Tag Archives: crash out

Friday 6th January 2023 – I’VE HAD MY FIRST …

… home delivery from the supermarket today.

They said that my delivery slot would be between 18:00 and 20:00 and so it turned up at … errr … 17:15 before I’d made room to put everything away.

There were several things that didn’t work out.

Firstly, there’s a minimun limit of €50:00 and so despite the cupboards being quite bare in here, I had to scratch around to make up a worthwhile order. At least I now have plenty of rice, pasta, tomato sauce and stuff like that.

Secondly, prices are somewhat elevated. I’m paying a fair bit more than I would in the shop and so, added on to the €9:95 delivery charge, my shopping bills are going to be expensive for a while.

Thirdly, some of the stuff isn’t what I ordered. For example, the soya has come with added vanilla rather than the variety that has added calcium. And I don’t like vanilla in my soya.

However, everywhere is now stocked up which is good news. And I had a lovely tea tonight. Burger on a bap with chips and a salad and for the next couple of weeks I reckon that my meals will go back to being quite exciting again.

What I’m going to do though when stocks run down is another issue. There’s only so much bulk goods that I can store. I suppose that the next load, in a couple of weeks’ time, could have a supply of coffee as I’m starting to run low on that. But then I shall haveto have a good think.

And who knows? Maybe I’ll be better by then and can go and do the shopping on my own.

But one thing that I can say, and that is that this idea of ordering food to be delivered is actually an idea that is practical and it works well enough to stop me starving to death.

It should be said though is that perhaps in the past I’ve had the finger pointed at me by some people because of the amount of tinned stuff that I’ve had on hand here. I made the point that it’s all here for an emergency and it’s just as well that I had it here when I came back from hospital. That was what I called an “emergency”.

Perhaps last night should have been an emergency too because nothing seemed to go according to plan. I don’t know why but I just wasn’t tired at all. I was still up working at 05:00 this morning.

At some point rather later than that I did go to bed. I switched off the alarm because there was no point trying to heave myself out at 07:30 but even so, I was awake at 09:20. I couldn’t go back to sleep either and so I gave it up at about 10:00 and made a start.

To my surprise, there was even some stuff on the dictaphone so I must have had some kind of decent sleep at some point. I had a cat at at one moment during the night but can’t remember anything about it.

Later, it was carnival and fête time. There was a carnival and fête at Crewe and also at Nantwich. I was at the one at Nantwich round by the White Horse. Everyone was having a tremendous time. I’d arranged to meet my sister and her family back at her house with the idea that she could go to the hairdresser’s and then come on to one of the fêtes afterwards. After a while and I hadn’t heard from her I contacted her. She was ‘oh crikey! Oh I’m really sorry. I haven’t done it yet” etc, going way over the top making wild excuses. In the end I told her that what I wanted to talk to her about was the fact that with the Nantwich Carnival being so good we should all go round to Nantwich after. She thought that that was the best idea. But it was another one of these occasions where everyone was taking so long to be ready that I was convinced that by the time we were ready to go back everything would be all over.

It tok me a while to warm up, as you might expect, and then I finished off the radio programme that I’d been trying to do yesterday. That’s done now which is just as well, and starting Monday I’ll be doing two each week in order to catch up with where I want to be. I like to have about 6 months of programmes in advance because no-one knows what the future has in store for me. Seven weeks in hospital sending off radio programmes that I was unable to replace with others has made quite a hole in my little stock.

Having done that, I went through my order for the supermarket and sent it off. The plan was then to make space on the shelves so that I’d have somewhere to put it when it came but that fell by the wayside somewhere.

There are also developments with my little project that is simmering away in the background. I’ve been copied into an e-mail between two other people that shows that there is considerable progress going on behind the scenes. Maybe before too long I’ll have something to report in this respect.

At some point in the early evening I crashed out for half an hour. That’s no surprise given the rough night that I had What was a surprise was that it was for only half an hour.

Tea was delicious, as I mentioned earlier. The salad made quite a change and it won’t do any harm to have a couple more here and there. I don’t want to eat all of the frozen veg too quickly.

Tomorrow I’m going to have to make some plans. There are 1.5kg of carrots to peel, dice, blanch and freeze for a start although I’m not sure exactly where I’m going to put them as the freezer is once more packed to the gunwhales. I really should have bought a bigger freezer but I suppose that I would have filled that just as quickly too.

And at least there’s plenty of food here again and I can relax a little about that for now. Looking back over my last few meals I’ve been eating really well despite the limited supplies here. Things should start to become interesting now that my shopping order has come.

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Wednesday 4th January 2023 – MY SHEPHERD’S PIE …

… was absolutely delicious this evening. With the left-over pie filling from Christmas, the left-over mushrooms from the weekend and topped with potato mashed in milk and butter( vegan, of course), and not to mention made with real shepherds, it was really nice with vegetables and gravy.

This is going to be something that I’ll have to work on for the future – although I doubt that it will be every day that I have a mugful of lentil and tofu pie-filling lying around left over from a previous project.

It was much better than the sleep that I had last night, that’s for sure. I have a problem with an ingrowing toenail on my left foot and last night it began to play up – to such an extent that I had first to take off my elastic stocking and seeing that it didn’t resolve the problem, to take off the plaster that was protecting the toe.

That didn’t seem to help very much either, but at some point I managed to doze off into sleep. I ended up with the guys off The Navy Lark, Pertwee, Johnson and someone else. It was my birthday so I’d been round to see if they would come out with me but for some unknown reason the 2 girls didn’t realise that it was my birthday, they were busy or they didn’t want to come or something so in the end it was just the 4 of us. Just as we were leaving Pertwee’s apartment the telephone rang so we nipped back upstairs to see if it was anything for him. No it wasn’t, and nothing to do with any of us. They asked me where I’d like to go so I suggested that in the Chaussée de Wavre down the road there was a good Italian restaurant. Actually there were 2 but I meant a different one. They said “yes, let’s go there”. We walked down the Boulevard towards the Chaussée de Wavre and suddenly ended up in a restaurant, just the 4 of us, no-one else. The place was empty but it looked really nice, nice paintwork, curtains, tablecloths etc, very much the pastoral Italian place. I thought that if the food’s as nice as this place looks we should be OK here. We settled down at a table where there were 4 chairs by a fire.

When the alarm went off at 07:30 I was already awake but I wasn’t in much of a mood to leave the bed. I missed the second alarm too but when the third one went off at 08:00 I was actually up and about. High time that I showed willing.

Once I’d managed to come round into the Land of the Living, whenever that was, I made a start on tidying up in here. I was hard at it too and managed not only to put everything away and file away the pile of papers that had accumulated over the last few months, I wrote a couple of letters that were necessary – a couple of bills had come in at some point and I’d overlooked them.

All of that was enough to make me crash out for half an hour and I didn’t feel any regret because it does look so much better in the bedroom and I won’t be afraid or embarrassed to let people see inside here. In the run up to going away I had rubbish just about everywhere and nothing had improved since I’d been back. Quite the contrary, in fact.

My freidnly neighbourhood cleaner came round at 14:30 and spent an hour here. And she accomplished far more in the apartment in an hour than I have accomplished in all the time that I’ve lived here. She found tons of stuff that I’d missed as well and that was good news. I did wonder where half the stuff in this apartment had gone.

So it’s looking quite nice in the place at the moment. And as she catches up with the arrears it’ll look even nicer. I can’t wait for this place to look as if someone lives here.

Just now I mentioned tea. It really was nice and as I said yesterday, I ought to spend more time looking after myself properly as far as food goes.

And while I was at at, I had another look at my shopping list. I’ve decided that Friday afternoon is when I’ll send off my order to the supermarket and see how I get on with that. I’ll probably order a delivery every couple of weeks and in the meantime ask my cleaner if she’ll pick up some mushrooms for me on the weeks when I don’t pass an order. That was I can keep on top of everything.

And who knows? At some point I might even have another go at going to the shops myself if my walking improves. You never know.

But that’s for later. Right now, much later than I was hoping, I’m off to bed. Whether I sleep or not is another thing because I now have a pain in the other foot. It’s non-stop, isn’t it?

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Sunday 1st January 2023 – EVEN AS I …

… type, it’s just coming up to 02:45 tomorrow.

Not that I’m complaining because having spent the last couple of months in such an air of indolence, if I end up doing something I may as well carry on as long as I can. After all, it’s high time that I did some work some time.

Not like last night though. I was busy doing nothing until about 00:30 when I finally staggered off into bed and there I stayed until 11:00 this morning. I’d awoken a couple of times during the night, including having another one of these night sweats that I used to have so regularly.

That was always something that worried me to a certain extent. Whenever I went to the hospital, they used to ask me the same 20 questions, one of which was “do you have night sweats?”. And whether I replied “yes” or “no”, it didn’t seem to make any difference with what they were doing to me so I didn’t know why they ask.

Still, they aren’t going to ask me tomorrow, for the simple reason that I’m not going to be there. Firstly, transport is quite limited today and secondly, I can’t walk that far.

Breakfast this morning was beans on toast with sausage and home-made hash browns followed by toast with mushroom paté. That’s almost all of my holiday food eaten. Just the last of the beans and some of the mushroom paté to finish off tomorrow.

Strange as it might seem, I fell asleep this afternoon. Even after all of the sleep that I had. But I did manage to pair of the music for the next radio programme that I’ll be preparing. Not that I’ll be doing it tomorrow though because I’m having another lie-in to catch up on the fact that it’s both a Sunday and a Bank Holiday today so I’ve really missed the Bank Holiday lie-in.

No neighbours today. In fact no-one disturbed me at all which makes a change considering the way that things have been just recently. It was quite a peaceful day.

Tea was nice – vegan pie with vegetables and gravy. That pie that I made for Christmas was a resounding success and I’l have to remember the recipe. There’s some stuffing left so I might even push the boat out and have a shepherd’s pie – made of real shepherds of course.

Some stuff on the dictaphone from last night too. There was a group of us going out to visit some submarines last night, probably I dunno about 20 of us. We all boarded some kind of pilot boat and set out from shore to the deep water. The sea was quite rough and there was plenty of spray going about. We sailed over a couple of submarines that we could see below us and then a pile of World War II bomber aircraft that had obviously crashed into the sea for scrapping that we saw down below. Then we were out in the bay about a mile or two and it really was rough. We pulled up alongside some kind of submarine. I had to call out the full names of the submarines one after the other so that people could sit in the right kind of position on board this pilot boat. Everyone was becoming soaked to death being taken off their boat onto this submarine thing. There were people with dogs. I wanted to make sure that the dogs were on board first before I moved otherwise that would be chaotic. Eventually we managed to have everyone moving and sorted out

And later I was in Canada last night driving, somewhere down the coast. There was a girl or woman hitch-hiking so I stopped to pick her up. She was going to the local supermarket to buy some stuff So I said that I’d run her as I had time. As we drove a little way along this road to where she told me to turn off I could see the signs for Miramichi so I knew where I was and was able to drive some of the way. I was torrential, pouring down with rain, a downpour. I took her so far. By now this passenger had turned into a guy. We were talking about old cars. He took me to some kind of abandoned street where there was a whole row of derelict houses. He took me down a pathway in between two derelict houses. I could see an old American car that I thought at first was a Peugeot 403 parked there. The closer I looked, I could see that there was probably about a dozen old cars there like an MG Allegro, a BMC MG1100, all kinds of things, all in various stages of disrepair. Some were quite valuable and interesting. Others had been cut up with an angle grinder. We talked about these. I asked if I could take some photos of them. He told me that I could but to leave one particular car out. He was by now this woman again. She asked me why I didn’t come down here every Saturday to have a play with them. That idea appealed to me somewhat for a variety of reasons. By now there were lots of other people down there, members of my family, so I took my camera and asked them all to stand still while I took some photos. It had to be a very long exposure because it was dark. For some reason the photos wouldn’t take. I was there for several seconds with my finger on the shutter trying to take these photos but they were just coming out blurred because the shutter wasn’t clicking off. I had to try on several occasions but nothing that I coud do would help me take some really good photos of these old cars.

So now I’m going to bed, even if I’m not tired. No alarm tomorrow so I’ll wake up when I wake up, unless they ring me from the hospital to ask me why I’m not there. They probably ill do something like that, especially as I’ll be sleeping.

But it’s a silly idea to expect me to be there at 10:20 the day after a Bank Holiday when there’s no transport.

And a Happy New Year to everyone too. I’ve not said anything to celebrate the season because I’ve not been feeling very festive just recently and I’ve had plenty of other preoccupations.

I’m sure that you’ll all understand. It’s difficult for me to summon up any enthusiasm, when I have nothing to be enthusiastic about.

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Saturday 31st December 2022 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… miserable, rotten day today and how I’m fed up with these right now. Nothing seems to be working my way.

Yesterday was a fairly early night and for a change I had one of the better sleeps that I’ve had just recently. That’s probably the nicest thing that I could say about the events of the day.

There was time during the night for me to go off on my travels too. I was working at the Fish Processing Plant last night and a young family came up with some shellfish. They dumped their bucket on the counter so I showed them how to do it all, explained to them to put it in a sieve and shake the loose soil out and to weigh it on a balance. It came to 5 units of something at €0:39 per unit. There was a little girl there who was quite chatty. I asked her what was her favourite colour. She told me and I gave her a lollipop to suck that was that colour.

And then I went to the library but when I arrived the place was in darkness. I switched on a couple of lights and found that there were plenty of people working away in there, referring to the books. I went to look for a book and ended up with a book about steam locomotives up to 1940 that included a collaboration between the British railway companies and the French railway companies and how they diverged after the invasion of France. I took the book with me to a quiet corner but that meant climbing up a kind-of ladder or shelf things. I realised then why in the past I’d worn a backpack and not carried a bag in my hand. I settled down there to work and all the lights went off again. It looked to me as if I’d been locked in there for the night and everyone had gone home and not thought to find out about where I was.

Once again, I didn’t bother about the alarms and it was … errr … somewhat later when I finally arose from the bed. And from then on I didn’t do much else except slept because that’s how my day has been spent.

There have been a couple of interruptions though. Firstly my mushrooms and peppers came, brought by my neighbour of the fourth floor.

And then another neighbour ‘phoned me up to ask if he could come to see me. I wondered what on earth was going on and why would anyone want to come to see me but it turned out that it was simply for a chat and that’s quite surprising. I’m not usually the kind of person with whom people like to pass the time, not being of a sociable turn.

And so after he left I was still none-the-wiser. One thing that I did notice though was that I could ease myself out of the settee a little easier than I did on Thursday, and also that I seem to be walking slightly easier. Only slightly, but anything is an improvement.

So that’s that really. Nothing else of any importance has happened today and I don’t really care either. I’m going to bed with no alarm set for the morning because it’s Sunday and also a Bank Holiday and so it’s going to be a similar day to today.

But I’ve taken the stuff for brunch out of the freezer so that’s currently defrosting so I won’t be going hungry when I finally awaken – whenever that might be.

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Friday 30th December 2022 – I HAVE BEEN …

… out and about this evening socialising.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that there’s something going on in the background here in this building that might burst out into the open at some point in the future. Consequently I’ve been out to see one or two people in the building for a meal and for a good chinwag while we work out a cunning plan.

It certainly pays dividends to have the right people on your side at moments like this because you end up on the inside track when it’s all filtering through. But how things develop, we shall have to see because there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.

One of the slips was that I nearly didn’t make it. When it was time for me to go I was actually asleep on the chair in the office and I had quite a job to drag myself out and upstairs.

Not that you would have thought so because I was in no rush this morning to leave my bed. WHen the alarm(s) went off I could hear the howling gale roaring around outside. And so in the words of the old song, REMEMBERING MORNINGS, SHILLINGS SPENT, MADE NO SENSE TO LEAVE THE BED.

It was actually about 09:00 when I finally did leave the bed and for a change I had no pangs of guilt whatsoever. It’s clearly getting to me, this strange mood in which I find myself.

First things first – I had to do the finances for the end of the year to see how I stand. And to my surprise, I can actually afford my little project without making too much of a special effort.

And no-one is more surprised than me. When I embarked on this plan back in early November while I was lying in hospital I thought that I might be pushing out the boat a little too far but apparently not. So let’s get on with it. Unfortunately it doesn’t really depend on me – I’ve done all that I can for the moment and I’m waiting on others to extricate their digits.

When the streets had quietened down for lunchtime, I went out for a play in the pouring rain with Caliburn. He struggled into life again so I took him for another good run, but it’s still not made starting any easier. It sounds to me as if the starter motor must be on its way out. I’ve put the spare battery on charge and at some point I’ll swap them over to see whether that improves things.

In case you are wondering (which I’m sure you are) I’m not going far in Caliburn in busy times because with having no force in my right leg, braking is proving to be something of an issue. I’m having to leave plenty of space in front of me just in case an emergency arises

This afternoon I’ve had to register with URSSAF, the body that deals with minor self-employed people. My “cleaner” (and how embarrassing is it for me to admit that I have one?) is actually employed under these regulations and so I have to pay URSSAF for her services and they deal with all of the paperwork and any tax liability for all of her clients.

There’s some good news about this too (and it’s been a long time since I’ve had any) and that is that because I’m over 65 and suffering from a serious illness, I can actually claim part of my payments to be offset against my income tax. The French Social Security system is certainly up to the mark.

Although it had taken me ages to go off to sleep last night, I must have fallen asleep at some point because there was this huge, long rambling dream about me being in Crewe with STRAWBERRY MOOSE, my three sisters and all their kids and dozens of cats etc. I even ended up at a couple of their houses. I’ve no idea what was going on there but it was one of these things that went on for just about ever.

And then I’d been on my travels later on last night. I bumped into Claude and his daughter and her kids. It turned out that there had been some kind of water fair near where I’d been living and they’d been to see it that morning. They’d even bought some boats and had been sailing around on the canal. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t gone, never mind not seen them. One of the things that was taking place was the throwing of some kind of mechanic’s tool like a set of Stilsons and embedding it in a door. This had all finished but I was throwing one or two things about and having some good results. I felt a shame that I’d missed the early part of this where it had been competitive and I might have had a good score. In the end after much messing around someone gave me a set of Stilsons to try. I threw it and it bounced off the door into the canal. I had to go to fish it out. Eventually I had to leave. It was like leaving one of these spaghetti western type of things with the plains and the shot in the distance, riding on a horse across the plains up the side of a hill into the mountains and disappearing out of the shot.

When the alarm went off for the first time I was with Beth I used to know from my time on the Scottish borders trying to relax her for an interview that she was due to take. I would have loved to know how all of this unfolded.

When I came back from my evening out I watched the football. Y Drenewydd were playing Aberystwyth and the least said about this the better as Aberystwyth were simply swept aside. It was really no contest and how the score was only 1-0 at half-time was one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

But 10 minutes of madness shortly after the restart saw Y Drenewydd rattle in 4 more goals and they scored a sixh later in the game that was the result of some of the worst defending that I have ever seen in my life. Aberystwyth scored a goal out of nothing in the dying minutes of the game but the game was long-since finished by then.

Tomorrow I’m having a little shopping done for me. Some mushrooms and peppers ready for my meals next week but that’s about it. Walking around today, I seemed to be moving a little easier and I might have been tempted to have another go on the bus into town had it not been a day when we might have the crowds out in the streets doing their shopping for the New Year.

And i’ll try to make an effort to haul myself out of bed at some reasonable time too, except that its already much later than it ought to be. I’m going to have to organise myself much better than this.

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Wednesday 28th December 2022 – I’VE JUST BEEN …

… completely crashed out on my chair in the office. Out of my tree completely.

Anyone would thing that I must have had a hectic day but actually nothing could be farther from the truth. The most strenuous thing that I’ve done today is to eat my taco roll and rice for tea.

Strangely enough, I’d had a lie-in this morning too. never mind the 07:30 alarm going off – I didn’t get out of bed until the wrong side of 08:30 and if I hadn’t had to go for a ride on the porcelain horse I’d probably still be in bed.

During the night I’d been on my travels too, although nothing like the travels of yesterday. We started off at some kind of school, a science laboratory or something. I can’t remember anything like all of this at all but there was someone involved in this who shouldn’t have been involved like a Mafia boss or something. It all had very strange complications. Something had happened in there and they asked me for my opinion of it. That was that seeing as the lab was currently closed for investigation they should develop some kind of rocket-assisted propulsion, use it and get back to sync with it and propose to that Mafia boss some kind of advantage from the invention like a getaway vehicle so he would see a need for the lab to keep on his good side etc without any issues that they might expect once the investigation had gone under way and all things were covered. But there was much more to it than this that I can’t remember.

And then I was round on the Pyms Lane area of Crewe on a few council estates with a bus picking up and dropping off schoolkids. It was lunchtime and there were school buses parked everywhere. It was quite a nightmare to get through. In the end we ended up being on board a dustbin lorry. The driver tried a short cut but there was a bus blocking the end of that so he had to reverse out. I had to get out and direct him. The bus wouldn’t move and a Thames Trader lorry came along and got in the way again. I finally managed to climb back aboard this dustcart. It was brand new and was really nicely trimmed inside. One of the girls said that we out to get the group’s van trimmed like this but I mouthed “new vans” because the vans that they had were old. It was my plan to split the gear into two, first of all the heavy stage gear that would go in one van and then the musicians, their instruments and light stage gear in the other. The one wouldn’t have to be dependent upon the other. That led to a bit of a discussion.

Finally, there had been a bus route that had gone out of town down Victoria Avenue and round to West Street back into town that way. I was trying to have this bus rerouted so instead of going down Wistaston Road it would run down Gainsborough Road past my house. That seemed to be some kind of logical way to go, where there were more passengers but I wasn’t having any luck with that at the moment.

The highlight of my day was chatting to Liz on the internet. And then one of my neighbours rang to ask if I needed anything from the shops – so I now have a kilo of onions. Pretty vital stuff as far as I’m concerned. I can’t live without them.

And that is that. All the excitement of my day today. No reason whatever for me to be so tired, except presumably that I’m not very well. Although I ought to be doing so much better than this.

One of these days I’ll have the answer to all of this, but right now I can’t even work out whet the question is. I’ll just go to bed instead and start again tomorrow. When I’m feeling like this, things can only get better.

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Sunday 25th December 2022 – A MERRY CHRISTMAS …

… to all of my readers. And no mention of the public conveniences on Crewe Bus Station this year because they are just a dim and distant memory.

There was a story going round about how someone filmed a film about a nuclear explosion where the explosion was created without any CGI whatsoever. It’s a little-know fact that the aftermath of the nuclear explosion was filmed in Crewe Town centre, also without any CGI. The modern shopping centre in Crewe that I remember being built when I was a small child has how been completely flattened in an act that even the Luftwaffe would have been proud to accomplish.

Talking of the Luftwaffe, another little-known fact is that in 1941 there was a Luftwaffe attack on Crewe that caused £14,000,000 worth of improvements.

Anyway, I digress.

Today I have emulated my namesake the mathematician and done three-fifths of five-eights of … errr … nothing. It is Christmas Day after all and with nothing whatever happening anywhere that I can go to see, there wasn’t really much point in doing anything else.

In fact my most exciting activities took place during the night. I was involved in another fight or argument with my brother over all kinds of stuff, usually about breakfast food. I ended up insisting that I was going to have what I wanted to have and it was too bad if he didn’t like it or wanted it himself. We were in a big house and it was full of people and pets and very unhygenic sitting there trying to eat this breakfast cereal in the middle of all of this was extremely uncomfortable. I wished that I was somewhere else without having to put up with all of this nonsense that I was having.

Later on I was trying to bake some bread or something. In the end it ended up erupting like sourdough and going all over the place making an absolute mess. It took me ages to clear it all up away from everywhere. Then I threw it into the fire as a way of disposing of it. It was awful, a horrible mess. At that moment there was a knock on the back door. I went to open it and the 4 little girls who had been to dancing class came in. They went to sit in the living room. I thought “thank God I managed to dispose of the worst of the stuff”. I asked them how they got on. The eldest one who was about 11 said that she hadn’t done very well. She’d ended up biting people. I thought that I’d find a quiet moment and have her sit on my knee and she can tell me all about it. I’ll see if I can’t come up with some suggestions about what the problem is.

Finally there was me, the parents of Zero and someone else round at Zero’s’s bungalow somewhere. We’d all been working and were quite dirty. The question of a bath came up. Zero’s mother made a bath in the living room by the fire but told me not to go in it until the agenda was covered. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. We prepared to go into the bath. I went to go in but she said that the agenda wasn’t covered yet, which probably meant that people could still see. I said that I’d wait. She passed me a couple of items of clothing,including a T-shirt. She asked me to put the T-shirt in the bin as it was dirty on both sides. I went outside to the bin to put the T-shirt away.

How many times is this now that a dream has shuddered to a halt without Zero putting in an appearance when the rest of her family has been there? Someone is trying to tell me something and I wish that I knew who it was and what was going on. Somehow, though, members of my family manage to rear their ugly heads uninvited and I can’t seem to shake them off.

For brunch I had toast with beans, sausage and potato cakes followed by chocolate cake and for tea I had my vegan pie with veg and gravy.

So that’s it. I hope that you all had a more exciting day than I did. Tomorrow I have a few things going on, not the least of which is the physiotherapist coming to see me. I’m supposed to be radioing as usual but not on your Nelly when it’s a Bank Holiday. I’ll still have to be up early though but I shall be having a little rest at some point. I had a brief 15 minutes doze before tea and I don’t mind having another tomorrow.

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Saturday 24th December 2022 – I WAS REALLY …

… late going to bed last night. That’s because before retiring last night I changed al lthe bedding.

And while it smelled rather damp, it was beautiful to nestle down into something clean and comfortable for a change and I must do this more often.

It therefore goes without saying that I took no notice whatsoever of the alarms this morning and it was round about 09:40 when I finally crawled out of bed. And quite right too.

Some of the morning was spent tidying up in the kitchen. Not very much though. I could do about 10 minutes and then I’d have to go and sit down for an hour to recover and, on at least one occasion, crash out for 20 mintes.

There was a pile of plastic, metal and glass rubbish that needed to be taken down to the bins. I put it in the new shopping trolley and set off. And I do have to say that that’s not going to work as well as I would like either. In fact it took me over half an hour and it’s only just across the road from here.

However, when Laurent from the radio came round to see me the place did actually look better and I felt much more comfortable in having people round.

That’s just the living room and part of the kitchen though. The rest is pretty appalling. I’m hoping that Social Services will contact me soon about having some assistance because I can’t manage on my own.

But I’ve had another ‘phone call. A different physiotherapist wants to come to see me on Tuesdays and Thursdays in addition (apparently) to the first one who wants to come round on Mondays. So what’s kindled his excitement?

Tea was a baked potato with veg and a couple of these small breaded quorn fillets that are really nice. And on that subject the delivery from Amazon with the vegan food in it turned up today too. So mushroo pâté on my toast for breakfast tomorrow.

Some stuff on the dictaphone too. I was retiring from work (and that’s a recurring dream, isn’t it?). With getting everything ready I wanted to go to say goodbye to the people with whom I used to work in Chester years ago in the early 70s. I recalled that I’d bumped into one of them a couple of years ago telling him that I was thinking of moving on. He said not to forget to call in. It was a fraught journey. I had to catch a train to Chester that arrived at about 08:20 but with all of the roadworks and diversion and new one-way systems it took an age and an age to actually make our way across the city to Stanley Place where the insurance company used to be situated. I thought at one time that we would never ever arrive. Some woman had come with me, a girl, and I was talking to her about it. I kept on having flashbacks to remember different bits of this story. All the time we were walking I was gradually piecing things together about how it had come about that i’d met this guy again after all these years and he’d invited me back. Even then I couldn’t recall the complete story and we were still wandering around the city trying to find a way to reach where we wanted to be with things having changed so much that I hardly recognised anything of the route these days.

And then it all became confusing. The next thing on the list was that I was back in this dream again – but which dream again – about going on this camping thing. We’d stopped at the side of the road to have something to eat and to check all of our possessions. By now the vehicle in which we were travelling had become a 4-seater saloon rather than a 2-seater van with a guy sitting in the back. We couldn’t find half of the stuff. Some of it was missing etc and we couldn’t find anything that we needed for certain tasks. The woman suddenly remembered that on one occasion we’d even taken the doors off the railway carriages to construct a shelter. I said “for God’s sake don’t mention that to anyone or you’ll have no idea what they are going to take off. Let’s hope that no-one else on this trip actually remembers .

A little later I remembered some more of this other dream that I’d woken up back into. It was about me showing some people around the southern part of Brussels. There was a mural on a wall about someone who had been killed in a trapeze accident. We ended up back in my apartment which was a tip even worse than it normally is. I’d made these people a coffee but it was as weak as hell, there was no sugar etc. We decided that we would set off somewhere to go on a camping trip, me and a woman sitting in the front of this Escort van and a guy who was sitting in the back of it. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember now.

So I was clearly becoming all mixed up in my wanderings last night, which is no surprise.

It’s Christmas Day tomorrow and I want to apologise in advance for my lack of festive spirit. I’m not feeling in the least bit Christmassy with all of this going on right now and it’s all too much of an effort.

Rest assured though that I appreciate all of your help and support and wish you all a very Merry Christmas, even if I’m not feeling much like it myself.

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Wednesday 21st December 2022 – I’VE HAD A …

… horrible, really horrible day today. In fact I’ve spent most of it fast asleep on my chair with no enthusiasm to do anything and much of the stuff that I planned to do today has remained undone.

It actually started off quite well too. Although I didn’t beat the second alarm to my feet, There wasn’t much in it and I was good and ready if the pharmacist decided to bring me my injections. But, as you might expect, she didn’t come past.

Someone who did come past though was one of my neighbours saying that she was going shopping. I passed an order for potatoes, carrots, sprouts, pears and clementines. It cost a fortune but now I’m set up with everything in the fruit and veg line for the next two or three weeks.

In the time that it took for her to go and come back, I was flat out asleep on the chair in here. I really have never felt so awful as I did this morning and I’ve no idea why. I reckon that the effects of yesterday were just far too much for me.

This afternoon I’ve been asleep for quite a while too but when you look at what I’ve managed to do, it looks impressive nevertheless. Like tidying up, for example. The place looks a little better now that I’ve cleared a few things away.

And a big load of washing too. Surprisingly that’s all up-to-date now and it’s been a while since I’ve been able to say that.

1kg of sprouts and 1.5kg of carrots took some peeling and blanching, but they are all done now too. The sprouts went into the freezer but there was no room for the carrots so for the moment they are in the ice box in the fridge. It’s not ideal but I wasn’t going to miss out on the opportunity to stock up.

For my Christmas meal, seeing as I don’t have anything special, I’ve decided that I will make a nice pie. So I put a cup full of lentils in the slow cooker. When they boiled up, I drained and rinsed them and put them back with some tofu and a pile of herbs and some garlic. They will marinade on a slow heat overnight and should be delicious.

Tomorrow I’ll fry some onions and add the tuff from the slow cooker and then add porridge oats to bind it all together. And when it’s cooled, I’ll make a nice tasty pie. But I can’t find the pie dish that I want to use and I have a feeling that I might have to invent something for that.

Ingrid telephoned me too and we had a chat. Not quite a Rosemaryesque chat but a long and interesting one nevertheless. She’s just as appalled as everyone else about what went on in the hospital in Leuven.

So this afternoon, I’ve been a really busy little beaver despite the fact that I didn’t feel at all like it and didn’t think that I’d done all that much.

Although I didn’t make any progress with the radio programme that I’ll be trying to prepare tomorrow, I managed to find the energy to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I started off taking a coach tour party to Blackpool. We made it as far as a motorway service area where we’d stop for half an hour although I forgot to tell everyone that it would be just half an hour. It was so tight in there that I had to get off the coach, shunt the other coaches around so I could find myself into a place to park. So there I was, heaving and mauling on these coaches. Eventually I put mine into a decent place. There was a guy with me who was looking at it. I said “it’s a good job that I can do this on my own, isn’t it? I used to be married”. We had a little chat. Gradually the passengers started to drift back. We ended up having another talk about monsters and that kind of thing, how gruesome and everything these slimy creatures were, the kind of stuff that I wouldn’t normally print on my blog but I seem to be doing it a lot just recently.

This next one is a story about a group of kids and adults, all extremely wealthy except 2 boys. 2 young girls move into their neighbourhood and the two boys seem to be more interested in the new girls than these women and girls who had been here before in this rich type of scenario. It starts to cause a load of problems.

So tomorrow I’ll be having a go with making my pie. I also have to make some more fruit buns as there are only enough for breakfast tomorrow. What i’m going to do with the ones that I don’t eat quickly I really don’t know as there is now no room in the freezer.

But that’s a problem for tomorrow. Right now I’m going to bed even if it is early. It’s been a horrible day – the kind that you just want to switch off and start again. But I’ve had a quick taste of my simmering pie filling and it is rather special. provided that I can find a pie dish it should work out really well.

Here’s hoping.

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Thursday 15th December 2022 – TONIGHT’S TEA …

… was sausage, beans and chips. And how beautiful it was too. I really enjoyed it.

One of my neighbours was going for a walk down to the shops this afternoon and he saw my note on the door so he came by to ask if I needed anything. Of course, if someone is going down to town on foot they can’t bring back very much of anything so a bag of potatoes it was.

At least my desire for chips is satiated for now and there’s enough for tea on Saturday night.

And in other news, I’ve had to make a start in tidying up the apartment as I’m going to have a visitor on Monday at lunchtime. I’ve finally managed to contact the doctor and he’s going to make a house call on Monday.

It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out once he comes round. What he’s going to say and what he’s going to suggest. At least it’s a start, but then again as I used to say back in the 70s when I was attending auctions as a buyer, it’s not where we start that’s important, it’s where we finish.

And to tell the honest truth, I’m probably finished already.

While we’re on the subject of finishing … “well, one of us is” – ed … I finished early last night and was in bed quite promptly looking forward to a good sleep.

Not that it worked out that way because I still had to leave the bed to go for a stroll down the corridor, and then apart from that I went off on quite a few little voyages during the night. We were living in Shavington and it was all quite primitive. We only had a cold water tap in the downstairs sink so I was trying to work out how I could make some kind of hot water tank underneath the sink with a candle to heat the water. I had a rough idea in my head but but it wouldn’t be particularly good. I spoke to my brother and said that maybe we ought to give it a go. My mother and my sister had been out somewhere. They came back in. We’d been watching a cowboy film but they switched over to watch The Clitheroe Kid. Then the two of them were in bed and were fighting over a sandwich that my sister was trying to eat in bed so I said something like “fancy swapping the TV over on our programme and then not going to watch it”. She said that we could swap back. It was right at the end, a Western something similar to one of the EL DORADO trilogy of films where the fight was over and the young boy was leaving. A young girl who had obviosly been close to this boy was practically in tears about him going but he said that he had to leave. “We’ve had 3 or 4 years of good times but it’s time to move on”. She was totally distraught about the whole idea of him leaving and rather than it being a happy ending it was a really sad, dramatic one. Even in my sleep I could feel how powerful the ending was.

Later on I had some money so I was going to invest it by buying a property in PIonsat, some apartments but it had to be a good quality apartment (not that there’s anything quite like that in Pionsat). I didn’t want to buy any old rubbish. There were several decent buildings in the town so I had a wander around and ended up at the bank. That was almost fraught because there was a traffic hold-up and a lorry decided that it would reverse down the High Street, nearly knocking me over as I crossed the road. In the bank I had to queue. It looked as if someone had forgotten his carrots but he walked off without them so I asked the guy in front of me if they were his. He said “no”. It was then my turn and I started to chat to this girl. This guy slipped a piece of paper “I know all about you” it said. “Don’t do it”. I asked “what on earth is this about?”. He said that someone chatted up a bank cashier and ended up meeting her in an alleyway and finished by murdering her. I said “I don’t remember this”. He replied “no, it was in 1968 so just you be careful”. I couldn’t understand what this guy was talking about. He was clearly not in the same world as the rest of us.

And then it was this summer and I was deciding to go into work very early, having spoken to someone who worked the early shift once this year. It would start at about 05:45 that meant that I would be in there by then. Of course my mother threw a fit, saying that I was never at home to help out. I told her that I was at home 24 hours per day 7 days per week except when I was at work, and going to work was normal. We had quite a row about it. When I arrived at work, rather than find the place empty there was someone around sticking up posters about the Roman excavations taking place in the wood. I was expected to go to work on some kind of bricklaying supervision. I tok myself out and was watching these bricklayers work while I was supervising this little group that I had with me. I felt that I was talking to myself all the time about what these bricklayers were doing. I thought that these few people here must have thought me totally crazy. When I concentrated on the work I found that we had a dip in one of the courses, a quite bad dip. There was no way that it could be rectified and we were going to have to take it all out again. There was one woman from work whom I came across as I was on my way into work who was sitting in a chair at the side of the road. She said “hello” to me so I said “hello” to her and didn’t think anything of it. Then I saw in the paper that she’s actually been in prison and was on some kind of rehabilitation course so I don’t know what she was doing at that particular moment, just sitting by the side of the street saying hello to passers-by unless it was part of her rehabilitation.

As you might expect, we have the family back in the equation but none of my favourite characters. That’s something that I find quite depressing.

When the alarm went off, I was in no mood to leave the bed. In fact if I hadn’t had to go down the corridor one more time I’d probably still be in there now.

Having slowly come round, I made a start on the radio programme that I wasn going to do, but my heart wasn’t in it. It took me much longer than anyone could ever imagine to complete it, not helped by crashing out on a couple of occasions and then a break to call the doctor.

When my neighbour called, I was fast asleep yet again. That seems to have been the story of my day, but I’m glad that he awoke me because tonight’s tea really was delicious.

After tea I had a long chat with Liz on the internet where we put the world to rights for a good while.

So right now I’m off to bed early again, in the hope that one night at least I’ll have a really good night and a good sleep to go with it. And if one of my three favourite young ladies could come and keep me company, then so much the better.

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Monday 12th December 2022 – YOU MAY NOT …

… believe this, but Caliburn actually started up this morning on the battery that was on the van. And that’s astonishing, especially as he hasn’t run for over 11 weeks. There’s a small leak in the electrical circuit somewhere that slowly drains the battery so I was expecting it to be dead by now.

What wasn’t nice though was that I’d left open the window in the driver’s door. It had rained in somewhat but one of my neighbours had stuffed a black plastic bag in the door and taped it up to keep the worst out.

Nevertheless, fancy Caliburn starting. I gave him a couple of laps around the block to warm him up and charge up the battery but I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that driving him in my condition is a nightmare.

And so as you can imagine, I’ve been outside this morning, and in the freezing fog too. I had to take some rubbish to the bins across the road and even though it is just “across the road” it took me an agonising 25 minutes to do it, going in baby steps. I thought that having had a good relax and a gentle easing off of the stiffness would have made things better, but far from it.

This trip to Leuven for 2nd January is therefore looking less and less likely.

In other news, Strawberry Moose is back home. On eof the reasons why I put a battery on charge last night and then went to start him today was that a couple of guys from the radio had told me that they would be around today at lunchtime.

It was my intention to ask them to help me carry the battery downstairs and to couple it up in order to start him but that wasn’t unnecessary. But they brought back my suitcase completr with His Nibs.

It was interesting too because they work for the local council and they were able to give me some useful hints about dependent living. Having had some kind of impromptu interview, they told me that someone would be in touch.

And I’ll need it too after last night, which was another awful, horrendous night. I kept on waking up, went for one or two walks down the corridor and so on. I was also on my travels quite considerably during the night in another sphere as well. I was with my friend from the Scottish Borders last night. To my surprise she was heavily involved in Black Magic and Spiritualism. She had one of the original books from that period and she had lent it to me. Every time I tried to make a start on reading it someone came past and I wasn’t comfortable about reading this book in full view of whoever it was so I kept it hidden below the desk or down the bed or something until that person had gone. After a while my friend became frustrated and quoted some phrase in the book about “whoever has taken me from my possessor” or something like that. I explained that I hadn’t actually done that. I’d explained what I was doing but she thought that I had to be a lot more forthright about reading the book even though I was uncomfortable. In the end there was always a piece of music that I played that stopped us arguing. She handed me my guitar and asked me to play this piece even though I hadn’t played for quite a while. My performance was bound to be suspect but I thought that I’d give it a go, although I felt that this was just a sticking plaster over a wound and wasn’t actually solving the problem of me getting down to actually reading this book. Whether or not I has an interest in Spiritualism I had an enormous amount of curiosity and I was intrigued just as much as anyone else to see what was in this book and how everything would unfold. However just glancing through a couple of pages made me seem to think that she had at one time or another said something about almost everything that was in there

There was something in there as well about working in the suburbs of Brussels, how some people were complaining that it was expensive. The question was then asked “why don’t they move even further out? That way they could find somewhere more affordable”. The reply came back about the cost and time of commuting which would put them back to Square One even if they were to do that.

Percy Penguin sent me a text to ask me if I could run her to a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon. I replied “yes I would” but then I had a realisation that there was no MoT or tax on the car. I had to send her another e-mail straight back. She said that she had cancelled her transport at work so now I was pretty-much obliged to take her unless I could find someone else or someone else would volunteer. Then I was with friends walking around Middlewich. I was pushing something like a pram or a push-chair or whatever. We came off the street around some kind of semi-circle parking place to try to get through to where Walgrens and Marks and Spencers was. We’d been talking about the traffic problems being caused by people turning into their car park. I said that they should get all the nouveau-riche pretentious people, put them in Marks and Spencers and Walgrens and then drop a bomb on the place. That didn’t go down too well with my friends. We were trudging round this semi-circle car space with a cinder base thing. I suddenly wondered if we could get through to Walgrens from here. They replied “no, we should have gone through somewhere else”. On the skyline 100 yards ahead of us were these most peculiar buildings, tall and really narrow. They looked most unsafe. It turned out that these were single-bedroom flats for single occupancy. We were thinking that maybe Percy penguin could find a place there. Then we thought that they looked so delapidated that they would be bound to be closing down these places and demolishing them soon. Nevertheles we went in. There was only a small ladder on the ground floor on the inside. I thought that we had to climb up this ladder, look out of the top by poking our heads through the roof to look out over the top to see how we could get to where we wanted to go. If this ladder wasn’t tall enough for us to be able to do that then we would have a great amount of difficulty. I didn’t fancy leaning too much against the wall of one of these buildings in case we pushed it over because it was really unsafe.

I was also having a dream involving Rosemary. A Government had arbitrarily cut some kind of rate on bankruptcies. She couldn’t see a problem except that someone else had noticed and pointed out to me that it had wiped out the whole market for Insolvency Practicioners. This led to a big discussion about the acounts already agreed with Brussels. The only difference was that the dissident who was supposed to have been held in Moscow at some time but turned up eventually in China. She had a talk that they had a benefit concert for this guy in China but the two people who contributed most in bringing his name to the forefront never actually turned up for it. That name rang a bell with me.

When the alarm went off at 06:00 I felt absolutely awful and I was all ready to stay in bed but I forced myself out. I’d already written half of the notes for my radio programme so I finished the rest, recorded and edited them and then assembled everything.

For a change, I was working backwards so I fell about a minute short so I had to expand my notes and re-dictate some of them. Therefore I didn’t really save as much time as I might otherwise have done.

Then I had Caliburn who required attention, and then my visitors.

Once everyone had gone I had a play around on the computer but fell asleep on my chair. That prompted me to go to bed, something that I have been trying not to do but there was no alternative as I have never in my life felt so tired, as all of … errr … 7% of my daily target will testify.

When I finally crawled out of bed (due mainly to a need to go and take a ride on the Porcelain Horse otherwise I’d probably still be there now) I ended up doing … shock! Horror! … some tidying up. Not much but just enough to take me up to tea time.

So now I’m off to bed. I have a Welsh lesson tomorrow so I need to be on form and then I’ll (hopefully) take Caliburn for another spin. See how I feel and maybe in a few days I’ll pluck up the courage to go to the shops.

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Saturday 3rd December 2022 – IT’S THE WEEKEND …

… and so it’s been quite quiet in here yet again.

There was a brief visit from a cardiologist though but she didn’t even give me time to sit down. She did come into my room and bellow my name while I was shaving and as a result I have a cut upper lip.

When I did come out, she pounced on me before I’d even had time to sit on the edge of the bed. She gave me the usual platitudes so I sent her packing with a flea in her ear by giving her my usual spiel about what I reckon is going to happen on Tuesday next week.

As Hawkwind once said, YOUR ONLY REAL PROTECTION IS FLIGHT and she adhered to Michael Moorcock’s counsels.

That’s really about all of the excitement today, although one of the nurses – and not a student nurse either – seems to be starting to become a little over-familiar. As if I don’t have enough on my plate.

Last night though was another strange night. I went to bed late as you might expect, and couldn’t go to sleep for quite a while. I’d turned off the computer (and the Old-Time Radio) at some point but still didn’t go off to sleep. I was left hanging on for quite a while.

At some point I must have fallen asleep because the alarm awoke me at 06:30. And so I had a listen to the dictaphone. I awoke 3 or 4 times and saw someone’s father kicking an animal. It might have been a beaver or something each time that I awoke. It was so real that I almost called someone to make a note of it because it really seemed as if that was what he was doing each time I awoke around 01:45.

After breakfast (which was rather late today) a nurse turfed me out of bed so that she could change my bedding. I cleared off for a wash and that was when I had my encounter with the doctor from Cardiology.

On several occasions I fell asleep – and deep sleeps too – only to be awoken by various nurses for various treatments and on one occasion for lunch.

And we’re back on the old soya burgers that I don’t like again. That was a shame after the nice burgers that we had had yesterday.

Apart from a chat with Liz today, nothing else has happened, except this over-familiar nurse. It’s been as boring this afternoon as boring can be.

Tomorrow will be the same too, I reckon, so I need to have a good sleep to prepare me for the effort that I’ll need to make o keep awake.

It’s all go, isn’t it?

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Wednesday 30th November 2022 – I MIGHT JUST HAVE …

… solved the problem of doctors wandering off on phantom ‘phone calls just as I start laying into them

During the day today I’ve had no fewer than three “official” visits from various doctors and specialists. And each time that they have set foot in here I have gone on the offensive.

And believe me. If it’s “offensive” you want, then in the words of the late, great Bob Doney, “I’m your man”.

What I’ve done is to set the stopwatch on my ‘phone to start. And then I explained to the doctor or specialist concerned that my world-wide friends on the internet and I are having a sweepstake to see how long the interview lasts before there’s a ‘phone call.

And surprise! Surprise! The interviews have played out to a conclusion without a single ‘phone call.

Of course, tomorrow is another day. And today might have been a pure coincidence. Nevertheless it was still rather hilarious.

More of that anon. Last night I was asleep by 22:00 or thereabouts and wide-awake by 00:45. I’d been on my travels too during this little window. I was at a Spacerock festival. There was a lot of time between the groups. They had nothing whatever arranged so I fetched my CD and tape deck from home from my old hi-fi unit where I had a CD unit, a triple tape deck etc. I brought it down and wired it into the PA of the band and blasted out all my Hawkwind records. I was there with a girlfriend of mine, it might have been Percy Penguin, I dunno, but it was someone who knew nothing about it. She was giving me all the help she could. Quite a lot of the fans were disappointed with the quality and output but the DJ in charge explained that this was the best we had. It was all Hawkwind and this was what they wanted to hear if only they would hear it. One of the groups suggested another way to broadcast instead of using *.mp3 off the tapes etc. I knew that that would take a lot of work but the punters were in no mood to wait for me to configure anything. I just had to continue blasting out CD after CD and tape after tape. The guy from one of the groups said “go on! You have a chance to make music history here. You’ll be famous for ever if you do it”. I was sitting there thinking “I’ll be more likely lynched if I don’t”. I had really no option but to carry on with this because at least something was working and some music was going out and calming the fans. I didn’t know what to do. All I knew was that if I kept on doing what I knew what to do then at least something would work. This girl was helping me bringing the CDs, helping me plug in decks to the PA etc. I felt really sorry for her because she had nothing whatever to do with this. Neither had I, yet here we were.

There was a guy who had the care of two children, girls aged about 7 and 11. I was bringing them up in some kind of environment where there were a great many other people who didn’t like or appreciate the way in which he was bringing up these two girls. However it was clear to most people that he was doing his best considering he’d never been parenting before he’d had these two girls dropped upon him. It was a slow battle of trying to win the other people round to his way of thinking while at the same time trying to be fair with these girls, in particular the older one. He had to give her some lessons in basic subjects like Maths, Geography etc. It was clear that he was completely out of his depth. He was doing his very best as far as he could to make sure that in particular the older one had some kind of education. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember – a whole lot more than I’ve described.

This morning started off with the blood pressure tests and the like. And my blood pressure was surprisingly high.

So much so that the Senior Ward Nurse came to see me a short while later.

“We need to redo the blood pressure test” she said. “It seems to be unusually high.”

Actually, I didn’t like to tell her that the cute little student nurse is back on duty and she had already taken it this morning.

And it’s a good job that the Senior Ward Nurse came to redo the blood pressure test BEFORE the cute little student nurse came back to climb all over me to change my dressing from Sunday.

It was quite interesting watching her do it in a textbook fashion rather than in the ad-hoc way in which the trained nurses do it. I had to help her through one or two procedures and to remind her of things that she’d forgotten. But she IS cute.

Not long after I’d gone back to sleep I had the physiotherapist round. I was right about the rocket that he must have had inserted into his nether regions because he had me out of bed and setting off for a stroll down the corridor before I was even properly awake.

It was a rather aimless shambles of a scramble down the 20 metres of corridor to the doors at the end that we only just about managed, and the trip back was even more exciting.

He kept on asking me “are you okay?” and “would you like to sit down?” every couple of paces and believe me, I was ready to slosh him before we’d gone five metres

The first of the official visitors was a guy from cardiology – or was he from the pneumonology? – department. He spent a great deal of time running over the history of my case and then told me that they had a few tests lined up for me – a couple of weeks after I’ve been expelled.

Of course I asked if these were tests that I’ve already undergone on my two or three previous visits to his department, but he replied that he didn’t know. He thought that they might be new ones so I asked him why they hadn’t been undertaken when I was there on one of my previous visits.

It goes without saying that his response was that he wasn’t there at the time and wasn’t involved in the decision-making back then. I asked him if he realised just how much of a cop-out that sounded and would he really be satisfied with such a weak excuse?

At least he stayed to the end of the interview and cleared off in his own time without a phone call.

Next up was someone from the physiotherapy department. He asked about my mobility so I told him to consult his own department and in particular the guy who comes to see me every working day.

He replied that he had done so but wanted my own opinion. I told him that I was struggling to go 20 metres but the hospital wanted me to go 700 kms at the beginning of the week. I reckoned that I would be in the Casualty department long before I was at the bus stop.

After much discussion and debate he asked me whether I would be interested in going to the clinic out at Pellemberg for an intensive course in therapy – a couple of weeks of two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve been to physiotherapy in Granville for almost a year – one hour per week for about 30 or 40 weeks. What they are offering me is 40 hours of intense therapy in two weeks that is going to be tailored much more to my individual needs.

There needs to be a place to come free of course but having thought about the matter during the discussion I decided that if the opportunity presented itself I would accept it.

It won’t do anything to ease the trapped nerve but I may be able to climb steps and to pick myself up if I fall over.

The third official to visit me was the house doctor who seemed to be several weeks behind the time and hadn’t updated her notes. She hadn’t, for example, noticed that I’d been in the Stargate thing or that I have a trapped nerve and a couple of slipped discs.

It seemed to me that she realised it too because her visit to me, without a ‘phone call to disrupt it, lasted all of 4 minutes and 57 seconds and that was that.

The rest of the day has been dealt with being fed medication by various nurses. And Rosemary telephoned me too. Just a short conversation too – only one hour and seventeen minutes today.

There hasn’t been much else of any interest but that was enough to keep me going for a day.

Mind you, if this re-education thing comes off, it might be well worth a go. It will put on hold many other plans that I have but I think that this might be an opportunity too good to turn down.

We’ll have to see how things unfold.

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Saturday 26th November 2022 – I WOKE UP …

… this morning – (cue Blues introduction here) – in a deep dark depression.

And the only thing that has changed during the course of the day is that it’s gone worse and I have slipped even deeper in.

The only surprise here is not that I’m in a deep dark depression but the fact that it’s taken as long as this.

So having to contend with not only the regular ointment in my eyes but also an uncomfortable catheter in the back of my left hand, I’ll tell you all about it.

It all began to go wrong last night at about 21:30 when a nurse came by to check the catheter port in my chest.

She pulled out the catheter and went to fit a new one. And then she pulled it out because she said that it wasn’t working, fitted another, still couldn’t get it to work. She said that she’d have to go off and see the night nurse.

At some point I must have fallen asleep because I awoke at 03:30 with the headphones still on and the old-time radio on the computer still going, and still no night-nurse.

A couple of hours later I started to worry about the night-nurse knocking off so I pressed my bell.

An orderly came along followed closely, surprise surprise, by the night nurse. She said that she knew nothing whatever about the problem and suggested that maybe the person last night had contacted the specialist catheter unit.

By now it was too late for me to go back to sleep. The alarm was set for 06:30 and it wasn’t long before it went off.

After breakfast the doctor came to see me and it really was the wrong kind of day for that to happen but it was rather too late to worry about that.

She told me nothing that I didn’t already know so I launched into my usual spiel. When I reached the bit about the trapped nerve and my leg she RAN AWAY – actually ran away from me out of the room.

There was nothing left for it but to turn to my social network to vent the spleen that I don’t have any more. That in itself led to a lengthy discussion and a subsequent chat with Liz which was very nice.

Much of the rest of the morning was spent asleep and then, as I expected, the afternoon simply dragged and dragged aimlessly and endlessly.

Tea was delayed while a nurse took out the catheter in my arm and fitted a new one in the back of my hand, leaving me to bleed over my hummus butties. Luckily the cute little 1st-year student nurse was in the store across the corridor so she brought me a beautiful smile and a plaster.

Apparently this afternoon she’s working on the other end of the ward so I told her to ask for a transfer.

Later in the evening the doctor came back She told me that as my catheter port in my chest was redundant they were going to operate on me tomorrow morning to remove it so I must go into famine mode at midnight.

And she cleared off really smartish-like before I had time to tell her that now that we both know that this story about not doing an operation on my while I’m full of virus is total tosh, what’s her excuse now?

We’ll probably not have the answer to that tomorrow but we can at least try to find out.

My betting is that we’ll get a “this is a different kind of operation”.

What’s your bet?

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Friday 25th November 2022 – SO HERE I AM …

… stuck in my hospital bed and had it not been for the physiotherapist and several urgent needs for trips to the porcelain horse, I wouldn’t have put my sooty foot outside my bed today.

The nadir of my existence is that they haven’t even been to make my bed today and I haven’t had a wash or anything because no-one has brought me any clean clothes or washing material.

In fact, I seem to have slid downhill from Celia in “As You Like It” and her “I like this place and could willingly waste my time in it.” yesterday to Macbeth’s “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day” in the space of about 18 hours.

It’s all been brought about by the most boring afternoon that I have ever had. Absolutely nothing at all happened this afternoon to relieve the boring monotony of what didn’t go on.

Last night I fell asleep at some time in the early evening and awoke in a panic at some point thinking that it was quite late and I still had on my headphones. However it was only 23:40 so I switched off everything with a big air of disappointment.

At a couple of other times during the night I awoke and ended up at the bathroom but when the alarm did go off at 06:30 I was already wide awake.

There was quite a bit of stuff on the dictaphone. I was messing about as usual, dismantling cars, building little projects, getting electric circuits going, making lights flash etc. I ended up at University. I found an empty room so I moved a car and something else into it, put a bench in it, and began my car dismantling again and my little serendipitous experiments etc. I was having great fun. Then the idea came to me “why don’t I invite others from the University to come and share the fun with me,”. I announced that one evening I’d have a meeting in this room. The room was packed with people who came to listen to what I had to say. I told them what I wanted to do and hoped that they’d take part in it etc. The numbers whittled down during the talk. It came to a question of ghosts and it whittled down even further even though I had my notes about the experiences I’d had from ghosts in the past. I could see from the questioning of the two who remained that I’d have a hard core of maybe half a dozen people similar to me and we’d have something. However I was rather dismayed with all of the negativity that was coming from a few of these people even though I’d managed to talk my way into a University room etc. I thought that I’d done really well and maybe deserved a little more appreciation than I was receiving.

And then back at home the alarm went off and we all got up. It was the birthday of a girl who was staying with us. Nevertheless there were some presents that had to be wrapped for some other occasion so we began to wrap them. About an hour later my father appeared. he was the one who should have been wrapping these other presents but didn’t, saw that we were almost finished and made a few remarks. he said to the girl whose birthday it was “there’s a little present down there. It’s not very much, just a token of our appreciation. Is a fiver any good to you?”. She looked rather embarrassed but said “yes. Thank you very much”. My father said ‘you’ll probably receive much more than that after you take over this family once I’ve gone”. I could see the change of look in her eye, thinking of the impoliteness of what he had said to her etc, this little box with this fiver in it while we were wrapping all these big boxes for him. I could see the change in her face from one of annoyance to one of starting to make plans. I wondered how long it would be before my father found himself over the bannisters and this girl taking charge of the family

After breakfast the doctor came, bringing with her another junior doctor. And as I hadn’t seen anyone for a couple of days I gave the two of them a blast of what is rapidly becoming my trade-mark speech about the wasted opportunities that are happening, or not happening as the case may be.

She explained a little more about what is happening, such as this blood infection that seems to be coming from my catheter port and how on Monday I might be having another examination.

My point that with a lifespan that expires in 2026 at the latest I can’t afford all these delays. She replied that there wasn’t much that anyone can do about my underlying health condition while everyone is fighting the effects of this virus, but I was of the opinion that I would have expected all four professors from the various departments standing around me discussing my case in order to put an end to this bickering and continued case of “pass the parcel” that is wasting my life away.

In the end she went away. Not that I think that anything will happen but of you throw enough whatsit at a wherever some of it might stick and make its was back to the professors concerned.

Shortly afterwards the physiotherapist came by. He gave me a few exercises to do while I was in bed and then a few more to do standing up and even walking to the bathroom door and back.

While we were chatting, I mentioned that strengthening my muscles was one thing but it wasn’t solving the underlying problem of mu right lower leg folding up underneath me.

He was completely taken aback by my remarks, almost as if he hadn’t heard them before.

Anyway, I launched into my story, and gave him all of the information yet again but I wasn’t convinced that he took much notice of what I was telling him

So however all of this pans out, I bet that it won’t be exactly how I would like it to be, viz and to wit, to solve the problem of my leg definitively.

In case regular readers of this rubbish can’t recall the situation, the reason why “I like this place and could willingly waste my time in it.” is because I’m too scared to leave. All of these issues about viruses, infections and the like mean absolutely nothing to me in the normal run of things but I don’t think that I’d get 100 yards from here on my feet without falling over.

And then I don’t have the strength to pick myself up.

The rest of the day has been spent falling asleep and being shaken awake by a selection of nurses. It’s really been a most boring afternoon and the next couple of days will be just as bad as the hospital quietens down for the weekend.

So now I’m off to sleep. And having spent most of today trying to fight off waves of sleep, I bet that I won’t be able to fall asleep at all now.

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