Tag Archives: bouquet granvillais

Monday 11th March 2024 – TODAY HAS BEEN …

… one of those rare days when nothing at all has happened.

In fact I felt like erecting one of those signs that I saw in Fredericton a few years ago – “On 12th April 1894 On This Site, Nothing At All Happened”.

After I’d finished my notes last night I had half an hour or so to unwind and then went off to bed and that was it as far as I was concerned.

The excitement continued this morning. When the alarm went off I staggered out of bed and checked my blood pressure – 16.1/10.1, compared to last night’s 17.8/10.3 when I was supposed to be relaxed.

After the medication this morning I went off to the bathroom. First thing was setting the washing machine off with a full load. Such is the exciting life I lead this days that doing the washing is considered worthy of note

Second thing was to thoroughly clean my lower legs as well as I can and then apply some more of this vaseline cream that I borrowed from the hospital. And although I’ve only applied a couple of coats and there was an earlier one applied by a nurse at the hospital, I can see an improvement.

That’s not difficult because they were in a shocking state. I don’t think that the doctor had ever seen skin as dry as mine.

Back in here I tidied up a little and arranged a few things. I’ve actually lost the phone charger that was plugged in by the bed. It’s been missing for a few weeks now and the more I look, the less likely I am to find it.

It seems to have come unplugged in the confusion round about the time that I had my very bad fall but I’ve no idea where it went from there.

Having done all of that I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’ve been during the night. It was coming up to weekend on the taxis. We were organising the work. On turning the page to the Saturday night there was a note stuck there – “phone Mick, Crewe 1110”. I phoned the number and it was Mick Gorton who answered. He said “you have my book, haven’t you?”. I asked “which book” and he replied “The Private Lives”. I had to think for ages and I suddenly realised that he meant “The Private Lives of Sherlock Holmes”. I remembered that I’d been reading it. He asked if I could drop it off some time. I told him that I had piles of other books of his too so he hummed and hawed about what he was going to do about all of those because he didn’t think that he had the room, he hadn’t planned on them right at the moment until he was organised so that was something else that was left up in the air fir the moment

He was actually a strange guy. I don’t want to say too much about him though, merely that he wasn’t the kind of person ever to have wanted to read a book.

And as for the handle of my trolley jack that he borrowed once, that was produced in evidence a short while later at Chester Crown Court during a hearing of a charge of “grievous bodily harm” and I was never ever given it back by Cheshire Constabulary’s finest. Until I bought a new jack I had to use a length of piping and a screwdriver.

Yes, when I had my taxis I knew some very strange people. It made life so much more interesting.

It all actually reminds me of the time that I was giving evidence at Mold Crown Court
"I’ve listened to your evidence for three quarters of an hour, Mr Hall" said the judge "and I’m still none-the-wiser"
"Maybe not, m’lud" I replied. "But you’re certainly better-informed"

We were then working out the publicity for a friend’s radio station. I was thinking that maybe there would be people who had said things about the radio, chop them out and use them as publicity snippets, such as if someone had said that the radio station was rotten, you’d have “So and So, the Rotten Radio Station” and have the people themselves talking during the adverts, and trying to find people who have something to say that correlates with something about the radio, for example with the radio station of our radio we had someone who played football for the club on certain dates and part of his appearance date and about his shirt number and the date all seemed to tie up with part of the phone number, and use these snippets as publicity to drop in every now and again through all different programmes that would be running so that people will pick them up and use them with their own everyday lives without realising that it relates to the particular radio, thinking of other things that we used to say like calling people “Brain of a Duck” or that sort of thing. There were plenty of ideas and plenty of possibility of doing something interesting and novel for the adverts.

The fact that I can run an advertising campaign for a radio station in my sleep is something of which I ought to be proud. Quite often you hear people say “I can do that in my sleep” but here, I really can.

By the looks of things, I’m clearly in the wrong job.

The thing about phrases becoming everyday sayings is not a new idea. How many people use a “Hoover” regardless of which company made the vacuum cleaner? And here in France we’ll use a piece of Sopalin regardless of who made the kitchen tissue paper.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s there was a whole series of cult films with memorable phrases that worked their way into the English language from those films. And it was the thing (and still is, in some places) to quote this cult film dialogue at appropriate moments.

For example, whenever anyone said "it’s over there!" another person within earshot would always reply "What? Behind the rabbit?"

And if anyone ever came out with an intelligent fact, they would always follow it up with "Well, you have to know these things when you’re king, y’know"

The very first thing that attracted me to Nerina was that she spoke in film clichés too. I felt that I had a kindred spirit who was on my wavelength. I hope that, regardless of everything, she’s still managed to retain it

Finally, I had a visit from a nun. Apparently there’s something about me going into a rest home run by nuns. They wanted to assess me. It was all about how I could walk, how I could pick up glasses, how I could carry things, how I arranged all of my food on the edge of the worktop so that I could pick it up so much easier than if it was set back a little and whether there was any risk of knocking it off as I went past. This carried on for quite a while. Then the question of the meat pies on Sunday came up. I said that in all honesty I didn’t really enjoy the meat pie on a Sunday but because it gave the person who made it so much pleasure to make it I pretended to enjoy it and to appreciate it. He replied “actually I hated making the thing. The only reason that I made it was because you seemed to love it so much”. I said “well, we know where we stand in the future then, don’t we, the two of us about this meat pie”.

The food in places like that isn’t much to talk about. There are only two men allowed to work in a nunnery and they are also of a religious order too. In the kitchens you’ll find them – the chip monk and the fish friar.

The hardest work in a nunnery though is in the laundry. That’s where the nuns try to deal with their filthy habits. And in many of these places there’s work to be done on a commercial basis where the nuns actually bottle their own water.

Apart from that, most of the rest of the day (when I haven’t been asleep) has been dealing with radio stuff.

The notes for the final track have been written, the music for the next programme chosen, paired off and joined, and I’ve even started on choosing the music for the programme after that.

That final programme is for 27th December which, apart from a few holes, shows you how far ahead I am. This is where I want to be because if I fall ill, detained in hospital or even worse, I want to make sure that my radio shows roll on

After all, if I can run a radio advertising campaign in my sleep, no reason why I can’t run a series of radio shows from beyond the grave. Barclay James Harvest HAVE GREAT OPTIMISM FOR US
"Like brave Explorers bold and free
We sail forever on the sea!!
Above the seven seas is one
The sea of life we drift upon
Our spirits living in the waves
Survive beyond the grave!"

The cleaner stuck her head in the door and passed me some of the stuff that she’s been able to buy, following my hospital visit and changed prescription. The rest will come on Wednesday.

But she tells me that she’s having a week off work for a rest. And that’s hardly a surprise – I’ve worn her out with all these endless trips, I reckon.

One thing that I forgot to mention was that the dreams, that I had forgotten to add into LAST FRIDAY’S EPISODE, are now on-line and ready to read.

Tea tonight was a really nice stuffed pepper. And it would have been even nicer had I remembered to add the peanuts to the stuffing.

Honestly, if it’s not one thing it’s another, isn’t it? And once you start, you’d be surprised at how many other things there are.

However right now the only thing in which I’m interested is my bed. It’s time that I wasn’t here. I have a Welsh lesson tomorrow and I need to be on form

While we’re on the subject of nuns and lessons and schools … "well, one of us is" – ed … there’s quite often a school attached to a nunnery. At some point the girls who are about to leave are interviewed by the Mother Superior.

At the school run by the nuns in Crewe (there was one and I knew a couple of girls who went there) one day the Mother Superior asked a girl "what do you want to be when you leave school?"
"a prostitute, Holy Mother"
"Ohh you wicked girl!" exclaimed the Mother Superior. "Wash your mouth out with Holy Water"
The class teacher took the Mother Superior aside. "It’s all right, Holy Mother" she said. "The girl said ‘prostitute’, not ‘Protestant’"

Sunday 10th March 2024 – TODAY IS THE …

… first day of the new regime, in which I have an alarm call on a Sunday morning.

It was set for 11:00, which makes for a nice lie-in after working until 02:00 dictating radio notes that I’d written, but it will be a different time next Sunday and for every Sunday onwards for the next few months as the nurse comes to visit me.

Yes, a much different time on Sunday mornings in the future, so make the most of it today.

Sure enough, when the alarm went off I was deep in the arms of Morpheus but I still managed to stagger to my feet.

Last night had been quite calm after I’d finished my notes. I went back to reading THE DAWN OF ASTRONOMY and the baffling phenomenon of Sothic time periods and the calculation of epacts until the street outside had quietened down and then went to dictate the notes for three radio programmes

In fact though, there were only two. I hadn’t finished the third, what with being in hospital and all of that. It had completely slipped my mind, thanks to my teflon brain, to which nothing whatever seems to stick. Still, it will give me something to do on Monday.

So just two to dictate, and that was enough. The usual nonsense and garbage because first of all I’m all up to my eyes in a state of confusion and secondly, with the cancer now beginning to affect my eyes I can’t see what I’ve written anyway.

In fact, it reminds me very much of the student at art school when his teacher checks his art folder
"What on earth is this?" asks his teacher, waving a piece of the student’s work around
"I assure you sir" said the student "I paint what I see"
"Well the shock will come" said the tutor "when you see what you paint"

Having done that I cleared off to bed where I had a rather bizarre night, as you will find out in due course.

When the alarm went off I fell out of bed and the first thing that I did was to check the blood pressure. 16.9/10.7. Last night was 18.0/10.6, but that was after dictating the radio notes so it’s no surprise.

After the medication I went into the bathroom and gave me feet a really in-depth wash. At the hospital they had put some kind of vaseline cream on my legs to hydrate them and it seemed to work. Somehow the tube was left behind in my room and it found its way into my rucksack.

Now that it’s here in my apartment I may as well make use of it before they work out that it’s missing.

Having done that I came in here to transcribe the dictaphone notes from the night. We’d been to a restaurant, a group of us. We’d been having a meal. We’d ordered dessert but dessert was served in a strange way. There was a big bowl and everyone’s dessert was in the bowl. We would pass the bowl and had to help ourselves to our dessert from it. People were dipping in and taking their bits and pieces. I’d ordered some kind of pastry which was served as round balls covered in cream … "profiteroles" – ed … I was having a look for them but couldn’t work out which was mine or not. I lifted one up and said to the assembled multitudes “is this one of my balls?” which of course stopped the conversation and brought forth a whole gulf of eruption of laughter from the table, so much so that it actually awoke me.

That was what I mean by a bizarre night. The sound of the laughter did actually awaken me and I did actually sit upright with my eyes wide open

And then we’d been fighting a war against the Germans in World War I. We were in our front line somewhere and I vaguely remember walking in the air over the front line looking at all of the people still in the trenches as I passed by over their heads. It was a weird sensation. Then there was an attack, apparently the French attacking the Germans because the Germans had massacred all of their French prisoners in a certain town as some kind of reprisal for this particular raid.

It really was a strange feeling, that. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall several years ago I had a strange dream where I was running down some marble steps when I took off near the bottom and actually flew for some distance. It was a similar sensation to that, floating over the trenches looking at the heads of the soldiers in there.

It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder if that’s what happened to the soldiers when then died. Was it just as case of the light going out, like a switch being switched off, or did something live on afterwards?

There are lots of stories about people in a high emotion doing all kinds of things that they could never normally do, and there can’t be a much more heightened state of emotion than being psyched up to charge an enemy trench.

Later still I was with a friend and another guy. We were up in the hills looking down over a beach waiting for the D-Day landings to begin. The guy had one of the latest cameras that was capable of taking photos in the dark. He was playing with it and taking some really good images with the camera stopped quite low down. So I had a play with the little NIKON 1 J5 and that was producing some pretty good pictures too so I decided to go as low as it was possible to go and take a photo to see how it would come out. I pressed the shutter and knew that I would have to wait for several seconds but then my friend went and stood right in front of the camera to block the light. Every time I moved the camera he moved again with it to block the light so I was really quite annoyed about that because I was sure that regardless of the money that the guy had spent on his new camera my Nikon would take photos even better than the ones that he’d managed to squeeze out of his new camera.

Having my friends step in to confound my progress is not a new experience either. There was one of my friends who seemed to enjoy doing that as a matter of course but it wasn’t this particular one. Having said that though, I can think of a couple of occasions when I put my mind to it …

Finally the eldest daughter of my niece came to see me last night. She asked if I’d heard of a certain beach, (and she mentioned the name of it, but I’ve forgotten). I said “no”. She said that her friend suggested that they take me there. It’s very quiet and there are hardly any cars there. It would be nice. They handed me a card and after a little while I noticed that it said “credit cards accepted” so I wondered what on earth type of place it was.

Most beaches in North America are private. It’s not like Europe.

In the UK, for example, when lands began to be allocated shortly after the Norman Conquest, there was already an established road system and lands were allocated “back from the road”.

In North America however, there was no road network at the time of the allocation of lands and access was by the river, so lands were allocated “back from the river” and that included the beaches of course.

Québec is really interesting in this respect because much of the traditional medieval French system of allocation of lands is still reflected in the current system. For example, if you go around the St Lawrence valley you’ll see première rang or “first row” back from the river, and then deuxième rang or “second row” back from the river and so on that still exist today when you look at a map of current land allocations.

Anyway, I digress … "again" – ed …

After lunch, or breakfast, or whatever, I made a start on the next radio programme but I didn’t go far. I had pizza dough to make as I had now run out. And having used the same flour and the same yeast as yesterday I’m totally bewildered as to why it went up like a lift as I watched it.

There’s really something not quite right here with this dough and I don’t know what it is.

“Watching it” because I was making biscuits while it was proofing.

On the internet last night I found a recipe for oat and syrup biscuits, and I had all of the ingredients if I were to use honey instead of the syrup. That was what I did for the flapjack and it seemed to work perfectly, so why not?

It was quite an interesting way of making biscuits, more in the American line than the European but once I figured out what was going on (which took a while and wasn’t easy) they were absolutely fine.

The pizza was delicious too. The base had risen just as it ought to have done and it was well cooked too. I really seem to have found the knack of making these now, but I wish that I could pass on the skill to the bread-making activities.

The radio programme is almost finished now – just the notes for the final song to write and dictate. So I’ll do that tomorrow too along with everything else.

It looks as if I’ll be extremely busy this coming week with all that I have to do. Still, it keeps me out of mischief and I’d only be bored.

But right now I’m tired so I’m going to bed. But before I go let me just mention that it’s not just Rosemary who has joined the Air Fryer revolution. Grahame tells me that so has he, and he doesn’t know what he’d do without it now.

In the future I can see huge “hint-swapping” and “recipe-swapping” sessions on the agenda

The best recipe-swapping session took place in the mid-west USA in the 1940s when two farmers were having a discussion
"I hear that your old cow had the colic" asked one. "How did you treat it?"
"I made up a mixture of three parts turpentine, two parts paraffin and one part molasses" said the other.
"Very good" said the first.
Two weeks later they were talking again
"You know that recipe that you gave me for the cow with colic?" asked the first
"What about it?" asked the second
"I made it up and gave it to my cow and it died"
"That’s strange" said the second. "So did mine"

Saturday 9th March 2024 – GUESS WHO …

… forgot to switch his alarm back on last night?

It goes without saying that Bane of Britain was up to his usual tricks.

But what was so surprising was that I awoke at 07:35. None of this stuff that we experienced last weekend. And I was wide awake too – to such an extent that I was actually up quite quickly. And that’s even more surprising.

First thing that I did was to check the blood pressure. 16.7/9.4. and don’t ask me what it was last night because I forgot to take it.

But next time that I go to the hospital I’ll be taking my blood pressure machine with me. The figures at the hospital are nothing like the ones that I’ve been recording here. They are much more normal. So I wonder if there’s a fault in my machine or I’m not using it correctly.

If we can compare readings when I go back, that might help. And so will a little practical instruction. It’s not actually very likely that things will be worse here than at the hospital – that is, in respect of anything that’s likely to adversely affect my blood pressure

But fancy forgetting to record it last night. It was actually quite a relaxing late evening watching the football highlights from the games that took place. Nothing really exciting, except that TNS continued their monotonous, relentless march by stuffing second placed Connah’s Quay 5-1 – at the Quay’s home ground.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I’d be really proud of TNS’s achievements in the domestic game in Wales if only they would transfer some of that form to the European games that they play. But regularly and consistently (or should I say “monotonously and relentlessly”?) they are knocked out in the first round.

Wouldn’t it be nice if they could make it to the group stages of a European competition some time soon, and give us all something about which we can cheer? I mentioned the other day that depressing, dismal game in Sweden where we had to sit through 90 minutes of tactical ineptitude by a manager who is out of his depth at this level of competition.

Anyway, I digress … "again" – ed …

In the kitchen I collected the medication together and shovelled it in, piles of it. And it’s going to be even worse on Monday after my cleaner has been to the chemist’s with the new prescription. As if I don’t already have enough stuff in here.

But I’m glad that it’s the cleaner who goes to the chemist’s these days. I’m too embarrassed after the last incident that we had.

That time, I’d been to buy a pack of condoms. "What would you like?" she asked. "Ordinary? Or the new washable ones?"
"I’ll try the new washable ones" I said.
A week later, I went back to the chemists
"Can I have another pack of condoms, please?"
"What happened about the washable ones you had last week?" she asked
"Well, I’ve had this rather offensive letter from the laundry"

Having taken my medicine I went to make the bread for the weekend. And I forgot that it wasn’t Friday and that I wasn’t here, so I made three bread rolls as usual. So anyone who says that I don’t even have a clue what day it is is actually quite correct.

John Bongiovi TELLS THE DAY BY THE BOTTLES THAT (HE) DRINKS but I tell the days by the medication that I take, I reckon.

The bread still isn’t rising as well as it ought to, even though I’ve now moved on to a new type of flour. However, it wasn’t the abject failure of a couple of weeks ago and I suppose that we can be thankful for that

I tried baking it for slightly less time too, and that seemed to make a difference. But of course my oven is very much hit and miss so I can’t say with any certainty that it will be like that next week.

But anyway, it made a really nice toasted cheese sandwich, which was the name of the game anyway.

And that reminds me – me waxing lyrical about air fryers combined with a special offer on sale at LeClerc means that Rosemary has now joined the little air fryer community. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I’d be lost without my air fryer.

Next stop was to transcribe the dictaphone notes, not that there were all that many. There was a cute little girl at school who for some unknown reason seemed to attach herself to me, not that I minded particularly because I never did much at school except roam around. She caught me one day coming out of the school canteen. I asked her how she was. She wouldn’t say at first but in the end said that she’d failed her exam which I thought was something of a shame so I gave her a few encouraging words. Then she told me that she’d failed another one too so I didn’t think that things were going too well for her so I tried to boost her morale a little but I could see that she was rather sad. Then she asked, out of the blue, “do you want to be a GE?” which is the first level of work as a British diplomat in the Foreign Service. I asked why and it turned out that there was a meeting for schoolkids to hear a talk given by someone in the Foreign Service about careers with them. I thought to myself “I have to do something after I finish my exams, haven’t I?” so I said “yes, OK, I’ll come with you. I’ll be your invitee”. She said “you’re my second”. I asked “who’s the first?”, fearing the worst. And sure enough she mentioned the name of a student with whom I didn’t get on at all, who I thought was completely and utterly pretentious etc. She said “I’ve invited him”. I sighed and said “ohh well, OK” and said that I’d go with her to make her feel better. At least if she had two people coming with her it would do her some good in her exams which aren’t going too well anyway.

There seem to have been a few cute young girls attaching themselves to me during the course of the last few nights. I’ve no idea what’s going on here. I wish it had really been like that when I was at school.

And I wish that I knew who they were, so that I could see if it’s the same girl coming back, or a different girl each time. I’m intrigued to see how this serial ends, as I’m sure that you are. Doubtless though, one of my family will come along and shove le baton dans la rue at a crucial moment.

Like my brother, for example, who was “teacher’s pet” at school
… "Why? Did teacher like him?" – ed …
No – she kept him in a cage at the back of class.

But really – could you imagine me in the Diplomatic Service? It wouldn’t have been a shoe that I’d banged on the table as Nikita Khrushchev is alleged to have done, it would have been the heads of a few of the delegates.

It’s all very well these leaders pronouncing wars and all of that, but they aren’t the ones who have to fight them. It’s always the young and the poor. As the Communist Party once said about the First World War, “a bayonet is a weapon with a worker at each end”.

In my opinion, if someone wants to start a war, there should be vote. And all those who vote in favour should be given a rifle and tin hat and sent to the Front to fight it while everyone else stays at home.

Next on the agenda was the football. Y Bala v Caernarfon.

Two teams challenging for fourth place but it didn’t look much like it. The gale-force wind had something to say about the standard of play, I suppose, but in all honesty it will be one those games that will be forgotten quite quickly.

There was a good crowd there, as there always is when Caernarfon play, but I think that they were probably expecting more for their money than a tame, lacklustre 1-1 draw.

The rest of the day, apart from 10 minutes when I was away with the fairies, was spent chopping up sound tracks. Only about 30 or 40 hours remain before I can start to attack the stuff that the Shrewsbury Folk Festival sent me at the start of the year.

And I shudder to think of how much there is to do there. I’ve told you before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that i’m far too busy to die

Tea was baked potato with salad and one of the breaded quorn fillets that I like. And my home-made mayonnaise from the other week is still keeping on going. The garlic in there hasn’t dissolved the bottle, despite how muc I put in it. I really should put somewhat less in there than I do.

So having finished my notes, I’ll wait for it to go quite than do my dictating. Two programmes that need re-dictating and a third that I prepared last week. It’ll all be a right mess when I finish

Tomorrow there’s an alarm call – 11:00, which might be late for some but it’s early for me on a Sunday. I always stay up quite late because it’s only when the streets are perfectly quiet that I can dictate the notes properly

And then there’s pizza dough to make, and anything else that I can think of. I’ve not made any biscuits for ages, have I? Chocolate biscuits are always good but it’s been years since I’ve made any oat and honey ones. I might think about that.

Right now though I’m going to relax for a little while and find something interesting to read, like that friend of mine who read all of these horrifying reports on the effects of smoking.
"They frightened me so much that I gave up" he said
"Gave up smoking?" I asked
"No" he replied. "Reading"

Wednesday 6th March 2024 – GUESS WHERE …

… I’ll be this time tomorrow night.

That’s right. I had the blood sample taken this morning, it’s been analysed, the reports are in and so I have a taxi coming to pick me up at 11:00. “And bring your things”. So there!

It’s no surprise that I’m not a happy bunny. Not at all. I can’t keep on doing this. I have things to do, places to go, people to see and all that lark. There’s no room in my timetable for trips to Paris, whether by taxi, train, bus, bicycle or gaslight

So tonight I’ll have to go to bed early, in contrast to last night where it was quite a late night. But at least, once in bed I didn’t move around much

When the alarm went off next morning I crawled out of bed and checked the blood pressure. 14.5/8.5 this morning so clearly I had a quiet night. Before retiring last night it was 15.0/8.1 so there’s not a great deal of difference

After the medication I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Well, at this stage of this World Cup match tickets were £97:00 per ticket. There were huge complaints from people first of all about why it was only rich people who were attending the matches, not the average supporter, and secondly, why protesting hasn’t been allowed against the football matches. In the meantime some agreement has been made that everyone who bought a ticket for the opening match will have to give their next ticket away to another customer but whether that’s a good idea or not remains to be seen. The coaches brought the two teams down. There was plenty of late team news – one team had managed with just two injuries and would play a couple of replacements and the other team had wholesale replacements because of various problems, even signing someone on the last minute but who should be able to take part in the match. They looked as if they would have difficulties to coalesce for a while. It was up to the other side to take the play to them and try their best to go ahead while they would be outgunned but not coalescing together to get them to play like a team

I should have added that the only thing that I really had to worry about was to make sure that no-one pinched my van because we’d transformed it into a mobile home and office for me during the period of the World Cup. I’d to totally lost if someone stole that.

It looks as if I have an obsession right now with being a football coach. Not of course in the same vein as in the good old days of Malcolm Allison who, upon being told that he had been appointed team coach of Kuwait, he’d be having his teeth out and seats fitted next morning.

But my football coaching experience runs, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, to the Pionsat FC’s 3rd XI who played in the lowest league of Puy-de-Dome football all those years ago and were always at or near the bottom. It’s nothing to write home about.

My favourite position in those days was either left back in the dressing toom or right back behind the touchline

Being an all-inclusive football club we had a couple of gay footballers there. They would always be happy to change ends at half-time

While we’re on the subject of the Auvergne … "well, one of us is" – ed …Rosemary rang me up for a chat. Just a short one today – 1 hour and 22 minutes during which, as usual, we put the World to rights.

If only politicians would listen to Rosemary and me the World wouldn’t be in a mess like this. We would solve all of the problems immediately without all of this nonsense

And then the cleaner sailed in. "The hospital’s been trying to contact you" she said, so I had to phone them back.

It was quite complicated too. I had to check that there was a taxi available, find out what time, book the vehicle, ring the hospital back and they would then send me a bon de transport which I’d print off and give to the driver when he or she came to pick me up.

It’s a good job that the doctor at the hospital demanded 10 authorisations otherwise I’d be struggling with this kind of thing. It’s quite a complicated system but as I’m classed as a maladie grave it’s covered in principle by the Social Security.

Quite frankly, having a few taxi-ambulances that are conventionné by the Social Security is a little goldmine

This afternoon the cleaner came round to clean so I stayed in my room, chose my music for another radio show, paired it off, joined the tracks together and wrote out half of the notes.

One thing that I’ve learned following the debacle last weekend is that once it’s completed, I’ll read through it to make sure that it makes sense and that I don’t have to re-write it or anything.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry with rice, veg and a naan bread and I do have to say that everything – the naan bread included – was cooked to perfection and it was the best leftover curry meal that I have ever made

And it’s just as well because I shudder to think of what I’ll be eating for the next few days.

Tomorrow morning first thing I’ll be baking some bread. If I’m going to hospital for a few days I’ll need some supplies to sustain me so cheese and hummus salad sandwiches are on the agenda. I might look into making flapjacks too or something like that as a pleasant dessert.

If anyone else has any suggestions, then provided that they are physically possible they’ll be welcome

The food in these places really is bad, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. And, as you’ve probably noticed, I love my food. It’s the only luxury that I have left these days. And in the hospital it’s not even possible to go to a café or order a pizza.

Add to that the fact that my neighbour, who usually smuggles supplies in to me, won’t be in Paris while I’m there – I checked of course.

So all in all it’s going to be a depressing stay there, something that will become even worse I suppose when I discover what they intend to do with me.

And if it’s something nasty, these days I can’t run fast to escape at all – not like the time after one of my car accidents when I was going hell for leather down the corridor until the doctor saved the day by shouting to the nurse who was pursuing me "I said remove his SPECTACLES".

Tuesday 5th March 2024 – I’M NOT GOING …

… to have a mechanical aid fitted, so I’m told. I imagine that the mention of such a device in the letter that I’d received was just something to tempt me to turn up.

It certainly had me puzzled though as to what it might have been and I bet that it had a few of you scratching your heads too.

First things first though.

There were a few things that needed doing last night and as a result I was once more rather late for bed. Very late in fact, so I didn’t have as much sleep as I would have liked.

Rather less, in fact, than it might seem because it was another night like the previous one where I was tossing and turning around for quite a while

But when the alarm went off I rolled out of bed and had a search for the blood pressure tester. 14.9/8.5 this morning, compared to 17.1/10.6 from the previous evening. What had made me so worked up yesterday evening then?

On that note I went off and organised the medication for today, checked all of my papers, had a wash and waited for the car to come for me.

It eventually turned up and I was able to have a lift down into town and the Centre de Re-education.

After quite a wait she eventually saw me. We discussed my medical case, she inspected my legs and prescribed an ecograoh and 30 sessions of physiotherapy; transport included. I can see that I’m going to be a busy boy.

Back here I managed the stairs fine, so I’ll give them a couple more goes before deciding whether or not to resume shopping on Friday. I’m longing to get out and about and go for a bus trip and my morning coffee, but it’s no good if I have difficulty coming back home again

By the time that I’d made my coffee and warmed my fruit bun my Welsh lesson had started so I joined in. And it wasn’t as successful as the previous couple, mainly no doubt due to the fact that I hadn’t prepared for it

That’s something that I really should have done last night, knowing that I wouldn’t be here this morning. But even if I had, I wouldn’t have remembered any of it.

And then I had to listen to the dictaphone. I know that there’s some stuff on there from the night because I remember having to search for the batteries while I was asleep. Yes – I can do that too.

So anyway something must have happened to have made the King of France, whoever it was … "if she was Aliénor d’Aquitaine, it was Louis VII" – ed … dispose of his wife Aliénor as quickly and dramatically as possible because when I fell asleep all I could see was the flash of an explosion – a metaphorical explosion and him waving his arms around driving her away out of hid palace. It must have been a famous eruption for him to have disposed of Aliénor like that.

And if it was indeed Louis VII and Aliénor of Aquitaine, there really must have something of an explosion when their marriage was over because she went off and married the prince who was to become Henry II of England. She took with her the province of Aquitaine and thus the seeds of the Hundred Years War were sown

With Louis, Henry and Aliénor all having met in France very shortly before the separation, there must have been something going on of which Louis suddenly became aware. Their marriage was described as “shaky” anyway, but that would be nothing unusual in those days and no cause for alarm.

Mind you, you can’t blame Henry. Even though he was 9 years or so younger than Aliénor. The Carmina Burana, a contemporary manuscript discovered several centuries later writes
" Si tout l’univers était mien
Depuis l’Océan jusqu’au Rhin
J’y renoncerais avec joie
Pour pouvoir tenir dans mes bras
La reine d’Angleterre"
“If all the Universe was mine , from the ocean to the Rhine, I’d give it up with pleasure to be able to hold the Queen of England in my arms”. Sounds rather like me with either Castor, Zero or TOTGA.

And then one of the teams in the feeder leagues had been promoted to the Premier League so there was a big discussion about the kind of players that they needed to sign. One or two suggestions were made but I wasn’t very happy with either of them although I liked the full-back whose name had been bandied around by the club. In the Premier League games themselves I found that they were defending too far back towards their own goal and the back line could be pushed forward another 20 yards to make an effective stopping zone for everything to happen but it took a while to convince the managers concerned

And that reminds me of that dreadful game in the summer between TNS and that Swedish team whose name I forget … "it was BK Hacken" – ed … when they camped out on the edge of their own penalty area and waited for the opposition to attack them – with the inevitable results.

Later on I was up on the Scottish Borders again … "again" – ed … Someone – it might have been Claude – had given me the surround for an electric fire and it had an image of all these coal-fired electric fires that lit up when you plugged it into the mains. I’d given it to the people up there to put next to heir coal fire. It meant a complete redesign of their living room which was a work in itself, disturbing the children and everything. In the end we managed to make it fit on the wall right next to their coal fire. I have to say that it did look impressive even though we’d had to shorten it somewhat. It made that area look so much nicer. But as usual there were all kinds of debates, discussions and complications that went on up there about all kinds of various things, very little of which had to do with anything. There was also a meeting of the folk festival committee so we had to go down to the village hall as well for a discussion. I remember that the trip between the house and the village hall was nothing like the real trip with the house being situated several miles outside the village. It was much closer than that in the dream.

And I’ve no idea why this area should suddenly have come into my subconscious. None at all. Apart from the fact that ONE OF MY THESES FOR MY DEGREE was based on that area, the only person who ever meant anything to me out of that crowd has been pushing up the daisies for a considerable period of time now.

I wonder – did I dictate that load of nonsense about a song and a guitar that I dreamed that I was dictating stuff for the radio programme and it was all coming out absolute nonsense and I couldn’t remember half the names of the groups … "no you didn’t" – ed …. I had Adrian Gurvitz and the Adrian Gurvitz Army doing something at one point but I’m sure he’s never appeared on any of my programmes… "he hasn’t" – ed … I remember thinking as I was dictating that this is a total load of nonsense and it’s never going to work – me dictating a radio programme in my sleep.

Yes, another dream in which I was dreaming that I was dreaming. It’s al good stuff, isn’t it? Mind you, as for dictating nonsense, it’s par for the course, isn’t it? Even I don’t understand it, and I’m the one talking about it all.

And as it happens, I agree that my radio stuff is nonsense. What I’ve been doing this afternoon is going through the notes for the two programmes that I dictated on Saturday night and rewriting them. They were absolutely dismal, with all kinds of errors. There really are times when this medication is totally screwing up my mind.

However, I’ve been typing – and talking – nonsense for all these years. Why blame it on the medication now?

The cleaner came by and brought some more soya yoghurt as I’m almost out.

And I let her photograph the jar of tahini that I finished yesterday, so that she knows what she’ll be looking for at the shops. Two jars of that in stock will keep me going with hummus for quite a while and we’ll keep the vampires and werewolves away for quite a while.

But there’s been quite a storm about the decline in standards of English grammar with the remake of that old film "I Were A Teenage Waswolf"

Tea tonight was a delicious taco roll with rice and veg, with the last of the rice pudding for a while seeing as I now have sufficient stocks of soya desserts. But the rice pudding was really nice and made a pleasant change.

So tomorrow I have the injection, the blood test and I wonder what will happen next. It’s been a couple of weeks since they last changed my medication and we can’t go on like this. The cleaner hasn’t been there for a fortnight and I’m sure that she’s missing the journey.

It’s a good job that she goes and not me. I went there once and asked for a packet of condoms
"What would you like?" she asked. "Normal, ribbed, extra-sensory or multi-coloured?"
"I’ll have a pack of the multi-coloured, I reckon"
Nine months later I went back in and asked the pharmacist
"I’d like to buy a maternity dress for a friend, please?"
"Certainly, sir" she said. "What bust?"
"The red one" I replied.

Monday 4th March 2024 – JUST LIKE OLD …

… times last night.

Yes – while I was in bed last night I was tossing and turning around all through the night, there’s plenty of diverse stuff on the dictaphone and I’ve not crashed out once.

And so I’ve no idea what I’ve done wrong – or right, as the case may be – but it’s certainly working. So make the most of it – carpe diem.

It wasn’t as if last night was an early night either. It was just one of the normal “God help me – I’m running late again” type of nights that I seem to be having right now, but eventually I hauled myself off into bed and to sleep – after a fashion, that is.

When the alarm went off I fell out of bed again and went to check the blood pressure. 15.3/8.5 this morning compared to 15.5/10.0 last night. So not much difference there.

So eventually I managed to crawl off and and go for my medication.

The fruit buns that I had cooked yesterday were sufficiently cooled to go into the freezer. There’s enough in total for three or four weeks. What with that and my home-mode bread, I’m glad that I ordered some flour at the last delivery.

Having tidied up and put away most of the things in the kitchen I came back in here to make a start on the dictaphone notes – and to finish them after breakfast. Erik Dromore, a Norwegian, whoever he is but I don’t know him, who had come to live in Wales. He was very interested in cars when he was young. He had a car when he was only 14 which made all of us jealous. He had a lot of fun trying to insure it etc and was always being involved in Police interactions etc. He developed it so that it would split apart so that if he was stopped the part with him in it could escape leaving the other part behind as a kind of dummy that would be investigated and found to be nothing whatever of any importance. But it made all of us jealous that he had his own vehicle and we didn’t and he was that age.

Later on I also had a message from someone at school; asking me if I’d seen a certain girl. She was at school yesterday and should have been there today but wasn’t. I told them to speak to her brother because he’d known much more about her movements than I would. After all, it wasn’t as if the girl and I were actually being a lot involved or dong anything at this particular moment.

And that was a shame because I would have loved there to have been. She was a girl on whom I had quite a crush when I was at school but like most girls whom I knew, she had far more sense than to become entangled with me.

She went to University in Manchester after school and to my surprise we actually bumped into each other while I was living there. We went out on a couple of dates, much to my delight, but it was clear that h whatever interest she had was going in a different direction than mine and it was pointless trying to pursue it

That was definitely some kind of story, not of “what might have been” but more of “what would never ever be in a month of Sundays”. There I was, a long-haired rocker playing bass and singing in a reasonably successful pub-rock band, driving either an old J4 van or a Ford Transit that wasn’t much newer. Picture me in a three-bed semi in suburbia with a wife, 1.8 cars and 2.4 kids.

And then … being involved … "did you miss the front off this?" – ed … in all of this liquid that we had to collect – I did mention that, didn’t I … "no you didn’t" – ed … where there was a liquid that had been made with porridge and garlic, stuff like that poured into a great big vat and we had to collect it together as a team despite being attacked by balls of this liquid being thrown by other people? We had to collect 5 big bowls of it. That was our prize but the other teams were progressively trying to stop us. This was another occasion where it seemed that every time we made one step forward we ended up taking two steps backwards. We were really struggling until I found a huge bowl of this product that had come into my bedroom during the night. I’d no idea how or why but it actually matched the consistency and colour so I took it in and they counted it.

Now come on. You don’t really expect a dream to make any sense, do you? But it certainly sounds exciting. Maybe someone will invent a TV reality programme about it.

But I liked the bit about making a liquid. It reminds me of 1998 at Nottingham where a group of us from the University at Summer School successfully invented a liquid that dissolved absolutely everything with which it came in contact.

And then at the University Summer School at Norwich in 1999 (where I went with Annette, the young girl from Barbados) where we unsuccessfully tried to invent a container in which to store it.

After that we were on a motorway somewhere. There was someone on a motor bike who had had a joust with someone who had been going on the same carriageway as facing them as they tried to prevent us from going anywhere. In the end, after several attempts we managed to get under way. As we were under way I’d been talking to the boy who had joined us for the first time. he was telling us that his father was involved in this and he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps. Several of us told him that it was a wrong decision because your father would be there continually criticising you and measuring you against things that he did. In the end we talked him into going into our business. He was an extremely good catcher. At the end of the day he finished with cutlery in and none of any other runs of cutlery that the other team was throwing at us. He managed to identify our things correctly, keep them with us and throw away the other things despite how many other things they threw at us and how quickly they did it.

Then some girl was living in a houseboat. She was voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a singer. She had accepted the nomination and was busy rehearsing things with her father ready to go up and receive the award. She lived in a houseboat, so it appeared, and had ween another community so had sailed up the canal to this other community to make her home. She saw a plot of land with landing stage that hadn’t been occupied by anyone. She asked the land agent about it who confirmed that it was free. She spoke to the estate agents about buying it and was quoted £5002 which was a really good price so she bought it and introduced herself to her new neighbours and said something like she hoped that everything would go according to their plans, to which they replied “they certainly would as long as she was to keep the music down and keep her pets from going in all the adults’ waste materials in the barn

Finally there was some guy loitering around the entrance to one of the caves in LORD OF THE RINGS. He was hoping to see a young elf-girl and sure enough, she appeared. He told her that he was planning on buying a new dress for the ball that was taking place shortly and would she like to come? She agreed. She felt with her fingers and was able to write on him his size so that the girl in the clothes shop would know what size to buy without having to measure him. He rushed off to the dress shop. To his dismay the dress shop was closed for holidays until 16th July and the dance was taking place on the 2nd. Never mind – he went to the elf shop to pick up his elf-weapon but again, the elf shop was also closed until 10th July for holidays so he was really frustrated about this – nothing he wanted was going to be available. One of the elves then sent him off in an unusual direction where he encountered a German clothing specialist who was unable to sort him out but came up with a few suggestions. He also encountered an armourer who likewise gave him a few suggestions. He shot off to the orc workshop and found that that was undergoing some kind of building repair work but nevertheless they agreed to give him something.

In the past I’ve had plenty of people make all kinds of suggestions to me when I’ve been stuck for something or other. But many of them have been physically impossible and the rest have been far from helpful.

However, wouldn’t it be nice if I could find a nice young elf-maiden to take to a dance with me right now? Not that it would do me much good of course, except for my self-esteem, and that’s quite important. As I’ve said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I may not be able to walk the walk but I can certainly talk the talk.

And that reminds me of when I was going to a dance at the Grand Hotel in Oostende a few years back. I squeezed into a crowded lift and said "ballroom, please"
Another passenger in there said "I’m sorry – I’ll move in further"

There was a pause in the middle of all of that for my fruit bun and coffee. And I do have to say that the fruit buns were the best that I have ever made, especially warmed for 30 seconds in the microwave. I think that I have the hang of those now, and the diced dates make a nice difference too.

But while we’re on the subject of baking … "well, one of us is" – ed … I need to think about my hot cross buns. Check my recipe to make sure that I have everything because my next order from LeClerc might be my last before the cut-off date for baking.

My buns from last year were something of a failure because the dough didn’t rise. But at least they tasted like hot cross buns and that’s important.

For the rest of the day I’ve been dealing with the radio programme that I should have finished yesterday.

There were plenty of interruptions, including time out to have a really good wash and to bandage my ankle where I have this problem

Luckily I have plenty of sanitary dressings which is good news. They should help keep the wounds clean

And my chili hummus? Absolutely wicked. As I’ve said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … no danger of any vampires ever coming around here with the amount of garlic that I use.

Tea tonight was a delicious stuffed pepper and how I enjoy making these. With pasta and vegetables they are delicious.

There’s enough stuffing for a couple of days too. I want stuffing on Wednesday to put in a left-over curry to go with my naan bread. Now that I have divided the flour mix correctly into 6 portions of 90 grams instead of 9 portions of 60 grams, things on the naan front are going better

So having finished my notes, I’m off to bed where I’m hoping for another restless night with plenty of dreams about food.

And about Zero, Castor and TOTGA too. It’s been a little while since they have been around

But then like that character whose name I have forgotten in “An Item Of Cartography” – "Life is all one big huge joke. Nothing matters much except having a sense of humour"

Sunday 3rd March 2024 – I’M NOT TELLING …

… you what time I awoke today. It’s rather … errr … embarrassing.

And I’ve no idea either why it should have been what it was. I was in bed at 02:15 – a pretty reasonable time for a Saturday night/Sunday morning and I’d had plenty of sleep during the day too so I can’t have been all that tired.

There wasn’t much tossing and turning about during the night either. In fact I can’t remember moving at all while I was asleep.

The only thing that I can think is that I’ve had another one of those fits that I’ve been having just recently. But even then, I’ve been aware of my surroundings. This morning I was completely and utterly out of everything.

But we have to learn from lessons like this. You CAN teach an old dog new tricks and as of right now this minute, I shall be setting an alarm call for a Sunday. 11:00 might not sound particularly alarming for an alarm call for me, but it’s certainly a novel situation in which I find myself these days.

When I hauled myself out of bed I checked the blood pressure – 15.8/8.4, which is no surprise considering that my ears were steaming. Last night’s figure of 16.2/11.2 was due entirely to the frustration in having to track down some new batteries.

Why they can’t fit rechargeable batteries into machines like this is beyond me. My fitbit is rechargeable and even my kitchen scales will recharge off an USB port. How my life has changed since I’ve had my RECHARGEABLE KITCHEN SCALES and don’t have to scrabble around any more for batteries.

Once I’d done that I cleared off into the kitchen for my medication, and then I suppose that I’d better have breakfast, seeing what time it was – porridge, cheese on toast and hot black coffee – whilst I carried on reading some more of Sir Norman Lockyer’s THE DAWN OF ASTRONOMY.

He’s the guy who came up with the idea that the ancient Egyptians were star-worshippers and that their temples and pyramids were located and orientated so as to catch the light of certain stars as they rose and set. And I suppose that Lockyer was over the moon when he worked that out.

But several thousand years further on from the Ancient Egyptians there’s still plenty of star worship that goes on these days. But they aren’t the kind of stars of which Lockyer was thinking.

Back in here I transcribed the dictaphone notes, such as they were. A propos l’acteur Davy Buell il a continué vers le Texas où il a travaillé pour un petit moment, entré dans une Ordre réligieuse et puis était acteur à la télévision et acté dans les filmes qui sont biens connus par la publique américaine.

Yes, that’s what I said – In French, which surprised me completely. “About the actor Davy Buell – he continued on towards Texas where he worked for a short while, entered a religious Order and then had been an actor on television and in films that were well-known to the American public”.

It’s not the first time that we’ve had dreams in French. There have been several in the past. We’ve also had dreams in Flemish, Welsh and in Spanish too.

Yes, Spanish. Apart from having several Spanish colleagues at work from whom I was able to pick up the kind of language that you’d never learn in class, while I was having my “year out” after work in 2004/05 I went on a Spanish class at the University down the road from where I was living in Jette

That was quite an enjoyable year and an enjoyable class. I met that nice Asian girl with whom I had something of a fling but I can’t believe it (well, I can, actually) – even as recently as those days I still encountered parents warning their girls about me, and the girls taking notice.

It seems that I am fated to go wandering through the universe encountering this kind of opposition until I myself turn into a star – but no Egyptian will ever erect a pyramid of temple to worship me.

But do you know why there are pyramids in Egypt?
It’s because they were too heavy to move to the British Museum.

That reminds me of the time that I was in Egypt visiting the Great Tomb of Seti, I was told by a tourist guide that it was 3,200 years 3 months and 16 days old
And so I asked him how come they could date the tomb so accurately.
He replied "when I started work here they told me that it was 3200 years old, and I’ve been working here 3 months and 16 days."

There was more on the dictaphone too. Did I dictate the dream that I had twice … "no you didn’t" – ed … about being in that house and there being some kind of machine that had to fit on me like a blood pressure sleeve that would hopefully make me feel better but was one that I found very difficult to actually fasten on with one hand. It took a great deal of doing yet in the end I managed to fasten it on. It seemed to support me enough for whatever it was that needed doing. I had this dream not once but twice, once after the other.

That’s obviously related to this meeting that I have on Tuesday when they are going to be talking to me about some “mechanical aids” or whatever to help me with my problems. I wonder what they are likely to be.

Having done that I made a start on the radio notes – editing some in order to prepare the next programme.

The stuff that I dictated last night is going into the bin by the way. Whatever I wrote last week was total rubbish and makes no sense at all. Not that much of my stuff ever does, but we have to pretend about it.

There is however some stuff in a kind-of backlog so I made a start on some of that.

Not for long though because I had some hummus and some fruit buns to make.

Fruit buns first, and no banana today so I had to use more water. But piles of dried fruit, crushed nuts, sunflower seeds, desiccated coconut and the like. It’s all good stuff, took an age to knead but it went together quite well and rose nicely too.

While it was rising I made my hummus. One batch with chilis and a second batch with olives – and the missing ingredient was almost blood as I had cut myself quite badly on the blade of the food processor.

There was pizza dough to roll out too for tonight’s tea. And being plain flour it did really well too.

So the pizza was delicious, the hummus looks (and tastes) excellent and the bread rolls look great. I had a really good afternoon in the kitchen.

Shame about the morning though, but I hope that an alarm call in the future will help in that situation.

Nevertheless, what a state to be in? I ought to be ashamed of myself. As I’ve said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I can’t go on like this. It’s ridiculous

If I go on like this people will be calling me Rip van Eric and that’s not the reputation I want. Geoff Goddin called the volunteers behind the resurrection of the Talyllyn Railway as having a "Boy’s Own comic spirit of adventure, involving enthusiasm, ingenuity and a fair degree of irresponsibility" and that’s much more like my style of doing things.

As Tennyson put it, "my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the Western stars until I die" – which won’t be long a-coming but I’ll do what I can until then

Hence the alarm on a Sunday as of now. And about time too.

Friday 1st March 2024 – DYDD GWYL DEWI HAPUS …

… to everyone who can understand that.

And a happy St David’s Day to those of you who can’t.

It didn’t occur to me until this morning that I ought to be making a leek and potato soup, or maybe some bara brith or lava bread. It completely slipped my mind until it was far too late to do anything about it.

However, I did remember to prepare a “St David’s Day Special” for the radio featuring nothing but Welsh rock musicians. People like Man and Deke Leonard pumping out the stuff, but also stuff like Kim Simmonds from his heyday with Savoy Brown.

And also The Neutrons, desperate for a female voice for one of their songs on TALES FROM THE BLUES COCOONS, and someone drags in this young dancer who they found in ballet school down the road, Caromay Dixon, who was only 15 at the time but whose voice hypnotised all of us there.

They even WROTE A SONG for her to sing on the album.

But anyway, I digress … "again" – ed …

Last night was another late night and I didn’t have much sleep yet again. No football match to keep me awake – I was busy doing other things.

However for a change, it was good night’s sleep and I felt much better for it when the alarm went off. I still didn’t want to drag myself out of bed when the alarm went off, but it couldn’t be helped.

First stop was the blood pressure, and after all this time it seems that this part of the medication is working. Last night’s was 16.3/13.5 but this morning’s was 13.5/7.8, well within the parameters that they sent me at the start.

In the living room I had to track down some medication and then I could fuel myself up.

This morning’s task was to make bread for the weekend – three bread rolls. And even though I did exactly the same as I did last week, the dough didn’t rise today like it had done then.

The only difference was the yeast. Is this cheap yeast no good then? And ought I to be using the more expensive yeast that seemed to work last week? That’s an interesting idea.

My cheese on toast was still nice though so I’m not complaining too much.

While I was at it, I made a large rice pudding again to last me for the next couple of days. I’m becoming quite a fan of those too.

Having had my breakfast I came in here to listen to the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night and, more importantly, who had come with me. There was a group of us at some kind of athletics meeting last night. We were the ones putting out all of the hurdles etc for the athletes to jump etc. This went on for quite a while and then they announced the winner. I wasn’t paying that much attention but they also said that he’d won the student games and the National Indoor games in the summer. I was very keen to find out who he was so I decided to use the internet so I could look it up. We drifted on from there and were on our way home. Liz – the “other Liz” was with us and I was with Percy Penguin. We came out of High Street in Crewe and walked up Market Street in the pedestrian area. Percy Penguin and I had a very happy air about us as if something important had happened.

we were actually turning into Victoria Street at that moment from Market Street.

Next weekend it will be 15 years since the “other Liz” shuffled off this mortal coil. We served on the same University committees so we often found ourselves travelling together from one end of the country to the other – from Milton Keynes up to Newcastle upon Tyne and then down to Bristol for meetings of the Disabled Students group.

On one occasion, stopping off at Shrewsbury for a meal on our way from Bristol to Newcastle upon Tyne we encountered an old girlfriend of mine from school. On another occasion we came across a Wishbone Ash concert so we hung around for a while until it started.

She came to Brussels as a guest of the Belgian Association and attended a couple of meetings of the North European Students in Cologne with Jackie and me.

After she died I took her daughter to Canada to install her at University there and, leaving STRAWBERRY MOOSE to take care of her, I went off on my EPIC JOURNEY ON THE TRANS LABRADOR HIGHWAY

But anyway, all that was a long time ago.

After breakfast I made a start on finishing off the radio notes but I had another one of those cataleptic-like trances again – sitting for a couple of hours totally unable to function. It was just as if I had switched off. It was really strange.

But at some point I must have gone off to sleep because at some point in the proceedings I was changing the clutch cable in a Ford Sierra – and what a messy job that was having to route it through the bodywork. We ended up with most of the front panelling out of the car to fit it.

Being miles away like this, it took an age to come back into the present world but when I did I hauled myself off into the kitchen to make it look a little more respectable for the cleaner

While she was here I finished off the notes and then began to convert a pile of the music in the queue into an appropriate format to use on the radio. There’s tons of that in the waiting list and it will take an age to convert.

But at least I’ve managed to salvage a couple of albums that had become lost in the technological piles of spaghetti and I’m sure that there will be others hidden in there too.

Tea tonight was salad and chips with some of these nuggets. The air fryer came to the rescue again. I’m nevertheless going to have to look to see if I can make better use of it.

There must be dozens of things that I can be doing with it that I’ve not even explored yet. Cake-making, for example. I have a small cake tin that will fit.

And what else?

But as long as I can remain awake long enough to make them. I’m completely fed up of falling asleep at the drop of a hat. It’s really getting on my nerves.

Our old friend Gotthold Lessing said about some other subject "A man who does not lose his reason over certain things has none to lose" and I’m certainly going to lose my reason over this.

If I had a spleen I would vent it, that’s for sure.

And that reminds me of the doctor in that hospital in Verdun in 2017 who said that he wanted to check my spleen and began to undo my shirt
"I hope that you have good eyesight" I said
"Why’s That?" he asked
"Because my spleen’s in a glass jar on a shelf in a hospital in Montlucon 300 miles away from here"

Wednesday 28th February 2024 – TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY …

… Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. But it was also when I retired from full-time employment.

For the first time, that is.

At 50 years of age we were pulled out of the front line at work. They considered that we no longer had the speed, the fitness and the reflexes to cope with the conditions.

That, of course, is nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with my reflexes even today and, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I was still running every night up until two years ago

But anyway, there we were.

For the following 15 years life would be driving around Brussels in one of the fleet of Berlingos delivering parcels between the various buildings or, in my case seeing as I had a PSV licence, driving the shuttle bus.

But badger that for a game of cowboys. If you ask me which is more stressful – driving 4.5 tonnes of armoured Open Omega down a German autobahn at 260 kph at 04:00 or driving a shuttle bus around Brussels during the rush hour – I know which one I’d say.

With redeployment looming, my boss having retired and with “early retirement” being bandied about with all these hordes of Bulgarians and Romanians queueing up to join at half the salary we were receiving, I made sure that my pancreas flared up again.

A spell of sick leave, and then that was that

What followed was a lovely year of rest and then, after going to South Carolina for Rhys’s wedding, I picked up the threads.

A spell on a CDI working for General Electric’s training school to cover for maternity leave followed by 11 months at that bizarre American company where I met Alison, and then I set out for the Auvergne to seek my fortune, and the rest is history.

It wasn’t an early retirement last night though. In fact, what with one thing and another – and once you make a start you’ll be surprised how many other things there are – it was later than usual, and that’s saying something considering how late things have been just recently.

And when the alarm went off, I was totally wasted. I never felt less like leaving the bed but I had to make an effort.

First thing was to check the blood pressure – 13.8/8.7. That’s low. Below the target figure in fact. And much better than last night’s 17.2/10.5. I wonder what happened during the night to bring down my blood pressure.

After the medication I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to see what had gone on during the night. With the fall in blood pressure I didn’t expect that one of my favourite young ladies had been to visit me, but you never know. I was back in school at the start of last night with a group of people. We noticed that there was a girl standing not too far away from us looking at what was going on. I knew the girl – she lived in Shavington. I was just on the point of shouting to her to be friendly when I awoke.

Awoke – yet again, just as I’m about to speak to a girl. There’s something strange going on these days about this.

Then there was a football tournament taking place with all of the big clubs taking part. Almost everyone was having a go at refereeing matches. When it was my turn I drew Tottenham Hotspurs against someone else, I can’t remember. I took the ball and walked down to the pitch. On the touchline was an old friend of mine so I said “hello” to him and talked about another adventure. I tossed a coin and called to Spurs to ask what colour they wanted. They guessed correctly “yellow” so I set the board out because the pitch was something like a chessboard. They complained that the board had been set out incorrectly. It should have been set out the other way round. I didn’t think that it made very much difference so I told them to shut up and get on with it. In the end they went to complain to the FA. Someone from the FA came down. He agreed that the pitch had been incorrectly laid out and as kick-off hadn’t taken place we could reset the board the correct way round and start the match. This was a decision that completely disappointed me. I thought that the FA would have at least tried to uphold my authority as referee instead of behaving like this.

And did I dictate the story about the little girl who was born? … "no you didn’t" – ed … It was Alison Something. She had a very sad life and died as barely a teenager. The Doors wrote a song about her which became famous.

If they did, I can’t think of the song. Plenty of “Alison” songs, but none by the Doors as far as I can tell.

So anyway I stepped back into this football match. As I went in Tottenham Hotspurs were playing and they won the toss for kick-off so set the board out for them to start to play but they thought that I’d set it out incorrectly – that the point should be on the row that started on the second row. I measured it al and it would be the same distance so there’s no problem so … fell asleep here …

When the alarm went off, I wondered why the dictaphone wasn’t in its usual place on the corner of the chest of drawers. It was down the bed still ticking over showing 2 hours and 15 minutes. That’ll teach me to fall asleep again with it in my hand.

One thing that I can tell you is that it’s not very interesting listening to myself sleeping. And I remember a couple of times when Percy Penguin elbowed me in the ribs and said “stop snoring!”.

“I never snore” I would reply. “You must be dreaming it”. And now having heard myself sleeping, I’m sorry for doubting you.

The nurse came round, gave me my injection and took a blood sample.

The results are back now. My haemoglobin is slowly rising, which is good news, but so is my carcinogenic protein, which is bad news. It should be between 59 and 106 units, and it’s gone up from 270.3 to 276.4 in a week. The active enzymes, which should be between 6.7 and 11.8 are actually 31.2

In other words, things are slowly deteriorating, which is what I expect so there’s no big issue there. However, it is the first time that I’ve seen the word “terminal” written on the results of my blood test.

With the cleaner coming round I tidied up somewhat as best as I could in order to give her the impression that I cared, and then wrote out some cheques to pay a few bills here and there. She’ll post the letters for me while she’s on her travels

And then regrettably I crashed out for a while, which is no surprise after my late night.

But it wasn’t the usual kind of “crashed-out” – it was more like a cataleptic fit of some description where I’m perfectly aware of my surroundings, such as the radio playing on the computer, but I’m totally unable to move or to react to anything

It’s not the first time that I’ve had one of these either, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

This afternoon I finished my radio notes ready for dictation and then after the cleaner had left I made the dough for my next lot of naan bread and left it to fester.

Back in here I had more things to do but crashed out yet again, properly and really deeply too. I remember absolutely nothing at all of anything. I was so deeply in that I almost missed my tea.

But my leftover curry and fresh naan bread were delicious yet again, especially after I remembered to put the garlic in the naan dough. It was all cooked to absolute perfection too.

But now I think that I’ll go and have an early night. Right now, Tom Petty is telling me "I await the day
Good fortune comes our way
And we’ll ride down the King’s Highway"

But I’m going to have a pretty long wait. Having driven down the King’s Highway, along the Carolina coast, once or twice, I can’t see me ever having the possibility of doing it again.

He also says a little later " don’t want to end up
In a room all alone"

But it looks as if that’s exactly how I’m going to end up, the way these blood test results are going.

But never mind. He goes on to sing "Sometimes I get discouraged
Sometimes I feel so down
Sometimes I get so worried
And I don’t know what about
But it works out in the long run
It always goes away
I’ve come now to accept it
As a reoccurring phase"

That’s certainly true too. if something else crops up now, it’ll have to wait for a couple of weeks until I can find the time to worry about it.

Tuesday 27th February 2024 – I HAVE JUST …

… been flat-out on the chair for half an hour.

And that’s a shame because I have managed to keep going almost all day without feeling the effects

What’s particularly sad about it is that I’ve been a busy boy this afternoon too. My LeClerc delivery came and now the shelves in here are bursting with goodies. However, at the rate that I eat, the supplies won’t last long

It’s actually amazing how much food you need. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police who controlled the border between British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska in the Gold Rush days at the turn of the 20th Century wouldn’t let anyone pass into the gold-bearing areas without a ton of supplies for himself during the period when it was possible to work the streams up there.

As an aside, there’s someone in Western Canada who is still using her grandfather’s sourdough starter that was first begun by him as he set out for the goldfields over 100 years ago.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my adventures with sourdough, when the sourdough would react when I wasn’t using it and then fail to react when I wanted it. I never got the hang of sourdough.

It’s like the ginger beer. For a few weeks that was interesting and then we had the explosion while I was away at hospital, and since then my visits have prevented me from restarting. Ginger beer is not something that you can leave on its own to ferment, as the TV in the lounge will testify.

That was another short-lived experiment – the television and the HDMI cable so that I could watch internet football on the big screen. The glass from the exploding ginger beer bottle saw to that.

That was quite ironic though – of the batch that I was making at the time, two bottles were bottles that I’d re-used after buying them full of lemonade, and the third was a specialist bottle bought from IKEA. And guess which one exploded.

What was even more ironic is that the specialist bottle cost €2:49 whereas the others cost €1:69 and were full of lemonade too.

In the bathroom now is a nice collection of these flip-top stoppered bottles that I’d buy, ready to use for ginger beer or kefir once I’d drunk the lemonade that was in them (and delicious it was too).

Anyway, I digress … "again" – ed …

So, nice and early last night, I toddled off to bed and settled down to sleep.

Not for long though because in the middle of the night I sat bolt upright, wide-awake. And that was a surprise. I couldn’t wait to see if there was anything on the dictaphone that might correspond with it.

It didn’t take long to go back to sleep and I was deep in the arms of Morpheus when the alarm went off.

First things first – what was my blood pressure? 14.7/10.5, so it’s slowly going down. Last night it was 14.8/9.4. Looking at the figures from a week ago it’s quite a difference.

After the medication I went and had a really good wash and scrub up, and even washed the shorts that I wear in bed. Having called the cleaner down during the night after my fall a few weeks ago, I have to make myself sort-of presentable in case she has to come again, regardless of how I usually like to sleep.

Then there were the dictaphone notes. I started off with that girl – the youngest daughter of the woman whom I knew in the Scottish Borders and I can’t remember the girl’s name … "it’s “Beth”" – ed … Everyone was living in Caernarfon, somewhere out in the hills at the back. She was going out for the night so her father wrote a cheque for £50 for her so that she could make sure that she had a taxi back etc. He began to discuss the taxi prices. Someone said that it’s only £3:50 to go to the coast so it won’t be that much for going back but I was sure that it would be more. Someone mentioned something about excess charges if she swore at the driver etc. Her father said “perhaps I ought to have written the cheque out for £100 for you in that case”.

But that was quite a rum do, that affair on the Scottish Borders, and a lot of it went over my head because I didn’t understand the half of it, even though it was one of my bolt-holes in those days.

It had a terrible air of tragedy too. One of the young girls (not the one in the dream) who lived there took a year out after school to earn some money before going to University. She found a job in a supermarket that involved a 20-mile drive at some silly hour of the morning to work in her ancient, creaking Opel Corsa.

One night, a German tourist landed at Dover in his big, heavy Mercedes and drove all the way through the night up the M6 and M74, coming off at the very junction that this girl drove over.

Of course, in the small hours of the morning, a minor interchange onto a minor road, being overtired and being accustomed to driving on the right, the inevitable happened and the Opel and its driver never stood a chance.

Who will ever forget the events that followed

And then Zero put in an appearance, so welcome back Zero after all this time. There was a party taking place at Audlem so I went down to visit it with a friend. We’d been invited, and it turned out that Zero had invited me so of course I went. I took a present for her and a present for her mother. It was a big, modern detached house. We had to wait at the door to be formally greeted by Zero’s mother, we had to hand over our present to her and then go in. We were wandering around and someone came round handing out dishes of pasta and vegetable soup. They stuck a big dish of it in my hand. I couldn’t climb up the steps into the next room. I had to hand my dish to someone while I hauled myself up the steps bodily and then the person gave me back the dish. We went and found a place to sit down. There was some issue with his soup so he went off to find a spoon. I found a better place to sit and he came along to join me. There was some milk going round so even though it was 4% milk I had a drink. Then Zero appeared. I handed her present to her and STRAWBERRY MOOSE was just about to say something to her when I suddenly, dramatically awoke – and I mean properly awoke too.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that my subconscious seems to be erecting a barrier between my young lady-friends and me. Here’s another case where one of them makes an appearance and I awaken dramatically before I’ve had time for any interaction.

After that, I revised for my Welsh lesson, and that passed really well, although I have a feeling that I fell asleep at some point – I blinked my eye and they seemed to have moved on from where I’d remembered. Nevertheless, I was pleased with what I accomplished today.

My lunchtime apple was next, and then I sent off my order to LeClerc, which meant arranging the stuff in the kitchen so that there was space to put it.

It was a big order too and I’ve still not put everything away. But there were 2kg of carrots so most of the afternoon was spent washing, cleaning, dicing, blanching and freezing them. Shop-bought frozen carrots seem to be pumped full of water.

There was some time to write some more notes for the radio programme, and also to have a play on the guitar too. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good bash.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with some of the stuffing left over from yesterday. There’s plenty remaining for a leftover curry, and than reminds me that I have to make some more naan bread dough tomorrow as I’ve run out. I can’t have a left-over curry without a garlic naan to go with it.

So what’s planned for tomorrow?

Apart from the cleaner coming round, I don’t think that there’s anything on the agenda. I might be a quiet day for once.

There’s plenty to do though, and the postwoman has brought me more bills to pay. It seems to be all outgoing right now, and I can do with some incoming.

These days, there’s too much month left at the end of the money, rather like in the old days when, instead of being paid weekly, we were paid weakly.

During the Welsh class I told the story of how we were so poor once when I lived in that squat near Audlem that after dark we raided a farmer’s field and made a big potato and mushroom curry. A moth flew into it at a vital moment and we couldn’t extract it, and we were that hungry that we just stirred it in.

That was what being poor used to be like and I don’t want a return to those days. People talk about “the good old days” but to me, that was ice on the inside of the bedroom windows in the morning and grinding poverty. There was nothing good at all about it.

Deborah Oluwaseyi Joshua wrote "one day, you will tell your story of how you overcame what you went through and it will be someone else’s survival guide" and I suppose that to a certain extent, that’s true.

But that supposes that people want to survive. Far too many people are content just to sink further in, and that’s depressing.

For me, I’ll just be like Bhuwan Thapaliya who wrote in his poetry that "the older I get, the more I cherish the company of children. The children have no prejudices. They are what they are."

Monday 26th February 2024 – IT LOOKS AS …

… if I’ll be back in hospital sooner than I imagined.

In fact, if the hospital had its way I’d be there now.

The nurse who telephones me every few days to find out how I am and so I told her, and that was that. She told the doctor and he issued the instructions, and left it to the nurse to find a date seeing as I turned down “today”.

Yes, it’s “all go” here in the apartment. I wasn’t in bed very early because I had things to do, even though I was tired. And so I didn’t have much sleep.

What sleep I had was quite good though and I wish that I had had more of it. There’s no doubt that I seem to be sleeping better these days than I have done but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. As I have said before … "" – ed … my nocturnal travels are very important to me.

When the alarm went off I fell out of bed and went to take the blood pressure. A very low 14.8/8.9 this morning, compared to 17.1/11.8 last night.

After the medication I came back in here and had a few things to do before I could transcribe the dictaphone notes. We were at school last night. There was an issue about climate change etc. Our headmaster gave a speech to a certain organisation about something or other on this subject. It turned out to be a huge self-justification about all kinds of things. I somehow managed to access the meeting so I stood up and made a speech simultaneously criticising him for all kinds of different things that had gone on in the past in the school for which I considered him to be responsible but no-one took any notice of me at all. I thought “fair enough”. My life carried on as usual, I had a nice girlfriend (and I wish that I knew who she was). Then I noticed that there wee jobs for school leavers. A couple of them were really interesting. One was to go to Kenya for a couple of years as some kind of exchange of teacher or something like that. I must admit that that appealed to me. Anyway I wanted to go to sort out the headmaster. He had a meeting of people my year at school at the start of the afternoon so I went five minutes early and said “I want to talk to you”. He looked at me and said “and what position are you after?”. I had to be honest and explain that although I was after the one in Kenya I’d come to see him on another matter. He took the greatest amount of umbrage with me criticising him for his speech. He was really quite aggressive with his defence of what he said which I thought was way, way over the top and out of place.

It’s one thing that I’ve noticed about Climate Change deniers and the others of their ilk. When you challenge their “beliefs” the become quite aggressive and try to shout you out of their argument. Yet the facts are indisputable.

"Climate change is a natural phenomenon" – indeed it is, but that’s no reason for us to do nothing about it. It’s like saying that the Titanic was going to sink anyway so why bother pumping? The answer is that by pumping it gave them an extra couple of hours for Carpathia to come to the rescue. And that’s why we have to keep on trying to save the planet – to give us more time to find a solution.

"The Earth is simply rotating on its axis like it normally does". Indeed it does, but at a rate of 1° per 7,000 years according to calculations made by Sir Norman Lockyer, so we’re talking of arcoseconds in real terms. But if that’s what is going on according to the naysayers, why aren’t other parts of the World freezing as quickly as the High Arctic is melting?

But seriously, anyone who has been to the High Arctic can see the evidence for themselves. I was talking to an Inuit on Bylot Island who told me that he used to come to the spot where I was standing to fetch a block of ice for his old grandfather to make tea. And then he took me to the head of the glacier where it was in 2018 – a walk of 1.5 miles
"So how old were you when you did this?"
"Twelve or thirteen"
"How old are you now?"
"Twenty-four"

The glacier has receded 1.5 miles in 12 years.

In the memoirs of James Rae he writes about battling through the snow and ice around Pelly’s Bay in August 1854 when he met a group of Inuit who gave him information and relics about Franklin’s lost expedition. We landed at Pelly’s Bay to refuel on our way out to Mittimatalik in September 2018 and there wasn’t a fleck of snow anywhere.

The presentation that I did on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR was afrer we’d sailed several miles up a Fjord on Ellesmere Island and I showed a slide of an Admiralty chart of 1857 which showed no fjord there – the whole island was covered by an ice cap all the way down to the sea according to the chart.

Bylot Island, where I talked to that Inuit, wasn’t even an island. If you look at the map you’ll see that the strait that separates it from the mainland of Baffin Island is called “Pond Inlet” because that’s what it was when Europeans first visited it. It wasn’t until the ice melted that they discovered that Bylot Island was actually an island.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed, following on from the previous dream, the girl to whom the headmaster refused to talk … "which girl?" – ed … ended up teaching part-time at a college which was part of the story and in fact taught German to the guy who took over from her boss as whatever official position it was for which the girl was secretary, but she was still chasing her boss and trying to persuade him to either justify his speech or to withdraw it and the implications that it had against us, this particular girl.

It seems that there’s a chunk missing from these dreams somewhere, and that seems to be a regular thing. It makes me wonder what else I’ve missed, and I know that ON ONE OCCASION I missed a visit from Castor. Imagine that!

Having done that and pushed it out of the way I went to finish the radio programme that I was organising yesterday. It meant dictating the notes that I’d written last night for the final track that I’d chosen, and then editing it and adding it all in with the actual song.

And to my surprise it was exactly one second SHORT.

When they are too long, I can cope quite easily. I always include in my notes some things that can be edited out if necessary to bring them down to the correct time; but when they are too short it requires more inventiveness.

But one second isn’t too bad. That’s 20×0.050 second “silence generated” pauses in salient places and that’s the job done.

After that I chose all of the music for the next radio programme, paired it off and began to write the notes for it. I could have done much more too except that I … errr … had a rest

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper, with plenty of stuffing left over, thanks to having forgotten my mushrooms on Friday and a suspect tomato in the fridge. That will keep me going for a few more meals.

Tomorrow I have a Welsh lesson, and then there’s an order to send off to LeClerc as I’m running low on frozen vegetables. So tomorrow late afternoon will see me blanching carrots and sprouts ready to freeze. Still, there’s some chocolate cake left to see me through

Then I’ll have to think about this hospital appointment. Will it be for a stay or just a day visit? I know that it’s for a lumbar puncture which I dread, but I can’t believe that they’ll send me home on the same day.

But as Macbeth said, "If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly". And he was right. No point in waiting around because it will still be the same. It’s as Terry Venables once eloquently put it – "if history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again"

Or as Vivian Green sang, "Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain"

Sunday 25th February 2024 – I’VE HAD A …

… lovely chat with Ingrid this afternoon. Another one of our multilingual ones and which ended up as a Rosemaryesque conversation of 1 hour and 15 minutes. It’s nice to be popular.

It’s also nice to have had a really good night’s sleep too.

After the dictating the usual load of rubbish that passes for radio programme notes these days, I was in bed for 01:30. And then waking up ay 09:25 without having felt a thing, and then not leaving the bed until 11:30 What is there that is any better than that at my advanced age?

First thing that I did was to look at my foot. I had to take off my elasticated stocking on the right foot last night as it was irritating the foot.

A closer examination this morning reveals that the fabric of the sock has rubbed it raw for some reason and it’s inflamed. The skin is flaking around the wound too so a day or so in the fresh air followed by a disinfected cloth covering will do it good.

It’s a good job that I have some surgical tissues and alcohol disinfectant. They should help it heal and in the meantime I’ll show it to the doctor at the Centre de Re-education when I go there in 10 days.

Next step was to check my blood pressure. This morning it was 17.4/10.1 which compares with last night’s 17.7/10.5. So what excited me during the night? it certainly wasn’t TOTGA, Castor or Zero.

After the medication I came back in here to find out what had happened during the night. And it was rather disappointing, if not depressing. I’d been in a van with someone and we’d been driving somewhere. We had to stop because the person with me wanted a cup of coffee. We had a rope with us and I wanted to tie it up to something so that it would stay in the van. The only thing that I could find was the handgrip over the door. I tied the rope there with a kind of knot and went out to have my coffee. For some reason the rope wouldn’t stay tied. tt managed to untie itself and at that moment I actually awoke. That rope wasn’t right for some reason.

That’s not exactly what I call an exciting dream. The way things are in my life right now he only excitement that I have is what goes on during the night.

And not just with TOTGA, Zero or Castor either. While of course I’m delighted if one of them comes along with me on a travel, that’s really the icing on the cake. Having adventures, voyages and bizarre encounters is what my dreams should be all about regardless of who (with the exception of my family of course) comes with me.

Boring, sad and uneventful encounters have no place to play in my life, especially during the hours of darkness.

Instead I went for lunch – cheese on toast and porridge with strong black coffee to fire up the imagination.. And there are no complaints about my bread. It’s not perfection – in fact, it’s a long way from it, but it’s better than a couple of weeks ago.

Back in here, rather later than usual, I made a start on the radio programme whose notes needed editing. And while I was … errr … elsewhere during a little break, Ingrid phoned me.

after I’d washed my hands I phoned her back and we had our lengthy chat. Her elderly cat, who was 20 years old, has died, so she told me. And that’s sad news. Mind you, 20 years s a good age for a cat, especially around the Auvergne with so many predators

She’s talking about coming up to see me, which will be lovely. In fact there are a couple of people in the Auvergne who have been talking about coming up here. Not just to see me of course, but to have a little holiday break, and Ingrid is talking about hitching a ride with them.

If they do all come up here, it’ll make a nice break for them and a welcome distraction for me. Up here locked in my little room while my leg is healed and the lift is being repaired is doing me no good.

They say that the lift might be fixed by Friday in which case I can go to the shops on the bus.

The lifts here only go to the half-landings which is a shame. They don’t actually go to the floors where the front door is or the apartments are.

That’s something that sounds very strange but this is a 17th Century building built before lifts of course, and as it’s a registered historic building we can’t knock it about how we like

Before Ingrid phoned I was planning on making some biscuits as I’d run out but it was too late now. Instead I went and rolled out the pizza dough that had been defrosting since I took it from the freezer after lunch.

Yes, Ingrid on the phone or not, nothing will stop the relentless march of the Sunday pizza.

So now that my notes are written, I’ll have a think about finishing off the assembly of the radio programme and then choose the final track and write the notes for it. I’m not sure if I’m up to dictating them but we’ll see. Ralph Marston said "Rest when you’re weary. Refresh and renew yourself, your body, your mind, your spirit. Then get back to work" but if I were to do that, I would never ever restart.

With this new medication, I’ve noticed several side-effects kicking in. I’m having difficulty with my eyes (hence the typos), I’m all confused (you should see the mess that I’ve made of this radio programme) and I’m just so tired – all the time too.

There was an interesting paragraph in the Woolhope Naturalists (not “Naturists”) Club’s 1867 Annual Report which said that "the history of a people, for the most part, is but the detail of the trials and calamities that have occurred to them", and that is something with which I can personally relate.

Friday 23rd February 2024 – MY DAY OF …

… baking was quite a success.

And it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to say that

Yes, everything that I did today seemed to work and I’ve ended up with some pretty nice stuff. I’m quite pleased.

Ad for a change I actually had a good night too. In bed nice and early and I didn’t have much that kept me awake . And once I’d gone to sleep, I stayed asleep until the alarm went off.

Billy Cotton made me leave the bed and the first thing that I did was to take my blood pressure. 15.1/8.6. That’s low compared to how it has been. You can tell that I didn’t have a visit from Castor, Zero or TOTGA last night.

Before I went to bed it was 17.5/10.4 so the sleep did me some good by the looks of things.

After the morning medication the first thing that I did was to make the dough for the bread. And kneading it gently, as if I was massaging Zero’s clavicles, I was careful not to overwork it by resorting to violence.

When I was quite satisfied that it was ready, I rolled it out into a long sausage, cut it into three equal sections and then flattened it all down.

A handy small baking tray with a piece of baking paper was called into service upon which they could repose and hopefully rise.

Next step was to make the vegan cream filling. Whizz ip some milk until it’s quite frothy, add sugar, a little butter, vanilla extract, cornflour, and whizz it all up while slowly heating it in a saucepan.

That was complicated. I had the hand-whisk whisking it all over the kitchen until I managed to rig up a saucepan lid as a shield.

Meanwhile, melt some chocolate in the microwave and when it’s melted, whisk it well into the mixture

When It’s all whisked and nice and thick, leave it to cool. And there’s my chocolate cream filling.

Then the chocolate cake. A mixture of flour, sugar, oil, water and cocoa powder with a few extras. All mixed up into a kind-of batter-like goo, poured into a cake tray and then baked for 40 minutes.

By now the vegan cream was cold so it went in the fridge and I put the bread in the oven to bake.

They had risen quite nicely and were baked to perfection too so I had some lovely cheese on toast.

Rosemary rang me in the middle of everything so I phoned her back. Just a short chat today – a mere 58 minutes during which we put the World to rights but I also ended up going for a virtual drive around Montlucon.

Once everything was finished and the chaos was over I had a listen to find out where I’d been during the night. I’d started work but there was still a girl at school who I happened to like. For the last few mornings I’d been taking her into school. One particular morning we were running really late. It meant that I was going to be late for work if I dropped her off at school but nevertheless I was going to drop her off. We were preparing everything and panicking a little – I wasn’t dressed even. One of my friends came along and asked me what was happening. The girl briefly explained. He immediately said “I can run you into school to save Eric some bother”. I said that it’s no bother because I was quite interested in spending as much time as possible with her but he absolutely insisted and insisted until in the end she went off with him. I was furious. I sent him a text message “after all you promised me last time …” (because we’d had a similar situation a while ago where he’d done exactly the same thing and spiked my guns with a certain young lady. So I was set to go to work but there was a whole crowd of schoolkids around. I was in my Ford Cortina estate. I had to make the kids move so I could leave the car park but for some unknown reason they didn’t want to go. At that moment the car turned into a kind of cross between a bus and a taxi. All the kids were pleased because that was what they were waiting for. They said that they’d been waiting for a bus but the school had produced something else so there were some issues. I had to watch them safely aboard. I wasn’t sure which school they attended or where they went so in order to prevent a stampede I said “Primary School children first”. A few came on. Then I had to think of another way of dividing up these schoolkids so that I wouldn’t have all of them on board at once. But I was absolutely furious with my friend for spiking my guns with that other girl. It’s exactly what has happened before with him and it’s exactly what has happened in loads of dreams before this. Any time I’m anywhere close to getting the girl someone comes along to spoil it

Looking back at what I dictated, I was surprised that I’d been able to express myself like that during a dream. They must have been things that I felt quite deeply.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s usually my family who appear during the night and forestall all of my plans, sticking the baton dans la rue of whatever project I’m undertaking. They are always appearing at the crucial moment just as I’m about to Get The Girl and blow my chances out of the water.

But in the past, there have been a couple of friends who had the habit of doing that. One of them pretended to be looking after my best interests, as if I was senile or something, but in actual fact he had another agenda completely.

The second one, the one in the dream, he couldn’t stand to see anyone Get The Girl, whether he had already got a girl or not. He was of the opinion that only he should ever Get The Girl, no matter how many other girls he already had and that’s not an exaggeration either.

Anyway, this is all water under the bridge. There’s no point really in raking up stuff like this. Ambrose Bierce said "A year is a period of 365 disappointments" and we should all simply be resigned to it

It’s as I said though, there are some things that drag you down. Instead of trying to rise up, people simply want you to be down at their level. And in the end you either sink in with them or cast them all aside.

In Matthew 10:14 the Bible tells you "if anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet"

So abandoning another good rant for the moment, the cleaner was here again so I finished off the radio notes and hacked a few sound-tracks about to extract and convert a few tracks that I need for the next programme.

While I was at it, I hacked around a few sound-tracks of Louis de Funès films to collect a few more sound-bytes. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that although he’s been dead for several years, he and I have some interesting chats on my radio programmes.

Of course, having served on the Students’ Executive Committee and on other committees dealing with the various University bodies, I’m quite used to communicating with the deceased.

But Louis de Funès is my favourite French actor. Who will ever forget the MUSKATNOOS, HERR MULLER? or the NUDISTS sketches?

His sound-bytes really fit in well with my programmes and I keep on looking out for more in order to enlarge our conversations.

When the cleaner had gone I went into the kitchen, took the cake and cut it into 3 equal sizes. The took the cream from the fridge, whisked it again and used it as a filler in order to layer the slices. It was then wrapped in baking paper, clingfilm and put in the fridge.

And from what I tasted from the crumbs that were scattered around, it will be a world-beating cake. Nice and rich and chocolaty. I hope that it will last a while too. I’m fed up of things going off so quickly

Tea was chips from the air fryer with some of those vegan nuggets. There was a salad too which was delicious, and it would have been even more so had I remembered the mushrooms. I really don’t know what’s happening to me right now.

The vegan mayonnaise that I made though is holding up really well and was delicious.

So no alarm in the morning, a nice lie-in with a cooked breakfast and chocolate cake for my afternoon snack. It doesn’t get much better than this. A nice lazy day is planned with a football match in the late afternoon and a cooked tea with vegan wellington and roast potatoes.

That should give me something to celebrate, right enough. And i deserve it. I never thought that I’d ever arrive here. But as Mae West said, "If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself."

However, it’s too late to do anything about that now. I’ve managed to live to a ripe old age, and there’s no doubt that as I’ve grown older, I’ve certainly grown riper.

Anyone nearby will tell you that.

Thursday 22nd February 2024 – TODAY HAS BEEN …

… a better day today and I feel as if I’ve actually accomplished something too.

And considering how my day was messed around, that is an achievement because once more dealing with people who ought to know better, I find myself thinking of the words of John McCone, the USA”s Director Of Central Intelligence talking to Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defence, and saying "We will find ourselves mired down in combat in the jungle in a military effort that we cannot win".

Going to bed was quite straightforward though and once again, I had a good sleep. Strapping my legs together with an elastic strap is a really good move on my part if I want to bring some life back to weary muscles.

When the alarm went off I was talking about the Titanic disaster, but a similar disaster closer to the shore where a ship like the Titanic had split in two and sunk. Several of the passengers were arguing whether the front or the back was the stern but the radio was broadcasting the names of the people who in small boats had somehow managed to rescue some of the people but several people had died in the attempt – like “Mr So-and-so rowed 12 people home, Miss So-and-so rowed 2 people home, Mrs So-and-so was drowned when her boat overturned with so many people in it”. That was going on

This is probably something to do with the Empress of Ireland disaster. Sailing against the flow of ships, she was in a collision with a freighter off Rimouski in the St Lawrence River in May 1914 and sank with the loss of over 1,000 people. Several local boats took to the water to rescue who they could

This morning’s blood pressure was interesting – 16.8/9.2, contrasting with last night’s figure of 16.1/10.1. It’s usually higher in the evening than the morning.

Having sorted out the medication later, I came back in here to transcribe the rest of the disctaphone notes. At one point during the night apparently I was with that group of people. We were making bread. There was some kind of competition – a bread-making league or something like that and we were competing in it. I was ready to give instructions to my particular side. One thing that I wanted to make sure was that the period of the flour was different than the period when I expected people to look at me so they weren’t looking at me while I was adding the flour and then breaking up the process. So we made the very first mixing so I put it on the side while the alarm went off. Then the other team went to make their bread using their technique and timing to see how they could manage to make it.

A bread-making league of competition might sound interesting but I don’t think that any bread that I might make would be good enough for any competition. And that’s really depressing – I ought to be doing much better than I do.

Ane then at school I had to mention that despite the “nil” returns that I’d sent in during the week I had been involved in some kind of gangland activity and I wanted to talk about it. I was whisked off to the headmaster’s office. What interested them was on which days did I perform the gangland activity? What kind of activities were they? How many people were involved? All these kind of sub-headings to bracket the offence rather than to talk about the gangland activities and try to resolve the issue. It really was a perfectly strange situation.

And as if I am ever likely to be involved in any kind of gangland activity, at school or otherwise. I was always one who kept himself to himself mainly and didn’t interact with many of my peers

But then after this I ended up being in an office. There was a lot of work and it had been building up all the time. For one reason or another I hadn’t been doing it. Then I thought that I’d better grasp the nettle and see. I collected everything in. A lot of it related to work in another office so I went down there to see them to explain that in a couple of weeks I’d be having a huge pile of work to deal with. We worked out where the work was going to be done. It was going to be done by one particular person so I went to explain to him. He was extremely cynical about the whole affair. He showed me dozens and dozens of pieces of work relating to enquiries that he’d sent out to work that I was doing and which hadn’t been replied. I told him not to worry and I’d help him with the replies anyway once I’d actually replied to his messages. I could see that this spectre of not having done any work for ages was suddenly now going to haunt me for some considerable time while I tried to put everything straight

This actually a recurring dream, isn’t it? Something similar occurs quite frequently during my dreams, although it hasn’t reared its ugly head for a while. Being overwhelmed with work that I haven’t done is, however, something to which I can relate these days as I don’t seem to be doing as much as I ought to do and it is building up.

Back in this dream again … "errr … which dream?" – ed … and here were two burnt-out tanks and also the remains of a Panther …indistinct … had come to the rescue. I’d been attacked by the same machine and it was being slowly destroyed. Then the second Panther turned up too late to save its colleague and ended up with a pounding and beating too

Have I dreamed something like this before in the recent past? If not, I don’t see how I’m stepping back into it. But then again, not very much surprises me about what goes on during the night in my bed. Not these days anyway.

so having dealt with all of that I settled down to think about maybe doing some work, and the telephone rang.

And I don’t know why it is that I can give unequivocal and concise instructions to two people, make sure that they are perfectly understood, and four months later to the day, nothing whatever has been done about it and we have to start all over again.

That’s the kind of thing that totally depresses me.

So after several phone calls I have to write a couple of letters and send a few e-mails, and that takes all of the morning until long after midday, compounded by the fact that I had to clean the print head nozzles in the printer again.

They say that if it’s not one thing, it’s another. But with me, it seems to be everything all at once.

So with letters written I had to send messages to my cleaner about posting them, and she’ll drop by in the morning to pick them up.

After the midday fruit I turned my attention to the radio programme that I’m preparing. And I managed to pair off the music, merge the songs together and write most of the notes for it. It won’t take long to finish tomorrow

And that’s some Famous Last Words, isn’t it?

For tea tonight I tried an experiment. I have a small circular metal dish that is for making small pies in the oven. I tried it in the air fryer and it fits.

consequently, with my pasta, veg and tomato sauce cooked in a saucepan, I fried a burger with onion and garlic in the air fryer in the little metal dish – and it cooked the food to perfection.

Too much perfection actually – I didn’t need to cook it for 10 minutes. 7 or 8 would have done just as well

But now I know that that works, I can experiment with more stuff. Roast potatoes, anyone?

So now that I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed when I’ve checked my blood pressure and had my medication.

Tomorrow morning I have a shopping list to write out for my cleaner. And then I’m going to be busy.

There’s bread to make of course followed by a chocolate cake to make and then I’m also going to experiment with some cream filling. If the mayonnaise worked so well, there shouldn’t be any reason why I can’t make a sweet variety and use it as a filling in a layer cake. Or even flavour it with chocolate.

Yes, I’m feeling like being bold and adventurous tomorrow morning and I’m wondering now what else I can make while I’m there with my cooking stuff out.

None of the aforementioned might work but as Edward Appleton said, "I rate enthusiasm even above professional skill" and for a moment I seem to be full of enthusiasm (which is not like me these days) so I intend to ride the wave.

However Théoden said "night changes many thoughts" and I wonder how I’ll be feeling in the morning. But as Mona Lott used to say in ITMA, "it’s being so cheerful as keeps me going".

Wednesday 21st February 2024 – I DON’T KNOW …

… why but I seem to have lost all of my motivation today.

It’s been rather flaky for several months, even years, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but today, there it was – gone. And never called me “mother” either.

It’s not as if I didn’t have a good night either. I was in bed early, wasn’t interrupted too much, all of that kind of thing. Anyone would have thought that I’d have been ready for anything.

But at some point during the night, and I wish that I knew where it was, all of my “get up and go” must have got up and gone, leaving me behind. And so that was that.

It was an early night too. It didn’t take too long to finish everything off after I’d done my notes. And then I hauled myself off to bed, pushing STRAWBERRY MOOSE out of the way. He’s worse than a cat, monopolising everything around here.

And for once, I had a good night’s sleep and I hardly remember being awoken at all during the night. I had my musculation band around my thighs, but it’s no good if it isn’t doing the exercises. I have been hoping for dramatic results from it but if things carry on like this, it’ll be unlikely.

And who was it a couple of months ago complaining about his awful sleep?

When the alarm went off I fell out of bed and went to fetch the blood pressure tester to see where we are. Last night was 17.7/10.2 and this morning it was 16.3/9.6, and still no-one has told me what to do to try to reduce it to this mythical figure of 14.0/9.0

Following this, I dragged myself off into the kitchen for the medication, all 10 items of it (11 or even 12 if I need them). There are 5 (and maybe 6 or even 7) to be taken at night before going to bed, and that’s not including the painkillers that I’ve been prescribed but don’t take, so when I walk around, I rattle.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m not a fan of painkillers. They’ll kill the pain for sure, and make it easier for you to move around, but how much damage are you doing to yourself by continuing to put weight on whatever is damaged and that you can’t feel it?

At least, with a pain, you know that you have to take it easy, walk rather gingerly, or find a work-around.

Back in here I listened to the dictaphone to find out what’s upon it. And there wasn’t much. Iceland was playing Scotland in a World Cup elimination match, the finals of the heats or whatever. The score had been 4-2 for Scotland in the first heat at Hampden and in the second heat the Icelanders were leading 2-0 so would qualify for the final stages on “away goals”. Then an incident occurred in the penalty area and a penalty was awarded to Scotland which they scored. Everyone looking at it later from slow motion replays couldn’t see any contact that might have led to a foul. It was up to the adjudicators to say that he’d awarded it because of contact – even though it was only slight, it was still contact. An Icelandic football player went over and punched him three times in the face. There was an inquiry and a really lengthy suspension for the Icelandic player. Even the newspapers said “you can’t do that as a football player”.

And this is all very reminiscent of the 1977 incident involving Joe Jordan and Welsh defender David Jones where Jordan clearly handled the ball in the Welsh penalty area during a World Cup qualifying match.

The referee however gave Scotland a penalty from which Scotland scored and which effectively ended Wales’s chance of qualifying for Argentina 1978 to which Scotland went.

Scotland also went to the 1990 World Cup in Rome and a few days before the start, as I was driving down the A500 towards the M6 overbridge, a double-decker bus went past overhead on its way southwards, painted dramatically overall as a blue-and-white saltire for Scotland.

Scotland’s performance at that World Cup was quite dismal and they were eliminated early. And as I was driving down the A500 towards the M6 overbridge a few days after their final match, a double-decker bus went past overhead on its way northwards, painted dramatically overall as a blue-and-white saltire for Scotland

Things had obviously not gone well.

Things didn’t go well for me today either, as I mentioned. The nurse came on time to give me my injection and to take a blood sample, and then I was left on my own for a while. I should have done plenty of work but somehow I just couldn’t make a start and I don’t know why.

We all have days like those, that’s for sure, but I seem to be having more of them than most

It was only when the cleaner arrived to clean the apartment and I had to stay in my room here that I actually pushed on and now the notes for the radio programme that I started yesterday are complete.

The aim once that was finished was to start on choosing the music for the next programme but I actually fell asleep, and not once either but twice and once in an … errr … very embarrassing place.

It reminds me of one particular time in Montreal.

Originally, I used to stay outside the city at Dorval, catch the 202 bus to the DuCollege Metro Station and then the underground into the city. It wasn’t until i became ill that I took up lodgings in the city centre.

Anyway, the problem with being in a hotel outside the city is that if I was feeling tired, I couldn’t go back to my room for a lie-down and a coffee.

However I did have certain places where I could go for a rest, but was always on the lookout for others.

One day while I was exploring the Complexe Desjardins shopping centre in the rue St Catherine, I came across the public conveniences. Now they looked clean, comfortable and tidy, and with my jacket rolled up tightly to make a good pillow, I was really comfortable riding the porcelain horse and leaning against the cubicle wall asleep.

What I hadn’t taken into account was that to deter the homeless and the layabouts like me from loitering, they arranged for an automatic flush of the toilets every 5 minutes, which was about 30 seconds after I’d gone to sleep.

That was quite embarrassing.

So being rather late for tea I was quite starving too. But it was another delicious leftover curry with vegetables, rice and a naan bread cooked to perfection and as I said last week, I’ll eat that again.

Something else that I’ve repeated about my tea … "and on many occasions too" – ed … is that the idea of using couscous as part of the filler for the stuffing has made a real difference – and a positive one at that.

So what will tomorrow bring? Gotthold Lessing tells us that "better counsel comes overnight" and I do feel better after a good, relaxing night’s sleep. But I don’t seem to be having too many of those right now. The last time that I had eight hours sleep, it took me three days to have them

In the meantime, I shall have to be just like Ernest Hemingway who said "I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake".

And doesn’t that sound just like me?

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: bouquet granvillais

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