Tag Archives: vegan ice cream

Friday 20th May 2016 – AND I’VE BEEN OUT TODAY TOO!

After breakfast I had a few things to organise and then round about 09:30 I hit the road for my place, calling at the Intermarché at Pionsat on the way in order to buy some bread for lunch.

At home I had a little rest of an hour or so and then I started to collect up the stuff that I need for Belgium (and also for Canada, just in case I have the possibility to go there later this year). A few things I couldn’t find, and a few things I forgot, but I’ll call there tomorrow on my way out to the motorway and finish off a few things.

This afternoon, I took it easy. I’ve cut my hair and had a shower – so I’m nice and clean and tidy ready for the journey back home. I’ve done a load of washing too and even as I speak, it’s going round and round in the dryer because there won’t be enough time to dry it properly.

I’ve not planned my food resources correctly because I have some mushroom and lentil curry and also some home-made vegan ice cream left over. I’ll just have to come back another time to finish it off.

And now I’m off for a very early night. There will be no alarm clock in the morning because I intend to have a good sleep if I can. I’ve a long way to drive tomorrow and I’m not really up to it. I’ll have to do my best and see what happens. I can’t expect too much in my state of health.

But what was nice was that I had an e-mail from the Social Services department asking me how I was feeling and whether I’d been able to manage the journey back. That was a very pleasant e-mail – it’s nice to know that they have been thinking about me.

I didn’t catch up on my last night’s voyages, I was off on a different track completely. While I was waiting yesterday for Caliburn to have his contole technique, I was reading the local paper and noticed a story concerning someone whom I know in Pionsat. He’s been fighting a complicated legal battle for the last five years and judging by the news story and his post on his Social Networking site last night, he’s finally been successful.

And so last night, on my travels, I was involved with him in some way. It’s pretty-much a truism to say that there are no winners amongst the civilian population in a lengthy court case because whoever comes out on top, his card is marked and the authorities are hell-bent on revenge. And this was the case last night. This boy was harassed and harassed by the authorities and in the end was carried off and convicted of something or other. He’d left some of his possessions with me while he was away and I discovered a secret compartment in his affairs and the contents of this compartment went to show that maybe he wasn’t as innocent as he liked to appear. But, then again, who is? As you probably know, I have a theory that all humans are pretty much the same in the grand, and some are caught and others are not and that is the big difference.
Later on during the night I went for a walk and came across a huge mansion-type place across a field and lake and through a forest of cherry trees laden with blossom. I didn’t have my camera with me so I went back for it and then walked through the lake (it wasn’t very deep at first but I ended up over my knees by the time I reached the other side) to take a photo but of course my camera wouldn’t work. It turned out that this was some kind of Girls’ Schools something along the lines of Ampleforth College,with the girls wearing red and white checked dresses. This all rang a bell with me because I’d sat on some kind of committee where some novel educational programmes submitted by various schools had been judged, and while the winner was from some kind of mainstream school, one that had particularly impressed the committee was one that had been submitted by a person who had since gone on to become a senior teacher at this school. I was therefore interested to see if any of these novel ideas had been applied at the school and after having presented myself to the headmistress, I was granted research facilities at the school to examine the teaching and the recreational activities. I quickly adopted a committee of three sixth-form girls. I was impressed with the keenness and throughness of these girls, but not so impressed with the fact that when the bell went for the end of the day they immediately deserted and left me to do the tidying up and that sometimes went on for quite a while. One one occasion I went round to their room and “swept them out” with a large-bristled brush. Another thing that impressed me about the school was the fact that all of the food was vegetarian, although I was unable to find out if there were vegan options.

Sunday 8th May 2016 – I WAS A BIT PREMATURE …

… in my thoughts that I could turn of the air-conditioning in my room. By the time that I went back there at the end of the day, the thing had started up again and that was that. The night-nurse had a play with it later but he could only manage to slow it down rather than switch it off and so that was that.

It didn’t make a blind bit of difference though because firstly, the one right outside the door started off full-tilt a little later and secondly, we had an “incident” during the night. I’m not sure what it was but a group of family members which had stayed well-past the end of official visiting hours until the small hours of the morning suddenly upped sticks and went outside the room and two nurses came down, who promptly closed the security curtains around everyone else’s room entrances. One can only speculate.

I was awake until long after 01:00, again at 04:00, again at 05:30, again at 06:00 and I gave it up for good at about 07:00. By 07:45 I was encamped in the window seat in the day-room although with much less sun than before and with a nice pleasant breeze blowing in through the open door. But judging by the grief-stricken faces of the German-speaking family in there this morning, my speculation about the events of last night can only be correct. And later on, a nurse confirmed it when I asked her, although she was clearly unhappy to tell me.

I’d been on my travels too for quite a while during the night (so it can’t be the antibiotics that’s causing those then, can it?). I started off at home with my mother and my elder sister and we were as usual having a dispute. I needed everyone’s co-operation (and the chances of that every happening in our family were about zero, as anyone who has ever read any of this rubbish will realise) to be somewhere at 14:00. It was now 12:45 and nothing had happened and everyone seemed to be enjoying my discomfort. In the end I stormed out of the house, went off to a group of people – long-haired motorcyclists whom I knew – and we promptly all came back to my family’s garage-cum-service station (because last night that’s what we owned and that’s where we lived) and smashed the place and everything in it to smithereens and then burnt it down to the ground in an orgy of anger and destruction. It didn’t solve the problem of course but you’ve absolutely no idea how much better it felt.
Later, a friend and I were actually involved in the running of some kind of informal garage service. We’d taken over a derelict site that was still in working order (not the family one of course) and set ourselves up in business. I was dishing out the fuel from these dilapidated petrol pumps but I couldn’t let the cars go (there were only three of them anyway) because my colleague hadn’t come back with the paperwork that I needed (as you all know, I have a “thing” about recording fuel consumption, mileages and so on). When he did finally put in his appearance he had forgotten to bring the stuff with him so my plans were all of a waste of time. But then a car (a black Capri) appeared and asked for fuel, and an air line because the front offside (a RHD car) tyre was flat. My colleague said that the wheel bearing on that side had gone and needed to change it. The driver stuck his head over the wing of the car and asked if we needed to take the wheel off so I replied in the affirmative. He said “to blow the tyre up?” to which I answered that I thought that he was talking about the wheel bearing – you don’t need to remove the wheel to blow up the tyre.
A short while later, I was off a-wandering on the bank up to the railway station at the top end of Winsford. I don’t remember who was with me but one person might well have been Nerina (although I can’t be sure now) and the other was someone who was something of a long-term unemployed man who had to scratch around to make a living (reminding me very much of someone whom I used to know in Crewe in the early 1970s). We were walking up the bank and an aeroplane – a huge Guppy-type thing – passed right over our heads and descended even lower, passing over a village in the valley at less-than-rooftop height as it went into land at Manchester Airport (this is a good flight-path, I can tell you). The plane itself was painted white and belonged to the parcels carrier whose livery is white with dark red stripes and a kind of script writing (and whose name I will remember as soon as I press “Publish”). I asked our companion whether the planes flying as low as this overhead bothered him, to which he replied that these don’t, but the two that come over at 10:30 and 16:00 are devastating. We ended up back in his house and Nerina (or whoever) went into the kitchen to make food or something. The guy had been out for a while and came back, counting a sum of money which I reckoned to be about £120:00. This seemed to be his share of his “dole” money after his rent and other stuff had been paid. He told me that if I were to look in my jacket pocket I would find “a couple of quid”. This was intended to be for whoever was in the kitchen, for everything that she was doing for him, and he would be grateful if I could pass it on to her at a convenient moment.

Alison said that she would come to see me so I wandered back to my room to get prettied up ready for her visit – after all, I have to look my best, don’t I? And in my room I found a banana and a bottle of lemonade too. It’s like a hotel here and I’m so lucky.

When Alison turned up, she brought a few surprises with her. Such as, a pot of almond-based ice-cream, two cans of fiery ginger beer, two packets of dry toasts, one pack of rice cakes, two soya vanilla desserts, some strawberries, one partridge and one pear tree. The ice cream disappeared without trace right in front of her eyes and after she had gone, one of the vanilla desserts, the strawberries and some rice cakes went as well. And after she went, I went and made myself another cheese butty. My appetite is back and raging, isn’t it?

It was lovely to see Alison, though. A bright, cheerful, smiling face to match the sunshine outside. She stayed for almost two hours too which, at the price of parking here at the hospital, shows a major sacrifice. We had plenty of time to discuss my latest plans which, as you know, change with the weather (or, more likely, my state of health).

And if you think that that food was enough to be going on, that really isn’t all. My favourite little nursey, hearing that I couldn’t eat the bread on offer, went off and toasted a couple of rounds for me which was really nice of her. She even brought me an ice-cold bottle of lemonade afterwards so I must be clearly in her good books.

But apart from all of that, what else have I been up to today?

The answer is “loads and loads”.

I’ve finally been in the right frame of mind to have a huge attack at updating my blog.

You might remember that when I brought my blog in-house in 2013 all of the tags and links were missing, and the photos didn’t set right. I started a little plan of attack to correct it, which I have continued in a desultory kind of fashion but today I crashed right on, did the whole of April 2012 and some of July 2012 too (May and June need “special consideration” for which I need to concentrate). I just hope that I can maintain the momentum for the rest of the site.

So now I’m going to prepare for an early night. If I am being ejected tomorrow, I need to be on form. And furthermore, I need to know where I’m going to be living too because the girl at the Social Services was absent last week.

Good job that I have the fold-up bed and single quilt in the back of Caliburn, isn’t it?

Saturday 19th March 2016 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… I didn’t have to go anywhere today. And do you know what? Well, so I didn’t! The only time that I set foot out of the house was to fetch the bread from the boulangère.

Mind you, I’d been far enough on my travels during the night and so I reckoned that I owed myself day of peace and rest. The first part of last night’s adventure was quite gruesome. It concerns a man, a big businessman who was very rich whose sexual orientation was not restricted to members of the human race. Our attention had been drawn to him by looking through some old declarations that he had made of the income of a cinema that he ran, which had made a profit of just £205 but in actual fact the turnover ran into millions but was paid all out in expenses and there were various anonymous letters sent in alleging that this person was up to no good. As a result, we had this person under surveillance. We’d followed him to a party where he had met a girl who possessed the ability to transform herself into a dog and he found this to be quite interesting, so he went off with her at the end of the night. We talked to another girl at this party – she was a friend of the first girl – she wasn’t quite sure of what was happening. She was waiting for her boyfriend but it seemed as if he had deserted her for someone else. We were sympathising with her. We then picked up some news and so this girl, a small boy of about 6 or 7 and this girl piled into my car which was an E-type Jaguar hard-top with wire wheels to set off and see what was happening. One of the rear tyres on my car was damaged – there was some of the side wall which was breaking away due to the tyre having hit the kerb really hard and I hadn’t had time to change it. We shot off to the other side of this town nevertheless and found it to be under attack by aliens. This man had been parked up with this girl in his car in a quiet corner of this part of town and found himself right in the firing line. She had escaped, disguised as a dog, but he was trapped there. This girl and I had to brave the heavy fire of these aliens and run through the barrage to his car to extricate him and stick him in the back of my car. The girl who had come with me told me that she would stay behind to hold off the aliens to give me an opportunity to take this man away in my car and take him to a clinic. This was urgent because something had happened to him – whether it was to do with this girl or to do with an interaction with these aliens, but he was transforming himself into some kind of ugly monster and I had to throw a blanket over him to hide him from passers-by and from this boy. The girl gave me definite instructions where to take him – I must go to his clinic and only to his clinic because they had his records and probably knew something about his condition. So we shot off, braving the barrage of fire and with this bad tyre that was now becoming urgent and drove through the streets of this place, which bore more than a passing resemblance to Chester. On a corner of a street was another girl whom we knew and who had some connection with this man, and she was talking to the matron of the clinic where this guy usually went for treatment. We took the car round to the clinic, as the matron told us where it was, and we tried to persuade the people at the clinic to send out a stretcher and some men to take our passenger inside discreetly. However they insisted on doing things formally and we ended up being submerged in administration and paperwork while this man’ condition was deteriorating rapidly and the other girl was out on the edge of town under attack from aliens and I needed to get back there to rescue her. But this bureaucracy was stopping me from doing anything.
Later on, I was living in a house with a lot of kids and adolescents.We’d all been to church very early on one Sunday morning (which of course is highly unusual) and then we came back to start to think about breakfast. In the meantime, I’d been playing with one of the small girls, sitting her on my shoulders and giving her a run around. We had a lot of fun doing that and then came back to see the little puppy that these people had, playing around with some huge husky-type dogs and they were all having a really good time. I went of to make some toast for my breakfast but someone had already filled the grill pan with bacon. I simply put my bread on a higher level of the insert in the grill pan (we come across some astonishing items during our nocturnal rambles, don’t we?) and put that underneath the grill (why I didn’t use a toaster is something totally beyond me). I was halfway through writing an essay of some kind but I had to get up and do something, and in the meantime the girls who were involved with this bacon came downstairs and saw their bacon almost cooked so they sat down to eat it, right where I had been sitting writing my essay. I heard the two girls discussing my essay and saying that they had finished it off for me, writing that wherever I had reached in my essay was all down to feminist antagonism. I had to quickly grab hold of my essay and sit down to rewrite it and edit out their ending.

What with all of that, no-one was more surprised than me to be up and about yet again, a long time before the alarm going off. I had a nice leisurely breakfast and after the nurse had been I sat down to catch up on a pile of paperwork, an activity only briefly interrupted by my decision to go for a shower, which I can do now that my trials and tribulations at the allergy clinic are over.

This afternoon, I sat down to do my medical expenses. I need them to be up-to-date before I go off to Leuven tomorrow afternoon. Just a mere 50% of my pension this month, and that’s still with a few outstanding. It goes without saying of course that I haven’t yet had the reimbursement of the last lot that I sent in. After all, it’s only been three weeks!

We had leftovers for tea tonight, and by that I mean the leftover vegan meatballs from the other week that were put in the freezer. and like most spicy food, the longer it’s kept, the better it tastes. With spaghetti and tomato sauce they were delicious, especially washed down with home-made vegan ice cream.

So tomorrow, I’m off. But before I go I have to pack and to check Caliburn’s oil and water, and to wash and clean the camping stove. I have remembered the kettle and water but I’ve just realised that I’ve forgotten the coffee!

There’s always something, isn’t there?

Sunday 13th March 2016 – PHEW!

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

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

You have been warned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good night!

Friday 4th March 2016 – HAVING MADE THE EFFORT …

… to dash downstairs ready for the nurse as soon as the alarm went off this morning, it goes without saying that he didn’t arrive until about 08:30. But then, that’s typical, isn’t it?

Mind you, I was lucky to be here at all because I had travelled quite a long way during the night. And that’s despite it taking me ages to drop off to sleep last night too. Despite my little walk, an early night and an exciting hour or so watching “The Raiders Of Tombstone Canyon” or some such, I was still tossing and turning around at 23:30. Clearly the effects of my nightmare last night were having something to do with all of that.

But eventually, off I went. And “off” is the right word to use too. Belgium was the first destination last night and there was quite a large mob of us in the Belgian public transport system, which included my brother (him again?) and my niece in Canada and a couple of her girls. It was almost as if we had been to a family gathering and I do remember Shavington featuring in here somewhere – Hunter’s Avenue being where we got onto this bus. Once aboard, the conductress came round to check our tickets and she overheard me talking to someone, telling them a most improbable story about 2 different lines on the Montreal Metro. “Oohhh” she said. “Do you know the Montreal Metro then?” and so we had a lengthy chat about Montreal (very reminiscent of something that really did happen to me on a bus in Montreal a few years ago where it turned out that the driver was not only from Brussels in Belgium – he recognised my accent – but actually drove on the route that I used to take to see my friend Marianne, so we spent the journey chatting about that route). So after all of that, she checked my ticket, which was one of these Belgian 10-pass tickets but I had forgotten to stamp it when I got on the bus so as a favour to me she took it off with her to stamp. But it kept on showing up an error, so I thought that it had probably run out and so I needed a new one, but for some reason I didn’t have any money on me. After yet another lengthy discussion, she agreed that she would let me off for this trip but I’d have to buy another ticket immediately as soon as I alighted – after all, we were planning to make quite a lengthy voyage involving a few changes of vehicle. And so we alighted at our first destination and so one of our party was asking where we could go to buy a ticket for the transport. There didn’t seem to be a ticket office anywhere. I seemed to remember that there was a place downstairs in the station where we could buy some of these ten-trip tickets and so that was where we headed. But here, at the entrance to the restaurant, was an automatic ticket machine (but it was blue like in Montreal, not yellow as in Brussels). I pointed it out and said that I may as well pick up my ticket here, so everyone else said that they would go downstairs to the railway station and buy my train ticket for me while they were waiting for me to join them. So I went off to the machine but the first side of it was actually a telephone, not a ticket machine. The second side of it had a huge queue hanging around by it, and the third side was out of order. I went to the fourth side of the machine and I was just on the point of trying to buy a ticket from here when I suddenly and inexplicably woke up.
After the usual trip down the corridor we were off again and this second part concerns a boy who was being kept as a slave somehow in a weird first-floor apartment and was being made to perform all kinds of household tasks and general slavery duties. He was determined that at the first available opportunity he would to make his escape, and he had some kind of confidant who would help him. His master, who resembled a kind of cross between Ebenezer Scrooge and Alastair Sim was equally determined that he wouldn’t, and so his life became even more grim. One day one of the windows breaks in this apartment – the day that the master is having to leave the same evening and be away all night until the following evening. It was the next day, the day that the master would be away until the evening, that this escape had been planned. Now with this broken window the master decides that he isn’t just going to have the pane of glass replaced but four complete new windows with frames at the back of the apartment overlooking the rear entrance to the courtyard. Some workmen arrive and they start to take out the old window frames and to fit new ones. As the work is progressing well, the master leaves on his journey and the young boy is delighted by being invited by the workmen to kick over all of the windows that have been stacked up against the wall and watching them break. But by the time the workmen come to finish for the day, there’s still one window not installed so they need to come back the next day. But with the window missing it’s easy for the boy to escape from the house and climb down a stack of old furniture that had been piled up against the rear wall of the house. And so he makes good his getaway. He ends up down West Street in Crewe, out by Merrill’s Bridge heading into town past the pubs and chip shops, being followed by this big ginger cat that allows him to stroke it but not pick it up. He passes by a pillar box that is crammed full of mail and a couple of postmen are busy trying to wrestle a couple of sacks of letters from it. And a little farther down the street there’s a railway level crossing with a branch junction that swings round immediately to the right to opposite where this pillar box was. Eventually, he ends up with friends and tells them some (but not all) of this story and how he is leaving the next day. In the meantime these people whom he’s visiting are loading all kinds of scrap paper into a shipping container and compacting it in with a hydraulic ram. It ends up with this boy having to go back to the apartment for some reason but he’s really worried in case the master has unexpectedly returned (why he couldn’t make his getaway that night I really do not know) but that’s a risk that he has to take. And the rest of this story becomes something of an anti-climax because he goes back, re-enters the apartment, the master hasn’t returned unexpectedly, and next morning with the aid of his friend he makes good his getaway and disappears into the sunrise to presumably live happily ever after.
After all of that it was my turn to look at a couple of short videos offering ideas for holiday venues. One that particularly caught my eye was a snow-swept Central European town and so off I went. I was walking up the street here in rather inclement weather, somewhere near a road junction, and some woman was driving down the hill slowly on the wrong side of the road, totally oblivious to me. She approached closer and closer and rolled forward to come to rest against my shin. Her car was one of these little Autobianchis, a red one, and I was musing to myself that I could flip it over with my foot, it was so small and lightweight.

At that moment, the alarm went off so I never knew how it all finished. I shot off downstairs, as I said.

This morning, I had plenty of things to do but I didn’t manage anything much because Liz and Terry left me here on my Tod while they went off to do some shopping. I had a good play around with my 3D program and tried out a couple of new techniques that I had been thinking about.

Lunch was left-over pizza (which, like anything else spicy, always tastes better the following day) and bread with vegan cheese spread. and then this afternoon, I made a start on one of my courses – this one being a basic Dutch course. I’m off to Leuven in a couple of weeks and I’ve forgotten most of my Flemish. Dutch and Flemish are very similar languages so if you can understand one you can understand the other, but I’m not sure how that’s going to work as most people can’t even understand me when I speak English.

But we did have some excitement today. Being fed up of waiting for my Insurance Company to phone me back, I sent another one of my incendiary e-mails. And having blistered the paint off the walls of the receiving office, I received a reply. Basically “please find attached our acceptance of your claim to be suffering from a serious illness”. It’s only taken them 7 weeks to agree this.

What it means in practical terms is that instead of being reimbursed the ceiling limit of claims, I can receive an ex-gratia payment to cover the costs of my actual expenditure, together with certain other benefits that would not ordinarily be covered. And that is certainly a great help as far as my finance go. I may even be able to afford to eat as well, if I am careful. It’s quite reassuring for my voyage to Leuven, which I was half-expecting to have to pay out of my own pocket.

But talking of eating, I’ve had home-made vegan lentil-burgers for tea tonight, with chips and peas followed by vegan ice cream. Liz made the burgers and I was lucky enough to be in the kitchen just as she was starting. Consequently, I had a grandstand view of the whole procedure and have made copious notes.

Now, I’m off for my little walk up the hill again, even if it is pouring down with rain and has been all day, and then I’m off for another early night.

Sunday 28th February 2016 – THE DOGS …

… managed to behave themselves last night. I hardly heard a peep out of them. But nevertheless, I was taking no chances and you have no idea just how pleasant it is, lying there in the dark with headphones listening to really good music at something of an impressive volume. I awoke briefly at 00:30 just in time to hear the tail-end of my Simple Minds concert, and that made me feel so much better.

But just a litle word of caution – when I went to the bathroom, I had to leave my bed on the left-hand side (which is what I do here, although not what I do at home) because of the floor on the right-hand side being littered with all kinds of stuff relating to my illness. I’m not quite sure what, but then logic has never really played a great part in anything that might (or might not) go on during the night.
After the customary trip down the corridor, I fell back into the arms of Morpheus and ended up somewhere in mid-Cheshire, at a Tesco supermarket (although the facade of the building did actually seem to be the Morrison’s supermarket in Winsford). I was carrying a bottle of water and looking for the manager, who eventually appeared to see me. I explained that I was from the Tesco supermarket at Whitchurch and when we were checking the shelves we found a bottle of water in a place where it shouldn’t have been on the shelves, and so it would seem to have been delivered to us in error. I was therefore taking the opportunity to return it. He took the bottle, went immediately over to the cold shelves, and there stacked in amongst the lettuce was another bottle of water of the same time. He said therefore that it must have been done in some kind of error and there was no problem or issue about our having this bottle of water.
So clutching a giant packet of crisps which I had somehow acquired, I left the supermarket and mounted my bicycle. I had the idea to telephone a girl that I knew in the Whitchurch area to see if she fancied coming out for a drink, seeing as I now had an hour or two to spare, and if she turned me down it would be no big deal. But my battery showed just 3% charge and so I needed to charge it up in the van. I freewheeled off down the steep hill to the car park and this involved a sharp right-hand turn into the car-park entrance. I remember pelting down this hill and swerving sharply into this car park entrance, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to make the turn. And just as we reached the crucial point, whether I’d miss the entrance, overshoot, fall off, hit the kerb or make it round, the alarm went off and I sat bolt upright in bed.

At least, despite everything, I’d had a reasonable night’s sleep.

After breakfast and after the nurse, I pushed on with the dictaphone notes. All of France 2014 is now done and dusted and I’ve started on the final batch of football notes. There were about 70 soundfiles of those to deal with and now the number is down to about 50. With a bit of luck, God’s help and a Bobby, this might be up-to-date by next weekend too. This will be progress, I’m sure. All that I need to do then, next time that I’m home, is to save it all to an external drive and then burn a CD with all of the files. Then, I can clear the dictaphone.

I’ve tidied up my paperwork too and managed to find the details of the next appointment that I have at the hospital. This seems to be Monday 7th March, although Liz and I are both convinced that there’s something mentioned about Friday 4th. I suppose that I’ll have to ring them up to find out.

This morning we had a snowstorm too. Just a small one for half an hour and nothing stuck, but just a reminder that winter hasn’t yet departed.

For tea, Liz and terry had chicken. But I was the lucky one, for there was some of yesterday’s curry left over. What with a baked potato and a naam bread that was discovered deep down in the freezer, I had a meal fit for a king. So much so that there was no room left for any vegan ice-cream.

So tomorrow is Monday.people will be back at work and so I’ll be expecting a “response” to the rather incendiary e-mail that I sent out on Friday, but I’ll also have to set Plan B in motion because I can’t wait any longer to start something off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday 15th February 2016 – WHAT A NIGHT!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday 26th January 2016 – I WAS RIGHT!

I had an absolutely dreadful night last night. They finally connected up the blood at 00:45 and then I tried my best to go to sleep. I know that I had dropped off but it felt as if I was awakened almost immediately. They said about an hour – but I was unconvinced – but anyway, they needed to connect up the second pochette.

So off to sleep again. And an hour later, we went through the pantomime yet again.

And then we had the blood pressure test

And then the blood sample

And so it went on throughout the night. Just as I was settling down, I was awoken yet again.

I came round when the breakfast was served and I even managed to scrounge a second cup of coffee, such as it is, for which I am always grateful. They even brought me some things to have a shower, and I found a razor and some clean undies at the bottom of my bag. But the shower was interesting – with the drain and the tube in my arm, I couldn’t take my nightgown off so I was involved in some interesting contortions, but at least I’m all clean.

We had a moment’s excitement too. Two young student nurses came to change my bedding. And when they had finished, they asked “do you need us for anything else?” Being in hospital clearly has its compensations – but I’ll be expelled yet again before much longer. I’ve never seen girls go as red as they did when I replied that that was the best offer that I’ve had in 35 years.

A short while later, someone brought round something for me to drink. It was absolutely disgusting. Upon making enquiries I was told that my potassium count was too high and this drink was to bring it down. Personally, I think that it was a punishment for teasing the students.

The chief nurse came around later. Apparently my blood count is now 7.6 and that’s not high enough. They plan to keep me in and give me some more pochettes. I’m totally opposed to that idea as you know. I have things to do and I can’t do them while I’m still in hospital. I explained that I would be coming in tomorrow morning for good and a blood transfusion is already planned anyway. It’s pointless. And in any case, the blood sample was taken ar about 06:00 and it’s now 11:20. Had they decided at 06:00 that they would be giving me a third pochette, I could have had it already and been long-gone from here.

And so she went off to talk to the surgeon.

20 minutes later, she was back. And we had another delightful conversation.
Chief Nurse – “the surgeon says that you can go home now and come back in tomorrow as planned”
Our Hero – “good. I’ll get dressed then”
CN – “but we are rather concerned”
OH – “what is that?”
CN – “your blood count has only gone up to 7.6”
OH – “and what’s the problem with that?”
CN – “I understand that you came in your car. We don’t think that you are capable of driving home safely”
OH – “but it was 6.4 last night”
CN – “so I’ve been told – but I don’t see how that’s relevant”
OH – “well, it’s like this. If you don’t think that I’m safe enough to drive home with a blood count of 7.6, how come you thought that I was safe enough to drive here with a blood count of 6.4?”
At that, I was allowed to drive home by myself.

They took the drain out, spilling onto the floor most of the blood that they had given me, and I was off. Just as far as the café by the crossroads on the edge of town where I stopped for a good strong coffee and baguette and to gather my wits.

I spent the afternoon round at my place doing a few major tasks and sorting out a few objects that I needed, as well as generally relaxing. Then Terry came to pick me up – Caliburn is staying at my house while my future is being sorted out.

We finished off the vegan curry and then I finished off the vegan ice cream. No point in wasting it, so they better hadn’t ring up now to cancel my appointment. Final job was to write the two letters that needed doing and now that’s it. Whatever else isn’t done will now have to stay undone until I come back.

If I ever do.

Friday 25th December 2015 – MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I was going to say “Merry Christmas to all my readers” and to refer you to the old tale about Crewe Bus Station – the one that I have recounted before. Every year, in fact, or so it seems, so I’ll give you a rest this year.

Instead, I’ll simply refer you to my nocturnal rambles, such as they were and, more importantly, such as I remember because one thing that I’ve learnt this last evening was that it doesn’t matter whether I do have anything to drink or not during the evening, I still have to leave the comfort of my stinking pit on several occasions, something that breaks up my rhythm of sleep and, more often than not, causes all memory of my nocturnal rambles to disappear.

What I do remember about last night was struggling up Gresty Road past the football ground, dragging two huge suitcases with me. I was heading for a cheap hotel and I knew that there were rooms available at my price range in a dingy hotel down on the east side of Mill Street (in the days before that whole area was wiped away in the slum clearances) but much nearer to where I was going was the Royal Hotel up on Nantwich Road. And while this was a much more expensive hotel, there were a few rooms available at just £20:00 and I’d stayed in one of them once before. So hoping that there was still something of that nature available, in I went. Struggling through the door was one thing, navigating my way through the dining room and all of the false partition walls was another thing entirely. And when I did finally find the reception desk, people kept on pushing in front of me and there I was, worrying that if there were any rooms at £20:00, they would be all long gone by the time that I was seen to.
Somehow we wandered on past there into Nantwich and there I encountered a girl who had lived close to where we lived as kids in Shavington and who went to the same school as me. In real life she was a “big” girl, and I DO mean big, but last night she was a quarter of the size, with different-coloured hair and a very different personality – a completely different girl in fact. But seeing as how I never ever thought for a moment about her at the time, then how come, over 40 years later, she suddenly appeared last night? That’s probably the most bizarre thing about all of this

There was much more to it than that too, but that’s long since gone out of the window.

Anyway, there I was, crawling out of bed some time (but not much) after 07:45 and having my morning injection. Breakfast consisted of speciality bread (I had fig, nut and raisin bread rolls) and a huge home-made fruit salad that was absolutely delicious.

No need for me to tell you what happened next.

With a couple of young kids in the house we had Christmas-present-opening. Father Christmas had been and left piles of presents around the tree. And even Strawberry Moose entered into the festive spirit of events by supplying presents to all of the people present, such a friendly and generous moose that he is.

Everyone had a great time opening their presents and then we stopped for food

We decided that there would not be a big meal as such, but instead we would eat at intervals throughout the day. 12:30 saw us tucking into the starters, which was a kind of running buffet of all kinds of different nibbles. Raw vegetables in France prepared ready for eating are called crudités which is highly appropriate considering that I am here. After all, if you want crudities, then no-one is more qualified than Yours Truly.

There was a great deal of chatting to friends on the laptop too, although I didn’t have much to say to anyone. Most of my friends have their own family lives and Christmas is, after all, a time for families.

We had our main course at about 16:30. A real Christmas dinner with all of the correct veg including roast potatoes, and brussels sprouts cooked to perfection. I had a big slice of nut roast that went down a treat.

Dessert was at 18:30 and, unfortunately, no Christmas pudding. No-one but me likes it around here. Instead, there was a couple of bûches de Noël and for me, a Black Forest gateau, made of home-made vegan chocolate cake and home-made ice cream in a very large coupe and topped off with soya cream.

But one thing that was astonishing this evening was the moon. It’s full moon today, the first time that it’s been full moon on Christmas Day since 1977. And a huge moon that it was too.

Unfortunately, the camera on my mobile ‘phone isn’t up to as much as I would like it to be and so it can’t reproduce the moon as it was, but it’s the best that I can manage.

And so that was Christmas. Nothing much happened from my point of view but that’s not important. In a house with young kids, the most exciting part of it all is watching the delight on their faces as they see what Santa has brought them. That was certainly very much to the fore today. It’s all about kids and all about families, and I can have my own private Christmas another time.

Wednesday 23rd December 2015 – I KNEW THAT IT WAS A MISTAKE …

… to drink that half-litre of sparkling water with blackcurrant syrup last night. I was up and down like a yo-yo all through the night and I didn’t really have a very decent sleep because of it. Serve me right.

And the film that I saw – the James T Wong film – was the first time that I’d seen it. It was the first one of the series apparently and Boris Karloff had only a supporting role rather than the lead role that he had later in the series. And the film lost quite a lot because of it. The plot was rather thin and the denouément was rather weak.

Anyway, I was up at the usual time, had my injection and then had my breakfast. It was about 11:00 when everyone was ready to leave and so while they shot off to Montlucon and shopping, I went round to my house to check it over and relax for a while. Surprisingly (or maybe it isn’t), even though the day was grey and depressing, the batteries were fully-charged and the water was heating up nicely.

I headed off to Montlucon at about 14:00 and went to Carrefour, but I couldn’t remember what it was that I wanted to buy so it was rather pointless. And then I went off to the hospital.

16:30 was my appointment, and so I was seen bang on 17:45, and least I now know what they think might be up with me. Apparently I have a lymphoma of the ganglions, and the cure for that is quite drastic. They intend to take out my spleen. The spleen is also the organ that controls a great deal of the immune system and so while removing the spleen MIGHT (and only “might”) solve the lymphoma problem, it might provoke problems all of its own.

But it did lead to an interesting dialogue –
Doctor – “I’m afraid we are going to have to take your spleen out”
Our Hero – “Blimey – isn’t that a really difficult operation?”
Doctor – “Rubbish! Generations of surgeons have been taking the backbone out of politicians for almost 100 years! It’s child’s play by comparison!”

Anyway, after the holidays, they will arrange an appointment for me with the surgeon and the anaesthetist and we’ll see what happens then.

So rather chastened by the news I headed back here to tell Liz.

Liz – “Are they going to do that here?”
Our Hero – “No Liz – not in the kitchen”

To cheer me up, there was home-made ice-cream. The strawberry was excellent but as for my inspiration of the choco-mint-chip (made by the simple expedient of grinding up a mint-chocolate bar into a litre of coconut milk), it was astonishingly good. I was amazed.

At least that cheered me up. And I needed cheering up too because that wasn’t the only bad news that I had had. I mentioned to the doctor the story about the twice-daily injections and she confirmed that unfortunately they do have to continue.

So I shan’t be having my lie-in after all. Drat and double-drat!

-1

Tuesday 22nd December 2015 – WELL, I HAD THE CALL!

Yes, at about 09:30.

“Mr Hall, we’ve had your blood test results. You need to come in this morning for a transfusion”
“I’m still waiting for the District Nurse to come, and it’s over an hour’s drive to Montlucon, you know.”
“Well you really need to be here before midday”.

And so that was that. With no District Nurse by 10:30, I was off and gone – on my way to Montlucon.

Mind you, I was off and gone long before that. Despite having once to leave my bed (for the usual reasons), I had a really good night to make up for the dreadful one that I had had the night before. And I was running the Formula One racing network too. My youngest sister was driving one of the cars and my niece in Canada was doing the voice-over television commentaries. However, we were under attack in our house (which bore a strange resemblance to Hankelow Hall, the abandoned stately home where we squatted back in the 1970s, except that there was a more modern extension built onto the back) by people who wanted to take over the running of the organisation. We were trying to defend it resolutely but looking out of the back, I noticed that a load of gear, including skis (for some reason), was being passed from the new extension into our house on the floor below through a window that should have been guarded by my elder sister. The door into our room was then battered down and into the room surged a crowd of people, TV cameras, everything, and my sister saying that we had all agreed to pass on our rights to this new company. I however made it quite clear that she was not speaking for me.
From there via several removes, I ended up back at my house in Gainsborough Road Crewe where I was living with a woman who was about 20 years older than me, and we had a daughter of about 11. The behaviour of this woman was extremely bizarre, which puzzled the girl and me a great deal.

So after breakfast, we had to play Hunt The Moose again. Today, Strawberry Moose was in the sun-lounge camping. And also reading a story to his new best friend Violet the sock-sloth.

Robyn was keen to join in of course. She loves having stories read to her and no-one reads stories like Strawberry Moose. And in exchange, she drew a beautiful picture of him.

At the hospital car park, there was hardly anyone about so I had a good spec right by the entrance just 200 metres from the front door of the hospital. And they were waiting for me when I arrived, which made a nice change.

“Only one go” I said to the nurse trying to inject the drain into me. “They had four goes last time that I was here”
And so she did it in one, and a more painful injection I have never had. Total agony.

Lunch wasn’t up to much unfortunately, but you can’t expect much in the way of special diet when you turn up a l’improviste. However, I had foreseen this, having been caught out last time, and I had packed a packet of crisps, a handful of Liz’s home-made vegan biscuits and a banana. They didn’t ‘arf go down well. What was not so acceptable was the inexcusable, unpardonable sin of forgetting me when it came to bringing round the afternoon coffee. The fact that I MAY just have closed my eyelids to give my tired eyes a rest is neither here nor there. What you can be sure of is that harsh words were exchanged – and I did get my coffee.

I also got something else quite important too. The internet speed at the hospital is quite respectable for a public place, and so I profited by downloading a huge pile of radio programmes and a Mr Wong film from archive.org. That should boost up my supply of listening and watching matter if I’m going to be incarcerated elsewhere.

And talking of that, I was also speaking to my friend Alison, with whom I used to work at The Conference Board – that weird American company in Brussels. She had a very serious operation in Belgium and was full of praise over the treatment and care that she received. I’ve always said that Belgian health-care is the best in the world and that is where I would go if I were ever seriously ill, and so I asked her which hospital it was that she used.

It’s the one at Leuven, and having made enquiries, Alison told me that there is in fact a dedicated lymphoma department there. Furthermore, she rang them and it transpires that they would be glad to talk to me, and they passed their number onto her to give to me.

Why I’m doing this is that they have already told me that they don’t have the facilities to treat me in Montlucon. If I need treatment I have to go elsewhere. Clermont-Ferrand is, at the limit, acceptable because I’m still within some kind of travelling distance of possible visitors and facilities, but anywhere else is uncharted territory with no possibility of visits. Smuggling supplies into the hospital will therefore be extremely difficult and I’m not going to survive on what food a hospital can offer me.

Not only that, I’m dismayed at how much Flemish I have forgotten since I’ve left Brussels. I reckon therefore that a spell of immersion in a Flemish-speaking environment will do me the world of good.

An added advantage of Leuven is that there’s a Belgian 2nd-Division football club – OH Leuven, in the immediate vicinity and public transport in Belgium is very good. I’m sure that I can smuggle myself out of hospital occasionally on a Saturday night. If so, I can track down a fritkot too, and Alison has already promised to be my conduit for illicit food parcels.

I was thrown out of the hospital by 16:00 and I was wondering whether to go home for an hour or so but I wasn’t feeling up to much so I came back here. As a surprise, Liz and Kate have made me some vegan ice cream – strawberry and also choco-mint. It wasn’t ready for tea though but it will be fine for tomorrow. I hope that I’m still here to eat it, and not detained elsewhere.

I met up with the District Nurse too. He’s concerned about the continued use of this anti-coagulant and reckons that I ought to speak to the doctor about it tomorrow. he can understand why I needed it but it seems to him that the crisis has passed. He reckons that it’s now at the stage where it can be doing more harm than good, especially if I keep going for the total of three months for which it has been prescribed.

I’m all in favour of that. It’s costing me an arm and a leg for a start, and it will also mean that I can go back to having my Sunday morning lie-in. These continued 07:45 starts are killing me off.

-2

Thursday 14th May 2015 – BATTLING BRAVELY ON …

… despite the crashed hard drive in the laptop, I’m prepared to confront the morning.

Hans made breakfast, and I really do mean that, because today is Himmelfahrt, Ascenscion Day, and everywhere is closed, including the bakeries. What Hans did was to bake a loaf of bread and if I knew anyone in France who could bake bread quite like that, I’d never ever visit a bakery ever again.

With it being a Bank Holiday, theres a festival down the road in the town of Friesing. And in a German festival, they dont bother with just a simple pie hut or a French buvette, they go the whole hog, with beer tent and ooom-pah band.

And much to my complete surprise, one of the food stalls is selling just vegan roducts so I celebrate Himmelfahrt and the vegan pie hut with a late of falafel.

There are all kinds of things and all types of entertainment going on here too, including a barber’s shop quartet. Complete with real barbers too, it has to be said.

The young lad on the right isn’t all that impressed, is he? Mind you, the music wasn’t my style either although there was no disputing the ability of the singers. That’s the kind of thing that you can’t deny.

In the evening we went to the beer garden just down the road from Hans’ apartment.

It’s the centre of the local universe and seeing as how Hans knows everyone around here, we ended up being quite a crowd. Strawberry Moose met plenty of new friends and became quite popular with the locals.

another thing about this area is once again to do with vegan food. Theres an ice-cream parlour in one of the array of shops around the beer garden and so I wandered off, more in hope than expectation, to see what they had.

Sure enough, there was a choice of about 10 flavours of vegan ice cream (mostly sorbets, but vegan none-the-less) and so I made the most of the opportunity.

Back at the apartment, I had left the laptop running all day to see if it might repair itself past the point at which it keeps stalling. But to no avail. I’m going to have to write this off as a total loss, I reckon.

Thats a catastrophe, but it can’t be helped.

-1

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: vegan ice cream

Friday 20th May 2016 – AND I’VE BEEN OUT TODAY TOO!

Sunday 8th May 2016 – I WAS A BIT PREMATURE …

Saturday 19th March 2016 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

Sunday 13th March 2016 – PHEW!

Friday 4th March 2016 – HAVING MADE THE EFFORT …

Sunday 28th February 2016 – THE DOGS …

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

Monday 15th February 2016 – WHAT A NIGHT!

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

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

Tuesday 26th January 2016 – I WAS RIGHT!

Friday 25th December 2015 – MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Wednesday 23rd December 2015 – I KNEW THAT IT WAS A MISTAKE …

Tuesday 22nd December 2015 – WELL, I HAD THE CALL!

Thursday 14th May 2015 – BATTLING BRAVELY ON …

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