Tag Archives: hospital

Thursday 17th March 2016 – IT’S DAY FOUR …

…of my hospital marathon – the day that I had a marathon session in the allergy clinic, just by way of a change. And just by way of a change I was up a long while before the alarm went off too

And that surprised me immensely because I hadn’t ‘arf been on my travels during the night too.

I started off at the allergy clinic (I can’t keep away from here, can I?) and we were making up a soundtrack tape – don’t ask me why – and we found a record featuring someone singing but there were also loads and loads of background noises of all kinds of things that represented actions and items that were taking place in the song. We were listening to it. Liz was only listening with half an ear to it and all of a sudden she pricked up her ears – “did I hear a fox?”. “I think that it’s something on this record” I replied. We played the record back two or three times and, sure enough, there was some kind of reference in it to a fox, and the fox is barking away in the background.
Liz made a subsequent appearance too, in reference to a school trip that she was organising. In fact, she wasn’t really organising it because it was now September and the kids had been back at school for three or four weeks. The aim of this trip was that it was some kind of field trip which involved the children being away for a few days and this was to take place at the end of December. So much time and trouble had gone into the organisation of all of this but people had forgotten to tell the parents about it and it was only now that people at the school were discussing the presentation of the event to the parents. But Liz’s school was in such a poor, deprived area that it was obvious that not many of the families – Group B families was how she described them – would be able to afford the trip and wouldn’t have the possibility to save up between now and the date that payment needed to be made so that their children could go. So rather than be an exclusive trip and not allow some of the poorer kids to go, they were talking about postponing this trip to another year and maybe a few months later in the year so that everyone would have a chance to save up for it.
Next stop was back in Crewe, where I was going for a walk. and I’d been for a walk down Market Street, passing underneath the Cumberland Bridge at the bottom and into Middlewich Street (where we were a few weeks ago, as you might recall). As I was crossing the road I had to start to run as a car came around the corner under the bridge from Market Street at something of a speed on the wrong side of the road, which is actually the right side of the road because we are talking about the UK, although for some reason I wasn’t aware of this. So I had to make a run for the pavement. I had the idea that the road under the bridge was a one-way street, which it wasn’t as vehicles were coming from both directions. Anyway, I was around the corner by now and walking up Middlewich Street and a bus was coming down the street, travelling quite quickly. he reached the bottom and swung round to the right to go underneath the bridge but a car came hurtling out from somewhere under the bridge, shot off up the side of the railway line where there is no road, causing the bus to jam on his brakes. He only just missed this car. I carried on with my walk and it was dark by now. I’d been chatting to a couple of people whom I’d met on my travels but by now I had arrived at a place that was a bank. It had a cash-point which was in the basement, and there were people in there using it. It occurred to me to go and check my English bank account so went downstairs. I pulled out my card ready to use and while I was waiting my turn I noticed that there was something like a shop counter down here, with money all over the place, but no-one had taken any notice at all of this money. I already had a fair bit of money in my wallet, by the way. While I was sorting myself out, another person came down the steps behind me so I told him to go ahead – I’ll be a minute or two yet. he looked at me strangely and said “do you always carry that enormous amount of money around with you?”. I said “no” and carried on doing what I was already doing. But he stood there watching me. I told him again to go ahead and use the machine but he just stood there. I was starting to sense that we were going to have some kind of confrontation but just then, one of my friends from Brussels came in and came downstairs to use the cash point. He (my friend) asked me “what’s 212 plus 212?” as if this was the key to his PIN. I was having to be very vague in my reply because of this other person lurking around in the vicinity. But now of course there were two of us in there, both of whom were likely to be potential victims for this guy loitering around on the stairs.
We haven’t finished yet either, for there was some other part of the dream going on about my youngest sister. She was with a friend and they both drifted in and out somewhere along the way. But in the meantime there was a man who had come from the UK and was now in the USA who had travelled all around the USA on something of an extended holiday. He’d retired from work and there was a great deal of confusion about his pension arrangements, what employment pensions he was entitled to and what he was going to receive. In the end, after a great deal of argument and discussion, he’d been to his former employer who had promised to look into everything. This was an oil company, and the people there decided to make a presentation to him. They gave him an old oil drum which, while not sounding as it it was very much, was actually quite symbolic because it had fallen off a ship somewhere off the coast of New England and washed all the way down along the eastern coast of America (regardless of prevailing winds, tides and ocean currents), round Cape Horn and the Tierra del Fuego and then back up the western coast of America (regardless of prevailing winds etc) and had been recovered again near Seattle. They presented it to him as a symbol of his own voyage all around the USA. Eventually, it worked out that they had found three pension entitlements for him and so he could live happily ever after.

And so you can see why I was astonished by my early night.

On the way to Montlucon through the snow, which dramatically cleared by the time that we reached Pionsat, and then it was quite straightforward as far as the hospital, although I did stop for some cash at the bank on the edge of the town, seeing how the nurse will probably want paying this weekend before I go. And being nice and early at the allergy clinic, that meant of course that they were all late.

But I did happen to notice the first E-plate on the car park. It was a, EA — KK registration so I reckon that it’s about three weeks since they first came out. They now seem to be slowing down to well over two years a letter.

At the allergy clinic, first thing that they did when they arrived was ask me to take off my upper clothes and to check my body. Then they sat me down in a comfortable chair (or what passes for a comfortable chair around there), gave me a couple of injections and then started to squirt something out of a syringe into my mouth – something quite minty and also quite bitter. Then they told me to take a drink of water.

This was how we went on for much of the day. I’ve no idea what it was that they had given me but they ought to have given something to the room and the chair to stop them spinning around while I was trying to sit there quietly and do some work on my Canada notes.

They brought up some food too, but it was, as I expected, some meat (there seems no point in going to an allergy clinic and telling them about your allergies if they are going to totally ignore them, is there?). I was prepared for this however, and had brought along some vegan cheese and tomato butties. But we did have coffee too and that wasn’t too bad.

When I’d finished and the room had stopped spinning, I went off to find Caliburn and then I headed back to my place for an hour or so to gather up some of my possessions, or such that I could remember of them.

And the snow had gone, much to my surprise and pleasure. It was in fact quite warm and I felt a little better once I had warmed up.

Back at Liz and Terry’s, I had another early night. I need to build up my strength prior to leaving because it’s a long way to Brussels, even if I am going to do it in a couple of steps. The days when I could do a full day’s work and then drive the 800kms between Brussels and my Farm through the night – they seem to be long-gone now.

0

Wednesday 16th March 2016 – HOW WE LAUGHED …

… when the nurse said something last night about it going to snow today. And so would you have done, given the glorious day we had yesterday.

But coming back from Montlucon, and passing through Villebret where you start to climb up into the Combrailles, I saw a few suspicious-looking white flakes being blown about in the sky. By the time I climbed up over the Font Nanaud and down the other side towards St Gervais, the sky was clear again but about half an hour after arriving back here, we got the lot. There’s now about 10mm of snow outside and it’s still falling.

Yes, and I have to go back (GRRRRR!) to Montlucon and the hospital tomorrow too. I arrived there nice and early but had to wait for almost three quarters of an hour before I was seen properly by the nurse. She examined where I’d been injected and where I’d been patched, and told me that there is some reaction so I need to return for further tests.

You don’t need me to tell you what I think of that.

But anyway, off up to the day hospital and the blood transfusion. My favourite nurse and my second-favourite student were there and once more there was a decent and convivial crowd in the room. We all had quite a laugh and a good time, which made us all feel better and helped the time pass by.

Lunch was the usual disgusting muck but at least it was something, I suppose. And although I was finished by 14:30 I told them that I wasn’t leaving until I had had my mid-afternoon coffee.

On the way back from Montlucon I got myself lost in the back streets trying to find the short cut to LIDL. I needed some of my vitamin B12 juice and some sparkling water, and I also bought a couple of big packets of crisps and some packets of sweets to nibble on while I’m driving to Leuven. And they sell 1-litre bottles of orange juice in there and they are just the thing to drink in the van while I’m driving but as usual, Bane of Britain forgot to buy any.

I was going to go back home for a couple of hours afterwards too but it was rather cold and that made me think for a moment, and then with the white stuff, I decided that being back in the warmth and off the road was a much better plan.

And here I am and there I’ll be in a moment – in bed. I’m not going for a walk tonight as I’ve walked far enough today (as well as going all around the hospital I had to go off to find the Records Department to pick up a copy of my file to take to Leuven).

And while I’m on the subject of files and records, I did ask the doctor there to prepare his file and records ready for me to pick up. And so I went to see his secretary and it will come as no surprise to you all to learn that he hasn’t done so. I told her “Friday at the latest” (well, actually vendredi au plus tard, but you get the idea).

So I hope that I have a more interesting and exciting sleep than I did last night. I was out like a light in a very deep sleep and the only recollection of what happened was what was on the dictaphone. And we were dealing with football issues yet again.

We were talking about the Controle Technique in football (well, exactly!) and one of the issues in this is that the player concerned has to take a penalty kick. Now it doesn’t matter whether the player scores or misses, or whether it’s saved by the keeper – it’s all down to whether the player is capable of kicking the ball in that situation. One player having his Controle Technique came out onto the field. He was wearing a red football shirt with his name on the back – a really long name that ended with Platini. He was preparing to take the kick but we noticed that underneath his shirt he was wearing a Father Christmas outfit complete with hood trimmed in white and with a white bobble – and his hood is up on his head. He runs in to take the penalty as soon as the whistle is blown, but almost immediately the whistle is blown again to stop the kick being taken, in order to order him to put his hood down so that the controller could see his head and face. And so he does, and then he runs in and takes the kick again. However the keeper is really quick off his line and manages to block the ball with his knees. The ball thus ricochets off his knees up into the air. Now the goal that they are using for this is actually an over-bridge, so it’s clearly the correct dimensions for a goal underneath it. The ball balloons up and over the bridge past the people who are crossing the bridge and then back down the other side and goes quite a way away. The man who has taken the penalty now needs another ball to do something different and so he climbs up the side of the cutting which this bridge crosses, and plucks another ball that was in a bush that was growing on the top of the cutting, so they can continue this Controle Technique.

After all of that, I was down here early yet again, breakfasted and off on the road at 07:30 with the coffee in my Tim Hortons thermal mug. The drive was pretty uneventful with no-one in my way and even though I stopped at the bank to add to the fighting fund, I was at the hospital for 08:20.

I spent most of the day dealing with my Canada 2014 voyage for the month of September. I’ve now arrived back on Nova Scotia (travelling backwards of course) but then I had to start from the other end at Montreal and reach as far as the Sorel – St Ignace ferry across the St Lawrence because there’s a gap in my notes. I know that they are there because I remember transcribing them and I’m sure that I’ve seen them, but they are probably out of order so I’ll need to find them – and the easiest way to find them is to start at the other and and file the stuff from there, and eventually I’ll come across them.

That’s a nice job for me tomorrow then, seeing as how I have to spend all blasted day in that perishing mausoleum.

0

Tuesday 15th March 2016 – I’VE BEEN OUT …

… for a walk after lunch this afternoon.

gorge de la sioule toureix sauret besserve puy de dome franceAnd quite right too, because it really was a beautiful day.

I took my time and slowly walked to the end of the lane and then up the main road for 400 metres or so to the turning to Toureix, enjoying the warm temperature of the sunny spring afternoon. From here, you can look down the hill to the turning to Le Fournial and further on over the Gorge de la Sioule.

And I learnt something new today too, which is always a good thing. There’s a huge steel mill about 10 miles from here, right out the other side of Les Ancizes in the countryside. It’s the most surprising thing to find in the countryside and I’ve always wondered why. And now I know the answer.

It turns out that when the built the Viaduc des Fades at the turn of the 20th Century, they correctly identified the potential of the water in the Gorge de la Sioule as a source for hydro-electric generation.

They weren’t wrong either. Today, there’s a big modern dam right across the valley but back in those days 100 years ago they installed a basic, simple hydro-electric turbine which produced its first electricity in 1917.

And then they discovered something important. The generator was a success but they had overlooked to find a market for the electricity. No-one around here had electricity in those days and the transmission of electrical energy was in its infancy and there was nothing like a National Grid to distribute the power.

And so if they couldn’t send the electricity out to clients, they needed to bring in a client from elsewhere. And hence the arrival of Duval’s.

As you know, I had an early night last night. It took me ages to drop off to sleep and once I’d gone off, I remembered almost nothing. I really must have been exhausted. There are just snippets of this and that on the dictaphone that don’t mean much, but then I suppose that after the marathon epics of the last couple of nights, you would welcome the rest.

We started off at the football again during one of my nocturnal rambles and strangely enough, when I awoke in the middle of the night I could name the entire Sheffield United starting line-up but in the time that it took me to reach for the dictaphone, the whole lot had disappeared completely. There was a small guy leading the attack and another small guy in the team and he had been whingeing at me about something or other that had actually started off this particular dream. And I couldn’t recall that either.
But not to worry. I was soon back to sleep, going off somewhere with Liz in her Volkswagen and all of a sudden she came over really, really ill and I had to help her back to the car. I called Terry and he appeared too, so we both helped her back. He was really upset and panicking abut how ill she was and being really nice to her, encouraging her back to the car even though she was in agony. Back home, I was making this salad with rice and chick peas, all kinds of things. I was having to boil up these ingredients separately to go into this rice and someone else was helping me. Liz was there supervising and giving directions. We had boiled up something for quite some time and stuck it in this salad but there was something else on the boil, which I thought was something quick and so I tipped that into the salad as well. It turned out to be dried chick peas so I asked Liz how long they needed to be cooked, as I imagined that it was quite some time. She said that they needed just 2 minutes, and so seeing as they had been on the boil for longer than that, that was OK. I then was curious to know why, if they only needed two minutes, we hadn’t cooked them with the rest of the food. All of this, by the way, was going on in the really cramped kitchen that we had in Davenport Avenue when we were kids.

That was basically it, I suppose. But then I was awake early and downstairs before the alarm went off. I’ve not done too much though because I’m still not in the mood for very much, but I’ve finished off all of the notes for 2015 and done the dictaphone notes for October 2014 and part of them for September 2014 too. But my heart wasn’t in it really – I could do with a change of scenery right now but I’m in no fit condition to do anything about it.

I’m on the move tomorrow anyway because I have the hospital. The allergy clinic followed by the blood transfusion service. Neither of these would have been necessary had the removal of my spleen done its job, but it’s no use crying over spilt milk now.

And so I suppose that I’d better have an early night.

And you can all have an early night too. Only 903 words tonight – I’m clearly losing my grip.

And quote of the week must be that from Terry, listening with only half an ear to the football on TV –
“Manchester City have SEX OFFENDERS in the team tonight???”
“No, Terry” I replied. “He said ‘six defenders'”.

0

Monday 14th March 2016 – WELL THAT’S ME TOTALLY P155ED OFF!

I had my blood test at the hospital this morning, and the blood count has gone down yet again to 8.1. And that’s despite having a blood transfusion the other day. The operation that I had to go through 6 or 7 weeks ago has clearly done no good whatever and I might just as well have saved myself the agony.

The thing that gets me though is that no-one in the hospital seems to care. Here they are, messing about with allergy tests for a different medication to deal with the immunity issues following the removal of the spleen, and on Friday I’m in hospital for a scan on my lung to see where this blood clot (the one in my lung that I picked up in hospital) has got to.

But as to my underlying illness and the causes of it, and any potential solution – not a word!

What made me even more depressed about all of this is that while I was sitting in the allergy clinic with all of these patches and injections and so on, I was editing all of the photos that I took in Montreal and sorting out all of the notes that relate thereto. And then I got to thinking about just how much I enjoyed the city and how much I felt at home there. And then I reached a conclusion.

And that is that seeing as how no-one cares, then I don’t either. if nothing definite comes out of my visit to Leuven next week and they can’t sort something out, then I’m on the next plane to Montreal. I’ll find a quiet room in a house somewhere around the Cote des Neiges, which really is my favourite part of Montreal, and let nature take its course.

I can’t go on like this. it’s nothing short of purgatory for me to have to go through all of what I’m going through and for no good purpose either. I may as well not be here and be somewhere else instead, whether in this world, the New World or even the next world.

What didn’t help matters very much was that I had another one of those comfortable, reassuring dreams where everything went according to plan, our hero got the girl and we both walked off together into the sunset and all of that – something that never ever happened to me in real life and how I wished that it had.

I was back playing in my rock group from the 1970s again and we were totally unrehearsed – we hadn’t played together for years and we were featuring in a venue somewhere. This was downstairs in a basement somewhere, rather like Enoch’s in Crewe used to be, and we weren’t even sure what numbers we were going to play, never mind how we were going to play them. This went on and we didn’t have all that much idea about what we were going to do. We spent so much time discussing and debating it that we weren’t actually getting anything done. There were quite a few of our friends there, including one particular girl whom I fancied and who I was trying to impress, who were coming to see us and so we HAD to be organised. Came the afternoon of the gig and we decided that we would have a rehearsal. I headed off towards the rehearsal room, carrying my bass guitar and there was some girl, whom I had seen vaguely back in the past but I hadn’t particularly noticed very much, came over to me and asked me if my guitar was a Gibson SG. I told her to count the strings, which she did, and agreed that there were just four of them. And so I told her that it was in fact a Gibson EB3. We started to talk about bass guitars and musical instruments, and she said that she had a mandolin with four strings on it. Of course – a mandolin – that brings back Lindisfarne and “Road to Kingdom Come” and “No Time to Lose”, all of that kind of thing. We ended up having quite a chat about this kind of thing, and she said that she could actually play some Lindisfarne music on the mandolin. It’s always been my ambition to play in a folk-rock group like Lindisfarne so I egged her on to go and fetch her mandolin,which she did and we had a brief jam session. After that, we wandered off together hand in hand. As I said earlier, this was another one of these comfortable situations and I wish that I could remember who she was, or even what she looked like – rather different from the Girl from Worleston the other night whose face is still vividly fixed in my mind. Anyway, off we went, hand in hand and there were a few people loitering in the vicinity who noticed the pair of us together like that and gave a little smile to each other. We walked to a rocky wall where there were a few seating areas set into it at various levels – just flat, grassy areas. I invited her to sit down with me but she said that she had other things to do and didn’t have the time. I continued to encourage her to sit down, she continued to be doubtful and it was at this moment that I woke up rather dramatically and shattered the illusion, much to my dismay.
After the usual crawl down the corridor I ended up at the football – Nantwich Town in fact. And while Nantwich Town might have a new ground, down on Kingsley Fields, this match wasn’t being played there. And neither was it being played on their old ground at Jackson Avenue either, but in the street in London Road right more-or-less outside Churche’s Mansions. I was watching the game, with about 4 or 5 others (huge crowds they have in Nantwich), a couple of girls and a couple of kids, having a kick-around with the balls.There was a really strong, swirling wind blowing that was creating havoc and on one occasion, much to my surprise, I actually caught the match ball one-handed, swerving around in the wind as it went out of play and that was really impressive. For the rest of it, the conditions were really difficult and catching the ball, even a simple catch, was really difficult if not impossible. We were actually watching this at the back of a river and the house rear yards backed right onto it. One small boy was climbing over the back wall and the wooden fence on top and lost his footing, sliding straight down into the river and emerging all covered in green slime. That certainly looked unhealthy! All of these houses had basements that were well below the level of the water but were somehow really dry. I wouldn’t have liked to have lived down in there, although there were people quite happily doing so. There were two teenage girls watching this football match and they lived in one of the houses. At half-time they went back to their house where the mother was cleaning the room of one of these girls, and one of the girsl asked the other what she would like for breakfast. The other replied that she would like one round of cheese on toast with half a packet of crisps and a coffee. I said “breakfast? It’s getting on for 10:30 and most of us had eaten breakfast long before this match kicked off”. But anyway, the first girl dragged a big metal wood-stove out from a corner into the middle of her little basement room ready to fill it and light it to make the toast and put the kettle on. They asked me what I would like to which I replied that I’d had my breakfast a long time ago, but I’ll have a cup of coffee with them. They next asked me what coffee I wanted and what mug I wanted and I thought that they weren’t half making life complicated when all that I wanted was a simple cup of coffee.

But anyway, enough of this. I was up early enough, breakfasted and on the road by 07:40. And what a beautiful morning it was too. I was in Montlucon at the hospital by 08:30 and in the comfy chair by the power point at 08:40 too.

I had the blood test, as I mentioned, and then had the drain fitted, and then injected and patched with all kinds of things. My companion from the other day was there too and we had quite a chat. And while I might have won the “mine’s bigger than yours” competition by having the largest lump on my arm, I felt really sorry for her with all of the tests that she was going through and the mess that they had made of her arm. In consolation, I let her have my mid-morning cake to cheer her up.

We had quite a few moments of humour too, including when one of the others asked if she could leave the room to use the bathroom.
“You’re supposed to raise your hand” I retorted.
“Just like school” said someone else.
At least, despite everything else, there’s a good feeling of cameraderie there in that clinic and the nurse is a really good sport too, which is good.

But the bad side of this is that I’ve had a few adverse reactions so I need to come in again. I explained my situation, all of my hospital appointments and my visit to Belgium and as a result, exceptionally, they can fit me in provisionally at 09:00 on Thursday.

I mentioned that at this rate I ought to be looking for an apartment here in the vicinity of the hospital and asked the young girl here with me whether she had a spare bed in her room. She said she did, but her mother wouldn’t like it. I asked “who cares about your mother?” which made everyone smile, but didn’t have the desired effect.

Not that I expected it to either, but there you go.

As for the blood test though, it’s on the limit of the blood transfusion level, but that’s not good enough for me. I’m off to Leuven next week – 800-odd kilometres by road – and I need to be on my best form for the journey. So what I’ve done is to change my little one-hour appointment back at the allergy clinic from tomorrow to Wednesday at 09:00 seeing as how there was a space, and then went up to the day-hospital and persuaded them to take me in straight afterwards for a blood transfusion. That way, then at least I’ll be in something-like reasonable health to undertake the journey. Coming back won’t be too much of a problem as I don’t have a time-limit for that so if I’m tiring out, I can take a good rest and carry on later.

But as I also said earlier, I’m thoroughly depressed by the way that all of this is panning out. I’m thoroughly hating the past, hating the present and hating the future too.

To cheer myself up, I went to Carrefour and the Flunch to have a plate of chips and vegetables but that was a waste of time as they were stone-cold. Liz had given me a little shopping list that involved going to Grande Frais and the Carrefour so I bought the necessary and looked for something else to cheer me up but there wan’t anything there that took my fancy. That’s always the case when you’re in the middle of a black depression – nothing will pull you out of the pit.

Back home – for only an hour as Liz wanted the shopping by 16:00 – I still couldn’t find my copy of Paint Shop Pro or anything else that I needed. But there was a little issue that the water in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater was off the temperature scale. I had to drain off 5 litres of the water and put 5 litres of cold water into it. I’ve also plugged the fridge into the main circuit so that it’ll now be working 24 hours per day. I’ll have to do something because with no-one there drawing any current, there’s tons of surplus electricity and it’s all dumped into the hot water.

Yes, 41 amps of surplus energy was being generated when I arrived and the cables to the immersion heater element were stone-cold – a far cry from 6 months ago when they overheated at half of that and I had to rewire everything. All of this, the temperature in the water and the amps that the cables are currently … "ohh! Very good!" – ed … handling just goes to show how much current was being lost by the rubbishy cables that I had been using. Decent cables, even half the diameter, properly crimped and soldered, is definitely the way to go and I wish that my soldering techniques would improve.

However, if things continue like this, my soldering techniques won’t be an issue.

I stopped for diesel on the way back and also to the pharmacie at Pionsat for the next lot of anti-biotic prescriptions (which wouldn’t have been necessary except for this spenectomie, and what a waste … "you’ve done that already" – ed … and then back to Liz and Terry’s.

After tea, which was a stir-fry with the stuff that I had bought earlier, I said “sod it!” and went to bed. I’ve had enough disappointments for one day. I’d already crashed out for half an hour on the sofa and it was beyond me to keep on going – not when I wasn’t in the mood to go on fighting.

Tomorrow is another day. Let’s see how we get on with that. Not any better, I bet.

I’ll leave you all to sit and read this rubbish – all 2322 words of it.

And serve you all right too!

0

Sunday 13th March 2016 – PHEW!

When was the last time that I was up and about and eating breakfast long before the alarm went off? And on a Sunday too! And what has surprised me more than anything else is that after all of the travels that I was on last night, that I managed to make it back here in time.

But start as you mean to go on. And before you start, I perhaps ought to warm you that the sum total of my travels last night comes to something about 2200 words.

You have been warned.

I started off last night by falling asleep watching a film on the laptop last night and it wasn’t long after that at all before I was on the road. It started off at first as if I hadn’t done a great deal because I’d been away with a group of people. There was a timetable for us and on the first day we had to inspect half a dozen countries and on the second day another half-dozen, on the third, yet another half-dozen and so on. This didn’t leave me much time to be going off on a nocturnal ramble but then I found myself in Chester. I don’t know exactly where I was living but it was on top of a bunk-bed somewhere and this was quite a long way off the ground and difficult to climb on to. There had been a young girl that I had quite fancied in the past when I was younger, and so had a few of my friends, but she had started to go out with a boy who was older than us and quite a bit older than her. There was some kind of correspondence that had taken place between the two of them, and one of these letters had fallen into my hands. I was busy parcelling up this letter into a brown envelope and trying to write a letter to one of these friends of mine to tell him about this letter. Obviously the contents of this letter were interesting and I reckoned that it was worth a couple of quid for me to give him this letter to read and I could buy myself a pint of beer. The difficulty that I was having was to make my letter sound sufficiently encouraging and interesting to make him part with the money and it was taking me hours to think of the ideal form of wording.
The next port of call started off to be quite amusing. I was out and about with a dwarf and we were trying to book ourselves into a hotel. While we were there at the reception desk, a message came downstairs to the effect that a woman in one of the rooms required a companion. Of course, the ears of the dwarf and I pricked immediately up, imagining full well what might have been meant by that and so as soon as we had finished registering ourselves into our room, we shot off to the room that had been mentioned. In the room we found a girl who was totally surprised by our intrusion because that wasn’t the kind of companion that she meant. She wanted a companion to talk to and confide in. All three of us were taken by surprise at what had just unfolded. The dwarf then left the room to go back down to reception and arrange a room for himself I started to chat to this girl and it seemed that she was intending to stay not for just one night but until the middle of next week and so I jokingly suggested that I could check myself into her room for a couple of nights and see how it goes. I slid quietly into her bed (it was a big double-bed)while she was adjusting her hair and her night attire and she didn’t seem to mind at all.
I’m clearly going to have to keep up these injections and anti-allergy patches and so on if this is the kind of thing that happens to me during the night. I’ve never had this kind of luck when I’ve been on my travels in real life.
Anyway, after all of this, I made a guest appearance as Sherlock Holmes (not for the first time just recently either) in the case of a girl who had been murdered. There were five people who had been arrested in connection with this and the newspapers were making ever such a fuss about all of this, how there was some really rough street in Leicester (why Leicester?) where all of the criminals seem to live and how this case was connected with this. But it turned out that only one of these five people was connected with this street
I next found myself out and about with Terry and Liz, but it wasn’t Liz but my friend Helena from when she was quite young (and making her debut in these voyages too). We’d all been for a drive out and had stopped somewhere in the salubrious surroundings of somewhere that looked like a gent’s restroom and changing rooms for a sports ground, but somewhere that had clearly seen better days and was creosoted rather like an outdoor toilet of the 1950s. We were all hot and sweaty, having been for a really good walk and we were all thirsty. Terry produced a tangerine for himself and Liz (or Helena) said that she was going to have something else and no-one asked me what I wanted. This depressed me a little, but then Helena produced an orange, a really nice juicy one, peeled it and gave it to me, which I thought was really nice. She asked me to save her a segment, which of course I was only too happy to do. While we were here, we were listening to the radio. Speaking was Mike Harris, the chairman of the TNS football club. The club used to play at a ground in the village of Llansantffraid but had moved up the road to the old army football stadium at Park Hall near Oswestry. He’d offered to sell the ground to the local community on some kind of share basis, £10 per share. This was of course about 10 years ago and property prices had risen dramatically since then and now the local council was trying to buy the ground at the price that Mike Harris had asked for it 10 years ago, presumably to sell on for redevelopment and make a profit based on today’s values. It goes without saying that Mike Harris was not at all willing to sell it under those terms and conditions, and this discussion was the basis of the radio programme that was being broadcast. What was interesting about all of this is that from where we were, we could see the old football ground across the valley behind a shopping precinct in the distance (which incidentally bears no resemblance whatever to the actual site or situation of the ground). I immediately dashed to the car to fetch my camera because what was going through my mind was that if this broadcast was live, everyone would be down at the football ground right now and the ground would therefore be open. After all, the old ground at Llansantffraid is one of the places that I’ve yet to visit while I’ve been on my travels around the various Welsh football grounds (this is in fact actually the case). The others saw my camera and wondered what I was going to do, and so I explained. But I had to go to the bathroom first, and this was when I awoke – right at that moment, because I actually did have to go to the bathroom. And once more, I found all of my bedclothes all over the floor. Rushing to the car for the camera must have been the reason for that.
After the bathroom break, which was actually the Easter break for me, I found myself back at work. The first thing that happened was that one of my colleagues said “hello” to me, which took me completely by surprise. And all of the new vehicles had arrived – new white vans of various shapes and sizes (and “H”-registered too, which was something of a complete surprise). We were to swap our vehicles for the new ones but I couldn’t find the one that had been allocated to me, and I couldn’t find a place to park my own either as the car park was full. So I went back to my desk and started to chat to Anne-Marie, a chat that went on for ages while I was trying to do some work. And someone had put a pile of files on my desk with all kinds of post in there dating back to 12 months and even more, all kinds of legal stuff and so on, a problem that I solved in the good old-fashioned and well-tried way of simply “losing” the post somewhere inside the file and filing the file away on the filing racks, where they would be lost for quite some time. Once Anne-Marie had wandered off, I went to take my coffee things back but I couldn’t leave the office by the front as it was all closed in with windows rather like the front end of the upper deck of a double-decker bus. Walking back up the other end I came upon Anne-Marie and her two friends Caroline and Theresa, lounging about on one of the side-on seats that you find over the rear wheel of the lower deck of a double-deck Lodekka type bus. I said “hiya, girls”to them but they all turned their backs to me which I thought was rather impolite. What had I done now? So downstairs with my coffee things, I found myself out on the edge of a cricket ground where a match was due to be played sometime soon, somewhere out towards Stafford. There was a huge discussion taking place about this match and about the players. I hadn’t been selected (I don’t think that I expected to be) but it seemed that a couple of footballers from FC Pionsat St Hilaire, Gregory amongst them, were going to be playing and the person who was organising it, none other than Mark Dawson, was urging the rest of the team to welcome them. Mark had been waving around a yard brush which had a plastic handle, but people had been stubbing out their cigarettes on it and burning the handle, so I took it from Mark and put it back up against the wall. “It wasn’t me” said Mark. “I don’t smoke”. I replied that I knew that he didn’t, but nevertheless it was marked and so I put it out of everyone’s way. There was someone else there with a Velocette Venom which had become the subject of some discussion. The owner said that it had cost £129 new but now it’s worth about £66,000. The bike was being pushed around and so I put it up on a piece of hard-standing right by this little building where we were congregating. Someone said that we had been told not to park motorbikes up there but I replied that it was OK because it had its centre-stand up on a paving slab. From here I was heading off onwards down south past Stafford and I noticed that Mark didn’t have transport and so expecting him to be heading now for the cricket pavilion, I asked him if he wanted a lift. I was in my big old Senator so I opened the door for him and he told me to drop him off near the town hall in Stoke on Trent, about 10 miles away through the traffic in the opposite direction and that will cost me a couple of hours in time. But a promise is a promise so I bit my lip and set off.
And I still haven’t finished yet either. Because all of this ramble about me being at work seemed to have started off with me being on a wide-bodied jet aeroplane (and I do mean “wide” – it was rather like a cinema auditorium). I seemed to be the first on board so I chose my seat in the central part but against the aisle, and put my black fleece there. There were four air hostesses in a bunch over on the other side in the aisle and they waved me over, so leaving my jacket behind, I went over to see what they wanted. “Ohh, come over here and sit by us” they said. “Why? What’s up?” I asked. “Am I the only passenger on the aeroplane?” “Ohh no” they replied. “But you’re first on so you can sit here if you like”. And so I went and fetched my jacket, and then came back to sit by these air hostesses. I’d boarded this plane by chance, really, just looking to get away for a few days and this was the first plane in. It was flying out to the Channel Islands somewhere on this Friday late afternoon and was coming back on Sunday evening, which suited me fine for a short break.
No wonder it was a surprise to find me up and about so early this morning after all of that.

So with all of this effort I had another day of sitting and vegetating. I mean – it took me all morning just to type up my notes from through the night.

But this afternoon, I finished all of the notes from September 2015 and I’ll soon be ready to start on the ones for August. And then, I have 2014 to do. Then, I can take the 2013 notes and merge all of them together in the appropriate places. It’s not going to be something that will be over in a day or so.

But with it being Sunday, Liz has been cooking. For lunch, we had home-made mushroom soup (made with real home-made mushrooms of course), followed by vegan carrot-cake for our afternoon snack, and then for tea we had home-made nut roast followed by home-made vegan chocolate chip ice-cream. As I have said before … "and you’ll say again" – ed … whenever (if ever) I’m fit enough to leave here, I’ll immediately try to find something else wrong with me.

And so on that note, I’ll leave you all. I’m not even going for a walk because I need the early night as I’m off to Montlucon and the hospital early in the morning and I’ll be doing more than enough walking while I’m there.

And if you’ve managed to read down this far then congratulations because it’s a mere 2474 words, a new record posting for a blog entry, and by a country mile as well.

Good night!

0

Friday 11th March 2016 – JUST IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING …

… what happened last night with me not posting my blog, the answer was that by the time 20:15 came around, I was already tucked up in bed and out like a light. Crashing out was certainly the word – I had gone completely.

But then again, I’d had a hectic day – and one that had started not long after I had gone to sleep. And furthermore, it all started with yet another appearance by a girl who has been described on these pages as “the one that got away”. But for the second time in succession, she didn’t get away from my evil clutches last night.

Ohh no she didn’t!

I’d been out yet again in Nantwich, having been for a really good wander all around the Crewe Road End – Millstone Lane area of the town, having a good look at all of the houses and so on. And all of the area behind the houses on Millstone Lane, between there and The Crofts, had been cleared away, flattened and rolled out ready for a new housing estate to be built there. Even Flash Meakin’s hovel had gone. I wandered over there to make a brief inspection but the builders tried to chase me away. However, it was common land and so I had every right to be there, and I made sure that they knew it. And there I stayed. Having made my inspection, I wandered off to continue my travels and this is where I bumped into the aforementioned young lady. She was living on The Crescent apparently and so she invited me in for a coffee. We had a really good chat about old times and then she invited me to stay for dinner. So I prepared all of the vegetables and she cooked the food – a risotto it was. I was given a choice about what I wanted for dessert – beans on toast was mentioned (this is why I enjoy so much going on these nocturnal rambles – they are totally surreal) but of course I had some completely different ideas about what I wanted to have for afters. But I settled on a banana, which I suppose is rather symbolic. But then her young daughter came in and was telling us about how she had been threatened by some young boy who had somehow found his way into the house. She had been in the attic and had gone out onto the roof to see what was making a noise, and he had sneaked in behind her. When she came downstairs he surprised her. She was shocked and so the police were called and he was carted off, even though he insisted that he’d only done it for a dare. He ended up with 30 days inside and was ostracised by all of his friends. In the meantime, the two of us were carrying on chatting and the conversation came round to what was happening in the evening. I invited her to the cinema and her daughter thought that this was a really good idea. But her elder boy looked rather worried as if he was afraid of having his mum taken away from him. But there was no doubt that she was really keen to go to the cinema with me and I was of course just as keen to take her.

Yes, it’s a shame that things like this don’t happen to me in real life.

The alarm went off before I’d reached the exciting bit and it left me wondering about what would have happened had I been able to sleep in until the usual time of 07:45 instead of this wretchedly-early time of 07:00. I was feeling as if I’d been cheated out of 45 minutes of wishful thinking, but there we are, I suppose.

I was on the road by 07:40 and at the hospital at 08:35, managing to pinch the next-to-last parking space on the car park. The allergy clinic is weird, with just a half-dozen or so of comfortable seats, and with le being the first arrival, I had the pick of the chairs – right by the door by the power point. I had some kind of pattern drawn in biro on my arm, with initials and numbers, and then injected and some kind of fluid rubbed in. One or two of them flared up quite dramatically and the nurse measured them with some kind of hole gauge.

The nurse then found a sheet of something that resembled an aluminium-backed piece of bubble-wrap, peeled off the sticky front of it, stuck it to my back and then burst the bubbles so that, presumably, the product in each bubble would interact with my skin. I have to leave this on until Monday.

But if I think that I’m hard done-to, what happened to me was nothing to what happened to the young girl next to me. They drew some kind of chess-board on her arm and she had a huge number of injections, a couple of which flared up like nothing that I have ever seen before. One of them was starting to look like something out of Quatermass’s Experiment.

I felt so sorry for her that I let her have my cake that came with our mid-morning coffee. And then I invited her for a game of draughts on her arm.

One thing though that surprised me was that each one of us, on entering the room, had a drain put in our arms. Not that that was surprising, the surprising bit was that they didn’t use it for anything. Rather a waste of effort to me. But at least the nurse who did it had “the touch”. I hardly felt a thing.

But my results were such that I have to come back for a full morning on Monday, and an hour or so on Tuesday. And as for my Monday-morning blood test, the nurse will do it then and there as long as I remember to take my prescription with me.

We were thrown out at 12:00 and I went down to the Amaranthe. I bought some more vegan cheese and some mixed seeds, as well as a couple of hundred grams of muesli biscuits. I think that I deserved a little treat. But the Amaranthe is now selling Mozzarella-like vegan cheese (and this is progress, considering that even 18 months ago they didn’t stock any at all), although I didn’t buy any to try as it looked to be tainted. I’ll pick some up next time maybe.

Lunch was a plate of chips and vegetables at the Flunch, and then I went around the Carrefour and the Auchan for some shopping. There were no loose porridge oats, but the Auchan “own-brand” packaged oats were a reasonable price so I bought a few packets of those. I can’t be without my muesli now, can I?

I went home afterwards for a relax and to look for some more stuff that I forgot the other day. I still can’t find my Paint-Shop Pro disk but I did manage to find my dash-cam. I’ve also copied all of the dictaphone notes onto a rewritable DVD and onto a back-up drive, one thing that I’ve been meaning to do ever since I finished transcribing them.

I went to the pharmacie in St Gervais on the ay back here. I needed to pick up the medication that I ordered. The good news about this is that a month’s supply of the new injections only cost half of the price of the current lot, and then of course it’s only going to be once a day too. So that’s something like progress anyway. I shan’t be struggling quite as much for finances.

But the bad news about it is that the other injection that I need to take with me to the hospital next Friday – it’s more like an injection for a cow or a horse, judging by the size of the box. I don’t like the idea of that.

I also forgot to ask for some more boxes for my empty needles, and then I also realised that I hadn’t been to pick up my paperwork from the Archives at the hospital either. It clearly wasn’t my day. And on leaving the town, someone in a small silver saloon of which the registration number began CZ flashed his lights and waved at me. I wish that I know who it was.

Chips were on the menu back here, so that’s twice today. Not that I am complaining of course, because we have real malt vinegar here. And then I crawled off to bed – I didn’t even go out for my walk, but then that’s no big deal because I’d walked enough (at least, for my present state of health) today.

And with this patch-thing on my back, I’m glad that I had a shower yesterday.

And so are we” said terry.

0

Thursday 10th March 2016 – I HAD A SHOWER …

… today, and I’m not talking about anyone from … "you aren’t still doing that, are you?" – ed.

First time since the end of January in fact, the morning of my operation. But then I couldn’t have a shower with my soluble stitches in place. I had the clearance from my surgeon on Monday but what with one thing and another, it wasn’t until this evening that I had one, while my pizza was cooking.

That’s right. It seems that Thursday night is pizza night in Sauret-Besserve, and so I made my own. Tomato, mushrooms and onion with tomato sauce, vegan cheese and herbs. And it was delicious too. So much so that there’s none left for lunch (which is just as well, for I’m not here for lunch).

During the night, I was having rather a fitful series of voyages halfway around the world. The first part featured me as some kind of sheriff or marshal (I’ve clearly been watching far too many westerns before I go to sleep) and I was keeping an eye on a bunch of drunken factory workers dressed as either Indians or baddies who were on the way to the seaside but there were three hours or more of the train travel before we got there and someone needed to keep an eye on these people to make sure that they weren’t up to no good. But at this point, I awoke rather dramatically so I didn’t see how this was going to develop.
But never mind – I was soon back to sleep and found myself in Canada for some reason or another. I was at Rachel’s and Darren’s and the first night that I was there the bottle of gas in the gas heater ran out. And was I cold! I had no heat, no hot water and nowhere to make any coffee in the morning. But then I remembered that there was a bottle of gas in the verandah – like I have at home – so I went to fetch that and couple it up. But before I could do that, I was interrupted by someone like Sherlock Holmes, with Doctor Watson and a third man. This was round about the time of the disappearance of Holmes, and Watson was struggling on his own to solve a couple of cases, but he wasn’t making any headway. But Holmes returned and we had the meeting between Watson and Holmes-in-disguise, with Watson fainting and having to be put to bed. Holmes then started to shave off his whiskers, which clogged my yellow-and-white razor. but this part of everything was filled with some delightful anachronisms (like the black-and-white Sherlock Holmes films of the 30s) with record players, LP records, plastic macs and so on in this scene of Sherlock Holmes. But then I started to talk to Darren about this gas again and Rachel was saying that it doesn’t matter now because look how the temperature has gone up.
After the obligatory walk down the corridor, I went off to Mid-Wales where I was driving along this road – on the right as it happens on a dual carriageway, and in the distance was this enormous rain cloud. I was in my car and had just been overtaken by this huge lorry, who clearly couldn’t care less about conditions on the road. The road was soaking wet and he was splashing spray everywhere and at times you just couldn’t see anything.We drove down this hill with the lorry sending spray everywhere and soaking the pedestrians and policemen gesticulating at the driver. We ended up in one of these big mid-Wales towns (but nothing like any Mid-Wales town that I ever knew) and by this time I was driving a Van-Hool Alizee coach of the late 1980s, the type that I used to drive when I worked for Shearings but which was white with no writing. There were a variety of ways out of this town – at the junction there were five roads out. One of them, a diagonally left-of-straight-on, went under a railway bridge and up a hill, round a right-hand bend and then higher up to a set of traffic lights. That was the way that I went. Just after the bend parked on the left in a restricted area was a purple mark I Escort van with a “four plus two” 1963 number plate (which, seeing as how they weren’t made until 1967 was something quite surprising), and next to it was an old 105E Anglia. I was wanting to stop and take photos of them but there wasn’t anywhere to stop, we were climbing up the hill and there was all kinds of traffic queues. I thought that I would never get to the top of the bank at this rate, stuck here in this enormous traffic queue for the lights to get out of town.

After breakfast, I carried on with my Canada 2015 notes. I’ve finished the dictaphone notes for September and I’m now incorporating the blog notes into the text. That might take a few days as there are quite a lot of those. So far, I’m on that place where I camped overnight about an hour and a half from Happy Valley-Goose Bay (but travelling backwards).

So in a few minutes’ time, a nice clean me will go for a walk and then I’ll be off to bed. I have to be up at 07:00 tomorrow ready for my early morning drive to the hospital at Montlucon. I am not looking forward to that.

0

Monday 7th March 2016 – I WENT TO RESCUE …

… Caliburn today. And it’s a good job that I did too.

When I arrived around back at my place during mid-afternoon, it was just another grey, cold day with nothing particular to say about it. And I went inside to look for some stuff that I needed – some clothes, a small rolling suitcase, my missing Paint Shop Pro CD, my passport, the post, all kinds of stuff. And while I was up in the attic I remember thinking “blimmin’ ‘eck – it’s going dark early!”

caliburn ford transit snow les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut looking up, I could see that the skylights were completely snowed over and flakes the size of dinner plates were falling down. No wonder it was dark up there.

This wasn’t the time to be hanging about in my opinion. I grabbed what I could and headed for Caliburn and then headed for the hills before I could be snowed in.Luckily, after about 6 weeks of standing around, Caliburn started up easily so that was no problem.

And I’m glad in some respects that I didn’t have to hang around too much. It was taters in my attic – all of 5.9°C although it did warm up to 6.4°C after I had been there for an hour or so. Such are the advantages of having the place bung-full of insulation. I keep telling people – money spent on good insulation is never wasted.

But never mind that for a moment – let’s go back to this morning and the blasted nurse because he flaming well forgot me YET AGAIN! And it’s blood test day too so that has put the tin hat on it, hasn’t it?

I had made a special effort to get up early too, even though I was well away with the fairies.

It was an evening at weekend and, as was my custom, I’d gone out to a nearby town (and I can’t remember now which one it was) for a good prowl around. It was something that I did every weekend, and it was always to the same town, and I knew by heart everywhere to go here. It suddenly occurred to me that I was bored with it? Why didn’t I go to somewhere different? After all, the Potteries weren’t too far away. There, I had six towns to choose from and there was plenty to do, much of which would be totally new to me. But the downside of that was that where I was visiting, there was a kind of hotel where you could go for just a couple of hours and crash out. That was something that I did every time that I was there and I reckoned that it was quite important to me. There wasn’t anywhere to do that in Stoke on Trent, as far as I was aware. But on one of my walks around the town I was looking in the window of a motorcycle shop. There was a Honda 350cc in there – something totally modern that I had never seen before. It had no seat on it and the engine was missing, and the frame was really low-slung like a racing bike. My brother (him again???) came to stand next to me and we were looking at the bike. I told him that I couldn’t make out whether it was beautiful or totally hideous. There was also an old British 2-stroke twin in the window and that was much more like my kind of motorbike. He asked me about Hondas, and especially the Honda 250. Which was the best – the CB or the CD? I told him that the CB was more highly-tuned so it would respond better when being used under normal circumstances around town and on the road (ironically, whenever I had been asked this question in the 1970s, I had always recommended the CD).
From here, via a long convoluted trail I ended up back at my house with a crowd of people there, including my brother (yet again!) and the debut appearance on these pages of his wife. While we were talking, she suddenly produced a modern single-bore shotgun. This enraged me completely and right on the spur of the moment I started to sing a song that I made up on the spot as I was going along. Sung to the tune of “I don’t want to join the army” from “Oh! What A Lovely War!”, it started off –
“Don’t bring guns into my kitchen”
“Don’t bring guns into my hall”
And it concluded
“I may not want to kill”
“but I’m not so very ill”
“to let myself be shot inside my home”
and the astonishing thing about this is not only do I remember myself singing it, but the fact that I could come up with the lyrics, all of which scanned perfectly, as I was going along – and in a dream as well.
My technique must be improving!

Being fed up of waiting once 09:15 had arrived, I had my breakfast and then carried on with a few little things that I had to do, and seeing as how I was going to see my surgeon, I thought that I would make myself pretty.
“You’d better get a move on” said Terry. “We have to be off in four hours!”

So having done that and come back downstairs to another barrage of abuse – “well?” asked Terry. “When are you starting?” – we eventually had lunch and then off on the road to Montlucon.

Now I don’t know what they are spending the money on at the hospital but it’s not on the archives department, I’ll tell you that. It was like something out of Charles Dickens. Anyway, they can give me a complete copy of my file but not straight away as they need to photocopy it – at … gulp … €0:18 per page. This is going to run out to be very expensive. I can pick it up on Friday.

Back in the hospital, I’ve changed the appointment for the scanner. As you know, it should have been the day after my appointment in Leuven but that’s clearly not going to happen. But down at the secretariat of the X-ray department, they managed to find a little gap for me – they had a cancellation for 10:30 on Friday 18th of March and so I’m fitted in there.

I finally got round to seeing the surgeon, having bumped into my little student nurse on the way up and we had quite a chat. My surgeon didn’t say anything but the look on her face was enough when I told her that my blood count was going down quicker than the lifts in the hospital. Her response was “well, we’ll see what the scanner has to say and then we’ll see what else we can do for you”.

It was those last few words that filled me with foreboding.

But everything that I asked, and all of the problems that I discussed, everything was “we’ll see what the scanner has to say”. I really do believe that they have run out of ideas and are groping a little in the dark. But my stitches have indeed disappeared – they were indeed soluble – and now I can at last have a shower, which I shall be taking tomorrow.

I only had to wait two minutes for Terry, who had been to Brico Depot for an earthing rod – and then we were off back to my place.

And after everything back there, it was nice to be back behind the wheel of Caliburn even if there was a load of snow on the road as far as the Font Nanaud. I’ve missed driving, and I’m now toying with the idea of maybe going by road to Leuven.

That’s not as silly as it sounds, actually. I was in no difficulty at all with the driving, and I have four trips to make to Montlucon before I need to leave for Leuven so that will ease me back into it. And not only that, it will save on having to walk and drag a suitcase around with me while I change from train to train.

But even that might not be an issue because with all of the walking that I needed to do today, as well as all of the stair-climbing, I was moving quite a good deal easier than I was even yesterday, never mind last week when I first started on my exercise.

If only I could do something about this continual loss of blood – but if the nurse doesn’t come to give me the tests, what can I do about controlling it?

0

Thursday 3rd March 2016 – WHAT A NIGHTMARE!

The first person to put in an appearance during my nocturnal ramble last night was, would you believe, my mother. I was so surprised, if not shocked, to see her that I sat bolt upright in bed. What on earth was she doing there? I can’t remember what role she was playing last night because the whole memory of whatever I was doing at the time was immediately wiped away.
And if that’s not enough to be going on with, the next person to put in an appearance, once I’d calmed down and gone back to sleep, was my father. I was living back in my house in Gainsborough Road, but in the front room that had been converted into a bedroom. And when my father turned up (he was apparently living somewhere else in the house) at about 6:30am, he brought none other than Percy Penguin with him. She was wearing a pair or pyjamas in a kind of flanellette material, pink with a white waistband, collar and cuffs. She hopped into bed with me for a while and then I left the bed to start to tidy up the room (as if that’s ever likely to happen anywhere where I’m living), totally ignoring her. And then I’d be back in bed again, and then back tidying up and ignoring her and so on it went.
But then I had a sudden flash of realisation about something. Out here in St Gervais there’s a proposal for one of these social cafés for the Alternative Community – not just a café but a “meeting place and social centre with board games, debates and discussions as well as food, including a vegan and vegetarian option” to quote just some of their advertising. While it’s an idea that receives my fullest support, it’s all very utopic and I’ll give it 6 months at the most. But anyway, last night, while I was in my bedroom with Percy Penguin in my house, I suddenly realised that it was the Opening Night of this café and so abandoning Percy Penguin yet again, off I went to St Gervais – a mere 850 miles or so from Crewe but since when has that ever bothered me during a nocturnal ramble? I’ve travelled much greater distances than that. When I arrived, I found that one of the people who was in charge was one of the footballers of FC Pionsat St Hilaire. He was talking about using he venue for boxing matches and training and the like, and so I asked him if he was aware that a boxing venue needed to have a doctor present at all times if there was action of any kind in the ring and who was going to pay for this. he was clearly unaware of this – he just shrugged his shoulders and wandered off into the crowd. I had a wander around, admiring the nice, shiny and polished wooden floor, and ended up at the buffet in an annex at the back. Most of the products were chocolate-based and so I asked the two girls who were serving which ones were the vegan option, but they just looked at me helplessly.
The moral of this story – particularly the latter part of it – is that leaving aside my natural cynicism (and I am the first to admit it) many of these so-called social projects are all very well and good but in 99% of these cases they lack the professionalism, the foresight, the staying power and the finance to be successful, being far too detached from reality to see what is going on. Once the initial enthusiasm wears off, they run out of ideas and can’t keep the momentum going.
Mind you, I would love to be proved wrong.

As for the moral of the first part, I cannot think for the life of me what my parents were doing during the night appearing on my travels like that. One of them is bad enough but both of them – that’s enough to put me off going to sleep for the rest of my life. I still shudder when I think about it even now, and I fled from home almost 45 years ago.

So while I was slowly coming round this morning after the alarm went off, I heard a car pull up outside. Yes, it was the nurse, so I half-ran, half-fell downstairs at something of a rather indecent turn of speed for me these days. But the news – whether this is good or bad, I dunno, is that my stitches aren’t there. I asked him to look and so he did. Either they have fallen out on their own, they have dissolved, the skin has grown over them, or there weren’t any in there to start with. Only time will tell and I’ll have to wait until Monday when I see the surgeon.

Today, I’ve had a day off and done nothing at all. I reckon that I deserve some time for myself. I have plenty to do but a day here and there won’t hurt (I wish that I didn’t). I have however made myself a pizza and in a few minutes I’ll be off for another slow walk to see how I do. I’ll try to push a little farther on.

But here’s a thing – and I forgot to mention it yesterday which is a surprise because it made such an impression upon me.

When I was in the hospital yesterday, I was in the room next to the office – and in the chair underneath the hatch which was open so that I could quite clearly hear everything that was going on in there. And one thing that did happen was that the chief nurse was ringing up people about their blood results.

One call she made to a woman was clearly answered by the woman’s partner and went something along the lines of “we have her blood test results and they show that she has a blood count of 6.8. She must be very tired so she will need to lie down right away and we’ll send an ambulance for her”

Sure enough, when she did arrive here, not only was it an emergency ambulance that brought her in but she was on a stretcher.

When my blood count dropped to 6.8, I didn’t have this treatment. Not a bit of it. I was made to come under my own locomotion over 50kms, park Caliburn up somewhere in the car park and then walk all the way across to the hospital and up into the ward.

I dunno whether it’s whether your face fits, or whether she has some other illness of which I am unaware, but there’s certainly some kind of two-speed hospitalisation procedure going on here. maybe I’m just unlucky, or maybe I’m made of more sterner stuff.

0

Wednesday 2nd March 2016 – I’M BACK …

… from the hospital, thanks to Liz who brought me home after she knocked off work. And thanks again to Liz who also took me there too.

That meant a crawl out of bed at some ridiculous time like 07:30 and a rushed breakfast, and then off on the road.

And I was pretty exhausted too, for last night I was on my travels again. And things about my house are clearly preying on my mind because I was somewhere out there. I’m not quite sure where all of this started but I remember it from walking down a footpath (which isn’t there) at the back of my house (which wasn’t my house) through the woods (which aren’t there) and out into a field around the back where this path took a sharp right-hand turn due to a very high bank being in the way. I’d lived here for years but this was the first time that I’d really paid much interest in this bank and I was astonished when a passenger train rattled its way along it. Five minutes later, a swarm of people came along the path and caught me in the middle of a reverie. It turned out that there was a railway station here in Virlet – the train had stopped there and discharged these people. I’d had no idea whatever that there was a railway station here, especially one so convenient for my house. All of the time I’d been getting the train to the nearest rail junction and then catching the bus, and this was all quite inconvenient.This railway station in Virlet opened up all kinds of new opportunities.
From here I ended up in a pub somewhere in Nantwich – I had an idea that it was something like the Millfields (which has featured before on my travels). Someone was having problems with the indicators on his car – a late-model Nissan 180B I think – and so I had volunteered to fix them. I wasn’t making much progress and so I was tempted just to stick them back any old how but twisting the front flasher around, it started to work correctly and so I was quite happy. All of these manoeuvres had led me to get into a position where my head was stuck though the serving hatch and so the barman asked me what I wanted. I replied that I wanted nothing at the moment, so I could see the landlord making a face and a gesture or two to the barman to hurry up and get rid of me. I ended up though having to bend down to screw this front indicator light into the leg of this person (yes, it’s all logical, this, isn’t it?) but he told me that where I was screwing it, it wasn’t there before. I could see that – in fact I could see on his leg exactly where it used to be because there were little scabs there over the wounds that the screws had made – and I told him that it was going to be very painful if I were to screw it back exactly where it was. But he insisted and told me to go ahead – and so I did.

We arrived in Montlucon about 10 minutes late but seeing as they weren’t ready for me (the blood didn’t arrive until 10:40) it made no difference whatever.

The nurse putting my drain in was astonished. “Mr Hall” she said. “You really do have some thick skin”
“Well, what do you expect?” I asked. “I used to be married”.

And then I sat around and waited, read a book, did some work on the computer, downloaded a pile more films, all of that kind of thing, and chatted to a couple of friends on the internet. And I had lunch too – a plate of lentils and diced carrots, a vegetable pâté, a fruit purée and an orange. Much to my surprise, they even remembered to bring me a coffee.

It was all done by 14:30 and I was ready to be discharged. That meant sitting in a draughty hospital foyer but much to my surprise they allowed me to stay up there in the warmth. That was a good move because I button-holed my doctor up there and told him that I wasn’t satisfied with my progress and the follow-up that I was (or wasn’t) having. He was quite insistent that everything was normal – the fact that I was having blood tests and the transfusion showed that there was a follow-up.

But I asked him about the loss of blood – whether it was normal for me to lose so much blood so rapidly. He told me that things wouldn’t settle down for a couple of months, but he was lost for words when I replied that at the rate that I’m losing blood, I would be lucky to still be here in a couple of weeks, never mind months.

And he was also lost for words when I told him that I still had my stitches in – some 5 weeks or so after the operation. But he told me that that’s not his department – I need to see the surgeon (and so I tried to, and she was out of course).

However, I told him that I had been summoned to attend a meeting with the Conseil Général of my insurance company and made up a good story of why that should be so, and so he’s arranged for me to have a copy of my file the next time that I’m there. What I really want it for is of course to take to Leuven with me when I go.

Liz came for me after she finished work and now I’m back here, having had more pie, green beans and new potatoes for tea.

And it was just as gorgeous as yesterday. I really am so lucky staying here with Liz and Terry who are doing such an excellent job of looking after me. As I have said before, I shall be really sorry to leave.

0

Tuesday 1st March 2016 – I HAD A PHONE CALL …

… this morning, but it wasn’t necessarily the one that I was expecting.

>round about 10:15, while Terry was out cutting wood, the phone went off. “Mr Hall, this is the hospital. The Doctor has seen your blood test results and thinks that you should come in for a transfusion right away”.

So at last, someone seems to have taken notice of what is going on with my blood. But as I have said before … "and at great length too" – ed … a blood transfusion isn’t the answer. I could have kept on having these without the need to have suffered all of the agony in having my spleen removed.

But I told them that there was no chance of me going in at that time of day. Terry would have to run me, and then sit around all day until it’s done and he’s got plenty of work to do. And so we agreed that I’ll be going in tomorrow. Liz has a short day so she’ll take me in and bring me back. It’ll mean that I’ll have to sit around for a couple of hours in the hospital but that’s my problem, not anyone else’s.

Last night, I had a quiet night and didn’t go anywhere. And I do mean “anywhere” too – not even down the corridor for a ride on the porcelain horse. That is – I did go at 06:30 but seeing as how I didn’t go back to sleep afterwards and that it was nearly getting-up time, that doesn’t count. But no nocturnal voyage either – I must have slept the sleep of the dead last night.

As for today though, I’ve finished all of the dictaphone notes. Every last one of them. I would be going round to my house tomorrow where I could burn a DVD with everything on it, but I cancelled that idea yesterday as you know and in any case, I’ve the blood transfusion tomorrow.

Tea was one of Liz’s home-made vegan pies with new potatoes and beans, and didn’t that taste so nice? It made me feel so much better, that I promise you. What with the left-over pasta and tomato sauce for lunch, what more could any person desire?

So I’m off for another short walk in a bit and then I’ll be having a good wash and shave ready for tomorrow. After all, I must look my best.

But I’m bitterly disappointed with you lot from yesterday. 29th of February and I didn’t even get one proposal of marriage. You miserable bunch!

0

Monday 29th February 2016 – LOCK UP YOUR DAUGHTERS AND HIDE THE SILVER!

Especially if you live in Leuven, in Belgium. Because I’ll be off on my travels in early course and Leuven is the destination.

I was on the phone for quite some time this morning, firstly to the hospital at Montlucon clarifying all of the appointments that are organised for the next couple of weeks. And once we had done that, I spent the rest of the morning on the phone to the UZ Leuven in Belgium. I told them a brief story of my medical history, how I was satisfied with neither my treatment nor my progress and, quite surprisingly, the doctor with whom I spoke totally agreed with me. I ought to be doing better than this.

The upshot of this is that he’s agreed to see me in Leuven on 22 March at 14:00. And so I’m going.

What’s even nicer is that my friend Alison who lives a short drive away from Leuven has very kindly offered to put me up for a couple of days while I’m there and let me borrow one of her three cats. I think that that’s a really nice and generous gesture on her part and makes me feel so much better. Terry however clearly reckons that she doesn’t know me all that well.

And not before time too because I had the blood test this morning and the results were ready by teatime.

And it’s grim reading. What started out at 10.4 when I was in hospital and went down to 9.8 and then to 9.0 has now dropped dramatically through the floor to a dismal figure of just 8.0 – that’s a loss of over 12% in a week. And that’s after everything that I’ve been through and all that I’ve suffered over these last couple of months. Nothing has improved, I’ve picked up a pulmonary embolism and I’ve suffered pain like I never knew existed.

And all, apparently, for nothing.

And the thing that galls me the most is that my loss of blood is dramatic to say the least, and there’s not been a peep out of the hospital. I would have thought that this is all becoming urgent, not to mention crucial, and the people at the hospital haven’t shown even the slightest hint of interest at all.

In other news, I’ve had a reply back to my e-mail the other day. They’ve asked for my phone number so they can call me for a chat. Right after I made “other arrangements” for a second opinion. But of course this phone call is probably to tell me that I’ve been sacked or some such. I wouldn’t be surprised.

So having got all of that off my chest, what else has been happening?

We had another night of being careful how we left the bed due to bits of me being all over the floor. Twice in two nights, this.
But back in the arms of Morpheus and I was back off to a lock-up garage somewhere that I didn’t know and in there was some kind of small two-door estate car, dark blue, resembling a late 1960s Toyota or a FIAT 128. I was looking at this along with another person who had some kind of mechanical aspirations. The vehicle had been bought by my brother at an auction for £400, which was a lot of money to pay for such a vehicle, never mind its poor condition, and the person I was with expressed his surprise that my brother hadn’t tried to beat down the vendor to a more realistic price. Anyway, I couldn’t hang about. I was off up to Stoke on Trent, somewhere round about the Waterloo Road (which it wasn’t, but never mind) in a big van that I had at the time. I ended up down a side street in a maze of terraced houses being shown a room that was to let in a terraced house that was being used as a lodging-house. A girl that I knew – someone from my old days in Stoke on Trent – was running the place and so I asked her about it. She said that it was formerly a vet’s office but when it came onto the market it was too good to miss and so she converted it into rooms, with she and her family living in a tiny room right at the top. We went outside, there was a lovely (if that’s the word) view of the street lights and the urban area in the dark of the North-Western Potteries, all of the lights twinkling in what was a very late and clear evening. They say that the best time to see the Potteries is during the hours of darkness during a power cut and the local newspaper once famously described the old railway line that passed through here as “10 miles of the world’s worst scenery”.
But scenery notwithstanding, I’ve now moved on to Brussels (so there really isn’t all that much difference) living in an apartment that was part of a house conversion – what they call a trois pièces en enfilade. It’s not a very pretty apartment but anyway we start off with me not being there. I’m with Nerina up on the huge concrete windswept plateau on the high-rise council estate not too far from the Heysel Stadium and we’re looking over the parapet to some mid-rise (about 10-storey, I dunno) concrete-and-glass tower blocks. There are about dour of them, with a square footprint and they have some kind of reputation of being quite comfortable and pleasant places to live. Nerina was saying that we should have gone to live in a place like that and while I didn’t disagree for a minute, I did say (and quite rightly so) that a place such as that is way outside our budget. But we ended up back at our apartment (or maybe it was mine and she was only visiting) and we started to tidy up the place. There had been a new television delivered and I was idly flicking through the channels when I suddenly found a Morecambe and Wise film – and one which wasn’t part of the Morecambe and Wise trilogy either. And so I sat down to watch it while Nerina sat down at the other end of the apartment to do some painting. At a certain moment she asked me to pass her a bottle of paint of a red colour and so I walked over there to hand it to her, but it was the wrong bottle that I gave her.
Before she had time to say anything about this, the alarm went off and that was that. And despite a reasonable night’s sleep I was thoroughly exhausted. It was all that I could do to stagger downstairs.

At least I didn’t have to wait too long for the nurse to come to take my blood test.

Once everything had been sorted out and we’d had lunch (I had the very last of the curry with some bread) I cracked on with the dictaphone notes and now, there remain just 26 soundfiles to transcribe and we’ll be done. And I can’t wait to finish them off because there’s a lot of other work that has now built up and I need to deal with that too.

For tea we had pasta and sauce and garlic bread, and I’m really going to miss all of this when I go to Leuven – if I ever get there because I went out for a walk just now with Liz and I couldn’t even make 50 metres up the hill outside.

I have therefore cancelled my little trip out on Wednesday to collect Caliburn as I’ll be in no state at all to drive him.

All of this is starting to look very ominous indeed and I am dismayed.

0

Friday 26th February 2016 – AND THE ANSWERS …

… to last night’s questions are “Nowhere” and “No-one”.

I had my early night last night of course, but didn’t go straight to bed as I had a few things that needed doing. So I attended to them first while I was off on another nostalgia trip listening to my “Simple Minds” concert – the one that I engineered for Radio Anglais.

Eventually though, I was able to settle down and watch “Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday” – with the missing part recovered and the missing soundtrack restored and it was just as good as I remember it being. It’s quite possibly the best of the trilogy of films, I reckon.

And once I had settled down for the night, the next thing that I remember was the alarm clock going off at 07:45. First time for ages that I’ve managed to sleep right through the night, and also the first time for ages that I’ve not been on a nocturnal ramble (or, at east, a nocturnal ramble that I can recall). I’m not sure whether to be really pleased about the good night’s sleep that I’ve had, or sad that I didn’t go off walkabout during the night. As I’ve said before, these nocturnal rambles are the only way that I’m bringing some excitement into my life and relieving the boring existence of what is effectively an imprisonment right now.

It took me a good while to struggle out of bed and make my way downstairs, and much to my surprise, I managed to coax the boiler into life and had a lovely blaze going by the time that everyone else came downstairs. My technique must be improving.

Liz and Terry went off shopping this morning and left me to my own devices. I had a play with some of the new purchases that I made yesterday from the 3D Store that I use and generally took it easy. And I’ve also made great progress with my dictaphone notes for Canada 2014. I’m now on the outskirts of Montreal which means that I have only four days of voyage to transcribe. Who knows? I might even be able to do all of this over the weekend and that will please me greatly.

Now there’s one thing for which I should be grateful now that I am retired. And that is that I can’t possibly be sacked from my employment. Had I still been in employment and sent the mail that I sent out late this afternoon, I would have been in serious danger of being handed my hat.

But my excuse is that I was unnecessarily provoked.

I wrote to the Médecin Conseil of my Health Insurance provider to explain that the operation that I had four weeks ago (God! is it THAT long ago?) had evidently failed and that I reckoned that I ought to go somewhere for a second opinion. This will involve them in added expense and so I needed to consult them beforehand, to make them aware of what was going on and to approve the expenditure, and to see if they could recommend someone well-worth his salt, someone at the top of the profession who could give me the best possible advice.

I received the very helpful (I don’t think) reply of Nous ne pouvons, le médecin conseil, ne peut pas nommer aucun hôpital, vu que chacun a le libre choix de se déplacer à l’ hôpital de son choix _ crudely (and if you want “crudely”, then in the words of the late, great Bob Doney, “I’m your man”) translated by Yours Truly as “we on behalf of the Médecin Conseil cannot give out the name of any hospital, seeing that everyone has the free choice to go to any hospital of his choice”.

That’s all very well of course, but how on earth do you know which hospital to try and which hospital has the best reputation, and which hospital has the most efficient service etc. etc?. And which consultant is the most experienced and has the best connections? The hospital here clearly isn’t even sure about what illness I’m supposed to have so what hope do I have of knowing?

And so I sent them back a reply that would have blistered the paint in their office, and I ended up by asking if vu que chacun a le libre choix de se déplacer à l’ hôpital de son choix wasn’t merely a more-complicated way of saying “we couldn’t care less”?

As you can see, I can rule them out of any active involvement in my future well-being (such as it is) and as the hospital at Montlucon clearly has already run out of ideas (I’m really surprised that they haven’t been in contact with me this week to discuss the dramatic drop in my blood count) then I really am on my own here.

I have sore misgivings, and I don’t even have any ointment to rub on them.

And before I go, I would like to wish a happy birthday today to a girl who once played some kind of role in my life 45 or so years ago. I’m astonished that, with all of these various people making all kinds of cameo appearances in my nocturnal rambles, that she is yet to make her on-stage début. I would have placed her at odds-on to have made an appearance a long time before now.

0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0

Wednesday 17th February 2016 – WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT!

This streaming head-cold that I seem to have acquired during my stay at hospital is, if anything, worsening. It’s most uncomfortable, to say, the least, and I keep on waking up every half-hour or so with the most awful congestion.

This is interrupting my sleeping patterns quite dreadfully, not that they were anything much to write home about beforehand but now they are even worse. As a result, I’m just having patchworks of nocturnal voyages and waking up just as something interesting is about to happen.

For example, during the night I was off on so many nocturnal rambles that it was hard to keep track of them. You may laugh about the old joke about being a traveller in ladies’ underwear but that’s exactly how I started out last night and what’s more, I was travelling through the “wild west”. I was almost immediately held up, in good old western fashion, by a couple of desperadoes. One of these was, would you believe, carrying a baby. As this hold-up progressed, some corrosive liquid was spilt and this went all over the arms of the guy holding the baby. He was there panicking, holding this baby, while his arms were being attacked by this liquid.
I was being some kind of manager for a tower block on some kind of housing estate in either East Ham or West Ham. One of the families living here was a black family and as the parents were ill, I was obliged to make lunch for the four children. I decided on something quick and simple – beans on toast. Each child received two rounds of buttered toast and a scoop of baked beans. But for some strange reason, I couldn’t get the cooking to synchronise. I ended up burning the beans and the toast was cold. The two elder kids came in off their own bat to have their lunch leaving me to deal with the two younger ones. I had to shout down the corridor from my flat to theirs to tell them to come. But there was a man walking past and he was clearly some kind of official who was running the place. He stuck his head into their apartment and started to lecture their mother about something or other. In the meantime, I was calling these two kids and eventually the elder one came, so I sent him back to fetch his younger brother but this disturbed the man who was trying to tell the mother something. He had a couple of words to say to me about it so I replied in kind. But one thing that was going through my mind was that I needed four bowls (why not plates?) for these kids and I only had three white ones and one yellow one. I was wondering about any possible argument about which kid should have the yellow one.
We then went on to the local church hall where some kind of kids concert was taking place. I turned up as it had almost finished and the kids were all sitting on the floor around the counter of the bar or buffet. I nipped behind the bar and found a couple of biscuits to eat, for I was hungry. While I was there, one of the women told me where to go to sit down so I grabbed my biscuits and went off to sit on the floor where indicated, right at the end of the queue. As I took my place, a girl came up to me and told me that I need to sit at the other end of the queue, so I explained that the woman in charge had told me to come and sit here. Anyway, we ended up having quite a chat about this particular event
From the East End of London I ended up in the North-East of England at a terrace of miners’ cottages somewhere on a cliff overlooking the sea. These houses, although terraced houses, were actually in pairs of a similar style, with the next pair being quite different, and so on. One of the miners here becomes bankrupt and surrenders himself to the authorities to take charge of his bankruptcy, and being rudely awakened at this point, that was all of that.
Once more back into the arms of Morpheus, I ended up now on a train heading back from London. It was a big express kind of thing, a locomotive pulling a rake of carriages, and it pulled into Crewe station, which is where I wanted to alight. The train usually had a long wait at the station so I hopped off, leaving everything behind – my coat, my luggage, my laptop. I’d been sitting in a seat, one of a block of four, and this was where most of my luggage was to be found, but I’d moved with the laptop across the aisle to a seat with a table so that I could work from there. The train arrived at quarter-to the hour and was due to leave at ten past the hour so I had plenty of time to stretch my legs before gathering up my possessions and leaving. I went into the station buffet looking out of the window and the train suddenly pulled out, at ten minutes to the hour! There was no announcement at all. I wasn’t quick enough to leave the building otherwise I would have made a sprint for an open door, as many other people were doing. Now, all my possessions were streaming off northwards and I was only in the clothes that I was standing up in, plus some money in the pouch that I wear around my neck when I’m travelling. I had to wander off and try to find the station manager or someone in the lost property office to lodge a complaint about my possessions and to see if they could be intercepted by an official on the train or at the next station, before someone else redeemed them unofficially, and permanently.

It’s hardly surprising that after all of that, I wasn’t up to too much. Terry went out to cut some wood for an hour or two during a break in the weather (because it has been cold here, that’s for sure) and left me to my own devices but I wasn’t in the mood for getting into much mischief. I just sat and vegetated instead.

That was really the story of my day too. It’s too cold to do very much, no-one goes out unless they need to and so I’ll be staying here on the sofa.

Well, not tomorrow afternoon because I’m back at the hospital for yet more tests and examinations. I’m not at all sure why they didn’t carry out all of these tests while I was there because in my condition, still with my stitches, a round-trip of 100kms on some bad minor roads is not doing me any good at all. At the moment I might be taking one pace forward, but then I’m immediately taking two paces backwards and I won’t ever improve at this rate.

0