I was on my travels again last night, and it was once more with the guitarist/singer and drummer with whom I played for a couple of years in the mid-70s and who have been featuring rather a lot just recently in these pages.

We were in a pub in Liverpool sitting at a table waiting for things to happen before we went on stage and who should come and sit next to us but John Wetton. He’s a bassist/singer of no little repute, having appeared in several supergroups of the 70s and early 80s and though while he’s not on my list of top-10 bassists, I was still relishing having a good chat with him and maybe even getting him onstage with us in some capacity.

But for some unknown reason, the other two were being rather abusive and offensive to him and after a couple of minutes he left. I was quite upset at that because it’s not every day that one has the opportunity to be in the intimate presence of a superstar.

With all of those issues having been dealt with, I heaved myself out of my stinking pit and set about making breakfast. That wasn’t as easy as it might have been either, because I couldn’t remember where the coffee was, and I couldn’t remember which glass I used for my orange juice, all that kind of thing. It’s astonishing how, after just 45 days away from home, how much of my old routine that I have forgotten.

And talking of being back in the routine, once breakfast was out of the way I sat down and started work on the next batch of Radio Anglais stuff. And happy that I’d dealt with the shopping issues yesterday, I could have a really good whack at it. Three or four hours of uninterrupted work and I’d written four programmes – a mere 2774 words. When you can find the rhythm, it’s easy to understand how it was that people like Enid Blyton and Earl Stanley Gardner could knock off 5,000 or 6,000 words in a day on a consistent basis if they could be totally uninterrupted (except for someone serving up mugs of hot coffee on a regular basis too).

By now though, the weather had cleared and the sun was shining. That was something that was quite uexpected, but welcome nevertheless. We even, just for a fleeting moment, had an overcharge of electricity and I wish that I had thought on and reconnected the 12-volt immersion heater.

Later on in the afternoon, I went round to Liz and Terry’s. This was to rehearse the radio programmes because Liz is going to be busy tomorrow, and we also had a lovely vegan lasagne followed by vegan ginger cake. You’ve no idea how well Liz and Terry look after me.

Back home, I did a few more things on the computer and, just as I was about to settle down for an early night the internet suddenly sprang back into life. I restarted the computer and settled down to something of a long night. I had plenty of work to do.

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