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Monday 18th January 2016 – WHAT A NIGHT!

I know that I went to bed early and tried to doze off to sleep but it wasn’t much good. Half an hour later, I was wide awake doing something on the computer again. It was beyond midnight eventually before I settled down and still couldn’t doze off. It’s been months since I’ve felt like this, hasn’t it.

As for my nocturnal rambles, I didn’t have the chance to go very far because it really was a fitful night. Although I only wandered off down the corridor once, I was awake, tossing and turning on several occasions. There’s clearly a great deal on my mind at the moment. And what rambles I did go on were quite disturbing – they certainly disturbed me and I shan’t repeat them on here because you might be eating your tea or something like that. Let’s just say that they were not for the faint-hearted, and anyone suffering from Coulrophobia (12% of the population of the USA apparently) will certainly not appreciate them.

I was up and about at the usual time and had to wait for the nurse – but I didn’t have to wait long for the nurse. I passed the time by making the fire flare up and putting more wood in it – we still had glowing red embers at 08:00. The nurse was unlucky today. He couldn’t make any blood vessel in my left arm work and in the end had to switch over to the right – something that I’ve been trying to avoid since I had my blood clot. But at least there was some blood there – I’d told him that the reason why he couldn’t find anything in the left arm was that it had all gone.

But it hasn’t all gone – in fact my blood count is up to 8.7 at the moment – the highest that it’s been for quite a while. The transfusion that I had last Friday evidently worked. But it will diminish over time and I’ll probably be back in there this coming Friday – they certainly didn’t call up tonight.

And that’s just as well because we’ve had a really heavy snowfall today. Although most of it melted by late afternoon, at 14:00 it was looking quite ominous and I certainly didn’t fancy going anywhere at all. And neither did Liz and Terry. They had a car to rescue from near Menat and when it started snowing at about 09:30 they nipped off quickly before the roads became too bad, leaving me behind to hold the fort and man … "PERSON" – ed … the fire to keep it topped up.

In exchange, I asked Liz to post the letters that I had prepared and to pick up the next load of injections for me from the pharmacy in St Gervais. It’s pointless sending two cars out to the same place, particularly in this kind of weather. I stayed in and did some 3D work and some of my Animation course.

What we are studying this week is an animation technique called pixilation, which is where you use stop-motion photography to film humans so that it seems as if they are very realistic cartoon characters. It’s not what I would call animation and not what I want to learn, although many others on the course disagree. I’m hoping that pretty soon we’ll get onto Computer-generated animation, which is what I really want to do. However, it makes a great deal of sense to study the basics and learn the techniques.

Liz made a beautiful vegan chili for tea. Nice and hot which was just as well because earlier she had cut our hair. Mine is now really short and so the weather will certainly get at me if I have to go out, so loaded up with red-hot chili is a sensible solution.

So that’s it. I’m off for yet another early night. The joys of Swansea City against Watford I will miss tonight.Too much excitement is bad for me.

Sunday 17th January 2016 – I KNOW FOR DEFINITE …

… that I didn’t go outside today. Cold, grey and miserable – but that’s enough about me, let’s talk about the weather.

In fact it wasn’t that grey at all. Although we had been promised some snow during the day, it didn’t arrive and there were quite a few patches of blue sky here and there throughout the day. But not enough to tempt me out of doors.

I stayed put, did some of my animation course and then watched the football all afternoon, bored to tears because the matches were atrocious. Whenever Liverpool play Manure, I’m in a dreadful dilemma in that I don’t know which club to hate. I wish that it was possible for both teams to lose the match.

As for Arsenal against the Clayheads, watching the Clayheads try to kick the opposition off the park might be amusing to some, it totally broke up the match as the foreigners in the Arsenal side didn’t know how to respond to Sparky’s organised thuggery. Not that this form of football is unknown in the Potteries. The Clayheads have had a reputation for this for years, harking back to the days of Eric Skeels and Bill Asprey. It was once suggested that whenever a match was level after 90 minutes, the teams should play on until someone scored, but those players who had received yellow cards should be removed from the field for the extra period. Someone else then pointed out that in the case of a match between the Clayheads and Uruguay, there would be no-one left on the pitch to contest the extra time.

As a matter of fact, that was not all that I did. After breakfast (which was rather late today), Liz produced some envelopes and I sat down to sort through this immense pile of paperwork that has been accumulating around here. I have prescriptions, invoices, receipts, correspondence, medical reports, all kinds of things, and it’s in such a mess. So I spent quite a while sorting it all out, photocopying what needed to be done and then completing a couple of forms that I had to send off to my insurance company.

Just as I was finishing, Liz suggested stopping for lunch. “Blimey! That’s early” I thought to myself. But a quick look at the clock showed that in fact it was already 12:45. Time certainly flies quickly when you are busy, that’s for sure.

And so last night, I was back working on my 3D program yet again (as if I don’t already do enough of this in my waking hours without it invading my night-time ones too) looking for some poses for my K4 character. I’d seen some on the internet and I’d actually bought them – paid good money for them too, all of $2:22 in fact but when I downloaded them and tried them out, I was pretty much disappointed with them and I thought that that’s some of my good money wasted then, isn’t it?
From there, I moved back into an office where I was working and I had a whole pile of papers arriving on my desk saying how bankruptcy proceedings were about to be started against someone who owed about £25,000. In the course of this enquiry it turned out that the cause of his bankruptcy was that he was owed £27,000 by another person, and this could explain and account for everything. I had to get on the trail of all of this and collect the one money owed in order to pay off the other. So I set off in the van (not sure now if it was Caliburn) and lived in there for a few days while I was on the trail of this money and ended up in this town where the relevant County Court was – it might have been somewhere in West Yorkshire from what I remember. I needed to go to the County Court and so I asked for directions. But following the directions, I ended up in the car park of a big expensive hotel somewhere at the end of a cul de sac. There was a small, midget-type guy at the hotel and he told me where I had gone wrong, pointing across the car park to a hedge, the other side of which was the rear of the County Court. I’d turned somehow into the hotel car park instead of carrying straight on. It was too late now to go to the Court and too dark to do anything else so I reckoned that I would book a room in the hotel. It would have cost me £53:00 for the basic price but I received a good discount, costing me £48:00 including breakfast and two free showers. First thing that I did as soon as I arrived was to go off and have one of those. Once I’d organised that, I went off to make enquiries about this money and whoever I was talking to put me in touch with three people who had to take me to another part of the hotel. We went through an enormous labyrinth of corridors and doors in this luxury hotel, and up some stairs and along a passage that crossed over a road that ran through the middle of the hotel and back down the steps at the other end. Here, we picked up a girl who joined us, and it turned out that although she wasn’t the person who was owed this money, she knew everything about it and had had some very intimate dealings with it. We needed to sort out all of her finances in order to set ourselves off on the road to dealing with the finances of the other person. I spent some time with her dealing with all of this and we had to go to the cash desk of the hotel to withdraw some money. She had some on her but it was all in different bits and pieces. She paid off a few bills and other things that she had to pay, reorganised her finances and instead of having all of these bits and pieces, she ended up with £25,000 in notes of a large denomination, and two pence. She was quite dismayed about this because she needed some money to spend but she had only just enough money to equate to this bill that this guy owed – not forgetting the 2p that was left over. After all, she had to live and had to eat too and there was all this kind of quandary going on in her head about how she was going to solve this issue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday 15th January 2016 – THE ROAD TO MONTLUCON …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday 14th January 2016 – SNOW!

This was the sight that greeted me this morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all still happening, isn’t it?

Wednesday 13th January 2016 – I’VE BEEN WORKING …

… today. And outside too! Snow is forecast from Friday until next Wednesday and the woodpile is starting to look a little low. Terry had salvaged some beams from a previous construction project and so he set out to cut them up. He handed me a small hand-axe and I went to attack another pile of waste wood in order to reduce it to kindling.

We were out there for an hour or an hour and a half or so and ended up with quite a respectable pile that will keep us going for a while. But I’m clearly not fit – even chopping up a pile of kindling was wearing me out.

But that wasn’t the most exciting part of the day. That was reserved for something of a non-event. There I was, up and about and all ready, a good few minutes before 08:00, and waiting for my nurse to come and give me my injection. And waiting. And waiting. By the time that 11:30 came around, I realised that he wasn’t going to come at all and I could have had a decent lie-in.

When he came round in the evening, he was surprised to learn that he had forgotten. he had had quite a few blood samples to take (and they always have to have priority – no-one likes to hang around for too long waiting for breakfast) and then was carried away with the rest of his work. I’m not complaining though – as you know, I’m fed up of being used as a dartboard and if I can have half a day off, then so much better for me.

After lunch, Terry went out on an errand to visit someone out near Menat and I stayed here (just for a change). I didn’t do too much in the afternoon except work on my animation course. I wasn’t up to much and ended up going for an early night.

But then again I’d been on yet another major mega-ramble during the night and having the dictaphone right by my bed, I had recorded almost everything that had happened. And this news is bound to depress you because there was tons of stuff, a great deal of which totally surprised me when I came to type it out for I didn’t remember even half of it. It does make me wonder what I’ve been missing out of my nocturnal rambles over the last few years when I’ve not had the dictaphone to hand.

And so – here we go. You have been warned.

Terry and I were watching Convoy but, as well as I know this film, it was a Convoy with loads of scenes right at the beginning that I had never ever seen before. We were discussing the relative merits of the “cab-over” and the bonneted cab configuration of modern lorries. I said that Darren, my niece’s husband, hated cab-overs (which is hardly a surprise when you consider the machinations that a mechanic has to go through in order to reach the engine). We went out in an American lorry (and I’ve no idea what cab configuration it was) and we came upon a peloton of American cyclists who were all cycling nude. This led us onto a scene where there were two young girls, one of whom had had a text from her boyfriend referring to something about her going to have a really good seeing-to and the second making a joke about it, and then telling her mum that she had to go because she was “needed elsewhere” with all kinds of other things to do.

A bit later on, we had yet another family reunion as my brother once more entered into the fray. And as usual we were arguing. This time about a car workshop manual. And this took place as we were walking down the street in Welsh Row, Nantwich. I ended up tearing it into shreds, throwing it into the street and telling him to … errr … go away. And as I turned to storm off down the street I heard him call out “Goodnight” to my eldest sister, mentioning her name. And I didn’t know if she was really there or not, or whether he was merely saying that to make me turn round. Anyway, I didn’t turn round and carried on walking down the hill. It was pub-closing time when I reached the town centre. Everyone was milling around at the night clubs and I walked through the Crown Hotel (which wasn’t the Crown Hotel, but since when has that ever had anything to do with where I go and what I do at night?) where all of the people were leaving and the staff was busy clearing up the place. I walked out of the other door into the corner of Pillory Street and Hospital Street (which is of course nowhere near the door of the Crown Hotel) right opposite the old Boots shop to confront a big silver Mercedes saloon coming the wrong way up the one-way street, to the hoots and derisions of all of the pedestrians on the pavement. We ended up watching one of these tests about “what do you do if you have all of these chemicals and fireproof blankets and a fire breaks out?” The person running the test told us how to make a cocktail of these ingredients (which I shall be trying just as soon as I go home, believe me) and what effect it would have, but it’s also a by-product for treating eczema. And if you are treating someone with eczema who has been possessed by the devil, you don’t need to earth them to make the devil leave when you paste this tomato-like paste on their eczema.
Now here’s a thing. Of all of the family who have been recently making an appearance, you will be doubtless wondering when my niece in Canada will be putting in an appearance. Well, wait no longer because tonight, she finally walks onto the stage. We set out with me back home, packing, making ready to go to Canada, but for some reason, when I was all ready to go, I ended up not going. However, I went off to my office with all of my suitcases. My colleagues were curious about this and kept asking me where I was off to and so I explained about my trip to Canada. I then had to go to speak to someone, and I learnt that they were in the swimming baths – and I’d just come from there! All my swimming clothes were wet but nevertheless I had to go back there, change into them, and then go back into the pool. And the person for whom I was looking was no longer there. I went back to the dressing room and changed, being fed up, cold and wet, and went back to the room where my suitcases were. We then had a lengthy discussion that instead of me going to Canada, I was going off the Germany for a few days. But I had to book a bus – and you REALLY DID have to book it too, you couldn’t just turn up and get on – and I hadn’t done that, with just an hour left before the bus departed. Anyway I set off for Germany but it wasn’t Germany to where I was going but somewhere else and here I met up with my niece and her youngest daughter. We were having a really good chat but the surrounding were quite uncomfortable so she suggested that we all go back home again. For my part, I wasn’t too concerned and felt that it would be okay if I were to find a put-u-up bed or something. We each had a hot cup of syrup – mine was mint but I can’t remember what the others had. However my niece decided that she wanted hers cold so I had to put some seawater in it to cool it down. Daughter and I set off to find the seawater (the idea that the syrupy drink would be cold long before we returned never entered our heads) but outside the building was a pile of puppies and a kitten. Daughter saw them and fell in love with them of course. Someone in the neighbourhood shouted a puppy’s name and all of the puppies and the kitten scampered off. We walked off up the street and here we met someone with a pet raccoon. Daughter fell in love with that too and so we ended up having a good chat to this person. We eventually ended up where this water was, and it bore more than just a passing resemblance to the back of the city centre of Chester with the little streets that went down to the by-pass (which was the water line for us). The tide was in and the water had come up to the steps so in principle you could just wade in a grab some. However, the water didn’t look very clean and the faster-flowing water closer to the centre of the river would be much cleaner and so that was the place to go. This involved climbing up a stairway and along a raised brick and stone walkway to a tower right at the end, all of which was fenced in by a tubular metal hand-rail. But to reach there, with the tide being so far in, you ended up to your neck in water. I told daughter to make sure that she stayed on the steps on the shore and I set off , wading out to these other steps to take me up onto the walkway. However, the stairway was fenced off so I had to retrace my steps and swim right around to find a way up (how I was going to bring this water back without spilling it was yet another thought that hadn’t occurred to me). When I finally clambered up onto the walkway, someone was around there shouting to everyone to keep away as there was a raw sewage outlet just offshore a little further out. Daughter then put in an appearance – she hadn’t stayed where I had told her to stay. And so we had to think again about where we could obtain some more seawater.
The three of us (me, niece and daughter) ended up driving through Stoke on Trent with another guy in the car. I was explaining to him just how derelict The Potteries was, showing him many of the derelict sites around the city. We were heading from Hanley out towards Ash Bank and came to a big roundabout (bearing more than a passing resemblance to the roundabout on the outer ring road of Brussels right by the Woluwe Shopping Centre) but the roads over it, particularly the slip-road heading to the south, was completely overgrown with weeds. We had quite a laugh about this as I did a couple of laps of the roundabout, but despite the roundabout being very large, I ended up with two wheels on the kerb at one point. We took the exit that led off to Longton (which bears no resemblance whatever to the “real” Longton) and found the town to be crowded, loads of people around. We arrived at some temporary traffic lights controlling traffic at some road works. One of the workers had a pneumatic road-breaker digging up the road, but when the lights changed to green, he carried on digging so no-one could move. The lights changed back to red, and then to green, and he was still there digging. I rolled the car forward until it was right up against his spine but he still carried on. In the end, I left the car and switched off his machine so that he could hear me and I could ask him why he wasn’t watching what was going on and watching the traffic lights and so on.

It’s hardly surprising that I was totally worn out after all of that. How long can I keep this up? 2023 words tonight and it’s enough to give me another dose of writer’s cramp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all so unnecessary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and wasn’t all of that a silly mistake?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And serve you b*gg*ers right too!

Monday 11th January 2016 – Monday …

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday 10th January 2016 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S MAGNUM OPUS …

… I suppose you are expecting something similar today. But Sunday is a day of rest and so if you think that I’m going to be working as hard as I did yesterday, typing out another 2200-odd words, then you are mistaken. You’ll have to make do with a mere 1556.

Mind you, Terry was back at work again this morning. Still a small leak from the stoptap under the sink. That’s down to a worn tap and the turning on and off yesterday has aggravated the wear. Being Sunday of course it’s not possible to find a replacement and so Terry resolved the issue simply by turning the tap fully-open, as tight as he could make it with a couple of spanners, and the metal-to-metal contact has done the trick. It means of course that you can’t now switch it off, but it won’t leak until the next trip to Brico Depot when he can buy a replacement.

Apart from that, I’ve been doing some of my 3D Animation course, although I can’t find the enthusiasm for this like I did with my course on Hadrian’s Wall, and on one of the support sites for the 3D program that I use, there’s also been a mega-sale for items that would fit a couple of my characters and seeing that I didn’t manage to treat myself to a Christmas present this year I treated my characters to a couple of new outfits. It’s an ill-wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good, even a 3D model character or two.

We had an excellent tea too. I’ve been having food fantasies again (I’m not sure why because I’m anything but starving being here right now), this time about boiled potatoes, broccoli and vegan pie. I’d even bought a head of broccoli last time that I was out at the shops. And sure enough, Liz conjured up something magnificent, consisting of vegan pie, boiled potatoes and broccoli. It really was a superb meal and I enjoyed every mouthful.

As for my nocturnal rambles, I suppose that you are waiting for something quite stunning, following the incredible rambles of the last few days. It’s not quite as dramatic as that because I imagine that whatever part of me goes off on these journeys is as exhausted as I am. But last night was certainly different.

I remember quite clearly going to bed, I remember switching off the laptop, but the next thing that I remember was waking up at 04:50 with the bedroom light still burning brightly. I must have been absolutely shattered to crash out just like that.

But I do remember quite a lot about my journey last night and, seeing as how at 05:00 I was wide awake after a trip down the corridor, I sat down to type it out.

I was in Belgium, in my old Vauxhall Senator, parked in Brussels in one of these large squares in front of a big building or monument with steps leading up to it. I’d rigged up some kind of temporary curtain out of a grey plastic sheet so that I could have some privacy in there while I had a doze but it wasn’t very effective. In fact, it was only when I installed myself in the back seat and pushed the surplus plastic over the back of the front seat that I was anything like comfortable. But from here I ended up in a police holding cell there, along with about 20 other young people of both sexes. It appeared that I’d been in a car with a girl called Annick (whose family name began with “C”) and she’d been driving but somehow in the confusion, I’d been arrested instead. After a while an officer came into the cell and said that he’d been in contact with as many family members as possible for all of the different people in the cell and that bail had been arranged for most people. When he called out their names, they would be taken out to sign the papers and then they could leave. And so gradually our ranks thinned out. And then some older woman came in and called out “Annick C….”. I explained that it was probably me, and explained the circumstances, so she crossed out Annick’s name and wrote mine down instead. I said to the girl standing next to me, a very tall, thin young blonde girl, very nervous, that it’s worrying when even a junior member of a foreign Police Force knows my name and my identity well enough to write it down without even asking me to give it. Clearly, I’m well-known to the Police in Brussels. And we ended up chatting, with her telling me that it was her first time ever being arrested and in a police cell. So I gave her some reassuring talk. An older man put his head around the door and called “Annick C…”, to which I once more replied that it was probably me, so he told me to come along. I gave this girl the “thumbs-up” sign to encourage her and set off with this old guy. He was clearly British, with a working-class Northern England accent so I asked him what he was doing here and how come he’d found employment in a foreign police force. He explained that he’d come over, ended up driving a bus full of children with behavioural issues, and “then we’d lost touch with each other”. He clearly seemed to know who I was but I had no idea about him. He took me into an office – a really big office with a huge table, about half a tennis court in size. I was to sit at one end and there was someone else at the other end. There was a small pedestal fan on a filing cabinet there, making a terrible racket so I asked if I could turn it off. “It’s my office” he growled.”Fair enough” I answered, “but I can hardly hear you”. He walked over to me and said “what would you do if I did this?” and gave me a huge kiss on the mouth, so I pushed him away and asked him whether he meant that for “Annick C…”. His response to that was to call someone else in, a big man in a pork pie hat, who proceeded to put my head in a head lock. I had realised by now that the purpose of this noisy fan was to flood the room microphones so that the police misbehaviour and the screams of the victims would be drowned out on the tape recording of the interview (this is a typical Belgian police tactic), but this headlock was puzzling me. It wasn’t hurting me at all or causing me any discomfort whatsoever, and I didn’t see the point of it.

So having finished dictating my notes, I snuggled back under the quilt and I was off again. This time, my father was there (my nocturnal rambles are becoming much more like a family reunion and that’s a frightening thought, if ever there was one) with his annoying habit of calling everyone insulting names. Anyway, I’d had enough of this so the next time he did it, I smashed a bottle across the back of his head and killed him. I found a large wicker basket, lined it with a large plastic bin liner, stuffed him into it and filled it with water. And then I hid it in the corner of the garage of an office where I worked. I disposed of his two dog leads (why would he have two dog leads?) anywhere about the place. As luck would have it, I found an identity document – not his but someone else’s – which resembles nothing like an actual identity document, and carefully scribbled out the owner’s identity details, making sure that I left just enough visible so that a really good investigator could read, with some effort, the identity, and then hid it near the body. Of course, eventually the body was discovered by some woman and the police were called. I was rather worried, wondering it I ought to have done so much more to hide the body and wondering if the identity card ploy had been careless, but I reckoned overall that it would run the police up a blind alley for a good while. I would have run much more of a risk by trying to dispose of the body just after I’d done the deadly deed.

I can’t believe the number of family members who have appeared quite recently in my nocturnal rambles. There were all kinds of issues in our family over the years. We weren’t really a family at all but, just like the family in the superb Frank Sinatra film Tony Rome, a “bunch of people living under the same roof” and in the end we made the decision that, like the Knights of the Round Table in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, we would go our separate ways. It was the most intelligent way to put an end to all of the difficulties that we were facing.

Since then, I haven’t spent any time thinking about them and they, doubtless, have returned the compliment and so what’s going on with them playing major supporting roles in my rambles?

Weird!

Saturday 9th January 2016 – WE HAD SOMETHING …

… of a minor crisis here today – like waking up and finding a puddle on the floor of the kitchen. First job therefore was to dismantle … "disPERSONtle" – ed … the kitchen unit where the sink was. Sure enough, one of the water pipes was soaking wet.

This meant turning off the water and checking all of the joints. One or two rubber washers inside were rather perished so Terry replaced them all, and then switched the water back on. And sure enough, five minutes later, more water!

After lunch, further inspection revealed that one of the braided tap-hoses seemed to be distorted. It’s not that it ever is so cold in the kitchen that the water would freeze and burst the hose but it didn’t look right at all, and after an exhaustive search, Terry couldn’t find a spare one. So off to Montlucon and Brico Depot (a round trip of 110 kms).

He was back after 40 minutes. Passing by St Eloy, he noticed that the plumber’s was open. It costs twice as much in there as it would in Brico Depot, but it saves on time and on fuel. So crawling back underneath the cupboard, he wielded his spanner and … CRACKKKKK … the bottom of the tap broke off. There was a hairline fracture in it and it was this that was causing all of the problems right from the beginning.

So it was off to Brico Depot anyway, and all that I can say was that it was a good job that Terry didn’t go there before to fetch the hose. That would have been the end.

So now we have a nice new tap which works perfectly.It’s the same design as the ones that I bought for my shower and my sink in the shower room back home, and probably the one that I will buy for my kitchen, whenever that might be ready to need one.

But we needed one to do all of the washing-up after Liz’s glorious meal last night. A basil-flavoured tofu stir-fry with noodles and it was gorgeous too. And I had ice-cream for pudding – after all, I can’t have any more until that is finished.

Talking of finished, I certainly was! When the alarm went off, I switched it off and went back to sleep. It was only a car pulling up outside that woke me bolt-upright. The neighbour’s car, not the nurse’s as it happened, but I didn’t know that at the time and shot down the stairs, missing my footing and falling most of the way to the bottom. And after the nurse went, I crashed out again on the sofa until Liz and Terry came down.

There is a reason for this however, and that is that once again, I’d been off on a couple of mega-rambles. And these were so enthralling that I woke up twice during the night and dictated them immediately into my little machine. And it was only on typing them out that I noticed the first couple of them – I had no recollection of it at all and it does make me wonder what else that I’ve missed.

The first part of all of this concerned a young boy – aged about 11 but looking about 7 or 8. We were back in mid-Victorian times and in a court room. He was charged with stealing a barrel of beer that he and a friend had sat down and drank. While the hearing was taking place, he was in the dock being violently ill everywhere, crawling on his hands and knees on the floor. In the end, the bailiff of the court, someone like John Wayne, sitting on a chair, took this boy onto his lap but the boy carried on being violently ill. In the end, the judge said something like “this is totally insupportable. We can’t possibly continue with the case like this!” This was quite true as it was clear that the boy wasn’t capable of understanding anything whatever of the procedure in his current state.

I then had something going on, involving me and someone else being chased by a dragon. This was something to do with where I was working and although I recall nothing of this and it was a surprise when it appeared on the dictaphone, I did hear myself say, when it had us trapped in a corner, that I wish that this dragon would clear off and let us get on with some real work.

From there, I went on to dealing with some issues of Marianne, who had miraculously come back to life. Nerina and I were looking after her (in the same way that Cecile and I did) and she was living in a duplex apartment, part of which were premises where I was working, on the floor below. I was down there trying to work and trying to do loads of other things too. but to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … Marianne passed on once more, and her body was still in the apartment – it not being possible to find someone who could come and take her away. It was Monday and no-one could come before Thursday. Nerina came back from where she had been and we had a chat, and I wasn’t sure whether I should allow her to share my bed or even stay the night, with all of this confusion going on right now. It was quite late by now and I was ready for bed at this moment, in my jammies and dressing gown. We were having a little cosy chat around the table in my room and suddenly, the door burst open and my boss from a job years ago, an absolute swine, stuck his head around the door, and cleared off again. And Nerina had to clear off as well. I escorted her to her car. Now earlier on in the day, I’d been having trouble with a TV camera – it would show TV programmes if you pressed the correct sequence of buttons but this was such a complicated sequence that I had managed to do it once but never again. ever since, every time that I pressed a button it made the boom arm collapse onto my head or something like that; So after Nerina left, I was out on this car park having yet another play with this camera. And then HE appeared again, brandishing a pink brochure of some kind. “Mr Hall, how DARE you tell the tea-lady that I was going to be here for the St Something-or-other (which implied that he was going to be at a dance that was taking place on that day)?” but my response was that I had said nothing of the kind. “I said that you were going to be here ON that day – a completely different thing altogether!”. He burst out laughing (for a reason only known to him) and said that he would see me about it in the morning. “Be afraid – be very afraid!”. Naturally, I thought that this was totally ridiculous.
We’re a long way from finishing yet. After a trip down the corridor at about 03:40 (having a timer on my dictaphone comes in quite useful) I was back in the arms of Morpheus and this was yet another really bizarre voyage. I could only recall some of it and I wish that I could remember all of the rest. For a start, I wish that I could remember who I was with. It was another young girl, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the much-maligned Percy Penguin (who doesn’t appear in these pages anything like as often as she deserves) but it wasn’t her, however it’s someone else that I’m sure that I know too. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we were in New York and after a major ramble (I couldn’t remember a thing about this ramble when I awoke) but we found ourselves at the tip of Manhattan, in Battery Park (although it’s nothing at all like the real Battery Park) and the park was quite high up, but surrounded by tall buildings, which meant that there was no view of East River, except in one particular place where the building was quite low. We were waiting for a certain ship that was going to dock at a certain quay – Quay 34 if my memory serves me well (as Julie Driscoll once said). This ship displaced 26,000 and a few tonnes which was quite small (such is the logic of these night-time rambles). We had no idea where Quay 34 was but in another astounding fit of nocturnal logic, a small ship would go into a small quay and that would be where this small building would be. Seeing it is one thing – being able to arrive at it was quite another, so we set off in the direction that we thought would bring us there. The idea was to walk all around the edge of Manhattan and hopefully we should arrive at it. A short while into our walk we came to the Deutschlander Tör – the gate that leads into a small Park in Manhattan that had been given in perpetuity to Germany by the USA Government for some act or other – it was not part of the USA but part of Germany. The gates were wrought iron, black and gold, about 4 metres tall and with impressive emblems. Crowds of people were milling around, photographing them, and just as I went to take a photo, a woman directly opposite me went to photograph them from the opposite direction. We would each have included the other in our photos. So we had a smile and a laugh, and I called out “one, two, three” and we took our photos simultaneously. Once we had sorted ourselves out, the girl and I continued our walk into the park. Here, we met up with a coach party, ours of which we were part, in fact, that we had somehow managed to miss during our ramble around the city. They were preparing to leave, but we weren’t. And in any case we weren’t going back with them an the day that they were flying back but staying on and going to Canada. I was looking for the toilet because both of us needed to go. A park guard pointed us in the right direction, indicating a girl in the distance with an orange “Home Depot” plastic bag. The entrance was right by there and he would walk up with us. One of the women from the party offered to come with us as well, and while we were chatting to the guard, this woman was talking over the top of our conversation, saying how inconsiderate some people were, talking loudly while others were trying to have a conversation, the irony of what she was doing having gone completely over her head. And everyone on this coach was urging us to come back as the coach was leaving at 19:30 as they were flying out at 21:00, despite my explanation that we weren’t coming back with them anyway but going on to Montreal (although our proposed route would take us nowhere near Montreal, not that this has ever bothered me in a nocturnal ramble). We eventually arrived where the guard had indicated, and what there was was merely a window sill that everyone was using. I let the girl go first and I went second. But – once again – who on earth was this girl who was so familiar?
Strangely enough, some of the scenery and background, particularly of the bit about the route to Canada, has appeared in a nocturnal voyage a while ago when I had flown to New York and hired a car to take me out into the rural area to the south-west across the Hudson River where I could see the surreal urban landscape of the city and the enormously high elevated highway that would bring me back to the city.
And this isn’t all, either. In the 15 minutes that I dozed back off to sleep after the alarm, I was gone yet again. I was in France, back at my house (although it’s nothing like my house at all) and I decided to go for a bicycle ride along the trails in the woods. I went on the blue and silver racing bike (I really have this, rescued from a house clearance a couple of years ago) which had no brakes and no gears. On a particularly steep bit across the ravine I could see the neighbour’s children having a great deal of fun amusing themselves and looking over at them, I stalled and I just couldn’t get the bike going again no matter how I tried. I pushed the bicycle up the steep hill towards the houses and the shops and there at the top of the steep bit, coming down the hill on a bicycle was a girl aged about 11 or 12 in a tube top kind of outfit, cycling past the houses and the shops. It was at this point that the car pulled up and slammed its door – the real car outside – and I was off downstairs.

And that’s your lot for today – all 2237 words, another new record, and most of which is total rubbish. No wonder it took me so long to type it. I really ought to be charging you to read this rubbish. Don’t forget about the Amazon links aside.

Saturday 9th January 2016 – 2114 words!

Yes, that’s what you had yesterday, you lucky people. Serves you right!

I really ought to be charging you a fee for all of the work that I’m putting in these days. You don’t get all of this entertainment for free anywhere else, you know.

And that reminds me, if you have enjoyed or benefited from these pages, please make your next Amazon purchase by clicking on the links in the right-hand column. It costs you no extra, but I receive a small commission on the sale. I reckon that I deserve it.

But anyway, enough of that.

Yesterday, I was out yet again. In the cold, the wet and the wind. I’d finally managed to track down the person who needs to come and inspect this septic tank where we had all of the issues on Wednesday, and he agreed to meet us there at 11:00. So after breakfast and coffee Terry and I set off.

We made sure that we both had our telephones with us this time, and that we had the papers with all of the contact details, but that was clearly not enough. As we were passing through Montel de Gelat, Terry suddenly announced “blast! I’ve forgotten the key!”.

You really don’t need a key to enter any of the houses around here, but you do need some tools. And having gone down there in the FIAT instead of the Transit we didn’t have any of those. So Terry dropped me off at the house and nipped off to the D-i-Y shop at Pontaumur.

The inspection didn’t take long. The person who came had actually done a survey on the property a short while ago so he simply checked the system for leaks. He would copy the plans of the system from his previous report.

On the way back, the yellow light came on. We were running low on fuel. The nearest petrol station is 16kms away in St Gervais so I told Terry that he had better put his foot down.
“Why?” asked Terry
“Well, you want to get to the petrol station quickly before you run out of fuel”

Back here, I did some more of my course work in the afternoon, in between having a doze or two. And then after tea, we watched a film for a short while and then went to bed.

It’s hard to understand why I was so tired today because I hadn’t been up to all that much during the night compared to many of my recent ramblings.

From what I remember, which isn’t necessarily all that much, I started off with something to do with Antoine de Saint Exupéry – the French airman and children’s writer – although I can’t now remember what he was doing in my dreams, and why he would be there at all.
And then we moved off to the cinema. I was babysitting a girl of about 9 or 10 and so I decided that, in order to keep her entertained, I would take her to the cinema to watch a film. However we didn’t get to see much of the film because my brother (again!) was there and he insisted on distracting this girl by teasing her and generally annoying her – to such an extent that we had to move away to another part of the cinema. However, he followed us and carried on with his behaviour and so we had to move yet again. In the end, the only place where we could find some peace was in finding two empty seats in the middle of a crowded area where there were no other empty seats in the vicinity and so he couldn’t follow us and this girl wouldn’t be disturbed.
But from here, after a visit to ride the porcelain horse, I was back into a different country, in Canada to be precise although it didn’t look much like any part of Canada that I knew. I had a Mk IV Cortina estate that needed some attention and I’d been quoted something like $140 for the repairs. But when I went back to pick it up, it was still up on the ramps (complete with Czech numberplate, don’t ask me why) and the garage proprietor was busy removing my two spare wheels. Apparently, according to him, the tyres were no good although I disagreed (a strange parallel here with an incident involving Caliburn last May). So when I received the bill, it wasn’t for $140 but for almost $600, but he would “make me an allowance for the two tyres” (and no mention of the wheels, which I rather wanted back). I had to sit down and add up the bill in order to check that it was correct. And this bill was all in pounds, shillings and pence (decimal currency was introduced into the UK in 1971 but Ford Cortina Mk IVs were introduced in 1976 so there was clearly some logic here). It was a very complicated and involved account but I was doing it in my head. I’m quite capable of doing this, but each time I nearly reached the end, my brother (who had now put in yet another appearance) contradicted me over a figure, which I knew full well that I was right but his interruption distracted my train of thought and so I had to start again. And then he made another interruption. This was how it continued and I was wishing that he would clear off and go and annoy someone else. And not only that, do I make a fuss about my tyres? And my wheels? I really need my wheels back at the very least, but the reduction in the bill is important and I’m short of money so the discount is welcome. Strangely enough, I gave no thought whatever about the fact that I had been considerably overcharged compared to the estimate.

Thursday 7th January 2016 – EEEUUURRRGGGHHH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Totally unbelievable.

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

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

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

Wednesday 6th January 2016 – WE WENT OUT …

… this morning – all the way to Montel de Gelat. and all for no good purpose too.

I’d had to arrange an inspection of a fosse septique – a septic tank on behalf of Terry for some project that Terry had on the go, and this was for this morning at 11:30. And so we duly presented ourselves at the premises.

And waited

And waited.

Terry had forgotten his mobile phone and I didn’t have mine either, so in the end Terry went back home for his phone and the phone number of the person who should be visiting, leaving me in possession of the field for the moment.

It was absolutely taters out there, with a high wind blowing like crazy and I was frozen to the marrow. In fact, I spent my time sitting on a small electric radiator. But I made a friend and had company all the time I was there. A young ginger moggy came across for a stroke and, of course, strokes are second only to food in a cat’s order of importance.

When Terry returned with the necessary, the matter quickly resolved itself. It appears that the former owner lived in the Creuse and so he had the phone number of the Inspector for the Creuse region. To reach the property where we were, you have indeed to leave the Puy-de-Dome and enter the Creuse and turn immediately right, but the land straddles the border of the two departments and the property itself is actually back in the Puy de Dome. I hadn’t seen the postcode of the property until today, and I could see that the postcode began with 63 – the Puy de Dome’s number.

Anyway, the inspector had realised that too this morning. It’s out of his area so he’s not authorised to inspect it. He had left a message on the phone but of course, we didn’t have it with us.

So back here for soup for lunch and then in accordance with my usual agenda, I crashed out on the sofa for an hour or so. And that’s no surprise because I was exhausted after last night’s adventures.

In fact, last night’s voyage was so special and so well-detailed that I sat bolt-upright at about 03:30 to dictate it into my machine. And finding the batteries in there to be flat, I sat down and typed it out then and there, so that I wouldn’t forget it.

I was back in Crewe again, back with Nerina, back running my taxi business and I’d just moved house. I was busy trying to fit the stereo and the chests of drawers and the like all round the walls of one of the rooms in which I was living, but there wasn’t enough room so I was going to have to stack them some how one on top of another. I ended up with one of my huge hi-fi speakers (the ones that I had bought from a guy in Tunstall in 1992) stuck on top of something else in a corner behind the armchair. That would never do but it was the best that I could manage right now. Nerina came home from work in Stockport and told me to stop what I was doing as there was much more to do that was more important. In fact we ended up in West Street with Paul, one of my former drivers, going to the chippy for meat pies and chips. They weren’t particularly generous with the chips so I gave mine to Nerina, who expressed surprise at my generosity where food was involved. “Never mind” I replied. “Here we are in West Street with two more chippies within 100 yards. I’ll buy myself another portion”. So I went into the next chippy for two large portions of chips and gave one of those away to someone, but I was depressed that my “large portion of chips” turned out to be a very tiny portion of chips and a tub of baked beans. We carried on walking past the desolation of the south side of West Street (it was all being demolished at that time) and Nerina told me about a confrontation that she had had with a bailiff. It was over some money allegedly owed in Stockport but she had had a statement from Stockport Metropolitan Council to say that she had overpaid by £0:02. The bailiff accused her of having forged the letter and said that he was going to come round and “sort her out” with threats of physical violence. We ended up on the Elm Drive estate, having added to our entourage the guy who married my younger sister (twice in two nights?) walking back towards town, discussing the merits of the two pubs on the estate, the one on the roundabout (which of course isn’t there) and “the Brunel” (which is actually the Royal Scot but which was a white-stuccoed pub, nothing like the Royal Scot, and the real Brunel Arms is in, would you believe, West Street, where we have just been) down a side street. I said that when I lived in Elm Drive (which I did, for a short while) I went to the pubs out on Sydney Road which was dangerous for coming back because they switched off the street lights and we were always walking into things. Further on down Elm Drive, towards the town end, we went to the home of the girl who answered the telephone, and she joined our little party. We told her that if the phone rang, we didn’t have a car available for half an hour (which was rather pointless as she wouldn’t reach our house to answer the phone before we did). We turned into Middlewich Street and walked down the hill to the railway bridge at the bottom near Henry Street. Here in a triangle of waste land in between the railway line and the new road were a few vehicles parked up of which two interested us. One was a Volvo B10M coach with an Alizee body, M-reg (as in 1994) and carrying the name of a dance troupe, parked up just before the railway bridge in fact, and an old Volkswagen or Mercedes van dark blue with a white top and looking as if it had stood for years. There were crowds of people across the new road, milling around as if they were waiting to get into a night club, so we reckoned that we had better get a move on and get home to do some work – it was already 20:30 and the night was drifting away. But we were then embroiled in a (friendly) dispute about the quickest way to reach home. I was all for the short cut up Meredith Street but each one of us had his own favourite way to go.

And all of this goes to show that it’s nothing to do with Liz’s cooking, despite what I have said recently, because I had nothing whatever to eat yesterday that had any connection whatever with Liz’s culinary delights.

But as an aside, back in the mid-late 1970s (a good few years before I met Nerina) we would indeed go for these mega-rambles around Crewe on a Saturday night. Crewe used to have some really decent pubs (neither of the two pubs mentioned came into this category, by the way) but they were scattered right across the town. We’d inevitably visit three or four, having a quiet pint in each, but most of our time would be spent on foot walking for miles around the town, and a visit to a local chippy en route would be always on the agenda. Good beer, convivial company (there would be three, four or five of us), excellent food (because in those days the chippies in Crewe were really good).

A really good night out. There wouldn’t be the slightest hint of misbehaviour because whatever alcohol we had consumed in one pub, we would walk off with travelling to the next one. And, strangely enough, all of the walking that we were doing would keep us really fit.

Those were the days of innocence really. You couldn’t do it now of course. Firstly, half of the pubs have closed down. Secondly, the chippies have changed ownership and I’ve yet to find a Chinese chippy that can cut and fry chips like an old-fashioned English chippy (although the popularity of Chinese chippies these days shows that I’m clearly in a minority). Thirdly, and sadly, British society has changed for the worse. People no longer know how to drink responsibly. The aim seems to be to drink as much as possible in the shortest space of time and as a result, I’ve seen loads of reports about town-centres being no-go areas after 21:00. Not that I would know too much about that these days, and to be honest I have no intention of finding out.

But why am I becoming all nostalgic? I could understand it if it had been during my waking hours but there’s clearly something happening in my subconscious that’s bringing all of this to the fore.

So having woken up from my snooze this afternoon I made a start on my Animation course but I didn’t get far. I’m not as energetic as I used to be. We had tea and after a while I went off to bed – another early night.

I really can’t last the pace but it’s hardly surprising today. This mega-ramble around Crewe last night has totally worn me out.

Monday 4th January 2016 – SO NOW WE KNOW!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday 3rd January 2016 – WHAT ARE THESE PEOPLE …

… doing intruding into my nocturnal rambles? All kinds of people from my past have played some kind of supporting role in them, but quite recently there have been some people roaming by in the night who certainly wouldn’t ever have given me the time of day in the day, if you see what I mean.

And so it was last night too.

There was such a lot to last night’s voyage but unfortunately I can’t remember all of it. But the part that I do remember concerns a company called British Salt, a company for whom my father worked for many years until about 20-odd years ago. Last night the company was based not in Middlewich, Cheshire, but somewhere along the Waterloo Road between Cobridge and Tunstall, and I’d received “the call” to go there. The factory had five entrances, which from north towards the south were two before the first roundabout, one on that roundabout, a fourth between that roundabout and the next, a fifth on the second roundabout and another one south of the second roundabout (which of course does not make five but since when has logic played any part in my nocturnal rambles?). Of all of these entrances, the second was the tallest and that was the way that I went in. I wandered around to the transport yard and into the office where my first task was to respond to “does anyone here understand French?”. It turned out that the woodstove in the garage had all of its instructions and makers’ plates in French. So I translated them, showed them how to light the fire and work the automatic log dispenser (and I’m going to patent this design when I wake up because it was superb). Then, they slid a fork-lift truck underneath the stove and carted it off somewhere else, right through the garage, right past where my father was working.
It had been 14:00 when I arrived but it was 16:00 when they finally told me what they really wanted me to do. There were two lorry-loads of stuff that needed to be delivered (lorries again after last night?), the first of which was a load of metal plates that had to go somewhere beginning with M (I forget where) up by Stretton near Warrington. The man in charge asked me if I knew by which gate I had to leave so I phoned up the lodge at gate two. The lodge-keeper told me that the height was 4m 01 and so I told the man in charge that I’ll go out that way and that I was sure that I remember it being 12’3″ (such is the logic of my nocturnal rambles) back in the old days. He showed me which lorry to take and so I walked around it to check the wheel nuts and the lights, and then off I set – totally forgetting about the height limit on the gates, but luckily going out of Gate Two all the same. Arriving safely at Stretton or wherever (the first time that I’ve driven an HGV for 20 or more years by the way) I had to unstrap my load and then they craned it off. I gathered up the straps but they were all entangled so I needed to sort them out. This ended up by me having to undo the hooks from the straps but that still didn’t work. It appeared that the people in this factory had hooked up my straps to the ceiling so that they could sweep the floor. They needed to be unhooked and rolled up neatly but by this time I was going to be horribly late for my second load so I just threw them any old how into the cab – a cardinal sin in the HGV world.

But anyway, enough of that. In my “taking it easy” mode these days I had my injection, then my breakfast, and spent a leisurely morning watching Ben Stokes and John Bairstow take apart the South African bowling in the Second Test in Cape Town. I felt sorry for the South Africans actually. Ravaged by injury and giving two young bowlers their test debuts, it must have been very soul-destroying for them, watching their best balls disappear out of the stadium. I can’t remember the last time that England scored over 600 runs with 5 wickets still to fall. In fact, I can’t remember the last time England scored over 600 runs in any circumstances.

Another thing that I turned my hand to in the afternoon was something that I ought to have done a while ago. It’s my custom to write a small web page at the end of each year to talk about the work that I had done on the farm in that particular year. And when I was thinking about what I was going to write for 2015 I suddenly realised that I hadn’t done it for 2014 either.

That needed to be dealt with so I cracked on and I reckon that I’ve done about 75% of it already.

I didn’t finish it off though because by 20:00 I was drifting off into the arms of Morpheus and so I was ready for an early night. I really can’t keep going these days – not the 02:00 and 03:00 finishes that we used to have only a few months ago. All of this is depressing me.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: sauret besserve

Monday 18th January 2016 – WHAT A NIGHT!

Sunday 17th January 2016 – I KNOW FOR DEFINITE …

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

Friday 15th January 2016 – THE ROAD TO MONTLUCON …

Thursday 14th January 2016 – SNOW!

Wednesday 13th January 2016 – I’VE BEEN WORKING …

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

Monday 11th January 2016 – Monday …

Sunday 10th January 2016 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S MAGNUM OPUS …

Saturday 9th January 2016 – WE HAD SOMETHING …

Saturday 9th January 2016 – 2114 words!

Thursday 7th January 2016 – EEEUUURRRGGGHHH

Wednesday 6th January 2016 – WE WENT OUT …

Monday 4th January 2016 – SO NOW WE KNOW!

Sunday 3rd January 2016 – WHAT ARE THESE PEOPLE …

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