Tag Archives: granville

Tuesday 11th March 2025 – I’M HAVING ANOTHER …

… late night tonight but ask me if I care. I have just seen one of the most exciting football matches that has been broadcast on S4C and believe it or not, it was between the teams who are next-to-bottom and third from bottom in the table, Llansawel and Y Drenewydd.

Never mind though about the late night – it will go with the late night that I had last night. It wasn’t until about 01:25 that I finally crawled into bed.

Thinking about it though, when I remember how things were nine months ago when I was crashing out for a couple of hours in the afternoon,staggering into bed like a zombie and struggling to rise up next morning, it does point to something of an improvement the way things are now, and I suppose that it’s the dialysis that is responsible for that. I can’t think of any other reason

So there I was, crawling into bed at 01:25 and there I stayed, flat out without moving until the alarm went off at 07:00. It wasn’t a particularly perspiration-laden night – not as much as some have been just recently – so I suppose that dialysis may not be to blame for the perspiration either.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and clean-up and then into the kitchen for the medication.

Back here there was the dictaphone that needed my attention. I was running a wedding car business last night with an old Rolls Royce. At one wedding that I went to, I actually missed it myself because there was some kind of problem going on with the car or with something. While the party was in there marrying I actually had my head under the bonnet of this Rolls Royce so I didn’t make the ceremony. There was a second wedding too and I also missed that but I can’t remember why now but I didn’t go to it. The next one I had all the people on board the Rolls Royce and they wanted to stop at the corner shop so I pulled up, went out and came back with some cans of drink. They climbed back in and we had a chat. The man said “right, let’s go to the wedding. You don’ want to miss this one, do you?”. I made some remark and he replied “yes, but let’s go to the wedding and find a reason for hating him”. We set off and the Rolls Royce turned to the right inside this great big building. I was going straight on for some reason. Whatever it was that I was pushing became bogged down in the carpet and I couldn’t move it and I was still there trying to free it off and free it off.

Sticking my head under the bonnet of a car was something that I spent a lot of time doing, and I would have enjoyed it very much had I had the time, but things always seemed to go wrong at the wrong moment. It was a never-ending story of swimming against the current back in those days, probably very much akin to being stuck on the carpet while everything is going by past me.

Isabelle the nurse was horribly late today. It’s her first day back on duty so I suppose that she has all of the blood tests and injections that have been building up while her oppo was doing the rounds. She breezed in and back out again and hardly had time to draw breath while she was here.

Breakfast was next and then there was MY NEW BOOK. Today we have been examining early English folk-tales. He’s been looking at them in depth and identifying customs and practice in those folk tales that bear no resemblance whatever to real customs and practice, either in the British Isles, traditional Middle Europe or Scandinavia,

His argument is that the English population as we know it, starting with the Celts, came from those areas mentioned. If the customs and practice in the folk tales does not come from those areas, it must therefore come from someone else, which of course is logical. However he suggests that it comes from the race of humans in the British Isles that the Celts found when they arrived in the middle of the first millennium B.C.

This is how he reckons that he will be able to construct something that will give us some idea of the social and interpersonal life of those who were here before the Celts arrived.

Later on I began to revise for my Welsh. I had a good hour at it and made more progress that I thought that I might but it was to no avail because the lesson was not as good as it might have been. However I was relieved (to a certain degree) to find that I was not the only person in the class who is struggling to keep up, and we talked about going on a Summer School together later in the year

After the lesson I was computing again and I now seem to have almost everything that I need. There’s one program that I mentioned that I can’t find, and for some reason, Waterfox wouldn’t connect me to my Welsh lesson and I had to use another steam-driven web browser. I shall have to look into this and find out why.

Tea tonight was a taco roll as usual, a hurried tea in fact because of the football.

Aberystwyth look well-and-truly down, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … but of the other three clubs at the bottom, Y Drenewydd, Llansawel and Y Fflint, they seem to have cycles – one will win two or three game and pull clear, and then another one will do the same and catch up, and then it’s the turn of the third.

Consequently, tonight’s game between Llansawel and Y Drenewydd is of crucial importance to both clubs who are level on points in the table.

Y Drenewydd came out of the blocks at a tremendous rate and it must have been almost 10 minutes before Llansawel entered their opponents’ half. I forget now how many times Y Drenewydd hit the post, hit the bar, had shots cleared off the line, and had Will Fuller in the LLansawel goal not played the game of his life it could have been a catastrophe.

Llansawel had only really one good chance in the Drenewydd penalty area and you surely don’t need me to tell you what happened.

Nevertheless Llansawel have made something of a habit of dropping points by conceding goals in the final minutes of a game and today was no exception. A 1-1 draw was probably a good reflection of Y Drenewydd’s failure to capitalise on the chances that they had and a tribute to Llansawel’s dogged defence. From a neutral spectator’s point of view, it was a thrilling, exciting match.

Tomorrow is shower day of course, and radio day too so I’ll be busy. It will all keep me out of mischief anyway, I suppose.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Rolls Royces … "well, one of us has" – ed … when Tiger Woods came to play at the Scottish Open a few years ago he hired a Rolls Royce from Edinburgh Airport and set out to drive to St Andrews.
On the way he picked up a young girl hitchhiker, and he delighted in showing off all of the luxury fittings in his car. She kept on pointing to things asking "what’s this? What does it do?" and he told her.
She pointed to some plastic things in the tray by the gear lever and asked "what are those?"
"They are tees" he said
"What are they for?" she asked
"You put your balls on them before you drive off" he replied
"Blimey!" she exclaimed. "Rolls-Royce think of everything!"

0

Monday 10th March 2025 – I HAVE RECEIVED …

… a rather disturbing communication today from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

At first I thought that it might have been Castor who had finally caught up with me but it’s much more disturbing than concerning anything that might (or might not) have occurred on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my place in Canada is actually on the frontier with the USA – quite literally, because my southern boundary is actually the international border between Canada and the USA. This letter tells me that if I "see or hear any suspicious activity at or near the border, to telephone …" and gives me a freephone number to use.

Obviously the Canadian authorities are taking Trump’s sabre-rattling quite seriously and who can blame them? It’s bad enough having a bunch of paranoiacs living next door to you but when the head of the family is someone who is in my opinion clearly insane, it must be extremely worrying.

Seeing Trump’s rants about Canadians, Mexicans and all kinds of other people, I am reminded of the outpourings from Nazi Germany reviling the Jews and the Poles in the 1930s and I have begun to wonder, a long time before this, whether Putin and Trump have done a deal to divide the World between them – Putin in Europe and Trump in America. If so, the Americans are going to learn the hard way that if you lie down with dogs, you’ll inevitably end up with fleas. Putin is much more clever than Trump.

But anyway, at a certain moment I decided that I would leave the politics out of my writings, but sometimes it really is unavoidable.

Going to bed late seems to be unavoidable too these days. After 01:00 when I finally crawled into bed after a long day’s work. I was asleep quite quickly too and only awoke once or twice during the night.

When the alarm went off it took me a minute or two to gather my wits, which is surprising seeing how few I have these days, and then I staggered of into the bathroom. I had a wash and shave, in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant, and then I had some washing to do. I must make myself and my clothes look pretty.

After the medication I came back in here and listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was back at the family home in Vine Tree Avenue having a wrestling match with another kid. all of a sudden I felt another person join in. Of course, both my hands were occupied with the first kid so I couldn’t do anything about the second one starting. After a minute or two I felt “this other person means this!”. The first person disengaged and cleared off but the second person continued to grab me around the neck etc. After a while it spoke and I recognised it as someone from OUSA. I thought “what have I done to you to merit this?”. She came up with some kind of nebulous response that didn’t mean a thing and pressed home her attack. In the end I refused to retaliate and tried to wriggle myself free. After a couple of minutes she said “well I suppose you have other things to do, have you?”. I thought to myself “not really but I can find something”. She disengaged and in a minute or two she left. I thought “what on earth was that all about?”. I went into the living room or other room. My grandfather was there but I didn’t see him but it was his dog and our collie was there. I began to stroke them both. Our collie was old and blind so I talked to her to let her know that it was me but the two dogs were there in our living room and I just continued to stroke them for a while before I went to look for my shoes to go outside.

It’s not difficult to understand why anyone from OUSA would want to strangle me. I was definitely not “flavour of the month” back in those days but then again far too many people took far too many things far too seriously. But what on earth is my grandfather (or, at least, his dog) doing in my dreams? He (the grandfather, and probably the dog too) has been dead for almost 50 years.

The nurse actually had something interesting to discuss today. We were talking about one of the local football clubs that I used to go to see in the days when I could get out and about. Apparently he used to play for them years ago and will even turn out today when they are short of players.

Then it was breakfast and MY NEW BOOK time. Today we are starting to come to the meat of the matter.

He tells us that "analysis of each custom, rite, or belief will show it to consist of three distinct parts, which I would distinguish by the following names :-
1. The formula.
2. The purpose.
3. The penalty or result."
And that there are usually several ancillary elements too.

What he intends to do is to make a table, say, from 1 to 10 and then from, say, A-Z. Then to select folk tales from all over the World and fit each one horizontally into the table, with common principal parts in the same numbered column and common ancillary elements in the lettered column.

He’ll then to read down the columns to identify common themes in various different folk tales and see if he can identify common folk tales that have changed over the centuries.

It’s going to be an absolutely fascinating thing to try to do and I’m looking forward to seeing him do it and what might be his results.

As a matter of fact, it has a special appeal to me. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when this project about dreams started, it was the aim of the student undertaking this project to see whether or not dreams had common threads running through them and whether or not several over a long period could actually be tied together like episodes of a soap opera. We’ve seen enough over the years to identify many common threads but I’m wondering if I ought to go back and set up a table like Laurence Gomme has.

Back in here I was unzipping files until my cleaner arrived, and I witnessed her have meltdown when she realised that they had given her the wrong medication at the pharmacy.

The taxi was late arriving and then we still had to go to pick up someone along the way. Consequently I was last in the queue and had to wait for ages for them to deal with me.

They checked my heart today and I still have it, which is good news. It means that I’ve not turned into a Tory yet. They also gave my feet an examination and I noticed that the nurse put on rubber gloves before she touched my socks.

Last in means last out and we had to bring someone else home too. And then we had an accident. The car in front overshot his turning, stopped and then reversed backwards without looking, straight into the front of our car. Luckily, the damage was minimal and after what can be best described as “a frank exchange of views” the drivers exchanged details and we drove on.

All the time, I was thinking that it was a shame that it wasn’t my favourite taxi driver taking me home. I would have loved to have seen the fireworks.

It was 19:35 when I staggered in here. I didn’t feel much like making tea but I had a stuffed pepper all the same. And now I’ll be off to bed in a moment.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I was talking the other week about studying while I am in dialysis. While I was uploading stuff to the computer I came across a programming language called “Python”.

It’s a useful little program for writing little scripts for batch processing so I uploaded it back at the farm when I was doing some work in 3D. Today at dialysis I downloaded the most recent version as well as the clip libraries and I reckon that I might see what I can do with it. It’ll keep me out of mischief.

But while we’re on the subject of snakes … "well, one of us is" – ed … someone once caught a snake and asked me what type it was
"How long is it?" I asked
"It’s just about 3.14159 feet long" he replied
"Oh yes" I replied. "What you have there is a pi-thon"

0

Sunday 9th March 2025 – THAT WAS MORE …

… like what I call a decent night after the last couple that I have had. I was in bed just after midnight and slept right through until about 07:45 without any interruption at all, taking almost full advantage of my extra hour’s Sunday lie-in. I could certainly have done with it too.

After I finished my notes and everything last night I dictated the radio notes ready for editing and refraining from doing more work on the computer, I crawled off to bed for a good night’s sleep.

At 07:45 I had another one of these dramatic awakenings and although I didn’t look at the time I had a good idea of what time it might have been by the fact that it was light outside. I simply curled up under the quilt until the alarm went off.

Last weekend the nurse caught me in flagrante delicto in the bathroom. Today either I was quicker than that or he was later arriving because I was actually back in here when he turned up.

After he left I made breakfast and carried on reading MY NEW BOOK. His take on religion (which we are discussing today) is that "I venture to think that civilised man shares with the savage of today, and with the primitive ancestors of all mankind, the charge of applying perfectly good logic to an insufficiency of facts."

Interestingly he notes a great similarity in religious beliefs between various bands of Native Americans, natives in Guyana and in Brazil, as well as other beliefs shared by other widely-dispersed groups of natives.

Back in here there were the dictaphone notes that needed transcribing. I was with one of the boys from school last night. We were walking along Alton Street in Crewe. He was telling me that what he was looking for was some kind of place where he could give singing lessons and have a kind of pied-à-terre there too. I asked him “what kind of place? But what? First-floor balcony? Open-air roof garden?”. In the end he came down to the idea of a singing workshop with apartment. I said “what you are actually looking for is what you would used to find on every street corner in Crewe in the pre-1920s Crewe which is the old local shop that would have been a grocer’s or a hairdresser’s or something with a two-roomed apartment above it”. Just at that moment we walked past what was a florist’s so I said “just like this in fact”. He wasn’t very enthusiastic but I couldn’t see exactly what he was hoping to do if that wasn’t the solution. While we were pondering on this I stepped out off the kerb into the side-street and was nearly run down by a car coming the other way. I looked around and we were in Nantwich Road near the Earl of Crewe. I wondered what on earth I’d been doing to have walked this kind of distance from Alton Street up to Nantwich Road without thinking about what I was doing and where I was going.

Whoever this boy was and if I recognised him in the dream, I have no idea. But it was certainly a quick transition up the hill from Alton Street to Nantwich Road.

Later on, we were round at my house in Virlet last night, me and a couple of my siblings. The house was in a total mess with dust and rubbish and papers everywhere and hadn’t been lived in for fifty years. They were having a good look around it. We were wandering into the next room looking at the damage and the decay and the waste, all the rubbish and dust. They came to a door in the side wall and managed to force it open. Next door was the Council Chamber which was all richly furnished with seats and huge tables and chairs with silks and everything. The contrast between that room and the rooms in my house was astonishing. They all noticed it and made some remarks. They they picked up a couple of brushes and began to sweep everything up. I’d left everything as it was because I was intending to go through the rubbish and sort out everything that I needed but they just began to brush things up and stick them in bin bags. They went into the bedroom and found that the bedroom was in total disorder and mess that someone must have left the door open, the Christmas tree had fallen down so I’d better go to have a look at that. Then they came to the door at the end of the house and couldn’t open it so they all pushed against it. Suddenly it opened and they cascaded out, falling down one storey into the yard at the back. They asked “how do we come out of here?”. I told them to go down to the end of the alleyway and turn left. I thought “this is the moment when I suppose that I ought to go too”. I locked up the house and left. When I reached the place where they should have been, there was one of these cryptic signs so in the end I interpreted it as “Eric, forget this and go home” so I thought that I’d better set off for home. It was a sunny day with lots of cloud though. All the rain that we’d had over the last few months was slowly beginning to dry out. I thought that this is going to be a really nice day.

The house I actually recognised. It was one in Gresty Road opposite the football ground, one that I knew quite well at one time. But the idea that the Council Offices were next door is a long way short of the mark. The story about the house and dust everywhere sounds just like the farm in Virlet when I was plastering it and dropped a huge bag of screws all over the floor into the dust. I loved my place down in Virlet but it was no place to be when ill-health strikes. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the old man with whom I was quite friendly who had a fall in his house in the middle of a minus eighteen degree winter and lay on the floor undiscovered for four days and never recovered.

There was a bread roll to make for lunch. Last week the fresh bread roll was an excellent idea so I was keen to give it another try.

After that we had the football, Stranraer v Peterhead. It was a tough gritty match that finished 0-0 and quite rightly too because no-one had any much more play than the other. But the disgraceful scenes at the end when the Peterhead coach came onto the field and attacked a Stranraer player have no place whatever in football. And even worse, the referee took no notice whatever of the incident. Whether he mentions it in his match report remains to be seen.

There were the highlights of the matches in the Cymru Premier League to watch too. And Penybont finally won a match in the second phase as they beat Y Bala. Aberystwyth went down 3-0 though and now look certainties for the drop down to Tier Two. Y Drenewydd live to fight another day after a draw with Y Fflint but Llansawel went down at home against Y Barri by a last-minute goal.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent finishing off the uploading of data onto the new system disk. It’s all there now but it needs unpacking and sorting and that is going to be a mammoth task and will take an age until it’s finished

The cheese on toast on fresh bread roll, all cooked nicely in the air fryer, was excellent again. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I am really impressed with my air fryer, almost as much as I was with my stainless steel dustbin.

Later on I had bread to make and following the success of the loaf last week I put sunflower seeds in this one too. And it rose up just as well as the one last week did

There was pizza dough to make too. This was another really good batch that rose up really well. Two lumps are in the freezer and the third made a lovely tea tonight – a tea that would have been even nicer had I remembered to put the cheese on before the cherry tomatoes. I really don’t know what’s happening to me and my memory these days.

So now that I’ve finished my notes I’ll carry on unzipping *.RAR archives for a while and then go to bed ready for Welsh homework and dialysis tomorrow

A few days ago though, we were talking about the dams in Germany that the Dambusters breached. So while we’re on the subject of religion today … "well, one of us is" – ed … when the Mohne Dam broke, the warden telephoned the church in the valley to tell the vicar to flee
"I’ll be okay" he said. "The Good Lord will provide"
When the water reached the church the vicar climbed into the tower. A few minutes later a boat rowed past. "Quick, vicar, leap aboard"
"I’ll be okay" he said. "The Good Lord will provide"
When the church was flooded the vicar climbed up to the steeple
Another boat came past. "Quick vicar, leap aboard!"
"I’ll be okay" he said. "The Good Lord will provide"
But the Good Lord didn’t and the vicar drowned
At the Pearly Gates he met St Peter and he remonstrated with him. "I always believed in the Lord and he betrayed me. Why did the Good Lord let me down and let me drown?"
"Well" said St Peter. "He did send two boats for you."

0

Saturday 8th March 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone this morning.

But then that’s hardly a surprise when you don’t go to bed until 02:20 and you are up and about by 05:35. And that’s something of a tragedy because if I’m going to have a bad night’s sleep at least I want to be going out and about enjoying it, even if it is only a notional travel.

As you might expect I was hunting down files and data last night and then ended up being carried away by something or other, and once you make a start you’ll be surprised at just how many other things there are. It was still a very weary me who crawled into bed at about 02:20.

Not that it did me all that much good because although I did go to sleep at one point it wasn’t for very long and in the end I became fed up of doing nothing whatever and arose from the Dead.

In the bathroom I scrubbed up and washed my clothes, and then went into the kitchen to take my medication. Next task was to finish off the unpacking of the food from yesterday and organise the collection of glass jars so that there was room to add some more

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m trying to do away with plastic in here. Over the last few months I’ve been buying my olives in these big glass jars and I now have quite a collection. My range of glass-bottled loose product is expanding quite rapidly because of the extra stuff that I have bought over the last few months as my recipe ideas have expanded and as I try to move everything out of plastic and paper bags into glass jars.

Before I came back in here I tidied away all of the shopping bags so that they weren’t all over the floor. But in any case it doesn’t work. My place is now just as untidy as it was yesterday before my cleaner came.

Once back in here, with nothing on the dictaphone to transcribe I made a start on unzipping data but was halted in my tracks by the nurse who came to sort me out. He asked me the same questions as usual and so he had the same responses as usual, not that I’m too bothered.

After he left I made breakfast and carried on reading MY NEW BOOK. We reached page 123 today and that marks the end of the introductory preamble as he sets the scene for what is to come.

He’s convinced that these strange stories that Julius Caesar reported about the British people being cannibals, holding wives in common and other "odious practices" as he puts it were not actually the practices of the Celts who Caesar met but those of the people who were here and were displaced by the Celts when they arrived.

Furthermore he thinks that he can prove it too and I shall be interested to see how he manages to do it, bearing in mind that if there are no written records of the Celts there are likely to be even less for the people who were here before.

In here I carried on with the extraction of files until my cleaner arrived to fit my anaesthetic patches. She had only just finished too when the taxi arrived. 12:15, 15 minutes early. Not that i’m bothered though because the sooner we start the sooner we finish (in principle).

It was the young chatty driver who came for me today but he didn’t have much to say for himself which is a shame because the time passes more quickly when you are having an interesting discussion.

First in at the dialysis centre I was, and first to be coupled up. Julie the Cook had left a message for her colleagues and they applied the ice pack too before they plugged me in and although it did hurt, it didn’t hurt as much as it has done in the past.

There was football this afternoon, TNS v Hwlffordd. Hwlffordd are pushing Penybont for second place following Penybont’s dramatic collapse of form but TNS demolished them with some ease and the 5-1 scoreline was not flattering TNS at all.

Hwlffordd played some pretty football at times but it was all to no real purpose and they didn’t look threatening at all. For all the distance between Aberystwyth and Hwlffordd in the table and in the style of play, Aberystwyth’s showed much more dogged resistance last week that Hwlffordd did today.

Emilie the Cute Consultant was there today and she said “hello” to me, but that was about the extent of her interaction today. No-one else spoke to me until it was time to be unplugged.

The driver who brought me home was the young girl who brought me home several weeks ago. We were talking about food and I found, to my surprise and to hers too, that we are both vegan. She immediately asked if she could come round for a meal and who am I to refuse such a request?

Mind you, I’ll believe it when I actually see it.

My cleaner watched as I ascended the stairs and once I’d sat down and recovered my strength I had my disgusting protein drink.

Tea tonight was one of those weird chili burgers on a bap with salad and baked potato followed by date bread and soya dessert. It was the first time for a fortnight that I’ve actually felt like eating a proper meal.

So there’s some dictating to do and then I’m off to bed ready for tomorrow. I have a busy day of baking and there’s some fruit that needs transforming into juice and purée.

But while we’re on the subject of glass bottles … "well, one of us is" – ed … I used to collect them if they were any good and reuse them for other things. One day I found a really nice one.
It was rather dirty so I went to rub it clean and suddenly a genie appeared out of the neck.
"You have released me from the bottle and now I am yours to command" he said. "Give me 100 gold pieces and I will answer any two questions"
"Blimey!" I said. "That’s a lot of money for two questions, don’t you think?"
"Yes" replied the genie. "Now what’s your second question?"

0

Friday 7th March 2025 – DOES ANYONE WANT …

… some cabbage?

This week LeClerc has had its vegetables on special offer and as I have plenty of broccoli already, I thought that I’d go with the cabbage and cauliflower at €0:99 per head.

The difficulty with not going to the shops yourself is that you can’t see what it is that you are buying, and I had I seen beforehand, I might have changed my mind somewhat. Freezing is not possible because already I’m rather short of room in there, so it looks as if I shall be eating cabbage for the rest of my life. I have never in my life seen a cabbage as big as the one that rolled in through my front door this afternoon.

That was really the highlight of the day. Today should have been a Woodstock day today but as I said yesterday, I had other fish to fry, like dealing with the recalcitrant computer.

It was well after 02:00 when I finally crawled into bed this morning, feeling very much the worse for wear, but at least I had a working computer with all of the internal drives connected and the basic suite of programs installed so that I can carry on working in the morning. And, as expected, I didn’t need much rocking at all.

In fact, I slept right the way through until the alarm went off and don’t recall awakening at all, but then again I suppose that five hours sleep isn’t all that much to write home about. And it was certainly another perspiration-laden night as I discovered when the alarm went off.

Into the bathroom for a good wash and scrub up and then into the kitchen for the medication.

Back in here, now that the computer is up and running with the new system disk installed, I began the on-line hunt for all of the little files and utilities on which I rely. I have most of them stored in one of the back-up disks but an opportunity like this to see whether there have been any upgrades in the meantime is too good to resist

To my regret one of the most important ones seems to have been withdrawn. All that I have in the back-up are the extractor files, not the program itself so I’m rather stuck. Searching on the internet with the writer’s name just comes up with links to some other people’s efforts which are nothing like as good.

The nurse’s arrival interrupted my flow somewhat. he didn’t have too much to say for himself but he did ask me in view of my computer problems "I have a friend who is an informatician who can help you. Would you like me to contact him for you?"
"Thank you" I replied "but I can manage quite fine, thank you" and I can too. And in any case, if his friend is anything like his taxi driver friend, I’m keeping well clear.

He asked me how come I can sort myself out and so I told him.
"You should have opened your own business!" he said. "You could have been rich!"
However, he has in the past berated me for doing my washing in the morning instead of awakening in the middle of the night and doing it then to save 50 centimes on the electricity bill (and awakening all the neighbours). I know that I’m careful with my money but even I can recognise the difference between “being careful” and “having an unhealthy obsession”.

After he left, it was breakfast and MY NEW BOOK time.

Today we have been identifying the violence in the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm that "we are entitled to call savage, because they are so far removed from the European culture amidst which the folk-tales have lived, and because these elements belong not to the accidentals of the stories but to the essentials.".

He goes on to say "An occasional savage incident might have been considered a freak of the original narrator, or a borrowing by one of the countless late narrators of these stories brought home from savage countries ; but statistics disprove both of these suppositions. It is not accidental but persistent savagery we meet with in the folk-tale. It is also the savagery to be found amongst modern peoples still in the savage stage of culture"

And then "The modern savage is better off in this respect. He has an outside historian in the traveller and the anthropologist of modern days. The savage who was ancestor to our own people had no such means of becoming known to history, or had but very limited means, and it is only in the deathless tradition that we can trace him out ….. History is indebted to tradition for preserving some of the most remote facts of racial or national life, which but for tradition would have been lost"

What I have to admit is that when I saw a reference to this work when I was reading something else, I hesitated to download the book because I wasn’t sure that it would be interesting. But rather like the Ancient Egyptian Astronomy book that we read, this is turning out to be absolutely fascinating and I’m keen to find out where we’ll go next.

Back in here afterwards I began to write the notes for yesterday and they are on-line now if you missed them

The LeClerc order was next. That needed to be reviewed and sent off For a change they had almost everything. Only the garlic that I like was missing but they had a substitute and that will keep me going until the next time that I order.

Having done all of that, all that I had to do was to upload the data that I need. Some of it is of course available because I’m still using the old data disk but some of it isn’t and I had to trawl through the back-up drives to find what I need. But there is still some stuff that I can’t find and I’ve no idea where it might be.

My hunt for data ended up with me having a closer look at the failed hard drive and after a lot of manipulation I’ve managed to make it fire up which is a surprise. So all is not lost quite yet. I’ve left it running all day and it seems to be fairly stable to date But the hunt for data and sorting it out instead of leaving it in a mess will go on for several days, I should imagine.

There were the usual breaks of course. No lunch because I still haven’t recovered my appetite as yet and I’m not going to force it. Then we had the cleaner coming round to do her stuff. After that we had the disgusting drink break and finally, the LeClerc order arrived. I’d asked or it “any time after 17:00” and at 17:01 it was coming up the stairs.

There wasn’t very much in the order today but there’s nevertheless not much place to put things. I’m not going through the food as quickly as I used to now that the appetite has diminished.

The cabbage and cauliflower took an age to cut up and now they are blanched and draining on the draining board. I’ll have to find a way to fit it all in the freezer before I go to bed.

Believe it or not, I’d forgotten to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I’d been out with a group of friends from school. We’d been through the city centre of Antwerp. There ended up being a bunch of about seven or eight of us. They asked me if I could take their photograph. I didn’t have a camera so they gave me someone’s telephone. They set out to walk around a corner and I had to capture them coming round it. They had to do it seven or eight times before I finally took the photo. First of all I couldn’t make the camera work, then I had someone in the way, and then there was something else that happened. I had to do it ever so many times before I’d even taken one.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that camera issues used to be another theme that ran regularly around my nocturnal perambulations. It’s a surprise that it’s suddenly reared its ugly head yet again after all this time.

Later on I was talking to a girl. We were discussing some ballerinas. One ballerina was an older girl who was talking about her biography and talking about the University that she went to in the Netherlands at Leiden. This carried on and I could see one of my friends being more and more disgusted with this conversation. I asked “what’s the matter with this?”. She replied “my father works as a lecturer at Leiden and he could tell you that she’s never set one foot there in her life. They were then talking about a much younger girl who had been very very talented but had given it up to go to work in the coffee bar of the local police force in London and what a waste of talent it was. Then they announced that she had actually given up the coffee bar and had gone back to be a ballerina.

Several friends of mine have daughters who are ballerinas, and not just the average Saturday afternoon ballerina either. One of them is currently at sixth form in the National Ballet or somewhere and the other one, a few years younger, danced for the UK at the European Championships in Prague a few months ago.

Tea tonight was more vegan nuggets (seeing as they were on special offer) with chips and salad. I have to do my best to keep the food going.

But I’l worry about that tomorrow. Tonight I’m off to bed.

But as we have been talking about computer problems … "well, one of us has" – ed … I am reminded of an old Andy Capp cartoon from many years ago. Andy Capp and Chalky White were watching some guys struggle to try to fit a 1950s computer through the door of a building.
They stood there watching for about fifteen minutes as the men tried first one way and then another and then another.
In the end Andy Capp went over to them and said "why not plug it in and let it work it out for itself?"

0

Thursday 6th March 2025 (cont) – NOW THAT THINGS … .

… are back to normal (well, as normal as things ever could be around here) I can carry on and do what I ought to have been doing, and update everything.

And had I known how things were going to have worked out, still being on my feet (well, OK, on my chair) at 02:00 I would have had an early night instead of being up to all hours watching Stranraer, after several weeks of impressive football, go back to their old, miserable ways and be easily beaten by the bottom club in the league who spent most of the night playing with just ten men.

That was as embarrassing as the defeat aginst Clyde a couple of weeks ago and was really depressing after the last three or four performances.

So anyway I went to bed eventually and had another perspiration-laden night where I was only really half-asleep for most of it.

When the alarm did go off I hauled myself to my feet and headed off to the bathroom for a scrub and even a shave. After all, you never know if Emilie the Cute Consultant is going to be there today.

No medication right now because you also never know if the nurse might actually want to come along and do this blood test this morning and it has to be done à jeun so I listened to the dictaphone instead to find out what had gone on during the night. There I was, lying here asleep and a girl was trying to load some ink or something into my mobile ‘phone so that it could print a document. I tried to pur some fat into it but the fat was in a chip basket thing. Of course, every time you tilted it to pour it the liquid would seep out through the holes so I wasn’t having any success with my cooking last night.

Can you imagine trying to lift molten fat out of a chip pan with the chip basket? I’ve no idea what goes on inside my head at night, but there again, I don’t have all that much more idea about what goes on inside my head when I’m awake.

Later on I was out in North Wales looking for an address. I ended up somewhere beyond Conwy in an area that I didn’t know very well but I couldn’t find it. I ended up on an extremely steep hairpin bend. Trying to walk or cycle up there was extremely complicated. When I reached the top there was a waterfall. The waterfall was where some kind of primitive dam had been that had been broken and the water was cascading over it down into the valley where it joined the main river. There was a main road off there to the right and there was a lot of traffic coming that way so it was complicated to cross the road. I did cross the road but still couldn’t find this address. In the end I saw a map with the shape of where it was and I identified that I should have been four miles beyond Abergele so I had to retrace my steps and try to return across the road on a pushbike was even more complicated with all of the traffic that was coming straight on down the main road. Once or twice someone paused and that was the signal for someone to nip over but I had to wait for a while and found myself in the end with about a dozen vehicles on the central reservation waiting for a gap in the downhill traffic again. Once we set off there were all these vehicles passing so closely and I was then freewheeling down the hill listening to the news about a bicycle race. There were two people in the middle of the road, a man and a woman with bikes and they didn’t seem to be paying any attention to me as I came hurtling down and I missed the woman by a matter of millimetres.

As it happens, I recognise this road too. It’s out of Llangollen heading down into mid-Wales and I was there 20-odd years ago with Nicole when we came to pick up the old LDV. The dam is very much how I would have imagined one of the “Dambusters” dams to have been after it had been blown up. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we WENT FOR A LOOK AROUND the dams few years ago on our way to Colditz and STRAWBERRY MOOSE‘s famous escape attempt.

Incidentally, four miles beyong Abergele up a steep mountainside is one of the Iron Age hillforts to which Arthur Allcroft took us a couple of weeks ago, but there was nothing about any hillforts anywhere last night.

When the nurse did finally turn up he did actually take the blood sample and I knew all about it because, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … he just doesn’t have “the touch”.

After he left I made breakfast and carried on reading MY NEW BOOK. We’re discussing exciting subjects today, such as men marrying their daughters and the young killing off the old folks once they stop being productive and become useless mouths to feed.

He’s actually done some research into this and has found plenty of examples back in history and in more remote parts of the World where those customs were still current when he was researching his book. All I can say is that for someone whose day job was a clerk in London County Council, he had some strange pastimes and hobbies.

However, he has proved a point over which I have been puzzling. If people back in ancient history were so concerned about having useless mouths hanging around eating the produce, the produce must have been so scarce that not even family ties could hold the people together and stop them killing each other. So I remain totally unconvinced by the modern way of thinking that these hillforts were nothing but symbolic. The huge amount of effort that went into the construction of these immense defensive works and the amount of time they had to spend away from the fields or from the hunt, they really must have been scared almost to death by what might have happened had they not spent all that time and effort in their construction.

Back in here later I had a few things to organise and sort out but was interrupted by the telephone. "Is it OK if I come a little earlier, like 12:00?". It was my taxi driver.

What has happened was that last week these new Social Security regulations came into legally-binding force and so this is how it’s going to be from now on – taxis turning up at any time they like if they are obliged to combine trips. Not that I’m complaining because, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed …, it’s a free service and in any case the sooner we arrive, the sooner I can leave and so I sent a message to my cleaner to inform her.

Poor thing, she had to scramble here to fit my anaesthetic patches and was still here when the taxi arrived – at 11:47. The Sécu has instructed that a timespan of 45-minute either side of the booked time is acceptable under these new regulations and by my reckoning the car was actually 43 minutes early. That’s cutting it fine.

We had to pick up someone else on the way of course, someone who had a hospital appointment for an operation. "As we’re so early we may as well drop madame off at the hospital first."
"She’s going to hospital in Rennes"

When I arrived at the dialysis centre I was so early that they hadn’t even finished dealing with the morning’s patients but Julie the Cook saw me and she quickly finished off setting up my machine (patients have their own individual settings) and I was installed and up and running by 13:15.

She tried a new trick this afternoon. While she was setting up the machine she slapped an ice bag on my arm. And that actually might have helped a little – at least until the effect wore off.

Apart from the coffee, no-one bothered me at all until it was time to unplug me. Julie the Cook had gone home a long time before and one of the others came to sort me out. For some reason I was rather unsteady on my feet at first. It can’t have been low blood pressure because that was OK.

So it was 17:30 when I staggered out of the centre and the taxi was already waiting for me. We had someone else with us to drop off along the way but even so I was back at home by 18:15, much to the surprise of my cleaner

That was when I discovered the catastrophe in here, with the big desktop computer spinning around in BIOS mode complaining “I can’t find any disk with an operating system on it”.

Luckily I had a spare 1TB SSD that I’d dismantled from another machine so I formatted that in a disk caddy with the help of the travelling laptop and set about dismantling the big computer. It’s always good to perform a clean installation every couple of years because you’ll be surprised (or maybe you con’t) at the amount of rubbish that accumulates over the passage of time.

While I was doing that, I actually found what I suspect is the fault. There’s an internal power lead with three connectors for disk drives. The one that was connected to the SSD system drive has a crack in it and what seems to have happened is that the crack has allowed the internals to flex and they have shorted out.

No problem. I just disconnected the internal back-up drive and plugged the new SSD System drive into that connector. I’ll have to order a new power lead from somewhere in due course to connect everything back up on a more permanent basis.

While it was sorting itself out I made a quick tea – just like THE CARMICHAELS and "supper waits on the table inside a tin".

Back in here afterwards, I settled down and steeled myself ready for what is going to be a very long night

But while we’re on the subject of Colditz Castle … "well, one of us is" – ed … I’m reminded of that legendary “Two Ronnies” sketch from years ago.
"We’re making a film about prisoners escaping from a camp in Germany"
"What’s it called?"
"The Colditz Story"
"What are you making next?"
"A film about life in a South Wales mining village"
"What’s it called?"
"The Coal Tips Story"
"And after that?"
"We’re doing a film starring Raquel Welch who will be playing the role of an Inuit"
"What’s that called?"
"We haven’t decided yet"

0

Wednesday 5th March 2025 – MY CLEANER IS …

… a heroine – an absolute marvel, and I’m really pleased and grateful that she’s here.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that now that I’m properly settled here on the coast with no prospect of returning home to the farm, I’ve been changing a few things around.

One of the things that I’ve been doing is slowly disposing of all of the plastic that I have and replacing it with glass as much as possible. My plastic chopping boards are looking very much the worse for wear and I have been planning to let them go the Way of the West whenever the next opportunity presents itself.

A couple of weeks ago, LeClerc sent me a preview of the next instore sale that started on Tuesday. They had some lovely tempered glass chopping boards – huge ones too – at just €2:85 each and had I been able to do so, I would have been queueing at the door on Tuesday morning.

When she was here last week I mentioned it to her in passing and talking about how I would have liked to replace my two plastic boards (I have one for smelly foods and one for other stuff).

So today when she came in to sort me out, she produced two tempered glass chopping boards, one black and one white.

It’s quite strange really that it’s the slightest thing that makes such an impression and makes such a difference. I couldn’t believe that I’ve been so impressed by this – even more impressed than I was with my stainless steel dustbin.

Not so impressed though with last night. A late night again and then pretty much more of the same old same old …, difficult to sleep, waking up drenched in perspiration again. The difficulty in sleeping I can cope with, but it’s everything else. However, at least, despite what I said yesterday, if I had another perspiration-laden night when it wasn’t a Dialysis Day, it can hardly be the dialysis that’s causing it.

Nevertheless I was asleep this morning when the alarm went off, doing something with someone else, talking about food, saying that the food, which should be a natural substance and not a processed kind of meal or processed kind of product. Then we were watching something on the television, a quiz game where people produced some kind of extraordinary object and the second team had to try to decide exactly what the purpose of that object was. They had invented some kind of quiz game out of this.

Something else that I can do in my sleep that I can’t, or never had the opportunity to do during my waking hours. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … if only I had found someone capable of making some use of all of these marvellous ideas that I only ever seem to have when I’m asleep. I’d be typing this from the deck of my yacht in the Bahamas with floozies peeling grapes and tossing them into my mouth.

It was another struggle to extricate myself from my bed before the second alarm and to struggle into the bathroom. Back in here straight away afterwards because I can’t ingest anything until after the blood test.

Instead, I transcribed the dictaphone notes from the night. Apparently at one point I’d just been for a walk through part of Crewe. I went down Mill Street and up Brook Street and up and over the railway bridge in Edleston Road. In fact was walking over the bridge in Edleston Road when I awoke. I don’t know what I was doing and there was no-one else with me. I was just strolling around.

That’s a disappointing evening, walking around Crewe like that during my sleep. I’m old enough to remember when the east side of Mill Street was a maze of cheap, crumbling terraced houses until in the early 60s the whole lot was swept away practically overnight. And as is typical for Crewe, it remained a derelict bombsite for thirty years afterwards until some kind of new development began. I can see the demolished town centre being like that for the next ever so many years.

Later on I was talking to some American woman about some people who had left the USA to go to live over the border in Mexico. I was explaining to her that to actually come to live in the USA and work was quite a straightforward matter but complicated as long as you had the right kind of education, background and qualifications but once you were in the USA changing jobs is extremely complicated and difficult. For many people it’s no longer an option to do so and they begin to look around for other ways of earning their income. At first she didn’t believe what I was saying and pooh-poohed it but gradually she began to understand the point that I was trying to make. She ended up by agreeing with everything that I was saying.

That’s a rare achievement, isn’t it? Having people agree with me like that. But conditions for employment in the USA are quite strict. Even though my niece’s second daughter is married to an American and lives in Michigan, she couldn’t even think about changing her job and leaving her Canadian employer until she’d applied for and been granted a work permit to do so. It took her fifteen months to obtain it.

The nurse came round and told me that he’ll take the blood sample tomorrow. So I’d gone without my morning drink for nothing. There’s no point remonstrating with him about it because it will only give me ulcers. I know what I would like to give him.

Breakfast and medication was next while I read MY NEW BOOK. Today, we’ve been talking about the myths of buried treasure, the myths of open-air meetings and also the ancient Graeco-Egyptian LEGEND OF RHODOPIA. Have a read of that legend and see if you recognise anything in it from your own childhood.

There is going to be a considerable amount of mileage in this book, I can see that. It’s going to destroy a great many of my childhood illusions.

Buried treasure, usually guarded by a mythical monster, is another story with a lot of mileage in it. It was usually buried in time of war and disturbance and his answer to the mythical monster is the threat that the person who buried it made to whoever was watching him bury it. People believed in mythical monsters in those days.

That’s not so far-fetched either. Nerina and I were driving around Brittany once many years ago and came across a garage proprietor who had discovered several ancient French cars from someone’s collection walled up behind a false wall to hide them from the Germans. The person who had walled them didn’t live to reclaim them and there they stayed until the garage proprietor found them.

“Buried treasure” is regularly turning up, buried in haste in the path of invading armies centuries ago, and presumably the owner didn’t live to dig it back up again.

After breakfast I made a start on the next radio programme. I’ve decided after much thought that I’m still going to keep on well in advance with one programme per week to keep up the rhythm, and use the spare time in the week to work on the Woodstock set. That way, I shan’t become bogged down.

Anyway, by the time I knocked off tonight, I’d done everything for the programme except dictating it and choosing the final track. That’s going to be another Saturday night/Sunday effort.

There were the usual interruptions – not a lunchtime one though because my appetite is still very much diminished. There was the visit of my cleaner, the shower and the disgusting drink break, as well as probably one or two other things that I can’t remember right now.

Tea was a leftover curry, except that there aren’t any leftovers. Instead I found a helping of pie filling in the freezer and used that instead. Not one of my more memorable meals, but you can’t win a coconut every time. The naan was delicious though. This batch of dough (of which this naan was the final helping) was an exceptionally good batch.

Tomorrow is Dialysis Day but I’m past caring about it and how it’s going to turn out. I’ll just wander off to bed (late as usual these days) and tomorrow will be another day.

But while we’re on the subject of treasure … "well, one of us is" – ed … one of my friends once told me "my wife is a little treasure"
"Is that so?" I asked
"It certainly is" he replied "and furthermore, I’m not going to tell anyone where I’ve buried her"

0

Tuesday 4th March 2025 – IT’S NOT THE …

… heating in this room that’s making me perspire during the night, I’ll tell you that. Last night was one of the most perspiration-laden nights that I’ve had for quite some considerable time, but the heating in here was turned down quite considerably. In fact with the temperature being only 2°C outside, the bedroom was freezing.

It’s true that one of the side-effects of my cancer is a nocturnal perspiration and I’ve been having those since 2015, but nothing whatever anything like those that I’ve had over this last couple of months. And in any case, for the moment my cancer is stable, not worsening.

It’s even much worse on the night following the dialysis, and so the only thing that it can be is something connected with that process. They deny that they are doing anything that might provoke it, or that they are putting something extra into the mix, but there’s something definite going on.

So that was yet another restless night where I had a great deal of difficulty sleeping. I’d been to bed late, as usual these days, after taking too much time finishing off everything that I had to do. And although I went to sleep quite quickly, I was awake again shortly afterwards and that was how I remained throughout the night, drifting in and out of sleep.

When the alarm went off I was definitely asleep and it was a struggle to make it to my feet before the second alarm. But into the bathroom I went for a good scrub up, and then into the kitchen for the medication.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I had been during the night. I dreamed last night that my punctures had burst while I was in bed and there was blood everywhere and someone had to come along to compress it so that it would heal. That wasn’t very nice at all.

That is my greatest nightmare, and we had something similar to that in real life a couple of weeks ago when I found the pillow soaking in blood. But as I said last night when I was talking about dreaming about dialysis, if those dreams are now becoming nightmares, it really is the end of the line as far as I’m concerned.

A little later a friend of mine from University who lives in Germany put in an appearance last night with her husband. They were talking about when they first met all those years ago and how for their first heavy date they actually had to go to London for a health appointment which was quite amusing for them and particularly when her mother warned her about going on this kind of heavy date with boys and young men. They were telling me all kinds of stories about the first time that they slept together and one of them made me squirm because it was horrible.

Actually, I can tell you a funny story about the first time that I shared a particular bed with a certain someone and my old black cat had a fit of jealousy, but as it might touch a sensitive nerve if you are eating your tea, I shall restrain myself. However I shall say that the first time that I took Cécile out was to a funeral in Pionsat, and the first time she took me out was when she was giving evidence in a criminal case in Riom. We did have some really exciting dates.

While we’re on the subject of Pionsat and the Auvergne … "well, one of us is" – ed … I was in the Auvergne walking past a vehicle garage where he was doing repairs and working on all kinds of old cars, mainly Peugeot 203s scattered around for pieces outside. I heard him talking to someone on the ‘phone and then I heard him say “that Mr Hall, he’s the guy”. I was intrigued to find out what he was talking about. I went into the workshop where he was still on the ‘phone talking away so I had a look around. There were a lot of old motor bikes there, Japanese ones from the 1960s and 70s. I was having a look through them to see what he had to try to find something of interest. After he finished his conversation I went over to him and said “so you were bringing my name into the conversation. Now what have I done?”. “Nothing at all really” he replied. “It’s about Wind Turbines and everything. When you have your system all properly working it’ll certainly be something for everyone else to see” so we had a chat about that. I told him that I was having problems with my car and he needs to look at it. He said that he would be able to do that. I told him that if I were to drop it off someone would have to run me back home again. He replied “either that or we could come round and pick it up from your place”. We had a bit of a chat about that.

Strangely enough, I can see the garage proprietor now, and he is a garage proprietor in the Auvergne. But it was someone else’s garage where he was, not his. And that was confusing when I thought about it.

The nurse came round and I gave him some bad news, such as he has to take a blood sample tomorrow. He hates doing them and certainly doesn’t have “the touch”, but it needs to be done even if we both aren’t looking forward to it.

After he left I made breakfast and began to read MY NEW BOOK. It’s called “Folklore As A Historical Science and the author, Laurence Gomme, is going to argue that many, if not most folklore tales have an actual basis in fact, but that the facts were misunderstood by an imperfect contemporary understanding of modern science.

In my opinion, that’s quite likely. The westward spread of the “more advanced” civilisations into the area of a “more primitive” culture several thousand years ago and the skills that they brought with them must have had a terrifying effect on the latter.

We can see that too in the tales of the Norse Sagas in “Vinland”. Just because the Sagas talk about unipeds and other mythical beasts doesn’t change the underlying fact that the underlying events in the Sagas such as the voyages, the encounters with the “Skraelings”, the settlements in Labrador and Newfoundland actually did happen. We’ve found some of the settlements and the encounters with the Norse are preserved in several folk tales of the Mi’kmaq

A reviewer in “Nature” magazine of 4th June 1908 is not however as easily convinced. He states that Gomme "still has to account for e.g. why the cult of Lug in regions so far apart as Leyden, Lyons and County Wicklow, as well as a host of intermediate places"‘ was celebrated simultaneously

But perhaps Gomme didn’t feel the need to explain it because all you need to do, in my opinion, is to consider the westward spread of civilisation as Allcroft and many others whose books we have read recently have stated. Work out at what period in history a civilisation that was in occupation of those places where Lug is celebrated and trace that civilisation back to its starting point. Not only will you then have a good idea of where the cult originated, but when – as in before the civilisation dispersed to the various destinations in the West.

Back in here I revised my Welsh and then went to the lesson. I was rather disappointed today with that which I did (or didn’t, as the case may be) accomplish. I’m going to have to do much better than this if I’m going to be making any progress. I can feel myself sliding backwards and that’s disappointing.

After the lesson I had a really good think about my radio programme for Woodstock. It’s not going to be as easy as I think that it will. For a start, a couple of the groups were totally unknown and then a couple of acts only ever performed at Woodstock and nowhere else. Much of the information is contradictory too – there are two, three, four and even more versions of the same incident doing the rounds.

However, if it’s not going to be a challenge, there’s no point in doing it. I’ll sort something out though.

Tea tonight was different, vegetables made into a kind-of potato salad with onions, mushroom and something out of the European Burger Mountain, followed by date bread and soya dessert. Tomorrow is curry night and with no leftovers to use up as yet, I shall have to be inventive.

But I’ll worry about that tomorrow. Now I’m off to bed. It’s shower day tomorrow so with a bit of luck there will be a nice clean me tomorrow night.

While we are talking about our Welsh course … "well, one of us is" – ed … one of the tasks for homework in a few weeks is to tell a joke in Welsh. It reminded me of the story of the three Englishmen who married on the same day in the same church with the same vicar, one to a Thai girl, the second to a Japanese girl and the third to a Welsh girl.
During the pre-nuptial interview with the vicar each Englishman said that regardless of current thought and opinion he was going to tell his new wife that her role was to keep the house clean and tidy and to prepare his meals punctually.
A couple of weeks later the vicar encountered the three men and asked them how things were going.
The man who married the Thai girl replied "at first I didn’t see any improvement but after a few days I noticed that she was making an effort and she slowly got the hang of things"
The man who married the Japanese girl replied "at first I didn’t see any improvement but after a few days I noticed that the meals began to arrive and the house began to take on some kind of shape"
The man who married the Welsh girl replied "at first I didn’t see any improvement but after a few days the swelling went down and my left eye began to open a little"

0

Monday 3rd March 2025 – THAT WAS MUCH …

… less painful today in the dialysis centre. In fact, it was just the normal amount of pain and after last Saturday, it was something of a relief. I certainly wasn’t expecting or hoping for another afternoon like that one.

It had taken me quite a while to psyche myself up for the trip today, trying to put off for as long as possible going to bed in the hope that today wouldn’t actually come round. Eventually though, even later than usual, I made it into bed.

For a change, especially during Carnaval week, I slept all the way through until the alarm went off. It’s been a while since I’ve done that, but then again, it’s not as if it was a long time last night.

It was still quite a desperate struggle to rise up from the bed before the second alarm but I did manage it. Then into the bathroom for a wash and even a shave in case Emilie the Cute Consultant is there today.

After the medication I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone. I was preparing for dialysis and two of the girls from the local area were helping me make myself ready. One of them asked me how I was going to behave at dialysis in order to keep out of mischief. I simply took her in my arms and embraced her, and gave her a huge kiss, something that took her completely by surprise and she was helpless to recover. Her friend thought that it was funny and quite laughed, making some kind of comment or two about the situation and how unlikely it was to take place for real. I was much more interested in the reaction of the other one.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … if I’m dreaming about dialysis it really is the beginning of the end. When I’m not there I want to relax and not have to worry about it, and if it’s appearing during the night and affecting my dream patterns, which as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … my only form of escapism these days, then it’s destroying the last little pleasure that I have left. What did I say just now about “psyching myself up” for dialysis?

But misbehaving in the dialysis centre – chance would be a fine thing. I can laugh and joke with the nurses there, right enough, but I bet that they know how to deal with patients when the rough stuff starts. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … you can tell how much a patient is liked by the nurses by how they put the needles in, and it’s painful enough without them seeking any revenge for anything.

The nurse was early today but still later than yesterday which is good news. He was only here for two minutes and then off out again and that’s fine by me. I could make breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

In fact, it’s the last of my book and I’m not sorry about that. I would have enjoyed reading it under normal circumstances but being an old book the pages are worn and discoloured and it’s very difficult to make out the print. It’s definitely one of the Gutenberg Project’s failures. So I wonder what the reading list has in store for me tomorrow

Back in here, I’ve been chatting to the people at the radio and they have agreed to my suggestion that the weekend of 15th-17th August will be a “Woodstock Weekend”.

Friday night’s programme will be the introduction plus what happened on the Friday

Saturday’s will be about what happened on the Saturday

Sunday’s will be about what happened on the Sunday plus the “after Woodstock” details.

So now that its official, I’d better motivate myself and do it. On my travels around I’ve heard dozens of anecdotes and I’ll need to verify them as much as I can and even find a pile more. And then track down some music from some of the more obscure bands who played there, including the band that opened the “practice Woodstock” concert a week earlier when they tested the stage and the sound system.

After I’d sorted that out, I made up a “cheat sheet” for my Welsh, seeing as we have a revision week coming up quite soon. We’re back in class tomorrow so I can’t leave it for too long before I sort myself out.

My cleaner breezed in to fit my patches and the taxi came for me even before she had left.

There were three passengers in there today and I’m certainly having my money’s worth, seeing parts of Normandy that I never knew existed as we comply faithfully with the new rules and regulations concerning the combining of transport.

For a change, I was almost first to arrive at dialysis and I actually was the first to be connected up. That’s good news because first in, first out and I’ll go with that.

The doctor (not, unfortunately, Emilie the Cute Consultant) came to see me today and I told him that I was keen to reduce my hours. He wasn’t very happy about the idea but after a long chat he agreed to at least make a series of examinations to see if the toxins are being extracted sufficiently to enable them to consider it.

Apart from that, I revised my Welsh again and then performed some housekeeping on the computer, tidying up some of the directories, merging duplicate files and the like.

After they uncoupled me I was so early that I had to wait five minutes for my taxi, and it was really nice to be back home while it was still light

Also very nice was my leek soup, with some potatoes and veg decanted into it and accompanied by fresh bread. It made a very pleasant change from the usual food, but I’m still not all that hungry

So my Welsh lessons start up again tomorrow and I need to be on form so I’ll crawl off to bed right now.

But as we are talking about misbehaviour in hospitals … "well, one of us is" – ed … it reminds me of an incident in the legendary INSPECTOR HORNLEIGH ON HOLIDAY
The chief surgeon looked at the report card that Gordon Harker had filled in and said to the nurse "I know Dr Toomey’s face but I can’t place it. Is he familiar to you?"
"Huh!" said the nurse. "Very!"

0

Sunday 2nd March 2025 – I NOW HAVE …

… a complete flapjack and also a complete loaf of home-made bread.

And as well as that, I also have a large bowl of leek soup, mainly in the grounds that at lunchtime I wasn’t at all hungry and there’s no point in forcing food down if I don’t feel like eating it. It will do for tea tomorrow night instead, complete with a fresh bread roll that I also made today.

There were in fact lots of things that I didn’t feel like doing, but what accounts for that is the really miserable, wretched night that I had.

It was late when I went to bed, for one reason or another … "mainly the football highlights" – ed … but I was soon asleep. However, not for long. As I said into the dictaphone at the time, “not long after I went to sleep I was talking to a girl about music and one or two popular musical sayings. I didn’t go very far into that dream before someone walked past in the street blowing a saxophone and awoke me, and that was that”.

And that was it too. Not the noise from the disco or the fairground last night, but a whole series of attacks of the most severe cramp that I’d had for ages. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few years ago I was having regular severe attacks of cramp, and last night they were back.

There wasn’t much danger of going back to sleep after that.

Anyway, I stayed in bed until the alarm went off at 08:00 and then had a difficult climb out of bed and into the real World. The nurse came round very early today and caught me in flagrante delicto in the bathroom. He wasn’t happy about being made to be kept waiting but that’s his problem not mine.

After he left I made breakfast, had my meditation and read some more of MY BOOK.

We are still wandering around the South Downs admiring the scenery, something that has very little, if anything at all to do with the “Earthwork of England”.

However, I’m still puzzled over his book, even more so these days. Is it a historical account, a scholarly work of reference, a travel guide for the educated tourist or simply an exercise in prose? When you see flowery phrases such as "your dreams here should be of times and peoples yet earlier than the Roman—of taller warriors clad in skins and armed with stone, and of others harnessed in bronze or helmeted with the horned casque of the iron time, but not of those terrible squat interlopers who made such play with the short sword and the pilum, and carried upon their shields the blazon of the thunderbolt." you begin to wonder what on earth he must have been smoking, and could he maybe pass it round to the rest of us?

Back in here there was the dictaphone. Surprisingly, there was something else on it from last night. I went back into that dream … "presumably the one where the saxophone awoke me" – ed … later on and I was talking to a girl from Crewe, one of the friends of a girl whom I knew. She was actually doing something like being a hairdresser, something like that, and I was waiting to have my hair cut. I recognised her and remembered her name, Jennifer Marie something so I said “hello Jennifer Marie”. She looked at me and said “well I’m going to obviously have to change my name if people start recognising me”. I said “yes, change it to ‘Miss Crewe 1962’ ” which made her smile. Then we began to have a chat about the old days when a group of us used to go to the rock venue in High Street in Crewe. It was a real surprise to see her in a dream.

This is rather interesting because the girl concerned didn’t have a friend of that name, and I knew most of them. They were much younger than we were but used to sneak into the rock music venue to watch the groups on Saturday night – the one where I had that very long and interesting chat with that Dutch rock group “Alquin”. At their age (the girls, not Alquin) they wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a bar, never mind a night club full of rockers, but they used to tell their mothers that they were sleeping over at a friend’s and the friend would tell her mother that they were sleeping over at the first friend’s – you get the picture. Then at 03:00 when we were thrown out of the club they would go and sit on the station drinking coffee until it was time for them to “come home after breakfast”. I’m surprised that they got away with it for as long as they did but the downfall was inevitable. For once, I managed to keep myself well out of trouble and well out of the picture because even then, the young, naïve irresponsible me had no doubts at all about how it was going to finish. It’s strange though that it should all come flooding back last night.

After that, there was football to watch, Edinburgh City v Stranraer. Stranraer seem to be on a roll at the moment and it carried on today with a hard-fought 1-0 away win up at Meadowbank. Once again, luck was on their side as they survived a few desperate scrambles on their goal-line,

They were also lucky to have finished with all eleven players still on the pitch after a foul that would have seen many other players in many other clubs and many similar moments taking the walk of shame to the tunnel for the early bath.

Then I’ve been intermittently working. I’ve been sketching out the bones of how my “Woodstock” programme is going to work and it’s going to take some organising too. I have very little live music for the groups and artists who played on the Friday night and not much more for the blues artists that appeared on the Sunday night. As for the rock groups on Saturday, I could fill half a dozen programmes with what I have and still have plenty left over.

No lunch, as I said, but I did make a bread roll to eat with it. It will still be good tomorrow night. It means that if I have another bad time at dialysis I shan’t need to worry too much about tea.

The flapjack was interesting though. I added some coconut oil in place of some of the vegan margarine and it certainly made it sweeter. A little softer too, which was surprising.

As for the bread, in view of my recent successes I went back to where I was right at the beginning and added several handfuls of sunflower seeds. Once more, it rose up light a lift and was as soft as anything that I have ever made. And because it was a full-sized loaf, that was baked in the big oven too after the flapjack.

Jamais deux sans trois as they say around here, and the third thing that went into the oven was the pizza. I’d taken some dough out of the freezer earlier.

This pizza was another resounding success too and tasted as delicious as any that I have ever made. In fact, my baking seems to have moved up another gear right now. I hope that it keeps going.

But I’m not going to keep going. I’m going to bed, hoping that there are no attacks of cramp or people playing the saxophone.

Yesterday though, we were talking about Carnaval and dressing up … "well, one of us was" – ed …
Today I spent some time thinking about if I were fit, well and able to join in, how would I dress up?
At one time I thought to myself "why shouldn’t I dress up and disguise myself as a suitcase?"
But then of course a touch of realism crept in with ourselves and I thought "now let’s not go getting ourselves carried away here with this idea"

0

Saturday 1st March 2025 – DYDD GWYL DEWI HAPUS.

And a happy St David’s Day to those of you who don’t celebrate it. And my leek soup was delicious. Even better – there’s enough left for lunch tomorrow.

That is of course, always assuming that I’m here to eat it because a few more nights like last night and a few more days like today and I won’t be.

As I expected, last night was another late night. I didn’t hang around at all though so I’ve no idea why I couldn’t have been in bed at a reasonable time.

Once in bed though, I couldn’t sleep. I had a pain in the neck (and I’m not talking about a partner here) that was absolutely agonising and try as I might, I couldn’t make myself comfortable. What with all of the music drifting up from the ball in the town centre and the revellers making their way back to the millions of motorhomes parked all around here, I lay awake for hours and I’m not joking either.

When the alarm went off I was fast asleep though and once more it was a very weary, bleary-eyed me who struggled to his feet.

After a wash, I set the washing machine off. And how many times is this now that I’ve had dirty clothes left over after I’ve filled the machine? Either I need a bigger machine or else I need to use the machine more frequently.

Next, it was into the kitchen for the medication, remembering not to take the medicine that I’m not supposed to take on Dialysis Day.

Back in here, I was surprised to find some stuff on the dictaphone from the night. I seriously thought that I hadn’t been asleep long enough. I’d been out on a night off and had gone to the pub to sit and have a quiet drink. Then I thought that it was becoming late so I’d better set out and head for home. I began to jog and when I reached my house, I carried on running but suddenly realised that I was supposed to be going home, not for a run as I used to do at night, so I turned round and went back to the house but suddenly found myself running again. I had to stop and go back another time. When I reached the house I put my hand on the door to open it and a dog began to bark. Someone said “it’s Eric”. They came to meet me and said “a girl has been to see you” and mentioned her name. I thought that I recognised the name from somewhere as if it was someone whom I knew in Stockport but I suddenly realised that it was a girl with whom I’d worked once. Whatever does she want? “Well, she’s left her business card”. I went in and saw on the table a business card so I picked it up. It wasn’t hers though, but for a guy called Tim Edmonds who works for the Government. “Who’s Tim Edmonds? What does he want?”. My youngest sister asked me “is your car OK?”. I replied “yes. Shouldn’t it have been?”. She looked at her husband and said “I’m just making sure that he has some windows in his car” so that there had obviously been something about windows in cars between the two of them.

When I was taxi-driving when I lived in Winsford I often used to go for a run when I came home at some kind of silly hour in the early morning. I really enjoyed it and it was a really good way for me to relax and unwind. I lost the habit after that when I moved to Crewe but I started running again when I moved to Belgium. After I taught Roxanne to ride a bike she used to chase me through the local park. There’s also a story about my youngest sister, her husband and a window too but that’s yet another story that the World isn’t quite ready to hear.

Isabelle breezed in, hours late because of Carnaval. Today is the defilé des enfants – the Children’s Procession when all the kids dress up as their favourite characters and walk into town accompanied by the brass bands, and they have begun to close all of the streets even at this time of the morning. That’s actually my favourite part of the long weekend and a few years ago I hit the streets with my recording gear and interviewed some of the kids to make a radio programme

After she left I made my breakfast and read MY BOOK.

Today we are talking about Burpham Camp in Sussex. And having disputed at great length (as regular readers of this rubbish will recall) the opinion that some of these hilltop camps are “Danish camps” because the Danes wouldn’t build impressive fortifications, he tells us, about Burpham Camp, that "it is safe to suppose that it is not a British work. For reasons as obvious it is not Roman. It has no known characteristics of Saxon work, and had it been such, the church would certainly have been within the vallum. It must therefore be either Danish or Norman. To Norman work it has no resemblance, and the conclusion is that it is Danish.".

So having insisted "that it is not a British work" and "has no known characteristics of Saxon work", according to archaeological excavations undertaken on behalf of the National Heritage List, "the Iron Age promontory fort at Burpham is an example of an inland fort where the natural defensive qualities of the land were utilised and the site was reoccupied as a burh in the Anglo-Saxon period. ".

After breakfast I had bread to make for tea tonight – just a couple of rolls – and then I went to sit down for half an hour for a rest with a mug of coffee.

When my cleaner came in, she found me hard at work. Not only had I prepared all of the veg for my soup, I actually had it all in the pot simmering away and the bread was in the air fryer cooking. Today we gave the anaesthetic cream a try-out and after she left, I carried on with my soup.

The taxi was driven today by my favourite taxi driver but she was late. And then we had to go to pick up someone else but because the roads were all closed because of the defilé we had to go miles and miles out of our way.

It took an age to sort out the other passenger and then we had to go almost to Bréhal before we could pick up the road to Avranches, a detour of about a dozen miles.

As you might expect, I was last to arrive and was even later because there were two emergencies admitted. My appointment is in principle at 13:30, and I wasn’t seen to until 14:45.

By that time the anaesthetic had long-since worn off so I knew all about the connection. And Julie the Cook tried to do it all on her own and failed, and I was in total and utter agony and despair throughout the entire session.

However, I did manage to watch the football. The result was predictable, with TNS, eight points clear at the top defeating Aberystwyth, eight points adrift at the foot of the bale, winning the League Cup.

What wasn’t predictable was the heavy weather that TNS made of it and while Aberystwyth never looked like threatening the TNS goal, a 1-0 win isn’t a safe win by any means. All I can say though is that if Aberystwyth had played with the same fire and spirit throughout the season that they showed today, they wouldn’t be in anything like as much trouble as they are.

What with one thing and another it was 19:45 when I returned home. While all of the police had ringed the town with roadblocks to hunt down drunken drivers, a bunch of drunken teenagers were misbehaving in the street blocking all of the traffic and needed quite a lot of persuasion to move.

When I finally returned home I finished off making the soup and have somehow ended up with two litres of it. That will keep me going for a while, I reckon.

Tomorrow I’ll be bread-making, a complete loaf this time, and flapjack-making. As for the radio programme, Grahame and I have been chatting on the internet exchanging ideas and I’ve decided to make three programmes for my “taste of Woodstock” – one of the Friday to be broadcast on the Friday, one of Saturday and the third of the Sunday, to be broadcast similarly, mutatis mutandis. So tonight and tomorrow I won’t be radioing.

But talking of Carnaval and dressing up, I told my taxi driver to be careful on the way home. "There are several elephants in the town and at Carnaval they disguise themselves by dressing up in black suits and black glasses and pretend that they are the Blues Brothers"
"That’s nonsense" she replied. "I’ve lived in this area 30 years and I’ve never seen tham"
"There you are then" I said. "It shows you just how good their disguise really is"

0

Friday 28th February 2025 – I HAVE FINISHED …

… my magnum opus at long last. And magnum is hardly the word. Having slashed the music as much as possible (out of the thirty-two acts that appeared at Woodstock I have included a mere ten) and written as little as possible to accompany it,, I am now looking for suggestions as to how to fit one hour and forty-four minutes of programme into a one-hour slot.

Had I done the “essential Woodstock” as I was planning to do, I would have ended up with probably about four hours.

Anyway, that will be Saturday night’s dictation and I can wrack my brains on Sunday as to how I am going to do it

It was a very weary process though today, not helped by the fact that I was up until late again. Another good concert came around on the playlist and that kept me up while I listened to it. I had to switch off the computer rather hastily once it had finished just in case something else interesting came around.

And last night I tried a novel experiment. I turned the heating in the bedroom right down, to see if that might improve the situation about all this perspiring.

Once in bed, it took, as usual, an age to go off to sleep and then as is the case these days … "??" – ed … we had another turbulent night… "!!" – ed … when I was tossing and turning from one side of the bed to the other. Not perspiring as much though. Maybe the room is too hot.

When the alarm went off I was fast asleep, walking through Chester and having an urgent need to go to the bathroom. I dived into a café where I knew the toilets were. The waitress moaned at me so I said that we’d sort out the coffee later. “When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go”. I dashed downstairs but took one look at the bathroom and decided that I wasn’t going to waste any time in that place. What was interesting was that the WC had a view through an open window right across the river where anyone going past on a boat could see what was going on.
.
Between 1972 and 1974 I had a couple of happy years living and working in Chester, finding my feet after leaving school and running away from home. I should have made much more of my stay there than I did but hindsight is a wonderful thing. Surprisingly, there are things going on in my head right now where Chester actually does figure quite considerably, but the World isn’t ready to hear that story right now either.

After a good wash and scrub up I went for the medication and then came back into Ice Station Zebra where I turned up the heating and listened to the dictaphone. There was an athletics tournament taking place in Scotland. The winner of the tournament was the town of Edinburgh and so Edinburgh announced that it was actually going to re-partake in some kind of national competition again because this was the forty-fourth time in succession that the town had actually finished top in events like this, measured on the performances of the athletes compared to the athletes of other towns that were in this particular competition.

Forty-fourth time in succession? Sounds like TNS winning the Welsh Premier League, doesn’t it? Penybont have blown up spectacularly after leading the table for a while and if they carry on at this rate Hwlffordd could well overtake them into second place, something that seemed most unlikely six weeks ago.

Did I dictate the dream where I was with someone and my apartment needed tidying up … "no you didn’t" – ed …. Some guy and his young daughter came round and decided that they would spend a whole day helping me. She used the Welsh term ysbridoli – “a spirit” or “to inspire” – to describe how they were feeling when her father said that they had set out really early in order to have a really good day at it.

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone would come round and tidy up my apartment for me right now? Tidying up is not my strong point, as anyone who has been anywhere where I have been will tell you. Ezra Pound once said of Ford Madox Ford "Put Ford naked in an empty room and within an hour behold total chaos" and “Fordy” is not alone in this skill.

Finally there were two friends who lived next door to each other. One of them was married but the other friend was having an affair with his wife. This had been going on for some time. Suddenly the other guy found out about it, didn’t say anything but waited until the man said something to him that he and the wife wanted to run away. The married man pulled out a revolver or was it an automatic, and waved it around in front of the guy’s nose. The guy said “you can’t be serious about this?” so the guy just pulled the trigger and shot him. He had then to dash into work because he was late and had to think of a way of making sure that people thought that he was at work. He waited until a delivery lorry came in and then spent all the morning helping them unload the delivery lorry. The police though were quite suspicious of him because someone had put some rubbish into the waste bin earlier that morning when at the time he was supposed to have been at work but wasn’t. They didn’t know who it was who had done that and suspected that it was him

The things about which I dream are sometimes really weird and have no explanation at all that I can see.

Isabelle the Nurse was late again today. She didn’t stay long, but was in quite a good mood. She’ll be here tomorrow but on Sunday she’s off for a week Carnavalling. I reminded her to show me the photos afterwards.

Once she’d left, it was breakfast and BOOK time. Today, our author has spend about fifteen pages waxing lyrical about the South Downs, how the butterflies are fluttering in the gorse and baby lambs are baa-ing from the hedgerows and stuff like that, nothing whatever to do with any earthworks at all.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I’m not sure exactly who his audience is intended to be. It’s certainly a very restricted circulation and he seems to be casting more and more people adrift as he goes along.

And then back in here I began to finish off the radio programme.

There were the usual Friday interruptions, such as half a slice of flapjack, my cleaner coming around to do her stuff and then the disgusting drink break. However, by about 18:00 it was all finished – at least, as far as I can for the moment until I start the editing once it’s been dictated.

But what do you leave out?

That was always my problem at University – “write 5,000 words on …”. How do you do that? I just used to write out what I had to say, which was probably three times as long, and then ruthlessly edit it down to something approaching the total because it was the only way that I knew how.

However, my editing was never ruthless enough, and when it was, you’d end up with these strange remarks from your tutor, like "you should have fitted … in"

"Yes" I replied. "Where should I have fitted it? And what should I have left out so that I had room to include it?"

Strangely enough, the tutor would never give you an answer to that.

But that’s the trouble with being an older (I won’t use the term “mature”, so as to avoid all kinds of ribald comment) student. I was studying for pleasure and interest, not because I wanted a job, and what I was doing only ended up having the vaguest relevance to what they wanted me to study. So I wasn’t all that concerned about following the rules slavishly.

What’s the point of a word count anyway? The only way that it makes any sense at all is to spare the tutors some sleepless nights as 30 equivalents of WAR AND PEACE drop onto their desks.

Meanwhile, I digress … "again" – ed …

Tea tonight was air-fried chips with falafel and a salad – a small helping. And no pudding either. I’m really not very hungry these days.

So I’m off to bed to make ready to go to dialysis in the afternoon where I’ll hatch the football and read through my notes ready for dictation. But it’s Dydd Gwyl Dewi so I have leek soup to make. That will be tea on Saturday night, with some freshly baked bread.

But seeing as we are talking about Dydd Gwyl Dewi … "well, one of us is" – ed … I once met a Welsh woman who was complaining about the fact that she had seventeen children
"Didn’t your husband ever take precautions?" I asked her. "Does he know about ‘French letters’?"
"Ohh yes, he knows about those" she said "but he uses a ‘Welsh letter’"
"What’s that?" I asked
"It’s a French letter with a leek in it."

0

Thursday 27th February 2025 – ANOTHER PAINFUL SESSION …

… in the dialysis centre today. And not just because of the needles either but because the stabbing pain in my foot started up again mid-session.

"Would you like a doliprane?" aske the nurse. Had it not been one of my favourite nurses I would have shown her where to put the doliprane, but I managed to restrain myself. I’m becoming quite good at that.

Not so good at going to bed though. Just as I was about to hit the hay a concert of 10,000 Maniacs that I’d done in the good old “Radio Anglais” days came around on the playlist. So that was me, well-gone for ninety-five minutes. Yes, there are many things more interesting than sleeping.

As it happened I didn’t go straight to sleep either. I tossed and turned for quite a while and at one stage thought that I wasn’t going to manage to drop off at all. But when the alarm went off I was definitely asleep, even though it had been a turbulent night.

At that moment I was discussing Tranmere Rovers with a friend of mine. I’d heard that Tranmere had signed a new goalkeeper and I asked him about it. He came out with a name but I couldn’t find it. I wondered whether it might have been someone with a similar name. We had a team-sheet for one of their next game and looked at the changes in the squad over the last week. There must have been about fifty new players signed. “This is surprising”. He asked about one or two. I said that it seems to be that they are going for quantity not quality and that is quite probably the wrong way round. We were chatting about that when the alarm went off.

That’s a familiar story. During the close season almost two years ago, in the run-up to the European matches Connah’s Quay Nomads had enough players to be able to put out two completely different teams each half in a warm-up game against Stranraer. However, as events subsequently proved, quantity is no substitute for quality and if they had signed five really decent players for the budget of ten run-of-the-mill ones, they would have done so much better.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and scrub up, followed by a shave. And then into the kitchen for the medication, remembering not to take the medication that I’m not supposed to take on Dialysis Day.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. That’s twice during the night that I’ve reached for the dictaphone and the dream has evaporated right out from underneath me. But for the second one I have the image of a very small girl still engraved in my mind but I don’t know what she was doing or where she fitted in to this but she was there impressed on my mind even though the rest of the dream and the one before it have totally disappeared.

That’s becoming a rather far-too-familiar tale of woe these days and I wish that it wasn’t. I put it down to old age myself. It’s really sad how my memory is deteriorating.

Later on, a local farmer in Sandbach had written to the local Country magazine to write about the projects for his farm and what he was planning to do on increasing his investment etc in order to reap greater dividends. He explained that it was necessary to do that to keep ahead of the programme and to keep his agriculture on the move. In actual fact he’d been reading dozens of these farming magazines and decided to make a change in the way he operates his cattle and try something to be done in a different way. This was going to require a lot of investments and he was making a start on doing it right now.

It wasn’t actually Sandbach but Shavington. I can still see the place where it all happened … "your memory’s not that bad then" – ed … and it was by the Sugar Loaf in Crewe Road where I used to catch the bus to go to school. Not that I caught the bus for all that long because once I had built a decent(ish) pushbike I used to cycle to school

Finally I was going somewhere in a car. There was a long queue of traffic going through a tunnel. We were having to wait in this queue, and then a few vehicles in front began to move but the one immediately in front of me didn’t move. I had a look and there were two people beneath it. I wondered what they were doing. Someone behind me klaxoned so I explained to him. Then these two people began to push their car out of the way, apologised and said that their car won’t start. I replied “it’s not any problem” and carried on. A little further on I came across a couple of older motorcyclists. One of them, the woman, was telling me that now that they had retired they had bought a motorcycle to travel about but I watched the man try to climb on but he couldn’t lift his leg high enough to climb up onto the motorbike. He was there for about 10 minutes making an effort.

So after the previous night, there I was last night going for a ride in a car. Without Zero unfortunately. It would be too much, I suppose, to expect her to come along twice in succession but I can live in hope. However that “couldn’t get his leg over” is very reminiscent of the famous moment between “Johnners” and “Aggers” LIVE ON THE BBC.

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in and breezed out again in a flurry, stopping just about long enough to read my health card as tomorrow is her last day in this month and so she’ll be very busy. And then she’s Carnavalling.

After she left I made breakfast and read more of MY BOOK. We’ve been discussing Civil War military emplacements today, not that there are so many still extant. Tomorrow we’ll be starting on the earliest traces of industry and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve discussed this before. I’m interested to see what is his opinion of the wiping out of the industrial base upon the arrival of the Saxons.

Next stop was back in the bathroom where I went one better than David Crosby, presumably because I’d had the ‘flu for Christmas and I’m paranoid when I look in the mirror and see a police car. However, I didn’t give in an inch to fear and sorted out the sheep-shearer.

Back in here I carried on with my proto-Woodstock programme and wrote a few more notes but it’s not going as quickly as I would like. I shall have to finish it tomorrow regardless otherwise I’ll be doing it for ever and I have other things to do.

My cleaner turned up to fit my anaesthetic patches and then I tidied up the kitchen while I waited for the taxi to arrive.

Today we had another new driver and I had to help her find a way out of here. It’s more complicated than usual today as all of the motor homes arrive ready for Carnaval. She was late arriving but she had her foot down for much of the way. It’s much easier now that yet another radar has gone up in flames. That’s three now in the area.

Last in at the hospital though, so last to be connected up. Despite all of the people milling around in there today, no-one came to disturb me except to bring me the coffee, and that suits me fine. I revised my Welsh and then chopped up a sound-track of a Canadian group who had appeared once at a Hawkfest

Unplugging me was about as painful as plugging me in, and the nurse reckons that I ought to try the anaesthetic cream for once and see what good that does. It has to be worth a try. I can’t go on like this.

One of my favourite drivers came to pick me up to take me home – the Belgian girl with the twins. We had a good chat on the way home but of course, late in means late out. It was a very weary me who struggled up the Twenty-Five Steps.

Tea tonight was steamed veg, vegan sausage and vegan cheese sauce. No pudding though because I’m still not hungry. My appetite has really diminished just now. All of the stuff that I didn’t eat at Christmas and said that I’d eat on my birthday will still be there next year, I reckon. I’m not sure if I will be.

So I’m off to bed now, ready for a work-in tomorrow and I shall keep at it until I’m finished. There’s a football match tomorrow night but I’m going to miss it and watch it at dialysis on Saturday – I may as well make good use of the time.

But seeing as we have been talking about old age and memory … "well, one of us has" – ed … I told my cleaner the other day "two things happen to you when you reach my age"
"What are they?" she asked
"The first one is that you forget absolutely everything"
"What’s the second thing?" she asked.
"I don’t know" I replied. "I’ve forgotten"

0

Wednesday 26th February 2025 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S EMBARRASSING …

… lack of effort on behalf of Yours Truly, we’ve had a somewhat better day today. Still plenty of room for improvement of course, as there always is, but at least I’m slowly awakening.

What with one thing and another (and until you start, you have no idea how many other things there are) the indolence carried on after tea and it ended up being a late night last night. It was a struggle to find my way into bed before midnight.

At least, I wasn’t too tired to be still up and about at that time, not like Monday night.

It was another turbulent night again last night and I ended up being wide awake at 06:14. However I went back to sleep again and that was where I was found when the alarm went off. At that point I’d been classifying musicians out of a card index. One of them was called Ian P Taylor although who he was I don’t know and I can’t remember any more about him.

According to the musicians’ database, there is no-one of that name been involved in the writing or recording of a published song.

Into the bathroom and then into the kitchen for my medication, then back in here to listen to the dictaphone to see where I went during the night. There was something about me being ill and being invited to sing on the radio. I arrived on a motorbike and sidecar. A little later on I remember detaching the actual sidecar from the chassis and tipping it into a marshy bit of water on the edge of the shore but I don’t know where that bit fitted in.

When I lived in Chester one of my friends bought a motorbike and sidecar. He dumped the body off the sidecar chassis and fitted a large wooden box. Then we would all throw our camping gear into the box and go off on our motorbikes together for weekends

And then Zero put in an appearance last night. I’d been round at her house with her parents. They decided that as it was a Sunday afternoon we’d go to the seaside. I sat down and finished my cup of tea thinking how lovely it would be to be sitting in the back seat of the car next to Zero. As I drank my tea I could hear the voices outside but no-one was coming in so I went out to see what was happening. It was going dark. I thought “we’re going to leave it really late to go to the seaside now but nothing seemed to happen, no-one ever seemed to be moving etc. In the end I said “I take it that we aren’t going to the seaside now”. They replied “oh no, it’s been raining” and I was really annoyed and sad about missing that opportunity. I was making ready to leave and had to go to catch the bus. I went away to the bus stop. There was a crowd of people there. Bus 42, an old Bristol RE turned up and drove straight past. I had to wonder about “what number bus is it that I catch?”. I couldn’t remember. I had to go to look at the sign but it was dark. I thought “the next bus that comes along and stops to take all these people, I’ll climb aboard too. Instead, I ended up walking away and walked down a footpath. I could see the scrap lorry pull up and everyone went to throw their scrap into it. I saw kids with a couple of old bikes. I thought “I wonder if Zero is there. Should I have waited until the lorry had been past to see if she’d come out?”. Then I ended up in the back of my van. I noticed that the back door was open and my clothes in that old brown holdall that I used to have were all just about ready to slide out. I thought “it’s a good job that I noticed this”. I put everything back and closed the door and went home. When I arrived home there were a couple of those old bikes that had been there to have been thrown into the scrap with the skip when I was at Zero’s parents. They were there in our yard. I wondered how on earth they had managed to be here. There was one with a very low pair of handlebars like European type that you don’t see in the UK. The other had some kind of strange upside-down-W type of frame

How disappointed would I be to have missed out on a journey sitting on the back seat of a car with Zero? And I couldn’t see me leaving her house so easily but then these dreams are completely irrational. The brown holdall really did exist too. It was bought for me one birthday a long time (like 50 years ago) by a former girlfriend. And there’s a long story behind that too, but the World isn’t ready to hear it quite yet. In fact, I never had much luck with the girls in my life, but as there is only one common factor shared by all of them, I shall close my mouth and push on quite rapidly.

Finally, I was in a shop last night looking for a map. I saw one of Australia and thought “right, I’ll buy this one”. I went to the cash desk but while I was on my way one of the women who was sitting there in the side said “I can see that you are going to have something of a disappointment with that” she said. There are no mileages on it. I reached the cash desk. The woman behind the counter said “before you buy this, let me tell you that there is no index of mileages on it and that’s a shame but really you have no choice in Australia but to go, have you?”. She began to have a look through it to see whether in fact the mileages were written down somewhere or whether you had to calculate them on the basis of the little figures at the side of each main road on the map.

As it happens, I was rummaging around in some papers and came across a map of the USA that I’d bought in the days before I had a North American satnav. That’s quite possibly what has triggered this memory. And the little figures by the side of the roads showing the distances is very reminiscent of the old RAC and AA handbooks when I was a kid.

Isabelle the Nurse was horribly late this morning. A lorry unloading part of the fairground that will be here for Carnaval had blocked her in on the Health Centre car park down in town. She was obviously in quite a rush and hardly had time to draw breath before she was off back out again.

So I was running late this morning, making breakfast and reading MY BOOK. And I had a little smile to myself.

Amongst the earthworks we have been discussing today is the very peculiar system known as “Thornborough Henges” in Yorkshire. And I had that smile to myself because whereas yesterday, everything was either astronomical or astrological, he says nothing at all today about Thornborough. However, modern aerial research shows that its layout mirrors Orion’s Belt and that it’s aligned with the Midsummer sunrise and Midwinter sunset.

He also talks about Maumbury Ring near Dorchester, telling us "the imagination of some generations has exercised itself in trying to fit in the details of the work with what is known of the arrangements of Roman amphitheatres… The fact is that amphitheatres, with their implication of butchery, are as much an obsession with the multitude as are the Druids with their supposed unholy rites. Antiquaries of repute have gone out of their way to voice the totally unwarranted assertion that ‘every Roman town in Britain had its amphitheatre’ "and then launches himself into a tirade of T Rice Holmesque proportions for no fewer than two and a half pages of gratuitous disparaging comment on the “amphitheatre” supporters.

According to an archaeological investigation carried out on the site by H St George Gray 1908-1913 (the time when Allcroft was writing his book) and by G S Wainright in 1970-71, the site is a Neolithic henge that was "remodelled in the Roman period when it was adapted for use as an amphitheatre for the use of the citizens of the nearby Roman town of Durnovaria (Dorchester). The banks were lowered by around 3 metres, with the material produced piled onto the banks. The interior was modified by the excavation of an oval, level arena floor, and the cutting of seating into the scarp and bank which was revetted with either chalk or timber. Chambers were cut into the bank to the south-west and one on each side of the centre. Finds found during the excavations include an uninscribed British coin, Roman pottery, leg bones, coins, and a 2nd-century burial".

It makes me wonder whether the leg bones belonged to the burial victim.

Back in here I made another start on the proto-Woodstock radio programme and by the time I’d finished this evening, I’d found all of the music that I need, including some spares, and it’s all edited and remixed. I’ve written the preamble, which seems to go on for ever, and have made a start on the notes for each group or performer who will be featured. It’s simply not possible to feature all of them, of course. I’ll be lucky to fit in even ten of them, but there’s only so much that you can do when you only have an hour.

There was the usual interruption when my cleaner arrived and when I went for a shower. There was also lunch break and disgusting drink break too. All in all though, it was abetter day than yesterday.

Tea was a delicious leftover curry with naan break, and I forewent the pudding because I’m still not that hungry (which is good).

So now I’ll finish my notes and go to bed, ready to crack on tomorrow before I go to dialysis. I can’t wait … "cough" – ed …

Yesterday tough we were talking about work, and my correspondence … "well, one of us was" – ed …
Seàn had sent me earlier last week a message that headed “do not open until 24th of February”.
So yesterday I wrote back to say that I had done so, and I thanked him for the message.
"I’m glad that you managed to restrain yourself" he said.
"I have to" I replied. "I can’t afford those women in Soho any more"

0

Tuesday 25th February 2025 – NOW THAT’S WHAT I …

… call a wasted day today. I have emulated my namesake the mathematician and done exactly three-fifths of five-eights of … errr … nothing.

Some of it has been my own fault, as you might indeed expect, but some of it hasn’t. I really need to motivate myself better if I am ever going to accomplish anything.

The most obvious excuse to use is that I was thoroughly, completely and utterly exhausted. The other day, returning from dialysis, I was in bed at 21:30 and last night it was 22:20. and I was lucky that I made it that far because I really wasn’t in the mood.

Once in bed though, going to sleep was another matter. “At least, being in a horizontal position is resting and relaxing” I kidded myself.

Eventually though I dozed off into oblivion and had yet another turbulent night. For a change though, following a dialysis session, I was actually asleep when the alarm went off at 07:00

At that moment I was with a friend of mine and we were trying to go into her office. There was a security reception desk and the girl on there was known to be rather strict so it was necessary to fill in an application form, and when you went for an eye test, the optical test, it would come up with several people similar and you had to guess which one you were. The aim was that I would find someone similar to me and say that I’d lost my card. She would give me a new card and I would go in. This however wasn’t working and there was nothing very similar to me at all so my friend had to think of another excuse. The girl at the reception desk took an absolute age to deal with all of this before she finally handed me a duplicate card. My friend said “this is just typical of this girl. She knows that this is a fraudulent application because we have thousands, and she’s just taking her time about it as she always does”. We went in a walked down a corridor, then we had to climb down into a courtyard and up the other side. Climbing down was fine but climbing up was almost impossible for me so I had to think of another way of doing it. At that moment a man came down and sat in the corner to begin to smoke a cigarette. I thought that the easiest way was to strike up a conversation. This place looked rather Asian so I talked about having a Japanese garden in here. My friend came back to look for me. He asked her “how long have you worked here?”. She replied “oh, years. I came here in August” and said which year it was. He asked “how do you find it?”. She replied “I made a mistake because I came here in a jumper and I regretted it”. She wandered off and he said to me “she’s a tough girl, isn’t she?”. I said “someone who had had the problems that she had had and survived, anyone would be tough”. He was looking at me and could see that I was disabled and said “oh please sit down”. I replied “I can’t because if I sit down I can’t stand up”. Then he began to panic saying “oh please sit down, sit down, sit down”. I wondered what was going on. This place where we were was like a volcanic crater although it was a garden with pavilion-type Japanese buildings in it, all ringed by a really jagged range of mountains in a huge circular form that looked just as if it was inside a volcano but with a garden inside instead of a crater.

That’s an interesting idea for Security, isn’t it? Being able to choose who you were. After all, NAMES ARE FOR TOMBSTONES, BABY. And I had a friend for a while in Brussels who had been a diplomat in Japan, but it wasn’t she. But if I’m going to be disabled and handicapped in my dream, then it rather defeats the point of them, doesn’t it? Not much point in escapism if you can’t escape.

Into the bathroom for a good wash and then into the kitchen for medication; Finally back in here to listen to the dictaphone because there was much more than just the above. I’d been working on a radio programme and I couldn’t ever make it right. It never seemed to go anywhere as how it was supposed to do. It was continually failing the quality control check. After several weeks of editing I finally had it something like and was ready to send it off. The recording engineer and some of the producers were however rather fed up of having this come up on their desks every week so they were determined to stop it but I sent it off anyway but they still came back and refused it. What should have been a deadline for the 28th of April was now running into May. They basically said that they wouldn’t edit it again and it was finished. I replied “well for failing it this last two or three times on tiny issues, it shows a serious lack of goodwill particularly when I have worked as hard as I have done over the past day or two to put the issue right. If there was nothing substantially wrong with the last one you should have accepted it” but they were still very unwilling to move on this particular issue and I could see this programme running on and on and on.

There have been radio programmes that have taken an age to do because the editing has been so complicated. There was the one a few weeks ago that took several weeks, and the worst part of it was that it overran so I had to edit it, and one of the bits that went was the bit where I’d had all of the difficulty

There was a girl from school directing a film last night. She was running through the scenes. I had a look at the scenes and towards the end of the film there were thousands of scenes every second, so many scenes to go through and they lasted a blinking of an eye. I was appearing as an extra in it and so was a friend of mine. We’d been to makeup and we’d been dressed up and put our costumes on. As the film was being filmed it was passed through some kind of computer animation so people became like cartoon characters as they were going through the motions for real. When I looked at my image and the vision of the girl who was with me, the images were horrible, the faces were all distorted and nothing seemed to be correct at all. We were standing on the set waiting to be directed. The girl from school came along, took one look at us, took one look at the screen effects and told us to leave the stage. We thought “that was a waste of an entire day. What a shame. Our chance for fame and fortune”.

This is another girl about whom I haven’t spent a day thinking since I left school. So why she would put in an appearance right now I really don’t know.

Later on I was with another girl. We’d stopped somewhere to look at something that we’d seen earlier. All of a sudden I had a horrible realisation that I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t have a clue as to how I’d arrived at this place, or the name of the place or what I was doing here anyway. I left the girl with the car and walked a little way up the road to see if I could see anything. On the left-hand side of the road was a funeral director’s place with gravestones in it but it was all closed, dusty, and hadn’t been open for years by the looks of it. I decided to turn round and walk back to the car and drive until we find a village and see the name. What I could also do later was to look through the dashcam videos and see if I could identify the route. As I was walking back a lorry that was coming up behind me stopped at the side of the road behind me. The driver alighted and stood by the side of his cab. A lorry that was coming towards me, he stopped too and he alighted from his cab. He was carrying a small puppy and he stood by the cab. I was effectively blocked in between these two lorries, and my car and my friend were beyond them. As these two guys stood there I had this horrible menacing feeling that something pretty awful was about to happen.

So who are all these girls who keep on appearing? I wish I knew. Some nice, charming, pleasant company would be just what the doctor ordered and to actually have them present and allow them to slip away so easily like this is something of a shame. And I know that regular readers of this rubbish will recall saying on many occasions that I never “know where I was” but in this dream it was for real. As for those two guys in the lorries, I know THE BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH THEM .

isabelle the nurse breezed in this morning, late as usual due to having to do all of the blood tests that her oppo doesn’t want to do. She had a few cheery words of greeting and then rushed back out. She’s been working on her float for Carnaval and making the costumes and she’s promised me plenty of photos after the parades this forthcoming weekend.

Then it was breakfast time and MY BOOK time.

Today we are discussing miscellaneous earthworks again and despite his dismissal of much that has been assumed or inferred on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, he seems to conclude that everything uncertain is “probably” something astronomical or astrological, or both. However, he is yet to post one single piece of evidence to suggest what it is that is supposed to be indicated or observed, and the position of the stars and planets in the sky hasn’t changed that much in the last 5,000 years. The earth rotates through something like 1° every 7000 years.

His “pottery works” on the shores of the Thames estuary in Essex was excavated in the 1930s and identified as an Iron Age or Roman salt evaporation site, and not only did I manage to find the report of the excavation, I found a treatise on the operation thereof and now I would be quite confident in running my own sea salt production facility if the need ever arises. It would have been the kind of thing that, had I found it 20 years ago, I would have gone to try it to see if it would work.

Back in here I had all of the replies to deal with, and you’ve no idea just how many there were. Do I owe you all money or something? Once again, a great big thank-you for your continued support.

No Welsh today, so I decided to deal with the “Taste of Woodstock” radio programme. First task is to see what “songs played at Woodstock” I have in my live music collection As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I can’t use material actually performed at Woodstock unfortunately.

The answer to that is “not as much as I need” so I edited what I had and then set out to hunt down more music but I was waylaid. One of my neighbours, the President of the Residents’ Committee, wanted to come to pay me a visit. She’d left me a birthday present yesterday, which was nice of her.

She came along and we had a very nice chat for a while and discussed several issues, one of which was, surprisingly, one of the topics that I’d discussed with Rosemary the other day. It seems to be something that’s on the minds of a lot of people right now.

Next was my little great niece (or is she my great little niece) who arrived back home in Canada last night from Ecuador. She showed me all of her photos and videos of her trip and I told her how impressed I was with her. And I am too. These opportunities for travel only come along once in a lifetime and you should seize the moment. Sitting there with her feet straddling the equator beats the one that I took of Alison straddling the driehoek – the three-cornered border between Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, and also beats the one of Rosemary, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and me straddling the Arctic Circle.

Had His Nibs and I been able to reach the North Pole in 2018 I might have trumped it but, regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we stopped 700 miles short. My niece has 50 years ahead of her to do that, and good luck to her.

And while we’re on the subject of Rosemary … "well, one of us is" – ed … she rang me again today for a short chat. And it was short too – only fifty-three minutes. She needs the birth certificates of her parents and didn’t know how to go about finding them. Consequently I had a very happy time delving deep into the bowels of the Public Records Office in Kew and to my delight, I came up trumps too. When I was in Wandsworth working in that Italian restaurant I spent a lot of time in the PRO

The radio programme for this coming weekend needed chaeking too. That’s now done and sent off, but there was no time left to carry on with any more work. I was late as it was. But making a taco roll with rice and veg followed by date bread and soya dessert doesn’t take long.

So now I’m off to bed ready for shower day tomorrow. And I hope that I have a more productive day than today was. I can do without too many days like that. However, I’ll never turn down an opportunity to talk to a friend when the opportunity arises. There are more things in life than working.

But while we’re on the subject of working … "well, one of us is" – ed … One of my friends had sent me a message for my birthday, saying "I hope you managed to lay your hands on something tasty for your birthday"
And so I replied saying "unfortunately not. The nurses at dialysis kept well out of my reach."

0