Tag Archives: crash out

Saturday 1st July 2023 – FOUR YEARS AGO …

… today I was on the deck of THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR in Aberdeen, Scotland (for the benefit of those who don’t know where Aberdeen is) waiting to cast off forr’ard and left hand down a bit on our way to Kugluktuk on the border between the Far North of Canada and Alaska.

When I set out I didn’t really have much of an idea when I’d be back home (if ever at all) and it wasn’t until late October that I finally returned to perch upon my little rock, having made a brief stop in Morocco on the way back.

That was some voyage. Rosemary came with me as far as Greenland of course, and HIS NIBS did the full circuit with me.

A great many of my lifetime ambitions were realised. I finally managed to visit the site – Hvalsey – in Greenland where the last known record of the Norse colony was recorded, and next stop, I went to visit Leif Ericson’s house at Brattahlid,

Higher up on the Canadian side of the Davis Strait I walked upon the site of one of Franklin’s camps – at Beechey Island – and visited the graves of some of his sailors and inspected the remains of the cabin and the boat that later explorers left for him and his party (in vain) in case they even made it back to civilisation, and I passed through the mythical North-West Passage.

Not only that, but when I had to leave the ship for a couple of weeks in Greenland when that party of schoolkids joined (I don’t have a North American police check of course) I flew out to the Rockies to continue my journey along the Emigrants’ Trail to California and walked up South Pass – the North American watershed where east drains into the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, and the west drains into the Pacific – to see the tracks of the covered wagons that made the journey between 1846 and 1861.

There was also standing on the stage where my grandmother performed with a variety of famous American music-hall artists in Winnipeg, the house where she lived, the church where she married and the grave where her first husband is buried.

And not to forget the rather “strange” encounter that I had over a period of three days right at the end of the voyage … “strange encounter?” – ed … “I told you not to mention that!”.

How I wish that I could go and do it all again but I’m struggling these days to even walk to the door of the apartment.

It was even a struggle to get out of bed this morning. I was dead to the world when the alarm went off.

That might possibly be something to do with the fact that I didn’t go straight to bed last night as I said that I would. I ended up having a nostalgic session on the guitar for quite a while – blow all the cobwebs away. So with not going to bed until late, I was not in the mood to do very much.

Nevertheless I did manage to struggle out to the shops this morning. And considering that I didn’t think that I’d need very much, I spent a small fortune.

Noz was quite expensive today, something not unconnected with the fact that they had some digestive biscuits in today. They were quite expensive, but ask me if I care.

LeClerc was expensive too but a lot of that was due to the fact that I’ve almost run out of coffee and I’ve not seen any on special offer for ages. It had to be stocked up at any price, so watch it be on sale next week.

On the way home I had to call at the pharmacy by the Agora – the only one on my route that it’s convenient to visit with a vehicle.

That’s because I had an e-mail from the nerve specialist yesterday that is a prescription. By the looks of things it’s for a blood test so I’ll have to talk to the nurse when he comes to give me my Aranesp on Monday.

There’s a whole pile of stuff that needs to be checked, including Hepatitis B and C, and also the creatinine in my urine. So I needed a sample pot and they are obtained from the chemist.

But looking at this list, it’s really quite ominous, the things that they want to check, and I’m wondering if it’s anything to do with a hospital admission. As the policeman said, when he was told about the hole that had been blown in the wall at the nudist camp, “I shall have to look into this”

After I came back home and had my coffee and cheese on toast, I went back into the bedroom – and passed out completely. All of the exercise today has totally worn me out. While I was asleep I was in Whitchurch living in a room somewhere. There was a fête on somewhere out in South Cheshire and I’d arranged to go there. It was becoming late and no-one had been to pick me up. I decided that what I’d do would be to set out and walk there. It might be 12 miles but the chances are that I’d meet the people for whom I’m looking on my way. Even if I didn’t the walk would do me good. I had to sit and think about how long it was since I’d actually been on a walk for that long. I was busy preparing myself. I had a half-eaten apple that I needed to finish. I was thinking that I’d better set off soon because otherwise if I had to walk it’ll be all over by the time I’d arrive. The thing about this dream was that it was just so real that when I awoke I actually began to think about leaving for this walk.

It’s no surprise that I didn’t feel very much like doing anything particular after that. It’s actually quite beyond a joke how tired I seem to be these days.

But having drank my very cold coffee I had a listen to the rest of the dictaphone because there was plenty on there from the night. We had a whole tribe of Zulu warriors, native African warriors of all ages in the jungle who’d gone to intercept a party of European girls. The girls had managed to put them to flight and chase them away. I’ve obviously been watching too many SAINT TRINIANS films. But each one of these Zulus was created as I’d create a figure in 3D as if it was some unseen hand guiding everything around, although of course the hand wouldn’t have been unseen because I could see it manipulating these 3D figures.

It actually reminds me of the old, hoary joke
“I was playing cards with some Africans last night”
“Zulus?”
“No. I won a fiver.”

I was on holiday with a young girl and we were sharing a room. Something had happened and she was absolutely outraged. I don’t think she was all that happy. Then we had to go to the bathroom to get ready for bed. First she went and then I went. I then went back in the bedroom getting ready to go to bed. There was a little kitten sitting there, obviously waiting for the two of us to go to bed because it would join us. It looked ever so cute. The girl seemed to be pleased to see it. We got into bed and the kitten joined us. Next morning we were in like a restaurant looking out of the window. We weren’t sure which town we could see. Someone asked me if it was Kherson. I said that Kherson was somewhere “over there. It might be Almaty or something”. While we were talking away 3 people took our seats. We said “hey we were sitting there”. The woman there said “you were talking Welsh. I didn’t realise what language you were talking”. In the end because the place was so full we all squidged up and sat around this table, all of us. One of their children came to join us too so we were all really crammed into this little café restaurant type of place like sardines.

Finally it was the birthday of a couple of kids. They were 11. They’d had a bike each for their birthday. Their father was really angry and annoyed because he said that the bikes were wrong. Someone tried to explain everything to him but he wouldn’t listen so they wandered away. he turned round to me to say this is what they said etc, laughing. I replied “you’ll probably find it even more funny when you find out later that they are totally correct” at which point he went berserk. In the end we bought two new bikes and measured them. There was absolutely no doubt about the measurements. We began to assemble them right in front of him. They went together completely naturally just as they ought to do with no adjustment or manoeuvre. It was quite obvious that the measurements for the 2 bikes that he’d been given had been perfectly correct.

That’s not all that happened last night but you really don’t want to know the rest, especially if you are eating your evening meal or something.

Later on I was invited out to visit some neighbours. There was a nice couple who were living here when I first moved in but my reputation had clearly preceded me because they left a short while after I arrived. But they were visiting so we were all invited for a chat.

Usually I’m not a very sociable person, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but I forced myself and stayed for a couple of hours and that surprised even me.

Consequently my evening meal was late. Chips and salad and one of these soya burgers in breadcrumbs. That’s the last of that batch and I’ll have to start now on the ones that I bought a few weeks ago

So later than usual, I’m off to bed. It’s Sunday so I can have a lie-in and won’t that be nice? I must say that I can do with one, especially if I can go on some exciting voyages.

It’s quite a shame really that all of the excitement that ever happens to me these days takes place when I’m asleep. At least they haven’t descended into the chaos felt by the poet Charles Sorley at the Battle of Loos
“When You See Millions Of The Mouthless Dead
Across Your Dreams In Pale Battalions Go …”

Wednesday 28th June 2023 – I REALLY MUST …

… remember that the bottle of tabasco sauce doesn’t have a drip feeder.

After tonight’s leftover chili I’ve had to put the toilet paper in the fridge. And if there ever would be a damsel in distress stuck in my apartment and a knight in shining armour came to rescue her, I’d make pretty short work of him. Who needs a dragon after my tea tonight?

Well, actually, I needed a dragon this morning to get me out of bed because I was flat-out in the arms of Morpheus when the alarm went off.

It was quite a struggle to rise to my feet before the second alarm went off but I managed it. And I staggered into the living room for my medication feeling like the Wreck of the Hesperus.

Today I’ve been organising stuff for the radio now that I’ve finished (for the moment) updating the directories on the computer. Another pile of stuff went the Way of the West today and I do really wonder why most of it hadn’t been filed away correctly.

And having organised that, I’ve been back in Cartwright down the Labrador coast.

At the moment I’m out in a small boat at Muddy Bay. That was the site of one of these Residential Schools about which so much has been written over the last few years and was something that I had wanted to see.

However this one is rather different in that it wasn’t designed for imprisoning native children who had been forcibly removed from their parents like most of them. This was effectively an orphanage opened in 1919 to house the children who had lost both parents in the Influenza epidemic that devastated the coast and who had nowhere else to go.

There have been several accounts written by residents and in the main it seems to have been a respectable and reasonable place. However two boys obviously didn’t think so as they burnt it down in 1928.

There’s also the mystery surrounding Marguerite Lindsay.

She was one of the Grenfell Association’s “WOPs” – volunteer workers who came “With Out Pay” to help the coastal communities and taught sport to the girls in the orphanage. In August 1922 she went for a walk – and never came back.

Four months later they found her body frozen in the ice with a bullet wound.

The official verdict was that she fell and landed on her pistol which discharged itself with the shock. But as you can imagine, conspiracy theories abound.

The cleaner came round today of course and we had a good chat. She doesn’t think that my neighbour will ever recover her health after the bad fall that she had, and that’s sad.

There was plenty of stuff on the dictaphone from the night. I was doing some research into suicides amongst children for a University thesis. I was busy compiling a whole list of case studies and statistics of everything that I could find going back several years. I found so much stuff that I was having difficulty trying to think how I would write it and what information I would use. I didn’t just want to discuss one case after another, I wanted to write about them in groups or something like that where each group had a common factor. I came across something very interesting while I was doing it, a kind-of game similar to American football where you’d throw an object down a field and a cat would chase after the object, catch it and bring it back. I ended up being totally engrossed in this idea, reading all about famous cats and famous games in which these cats had played “fetch”. That was something that would sidetrack me completely because it was much more interesting than what I was doing. Some of these cats were quite impressive with some really high-class performances that took me by surprise.

And isn’t that the story of my life? When I was at University I had a thesis to write but was side-tracked completely and while what I wrote was well-researched and well-written, it went totally off-topic and I received a miserable mark for it. I would make a useless academic. I went for an interview once to see about doing a PhD but I was told quite frankly that I didn’t have the temperament to sit and concentrate all my efforts into one narrow sphere.

Then there was someone from Crewe in the Victorian era who went to explore the High Arctic and was lost. He was due to marry and his finacée had a nervous breakdown. Everyone was trying to console her. She actually worked in a building in the Town Centre, a kind-of early 5 or 6-storey skyscraper that was one room on top of another on top of another etc, called Robles and Co, an art-deco kind of 1920s dark red brick building.

Later on I was at a party in the Auvergne with a lot of people from the Alternative Society, one of these ecological meetings. I was feeling really bored because I didn’t really think all that much of most of them. Just wandering around and someone introduced me a girl there. We began to chat. It turned out that she was a folk singer from San Francisco. We began to talk. She asked me if she could borrow something or other so I took out my wallet to get it. It was a card with my number on she wanted. Of course I had a pile of railway tickets there and they all fell out. That made her smile. I picked everything up. We carried on chatting. I kept on asking her questions and getting everything wrong, like I mentioned LA and she said no, she came from San Francisco etc. In the end she was showing me posters that she still had on her of when she first played different gigs etc. I was just on the point of asking her if she’d like to get together to maybe have a jam some time when I awoke. That’s typical isn’t it?

Finally I’d found myself a little job working part-time in a DiY paint shop in Crewe town centre, Market Street. I was just there for a couple of hours helping out the girl who ran it. The first time that I was there she gave me a couple of things. The second time she gave me two big brushes. When it was closing time I locked up the shop. As I was leaving I bumped into my brother who was leaving his clothes shop a couple of doors away. I walked home to Macclesfield and on the hills at the back of Macclesfield it was snowing quite heavily. I heard someone whistle behind me but I didn’t pay any attention. It whistled again so I turned round. It was the girl who lived a couple of doors away who was rather ethereal. She had a big stick about 2 metres long, very straight, that she was carrying. I said “that’s a fine staff to go to a solstice with”. Just then a circular saw in the neighbourhood started up so I had to repleat myself 2 or 3 times. By this time I was carrying a large stuffed toy. She mentioned stuffed toys so I told her that it was to be a companion for STRAWBERRY MOOSE which she thought was quite funny. That was when I awoke.

What’s interesting about last night was that it’s usually my family or someone like that who comes along and sticks their oar in when I’m having serious chats with nice young ladies, but last night, just as things were becoming interesting, my subconscious awoke me, obviously trying to tell me something.

Not that it has any need to do that, because the chances of me encountering any presentable young ladies right now is absolute zero and even if I were to do so, the chances of enticing them back into my lair and into my evil clutches would be even less than that.

And talking of Zero, whatever happened to her and TOTGA and Castor?

What was disappointing about today was that I lasted until about 19:00 before crashing out. Even though I was exhausted today, I was hoping that I could keep going all day but it wasn’t to be.

Tea was, as I said, the leftovers in the fridge with a small tin of kidney beans, rice, veg and rather too much tabasco sauce. I’ll know all about that tomorrow.

But I have to go to sleep, and that I’ll be doing right now. There are lots of things to do tomorrow so I can’t hang around. And then if I have time I might go off to Cartwright and another adventure.

That’s actually the kind of town where I wouldn’t mind being stuck for a while. And if that doesn’t bring property prices crashing down over there, I don’t know what will.

Tuesday 27th June 2023 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… miserable day today.

Not that you would have thought so from the way that things began, because when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was actually up and about already.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I sat down to work through the Welsh lesson that we would be doing today. But once again, the Teflon brain made its appearance and nothing seemed to stick to it today.

It’s something that is becoming more and more of a daily occurrence, this. It makes me feel rather like Homer Simpson and “every time I learn something new, it pushes out something old”.

It reminds me of a discussion that I had with someone the other day on a Social Network group where I could remember the name of a family who lived in a certain house in village where I lived as a child, over 50 years ago.
“That’s pretty good going” said the woman to whom I was talking.
“That’s as maybe” I replied “but ask me why I walked into the kitchen 5 minutes ago”.

Anyway, the lesson itself was pretty dismal. I couldn’t remember anything and my head was full of spaghetti instead of any coherent thought. I was glad, if not relieved, when it was finished.

What didn’t help was the fact that I was desperately fighting off a wave of sleep. That’s the kind of thing that you can only do for so long and then at some point this afternoon I succumbed.

Out like a light too, and for quite a while. It was quite depressing today.

There’s a pretty good reason though why I was feeling so awful, as I found out when I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I was at home on my own. Everyone else had gone out. I put my phone on charge and was sitting doing a few things here and there. The place was quite untidy. Eventually I took hold of the telephone to check that it was charged and opened the door into the corridor, but opened it really quickly so as to frighten anyone who might possibly have been loitering around outside. There was no-one there so I made my way down the corridor and began to go down the stairs. I heard the front door open so I quickly dashed down to the bottom to turn the lights on to make it look as if I was working down there. I came back up. It was my mother who was for some reason quite angry saying something like I hadn’t spoken to her since she left to go out earlier. I replied that that’s hardly surprising because she wasn’t here. She was out.

Later on I was out in Labrador again, wandering around an old fishing village inspecting what remained there or traditional activities. The harbour was there of course but everything else was closed or run down or depleted. The place was looking really sad and sorry for itself. I hardly recognised it from its heyday when it was in the photos in a lot of the newspapers etc at the time.

Did I dictate the one about going on a coach trip … “no you didn’t” – ed. There had been snow in the mountains. We were staying somewhere for a couple of nights. We were having lots of problems with the snow but it stopped. I thought that this would be the moment to try to leave this valley, up into the mountains and out the other side. We sent the passengers off in a coach. Apparently the conditions were so bad in the mountains that the coach became stuck in the snow. I had to walk all the way after it, rescue the passengers and bring them back down the valley by walking. It took several days to do this. I managed to chivvy them up into being a little enthusiastic about it but it was clearly not going to work and there would be loads of complaints. In the end we managed to struggle back to the hotel where we’d been. I just hoped that the landlord hadn’t re-let the beds so that people had a place to go back to rest while we thought of another plan. Someone said to me that they knew that I’d tried my best but that I certainly wasn’t any expert. I replied that I’m certainly the first to admit that I have an awful lot to learn about everything.

Then we were back in Labrador. There had been a table lamp set up on a table there that over the years had melted a hole in the top of the television. You could travel in and out of this hole and broadcast yourself to wherever you wanted to go so I went to Labrador and had a look around. I found that the Europeans were packing up and making ready to move off somewhere else. These items said something about having flights back to the local people but I thought that it was more like that the company had exploited the area for all that it was worth. Now there was nothing whatever left of the interest so they were disposing of the evidence basically by giving it to the Inuit and hoing that the Inuit would clean it up.

Later still I was with another driver from Shearings spending the night in a Bed-and-Breakfast in Welsh Row, Nantwich. While we were out in the evening we came to this Australian group of older people who were quite intoxicated and in a bad temper. They were looking for some fish and chips. I don’t know why my friend did it but he rounded them up and told them to follow us and come to have some chips at the pub. I thought it strange because it was the last thing that I wanted to do, to be associated with people like this. They followed up and walked past 2 or 3 fish and chip shops. They were protesting. In the end they came to our pub. We went up to our room for the night. You could hear these Australians whining and moaning at the bar. Next morning I awoke. It was 09:20 and we had to be on the road at 10:30. I thought we’d have to hurry. My friend had been up and out once. I heard someone talking about a Mausolina. I asked him what it was. He replied that it was something that was petit, petit, petit, petit as in “small”. I thought that i’d better dress quickly and see if there’s any food. I don’t want to talk about these Australians because I had a feeling that things hadn’t gone very well with them last night and I didn’t want to stir the pot.

And finally I was a pilot on board an HMS sailing ship that had put into Labrador. We’d left the ship and went for an explore in a settlement on the coast that was formerly some kind of European colony. I can’t remember very much at all of this from here on.

It seems that I’m spending a lot of time in Labrador during the night. It’s probably the effect of wading through all of these notes that I wrote or am trying to write about my trip there in 2017. And I need to push on with that.

Today though I’ve been wading through the working files on the computer and deleted or moved, would you believe, 60GB of data from the working drive – something that I should have done a long time ago. Despite how awful I was feeling, that was some pretty good work today.

The physiotherapist came round today and we went for a walk outside. I told him that things are going downhill as far as my mobility goes and he’s going to have a think about what he can do try and pump me up to keep going. But right now it’s quite a struggle to move around.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with some of the stuffing that was left over. There’s still plenty for a chili sin carné tomorrow with some kidney beans added in.

While we’re on the subject of Welsh lessons … “well, one of us is ” – ed … regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I was thinking about doing 2 Welsh courses next year. One course as the successor to the one that I’m doing now and another to retake the current course.

What has happened though is that I noticed a three-week crash course on a full-time basis offered by the Gwent College of Further Education. I’ve undertaken a few courses with them in the past and quite enjoyed them, so I’ve signed up for this one.

That will keep me out of mischief for the month of August, so with the one-week Summer Revision School in July and three weeks in August to do the course again, if I haven’t grasped it by then, then I never will.

All I need now is to wind up my brain, but that’s a pretty hopeless cause these days. I’m losing my braincells at a rather rapid rate of knots. All I have left are my marbles but I’ll be losing them before too long.

Thursday 22nd June 2023 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… depressing day today. And I bet that you are as fed up of reading about it as I am about living it.

My own fault though. I had a doctor’s appointment at 10:00 this morning so I decided that I’d be brave and walk – or, rather, hobble – down the hill into town on my crutches.

The idea didn’t exactly fill me with confidence but I had to do it. And it passed without any serious incident, which was good news. Just the occasional wobble here and there.

But as you might expect, I was well out of it this afternoon. Totally out of my tree in fact.

And that’s not really much of a surprise because apart from the fact that it seems to be par for the course these days whenever I go anywhere, when the alarm went off this morning at 07:00 I’d been up for ages.

First thing that I did after the medication was to try to resolve a computer issue. I said yesterday that I’d fitted a new hard drive into this machine. A couple of my graphics programs weren’t functioning correctly so I left them in the end and went to bed.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, graphics is one of the reasons why I bought a machine like this big desktop machine. But it’s not a proprietary machine, it’s something of a “bitsa” with a collection of assorted bits and pieces for the best possible performance, and I’ve upgraded it since I’ve had it.

Consequently you’re wasting your time looking for a manufacturer’s upgrade.

After prowling around for a while in the innards of the machine, I found that it was working with the drivers for a Windows-generic video card and I couldn’t remember the make of the video card that we fitted. I had to work through quite a collection of drivers until I found the correct one.

It’s working so much better now, which is nice.

All I need to work out now is why although the operating system recognises the 32GB of RAM that’s fitted, only one bank of 16GB seems to be working.

Even so, with a Solid State Hard Drive powering the machine it’s working a lot quicker and a lot quieter too.

In between all of this I had a shower to make myself look pretty and then struggled down to the doctors for a check-up and for the prescription for the next lot of Aranesp. I mentioned the hospital in Paris and he says that it’s one of the best in the country with a famous nerve-centre, if you’ll excuse the pun.

But the good news, if you can call it that, is that because there is no obvious element that’s affecting my nervous system, he reckons that I’m classed as permanently disabled. He’ll type a report for me to pick up tomorrow and told me to go the the Mairie and tell them.

And so I did, and they gave me half a rain-forest worth of papers to fill in. And if I need any help I can call a Social Services rep to help me. I have to fill it in and send it to the Prefecture at St-Lô, and then prepare for a long wait.

But if I’m lucky, I’ll have a disabled parking pass, free transport on the buses (mind you, buses are free here in Granville anyway) and things like that.

Next stop was the Post Office.

Something else that I’d done this morning was to gather up the papers that I needed and to fill in my Tax Return. That needed to be posted and there was a recorded delivery letter to pick up.

Next week it’s the annual general meeting of the owners of this building and as I own 250/10,000 of it since April I’m invited. So there was another rain-forest worth of papers about that sent to me by recorded delivery.

There’s a new artisanal high-class bakery opened in town so I stopped off for some specialty bread for my cheese on toast. I thought that in view of the effort that I’d made, I deserved to pousser le bateau dehors as they might say around here.

Final stop was to go to the chemists to drop off the prescription. 6 months worth of Aranesp but they can only order it one month at a time. I have to ring her every 4 weeks to reorder it.

It was the nice cheerful girl who served me today. “do you want to pay for it now?” she asked.
“Just this four weeks” I replied. “Not all of it”
“That’s what I meant” she retorted.

It was a struggle to come back up the hill onto my rock and I was exhausted. I had my coffee and cheese on toast but that was really my lot. I was in no fit state to do anything else for quite a while.

Later on I did manage to have a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And it’s a surprise to me that I was up and about so early because I travelled miles. In fact, I probably got out of bed on my way back home from my travels. I started out in Labrador last night. I’d been to visit a spot where a member of my family used to live. There was some information that I gathered there that I knew would be of interest to someone else who was hunting down family relics. I made a note and brought the information or copies of it with me and met up with this guy back at his place where because of the way that whatever was written on this information that I had, it was all about snow etc which of course would be most unlikely in South Cheshire but it was a very complicated ritual involved in making sure that he had the information. Then I had of course to get the information from him that he had found out about my family so it was all extremely confusing about this Labrador in Cheshire kind of thing.

Then there was a tractor for sale at a rather cheap price. I went to see it but when I returned Nerina asked me about it. I told her that basically it’s been taken in part-exchange and they want rid of it quite quickly so they’ll do a good deal for cash. She was wondering why it wasn’t on the forecourt. I explained that word about this tractor would go around by word of mouth quickly enough. They don’t need to make any effort to sell it etc. There was one guy there who insisted on shouting me down, giving me his own interpretation of what was happening even though I’d just been to talk to the owner about it. he wouldn’t let up no matter how I tried to explain to Nerina. In the end I told her “the vendor knows exactly how much that tractor owes him, exactly how much it’s costing them to keep it on the forecourt”, all the little details like that. They’ll know exactly where the breakeven point will be so if someone comes along with the cash they’d let it go. But this guy was not having any of this at all. It was really strange how he thought he knew absolutely everything without even having been to see it and talk to people about it. He thought that I was totally wrong.

I’d also been out with one of my schoolfriends. On the way back we stopped at his house. I started to chat to his sister who I fancied (and I actually did too in real life). We had something of a flirty exchange as a couple of teenagers would. I happened to mention something about Saturday night. she said that she was doing something that night which was a shame because I was hoping that she might be free and want to come out somewhere. We continued this chat and she asked me “what are you doing Tuesday night?”. I replied “nothing”. She continued “do you want to come with me on Tuesday night instead?”. Of course immediately my ears pricked up. I asked “where are we going?”. She asked “how do you fancy going to church?”. I replied “if it means going with you, I’ll come”. She said “it’s every fortnight”. I replied “that’s not a problem. I can manage that”. We arranged to meet on the Tuesday night. I went outside after that ready to go home. My friend was outside so I said “you’ll never guess what I’m doing on Tuesday night”. He replied “you’re going to church youth club aren’t you?”. I asked “how do you know?”. he didn’t really give me an answer about that but he obviously knew that there was something in the wind. She didn’t really like me all that much in real life when we were at school, which was no real surprise. But she went to University in Manchester while I was living there and we did meet up a few times, but nothing much ever came of it.

I was at work last night. I’d gone into the office which was packed. I went to find the lift to take me up to my floor. There were dozens of people hanging around the lift, people making music and singing Christmas carols, a little choir etc. It looked as if everyone was preparing fo Christmas. I was hoping that I’d see my Irish friend so that I could talk to her about my date on Tuesday night (so I must have gone back into that previous dream) but I can’t remember what happened after that.

She was a nice girl too and I liked her very much. We went on a skiing holiday once together which was really good fun but she had far too much good sense ever to become involved with me

Finally we were in Iceland waiting for a ferry back to the mainland of Europe. There was a storm and the ferry was delayed. It looked as if it wouldn’t sail for ages. Everyone was dashing around trying to find accommodation but I had a cunning plan. I would hire a van and sleep in it for a few nights which I reckoned would work out a lot cheaper. There was a young girl there whom I liked very much. We’d spent a lot of time chatting. We were standing in the queue and I bought her a coffee. I asked her what she intended to do. Obviously if she didn’t have any accommodation i was going to invite her to share the van. She mentioned Tom, another guy on this trip with us. She said “I’ll be spending the night with Tom, my boyfriend. I’ve been spending the last couple of nights with him anyway so another night won’t make any difference”. Of course you’ve absolutely no idea how disappointed I was, or maybe you have, I dunno. It’s quite a regular occurrence during the night – me being confounded like this while I’m engaged in the evil pursuit of nice young ladies. Anyway that was that.

The physiotherapist came round today too and massaged my right knee which is now playing up after my walk. I’m wondering what is going to break next. I’m at the stage where I’m afraid to go to the toilet.

Tea was a big bowl of pasta and veg with the rest of that vegan bolognaise stuff from last week. I livened it up with some chili and garlic salt and that gave it a kick.

Tomorrow I’m off to town again for my Aranesp and a bit of shopping. That means that in the afternoon I’ll be flat out on my chair again. It’s becoming far too much of a habit but there’s nothing that I can do about it regrettable. Onwards and upwards, hey?

Tuesday 20th June 2023 – I’VE HAD A …

… horrible afternoon today. and I really mean that too, in case you think that I’m exaggerating. I’ve spent almost all of it fast asleep on my chair, well out of just about everything.

It’s not as f I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep last night. I was in bed at some kind of realistic time and I can’t remember being awake for all that long.

And when the alarm went off I was on board the THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR. It was the last day of our trip around the High Arctic so we came back on board handing in all of our possessions etc ready to go to our cabins to pack for the next morning before we leave. I was talking to a few people and a girl probably in her late 20s with curly hair began to talk to me. She asked me what my plans were. I said that we were going to fly to Houston from here. I was going to hire a car and drive around for a few days. She didn’t ask but began to plan my voyage with me “we’ll have to do this, we’ll have to do that but you’ll have to drive of course” etc. She was a nice enough girl, pleasant, but I couldn’t get over the fact that she was wanting to come along and hang around with me for a few days. I went back to my room thinking “I hope that I recognise her when we’re having our evening meal tonight”. Back in my cabin, it was an absolute tip. I remember leaving in a hurry but I didn’t remember it being in such a mess as this. I began to tidy up but there was so much stuff, all kinds of it and a huge pile of lace curtains that i’d somehow brought with me. I thought “there’s no way I can take this home” so I began to wrap it up and put it in a sack ready to take to the rubbish. It was at that point that the alarm went off.

After I’d had my medication I did some preparation for my Welsh class but at about 09:50 I headed out for the nerve specialist, having a little chat with a neighbour on my way out.

The news was, as I suspected, not so good. All of the obvious checks were made and came up with nothing. The only thing to think of is that the cancer is spreading into my nervous system.

There’s a hospital in Paris that specialises in nervous disorders and goes deeply into the matter. Would I like to go there? Well, do bears have picnics in the woods?

As well as that, there’s also what they call a Centre de Réeducation here in Granville. That’s a place where people who have had a severe accident or illness go in order to redevelop their life skills ready to go back to their normal life. He thinks that I might benefit from going there and would I like a referral?

One thing that he did tell me is that I mustn’t hold out too much hope. If the cancer is in the nervous system nothing is going to improve but it’s important that I keep my autonomy as long as possible and the treatment that I’ll be receiving will be towards that end.

On leaving, I went to Lidl to do some shopping and then I came back here. Grabbing something to eat and a coffee, I went to my Welsh lesson. But it wasn’t a success. My mind and my heart weren’t in it and I was really glad when it was over.

While I ate my lunchtime fruit afterwards I was chatting to Liz on the internet and then I completely, absolutely and definitively crashed out. and it was the deepest and most desperate that I’ve had.

When I finally awoke I had my hot chocolate and then transcribed the dictaphone notes. Some you have seen, but there were other. I was back at school last night. I couldn’t find any course work for any of my lessons. I’d left my satchel in our form room while I’d gone off somewhere. When I came back there was a class in there so I couldn’t go in. One thing led to another. The following morning I still didn’t have my class work so I decided that I’d go in to the class to enquire. No-one understand what I was talking about for a minute until it suddenly twigged that it was in fact my form classroom too but no-one had seen my satchel. The teacher couldn’t help and neither could any of the pupils in there. In the end I had to leave it and go to find my current class completely without papers. I walked in a few minutes late. The teacher scowled at me and asked where I’d been. I gave some kind of vague excuse and sat down. She had to give me a photocopied sheet for the current lesson that we were supposed to be doing. There was something strange, that the class that I’d interrupted to find my possessions, all the kids were in school uniform except for 2 who were in completely different school uniform of green pink and white that had nothing whatever to do with our school colours that were navy blue and white.

And then I was with a girl from school last night. We had a kind-of fast food stall in the town centre late at night. It was an upmarket thing. We had a stainless steel plate that we heated on electric elements and would fry peppers and stuff like that on it. It was a very complicated way to go about doing things but if you used the correct cooking oil it turned out to be really nice. It was the end of the night about 02:00. Everyone was going home and we were packing up. Lots of people would come over to chat and have something to eat. We ended up having an interesting chat with a couple of guys and girls. They gave my girl a beer to try, a special beer. She politely offered me one but I said no. She offered me some cake so I said no. We had a very interesting chat about nothing at all for a couple of minutes as we were cleaning everything up and putting it away.

Before I had tea I had to clean dice and blanch a kilo of carrots. I’d bought some at Lidl because I was running low. And it was a real fight to fit them in the freezer.

Then I made tea. A taco roll with rice and veg followed by the cinnamon roll and ice crea.

So having had an awful day, I’m going to bed. I’ve had enough of this and I’m going to start afresh tomorrow. There’s something going on right now in my body and I wish that I knew what it was.

Saturday 17th June 2023 – I’M REALLY GLAD …

… that I decided in the end to go to Noz while I was out at the shops because I had a lovely tea tonight, and I’ll be having more of the same over the next few days.

Last night though I wasn’t all that sure and I was still undecided when I went to bed. And although it took me just as long as usual to go off to sleep I had a better night’s sleep for once, such as it was.

When the alarm went off this morning I was dead to the world and it was quite a battle to haul myself out of bed before the second alarm went off.

After the medication I caught up with a few bits and pieces and then set off for the shops.

What made me decide to go to Noz was that there was a parking space free right outside the front door so I didn’t have to go far.

And I did well in there today with quite a lot of stuff. Some of those frozen Chinese things that I had a while back, some Kale and Quinoa burgers, a new light fitting for the toilet, and a small pyrex bowl (I’ve been after one of these for a while) smaller than the standard size to fit in the air fryer with room to spare, and some other stuff too.

But pide of place was some more stuff from that German vegan company, such as a bake-it-yourself vegan apple and cinnamon roll and some vegan chocolate ice-cream. So my pudding tonight was marvellous. I’ve given up having dessert but as long as there’s this cinnamon roll and ice-cream I’ll carry on and make an exception.

And there are dramatic new developments at LeClerc. They are now selling vegan cheese of course and have been for a while, and they had some more in the short-date clearance bins too (“had” being the operative word here ‘cos it’s not there now, the ground’s all flat).

But now, even more progress is being made because they are now stocking vegan sausages. Wonders will never cease. We’re definitely being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century here.

Although I have a few packs of vegan sausages in the freezer I bought another one today. Not because I needed it but as a sign of solidarity. It’ll encourage them to keep on stocking them.

But two weeks on the run they’ve had no cheap frozen peas in. Just expensive ones. I think that someone has really been taking the peas over this.

Back here I made my cheese on toast and some nice strong coffee but regrettably crashed out. And crashed out good and proper too. Not once but twice and that’s depressing.

When I’ve not been asleep (which wasn’t often) I’ve been working on my Canada notes, hunting around the cemetery in Cartwright for the grave of Garnett Lethbridge.

The story told around Cartwright is that Lethbridge befriended a young fox-fur farmer called Clarence Birdseye whose farm at Muddy Bay was failing, and taught him a little technique that he’d learnt for freezing his catch of fish when he was out on the ice.

Birdseye took copious notes and when his fox farm failed in 1917 he went back to the USA to develop the technique that Lethbridge had taught him.

Birdseye went on to make millions while Lethbridge caught the flu in 1918 and died in poverty, being buried in a pauper’s grave.

Well, he would have been, except that the pauper objected so he had to have one of his own.

As an aside, in the Census of 1911 there were 49 inhabitants of Cartwright. And 17 people were buried in the cemetery who had died of flu in November 1918.

As another aside, in the period 1911-1921 the population of the island of Newfoundland rose by 8.5%. In the same period in Labrador the population fell from 3949 to 3774 despite a net migration gain of 106 people.

But returning to Lethbridge, his grandfather was an interesting character. He came from Devon and was one of the first settlers on the coast. A tinsmith by trade, he came to Labrador with Hunt and Henley when their salmon-canning factory opened .

When the Hudson’s Bay Company bought out Hunt and Henley’s business they closed down the plant. Lethbridge senior was so incensed that he refused to have any dealings with them and on his deathbed ordered that all of his possessions, including his boat, should be burnt so as not to fall into the hands of the company.

There were exciting times on the Labrador coast all those years ago. I would have been quite at home there.

Especially when you have a close look at the Censuses for that period, and two columns that caught my eye. The enumerators had to record the number of people who were “crazy or lunatic” or “idiotic or silly”. And I’m sure that you think that I’m making this up.

There was also time to go through the dictaphone and see what happened during the night. There was something going on in Guildford to do with some wrestler’s wife who was going to take on some kind of role in running the town and maybe going to be given the keys to the treasury. That led to some kind of scandal. Members of the council ended up being impeached. As a result of a huge press campaign coverage it never happened but there was a little more contentious issues of a similar nature somewhere else in the vicinity too that attracted a lot of attention

Later on a group of us had been out somewhere in Germany on a tram. We’d been out and had to catch this tram. The tran station was absolutely heaving. When the tram pulled in we had to fight to board. Everyone was on one side of the track but we noticed that it was a single track and there was a platform on the other side. When the tram pulled in we swung round the other side where there were fewer people and swarmed aboard. We managed to grab a seat. It was an extremely uncomfortable seat but we managed it all the same. At some point we alighted. There had been some issues about the railway line. We’d been cutting up these railway lines. We suddenly realised that we’d cut the railway line for the tram. We were sitting here with this big square-profile length of wood like a chevron or a demi-chevron or something. We suddenly realised that this was our tram. A couple that had gone past weren’t actually ours. They were much smaller anyway. We eventually ended up back at home, or at least I did. Something had happened and the washing machine hadn’t been put back in the right place. There was some coffee in the pot so I poured it. It was cold. I went to put it in the microwave. I thought that I would have to move the washing machine before I go. I wondered how I was actually going to do it. I suddenly had this eerie feeling that here I am in the house, the doors are open and there’s coffee around but there isn’t anyone. There should be people so why aren’t there any people? It was really weird, all this, about what was actually happening in this house.

Tea was a salad and chips and something that I found in the freezer that had been in there since the Dawn of Time. “Surely not very old” I hear you say. “Well, geologically speaking, I suppose not” I reply. And followed my a bit of the cinnamon roll and ice cream.

Tomorrow is Sunday so I’m having a lie-in. And I have to make some pizza dough too because I’ve run out. The big question is whether there’s enough room in the freezer to store the excess, but I’ll worry about that at the appropriate moment.

Right now I have other fish to fry, like a nice warm bed.

Friday 16th June 2023 – I’VE BEEN DOWN …

… in town this morning.

Not that I walked, though. I think that I’ve had that for good.

Instead I hopped on the bus with a neighbour who just happened to be waiting.

The bus took me down to the port and I staggered off to the Carrefour where I bought some mushrooms and peppers as well as a bit of bread to make some cheese on toast.

And then back to the bus stop where I met my neighbour who had done her shopping elsewhere, and we came back together on the bus.

It was actually quite nice out there today as well. It was the first time for ages that I’ve felt really warm. There wasn’t much wind about either. In fact it would have been the kind of day where I would normally have gone for a nice long walk. However …

Anyway, during the night I went for a few long walks. Despite my nice, new, clean and fresh bed I don’t think that I spent much time in it.

I was in North America again last night in a fishing community preparing a lot of things ready to go somewhere the following day. By 16:00 I’d finished. I said to the people at the counter that I’d finished. If they would send someone into town to pick up some fishing tackle for me I’d be grateful. They weren’t paying a great deal of attention so I didn’t really say much. Next morning I came in and asked for my stuff. They replied that they didn’t have it. I sighed and said that it was important and I’d told them yesterday etc. They were all extremely apologetic. Then the little girl who hung around there, whether she was someone’s daughter or not I don’t know, skipped into the back and came out with a packet that she handed to me with a big smile on her face. Everyone else began to laugh. I told the girl that she ought to have a good spanking and they all laughed at that. And I had my things

After that I’ve forgotten what I was going to say now with having to mess around with the batteries and dictaphone at some crazy hour of the night. Everything has just slid out of my head but there was something about a woman with a yellow handbag thing on the quay, a handbag having just been on the market. There she was with an enormous one on her shoulder obviously well in advance of everything else around here

We were then back on the subject of these old cars again. I had old cars scattered around here and there over the town. I came to one place where there were 3 or 4 of mine. The first thing that I noticed was that a Volkswagen Beetle that I had there had gone since the last time I was here. The MkII s-type Jag was still there although one of its rear wings was missing. I went round and found the person for whom I was looking, sitting on the terrace outside the building. They gave me the key to go inside. They told me that I needed to go in through the second door but to be careful of the animals and the cow in there that wants to come out. We talked about the cars and what we were going to do, not that I had any real plans but I just said anything. he said that the Jag was looking very sorry. I said “yes, we’ll have to bring it back to my place, take the engine out”. He wanted to know how we were going to do it because for some unknown reason the car wouldn’t tick over. It was going to be complicated to move it and take out the engine. I didn’t really have a clue how I would make it work.

Finally on the way out of Sandbach they’d built this huge new petrol station. It wasn’t open yet but things were progressing rapidly. There were scores of people around there. I knew a lot of them too from Crewe. It seemed that they’d recruited the labour force now and were preparing to open. I went over there, said hello to a few people whom I knew and asked if they could introduce me to the boss. They thought that I was touting for work, which I was. Eventually after much hunting around I found the boss. I explained about my taxis and how we’d be available if ever they needed any here for running the staff around or anything like that. She thought that I only had some plates for working in Crewe but I told her that I had some plates for working in Sandbach which quite surprised her. She said that she’d bear it in mind if anyone ever needed anything

When the alarm went off I was actually already up and about again. I’d awoken with a start at about 06:50 and I’ve no idea why. However it did take me quite a while to gather my wits this morning, not that I have many wits left to gather these days but here we are.

In fact I almost missed the bus into town and had to dash. Well, relatively speaking.

Back here I made my cheese on toast and some strong coffee but regrettably I crashed out and awoke to a mug of cold coffee. That’s what I call “embarrassing”.

This afternoon I’ve been pressing on with my Canada 2017 trip and I’m just leaving the cemetery at Paradise River. I had hoped to have been in Cartwright by now but trying to match up the names on the headstones with the poor handwritten entries in the Censuses is complicated

As well as the Census records I’ve been trawling through George Cartwright’s diary. The influenza epidemic that ravaged the Labrador coast in 1918 was devastating, but Cartwright mentions an outbreak of influenza that occurred in 1778 and an occurrence of smallpox a couple of years earlier that played havoc with the native population

As I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … it’s no surprise to anyone that Canada took such strict measures about the Covid rules and regulations when you see what happened in the past in these isolated communities where even today there’s no medical service.

Something else I’ve come across is some kind of diary where people who lived around Sandwich Bay have added little pen-pictures of their lives going back 100 years to the period of the 3 Fs – Fishing, Furs and Forestry that were the mainstay of life on the Labrador coast.

All that has changed dramatically today. Even as late as 1961 there were as many as 161 people living in Paradise River. At the Census in 2021 there were 5.

When I visited the place in 2017 there were 10 inhabitants, and I think that every one of them turned out to watch me drive to the quayside.

Tea tonight was potatoes baked in the air fryer with a salad and some of those vegan nuggets. It was absolutely delicious.

But we’ve hit a tragedy. I finished the very last of my HARRY POTTER COLLECTION of films. That’s a shame because I really enjoyed them. But like most films of that genre, they really only scratched the surface of what could have been something really powerful.

What I’ll probably do for my next teatime film sessions will be the SAINT TRINIANS films. These are of course a completely different kettle of fish.

But they do include some of the funniest lines ever recorded in British traditional comedy, all delivered by Alastair Sim of course
“when girls usually leave school, they find that they are not ready for the big wild world. When our girls leave this school, it’s usually the big wild world that is not ready for them”
and when one of the girls burnt down the school Sim said with exasperation
“there’s far too much arson around in tis school”

They don’t make films like that any more in the modern PC World where everyone is so easily offended and there’s no humour around any more. I’m just not cut out to live in this modern world, I’ll tell you that.

However, that’s tomorrow. I’m going shopping and I’m debating going to Noz after my little accident a fortnight ago. I suppose I really ought to make an effort but it’s probably a lack of confidence after my fall. I was like this after my fall on the boat coming back from Jersey, I seem to recall.

But there’s bound to be a change in my state of health. There’s plenty of room for things to be worse.

Thursday 15th June 2023 – IF I EVER LAY …

… my hands on whoever rang my doorbell at some stupid time of the morning, like 04:00 or something like that, they won’t ever do it again.

What made matter worse was that despite what I’d said yesterday, I didn’t go to bed until quite late. Much later than usual in fact.

And when I did, I couldn’t sleep for ages afterwards. And then we had all that nonsense.

At least, I thought that it was the doorbell because that’s exactly what it sounded like. But there was always the possibility that I’d dreamt it. I’m not ruling that out.

And strange as it may seem, I was up early too. When the alarm went off I was sitting on the edge of the bed looking for my clothes. That was something I hadn’t done for a good few days.

After the medication I had another slow start to the day and it wasn’t until I’d had my mid-morning coffee and fruit bun that I was able to start work – that is, when I wasn’t curled up asleep on the chair.

And by the time that I knocked off I was in Paradise River poring over the diaries of George Cartwright, who in 1775 was the first European known to have visited the area and ” sent the people on shore to build the wharf on a point which I named Paradise”.

However what intrigues me is Carl Rafn’s “Antiquities Americanae” from 1846. I’ve been poring over them as well.

Rafn was the first scholar to take seriously the Norse Sagas of the visits to Vinland and his translations refer to a visit by Thorvald to an area and who was so pleased with this place, that he exclaimed “This is beautiful and here I should like well to fix my dwelling”

Thorvald describes in great detail the area where he is and it corresponds pretty much with what I see on a map when I look at Sandwich Bay. In fact, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I was near there I went out in a small boat to look at the geographical features along the coast there.

Rafn though made several miscalculations and ended up putting the Norse ashore in Massachusetts, something that confused people for 70 years.

Firstly, he calculated the distance that a Norse longboat would sail in an hour, multiplied that by 24 and then by the number of days to arrive at their destination.

However, in my opinion, it’s out of the question that, experienced sailors as they were, they would have sailed into unfamiliar waters and kept going through the hours of darkness. They would almost certainly have heaved to until daylight.

Secondly, Rafn calculated the distances based on the speed of a longboat. However the Sagas state that they bought a boat from a trader who put in to Erik the Red’s camp at Brattahlid.

It wasn’t until they carried out some excavations at Roskilde in the early 1960s that they came across a Norse trading vessel, or Knǿrr and that has completely different sailing characteristics

The physiotherapist came round this afternoon and had me walking up and down the stairs. And it’s difficult, that’s for sure. Nothing like as good as it was two weeks ago and that’s a real disappointment. I thought that I was making decent progress until that latest fall.

But still, no matter how bad I’m feeling, there are always people worse off than me.

With him coming I went and had a shower. And while I was at it I went one better than Dave Crosby. probably because I had the ‘flu for Christmas and it was increasing my paranoia. Sill, I’m not giving in an inch to fear because I promised myself this year – I feel like I owe it to someone.

This evening I was stuck for an idea for tea. But having a rummage around I came across some vegan bolognaise sauce with soya mince that I’d completely forgotten. The expiry date on the jar was about 100 years ago but in for a penny in for a pound and it was actually quite nice.

There’s half a jar left so I’ll have that next week with some more pasta and veg.

But a tragedy here – I’ve run out of brussels sprouts now after all of that pile I bought and froze at Christmas. I mustn’t forget to buy some more at the weekend, but I have a feeling that ready-frozen ones might have to do.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from the night. Whenever whoever it was rang my doorbell, if that’s what it was, I was in Canada again, down at the end of a headland looking out to sea where there was another island. There was some kind of pond there. We’d measured it and it was 10kms across and ever so deep. There were all kinds of grids around, all marked with yellow paint as if there was something going to happen to them. There was talk about this island joining up with the part of Canada where we were. That would have happened much earlier had there not decided to be a vote on it. We made some kind of remark about how people complained that it was democratic where we were and not democratic on the island yet the agreement to unite had been taken by the mainland without any kind of vote at all yet the people on the island had been allowed to have a vote on it. We thought that to be extremely ironic.

Later on I was doing something for some kind of investigation. We had to go to Edinburgh so I went on the back of someone’s motorcycle. When we arrived in Edinburgh I couldn’t remember my way. Nothing in Edinburgh looked like anything that I ever knew. We became confused at a road junction on this motorbike and ended up on the pavement trying to work out our way. There were all kinds of people hanging around. The driver of the motorbike said “put your feet up on the pedals and hang on tight. These people don’t look very safe to me”. We set off still going the wrong way and came to an old house. We went in but couldn’t find what we wanted and lost our way again. We ended up back in a Government library with all kinds of old documents. We described this house to someone. he came up with several suggestions and showed us photos but none seemed to resemble this particular house, situated set back from the road on a corner by a railway line with a statue in front. While we were there we started to go through their records for something else. I found loads of interesting things like squardrom flying books from World War I. The papers we wanted we couldn’t find. They kept bringing us files telling us that these were the correct ones but none of the references matched. But I was having a whale of a time going through here reading all the old notebooks, pencils and Court reporters’ books. I thought that I could have moved in and lived here with all of this but none of this was actually finding the information that they wanted. He kept on coming up with stuff that he said was the correct reference but when I looked at it, it was nothing like the information that we wanted.

So now I really am going to bed. But I’ll change the bedding first now that I’m all clean and tidy. It’ll be nice to have some clean bedding. I really ought to change it more often than I do. Usually it walks into the linen basket on its own so I need to organise myself better than I do.

But not much hope of that. As Guildenstern said in “Hamlet” “dreams indeed are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream”

But as an anonymous writer once said about the father of George Cartwright whom we discussed earlier,
He had a genius for encountering difficulties

Wednesday 14th June 2023 – AHHH WELL!

Just in case yo were wondering, last night was very much like the previous couple of nights. And today was like the last couple of days where I’ve spent a great deal of time flat out on my chair.

When the alarm went off this morning, I was dead to the world again and it took me a couple of minutes to leave the bed

But I think that that was about the only time that I was asleep because you’ve absolutely no idea of the miles that I travelled during the night. We’ve had a few where we’ve logged the miles but this one will be up there with the best of them.

I started out in Labrador last night sorting out some food, trying to make up some burgers from bits and pieces that I had lying around that I could cook in the air fryer. When I looked in the air fryer there was a load of breaded fish-type fillet things in there and a load of other food lying around too. I thought to myself that if I don’t put that lot into a fridge or a freezer or something it’s all going to have to be thrown away.

And then back in Newfoundland again. My mother had gone away for a few days and left the kids behind. She’d given us a few tasks to do but we hadn’t been particularly diligent in doing them. For a start, all the plastic bottles and jars were still in the container under the sink. When she came back I hastily rearranged it so that it didn’t look quite so obvious. She began to have an enquiry into why things weren’t done. She became quite obnoxious and short-tempered about it. I was beyond caring at this particular point so I snapped back and called her a lot of names that weren’t particularly polite under any circumstances. We had this enormous slanging match that went on with her shouting, trying to keep me quiet and me hurling vulgar gratuitous abuse

And yet again where there was some kind of director of a Holiday Camp in Newfoundland who was something of a megalomaniac and was trying to build up his own evil empire. he was converting all the camps of the children in his care and using the money to buy weapons etc. He was bankrupting the community but wasn’t intending to let up on anything. They took him to court, some of the people, because they’d noticed that he had applied for control of a couple more accounts of the children in his care. This led to a huge Court case and he was prevented fromopening, holding or operating any furhter bank accounts. But no-one believed that he would be able to respect the court order and everyone was preparing for the worst

There was another disreputable financier somewhere. He was giving the while finance system a really bad name. He had his office in a big building in New York. It was a couple of floors underneath in the same building of where the President of that weird American company was where I worked. Everyone was quite surprised that knowing this man’s proclivities that they were in the same building and not quite some considerable distance away. I was talking to someone about the system of finances, saying about this network of corruption and so on and they replied “things can only get better from here on” but I wasn’t convinced at all. I thought that there was plenty of time and plenty of room for everything to go worse.

Then there was an incident at a football match. We’d arrived early and took our seats, sitting there waiting for everything to happen. The game was a while off starting so we stood up to stretch our legs when a couple of well-known footballers came along and sat in our seats. We told them to clear off. This led to some considerable argument about how they should have seats because of who they are and what they’d contributed to the game etc. I said “that has nothing to do with it. My friend and I are taxi drivers and we contribute an enormous amount to society too, but at least we had the sense to book our seats early for this game”. If they wanted seats they should have done the same. It led to quite a long argument. It wasn’t until that guy’s dog went to sit on my seat while I was standing up and I grabbed hold of the dog. In the end these two footballers wandered away muttering curses and things like that under their breaths

After that it was Friday lunchtime and I had to leave work to go to run some errands and then pick up a bike because I had to cycle somewhere for the weekend for a meeting or party or something. I had my bedding with me so I had to sort the bedding out and wrap it into a pillow case then I could prepare to go. On the way out there was a question of an old car that I’d bought, a big 14hp Vauxhall from the 1930s. It had been stolen and recovered, and I’d bought it. Since then I’d decided that I was going to sell it so I had to collect all the photos up and many of the photos were taken by the previous owner. Then I wasn’t sure whether wherever I’d left the car for the moment was going to let me sell it from there or whether I needed to talk to them first. Then there was a story about the policmen who had to go to give chase to someone. They pulled out of their yard and it was like the Keystone Cops watching them drive through these narrow streets running pedestrians over and hitting vehicles coming the other way. Eventually they came across their chief superintendent who was also in a car. They had a collision with him but he sent them on their way. It turned out that it was a fleet of bikes that were leaving work. The issue was all these bikes riding on the wrong side of the road.

Back in this dream later and I came into Shavington to look for this car. The first thing that I noticed when I reached Gresty was that the whole road realignment had changed. It took me a few minutes to collect my bearings. Where the Cheshire Cheese pub had been had been flattened. It was just a demolition site full of weeds. I drove up and down the road trying to find this house but suddenly realised that it would have made things much easier if I’d had the house number with me so I could simply have gone and knocked on the door. No house in the street resembled what I’d seen in the photographs so I was beginning to think that I’d probably be better off going home, finding the number of the house and coming back again. That would probably be much quicker.

It’s hardly surprising that I was thoroughly exhausted after all that.

Nevertheless I struggled to my feet and went for my medication. And after that it took me a while to get going. For a couple of hours I couldn’t do all that much.

Once I started work though I’ve been looking for stuff about someone called John Osborn Williams.

Born in Cardiff into the timber trade, he came to Canada in the early years of the 20th Century and saw the opportunities. Despite having been bankrupted in the past he played on the innocence of the Newfoundland Government and ended up with a large timber concession on the Labrador coast at the height of the Depression.

With there being no official schooling in Labrador (it was a British colony until 1949) many people down the coast were illiterate and had had no contact with the outside world and so they were prey to Williams and his enterprise. For almost 15 years he drove them as a slave driver would and exploited them ruthlessly, all for 25 cents an hour which they had to spend in the company shop.

What’s strange about this though, or maybe it isn’t, is that opinions about him are “varied”. Some people see him as nothing more than a dyed-in-the-wool villain whereas others see him as some kind of victim of a wicked conspiracy.

The cleaner came round today as usual. She gave me some good news about our neighbour who had the bad fall a few weeks ago. Although it’s unlikely that she’ll ever fully recover she’s managed to set foot outside the building for a couple of occasions, with some help. In fact she’s probably doing better than me right now

There were too many leftovers today to use with some of my curry and naan bread. I was going to simply lengthen it with a small potato and make a curry like that but I had another idea.

What I did was to tip a few kidney beans in it and turned it into a chili. And it was quite nice too. I shall remember that for another time. It makes a nice change to vary the diet every so often.

It’s a shame that I spent so much of the day crashed out as I had so much to do. I probably won’t be able to sleep now but I’ll have a try all the same.

Tomorrow the physio should be coming, if he decides to put in an appearance. I’ll have to have a shower too so that I’ll smell nice. I don’t know what to have for tea tomorrow as yet but I’ll worry about that at the appropriate time. Right now I just want to go to bed.

Monday 12th June 2023 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S …

… rather depressing day, today hasn’t been any better.

It was another day during which I spent a lot of time curled up on my chair asleep

It beats me what is going on right now. I went through a phase of this a while back and I thought that I’d managed to pull through it. But it seems to have come back with a vengeance.

Despite what I said, I didn’t go to bed all that early. When I’d finished everything that I had to do I went and checked over what I’d written about my trip to Canada in 2017 and added a few extra notes. I was still in bed in plenty of time though

What didn’t probably help was that it was a very mobile night. There was quite a lot going on. I started off by having a dream about some isolated community in Newfoundland and Labrador. The whole thing was a really exciting and interesting dream but it all just evaporated. All I could remember was me telling someone that it was their fault because they’d become involved in it. The rest of it completely disappeared and that was extremely disappointing.

Next off I was walking around and suddenly overcome with an attack of whatever it was that I have when I’m about to drop onto the floor when my knees all fold up. The funny thing was that I was asleep in bed having a dream and it happened in the dream but it really did feel realistic that I was going to crash to the floor any minute. In this dream I was teaching in a school of very small children. Something came up about an opportunity to go on a travel somewhere to North America. Someone came down to talk to the children about it. His manner of speaking was for much older children and adults so my children didn’t really understand it so I had to practically interpret. Afterwards when he was still in the classroom with the children and I’d gone out, I was looking through the paperwork and found more things that the children needed to know about this so I had to keep going back to talk to them even though he was in there just being sociable. Things like “if the parents had difficulty understanding the forms they could come to see me and we’d fill them in together”, those kinds of problems that I was finding

At one point here I was in Hogwarts again trying to write an ending to the story. Hermione was there in the ladies’ bathroom talking to a mirror that was all fogged and confused. The two boys walked in so she had a little chat to them about how she was feeling and how they’d been over all this before, everything like that. It was a shame that their last spell at Hogwarts would end up like this

There was also someone’s taxi that was not charging the battery. he had a problem with the electrics or something. I had a go at fixing it but then there were no dashboard warning lights. It must have been a fuse. I took the fuse out to clean it and put it back in but still nothing. I fetched my circuit tester and saw that there was definitely a circuit going in and going out again at the fuse box. I then had to hunt for my fuses in the barn. That was extremely difficult. I looked everywhere. We were talking. I said “I know that I have some for every time I used to go to the scrapyard I’d look under the bonnet of a car and take a handful of fuses”. As we were talking I suddenly had a flash of inspiration and looked on one of the shelves in the barn. There was the fuse container that I had so I took a fuse from there and took it over to his car.

When the alarm went off we were discussing cross-Channel ferries, one in particular called Berengaria, named after the Queen of Richard I. There was actually an ocean liner called Berengaria. She was the old German Imperator that was seized as war reparations after World War I and sailed for Cunard under the command of Arthur Rostron, he formerly of the Carpathia and who saved the passengers from the Titanic.

After the medication I went to have a shower and pretty myself up ready for the nurse to come. He gave me my injection and I reminded him that next time he comes, he needs to give me the blood test so that the hospital can see how I’m doing and whether there are any complications

After he left, I’ve been working on my notes from Canada 2017. Despite spending a lot of time asleep I’ve pushed on quite well with the notes. I’ve been all around Red Bay, visited the wreck of MV Bernier and I’m now pushing on through the interior towards the coast at Mary’s Harbour.

Despite my Welsh lesson tomorrow and the visit from the physiotherapist, I’ll push on with my notes. I should make it to Port Hope Simpson tomorrow, where I spent the night on my way around.

That’s an interesting settlement. Created in the 1930s as a logging camp to hose the workers working on the timber concessions there, it was one of the places chosen by the controversial Prime Minister of the Province, Joey Smallwood, to house the people from the coastal settlements that he had cleared out under his even more controversial resettlement programme

So of course, it goes without saying that once everyone had settled there, the operator of the logging concessions closed down the business and the people were left with no work.

And how many times have I heard that story? People whisked away from their traditional hunting and trapping grounds, dumped in a strange new settlement and abandoned with no prospects whatsoever?

It wasn’t quite so bad for the people of European and Métis descent but for the Innu and Inuit it was devastating and has led to an enormous social and domestic problem in these communities.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta. The pepper came out of the freezer and cooked for 16 minutes at 160°C in the air fryer cooked it to perfection

So I’m going to bed now. I’m hoping for a better sleep tonight if I can. I should be fighting fit tomorrow for my lesson – fighting for breath and fit to drop.

Sunday 11th June 2023 – I’VE NOT HAD …

… a very good day today.

In fact I’ve spend much of it asleep on my chair.

It was a very late night last night. I was still going on at 03:30 and I was still working last night.

Whatever time it was that I went to bed I really don’t know but I was up and about at 11:00, wide-awake and unable to go back to sleep.

It had been a bad night during the night too, one of those occasions where I kept on waking up in the middle of it all. I had something of a nightmare too during the night, about some kind of secret that was circulating. People became aware of it and used it in a bad way to compromise a few other people. There was some kind of investigation and found the culprit, a girl who was a service clerk at a Volkswagen garage. They caught her, brought her in and began to interrogate her. It was absolutely the most violent interrogation that I’d ever seen. There was one interrogator and a couple of witnesses. It was probably the most violent thing I’ve ever witnessed. In the end the girl admitted that she hadn’t actually told anyone in the general public. She’d simply told a few other people, one of whom was my brother. The team of interrogators and the girl then left to go down the corridor to begin dealing with those three to find out who it was who had spread the rumour around in the outside world. But it really was the most violent thing that I’ve ever witnessed, asleep or awake.

We’ll go back to that dream because it wasn’t quite as I just dictated. It was near enough but there was one main interrogator, a couple of senior interrogators and a few witnesses. They all stormed off down the corridor to these rooms trying to find out from the people there who had spread this report where it shouldn’t have been.

I was also going on a boat trip to Russia, into the centre. I had to pack everything and go to the airport. When I reached the security desk they took my backpack from me and said that they would look after it and put a label on it. This left me with next to nothing about me. There was another couple there as well. They were going, and seemed to be quite friendly so I was talking to them. They were allowed to take their bags through security so they said that they would go and dump their bags and catch up with me later. By now we were on board the ship and set sail down this magnificent river. We turned off into a tributary which meant going through some lock gates, up some rapids and into a big, wide river. It was really beautiful. By now we were on the road on a coach driving through a gorgeous countryside. I thought to myself “wouldn’t I like to come here in Strider on my own for a look around. We estimated to reach our destination by 21:00 that evening. When we pulled in and sorting ourselves out there was a guy we were talking to who was living in either a tent or a mobile home or something on wheels. You couldn’t actually see him but you could see the mobile home. He was us that he was so deep in debt that he didn’t know where to turn. The reason why he was deep in debt was … but he never answered his own question. he said the statement again and left us all on tenterhooks wondering what on earth it was that he meant.

During the day when I’ve not been asleep on my chair I’ve been dealing with my Canada 2017 trip. I’ve been around Forteau looking at Valard’s new port facilities as at the moment I’ve just gone through L’Anse au Loup on my way north up the Labrador Coast towards Red Bay and the shipwrecks on the rocks there.

My pizza tonight was not a success.

I probably overcooked the base when I tried to save it the other day. It had bubbled up and during the freezing and defrosting process one of the bubbles had burst and there was a hole in it.

What I did was to roll out a small piece of dough to patch the hole ready for when I assembled it but then we had the problems about the different cooking times.

The toppings were really good though and they tasted OK. And if I have learnt anything at all from my efforts today, it’s that it was my own fault for not putting the dough back in the freezer the other night and I ought to be more careful.

The way that I’m feeling right now I shall be going to bed very soon and hoping for a good sleep. Tomorrow I have the nurse coming to inject me and then i’ll be carrying on with my notes from Canada 2017.

If I manage to have a good day I should have reached Red Bay and carried on northwards towards Cartwright

Cartwright is one of the most interesting towns in Labrador, and for many reasons too as you will all find out in due course.

But years ago when I was small I saw one of these wildlife programmes on the TV where a film crew in a small town out on the Labrador coast in the middle of winter in the filming of a nature programme came round a corner and ended up nose-to-nose with a polar bear

When I was in Cartwright for the first time I mentioned that to someone with whom I was talking.
“Ohh yes” she replied. “I remember that. It was just here around the corner”.
I had no idea.

It’s still not as interesting as the events that took place a few years ago in St Anthony across on the other side of the Strait of Belle Isle. There were two headlines on the front page of the newspaper, side by side –
“Polar bear seen in town”
and right next to it
“Mr (whatever) missing from home”

It reminds me of the time that they had a few bicycles on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR and they announced that anyone could borrow them

And I immediately thought of one polar bear saying to another one “high time there was a meals on wheels service around here”.

Thursday 8th June 2023 – I’VE JUST HAD …

… quite possibly the nicest tea that I’ve ever had – at least, that I’ve made myself.

Steamed vegetables in a cheese sauce with vegan meatballs, it was. And for the vegetables there was a small handful each of potatoes peas carrots, runner beans, sprouts, cauliflower and broccoli, cooked to absolute perfection with some dried mint in the steamer

There’s no doubt whatever though that the pièce de résistance was the broccoli that I froze the other day. It was a hundred times better than any frozen broccoli that I have ever bought from a shop

So when there’s more room in the freezer I’ll buy some cauliflower and freeze that too and see if that makes a difference. I’ve already commented in the past that the sprouts and carrots that I have frozen in the past are much better than any shop-frozen ones have ever been

The vegan fondant cheese that I put in my bechamel sauce was delicious too along with the fresh-ground black pepper and tarragon.

There’s no doubt in my mind that my cooking is slowly improving.

Which is more than can be said for my sleep. When the alarm went off this morning I really was deep in the arms of Morpheus and I had to struggle to my feet. But that was probably because I didn’t go to bed until long after midnight, being stuck in at my travel notes from 2017.

And that’s what i’ve been doing today, bashing out yet more stuff.

This morning I was dealing with the “Arrow Air” crash at Gander Lake, reading the Canadian Air Investigation Board reports where the investigators argued about the causes of the crash to such extent that the Board was wound up and a new organisation created.

This afternoon though I was hunting down stuff relating to the Newfoundland Railway, at one time in its heyday the longest narrow-gauge network in the World but which was closed down overnight in the 1980s during Canada’s ruthless savaging of its railway network that made Beeching look like a guardian angel.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my misadventures trying to go to see my niece just now. There’s actually a railway station at the back of her office that would have been ideal of course but that line was closed in 1989 when the Canadian Pacific slashed its entire network east of Montreal.

There is now only one passenger train east of Québec City and that’s the train that I caught. It goes down to the coast at Halifax and runs every Preston Guild.

The physiotherapist came round today, and he says that he’ll be here tomorrow. He tells me that he’s quite concerned about the way that things are developing, and to be honest, so am I. But there’s not much that I can do about it. At least I had a shower before he came so that I would smell nice.

And after he went I crashed out for half an hour. I must admit that I was feeling dreadful for a while

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too from the night. Morton were playing in a football match, a Cup Final of some description. They had gone 1-0 up but towards the end of the game the opposition equalised. They were pressing forward and the keeper, Brian Schwake, made a really good and dramatic save with just seconds to play. he gathered the ball, kicked it downfield straight away and Jai Quitongo running down the field reached the ball and took it into the opposing penalty area to score past the keeper. As a result Morton won their first Cup competition for quite some considerable time. And no-one is more surprised that me that I can remember the names of Morton’s right-winger and on-loan Livingston goalkeeper when I’m asleep.

Not so much luck with this next one though. There was another dream somewhere about a few of us out walking. The girl with us was handicapped. Someone had to explain to one of the little boys what that actually meant and what the implications were but I can’t remember any more of this.

My delicious tea I’ve already mentioned, so now I might even have an early night. Tomorrow I’m carrying on with my little voyage around Newfoundland.

Amongst the places I’ll be visiting will be the site of where the very first commercial Transatlantic flights across the North Atlantic landed (well, they didn’t actually “land” but you’ll see what I mean when you eventually read the notes) in the late 1930s and also where the very first action of World War II on the American continent took place.

There’s no doubt that I was certainly getting around back in those days. Strider and STRAWBERRY MOOSE did me proud.

Monday 5th June 2023 – LAST NIGHT WAS …

… somewhat better than the previous one.

But that’s not difficult. Almost anything could have been better than that.

Feeling as tired as I was, I went to bed early and was asleep quite quickly. Just the occasional tossing and turning here and there.

Mind you, I did awaken early and when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up. Not quite “about” but I was sitting on the edge of the bed dressing.

After the medication I went and had a shower. It was something of a struggle to climb into the bath but only because of the pain in the lower calf, not because of any underlying health issue that might have affected my climbing into the bath in the past

The nurse came round at 08:20 and gave me my injection. He went afterwards to my neighbour who had the bad fall. Apparently things are not looking so good for her and that will be quite a shame.

And the nerve specialist finally phoned me back early this morning too. He can fit me on on 20th June at 10:15.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent travelling through Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island and on the ferry across the Gulf of St Lawrence. We’re now pulling into port at Argentia ready for Strider, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and me to drive up to Saint John to see my friend who lives there.

Argentia is quite an interesting place. The slow Transatlantic convoys – those with prefix SC – in World War II set out from Sydney, from where I’d just sailed, and the destroyer patrols that guarded the convoys in the early stages of their journey sheltered here in Argentia.

The village itself was demolished to make room for the naval installations. Even the bodies in the graveyard were dug up.

On 10th August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt met in the harbour on board a ship in the harbour to discuss issues concerning the conduct of the War to date and how the USA could help to further the UK’s War aims.

When I was HERE IN 2010 it was in the middle of a torrential rainstorm so I didn’t have much of a look round. And when I was there in 2017 I was in too much of a rush.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from last night too. I was keeping a diary. One of the entries on which I was working was about my trip to the hospital where I’d ended up being in some kind of class that was doing something like an eye examination test where everyone was being asked questions about eyes etc but in a more vernacular rather than a scientific sense. I wasn’t asked any questions but I still had to take part in it. I was writing it up in the diary. There were lots more than happened on that particular day but I can’t remember much of it now

There was another dream about a circus, Silcock’s Circus but I can’t remember how it went. But then I was with my friends from the Wirral and another one of my friends but the woman with him was neither of the women with whom he has been married. We’d all met up once for my birthday but it was time to go. We walked back to the bus stop in Weston. The couple from the Wirral were walking ahead so I was walking with the other two who were bringing up the rear. I said my fondest goodbyes to them and that I’d see them again but I wasn’t sure when, then walked off to say goodbye to the others. The Wirral couple cut me off and headed that way. The other two went to speak to them. I thought “never mind. I’ll wander off anyway and leave those four to it”. Eventually the 6 of us (so who was the sixth?) were together at the bus stop. I pointed out the new views of Crewe with all of the redevelopment and cutting down of trees you could see so much more of the town from here than you could 30 years ago. We talked about all of the changes that had taken place in the area. Mrs Wirral asked me if I could fly by aeroplane. I told her that I had done but the problem with aeroplanes was the transfers. If I go by bus it’s basically door to door with no wandering around unnecessarily whereas with the aeroplane I’d have to walk miles and that was what was the problem with that. It wasn’t the question that I couldn’t afford it. That was something else.

I was an explorer back in the early Middle Ages. I discovered Paris on behalf of the French. That led to huge dances and celebrations all over the country. I was at one of them. For some reason King George ended up displeased and I was arrested. Crowds of people still came out to the exit to watch me take my exercise. I was thinking that one day they would decide to cut off my head at the end of all this. They were presumably letting things drag because nothing at all seemed to be changing.

At some point during the morning I dozed off for half an hour. I’ve clearly not recovered from Saturday night and my lack of sleep.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper, made with one of the peppers out of the freezer. And I cooked it in the air fryer on a low heat of 160°C for a total of 17 minutes, and that cooked it to perfection. It really was done to a turn.

And on the subject of things being cooked to perfection, my fruit buns were certainly delicious. It was an excellent batch that I made yesterday.

So tomorrow I have a Welsh lesson so I need to prepare for it. And the physiotherapist is coming round tomorrow afternoon too. I’m not sure what he’ll have to say about my leg and the little incident on Saturday morning, but with having had the nerve specialist contacting me again, it looks as if things are slowly moving forward.

it just makes me wish that I was.

Sunday 4th June 2023 – THAT WAS A HORRIBLE …

… night last night. I don’t think that I went off to sleep for a moment.

My left leg was hurting all the way through the night and I just couldn’t make myself comfortable.

So much so that I was wide awake at 08:00 and out of bed by 08:30 and when was the last time that that ever happened on a Sunday?

After the medication and the mails and messages I spent much of the day working on my Canada 2017 journey. I’ve now spent a week at my niece’s house, done some work on Strider and now I’m on my way for the Bay of Fundy to pick up Strider’s insurance.

That’s something that I won’t have to worry about in the future because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, Strider is up for sale. There’s no point in having him sitting rusting away at the end of my niece’s drive when someone else can make use of him.

Liz came onto the internet too. Her grand-daughter is into ballet and is off shortly to Portugal to perform. She’s appeared in a couple of videos just recently so Liz sent me the links to watch.

Tonight’s pizza was another masterpiece. I seem to have this off to quite a fine art now and that’s really good. I’m not sure how I can improve on how they are turning out at the moment.

What helped today though was that the oven was stinking hot when the pizza went in. I’d run out of fruit buns at the end of the week so I made a batch this afternoon and they look quite good. I’ll tell you tomorrow about how they taste.

There’s a little room in the freezer now to put the spare ones. While I was ferreting about in there I found a plastic container with some soup in it. Carrot and ginger it was, and I remember making that and how good it was.

And notice the use of the past tense. The soup no longer exists and it was just as delicious as I remembered it. It made a nice change from cheese on toast at lunchtime.

Despite what I said just now, I must have gone to sleep at some point during the night because there was some stuff on the dictaphone. I started off in the Air Force in World War I. My aeroplane had been attacked and I’d been killed. I was still somehow going through the lines of a song trying to work out the lyrics and have the tune fitted into them because it wasn’t as straightforward as it might have seemed.

Then I was in the mountains of Central Europe last night with a couple of other people. We’d been climbing these rocks and were having to move this wood about, these very long tree trunks. At times it was extremely difficult and complicated on these rocks. More than once we almost dropped them into the valley down below. When we reached a place where we could relax I was talking about cars. Someone knew where there was a certain type of car for sale but it was in Bulgaria. he translated the advert for me. I mentioned that I’d be interested in paying so much for it. In Bulgaria he said that’s an “anhorse”. I had to be very careful not to confuse it with “anhorst” and a few others that meant different sums. he coached me through it and then wrote it down. I looked at samples of his writing. There was writing of other people there. Some of it was really close together but very tall. He talked about whose that was. We agreed to make an appointment to see the vehicle but now we had to retrace our steps back the way we’d come with these two enormous tree trunks which was really difficult. We almost dropped them again in the same place. One of the other people suggested that he go in front so that he could hold them from the front while I held them at the back and we slid them along. How he was going to go to the front past me and these tree trunks was another big complicated issue. There was also a young girl there too but I can’t remember what she was doing or why she was there.

And then very early on Sunday morning I was heading into Crewe Town Centre to do something about this leg. I’d gone over the bridge in Flag Lane ready to turn into Delamere Street and they both came round the corner, my father eating some chips. I grabbed a chip and said that I hadn’t had any this weekend. I asked how they were and they asked how I was. We had a little chat really about nothing very much in particular

Shortly I’m going to bed – nice and early too. I’m absolutely whacked and I’ve already fallen asleep once or twice today sitting on my chair. I’m hoping to have a really good sleep tonight. I’m certainly tired enough but things never work out quite like that, do they?

Saturday 3rd June 2023 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… really bad fall today.

And this one is the worst that I’ve had. Even worse than the one on the boat coming back from Jersey last summer.

And not only that, it’s much more worrying too. usually what happens is that all of a sudden there’s no sensation at all in my right leg and when I put my foot down I simply fall over gently as if there’s no leg there.

However today, it was the left leg, my good (or maybe I should say less bad) leg, there was a stabbing pain all the way up my left leg and I had a really heavy fall.

It happened on the car park at Noz and I wasn’t able to stand up afterwards. I had to crawl on my hands and knees to Caliburn and lean on him to help me up.

Right now, I can’t move without being on crutches and each time I try to stand up or put my leg in an unusual position the pain comes back.

It’s not a “broken leg” type of pain but definitely a muscle or nerve issue. I’ll have to wait until the physio next comes to see me and have a chat with him. In the meantime I’ll be taking it easy

Not that I took it easy during the night. I stayed up until I finished the notes for the day in Canada 2017 on which I’d been working so that I could go to bed with a clean slate.

But once more, we seem to be back in the “tossing and turning during the night” stages. I thought that we’d got over all of that, but apparently not.

When the alarm went off this morning I was fast asleep again and it was a struggle to beat the second alarm.

There were a few things that I needed to do before setting out and then Caliburn and I went out to the shops.

And today I didn’t buy a thing at Noz. It really was a waste of time going and had I known how it would turn out I wouldn’t have gone at all.

At LeClerc I bought everything that I needed (although I bet that I’ve forgotten something) and then went to the appliances department in a separate building to buy a gas cylinder for my sodastream

Back here I had a fight with the freezer to fit in the beans that I’d bought and then settled down with my coffee and cheese on toast.

Regrettably, I crashed out for a while too. That’s becoming a habit, it seems, whenever I go out and about.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from the night. I was a passenger on a coach trip with a young girl, someone like my youngest sister. We were in like a ballroom place sitting down talking. There were all kinds of things happening. We’d left the room for some reason but when we returned the band was just striking up a waltz. I grabbed hold of whoever I was with and we waltzed into the room. We were the only couple on the dance floor. my friend from Germany was there so she took her husband and they began to dance. We began to have a ballroom dance-type of thing. My partner wasn’t particularly good but I was able to guide her around somewhat. It began to be a nice pleasant evening.

Later on there was a family, something like the Lyons (as in “Life of Lyons”) family who lived at 222 some street or other. One of their children had to go to the radio centre to introduce a radio show. I went to pick him up. First of all I was surprised. I was expecting mansions, all this kind of thing but they were just modern terraced houses in a big square. I drove around and found the house. What was interesting here was that there was no front door. The living room overflowed into a common area. The doors behind went into the kitchens and bedrooms. I could hear the children talking in there. I recognised the voices so I went and knocked on the door leading to the back and they began to come out.

At that moment though I had a horrible attack of cramp in my left calf and that awoke me so I’ll never know how that would have ended..

Finally I had to go to a Tax Office last night to take all my papers. The first thing that I had to do was to take a plastic bag in which to put everything. There was a big pile of them. I took one that implied that I was Moroccan. I don’t know why I did that. I put all my papers in and had to join this queue. There were probably 20 clerks sitting at a long desk. You just went to stand at the desk and one of them would talk to you. I handed all the papers of my employment to her. I was marked down as “leaving definitively”. I had to hand in another certificate to the guy sitting next to this girl. He looked at it and said “we already have these. You didn’t need to bring this”. I replied “I bring everything anyway”. he began to go through all my paperwork with the girl. he asked me “do you have any more income with the Commonwealth?”. I replied “no”.

The rest of the day has been spent feeling sorry for myself and writing up the notes for the next day’s walk (in the days when I could walk) around Québec.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that years ago I wrote something about THE CHEMIN DU ROY from Montreal to Québec. I started from Repentigny because I wasn’t sure of the route out of Montreal but over time I traced the route and so I was on foot from the centre of the town out as far as the Jacques Cartier Bridge and a little bit futher east.

And one thing that I’ve often wondered. In North America most of the landmarks are named for the first European who actually saw them. I always wondered what Jacques Cartier must have said when he sailed up the St Lawrence to what in those days was the Iroquois settlement of Hochelaga in 1535 and saw that massive bridge.

There was a burger that had been in the fridge for a while and when I inspected it this evening I decided that the best thing to do with it would be to file it under CS. Consequently I had a further fight with the freezer and put one of the two remaining lasagne slices in there to keep

The other one, I ate tonight with a vegan salad and it was all extremely delicious. I’m really impressed with that lasagne, that’s for sure.

Not so impressed with my health though. It seems that I only have to think about going back to the Land of my Great Grandfather and I have a bad fall, just like last year.

However that time, I ignored it and went all the same, and look how that turned out. I think that my body is trying to tell me something.

What I’ll do for now is to carry on around the Port of Montreal ship-spotting and when things quieten down, dictate some radio notes that I’ve prepared.

No alarm tomorrow. I’ll have a good lie-in. But I have to be a-baking though. I’ve run out of fruit buns. No idea where I’m going to put the ones that need to be stored though. We’re back to where we were ages ago with not even the hint of a place to put stuff

Well, it’ll all work out somehow. It usually does. I just wish that I would.

EPIC HALL

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