Tag Archives: blood count

Monday 14th March 2016 – WELL THAT’S ME TOTALLY P155ED OFF!

I had my blood test at the hospital this morning, and the blood count has gone down yet again to 8.1. And that’s despite having a blood transfusion the other day. The operation that I had to go through 6 or 7 weeks ago has clearly done no good whatever and I might just as well have saved myself the agony.

The thing that gets me though is that no-one in the hospital seems to care. Here they are, messing about with allergy tests for a different medication to deal with the immunity issues following the removal of the spleen, and on Friday I’m in hospital for a scan on my lung to see where this blood clot (the one in my lung that I picked up in hospital) has got to.

But as to my underlying illness and the causes of it, and any potential solution – not a word!

What made me even more depressed about all of this is that while I was sitting in the allergy clinic with all of these patches and injections and so on, I was editing all of the photos that I took in Montreal and sorting out all of the notes that relate thereto. And then I got to thinking about just how much I enjoyed the city and how much I felt at home there. And then I reached a conclusion.

And that is that seeing as how no-one cares, then I don’t either. if nothing definite comes out of my visit to Leuven next week and they can’t sort something out, then I’m on the next plane to Montreal. I’ll find a quiet room in a house somewhere around the Cote des Neiges, which really is my favourite part of Montreal, and let nature take its course.

I can’t go on like this. it’s nothing short of purgatory for me to have to go through all of what I’m going through and for no good purpose either. I may as well not be here and be somewhere else instead, whether in this world, the New World or even the next world.

What didn’t help matters very much was that I had another one of those comfortable, reassuring dreams where everything went according to plan, our hero got the girl and we both walked off together into the sunset and all of that – something that never ever happened to me in real life and how I wished that it had.

I was back playing in my rock group from the 1970s again and we were totally unrehearsed – we hadn’t played together for years and we were featuring in a venue somewhere. This was downstairs in a basement somewhere, rather like Enoch’s in Crewe used to be, and we weren’t even sure what numbers we were going to play, never mind how we were going to play them. This went on and we didn’t have all that much idea about what we were going to do. We spent so much time discussing and debating it that we weren’t actually getting anything done. There were quite a few of our friends there, including one particular girl whom I fancied and who I was trying to impress, who were coming to see us and so we HAD to be organised. Came the afternoon of the gig and we decided that we would have a rehearsal. I headed off towards the rehearsal room, carrying my bass guitar and there was some girl, whom I had seen vaguely back in the past but I hadn’t particularly noticed very much, came over to me and asked me if my guitar was a Gibson SG. I told her to count the strings, which she did, and agreed that there were just four of them. And so I told her that it was in fact a Gibson EB3. We started to talk about bass guitars and musical instruments, and she said that she had a mandolin with four strings on it. Of course – a mandolin – that brings back Lindisfarne and “Road to Kingdom Come” and “No Time to Lose”, all of that kind of thing. We ended up having quite a chat about this kind of thing, and she said that she could actually play some Lindisfarne music on the mandolin. It’s always been my ambition to play in a folk-rock group like Lindisfarne so I egged her on to go and fetch her mandolin,which she did and we had a brief jam session. After that, we wandered off together hand in hand. As I said earlier, this was another one of these comfortable situations and I wish that I could remember who she was, or even what she looked like – rather different from the Girl from Worleston the other night whose face is still vividly fixed in my mind. Anyway, off we went, hand in hand and there were a few people loitering in the vicinity who noticed the pair of us together like that and gave a little smile to each other. We walked to a rocky wall where there were a few seating areas set into it at various levels – just flat, grassy areas. I invited her to sit down with me but she said that she had other things to do and didn’t have the time. I continued to encourage her to sit down, she continued to be doubtful and it was at this moment that I woke up rather dramatically and shattered the illusion, much to my dismay.
After the usual crawl down the corridor I ended up at the football – Nantwich Town in fact. And while Nantwich Town might have a new ground, down on Kingsley Fields, this match wasn’t being played there. And neither was it being played on their old ground at Jackson Avenue either, but in the street in London Road right more-or-less outside Churche’s Mansions. I was watching the game, with about 4 or 5 others (huge crowds they have in Nantwich), a couple of girls and a couple of kids, having a kick-around with the balls.There was a really strong, swirling wind blowing that was creating havoc and on one occasion, much to my surprise, I actually caught the match ball one-handed, swerving around in the wind as it went out of play and that was really impressive. For the rest of it, the conditions were really difficult and catching the ball, even a simple catch, was really difficult if not impossible. We were actually watching this at the back of a river and the house rear yards backed right onto it. One small boy was climbing over the back wall and the wooden fence on top and lost his footing, sliding straight down into the river and emerging all covered in green slime. That certainly looked unhealthy! All of these houses had basements that were well below the level of the water but were somehow really dry. I wouldn’t have liked to have lived down in there, although there were people quite happily doing so. There were two teenage girls watching this football match and they lived in one of the houses. At half-time they went back to their house where the mother was cleaning the room of one of these girls, and one of the girsl asked the other what she would like for breakfast. The other replied that she would like one round of cheese on toast with half a packet of crisps and a coffee. I said “breakfast? It’s getting on for 10:30 and most of us had eaten breakfast long before this match kicked off”. But anyway, the first girl dragged a big metal wood-stove out from a corner into the middle of her little basement room ready to fill it and light it to make the toast and put the kettle on. They asked me what I would like to which I replied that I’d had my breakfast a long time ago, but I’ll have a cup of coffee with them. They next asked me what coffee I wanted and what mug I wanted and I thought that they weren’t half making life complicated when all that I wanted was a simple cup of coffee.

But anyway, enough of this. I was up early enough, breakfasted and on the road by 07:40. And what a beautiful morning it was too. I was in Montlucon at the hospital by 08:30 and in the comfy chair by the power point at 08:40 too.

I had the blood test, as I mentioned, and then had the drain fitted, and then injected and patched with all kinds of things. My companion from the other day was there too and we had quite a chat. And while I might have won the “mine’s bigger than yours” competition by having the largest lump on my arm, I felt really sorry for her with all of the tests that she was going through and the mess that they had made of her arm. In consolation, I let her have my mid-morning cake to cheer her up.

We had quite a few moments of humour too, including when one of the others asked if she could leave the room to use the bathroom.
“You’re supposed to raise your hand” I retorted.
“Just like school” said someone else.
At least, despite everything else, there’s a good feeling of cameraderie there in that clinic and the nurse is a really good sport too, which is good.

But the bad side of this is that I’ve had a few adverse reactions so I need to come in again. I explained my situation, all of my hospital appointments and my visit to Belgium and as a result, exceptionally, they can fit me in provisionally at 09:00 on Thursday.

I mentioned that at this rate I ought to be looking for an apartment here in the vicinity of the hospital and asked the young girl here with me whether she had a spare bed in her room. She said she did, but her mother wouldn’t like it. I asked “who cares about your mother?” which made everyone smile, but didn’t have the desired effect.

Not that I expected it to either, but there you go.

As for the blood test though, it’s on the limit of the blood transfusion level, but that’s not good enough for me. I’m off to Leuven next week – 800-odd kilometres by road – and I need to be on my best form for the journey. So what I’ve done is to change my little one-hour appointment back at the allergy clinic from tomorrow to Wednesday at 09:00 seeing as how there was a space, and then went up to the day-hospital and persuaded them to take me in straight afterwards for a blood transfusion. That way, then at least I’ll be in something-like reasonable health to undertake the journey. Coming back won’t be too much of a problem as I don’t have a time-limit for that so if I’m tiring out, I can take a good rest and carry on later.

But as I also said earlier, I’m thoroughly depressed by the way that all of this is panning out. I’m thoroughly hating the past, hating the present and hating the future too.

To cheer myself up, I went to Carrefour and the Flunch to have a plate of chips and vegetables but that was a waste of time as they were stone-cold. Liz had given me a little shopping list that involved going to Grande Frais and the Carrefour so I bought the necessary and looked for something else to cheer me up but there wan’t anything there that took my fancy. That’s always the case when you’re in the middle of a black depression – nothing will pull you out of the pit.

Back home – for only an hour as Liz wanted the shopping by 16:00 – I still couldn’t find my copy of Paint Shop Pro or anything else that I needed. But there was a little issue that the water in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater was off the temperature scale. I had to drain off 5 litres of the water and put 5 litres of cold water into it. I’ve also plugged the fridge into the main circuit so that it’ll now be working 24 hours per day. I’ll have to do something because with no-one there drawing any current, there’s tons of surplus electricity and it’s all dumped into the hot water.

Yes, 41 amps of surplus energy was being generated when I arrived and the cables to the immersion heater element were stone-cold – a far cry from 6 months ago when they overheated at half of that and I had to rewire everything. All of this, the temperature in the water and the amps that the cables are currently … "ohh! Very good!" – ed … handling just goes to show how much current was being lost by the rubbishy cables that I had been using. Decent cables, even half the diameter, properly crimped and soldered, is definitely the way to go and I wish that my soldering techniques would improve.

However, if things continue like this, my soldering techniques won’t be an issue.

I stopped for diesel on the way back and also to the pharmacie at Pionsat for the next lot of anti-biotic prescriptions (which wouldn’t have been necessary except for this spenectomie, and what a waste … "you’ve done that already" – ed … and then back to Liz and Terry’s.

After tea, which was a stir-fry with the stuff that I had bought earlier, I said “sod it!” and went to bed. I’ve had enough disappointments for one day. I’d already crashed out for half an hour on the sofa and it was beyond me to keep on going – not when I wasn’t in the mood to go on fighting.

Tomorrow is another day. Let’s see how we get on with that. Not any better, I bet.

I’ll leave you all to sit and read this rubbish – all 2322 words of it.

And serve you all right too!

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Tuesday 8th March 2016 – FIRST EXCITING THING …

… to happen today was that my web-host’s server went down. And was down for about three hours in total and so you were all denied the pleasure of reading about my ramblings in the early part of the afternoon.

But that wasn’t what upset me the most about it. What did annoy me was that I had been actually using part of the blog from October, and when it all went down, my work came to a shuddering halt. As I mentioned the other day, the next part of the magnum opus which is the collating of the photos that I took in Canada last year with the relevant notes that I made on the dictaphone – that’s also coupled with the entries that I made on my blog so I needed to cut and paste the relevant sections out of there to correspond with whatever I dictated on the dictaphone. And of course, with the blog being down, that I could not do, and so that was that.

Second exciting thing was that the nurse remembered to come this morning. And as a result, I had my blood test. I’ve had the results too, which show that my blood count has now gone back up to 9.0. “Good news” you might be thinking, but it should be tempered with the fact that I’ve had a blood transfusion with two pochettes of blood in between this one and the last one. It’s going to be much more interesting to see what happens at the blood test next week and see where we have got to.

Third exciting thing was that Nerina came along to visit me again during the night, which certainly makes a change from members of my family. Regardless of anything that might (or might not) have happened in the early 90s, I would prefer her company any day to three or four of the others whom I’ve met recently while I’ve been out and about in the middle of the night.

But it was not she who made her appearance during the early part of the evening, but some others with whom I can well live without. I can’t remember what was happening here now with this first bit but I had nine somethings – was it nine stitches? Nine rows of stitches? But they had to be taken out and while this was going on I was surrounded by a load of people whom I knew – some of whom worked in the OUSA offices. But I do remember in my dream passing out long before we reached the end of what was going on there.
But after the trip down the corridor, the next part was a lot more coherent even if I couldn’t remember the beginning of it. I’d been out for a drive with Nerina, each of us in our own car. Both of them were markIII Cortinas – mine being a lovely pale-green late-model one but Nerina’s was an old 2.0 bronze-coloured one. But I was ill and having difficulty driving mine, having been told not to go too far in it, but that wasn’t likely to stop me. After a while, we came to a petrol station and I was feeling really uncomfortable by this time. Nerina suggested that we swap cars as hers was fitted with power-steering and so it would be easier for me to drive. And so we swapped. The fuel gauge in Nerina’s car wasn’t working so I reckoned that I had better fill it up to make sure that I had enough fuel to make it back home again. I told the girl in charge of the petrol pumps to “fill ‘er up”. But after a few seconds, the counter on the petrol pumps stopped working so she tried with the next one, and the same thing happened. And so on, and on. But anyway, it seemed that Nerina’s car was almost empty so I was filling it right to the top – as much as would go in it. Not that that annoyed me – what was annoying me was that the fuel read-outs on the pumps weren’t working. As you probably know, ever since I started with my taxis in 1979 I’ve always kept fuel records for the vehicles that I’ve used, and I still do so even today with Caliburn. I was telling the girl at the fuel pumps about this and she replied “don’t worry, sir, it’ll all be okay. We’ll work it out somehow”. I was wondering just how she was going to do this with all of this confusion about changing from pump to pump, how much fuel had gone into Nerina’s car and how much it was going to cost me. And then how was she going to prepare a receipt for me with all of the details that I needed to keep up with my records as I usually do. The delay was now starting to get on Nerina’s nerves, and she mentioned that I had only invited her out for half an hour and now I had her doing all of this (and it wouldn’t have been the first time that I had heard this complaint either). And I hadn’t even checked the water in the car yet.

But then downstairs, wait for the nurse, work on the web pages as much as I could, coffee and vegan banana muffins for break, baked beans on toast for lunch and home-made vegan lasagne for tea. I’ve told you before, … "and you’ll tell us again" – ed … if I ever recover from this illness that I have and am fit enough to go back home, I shall immediately find something else that might be wrong with me.

Much as I love my little house and miss it very much, I shall miss Liz’s home cooking even more.

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Thursday 3rd March 2016 – WHAT A NIGHTMARE!

The first person to put in an appearance during my nocturnal ramble last night was, would you believe, my mother. I was so surprised, if not shocked, to see her that I sat bolt upright in bed. What on earth was she doing there? I can’t remember what role she was playing last night because the whole memory of whatever I was doing at the time was immediately wiped away.
And if that’s not enough to be going on with, the next person to put in an appearance, once I’d calmed down and gone back to sleep, was my father. I was living back in my house in Gainsborough Road, but in the front room that had been converted into a bedroom. And when my father turned up (he was apparently living somewhere else in the house) at about 6:30am, he brought none other than Percy Penguin with him. She was wearing a pair or pyjamas in a kind of flanellette material, pink with a white waistband, collar and cuffs. She hopped into bed with me for a while and then I left the bed to start to tidy up the room (as if that’s ever likely to happen anywhere where I’m living), totally ignoring her. And then I’d be back in bed again, and then back tidying up and ignoring her and so on it went.
But then I had a sudden flash of realisation about something. Out here in St Gervais there’s a proposal for one of these social cafés for the Alternative Community – not just a café but a “meeting place and social centre with board games, debates and discussions as well as food, including a vegan and vegetarian option” to quote just some of their advertising. While it’s an idea that receives my fullest support, it’s all very utopic and I’ll give it 6 months at the most. But anyway, last night, while I was in my bedroom with Percy Penguin in my house, I suddenly realised that it was the Opening Night of this café and so abandoning Percy Penguin yet again, off I went to St Gervais – a mere 850 miles or so from Crewe but since when has that ever bothered me during a nocturnal ramble? I’ve travelled much greater distances than that. When I arrived, I found that one of the people who was in charge was one of the footballers of FC Pionsat St Hilaire. He was talking about using he venue for boxing matches and training and the like, and so I asked him if he was aware that a boxing venue needed to have a doctor present at all times if there was action of any kind in the ring and who was going to pay for this. he was clearly unaware of this – he just shrugged his shoulders and wandered off into the crowd. I had a wander around, admiring the nice, shiny and polished wooden floor, and ended up at the buffet in an annex at the back. Most of the products were chocolate-based and so I asked the two girls who were serving which ones were the vegan option, but they just looked at me helplessly.
The moral of this story – particularly the latter part of it – is that leaving aside my natural cynicism (and I am the first to admit it) many of these so-called social projects are all very well and good but in 99% of these cases they lack the professionalism, the foresight, the staying power and the finance to be successful, being far too detached from reality to see what is going on. Once the initial enthusiasm wears off, they run out of ideas and can’t keep the momentum going.
Mind you, I would love to be proved wrong.

As for the moral of the first part, I cannot think for the life of me what my parents were doing during the night appearing on my travels like that. One of them is bad enough but both of them – that’s enough to put me off going to sleep for the rest of my life. I still shudder when I think about it even now, and I fled from home almost 45 years ago.

So while I was slowly coming round this morning after the alarm went off, I heard a car pull up outside. Yes, it was the nurse, so I half-ran, half-fell downstairs at something of a rather indecent turn of speed for me these days. But the news – whether this is good or bad, I dunno, is that my stitches aren’t there. I asked him to look and so he did. Either they have fallen out on their own, they have dissolved, the skin has grown over them, or there weren’t any in there to start with. Only time will tell and I’ll have to wait until Monday when I see the surgeon.

Today, I’ve had a day off and done nothing at all. I reckon that I deserve some time for myself. I have plenty to do but a day here and there won’t hurt (I wish that I didn’t). I have however made myself a pizza and in a few minutes I’ll be off for another slow walk to see how I do. I’ll try to push a little farther on.

But here’s a thing – and I forgot to mention it yesterday which is a surprise because it made such an impression upon me.

When I was in the hospital yesterday, I was in the room next to the office – and in the chair underneath the hatch which was open so that I could quite clearly hear everything that was going on in there. And one thing that did happen was that the chief nurse was ringing up people about their blood results.

One call she made to a woman was clearly answered by the woman’s partner and went something along the lines of “we have her blood test results and they show that she has a blood count of 6.8. She must be very tired so she will need to lie down right away and we’ll send an ambulance for her”

Sure enough, when she did arrive here, not only was it an emergency ambulance that brought her in but she was on a stretcher.

When my blood count dropped to 6.8, I didn’t have this treatment. Not a bit of it. I was made to come under my own locomotion over 50kms, park Caliburn up somewhere in the car park and then walk all the way across to the hospital and up into the ward.

I dunno whether it’s whether your face fits, or whether she has some other illness of which I am unaware, but there’s certainly some kind of two-speed hospitalisation procedure going on here. maybe I’m just unlucky, or maybe I’m made of more sterner stuff.

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Wednesday 2nd March 2016 – I’M BACK …

… from the hospital, thanks to Liz who brought me home after she knocked off work. And thanks again to Liz who also took me there too.

That meant a crawl out of bed at some ridiculous time like 07:30 and a rushed breakfast, and then off on the road.

And I was pretty exhausted too, for last night I was on my travels again. And things about my house are clearly preying on my mind because I was somewhere out there. I’m not quite sure where all of this started but I remember it from walking down a footpath (which isn’t there) at the back of my house (which wasn’t my house) through the woods (which aren’t there) and out into a field around the back where this path took a sharp right-hand turn due to a very high bank being in the way. I’d lived here for years but this was the first time that I’d really paid much interest in this bank and I was astonished when a passenger train rattled its way along it. Five minutes later, a swarm of people came along the path and caught me in the middle of a reverie. It turned out that there was a railway station here in Virlet – the train had stopped there and discharged these people. I’d had no idea whatever that there was a railway station here, especially one so convenient for my house. All of the time I’d been getting the train to the nearest rail junction and then catching the bus, and this was all quite inconvenient.This railway station in Virlet opened up all kinds of new opportunities.
From here I ended up in a pub somewhere in Nantwich – I had an idea that it was something like the Millfields (which has featured before on my travels). Someone was having problems with the indicators on his car – a late-model Nissan 180B I think – and so I had volunteered to fix them. I wasn’t making much progress and so I was tempted just to stick them back any old how but twisting the front flasher around, it started to work correctly and so I was quite happy. All of these manoeuvres had led me to get into a position where my head was stuck though the serving hatch and so the barman asked me what I wanted. I replied that I wanted nothing at the moment, so I could see the landlord making a face and a gesture or two to the barman to hurry up and get rid of me. I ended up though having to bend down to screw this front indicator light into the leg of this person (yes, it’s all logical, this, isn’t it?) but he told me that where I was screwing it, it wasn’t there before. I could see that – in fact I could see on his leg exactly where it used to be because there were little scabs there over the wounds that the screws had made – and I told him that it was going to be very painful if I were to screw it back exactly where it was. But he insisted and told me to go ahead – and so I did.

We arrived in Montlucon about 10 minutes late but seeing as they weren’t ready for me (the blood didn’t arrive until 10:40) it made no difference whatever.

The nurse putting my drain in was astonished. “Mr Hall” she said. “You really do have some thick skin”
“Well, what do you expect?” I asked. “I used to be married”.

And then I sat around and waited, read a book, did some work on the computer, downloaded a pile more films, all of that kind of thing, and chatted to a couple of friends on the internet. And I had lunch too – a plate of lentils and diced carrots, a vegetable pâté, a fruit purée and an orange. Much to my surprise, they even remembered to bring me a coffee.

It was all done by 14:30 and I was ready to be discharged. That meant sitting in a draughty hospital foyer but much to my surprise they allowed me to stay up there in the warmth. That was a good move because I button-holed my doctor up there and told him that I wasn’t satisfied with my progress and the follow-up that I was (or wasn’t) having. He was quite insistent that everything was normal – the fact that I was having blood tests and the transfusion showed that there was a follow-up.

But I asked him about the loss of blood – whether it was normal for me to lose so much blood so rapidly. He told me that things wouldn’t settle down for a couple of months, but he was lost for words when I replied that at the rate that I’m losing blood, I would be lucky to still be here in a couple of weeks, never mind months.

And he was also lost for words when I told him that I still had my stitches in – some 5 weeks or so after the operation. But he told me that that’s not his department – I need to see the surgeon (and so I tried to, and she was out of course).

However, I told him that I had been summoned to attend a meeting with the Conseil Général of my insurance company and made up a good story of why that should be so, and so he’s arranged for me to have a copy of my file the next time that I’m there. What I really want it for is of course to take to Leuven with me when I go.

Liz came for me after she finished work and now I’m back here, having had more pie, green beans and new potatoes for tea.

And it was just as gorgeous as yesterday. I really am so lucky staying here with Liz and Terry who are doing such an excellent job of looking after me. As I have said before, I shall be really sorry to leave.

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Monday 29th February 2016 – LOCK UP YOUR DAUGHTERS AND HIDE THE SILVER!

Especially if you live in Leuven, in Belgium. Because I’ll be off on my travels in early course and Leuven is the destination.

I was on the phone for quite some time this morning, firstly to the hospital at Montlucon clarifying all of the appointments that are organised for the next couple of weeks. And once we had done that, I spent the rest of the morning on the phone to the UZ Leuven in Belgium. I told them a brief story of my medical history, how I was satisfied with neither my treatment nor my progress and, quite surprisingly, the doctor with whom I spoke totally agreed with me. I ought to be doing better than this.

The upshot of this is that he’s agreed to see me in Leuven on 22 March at 14:00. And so I’m going.

What’s even nicer is that my friend Alison who lives a short drive away from Leuven has very kindly offered to put me up for a couple of days while I’m there and let me borrow one of her three cats. I think that that’s a really nice and generous gesture on her part and makes me feel so much better. Terry however clearly reckons that she doesn’t know me all that well.

And not before time too because I had the blood test this morning and the results were ready by teatime.

And it’s grim reading. What started out at 10.4 when I was in hospital and went down to 9.8 and then to 9.0 has now dropped dramatically through the floor to a dismal figure of just 8.0 – that’s a loss of over 12% in a week. And that’s after everything that I’ve been through and all that I’ve suffered over these last couple of months. Nothing has improved, I’ve picked up a pulmonary embolism and I’ve suffered pain like I never knew existed.

And all, apparently, for nothing.

And the thing that galls me the most is that my loss of blood is dramatic to say the least, and there’s not been a peep out of the hospital. I would have thought that this is all becoming urgent, not to mention crucial, and the people at the hospital haven’t shown even the slightest hint of interest at all.

In other news, I’ve had a reply back to my e-mail the other day. They’ve asked for my phone number so they can call me for a chat. Right after I made “other arrangements” for a second opinion. But of course this phone call is probably to tell me that I’ve been sacked or some such. I wouldn’t be surprised.

So having got all of that off my chest, what else has been happening?

We had another night of being careful how we left the bed due to bits of me being all over the floor. Twice in two nights, this.
But back in the arms of Morpheus and I was back off to a lock-up garage somewhere that I didn’t know and in there was some kind of small two-door estate car, dark blue, resembling a late 1960s Toyota or a FIAT 128. I was looking at this along with another person who had some kind of mechanical aspirations. The vehicle had been bought by my brother at an auction for £400, which was a lot of money to pay for such a vehicle, never mind its poor condition, and the person I was with expressed his surprise that my brother hadn’t tried to beat down the vendor to a more realistic price. Anyway, I couldn’t hang about. I was off up to Stoke on Trent, somewhere round about the Waterloo Road (which it wasn’t, but never mind) in a big van that I had at the time. I ended up down a side street in a maze of terraced houses being shown a room that was to let in a terraced house that was being used as a lodging-house. A girl that I knew – someone from my old days in Stoke on Trent – was running the place and so I asked her about it. She said that it was formerly a vet’s office but when it came onto the market it was too good to miss and so she converted it into rooms, with she and her family living in a tiny room right at the top. We went outside, there was a lovely (if that’s the word) view of the street lights and the urban area in the dark of the North-Western Potteries, all of the lights twinkling in what was a very late and clear evening. They say that the best time to see the Potteries is during the hours of darkness during a power cut and the local newspaper once famously described the old railway line that passed through here as “10 miles of the world’s worst scenery”.
But scenery notwithstanding, I’ve now moved on to Brussels (so there really isn’t all that much difference) living in an apartment that was part of a house conversion – what they call a trois pièces en enfilade. It’s not a very pretty apartment but anyway we start off with me not being there. I’m with Nerina up on the huge concrete windswept plateau on the high-rise council estate not too far from the Heysel Stadium and we’re looking over the parapet to some mid-rise (about 10-storey, I dunno) concrete-and-glass tower blocks. There are about dour of them, with a square footprint and they have some kind of reputation of being quite comfortable and pleasant places to live. Nerina was saying that we should have gone to live in a place like that and while I didn’t disagree for a minute, I did say (and quite rightly so) that a place such as that is way outside our budget. But we ended up back at our apartment (or maybe it was mine and she was only visiting) and we started to tidy up the place. There had been a new television delivered and I was idly flicking through the channels when I suddenly found a Morecambe and Wise film – and one which wasn’t part of the Morecambe and Wise trilogy either. And so I sat down to watch it while Nerina sat down at the other end of the apartment to do some painting. At a certain moment she asked me to pass her a bottle of paint of a red colour and so I walked over there to hand it to her, but it was the wrong bottle that I gave her.
Before she had time to say anything about this, the alarm went off and that was that. And despite a reasonable night’s sleep I was thoroughly exhausted. It was all that I could do to stagger downstairs.

At least I didn’t have to wait too long for the nurse to come to take my blood test.

Once everything had been sorted out and we’d had lunch (I had the very last of the curry with some bread) I cracked on with the dictaphone notes and now, there remain just 26 soundfiles to transcribe and we’ll be done. And I can’t wait to finish them off because there’s a lot of other work that has now built up and I need to deal with that too.

For tea we had pasta and sauce and garlic bread, and I’m really going to miss all of this when I go to Leuven – if I ever get there because I went out for a walk just now with Liz and I couldn’t even make 50 metres up the hill outside.

I have therefore cancelled my little trip out on Wednesday to collect Caliburn as I’ll be in no state at all to drive him.

All of this is starting to look very ominous indeed and I am dismayed.

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Tuesday 23rd February 2016 – AND WASN’T THAT A WASTE OF TIME?

I finally had my blood count results back today. And the total has dropped from 9.8 to 9.0 – that’s not far short of 10% – in a week. And not only that – some of the things that needed to go up have indeed gone up, but some other things that needed to go up – including the most important things like the haemoglobin – have gone down. According to the infirmière who comes twice a day to inject me with the anti-coagulant, this means that it’s not just a simple case of dilution of the blood but that there’s something much more serious going on somewhere.

This means that it’s time to put Plan B into … errr … operation. Tomorrow, I’m going to see about having a chat with the Médecin Général of my Health Insurance company to see what he thinks about me having a second opinion somewhere with a specialist.

But as you can tell, I am not amused by all of this.

I didn’t manage to make it to Worleston last night by the way. I ended up being sidetracked elsewhere. I started out on the borders of Shropshire, Cheshire and Wales, my old stamping ground from many years ago. I was heading back north towards Crewe, I suppose, and I had the wife of a friend in the car with me. She was complaining about her husband, how he was all untidy and disorganised and how she wished he was like another one of the people that we knew. I cautioned her about that, because in my experience the tidiness and organisation of our other friend was nothing but superficial and just underneath the surface was a kind of chaos worse than ever you could imagine.
So back at my place in France where I brought a coach home – an old Ford R1114 with a Plaxton Supreme body. I drove it down the lane as far as my concrete parking place (which is most unlikely) and managed to turn it round at the bottom and park it facing uphill (which is impossible). I had a few things to do there and then went off for a walk, which took me right out to the southern edge of Stoke on Trent, somewhere round about Blurton or Trentham. Here in the middle of the road was a football match taking place – one team in green and the other in white. It wasn’t a suitable place to play a football match because the road had quite a steep slope, the top of which was defended by the green team. Stanley Matthews was playing on the green team and word had gone out that if his team won, he would be made man of the match, so right at the end of the game the green team had a shot on goal. The white goalkeeper, none other than Lev Yashin, stood there watching the ball, making no effort to save it. When I asked him about it, he replied that Matthews deserved the reward. And so I headed back home, reckoning that it would take me about an hour to walk from here (yes, quite!) and I ended up heading through the centre of Stoke-on-Trent. I was passing by the bus station at Hanley (I go a strange way home, don’t I?) just as a former work colleague was arriving. he told me that my absence was missed because the boss wanted to see me and a pile of other people (who he named). It turned out that the people who he named were those who were top of the list to receive a promotion and so I was wondering whether this meant that I was in a line to receive a promotion too. This was certainly some quite exciting news and I regretted that I hadn’t been there at the time.
The next part of my voyage was even more interesting, because I was actually a nun! (And before anyone ever says anything, my brother really was a nun, although not very many people know this. Every time he was up before the bench, the magistrate used to ask him his occupation and he always replied “nun”). I was going for an interview for a religious post and having a really good chat with the interviewers. They showed me a kind of green plastic key with holes in it at strategic places and asked me if I knew who it was who made the most profit from this. Of course, I had no idea and so they told me that it was eBay. That surprised me, but they replied “when you are using this to do something like buying 30,000 ice creams, by far the greatest percentage of the money is taken by eBay”. I was astounded by the figure of 30,000 and it clearly showed. “Didn’t you realise that as part of your duties you would be taking 30,000 children out for walks?” I replied that I hadn’t given it any thought at all and that if this were part of the duties of the post I wouldn’t hesitate in carrying it out. It was the way that the matter had been presented that had caught me off-balance. But it turned out that the question of the green key related to a form of payment, rather like some kind of credit card. It was inserted into a slot, something similar to an old punch-card data input system, to confirm a payment made on credit.

But going back to the previous night, I was here on my own all morning (it might not sound relevant, but you’ll see how it all develops) as Terry went off to do some work and so, in a mad fit of nostalgia, I played some music that I had on the laptop, and played it pretty loud too. One of the tracks (if that’s the correct word to use) was the “Simple Minds” live concert that I mixed for Radio Anglais
 a while ago, and I do have to say that it’s probably the best live concert that I’ve ever mixed. The music is probably the best too, and it features the track “Someone Somewhere in Summertime”. And as I was listening to it, I picked up on the words
“Somewhere there is some place, that one million eyes can’t see”
“And somewhere there is someone, who can see what I can see”
And while I’ve found the place, what I haven’t found in all of my life is someone who can see what I can see. If I had to name the biggest disappointment of all of my life, that would be it, and maybe the vision (because it was more than a simple dream) of the Girl From Worleston the other night is something subconsciously to do with that. As you all know, I’m a great believer in the subconscious, instinct, second sight and all of that.
Anyway, have a listen to Someone, Somewhere in Summertime.

In other news, I’ve not done too much with my dictaphone notes because I’ve been rather sidetracked, dealing with issues arising from the very controversial historian Dr Alwyn Ruddock.

She was (because she died in 2005) a well-known and respected historian who did a great deal of research into the Italian banking families of the 15th and 16th Centuries and during her research, she came across some so-far undiscovered information concerning John Cabot. According to her press release into the Academic World, this information would radically change our perception of the discovery of North America in the 15th Century.

She signed a contract with the Exeter University Press to publish a book, and began to undertake some serious research into her subject. She was sent information from a couple of other historians who had uncovered hitherto-unknown documents and who felt that she was best-placed to use the material, but she dismissed most of that in a rather offhand way.

The upshot of all of this is that she never published her book and when she died, hordes of scholars were eager to peruse her notes to see if they could bring her research to a conclusion and to bring into the public domain her rather startling discoveries. Unfortunately, they were all confounded as in her will, she had left instructions that all of her research notes, photographs etc was to be destroyed unread. And indeed, her executors had shredded 87 sacks of documents and all of the clues to her discoveries were lost.

I’ve never ever met a scholar who has wilfully destroyed his or her research notes. Most scholars have an assistant who will carry on the work if the unforeseen should occur, or else they bequeath their papers to a University so that another researcher could pick them up. And that’s how research should be carried on – as a community project. And if you find that all of your work is ultimately incorrect, then scholars should be sufficiently detached from their subject to contradict themselves, as I have seen several scholars do.

But now all of this work is lost and the poor researcher who discovered some documents in the British Library in 1987 and which were kicked into touch by Dr Ruddock now has to creep back up a dark alley to rescue them and start again, after a delay of almost 30 years.

And we are still no nearer to finding out what it was about Cabot’s voyages to North America that, according to Dr Ruddock, would change our perception of the discovery of North America.

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Monday 15th February 2016 – WHAT A NIGHT!

Last night was definitely, to coin a well-worn football phrase, a night of two halves. I was in bed early watching one of the series of films of the “Three Mesquiteers”, a series that was heavily parodied in The Three Amigos! but afterwards, I just couldn’t doze off to sleep. I was awake for hours. By the time 01:30 came round, I was in agony too. I told you a day or so ago that I was really feeling uncomfortable in my stomach, and the feeling had developed right through the night until it was unbearable.

In the end, I staggered off down the corridor to the porcelain horse and this is where it all starts to become vulgar, because if … errr … flatulence had been a recognised sport, I would have comfortably won an Olympic Gold Medal.

Strangely (or maybe not), I felt so much better afterwards and even managed a decent sleep, of which I remember almost nothing at all. But I do recall some kind of preoccupation that the nursing staff at the hospital had with all of this. A couple of times per day they would ask me if I had … errr … made any gas recently. Clearly, in the nature of post-operative care, that kind of thing is quite important, and after last night’s effort I can now understand why.

This was like something out of “Kez”, which is quite surprising because that is a film that I have never ever seen, so how would I know? I can’t remember too much now about what was actually happening but what I do remember was that I was having an aerial view of what was going on, actually as if I had been the kestrel that was flying above the scene. It was all rather disorientating.

We had the nurse this morning, and my blood count has gone down again – to just 9.8. I’m hugely disappointed by that but then again, if it’s too early to be glad about the positive news from Thursday’s test, then it’s too early to be sad about today’s. I have to bear in mind that if someone had offered me 9.8 as a permanent figure after my operation, I would have been glad to take it, given some of the dire results beforehand. Don’t forget that I haven’t had any “extra” blood for well over a week.

We also had a heavy snowfall too. The temperature has been teetering around freezing point for most of the day so it was really only like slushy rain, I suppose, and while it looked as if it was so impressive, it melted away almost as soon as it landed. It will be interesting to see what happens overnight – I have to go back to hospital tomorrow.

The snowfall didn’t stop a visitor arriving. To save Liz the trouble of going out, one of her pupils came here and had a two-hour lesson. It was interesting for me to overhear what was being discussed as I’d never previously really sat in on a lesson.

For tea I had a beautiful bean pasta-bake with grated cheese. Gorgeous, it was. What was even nicer was the vegan ice-cream. That’s still just a little short on shop-quality as far as the smoothness goes (which is no surprise seeing that we aren’t set up here for an industrial operation) but as far as the taste goes, it was excellent and Liz can be proud of herself. It’s the third batch that she has made, all of which have been through trial-and-error, and each time there’s a major improvement.

I shall be really sorry when I have to go home.

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Thursday 11th February 2016 – FOR THE FIRST TIME …

… since coming out of my morphine-induced semi-coma about 10 days ago, I haven’t been on a nocturnal ramble during the night. Or, at least, if I did, I know absolutely nothing at all about it.

I had an early night and watched a film on the laptp, one of the ones that I downloaded from http://www.archive.org while I was in hospital, chatted briefly to a friend on the internet, and the next thing that I knew, it was 06:15. A stroll down the corridor to the porcelain horse, and then the next thing that I noticed after that was the raucous cacophony of my alarm clock telling me that it was 07:45. I remember absolutely nothing else at all.

The nurse finally turned up at 08:40 for the blood test, and then I could have breakfast. And then, I’ve done precisely nothing at all. And I don’t care either. I’ve spent most of the day either relaxing or dozing. And that’s my lot.

As for the blood test though, there’s some good news. Most of the things that should be expected to go up have indeed gone up, and most of the things that should be expected to go down have indeed gone down. My blood count is a massive, astonishing 10.4 and it’s never ever been that high. Of course, one swallow doesn’t make a summer and I’d want to see 20 blood tests with that kind of figure before I pass judgement, but it is an encouraging sign.

To celebrate, I made myself a pizza for tea. The process was slow and agonising but the end result was well-worth it. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Now I’m off for an early night, hoping that I can have yet another really good sleep. I deserve more than a couple after all of my exertions and I’m hoping that they’ll come soon enough.

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Tuesday 26th January 2016 – I WAS RIGHT!

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

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

And then we had the blood pressure test

And then the blood sample

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

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

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

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

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

And so she went off to talk to the surgeon.

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

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

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

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

If I ever do.

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Monday 25th January 2016 – B*GG*R!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thursday 21st January 2016 – SO IT WAS NERINA …

… who drew the short straw tonight, coming with me to take a coach party down to the south coast, Worthing or somewhere similar. We stopped the night at a town not too far away, somewhere near Lewes. While we were there, I rang up the hotel on the coast to make all of the arrangements for our arrival, and to find out the directions to the hotel. When I came out of the telephone booth into the bar, there were several giant-sized people in the bar, all professional wrestlers who were handing out promotional gifts. I was given a cigarette lighter (of course, I don’t smoke) but it leaked and I was getting all of the fluid all over me and smelling like a tart’s boudoir. In the end, Nerina sent me to wash my hands so I went into the toilet but all of the sinks were full of baby clothes – someone had filled up all of the sinks and left the clothes in there to soak. This had annoyed everyone in the hotel. I went to someone else’s coach because I knew that he had a kind of tap and hand-washing arrangement on an extendible pipe right by the driver’s seat (it was a left-hand drive coach but the entrance was on the left). I used this to wash off my hands. While I was doing this, other coach drivers came up to ask what I was doing, so I explained. I had difficulty closing off this tap no matter what I did, so the other drivers had a try and they couldn’t do it either, so they started to fill their bottles of drink with it. Coming off the coach I heard some woman talking to one of the coach hostesses talking about exit doors on coaches. She was going on about a particular kind of coach and describing a particular kind of door, to which I interjected that that was a B10M (which, incidentally, is a model of chassis, not a body) but no-one was listening and the hostess was saying that it’s not an E62 like we have. So I said “B10M” again, to just the same amount of notice. And back in the hotel still filthy, still covered in cigarette lighter fluid, and I eventually found a map of how to reach this hotel. It wasn’t where I thought at all but to the west of the town on a headland and fairly easy to reach. There was a big coach park right opposite just by the headland and also a small restaurant close by which was useful because I knew what hotel food was like and I could see me eating out every night if the hotel food was rubbish.
And Maria, having made her rather dramatic entrance onto our stage yesterday, is back for a follow-up appearance. This time however, she was quite seriously ill and had been discharged from her employment at the EU. I was running a business from my home with about three or four people sitting at desks doing things (I can’t remember what now) and so to help out Maria and make sure that her Social Security obligations were met, I offered her a small job at my place. And so she came to work, not doing very much. On one day needed to go to a medical appointment so I offered to take her. “You can’t go like that” she said, indicating my present attire, and nipped off upstairs (I’ve had exactly the same conversation with a friend of mine a couple of months ago, by the way). She came back down again with a pair of denim jeans. “Put these on”. “What size are they?” I enquired, to which she replied that they were 32-inch. Now up until I stopped running in the late 1990s I could fit into 32″ jeans, but even on a nocturnal ramble I knew full well that they would be too small, but I tried them on and found that I actually needed a belt to hold them up, which amazed me. But anyway, off we went to the hospital and on the way, I found that the two of us were holding hands, something that Maria would never ever do in real life (and which parallels, incidentally, something that was going through my mind with another person just before I dropped off to sleep).
Later on, the two of us found ourselves out on the ski slopes. We were fighting our way out through hordes of children up the steps to the three ski-lifts that were there and then I came to a sudden stop. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on three or four occasions in the past my nocturnal rambles have taken me to a certain ski-run which involves a passage down a narrow valley, a difficult passage through and over some kind of watershed and then a glorious run down another valley which made all of the hard work quite worthwhile (and we even visited it in our red Cortina estate on one occasion during one night) – anyway, this was where I was heading. But I couldn’t remember how to get there now. Looking at the map board, I could see a black run indicated (ski runs are colour coded to give their degree of difficulty and black runs are the most difficult) which I reckoned would be the one that I wanted, but I couldn’t work out how to get there. Maria said that she knew the way but was surprisingly evasive when it came to actually telling me. I was looking for a map to take with me but there wasn’t one available and so I was feeling really disappointed about this as I had really been looking forward to revisiting this ski run.

On that note of disappointment the alarm went off and I came downstairs. And then had a long loooooooooong wait for the nurse to come. He’d forgotten that it was blood test day and was busy doing his rounds elsewhere while I was sitting here starving.

And talking of blood tests, here’s a shock. I have an id and password so I can go to the laboratory’s website any time after 16:30 and pick up my results. And this evening I found that my blood count has NOT gone down. Now there’s a surprise. I wondered why I had not been “summoned to appear at nine o’clock in the forenoon to answer to the aforesaid” at the hospital.

But this brings with it it’s own problem. I mean – this is good news, make no mistake – that if the blood count is down on Monday, I may well be called in on Tuesday, but I’m being admitted to hospital on Wednesday for my operation on Thursday. On Wednesday I’m definitely having a transfusion (I’ve been told that for definite) and it’s likely that on Thursday and Friday they will be carrying on (assuming that I’m still here on Friday). Too much strange blood all at once can provoke a strange reaction and I don’t want one of those while I’m under the knife. I would have been much happier to go in tomorrow regardless.

But apart from that, I’ve had a quiet day in the house doing not very much at all. I’ve not even set foot outside (although Terry took his van for the controle technique – it passed, by the way). There was a huge mega-sale of items on the 3D site that I use so I spent a little money today (and I would have spent a great deal more had I had it to hand) and I pressed on with my 3D Animation course.

The course set us an interesting challenge. We are doing computer-generated 3D animation now (the part of the course that is of most interest to me) and the aim was to produce a bedroom and fit it with items so that the occupant of the room could be clearly identified. I have therefore been scouring www.sharecg.com – the leading free resource community for the 3D program that I use -for items and happily building a bedroom for my K4 character. She now has a bed with teddy bear, a desk with homework scattered about, a chest of drawers with a boom box on it, a wardrobe with clothes hanging in it (it took me hours to do that), a skateboard with helmet and also a pile of clothes scattered about the floor. No prizes for guessing who is the occupant of THAT room.

Apart from that, I’ve had a shower (so that’s me sorted until September) and a change of clothes (ditto) and done badger all else. And ask me if I care.

But I suppose that really, I do care. I can’t go on like this. I’m not looking forward to the operation and I’m looking forward even less to the week or so that will follow. But I need to do something positive and put my life back on the rails. Much as I enjoy being here, I really want to go home and get on with everything.

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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.

heavy snowfall january 2016 sauret besserve puy de dome franceAnd 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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