nerina or whoever the woman with me was knew something about. She showed me a couple of places that she had visited when she was at University there. We had a new driver starting as well. We gave him a run-down of what to do and what we expected of him then we set off. The first job was that we were going to the same place but picking up from different places so we met up and went together in the end. This person paid for both taxis. It came to £2:50, £1:10 for me and £1:40 for him. It had to be split up but for some unknown reason the maths were extremely complicated. I was scratching my head about this because I knew the answer straight away but I didn’t want to say it in case everyone thought that I was trying to cheat someone. We were talking about whether we’d be busy or not but on the way into dropping off these passengers we’d seen queues at almost every taxi rank so we expected that we would have a really busy night. For some reason I wans’t in the mood to be busy. It was very difificult when there were just 2 of you and one was a new driver.

Something else occurred as well. The place was untidy so I asked the family if they would halp me tidy it. One thing was an enormous pile of books with books all over the floor. Their response was a quote from Churchill about “you should find books everywhere in a house and that’s a good sign if there are”. I thought that that was typical with no-one coming round to help me out.

Finally I was out last night somewhere in the Home Counties. There was a group of people who had gone to meet someone. They had an Avengers-like plot trying different pulls on them to see which was the most efficacious in killing them. They lured someone down to a quiet remote cul-de-sac in the countryside. They person whom they were supposed to be meeting wasn’t there so he stopped a passer-by who happened to be one of these secret agents who planted this thing on him and gave him directions as to where he ought to ben which of course were false. He set off with the idea that he’d die. I’d observed this so I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. I got into my red Cortina estate and reversed out of the side street. I hadn’t noticed this traffic island. The rear of the vehicle went up on it and stuck so I gave it some extra revs to take me right over. There was a car coming behind me, one of these horrible yellowy-green 1100s. I hit it and said “oh God! Here we go again”. I pulled up on the side of the road to go to talk to the guy but he just turned his car round and drove away. I wondered what to do next – do I sit there and wait for the police or wait for him to come back or do I go and risk being prosecuted for driving away from an accident. I really had no idea.

So Nerina was there last night, but also so were members of my family (well, Nerina is a member of my family too but you know what I mean). It’s been a good few days since TOTGA and Zero have put in an appearance and my other favourite girl, Castor, seems to have dropped off the radar now. She’s not been around for ages.

It all reminds me of “I’ve been having bad dreams
Well maybe tomorrow when I’m hungry baby
I’d beg for you, what’d I say steal and borrow
Would you help me
Really help me, really help me
To run down the road
Would you be with me”
But not even STEVE MARRIOTT can conjure up Zero, Castor and TOTGA for me.

Anyway, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, so live for the present!

After the medication and checking my mails and messages it took me a good while for me to come to my senses and once I’d had a rather later-than-usual mid-morning coffee I started work.

First thing to do was to pay the property taxes on my place in Canada. I had high hopes for that piece of land, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall and was out there getting quotes for log cabins and the like, only to be struck down by a thunderbolt back in late 2015.

The fact that I’m still going is a tribute to the medical staff at Leuven but how I would have loved not to have had to involve them in my projects.

Wouldn’t things have been different? But then I wouldn’t have made it to the Arctic and I wouldn’t have met the Vanilla Queen (who dropped off the radar a long time ago) and Castor.

Second thing was to pay my cleaner. I also had to leave her my niece’s details for when I’m in hospital if the necessity should ever arise. And of course I have a different phone to the one that I used to take with me to Canada so I had to hunt down all of the details and check with her that they were still correct.

During one of the pauses I had a shower too. The physiotherapist was to come round this afternoon and I wanted to be nice and clean for him. And climbing into the bath to take a shower is no longer an issue, which is good news. This physiotherapy is working.

The rest of the day has been spent writing notes for the radio programmes, which are now all done, writing out the details of my trips during the night, and also converting and remixing a couple of soundfiles that I tracked down the other day.

A little earlier I mentioned that there were a couple of other things that seem to be looking up. The second one is that the physiotherapist is as pleased with my improvement as I am and reckons that he can see a time when I’ll no longer need the therapy.

That’s not to say that I’ll be cured, of course. What he means is that if I keep up the exercises as I seem to be doing, then I won’t need him to supervise me.

He’s given me a few more exercises to do and a list of things that I need to buy at the sports shop tomorrow. And as of next week he’s only going to come once a week, Friday morning, to check on my progress.

That’s interesting, to say the least.

Tea was delicious as I said just now, and the apple pie with soya cream finished it off nicely. One more slice of pie left, as far as I could see, so that will bite the dust tomorrow.

While we’re on the subject of tomorrow … “well, one of us is” – ed … I’m out shopping if the wind has died down. It reached 110kph this morning but hopefully it will blow itself out at some point.

That’ll be something for me to think about while I’m in bed, and I’m going off there right now. Goodnight.

0

Tuesday 28th March 2023 – AFTER ALL THAT …

… I didn’t have my door painted today.

Just as I was going out to the doctor’s, the painter rang me again. “Apartment 13 isn’t it, yours?”

“Yes it is but you’re not coming round now are you? I told you yesterday that I’m out this morning” and he confirmed that he would be back at 14:00 as we agreed yesterday.

At 13:30, just as my Welsh lesson was coming to an end, the bell rang. “It’s the painter”.

When he eventually found me, after having wandered around the building for 10 minutes, he said “there’s been a mistake. It’s not your door I’m supposed to be painting at all. It’s another one somewhere else”.

“That’s what I thought” I replied. “My landlord never told me anything at all about having my door painted” and that was that. he wandered off again elsewhere.

So retournons à nos moutons as they say around here – just for a change last night I actually had a really good sleep without too much tossing and turning around at all. The only disappointment from my point of view is that having gone to bed much later than I was intending, I didn’t have enough of it and that was rather depressing.

It was another real struggle to leave the bed this morning but I didn’t hang about too long. I managed to beat the second alarm, but not by much.

And after the medication and checking the mails and messages I went and had a shower so that I could look my best. And climbing into the bath to take a shower is no longer any kind of effort – at least, at the moment. Who knows what the future might bring?

Having dealt with the painter as I said earlier, I went to see the nerve specialist. And regrettably, I fell asleep in the waiting room. I must have been tired.

So the news is that there is a trace of cancer in the nerve cells and also a trace of infection. But what’s causing most of the problem seems to be some kind of inflammation. And that’s what the hospital is going to be treating when I go there for a week. He told me not to be too optimistic but I should certainly expect some improvement.

And if there really is some improvement on top of what I’ve already noticed, I shall be quite happy for once.

On the way home I went via LIDL but there wasn’t all that much that was interesting. I still spent €15:00 though, without an awful lot to show for it.

Back here I made myself a vegan cheese butty with tomato (I’d not had any breakfast of course) and then attended the second part of my Welsh lesson, that passed off OK.

This afternoon, there was football on the internet – Cymru under-17s against Montenegro under-17s, many of whom looked rather older than I was expecting.

Cymru needed a point to qualify for the European finals in the summer and were cruising along nicely, but two goals in a minute in first-half stoppage time seemed to have sunk them. The first goal, fair enough, but in a mad fit of rush of blood to the head, the whole team swarmed upfield from the kick-off to try to score an equaliser, and were hit with a sucker punch – a long ball out of defence over the top of the advancing Cymru defenders with an attacker running on from deep.

Pretty much text-book stuff.

Cymru pulled one back 10 minutes into the second half and then in the dying seconds the centre-back showed them how to do it, running in from defence and backheeling one home from three yards out to equalise and for Cymru to qualify.

But Cymru are going to have to find some strikers from somewhere. The midfield tore the Montenegrins to shreds and the guy on the right wing, Freddy Issaka, had them in all kinds of spins but the front two couldn’t hit the nether regions of a ruminant animal with a stringed musical instrument with all of the chances that they were given.

Shooting wide from just three feet out, right in the centre of the goal, was just one of the several simple chances that Cymru missed.

During half time I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I’d taken over the job as a football secretary of a local football club. The very first day I’d received some forms to fill in but I thought that I’d deal with them after the weekend. When I was talking to one of the guys from the club on the Saturday night he told me that one in particular I should have dealt with immediately and sent back because it concerns their match on Sunday. If it’s not dealt with immediately then the match won’t go ahead. There’ll be all kinds of consequences. I was totally unaware of that so I thought that I’d go to the bank to see if the form was still there. I arrived at the bank. The woman there was most unhelpful and I didn’t feel like pushing the matter. I thought that I’d leave it. I’d been invited to a party on the Saturday night. Lots of people were going. I walked along to the venue. Instead it was by the side of a river. Even though it was late at night it was all lit up. Photography would have been excellent had I had a decent camera and a decent place to stand to take the photos. I tried with what equipment I had but nothing actually worked that I wanted. There were far too many people in the way. On the way I’d stopped off at a chip shop to buy sausage and chips. I put my £2 down on the counter. Eventually I was served – about half a dozen cold chips and a small sausage which I thought was ridiculous for the £2 so I took a photo of it. While I was at this waterfront site I heard a couple of people saying that even though a couple of the girls were going to somewhere in the Spring, they were going to build a castellated wall around. This woman was describing in detail what this castellated wall was. Her friend was listening intently and so was I. at the same time for some reason I was mixing cement in the back of Caliburn on a plastic sheet. I couldn’t think why I was mixing the cement. There wasn’t much of it and trying to mix it in the back of Caliburn where I can’t stand up was extremely complicated.

The physiotherapist came round and ran me through my paces. He asked me if I would be interested in upping my programme to include a few more exercises. He was telling me that most people only like to take their therapy up to a certain point and leave it as it is but what about me?

My reply was that there’s a whole world out there still waiting for me and I want to get out and see it and take part in it. So he’s going to work out another programme for me

In between everything else I’ve been selecting more music for the radio programmes. What I’ll have to do now is to start to write out the notes. I’ve a few now that need text and then I can dictate one or two of them over the weekend to start to make some more programmes. I’ve plenty in the pipeline already prepared but you never know when I’m going to be “indisposed”.

Tea was a taco roll with rice and veg. And my stuffing is now down to a fine art and tastes really exquisite. I can’t wait to get my hands on a real kitchen though, although I’ve no idea when that might be.

Tomorrow the cleaner is coming so I’ll have some tidying up to do. It’s the last time this month that she’ll be here so I’ll have to do the accounts at some point. That might be a good thing to do if I need a break from writing radio notes.

However I am hoping for plenty of dictaphone notes. I need to bring some more excitement into my life and nothing much is happening during the daylight hours. Wandering off into the next dimension when I’m fast asleep is about the best that I can manage right now.

0

Friday 24th March 2023 – JUST BY WAY …

… of a change, I wasn’t up and walking about at 04:45 this morning.

It was in fact 03:30 instead. And I think that that tells you all that you need to know about another miserable night that I had.

However, I didn’t manage to be up and about this morning before the alarm went off. I was definitely awake at 07:15 but I must have fallen back to sleep at one point because it was something of a rude awakenng at 07:30 and I staggered out of bed looking like a cross between The Death of Nelson and the Wreck of the Hesperus.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages (including one from this guy with whom I spoke the other day about my shower) I contacted the hospital at leuven to sort out these appointments. The result of this is that I’ve arranged for them all to be on the 11th May. That means that I can breathe some kind of sigh of relief about my congested fixture list.

For most of the day I’ve been planning. I’m planning in the future to reorganise my radio programmes to give them more structure, and I’ve been going through my record library making a list of songs that make reference to space exploration. At the moment I have Elton John’s Rocket Man off with Guns and Roses’ Rocket Queen on the Hooters’ Satellite for Bebop Deluxe’s Honeymoon on Mars, to name just a few of the tracks I’ve been sorting out.

The dictaphone contained a few sound files too that needed transcribing. I was at a class for French lessons at one point last night. We were divided into groups of 2. With me and my partner, who was an old guy, we had to wander around the streets looking at nouns and adjectives, finding where they’d been paired either before the noun or after. I was very difficult for me of course because I was on crutches but I did the best that I could. We spotted maybe half a dozen where the adjective was in front of the noun. I couldn’t remember what they were so we had to go to scrounge an old envelope and pencil off someone, go back and start again. On the way around I ended up with a bottle of wine. As I was returning to where our group was standing there were some people with a dog. It wasn’t on a lead and began to run at me, barking. Every time it came close I gave it a kick with my left foot. I was quite accurate too. They were surprised and so was I because the way that my health is for walking I was surprised that I could kick anything at all. This dog certainly knew that it had had half a dozen good kicks from me as it tried to close in. In the end I gave the bottle to one of the people who was there with the rest of the class.

And then I was in a LIDL somewhere. It was half-full of all kinds of end-of-range stuff. Nothing in there of any particular importance. The rest was stuff that they were assembling for the following day. I was having a look around and couldn’t see anything that I liked. There was a film crew in there. A guy was filming something. He was with his son. Something happened and the father bawled out his son and said to the film crew “I hope that you didn’t record that”. I asked “why? Are you ashamed of it? You ought to be! Fancy treating your son like that!”. He followed me down the aisle and started trying to provoke a fight. he was completely out of his mind.

At another moment I was a passenger in a minibus that was doing a school run. We were all dropped off somewhere. The driver wandered off. He came back and got into his bus. Then he came over to me and said “can I ask you something?”. I replied “yes”. He said “next time you fuel the bus up can you fill it right to the brim?”. I replied “yes. Of course I can. I always wondered what happened to this bus after I got off it”. Just them another guy came up. He said “excuse me but someone was telling me that you don’t have a PSV licence, the blue and yellow one”. I pointed to the sign on the door that said “Shearings Bus and Coach”. I replied “of course I do. I worked for Shearings before. I used to work for Shearings. You could see a strange look on the faces of both of these guys.

There was a break in the day’s programme for the physiotherapist, who was very pleased with my progress, and tea tonight was a rather rushed salad and chips with veggie balls.

Rushed because there was football on the internet. Connah’s Quay Nomads v Y Drenewydd. It’s never easy to play football in a howling gale and rainstorm as it proved tonight but Connah’s Quay, playing with the wind in the second half, took full advantage and scored two goals.

However, I would have liked to have been on the touchline to check the positions when Harry Franklin played the ball to Jack Kenny for the second goal. From up on a gantry on the halfway line you have a totally different view of the proceedings and the perspective.

Nevertheless, there were several moments when I was convinced that the referee and the linesmen were officiating a completely different game to the one that I was watching.

Shopping tomorrow, and I don’t need much, although I have said that before with disastrous results. In any case, as I’m out on Tuesday I might nip to Lidl on the way home from the doctor’s then, which means that I’ll need even less today.

But we’ll see. Just because I don’t need much doesn’t mean that I won’t be buying much, does it?

0