Tag Archives: hospital

Tuesday 26th January 2016 – I WAS RIGHT!

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

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

And then we had the blood pressure test

And then the blood sample

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

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

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

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

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

And so she went off to talk to the surgeon.

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

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

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

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

If I ever do.

Monday 25th January 2016 – BGGR!

And so I had the phone call – at 17:27 precisely. “Mr Hall – you need to come into hospital for a blood transfusion. Your blood count has dropped right down to 6.8”. That is, incidentally, the lowest that it has been during this whole procedure except for the day that I crawled into the doctor’s.
“But do I really need to come in? I’m coming in for good on Wednesday anyway and I’m having a blood transfusion as soon as I arrive”.
“I’m afraid that you do – in fact you need to come in to the Urgences right away”.
And so after a brief discussion, I packed my bag. Liz had just come home from work and luckily, there was a vegan lasagne to hand in the fridge so I managed to have a meal this time before I set out.

It also gave me an opportunity to reflect on my last night’s voyages, where for the first time for ages, I was accompanied by no-one that I knew (except for a very brief cameo appearance right at the end).

We were in the USA last night. There were three guys, two of them were quite sedate teenagers and the third was quite wild. Something had happened involving the farces of law and order and they had had to flee from their homes. This is the story of their drive to safety, something like Thelma & Louise or Fandango as they fled north towards the Canadian border. The two sedate guys were fleeing together and eventually the police caught up with them and flagged them down. The third guy turned up on his own a short time later, bringing with him some shoes that he had … errr … borrowed along the way. He found himself on this fuel station and was immediately surrounded by the police, so he gave himself up. It turned out that the person who had been doing all of these dreadful things against these boys, causing them to flee, was wanted by the police himself and on some quite serious charges too, and once this had all become clear, they began to be treated as witnesses rather than as criminals themselves. The third boy, the one with the shoes, was told by the police “ohh yes, you were bringing the shoes to us, weren’t you? You were coming here to meet up with your friends and to bring us the shoes as evidence”. Of course, he immediately agreed and so this car chase ended on a happy note and everyone lived happily ever after. This fuel station where we were was one of these places that was clad in green corrugated iron (the modern angular stuff) that was quite close to a road junction that was a diagonal T-junction. The main road was flanked by a row of buildings with the side turning diagonally backwards and the petrol station was up the side turning behind the buildings on the main road. And in the corner right up behind the service station right up against the back of the buildings was a kind of café in a portakabin made of the same material. I’d been reading some instructions somewhere in this fuel station about petrol stations that sold bottled gas for parties, barbecues and so on. It listed all of the places where you could go to buy it, and one group of places that was listed was a group of petrol stations that were struggling to survive now that they had lost their Phillips Petrol franchises. I remembered something in the back of my head that I had heard while I’d been on my travels about Phillips Petrol Stations not being allowed to sell bottled gas. But as soon as they had lost their franchises, they had started to sell everything, including bottled gas, as they fought for survival. Anyway, these two boys decided that with peace having broken out, they would go home and this would be the end of their adventure. The third guy decided that he would carry on, head north and into Canada, pawn the car that he was driving (which was someone else’s car anyway) and make a new start in Canada. I decided that I would go back to Canada with him. But as I came out of the service station building onto the forecourt I had this astonishing feeling of déjà-vu that I had been here before – maybe when I had crossed over into the USA I had come here to buy some fuel and buy a coffee in the café. We can’t be all that far from the Canadian border here. As these two boys were leaving, they were going through their receipts and statements of their expenditure. One boy had a look of horror on his face “TWENTY …… ONE THOUSAND dollars for candy” in a very indignant tone. “really, I don’t think that I’m allowed that!”. The third boy and I had smiles on our faces. How on earth had he managed to spend that much money on sweets?
A little later, we had the story of two brothers, one of whom was brilliantly successful and the other who was not. The unsuccessful one lived in a big house and was clearly sponging off his other brother. A deal had been done somewhere and the successful brother had ended up some $150,000 light on it. On making certain enquiries he discovered that some document were missing. He went round to see his brother and they went through all of the papers and in the end the poorer brother admitted that he had them and this was part of the fraud that he had committed on his brother. The rich brother then asked for them back and put some very heavy pressure on the second brother. In the end the papers were handed over but the second brother then put his hand into his desk drawer and pulled out a recording unit. he had apparently been recording this discussion which had contained details of some of the evil deeds that the rich brother had done in order to get where he was today. Of course the richer brother wanted to have this recording but the poorer brother wouldn’t let him and so there was a fight and the richer brother ended up beating the second brother to a pulp in order to lay his hands on the incriminating recording. He walked back out to the front of the house where the second brother’s wife and some friends had been having some kind of party, but he explained that he had to go. He got into his car, which was a red Toyota kind of thing and drove away. A short while later, his wife said that they should go and check up on the other brother – it was the thing to do and they had other things to to anyway – so she went back to check. On returning, she said that he had crashed out and was having a really good sleep by the pool but she hadn’t looked really closely. And should they ring him up? It might spoil his sleep. The first brother, who had been something of an actor, ended up disguising himself as some kind of a tramp with 2 days’ growth of beard and shabby clothes. He walked into this Greyhound bus station and this was where I entered the scene. I was with someone else – it might even have been Rosemary but I’m not too sure and I was saying “this is how bus stations are in North America. It was in the open air, with the soil being that red compacted sandy soil that you find in the Utah Desert. We had apparently been talking about the pie huts in American bus stations before and here was one exactly like the one that we had mentioned, right on the corner at the bottom and there were loads of poorer people around here. We went into the waiting room, which was like a portakabin of exactly the same type as the café at the garage earlier this evening. We waited for our bus and this brother-disguised-as-a-tramp was in there talking to a girl. This girl was a network-marketeer and she was in someone’s network at quite a senior grade,called a Scooby-Doo in her network. She did a good deal of the motivational talks as she was really keen and really enthusiastic about it. This brother wasn’t really all that keen or enthusiastic about it – not really interested at all, but he needed someone to talk to in order to make some kind of convincing cover for himself.

I had my blood test after this (as mentioned above) and then breakfast. And then I found myself alone. Liz had to go off to work and Terry had a job on for today. I wasn’t up to much and so I stayed behind and did some work on my 3D project, wrote a letter and generally had a quiet day. That is, up until my phone call at 17:27.

I was on the road again at 17:50 heading north to Montlucon, stopping at the Intermarché at Pionsat to buy some bananas and a packet of biscuits. I’ve been stranded in the hospital without food before, as I’m sure you all remember.

There was a parking place outside the Urgences when I arrived at 18:45, so I didn’t have far to walk. I didn’t have long to wait in reception either, but once I’d crossed the threshold, the problems began. My previous history means nothing at all, apparently, and we had to start right from the beginning yet again, even down to the electro-cardiac tests. I had two doctors examining me too, and each one of them asked me exactly the same questions and did exactly the same tests.

While I was lying on a trolley in the corridor waiting to be assigned, a woman came over to me and had quite a friendly chat with me, as if she knew just who I was. It took me a while to figure it out but eventually I realised just who she was. She’s the surgeon who will be attacking me on Thursday morning. And doesn’t she look different in civvies? She reckoned that the horrible solution that I Just had to drink – allegedly to reduce the amount of potassium in my blood – was in fact a punishment for some misbehaviour that I’ve carried out.

But one thing in which she totally agrees with me – and that is that to have a blood count of 8.6 last Monday, and for it to be still 8.6 on Thursday and then for it to dramatically drop to 6.4 (because that’s what it was by the time that I arrived here) today is quite simply not normal. I’ve mentioned before another set of abnormal results from the Laboratory and so I wonder whether there’s something not quite right about the Laboratory.

The blood has finally arrived anyway – at, would you believe, 23:40. I’m being moved to a private room so they can feed it in. I foresee a very restless night.

Saturday 16th January 2016 – I’M TRYING TO THINK …

… "always a difficult task" – ed … if I went outside yesterday. And the answer is that I did, briefly, to buy a loaf of bread when the mobile baker came round. That was the sum total of my adventures outside in the snow today.

But there wasn’t much in the way of snow. The promised downpour during the night never came and instead we had maybe half an inch and that didn’t last too long. The gritter finally found its way down here too this morning so at least it’s possible to travel around, if you wanted to.

But no-one wanted to. We all had a day in watching England dispose of the South African Test team in what can only be described as an eventful day’s cricket, and then watching the football. And probably the most exciting Premier League match that I have seen in years – the second half of Aston Villa v Leicester. A game that was played in exactly the fashion of how a good old First Division match of the 1970s would have been played instead of the boring, monotonous garbage that’s served up today where teams will pass the ball all the way back to the goalkeeper from the opponent’s penalty area if it means keeping possession of the ball rather than going on an all-out attacking rampage.

I’ve caught up with the second week of my animation course too. Back right on schedule although I’m the first to admit that I’ve not done the practical work. I don’t have the facilities here to do any of it so I’ll have to wait until I return home, whenever that might be. Furthermore, they make available the animation software that you need, but only for an i-Phone and my phone is a long way from being one of those.

But here’s something amusing. The postie came by this morning and brought three letters, all of which were for me! One was my blood test results and the other two were the long-promised letters from the hospital. I now know what is wrong with me and what they intend to do with me, and I also know that it’s going to be of long durée. so after this operation, I won’t be out of the woods – I’ll just have moved into different woods instead.

But it’s pleasing to know that I don’t have Hepatitis C, I’m not HIV-positive and that there are no traces of alcohol, tobacco or … errr … toxic substances in my blood. Not that there ought to be any of those things of course, but you never know what it is that’s going on when you are being injected with needles at least twice per day and receiving pints of blood from unknown sources.

So having had a nice, restful day, I can tell you about my nice restful night because for once these recent nights I didn’t get up to all that much. I started off doing something with one of the kids characters that I’ve created with the 3D modelling program that I use but I can’t remember what it was and which character it was (it was very likely K4). Anyway, someone (it might have been Cécile or Nerina) came around so see what I was doing but I explained that I don’t like people looking at my work until it’s finished so I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the idea. There was a new release of poses (for those who can’t create their own) for the character but these had to be applied only under certain circumstances. I applied them under all kinds of different circumstances regardless, but the characters came out all very wooden. I was wondering whether this was because I’d applied the poses in the wrong circumstances, or whether something else was going on.
I can’t remember where I was after that but it was Manchester or somewhere like that, at a concert venue below street-level and Man were due to appear. Instead of hanging around waiting for them, I went for a little wander around in the immediate vicinity and found another concert hall almost right next-door and this attracted my attention for a while. Then, returning to my venue, I could hear the music drifting upstairs so I dashed down, just in time to miss the last number! Drat! So I went to buy a beer (I haven’t had a beer in over 25 years, by the way) and there, sitting on a stool behind the counter as if he was supervising the place, was a boy who lived in the same village as me and who was on the same educational path and whom I haven’t seen for probably 40 years. But to buy a beer, you had to queue down a line of trestle tables until you reached the end, which was right up against the wall of the building, but the seats were so close to the trestle table that it as quite a squeeze to come back with your full beer glasses.

What? Me drinking beer? This really is becoming quite nostalgic. I’ll be eating cheese next, you just wait and see.

AND JUST IN CASE YOU ARE WONDERING why your comments on these postings aren’t appearing automatically these days – WordPress (which supplies the technical support for this blog) is being hit badly by another mega-spam-surge and we are being overwhelmed with spam-comments.

I’ve therefore had to delete the “automatic approval” setting for now and approve (or otherwise) all comments manually until the panic dies down. Normal service will (hopefully) be restored in early course (if I can remember how to do it).

Don’t let this hiccup stop you from adding your pearls of wisdom to my remarks.

Friday 15th January 2016 – THE ROAD TO MONTLUCON …

… wasn’t too bad this morning. I was up bright and early … "well, maybe not so bright" – ed … at 07:00 and by 07:25 I was on the road with a nice thermal mug of hot coffee to keep me going.

I took it fairly easy and although Caliburn slipped around in a couple of places we didn’t have any big issues. Even going down the Font Nanaud wasn’t anything like the challenge that I expected it to be, and by the time that I reached whatever the name of the place is in between Marcillat and Villebret, the road was pretty clear. All in all, it only took me 10 or so minutes longer than usual and I was parked up at the hospital by 08:30 as usual.

Mind you, I’d beaten all of the staff of the day hospital into work so had to hang around 10 minutes before the doors opened up. And then, being first in, I could have my comfy spec in the armchair in the corner by the radiator and the power point.

It was the student nurse who came to fit my drain and that filled me full of foreboding. She was the one who had had three tries the other week before abandoning the job and calling for a friend. But today, to my surprise, not only did she do it in one, it was the least painful of all of them.

And here we had the confusion, much to my dismay. It was the young doctor who had telephoned yesterday to summon me to hospital, and although he had probably told the nurses that I was coming, there had been some confusion about the ordering of my blood. Consequently, I had to wait until about 11:15 for the blood to arrive. Then we had the new marvels of modern 21st-Century technology for warming up the blood – to wit – me stuffing it up my jumper.

At about 11:40, someone brought me a nice hot cup of coffee. I’d only been waiting since about 09:00 (the first time that I asked). But in the meantime I’d not been idle. I’d downloaded another whole pile of stuff from www.archive.org and now I reckon that I have a whole decent set of radio programmes to keep me company. I’ll have to check to see if I can find The Men From The Ministry because I forgot about that.

Running so late, I ordered lunch, and ended up with asparagus and tomato for starters, rice and boiled carrots with a bread roll for main course, and then apple purée and an orange for desert. Not the most exciting meal that I’ve ever had, by a long chalk, but it was quite filling and actually tasted quite nice.

It was 14:50 by the time that they had finished with me and I was really disappointed by this. But every cloud has a silver lining, for Ingrid was in the hospital and due to finish what she was doing at 15:00. So go down to the shops or have a coffee with Ingrid? No competition really, is there?

By 16:20 I was on the road and by then, the return journey was a very different story. There had been a flurry of snow in Montlucon at lunchtime and everyone had rushed to the window to see it. But by the time I reached Villebret there was much more than just a flurry and it gradually worsened the higher into the mountains that I climbed. The drag up to the Font Nanaud (height, 934 metres) was exciting, especially as there had been no snowplough or gritter south of Pionsat (I eventually met one, coming towards me from St Gervais) and I was right behind a Mercedes Vito towing a plant trailer with a mini-loader on the back.

He of course had no chance, but he did his best. Rear-wheel drive is useless in this weather when you are pulling something like that and he was sliding everywhere across the road, fighting for grip. He ought to have realised that it was pointless and should have turned round on the old railway track bed to go back down, but he pressed gamely on.

It wasn’t very long before the inevitable happened. He completely lost traction, slewed across the road and came to a shuddering stop. I couldn’t stop to help him because I would have lost traction too so I chugged on over the top and down the bank towards St Gervais.

The conditions round by St Gervais weren’t quite so bad as up on the Font, and the farther south that you travelled, the easier the route became.

By the time I got to Phoen … errr … the Centre Ornithologique, things had cleared quite considerably and the roads were much easier to move about, which was good news for me.

I stopped here to take a few photographs of the snow, to record it for posterity. St Gervais, over there on the hill about 100 feet higher up than where I am, looks particularly covered and you can tell by the sky that there’s more to come.

Pulling away from here wasn’t easy either, with a couple of traction issues to get over the ridges made by the car tyres in the snow. But I was soon off and back down here to dig myself in for the foreseeable future.

I have no plans for going out anywhere else until my next hospital visit. And that’s a thought to depress just about anyone

Just in case you are wondering, we had none of the usual suspects, no family members and only one slight mention of a place of my previous existence during my nocturnal rambles of last night.

I’ve no idea where I was when I started off last night but it was a place that I certainly didn’t recognise, somewhere on the coast of the UK. It was a holiday resort, at a part of the town that was inland a little and high up with a view over the bay. There was quite a group of us and we’d heard that one of our rock heroes or bands was playing in this place at the carnival on the seafront. The word “Jubilee” was mentioned, and it turned out that Jubilee was a suburb of this particular town with access to the sea, so I was making a few enquiries to find out which trams we needed to catch to go there. There was a tram stop just outside the building where we were staying and I was trying to read the timetables and tram routes. But I was there for hours trying to find out which tram it was that went to Jubilee, with trams passing in front of me and all around me. In the end, I went back into the building, which was the hospital where I’d been a few days ago.
We then had an old woman putting in an appearance. I’ve no idea who she was but last night she was living next door to me and I had her doing quite a few of my affairs for me. I’d just turn up out of the blue and she’d do a few things for me and then I’d go off again. When I was there last time, and had her go along and do something for me, and as a reward I had paid for her haircut at the hairdressers. She said that she had only just been, so I told her to go again and have the same cut done, or something else, a second time. And so she ended up with almost no hair. She also said that next day she was going into hospital for an urgent operation but that cut no ice with me. I was supposedly in Crewe by this time, Alton Street or somewhere around there. I had wandered off somewhere and a couple of days later I was back, still looking for this Jubilee. I went into the local hospital and here I came across this woman. she’d had her surgery and I’d forgotten completely about it, so I had to pretend to be interested and to talk to her about it. I’d intended to go to see her later in the day in fact because this was really early in the morning when I arrived. But she was awake this early so we had the chat about her operation
From here I went off to work as a general handyman for some rich old lady. We were somewhere in an urban French environment and she took me with her, beckoned me to follow her around and through these old outbuildings into a large barn-type of place and through into a garage that fronted the street. I had to open the doors to let her friend in with a car. These buildings were full of what I thought were dead insects but she explained that they were immature crabs. She’d bought a huge pile of them but ended up with 100 too many but rather than take them back she’d just dumped them out of the car and they had all died. So we managed to bring the car in and then we went off, her beckoning me to follow once more up to a gallery place with a metal walkway. She’d erected a kind of metal fence around it that went around a kind of headland that she owned or had something to do with. It seemed that the neighbours had objected to the fence (it was merely strands of barbed wire) and so it had to be pulled up, so that was my job. Some guy who worked for some Civil Service body was watching me, telling me what a good job it was in the Civil Service and how I ought to apply to work there. But I was busy pulling up these stakes and coiling up this wire. He wanted to know what I was going to do with this wire so I replied that I was going to keep it – one of the perks of my job. He had quite a moan about that. meantime, I’d noticed that this wire was swinging around all over the road so I had to go down and coil it up properly. I’d also had to consult my telephone to see what was going on because someone else had started this job with me but had gone again, so I wanted to see where he was. However, I somehow managed to connect to a film on this telephone – a black-and-white film of the 30s with some film star appearing in it and I couldn’t stop it – each time that I tried to press “stop” or to switch it off, I had a “buy it now” screen. The volume was set quite loud – I couldn’t lower that and everyone in the area could hear it.

And so despite my trip to Montlucon today, I reckon that I’m still cracking up far more miles during the night. It’s hardly any surprise that I’m so exhausted these days.

But I do wonder what it is that they are putting in my food to make all of this happen.

Thursday 14th January 2016 – SNOW!

This was the sight that greeted me this morning.

Well, actually, no it wasn’t. When I came downstairs, it was dark. Too dark to take a photo with the camera on the phone and I had to wait until it was lighter. By that time, some of the snow had melted and so it didn’t look quite like this, but still it’s the first snow that I have seen this winter.

It’s not actually the first snow of the winter, but when we had that, I was incarcerated in the hospital and never managed to see it.

The nurse managed to remember to come this morning, which was just as well because it was blood test day and I couldn’t have my breakfast until afterwards.

Once the nurse had gone and I had had breakfast, I didn’t do too much at all. Watched the first day of the 3rd Test with Terry and did some more of my animation course.

For tea, I made myself a pizza with peppers, mushrooms and olives, covered by grated vegan cheese. And I remembered to put the herbs on too. It didn’t half taste nice. And then I had a really early night – at just 19:45.

I had to go out to Caliburn though before retiring – to lift the wiper arms so that the blades aren’t touching the screen and to fetch my thermal mug, as I have an early start tomorrow. They’ve had my blood test results and despite the two pochettes that I had on Tuesday, my blood count has barely struggled up to 8.0. It’s clear that I’m starting to lose this fight and they have called me in to the hospital tomorrow for more blood.

As for anything else, members of my family are continuing to feature quite regularly in my nocturnal travels, and I still seem to be stuck in not merely a time-warp but a place-warp too, back in my old stamping grounds of my younger days. There’s clearly something significant, if not ominous, about all of this.

I started out last night by watching a film – one of these types of surreal horror film of the 1970s which centred around quite a few events. There was a girl aged about 9, rather a large girl, all covered in blood and gore. Anyway, there was a pile of us, all young kids, all living in a big house with a big bedroom. We all had our bed and that was about it – nothing else, and beds were crammed into the room everywhere with hardly any place to walk in between. We’d been doing something or other and I’d come back to crash out on the sofa. Also on this sofa were two jewel boxes that belonged to my mother and she asked for them back. My older sister however replied that she couldn’t get them back as I was asleep right there. At that, I woke up and asked her why she hadn’t reached in to get them? It wasn’t as if there was any big deal about this instead of making all of this comedy about everything. I crawled off into the bedroom and into my bed which was along the long wall. My parents came in and the whole thing erupted. There were all kinds of nightmare characters in these beds, we’d seen highlights in flashbacks from this film, rather like in Catch-22. My parents then went into a second bedroom where there were loads of kids, all of whom had the faces of gorillas and hippopotamuses and so on – astonishingly surreal. And the doctor had said something to this young girl – telling her to keep herself very clean and take care of her body.
From there, we moved on to another party designed to say goodbye to my niece and her husband, who had come over from Canada specifically for the party so that we could say goodbye to them! There were so many people milling around that we had to apportion them into all kinds of different vehicles. In the end they shot off to wherever it was that they were going for this meal, that was starting at 13:30. However I had a lot to do so I knew that I would be late, and I ended up at Alvaston Hall (or at least, what I reckoned last night was Alvaston Hall). When I finished, I had to get over to where this meal was taking place and for once in my life I had to take a taxi. At Alvaston Hall there were loads of people and loads of cars, but not a single taxi loitering in the vicinity. However, I noticed that at the table having lunch were three taxi drivers who I knew and who worked for a small company in Crewe. I went over to them to ask if any of them fancied a fare over to wherever this meal was taking place. They however insisted on their lunch-hour, so I asked them what time they had started. They replied “12:00” – which made no sense at all to me (even in a nocturnal ramble where nothing usually makes any sense) seeing as it was now 13:30. I asked them how long they would be, to which they said a half-hour or so. Totally crazy, but I was wondering that if I called someone out from Crewe, it would take that long for them to reach Alvaston Hall anyway. I then managed to lay my hands on a car, an old one of the type of the 1920s, and I planned to go off in that. However a group of young environmental campaigners was protesting against it. Of course, I was sympathetic with their aims but I was also in a hurry so when I made to drive off, they started to spray it with water and foam. I chased them all off but one young guy was really spoiling for a fight and was so insistent that in the end I had him on the ground and tied his hair to the railings in the best Vinny Jones fashion. “Get out of that without moving!” I then quickly cleaned the car, but when I opened the glove box, a pile of rusty water and old rusty Printed Circuit Boards fell out. One of these environmental protesters was there watching me do all of this – a young girl with blond curly hair, a green jumper and light brown slacks. We ended up having a rather heated dispute. She started to leave so I followed her to continue our argument and we ended up passing through the foyer of this 1950s-type glass and concrete conference centre and outside on the concourse. She didn’t make too much of an effort to escape so our argument continued, and suddenly, for no good reason, I put my arms around her in a rather passionate embrace. She offered me no resistance whatever – in fact she was rather encouraging.
I then found myself briefly in Italy with someone else and loitering around somewhere in the street. There was a young girl selling ice-cream from a mobile trolley so I went over there, took a cornet, filled it up with Neapolitan ice cream and stuck it back in the cornet holder. This girl didn’t make half a much of a fuss as I would have imagined.

It’s all still happening, isn’t it?

Tuesday 12th January 2016 – I REALLY DON’T KNOW …

… why they pay some of these people. If I were in charge, they would be paid in washers.

It’s no surprise to anyone to learn that neither of the two letters that I was promised, by two different secretaries of the hospital at Montlucon, has been prepared – let alone signed and posted. And so we had another fifteen minutes of unpleasantness at the reception counter when I went to collect my droit d’entrée to go to see the anaesthetist.

However, this was resolved in rather dramatic fashion while I was talking to the head of the accounts department. She told me (again – because she had told me this three or four weeks ago) that I needed to have the authorisation of my insurance company for the hospital to send the bills for consultation directly to them, and for this, I needed a letter from the doctor who was treating me.

I then (rather patiently for me) explained that I was in total agreement, but having asked for those letters on 23rd December from my Doctor and again on 4th January from my Surgeon, I had still received nothing despite the re-assurance on the telephone the other day, and in fact the letters hadn’t even been typed out.

At that news, the head of the accounts department picked up the telephone, dialled a number and had what can only be described as “a frank exchange of views” with someone on the other end of the line, including the phrase “do you realise that you are holding up the work of the hospital?”. And after she hung up the receiver, she gave me the form that I needed.

I don’t need all of this stress, and even less so when I’m ill like this. And I just go back to the very first day that I was admitted to the hospital, back in late November, when I handed my insurance card to the hospital. As you may remember, the hospital refused (and on a couple of occasions too) to telephone the insurance organisation as I was admitted. Hod they done so, they could have opened a file ON THE SPOT and established all of the information necessary to establish the necessary procedures and coverage ON THE SPOT and all of this unpleasantness could have been avoided. I don’t know enough about hospital procedure to be able to explain to anyone else what is happening and what to expect (from an accounting point of view), and the procedure in Belgium (where my insurance organisation is based) is so much different from that in France.

It’s all so unnecessary.

But abandoning yet another really good rant for the moment … "thank God!" – ed …
let us retourner à nos moutons, as they say around here.

The alarm went off at 07:00 and I crawled agonisingly out of my bed. I’d had an early night and crashed out really quickly.

And during the night, I’d been trying to go to a rock concert somewhere but I had never managed to make it. And so I was at home somewhere or other (a house that I actually know but I can’t put a name or address to it, although it strongly resembled Davenport Avenue), and the musicians arrived! The three of them fitted into my tiny bedroom and started to play, just for me. The group might have been “Rush” or it might even have been “Strife” (I’ve been talking a great deal about them on my social network account just recently) but one thing was sure and that was no matter who it was, there was just one musician – the bassist – from the group and the other two members were the guitarist and drummer with whom I used to play back in the 1970s. And when they finished, the bassist said something along the lines of “that’ll teach you to come to our concerts next time”.
So from here, the drummer, guitarist and I had to catch a bus back to Crewe (we were in Chester at the time apparently – scene of many of my earlier musical successes) and so we waited – and waited – and waited – and no bus came (back in those days the C84 ran every hour). Eventually another bus came. This was a bus of the type of the mid-60s – an early Bristol RE single-decker with a green lower and white upper, but with large windows and very curved rather than angular corners – and on the headboard it was indicating “Whitchurch”. Buses heading from Chester to Whitchurch usually travel down the A41 through Christleton and that way but this bus was on the road out of Chester in the general direction of Tarvin, so I assumed that it might be going to Whitchuch via Nantwich, from where there were buses every 15 minutes to Crewe. But chatting to the driver, it appeared that he was only going so far down the Nantwich road, turning off just after Tarporley somewhere in the general area of Bunbury. And so we were there for a good while – the guitarist, the driver and I debating whether or not to take the bus, alight where it turns off the main road and wait for the very late C84. But what if the C84 overtakes us along the route? We’d then be even later and that would clearly be no good (the idea that if our C84 wasn’t running, we would be stranded wherever we were hadn’t entered our heads at all, apparently). The driver said that he could as a favour, pass by Aston Juxta Mondrum (which is nowhere near where we want to go and in any case didn’t have a bus service to anywhere) and drop us there, but we stood for ages at this bus stop, haunted by indecision and being totally incapable of making up our minds.

I was on the road by 07:30 and pulled into Pionsat at more-or-less the same time as the nurse (she who runs the pie hut at the footy) and so paying for my consultation from the other day was quite straightforward.

I arrived at the hospital in Montlucon at 08:30, having found a good spec to park Caliburn, and despite having had a little adventure on the way. It was pouring down with rain and round about St Gervais, the driver’s side windscreen wiper became attached from the arm. Luckily, I was able to rescue it and replace it but it came loose again and so I drove all of the way there without wipers (once you go through the initial 5 minutes of blindness, you’ll be surprised at how clear the view is through a “liquid windscreen”). Subsequent enquiries in the daylight revealed that the blade hadn’t been fitted correctly and I was able to deal with that.

It was just as well that I was early at the hospital. Once more, I had the choice of seats (the one in the corner by the power point) for we ended up 5 people in a room made for two and they were turning people away, to wait in the waiting room until there was a space for them. It really is no surprise that they couldn’t fit me in last Monday afternoon if this is how busy they are in the day hospital.

It was the efficient nurse who dealt with me today. Not only did she fit my drain at the first attempt, it hardly hurt (in comparison to all the others who have tried). And then we reverted to the marvels of modern 21st-Century technology, warming up the blood by stuffing it up my jumper.

I took advantage of my stay there by having a browse through www.archive.org. I discovered a while back that they are now grouping as *.zip files many of the old-time radio programmes instead of having them as individual downloads, but 1.4GB is beyond the capacity of my internet connection at home or here chez Liz and Terry. But not at the hospital where a real (as opposed to “notional”) 600kb/s is readily available, and so I downloaded all of Beyond Our Ken, all of the Sherlock Holmes radio shows of the 40s and all of the Philip Marlowe radio shows.

If I’m back next week (which is more-than-likely) there’s the Clitheroe Kid and the Navy Lark to download. And then I’ll be keeping an eye out for ITMA and Much Binding In The Marsh. And if it keeps on and on and on, I’ll end up with more radio shows than the BBC.

I declined the lunch that was offered, and for two reasons too.

The food in the hospital is disgusting
I was hoping to be in and out long before I became hungry

and wasn’t all of that a silly mistake?

I was indeed finished early – at 12:45 in fact. So much so that I had time for a coffee in the café, but I won’t be doing that again. Coffee from the machine is just €0:60 but in the café it’s €1:70, and it’s not as if the surroundings are any more pleasant than the hospital foyer. It did give me an opportunity to spy out the land there and check the food on offer (I need somehow to supplement the hospital diet) but there was, as I expected, nothing there that I could eat.

Then it was time to deal with the anaesthetist, and this is where we had all of the nonsense mentioned above. By the time that I had finished, it was almost 15:00 and how I wish that I had had lunch in the hospital earlier.

I gave the usual spiel to the anaesthetist. “I hate tubes, injections, internal cameras and all of that kind of thing. I don’t want to know what you are going to do to me – just do it and get on with it. if you find anything else when I’m opened up, do that too because I don’t want to come back a second time. But when I wake up, I want to have both my hands and both my feet, and I don’t want to see any tubes, pipes and cameras”.
“Both your hands and both your feet?” said the anaesthetist? “Not your head?”
“I lost my head years ago” I replied.

So we had a nice friendly chat. He’s an old guy, probably my age, with a sparkle in his eye and a devilish sense of humour which makes a change from most French people whom I know. I wish that there were more like him. And then I went for another spy around the 3rd floor to see what I could see. There seems to be a nurse there who would love to sooth my fevered brow, but I’ll be b*gg*red if I let him.

I did some shopping at Amaranthe, the health food shop. A pile of vegan cheese (we’re running low here) and a few other vegan bits and pieces. I bought myself a big pile of vegan muesli biscuits for lunch and nibbled them throughout the afternoon Liz didn’t give me a shopping list for the Carrefour so I had to improvise, and ended up forgetting a pile of stuff that would have been useful to us.That’s a shame, because I feel that I ought to be paying my way while I’m here, and a load of shopping each week would certainly help.

A new pair of slippers and a few pairs of sock was on my shopping list though. The slippers that I have are falling apart and my socks are … errr … quite religious. There was a special offer of 6 pairs of socks at €5:99. Terry asked me if they would last any kind of distance, to which I replied that maybe I only need to worry until the 27th January.

I didn’t feel like much in the way of tea. Too stuffed up with muesli biscuits I reckon. And then I had an early night, leaving you to digest a mere 2000 words this evening.

And serve you b*gg*ers right too!

Monday 11th January 2016 – Monday …

… means “back to work” for most people. But not for me. And not for Terry either because the weather was thoroughly dreadful. We had grey skies, high winds, driving rain and even a flurry of snow at about 13:00. Not the day for being outside under any circumstances.

as a result, Terry and I stayed in all day and didn’t do a thing. I carried on perusing the sale on this 3D support site and downloading a couple of free files, and also doing another pile of studying for this Animation course that I’m doing. I’m not quite sure what else I did, but it wasn’t very much. I know for a fact that I didn’t set a foot outside the house.

I had my blood test too this morning. I’ve not yet had the result but it can’t be very good because at about 16:45 I had “the call”. “Mr Hall – you have to come in for a blood transfusion tomorrow morning”.

As it happens, I have to go into Montlucon tomorrow anyway for my appointment with the anaesthetist at 13:30, and so for once, my appointments have dovetailed in nicely. That makes a change.

It doesn’t sound too exciting, my day today. And indeed it wasn’t. And neither was my nocturnal ramble last night. I don’t remember all that much of it, but it did involve a couple of young girls, one of whom, Zero, is quite a regular companion on my nocturnal rambles around the world. Some graffiti had appeared in the sky and I had to go to check it so see just how visible it was through the trees as it was winter and there were no leaves on the trees. This journey took me out to the Shropshire Union Canal bridge near Henhull on the A51. I started to run back home after my check (strangely reminiscent of the occasions in the past when, during a couple of nocturnal rambles I’d spent all of my time running between Crewe and Nantwich at all kinds of silly hours of the night), I was overtaken by two people on bicycles. Now, do you remember the other day when an old boss of mine drifted into my nocturnal rambles, tonight it was two of my working colleagues from those days, two people with whom I didn’t have any rapport at all and haven’t entered into my thoughts at all for 3O-odd years (except for a curious incident involving the Arsenal-Manchester United cup final of 1979 which remains part of my repertoire to this day). But to cut a long story short … “hooray” – ed … these two told me to hurry up back to the office because the boss (he of the other night) was waiting for me in order to start a group meeting. I asked why there was such a rush, to which they replied that I’d find out when I arrived.

Thursday 7th January 2016 – EEEUUURRRGGGHHH

Talk about dart boards. I’ve had no fewer than 6 injections today. That’s right – SIX, and I’m thoroughly fed up of it all. For a start, there was my twice-daily injection of anti-coagulant and the one thing that I’m really looking forward to about this operation is the ending of this particular circus.

And then we had the blood test. I’m fed up of that too, but that’s something that I’m going to have to suffer for the rest of my life, I suppose. I imagine that even when they’ve done this operation they will still be wanting to check that, to make sure that they cut out the correct bit. And as an aside, my blood count has gone up to 8.6 following the recent transfusion that I had. It’s not been this high for a while, but it’s still a long way from normal and it’ll be going down again even as we speak.

But the final straw that has broken this camel’s back are the other three injections that I needed to have. When my spleen is removed, it will remove a good deal of my immune system too and so I need to be vaccinated against certain illnesses and diseases, starting before the operation. I’d picked up the injections the other day and so I phoned up the doctor’s surgery after lunch, 13:30 to be precise. The receptionist – she who runs the pit hut at Pionsat’s football club – told me that the doctor would see me at 14:30, so off I went. It has to be done at a doctor’s surgery because, apparently, there could be some side effects after the injection so I would need to sit somewhere for a good half hour afterwards, somewhere where there was medical surveillance to hand.

I’ve complained in the past (and I’ll be complaining again – wait and see!) about the lack of formal information coming from the hospital. However, it appears that I am not alone because the doctor has received nothing either, despite me having to fill in a form each time I visit, when I’m clearly asked the name of my GP.

So I’m in the dark and she’s in the dark too. And when she saw the three injections, her eyes rolled too. “Are you supposed to have these three together?” she asked
“Apparently so” I replied. “That’s what I’ve been told”
It was news to her and so she had to sit there and read the instructions to make sure.
“Well, it doesn’t say that you can’t, so I suppose you can. Are you right-handed or left-handed?”
“Right-handed”
“Good. So that’s your left arm and your two legs we’ll use then. Better not do everything in the same place”.
So now you can see why I’m totally fed up

“What have they said about what is going to happen after the operation” she asked.
“No idea” I replied
“Didn’t they tell you?” she asked, with an air of astonishment.
“I didn’t want to know” I answered. “What is going to happen is going to happen anyway without me spending all this time worrying about it. I’m trying to push the lot of it out of my thoughts”.

It was quite fun in the waiting room after that, watching the world go by. And I really do mean that, because it was spinning around at quite a rate of knots. It was much longer than half an hour before I felt fit to leave the room.

But while I was there, I was reading a magazine, and this answered a question that has been puzzling me for a while. There’s a team in Division 3 of the Puy de Dome football league that has suddenly started to win its matches by some … errr … interesting scores, and now I know why.

There’s an empty old-people’s home in the village and it’s been converted into a temporary hostel for asylum-seekers, where they go while their papers are being processed. And currently in there are a former Syrian football league goalkeeper and a centre forward who was a Nigerian under-17 international, as well as one or two others with an interesting football pedigree. While they are awaiting processing they aren’t allowed to earn money or travel very far so they can’t play professional football. But they still need to train, keep fit and keep their match-fitness, much to the delight of the local football team and its supporters.

A flash in the pan it may be, but who says that refugees are nothing but a negative influence? It’s a really ill wind if it doesn’t blow anyone any good.

When I left the doctor’s, I went round for a while to my house to see what was going on and to relax a little. It was here that I realised that Bane of Britain didn’t have his laptop with him. And it was cold up there too. 8.4 degrees in fact. I’m glad I wasn’t planning to stay there long.

After tea, I managed to stay up until almost 22:00, but that was mainly because we watched a good film on television. My Darling Clementine, which is a highly-fictionalised story of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. What’s interesting in this film is not so much the film itself or the stars who act in it, but the supporting cast. We have Grant Withers, who played the Police Inspector in the Boris Karloff’s James Lee Wong films (of which I have all, downloaded from www.archive.org), Walter Brennan, who plays Stumpy in Rio Bravo and which bears more than a passing resemblance to the OK Corral, Ward Bond, who has played second-fiddle in dozens of leading westerns and several other names that ring great big bells with me.

The film itself is rather over-dramatised, which rather cuts up the action needlessly (thank heavens that by 10 years later this kind of thing had gone) but enjoyable all the same. Even more enjoyable was that much of the action takes place over an area over which I have driven in the past and which is probably amongst the most spectacular scenery in the world.

And so off to bed – not so early this time. And I doubt if my travels tonight will be anything like as interesting as last night’s, because I sat bolt upright at about 06:00 with it all ringing in my ears, and I dictated it almost immediately so that I wouldn’t miss a moment of the action.

Last night, I was planning on setting off to London in my car and I had the most unusual travelling companion. Her name, I think, was Lynn, but she didn’t resemble the Lynn whom I thought that it might have been. She did however strongly resemble someone from one of my previous existences – someone fairly similar to the Sue who shared my apartment for a week or so not long after I came to Brussels, young, quite vivacious, small, thin-faced and mousy blond hair in a pony tail. Anyway, we were getting ready to, and I was changing into some clean clothes and put on a pair of jeans, but this Lynn vetoed them. Although they were washed and cleaned, they still had faded oil marks upon them. The next pair of jeans that I found were perfectly clean and quite new although they had holes in them. And although they were clean, they had all kinds of things in the back pockets too – a CD, some papers, all kinds of stuff. And then I had to change my shirt. I’d been in a white dress shirt but I wanted to wear a tee-shirt. And I finished off with that light blue jumper that I had bought in the USA years ago and which I wore for years as people said that it matched my eyes. In the meantime my elder sister and her husband (them again???) were busily tidying up my room and sorting through a pile of stuff that I had in there. But in there was a pile of stuff that I rather wished that no-one knew about and they were working their way frightfully close to it. They’d already uncovered a pile of stuff (some of which, incidentally, featured on these pages a short while ago) without realising the significance so I needed to distract them. I told them to hurry up because we were about to go. We should have left the house at 16:45 – that was the usual time – but it was passing 17:00, 17:05 and we still weren’t on the road (as if 15 or 20 minutes was here or there on a trip from Crewe to London down the M6 at that time of day) and there were still one or two things that needed doing. It was at this point, as they were leaving, that my sister’s husband found one of my bank statements so we had all kinds of grumbles and groans and so on that you might expect. Anyway, after they had left and we were finally preparing to leave, I said to Lynn that my sister’s husband wasn’t very happy, and she explained to me a couple of reasons why he wasn’t so happy – a few things that had happened before he found this bank statement and not a thing about this bank statement at all. So we were finally ready to go and piled into the Cortina. Now a Cortina has a range of about 250 miles or so and I noticed that on the fuel gauge we had three-quarters of a tank of fuel and that might just be enough to get down to London. But we were going to the west side of London – Shepherd’s Bush or Hammersmith or somewhere like that – and I knew a way, a kind of short cut that I’ve taken on numerous occasions during my previous nocturnal rambles. You drive down the M1 almost to Luton and head south on this nice, wide A road round by High Wycombe, and there across a field you can clearly see a big BP petrol station, which you reach by carrying on half a mile to a major road junction and turn right. And that was where I was planning to fuel up. However, if we didn’t have enough fuel to make it to there, there’s another fuel station that I’ve also used on many occasions on my night-time voyages somewhere round about the A5 or M1. Here, you pull off the main road up to a roundabout and then turn into what looks very much like a motorway service area, with the fuel on the right as you pull in, and them a big rectangular car park with the buildings right ahead of you way across the car park. We couls always fuel up there if necessary.
But what puzzled me in all of this was this girl, Lynn or whatever her name was. I’m not used to people being so fond of me like this, although of course anything is possible during the night. But even more so, is that I know her, and I know who she is too. Her face, her build, her features seemed just so familiar to me but I just can’t recall her at all. I’ve no idea who she is, although I feel that I ought to know her, and know her so well. It’s bewildering me, all of this, and I do recall it bewildering me while the action was taking place.

So why did I say earlier on that you would hear more about the lack of news?

The answer was that when I was at the doctor’s in the hospital at Montlucon back on 23rd December, I asked the doctor for a letter setting out my illness, what treatment was required, all of that kind of thing, the doctor promised that she would do it. But I still haven’t had the letter, some two weeks later.

Being rather fed up of this, I telephoned the hospital and spoke to the secretary in order to find out what was going on. And she asked for my name.
“Ohhh yes – Mr Hall. The doctor did dictate a letter for you. I’ll type it this afternoon”.

Totally unbelievable.

I’ve often said before … "and you’ll say again" – ed … that all civil and public servants should be given 6 months unpaid leave after every ten years of service, and made to find a real job in the private sector. Then they would have to learn what life is like in the real world.

It would probably wake up quite a few of them – and probably kill off all of the rest.

And 2114 words – something of a world record this. I clearly have nothing better to do.

5th January 2016 – BACK IN HOSPITAL

I told you yesterday that I had been summoned to the day ward today for a blood transfusion, so after at 7:00 am alarm and breakfast, I was off. There wasn’t much on the roads – at least as far as Montlucon – so I was lucky to arrive early and finding yet another good spec for Caliburn, right outside the hospital building.

And I’d remembered to take the second bank card too so that I could stop off at the bank on the way in. And now the Fighting Fund is looking a little healthier.

It was a good job that I arrived earlier at the hospital too because they were … errr … somewhat under pressure. I was lucky in being the first to arrive, for I could have the pick of the chairs in the day ward – right in the corner by the window by the power point. The others weren’t so lucky and to give you some idea of what was going on, our little ward for two people ended up with five of us in it – two on the beds, two in armchairs and one on a trolley. Maybe they REALLY couldn’t have fitted me in yesterday.

Putting the drain in my arm was another complicated manoeuvre that didn’t do me too much good and I can still feel it now.

We did have a stroke of luck though. Just after I arrived, the woman in charge of the kitchens came up to our ward to chat to the staff there just as they were counting heads for lunch. Hearing that I was “difficult”, she came over to chat to me about my vegan diet and, much to my surprise, at lunchtime I ended up with couscous, chards in sauce and a portion of lentil salad. It just goes to show what can be accomplished if you happen to fall in with the correct people.

Another surprising thing was that the blood was already there waiting for me. But it was freezing cold, so to warm it up I had to stick it up my jumper (and I bet that you think that I am joking too – the old traditional methods are much more effective than anything that modern science can come up with). And that meant that by 13:30 I was all done and dusted, and they threw me out.

Not too far though. I had to go up to the ward where I will be confined during my surgery, to pick up a letter from my surgeon. Of course, it goes without saying that it wasn’t ready (half a day is far too short a notice for a civil service secretary) but it did give me an opportunity to spy out the land while I was there. And I’ll tell you something – there are a few nurses up there who can sooth my fevered brow any time they like! There have to be some compensations for being seriously ill.

On the road again, I went round to Amaranthe to pick up some vegan cheese, only to find that it was closed for stocktaking, and to Leader Price to buy some Cheddar for Terry, but was sold out in both the branches that I visited.

I had more luck at the Clinique St Francois where I was finally able to pay my bill for the blood tests. And I’ll tell you what – I’m glad that I’m not having my operation there. The back wall of their clinic is the side wall of the local cemetery. I suppose that it’s quite handy for discreetly disposing of the surgical failures – a quick heave over the wall in the middle of the night – although it must be a discouraging view for the patients in the rooms at the back.

At Pionsat I picked up my outstanding medication, and so I went off to blag my way into the doctor’s for the injections that I need to have done to bolster my immune system (once the spleen goes, I’ll be relying on those to keep me going) but it appears than Bane of Britain has forgotten to bring the prescription with him.

But here’s a thing. Diesel at the Carrefour in Montlucon is currently 104.9 centimes. At the Intermarché in Pionsat, it’s just 99.9. It’s the first time that I’ve ever seen it cheaper there. Of course, I took the opportunity to fuel up – it’s over 100kms round trip to Montlucon and back even if I don’t go anywhere else, and that soon gets through a tank of diesel in Caliburn whose maximum range is about 750 kms or so. It’s a good job that I don’t have Strider here, who is much more thirsty and struggles to do 450 kms.

Back here I crashed out. I wasn’t up to anything at all. No food, no drink – nothing. Just like in the bad old days in mid-November. I had my injection and then crawled off to bed at some ridiculously early hour – even more ridiculous than the 20:00 of late.

Talking of bed, I’ve forgotten to tell you about last night’s adventures. I bet that you were counting your blessings, thinking that you had escaped from it all.

Not so lucky, are you then?

Anyway, last night was yet another night where there was so much going on and yet I can only remember a small amount of it. Going to bed at 20:00 or thereabouts just recently is certainly doing something for me.

We started off back at a house that I clearly recognised, but which I can’t now recall. I’d been somewhere in a car (and I can’t now recall which car) and by the time that I returned, the car was full of rubbish and totally untidy, not an unusual occurrence of course. I needed to empty the car completely before the long-suffering Nerina came back to witness the disorder, and my brother (what’s he doing here again?) came along to give me a pile of gratuitous advice. Nerina did indeed turn up, and sooner than expected too, but her car was in an even worse state than mine although that didn’t deter her from making a few acid comments.
I then moved on to another house where I was living with my family, although I don’t recognise this house at all. It was crammed with people and, furthermore, we’d let a room to three young men, a French guy (someone whom I’ve known for years but who bore more than a passing resemblance to a guy whom I know in Germany), the guy who married my youngest sister and a third guy, who may well have been the brother of the second. This had involved shuffling around the rest of the inhabitants and it was certainly causing a whole pile of confusion. It started off with me having to help a young boy of about 5 years old feed himself but that wasn’t working. He was being difficult about it and so I had to go up to the room where he had been sleeping to fetch something. He was one of the people who had been shuffled around but I had forgotten this, so I barged straight into the room where these other three people were. Back downstairs, by the time this boy had finished his meal, I reckoned that it was time for him to go to bed but he wasn’t convinced. There was only one clock in the house that was anything like reliable, and that was the bedroom where he had been sleeping. So up I went to check and, forgetting about the change of rooms, barged yet again straight into the room where these three guys were, without knocking. I was full of profuse apologies, to which they replied “it’s not a problem – it wasn’t as if we were doing anything”. My response was that knocking was a form of politeness (a comment that has a strange parallel with an event that occurred in “real time” a couple of days ago). Anyway, the young boy was correct – it was only 18:30 and far from being his bed time. It was however dinner time for the grown-ups and all of the family was there tucking in. And a few minutes later we were joined by our friends from upstairs who had to fight their way into the table as our family gives no quarter when it comes to sticking our snouts in the trough.

But all of this is really bizarre. There are several people making little cameo appearances in my night-time rambles. There are some to whom I’ve given no thought whatever for probably the last 45 years (if I ever gave them any thought back then), some people who wouldn’t give me the time of day in real life (and boy, could I tell you some stories about that), some people whose actions on the second plane totally contradict their actions on the first plane, and some people who remain totally true to type no matter on what plane of existence they are.

But never mind. As I have said before, and I’ll say again … "and again and again and again" – ed … my nocturnal rambles are much more exciting that what is going on currently in my real life, and that’s not something to be rejected.

I just wish that it was me doing the casting, choosing the characters who could take part in it. I’d have a much more exciting cast than this current lot (one or two people excepted).

Monday 4th January 2016 – SO NOW WE KNOW!

28th January is the day that is set aside for my operation. I need to come into the hospital the day before, at 09:00, so that I can have a major blood transfusion prior to the operation. And I can guess why.

But as for the rest of the details of the operation, my card is marked ne veut pas recevoir des informations – “doesn’t want to have any further information”. Yes, what is going to happen is going to happen regardless of whatever they tell me about it, and if they start to tell me about it, I’ll just spend the next three or four weeks losing sleep worrying. Frankly, I’d prefer to be walking calmly across the car park, to be clouted from behind by a pick-axe handle and wake up to find that the job has been done.

As it is, I’ll be spending at least a week in hospital afterwards while I recover – if I do – and that’s something that ought to worry all of you a great deal because if it does all go wrong, then I’m going to come back and haunt the lot of you. Especially if you are a female reader. I wouldn’t mind putting the willies up quite a few young ladies of the female sex and I have a list already prepared.

We can start with a young lady who has featured on these pages before. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my mentioning a girl described as “the one that got away” from my evil clutches 20-odd years ago. She’s put in an appearance or two on these pages since then, and there she was again last night. I can’t remember where I was going or what I was doing for the first part of last night’s journey, but she was certainly there and her card will be amongst the first to be marked.
But after a nocturnal ramble down the corridor to the porcelain horse and back into the arms of Morpheus, I had a different partner in crime and I can’t now remember who it was. But whoever it was, we were also in the company of a couple of regulars from the Carry-On team, Sid James and Joan Sims included. We were somewhere up the north -west coast of Spain near the cape, whatever it is called, where one turns into the Bay of Biscay. The cape is a kind of headland that shelters a bay to the north-east and there was a big run-down house overlooking the bay, with a big sandy beach, rather like a cross between the setting in And Then There Were None and the old house in Carry On Regardless. Everyone was planning on going down there for a couple of days so my companion and I decided that we would seed the house with all kinds of practical jokes. This worked in spades and we certainly succeeded in putting the willies up the rest of our company.

From there, I waited for the nurse who was to take the blood sample and then I could have breakfast, followed by a nice hot shower. I must make myself all clean and tidy for the hospital after all.

At Pionsat I went to the pharmacy for the next round of prescriptions and then to the Intermarche for some bread and tomatoes, and then off to my house to inspect the property and see what else was going on. It was cold in my attic too, although not as cold as it might have been.

Back on the road I headed for Montlucon and tracked down the office where I need to go to pay for my blood tests. They’ve sent me a reminder. I didn’t stop and go in because there was nowhere in the vicinity to park and I didn’t have the time to walk any great distance. I went off to the Hospital for my interview with the surgeon and it was really busy – I found possibly the last parking place on the overflow car park.

The surgeon who will be operating on me is only a young girl (which is more an indictment of just how much I have aged than any criticism of her) and we had quite a chat, much of which was in Flemish. There has been quite a commentary on these pages about a certain hospital, the Universiteit Ziekenhuis van Leuven in Flanders – a hospital that has received several good remarks in its favour, and guess where this surgeon did her training? That’s right, the Universiteit Ziekenhuis van Leuven. And so it looks like I’m going to have the best of both worlds. I’m sure that if I ask her nicely, she’ll bring me a plate of fritjes.

In fact, I had quite a chat about my diet with one of the nurses there. She suggested a food hamper too.

In a desperate effort to kill two birds with one stone, I went up to the oncology department to see if they had received my blood results. Apparently not, so they rang up to enquire. Just 7.7, a decline of 0.3 in just 2 days. This is starting to become silly.

I do need to have a blood transfusion, according to them, so I explained about my 100km round trip to the hospital, explaining how it was wearing me out. But to no avail. They couldn’t do me now, sir. I’ll have to come back tomorrow. I went to the Carrefour and did some shopping instead.

We had a minor disaster on the way back. I’m using my Belgian bank account as a kind of fighting fund, but when I went to draw some cash out (there’s a branch here in Montlucon) I found to my dismay that my card expired at the end of December. That’s going to halt me full in my stride, without a doubt. I need to do something about this.

Vegan vegetable lasagne for tea (Liz’s gorgeous cooking is the one positive side of being ill, no doubt about that) and then another early night. I can’t keep it up like I used to, and having to go back to Montlucon means that I need another 07:00 start – never mind 07:45.

I shan’t be sorry when all of this is over, regardless of the outcome.

Friday 1st January 2016 – IT’S LIZ’S COOKING …

… that’s causing me to have these delightful and intense nocturnal rambles – no doubt about it.

Yesterday, I had nothing that came from Liz’s kitchen or anything that I had cooked that she might have influenced, and as a result I had a relatively static night.

Mind you, there might have been another reason. And that was that in one of the cubicles in the casualty ward where I spent last night, there was a poor old guy clearly suffering from dementia who was having a rather difficult time. Even with my head buried deep under the pillow down the bedclothes, I couldn’t cut out the noise and the time dragged on SOOOOOOO slowly. At one stage, I was even contemplating sneaking out and sleeping in Caliburn.

But I must have gone to sleep at one time because I was rather rudely awakened by two nurses coming in with the tensiometer to take my blood pressure.
“Yeeuucchh!” ejaculated Our Hero. “What time is it?”
“Five o’clock” replied a nurse. “Plenty of time to get more sleep!”

That’s what they think. There I was, turning round and round in my bed, and just as I was on the point of dropping up, I was reminded that I had forgotten to cancel the 07:45 alarm. You don’t need much imagination to work out exactly HOW I managed to forget it.

So that was my night totally ruined so it’s no surprise that I didn’t manage to go anywhere.

We had the usual hospital breakfast too
Nurse – “we have coffee, biscottes, jam and orange juice for breakfast”.
Our Hero – “Mmmmm – a nice, hot, strong coffee”.
Nurse (after what can only be described as a “pregnant” pause) – “well, it’s coffee”, and I suppose that it might have been too.

I managed a shower too. One of the nurses came round with a clean gown, a towel and a flannel. And seeing that my bed was just two feet away from the bathroom, I couldn’t resist the opportunity. It was gorgeous too – probably the best part of my stay in the hospital.

The doctor came round a little later to discuss my case. He told me that I need to have a blood test tomorrow morning and then telephone them as soon as I have the results so that if necessary I could be called in tomorrow afternoon. I explained that I wouldn’t receive the results until after 17:00.
“Which laboratory handles your blood?”
“Clermont Ferrand”
“Okay, I’ll send someone round to take a sample now”. Personally, I don’t see the point of giving me this blood if they are going to take it straight back out again.

A couple of hours later, he was back.
“Your blood shows 8.0 for haemoglobin” he said. “What is it normally?”
“It was 7.2 when I came in” replied Our Hero, “but the first time that I came here it was 3.8”
And do you know – I’ve never seen a doctor fall off his chair before.

Anyway he went off to make further enquiries. he seemed to think that I might need a third pochette. And he did want to know how I would return home once I was discharged.

However the third pochette was not to be. Half an hour later a nurse came in.
“Would you like some lunch before you go?”
What? With a friendly neighbourhood Liz in the vicinity? You must be joking.

In the corridor, I bumped into the doctor again.
“Drive safely, and if you feel tired or ill make sure that you stop and rest” The fact that I’d driven all of the way to Montlucon with less haemoglobin that I was going home with had gone over his head completely.

Back at Liz’s I had a leisurely lunch and then a leisurely afternoon, dozing off every now and again to catch up with the sleep that I missed

And with Liz’s nut roast at lunchtime and Liz’s home-made vegan lentil and pepper curry for tea, it’ll be interesting to see if I go back on the road tonight.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year to you all. I wish you for 2016 everything that you wished for everyone else in 2015.

Thursday 31st December 2015 – I HAVE SPENT NEW YEAR’S EVE …

… in some strange places, but this evening will be about the strangest. I’m back in Montlucon, back in the hospital and in the casualty department connected up to a couple of pochettes of blood.

This morning I had the usual blood test and at 17:15 I had the phone call. Apparently my blood count has collapsed and it’s down to 7.2, which means that in 4 days I’ve lost 15% of my haemoglobin. There’s no Day Hospital tomorrow (yes, I now know the reason why I have blood tests on Mondays and Thursdays – that’s because the Day Hospital is usually open from Monday to Friday, Bank Holidays excepted of course, and they can call me in the next day if the results are bad) and so it has to be done in Casualty.

And so I rode off into a rather symbolic sunset – symbolic in many senses in that it’s the final sunset of 2015, bringing down the night onto the end of a rather significant year for me, and that I have a rather uncomfortable feeling that it’s bringing down the night onto a significant chapter in my life and that whatever happens to me once a new dawn breaks will be completely different to that which I’ve experienced to date.

Nevertheless, at the Site Ornithologique just outside St Gervais, one of my favourite photography spots, I stopped to take a photo of the sun dipping down under the horizon.

And I wasn’t alone here either. Liz was here too. She was on her way back from the airport at Limoges, having taken her family back for their aeroplane to East Midlands, and she was impressed by the view too. We had a little chat and then I was on my way.

Evening meal for me, my “special treat” for New Year’s Eve, was a large packet of crisps, a packet of biscuits and a banana. There wasn’t any time to prepare any food back at Liz and Terry’s because the hospital wanted me in and out before the midnight rush of drunks began, and so I had to pick up what I could find en route.

At the hospital, I was lucky enough to find a parking space for Caliburn close to the casualty entrance, and once I was inside, I was whisked straight into the casualty ward and prepared for transfusion, with the second-most-painful insertion of a drain. And this is when I discovered that the claim, on the telephone earlier, that “the blood has already been ordered” was somewhat economical with the truth. It didn’t arrive until 21:30 in fact.

And in the meantime, I was in a small room right by the entrance to the Casualty Department. Ambulances, with blue flashing lights and sometimes sirens, were pulling up right outside my window and the electric door into the Department was right next to the door to my room, which was open. Each time I closed my eyes, an ambulance would pull up, the electric door would open, and I’d be wide awake. And then I’d close my eyes again ready to doze off and the procedure would be repeated. And as New Years Eve approached and the stream became a flood, I gave it up as a bad job and asked for a coffee.

Yes, some let the New Year in with a glass of champagne. I let it in with a plastic beaker of coffee.

By 01:30 they had finished with me, and they offered me a bed for the night in the ward at the back of the Casualty Department. I didn’t really feel too much like the drive back to Liz and Terry’s and in any case they would be well asleep by the time that I returned, so I gladly accepted the offer.

And here I’m staying until tomorrow.

Mind you, it’s hardly surprising that I wasn’t up to the drive back. I’d done quite enough driving last night on my nocturnal travels.

I’m not sure now exactly how I started out on my travels but I was definitely in my chocolate-brown Cortina 2000E, TNY143M, that has featured quite a few times just recently on my nocturnal voyages and I’m not sure why. But as our story unfolds, there was a huge argument in a car park that abutted, albeit about 20 feet higher up, onto the street where I was parked. It concerned some kind of illicit behaviour involving a taxi company or two, something that would be of great interest to me of course, being in the taxi business, and a girl was having a huge argument with the driver of a big black saloon car parked on the edge of this car park. The net result of this argument was that she grabbed hold of the driver’s briefcase and flung it high into the air. The case landed at my feet with the papers scattered everywhere so I quickly gathered up the papers, half-expecting the driver to come charging down the bank after his possessions. Instead, he got into his car and cleared off quickly leaving me holding all of the evidence, which would make good reading in the taxi licensing office. I walked back up the hill to the pizza place on the corner of the main road and ordered, inexplicably, a chicken pizza. While it was being prepared, I reckoned that I had better go and recover the Cortina and bring it up outside the pizza place where I could keep a better eye on it and its contents. So back in the pizza place and the server asked me if I wanted ham and some other meat on it – they hadn’t even finished preparing it, never mind cooked it. I had a feeling that this would go on for ever and I didn’t have the time to spare.
So never mind – I’d planned to go to the cinema that evening but I could go earlier and I could watch the film twice. But this meant going on the bus so off I went. And at the end of the first showing, it meant going back on the bus again, doing a round trip and then back to the cinema. And here on the bus this time around I met a girl, someone who had made a couple of cameo appearances in my travels during the autumn. The bus took us on a guided tour of the town and stopped at a big desolate area of waste land, with the driver telling us that this was formerly the old medieval centre of the town which had been demolished and a modern town centre built elsewhere. We were being asked all kinds of quiz questions about street names and the like too.
After the cinema I took this girl home with me, which I realised too late was probably not a good thing to do, because before going out I’d emptied out the van and having nowhere to store the stuff, I’d stacked it, all kinds of rubbish too, into the living room so there was hardly anywhere to sit. My Aunt Doreen (she who hanged herself almost 20 years ago) had been there and so I asked the girl if she would write a note of appreciation to Doreen. However, we couldn’t find a single blank page in any of the notebooks in which we looked. Clearly we weren’t doing so well here. I also asked someone else, who was present at the time, to take out a pile of vehicle hubcaps and dump them in the bin, but then I had a change of mind, thinking that they all might come in useful at some time.
From here I drove back to the family pile in Shavington, followed by my father and my brother (no idea how come they have appeared on my travels). And near the top of Gresty Bank before the corner where Dubberley’s farm used to be, in the road in the southbound lane was a woman with a trestle table doing the washing up. We had to wait until she had finished but she took so long to arrange her crockery that I emptied her washing-up bowl for her. However, the woman in the car immediately behind me was so close that I couldn’t reverse my car enough to go around this obstacle, so the car and I had to duck under the table.
Back at the family pile, I was horrified to see not only the state of the place but the fact that the house was stinking hot with the electric heating going full blast – so hot in fact that all of the windows had been opened despite the heaters being on. There was so much waste and untidiness (and the untidiness must have been bad if it upset me) that I reckoned that my father would be appalled when he arrived. But it was my brother who appeared first, so I challenged him about it, but he replied that our father wouldn’t be coming – he had gone elsewhere. In the hallway there was cat food all over the place but he said that it was the fault of my cat, who wouldn’t eat any of it.

The alarm went off at this point and after a few minutes spent gathering my wits (it doesn’t take very long as there aren’t too many of those) I came downstairs to wait for the nurse and the prise de sang.

Once he had gone, I could have breakfast but I’d run out of muesli so I had to borrow some of Terry’s. And then we had the confusion as all of our visitors prepared to leave. I had a few big hugs, which was nice as I don’t have too many of those these days, and it goes without saying that Strawberry Moose had quite a few too.

Once everyone had left, Terry and I had a coffee and a relax and then I went off to St Gervais with a shopping list from Liz. I try my best to do some shopping here once a week – it’s the least that I can do to recompense Liz and Terry for all of the effort they are making in looking after me. Mind you, I did manage to buy the wrong milk and so I rather blotted my copy-book here.

Vegan cheese on toast for lunch (I’m becoming quite partial to this these days) and then I sat down to alternately have a little doze, drink a coffee and to continue to write up my notes from my voyage around Canada in the Autumn.

And this was when I received “the call” …

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

Yes, at about 09:30.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-2

Monday 21st December 2015 – WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT!

Last night, I had the worst night that I have ever ever had.

I told you that I went to bed as early as 20:00, watched a film and by 21:15 I was tucked up nicely in bed dozing off to sleep. But at 22:30 I was awake again, with a chronic indigestion – or, at least, what I thought was indigestion. And as time rolled on, the pain became worse and worse, spreading right across my stomach behind the lower part of my ribcage.

It wasn’t long before I was doubled up in agony – I say “doubled up” but that’s not really true as there was not a single position (that I found anyway) that was better than any other as far as the pain went. Within the space of an hour I was driven out of my attic into the bathroom where the proximity of the sink to the porcelain horse was very useful and was put to good use.

And that, dear reader, was where I stayed for a good hour or so even though it did nothing to diminish the agony. So back in the attic again, but 10 minutes later I was back in the bathroom.

This was clearly going nowhere (except into the bathroom) and so I ended up making sure that the route from the living room to the bathroom in the cellar was free, and then I settled down on the really comfortable sofa in the living room.

By about 03:30, having made several trips to the bathroom, the pain slowly began to subside. I remember it being 04:00 and then the next thing that I remember was it being 06:45 and the pain had gone. The alarm at 07:45 brought me to my senses (such as they are) and that was that. The worst night that I have ever had.

I had my blood test at about 08:30 and signed up to a scheme whereby I could receive my results by e-mail. Sure enough, at 17:30 they were there. The blood count has gone down further to 7.7. I was expecting a phone call from the hospital to call me back in, and although I did receive a call, it was to tell me that my Wednesday appointment has been put back to 16:30. Never mind, I’ll discuss my blood situation then.

After breakfast, we had to hunt for Strawberry Moose again.

Today, he was in the sun lounge painting Christmas decorations. And it does have to be said that he seems to have more paint, glitter and Christmas stars on himself than he did on the decorations that he was painting.

Still, he gets full marks for trying.

Everyone went to the shops this morning, except for Terry and Yours Truly. We had a very relaxed morning watching the cricket in Australia. We had our usual argument too. Terry is all for this modern “slash and run” cricket whereas I’m much for the good old days of Geoff Boycott taking three days to score 20 runs.

We had a late lunch when everyone returned, and then I decided that I was going to do something that I detest – only doing it in the direst emergencies – and that was to go back to bed. And there I stayed until tea time.

The nurse has told me to talk to my GP about my blood results but I’m waiting until Wednesday at the hospital. The GP can’t tell me any more than I know already and all that she can do is to refer me to the hospital. And that won’t be any quicker than doing it myself on Wednesday.

Bedtime for the little ones came at about 20:00 and you can’t have bedtime without having story time first. It goes without saying that Strawberry Moose wanted to be involved in story time too.

We’ve ended up being nice and peaceful this evening, with nothing much going on except to sample Liz’s home-made blueberry biscuits – vegan of course. Just for a change, I’m not tired but then again that’s no surprise seeing as how I had a good three hours sleep this afternoon.

But it doesn’t matter what time that I go to bed, I still have to be up at 07:45 for my anti-coagulant injection, and I’m getting quite fed up of this.

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Friday 18th December 2015 – EEEUUURRRGGGHHH!

That’s how I’ve been feeling today.

Despite my very early night last night, and even though I was awake for about an hour or so (during which I wrote last night’s blog) I was well out of it this morning. In fact, I’ve had another day like I had a few days ago which, you will remember, I sat around all day and did nothing at all. Even Liz and Terry going out for an hour or so this morning to St Gervais, leaving me all of this time to get into mischief, failed to galvanise me into action.

The nurse as late too – 10:00 when he arrived. “A lot to do this morning” he said, and which for all I know may well be true and I don’t have a problem with that. I just wish that he had phoned to tell me, or mentioned it last night so that I could have seized the opportunity to have a lie-in. I would have appreciated it.

And so apart from spending most of the day being tired, what else have I done?

Ohh yes! I’ve moved myself and my possessions into the garret. The fact is that tomorrow night Liz’s daughter and son-in-law are coming tomorrow to stay for 10 days and bringing their two kids with them. The kids, aged 7 and 4, clearly need to sleep in the next room to mummy and daddy so that’s all of the rooms on the 1st floor occupied. I’m still here of course, simply because I can’t be anywhere else on my own right now, and so it’s the attic for me. Just like home, isn’t it? But not that it bothers me too much because there’s a rocking chair up there and a couple of agnostic guitars. But it’s a shame that, since I’ve been on the Prozac, I haven’t had the blues for months.

In other news, the results of my blood test from yesterday haven’t arrived. I don’t know what’s happened to them because they should have been here this morning – but that might explain why I’ve not been summoned to the hospital at Montlucon for a blood transfusion. I’ll doubtless have that pleasure to come.

And so apart from that, nothing special to report. I’ve not done much – I’ve not been out of the house. All in all, a pretty nondescript day. But tomorrow, while Liz is off to the airport to meet her family, there will be a list of tasks to perform and it looks as if I’ve drawn the “shopping” straw.

Aren’t I the lucky one?

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EPIC HALL

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