Tag Archives: cleaner

Friday 25th August 2023 – I MADE AN …

… executive decision today. And in case you don’t know what an executive decision is, it’s a decision that you make that, if it goes wrong, the person making it is executed.

So having a form to be picked up from the chemist’s in town and knowing that my neighbour would be heading that way, and not feeling in the right kind of mood to rush about this morning, I abandoned the idea of going into town this morning and asked my neighbour to go to the chemist’s on my behalf.

It was probably something to do with the fact that I didn’t end up going to bed until really late last night and although I had a slightly better, more quiet night than I’ve had recently, there wasn’t enough of it to make a difference.

When the alarm went off I was flat out in the arms of Morpheus. I was actually in a zoo or a circus, somewhere where there were animals, but the alarm went off just as I was starting under way.

Struggling to my feet I had my medication, checked my mails and messages, spoke to my neighbour and then tried to find someone to pick me up at the station on Wednesday.

You’ve no idea how difficult it is, and I’ve no real confidence that the people who in the end agreed to meet me are really as reliable as I would like them to be.

Today was the final Welsh lesson of the Summer and it went OK, although I wish that it would have been better. There’s a couple of weeks now before the next year’s course begins and I’ll probably have forgotten everything by then.

At lunchtime I had a really beautiful shower and then changed the bedding. I’m going to have a really nice sleep tonight, a nice clean me in a nice clean bed. And I can’t say that I’ll be sorry. Mind you, as usual, I’m sure that it won’t be as really nice as I would like it to be.

With a short while to spare before the lesson restarted, I listened to the dictaphone to see what was on it. I’ve talked about the animals at the zoo or circus. We were going off from school on our Christmas meal somewhere. I was struggling to walk somewhat of course but I did the best that I could. My friends weren’t particularly interested for some reason. We had to board a couple of buses. The one in which I was sitting was an old lightweight thing with no windows, an open-top type of bus. It set out through these icy roads. Something happened up ahead which meant that we had to stop. Our bus had no traction and began to slide. The bus in front then decided that it would reverse to go around the obstacle. At that moment with the force my head was flung outside the edge of the bus and the bus that was reversing hit me with the most almighty bang straight in the right eye. I had never ever felt so much pain in my head than at that particular moment. I really did feel the pain from somewhere. People came running. There was a girl whom I knew and couldn’t believe at first – telling me not to be stupid about all of this kind of thing. Suddenly she screamed and ran off. A couple more people came and began to give me some First Aid to my head. But there was a real pain that I felt at that moment in my head and right eye

That’s probably why I wasn’t feeling like very much this morning. I really did feel the injury that I suffered during the night. I’ve no idea what had happened while I was asleep that might have caused it.

After the lesson I made my hot chocolate and then came back in here where I crashed out for a couple of hours. And it was another really deep sleep that took me out of just about everything.

Tea tonight was a salad, but with no mushrooms (because I didn’t go to the shops today) I had cheese and olives with it. The chips and vegan nuggets were cooked to perfection in the air fryer – the best that I’ve ever made.

Later on, Rosemary phoned me and we had a really lengthy chat as we usually do. Then both Liz and Alison were chatting to me on the internet. It seems that I’m quite popular these days but I’ve no idea why.

Tomorrow I’m shopping and then I’m having a rest. I’ve been working to hard just now and I could do with putting my feet up.

Not that it’s likely to happen but you never know your luck. One of these days nothing will happen that will disturb me. But then I’ll probably be bored to tears.

Wednesday 23rd August 2023 – IT’S QUITE STRANGE …

… how my Welsh course is going. It seems that every time I have a good day, a bad day follows immediately on its heels. I can’t seem to manage to have two good days one after the other.

And so having had a reasonable day yesterday, today wasn’t so good at all. Couple that with the fact that the mike on my webcam is feeding back and I can’t make the remote mike work on the computer, it’s not been a very good day.

That’s a shame because I’d been to bed fairly early (comparatively speaking) and had a reasonable (comparatively speaking) sleep for a change. And at some point during the night, Zero put in an appearance, so “hello” again to Zero.

Then I had awoken at 06:30 ready to leave the bed early but I fell asleep again and had to be aroused by the alarm.

Once I’d had my mails and medication etc I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was going for a ride on something like an elephant. There was a couple of others and we were quite high up on this thing that was moving around. It ended up in some kind of hall or ante-chamber. At that moment a young girl whom I know came out of her room with what looked like her baby brother or something like that. She had a chat with me up on whatever it was that I was on and she down below. She said that she was taking whatever it was to the bathroom. I said “we’d better make sure that we don’t step on him then”. She asked what I meant by that. I replied that i had to go to the bathroom too.

My passport – I’d lost it a while ago and I’d been issued with a temporary Belgian 6-month passport. That was running out so I had to go to renew it. It meant going into this warehouse place, a dingy Government office and queueing. There were quite a few people in there. It was rather disorderly. It was coming to 21:00, 22:00 and we were still there, a few of us waiting. I was worried that a couple of people would push ahead of me in the queue and be seen out of turn, meaning that when the place closed I’d be out on my ear. One person was being attended to and the girl working the machine was having no end of problems. Eventually one or two of the people in the queue had to show her how the thing worked. I was sitting here thinking that this is totally crazy. It’s 22:00 and I suppose that she wants to go home – I know that we do – and what will happen if it turns out that my passport isn’t actually valid and I should have applied for a British one when I lost my original one?

Finally I was back in Virlet. My place was a total mess as usual but there were all locals around there cleaning all the vegetation away from around the house. When I arrived I couldn’t enter the house so I was sleeping outside. The bad-tempered neighbour was there with her brush-cutter cutting away all around me. They were all going in and out of my barn and garage etc. I was becoming annoyed about this but they were taking absolutely no notice at all. Then I decided that I had to think about leaving as I was leaving the following day and had someone to pick up at some town near Chartres at 17:00 and I needed to make arrangements as to where they’d be. I also had some bits and pieces that I had to take back to Caliburn. That was a real hike through the village to where I’d parked the other van and then march back. While I was asleep it had begun to rain. I was asleep out there in the rain but the neighbour who was brush-cutting abandoned her cutting, went and lay down in the grass and pulled a tarpaulin over herself which I thought was the strangest thing I’d seen for quite some time.

That wasn’t everything either but you really don’t want to know about that, especially if you are eating your tea right now.

Once I’d done all of the I spent a while revising my Welsh and then, armed with a coffee and fruit bun, attacked the lesson. We had a new tutor today who has a strange way of teaching, it has to be said, and that took us through to knocking-off time.

At lunch time I went for a shower and then sorted out the dirty clothes, seeing as I’m on the point of running out of clean ones. I also tidied up the place a little so that the cleaner doesn’t die of horror.

At the weekend I’d bought a pile of fruit because it was cheaper to buy in bulk than loose, but I was somewhat overwhelmed with the stuff, so I gave my cleaner a pile of fruit when she left.

And then I set the washing machine off on a cycle and then went to see a neighbour for a chat. Not that I’m all that much in favour of socialisaing, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but I have to make an effort.

Back here I hung out the washing and then made tea. There was some stuffing left so I added a small tin of kidney beans and ate it with rice and veg, another really nice meal tonight, nice and spicy. But I do like those new containers that I’d bought.

So right now, nice and early, I’m off to bed. Two more days of my course to go and then I’m going to relax. Until Wednesday next week, that is, because I’ll be then off to Paris and I’m not looking forward to that at all.

They probably won’t be able to do much for me, but I won’t ever find out if I don’t go.

Wednesday 16th August 2023 – TODAY’S WELSH LESSON …

… passed off quite a bit better today.

The unit on which we were working was a revision unit which involved discussing several of a selection of about 30 different topics, chosen by lot.

It’s quite true to say that I don’t know much and I can’t remember much but one thing about talking and chatting at large is that basically you just talk about what you know with whatever bits of grammar and vocabulary you can remember.

It doesn’t need to be complicated, and if you can keep it simple, then that’s all you need.

In schools in the UK, languages are taught in a ridiculous way. The emphasis is on grammar and being absolutely 100% correct, with the result that kids are quite timid and rather afraid to speak in case they make a mistake.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I was in Belgium I worked with people of all different nationalities and it didn’t take long for me to get the message that grammar counted for next-to nothing.

Iit didn’t matter what you knew and what mistakes you made. The aim was to make yourself understood to people and to understand their reply.

Knowing 100 words and using them is much more important than knowing 10,000 words and all kinds of obscure rules of grammar but not being able or being unwilling to use them.

But I digress.

Once more, the night that I had was marginally better than things have been quite recently. I didn’t travel far either. It was the annual meeting of our Students Association. I was with my friend who is no longer with us. Instead of flying to Birmingham we caught the train. When we arrived we actually arrived at the airport. It was a long walk through security, check-in etc out into the concourse where we found some people who my friend knew from the Association who were sitting around so she waved at them. I asked who they were and she told me but it didn’t ring any bells with me at all. We walked past a hotel at the airport concourse. The guy with us said “that’s where we should have stayed. It’s a much better place”. We ended up at reception at our hotel and given the keys. We all went into our room. I was busy chopping and dicing an onion ready to make sandwiches but had the onion all over the floor, all over the carpet. I was picking it up. I asked my friend if she had a plastic bag but she said no. I asked if she’d go to fetch one so she did. There were some other people in this room too who were clearly members of the Association, talking to someone on the phone saying “you’ll be here by tonight. Look for the Ealing branch” and a few other things like that. The way they were going on it sounded extremely doubtful about anything really. I was expecting something much more professional.

There was also something about me being in the USA. I was on my way to meet someone. We came to a very steep hill, so steep that you couldn’t actually see over the bonnet of the car as you went down. I had to be very careful as there were lots of cyclists etc about. There were traffic lights at the bottom so I stopped. As the lights changed and the car set off, I fell out of it and the ca, an automatic, went off on its own. It went round and round in a circle at this interchange, not hitting anything. I was trying to catch it to stop it. A passer-by came to help but we couldn’t manage to do anything. All of a sudden it changed direction slightly, came round, rolled up to my stomach and stopped. I was so relieved because this was the kind of thing that could have gone on for hours and could have been disastrous.

That wasn’t everything either but you really don’t want to know about the rest, especially if you are having your tea right now.

It was another slow start to the day before I transcribed the dictaphone notes, and then what time was left was spent revising my Welsh ready for the lesson. and wouldn’t it be nice if some of the stuff would stick in my brain?

At lunchtime I went and had a shower and then did some tidying up ready for when the cleaner would come round.

After the lesson the cleaner and I had a chat. We’ve worked out some kind of plan of action about the place and she also filled me in on a few things about the place that I didn’t know before. It’s always good to know about things like that.

Tea tonight was a curry from the freezer – one of those special ones I made about a year ago. And having matured for as long as that in the freezer it really was quite delicious.

But while we’re on the subject of the freezer, it’s slowly starting to empty itself now. I’ll wait to see what’s on offer in Noz at the weekend and if it’s a disappointing day I might just bake a vegan pie at the weekend to fill up the space.

That’ll be a good idea because there’s stuff in there like vegan minced soya stuff and using some of that in a pie would be a good idea.

While i’m at it, I’ll see about finding a recipe for some vegan sausage stuffing so that I can have a go at making sausage rolls. As I’ve said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I’ll have to buy pastry for that because making flaky or puff pastry is a difficult and complicated procedure that’s beyond my capabilities.

That’ll give me something to think about while I try to sleep.

Wednesday 9th August 2023 – THERE REALLY ISN’T …

… any point going to bed and trying to go to sleep early if I wake up at 03:00 and then can’t go back to sleep again. It really does defeat the point.

However, I did manage to go back to sleep again, but not for long and when the alarm went off I was already up and about (after a fashion).

Once I’d had my medication I attacked the dictaphone notes, of which there were more than just a few. I was down in the jungle last night with a pair of socks or something that wouldn’t behave themselves. It was like if I took them off they would keep on attacking me each tme that I turned over in bed or something like that.

Later on I did a lovely turn on the football pitch last night. A foul or offside or something was given in our favour so I went back to take the kick but the full-back decided that he’d take it and kicked it upfield. It was a really weak kick and 3 or 4 different players scrambled for it including me. I reached the ball and managed to flick it behind me. I turned and caught everyone totally unawares – including me – and had a shot at goal which hit the post, came back in but unfortunately broke back up the field. We were all caught out by a breakaway back down the field into our penalty area.

I was going away to a music festival at another point. I’d made enquiries and found out the pitch where my friend from the Wirral and his wife were staying which was one of the ones in the middle in a depression or hollow somewhere. I’d arranged to have a pitch very close nearby. We went down there and were one of the first to arrive. We had to sort through all our things to erect the tent. Then I decided that I wanted a shower. The only way to have a shower was to actually have a shower on your bed. My bed was in the middle of 2 or 3 others so I had to prepare for the shower, rig up a hosepipe or something then sit on my bed and wash myself with the hosepipe. The idea that this was going to ruin my bed and bedding never entered my head all at the moment. There was more stuff than this too, including something about the security arrangements. There was a company called Fitz Security that was doing it but I can’t think now what brought that into the conversation during the night.

Back at this folk festival again. It’s now mid-afternoon, everyone is arriving and starting to set up. There’s a food stall being set up somewhere and people are starting to queue for it. Again there’s much more going on than this but I can’t remember it. Some of it relates to the kind of food that was in some cases rather unpleasant.

Actually, if I were in the UK at the moment I would be on my way to a music festival even as we speak. It’s “Cropredy” this weekend, the Fairport Convention festival in Oxfordshire.

Did I dictate the dream that I was working for a taxi company? … “no you didn’t” – ed … A woman turned up and awoke me out of bed. I had to hunt around for my dressing gown. I was most uncomfortable but I let her in. She began to talk about another taxi company, how she’d seen their adverts everywhere and how she was looking forward to maybe working for them etc. I realised that she’d come for an interview at the wrong place. I let her carry on for a while. Suddenly she disappeared, I can’t remember how, during the dream and the interview finished. Then the boss came home and I told him about this incident. I also told him that the immersion heater wasn’t working again and I’d tried to fix it but I wasn’t able to. He was annoyed with having no hot water. he had a look around. The office was quite shabby. he asked “when are you going to paint it as you promised?”. I asked him what colour. he replied “lemon”. I said “yes OK. I’m glad about that. I don’t like white”. We made arrangements that I’d start to paint the place.

There was also something about a Zeppelin type of thing. It had a leak and there was condensation inside the gasbag that was leaking out in drips of water. We landed the Zeppelin, stripped down the valve and installed a new one, fitted it. That seemed to make the matter worse. In the end we went to a Government office where we could maybe find the parts. We were sitting around there for hours. In the end one of the women with us managed to buttonhole one of the clerks to ask him about it. He replied that these parts are special. They’re on the secret list and can only be sold to people who are bona fide citizens of the UK. The guy had a strange foreign accent so I went over to the woman and we had a laugh about the idea that the parts can only be used by bona-fide British people but can be sold by just about anyone in the whole wide world. It didn’t make any sense. We carried on chatting and ere there for quite a while talking about nothing in particular

We had a long rambling dream about being up in the Arctic ready to fly back. We had to wait for a couple of weeks while the weather ship went to pick up some weather information. It went all the way across to Greenland, round the Davis Strait and back. I grabbed hold of one of the officials and asked about the possibility of going out on the weather ship the next season next year. They said that it was simply not possible but I harassed and harangued them and generally tried to insist but it was no use at all. I was there for ages trying to convince them. Then we flew back. We arrived at the airport. I was with Nerina. As we left the plane she said that she’d forgotten something and she’d see me after Immigration. We had to run all the way round this spiral staircase thing going through different rooms, round and round to our left all the time down these stairs. We reached the bottom and had to board a bus. After the long descent down the stairs we boarded this bus. There was just one other man and me. He asked what I thought about the flight. I replied “I can’t remember anything at all about it. I remember boarding the plane and having a cup of coffee. The next thing that I remember was coming in to land at Fredericton and I had a cup of cold coffee”. He didn’t realise that we’d landed at Fredericton and was surprised when I told him the name of the town. He said “you’re wrong about the coffee. You had to go to the machine yourself and put a token in etc”. In the meantime the bus was going down the road at quite a rate of knots into the city. Suddenly it came to a spot where there was a car parked on either side of the road, a lot of cars on one side and just one on the right-hand side. They hadn’t left enough room for the bus to go through so it came to a grinding halt.

There’s no doubt about it – you’re certainly getting your money’s worth with this.

There was the Welsh homework to do and then we had the lesson. It passed reasonably well today, but we have a long way to go of course.

The strange thing was that while I was awake in the middle of the night I was working through my Welsh from yesterday. It’s preying on my mind, I suppose, and I hope that some of it might stick. I can’t remember any of the vocabulary though.

The cleaner came around too and we had a little chat in the middle of everything.

When the lesson was over I attacked another radio programme. I’ve chosen all the music, paired it off and even written the notes for about half of it. I really don’t know what’s happened to me.

Tea was leftovers with a half-helping of curry from the freezer and a naan bread. I won’t be bothered by any vampires for the next couple of days either – that new batch of garlic butter than I made is pretty good.

So now I’m going to try to go to bed early again, and hope that I can have a better sleep than last night. I haven’t paid all this money for this course not to take any benefit from it.

There’s plenty of other stuff going on too so I have my work cut out right now. At least it keeps me out of mischief.

Wednesday 2nd August 2023 – I MANAGED TO KEEP …

… on going this afternoon until about 17:00 before I crashed out. And then it was only for about 10 minutes or so.

That makes a change from how things have been just recently. But there’s no need to crow about it because one swallow doesn’t make a summer, as we all know.

And in any case, even if it were to be the situation, past experience tells us that what goes around comes around and it wouldn’t be too long before we’re back there again.

Mind you, it’s a real surprise that that’s all there was, considering the night that I’d had. Because I’d certainly been around the block, and more than once too. There was some kind of weird dream about cats and football goalkeepers and these wafers that you have on which you spread your food but I can’t remember any of it at all.

Then there was something to do with the town football club that had been playing in Wales. They’d played against three Welsh Premier League clubs and had been beaten comprehensively in each one 4-0. They went on some kind of outing. I was there and took part in it. We had to walk through a really old building. When we reached the far end someone opened the door and there was a very small yard outside. The tour must have stopped at this door but there was no-one about to talk to and we hadn’t actually seen anything. It was one of these dreams where one expects something to happen and you grip the edge of your seat waiting for it yet nothing does. You end up being in some kind of void about it. I was walking without crutches but having some mobility problems.

There was another distressing dream about being in the Southern Hemisphere where the penguins there were being fed live rodents, just tearing these rodents to shreds. The squeals were horrible. In the snow was a strange vehicle that went past. It looked like a tadpole travelling in reverse making a noise as it scrunched past the snow. But it was the squeals of these rodents that were being torn to bits that got me.

We were also talking about these animals that were watching a football match. They somehow managed to escape from the crowd and ran down this narrow footpath through the ice. People chased after them in different cars and machines and so on. One person was on foot and managed to corner them in the kitchen of a house somewhere but they threw some product onto the fire to make an explosion that broke these people’s trains of thought so that they could escape without being noticed

Later on I was back in Crewe. There was a wedding of a membr of our family. I’d no intention of going. My sister was going but there was no-one to do her job. They couldn’t find a replacement at the pub where she worked in Nantwich. I said that I’d go to do it. I prepared myself . That took me much longer than I expected. In the end I set off in this ancient Ford Transit van that was rusting and generally falling to bits. When I reached where I was going to park, an Indian guy came over to ask me what I was doing. I told him. He had a look inside my van and saw tons of stuff lying around. He went round to the passenger side and just with the force of his hands slid down the window from the outside. I shouted at him and told him what I thought. I said “if I come back here and find stuff missing I have a good idea of your face and I’ll call the police about it”. He asked “what would the police do?” as if the police wouldn’t be interested in a case like that. He explained that he owns several properties in the town and rented the rooms out to different people. I replied “God help them!”. Making sure that the van was locked I set out to walk to the pub but bumped into a friend of mine. As we were walking down towards the river bridge in Welsh Row the subject of Charles Hawtrey came up. I explained that I’d once actually met him. He replied “yes he’s a wonderful guy. You’re really lucky. I would really have liked to have met him”. I was thinking that I was already running late . Everything that’s happened since has been to delay me. I’ve no idea what the time is now. I was too afraid to look in case I’d messed the thing up totally and completely.

Finally I was back in Crewe again, this time for the first time in years. I’d gone to help out to work on the taxis. There was a job to pick up at 01:45 from a house. I didn’t recognise the address but someone said that it’s next to a certain pub near Nantwich. I knew where the pub was soo I thought that I could find the house. I set out but the whole entire road layout had changed. New roads had been added. I completely and utterly lost my bearings. In the end I had to retreat to a place that I knew in the centre of Nantwich and walk the way that I would walk 30 years ago. I found out where I’d made a mistake and eventually found my way to this house. I was running ever so late because of all this confusion but it really was bewildering how all of the roads had changed. I didn’t recognise anything.

As you can tell, it took me quite a while to type out all of that. It was quite a voyage last night.

Something else that I had to do was to re-do part of the radio programme that will be broadcast at the weekend.

As you might expect, being so far in advance causes all of its own problems, and we had the usual one that having dictated something along the lines of “and is still performing even now” about a musician, he then duly obliges by shuffling off this mortal coil to go to that Great Gig In The Sky.

It’s all very well being “not frightened of dying – Any time will do, I don’t mind” but I wish they wouldn’t do it a week or so before the programme is to be broadcast.

While the cleaner was here I finished off the notes for the next radio programme and then after she left I turned m attention to the notes for the trip around Canada in 2017.

Right now, I’m coming off the Eagle Plateau and out of the Mealy Mountains down into the valley of the Churchill River where I’ll be heading east and then north to North West River, the furthest north that it’s possible to go by road.

Well in fact, it’s possible to go further north, but not in a continuous drive. Strider and I would have to take a freighter and head north to one of the Mission Stations where the Moravian missionaries attend to the spiritual needs of the Inuit.

That would have been an interesting trip prior to the Influenza epidemic of 1918. There were about a dozen or so Mission Stations but several of them were wiped out and abandoned. There are now just five.

But as for the road, that didn’t go to North West River in the past. Access was by boat and then a cable car across the river.

However, the discovery of a deposit of uranium at Makkovik at the height of the Cold War led to the construction of a road, which reached as far as North West River before the deposit was found to be uneconomic.

The road was thus abandoned and piles of radioactive rock was left lying around causing a health risk to the local inhabitants.

Tea tonight was one of the best that I’ve made. It should have been a leftover curry but I’m saving that for tomorrow because I won’t have much time.

Instead, I had the meal that I promised myself – steamed vegetables in a cheese sauce with a spicy vegan sausage. It really was delicious.

So I’m off to bed, hoping to have a really good sleep. Or if not, a really good voyage. The other night several of my favourite characters came to accompany me and it would be really nice if they were to turn up again.

Wednesday 26th July 2023 – I WAS WELL AWAY …

… with the fairies when the alarm went off this morning.

Mind you, it didn’t seem as if I’d had any sleep at all. I know that it took me a while to go off to sleep again once I finally went to bed and I suppose that that’s the reason.

There was plenty of stuff on the dictaphone too so it must have been a restless night. My parents had gone out for the evening. I was at home with my sister. I was working on the computer and she was doing something. Later in the evening I noticed that it had all gone quiet. There was only me. It seemed that she had gone off to bed and not said anything. I carried on working. All of a sudden the door burst open. It was my parents back. They had brought with them another couple and 6 or 7 children aged from about 9 to about late teenage. I was watching Connah’s Quay play on the internet against another Welsh club. A couple of boys sat down and started to watch it. One of them made a suggestion about who it might be so I said that it was Connah’s Quay. he said “I have a season ticket for them” so we began to watch the football. But I was much more interested in watching the 2 girls who had come with these boys and their parents who I thought were quite nice. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t heard about these girls beforehand

Then I was at the airport waiting to pass through Immigration or Boarding or whatever it is to go down to where the planes are. We all had forms to fill in. I filled in mine and handed it immediately to the guy at the small desk place. So did a few others. We weren’t allowed to pass through yet. Then they called the flight so everyone else formed a queue there. All their documents were read and stamped etc. I was wondering why there were a couple of agents standing round doing nothing and why people were just forming a queue with one guy and not going to the others. Eventually the others began to call people to them and we were all through. I was expecting that he’d give me back all these papers so I’d take them on to the next stage. The first thing that he said was “I’d better go to fetch the ones that are filled in” which for some unknown reason had found themselves back on the table where we started. They were all in envelopes so we had to go through the envelopes again. I was still hanging around there in limbo waiting for something to happen which didn’t happen, thinking that I would have these back but he didn’t seem to want to give them back to me. We were just standing there looking at each other.

We also had a couple of cats. My partner and I went for a walk and the cats came with us. One of them found a potato so it picked up the potato in its mouth and began to carry it around as if it was a kitten. Then it came to another one so it tried to carry both but they were far too heavy. In the end I was carrying these 2 potatoes for the cat. We set out to return home through Nantwich. It was early in the morning so there wasn’t much traffic about so we were lucky that we could do this. I didn’t fancy the cats running around on the side of the road in Hospital Street when there was plenty of traffic. We managed to shepherd them along even through the busy interchange at the roundabout outside Churche’s Mansions. A policeman in an American car gave us some strange looks. At one stage one of these cats was a duck waddling along but then it became a cat again a little later on. It was a really weird situation with these 2 cats that had come with us for a walk and these potatoes that they were trying to nurse.

Later on there was someone with a big van pulling a mobile home which they were using as a caravan. They’d parked at this camp site blocking everyone’s view so that they could see the lake while they had lunch. I was trying to have them move to a more convenient space because this wasn’t very good. In the end they agreed to move but the area to where I wanted them to move, there was no access to vehicles so they were there blocked with this vehicle somewhere. The guy got out to go for a look around on foot. He ended up being stranded somewhere. We were left with this mobile home blocking just about everyone with loads of people wandering around.

Finally I was somewhere else with a group of people, one of whom was my friend from North Wales. We were staying in digs somewhere. I’d had a wash and a shower. They decided that they wanted to go to the pub called “The Great Eastern”. It was quite late at night but we set off to walk. Halfway through it I realised that I didn’t have my watch. I wondered if I’d left it back at my room or whether it had fallen off my hand somewhere. We ended up on a main road. I joked with my friend that the pub she wanted to visit had closed down and was now a night club. I found that on this particular corner there was the pub, some kind of café and a night club too. All the people with me, including my friend waltzed off into the night club. I supposed that I had to follow but I really had no interest at all in going to a night club but that was what everyone wanted to do.

It’s no surprise that after all of that I was flat out at 07:00.

Not that I could do all that much either once I was up and about. It took me an age to get going yet again. Eventually I gave up trying and went for a shower to try to wake myself up and to make myself smell nice for the cleaner when she comes.

And then I transcribed the dictaphone notes that you read just now.

After lunch I did some tidying up and sorted out the clothes that I’d washed last week, and then while the cleaner was here I finished off the notes for the next radio programme.

There was also some time to carry on with my notes from Canada 2017. Not much though because firstly, regrettably, I fell asleep again.

Secondly, I’ve been trying, rather unsuccessfully, to track down the details of the supposed settlements of Salome’s Point and Crooked House Point on Earl Island.

What would really help would be if the Newfoundland Museum Antiquities Department would publish an itemised list of all known or suspected archaeological sites instead of having to pick through the theses of various researchers.

Tea tonight was a chili sin carné with the leftovers in the fridge with a small tin of kidney beans added in. It was delicious as usual, and then regrettably I crashed out again once I came back here to sit down.

But right now even though it’s early I’m going to bed. I really need a decent night’s sleep and I know that I won’t get it, but that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t make an effort.

Wednesday 12th July 2023 – I’VE JUST SEEN …

… one of the worst games of football that I’ve ever seen in my life. And I’ve seen some bad ones too.

It’s the Preliminary Round of the European Cup this evening and TNS have been playing away in Gothenberg against the Swedish Champions BK Hacken.

TNS lost 3-1 and really and honestly it could – and should – have been 13-1 and TNS would have had no cause to complain because they really were awful.

But it wasn’t the score or the difference in technical ability that upset me so much. What had me going was the fact that TNS sat back – not in their own half and let the opposition come onto them – but in their own penalty area. They simply camped on their own 18-yard line and tried to soak up the pressure.

If you’re going to play like that, you have someone always in the centre circle. It ties down a couple of defenders and you know where you can clear the ball. Whoever is up front can hold onto the ball while the wingers break free and you can start an attack.

But no. Everyone was in the TNS penalty area.

If TNS don’t have a dramatic change of plan for the home leg next week it’s going to be all over for them yet again. I don’t know what it is but they just can’t do it on the European stage. They seem to make a business of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

One thing that I could do today was to be up before the alarm went off. A good 5 minutes too this morning.

After the medication and checking my mails and messages I went for a shower so that at least i’d be nice and clean. And then I revised my Welsh.

The lesson seemed to go much better today and I actually understood what was going on. That makes a nice change too. But when we finished we were way behind where we are supposed to be and I don’t know how they are going to fit in the missing work.

The cleaner was here this afternoon and she was still here when the lesson finished so we had a quick chat before she left.

There was plenty of stuff on the dictaphone from the night. I’m surprised that I had time to wake up early. With the consumption of alcohol falling off some bar owner had decided to go in for live music. He realised that this would cost him more than he might make but he was going to give it something of a go and hope that he could entice in a lot of patrons. His regulars had quite mixed feelings about the idea but he’d see how it would work out. There was more to it than this but I can’t remember now.

There was an important sports match taking place so everywhere was sold out. All the people were making all kinds of strange arrangements to see the game, drones being tethered to balloons, free-flying balloons, loads of people on these hydraulic platforms like skyjacks etc that were being raised up. Everything was having a problem. One guy’s daughter had bought him a kind of small dirigible to which he could attach his drone so that it wouldn’t leave the ground. He reckoned that it was probably 3 feet below the level of the ground. They couldn’t make the drones point in the right direction. All these platforms were breaking up and extremely unsteady. People weren’t falling out but they were having to lower the platforms down because they were so unsafe. It really was an absolute nightmare for people to manage to see this game with all of the tricks that they were trying to ba able to see over the fence into the ground. It looked like some kind of jungle with lots of trees in it all peering up and peering over the fence into the ground.

We were then out doing something around the offshore islands in Labrador last night but I can’t remember what it was. We visited several and checked the heights etc then flew the information back to the central point with a drone but that’s all that I remember

There was a dispute about an inheritance with 2 young boys who were inheriting from their grandfather. It was suspected that one of them was illegitimate so wasn’t able to accept. This led to all kinds of disputes. In the end he was packed off to school anyway but his DNA was sent off to somewhere. Some time later it came back. There was no formal announcement of the results but he was sent the coveted black sweater of his clan. It was sent to his school and I had to pack it along with the belt to hold up his trousers. This obviously meant that he had actually been recognised as a blood descendant and was now no doubt a member of the family clan and could inherit everything.

Actually, there was a real case like this going on in the USA. Some rich guy had died and left his estate to be divided equally between his sons, of whom there were two. Subsequently it turned out following a DNA test that one of his sons isn’t actually his – his wife must have been up to no good at some time – so the real son was suing the other one for the return of his half of the money.

Finally there was a programme on TV last night about taxi drivers saying that about 1 in 4 licences issued were bogus licences to people who aren’t going to be engaged in taxi driving but need them for some other nefarious purpose. There was a lot of talk about that and also some talk about a new differential for a black cab that seemed to improve the gearing and manoeuvrability. They were discussing that. I had to take a sample in to a garage. The asked about the sample and what I was looking for. I said that it’s the quality of the facing joints as far as I’m concerned. A few other people had different ideas but to me as long as the facings were of perfect quality then that would be a very good start for the construction and assembly of these differentials

With the football, tea was quite late tonight. With not much in the way of leftovers I had a half-helping of curry out of the freezer to go with it, and a naan bread. That was all really delicious and I’ll have to do that again. But I’m not sure what I’ll do for tea tomorrow. Probably invent something.

But I’ll worry about that another time. Right now I’m off to bed ready for a revision session in the morning before my lesson. I’m hoping that I can keep up this improvement. But I reckon that it’s only temporary. Nothing whatever is sticking to my brain.

Wednesday 5th July 2023 – I MANAGED TO …

… beat the alarm clock again this morning, even though I didn’t feel anything at all quite like it. When it went off this morning at 07:00 I was sitting on the edge of the bed dressing

It goes o show that nothing in this life is permanent. I remember not so long ago going through a phase of not being able to get up out of bed at any price and I remember thinking at the time that it’s just going to go worse.

But the way that things have turned out, then I suppose that there are some grounds for optimism. I just wish that I knew what they were.

However, as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … being up and out of bed is one thing. Actually being at my desk and working is something else completely.

Isabel the nurse was the first to dislodge me from my reverie this morning. She’s supposed to be giving me a blood test tomorrow but apparently this one is extremely complicated and has to be done at the laboratory.

The laboratory opens at 07:30 and I need to be there before 09:00. And she hopes that I won’t be in a rush because these are “special” tests that take about 10 days before the results are ready.

Next person to ring was the nerve specialist’s secretary. I was wondering why I’d been copied into a blank e-mail but it turned out that the e-mail should have contained the copy of the prescription that he sent to me. He wasn’t available and his secretary needed it for her records so could I send it to her?

It all sounds quite bizarre to me, but who am I to interfere?

Having sorted out the playlist for the next few days, I wrote out a few more notes for a radio programme. It’s quite strange really but my heart doesn’t seem to be in it right now.

But to be honest, my heart isn’t really into anything much right now. All my get-up-and-go seems to have got up and gone at the moment – quite a change from that dramatic burst of energy that I had a couple of weeks ago where I was ready to take on the World.

Yesterday I mentioned that I’d revised half of my first Welsh course book. Today I looked through the other half. And I’ll keep on doing that through the summer, I reckon. The only difficulty is that with my teflon brain, nothing is sticking. I’m going to have to do something dramatic about that too.

The rest of the day has been spent walking around on the Furdustrandir, the beach where the Norse voyagers landed on their epic voyage down the North American coast – or, at least, where I think that the Norse landed.

Everyone has their own preferred location as to which beach it might be, and find 100 reasons why it won’t be anywhere else, and then someone else finds 100 reasons why it’s not where anyone else says that it might be.

The early writes on the subject, like Carl Rafn, Gustav Storm and Arthur Middleton Reeves put the beach as far south as Massachusetts and quote the number of daegr – or “days” quoted in the Sagas, and the average speed of a longboat.

However, no-one is going to sail a ship in unfamiliar waters full of shoals and rocks during the hours of darkness, and they weren’t in a longboat anyway but in a cargo vessel.

William Munn wrote a book in 1914 to suggest that Newfoundland was the likeliest spot for the Norse to have settled and when confronted about the problem of “vines growing in the neighbourhood”, Munn’s suggestion that “maybe the climate was different in those days” – the first ever reference to Global Warming – was loudly ridiculed by his contemporaries.

In any case Vaino Tanner, the Finnish anthropologist, whose ancient Norse language is bound to be more reliable that many other Westerners, tells us that “vinland was originally a nomen appellativum derived from the early Nordic word vin (pronounced vinn), plural vinjar, which signifies grassland or pasture suitable for cattle.”

And as for the critics who say “grassland or pasture suitable for cattle in Labrador?”, they’ve obviously never been to Greenland and seen what passes for pasture there.

So I suppose that that will be my next project, if ever I finish this one. To write up my notes of my visits to the Norse sites in Greenland.

There was plenty of stuff on the dictaphone again from the night. I had a couple of wax mannequins or dummies in my house that I used either for decoration or putting clothes on etc. What people didn’t realise was that they were in fact some old friends of mine, including Rosemary, who I’d somehow managed to kill and coated in wax as a way of disguising their bodies while I had a think about what I was going to do with them. They’d been around in my apartment now for a couple of years and I was beginning to wonder how long I could get away with it if none of these people had, say, featured on their social network in that time. Someone would be bound to ask me a few questions about them, where they are. One idea that went through my head was to use their mobile phones to establish some kind of connection so that their online presence would be noted but that would inevitably draw people in to where I was and that wasn’t what I wanted at all. I was in this enormous quandary about what I was going to do and how I was going to do it

My brother had his motorbike and we were planning on doing something with ours. We said that we’d meet at a certain pub after a music concert. He got onto the pub who said that we could leave our motorbikes there during the concert. We wandered slowly home to fetch the bikes. He had his and I told him to wait a few minutes. He said that his wouldn’t start so he’d have to push it. if we set off now we’d be there at the same time. Off we set. I went into the barn. It was filthy, untidy, dusty and dirty etc, a real mess. I even found 20p in the dust and an album cover from a Who album. Trying to get my motorbike down was really difficult. I had to pull myself up with my arms and elbows onto another half-floor above. I needed a great deal of strength to do that. I had to open a cupboard, the door opened upwards, take the bike out and somehow lower it down to the floor below. I wasn’t looking forward to doing this at all. I reckoned that it would be extremely difficult. Then I thought that I hadn’t run the motorbike for years so what if it doesn’t fire if the petrol has gone stale or something like that?

I had some cars that needed washing. They were all kinds but mainly ancients – stuff that you find that’s 100 years old that’s dragged out of a barn. I had them in this kind of workshop and coupled up the hose but it wasn’t long enough. It made life really awkward. Someone found an extension piece for the hose. I put that in but there wasn’t enough water pressure so it was taking just as long anyway. There were all kinds of stuff – vans from the 1920s rotten as hell. There was one vehicle that we couldn’t really identify at first. It was dark green and big like a furniture removal lorry with Yale locks on it. It looked as if it was from the 1930s. I thought that I could make out what was a Bedford plaque from much more modern times so we were sitting there trying to decide what kind of vehicle it actually was until we could get close up to it to have a look

Tea tonight was a vegan chili using the leftovers and a small tin of kidney beans. This time I used chili powder rather than tipping the tabasco sauce in and it worked well enough.

So now I’m going to bed. Exhausted yet again and I have to go out early tomorrow morning. And I don’t really feel like it, but then again I don’t really feel like very much at all right now. In fact, early though it may be, I’m ready for bed.

My cleaner did a good job of tidying up the place so at least I don’t have to worry about that. And that’s just as well. I have plenty of other things to worry about right now.

Wednesday 28th June 2023 – I REALLY MUST …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s also the mystery surrounding Marguerite Lindsay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday 21st June 2023 – HAPPY SOLSTICE

Happy World Giraffe Day, Happy Seashell Day and Happy Cuckoo Warning Day too.

Not quite so happy for me today though because when I went to switch on the computer it wouldn’t fire up.

After a couple of hours of tinkering I managed to make it fire up but not even the BIOS would work. The hard drive has been creaking away over the last few days but last night it must have creaked its last croak..

it wasn’t all that unexpected and I had a few spare hard drives lying around so I started it off with a 1TB Solid State drive and spent a very happy morning configuring it and uploading an operating system

When I’d finished that and everything was running properly I had a rummage around and found an old 4TB drive that I’d been using at one time as a back-up drive before I bought the desktop array. This drive had about 900GB free space on it so I added that into the computer.

And so even as we speak, I’m going through the stuff on this drive and sorting everything out.

But it goes to show just how important having a back-up is. There’s a big memory stick that lives permanently in a USB port at the back of the computer. Every night before I go to bed I copy onto it the data files on which I’ve been working during the day

In case of an emergency it takes a while to sort out the directories in which each file might belong but at least they are all there. and at least it all kept me out of mischief while the cleaner was here.

Something that has been quite strange though is that while all of this was going on, I didn’t somehow manage to crash out. That’s quite a rare event these days, especially when I was up and about before the alarm went off too, despite how I was feeling yesterday.

There was even time to transcribe the notes that were on the dictaphone from the night. I’d been off somewhere last night. While I was away someone had taken one of the cars out. There had been a boiler explosion and it was sitting in the middle of the road with bits all blown around about it. Apparently no-one was hurt but the car had been sitting there since 03:00 and it was becoming light. People were having to pick their way around the wreckage in the street. I wanted to know whether my father had been told about this and if so what was he doing. It turned out that he had. One of these days he was going to get round to fixing it but he was busy right now. he was going out taking our exchange student back to college. I said “of course you can’t just leave the car there”. I was planning on phoning up having it moved, having a breakdown truck in etc. In the end I decided that it was really none of my business. If that’s what he wanted to do with it then that’s entirely up to him. By now our exchange student was ready to go to bed but she wasn’t very happy about me being there while she was being dressed so she asked me to leave. I thought to myself “I’ve seen plenty of girls in a state of undress before. One more isn’t going to make any difference but I suppose that I’d better go to find something else to do so I walked out of the room.

Later, I went to see Man play somewhere in Belgium I think. I’d arranged to interview Micky Jones afterwards so I had to catch the bus so far, walk the rest of the way. While I was walking I bumped into Deke Leonard. We were both soaked to the skin and wet. We arrived where Micky Jones was. I had to wait. He kept me waiting for quite some time while he finished off a few things. By this time I was dying to go to the bathroom but I thought “if I go to the bathroom now and he comes down I’ll miss him”. Eventually he came down and when he came close he looked nothing like he did on stage. We began to chat. He said that he was one of several who came from somewhere specific in Wales and went on to tell me about all the problems they’d had, how Deke Leonard hadn’t stored the stuff where it was supposed to be. It was in some other place which wasn’t very convenient and he didn’t think was secure. He has to go round every couple of hours to check on the instruments etc to make sure that they are still there and not moved

Tea tonight was another on of these leftover whatsits with the leftovers, some kidney beans and tomato sauce with pasta and veg, followed by the last of the cinnamon roll and ice cream. A good meal it was too.

So having been busy, I’m off to ned now, hoping that the computer will start tomorrow without having to wind it up. But at least, in principle, a Solid State Drive is more reliable than an old type of drive and I’d been planning to change things for quite a while.

At least, it’s done now.

Wednesday 14th June 2023 – AHHH WELL!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday 7th June 2023 – BRAIN OF BRITAIN …

… strikes again!

When I was going through the freezer yesterday I took some stuff out while I looked for something in there. This morning I found that I hadn’t put the pizza dough back and it had defrosted.

There are some things that you shouldn’t refreeze one they have defrosted so I checked with Liz, and apparently dough is one of them. So I had to bake the empty shell part-way through and then try to make some room in the freezer so that it would fit.

Whether it works or not I really don’t know, but we’ll find out on Sunday, I reckon.

And while we’re on the subject of working … “well, one of us is” – ed … I was working today. And in fact, just for a change, I had a good day too.

It started off quite well because once more I was up and about before the alarm went off.

And after the medication and checking the mails and messages, I made a start.

Much of the day has been spent on the Canada 2017 project. Today I’ve been in Heart’s Content in Newfoundland, the site of coming ashore of the first Transatlantic communications cable in 1858

Although that one only worked for a few weeks, several others were laid that came ashore there subsequently, the first in 1866 laid by the steamer Great Eastern, one of Brunel’s leviathans that although a resounding success from a sailing point of view, was an economic disaster as a passenger vessel.

Somewhere else I visited was the town of Dildo, a very popular holiday resort for single ladies from a certain Greek island but contrary to rumours, not twinned with Fücking in Austria nor Orgy in the Auvergne nor Condom in South West France.

It might have a close relationship with Grandes Piles in Québec though

A third place that I visited in Newfoundland today was a site called Come-by-Chance, the place of the first recorded meeting between the European settlers and the Beothuk natives. Something that the natives didn’t live to regret because by 1829 the whole tribe had been exterminated.

The cleaner came round this afternoon and gave me the news about my neighbour. Apparently there are some little signs of improvement and that’s good news She actually went for a little walk with my cleaner for a brief moment yesterday, the first time that she’s been out of doors since her fall.

As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … I might not be doing so well but there are people far worse off than me.

And I had to redo a radio programme today. The one that I was due to send off this week was suffering from this muffled bass issue that seems to have sprung up. Luckily I found the master files and so it didn’t take me as long as I might had I had to do it all from scratch again.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too from the night. I was checking the times of the buses because I had to go to hospital. There was a bus from here that arrived there in time but coming back was going to be something of a lottery. I was chatting to some people whom I knew about that. They asked me why I didn’t think about taking the bus at the hospital and carry on the route instead of coming back so that I’d go all the way round. I explained the the bus’s terminus was in Baschurch, absolutely miles away. If I had to go out all the way there where I could catch a bus back I’d be out there for ever. It won’t be a case of a simple one-day bus trip.

I was walking around a town somewhere. I bumped into a couple whom I know and a few other people. We all went for a coffee and chatted about these car boots that you fit to steering wheels to prevent people stealing them. There had been a new one on the market just recently and someone had written a report about how easy they were to take off. I suddenly realised that a while ago I’d had to take one off a car so that we could move it. It was quite easy too. They were on sale in this newspaper for £10:00 each. We had a lengthy discussion about these car boots. In the end I asked this couple what they were doing around town. They said that they’d come to buy a camera because I had theirs. “Oh dear” I said. “I can’t remember having it. I should have looked”. Just then a caravan came down the street, a big huge thing being towed by a car. It had outriggers on it to stop it overturning. It went round the corner and a little girl with us said “oh look it has a flagpole”. I said that if it were to go on a campsite it would have to pay extra for the pole. The girl was so surprised but the couple said “yes, you have to pay extra for that”.

As well as speaking to Liz and the cleaner today, I’ve also been speaking to my niece and I’ve had another marathon chat with Rosemary. Her Ukrainian refugee family had been with her a year at the end of May and so were obliged to move on. Somewhere more relevant has been found for them and they left on Tuesday

My niece was telling me that her husband has had to have surgery and will be away from work for quite a while. He’ll find that extremely difficult because I’ve known him for 30 years and I’ve never ever seen him idle

Tea was another leftover curry with half a helping from the freezer, accompanied by one of a batch of naan bread that I made this afternoon. And I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that I’m not going to be troubled by vampires thanks to how I made it. It’s pretty wild.

Tomorrow I’m going to carry on with my Canada 2017 stuff. I have a visit planned to the site of the deadliest aircraft disaster in Canada.

But right now, later than intended, I’m off to bed. I’ve done enough for today and I’m exhausted. And I’ll have to work on my fitness because there’s shopping to do at the weekend and I have to be on some kind of form for that.

Wednesday 31st May 2023 – I’M ABSOLUTELY EXHAUSTED.

And that’s no surprise considering the distance that I’ve travelled today.

This morning after the medication and checking the mails and messages I left my motel in Québec and headed to the library of the Department of Nordic Studies at Laval University to look for a thesis.

Then I went to the site of the battle of Sainte-Foy and then hit the road for Montreal where I spent a couple of days.

Leaving Montreal I went to Kingston in Ontario to see my cousin Sandra, and then crossed the border into the USA.

Strider, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and I then drove all the way down to see my friend Rhys in South Carolina.

After spending a few days there, I headed on south so that Strider could tell his friends that he’s been to Georgia and then we went to Myrtle Beach for a few days to rest.

Myrtle Beach brings back some very strange memories because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we’ve BEEN HERE BEFORE on our way back from Rhys’s wedding.

When Alison and I worked at that strange American company, we had a colleague who waxed lyrical about Myrtle Beach and said how wonderful it was, not knowing that I actually knew the place.

So I produced all of my photos from 2005 and she never said another word. In my opinion, the centre of the town is like Rhyl but with sun, as the photos went to show.

After a nice rest in a cheap seaside hotel, I came back all the way up the Outer Banks and I forget how many ferries I took as I kept to the outside. Forget Interstate 95 – the Outer Banks is the way to go north.

Especially with all of the ferries. people have been saying that I’ve been all at sea for years.

We finally hit the mainland at Bridgeport in Connecticut having had that gorgeous sunset going over Long Island Sound, and then STRIDER, STRAWBERRY MOOSE AND I IMITATED JACKSON BROWNE and went “Rollin’ down 295 outta Portland, Maine” (although in my case, I was rollin’ up it).

That song, by the way, was actually recorded on Jackson Browne’s tour bus as it really was rolling down Interstate 295 and you can hear the engine in the background.

However, back to today and we ended up back in New Brunswick, parked up Strider, celebrated Thanksgiving (I think that everyone was giving thanks that I was leaving), caught the bus back to Montreal and the plane back to Belgium and the hospital.

So you can see that I’ve been a very busy boy today and I’ve finished sorting the photos. I’ve even made a start on rewriting the notes.

But my visit to Laval University was interesting.

An author by the name of James Enterline wrote a book arguing that the Norse didn’t actually sail down the Labrador coast on their epic voyage of discovery in 1000AD but instead, went to the west of Cape Chidley and ended up in Ungava Bay.

He quoted at great length from the report of Thomas Lee who had excavated at Pomiok Island in the bay and had found what he (Lee) claimed to be a Norse longhouse.

Lee’s research was funded by the University of Laval on behalf of their Department of Nordic Studies. Unfortunately though, Laval is one of the few Canadian Universities that doesn’t have its theses on-line these days.

So off I went to find Lee’s report and eventually it turned up in a dusty corner where it had sat untouched since the mid-1960s

To my surprise, it contained a note to the effect that Lee had seen Enterline’s arguments and he went to great length in this appendix to dismiss them out-of-hand.

The sad thing about this is that Lee’s style of writing was polemic and contentious to the point of being confrontational, certainly not academic. And presumably as a result, his request for funds to continue his excavations the following year was denied.

And no further excavations has been carried out.

This is the big problem with a lot of incestuous academia. Everyone starts off with all of the best intentions and attacks their work with gusto. They do quite a lot of good research, obtain their Master’s and then go to work in a Bank and that’s your lot. It’s all forgotten.

Meanwhile, in other news, my cleaner came round again this afternoon to try to bring order out of chaos. She told me some bad news about my neighbour who had a very bad fall a couple of weeks ago. It looks as if she’s done herself a permanent mischief. There are people much worse off than me, that’s for sure.

Tea was a half-portion of curry from the freezer with the fridge leftovers, some rice and veg and a naan bread. And I’m eating really well these days, that’s for sure. That was lovely.

And there are some lentils simmering in the slow cooker too ready for my lasagne tomorrow. I’m looking forward to that so it had better be good.

Plenty of stuff on the dictaphone from the night too. I was round at some woman’s house and she had a lot of animals living in there, like a zoo. On one particular occasion a tiger took quite a fancy to me but in the wrong kind of sense. I had no intention of being a tiger’s main course meal so in the end I had to chase it away. She locked it outside the room where we were sitting talking. She went out with it and I barricaded the door. There was then a knocking on the door. It was her so I had to unlock it and let her in. another animal tried to come in too so I had to somehow chase it out, close the door again and wedge a sofa up against the door. She asked “if you’re doing all of that how are we going to manage if you have to go to the bathroom?”. I replied ” I couldn’t care less about going to the bathroom. I just want to keep away from these animals”.

Later on I was with someone whom I knew from my time in Stoke on Trent, and not any of the “usual suspect” eithers. We went into a pub in Hanley somewhere. We’d come out of work and there was some kind of discussion about how we never went for a drink any more, basically because there was some kind of atmosphere going on between a group of us and we’d decided that we’d go our separate ways. Talking to him, he said that he’s thinking restarting going to the pub early in the morning before coming into work. I thought that that’s not a particularly good idea. We ended up at the pub and that person whom I mentioned concerning the bad feeling was there playing darts. I couldn’t buy a pint for just the 2 of us, I had to buy one for the 3rd guy. I went to the bar to order while my friend and this lad stayed behind talking. The first thing that I noticed was that the Mild tap had been taken off the bar. I asked about that. The barman told me that they didn’t have any at that moment. I thought that I’d better order two brown ales or something and see what the 3rd guy wants.

Later on, L found myself driving towards Fredericton last night. While I was there I went into the Bulk Barn but I awoke before I remembered what it was that I was going to do there. Bulk Barn shops by the way are very exciting. Anyone who remembers “Weigh and Save” in the UK in the 70s and 80s will know the type of shop but in Canada it’s a huge chain and about 100 times better than Weigh and Save ever was. Of course Canada has a mush more rural population still carrying on the traditions of the 1950s (which I like) so a place like that does really well.

Finally I was doing another taxi job last night. I had to take someone to the hospital but via a medical centre type of place. I arrived and a couple of people helped the guy out. They said that I could leave him there and drive on. I tried to have someone sign the book for the account but no-one would. They all wandered off. In the end I just had to turn round and drive back into traffic.

Tomorrow, I’ll push on with my website stuff. I’ll see how far I get and whether I can actually complete this project without falling by the wayside. Then I have plenty more after that to crack on and finish. I’ve not even finished editing the photos from the High Arctic in 2019 yet and it’s almost 4 years since we set out on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR in Aberdeen and alighted, after many misadventures, on the Canada-Alaska border.

High time that I extricated my digit instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself.

Wednesday 24th May 2023 – I AWOKE AT …

… about 05:55 with the idea in my head of some woman who was dressed in some kind of Eighteenth-Century formal Court dress like someone out of the French Empire. It was such a shock but it awoke me bolt-upright and there was a very uncomfortable feeling for a few minutes as to how this had come about for I remember absolutely nothing at all of what happened, just the image of this woman that had appeared in my head so dramatically.

So as a result, when the alarm went off this morning at 07:00 I was already up and about. Not by much, I have to say, because it took me a while to come to my senses (not that I have too many senses to come to these days) after I awoke.

After I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages the first thing that I did was to check the curry that had been simmering away in the slow cooker over night. It was fairly liquid, more than I expected, so I bunged in a couple of potatoes duly diced and some bulghour and let it carry on simmering.

In case you are wondering what spices I use these days in a carry, there’s cumin (ground as well as seeds) turmeric and coriander of course, and then some hot chili powder, fenugreek and fennel. There was also some garlic salt too, as I always put in if I’m leaving something simmering overnight. I’ve no idea of the proportions of the spices though. I just add the stuff until it tastes right.

Next task was to telephone the doctor. I need some more Aranesp and much more of it too, what with having to take it every week with effect from next week. So on Friday at 10:45 I have to stagger down the hill into town. And, presumably, stagger back too. That’s the bit that finishes me off these days.

Checking the dictaphone next because there was more stuff on there from the night. I’d been left alone in my parents’ house while they’d gone out. I’d been doing a few things like the washing up and tidying up, getting everything ready and then feeding the cats. By now it was sometime really late at night so I thought that I’d just go outside for 5 minutes for a breath of air or something and then go to bed. I went outside and there was plenty of snow around. I was just standing there at the side of the house when almost immediately my parents pulled up. They had one of our cats with them but it was on a lead. Of course it wasn’t my parents in real life. They wanted to know what I was doing and why I was outside. It was very difficult to explain that you’d just go out for some fresh air.

So my family again, and also a few cats. This is becoming rather monotonous.

This afternoon the cleaner has been here tidying up for me. I had a shower before she came so that at least I’ll smell nice, instead of just smelling. And that reminds me – the laundry basket is rather full now so I’ll have to let the washing machine do some washing on Friday while I’m in the town.

While she was doing her stuff I’ve been choosing the music for the next series of radio programmes. Once again we’re back into the obscure artists bit, including a track recorded by someone who was at one time Pete Townshend’s chauffeur.

And I also had a little … errr … relax. The strain of the early morning was rather too much.

By the time that I was ready to make tea, the potato and bulghour had done their stuff and the mixture in the slow cooker was now nice and thick. So I fried a couple of large onions, a few lumps of garlic, the leftovers out of the fridge and then added the pile of stuff out of the slow cooker.

There’s enough for 6 helpings so five of them will be going into the freezer (now that there’s room) when they have cooled and the sixth one went down really nicely with rice and vegetables and one of my naan breads.

Tomorrow I’ll finish off selecting the music and then make a start on writing the notes. But I really need to have a good think about what I’m going to de for my 200th radio programme.

For my 100th, I did an overnight 12-hour rock festival of the various groups and musicians who I’ve encountered on my travels around the Northern Hemisphere but I’m not sure that I’ll be doing the same thing again. Going through the back-up drive I’ve found a few tracks on which I played back in the 70s but the quality isn’t good enough and the there isn’t enough of it anyway.

However, there is always that infamous Colosseum concert. It’s accompanied me on many of my voyages around and about, including the time that I sailed across the Atlantic on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR when I reckoned that I would have plenty of time to remix and re-edit it.

But it was on those voyages while I was trying to re-edit it that I had my strange encounters, firstly with The Vanilla Queen and then with Castor so it’s a concert that has a … errr … certain significance. If it ever does find its way onto the airwaves it should certainly stir up something.

And that’s the idea, I suppose. Life is quite boring these days without being able to go off and make things happen. It’s high time that I made some excitement happen, although I’ve no idea how I can manage it. Finally getting the Colosseum concert onto the airwaves is a good place to start.

Wednesday 3rd May 2023 – SOME STUPID PSEUDO-JOURNALIST …

… is telling me that the events that took place in Wrexham over the weekend are the most important things to have happened in Welsh football “for decades”.

So a club’s promotion from the fifth to the fourth tier of a foreign football league is more important than the country getting to the semi finals of the European Cup …checks notes … seven years ago, or getting to the World Cup just recently?

To be honest, I’m finding this hysteria and sycophanty to have reached the levels of total absurdity and insanity, and I’m totally astonished to see all these supposedly well-informed people blindly leaping aboard any old passing bandwagon. They have totally lost touch with reality.

Anyway, enough of that. Let’s talk about more exciting things. Like the night that I had last night, for example.

It was another late night and yet another where I took ages to go off to sleep. And I awoke in the middle of events and took ages to go back to sleep again. But I must have done at some point because when the alarm went off, I was stark out and it was something of a battle to leave the bed.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages and so on, I set to work.

And I was at it for ages but it was all well worthwhile because I now have a biscuit tin full off rather overdone coffee, orange and almond biscuits.

Somewhat on the strong side unfortunately (note – put less coffee in next time) and rather overdone (must buy a new oven) but nevertheless, here we are. I tried a few with my afternoon hot chocolate and I’m still alive so I suppose they are OK.

As well as all of that I made a batch of dough for my naan bread and some more dough for the next round of pizzas. The naan dough didn’t rise at all but the pizza dough went up like a lift. I wonder why the difference. It’s the same flour.

And while I was at it I finished off that big bag of flour that I bought a while ago. A good job I bought another one the other week.

While the cleaner was here cleaning up, I carried on with the notes for the next radio programme and they are well over halfway through. I’ll finish them off over the next couple of days and dictate them through the night on Saturday when it’s quiet. With all of the baking done already I’ll have nothing to do on Sunday so I can edit and assemble the radio programme

After she left I had my hot chocolate and biscuits and then had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was a passenger on a double-decker bus last night going from South Wales up to the North going through all these little by-ways, country lanes and alongside canal towpaths, disrupting football matches etc. I ended up driving it at some point. It took 1 hour 20 minutes. There was a big campaign for 3 buses to go across Wales to link up bits of the country. They would all meet and interchange in the centre. Somewhere along the route I stopped and went to a chip shop. The people with me had written down an order, I think that it was for 2 chicken and chips or something and I was going to buy something else with chips. When I was finally served the guy told me “there’s something over there already cooked”. I said “I’ll tell you what I want and you can see what you can do”. But he took the paper from me which was an old order that had been printed out with the new order written in biro on the blank side. I thought to myself “this is going to end up in a right mess and confusion now he’s doing this”.

And later there was a game of football going on between 2 villages. I went along as a spectator. I was chatting to a couple of the guys on one team. They went 1-0 down almost straight away from the kick-off so I decided that I’d give them some coaching from the touchline. There was 1 lad who was really quick. I had him do a beautiful diagonal pass and run on for the return. He got in right behind the defence and hit the post. On another occasion he missed an open goal in pretty much the same fashion. 30 seconds later he scored one and 30 seconds later scored a second, all the time with me standing on the touchline telling him what to do. It looked quite straightforward and simple for me. Then I thought to myself “now we’re 2 minutes into the game, he’s hit the post, missed a sitter and scored twice. I’d better go to sit down and shut up before I’m accused of ruining the game.

It reminds me of a game that I saw years ago when Pionsat’s 3rd XI was playing somewhere. They had a young lad playing centre-forward who was completely out of his depth but trying very hard. When Pionsat won a penalty and the centre-back went to take it I shouted at the lad to follow it in. Sure enough he did, and sure enough, the keeper spilled it and he had a simple tap-in. No-one was more pleased than he was.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry, and the naan bread wasn’t as good as the previous batch. That first batch must have been “beginner’s luck” but I’ll persevere. I’m sure that I’m on the right track somewhere and it’s just a case of fine-tuning everything until I arrive at where I want to be. We won’t be discouraged.

So I’m off to bed. Tomorrow I have my appointment with the house agent about doing something about my new apartment and to see where I stand. In the meantime I’ll read up about Peter Rachman and see if I can find out a few tips. He was, of course, a stateless person and with me having no right to vote in any country in the World right now, we have more than just a few things in common.

EPIC HALL

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