Tag Archives: cleaner

Wednesday 12th April 2023 – MY HOME-MADE …

… garlic naan was delicious. And what’s even better is that there are two more balls of dough in the freezer for further use for the next batch of leftover curries. And shock! Horror! I didn’t use the air fryer but stuck the naan in the wok to cook when I’d finished cooking the curry.

The leftover curry tonight was even better than usual too. The naan bread recipe called for just half a pot of soya yoghurt so instead of soya cream, I added the remains of the pot to my curry and that definitely gave it a certain je ne sais quoi that it didn’t have before.

The fact is that gradually I’m working on my diet and my meals and I’m having some really good stuff. My diet is improving in leaps and bounds and that can only be good news.

It’s better news that what happened during the night. That’s certainly true. I was late going to bed and when the alarm went off at 07:30 I was already sitting down here working. I’d been up since 06:00 and awake for more than an hour before that. It was quite a dreadful night.

Anyway I went for a shower and then set off to walk to the doctor’s, with both my crutches. I almost had a fall going down the steps to the Place Pelley but I managed to hang on and made it the rest of the way.

The doctor was extremely pleased to see me and he said so. He also said that when he saw me for the first time after I came back from Canada via the hospital he was extremely worried and wasn’t sure at all that I would pull through.

Not the first time that I’ve heard that either. I had a friend once who told me that he had been at death’s door but the hospital pulled him through.

After the doctor threw me out, armed with a pile of prescriptions, I went first to the little Carrefour and then round to the pharmacy. Outside, I met the friendly neighbourhood itinerant street dweller and we had quite a chat.

The chemist has to order in my Aranesp so that’s another trip down into town tomorrow. And I’m slowly warming to the idea of going to Leuven next by train regardless of the struggle through Paris because right now I seem to be managing to walk fairly well, all things considered, on my crutches and I’m hoping for an improvement after my week next week at the hospital.

What underlined that was the walk back home afterwards. I made it all the way back here without having to stop to catch my breath and it’s been an age since I’ve been able to do that. Things are looking up.

While i’d been in town I’d bought a crusty baguette so I made some cheese on toast for a late breakfast, especially now that I can actually buy vegan cheese in the big supermarkets. It’s not just my cooking that’s looking up but the supply of ingredients too.

Tons of stuff on the dictaphone too from during the night despite how short it was. I was driving a taxi last night. I had my little company going but all kinds of issues were going on. I ended up with just one car doing a few bits and pieces here and there. I was fed up with trying to organise everything and do everything. It ended up in Court for some reason or other. It was all very depressing last night.

And then I was in a house with someone. She was going to have a bath. She had left me alone in the living room. I’d seen all of her plants. She had some books on plants.

There was also a dream about a big female cat like Chloe (the cervil). She’d had kittens and one of them wasn’t very well. It had a respiratory issue. She brought the kitten to me to presumably take to the vet. I took the kitten and her too at the same time.

Later on I stepped back into one of these dreams again about a girl whom I’d been dating. Her parents began to accept me as some kind of fixture. She told me that Robert had rung up to talk to me. She thought that this was my father. I explained that this was Percy Penguin’s father. I couldn’t understand why he would want to get in touch with me. Her mother didn’t say very much and wandered away so I talked to this girl who by now had become Percy Penguin. She was saying that she’s being treated much better at home now because she’s been spending more time with them and more time looking after the pets and animals which has made har parents quite grateful. Maybe my new favoured position has something to do with all of that.

When I awoke later on (whatever that’s supposed to mean) I was with this girl again. I don’t know what’s happening here now.

That’s not everything that happened during the night by the way, but you really don’t want to know about the rest of it.

The cleaner came round this afternoon and we had a good chat while I wrote out some notes for one of my radio programmes. But then I crashed out – good and proper too – for at least an hour so I didn’t do as much as I would have liked. But I still managed to find the time to make some dough for the delicious naan bread.

having talked about my curry earlier, I’m just going to do a little more work and then I’ll head for bed. No lie-in tomorrow of course because I’m having a blood test and I have to have had nothing to eat. So right now I’m finishing off the last of the special chocolate that I bought for myself for Easter and then I’ll be going to bed.

But after crashing out like I did today I probably won’t have much of a sleep tonight either. Still, a good walk into town should wear me out enough and I’ll be fit for nothing when the physio comes round on Friday morning.

It’s all go around here, isn’t it?

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Wednesday 5th April 2023 – AFTER ALL OF THE …

… misery and depression that’s been about for the last couple of days, today was a much better day as far as I was concerned and I actually managed to do some work today.

Not that you would have thought so after last night because it was another miserable night where I couldn’t go off to sleep and when I did I awoke at 03:20 and then couldn’t go back to sleep again for what seemed like for ever

Mind you, when the alarm went off at 07:30 I actually was asleep and it was a battle to raise myself from the dead before the second alarm went off.

Once I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages, I actually made a start on doing some work and that’s not like me these days, is it?

But by the time that lunchtime came round I’d written all of the notes for one of the radio programmes that I was intending to do today. Not exactly going flat-out, I have to say, but slowly keeping on going regardless.

First task though was to make up a playlist of albums from which I’ll be selecting the next batch of music. I used to do this every week but I haven’t actually updated anything since before I went to Canada. I’ve been letting myself go somewhat.

Another thing was to telephone the doctor for an appointment as I’m running low on some medication. I can go to see him on Wednesday morning next week at 10:00. I also need a pot to give a urine sample for the laboratory to analyse and the nurse will be taking it away with the blood test that he will come to do on Thursday morning next week.

So he’ll be taking the p*** then.

Lunch came round rather quicker than I was expecting, but I called a halt to my progress in order to have a shower and to do some tidying up. What with the cleaner coming, I have to make both myself and the apartment look presentable.

While she was here doing her stuff, I was making a start on the text for the next radio programme and talking to a neighbour on the internet. She was supposed to be coming home tomorrow but she finds herself stranded in Paris due to industrial action.

Several people have asked me why it is that the French are so upset about having their retirement age raised from 62 to 64 when for the UK the retirement age was raised from 65 to 67. Why do the French have it easier than the Brits?

The answer is that when the French are upset they go out to do something positive about it. The Brits just roll over and take it and, if they feel particularly incensed, they get up a petition, just like we did at Primary School.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I used to work for a pan-National Organisation that was inundated with petitions. The net result of all of these petitions was that our annual bill for toilet paper was zero.

And apparently I’m also in someone’s bad books. As soon as the apartment downstairs went up for sale, I was given the wink and the deal was all done and dusted within a matter of a couple of weeks. And I kept silent about it until I’d signed the commitment to purchase.

Now the news is spreading around the building that I’ve bought it, and someone else is bitterly upset because no-one told him or her that there was an apartment for sale and they were just as desperate as me to buy an apartment here.

So we have a very unhappy bunny somewhere in the building. And I have to say that I’m not sorry.

After the cleaner left I made some delicious hot chocolate and then had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. At some point during the night I was defrosting the freezer. I can’t remember who I was with now but it was a very long rambling dream again. One of the things that we were doing was dealing with the frozen food. We were having a lot of trouble fitting it all into the drawers. The girl said that we ought to defrost the freezer. I was certain that it didn’t need it because it wasn’t iced. But when I looked again it was so iced that all of the frozen ice blocks in there were all being pushed out. We ended up taking out everything and starting to repack it. But instead of there being ice blocks they were now like flexible containers like these heat bags. trying to squeeze them into the confined space because the shelves were so small was as if this freezer bag was taking up more than half the place inside with the equivalent of a vacuum flask meaning that there was very little room if any left for the frozen food. I was sitting there scratching my head about how this could possibly be. It certainly wasn’t like that when we’d started and the freezer wasn’t like that before. I was as if it had undergone a metamorphosis

Did I dictate the dream about going off to Canada with a few of my friends? … “no you didn’t” – ed … We wandered around New England for a couple of weeks without having much time to do very much. When we came back two other of my friends had gone away. They’d also gone to the USA. We set about changing the house round. We stripped out the kitchen and had a new window somewhere and had the old window from there in one of the current window frames, put some furniture in one of the bedrooms. When they came back I showed them around. They were very impressed with what we’d done. I went to bed but I didn’t really go to sleep. Whoever was there with me got up and went. I ended up getting up and going for a walk around. On the way back was a really steep hill that you actually had to climb. There was another woman climbing this hill. She couldn’t quite see how to get over the top. I explained that it was a case of having to climb up the fence, over it and then down again on the other side. She wasn’t willing to do that so she went. I managed to climb up that last bit and over the fence and on to the other side.

And I wish that I could remember who these girls are who keep on featuring in my dreams and then disappearing before I can put names to them. That’s really disappointing.

Rosemary rang me up later on and we had another marathon chat. We were talking about cruises and in particular one that is setting sail in November for three years, 300 ports and 137 countries. Three years at sea would suit me fine – after all, I’ve been all at sea for most of my life – but I draw the line at finding $158,000.

Nevertheless it would be interesting to find out more about it.

Tea tonight was another delicious leftover curry, and now there’s a little room in the fridge.

There will be some room in the freezer tomorrow too because I’m going to take out a couple of the drawers, empty them and then clean and repair them. That’ll give me an opportunity to see what’s in them and work out a plan about reducing the contents of the freezer.

There’s far too much old stuff in there that I don’t know that I have. I need to sort it out and use it before something drastic happens to it.

But that’s for tomorrow. Right now, even though it’s early, I’m off to bed. I reckon that I’ve earned it. I certainly deserve it.

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Friday 31st March 2023 – MY SAUSAGE …

… chips and beans for tea was delicious. Now that I have some melting vegan cheese, and more importantly, now I know where I can find some more without any effort, I added some cheese to the beans while they were cooking and that made an impressive difference.

The air fryer struck again. Cooked my sausage and chips to perfection. And later on, seeing as I found some more frozen apple pie in the freezer, it defrosted and crisped up my slice of apple pie.

And rummaging around in my box of cooking accessories, I found a shallow porcelain pie dish tested for use in the oven that fits nicely in the basket of the air fryer.

Things are looking up!

There are several other things that also seem to be looking up too.

Firstly, I had another better night of sleep. I was late going to bed and it was a real struggle to awaken but I even managed to beat the first alarm this morning, never mind the second one.

That’s a surprise in itself because although it wasn’t anything as like as restless as it has been in the recent past, I still put in a god few miles while I was asleep. The subject of Lonnie Donegan came up in a discussion between me and several other people. It brought out the fact that after he’d finished with a musical career he’d gone into the motor trade. He’d bought a ruined garage somewhere and had started to work from it. I was hoping that there might have been something going here for me but no-one said anything so I made a few enquiries of my own. I was pointed in the direction of where he might be. I turned up there and it was an ice speedway race taking place on an ice rink somewhere in south London. He was actually racing in it and won, which of course cheered everyone. Then there was something about music. One of the guys in it was called Kenny Driscoll whom I know from “Lone Star”. We were talking about some kind of jazz group that was involving him and someone else well-known was looking for an over-dub guitarist for making albums of the live concerts they were doing

There was something else involving music but I can’t remember very much of this except that it involved some kind of guitarist who was fleeing from justice. They had him surrounded. It went on from there but I can’t remember very much but one of the tracks on the album that he was recording was called “A State of Bohemia”. Someone interpreted it to mean that they were living some kind of uncomplicated life. It was really quite funny because they didn’t know, although most people did, that Bohemia was the name of an ancient State in Central Europe now part of the Czech Republic (and I’m impressed that I knew that in the middle of a dream) but there is lots more to this dream than this but I can’t remember it

And then I was driving taxis in a new town last night. It was a town about which Nerina or whoever the woman with me was knew something about. She showed me a couple of places that she had visited when she was at University there. We had a new driver starting as well. We gave him a run-down of what to do and what we expected of him then we set off. The first job was that we were going to the same place but picking up from different places so we met up and went together in the end. This person paid for both taxis. It came to £2:50, £1:10 for me and £1:40 for him. It had to be split up but for some unknown reason the maths were extremely complicated. I was scratching my head about this because I knew the answer straight away but I didn’t want to say it in case everyone thought that I was trying to cheat someone. We were talking about whether we’d be busy or not but on the way into dropping off these passengers we’d seen queues at almost every taxi rank so we expected that we would have a really busy night. For some reason I wans’t in the mood to be busy. It was very difificult when there were just 2 of you and one was a new driver.

Something else occurred as well. The place was untidy so I asked the family if they would halp me tidy it. One thing was an enormous pile of books with books all over the floor. Their response was a quote from Churchill about “you should find books everywhere in a house and that’s a good sign if there are”. I thought that that was typical with no-one coming round to help me out.

Finally I was out last night somewhere in the Home Counties. There was a group of people who had gone to meet someone. They had an Avengers-like plot trying different pulls on them to see which was the most efficacious in killing them. They lured someone down to a quiet remote cul-de-sac in the countryside. They person whom they were supposed to be meeting wasn’t there so he stopped a passer-by who happened to be one of these secret agents who planted this thing on him and gave him directions as to where he ought to ben which of course were false. He set off with the idea that he’d die. I’d observed this so I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. I got into my red Cortina estate and reversed out of the side street. I hadn’t noticed this traffic island. The rear of the vehicle went up on it and stuck so I gave it some extra revs to take me right over. There was a car coming behind me, one of these horrible yellowy-green 1100s. I hit it and said “oh God! Here we go again”. I pulled up on the side of the road to go to talk to the guy but he just turned his car round and drove away. I wondered what to do next – do I sit there and wait for the police or wait for him to come back or do I go and risk being prosecuted for driving away from an accident. I really had no idea.

So Nerina was there last night, but also so were members of my family (well, Nerina is a member of my family too but you know what I mean). It’s been a good few days since TOTGA and Zero have put in an appearance and my other favourite girl, Castor, seems to have dropped off the radar now. She’s not been around for ages.

It all reminds me of “I’ve been having bad dreams
Well maybe tomorrow when I’m hungry baby
I’d beg for you, what’d I say steal and borrow
Would you help me
Really help me, really help me
To run down the road
Would you be with me”
But not even STEVE MARRIOTT can conjure up Zero, Castor and TOTGA for me.

Anyway, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, so live for the present!

After the medication and checking my mails and messages it took me a good while for me to come to my senses and once I’d had a rather later-than-usual mid-morning coffee I started work.

First thing to do was to pay the property taxes on my place in Canada. I had high hopes for that piece of land, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall and was out there getting quotes for log cabins and the like, only to be struck down by a thunderbolt back in late 2015.

The fact that I’m still going is a tribute to the medical staff at Leuven but how I would have loved not to have had to involve them in my projects.

Wouldn’t things have been different? But then I wouldn’t have made it to the Arctic and I wouldn’t have met the Vanilla Queen (who dropped off the radar a long time ago) and Castor.

Second thing was to pay my cleaner. I also had to leave her my niece’s details for when I’m in hospital if the necessity should ever arise. And of course I have a different phone to the one that I used to take with me to Canada so I had to hunt down all of the details and check with her that they were still correct.

During one of the pauses I had a shower too. The physiotherapist was to come round this afternoon and I wanted to be nice and clean for him. And climbing into the bath to take a shower is no longer an issue, which is good news. This physiotherapy is working.

The rest of the day has been spent writing notes for the radio programmes, which are now all done, writing out the details of my trips during the night, and also converting and remixing a couple of soundfiles that I tracked down the other day.

A little earlier I mentioned that there were a couple of other things that seem to be looking up. The second one is that the physiotherapist is as pleased with my improvement as I am and reckons that he can see a time when I’ll no longer need the therapy.

That’s not to say that I’ll be cured, of course. What he means is that if I keep up the exercises as I seem to be doing, then I won’t need him to supervise me.

He’s given me a few more exercises to do and a list of things that I need to buy at the sports shop tomorrow. And as of next week he’s only going to come once a week, Friday morning, to check on my progress.

That’s interesting, to say the least.

Tea was delicious as I said just now, and the apple pie with soya cream finished it off nicely. One more slice of pie left, as far as I could see, so that will bite the dust tomorrow.

While we’re on the subject of tomorrow … “well, one of us is” – ed … I’m out shopping if the wind has died down. It reached 110kph this morning but hopefully it will blow itself out at some point.

That’ll be something for me to think about while I’m in bed, and I’m going off there right now. Goodnight.

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Wednesday 29th March 2023 – TODAY HAS BEEN …

… a much more quiet day today. Only the cleaner disturbed my peace this afternoon. Apart from that, and a chat with my niece on the internet, that was all the excitement today.

There wasn’t very much excitement during the night either. I was in bed early and I had a fairly decent night’s sleep again. I’m wondering if my sleeping issues might have had something to do with the blackcurrant, lemon and honey drink that I used to drink before going to bed. I’ve not had one for the last few nights and that seems to correspond with when I’ve had a better sleep.

There was still plenty of time to go off for a wander around during the night. I might not have remembered much of what went on, but there was plenty of stuff that I dictated. I’d become a serial killer. I was living in the poor area of a city somewhere. All these down-and-outs who lived in the same area as me, I’d been bumping them off one by one. There in my living room I had about 20 bodies. I had to start to dispose of them soon and I had no idea how I was going to do it. I began to realise that it wasn’t the best decision that I’d made, to kill these people. If I wasn’t happy before I started I’m certainly not happy now. Some woman who knew my secret was going on about how she wanted to live a quiet life in peace, to see out her days etc. The way she was talking, her targets weren’t set very high as to her quality of life. I began to realise that that was the kind of thing that would be ideal but would never ever happen to me. It was a really sad dream, this. I felt awful.

And then a couple of us had been to London for some kind of event. On the way back we were driving up the A5 instead of the M1 and M6. At a certain point there was a guy hitch-hiking. We recognised him as someone whom we knew who had been to this concert thing or whatever it was. We stopped and picked him up. We were all chatting. I was drifting in and out of sleep for some reason, being a passenger. I remember coming up to a certain town with loads of roadworks. I recognised it immediately as Bedford. We became stuck in these roadworks, first of all because someone coming through the roadworks against the lights kept us waiting to leave, and then they changed halfway through and rather than push on to the end our driver just stopped in the middle. I thought to myself that this is going to start to cause some real problems if he doesn’t move. He can’t stay here.

There was also something about some powerful man sending messages in the name of his wife to his son but I can’t remember much about this but he was boasting about it. I thought that it was an extremely strange thing to do.

When the alarm went off I struggled to my feet and went off for my medication and then to check my mails and messages. And for most of the day I’ve been writing out the text for most of the music that I’ve been preparing over the last couple of weeks and that’s really about it.

One other thing that I have done – well, three things actually – is that I’ve found three more soundtracks for old analogue albums that are in my possession.

One of them is taking ages to convert because it’s on an extremely rare digital audio format. The converter has been running for several hours already and there is still a good few hours to go. Ordinarily I’d try to find another version in a more common format but it’s a rare spacerock album by an unknown German group whom I first heard at a Hawkfest years ago and I’ve never ever heard anywhere else.

The cleaner did another nice job and gave me her accounts. I’ll have to do those on Friday, the last day of the month. She has a form to fill in because I have to nominate a “next of kin” for the hospital and Liz is no longer here. I’ll give her my niece’s details too in case they are required. She knows what my future wishes and plans might be.

My leftover curry this evening was the best that I have ever made. I’m really getting the hang of stuff like this now, and so I should after all this time.

Tomorrow night, I have the rest of those Chinese whatsits so I think that I’ll make them with fried rice this time and see how they go. A little olive oil and some vegan butter along with some lemon grass might make something really nice.

But that’s for tomorrow. Right now, I’m off to bed. I want a nice long sleep if I can ready for a good day’s work tomorrow if I can. A nice little voyage or two into the surreal would be nice too as long as it’s not all about mass murder. But then beggars can’t be choosers.

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Wednesday 22nd March 2023 – AFTER ALL OF YESTERDAY’S …

… exertions, today was a much quieter affair and no-one phoned me at all.

There were a couple of e-mails though. Someone had sent me the address of some handyman who might be interested in fitting a shower in my new place so I e-mailed him. And shock! Horror! He actually replied to me.

That’s a first, isn’t it?

It’ll give me something to think about in bed tonight. And that will make a change from lying there thinking about why I can’t go to sleep. Yes – we had another night like that, didn’t we?

No car alarms this morning but I was still awake quite early. I was on the point of thinking about gettign up when I must have gone back to sleep because the next think I remember was the alarm going off at 07:30

It was a real struggle to crawl out of bed this morning and I didn’t beat the second alarm by all that much.

Once I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages it was a very slow start to the day and I didn’t do all that much at first. But once I’d organised myself I made a start on the next radio programme. I’ve paired off all of the music and by teatime I’d written all of the notes.

Not one of my quickest efforts today.

After my lunchtime fruit I had a shower. And I needed it too because I forgot yesterday what with there being no physiotherapist. And getting into and out of the bath was no problem at all. Things have improved considerably and I’m much more comfortable doing my exercises. I still can’t walk properly but anything is an improvement to how I was 3 months ago.

Another thing that I was planning to do was to take the rubbish out and bring the shopping in but not only was there a howling gale, it was pouring down with rain too so I’ll leave that for another time.

While the cleaner was here I carried on with the notes for my radio programme and after she left I made a mug of hot chocolate. And then, regrettably, I crashed out for a good hour or so and I felt awful.

But that’s not a surprise because when I listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night, I was astonished. We were in the latter stages of World War II. There was a huge battle taking place on the border between Germany and France. What had happened was that the Front had been shattered and there were hundreds of these German pockets of resistance everywhere. The logical thing for the Germans to do was to abandon many of these pockets of resistance and try to create a front line somwhere but the American general who was being interviewed was adamant that he thought that the Germans would try to defend everything. Their forces would be so thinly spread that they would be overwhelmed. Something had happened to his legs. He’d been blistered with something and the blisters had died so all the skin on his legs was peeling off. It looked a complete mess. Then we had the German Army HQ in this city that was surrounded by all kinds of bomb damage. These high-explosive shells were falling on this concrete bunker. It was very clear that they couldn’t stay there because of the pounding that the bunker was receiving from these shells.

I’m not sure when I reached when I dictated that other dream (and I’ve no idea which other dream that would be) but I finally made it to the hospital for my appointment. There were no notices about which floor you were on in the lift. You had to press a button with some kind of shadow outline drawing on it and hope that the lift stopped at the correct floor for you to go for your appointment.

That previous dream – I forgot a lot of it that I hadn’t remembered but basically I had to go to the hospital at Avranches but there was much more to it that I’ve forgotten and I wish that I could remember it now

Later on I had to sit down and make a map or proper agenda of where I was supposed to go for all these appointments but I couldn’t remember where half of these examinations took place in the first place so I could work out where I had to go again for the repeats. There were all these strange things that happened to me and I didn’t have a clue how I ended up there or even where it was where I had undergone some tests. I really didn’t know how I was going to find these places again in order to go there this time round

I’d hired a Volkswagen to go and do something. When I went to pick it up next morning one of the tyres was down. I strapped an air compressor to the wheel, coupled it up to the tyre and set off. When I arrived at this dirt track that I had to take I turned onto the track and stopped to disconnect the compressor. There were loads of people standing around there examining this Beetle, pointing out the defects. Someone kicked the door. I started to be really annoyed. I went up to one guy and gave him a sharp kick. I asked “how do you like it if my car came along and gave you a kick?” and I kicked him again. “Stop kicking my car and go away”. These people just stood and looked at me as I went to go back into my car. One guy was standing by the door so I said “excuse me”. he asked “do you want to get in your car?” I replied “no, I want to open my door and hit you in the face with it” so he moved off as well.

And then I was with my girlfriend (I wish that I could remember who she was) and 2 other people, another guy and a girl. We’d gone skiing somewhere in this expensive ski resort. I’d been playing bass in this rock band and the guy had been playing drums in it. On our way back to our room afterwards we noticed that the orchestra had set up in the ballroom. He got behind the drums and I picked up the bass. One of the employees came running over and shooed us away telling us not to touch the instruments, going on about the mess that we were bound to make trying to play these things, the noise and how we would disturb everyone in the building withour realising that they almost had for free a concert that they would have paid hundreds of Euros to see.

Finally I was with a friend of mine. We’d constructed a big lean-to shed at the side of Virlet for the rainwater butts to keep them out of the way. I thought that if I were living here I probably would put the batteries in here too. That sounded like a good idea to me. We were busy trying to take some stuff to the tip so we began to tidy up. We began to drag stuff into this shed to see exactly what we had. The first thing that went in was a huge box of coal and wood. That was tucked in the corner. We moved a few things in and then went out for some others. His wife was busy wrestling with a board with some electrical equipment on it so he went to take that from her and put it away. She said that she would put some more stuff in that box of coal and would but we said that she’d have a real problem trying to reach it now that we are arranging everything and getting things ready to go to the dechetterie.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry. Not as good as it usually is (but that’s not saying that it was bad) because I had to rush. There was football on the internet at 20:00 – Cymeu under 17s against Scotland under 17s. I missed the first 5 minutes and by that time Wales were already 1-0 up, and they scored a second goal quite quickly too.

And for the first 70 minutes they were scything their way at will through a very static Scotland defence and how the score was only 3-0 by then I really don’t know.

And then we had a raft of substitutions by each team. It completely disrupted Cymru’s rhythm but it seemed to galvanise the Scots and to everyone’s surprise they scored 2 goals in a matter of 5 minutes and looked by far the better side from then on. We actually had a really exciting final period.

But then Scotland were caught short at the back pushing forward for an equaliser and Cymru scored a fourth.

The next couple of Cymru under-17 games against Montenegro and Iceland should be very interesting.

But now I’m off to bed because I’m exhausted. I can’t keep on going with these bad nights and something will have to happen at some point. I have to be prepared for a nice deep sleep sometime, and my money will be on when I’m at the wheel of Caliburn if I’m not careful.

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Wednesday 8th March 2023 – MY LITTLE WALK …

… into town this morning was quite a success, all things considered.

In fact, despite walking much farther than I have ever walked in one go, I managed to do it without any complications or difficulties and I was quite impressed.

Much more impressed than I was with my night of trying to go off to sleep. That was something of a disaster because it took me hours to drop off and I was wide awake again at 04:45. That’s the kind of thing that fills me with dismay.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too so I must have had a deep sleep at some point. I was with Zero’s father (but not Zero unfortunately) last night walking around this industrial estate somewhere. We’d actually been in our office and had seen something on a TV programme from the USA about chaos in an Australian chat room on the internet. The Americans were going on about how there were all these wonderful innovations coming from Australia that had yet to hit the USA such as video conferencing etc. Of course, as we were walking around we were talking about how we’ve been saying that we’ve been having all of this for 20 years in the UK. There were vehicles parked everywhere on this industrial estate on the grass verges and all over the place. We’d heard a story of someone who had been taken seriously ill there. There were some paramedics tending to him. We were wandering vaguely that way to see what we could do. There were some women lorry drivers parked on a car park doing something on the internet and having a blazing row about someone doing something or other. We just kept on walking and talking.

After the medication I checked my mails and messages and then had a few things to do here and there before setting out for town, like doing some photocopying and writing an important letter.

It was cold, windy and threatening rain but all the same it was quite a nice walk. Despite the crutches it took me less time than the time before to make it to the chemists where I picked up the product that I need for my hospital visit next week.

They agreed to dispense the prescription that I’d received at Leuven, but only insofar as they could because the trade names are different for the products and while some are easy to translate, others are not and they don’t want to make a mistake.

Some of the stuff wasn’t in stock so they had to order it. And that means another trip into town tomorrow. That should be exciting.

After that, I staggered on to the bank. When the final Act of Purchase is signed for this apartment that I’m buying, I’ll need to have an insurance policy in force to cover my liability. The bank deals with my insurance policies and the more that I have, the greater a discount I receive so I may as well get them to do it.

All in all I was there for an hour and a half. Actually signing the forms for the insurance took about 10 minutes but the rest of the time was spent having the hard sell worked upon me for more stuff that I don’t need. I couldn’t help but bring to my mind the lyrics of PRETTY BOY FLOYD and
“As through this life you travel
You’ll meet some funny men.
Some rob you with a six-gun
And some with a fountain pen.”

It was too late to do anything much by the time that the interview finished so I posted the letter and then headed for home. There’s a new spices shop opened in town and I wanted to go for a look around but not during lunch break. As Maréchal Foch once said when he was appointed to command a French Army during World War I “I only require two things. A free hand to deal with the Army as I think fit, and two hours for lunch” and nothing in France has changed.

It was 13:00 by the time that I returned here – a three-hour round trip. The first thing that I did was to have lunch. I ‘d been given a coffee down at the Bank but that’s not enough for a growing boy like me. And I do have to say that my fruit buns are delicious.

The second thing that I did was to make the place a little more presentable so that the cleaner wouldn’t have a heart attack. And I’d locked the door to the apartment on coming back through force of habit so she had to phone me up to get me to open the door.

While she was here I wrote out the notes for the radio programme that I’d been preparing and they are mostly complete. I just want to rewrite the final one so that it makes a nice lead-in to the end of the programme.

Another thing that I did today was to make the final payment for the apartment that I’ll be purchasing. That involved sorting out a few things in Belgium. I had hoped to do that over the counter when I was in Belgium last week but what with not being kicked out of the hospital until it was far too late, that was that.

But it’s all paid for now and I’m just waiting for the solicitor to extricate his digit and bring the papers up to date. But I do have to say that I’m glad that I hung on to the balance of the sale price of my old apartment in Belgium and didn’t fritter it away.

Tea tonight was a burger on a bap with a salad. And for a change, seeing as I had some vegan sliced cheese, I made my burger into a cheeseburger and that was delicious with a baked potato done in the air fryer.

So tomorrow I’m heading back into town to pick up the rest of the medication. I have noticed that the muscles on my legs are thickening out again so all of this moving about is doing me good. I shall have to do more of it, if only I could summon up the energy.

So let’s see what the hospital at Avranches can come up with next week. I don’t think that I’ll actually pick up my bed and walk, but almost anything will be an improvement to how things are right now.

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Wednesday 22nd February 2023 – MY LEFTOVER CURRY …

… was delicious tonight. And plenty of it too. There was quite a backlog of food building up in the fridge that needed to be eaten and if I were honest, I needn’t really have added in a small potato to lengthen it

In fact, I’ve had plenty to eat today. The other home-made bun from the weekend, just as delicious as the first one on Monday. And then at lunchtime some soup from the container that I’d opened yesterday.

This afternoon I was invited out for a drink by the President of the Residents’ Committee of the building, at which there were a few nibbles, and then my curry tonight.

Being invited out by the President was interesting because even though the final act of purchase of the apartment downstairs hasn’t been signed, it seems that I’ve already been accepted into the inner circle.

Several of the apartments are rented out, several more are second residences so there aren’t too many that are full-time owner occupiers. What cheers up the people here is that the apartment that I’m buying will revert from a tenanted apartment to an owner-occupied apartment and that’s a rare reversal of fortunes for a modern seaside resort.

There are far too many apartments being sold out of private stock and into holiday accommodation and that’s killing so many coastal towns, and that’s mainly due to these casual letting websites that are now being swamped by exploitive casual racketeers.

But that’s a subject for another time. I’m much more interested in what happened last night. And there was quite a lot too because it was yet another night where I didn’t have a great deal of sleep, lying there tossing and turning and hoping that I would drop off at some time.

And I must have done too because there were plenty of travels that must have kept me busy. There was an aeroplane that had a pilot and a small crew on board. For some unknown reason the aeroplane started to dive forward towards the ground. Someone went into the cockpit and found that the pilot was asleep. They awoke him and he carried on flying. The exact same thing happened again. He’d fallen asleep again. The third time when they were trying to shake him awake they found that there was some kind of insect in the cabin. For some reason or other this insect had a power to put people to sleep. They managed to trap this insect and remove it from the cabin. From then on the flight proceeded quite normally just as it should without any problem.

And then there was someone in Jersey who had an agricultural business but had lost it for one reason or another. He had problems with the new purchaser or operator of the business and the business reverted back to him. He was obliged to carry on. I can’t remember any more about this now.

Someone wanted a change of room last night in a hotel or something and insisted on seeing the manager. What had happened was that there were some roadworks on the main road and the traffic had been diverted down a diversion which just happened to go past the front of the hotel which of course would keep everyone awake at night. There was nothing that the proprietor of the hotel could do about it obviously but he received all the blame for what was happening.

Later on I’d been to Shavington, Vine Tree Avenue, to visit my old house where I lived. When I left I was being watched all the way up the street while something was happening. I thought that the easiest way to do this was to nip in via a neighbour’s house and over the fence into the back and disappear that way. In the end I ended up knocking at the door of this neighbour. She was absolutely delighted and invited me in. Of course it was someone whom I didn’t really like and with whom I didn’t really get on but she was there making me welcome. We talked about bees and honey etc. She fetched her husband and phoned her children to say that I’d come round. I could see that rather than having just gone this way for a short cut I’d be here for a week if I wasn’t careful. I just couldn’t find a way of breaking off this meeting and leaving. Interestingly the names of the children weren’t the names of the children in real life. They were different.

Interestingly, when I lived in Shavington there were two families that were rather infamous for their lack of personal hygene and social niceties. And during the night I managed to find the address of one of them that was being occupied by the other.

At another point during the night a girl was presumed hanged herself or being untied by this snake during the song “Delilah”. The snake was slowly reaching its grasp. It looked as if there was going to be miles of arm of this snake left over by the time the snake had finished doing what it was intended to do with her. And if you can make any sense of what that was all about then please let me know because I don’t have a clue.

But when the alarm went off this morning I was having a cup of coffee. Not a real cup of coffee but a virtual one. I was actually back home. My mother had had to go to the shops for something or other. We kids had to get up. I was there with 2 of my siblings. We were looking at some notices that were plastered everywhere about words that we no longer used in everyday conversation. There was something about if Belgium and Italy elect Socialist governments this weekend it will be a first. Things like that. I didn’t have a chance to find out what was going on about it because the alarm went off.

Hardly a surprise that I was totally exhausted after all of that.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I rounded up the music for another radio programme that I’ll be preparing at some point. I don’t want to get too far ahead with the text of the programme because, as I’m finding out these days, more and more of the artists featured in my programmes are shuffling off this mortal coil and playing in that great gig in the sky which means that I have to keep on amending my programmes.

On the other hand, I need to keep some programmes all written up and ready. They came in handy when I was in hospital last autumn and there’s always the possibility that I’ll be in there again.

There was a pause for my lovely toasted bun, and another pause for the soup at lunchtime. In between, I tidied up a little here and there around the apartment ready for when the cleaner came. I also cut my hair and had a shower. I can climb so much easier into the bath these days so the physiotherapy is obviously working.

This afternoon while the cleaner was here I wrote up a few notes for the programme that I’ll be preparing on Monday and I’ll be doing the rest at some time in the near future. If I’m lucky I might even have the programme done before Monday too and then I can have a day off.

So having been entertained and having eaten my curry I’m off to bed for an early night. I need it too after the events of the last few days. Every now and again I go through these phases of having some really bad nights and by the looks of things I’m in the middle of another one.

Perhaps I ought to go out and about for a walk more often and get some exercise. Then I might be tired enough to go to sleep.

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Wednesday 15th February 2023 – WHAT A WONDERFUL …

… left-over curry that was for tea tonight. There was some stuffing left over from the stuffed peppers, a few mushrooms and sweetcorn from the weekend salad, a few fresh mushrooms and a small potato all fried together with an onion and garlic and some soya cream. A handful of rice and frozen veg made it into something special.

The next couple of curries should be OK but I’m running low on some of the spices that I use. I can see that I’m going to have to go shopping if ever I make it back to Leuven, whenever that might be. I can’t find a decent source of spices around here unfortunately.

Anyway, it’ll give me something to think about when I go to bed tonight. I spent far too much time thinking rather than sleeping last night and I expected to regret it, especially when I fell out of bed before the alarm went off, simply because I couldn’t go back to sleep having awoken earlier.

And there was plenty of time during the night to spend thinking too because it was what I would call a “difficult” night. I was in bed much earlier than usual, having finished all that I intended to do quite a bit earlier than I expected, so I decided to make the most of it.

It took a while to go off to sleep though, not that it bothered me too much, and once I was properly asleep I went off on a little travel. There was a group of us who knew each other from our school days. We’d come together, 6 of us, and we reckoned that we’d form a group and go off to perform some kind of series of concerts somewhere. 5 of us assembled but the 5th one was missing so we had to go into Crewe to find him. We suspected that he would be at a railway workers’ social club because he worked on the railway. We went there and I left everyone in the car park while I went in. I asked after him but he wasn’t there. Another one of my friends from school was. He came over. He was extremely upset because he’d read something that I’d written where there was a quote attributed to my father. He was furious that I was putting his words into the mouths of others. I told him in no uncertain terms that if I’d attributed a quote to someone, it’s because that person had said it. It’s extremely possible that in similar circumstances on similar subjects 2 people whom I know are likely to have the same kind of comment in reply.

It was a most unpleasant encounter, so much so that it awoke me. And it was from then on that it all went downhill. I’ve really no idea why such a dream, about nothing very much in particular, should be so disturbing.

But lying awake made me think about other things too and there ended up being all kinds of things churning around in my mind, more of which anon.

However, I must have gone back to sleep on a couple of occasions because I was off on my travels again. And who should come to join me on my perambulations but Zero? What a lovely surprise that was. I was round at her parent’s last night. I’m not quite sure what I was doing. She was there and she had 2 friends her own age round. They were outside in the dark playing housewives, all sitting around a plastic table pretending to drink tea. I was watching them through the window. 1 of the girls took hold of Zero and asked her if she could have a blueberry ice cream with some kind of syrup on it. For some unknown reason Zero was reluctant to make it. The girl was rather unhappy about that idea. She thought that Zero should go and make this ice cream for her.

Then later on I’m not sure whether I stepped back into this dream or whether I had some kind of flashback, but we were back on the subject of Zero’s unhappy family again. I was at home and her brother asked if I would go round to see their father. I told him that I couldn’t because I had plenty of things to do myself. I was busy. In the end I nipped out really early at about 06:00 in the gold Cortina estate. When I arrived there was no-one about so I just sat outside and waited. Then they all got up and started to have a party. I waited until the father came out so I could see him but his son walked past. He said “I thought you said that you couldn’t come”. I explained that I’d managed to find a little time. We wandered off. I thought that he would go to fetch his father but instead his father came out and wandered off doing something else. I could see him in the mirror.

And finally there was something else about something going on in a shopping arcade where there was a post office and post box and films. I wanted to go along to photograph this post office but it was pitch-black. There were all these people walking around there running around. I took the camera but it had to be on a time exposure. I had to hold the camera at a strange angle and press the button then wait for about 20 seconds without moving. Of course trying to push the button with this camera at this awkward angle removed the perspective that I wanted because the camera moved. I had then to quickly try to re-find the perspective that I wanted and wait for the film to take. of course it was a very long exposure being so dark and everyone was moving around. I couldn’t get them out of the way of the lens. I tried 3 or 4 times and had this really difficult struggle to actually make the button work and hold the camera straight, stop the camera moving, keep the people out of the way. None of the photos that I was taking were coming out properly.

So with all of that going on, I must have had some kind of sleep at some point. Especially if I managed to conjure up Zero after all this time. What with TOTGA the other night, all I need now is for Castor to put in an appearance.

After the medication and checking my mails and messages I had a few things to do. Like chosing the music for the next round of radio programmes. That involved going through the playlists and tidying them up because over the last few weeks I’ve decided to do things in a different direction.

That means doing some kind of major adjustment to the … errr … 6 playlists that I maintain. With over 1200 albums and 300 artists I’ve split the playlist into 6 with different artists in each one so that I don’t play the same groups too often.

But going back to what I was saying earlier about things going round in my head, one of the things that I was pondering was this question of paying for the apartment. I had a feeling that all of this was about to go pear-shaped so I spent several hours thinking of a cunning plan.

Sure enough, the company charged with dealing with the transfer rang me again today and came up with yet more demands for information. And in the end after much debate and discussion and having thought of a Plan B, I ended up telling them to clear off.

In the past, I’ve said that my bank in the UK is a regular favourite for the title of “worst bank in the world”. But right now, I’m firmly in their hands with their wicked exchange rate, their stupid daily limit and all of that, and it’ll take me forever to transfer the money over at an absurd cost. But the quicker I start, the quicker I’ll finish and the first daily amount has gone off today.

But as we have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … there’s no such thing as a recession. What there is instead is a whole load of money floating around waiting to be spent and no-one can be bothered to put the work in to go out and collect it.

And that reminds me – still no replies about that work I want doing. It’s unbelievable.

The cleaner came here for an hour as usual and made the place look a lot nicer. It’s a good plan having her here. And she took out all of the rubbish which was nice of her. That was a good decision.

So having sorted out allthe music, paired off the music for one lot (and I’ll pair off the other lot tomorrow morning) and had my nice tea, And having written my notes, I’m going to bed.

So who’ll come to see me tonight? It must be Castor’s turn of course, but “I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams”. I reckon that it’s going to be more like some member or other of my family.

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Wednesday 8th February 2023 – CALIBURN IS BACK

But not for long. When I went to pick him up this morning I discovered that they had forgotten to take him for his Controle Technique – the French equivalent of the MoT safety examination. The earliest the testing station can fit him in is tomorrow at 11:45 but I wasn’t going to struggle back home on the bus and come back out tomorrow to pick him up again, so I brought him home and I’ll drive him back tomorrow.

Hopefully I’ll have a better night’s sleep than I did last night. I was in bed at some kind of realistic time and was asleep quite quickly but I didn’t stay asleep for long. I was drifting in and out of semi-consciousness until the alarm went off and it would be wrong to say that I was sleeping.

There must have been times that I was asleep though because there were several little voyages during the night when I went off on my travels. There was me, a couple of girls and a young family with a small daughter. I’d cooked tea for everyone and made a big, sickly ice cream for afterwards. I doled out the ice cream between all of us. As I was handing it out I suddenly found out to my horror that I’d forgotten to make ice-cream for the little girl. I had to dash back into the kitchen and took my ice cream from the fridge and speedily divided it into half. I put her half into a smaller dish so it looked as if it was overflowing the bowl the same as everyone else’s and took it to her. Her eyes lit up and she was absolutely delighted by this. That made me feel much better but then I was going around afraid that I might have forgotten someone else’s ice cream. What would I do if that were the case?

And then I was back at work in another one of these recurring dreams where I was on the point of retiring. I had tons of work stored in my cupboard. Someone made some kind of strange remark about “we don’t know what you do all day”. I thought that they’d be surprised if they found out that I did nothing. I was going through some files and found some information about people whom we knew and one or two people who’d actually worked for us, and prison sentences that they’d received, for one person, defrauding an insurance company and another person for something else. We wondered why they had all gone quiet after leaving. There was some old guy in there who’d been sent to prison. Everyone blamed a friend of mine at work because he’d told a fellow to confess everything rather than keeping silent and making them have to prove it. Again it was a case that I could leave this job tomorrow and leave all this work undone and not have to worry about anything. If they were to talk about me behind my back I wouldn’t care.

Later on I was taking my passengers to the station in the yellow Cortina estate. We were driving through Shavington. There was a vehicle parked on the opposite side on the road. Suddenly 2 vehicles pulled out from behind it and I hit them head-on in the car. When I came to I was wandering around the area of Shavington trying to regain consciousness. I went into a big Department Store to buy some clean clothes. The staff was busy trying on a new uniform. They had T-shirts on etc while they were experimenting with these new clothes and weren’t interested in serving customers. Eventually I managed to track down a server who came to see me. I told her that I needed some clothes and needed to report this accident but she started to take me off in her direction where these clothes were

And finally I was in my new house last night, a house very similar to Gainsborough Road. There was a survey being arranged for it to decide whether or not I could buy it. I was already in there so I hoped that the survey was satisfactory. The house was a lot nicer than I remembered anyway. I was busy organising some things that I’d brought with me. I had my mother and father with me. My mother went into a cupboard and asked me to pass her some cheese and pork etc. She asked what I wanted to eat. I replied that I hadn’t yet decided so she told me to hurry up. Then my father came in. He’d been working outside and his hands were dirty. he had some hand cleaner with him that he’d brought. he went to put it down on the windowsill by the sink while he washed his hands.

After the medication I checked my mails and messages and then did a little tidying up ready for the cleaner. I phoned up the garage to check that Caliburn was ready and then caught the bus out to the garage to pick him up.

he actually started, despite about three feet of frost all over him, so something works, and I headed back to LIDL where I spent a King’s ransom on stuff that I needed for the next few weeks – and forgot the blackcurrant syrup.

Back here I made some coffee and while it was brewing I made a couple of trips down to Caliburn to bring up what I’d bought. And then I … errr … had a relax. I’m clearly not as fit or as well as I think I should be.

The cleaner awoke me when she came, and while she was doing her stuff about the place I paired off the music for the next couple of radio programmes and began to write the notes. And after she left, I fetched the final stuff up here from out of Caliburn, thinking all the time to myself about how much easier it will be when I move to the ground floor.

And that’s taken one step closer to the end today, because I gathered up all of the stuff that I needed to complete these forms about transferring my money for the purchase of the apartment. Hopefully they can now go ahead and create the transfer paperwork so that I can credit the money whenever I receive the final date of completion.

And then the fun will begin.

Tea tonight was another one of my leftover curries. And it was just as delicious as all of the others, although I’m still not sure why the rice and veg is going more soggy that it used to in the past even though I’m not cooking it any differently than I always have.

Tomorrow I have to take Caliburn back and if he passes, I’ll have a little trip to fuel up and go to LeClerc to do some shopping there. Make sure that I have a good supply of stuff on board.

And then probably have a little … errr … relax again when I come home because all of this effort is wearing me out much more than it ought to do. I’m clearly not as well as I should be and I shudder to think how I’m going to manage if they want me to go back to Leuven.

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Wednesday 1st February 2023 – I’VE JUST BEEN …

… crashed out on the chair in the bedroom. Not actually asleep but in some kind of cataleptic trance. I could hear the radio playing in the background but for a good 20 minutes or so I was totally unable to move.

It’s probably something to do with tiredness and that’s no surprise at all. I ended up last night – or rather, this morning – not going to bed until about 02:30. I started something before I went to bed and was somehow swept up in the excitement, such as it was.

And no-one was more surprised than me – not even you, I bet – that I was able to haul myself out of bed when the alarm went off at 07:30. And I kept on going al day as well.

After the medication and so on, I had a few things to do. Like bake my fruit buns. And I do have to say that they are the best that I have made – I had one with my coffee. I think that I’ve got the hang of them right now, although I wish that the dough would rise more than it does.

Most of the rest of the day has been spent sorting out the music for the next batch of radio programmes. It’s not like me to go around getting ahead of myself but one lot of music is done and paired off, and I’m halfway through pairing off the music for the second one.

However, I had to grind to a halt as I had other fish to fry. In fact, while I was listening to the one that I’d intended to send off, I heard myself going on about a musician who had died since I recorded it. Consequently I had to rewrite that bit, record and edit it, and then filter it in. And as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … it takes longer to edit a programme like that than it does to record it in the first place.

The cleaner came round too and had a good go at the place. She cleaned all of the air vents today which probably means that it’ll be a little cooler but smell nicer.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from last night too. I was with someone. We were living with someone on the edge of Paris. She’d been arrested in some kind of demonstration in Lyon so she was going to demonstrate against her arrest. She asked me if I’d drive her so we got into the car, a C15 van, and set out. We hadn’t been driving very long before I asked “are we actually going to Lyon?”. She replied “yes”. I then asked had she thought about what would happen if she were arrested again. She said “yes” and was quite prepared for everything. She intended to be true to herself and would feel pretty bad if she weren’t. We carried on driving. We stopped at a place for lunch, a pub. She decided that she wanted turkey, and they served me with turkey as well. There was someone else there whom we knew so the 3 of us were there eating turkey. She was talking about spells – how she’d like to go inside one of these spells and disappear off into the realms of darkness. She went up to the counter for something. When she came back she told us that she’d told the people at the counter what they had said and she told them what she wanted to do with this magic spell and this turkey. They had said that some Tory would probably come along and make sure that you stay there. We were eating this turkey and I suddenly realised that I was vegan and it was making me really ill. I had to stop and she was disappointed. I said that I wasn’t going to eat any more otherwise I’d be really ill. At that point a family came in, mother, father and a young girl. They looked around for a table and found one but there were no chairs. There were 3 of us and 4 chairs so the guy with us took our other chair and took it over to them to sit down so that they would at least have one seat.

Tonight’s leftover curry was delicious. It seems that my cooking is improving these days. I’ve no idea what I’m doing that is different or whether it’s my taste buds but the stuff looks much better and is much more tasty. But I’m hoping that when I eventually move into this new apartment with its nice kitchen and new appliances, it’ll be even better. A good oven will be a huge step up and I can’t wait for that.

But right now that’s for worrying about tomorrow because even though I’m not tired and it’s later than usual, I’m going off to bed. The physiotherapist will be here tomorrow afternoon so I suppose that I ought to make a start on trying some of these exercises otherwise I won’t ever improve.

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Wednesday 25th January 2023 – AFTER ALL OF …

… the excitement and effort yesterday, I’ve been taking it easy today.

With not going to bed before midnight last night, I decided to ignore the alarms this morning and I stayed in bed until 09:45 this morning. That’s all very well for an odd day here and there but it’s not too good in the long term, that’s for sure, and I really do have to put in more of an effort to crawl out of bed at a more respectable time.

It must have been a really good night for sleeping too because I didn’t go far during on my travels. We were working in a garage during the night. There was a Hillman Imp van there that someone had partially dismantled the rear light unit on the left-hand side. I went to reassemble it. Just then A former friend of mine from school appeared in the distance and was wandering into the garage. He pointed out that he’d had some problems with the vehicle on that corner and had taken the rear light apart to look at the suspension. He found that the hi-fi speaker was missing out of the place where it goes which was accessible through the back of the rear light. I had a look and you could see that there was no speaker there. All the lugs had corroded so it looked as if it had been missing for quite some considerable time.

After a leisurely start to the day I started to edit the radio programme that will (hopefully) be broadcast on Friday. We’ve had another musician go off and play in that great big gig in the sky and that involved some editing of the programme. And surprisingly, it takes longer to edit something that I’ve already done than it does to actually make the programme.

Particularly when I miscalulate yet again (I shall have to take up this idea of more compulsory maths) and end up with 10 seconds short so I have to turn round and do it again.

The cleaner came round this afternoon too for an hour and made the place look much more like home, for which I am grateful. Mind you, it’s the last Wednesday of the month so I have to think about paying her.

Once she’d gone I decided to go and make a start on bringing the shopping in from Caliburn. I decided that that would be the exercise for the next week – a dozen or so trips up and down the stairs carrying a small amount of stuff every time.

However it didn’t work out like that. I bumped into a couple of neighbours and they took it upon themselves to run a shuttle service up to my door, and everything was done before I even had time to lock Caliburn back up again.

It’s like I said, not only is the building and the area so nice, the neighbours are so wonderful too. I can’t understand why anyone would want to leave here.

With a mug of hot chocolate I transcribed the dictaphone notes and yesterday’s details are now on line for your perusal.

Tea tonight was a left-over curry and it was one of the best yet. I definitely have the hang of this now and my own mixture of spices seems to be working.

So now I have a few things to finish off and then i’m off to bed. I have a few important things to do tomorrow too and I have to set the ball rolling about gathering in what I need to pay for this apartment. I’ve already made a few enquiries about getting a workman in to help me with the shower but there’s plenty more to do too.

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Wednesday 18th January 2023 – I HAVE BEEN …

… really busy today.

So much so that I’ve not had time yet to transcribe the (pile of) dictaphone notes from last night.

Being … errr … somewhat later than the alarm didn’t really help matters too much. But as soon as I was finally sitting at the computer, the telephone rang. Someone was obviously checking up on me.

It was the guy from the radio on the telephone. On the 5th February there’s something going on at the local theatre and the radio needed some music doing. And I’m at the stage where if I don’t do something as soon as I have the instructions, I’ll either forget it or run out of time or something.

And so there is no time like the present to get on with the task.

At midday I took myself off outside as the rain had stopped for a short while. Caliburn struggled into life so we went for a good drive for about 25 kilometres. It’s still not enough to put a decent charge in the battery so when I returned home I started trying to track down an auto electrician who can put his equipment onto Caliburn’s starting and charging circuit.

It doesn’t seem to me to be the charging circuit or the battery that’s at fault because the battery doesn’t seem to be getting any worse. It’s either the starter that’s on its last legs or else there’s a bad earth somewhere. In the old days I’d be underneath Caliburn checking everything over but I’m really not up to that right now. For a start, if I were to lie down, I wouldn’t be able to stand up again.

Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be an auto-electrician anywhere in the vicinity. I shall have to ring up the guy in the garage and see if he knows of anyone or whether he has the equipment to do it.

The cleaner came round this afternoon and did some work on the place. She’s not impressed with the microwave and, to tell the truth, neither am I. Once I get myself organised, the microwave here will be going to the great kitchen in the sky and I’ll be having something decent.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, when I moved here in 2017 I bought everything new at the cheapest possible price on the grounds that I would have everything all at once, and then little by little I’d replace it with decent stuff as it wore out.

And then I had a ‘phone call from the UK. I mentioned the other day that I was having to sort out my finances and somewhere along the line I need to sort out the Royal Bank of Scotland. Their bank charges are somewhat exorbitant but there’s a way around this and it’s not the kind of thing that you can do on your own.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry. There were plenty of leftovers and so it was quite a decent curry. I’m getting the hang of these curries now and they really are delicious. Tomorrow night’s tea though will be a vegan pie, I recon. I found a slice in the freezer while I was looking for something else and by the looks of things it’s been in there for a while.

At some point in the future I managed to deal with the dictaphone notes. This was something to do with a football match where I was. The winger of one side and the full-back of the other side put in a really crunching tackle on each other and the ball ricochets out and goes into the back of the net of the attacking side. The commentator seemed to think that that was violent conduct, should be disallowed and a free kick given to the defence. Nevertheless the referee gave a goal. I could understand why he did it although I thought that there were many clubs who wouldn’t have been so lucky as to have the benefit of a decision like this go in their favour.

Watson and Holmes were in bed when a carriage pulled up outside, a big black open carriage the kind in which you would imagine Dracula riding. Someone alighted and awoke them both. He invited them to come with him for a consultation at some silly hour of the morning. They piled into this carriage. It turned out that they were going to somewhere near Chesterfield. They set out but Holmes was not impressed. They were dodging the traffic – these old 1950s Ford Anglias etc. Suddenly the guy with them started to panic pointing out “the red spot! The fourth red spot!”. It was only after they were able to focus, Holmes and Watson, that they could see floating in the air above them 4 tiny red spots like pieces of confetti as they headed out of north London. These were keeping just ahead of them, probably about 30 feet above the ground.

Then about half an hour or so later we had this Holmes and Watson story almost word-for-word again coming along.

Crewe Alex were playing in the Cheshire Senior Cup final against a team from Audlem called something to do with Geoff Barnes, the Geoff Barnes Thrash or something. Barnes was a former Crewe Alex player who could probably have been Eric Barnes who played centre-half for the Alex for years and then retired and owned a gents’ outfitters in the town. But in the dream he had this formidable amateur side that went on to win just about every competition that they ever entered for a year or two. I can’t remember any more about this dream than this

Finally I was at the BBC last night preparing a meal for the radio. We were making some kind of chili con carne with everything in it. There was a rat and we cut it into squares and started to add it but at the very last minute I decided that maybe this wasn’t a very good idea. I started to fish out all of the bits. It was a shame that I’d added it because it was looking so nice up to that point and fitted nicely into the saucepan but once I added these chunks of rat it overflowed so I had to grab a bigger saucepan. That was what made me ralise that there was too much and the rat ought to go.

So bedtime now. Tomorrow I have a radio programme to prepare and a few phone calls to make. Things are hotting up around here right now, and in more ways than one.

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Wednesday 11th January 2023 – I’M NOT GOING …

… to tell you what time I left my bed this morning.

One thing that I will tell you is that it wasn’t 07:30, that’s for sure. And another thing that I’ll say is that at least it was still morning.

And it was a better night’s sleep too, without an awful lot of disturbances. One or two nevertheless. I was on the Millfields estate in Nantwich walking around and there was one of the tiny Ford Transit vans parked there. When I went past again the back was open and it was fitted out as a guy probably my age was sleeping in it. We started to have a chat. Someone else came along and joined us. We were talking mainly about politics . The conversation drifted around to John Henry and the Liverpool poets and the “Conservative Government Unemployment Figures” joke which I told incorrectly. They agreed with me that society was in a right mess these days as far as everyone like us was concerned.

And later on I was in Canada in my father’s garage, which was actually the garage of my niece’s husband as well. I was there with this ancient Bedford QL … “actually he means an RL” – ed … They were doing something or other and asked if I had my tools with me. They were in the back of BILL BADGER, my old A60 van. They wandered off and when I went outside to look they had all my tools out everywhere looking for something. I went over, and it turned out that a socket had gone missing. They couldn’t find it. I said that it was a complete tool kit when I assembled it. We started looking over everywhere. I was climbing over this Bedford trying to find it. Someone mentioned something about it. I replied “yes, this was £80, or $120 when I bought it in 1978. It’s still running”. Someone said “I thought you were in that yellow car” meaning the Cortina estate. I replied “yes, that was a bit more expensive, $350 but I thought that I’d give the Bedford a run out in Canada this time”

Once I’d had my medication I had a few things to do in here, such as scanning all of the prescriptions that i’ve received just recently from the doctor and then spent an hour or so tidying up the worst of the apartment so that the cleaner wouldn’t die of fright when she arrived.

While she was here I worked on the radio, trying to choose the music for the next few radio programmes. Not that I organised too many because you’ve no idea just how quickly an hour passes when you are busy.

She was heading into town this afternoon after she’d been here so I gave her one of my prescriptions – the one for the pair of crutches that the doctor wants me to have – and she fetched them back for me. They need adjusting before I can use them so I’ll organise the physiotherapist when he comes tomorrow.

But there is an improvement in the way that I’m moving about which isn’t actually difficult because it surely couldn’t have been much worse. I think that come Friday, if it’s not raining, I’ll try for the shop in the town centre again for my mushrooms and peppers. I’ll have to work out how to use the crutches and pull my shopping trolley along at the same time.

Tea tonight was a curry made of all of the leftovers in the fridge, lengthened by a potato. And it was actually quite nice. Tomorrow I might have a slice of pie with potatoes and veg. I have plenty of potatoes following the delivery of my food order last weekend and they will go off if I don’t use them.

And that reminds me – I have the lettuce to use as well. I mustn’t forget that. But it’s a Batavia and they do keep longer than an Iceberg. And how I wish that I had bought a bigger fridge. We’ll have to see what we can do about that in the future.

Anyway, now I’m off to bed. Tomorrow I’m going to be doing another radio programme in order to keep up with this two per week for the next while until I end up about 6 months ahead. That way, there will be plenty of room for manoeuvre if something happens that I’m not able to prepare any, such as happened when I was in hospital.

There won’t be an 06:00 start though. And there won’t be an 07:30 start either, if recent events are anything to go by.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thursday 25th August 2016 – I HAD ANOTHER BAD NIGHT …

… where it took me hours to drop off to sleep. Mind you, the heat had something to do with that, I reckon. It really was stifling in here with the window closed.

And when I did drop off, it wasn’t for long and I kept on waking up all through the night with terrible coughing fits and I was feeling so uncomfortable. But I was definitely asleep when the 07:00 cacophony went off because that awoke me bolt upright. Mind you, waking up is one thing – leaving the bed was quite another.

When I eventually finished my breakfast, I came back up here and had a relaxing morning, which I deserved after my efforts of the other day. But I was out of the place at 11:00 tracking down some more accommodation. One estate agent was closed and another one didn’t have anything for me (and wasn’t all that interested either).

However, I did finally find the office of that student accommodation place – the one that was closed on Saturday – and when I explained my circumstances to them they didn’t throw me out but were content to have a listen to my story. They took my e-mail address anyway, and I suppose that this is something.

The Carrefour supermarket on the ring road by the football ground was next and on the way back home afterwards I found a few more places. One of them will consider me as a tenant and so I have to go to see the place tomorrow at 11:00. This is another one nearer the hospital so I hope that it comes up good.

After lunch I tried to take it easy but the cleaner came around to do the room – after a two-week absence. Now I have clean sheets and I’ll be taking a shower later so that I can have a nice clean me too.

Tea tonight was pasta, kidney beans and veg cooked with garlic fried in soya margarine and with boulghour and spicy tomato sauce added too. It was delicious too, and there’s enough for tomorrow too!

And so I’ll have an early night but I don’t imagine that I’ll be getting much sleep in this heat. But I shouldn’t be complaining – we haven’t had much weather like this so far this year.

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