Tag Archives: early night

Monday 22nd February 2016 – I CRASHED OUT …

… for a couple of hours this afternoon. And I’ve absolutely no idea why. It’s not as if I’ve been up to very much, is it, just sitting here waiting for Godot or whatever.

Mind you, I have had a day that’s been hectic in certain respects. For a start, in this urge to clean out the dictaphone and bring this up to date, I’ve not only finished the notes for the voyage to Canada in 2015 (which I think that I might have finished off yesterday) I’ve also dealt with the trip to central France in August last year, the one to Germany and the Czech Republic in June, and I’ve cracked on pretty well with the trip to Canada in 2014, the notes of which were lost when the previous laptop crashed.

You can see that it’s been a pretty hectic day all in all, at least from that point of view.

Having a blood test thins morning didn’t help matters either. That takes it out of me too, in more ways than one. Quite frankly, I don’t see the point of them giving me all of this blood if they are simply going to take it out bit by bit.

But it was during the night that, as usual, everything happened. and I do have to say that it’s rather sad right now that I have to have any excitement in my life by vicarious means.

We started off last night on the most amazing nostalgia trip. Memory Land had nothing on this. It was back in my school days and I’d started to go to school in a really scruffy, oily pair of green shorts (I actually had a pair of these too) and and equally scruffy light grey tee-shirt. It all makes a change from the school uniform that we had to wear back in those days. After school, we set off home and it was raining. I had an old, short kind of raincoat thing that I was wearing to keep the rain off. A group of us decided for some reason or other to go home a different way and we ended up wherever we were intending to be a good five minutes before the others arrived. We didn’t know this at the time but it soon became clear. There was a rather large stationary Ford Pinto engine there that performed some task or other at the place where we were, and I was having a look at it. I noticed that some of the spark plug leads had been caught up underneath it and trapped. This told me that the other kids hadn’t arrived yet otherwise they would have noticed it and sorted out the leads. Another thing that I noticed was that the cam belt adjuster had become slackened off and the belt was twisted. Someone had evidently tried to turn over the motor and that had upset the valve timing as the belt was sliding around over the top pulley on the end of the camshaft on the cylinder head. I needed my tools to adjust it and set it correctly but before I could go to fetch them, the other kids turned up. I told them not to touch the engine under any circumstances until I’d adjusted it (ohh! The nostalgic delights of changing cam belts on Ford Pinto engines! If I ever had a quid for every one of those I’d done in the 70s and 80s I would be dictating this to a couple of floozies sitting on my knee in the Caribbean somewhere). While I was adjusting and setting the cam belt and the valve timing, a couple of girls from the “latecomers” came over for a chat. One of them was very, very young (not even in school uniform – she was blond-haired, wearing a blue and white checked summer dress with a very pale blue blouse) and I had a little chat with her. The other girl then came over to join in. She was probably in year 3 or 4 of the Grammar School where I went, and I would be in year 6 or 7 (7 was the final year at out school). She lived in Worleston, so she said, and had shoulder-length dark red (almost brown) hair and a lovely smile, and I’m sure that I know who she is but I just can’t think who. We had a chat that started off just being something general and then slowly developed into something more personal. She asked me what “A” levels I was doing and so I told her that I was studying Geography, History and English (I actually studied Geography, History and Economics, as well as both parts of the “General Paper” which was an option). She told me that she was very interested in journalism because that was what her father did. She collected photographs and autographs, and started going through her collection of photographs with me. There were many photographs of lifeguards at the beach and also older ones of old Victorian women, so we started to make a few jokes that today would be considered in rather poor taste (not that that ever would bother me of course – I can’t remember now who it was who said it but I’m a fervent subscriber to the comment that “nothing is ever in bad taste if it is funny”) such as “I bet that she’s felt the cold hand of death on her shoulder by now”. We ended up having quite a laugh about this.
The bizarre thing about this – or maybe it isn’t so bizarre – is that while I was on this little voyage, I was feeling quite warm and comfortable. Chatting to this girl was very pleasant and it made me realise that during my school days -and later on – what I had missed out on was a nice comfortable companion with whom I could relax like this. None of my girlfriends at school would ever have fitted into this little scenario, and much as I liked Nerina, it’s fair to say that we weren’t ever “accomplices” in this sense. I’ve been noticing that we do occasionally have little nostalgic nights like this and I was all for turning the clock back 45 years and going off to track down this girl with the dark red hair. It’s not as if Worleston is a big place, after all and with a farmer who is a journalist, they aren’t likely to be part of the dispersed farming community out there. The “Royal Oak” would be the place to start, or maybe the church, where the Reverend Lillicrap (and I am not making this up) used to hold sway.
After the usual semi-somnambulistic stroll down the corridor, I was back at school again. This time though, it wasn’t anything like as pleasant. I’d been charged with an offence that was rather disreputable and as a result I’d withdrawn from my usual social circle (not that I ever had much of one) and was living in my car on a cliff-top somewhere. I would merely change into my school uniform to go to school and then change back into civvies as soon as I could afterwards. I only kept in some kind of social contact with one friend (someone with whom I am still in touch these days), and that was because I could rely on him and he believed in my innocence. As a result, any indiscretion that I might (or might not) have committed had not reached the ears of anyone else and I was defending the court case entirely on my own. But this all was about to change when he told me that his wife (and he mentioned her name – and she is in fact his sister in real life) had somehow heard about the events, and forbidden him to keep in touch with me. I asked him if he intended to take any notice, to which he replied that he had to. He admitted that, although no-one else knew this, she controlled him quite closely, even weighing him every day to make sure that he wasn’t eating any sweets or anything else to which he wasn’t entitled. I found this all hard to believe and when I saw her bright yellow vehicle right across the headland, heading slowly towards where I was parked up, I waved at her and that caused a major eruption amongst all people concerned.

So after all of that, it was back into the land of the living. And I had to make my own bed and open my own curtains because we were having visitors today and Liz had a day of teaching. Perhaps it was that which wore me out so much.

But counting through the boxes of injections, there is about half of them left. I wish that they would hurry up and get it over with.

And I’d like to have my blood test results too. They STILL haven’t come. And I want to go off for an early night and a decent sleep. It’s a long way to Worleston in the dark.

Sunday 21st February 2016 – OHH WHAT A BEAUTIFUL MORNING!

As indeed it was too. I crawled downstairs at about 08:00 this morning and opened the door into the kitchen where I met a whole host of shafts of bright sunlight streaming into the room.

You’ve no idea how much that cheered me up today seeing that. It’s just like the first day of Spring and it did remind me very much of that early morning in Labrador in late September – that freezing cold night when I had been sleeping out in the Wilderness in Strider and the sun bursting out over the horizon. That made me feel so much better too!

And I needed cheering up too because I’d had a rather difficult night. Not as far as sleep went – that was just as normal – but the voyage that I was on was one that was very uncomfortable, almost to the point of being distressing. I was working with a group of other people in a laboratory doing some tests on radio-active material. We broke off work to have the office party and I ended up dancing with a young girl, the daughter of one of my female colleagues. Afterwards, we went back to work, carrying on checking these samples for radio-activity. Suddenly, we found one that hadn’t been accounted for. It had been dropped in its watch-glass on the steps of the enclosed booth where we did the tests. This of course was a monumental error as the radio-activity could spread like wildfire, worse than the bubonic plague. As I had instituted this activity and was responsible for the tests, the woman actually carrying out the tasks asked me whether I intended to report the matter and accept the serious consequences. I immediately reported it and there was immediately a plant lock-down. Two women who were in one particular area of the factory were left behind and locked in and we could see, through the glass door, them dying an agonising death as the radio-activity spread across their bodies. The factory and its personnel dispersed but the personnel started to die off. The woman who had been carrying out the tasks went home and her mother who lived there, who was old and feeble, developed the radio-activity. She became seriously ill and her daughter, my colleague, was trying to reassure her and her own daughter (the one with whom I’d been dancing earlier) but kept fainting and collapsing, obviously gravely ill but doing her very best not to let anyone notice. The young girl was really frightened by all of this, hiding behind a door. She had two sons too and they didn’t know what was happening either. As everyone was dying out rapidly and my brother had put in an appearance by this time (what on earth was he doing here?) I asked him if he would go and check on this family to make sure that they were okay. He reckoned that they hadn’t been up to anything so they shouldn’t have any problems, not being aware of the woman’s involvement with the missing sample. I ended up back at home, in bed, and Nerina came round to visit. She had a bed at my house when she stayed the night and tonight, she needed a couple of extra pillows so I told her that she knew where they were. At this moment I noticed that I was starting to become ill. I had a touch of dysentery and thought that this isn’t like me and suddenly the revelation hit me that the radio-activity was now affecting me. I started to panic and wondered just who was going to be left over if even I was starting to succumb. We were all going to die and there would just be this young girl left. What a nightmare she would have, being surrounded by nothing but dead bodies of her family and friends.

No wonder I had an uneasy night with all of this going on. I really was happy to see the sun this morning.

i’ve spent most of the day watching the English cricket team totally humiliated by the South Africans (“just a blip” says the England captain but he’s clearly been watching – and playing in – a different series of matches than everyone else has been watching) and Manchester City bring the FA Cup and the game into disrepute by fielding a weakened team in a 5th Round competition. How I hate foreign footballers and foreign football managers who have no sense of pride and achievement and want to change the game to suit their own requirements.

Apart from that, I’ve finally finished the dictaphone notes for the 2015 trip to Canada. I’ve made a start on the notes of a voyage I made to Central France just before I left and I’m hoping to finish those tomorrow. Then, there will be the Germany trip and before that, the 2014 voyage to Canada.

But it won’t be done tonight as I’m going to have another early night in a bit. And I hope tomorrow will be just as lovely as today was. 16°C outside this afternoon, apparently.

Saturday 20th February 2016 – IT REALLY DOES COME TO SOMETHING…

… when I can’t think of anything to write.

I suppose that it’s all to do with what’s going on here right now. I’m not moving, not going anywhere, not doing anything, and the only excitement that I’m having seems to be going on at night.

Last night was no exception either. And the first part of it all was so interesting is that I didn’t even feature in it – either as a participant or a spectator. It took place back in the USSR – not in the John Lennon/Beatles era, but in World War II. There was a huge cinema there, a typical Soviet-era edifice, and a series of patriotic films was being shown. There was a young girl in charge of distributing water bottles in packs of six. These were given to different girls who acted as distributors during the show. One pack was given to a girl who was there with her friend, an officer in the Red Army, and her younger sister. This girl put the six-pack of water into a dustbin full of water to keep it cool so that she and her friends could sit quietly and watch the film. At the end of the film they prepare to leave but some official comes round to collect the unused water bottles. The girl in charge points out to him the other girl, who is on the point of leaving the cinema, so he shouts over to her. The girl whispers to her two companions to keep on walking and not to acknowledge her otherwise they would be sucked into this discussion. She walks back and the official asks her about these six bottles. She explains that they are a few rows back, stuck in a dustbin full of water, but the dustbin has by now disappeared. He starts to accuse this girl of anti-Soviet behaviour for having stolen these water bottles or else having been careless about their disposal. Suddenly, she makes a flash of recognition and dashes forward to where the first girl is sitting which is a kind of swamp (in a cinema?) and there’s a makeshift quay discreetly hidden amongst the seat bases. It unfolds to this officer that the girl in charge had been craftily going around and collecting all of the unused water, and someone had come along with a boat and taken it all away. Then she had dismantled and hidden the quay. He then turns his attention to the girl in charge rather than the other girl. But then a most extraordinary thing happened about that affair, in that the Soviets started to hush up the affair. It transpired that one of the people involved in this deception about the bottles of water was none other than the Queen Mother of the UK. This would not only cause the Queen Mother some alarm but the British Government some alarm too and if there was any estrangement between the two countries, the British would stop supplying war goods to the Soviet Union. The USSR needs to keep quiet about that.
After that, I ended up personally in a theatre attending what I reckon was a rehearsal for a play involving quite a few children. The producer was someone called Basil Blackwood – someone who really did exist by the way. As well as being a prominent barrister and civil servant, ha was an illustrator of children’s books and was killed at Ypres in World War I. But I digress. Blackwood had all of these children, some wearing the most extravagant costumes, all milling around and dancing. he was calling out all kinds of manoeuvres at a machine-gun pace, confusing them all but at the same time instilling some kind of discipline into them. And suddenly, he called a halt, and someone came in with a plate of sandwiches – little squares with the crusts cut off. Each child was allowed two squares but I was allowed three because, as he said, I had brought in the cheese and meat.

I managed to encourage the woodstove into action this morning, and that was exciting too. There were a few embers still in it so I gave them a really good prod and then opened the air vent. After about half an hour of simmering away, and a few delicate adjustments of the controls, it flared up so I quickly dumped a couple of logs into it and they caught quite nicely, and so we were off.

Liz and Terry left me alone for an hour and a half too while they went into St Gervais for the shopping, and left me to get on with a few things. one of the things that I’ve been doing is to continue where I left off before Christmas and catch up transcribing the notes from the dictaphone. It’s now grown to 146 files and I need to free up some space on there or else I’ll be running out. It’s not simply a case of transcribing them either but saving them to a hard drive and also copying them onto a CD as a back-up. I’ll be here for ever if I don’t put my foot down.

Some more home-made ice cream for tea tonight too and it’s tasting better and better. And now I’m off for yet another early night. I can’t last the pace these days with this hectic life that I’m living.

Friday 19th February 2016 – THAT’S MORE LIKE IT!

Having used the decongestant stuff last night before going off to bed, I finally managed to have a good night’s sleep last night, even managing to finish off watching the Flash Gordon film that I started to see the previous evening.

I only woke up once too, for the usual reasons, and promptly forgot everything that related to the little journey that I had been on up to then. But I had more luck when I went back to sleep afterwards. I seem to have cricket on the brain right now because I’d started a new job in an office somewhere and this place had a cricket team. There was some important cricket match taking place quite soon and I’d offered my services, but I’d never heard any more. Word on the grapevine however suggested that I’d been chosen to play but I’d never had any confirmation from anyone. Come the day of the match, I appeared at work without my cricketing gear, reckoning that if they were to tell me of my selection at this late hour they could allow me half an hour to go home and pick it up. But nothing happened so I didn’t bother. The match itself was played against a touring XI, either the Indians or the Sri Lankans and was largely a bad-tempered affair. One of the star touring batsmen was dismissed for a duck and the fielding team performed a little choreographed dance in celebration (which I thought was in extremely poor taste) and even the square leg umpire joined in the celebration, which is unheard-of. Obviously, the batsman was quite upset by this and made some kind of remark or gesture, which was met with a barrage of abuse from the fielding side and the umpire. All of this made me think that I was glad that it was a match in which I wasn’t taking part.

I could have gone on from here too but a rather dramatic noise from the kitchen broke the spell. What was actually happening was that Liz was busily destroying a cardboard box to use as kindling to light the stove. From upstairs, it sounded like an earthquake.

At least I managed an early breakfast out of it and then, in accordance with my usual custom, did absolutely … errr … badger-all for the rest of the day. I was the only one who did nothing however. Terry was out for a good few hours cutting another pile of wood and Liz had another student come round for a lesson. We also had a social visit too.

For lunch, I finished off the leftovers from yesterday’s pizza (which, like most spicy or garnished foods, tastes even better the following day) and for tea it was chips, burger and baked beans – with real Sarson’s malt vinegar.

In fact, the nurse asked me how I was doing and asked if I was eating well. I replied, quite honestly, that I was in the best restaurant in the world here and once I’ve recovered and ready to go home, I’m going to find something else wrong with me.

Now, having watched the England cricket team, and especially Chris Topley, brilliantly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory against the South Africans, I’m off to have yet another early night. I can’t last the hectic pace these days, can I?

Thursday 18th February 2016 – AND WASN’T THAT A WASTE OF TIME?

We went off to Montlucon this afternoon and the hospital. Terry dropped me off and then went to do some shopping, and I hobbled gamely inside.

Much to my surprise, it didn’t take too long to be seen, and to be honest, I needn’t have wasted my time. Nothing was resolved here that couldn’t have been resolved by five minutes on the telephone and what is even worse, they could have held this interview while I had been in the hospital on another occasion. All that happened was that I was asked about 20 questions while the doctor made notes.

What is even worse is that I now have to come back on three more occasions in this respect, and two of those will be half-day sittings too. Saying that I’m fed up is something of an understatement.

We came back home via the pharmacie where we stopped so that I could find something to help with my nasal problems. It’s no fun having a code in de dose, Balcolm.

And so that was that. What a waste of time. And I don’t have much to spare either as you know, not at my age. And the amount of fuel we are using to travel the 100kms each way and the pain that I’m suffering during the journey is starting to get on my nerves.

I can’t say that I wasn’t prepared for the journey though. I’d fallen asleep watching an old Flash Gordon film from the early 1950s (and it was funny to hear the outer-space villains talking in extremely camp German accents) and managed something resembling a decent night’s sleep with just a couple of interruptions. I started off back working for Shearings again and I received a communication from them saying that I had to go to a certain hotel to pick up a coach from a driver who had been taken ill. I was in BKV, my old Morris 1300GT at the time, right by Jackson’s Corner in Willaston facing towards Nantwich, and after taking the phone call from the phone box there, found that I had locked myself out of the car. My jacket and all of my keys were in there. Luckily, the rear passenger door was open so I could enter the car that way. I did a “U” turn, right across the traffic, with no lights on or anything, which upset everyone else on the road. I checked everything that I had to make sure that I hadn’t forgotten everything, and then I was off. It transpired that where these people were staying was near Walsall in a hotel near the football ground car park. It was a huge, sprawling, rambling modern hotel which, from the outside, was not dissimilar to one that I had visited a few nights ago (although the interior was totally different). All of the drivers and hostesses had a huge communal bedroom with a pile of beds in it, some single and some double. Mine was a single bed right in the corner by the wall. I managed a couple of hours’ sleep and then found my way to the showers. That wasn’t easy and they were communal too. After the shower, I went to sort out my diesel receipts. With not having a fuel card for the coach, I would have to pay cash and seek reimbursement so this would be an opportunity to recycle some of my old receipts. There I was, sorting through a huge pile, and then I realised that that was a waste of time because how would anyone accept a diesel receipt for today that was dated 1999? I gave it up and went back to bed to have another sleep. I was awoken by a girl sleeping in a bed on the far side of a double bed being shared by two drivers. She was complaining about how people should be more careful about who sleeps with whom, because of all of the noise. One of the two drivers was complaining about how he had slept in a circus and how he had continually thrown his partner out of bed to wake him up as he snored like a bull. I asked him whether I had snored very much. He replied in the negative, saying that I was all right, so I made a face at this girl, wondering why she was dragging me into the conversation. We were then interrupted by a photographer who came in with a pile of primary school kids in sky-blue pullovers and grey trousers or skirts. The aim was to photograph all of us and I had brought Strawberry Moose with me so I made sure that he was quite prominent on the photo. I had then to go somewhere across the car park quite quickly and I’d taken Strawberry Moose with me. Some young boy from this photography session, aged about 7 or 8, came along and we were chatting about His Nibs, he being vexed about how his father hadn’t introduced them to each other. I therefore let him carry His Nibs back to the hotel. I was in a hurry to return as the father was going to show me around his garage where he had quite a collection of old vehicles.
A short while later I was in a van – it might have been Caliburn, I think, with someone else whom I don’t remember. We were in the centre of a big city and pulled up at some traffic lights. Here was a police control and my van was checked over by a plain-clothes police team. They insisted on seeing my papers, which were all in order anyway, but they were taking their time about it. While we were waiting, a big artic pulled up alongside in the outer lane. It was a pale yellow matt colour. The police pounced on that too and asked for the driver’s documents. His cab was quite high off the road and so he simply threw his paperwork out of the vehicle, and also a television and a fruit cake (why a fruit cake I have no idea). The police picked up his documents and walked off round the corner with them to where their vehicle was parked. Meantime, the lorry driver realised that he had forgotten a paper so I said that I would take it. I really had to climb up high to reach it, and the lorry driver started to talk to me in Spanish, only a bit of which I could understand. When I descended from the lorry I had a quick look at the number plates, expecting to see Spanish plates, but in fact they were from Tennessee. I was surprised to see a lorry from Tennessee here in Europe but at least it would explain the Spanish (I was confusing Tennessee with Texas, I reckon). I took the paper – it was a flimsy yellow paper, written on one side with punch holes in various places – round to the policeman in charge. He asked “why do I need to see this,” to which I replied that I had no idea, but the lorry driver clearly thinks that it’s important. Anyway, we waited. And waited. And waited. For hours, I reckoned. And then I went round to see what he was up to, this policeman, and there he was, having a little street party and dancing with a couple of kids. I filmed it with my mobile phone and sent the images off to the local radio station. After all, there we were, this lorry and my van, blocking the street, the lorry driver had run out of hours too so he couldn’t move his lorry now anyway. The radio station sent a car and a camera around to film it for themselves. It didn’t half cause a stir.

I made myself another pizza tonight. The pizza base was one of these big square ones that I had bought by mistake so there’s plenty left for lunch tomorrow. Now I’m going to sit quietly and watch a football match, then I’ll be off for yet another early night – and hopefully finish watching my Flash Gordon film.

Monday 15th February 2016 – WHAT A NIGHT!

Last night was definitely, to coin a well-worn football phrase, a night of two halves. I was in bed early watching one of the series of films of the “Three Mesquiteers”, a series that was heavily parodied in The Three Amigos! but afterwards, I just couldn’t doze off to sleep. I was awake for hours. By the time 01:30 came round, I was in agony too. I told you a day or so ago that I was really feeling uncomfortable in my stomach, and the feeling had developed right through the night until it was unbearable.

In the end, I staggered off down the corridor to the porcelain horse and this is where it all starts to become vulgar, because if … errr … flatulence had been a recognised sport, I would have comfortably won an Olympic Gold Medal.

Strangely (or maybe not), I felt so much better afterwards and even managed a decent sleep, of which I remember almost nothing at all. But I do recall some kind of preoccupation that the nursing staff at the hospital had with all of this. A couple of times per day they would ask me if I had … errr … made any gas recently. Clearly, in the nature of post-operative care, that kind of thing is quite important, and after last night’s effort I can now understand why.

This was like something out of “Kez”, which is quite surprising because that is a film that I have never ever seen, so how would I know? I can’t remember too much now about what was actually happening but what I do remember was that I was having an aerial view of what was going on, actually as if I had been the kestrel that was flying above the scene. It was all rather disorientating.

We had the nurse this morning, and my blood count has gone down again – to just 9.8. I’m hugely disappointed by that but then again, if it’s too early to be glad about the positive news from Thursday’s test, then it’s too early to be sad about today’s. I have to bear in mind that if someone had offered me 9.8 as a permanent figure after my operation, I would have been glad to take it, given some of the dire results beforehand. Don’t forget that I haven’t had any “extra” blood for well over a week.

We also had a heavy snowfall too. The temperature has been teetering around freezing point for most of the day so it was really only like slushy rain, I suppose, and while it looked as if it was so impressive, it melted away almost as soon as it landed. It will be interesting to see what happens overnight – I have to go back to hospital tomorrow.

The snowfall didn’t stop a visitor arriving. To save Liz the trouble of going out, one of her pupils came here and had a two-hour lesson. It was interesting for me to overhear what was being discussed as I’d never previously really sat in on a lesson.

For tea I had a beautiful bean pasta-bake with grated cheese. Gorgeous, it was. What was even nicer was the vegan ice-cream. That’s still just a little short on shop-quality as far as the smoothness goes (which is no surprise seeing that we aren’t set up here for an industrial operation) but as far as the taste goes, it was excellent and Liz can be proud of herself. It’s the third batch that she has made, all of which have been through trial-and-error, and each time there’s a major improvement.

I shall be really sorry when I have to go home.

Sunday 14th February 2016 – THAT’LL LARN ME …

… to go bragging last night about being able to sleep, two nights running, right the way through the night. It goes without saying, therefore, that last night was a totally different kind of animal and I was awake for long periods on several occasions during the night.

But at least it meant that I remembered rather more of my nocturnal travels during the night. We started out with me having had my stitches out already but I was far from ready to have this done. I knew that my body hadn’t healed up properly but they had been taken out all the same, and you’ve no idea just how uncomfortable this whole idea made me feel.
From here I was on the move – quite literally too because I’d moved house – or, rather, a different house which was a two-bedroomed mid-terraced house of the 1920s rather like on the housing estate that I mentioned the other day. One weird thing about this house was that there were no doors to the rooms – just narrow slits in the wall. You had to be slim to squeeze through them. I didn’t have much problem to squeeze through but anyone overweight would have no chance of moving from room to room. A friend of mine and his wife told me that they would come to visit to look at the house, so I’d tidied up – just like normal. it really did need it. But in tidying up I’d left a big oily mark on the nice wallpaper on the bedroom wall – I’m not quite sure how. And so they turned up, and the first thing that I noticed was that it wasn’t his wife (although, actually, it was) and the second thing was that it was really late at night – more like in the small hours. Apparently they had been to visit someone else on the way and it was now 01:00. They had had nothing to eat that evening so i took them off to some kind of greasy kebab house in the vicinity where they had a burger and chips. They went to pay but there was no change in the place so I had to end up by giving them change out of my own pocket. We then started to go back to my house, engaged in deep conversation and as a result we walked right past my house – I couldn’t recognise my house from outside. It was only by looking at the house numbers that I realised that we had gone about 10 houses past where I was living, so we had to turn round and retrace our steps back to my place.
I was then in a prison but it wasn’t a prison, more like a hospital. I was sharing a room, or cell, with a couple, a couple who reminded me very much of a couple who used to go to watch the football at Pionsat every now and again. We could leave our cell, or room, but only step into the corridor. I found that I had a packet of biscuits but I couldn’t eat them because they contained milk so I was going to leave them outside my room for anyone else to take them away. But I was holding the packet in my mouth as I needed my two hands free to do something else but it looked just as if I was trying to tear open the packet, and I was seen by one of the “nurses”. Each time I went to put the packet outside, I had it in my mouth, and each time I was seen.

The alarm clock woke me up with its usual cacophony and off I trotted downstairs. We’d had snow again during the night and there was some of it still hanging around. The nurse came again – twice as you probably know – and it wasn’t quite as painful as last night. I’m now concentrating on having the injections on the left as the right is far more painful. To be honest, it feels as if I have a belt around my waist – a belt that is far too tight.

Liz has been experimenting with her cooking too. We now have home-made nut cutlets, home-made tahini, home-made hummus and my ice-cream too. It’s nice to see a fridge stacked high with vegan food.

Apart from that, I’ve done my usual badger-all today. There’s nothing to do and in any case I’m in no mood to do it. I wish that I could hurry up and recover.

Ohhh – and Happy Valentine’s Day to you all, with love from me.

Saturday 13th February 2016 – TWO DAYS ON THE RUN NOW …

… that I’ve managed to sleep right through the night without having to go for a stroll down the corridor. This is pretty-much unheard of and it must be a sign that I’m recovering a little.

But the downside of it all is that I remember almost nothing of any nocturnal ramble. The only thing that I recall for sure was that my red Cortina estate car XCL 465 X was involved in it somewhere.

I hated it when the alarm went off at 07:45. And I hated it even more when the nurse came round to give me my injection. The first one of this next session, and I’m fed up of it already. If that wasn’t bad enough, the injection that I had tonight hurt like blazes and that made me even more fed up. Still, only another 29 days to go!

And so apart from that, I’ve done almost nothing at all. Sitting down reading stuff on the internet, including what must go down as the most classic mistype of all time. In yet another case on The Old Bailey Online, one of the witnesses describes himself as “manager to J. A. Lawton and Co., carnage manufacturers, of 24, Orchard Street, London”. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

But Liz has been busy. She’s found more tips and hints about making vegan ice-cream and so she’s started one off to see how it goes. Coconut milk and a bar of mint-flavoured chocolate, together with maple syrup and a secret ingredient. We’ll definitely have to see how that goes!

But that’s my lot today. Nothing else has happened at all apart from the howling gale and torrential rainstorm that blew up around here. I’m going to go for yet another early night and watch yet another film. It’s this kind of life that is doing me good, I reckon.

Thursday 11th February 2016 – FOR THE FIRST TIME …

… since coming out of my morphine-induced semi-coma about 10 days ago, I haven’t been on a nocturnal ramble during the night. Or, at least, if I did, I know absolutely nothing at all about it.

I had an early night and watched a film on the laptp, one of the ones that I downloaded from http://www.archive.org while I was in hospital, chatted briefly to a friend on the internet, and the next thing that I knew, it was 06:15. A stroll down the corridor to the porcelain horse, and then the next thing that I noticed after that was the raucous cacophony of my alarm clock telling me that it was 07:45. I remember absolutely nothing else at all.

The nurse finally turned up at 08:40 for the blood test, and then I could have breakfast. And then, I’ve done precisely nothing at all. And I don’t care either. I’ve spent most of the day either relaxing or dozing. And that’s my lot.

As for the blood test though, there’s some good news. Most of the things that should be expected to go up have indeed gone up, and most of the things that should be expected to go down have indeed gone down. My blood count is a massive, astonishing 10.4 and it’s never ever been that high. Of course, one swallow doesn’t make a summer and I’d want to see 20 blood tests with that kind of figure before I pass judgement, but it is an encouraging sign.

To celebrate, I made myself a pizza for tea. The process was slow and agonising but the end result was well-worth it. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Now I’m off for an early night, hoping that I can have yet another really good sleep. I deserve more than a couple after all of my exertions and I’m hoping that they’ll come soon enough.

Saturday 23rd January 2016 – I AMOST MANAGED IT!

I do remember waking up at about 02:45 and thinking that I’d better wander off down the corridor in a minute once I gather my wits (which doesn’t take me too long these days, it has to be said). But the next thing that I remember was that it was 06:45. I could in theory have managed to hang on in bed until the alarm went off before heeding the call but that would have made me uncomfortable, so I succumbed. But I can’t think of the last time that I didn’t have to go off to ride the porcelain horse during the middle of the night.

It does have its downside though, meaning that I don’t remember much of what happened during the night … "for which we all are grateful" – ed … But from what I do remember, all of my 3D characters had decided to go on a cruise together, with me of course, and we all occupied a part of a deck to ourselves (I haven’t created THAT many characters, have I?) privately, with no other person admitted. However, a couple of other people insisted upon coming onto the deck and we had to keep on shepherding them off again (strangely reminiscent of an occasion at, of all places, Alvaston Hall – where we were the other night – back in the 1970s). although one or two people were allowed on. It was after one of these incidents that we noticed that one of our jars of Marmite (horrible stuff!) had been opened and someone had helped themselves to some of the contents. I couldn’t make out whether it was one of these visitors, or one of my cheeky 3D characters.
Later on, after my awakening at 02:45, I found myself with Cécile in North Staffordshire, somewhere in the suburbs of Stoke on Trent, with a third person, whom we were looking after, just as we looked after Marianne right at the very beginning of her illness. It was a cold, wet, miserable, grey, icy, slushy, sleety day and we were out there looking at the roads and discussing the North Staffordshire weather. Cécile had started to take skiing lessons and had had three while we had been together. But we had broken up. One of the things that we mentioned was about skiing down the banks (of which there are plenty) in Stoke on Trent and if the weather deteriorated any more we’d be well able to do that. Cécile mentioned that even though we were no longer together, she had been keeping up the skiing lessons and had had a good nine months-worth, and so next time that there was a really heavy fall of snow, she would get out her skis and come with me. She challenged me to a ski race. I had to go out and fetch myself some lunch and I knew that there was a fish and chip shop halfway down the hill, turn left at the roundabout by the petrol station and garage and it’s just behind the garage. Off I set down the hill, maybe going a little faster than I ought, given the conditions. At the roundabout, I put my foot on the brakes, which caused the car to slide round on the ice but I was in full control and ended up facing the right way up the right street. Reaching the chip shop, I found that it was one of those places whose name shall never be mentioned in anything that I ever write and which was agreed by a British High Court Judge to be inter alia exploiters of children. I won’t ever set a foot in the place (not even on my night-time rambles, evidently) so I carried on driving. I knew that in one direction there was a chippy about 15 minutes away but that was too far for me to go, and so I gambled on finding one sooner in the opposite direction. I ended up around the back of Hanley (or what passed for Hanley last night) in an area where they had done loads and loads of demolition. There were cars parked all over the sides of the roads and all over the waste land, and a young female traffic warden was out there checking car licences and parking tickets. With nowhere to park, I had to go further afield to find a chippy. I turned left at a crossroads near here and on the corner diagonally opposite was an old-fashioned bakers that made sandwiches. There were about 50 or so people queueing up outside this sandwich place for their lunch, but anyone who wanted just bread or a pie or anything ready-made was going in ahead of the sandwich queue. At the end of the road into which I had turned was a really big café with all old Victorian wooden shop-front windows in the art-deco style and painted a mid-brown. I remember saying to myself what a wonderful place it seemed to be, and that next time I come by here with someone, I’ll have to bring them here and check it out. And so I continued on my way looking for my chippy.

Meanwhile, I continued on my way looking for the porcelain horse and then after another half-hour, I was downstairs eating my new supply of home-made muesli and waiting for the nurse.

And here, I made a startling discovery that may well have resolved the hated issue of the daily question of twice-daily injections. Liz bought a couple of smaller boxes of the injections to take me up to Tuesday night because I had it firmly fixed in my head that there were two days’ worth of injections in each box. Opening the first one, I discovered that there is only one day’s supply.

I therefore went out to the pharmacie at les Ancizes (yes, a day out for me!) to buy some more but … they had none. Not to worry – I went on to the pharmacie at St Georges de Mons to try my luck there but … they likewise had none. The next stop on my route was Manzat but to be frank, I’m badgered if I’m going all the way there. On the spot, I took an executive decision (the definition of an executive decision is that if it goes wrong, the person who made the decision is executed) that I would stop these senseless injections then and there. And once the final supplies have been used, that will be that and I can go back to having a normal life. In fact, one of the reasons why I’m still at Liz and Terry’s is all down to these daily injections. It’s not practical for me to have these twice-daily visits round at my abode.

While I was at St Georges, I went round to the Super-U and stocked up with supplies.Bags of crisps, some chocolate, some vegan breakfast-biscuits and some soya desserts. If I survive the operation I’ll be in hospital for quite a while and we all know that the food in there is dreadful. I’ve no intention of starving myself to death while I’m there, and I intend to enjoy myself as much as I can while I am there.

We did have an exciting drive, groping through the fog to Les Ancizes and St Georges. As I was passing underneath the Viaduc des Fades going up the hill towards Les Ancizes, I met a light-brown Hyundai people-carrier coming down towards the barrage. On the way back, at exactly the same spot I met … a light-brown Hyundai people-carrier. Exactly the same model of vehicle, exactly the same colour, and it may well have been exactly the same vehicle. Who knows? It wouldn’t surprise me.

Back here after lunch I had a pile of notes from my dictaphone to download and type up, which seemed to take me hours and hours. And now that I’ve had tea, I’m off to have an early night. Now that the dictaphone is up to date, I have three really long and important letters to write tomorrow and they must be finished.

But with the recent, regular appearances of many of the usual suspects and places during my nocturnal rambles, we are now starting to see my 3D characters now not only coming along, and also coming to life as well. This is probably the most bizarre thing about all of this sequence of voyages.

Friday 22nd January 2016 – MY LITTLE 3D EMPIRE MADE THE NEWS …

… during the night. Someone was using my 3D Characters and settings to make some kind of party-political broadcasts in the real world. He said that he could name ten or so names of people who were up to no good in society. We of course said “such as?”, but when he replied, he named just three names which just goes to show how much rubbish is being spoken today. We can all think of three people without being prompted and he was trying to impress us with his knowledge and … err … exaggeration.
After this, we had Nerina putting in yet another appearance on our nightly voyages. We were still married, still together and we had a small child of about 18 months. We were both in the offices of the European Union doing something there. We had parked the car in the underground car park and we were on level 25, which was well-underground. We had had a good wander around the building and Nerina had gone off for a coffee in the small coffee bar there. I’d had to do something else and ended up being considerably delayed so I had to run like the wind down the stairs into this cafe but couldn’t see Nerina at all. But who was there was one of a family from Shavington (who on earth were they?), one of three boys, who gave me an estimate for the supply of some champagne and I was taken aback by this because it was one of the other brothers who was dealing with this. He was talking to me as if I knew what was going on, which I didn’t really, and anyway I was more interested in where Nerina might be. Suddenly, he clicked. “Ohh yes, it’s my other brother who should have brought you this, isn’t it? But he’s having to drive the tractor because the third brother is ill, so he’s given all of the paperwork to me”. At this moment, Nerina put in her appearance. She’d been in the ladies’, and on coming out she didn’t see me and so went straight off upstairs. I had to separate myself from these boys who were being quite friendly (and I was enjoying them being friendly too) to go off after Nerina. She had come out on the wrong level on the car park, 2 levels further down, and had to walk back up to the car again. When I caught up with her, we got into the car adnd I asked her what the plan was for the evening. She replied that she intended to go out and get drunk. I could see that she was totally fed up about something.Trying to cheer her up, I asked her to tell me exactly what she wanted really to do. “The weekend is yours!”. By now, Nerina had transformed herself into Liz’s daughter Kit. she was really, realy depressed and I felt like saying “why don’t we wait until Friday and you come up north from London and then we’ll go on to your family home in the North-East. I’ll run you back on Sunday evening”. Somehow, though, I couldn’t make the words come out. Anyway, we ended up going to see some friends of mine who ran a junk shop. There were all kinds of things there in the shop, including a set of ancient scales for weighing a baby. Tomake it work, you put the baby on the scales and thenjumped up and down on the floor to make it vibrate. It was something like an amusement ride for the baby so that was what we were doing with ours. Whilst all of this was going on, I was stroking their young black cat – a really friendly black cat. But then I noticed a really large and fresh flea bite on the cat, just above its eye. didn’t want to stay there after seeing that, especially with the baby there. The child wasn’t to happy about having to leave its game, and Ket was unhappy because I wouldn’t tell her why we need to go. And these people were unhappy too because we were having a good time and I especially enjoyed their company.
I was off to Finland later, with a guy from Stoke on Trent who once was a very good friend of mine. We’d been out in the wilderness and come back down the dusty road to rejoin the main road (something like the road junction at the back of Baie Comeau in Quebec where Highway 389 joins Highway 138). We turned left there and a couple of hundred metres further on, we needed to turn right at another major road junction by a fuel station. There was an enormous – and I do mean enormous – traffic queue here turning right as if there was some kind of road accident or other obstruction blocking the way. We were waiting for hours to move and in the end, we became thoroughly fed up and did a U-turn to go the other way. We found some fuel, because we needed it, and then returned to the road junction. Even though we had been away for ages, we found ourselves right behind exactly the same vehicles – a big silver tanker and a caravan come to mind. They hadn’t moved an inch. However, just as we pulled up behind them, the vehicles all started to move off. We turned round the corner and almost immediately had to stop at some traffic lights. We were in the third lane, with the vehicles that were going to be turning left 100 metres further on (it’s drive-on-the-rght in Finland of course). THis was however the wrong lane – we needed to be right over on the right-hand side of the road. I wound down the window on my side (apaprently I was passenger) and put out my right hand to indicate that we intended to pull out and muscle into the traffic on the inside. When the lights changed and everyone started to move off, there was no-one on the inside of us and no car within 50 yards of us. Plenty of room for us, I thought, so I told him to put his foot down and we can go. He was much more timid than that however, saying that there were too many cars. I would have gone, and so would many others, but the result of all of this hesitation was that we lost our place. There wasn’t room for ages and so we ended up sitting there. He wouldn’t carry on to the left either, do a U-turn up the side road and come back to the main road either so we just sat there, our right-hand indicator on, waiting for a space. And of course, the inevitable happened. A car coming up behind us, seeing the green traffic light, put his foot down, not realising what we were doing, and ploughed straight into the back of us.

So that’s enough travelling for one day, in my opinion. And I don’t know where it all came from either because I had a bad night’s sleep too – not going to sleep until very late and being disturbed by all kinds of things. In fact, when I went downstairs, I crashed out, slumped over the kitchen table until the nurse arrived.

Liz and Terry went off to do the shopping after breakfast, and I carried on building my 3D set for my practical work. You may remember that this course requires me to build a 3D bedroom and fit it out as far as is practical to go so that the occupant of the room can be clearly defined by the objects on view. I’ve worked out a stunner, which I’ll show you in due course. I’ve taken 160 snapshots from different camera angles, with the camera in the ceiling and slowly spiralling down to ground level, and what I need now to find is a free mvoie-maker program to turn them all into a short 10-second film. And my ending is a killer, even though I say it myself.

I’d run out of muesli too, so Liz bought me the stuff that I need, for I make my own. Porridge oats,, corn flakes, all bran, sunflower seeds, almonds, dessicated coconut, trail mix and whatever else happens to be around the house. The best way to start the day (if the blood-man comes on time).

After lunch I sat and vegetated for a while. I really don’t remember too much of what happened. I’m clearly not feeling myself these days which is just as well because it’s a disgusting habit anyway. But to bring me round, not only did Liz make a coffee but we had some more vegan Christmas cake too, and I’m all in favour of that.

I was in bed early too – by 20:30 too. Not one of my better days, this one. I’ve so much to do before Wednesday so I beed to get myself into gear. I’m not going to make any progress at all like this.

Wednesday 20th January 2016 – I HAD YET ANOTHER BAD NIGHT …

… last night. I was still awake at 01:00 and nowhere near going to sleep, although I must have done at some point because at 02:45 I was awake again and off down the corridor.

Between falling asleep the first time and going off down the corridor, nothing much happened. Or, at least, if it did, I know nothing about it. But between then and the next time that I woke up – round about 06:30, an enormous amount had been going on – to such an extent that I dictated almost 7 minutes of notes.

And this, dear reader, is what you have to sit through for the next few minutes or so.

We started off driving through a town somewhere – turning right at a set of traffic lights just before the centre. Once we’d turned, we noticed a big sports field on the left where there was a huge bowling competition taking place. All around the town and on the bus (because I was upstairs in a double-decker) there were people who all had little white lions (like the old Egg Marketing Board stamps) stamped on their body. The jacks had been stamped with the white lions and the marks on the bodies were where the people had been holding the jacks against themselves. A little farther on was a left turning where we swung around into the town centre and where were all of the shops. Just along this street was a branch of Woolworth’s (shows you just how old this all was) where we were heading but today it happened to be closed. Nevertheless, I found my way in and went for a wander around, particularly on the upper floors, having for some reason been separated from the others with whom I’d been travelling. But I was captured, and held as a kind of prisoner (during this part, I was actually a spectator, watching myself being restrained and tied up). The person who had imprisoned me had a heavy pole, something like a foot-length piece of sawn-off scaffolding tube and his intention was to use it to beat my head into a pulp. But thinking quickly, I said “hang on – isn’t that someone pulling up outside the building?”. He wandered over to the window to see and as he passed, even though I was still tied up, I managed to grab hold of the metal pole, wrestle it from his grasp with one quick movement and slosh him on the back of the head with it. I could then make good my escape.
We then descended into things that resembled even more like James Bond activities and I was partnered in these activities by a young girl who has featured a couple of times on my voyages. She was wearing a heavy dark blue hooded cloak something similar to Little Red Riding Hood’s cloak but with a much more pointed hood and which put her face well into the shadows, but I knew that it was she. I’d been searching through this house and ended up being accosted, and was being interrogated. I had to think quickly of a way to escape from this predicament. There was a an old vintage car in this room so I was thinking that if I could bolt some bolts though the holes in the sills so that the threads were protruding, and coat the exposed threads with a deadly poison, I could somehow contrive to have these people back up against the car, bang their legs on the exposed threads which would then inject the deadly poison into their bloodstream and that would be curtains for them (how I was going to do all of this whilst under constant surveillance didn’t appear to worry me, apparently). But while I was trying to work out all of this at the same time as answering all of these questions, I looked up into a dark corner of the room on top of the car but just underneath the ceiling, and there was the pointy blue hood and the dark shadowy face. I said out loud to the person interrogating me that it’s a shame that the girl (mentioning her name) wasn’t here with me because she would soon make short work of him – once he had backed up against the car, she would give him a real headache. His response was “don’t be silly – of course she isn’t here”. Of course, my little speech was to give the girl a clue as to what to do. It goes without saying that sooner or later, the guy in charge was leaning against the car, his elbow resting on the car bonnet while he was talking, and of course the inevitable happened. This girl wielded the scaffolding pipe (we still had that) to great effect. It was the matter of seconds to overwhelm the others and the girl and I made good our getaway.
I was back home after that and I had emptied out my van. There were all kinds of papers that needed to be sorted out, which I was doing. I’d left in the van a few books on submarines to read while I was on my travels but when I was going through all of these papers there was yet more stuff on submarines that should have stayed behind. One thing that I found was a rare postage stamp, a fidelity card for something, and a copy of a message – a parody of the “England expects” message issued by Karl Dönitz to his submariners on the eve of the surrender in 1945. I tucked this message into the plastic cover on the inside of my dairy thinking that I’d deal with this later. But with this rare postage stamp and fidelity card, I took them round to the girl who had accompanied me on my James Bond adventures. I knocked on the door and her mother (but it wasn’t her mother) answered the door, so I explained why I had called and asked if daughter was in. Daughter came bounding down the stairs with a huge smile on her face to collect these items. In exchange, her mother and granny (who was also there) gave me the post that they had been collecting for me in my absence and also a pile of used stamps. I was looking for Indian stamps as Bill had been looking for 50 rupees-worth to send off an application for something or other – and it didn’t matter if the stamps were used and franked or not.

From here I went down to breakfast and my injection, and afterwards carried on with some work on the laptop. But Terry said after awhile that “none of this is getting the work done” and proposed to go out and cut the rest of the wood that we hadn’t finished yesterday.

Working yesterday had worn me out but I can’t be an ungrateful guest, so I went out to help. I was there for another hour and a half or so and then we came in for coffee, having picked up some bread from the boulanger who came round today.

After coffee, Terry went out to carry on, but I was done for and that was my lot. I carried on with what I had been doing beforehand and then prepared everything for lunch.

Terry went out after lunch to price up a job and I stayed behind – I’m not up to all of this yet. I had a doze and then played around with my 3D program, had a doze and then did a pile more of my animation course. I’ve now finished week three (minus the practical work) and I’ve now started week four. I go into hospital next Wednesday and I want it finished by then.

Liz made a quiche for tea and I had an individual one, made with a kind of cheesy garlic and herb paste, together with baked potato and a kind of coleslaw salad. Really beautiful it was too. I do have to say that the food here is thoroughly excellent and I shall be very sorry to leave.

Now I’m relaxing, and then I’m off for an early night. I need one after yesterday’s and today’s efforts and the bad night that I had had last night.

And no 3D characters and no family members and no taxis in my voyage last night? I wonder where they all went.

And I wonder who will turn up tonight to accompany me on my travels.

Monday 18th January 2016 – WHAT A NIGHT!

I know that I went to bed early and tried to doze off to sleep but it wasn’t much good. Half an hour later, I was wide awake doing something on the computer again. It was beyond midnight eventually before I settled down and still couldn’t doze off. It’s been months since I’ve felt like this, hasn’t it.

As for my nocturnal rambles, I didn’t have the chance to go very far because it really was a fitful night. Although I only wandered off down the corridor once, I was awake, tossing and turning on several occasions. There’s clearly a great deal on my mind at the moment. And what rambles I did go on were quite disturbing – they certainly disturbed me and I shan’t repeat them on here because you might be eating your tea or something like that. Let’s just say that they were not for the faint-hearted, and anyone suffering from Coulrophobia (12% of the population of the USA apparently) will certainly not appreciate them.

I was up and about at the usual time and had to wait for the nurse – but I didn’t have to wait long for the nurse. I passed the time by making the fire flare up and putting more wood in it – we still had glowing red embers at 08:00. The nurse was unlucky today. He couldn’t make any blood vessel in my left arm work and in the end had to switch over to the right – something that I’ve been trying to avoid since I had my blood clot. But at least there was some blood there – I’d told him that the reason why he couldn’t find anything in the left arm was that it had all gone.

But it hasn’t all gone – in fact my blood count is up to 8.7 at the moment – the highest that it’s been for quite a while. The transfusion that I had last Friday evidently worked. But it will diminish over time and I’ll probably be back in there this coming Friday – they certainly didn’t call up tonight.

And that’s just as well because we’ve had a really heavy snowfall today. Although most of it melted by late afternoon, at 14:00 it was looking quite ominous and I certainly didn’t fancy going anywhere at all. And neither did Liz and Terry. They had a car to rescue from near Menat and when it started snowing at about 09:30 they nipped off quickly before the roads became too bad, leaving me behind to hold the fort and man … "PERSON" – ed … the fire to keep it topped up.

In exchange, I asked Liz to post the letters that I had prepared and to pick up the next load of injections for me from the pharmacy in St Gervais. It’s pointless sending two cars out to the same place, particularly in this kind of weather. I stayed in and did some 3D work and some of my Animation course.

What we are studying this week is an animation technique called pixilation, which is where you use stop-motion photography to film humans so that it seems as if they are very realistic cartoon characters. It’s not what I would call animation and not what I want to learn, although many others on the course disagree. I’m hoping that pretty soon we’ll get onto Computer-generated animation, which is what I really want to do. However, it makes a great deal of sense to study the basics and learn the techniques.

Liz made a beautiful vegan chili for tea. Nice and hot which was just as well because earlier she had cut our hair. Mine is now really short and so the weather will certainly get at me if I have to go out, so loaded up with red-hot chili is a sensible solution.

So that’s it. I’m off for yet another early night. The joys of Swansea City against Watford I will miss tonight.Too much excitement is bad for me.

Thursday 14th January 2016 – SNOW!

This was the sight that greeted me this morning.

Well, actually, no it wasn’t. When I came downstairs, it was dark. Too dark to take a photo with the camera on the phone and I had to wait until it was lighter. By that time, some of the snow had melted and so it didn’t look quite like this, but still it’s the first snow that I have seen this winter.

It’s not actually the first snow of the winter, but when we had that, I was incarcerated in the hospital and never managed to see it.

The nurse managed to remember to come this morning, which was just as well because it was blood test day and I couldn’t have my breakfast until afterwards.

Once the nurse had gone and I had had breakfast, I didn’t do too much at all. Watched the first day of the 3rd Test with Terry and did some more of my animation course.

For tea, I made myself a pizza with peppers, mushrooms and olives, covered by grated vegan cheese. And I remembered to put the herbs on too. It didn’t half taste nice. And then I had a really early night – at just 19:45.

I had to go out to Caliburn though before retiring – to lift the wiper arms so that the blades aren’t touching the screen and to fetch my thermal mug, as I have an early start tomorrow. They’ve had my blood test results and despite the two pochettes that I had on Tuesday, my blood count has barely struggled up to 8.0. It’s clear that I’m starting to lose this fight and they have called me in to the hospital tomorrow for more blood.

As for anything else, members of my family are continuing to feature quite regularly in my nocturnal travels, and I still seem to be stuck in not merely a time-warp but a place-warp too, back in my old stamping grounds of my younger days. There’s clearly something significant, if not ominous, about all of this.

I started out last night by watching a film – one of these types of surreal horror film of the 1970s which centred around quite a few events. There was a girl aged about 9, rather a large girl, all covered in blood and gore. Anyway, there was a pile of us, all young kids, all living in a big house with a big bedroom. We all had our bed and that was about it – nothing else, and beds were crammed into the room everywhere with hardly any place to walk in between. We’d been doing something or other and I’d come back to crash out on the sofa. Also on this sofa were two jewel boxes that belonged to my mother and she asked for them back. My older sister however replied that she couldn’t get them back as I was asleep right there. At that, I woke up and asked her why she hadn’t reached in to get them? It wasn’t as if there was any big deal about this instead of making all of this comedy about everything. I crawled off into the bedroom and into my bed which was along the long wall. My parents came in and the whole thing erupted. There were all kinds of nightmare characters in these beds, we’d seen highlights in flashbacks from this film, rather like in Catch-22. My parents then went into a second bedroom where there were loads of kids, all of whom had the faces of gorillas and hippopotamuses and so on – astonishingly surreal. And the doctor had said something to this young girl – telling her to keep herself very clean and take care of her body.
From there, we moved on to another party designed to say goodbye to my niece and her husband, who had come over from Canada specifically for the party so that we could say goodbye to them! There were so many people milling around that we had to apportion them into all kinds of different vehicles. In the end they shot off to wherever it was that they were going for this meal, that was starting at 13:30. However I had a lot to do so I knew that I would be late, and I ended up at Alvaston Hall (or at least, what I reckoned last night was Alvaston Hall). When I finished, I had to get over to where this meal was taking place and for once in my life I had to take a taxi. At Alvaston Hall there were loads of people and loads of cars, but not a single taxi loitering in the vicinity. However, I noticed that at the table having lunch were three taxi drivers who I knew and who worked for a small company in Crewe. I went over to them to ask if any of them fancied a fare over to wherever this meal was taking place. They however insisted on their lunch-hour, so I asked them what time they had started. They replied “12:00” – which made no sense at all to me (even in a nocturnal ramble where nothing usually makes any sense) seeing as it was now 13:30. I asked them how long they would be, to which they said a half-hour or so. Totally crazy, but I was wondering that if I called someone out from Crewe, it would take that long for them to reach Alvaston Hall anyway. I then managed to lay my hands on a car, an old one of the type of the 1920s, and I planned to go off in that. However a group of young environmental campaigners was protesting against it. Of course, I was sympathetic with their aims but I was also in a hurry so when I made to drive off, they started to spray it with water and foam. I chased them all off but one young guy was really spoiling for a fight and was so insistent that in the end I had him on the ground and tied his hair to the railings in the best Vinny Jones fashion. “Get out of that without moving!” I then quickly cleaned the car, but when I opened the glove box, a pile of rusty water and old rusty Printed Circuit Boards fell out. One of these environmental protesters was there watching me do all of this – a young girl with blond curly hair, a green jumper and light brown slacks. We ended up having a rather heated dispute. She started to leave so I followed her to continue our argument and we ended up passing through the foyer of this 1950s-type glass and concrete conference centre and outside on the concourse. She didn’t make too much of an effort to escape so our argument continued, and suddenly, for no good reason, I put my arms around her in a rather passionate embrace. She offered me no resistance whatever – in fact she was rather encouraging.
I then found myself briefly in Italy with someone else and loitering around somewhere in the street. There was a young girl selling ice-cream from a mobile trolley so I went over there, took a cornet, filled it up with Neapolitan ice cream and stuck it back in the cornet holder. This girl didn’t make half a much of a fuss as I would have imagined.

It’s all still happening, isn’t it?

Tuesday 12th January 2016 – I REALLY DON’T KNOW …

… why they pay some of these people. If I were in charge, they would be paid in washers.

It’s no surprise to anyone to learn that neither of the two letters that I was promised, by two different secretaries of the hospital at Montlucon, has been prepared – let alone signed and posted. And so we had another fifteen minutes of unpleasantness at the reception counter when I went to collect my droit d’entrée to go to see the anaesthetist.

However, this was resolved in rather dramatic fashion while I was talking to the head of the accounts department. She told me (again – because she had told me this three or four weeks ago) that I needed to have the authorisation of my insurance company for the hospital to send the bills for consultation directly to them, and for this, I needed a letter from the doctor who was treating me.

I then (rather patiently for me) explained that I was in total agreement, but having asked for those letters on 23rd December from my Doctor and again on 4th January from my Surgeon, I had still received nothing despite the re-assurance on the telephone the other day, and in fact the letters hadn’t even been typed out.

At that news, the head of the accounts department picked up the telephone, dialled a number and had what can only be described as “a frank exchange of views” with someone on the other end of the line, including the phrase “do you realise that you are holding up the work of the hospital?”. And after she hung up the receiver, she gave me the form that I needed.

I don’t need all of this stress, and even less so when I’m ill like this. And I just go back to the very first day that I was admitted to the hospital, back in late November, when I handed my insurance card to the hospital. As you may remember, the hospital refused (and on a couple of occasions too) to telephone the insurance organisation as I was admitted. Hod they done so, they could have opened a file ON THE SPOT and established all of the information necessary to establish the necessary procedures and coverage ON THE SPOT and all of this unpleasantness could have been avoided. I don’t know enough about hospital procedure to be able to explain to anyone else what is happening and what to expect (from an accounting point of view), and the procedure in Belgium (where my insurance organisation is based) is so much different from that in France.

It’s all so unnecessary.

But abandoning yet another really good rant for the moment … "thank God!" – ed …
let us retourner à nos moutons, as they say around here.

The alarm went off at 07:00 and I crawled agonisingly out of my bed. I’d had an early night and crashed out really quickly.

And during the night, I’d been trying to go to a rock concert somewhere but I had never managed to make it. And so I was at home somewhere or other (a house that I actually know but I can’t put a name or address to it, although it strongly resembled Davenport Avenue), and the musicians arrived! The three of them fitted into my tiny bedroom and started to play, just for me. The group might have been “Rush” or it might even have been “Strife” (I’ve been talking a great deal about them on my social network account just recently) but one thing was sure and that was no matter who it was, there was just one musician – the bassist – from the group and the other two members were the guitarist and drummer with whom I used to play back in the 1970s. And when they finished, the bassist said something along the lines of “that’ll teach you to come to our concerts next time”.
So from here, the drummer, guitarist and I had to catch a bus back to Crewe (we were in Chester at the time apparently – scene of many of my earlier musical successes) and so we waited – and waited – and waited – and no bus came (back in those days the C84 ran every hour). Eventually another bus came. This was a bus of the type of the mid-60s – an early Bristol RE single-decker with a green lower and white upper, but with large windows and very curved rather than angular corners – and on the headboard it was indicating “Whitchurch”. Buses heading from Chester to Whitchurch usually travel down the A41 through Christleton and that way but this bus was on the road out of Chester in the general direction of Tarvin, so I assumed that it might be going to Whitchuch via Nantwich, from where there were buses every 15 minutes to Crewe. But chatting to the driver, it appeared that he was only going so far down the Nantwich road, turning off just after Tarporley somewhere in the general area of Bunbury. And so we were there for a good while – the guitarist, the driver and I debating whether or not to take the bus, alight where it turns off the main road and wait for the very late C84. But what if the C84 overtakes us along the route? We’d then be even later and that would clearly be no good (the idea that if our C84 wasn’t running, we would be stranded wherever we were hadn’t entered our heads at all, apparently). The driver said that he could as a favour, pass by Aston Juxta Mondrum (which is nowhere near where we want to go and in any case didn’t have a bus service to anywhere) and drop us there, but we stood for ages at this bus stop, haunted by indecision and being totally incapable of making up our minds.

I was on the road by 07:30 and pulled into Pionsat at more-or-less the same time as the nurse (she who runs the pie hut at the footy) and so paying for my consultation from the other day was quite straightforward.

I arrived at the hospital in Montlucon at 08:30, having found a good spec to park Caliburn, and despite having had a little adventure on the way. It was pouring down with rain and round about St Gervais, the driver’s side windscreen wiper became attached from the arm. Luckily, I was able to rescue it and replace it but it came loose again and so I drove all of the way there without wipers (once you go through the initial 5 minutes of blindness, you’ll be surprised at how clear the view is through a “liquid windscreen”). Subsequent enquiries in the daylight revealed that the blade hadn’t been fitted correctly and I was able to deal with that.

It was just as well that I was early at the hospital. Once more, I had the choice of seats (the one in the corner by the power point) for we ended up 5 people in a room made for two and they were turning people away, to wait in the waiting room until there was a space for them. It really is no surprise that they couldn’t fit me in last Monday afternoon if this is how busy they are in the day hospital.

It was the efficient nurse who dealt with me today. Not only did she fit my drain at the first attempt, it hardly hurt (in comparison to all the others who have tried). And then we reverted to the marvels of modern 21st-Century technology, warming up the blood by stuffing it up my jumper.

I took advantage of my stay there by having a browse through www.archive.org. I discovered a while back that they are now grouping as *.zip files many of the old-time radio programmes instead of having them as individual downloads, but 1.4GB is beyond the capacity of my internet connection at home or here chez Liz and Terry. But not at the hospital where a real (as opposed to “notional”) 600kb/s is readily available, and so I downloaded all of Beyond Our Ken, all of the Sherlock Holmes radio shows of the 40s and all of the Philip Marlowe radio shows.

If I’m back next week (which is more-than-likely) there’s the Clitheroe Kid and the Navy Lark to download. And then I’ll be keeping an eye out for ITMA and Much Binding In The Marsh. And if it keeps on and on and on, I’ll end up with more radio shows than the BBC.

I declined the lunch that was offered, and for two reasons too.

The food in the hospital is disgusting
I was hoping to be in and out long before I became hungry

and wasn’t all of that a silly mistake?

I was indeed finished early – at 12:45 in fact. So much so that I had time for a coffee in the café, but I won’t be doing that again. Coffee from the machine is just €0:60 but in the café it’s €1:70, and it’s not as if the surroundings are any more pleasant than the hospital foyer. It did give me an opportunity to spy out the land there and check the food on offer (I need somehow to supplement the hospital diet) but there was, as I expected, nothing there that I could eat.

Then it was time to deal with the anaesthetist, and this is where we had all of the nonsense mentioned above. By the time that I had finished, it was almost 15:00 and how I wish that I had had lunch in the hospital earlier.

I gave the usual spiel to the anaesthetist. “I hate tubes, injections, internal cameras and all of that kind of thing. I don’t want to know what you are going to do to me – just do it and get on with it. if you find anything else when I’m opened up, do that too because I don’t want to come back a second time. But when I wake up, I want to have both my hands and both my feet, and I don’t want to see any tubes, pipes and cameras”.
“Both your hands and both your feet?” said the anaesthetist? “Not your head?”
“I lost my head years ago” I replied.

So we had a nice friendly chat. He’s an old guy, probably my age, with a sparkle in his eye and a devilish sense of humour which makes a change from most French people whom I know. I wish that there were more like him. And then I went for another spy around the 3rd floor to see what I could see. There seems to be a nurse there who would love to sooth my fevered brow, but I’ll be b*gg*red if I let him.

I did some shopping at Amaranthe, the health food shop. A pile of vegan cheese (we’re running low here) and a few other vegan bits and pieces. I bought myself a big pile of vegan muesli biscuits for lunch and nibbled them throughout the afternoon Liz didn’t give me a shopping list for the Carrefour so I had to improvise, and ended up forgetting a pile of stuff that would have been useful to us.That’s a shame, because I feel that I ought to be paying my way while I’m here, and a load of shopping each week would certainly help.

A new pair of slippers and a few pairs of sock was on my shopping list though. The slippers that I have are falling apart and my socks are … errr … quite religious. There was a special offer of 6 pairs of socks at €5:99. Terry asked me if they would last any kind of distance, to which I replied that maybe I only need to worry until the 27th January.

I didn’t feel like much in the way of tea. Too stuffed up with muesli biscuits I reckon. And then I had an early night, leaving you to digest a mere 2000 words this evening.

And serve you b*gg*ers right too!

EPIC HALL

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