Tag Archives: granville

Thursday 3rd July 2025 – REGULAR READERS OF …

… this rubbish will recall that when they pass by during the night, those from the far-flung corners of the Globe (and a few from closer to home too), they usually find that the latest instalment has managed to crawl on-line at some point, and they can sit and peruse it at their leisure while those readers closer to home are still in the Land of Nod.

And so last night, or this morning, they are probably wondering what has happened that there was nothing on-line for them to read.

The truth was that I was in bed, and had been since 19:30 in fact, for at dialysis yesterday afternoon I had another malaise and went into a coma again.

Not that any of that is a surprise. It was well after midnight when I finally went to bed last night, and I was awake again at about 02:40. This time though, I didn’t manage to go back to sleep and lay there tossing and turning until about 05:30 when I finally gave up the struggle and arose from the Dead.

It’s dialysis day of course, so I went to have a good scrub up and shave just in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and then I went into the kitchen to take my medication so that I would be ready to Fight the Good Fight.

Back here, I had a listen to the dictaphone, but as I was expecting, there was nothing on it. That’s no surprise, seeing that I only had two and a half hours’ sleep. Instead, I found a few other things to do while I awaited the arrival of Isabelle the Nurse.

When she arrived, she gave me the next of this series of injections. If it is indeed to stimulate the red blood cells in their fight against the carcinogenic protein in my blood, it’s a mystery as to why they are only giving it to me for five days, without any other kind of control. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when this cancer was first diagnosed back in the winter of 2015-2016 when I was also taking this Retuximab, they were injecting me twice per day

After she left, the plumber turned up and we had a lengthy discussion about my plans. He seemed to be much more amenable to my ideas so I gave him the keys and let him loose downstairs to do his thing.

Now that he was downstairs, I went to make breakfast, but I found myself confronting a major problem. The fridge door was part-open, an enormous mound of ice had grown inside and the door wouldn’t close. Add to that the fact that the soya milk inside had “turned”.

Fearing all other kinds of problems, I turned off the fridge for the moment and made breakfast, and then sat down to eat it and read MY BOOK.

Our author tells us that "Henry I built his manor at Woodstock, with a park … He placed therein … divers strange beasts to be kept and nourished such as were brought to him from far countries, as lions, leopards, linces, porpentines and such other" – presumably, the UK’s first safari park.

He goes on to say that "King Edward II … commanded the sheriffs of London to pay to the keepers of the king’s leopard in the Tower of London sixpence the day for the sustenance of the leopard and three halfpence a day for the diet of the said keeper … More, in the 16th of Edward III, one lion, one lioness, one leopard and two cat lions in the said Tower were committed to the custody of Robert, son of John Bowre."

So London Zoo has a very long history indeed.

After breakfast, I had to empty the fridge and attack the ice mountain with an old hair-dryer, but I couldn’t do it for long because, with my head upside down, I was losing blood pressure and my head was spinning round.

There were several interruptions while I was trying to work. First, the plumber came up to give me a progress report, and then Rosemary ‘phoned about a problem that she was having with a tyre on her car.

After half an hour I had to give up the cleaning of the fridge until my head cleared, so I came back in here to do some work on the radio while I calmed down, but I could feel a wave of ill-health slowly sweep over me.

When my cleaner came to fit my anaesthetic patches, she noticed the mess in the kitchen so after having sorted me out, she waded into the kitchen, took all of the food off the worktop, and said that she’d be back later.

The taxi came early for me, and I was soon at Avranches with a very chatty driver entertaining us (we were two passengers) with conversation almost all of the way down to Avranches.

For a change, I was early at the dialysis centre, and for another change, I was connected up quite quickly. However, I didn’t even have time to switch on my laptop before I’d gone into a coma – blood pressure down at 8.8, apparently.

When Fleurette noticed, it brought her running and she quickly flattened my bed and raised my feet, and that was how I found myself ten minutes later, totally unaware of what had happened.

Everyone was, as usual, quite concerned about me and did their best to do something to help the situation, but I just wanted to go to sleep, which I did for about ninety minutes. But one of these days, I’m going to go into one of these comas and not wake up out of it.

The doctor came to see me and changed my prescription, telling me to cut out the blood pressure medication on the grounds that it’s working too well, and to see what happens over the next few days. I don’t know why they even gave it to me in the first place.

When it was time to unplug me, they were all worried once again and tried to make me use a wheelchair but I refused yet again. And for once that I was ready quite early, the taxi was quite late. I had to wait over half an hour before it turned up and that was just about the end.

It was the young, chatty guy who brought me home to where my faithful cleaner was waiting, and we went to have a look at the bathroom in the new place.

And what a shambles it is. Behind the bath, the plasterboard hasn’t even been skimmed – it’s just bare hydrofuge. The floor under the bath hasn’t been made good either, never mind tiled, and the pipework is all non-standard size, as if someone has wanted to use up a batch of ancient out-of-date pipe.

On the wall behind the bathroom cabinet, the plasterboard hasn’t even been skimmed and in places, not even painted.

All in all, I don’t think that my Barratt House of 1979 was as poorly-prepared as this.

Not that I’m complaining, of course. When I work out how much I paid for the place, I still have a bargain, and the work to put everything right is work that I would have had done anyway when the shower unit is built.

By now, I was feeling so ill that I could only struggle up the first flight of stairs, and I failed dismally on the second. I ended up having to go up from the half-landing in the lift and come back down the stairs from the half-landing above.

Once back in here, I had a brief look at the nice clean fridge that my faithful cleaner had cleaned while I’d been in dialysis, and then I went straight to bed. That was about that for the day.

Seeing as we have been talking about my bathroom … "well, one of us has" – ed … I shall have to bite the bullet and have it painted, I suppose.
And when I see the cabinet-maker who is going to paint everywhere, I shall have to tell him to put on two coats.
"Why two coats?" he asked.
"Well, it needs to be ready for winter."

Wednesday 2nd July 2025 – I HAVE DONE …

… something that I have only done once previously over this last few weeks, and that is that I was still asleep this morning at 06:30 when the alarm went off.

Well, actually, I wasn’t. I was awake – but only just, and I was thinking about looking at the ‘phone to see what time it was when the alarm beat me to it.

It might be a disappointment, but it’s not so much of a surprise, especially as I didn’t go to bed until later than I would have liked.

Not that I slept for long, though. At 02:20 I was wide awake and after half an hour of trying to go back to sleep, I was seriously thinking about leaving the bed and doing some work. However, at some point I must have gone back to sleep because when the alarm went off, there I was.

Trying to return to my usual habits after the bouleversements of the last few weeks, first thing that I did was to go to the bathroom for a good wash, and then into the kitchen for the medication.

Back in here afterwards, I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I was staying in a hotel or somewhere like that, right by the beach. I had to go for a walk every day. This walk was very realistic, walking around the edge of the sands and edge of the dunes etc, having to deal with seagulls, take my injections correctly at the correct time. It’s all very much like the way that things would be now if I were actually at a hotel staying somewhere.

Here we go again. Another hotel. But as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … with almost all of my dreams, I am asleep when I dictate them but when I’m transcribing them, I have some kind of vague memory or recollection. This dream is, however, one of those rare ones where I have no recollection of anything whatsoever.

And then I awoke at about 02:20. I’d been walking up and down the beach with a friend, a beach that had a very broad similarity with the beach at Donville les Bains. While he’d gone off to do something, I’d set out to walk along the coastline following the railway, the electric overhead railway that was there. I didn’t meet him until his car turned up quite a while later. I seemed to have walked for miles. According to the map, I had. When I awoke, I was carrying on this conversation with my friend for quite some time before I went to check the time and found that it was now 02:40.

Leaving aside the fact that there’s no railway line, overhead electric or not, at or near the beach at Donville-les-Bains, nor has there ever been, it’s an interesting phenomenon for me to awaken in the middle of the dream and to carry on dreaming. I know that there are some people who can climb up into the dozens of layers of dreams, but I can only rarely make it as high as two layers. I wish that I could do it more often, especially when Zero comes to see me during the night.

This walk continued and we ended up at a really nice stone house, a typical “Midi” low-pitched roof. We ended up talking to the owners. One of them was British but the other one, we weren’t quite sure. They were talking to us about all of the work that they had done. What I had noticed was a car tyre on a wheel awaiting being prepared for the dustman to take it away. It was a cheap copy-tyre and had been worn down way below the tread limit. That made me wonder whether these people had any money, seeing a car tyre in that condition. Anyway after we had had a chat for quite some time, we were invited to take a walk around the garden. One of the women said to me “it’s OK. Someone has sent for a wheelchair for you”. I replied “no thanks. I’m intending to walk”, and walk I did, although I took my time … fell asleep here … all over the new stones etc. We went to sit in the shade in what must have been a chapel building. Slowly, everyone moved away but my two friends and I stayed there talking. Later on, I heard one of them on the ‘phone giving directions to where we are. When I asked what was happening, he said that we can’t go back via the railway line because they’d had a huge delivery of something or other and they were working there, so we had to find an alternative way and someone else was coming to pick us up.

Stepping back into a dream later is something that I would also like to do more often, especially when Zero etc. etc. And the number of times that I’ve been offered a wheelchair. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … when you are really ill, you have to keep on fighting, because that is what keeps you going. I’ve seen far too many people give up the struggle and a few months later, they have gone the Way of the West.

Isabelle the Nurse came around to give me my second injection and to deal with my legs. She tells me that the oedemas are almost gone, which is good news, and I hope that she is right about that. I need to find a way to bring down the creatinine in the bloodstream so that I can do something about this dialysis which is the bane of my life right now.

She told her family about the mouse in my hospital room and they were outraged. Just to underline the point, I showed her the photo that I had taken. But now that the dust has settled and I’m not quite so angry, I’m going to go on the offensive … "”offensive” is the correct word where you are involved" – ed … and write a scathing letter to the hospital administration. I’m not sure how they will respond, but if I mention that I’ll be writing to the Press and the Sécurité Sociale. In the words of Hugh Latimer, as he was being burned to death, I "shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, as I trust shall never be put out".

After Isabelle the Nurse left, I made breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

We’re undergoing a tour of all of the gates through the wall into the City of London, including the water gates. And I do like the cynicism of the author, which makes quite a change from the gullibility and naïveté of most medieval authors. He tells us, for example, that "in the west is the next gate … called Ludgate, as first built (saith Geoffrey of Monmouth) by King Lud … in the Year before Christ’s nativity … wherefore I pass over it … referring the reader to that I have before written out of Caesar’s Commentaries."

When he’s writing about Billingsgate, he tells us "Geoffrey of Monmouth writeth that Belin, a King of the Britons, about four hundred years before Christ’s nativity built this gate, but is seemeth to me not to be so ancient but to have taken that name of some later owner of the place. "

Back in here, there was football to watch – a friendly between Hurlford and Stranraer last night. Despite the gulf in league positions, Stranraer made really heavy weather of a 1-0 victory. They never really looked in much danger but their attack just wasn’t at the races and the Hurlford keeper didn’t have much to do.

Unless Stranraer find a striker from somewhere, they are going to struggle this coming season.

Following the football, I made a start on choosing the music for the next radio programme but I didn’t go far because I hadn’t realised how late it was. My faithful cleaner burst in onto the scene while I was having a disgusting drink break.

She spent most of her time tidying up the living room and vacuuming up dog hairs, in between finding time to shoo me into the shower for a good scrub up, and I have never felt less like doing anything, never mind a shower.

But a nice clean me came out and I came back in here to carry on working.

However, something else that I haven’t done for ages until this afternoon, miserable failure that I am, was to crash out in my chair. And it was another one of those crash-outs that I didn’t realise that I’d crashed out until I awoke, all of an hour later. So don’t tell me that we are starting these all over again after all of this.

But what this tells me is that they aren’t extracting enough fluid and impurities from me – in other words, this lack of eating is working better than I anticipated and my “dry weight” has fallen dramatically. They are still extracting fluid based on my previous “dry weight” which means that they aren’t taking out enough. It’ll be interesting to see what the blood test reading tomorrow will show.

There was time to finish choosing the music and to begin to pair it off before I went to make tea – a small stuffed pepper with a handful of pasta and veg and I didn’t feel much like eating that either.

So tomorrow, the plumber comes. I hope that it’s good news when he rips out the bathroom. But we’ll know that tomorrow. Right now, I’m off to bed.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about London’s City Walls … "well, one of us has" – ed … John Stow tells us that he found that someone had knocked a hole through the wall into the changing rooms of St Botolph’s nunnery.
He told me that he had reported the incident to the Mayor and the Constable of the Watch
"So what happened?" I asked him
"Nothing as yet" he replied. "They are still looking into it."

Tuesday 1st July 2025 – I HAVE EMULATED …

… my namesake the mathematician today, and done three-fifths of five-eighths of … errr … nothing.

And I can’t say that I’m sorry either. Not only am I not feeling very well, and haven’t been ever since the first drip of chemotherapy went in, I’ve done rather a lot over the last couple of weeks and I need a rest.

My rest actually started last night. I’d finished everything that I needed to do by about 22:30, and very shortly afterwards, I was in bed.

From what I remember … "which isn’t an awful lot" – ed … I must have been asleep quite quickly. I didn’t even start my nighttime mantra that helps me go to sleep when all else fails.

It was something of a turbulent night though. I remember being awake at 01:40 and again at about 04:20 but it was at about 06:15 when I finally decided that that was enough sleep. Not that I was out of bed quickly though – it took me a good ten minutes to summon up the energy.

The first thing to do was to watch a football match. Penybont had been playing a friendly against Airdrie in order to warm themselves up for their European Championship match. Whilst Airdrie had most of the play, Penybont’s desperate defending only allowed them to score one, whereas Mael Davies and Gabriel Kircough scored two of the sweetest goals that you are likely to see at this stage of the season.

The next thing was to transcribe the dictaphone notes from last night. I was in a hotel with someone. It was one of these plush places where everyone dressed for dinner. I couldn’t be bothered to dress for dinner so my friend and I came downstairs and found a table where we could just sit anywhere, expecting at any moment to be shunted off into a side gallery or somewhere like that out of everyone else’s way. I began to look through the menu to see what we could have when a young couple came down. They were very much like 1920s socialists with the cloth cap and all of this kind of thing. They chose to sit down at our table, not that we minded, of course. We began to chat, and I asked the girl what she would like for her meal. She said that she would like some really typical English sausages. I replied that there were some very, very English traditional sausages in the freezer but they were vegan ones. If she didn’t mind, she could have some of those. She asked if I could fetch two for her so I went off into the kitchens to find these sausages and to find one or two things that I needed too. I couldn’t find a plate so I opened the door to the cupboard and began to rummage through it. The noise that it made was absolutely awful so everyone looked around. I said “if you wanted to see what I was doing to make this noise, you are a little too late”. A few people made some kind of comment. I then had to go to fetch a ramp, and I really had no idea where a ramp would be. There were still one or two people making a few comments so I lay on my back and pushed myself along with my feet arched and my elbows dug in so that I could move quite quickly. Everyone was impressed by that. Then I came to a trailer that had exactly what I wanted as part of the floor bed on this trailer, so I lifted out the appropriate piece. It was really heavy. I then set out on my back propelling myself with my feel and my elbows to go back to my table.

When I was skiing in Bulgaria with my cute little Irish friend, we met another young couple (I wasn’t all that young actually) in our hotel and had a little chat with them. The guy was one of these clever types who knew everything … "like someone else we all know" – ed … and so it was hard to have a chat with them, but the girl, although she wasn’t my type and in any case, I was with my friend, was quite sweet. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have shared any of my vegan sausages with her. Coming from the kind of family that I had, “sharing” was a phenomenon that was quite unknown.

And then I was at school, and it was school lunch break. I met up with a friend of mine and we had a really long chat. It wasn’t until later in this chat that I realised that the time was now 15:35 and we were an hour and a half late to go back for our lessons. He thought that he’d better rush so I decided that I’d rush too. But I couldn’t go back to lessons at this time of the afternoon because it was nearly home-time. Besides, it would look silly just going in for the final thirty minutes, so I decided to loiter around. So when my friend disappeared around a corner, I hung back to wait until he’d gone but instead, he came back to look for me. I reluctantly followed him until we came into the school hall, where I took my leave of him and looked as if I was going to climb up the stairs to go upstairs. Instead, I went to hide in the bottom of the stone stairs that were in an artificial turret to wait there until the final bell went. However, a class came downstairs into the hallway, looking around. I recognised the teacher, who was one from whose class I had dropped out a while back. She was discussing certain things, but must have seen me somehow because she stuck her head in the door and asked “could you take these books back up to my room please?”. They were apparently books that she had been showing to this class but they decided that they weren’t of any use in this course. I began to collect the books but as I started to go, she called me back to take her handbag. I had to go upstairs and hope that the classroom was empty and that there was no-one in there; otherwise it would be extremely embarrassing, just walking in in the middle of a lesson with things to leave behind, and then to go again. They would all be wondering what I was actually doing.

Being in school was at one time a regular subject during my nocturnal rambles. Not that I enjoyed school – not at all – but when you spend seven years in a place during your formative years, it figures quite intensely in your make-up. Strangely though, I very very rarely see any pupils whom I knew. Quite a few “mystery girls” though, including the famous “girl from Worleston” whose appearance overwhelmed me for several months, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. I never did find out who she was.

There was something somewhere about another friend of mine who had moved back to live with his parents. They had a large house on the edge of a wood. With another friend, we were wandering around and I pointed out this house. I said “this is where so-and-so’s family used to live”. He replied “so that was the house that he was hoping to have as his inheritance. What a shame he isn’t going to have it now”. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to say that he was still living there, and I don’t know why I couldn’t say it.

This is a wood through which we’ve walked on several occasions in the past during our nocturnal rambles. But once again, here I am stuck in some kind of dilemma. Why take the easy route when there’s a way of complicating matters?

Finally, there were three of us on somewhere like a motorway services or airport concourse. We’d booked a room in a hotel on site. We found the hotel, which was enormous, by far the largest I had ever seen, but we couldn’t find the entrance. After walking all the way round, we found the entrance and found that we had room n°80. We set out to find the room, walking through crowds of people, several bars and so on, down several series of steps one after the other, until we came to a series of what looked like bathrooms. Even then, right at the end we still hadn’t found the bathroom for n°80,but there was another door with several more bathrooms beyond, and maybe n°80 was through there. But even so, we were still nowhere near finding our hotel room in this labyrinth.

This is a place that we have visited on several occasions during the night too. And dreams about hotels seem to be commonplace these days. I wonder why. Am I missing the fact that I’m not going away at all these days? And yet another dilemma?

Isabelle the nurse came round later to deal with my legs and to give me my injection. She tells me that it’s another one of the “injections of last resort” as I used to have all those years ago. It seems that we really have gone round full-circle.

She also seems to think that it’s a good idea to go to Rennes for chemotherapy rather than Paris. So does everyone, a sit happens, which is a change to find so many people agreeing with me.

After she left, I could make breakfast and then, now that I’m alone, go back to reading THE SURVEY OF LONDON.

There’s a beautiful example of the confusion caused by the calculation of the “old year” of the Julian calendar. Our author, John Stow, has been talking about the Rebellion of Thomas Wyatt.

He tells us that Wyatt and his men marched on London on 3rd February 1553. However, under the old calendar with the New Year beginning on 26th March in those days. In modern times the march on London has been dated as 3rd February 1554 because of the change of the date of the New Year to 1st January.

Back in here afterwards, I vegetated around for quite a while, chatting to my cleaner on the internet as she was doing a couple of laps around LeClerc.

When she returned, she came with a pile of shopping that she had found for me, including a shed-load of vegan cheese. Also two litres of olive oil on special offer at €13:20, a price that you won’t find bettered anywhere else.

This afternoon, I did something that I should have done a couple of months ago and filled in my tax return. This involves printing off a pile of supporting documents and luckily, my printer seems to be working properly for the moment. However, the ink is running low and we shall have to see if it continues to like these ersatz ink cartridges.

There were a few other letters to write. I’d been letting the correspondence run astray for a few weeks and it needed bringing up to date. No time like the present, before it goes completely out of hand.

For a change, there is some good news too. The plumber tells me that he’s coming to start work on Thursday, and won’t that be nice if he does? And not only that, the kitchen-fitter is starting on Wednesday next week and the way his programme is panning out, he thinks that he’ll be finished by the end of the month.

And so this move might be on much earlier than I thought. At least, I shall move my bedroom and office downstairs as soon as it’s possible. The rest can follow when there are people available to bring it.

As seems to be the case these days, I didn’t feel much like eating anything. However, I can’t go on not eating anything so I made a small about of stuffing and prepared a taco roll with some rice and veg. Even though there wasn’t much, it was still a struggle to push it all down.

And as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, if I’m off my food, then there’s really something wrong with me. I’ve been off my food ever since chemotherapy, and I wonder if my appetite will return before the next session. If not, I can see a huge load of complications arising.

So now that I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed. I’m restarting work tomorrow, and it’s also shower day, at long last. A good scrub will do me a lot of good.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about my namesake the mathematician … "well, one of us has" – ed … he is actually famous for other things. And another poem has been written about him.
"A mathematician named Hall
Went to a fancy-dress ball
He thought he would risk it
And went as a biscuit
But a dog ate him up, crumbs and all."

Monday 30th June 2025 – WE ARE NOW …

… alone, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and me.

At lunchtime, The Hound of the Baskervilles dragged his master off into the sunset and the last that I heard, they were sitting in a hotel in Le Mans eating plastic pizza, ready to go for a blast down the Mulsanne Straight first thing tomorrow morning.

It’ll take me a while now to adapt to the quiet in the apartment and my accustomed solitude.

There was plenty of solitude in my bedroom last night, although I didn’t notice it. By the time that I’d finished my notes and gone through the usual routine, it was 22:30 when I finally crawled into bed, dead to the World, and I remember nothing whatsoever after that.

It was about 06:15 when I awoke this morning, with no memory of anything that might (or might not) have occurred during the night. There was nothing on the dictaphone either, so I took advantage of the situation by reviewing the radio programme for the coming weekend and sending it off.

Round about 07:00 everyone else began to stir so I went to join them in the living room after having had a good wash and shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon.

We sat around chatting and drinking coffee for a while until the nurse came to see me. It’s the last day of his round today – tomorrow Isabelle the Nurse begins her round so he reminded me to tell her about the injections that start tomorrow. I can tell that he was pleased that he doesn’t have to do them.

The Hound of the Baskervilles dragged his master off for walkies and I stayed around to sort out a few things. When they returned, we had breakfast and then my friend packed away all of his gear into the car ready to leave.

My cleaner turned up as usual to fit my patches but spent more time saying goodbye to the Hound of the Baskervilles than she did attending to me.

After she left, we did a quick lap around the apartment to make sure that there was nothing left behind, and then we went downstairs to wait for the taxi.

It was my favourite driver today, which was nice, so we said goodbye to everyone and the two of us set off for Avranches.

Just for a change, we were early although it took quite a while to be coupled up. It was Alexi, the baby of the team, who dealt with me today. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her so we had a really good chat to catch up with events.

She told me that she’d just come back from holiday – in Japan – and that her father had bought her an olive tree for the garden at her new house now that she’s finished arranging it.

The bizarre news is that although it’s evident that I have some water retention, the amount of weight to be lost was “nil”. This lack of appetite seems to be having a good effect on my weight.

Alexi set it to 350 grams all the same, but when the doctor came by, he set it to 1kg, so Alexi came back to set it to 1,200. If I can push ahead, I will.

While he was here, I spoke to the doctor about the chemotherapy.

He thinks that fifteen sessions is far too many, so I asked him what he thought about going to the University Hospital at Rennes for the chemotherapy.

They could do the Retuximab at Avranches, but not the overnight chemotherapy. However he seems to know for a fact that they would do it all at Rennes.

The way I see it, it’s four hours in a car to Paris, four hours back that’s killing me off, on top of the treatment itself which is vicious, and the climb up the stairs here which, I hope, will soon be a thing of the past.

The idea about going to Rennes is that it’s only 90 minutes away so it’s far less travelling time. Then, if I’m really feeling dreadful, I can stay for a Wednesday night to recover and then come back on Thursday. And as Avranches is in between Granville and Rennes, I could be thrown out at Avranches for my dialysis on the way past.

That makes much more sense to me.

That’s how the doctor sees it too, and he told me to chat to them at the hospital in Paris about it when I go back for the next session.

Alexi unplugged me and compressed my implant, and when I weighed myself, I was the lowest weight that I have been for several years – only 700 grams above my “non-sporting” target weight and only 5.7 kilos above my athletic weight.

Alexi accompanied me to the taxi to hand the driver my bag, and I was disappointed that I couldn’t persuade her to come home with me to pander to my every whim. "I’ve too much work to do" she said, which I suspected was something of a cop-out.

The driver who brought me home was the one who spends all this time texting on his ‘phone as he drives. He’s going to come a nasty cropper one of these days, and I hope that it’s not when I’m in the car.

My cleaner was waiting for me back here, and she helped me stagger up the stairs into my apartment, and I have never felt less like doing it than today. It took me a whole half-hour to come round afterwards.

Although I wasn’t feeling hungry, I thought that I’d better eat something so I made a handful of pasta with veg and a vegan burger. And it was a struggle to force it all down, even though there wasn’t a lot of it.

So right now, early as it may be, I’m off to bed to sleep the Sleep of the Dead. I need it tonight.

But seeing as we have been talking about losing weight … "well, one of us has" – ed … a girl from Crewe went to the dietician to talk about losing weight.
The dietician told her "it’s not really a problem. Just take three sesame biscuits with a cup of mint tea at mealtimes."
And so the girl goes off home but half an hour later she rings up the dietician
"These sesame biscuits and cup of mint tea" she said. "Do I take them before or after the meals?"

Sunday 29th June 2025 – EVEN THOUGH IT’S …

… still quite early, I’m going to write up my notes and go to bed. I’ve had a really tiring day today.

Not that you would think so after last night. I sprinted through my notes, my statistics and my back-up and was in bed by 22:45 which made a lovely change. And there I lay, fast asleep, until about 06:20 – one of the longest and deepest sleeps that I have had for a while.

By about 06:30 I was at my desk working, feeling much better than I have done since the chemotherapy and that was at least some kind of good news.

The first thing that I did was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. We had to go to inspect some kind of shopping mall in a town centre. We went to have a look at it, but the inspection had to take place on the roof. We climbed up onto the roof and were walking around inspecting it. It was the first time that we had been on the roof of this place. You could see for miles and miles, with all of the plants and greenery in the distance and the hills and their outlines on the horizon. It was a wonderful view that I’d never seen before. There were some trees or little shrubs that were growing on the top. Someone broke off one of the berries, the little berries that were really hard, and tried to eat it. They said that they were some kind of stupefiants. This whole place was covered in stupefiants. We couldn’t believe it at first but this person was totally convinced of it. As we walked along, we found that what we were supposed to be doing was checking the roof of this because the shopping mall had come back into use after a while of being closed. Some big store had taken it over. The reason why they wanted a shopping mall outside was because they could have a really big opening party. So we walked along the roof and we worked out that where the biggest tree was growing was where this shop’s unit was. So someone walked along with a kind-of ball on a chain rather like a medieval military one-handed flail, and was banging on the side of this shopping mall until someone down below told him that we had reached the correct place. That was when we stopped

Even now, I can still see the view from on top of this roof. It reminded me vaguely in some ways of the view from the top of Mount Royal at the back of Montréal looking towards the Appalachian Mountains and the US border to the south. But as for anything in the actual dream itself, there is no significance at all.

There was also some kind of dream that involved some kind of panic. All of a sudden, instructions were given out to these people that they had to go home. They had to take a main-line train, not a branch line train nor a tram nor anything like that, and they should run now. So all these people began to run. As they ran past where we were standing, we could see that they were all small elves of the kind who would be working in Santa’s grotto. We were wondering what this was all about because we had heard nothing about this other than what had been said just now in the street.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few years ago a couple of us from the radio visited Santa’s grotto to interview the elves. And had they been warned in advance, I’m sure that they would all have run away in a panic.

People began to move around in the living room at about 07:45 so I went for a good wash and scrub up ready to join them and have a coffee.

The nurse turned up to do his stuff and after he left, the Hound of the Baskervilles dragged his master off for walkies and I went to watch the football.

First match was the highlights of a friendly between Ayr United and TNS. And I have a feeling that it’s going to be a long, cold autumn in Europe for TNS, the way that their full-backs were torn to shreds by the Ayr United wingers. Anyone from a JD Cymru League who saw that game will dash out immediately to try to sign two speedy wingers before the transfer window closes.

The second game was Stranraer in a friendly against Irvine Meadow FC. Packed with trialisis, the Stranraer team ran out 4–2 winners quite comfortably although with the gulf in league positions, it was only to be expected.

What was worrying about this was, despite a new central defence, the ease in which the Irvine attackers were winning the ball in the air. "Here we go again!" I thought.

When the Hound of the Baskervilles and his master came back, my faithful cleaner descended with a cake. It’s my friend’s birthday so we thought that we’d give him a little celebration.

Although I was feeling a little better, I didn’t feel like much breakfast but I forced some down and after a rest, we went out for a drive.

Our route took us past the nuclear waste disposal place at Cap de la Hague and then down to the port to see the famous revolving lifeboat house that we had visited FIVE YEARS AGO. We found a place that sold fish and chips so my friend had fish and chips and I had some chips.

On the way back, we passed by Dielette and its ferry terminal and then the failed nuclear reactor at Flamanville, passing by some beautiful coves and bays. The sun came up as the day drew on and we had a lovely time.

Unfortunately, my little renaissance couldn’t keep going and I began to fade away quite rapidly. It took an age to haul myself up the stairs into here, and then I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything. And if I’m off my food, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I really am ill.

So I’ll finish my notes, back up, do the statistics and then go to bed, to see if I feel any better in the morning.

But seeing as we have been driving past the Cap de le Hague nuclear waste plant and the failed Flamanville reactor … "well, one of us has" – ed … at the little beachside café they asked my friend what he would like to eat.
"I’ll have fish and chips" he replied
"We don’t do that here" the cook replied
"Do you have anything similar?" asked my friend
"What we do have around here that is similar" said the cook "is what is called ‘fission chips’. Will that do?"

Saturday 28th June 2025 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about this weight gain thing on Thursday.

The doctor seemed to think that there was something dramatically wrong with my metabolism that had caused the weight gain, and wanted me to come in early today for a four-and-a-half hour session to try to bring it under control.

On the other hand, I don’t know what she was expecting, but if you have 2 litres of chemotherapy fluid pumped into you, then your weight will naturally increase, but nature will take care of that over time. That was my opinion.

Anyway, what do I know about it all? I’m just a mere patient, so I bowed to her superior wisdom. I didn’t have any choice.

But anyway, last night, what with one thing and another, and once you make a start you have no idea how many other things there are, it was almost 01:00 when I finally made it into bed. It was not a very successful night either, because I spent much of what there was, tossing and turning about trying to make myself comfortable

Round about 05:42 I gave up the struggle to go back to sleep. There was this disgusting taste in my mouth (it’s still there by the way) and, as usual, I was feeling quite dreadful. It took about ten minutes to rise to my feet and had I had my way, it would have taken a lot longer.

The first thing to do was to transcribe the dictaphone notes from last night. I was back in Paris last night, preparing myself for another session of dialysis at the hospital. Fortunately the dream didn’t last long because I managed to awaken quite quickly but it really would have been my nightmare, I suppose if it had gone very further but luckily I awoke before the dream had progressed very much into it

Then I was preparing to go to dialysis again. I had organised my session for 12:00 so the taxi came and picked me up to run me down to the centre. There, sitting in the trees was a parrot that was clutching one of my large peppers. I thought to myself that I’d hoped that I’d ordered some peppers from the supermarket this week so that I’d still have some for next week

Finally, I was back in dialysis yet again. They were going to couple me up to the machine. My body weight was quite light there but they had this huge, heavy ball of things. I had a feel of it and it was really heavy and they told me that this was the amount of water that they had to take out of me today. It was enormous. Once again it was at that moment when I awoke.

There isn’t anything of the foregoing – the trip to Paris, the dialysis, the pepper from the supermarket, the rapid panic-awakenings to cancel out the dreams; that needs any explanation at all. Neither does the fact that it’s all preying on my mind when I’m supposed to be asleep and relaxing.

It seemed to be a rather late awakening for everyone this morning. Almost 08:00 when I heard signs of stirring coming from the kitchen, so I staggered off to the bathroom for a wash and brush up.

As you might expect at moments like this, the nurse arrived early today. He caught me in flagrante delicto and had to wait around for a few minutes while I finished whatever I was doing.

After he left, we had a coffee and then I made a little breakfast. I would ordinarily have done without this morning seeing how I was feeling, but they would only go berserk at the dialysis centre when they check my diabetes level.

One thing that I wanted to do was to write out my letter of notice for this apartment. I know that I said that I wouldn’t run the risk of the one downstairs not being finished. However, as I said yesterday, I can’t go on much longer like this, and I’ve lived in worse circumstances than what there would be down there, even with no kitchen. I’ll manage much better down there as things are rather than continue to struggle on trying to climb up here.

All of this called for more coffee (well, I didn’t) and a chat until my faithful cleaner came, earlier than usual because of my extended appointment, to fit my patches and to have a chat.

At 12:30 we went downstairs to meet the taxi driver, whom we met at the foot of the stairs just as he was about to come up, so we were away quite quickly. We picked up our other usual Saturday passenger and then I slept all the way down to Avranches. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … sleep is my “doliprane”.

For a change, I was one of the first to be coupled up. It was Anaïs and Océane who dealt with me today and Océane held my hand again. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I don’t know what she is after, but I don’t have it any more.

But I’m not going to complain under any circumstances. She can hold my hand as much as she likes … "and so can Anaïs, Alexi, Julie the Cook, Justine, Héloise, Amandine etc etc" – ed …

When they weighed me, they found that there was just 1.8kg to lose today, well within my three-and-a-half hour limit.
"But the doctor said four and a half" said Océane.
"The doctor doesn’t know what she’s talking about " I replied.

In the end, we agreed on a compromise of four hours.

However, when the doctor in charge came round, he took one look at the figures and reduced the time to three and a half hours.

This meant that I would have been able to be home early, and had the taxi been there instead of twenty minutes late, I would have been. Instead, we had to fight our way through all of the crowds going to the start of the town’s 10km road race just round the corner from here.

It was another struggle up to my little apartment, but at least my friend made me some tea, which was very nice.

We had a play with this recording desk afterwards, and then I sat down to write my notes for the day.

Now that they are done, I’m off to bed, and I can’t say that I’m not sorry. I’m still suffering the effects of the chemotherapy and I’m going to have to do something about it.

But seeing as we have been talking about losing weight … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of a girl from Crewe whom I knew who wanted to lose weight.
The dietician told her "it’s simple really – just eat normally for two days, skip a day and then eat for two days, skip a day and so on"
After a couple of weeks the dietician sees the girl from Crewe and asks "how’s it going?"
"I had to stop" replied the girl from Crewe
"Why was that?" asked the dietician
"On the sixth day I wore out the rope."

Friday 27th June 2025 – I AM ACHING …

… and breaking and I don’t kno … errr … in just about everywhere that it is possible to ache, and i’m feeling dreadful.

In LORD OF THE RINGS Frodo Baggins said that he felt "all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread."

And the way that I feel today, I know exactly what he meant and how he must have been feeling.

He went on to say "That can’t be right. I need a change, or something". And he was right – it can’t be right. I need a change, but how on earth do you manage to do that when you can’t walk or drive and every two or three days you need to go for a painful three-and-a-half hour session of dialysis.

There have been three things that have triggered off this current depression .

The fact that I am aching all over, absolutely everywhere and it’s becoming a nightmare to move
That the creatinine amount on my bloodstream has only reduced to 406 after nine months of dialysis (the critical limit is about 80).
Speaking to the nice receptionist at the taxi company this afternoon, the doctor dealing with my chemotherapy has asked for authorisation for no fewer than FIFTEEN trips to Paris and back

One of these trips and one of these sessions is more than enough. I am simply not going to survive another fourteen of them. And if next time I have the same kind of interaction with certain members of staff that I had this time, it will be the last time for sure. As has been attributed without positive proof to many theatrical personalities, "I’m too old, I’m too tired and I’m too talented to care" any more.

There is at least a positive side to all of this in that with another fourteen trips to Paris in the pipeline, the taxi company will be doing its best to keep on my good side.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, I was in bed long before 20:00 last night, curled up under the covers and dead to the World.

At one point I do have some vague memory of the Hound of the Baskervilles yowling and barking some little yelps during the night, obviously having some sweet dreams himself, but that’s about it. I eventually awoke at 4:42, drenched in sweat yet again which was rather unfortunate as I still had on my day clothes, as I discovered.

By 4:52 I was already at the desk writing out the notes from yesterday and it took me quite a while to do so, firstly because there was so much to write and secondly because it was so hard to motivate myself, as usual.

Once the notes were finished, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Later on … "later on from when?" – ed … I was being ill and so I decided that I was going to go home. My cleaner decided to come with me. There were quite a few of us in the car. We arrived at Davenport Avenvue and we all piled out. I went straight upstairs and my cleaner followed. Where these other people were staying was in one of the bedrooms and I pointed it out to them. I noticed that someone had painted the bathroom door and it looked really nice. I went into my bedroom, which was right down at the end of some kind of kinked corridor as at the hospital in Paris just now where I prepared myself ready to go to bed. As I climbed into bed, my cleaner came in. She was in her night attire too. She handed my ‘phone to me, saying that she didn’t know how these people had found my number – or her number … fell asleep here … So anyway, as I was about to climb into bed she handed me the telephone and said “I don’t know how these people have my ‘phone number”. I took it and answered, and it was the dialysis centre saying that they needed to have a talk with me about this afternoon. I waited and waited and waited but they didn’t answer at all so in the end I hung up. My cleaner told me that it wasn’t a very intelligent thing to do, to hang up on the dialysis centre but I said that I didn’t want to hang around in my nightclothes for very long at all. I wanted to be in bed.

And that is exactly how I’m feeling right now. I couldn’t care less about the dialysis centre, I couldn’t care less about the chemotherapy, I couldn’t care less about anything any more. I just want to go to bed and sleep.

Did I dictate the dream about my brother coming up to stay with me … "no you didn’t" – ed … We were talking about doing something or going somewhere so I asked him if I needed a car. He said that he needed one for the Sunday and to drop off a few other things on the Saturday. I thought that I’d arrange to hire a sports car for the weekend and we’d have some fun with it. We began to make our plans about where we were going and what we were doing but we had to wait around for a while for some reason or other. The next thing that I knew was that I found myself in bed. My brother was asleep in a bed in the same room, and when he awoke, he told me that he’d been vomiting through the night so I had to go to fetch some kitchen towels or something to clean things up. I asked him how he was and he replied that he was feeling much better but nevertheless, our plans were going to be changing. Because of this, I had a feeling that if I didn’t begin to exercise myself and have things done today we’d end up without a car at the weekend and that would be complicated

This isn’t like our family at all. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we are well-known for not being willing to share so much as a bus shelter in the middle of a monsoon with each other.

There was another dream too about being in Montréal. I was there with Nerina and we were talking to someone who was telling us certain things but I can’t remember now, but I remember saying that this is the fault with non-urban people, that they have a different outlook and a different approach to life. They can’t see things in the same way as everyone else, to which they agreed. I told Nerina about the woman whom I’d met in Labrador back in 2010 and with whom I’d kept in contact for a while until she moved to Toronto and I can’t remember any more about this particular dream.

One place to which I never took Nerina was to Montreal. I talked to her once about going to North America but she wasn’t impressed so I never mentioned it again. Canada was actually my preferred destination as a bolt-hole when my past began to catch up with me but Diplomatic Immunity in Belgium was a pretty good choice when that job came up. I still preen myself with pride … "show-off!" – ed … when I think that there were seventy-eight of us who sat that first exam in London for just one vacancy.

A friend of mine had a job as a house painter, to paint someone’s house. The house was in Ightfield, near Whitchurch. He asked me if I’d run him for his second day of work. I’d had a really bad night of sleep but nevertheless, when he came round at something like 08:00 on a Sunday, I took him out there. We found the house, so we pulled up outside it. It was a very narrow road. he took about five minutes to try to exit the van, saying that it was all muddy where we had stopped so in the end I had to move into the middle of the road and let him out there to fetch all of his things. Of course, with the road being narrow and me being in the middle of the road, a big lorry appeared so I had to move off quite quickly and swing into a side street to look for a parking place. There was a pub, so I drove into the pub. There were loads of people in there. I backed up against the pub wall on the inside, and climbed out of the van on my crutches and went to fetch the key to lock the doors. I suddenly realised that i’d left the keys in the back door. I’d backed the van right up against the wall so I couldn’t reach the key and I couldn’t start the van to move it because of course the key was in the back door. I was scratching my head thinking “how am I going to find my way out of this one? I seem to have made a huge mess of parking this van up. What was I going to do now?”.

Astute readers will be asking themselves the same question that I did when I transcribed the notes for this particular dream. Namely “if you drove the van into the pub and backed it up against the wall, you must have used an ignition key that is not stuck in the back door of the van, so why don’t you use that?”.

By about 7:30 everyone else had arisen from the Dead so we all gathered in the kitchen and had coffee and a chat. And my friend showed me a lovely ‘photo of an invalid scooter with a Kawasaki 900cc 4-cylinder transverse engine. I was sorely tempted until I noticed in the comments that someone was trying to work on fitting a V8 engine in one. I’ll wait and see how that pans out.

The nurse came round as usual, and if ever proof were needed that he doesn’t listen to a word that anyone says, we had
"How are you today? Was it OK at dialysis?"
"Not at all. My fever reached 38°C, coagulated the blood in the needles and they had to stop the session."
"And did you sleep well?"

After he left, we had breakfast and then set to work. We emptied the big glass-fronted wardrobe by the door that blocks the draughts. We turned it round to face the room and took several photos.

There is no place for it in the new apartment so it’s being sold. My friend, who has known me and my habits for sixty years told me to “put it online right now or else it will never be sold” so I advertised that and the kitchen units that I never used after buying them a few years ago. You can see the adverts HERE.

After all of that, we sat and chatted for quite a while and then my faithful cleaner came along and chased us out of the apartment while she did her stuff. We went downstairs and changed over the doors on the new fridge-freezer.

And that was an engineering job too, not at all simple. The two of us figured it out in the end because in some places the destructions were not at all clear. It took an age to do it and, as usual, we ended up with a screw left over.

After that, we went for a walk outside but by now the Black Dog was beginning to make its appearance. I was tired, I was aching and I was beginning to feel dreadful again.

Climbing back up these stairs was a Herculean effort and once I’d sat down, I had a really hard time standing up again. Tea was baked potatoes with a mixture of leftovers from out of the fridge with a sachet of vegan mince thrown in. And you can tell that I’m not feeling well at all because I’m still off my food. I didn’t feel like very much at all.

Now it’s bedtime and I just want to go to sleep. I don’t care about anything else any more, but I do know that I won’t be able to manage another fourteen of these chemotherapy sessions at this rate. I was looking back at my blog entries from when the Mapthera began, and it didn’t look very positive. I was hospitalised on several occasions after a dosage. And I was younger and fitter then, too.

But seeing as we have been talking about painters … "well, one of us has" – ed … my painter friend was asked to go and put two coats of light green all-weather matt paint on the porch at some rich person’s house.
When the guy cane back, he asked my friend "have you finished that paint job?"
"Yes I have" He replied. "But it’s not a porch, it’s a Ferrari".

Thursday 26th June 2025 – REGULAR READERS OF …

… this rubbish will recall that I usually upload my daily notes round about 23:00 (Central European Time) or thereabouts just before I climb up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire.

And so those of you who pass by during the night (because, of course, the time in Australia, Canada, the USA and other places where some of my regular readers hang out is totally different) will have come here in vain, and for that, I apologise.

The fact is that by 23:00 I had been in bed for at least three hours. We’d had yet another “health issue”. And now I’m beginning to understand why, when they sent me to the Universitair Ziekenhuis Leuven in 2016 for the first round of chemotherapy, they insisted that I stay within arm’s reach of the hospital and in a hostel where, at least, breakfast would be provided so that I would be assured of at least one meal per day, if I were too ill to make myself some food.

There was absolutely no indication this morning of any of this (or, rather, yesterday morning, but let’s not let ourselves be carried away with semantics here).

It was, as usual, a late night as I seem to have lost all of my motivation for pressing on for an early finish. However, for the first time since I don’t know when, miserable failure that I am, I was still asleep when the alarm went off at 06:30. And it took me a good ten minutes to find the energy to throw back the covers and rise up.

Whatever went on yesterday must have totally worn me out and I can see me being like this for the next couple of weeks … "prophetic words, those" – ed …

When I awoke, I had a thirst that you could photograph and an incredibly dry throat. And no water in my room. Whatever I’d brought in here last night I’d drunk before going to bed. And so this is going to be a real problem if it carries on.

The pain in my foot is still there. It’s becoming beyond a joke and I’m going to have to grab hold of the neurologist to see exactly what they intend to do about it, seeing as I’ve mentioned it in passing on several occasions and no-one seems to be taking any interest at all in it.

The first task was to check the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I was doing something at work, looking for an address for a guy called “Address”. I couldn’t find one anywhere so in the end I wrote to him at the address that I had for him. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I found out that his name was “Naddress” beginning with an “N”. Once I’d found out exactly his real name I then went and found his address so I thought that I was going to have to start this all over again. Then one of my colleagues from work came over and asked if I’d found anything for this “Address” person. For some reason I didn’t want to say that it was a mistake so I just said that I’d sent a letter out to whatever address that I had. She decided that she would do the same. I thought that I really ought to tell them the exact position and save everyone else a lot of work but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

So here I am, dithering about once more, trying my best to make a simple job turn into something much more complicated than it ought to be. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that seems to be the story of my life.

It might have been something of a lie-in for me, and it seemed to be for everyone else too because it was 07:30 when we all assembled in the kitchen for morning coffee. My taste buds are still distorted after that last bout of illness and so I’m having what they call, a café allongée – half coffee, half boiling water.

A café allongée is still stronger than the kind of coffee that you find served up in petrol stations in the USA. I remember the first time that they gave me a complimentary coffee at an American petrol station. "What do I do with this?" I asked. "Wash the car’s windscreen?"

However, I digress… "yet again" – ed …

The nurse came along, having ‘phoned to see if I were back (despite me telling him that he should come on Thursday as usual jusqu’à nouvel ordre). I told him the bad news, which was that starting on day 6 after my chemotherapy, there will be a series of injections to carry out for a week.

He didn’t seem impressed at all, as I expected, until he realised that it would be his oppo, Isabelle the Nurse, whose tournée it all fell into.

For a change, I wasn’t feeling like breakfast (and if I’m off my food, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I really am ill) I still felt that I ought to eat something, otherwise the diabetic register reading (as if I don’t have enough medical problems) will be below the floor and that will lead to many more problems at dialysis.

So half a bowl of porridge and a thin slice of toast found its way down. And, as subsequent events were to reveal, I’m glad that they did.

We’ve run out of bread again, (at least, I thought that we had) so I kneaded some dough for a sunflower-seed loaf and set it to bake when it was ready.

In between everything, in view of the fact that the freezer up here is full to the brim and has been since eternity, we sorted through it and chose a pile of stuff that could go downstairs into the new freezer, seeing as it has now been plugged in for a couple of days. We may as well see how it works, and take the opportunity to try it out.

That was when we found three well-frozen lumps of bread in the freezer

And that reminds me – we have to change the doors over on it because they are the wrong way round, hinged to the right instead of hinged to the left as I would like them to be.

My cleaner turned up rather later than usual to fit my anaesthetic patches, and so obviously the taxi turned up much earlier than it should.

My arrival at Avranches was much earlier than my appointment so I had to hang around for a while, but it was a combination of Justine and Julie the Cook who coupled me up, and it was one of the most painless that I have ever had. "fait avec l’amour" – “done with love” they said, and now I really am becoming worried, what with the secretary at the hospital the other day too.

When they had weighed me, they found that I was the heaviest that I had been for a while, which was no surprise with the two litres of liquid that they had pumped into my veins at Paris. And so they told me that I had to stay for four hours today. That was disappointing, but not unexpected.

The doctor on duty was the one with whom I had the argument the other week. She came and took my papers from Paris to go through them, and asked me several questions. She seemed to be quite satisfied, and then I could press on and work, preparing an order for LeClerc as we are getting through the supplies quite rapidly.

But I didn’t work for long.

After about two hours, I began to shake, shiver and tremble, and went deathly cold. And shortly afterwards, my machine’s alarm began to wail. The wailing went on intermittently for a while, with nurses coming to check and to switch off the alarm – until after about three hours, it shuddered to a halt.

That brought all the nurses running. Apparently, I’d been having a fever, my temperature had soared to 38°C (just 0.3°C below the critical limit when they have to summon the emergency services) and the blood in the needles had coagulated, blocking the circulation.

After a lengthy discussion with the doctor, they decided to stop the procedure and send me home (not that it would be any earlier, what with all of the discussions). “Could I come back on Saturday much earlier and have a session of four and a half hours?”.

Well, if I must, I must, I suppose.

It goes without saying that I was asked the six-million dollar question "would you like a doliprane?"

The taxi to pick me up hadn’t arrived so I had to wait ten minutes, during which period I saw Emilie the Cute Consultant. But she clearly doesn’t love me any more (in contrast with Justine, Julie the Cook and the secretary at Paris) because she found the greatest difficult in mumbling a bonjour. Nothing like our intimate chats last year in hospital, with her perched coyly on the edge of my bed. How times have changed!

Back here, I had a great deal of difficulty hauling myself up the stairs and into the apartment. And then into bed, with no food and no disgusting drink to console me. All I wanted to do was to sleep. Sleep is my “doliprane” – the miraculous cure for everything.

But seeing as we have been talking about my high temperature … "well, one of us has" – ed … when they were feeling my forehead, they mentioned to the doctor that my temperature was raging out of control.
"Well, don’t just stand there!" said the doctor. "Go and fetch the kettle! I could really do with a cuppa right now.".

Wednesday 25th June 2025 – I WAS NOT …

… alone!

And when they send me the bill for the €20:00 for the subsistence, I shall only pay half and the mouse that I saw at 05:25 eating the crumbs on the floor when I awoke can pay the rest.

What surprised me particularly was not so much the mouse but the nonchalant attitude of the staff when I told them, as if “we’ve heard it all and seen it all before”. One member of staff (the male nurse with whom I’d had that huge argument last night) even tried to chase it away into someone else’s room rather than try to eradicate it.

So now my mind is made up. When I move downstairs I am definitely going to have a cat – a female cat – and the problem with what to do with it when I’m in hospital is resolved because I shall bring it with me. It can have free board and lodging.

And if anyone tells me that animals aren’t allowed into hospitals …

So, retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, the intravenous drip went on until about 03:00, with me trying to sleep and every half an hour or so a nurse coming to check and awakening me

When they finally disconnected me, I could at last have some proper sleep, which I did until all of 05:20, which was when I saw the mouse.

As I said earlier, it was the nonchalant attitude of the staff that surprised me the most. They seemed to think that it was quite a normal thing to have a mouse in their hospital. I wasn’t impressed, though.

After they left, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. While I was having a brief doze I saw a couple of heavy lorries go past with huge, heavy trailers on the back. From one of them, the trailer broke away and 100 yards further on the heavy metal container body on the lorry full of scrap metal or something also fell off. The trailer careered off down a side street and I remember thinking to myself “so that was the end of Mike’s Music Shop in Edleston Road”.

There used to be a music shop in Edleston Road – it moved there from Nantwich Road several years ago. I bought a lot of stuff, including my famous Gibson EB3 bass, from there. However, one of the owners died a couple of years ago so I don’t know if the shop is still there.

Later on; I ended up having a row with a nurse during a dream last night. He wanted to couple me up to a drip-feed thing in a very complicated way that I was sure wasn’t right. When he came to work on it, he found that he had to make the cables longer so he pulled on the cables and that nearly pulled the catheter out of my arm. When I shouted at him to stop he made something of a face and we had something of an argument … fell asleep here …

And fell asleep for two hours and eight minutes, so the dictaphone’s timestamp told me. And I’ve seen enough of these couplings-up to a Portable Patient these last ten or so years to know how it’s done and to know if it’s not done correctly. But clearly, that row last night must have been on my mind.

They had coupled the machine incorrectly, and ended up with pipes looking like a plate of spaghetti, all tangled up in each other rather than a nice flowing series of pipes; And the fact that they were all tangled together was the root of this argument, when he pulled on one and it pulled all the others

Breakfast (for me, anyway) came at 09:10 this morning and when I finished, and I wasn’t in the mood to eat all of it they coupled up the chemotherapy stuff.

And round about 10:00 the side effects began. I began to shiver and shake, I went deathly cold and a huge wave of fatigue swept over me. There’s only one cure for this – I went to bed, under the bedclothes to keep warm.

The nurses and the doctor were frantic with worry but I know about this kind of thing and I know the best cure is to sleep it off. They were having none of it though, and insisted on taking tests and measurements

There was also, as you might be expecting, the "would you like a doliprane?"

Round about 11:30 they finally got the message and cleared off, except for the cleaner and the nursing assistant who brought me my lunch, which I refused.

With the taxi coming at 14:30, I left the bed at 14:00, still feeling shaky, and packed my bags. And then went back to sleep.

The taxi arrived at 15:30 and as I was feeling a little better, I walked to the car, refusing the wheelchair, and settled myself down in a comfortable position.

The driver has taken me before, and he’s a nice, friendly guy so we had a little chat as we drove out of Paris. For once, the traffic circulation was fairly fluid so we would make good time

Once we were on the motorway I fell asleep and slept all the way to Caen, except for dealing with messages from my friend ond my faithful cleaner about my kitchen, which has arrived at last. I mentioned to the kitchen fitter that it had arrived, so he’s going to start work on his next free day, which might be some time at the end of next week.

He’s also been to another store and found what he needs from there and has negotiated a good price so he’ll be bringing all of that after I’ve paid for it.

When I awoke we were going round the north side of Caen. My driver reckons that it’s quicker at this time of afternoon and he was probably right too because we arrived back at home after just four hours of travel And we were greeted by a rainstorm of tropical proportions.

The boxes of kitchen stuff look impressive in the new apartment. I can’t wait for them to be opened and assembled. And then I climbed up here, feeling a little better than just recently, despite the pain in my foot that has now gone off to the back of the base of my little toe and in my heel since the Retuximab.

My friend had made some food to eat which was nice of him, and now I’ve come to write my notes before I go to bed.

But seeing as we have been talking about this pain in my foot… "well, one of us has" – ed … one of the nurses asked me "have you ever thought about acupuncture to solve the pain?"
"Yes I have as it happens" I replied "but I just didn’t get the point of it."

Tuesday 24th June 2025 – THEY WERE WAITING …

… for me when I arrived, all lined up at the door. And before I’d even sat down on the bed they had pounced. It was like being a staggering wildebeest, beset with vultures.

And the worst part of all about it was when they mentioned the ponction lumbaire. That was when I knew that I was in for a difficult time.

There was something of a difficult time last night when, due to my dilatory habits, I didn’t finish my notes until midnight or so, and it was certainly later than that when I finally made it into bed.

Once in bed, I had a very peaceful night until about 05:20 when I awoke with another one of these dramatic awakenings, and by 05:45 I was hard at it at me desk.

As usual the first thing that I had to do was to transcribe my dictaphone notes; And I must have travelled miles last night. I was somewhere in rural France last night and came across a market. It turned out to be an autojumble of all kinds of bits and pieces. I went to stand in the queue to be served but no-one was serving really. There were all these dummies dressed up as people, and balloons painted with people’s faces painted on them, but there were no real servers. It was really ghostly and eerie. I walked around a little and found myself in one of the back rooms where I met a girl coming out towards the door. I asked her if she had an engine for a Panther. She said that she didn’t. I said that that was a shame because I was desperately looking for an engine for my Panther. She said that they were good bikes and that I needed a good engine for it. “They are good bikes because of their caiques” which I imagined she meant “sidecars”. She said that it’s a shame that I wasn’t here years ago because there was a place down by the road out that sold all kinds of bits and pieces like that. I replied “yes, that’s where the machine mart is now, isn’t it?” but she didn’t even remember where there was a machine mart. I remembered that place even though I’d never been in this town before. She wasn’t able to help me very much about an engine for this Panther. I hadn’t actually bought the bike at that time but had seen it for sale in one of these cheap garages, the frame and running gear but without the engine.

I would have loved a Panther, a nice, big 650cc single-cylinder “sloper” but trying to find one back in the early 70s was just about impossible. I met someone much later whose husband had had two but when he died, she simply gave them away. How disappointed was I?

As for the garage though, we have been here before on a few of our nocturnal travels, and we’ve also discovered old motorbikes here and there while we’ve been out and about.

There was something about vans now, these Ford Escort vans that we use for delivery. One of these places had a fleet of them. We’d been walking through the rushes and had finally made it onto dry land. Then someone went on up the hill to have a word with these garage people to see whether one of them would come down. There was some kind of story about them only doing certain kinds of jobs and only doing them within a certain radius and not very much in Ostland so it didn’t seem to be very hopeful. people were saying that this kind of service is not very good but it’s better than the nothing that was here before. There was one of my family with us too but he or she had difficulty manoeuvring … "PERSONoeuvring" – ed … or opening and closing … fell asleep here …

This is another one of those dreams of while I have no recall or recollection whatsoever and it doesn’t seem to relate to anything except, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we had a Ford Escort van for a while, an ex-Post Office one.

I was out with a friend last night. He was taking me to somewhere with a really big secret. It was extremely complicated and he wasn’t going to tell me anything about it. We got into the car and drove. This secret rolled and rolled and rolled as we drove. We ended up near Northwich somewhere, through this industrial estate full of these tiny little business units, many of which were empty and decayed. We eventually came to one, parked up and went in. There was a guy there who was brushing it out and trying to make it tidy. It turned out that he was the owner, and he had a tenant in at the far end, the end nearer the street. he was moaning about the tenant – how the tenant wasn’t tidy, his place had turned into a mess and had some bonsai plants. The owner had given him some but he wasn’t looking after them. As we walked through the shop I could see speaker columns and PA equipment, things like that. Nearer the door was more electronic stuff. I noticed that on the window was a letter addressed to me and my friend. I said something and he replied “yes, this is to where all of the correspondence for the two of us comes” of which I knew nothing about at all. In the end, he handed me a letter that he’d picked up that was addressed to me. I opened it, and it was from the Customs and Excise people telling me that they were refusing to export my pyramids, the ones that I’d sold to someone, because there was some issue about the card, some issue about the payment and the airline company being afraid that they would break en route. It was a big disappointment that they weren’t being exported because I’d received £600 for them. It was also a disappointment because with all this secrecy, I was expecting something much more important than this. I mentioned it to my friend and he replied “oh, no. We have to keep things extremely secret. The more secret it is, the better”. We went out and climbed back into the car. I said a couple of other things and he said “well, I’m going to have to do some more of this because I have to have that £400 back that I gave you as some kind of War information service”. I was wondering what was going to happen next.

This was one of those impressive dreams that seemed to go on for ever. I wish that I could remember who my friend was in this dream. There can’t have been a choice of too many. But the industrial estate reminded me of several places in North-West USA that I’ve visited and to which I wish that I could return. However, the idea that I would be wanting to export pyramids, never mind owning a few, would be bizarre to say the least.

There was time for a quick dabble into the radio programme that I am trying to prepare, but the I had to go to organise myself ready for departure.

After a wash and brush up, I went to prepare my things ready for departure and make some sandwiches because I know all about the food in the Paris hospitals. I packed a pack of crackers and some of my home-made energy fruit bars too.

While the Hound of the Baskervilles was taking his master for walkies, the nurse came and sorted me out, and then I had a message from the taxi “there in twenty minutes”.

At the appropriate moment we went downstairs where we met our driver at the front door. She carried my bags to the car and I followed along behind and climbed in. I’d had no drink and no food – on the basis of “what doesn’t go in won’t want to come out”.

The taxi had originally been booked for 10:00 but they had rung up yesterday to change it to 09:00. And I was right about the reason too. There was someone else to pick up – a woman who lived in an apartment in the centre of Avranches who had to take her seriously-ill baby to Paris.

Once we were under way again it was a rapid drive, and one thing that I learned was that both my driver and this other passenger knew how to talk. We had a non-stop chat almost all the way.

At a Motorway Service area on the edge of the suburbs of Paris we stopped to feed and change the baby, and I hoped that she would come back with a quieter one. I stood outside in the shade and cool breeze enjoying the weather and talking to a Moroccan guy who recognised my accent and asked if I came from Belgium. It’s not by any means the first time that I’ve been taken as being from Belgium. Old accents die hard.

Back in the car we drove off and went a different way into Paris, going through some of the nicest, prettiest, flowery suburbs like Plessis, an area that I have never visited before.

At a hospital down there, we dropped off mother and baby and then drove though some more leafy suburbs to he centre of the town and the Prif to the Hopital Pitié-Salpetrière, where we arrived exactly half an hour late.

There wasn’t even time for me to sit down, never mind have a drink, before everyone pounced upon me and began to push, probe and prod me. And prepare me for the ponction lumbaire.

They have changed he internet password here so I asked the young student nurse if she could enquire after the new one.
"C’est au-delà mes compétences" – “out of my range of duties” she replied, giving her shoulders a Gallic shrug.

She won’t last five minutes on a ward with an attitude like that, if she ever qualifies.

Eventually, everyone cleared off and the cute little nursing assistant, who can soothe my fevered brow any time she likes, finally brought me a coffee.

Surprisingly, the lumbar puncture was quite painless (mind you, anything is painless after a biopsie musculaire) and it would have been even better had the doctor not given a running commentary. She got the message though when I reached for my headphones and clamped them over my ears.

"You adopted a perfect position" she said.
"Well, it’s not my first time by any means" I said. "But if you’re going to do this again, can you tattoo a target on the small of my back?"

After they all left and I was lying down recovering, the secretary came to see me. And if I’d have behaved towards a female patient as she behaved towards me, I’d have been sent down for two years. I don’t know what she was after but I don’t have it any more.

They all came back a little later to wire me up to an intravenous drip. They explained what each one was and mentioned that one of them to combat nausea.
"Oh – is tea coming soon then?" I asked.

Rosemary rang for a chat but I had to cut her short (a mere forty minutes) because tea arrived. soup, salad, a pizza slice and some fruit salad. It’s a good job that I had some fruit bars.

Later on, we had an argument. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … they prescribe Doliprane for everything here. The country is awash with it, but they are really not just scraping the bottom of the barrel but through the base and into the muck underneath when they brought me not one but two Doliprane for “something that might happen”. You can’t go any lower than that.

When I revolted … "you’re always revolting" – ed … they threatened to call the doctor but I stood my ground and they took the Doliprane away. What is the matter with everyone that they dope themselves up with paracetamol at the first sign of any discomfort?

Then they wanted to bring me a urinal. Why? Because I might need to go to the WC.
"Why can’t I go to the bathroom?" I asked.
"How will you go?"
"On my two feet of course" I replied. "How else?"
"Is it possible?"
"How do you think that I do it at home?"

So they began to position the medication tree on the far side of the bed to where my catheter is.
"You’d better put it back here, or I’ll be tangled up in it if I turn over"
"But the pipe won’t be long enough to reach"
"So why wouldn’t I unplug the machine and take it with me and let it run off the internal battery?"
"You have two crutches"
"So why don’t I use the Portable Patient as one of them?"

Life is tough. It’s a battle to survive and if you want to survive you have to fight. Opting out and giving up the fight is the quickest way to the grave. I’m convinced that in the case of a serious illness, those who are prepared to fight and struggle are the ones who have the greatest chance of survival. No-one has ever accused me of taking the easy route when there’s a more difficult route to follow … "I’ll say!" – ed …

So now, coupled up to a machine or two and a raging blood pressure of 186/106, I’m going to give up the struggle, for the night only, and go to bed if only the high blood pressure alarm would stop sounding and nurses would stop dashing in to switch it off and summoning the doctor.

And I’ll tell you something else for nothing, and that is that this male nurse and I are going to finish by having blows. He lost his temper when I stopped him from performing a task because he was tangling up the wires and pulling on my catheter.

When he came back with the doctor, I bawled him out and told him not to ever talk to me like that again. That led to a “frank exchange of views” between the doctor and me, ending with me refusing once more the Doliprane, and telling them both that my life is much more important than their medication.

If I die in six months in full activity, that suits me much more than living like a vegetable for six years stuck in a bed.
"You have a very serious illness" he said.
"And I’ve had it since 2015, and since then I’ve been to within 900 kms of the North Pole, and I’d go there and die tomorrow rather than die in bed. I’m seventy-one years old and I’m not going to live for ever, no matter what you do, so what difference does it make? I’m not going to cling on to m life by my fingertips in total agony.. "

But seeing as we have been dreaming about pyramids … "well, one of us has" – ed … I was talking to the ghost of Sir Norman Lockyer who wrote THE DAWN OF ASTRONOMY about religious sites in Egypt.
He asked me "do you know why there are pyramids in Egypt?"
"I don’t know" I replied. "Why are there pyramids in Egypt?" I asked, bitterly regretting, ten seconds later, having done so.
"It’s because they were too big to fit into the British Museum."

Monday 23rd June 2025 – I HAD A …

… special visitor during the night last night – someone who hasn’t been to see me for quite some considerable time.

But more of that anon. This time tomorrow I shall be … well … not sitting in a rainbow, but sitting in a hospital bed in Paris where they will be starting this Rituximab cancer treatment.

Or, rather, restarting it, because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that was the product (or Mabthera, a generic thereof) that they gave me right at the beginning back in February 2016 after the chemotherapy failed.

And it worked at that moment too. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I was unable to walk and so ill that I had to live with friends because I was unable to cope by myself, yet six months later I was in Canada. I’m not expecting the same miracles this time, but any little help and relief that it might give me will be most welcome.

And in other news, it looks as if this apartment move will be taking place during the week of 18th-25th of August. That seems to be when the usual suspects are collecting themselves together, and I’m recruiting further volunteers if anyone else would like to join in. All are welcome and I do not practise any kind of discrimination at all. I hate everyone equally, regardless of race, creed, colour or sexual orientation.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, had I exerted myself last night I could have been in bed well before 23:00 but as usual, dillying and dallying about, it was about 23:30 when I finally crawled in underneath the covers.

When I awoke at 05:20 I was somewhere about in the dialysis centre but whatever it was that I was doing evaporated from my mind immediately … "not that there’s much in there to hold it in" – ed … which is just as well because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I don’t like to dwell on that place when I’m not there. It’s bad enough that I do when I am.

The first task that I undertook when I finally settled down at the desk (at … errr … 05:50) was to listen to the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night. And, as I said earlier, I had a special visitor come to see me. There was a group of us in a house somewhere and who should come in but our old friend (or mine, anyway), Zero. And what a long time it’s been since she last put in an appearance. I wanted to say “hello” to her but she walked right through the front of the house all the way to the stairs. I pretended to chase after, and she saw me, let out a squeal and ran upstairs. Her mother said something about going to frighten her away and that I had to look after her at that end of the room. My brother was upstairs in his room at the time and I could hear him and Zero talking to each other. I thought “how am I going to look after Zero at this end of the room if she has already gone upstairs?”. I thought in any case that he was supposed to be busy doing some things that he needed to do rather than sit around talking, but apparently not.

So here we go again. Zero having far more sense than to hang around chatting to me, and a member of my family turning up in my nocturnal rambles to spoil all my fun. I thought that we’d put all of that behind us, but apparently not. Presumably, some psychiatrist somewhere would come out with a few interesting remarks about this kind of situation, but it would all be news to me. There’s no other logical explanation for it, although whatever logic would have to do with what went on in my head during the night would also be news to me.

Round about 07:00 everyone else began to surface so I went for a good wash and scrub up ready for dialysis and Emilie the Cute Consultant, although I forgot to shave. And then we sat around waiting for Isabelle the Nurse to come to see me.

Almost as soon as she left, the taxi came round to take me to the Medical Centre to see the doctor about my heart.

At first, I saw his assistant who coupled me up to an echograph machine with a rapidity that took me quite by surprise.
"That’s not the first time that you’ve done this, is it?"
"Oh no" she replied. "Only a few thousand times.".

When she’d finished, she took me into the doctor’s room where he gave me a thorough examination.
"It’s not your heart that’s causing your problems" he said. "That’s working fine."

And that’s just as well because it’s only my heart that is keeping me going. With my low blood count and low blood pressure, my heart is having to beat about twice as fast as anyone else’s. Anyone’s heart can do that for a while, but mine’s been doing it for almost ten years. When it gives out, I’ll be gone in an instant.

But at least he found my heart and I still have one. I’ve not turned into a Conservative yet.

"Where’s all your paperwork?" he asked.
"No-one told me to bring any" I replied. "The dialysis centre arranged this appointment. I imagined that they would have sent you whatever you needed"
"You should always bring all of your medical paperwork with you when you come" he said
"I’ll remember that" I replied. "Do you know where I can hire a fork-lift truck?"

But as Kenneth Williams and Alfred Hitchcock once said, "it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners."

Back here (in the rain) I was halfway through eating breakfast when the ‘phone rang.
"What are you doing tomorrow?" a voice asked
"Not a lot" I replied.
"Good. Come to Paris and we’ll start the Rituximab"

So there we are. Now a frantic ringing-round to book taxis and obtain permission from the Securité Sociale.

My cleaner turned up as usual to fit my anaesthetic patches and then we waited around for a while. As the weather was now back to sunshine, we went downstairs to wait outside.

The taxi was bang on time with our other passenger already in, and we shot off to Avranches at the Speed of Light, me with my eyes closed. It’s not very often I feel nervous as a passenger these days.

And as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … there’s no point being ten minutes early anywhere if you have to spend that ten minutes washing your underwear.

When we arrived there were three ambulances ahead of us unloading the horizontal patients so I knew how this would pan out. And when one of those ahead in the queue had a crisis and everyone had to rush to help, I knew that that was that.

Having a trainee didn’t improve my morale much, and my 13:30 arrival turned into a 14:30 coupling up.

The doctor came round to see me to ask me how I was.
"OK at the moment but it won’t be for much longer if you keep on prescribing me these" and I showed him one of the boxes of tablets that I’d been prescribed on Saturday, a product that contained lactose.
"And your doctor moaned at me a few weeks ago when I had that attack of pancreatitis"

He didn’t stay very long after that.

The dietician came to see me too, to ask how I was getting on with the disgusting drink that she prescribed for me.

When I told her that I was taking it as instructed, she replied "Good" and renewed the prescription for another three months. I should have said nothing.

Julie the Cook was back from her holidays and she had ten minutes to come to sit on my bed for a chat, which was nice. She’s a really nice, bubbly, cheerful girl and always has a smile on her face. She can also perch on my bed any time she likes.

When I was uncoupled, I went out to the taxi but we had to wait (and wait, and wait) for another passenger who needs a lot of assistance. And who is dropped off first so it was at 19:37 when we finally arrived home.

My adjustable stool had arrived this afternoon and so things are looking much more positive downstairs. The stool will certainly ease my cooking issues, as I can now sit down while I’m at the worktop cooking, and take the weight off my knees.

Tea tonight was baked potato, salad in balsamic vinegar and a mix of falafel and veggie balls. It was delicious as usual.

Tomorrow I have bags to pack, sandwiches to make and food to rustle up, seeing as I don’t know how long I’ll be staying. They say that I’ll be back on Wednesday, but we shall see. I’m really grateful that my friend is here to deal with the kitchen that will (hopefully) arrive.

But first, I’m off to bed in the hope that Zero will come back.

Seeing as we have been talking about the doctor’s surgery just now … "well, one of us has" – ed … the patient before me was complaining about having a very sore throat
"Right" said the doctor. "Go over to the window, stick your thumbs in your ears and stick out your tongue as far as you can."
"Will that make me feel better?" asked the patient
"Oh no" replied the doctor. "My wife’s standing on the pavement outside."

Sunday 22nd June 2025 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S EXCITEMENT …

… today has been a much more normal day, highlighted by the fact that I actually managed to eat something.

And when I say “a normal day”, what I mean is one that actually began at 05:05 this morning, which is a pretty normal time for my day to begin these days.

The morning began, once I’d hauled myself out of bed of course, by making a start on the notes from yesterday. Not that it was actually 05:05 at that moment because it did take me rather longer than usual to haul myself out of bed after yesterday.

When I finished the notes, I had the dictaphone notes to transcribe. It was a surprise that there was actually something on there – I certainly wasn’t expecting it. There was a Football League playoff match between Huddersfield Town and someone else, taking place in Huddersfield. I was in a hotel and saw the outside broadcasters turn up so I was helping them install all their equipment. They were on the roof of an annexe at the back of the hotel where they had everything set up. I gave them a hand to install the equipment. We settled down on this sofa afterwards – there were five of us on this sofa with a couple of TV monitors and a screen, and began to watch the preparations. The commentator turned round to me and said “here, you can’t sit here and watch the game”. That really disappointed me and in the end I had to go to try to find another vantage point on this roof to look, but there was a fog settling down over and the view was becoming pretty hopeless. In the end I had to just shrug my shoulders and walk away. I thought that that was quite disappointing after all of the help that I’d given the group to set up

Why an outside broadcast unit was on the roof of a hotel watching a football match I really don’t know, but I bet that they had a screen and some TV monitors if they were trying to watch the game through a fog. It’s reminiscent of the GAME BETWEEN CONNAH’S QUAY AND BALA BACK IN JANUARY when they tried to play football in a fog so thick that the linesmen couldn’t see across to the other side of the pitch.

However, being disappointed in the outcome when I’ve done my best to help people is also par for the course. As Ambrose Bierce once famously said, "A year is a period of 365 disappointments".

There was time to do some more work on the outstanding radio programme before everyone else awoke, and then, having realised that I’d spent the night sleeping in my day clothes, I grabbed some clean clothes and went into the bathroom for a good wash.

The washing was piling up in the bathroom, seeing as there are more people than me living here at the moment, so I filled up the washing machine and set that going while I went in to try to drink some coffee. I found that I can’t drink strong coffee, so I had to thin it out with some boiling water. And, even worse, I can’t drink much of it before it begins to upset my stomach.

My faithful cleaner stuck her head in the door to see how I was doing, which was nice of her, followed by Isabelle the Nurse who was back to her cheery old self after yesterday’s emotion, and The Hound of the Baskervilles dragged its master off for walkies.

When the latter two came back, I tried some breakfast. A small amount of porridge, very thin, and so it overflowed the dish and flooded the microwave. I was half-expecting my slice of toast to set the kitchen on fire, the way things were going.

By now the washing was ready so we figured out a way to put the clothes airer up in the bedroom window on the windowsill. That’s the first time that the window has been opened since I lost the mobility in my legs. I can no longer go a-mountaineering over the chest of drawers in the bedroom.

Later on, we went for a drive northwards along the coast, visiting a few of the tidal islands (luckily it was low tide), finding a place to stop where my visitor could at long last have some fish and chips (they were delicious, apparently), a beach where the Hound of the Baskervilles could go for a roll in the sand, and ending up at the mouth of the River Sienne.

A turning tide prevented us from going much further so we turned and headed for home, having been out for a total of six and a half hours.

Tea tonight was, as usual, a pizza and blast me if the oven finally decided to cook something correctly in the correct time, after I’d set the oven to overcook by ten minutes as usual. A pizza with a scorched base is not as nice as it should be.

The football season has started in earnest with the first of the televised matches, and I had Stranraer FC against Larne from Northern Ireland in a friendly. Stranraer, who are probably one of the worst teams in the Scottish pyramid, only had a scratch side out with several trialists, and if the best that Larne (who are competing in European Club Football in three weeks time) could do is to beat them 1-0, then their European season is going to be a remarkably short one. They were not very convincing at all.

So right now I’m off to bed to try to recapture my usual routine – as in
1) A doctor’s appointment at 08:40
2) Dialysis between 14:00 and 18:00
3) An appointment with a dietician at 15:15 (and how they are going to fit that in when I’ll be coupled up to a dialysis machine I really don’t know)

And with the pain in my foot having subsided during the day, it’s started to come back this evening. I’m thoroughly sick of this.

But seeing as we have been talking about a dietician … "well, one of us has" – ed … the last time I saw her, she asked me how things were.
"Actually" I said "I haven’t eaten anything for three days"
"Good grief" she gushed. "You REALLY must tell me your secret of how you do it."

Saturday 21st June 2025 – I KNOW THAT …

… many of you spend the whole of your day gripping the edge of your seats in eager anticipation of the next instalment of my memoirs, and so I can imagine that those of you who made repeated visits here throughout the night to catch up with the news will have had a sense of dismay and disappointment on finding these pages performing a rather passable imitation of Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.

The fact is that I have spent almost the whole of the last twenty-four hours in bed. Alone, unfortunately, but it was probably just as well and it might even have done me some good.

There wasn’t the slightest indication of this last night when I went to bed. And so much has happened subsequently that I can’t even remember what time it was. It wasn’t early, I’m pretty sure of that, but I do remember that I was tired and that I didn’t stay awake for very long once I was under the covers.

It was 06:15 when I awoke, which is probably one of the latest times yet since my sleep patterns have been so disturbed, and the first task that I undertook was to have a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been. I was at school last night, in the final year of my sixth form. We should each have been doing some kind of independent work on our own during our free study periods. However, I had been doing something, something to do with the football. At first, I considered it to be a waste of time and tried to forget it and do something much more academic but in the end I went back and carried on doing these statistics and organisation of this football league. Then I thought that it’s just as good an education as doing anything else. However, I was talking to someone about it because we were living in Belgium at the time. The question of Georges Simenon came up and I explained that this is all about the metro station at Simonis. Where the name came from for Simonis was a derivative of the Belgian family name “Simenon” implying that their family in the past and maybe even today as far as I know had some kind of connection with the place.

Simenon was of course the author of the “Maigret” novels but he is probably more famous for his somewhat entangled web of relationships with which his long-suffering series of wives had to cope. The metro station “Simonis” which is the one to which the local bus would take me when I lived in Jette is named after Eugène Simonis, a Belgian sculptor who lived in the immediate area in the 19th Century.

There were some kind of works going on at Southampton Docks last night so all of the containers and container traffic for all the ships for export and the tunnel across the estuary there had to go north to a small port somewhere higher up the estuary. They had a video surveillance of the port to keep their eyes open for anyone who didn’t understand the message that everyone had received, and they noticed that there was a lorry that had been queueing for a couple of hours at the entrance to the port. They sent him a text message asking him what he was doing there. When he replied that he was trying to wait for the ferry, they asked him whether he had received the letter or not, or the e-mail, and he’d have to push on and go north to wherever this was. There was a long line of HGVs and containers heading north up this road towards the mouth of this tunnel and the little port that was there.

This doesn’t seem to relate to anything that I recall and as far as I can tell, has no significance.

I was about to go to a doctor’s appointment somewhere in South London. It was a complicated place to find, and in the end I ended up climbing over a wall of the hospital into the hospital grounds, finding the correct building and having the appointment. Next, and shortly after that, one of the girls in the house where we were lodging had to go. She was rather a sad girl so I decided that I’d go with her to cheer her up and one or two others did, so we had a minibus instead of the usual taxi to take us. This took us to the hospital, down a hill and into the car park. There, once in the car park, we had to swing out across the road, blocking the traffic, nearly hitting a green Ford Cortina and then reversing backwards in through the gates over these concrete teeth things. The girl climbed out and I wished her luck. I was hoping that she wouldn’t ask me where I went and how I arrived there but she didn’t. She seemed to know her way. One of my friends who was in there with us made a remark about having been here too. While we were waiting for her to come back, we were talking about one of our friends from school. Someone was talking so I asked “what was his place like?”. Someone said that he had three telephone coins just outside the side door. I asked “what on earth was he doing that for?”. He replied “that was how he came in and went out of his jail, by that way” so we were discussing that for a couple of minutes.

This area of South London is one that we have visited on numerous occasions during our nocturnal voyages, and one that I can’t understand because the only area of South London in which I’ve ever lived in is Wandsworth when I was working in that Italian restaurant one winter, and it’s certainly not there.

Everyone else began stirring at about 07:00 so I went for a wash and a good scrub-up in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant today, and then went in for coffee.

Isabelle the Nurse was soon along, and we had another example of her hidden side when she began to talk about why I wasn’t here the previous day. She keeps this side of her character well-hidden but just occasionally, a little glimpse of it is revealed.

By now it was about 09:00 and I could feel myself beginning to slide away. By 09:30 I couldn’t keep on going any longer and decided to go to lie down for a while. And just to make my day, the stabbing pain in my foot began again, and it’s still going on.

There I lay in bed, dead to the World, until The Hound of the Baskervilles barked to let me know that we had a visitor.

My faithful cleaner had come down to do her stuff and found me in bed. Nevertheless, she enticed me out and fitted my anaesthetic patches, then telephoned the dialysis centre to tell them that I was having another one of my crises.

She waited with me until the ambulance came, gave the driver his instructions, and we went down to the centre.

Because we’d been standing outside our building waiting, we were early arriving and although I was far too early for my appointment, they let me in and I was coupled up quite quickly.

They kept a close eye on me today, checking my blood pressure every 15 minutes, and I just slept right the way through the session – except when the doctor came to see me. And to my disappointment it wasn’t Emilie the Cute Consultant who had come to soothe my fevered brow but the doctor with whom I’d had that argument a few weeks ago.

There’s no point being early at the dialysis centre if the taxi is late coming to pick me up, and with a prescription issued by the doctor we had to go to two chemists before we managed to find all of the medication that we needed, so we were no earlier arriving home than we might usually have been.

It was a desperate stagger up the stairs and a desperate fall into bed, and that was how my day ended. And why you’ve had to wait until this morning to read this rubbish.

But seeing as we have been talking about the doctor … "well, one of us has" – ed … when she came to see me, I told her "I don’t know what’s the matter with me but I looked in the mirror and I looked absolutely dreadful"
"I’ll have to examine you to find out" she said "but I can say that there’s nothing wrong with your eyesight".

Friday 20th June 2025 – WE NOW HAVE …

… a plumber to do the shower. He charges much more than I was expecting but he’s available and willing to do the work. The only thing that I have to watch is that he wants to do his project in my bathroom rather than my project in my bathroom. That’s the kind of thing that irritates me intensely, so I shall have to keep a close eye on him.

And on Wednesday next week we shall have a kitchen – well, at least, a delivery of all of the flat packs that will need to be assembled and fitted. It’s all ordered and paid for, and paying for it was an adventure in itself, more of which anon.

So, retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, last night I was totally and utterly wasted. I don’t think that I’ve ever been so tired. I staggered through the notes, the back-up and the statistics etc, feeling less and less like it as time went on.

In the bathroom I fell asleep while I was … errr … riding the porcelain horse and it took some effort to make my way beck here where I fell straight asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow. It was only 22:45 too, which makes a change.

And there I lay, fast asleep and didn’t move a muscle until all of … errr … 05:20.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … being awake is one thing. Leaving the bed is quite another thing completely. It was about 05:50 when I finally dragged myself out from under the bedclothes and saw the light of day.

First task was to transcribe the dictaphone notes. There was some drink that I was supposed to be drinking and its chemical composition was really precise. I’d stir it every day with a metal spoon. One day, I’d left the metal spoon in there. When I went to pull the spoon out, I noticed that half of the spoon had dissolved into the liquid and wasn’t there any more. I was wondering “what on earth is this caustic substance that I’ve been prescribed that I’ve been drinking two of these each day?”.

This sounds like the disgusting drink of which I’m supposed to take two every day. I shudder to think what it might be doing to my insides if its chemical reactions are as bad as its tastes.

Everyone seemed to wake up early this morning so I didn’t have long to spend in here. I went and had a good wash and then to drink some coffee and have a chat.

However, we were all interrupted. A taxi turned up to take me for a medical appointment.

Don’t ask me why, because I was convinced that the appointment is on Monday, but apparently not. So I quickly put on my shoes and went downstairs with the driver.

It was nice to be outside in an early summer’s morning so I wasn’t complaining, although I did wish that there had been someone there to greet me at the doctor’s when I arrived. And after waiting half an hour and having tried the doors and found them all locked, I telephoned the dialysis centre. They confirmed that it is indeed today.

When the driver turned up to take me home, one hour later, the doctor still hadn’t arrived. We went back downstairs anyway to speak to the receptionist of the medical centre. She told me that the doctor wasn’t in today. She checked my appointments on the central medical website and there it was – for Monday, as I had thought. And so we went home.

It goes without saying that I’d missed the nurse. I did ring her up but it was the answerphone that answered the ‘phone.

At least, I could now eat breakfast and drink some more coffee. I certainly needed it.

The next task was to contact the kitchen fitter to remind him that we were waiting. I gave him a gentle nudge with an e-mail and he rang me back as I hoped that he would.

We had another lengthy discussion about everything that we needed and he promised to send me a final schedule later in the afternoon.

The postie turned up in the middle of all of that and dropped off a couple of parcels. All that I seem to be awaiting now are the microwave oven and the kitchen stool. The kitchen stool will be a boon because I really am now struggling to stay standing up for any length of time.

After lunch, the cleaner turned up, closely followed by the plumber. We showed the latter round the bathroom and he seems to think that it’s straightforward, although somewhat complicated.

He doesn’t like my idea of a wall and thinks that I should have a glass panel, “so that there’s more light” – not that light has ever bothered me, and that I should run the pipework behind a false wall rather than embedded in the new wall. He also wants me to change the toilet for a new one.

However, unless there’s a very good reason (which we won’t know until we remove the bath) my plans are staying put.

It took him a while to sort out everything that he needed to know, and then we agreed a price. Or, rather, he told me his. It’s useless giving me an estimate because we don’t know what’s involved until we remove the bath but I know his daily rate. Had I had any more time left to find someone else I would maybe have thought twice, but if he can do the job by the middle of July, which he thinks is eminently feasible, then I shall have to bite the bullet. Each month longer that I stay here, I’m having to pay an extra month’s rent.

With it being such a nice day, my friend and I went for a walk outside afterwards. I went over to the clifftop and watched the sea and the boats for a while until the heat drove me back inside again.

By this time, the kitchen fitter had sent me the list. He’s going to order the stuff from the DIY shop, but I need to order the stuff from IKEA.

That took a while and I blanched at the price that came out of it all, but it has to be paid. I’m probably over-engineering the kitchen But I’m only ever going to do this once and it has to have an island, if, for the only reason, to stop me falling over.

When it came to pay it, the struggle for position of The Worst Bank In The World took a new turn as the Crédit Agricole refused to make the payment.
Consequently, I telephoned them, and they told me "it’s over your transaction limit".
My reply was "I don’t care about the transaction limit. I want to make the payment. What are you going to do about it?"
"We’ll send you a form. Sign it and send it back and we’ll raise your limit temporarily"
"So I have to wait for the post to bring it, and the post to return it?"
"I’m afraid so" she replied.
"How much money do you have of mine in your bank?"
So she told me exactly
"Good. I’ll take it all out and find another bank who wants it and who will do what I want"
"I’ll have the manager call you back"
It goes without saying that the manager has yet to ‘phone.

However, I have been in this position before and it’s not for nothing that I also have bank accounts in Belgium, the UK and Canada. Consequently, the kitchen is all paid for and the things will be here on Wednesday.

In between everything else, I was editing the radio notes that I dictated the other day. They aren’t quite half done but I’ll keep on going with half an hour here, an hour there until they are finished. But it’s difficult to work when you have visitors.

There was also some time somewhere for me to make a loaf of bread, seeing as we had run out. I don’t know where all of this energy came from – or all of this time either, but I’ve certainly been busy today.

Tea tonight was sausage, beans and chips. And very nice it was too. I certainly enjoyed it and so did my friend.

And now I’m off to bed, ready for dialysis tomorrow I don’t think.

But seeing as we have been talking about the Crédit Agricole … "well, one of us has" – ed … an old farmer went into the bank to speak to the manager
"I need to take out a loan" said the farmer. "I need a new tractor and trailer and a few other bits and pieces"
"And how long will you need it?"
"I can pay you back over fifteen years"
"We can’t do that" said the banker. "To be honest, I doubt that you’ll live that long to repay it."
"Well, if I die" said the farmer "God in his Heaven will reward you when I arrive there."
"And what if you don’t go to heaven but go to hell?"
"In that case," said the farmer "I can give you the money myself when I see you."

Thursday 19th June 2025 – WE NOW HAVE …

… a fridge-freezer downstairs to go with the oven that came on Wednesday. A large van must have done half a dozen laps around here before deciding that this building is where he wants to be.

And we need a large fridge-freezer too because the temperature is ridiculous today. My faithful cleaner is convinced that she saw 38°C indicated on a temperature reader in the town. If that’s the case, it’s the hottest that I’ve been since I was IN HUNGARY IN 2020.

It didn’t look like that last night. It was fairly cool when I came in here to write up my notes, and I was so comfortable that I wasn’t in any rush to finish. It ended up a slow, leisurely evening and after midnight I was still letting it all hang out.

Eventually I made it into bed and was asleep quite quickly. But once again, not for long because at 05:35 I was wide awake.

With the extra-early start, I dictated the radio notes that i’d written earlier in the week – and then had to dictate them a second time as the first attempt didn’t record. And the volume is still weak and feeble, just like me at the moment

By now, everyone else was awake so I went for a wash and shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon. Then we assembled in the kitchen and sat around drinking coffee.

The Hound of the Baskervilles dragged its master off for walkies and I came in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was doing something with the radio last night, having to play around with various tracks to work out how long they were and work out whereabouts in the programme they would actually fit. I wasn’t doing it for very long because I don’t know what awoke me but I happened to wake up round about 05:35 so I’ve no idea.

One of the songs that was going round and round in my head when I awoke was Steve Earle’s THE DEVIL’S RIGHT HAND, sung by the Phil Beer Band. It was probably stuck in my brain due to the fact that I was listening to a concert by the group just before I went to bed.

After that, I made a start on editing the radio notes but everyone came back from walkies so we had more coffee.

Interestingly, the hackles on the Hound of the Baskervilles stood up and he began to have a deep, menacing growl. 30 seconds later, Isabelle the Nurse came in. He barked at her but she soon won him over and left me thinking “I wish that she’d stroke me like that!”

Once she’d left I could have breakfast, and then we plotted what we intended to do this afternoon and sorted everything out. We also watched a strange van circle around here a couple of times

My cleaner came bang on time to fit my anaesthetic patches, having noticed a strange van circling around. She’d asked then if it was for me but then denied it all, and carried on circling.

The taxi was early, and when I descended, I noticed that the van had made up its mind and had stopped. They had the tail-lift down and were manoeuvring … "PERSONoeuvring" – ed …. an enormous package – my fridge-freezer. My friend helped them move it into the apartment downstairs while I rode off into the sunset.

There were two other people to pick up on the way, but even so, we were early. However, it was to no avail, being early, because they weren’t ready for me. I had to loiter around for twenty minutes.

The coupling-up was painful as usual, and then I was so exhausted that I crashed out for fifteen minutes or so. The staff, though, left me mostly alone, except for the odd check of my blood pressure when the alarm sounded.

In the middle of it all, there were several ‘phone calls. There was another delivery but the driver was lost. Consequently I had to liaise with him, my friend and my faithful cleaner in order that the parcel arrived as it should. All of this effort for a new spice rack.

Océane uncoupled me this evening, and not for the first time, she held my hand while she compressed my arm, which I thought was sweet. When I was let go, she came with me to hand my bag over to the taxi driver, and as she turned to go back in, I expressed my surprise that she wasn’t going to come home with me.

But honestly, any one of a dozen or so of those nurses could come hime with me any time they liked.

Back here, I inspected the new purchases, and also the insides of the wardrobes that my friend had painted for me. They look so much better now, and will look even nicer when they are dry.

As a treat, I took him out to the Italian restaurant that we like. I had my usual penne al arrabbiata and he had ham in a gorgonzola sauce. I hope that it tasted better than it smelt.

So right now, thoroughly exhausted and the fan on to try to cool everything down, I’m off to bed where I intend to sleep for a week.

But seeing as we have been talking about the delivery driver … "well, one of us has" – ed … when I came home my friend told me that the Hound of the Baskervilles had been chasing the delivery driver down the street in his van.
"That’ll teach him a valuable lesson" I said. "Next time he comes here, he’ll take the keys out of the ignition and close the door"
Nevertheless, I was quite impressed. I didn’t even realise that the Hound of the Baskervilles could drive

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Tag Archives: granville

Thursday 3rd July 2025 – REGULAR READERS OF …

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