Friday 3rd November 2023 – SO MUCH FOR THAT …

… idea about having a good night’s sleep.

It might have been only 23:00 when I went to bed but at 03:30 I was still wide awake with no sign whatever of ever going to sleep.

However I must have done at some point but I was awake again before the alarm went off even if I wasn’t actually up and about.

Once the alarm went off I made it to my feet and went off for my medication. And then back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night. I’d been away somewhere for several weeks, it might have been the hospital, and I’d parked Caliburn in a shed on a piece of waste land at the back of a pile of terraced houses. I went there to pick him up. There were cars all over the place, being worked on or being dismantled etc. Going into the shed Caliburn, who was now an LT Volkswagen, had had one of his air vents bodily ripped out so there was a hole in the front panel. I opened the doo and there were engines, cowlings, covers and shrouds everywhere. I fought my way in. A guy came running over. He asked if I could give him a jump start. I started the van and rolled forward and it was to his father’s wheelchair. We had to put the leads from the van to the wheelchair in order to make it start

There had been something earlier. I’d gone on a long-distance journey with someone. Everyone else had gone at the end of whatever this meeting was. The only way out for me was to climb over the fence. That was extremely complicated and I ended up having to do practically a forward roll over the fence to go out again. I’d brought someone with me. We were talking about the accounts and he said “I’ll let you off some of the accounts in view of the fact that you drove”. I thought that the reason why we took so long was because we had to go back once or twice for things that he’d forgotten. That really bumped up the mileage. He’s not doing me any favours at all by knocking a couple of things off. I should be sending him a bill for all the extra mileage.

This “Peace Train” thing (whatever that might have been) was about Joan Baez and her guitar being hung from some kind of monorail track and being driven around as if she was a train on the monorail while she was playing the guitar and singing that particular song.

A kitten was wedged underneath the foot of the table and stuck up against the glass surface which was why it was looking so peculiar. I actually dreamt that bit in French and began to dictate it in French.

Finally I was coming back from work somewhere and I’d stopped in a town to have a coffee. I had a wheelbarrow with a few bricks and things like that in it which I no longer needed so I just abandoned it in the street and went in. The coffee bar was packed and there wasn’t room anywhere but the proprietor encouraged the patrons to move up a little. It made a space for me next to a girl. I sat there with my coffee and we had quite a chat before she disappeared. Then I had to leave. I was in a wheelchair by this time, doing down the steps in it when I noticed her outside. She asked if she could give me some help but I told her that I’d be able to manage. We were sorting through a few things of hers, LPs and CDs etc because there was a market on in the town where there was a stall for 2nd-hand CDs etc. I noticed in her glove compartment things like books about camping, scouting and so on. I thought that she was one of these strange “jolly hockey sticks” types of girls who never seem to grow up.

Later on I staggered out onto the bus and went to St Nicolas for my shopping. There wasn’t much that I needed but it was nice to be out and about and to have my coffee while I waited for the bus home.

Once more it was a struggle up the stairs and I really can’t go on like this much longer. But back in here I made myself some soup – and then I crashed out for half an hour.

In a couple of weeks’ time it’s the birthday of one of my neighbours and she was having some of her family around so I went up to say hello and to give her a box of chocolates that I’d bought her.

But as usual, I didn’t stay long. I’m not really the sociable type, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and after an hour or so I came back down here to crash out yet again.

What I’ve been doing this afternoon is to hack some sound-files about, tidy up some of the music directories (yes, directories – I’m still working in DOS 5.0 in my head) and reviewing some pages in my blog. There are quite a few that need updating with things missed off that I never had the time to do at the time, and I want to catch up with that.

As well as that, I’ve been chatting on the internet. Liz is helping me choose a couple of new domestic appliances, Rosemary and I talked about the storm and then Hans in Munich has found some real Bavarian gingerbread spice mix and would I like some?

Actually, today I finished the last of the honey and oat biscuits that I made and some gingerbread biscuits would be nice but the spices won’t be here by then. I fancy making some chocolate ones this weekend. The last batch of chocolate ones that I made were really good. Add some orange and some coconut flavouring and they’ll be really nice.

Tea tonight was chips cooked in the air fryer and salad with one of those strange burgers that I bought a while ago, and it was actually quite nice.

But that’s got me thinking. I’ll have to send my spies out to look at the pavements at one of the bus stops at Yquelon. There’s a bus stop that’s not too far away from Noz and I’m wondering if I ought to have a go at going there on the bus some time to see if I could survive the journey.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve hit the jackpot on several occasion at Noz with the end-of-range stuff that they have, and I wonder if I ought to think about going again.

Thursday 2nd November 2023 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about the weather last night. It did become rather windy. Not that there was very much about which we needed to worry – the gusts of wind didn’t go any faster than a mere 207 kilometres per hour as measured at the weather station by the lighthouse at the end of the road.

As well as police patrols on the cliffs to keep people away, several roads were closed, including the one that goes along the promenade near the sailing school where the waves were washing over the wall into the car park opposite.

At 06:00 the emergency services and the council workmen were called out to begin removing the trees that had blown down everywhere and to re-erect the signposts that had been uprooted.

It didn’t help my sleep very much either. It seemed that almost every time that I was off on a nocturnal ramble around and about, a large gust of wind awoke me and that was that.

Nevertheless when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was flat out asleep and it was something of a struggle to raise myself from the dead.

Later on I tried to telephone the garage about Caliburn’s Controle Technique but there was no-one answering. I imagine that they were among the many people who didn’t make it into work today. I know that my cleaner never made it into town. She gave up after going 150 metres.

Armed with a mug of coffee and a home-made fruit bun I had a listen to the rather depressing voyages on the dictaphone and to reflect on what might have been. There was something about meeting people via the internet last night. I can’t remember all that much about it except that there was a warning that if you encountered anyone taller than 5’8″ you had to communicate the fact to the organisers rather than proceeding as you might normally do. It wasn’t quite as simple as that – it was a complicated affair about meeting people and not simply a dating site or something like that.

We set out later from somewhere in the North to go somewhere down South in one of the hospital taxi vehicles. It looked as if the paperwork for my stay in hospital to sort myself out had been accepted and I could now travel that kind of distance instead of being stuck to a hospital that was much closer to home but maybe isn’t as specialised.

And then we were discussing ways in which our department could improve its output. Among the many suggestions was one that we should work closer with the local authorities. I set out a four-point plan of what I felt that the local authorities needed to do with out work, which was continually being interrupted by the guy in charge. There was a fifth point that I mentioned that each side should show the other some respect. For some reason he blew up at that. he began to list all the things that he said had happened including the fact that one of my colleagues had spent several weeks preparing something to be worked on by the local authority. I asked him “if that’s the case why are we having this meeting today to discuss ways of doing it if our colleague has already done it?” to which he blew up even more. He made it clear that he had no interest whatever in listening to anything that we had to say. In the end I told him that if he’s going to call a meeting simply to listen to our complaints and then shoot us down in this kind of fashion there’s no point at all having the meeting and I was going to do some work that was more productive rather than waste time around here. Somewhere in this discussion there was a situation on a roundabout where there was a system of wooden stakes that had been installed on it. Everyone wondered what they were. Someone actually identified them as stakes used to hold bodies still when the bodies are being cremated. That had everyone puzzled as to why they would want to put something gruesome like this in the middle of the roundabout in the town.

We were back discussing the hospitalisation of a young girl, what we’d need to do to make her stay as practical as possible but a gust of wind awoke me just as it began.

And there I was back at the hospital again, back as a young teenager in the Admissions section ready to be given a bed etc. While I was checking in another gust of wind sprung up outside awoke me and made me lose my train of thought.

Back at the hospital yet again trying to enrol this young girl onto a course of hospital treatment but just as we were filling in the forms yet another gust of wind awoke me while I was in the middle of counting something and it disappeared.

At another moment some woman wanted a sink or wash hand basin installing in her house so I had a word with someone whom I knew and took all the material down there ready for him to start but he never turned up. This woman did nothing but moan all the time about why he’d never turned up, what she was missing etc. In the end I sat down and began to do the installation but apparently that wasn’t good enough either. We had everything that we needed in the end in the same place, the electricity, the water, etc. We could screw the sink to a batten somewhere. I was doing my best to have the job done quickly but she was making so much of a nuisance of herself etc that it was just making it impossible. Even doing things like asking her to read me the M number off the top of the bolt – she just handed me the bolt and told me to look at it myself which wasted more time regardless of how impolite it was etc – all kinds of situation like that. In the end I just did the job any old how. I could have done a much better job that I did but it was just taking so long with her continual interrupting me etc so I was glad to leave the house afterwards.

And finally we were back trying to get this young teenage girl into hospital ready for treatment but the noise of the wind was such that it was making it impossible for anyone to hear what anyone else was saying to whoever. It was all becoming extremely complicated. We ended up having to experiment with a diesel multiple-unit, a modern type, having it flying just a couple of feet above the railway line to see whether it would fit underneath the infrastructure etc ready for it to come into service as quickly as possible. Again there was all kinds of confusion with the noise of the wind and no-one could hear anyone else. We were having real difficulty completing these reports.

All of that and, for the first time, not a single person whom I recognised. That was disappointing. It’s been ages since Castor put in an appearance so I imagine that she’s now gone for good along with the Vanilla Queen whom I met in the Arctic in 2018. But it would be nice to see Zero or TOTGA again.

Usually though, it seems to be my immediate family who keep on appearing.

With going out to visit my neighbour this afternoon I had a strip-down wash (I’m not up to climbing into the bath for a shower after my fall the other day) and then changed all the bedding at long last.

Back in the bathroom I went one better than Dave Crosby. I’m not sure why because there’s no danger of me having the ‘flu for Christmas because Isabelle the district nurse came by to give me my ‘flu injection.

However, there could be several other reasons why I’ll probably not end up feeling up to par. But I won’t be looking in my rear view mirror and seeing a police car because I can’t drive these days.

Before I went to my neighbour’s, I put the bedding and a few other things into the washing machine and then at my neighbour’s, I showed her the letter that I’d written.

She suggested a few amendments so I’ll retype it later and then post it tomorrow if I succeed in making it to the shops. She also mentioned that we’ve been invited to another neighbour’s tomorrow lunchtime.

Back here I took the washing out of the machine and then shook my head wondering how I’ve managed to survive as long as I have.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the struggle that I had a couple of weeks ago to take a basket full of damp clothes to the clothes airer. When I came to Granville I bought a little trolley-type of thing, basically a plank with 4 castors, because I thought that I’d left the big one back on the farm.

As it happens, I hadn’t. It was in the back of Caliburn so I left the new one in a cupboard here. So today, I fetched it out, put the basket of clothes onto it, and then pushed it along with my crutches. If only I’d done that last time.

After that I came back in here and finished off all of the notes for the second radio programme and then went for tea – fried rice with some of those Chinese whatsits.

When they run out and I can’t buy any more, I’ll have a go at making them. Some of the stuffing that I make for my stuffed peppers maybe made a little differently and I can buy some of that thin brick pastry on-line. It should be interesting to see how they turn out

And that’s it for tonight. The wind has dropped so I might well have a decent sleep tonight in my nice clean bedding. And then depending on how I feel, I’ll head on the bus to St Nicolas and the shops to see what’s happening there.

It’ll do me good to go out and about

Wednesday 1st November 2023 – THERE WON’T BE MANY …

… people having much sleep tonight. And there’s a police patrol out on top of the cliffs just outside the front door making sure that no-one goes too close to the edge.

We are currently being battered by one of the fiercest storms that I’ve encountered so far, and seeing that this is the windiest corner in France, that’s saying something. It’s absolutely raging outside.

There wasn’t much in the way of sleep last night either.

It was rather later than usual when I went to bed and despite it being another turbulent night, I was actually up and about by 06:20. I couldn’t sleep at all.

Of course, being up and about is one thing. Being awake is something else completely and it took me quite a while to come to my senses. And that’s a surprise, seeing how few senses I have these days.

Once I’d livened up, after my morning coffee, I went tidying up. My bedroom is now looking a lot better than it did earlier. There were books and papers all over the place but now I can actually see some work surface.

In the kitchen and the dining area too. It’s been a couple of weeks since the cleaner has been and so the place is in a bit of a mess. You’ve no idea how difficult it is to perform even the simplest of tasks around here.

One thing that I did today was to switch on the heating. I’ve put it off for a couple of days because I wanted to see November in before I switched it on, and I was desperately clinging on towards the end.

Just now I mentioned the turbulent night. There were tons of stuff on the dictaphone. I started off with a girl whom I knew from Nerina’s office but I can’t remember very much at all about what was happening in it. I seem to have forgotten it all. I do remember suddenly realising that it was a Tuesday night. I’d been off sick for several days and if I didn’t go back into work in the morning I’d be in all kinds of serious trouble. I needed to get a grip, get my things together and head back into work in the morning.

Later on I wanted to sit down and write a letter about the apartment downstairs, how I thought that I ought to be moving into it. There were so many hoops and so on through which I had to jump that it was extremely complicated and needed a great deal of thought before I could sit down and write out a letter about it, making sure that the letter said everything that needed to be said without actually causing any problems for the recipient.

And then my brother and I were at it again last night … "again" sigh – ed. We’d had something to do and he wasn’t at all happy about it. I just couldn’t care less. I carried on going on my way anyway. We ended up in this building that had an Indian restaurant in it. I had a job there as a delivery driver. He’d been hanging on behind me as usual. I prepared everything and went out through the door into the street. For ages nothing happened so I had a patrol around the building to see whether there was anything else happening in there or anything else I could be doing because I needed to be earning some money. In the end I went back into the restaurant. My brother, who had now become some kind of girl Was actually preparing meals. He was moaning, complaining and shouting all the time about what he was having to do and how he didn’t want to do it etc, how he didn’t even like waiting on tables. The proprietor said “yes, I didn’t tell you about the waiting on tables bit but you knew everything else” but that didn’t stop him having a really good moan about everything. He was really unhappy about what was going on.

Meanwhile, I’d had an engine out of one of the Cortinas and had taken it to pieces to have a good look. I’d reassembled the block and sump and put them in position and had all the ancillaries like the manifolds, camshaft etc all there ready to go in. Nerina came round to have a look to see what I was doing. I showed her how the engine worked, what bits were where and what they did. She put her hand in there and touched something. She said “oh it’s loose”. I explained that everything there has to go in under tension – you can’t put one piece in, tighten it up completely, then put another bit in. You had to put all them pieces in together and tighten them up bit by bit while it all goes into tension – it’s all tightened up together slowly. She asked if I’d done anything to the engine. I replied “nothing, except to scratch the name on one of the pistons. This vehicle has done 300,000 miles and there isn’t a sign or wear in the bores, anywhere. I’d never seen an engine quite like this”. We were putting it all together. Also in the garage was an Austin A30 or A35. Some young person came into the garage to look around and saw the Austin. They noticed that the way that the grille and headlights were arranged made it look as if it was smiling and said “of look! This car’s really cute! It really likes me”.

But never mind that – last time I rebuild an engine from scratch in a Cortina it sheared off a big end cap from a con-rod while I was going down a dual carriageway at a rapid rate of knots

And finally a little girl came to see me in hospital. She was all of these “My Little Pony” humanoid figures lying around so she went over to look at them. Later on she began to play with some of them. I told her that she could choose one to play with because it had some work to do in the hospital and it was very important that it was ready when it was required to perform this particular task of work.

While we’re on the subject of letters, there’s a very important letter that I had to write today. I’ve not sent it off yet because, due to its nature, I want someone else to read it first. And so I’m going for coffee with the President of the Residents’ Committee tomorrow afternoon.

While the cleaner was here I finished off the notes for the radio programme, paired off the music for the next one and then wrote half of the notes for that one too. I’ll finish off those over the next couple of days and then dictate them late on Saturday night, assuming that the gale has subsided by them.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry and it was one of the best that I have made. The leftover stuffing needed lengthening, and as 5kg of potatoes was cheaper than 2.5 kg so that I now have the European Potato Mountain in my apartment, I lengthened it with a potato.

Into the mix was some soya yogurt to make it nice and creamy like a korma, and I took from the freezer some of the naan dough that I’d made a couple of weeks ago and had a garlic naan with it.

So I’m off to bed now, with my head stuck firmly under the quilt until tomorrow. And then we’ll see what people think about this letter that I’ve written. I’ve always worked on the principle that “if you don’t ask, you don’t get” and asking costs nothing anyway.

It might even be beneficial, and that would be something!

Tuesday 31st October 2023 – BANE OF BRITAIN …

… strikes again!

This morning, trying to connect to my Welsh class, nothing was working. My camera didn’t seem to connect to the site and neither did my microphone. Even worse, no-one accepted my request to be connected to the group.

You’ve no idea what I went through to make it work – connecting and reconnecting, even switching off and restarting the computer.

Eventually, the light went on in the back of my head and I worked out what was going on. It’s half-term, isn’t it?

Still, start as you mean to go on. I was asleep when the alarm went off this morning but I struggled to my feet fairly quickly. I went and had my medication, drinking the wrong drink this morning (yes, it definitely wasn’t my day) and then listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been.

I was in my Welsh class at first and told my tutor that I’d have to leave at 12:00 to go to the Re-education Clinic. She pulled a face which was a surprise. So i went outside and there was some old World War II equipment lying around outside. I could see various types of scenery relating to different arrangements. For example, Year 1 was a hat and a haversack, Year 2 was a grip bag and something else. I had to put them on the passenger seat in my car in the correct kind of order before I set off. It took some juggling to do. I thought that when I arrive where I’m going I’ll have to leave this stuff in the car while I attend my re-education lesson.

And then I was in hospital and had to go for an operation. They gathered me up but I couldn’t find my head and couldn’t find my thoughts and couldn’t find anything physical either that I needed to take with me. It was just my body that they put on the trolley. They began to discuss a few things. The story of putting things on the seat of the car – Army soldiers’ possessions – reared its ugly head too. That made me wonder because I imagined myself having a car that was comfortably and luxurious up to the operation. I didn’t count on having anything uncomfortable and rustic like a Land Rover.

We were then working in the shed last night, my brother and I. I’d spent hours going through all my tools tidying them up and sorting them out but he’d come along and borrowed them and they were in all kinds of mess and confusion. I couldn’t find half the stuff I wanted. he was building a framework in the shed to put one of his power tools on using big, thick beams of wood that he’d drilled through and nailed using a big sledgehammer to fasten these nails in. Where he was doing this, he was stopping me reaching my benchtop angle grinder, a machine that I used all the time. I could see straight away that we were going to be heading for an enormous row about how things were unfolding because my patience was drifting away considerably at a rapid rate of knots.

Finally we were all back home again and I couldn’t work out what time it was on my watch. In the end I finally managed to send a message to a group on my social network. They all came back that it was 08:11 and I should have been up at 07:00. I staggered to my feet and began to rush to make myself ready. Everyone else left their beds and as usual in the morning when everyone was up and about it was total chaos. My brother was getting in the way as usual as I was trying to dress. I had this lovely white suit that I’d found somewhere and was trying to find some clothes that matched with it. I was trying to make myself look really smart (it must obviously have been a dream) but it wasn’t actually working (nothing new there, then). There was some kind of exchange between the two of us about some money that I’d had on top of my dressing table. In the end he ran off to tell mother what I’d said so I hurled some abuse at him. I went in for my breakfast, hours late, but no-one said anything. It was all just complete chaos from start to finish. I think that I had my tie on outside my shirt rather than under the collar etc.

Next step was to send off my order to LeClerc. And as usual, several items that I would buy were out of stock, even if they were shown as available on the website. That’s actually quite depressing because much of it is important.

Even worse, the grated vegan cheese isn’t even offered, and if I’m not careful I’ll be running out.

Having done that I had a couple of e-mails to send off and then I could finally sit down and revise for my Welsh class. That was interrupted because the shopping arrived and the frozen food had to be put in the freezer.

Back in here at the computer, and having realised that there was no class today, I went back into the kitchen, washed, peeled diced and blanched the carrots that had come with the shopping.

While all of that was going on I put away the rest of the shopping, had a really good wash and then made myself ready to go out.

The car that came to pick me up was early so I had to rush around but in the end we reached the Centre de Re-Education. I was led a merry dance around the building trying to find out where I had to go but in the end was directed to the reception.

There, I was registered as “in” and had to fill in a pile of forms. I was then sent off to see a nurse who filled in some more forms and asked me a pile of questions.

Eventually, I was taken to see the doctor, a young girl, who asked me a load more questions, gave me a good examination (and I felt sorry for her having to run her hands over my feet) and we had a good chat.

Apparently, my sessions of treatment aren’t starting until next week. Today was just the induction and to give them an opportunity to have a think about what to do with me. At the moment it seems that sessions of physiotherapy and sessions of ergotherapy are how they intend to start.

The doctor thinks that I ought to do better with a walkframe than crutches so I asked her if, bearing in mind my generation and my passions, whether anyone had launched the Sony Walkframe for people like me, but the comment went right over her head.

She also talked to me about hand-controlled cars but that’s a job for these APA people, whenever they might get around to it.

Back here, I struggled up the stairs . I can’t raise my left leg high enough now to climb the stairs and that’s the most depressing thing that can happen. If that continues, I’ll be a prisoner here in my apartment.

Armed with a mug of hot chocolate I came back in here where, regrettably, I crashed out for a while. I ended up doing nothing at all for quite a while, but to finish off the evening I’ve been editing and cropping a few very large sound files, just to say that I’ve done something today.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with some of the stuffing left over from last night. There’s still some left so I’ll be making a leftover curry tomorrow. I’d forgotten about the naan bread but when I was organising the freezer earlier I came across all of the naan dough that I made a while ago.

Tomorrow morning I have an important letter to write and then while the cleaner is here I’ll finish off the radio notes. And I might even be brave and start another programme.

While there’s nothing much going in, I may as well push on with some work and see how far I can get. But it’s not quite as easy as that.

Monday 30th October 2023 – OHHH! THE EMBARRASSMENT!

This morning I fell in my apartment, and I couldn’t pick myself up again. I had to rely on my cleaner to pick me up and put me on a seat.

What I was trying to do was to tidy up the bedroom but my foot slipped on the parquet floor and I ended up on my knee. And it was only a few weeks ago that I could stand up from a kneeling position if I had something to cling on to. But not any longer.

However at least I was able to pull myself up from bed this morning without any assistance – including any assistance of the alarm. I put that down to the change in time that took place on Sunday morning.

After the medication I came in here to type a letter. My cleaner was off into town so I wanted to send her with a letter to the doctor to find out where I have to go for this cardiac examination and to ask for a transport voucher to take me there.

And it was tidying up in here ready for the cleaner to come down for the letter that I had my issues.

After she’d gone I had plenty of phone calls to make. Caliburn is being picked up on Thursday, and I’ve sorted out some banking issues, including requesting documents that I need for this claim for assistance.

There was a load of stuff that I did, and there is probably more to do too.

There was plenty of stuff on the dictaphone from the night but I couldn’t remember much of it. I was in the middle of an enormous, lengthy dream that involved taxi licences. There had been two taxi licences issued for each small town in some kind of area. As the licences were occasionally handed back someone came along to pick them up and develop them. But I can’t remember any more about it than this because I had quite a dramatic awakening in the middle of this lengthy dream.

Then later on there was something about hospitals, military hospitals being used by some Middle-Eastern guerillas who were fighting for their land from a corrupt Government. Just as this dream was setting off I awoke yet again.

At another point there were two of us, me and someone else, driving in one of these big American articulated lorries along an Interstate highway somewhere, checking our maps and making our arrangements. The guy who was driving turned to his radio to announce that we were going to come off here to head down to the border. Once we arrive, maybe we’d stop for food but if he felt like it he might come off and instead, cut across country south-west and head for a different State border that way. We pushed on, left the Interstate and carried on driving. We came to the rest area where we were going to stop. My niece’s daughter was there. She asked about the recording of a concert. I said that I’d managed to record it and had it on CD. She asked if she could have it. I said that I needed it – obviously I’d recorded it because I wanted it but I could copy it for her if she had a spare CD that I could copy it on to. She hadn’t but she said that she could give me a different concert by this group that was shorter but I said that that still wouldn’t solve the problem because I still wouldn’t have the original concert that I wanted.

Looking at that dream, or, should I say, reading it again, it reminds me of the many times that I’ve rolled up and down Interstate 95 stopping off for home fries, beans and toast at Dysart’s Truckstop near Bangor and that famous night when a bus-load of cheerleaders dressed for action dropped in while we were filling our faces.

There was also that legendary trip in 2017 when Strider STRAWBERRY MOOSE and I went to see Rhys, my friend from University, down in South Carolina and then we crossed over into Georgia just to say that we’d been and then came back up the Outer Banks and over Long island Sound, then back up I-95.

Jackson Browne sang about DRIVING DOWN THE 295 OUT OF PORTLAND, MAINE – the “295” being the ring road that takes I-95 around Portland and if you listen very carefully, you’ll hear the tour bus that he was on while he was playing his guitar.

One thing that I missed was that I never ever had the chance to drive an 18-wheel rig down one of the Interstates. The biggest vehicle that I ever drove down I-95 was a 7.5 tonne GMC flatbed taking a big V8 engine from Canada to Weare in New Hampshire for reconditioning.

Still, the way things are, I suppose that that will have to do.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … , bed there had been another dream in which a woman wearing a red jumper was being followed around by a tall, older guy, some kind of down-and-out. It was clear that he had mental health issues but wasn’t a particular danger but it was extremely uncomfortable for this girl. One day he followed her into her office. She decided that she would skip out and wait for the guy to be tackled but he wandered into the room where she worked. He asked if anyone had seem the woman in the red jumper. Someone said “she’s gone down to the canteen for her lunch” to which he replied ‘that’s a shame. I have no money for any lunch” which sent some kind of alarm signal that made the other people in the room begin to think that this was a situation that wasn’t quite correct.

The rest of the day has been spent writing notes for the next radio programme, having paired off the music earlier. I’ve almost finished all of the notes for that one now. There was also time to review and send off the programme that will be broadcast this coming weekend.

Tea was a stuffed pepper – slightly singed but nice enough nevertheless with vegetables and pasta.

So lots to do tomorrow, including a Welsh class, a few forms to fill in, a few phone calls to make and a Re-Education course to begin.

But looking at some of the notes that I’ve been dictating and typing recently, I seem to be spending far more time looking backwards rather than looking forwards. I suppose that it’s normal, what with things being the way they are and that I only have memories to look forward to.

It reminds me of AE Housman
"Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again."

Sunday 29th October 2023 – NOT ONCE, NOT TWICE …

… but three times I’ve gone to walk out of the kitchen without my crutches.

Not that I got very far of course, but the fact that I actually found myself doing it must mean that I’m feeling that there’s a sign of improvement, whether there’s a real improvement or not.

Last night in bed was a real improvement. Or, at least, it would have been but no fewer than three people pinged me at some point during the morning while I was asleep.

And it must have been early too because I was actually up and about this morning at 08:50. That’s taking into account the changing of the hour too They must have been busy out at Stonehenge last night moving all those stones around.

After the medication I checked the mails and messages, replied to a few of them and then checked the dictaphone to find out if I’d been anywhere during the night. A friend of mine had been having problems at home and had been sent home for a few weeks. I’d driven him. After I’d left him I was wandering around somewhere. I bumped into a woman and we began to chat. She mentioned that her son too was having problems. They considered that he was spending far too much time at his music than at his studies and that the past couple of weeks his group had played 7 gigs. Basically she said that the members of the group were pretty broke and needed the money. I replied “we could all do with that. I’d play 7 gigs in a fortnight if I were to have the chance”. She said something like “do you think you would?”. I replied “I’m no better than many and probably as bad as most”.

And then it was a Thursday. There was just one more day of work before the office closed for the summer. The boss had already been in to me to give me a couple of questions that needed asking. One was “was our employee on long-term sick leave likely to come tomorrow?” and “would a certain rock group be playing? Would anyone else be playing?. There were several others. I had that much on my plate that at the moment I hadn’t actually asked the question. 10 minutes before it was time to go home he came along and interrupted me again, asking me the same questions. I replied that at the moment I hadn’t found out. He asked me what I thought. I replied that what I thought was pretty much irrelevant. He said “the important thing to know is whether this girl is going to come in and whether this rock group is going to be playing”. I replied “you asked me that a little earlier but I haven’t actually done it yet. There’s still 10 minutes before we go home and if you continue asking me these kinds of questions and keep interrupting what I’m doing while I’m working we’ll never find the answer because I’ll be going home without the task being done.

Nerina came home from work later and said that she’d had a puncture in her car. It entered into my head but for some reason, like many other things, it was pushed to the back. Next morning when we were both going to work, for some reason we went in one of the Cortinas. We had an argument on the way. I was trying to read a letter and she was hovering over me with a jug of water. I snapped at her and she asked why. I said “it’s important, this letter, and you’re spilling water on it”. As usual it led to a dispute. We arrived at work and were sitting in the foyer going through all of the correspondence we’d had that morning. I suddenly realised that I should have been at my desk a long time before this. As we packed up our stuff ready to go to our respective offices she said “at least you have something that I would like to have and you’re lucky to have it” etc. I asked what it was and she replied “you have 4 good tyres on your car”. I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t changed the tyre over on her car. I asked “why didn’t you remind me?”. She made some remark like she was always having to remind me to do things. I explained that I had so much going on that it was very difficult. “You need to sit on top of me to make me do these things at the moment rather than just tell me and let it drift away”. But things never worked out how they were supposed to work out.

Actually, that’s not as far-fetched as it might seem. I had a bad car accident late one night while I was taxi-driving and the bracket that holds the seat belt to the central pillar of the car was driven into the back of my skull. Even now, I still have the depressed fracture and it plays havoc with my memory. It must have been wild back in 1987.

“I can’t remember who I was with now” I dictated, which somehow seemed quite apposite considering that we’ve just been talking about my fractured skull. But whoever it was, it might have been Laurence or it might have been Cécile but could equally have been anyone else. We were living in a typical chaotic, untidy apartment. Something had happened about our old family home. I had the keys to it. A tenant who was in there moved out so we went down to see it. First of all there was an issue that the Post Office was no longer delivering. An old man in the neighbourhood was trying to arrange for all post to be delivered to him so that he could set himself up as a postman. We went into the house and met the landlord. There were quite a few things in the house that I didn’t recognise eg. there was a parlophone door-entry type phone on the wall by the chimney. I said “that’s new, isn’t it?”. One of the women said “it’s nothing to do with the landlord. That was something private that the occupier put in. We had a lengthy discussion about the house with the landlord and a few of the neighbours who were inside. At the same time we’d actually bought a house or apartment and we were going to have to move. It was something like the 28th of May we’d have to hand in our notice within a couple of days before the end of the month or we’d be stuck in our rented apartment for another month. But up to that date my partner (whoever it was) and I had never spent even one moment discussing our plans about moving. I had a feeling that this was something else that was all going to end in total chaos.

Later on I ended up having a video chat with someone. We’d already had a lengthy text chat but then it evolved into a video chat. And this new camera that I bought a few weeks ago really is good. I’m very happy with that.

And a chat that I had yesterday with someone whose interactions with me usually take place in the hours of darkness when I’m asleep also picked up during the day too.

There was no more pizza dough left so I made another batch of that this afternoon. Two lots ended up in the freezer and a third ended up on a pizza tray. What with having to order my flour on-line now, I can’t obtain the flour that I like and have to make do with what I can get.

Nevertheless, the dough, even if it was rather more sticky than usual, did work out very well and made a really nice pizza.

For the last few weeks I’ve been reading a book THE OLD STRAIGHT TRACK by Alfred Watkins. He was the man who laid down the theory of ley lines in the 1920s which since then has been brought into disrepute by the antics of various Esoteric Movements.

Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating account of all kinds of ancient and medieval mounds, ruins and trackways along the border between England and Wales, even if you don’t accept the ley lines theory.

As well as that though, it’s now brought me into an even more interesting one, EARTHWORKS OF ENGLAND and while I’ve not yet read it, I’m quite looking forward to settling down with a nice mug of hot chocolate in a quiet corner with some home-made biscuits and the book.

So tomorrow I have to arrange for Caliburn to go for his Controle Technique and then start to organise myself ready for this series of Re-education courses starting on Tuesday for 20 days.

That sounds exciting, and it can’t make things any worse than they are now.

Saturday 28th October 2023 – FOR THE FIRST …

… time since I don’t know when, there wasn’t anything on the dictaphone from the night and that’s not something that happens every day. I must have had one of the deepest sleeps that I’ve ever had.

Mind you, I didn’t go to bed until after 04:00. I was quite wound up and stressed out after my travels yesterday.

What I used to do in the old days when I drove taxis was that when I would finally return home I’d go out for a good run to tire myself out

That wasn’t anything that I could do after I married because I never had the time to unwind but when I moved to Brussels and was chauffering, I would go out running again. And I must admit that I was sleeping better after I started running yet again after I moved here.

Of course, all of that is well in the past now.

As I expected, the phone never stopped pinging during the early morning but I tried my best to ignore it. Nevertheless I abandoned all hope and staggered to my feet at 11:40.

Today, I’ve been quite busy. For a start, I’ve had to back up the main computer with all of the amended files that accumulated on the portable computer while I was away at Ice Station Zebra. And there were several hundred of those. It took ages.

There were several discussions on the phone and the internet too. Rosemary rang me and we had another one of our marathon chats. Liz and one or two other people sent me messages but the most surprising, and one of the most welcome, was a chat that I had with someone with whom I usually only have interaction during the night when I’m asleep.

We had football too – TNS v Y Bala. And as you might expect, it was more a case of “when” rather than “what”. The fact that Y Bala held out for 35 minutes before conceding was something surprising.

TNS scored a second too but Y Bala held out until the final whistle. And that was a much better effort than the last time that we saw TNS play Y Bala, when the latter team folded up so dramatically in the final few minutes last summer.

Sure enough, TNS are on their usual relentless stride to the championship with no real opposition from anyone.

Many people think that it must be pretty boring with TNS winning everything every year since the money came into the club, and whether or not that might be the case, the fact is that the race to catch up has improved the quality of the matches and the quality of the players dramatically.

In recent years we’ve had 4 full Welsh internationals, several under-21 internationals, a Zimbabwe international and internationals from Malta, New Zealand and one of the Caribbean nations plus many more besides. There was nothing whatever like that 10 years ago.

Tea tonight, later than usual, was chips (potato and sweet potato) with salad and one of those breaded quorn fillets that I like so much.

So bedtime now, and maybe if I’m lucky I’ll go on a wander about again during the night. I missed my night-time voyage.

Tomorrow I have pizza dough to make and then maybe I’ll have to start work again. I’ll have to do that some time.

Friday 27th October 2023 – THE PREVIOUS DAYS’ …

… completely entries are now all on line.

That’s because I have now found a decent internet connection – yes, I’m back home.

And getting back home was an adventure all of its own as you will find out as you read on.

Last night I’d gone to bed early ready for my early 05:30 start but as usual, I couldn’t sleep. I awoke at 12!50 with a start. I had the radio on and was still listening to it. Somehow the dictaphone that was by the side of the bed fell on the floor. I couldn’t find out where the noise that I was listening to was coming from. I searched round the bedroom for a minute or two until I suddenly regained my senses and found that it was my radio. I took off the headphones ready to go back into this dream and carry on.

And so I dictated into my little machine.

At some point I must have gone back to sleep but I awoke again at 03:00 and that was really that. By 04:30 I’d given up any attempt to sleep and ended up listening to the old-time radio programmes.

At 05:40 someone came round to take my blood pressure and then I had the breakfast that I was promised.

After everyone had gone I had a really good wash and then carried on with selecting the music for the next series of radio programmes. Nurses came and went of course but I battled on and I’m now up to 29th November 2024, with several holes in between such as my Isle of Wight Festival and my Hawkfest programmes for which I’ve yet to decide on the music.

The Hawkfest should be exciting though. There have been a whole variety of Spacerock groups from all over the world who have performed at the various Hawkfests and I managed to talk to a few of them at some point or another. I’ll probably end up with a couple of hours of music and there will still be a lot that I’d have to leave out.

At 11:50 I was whisked off to the IRM unit (in a wheelchair – how the mighty have fallen) where they injected me with a radioactive substance and left me to simmer for an hour, and then they stuck me in another Stargate where I went back and to for 20 minutes.

Back at my unit I was eventually allowed to eat my lunch – several hours later – and the doctor came to see me.

She told me much of what I already knew – about how the cancer is spreading through my kidneys, my heart and into my nervous system via a few other parts of my body.

She thinks, as I have been told elsewhere, that I wouldn’t be able to survive a heart transplant in my state of health so that’s out of the question. As a result she advised me not to buy any long-playing records.

However, she wants me to have an IRM done of my heart, and that can be done locally. It may be that some tweaking can be done to it to keep it going.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that right back at the beginning of all of this in 2015 I was told that I had a coeur de champion – the “heart of a champion” and that’s what will keep me going, but if ever my heart begins to give out, it’s the downhill slope.

And so her comments weren’t any surprise.

She did have some good news. She’s talked to the Haematology department and they may well be willing to take me on instead of my having to go all the way to Leuven. I’m entitled to transport to any hospital within 500kms of home. Paris is 334 kms and Leuven is 650 kms, so continue to go to Leuven means going by train and really, I just can’t do it any longer.

And that’s a disappointment. I had quite enjoyed my spell at Leuven because firstly it’s a beautiful city secondly, I get to see Alison, and thirdly it awoke all of the Flemish that I’d picked up when I lived in Brussels.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I first met Alison at that weird American company where I worked for almost a year after I left General Electric.

The doctor took my telephone and spent the next hour or so reading all of my reports from Leuven and translating them from Flemish to French. She’ll take them to the Haematologist and have a chat.

Presumably they’ll look into the other things that are going wrong with me.

The car pulled up for me just over an hour late and then we set off into the traffic.

Paris and its outskirts were nose-to-tail all the way, and we crawled slowly out of the city. Once we hit the countryside we could put our foot down and began to make good time, only to be pulled over in a Gendarme control.

It’ s obviously near the end of the month and the Gendarmes don’t have enough victims so they went over the car with a toothcomb until they found something for which they could write out a ticket.

It was 21:00 when we finally arrived here and my cleaner was waiting for me. She and the taxi driver helped me up the stairs into my apartment for which I was grateful. It was an agonising climb.

Once I’d recovered I made myself baked potato, baked beans and vegan sausage and that was that.

Now I’ve written my notes I’m off to bed. There’s no alarm in the morning and I’m going to have a lie-in – if I can. There’s usually always someone who comes along to interrupt me.

Thursday 26th October 2023 – THE GOOD NEWS …

… is that I can go home tomorrow. The car to pick me up has been arranged for 14:30 but if the last time that I was here is anything to go by, it’ll be long after midnight before I arrive back home.

My cleaner contacted me too. As I won’t be back until late, would I like her to fetch my Friday shopping for me?

As I have said before, the solidarity amongst the residents of my building is something that I’ve never ever encountered before.

The bad news is that it has not been confirmed that it is indeed the carcinogenic protein that has entered my nervous system.

That means that unfortunately the end is nigh because it will slowly creep through my body, including what’s left of my brain. And they did warn me right at the beginning of all of this that the end will not be very pleasant.

To be on the safe side, I gave my doctor a bit of lip this afternoon. In fact, she cut out a sample of the nerves in my lip to examine it – to see how far the cancer is advancing. If it’s that far up my body it won’t be long.

And I have made an executive decision – and as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, an executive decision is a decision where if the person making the decision makes the wrong decision, he is executed.

And the decision is that seeing as I can now barely walk, and I’m entitled to transport to any hospital up to 500 kms from my home, I have decided regrettably to end my association with Leuven and transfer my papers here. I really can’t struggle around on the train any more these days

In all honesty I don’t think that I’m very far off having to have a carer. It’s a shame that Percy Penguin can’t drive. 30 years of working in an Old People’s Home will have prepared her for whatever she might encounter with me but it’s no good if she can’t take me to the shops.

Meanwhile back at the ran … errr … hospital I had a bad night last night. It took me an age to go off to sleep, for a reason that I really don’t know

At least there was no blood test at 05:20 this morning but they did awaken me at 07:10 for something and again at 08:50 when they brought breakfast. So once more I had breakfast in bed.

After having a really good wash I sat down and listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There was something about changing one of my appointments around because of this therapy thing. I managed to do it absolutely fine. It wasn’t until the Tuesday when we were talking about my Welsh lesson that I realised that I’d promised to go on behalf of the class to some kind of meeting or conference on the Tuesday afternoon. Of course, that was now out of the question. I began to think about what I was going to do about it and how I was going to solve this problem.

There was something else too about being round at a girl’s bungalow. It was a girl whom I knew from school and a few of her friends. It involved going up a ladder onto the roof and doing certain things. I noticed while they were up there that part of the roof hadn’t been slated properly. There was someone else with me so I sent him up the ladder and gave him instructions as to how to do the roofing. In the end all the girls came down except the one whom I knew. She was still up there so I threw her a small pot of white paint and a brush and she painted some kind of slogan on the roof. She ended up with more paint on her than on the roof but never mind. When she came down, she reached as far as the edge of the roof and realised that her bra had come undone. She was having to fiddle around with it and fasten herself back in etc and hope that no-one else would notice before she came down the ladder. I noticed that her bra was a red tartan one. Eventually she managed to put it n beneath her clothes. As she came down she turned to me to ask if I’d sorted out the roof for her. I told her that someone had been up to realign the slates. She said that it didn’t look correct. I replied “no it doesn’t but that’s probably because you have the wrong slates. It’s certainly all properly realigned now”. She then began to talk about a few other jobs she needed doing like putting an electric junction box in the wall etc.

When we were living in Shavington there was a path that led to Willaston that went over the railway. The kids around there had all kinds of fun scrawling incorrect messages on the zebra so the controllers of the zebra decided that they would no longer stop there. It had already messed up all of my timetables before and it was going to do it again. One of the boys and I had this plan that we’d tackle this mess of graffiti by me climbing into the back of the truck and asking a pile of questions while this cat was crawling up my leg onto my lap. It took a long time to arrange this kind of meeting and it was as if she knew what most of it was about. She’d been talking for about 0.7 days even though I couldn’t walk and the cats were stuck in and the doctor had said so much about it and the kids couldn’t concentrate on doing their homework without thinking about the mill.

Usually, although I’m dictating while I’m asleep, when I come to transcribe the notes I can recall little bits of what’s been going on that ring a bell with me from the night. However for that one, I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of that one and it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever – not that many of my nocturnal travels actually do.

So back into the night and we’d all gone round to someone’s house in our family to watch a football match, Arsenal against some European side. We were all there watching this game in the living room. Just then my father pulled up in a van. We heard that he might be coming but he hadn’t been there at the start. As we watched, he just parked up outside. I opened the door and asked him “why don’t you reverse the van up the drive?”. He made some remark about how he couldn’t reverse like many other people. Then he opened the door and my mother and 6 or 7 other people swarmed out. We all said that it was totally stupid bringing that many people in this little van. They all came into the house and we had to explain to them how the wiring system works because we had special plugs for the television. While we were looking at the TV plugs we noticed that the wallpaper on one of the walls was becoming really damp. We all settled down – or at least, they settled down taking everyone else’s chair. When we came back in there was nowhere really for us to sit. There was just one seat so I said to one of the girls “you’d better sit in that seat because you’ll be comfortable there” because her seat had been occupied by my father’s sister’s husband. He had a reputation for chasing after the girls. She felt extremely uncomfortable when she saw him sitting in her seat.

When the nurse awoke me I was talking about gardening. We had all kinds of fruit trees, plants and so on and we’d been transplanting them. The girl with me had taken a couple of apple trees and planted them outside. A few hours later she brought one of them in to plant inside the house again, saying that it wasn’t doing very well outside and had caught some kind of disease or something. I was looking at one of the flowering plants in a pot. It hadn’t done very much for a couple of years but I noticed that now it had about half a dozen flowers on it and a couple more were forming. I told her about them but she was too busy at that moment to come to have a look.

For much of the day I was left on my own and was able to pile on with selecting the music for future radio programmes. In fact I’m now at 25th October 2024 but there are several gaps in there. I have to think about what music I’m going to play for my Hawkfest and to commemorate the first Isle of Wight Festival.

There were the usual nurses coming to and from and I had the usual gaggle of doctors come to see me, and that was when they told me the bad news. But they tell me that there are all kinds of follow-up action to come, some to be undertaken here and some that can be undertaken closer to home.

And so I’m going to be very busy in the near future, and the local ambulance service is going to be making a lot of money out of my health insurance providers. In case you don’t know, here in France they have what they call VSLs – Voitures Sanitaires Légères – that are like taxis but equipped to take people who aren’t mobile to their hospital appointments etc.

This afternoon the doctor came back with a friend. They wanted to take a sample of my lip tissue with a piece of my nervous system. So they injected my lip with a local anaesthetic and then attacked it with a scalpel. It took three attempts before they actually ended up with a nerve.

They did tell me that if I didn’t want the lip thing they could take a sample of grease from somewhere else but that would involve a surgical intervention. But sod that for a game of soldiers.

Importantly, while they were doing that I missed my coffee so I had to go out and hunt it down. They didn’t want to give it to me because of what I’d just been through but I insisted.

After tea I began to write my notes but a nurse came to see me to tell me that I must be à jeun tomorrow morning as I’m having something done to me at 12:00 for which I have to have an empty stomach.

But that fasting starts at 06:00 so as she’s coming to put a needle in me at 05:30 I persuaded her to bring me some bread jam and coffee. I’m not going without a meal.

So right now I’d better go to bed and make myself ready for tomorrow morning. I’m not looking forward to the needle, I’m not looking forward to whatever it it that they are going to do to me, but it will be nice to be back home.

Wednesday 25th October 2023 – I’VE HAD SOME …

… good news today, and some bad news.

The good news is that the Social Services have agreed to pay for my transport. That’s a great weight off my mind for sure.

The bad news is that it seems from the blood test results recently that not only is my red blood count dropping rapidly now that I’m no longer taking the Aranesp, but that the count of my platelets is dropping rapidly too.

12 months ago it was at about 275 units. Today it’s 115. The critical limit is 100 units.

The doctor from Belgium came to see me and to give me the bad news. In her opinion the carcinogenic protein is now attacking the platelets. It’s obviously not satisfied with attacking my red blood cells, heart, kidneys and nervous system

She’s no haematologist but at least, being from Brussels she can read Flemish so she’s much more of an idea as to what is going on at Leuven without me having to do my best to interpret, so tomorrow she’s going to see the haematologist to “have a chat” about me.

Whatever that means, we’ll soon find out.

This morning I was awoken by a nurse who came to take a blood sample – at 05:20. That was the last thing that I wanted. But to my surprise she did it first go. And that’s just as well because my arms are covered in Sticking plaster.

After that I couldn’t go back to sleep so in the end I gave it up. Mind you, I still had breakfast in bed. The food here is somewhat … errr … indifferent but two bread rolls, a pile of jam and a big bowl of hot black coffee is a good way to start the day.

First thing that I did was to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I was involved in some kind of project with the radio and the programmes. The Social Services etc wondered why they were played when they did. Someone explained that that was when they had a good audience. The plan was that after my death they intended to continue to broadcast the programmes just to keep things going over and to prolong the radio station;

Later on Nerina and I had an appointment with a local bank manager at 12:00. We set off on foot and on our way round we picked up a few bits and pieces of shopping and carried on to the bank’s office. When we arrived we rang the bell but no-one answered the door so we rang again. Eventually someone came and wanted to know what we were doing; We explained that we had an appointment so we were ushered in and kept to one side. A few minutes later someone came back and said “yes, you can go upstairs. Go into that room there, slide the ladder up and you can climb up to the next floor. We went in there and there was one of the strangest arrangements that I’ve ever seen. There was indeed a ladder there and four steps hanging down from the ceiling. The ladder was extensible and you would push it up to join up with these steps. It was narrow, rickety and looked completely unsafe to me. I held it steady while Nerina tried to climb but she couldn’t get up. I knew full well that I wasn’t going to get up. After several tries Nerina decided that she couldn’t go up there. I agreed with her because this was the biggest Health and Safety violation that I’ve ever seen. We went back to where this secretary person was. She was busy typing. We explained that we couldn’t go up the ladder. She sighed and went off to try to find someone else again. We had a good look round and found several interesting papers about different things that had been prepared in duplicate or in multiple copies. There were piles of these documents lying around. One was about a certain man whom I knew from North America who had died. He was said to have been the biggest promoter of Rugby League in the UK and of summer sport. It bewildered me why this stuff was here. Eventually a man came back with a couple of items that he must have taken from our shopping bag. He asked us if we recognised these items. We explained that we’d bought them on the way to the bank. He asked which shops we’d gone to to buy them. We explained and that obviously satisfied him because then he invited us into the office and up some proper stairs onto a landing where there was a corridor that led outside but without a roof and then up another set of stairs in another building until we finally reached his office.

Finally I was in my yellow Cortina last night driving through Shavington. I suddenly realised that I had the wrong numberplate on the front of the car. I’d bought the correct numberplate to fit on but I hadn’t done it at that moment so I pulled up at the side of the road, lifted up the car so the automatic jack clicked in and then went to fetch the numberplate out of the back. But then I noticed that screwed to the rear was a numberplate from New Zealand0… "South Africa actually" – ed … and I suddenly realised that I’d had this car registered in New Zealand so the front numberplate that I was going to fit on wouldn’t be any good. I’d have to have another one made. I went round to the front and a postman pulled up on one of these little Mobylettes, had a good look tat what I was doing and then rode off into his drive. I then picked up the front of the car and dropped it off the jack onto the ground and it just rolled off on its own, backwards across the road, did a spectacular spin round and shot off down the pavement. People just stood there looking at it and no-one made an effort to stop it. It ran into the back of someone’s car. I had to go round and apologise, and explain everything. They all found it hard to believe but that was certainly the case of what happened. I had to apologise for the accident.

With no tests or examinations scheduled today I planned on having a shower – and I don’t ‘arf need it.

However each time I prepared myself to go, someone came to delay or interrupt me. It wasn’t until 15:45 that I staggered into the shower.

Luckily, here it’s a walk-in wet room so I was quite at my ease and I really enjoyed myself. It made such a change to actually be in a shower.

While I was at it, I made a few phone calls. Firstly to tell the taxi company that my transport has been approved and secondly to book the vehicles to take me to the sessions at the Centre de Re-Education.

And then I had to telephone the ergotherapist to cancel our appointment next Thursday afternoon. He thinks that there’ an ergotherapist at the Centre de Re-Education and maybe they could help me. If not, I should recontact him for another appointment.

In between everything I’ve been attacking the radio programmes. I’ve chosen the music for another three of them. I’m trying to make the best use possible of my time while I’m here to give me a running start.

It also seems that I’ve been in great demand today. Rosemary rang me up and we had another one of our mega-discussions. And then I’ve had discussions on the internet with half a dozen people, or maybe even more. I lost count at a certain moment.

So now that I’ve had my tea and written my notes I’m off to bed. I’d like to have a running start with that too if they are going to wake me up at 05:20 for another blood test.

But what will be the outcome of this meeting tomorrow? One or two people have told me that I should be looking at it with trepidation but actually I’m not. I’m under no illusions whatsoever about the inevitable outcome of this illness and I’m fully prepared for it.

However it shows signs of optimism. They have found something, and they are intending to do something about it. You can’t wish for any more than that.

Tuesday 24th October 2023 – THEY STILL HAVEN’T …

… fitted this needle into me. I think that they really have abandoned all hope of giving me this infusion.

Instead, this morning they gave me another lumbar puncture and that has been that.

Last night I had one of the best night’s sleeps that I’ve had for a considerable length of time. I was in bed at 20:00 because it was that cold and, underneath the blankets I listened to the old-time radio

It was about midnight when I awoke to find the radio still going so I switched it off and went back to sleep. And that was that until about 07:50 when a nurse awoke me to take my temperature and blood pressure

When breakfast came I was still in bed and I really can’t remember the last time that I had breakfast in bed. It made a lovely change from the usual.

While I was washing a nurse came in and stuck a couple of freezing patches on my back. That of course can only mean on thing – a lumbar puncture. They are totally horrible things and so I wasn’t looking forward to that.

First task while I was waiting for things to happen was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was in the UK at some point. It was round about the time of the death of my aunt. We were making a lot of preparation for various things. We met the family of her late husband Michael. We spoke to them about various things. They were involved in some kind of career where to have a psychiatrist or an analyst was compulsory. We had a really good chat about that. They happened to mention that they had a son who lived near Warrington. Of course, that’s my neck of the woods so before I come back to Europe I decided that I’d go to see this guy. I set out but stopped to listen to the 09:00 news. I noticed that the clock in the car was wrong. After the news I set out to drive but couldn’t think for a moment of how to go to Warrington. I had to scratch my head to think of which back roads and country lanes would be the best and I ended up going round the back of Haslington. I couldn’t help thinking that I wasn’t dressed for the occasion. I was in some kind of grey fleecy trousers, sports trousers or something. We eventually met. He was a guy in his 40s, a very big, strong type of person with a wife and a few kids. We began to talk. He was really mocking his relative about the idea of having a psychoanalyst. He thought that it was a stupid arrangement, perpetuated by North American trend-setters and totally unnecessary these days.

And then I was out with a former friend of mine, somewhere and were coming down the motorway. Something happened to the car. I think that it wanted some fuel. It was a strange kind of car so we called in and had to find the fuel filler. It was in the engine behind the right-hand headlight. We had to pull the headlight forward to reach the fuel filler. It was an extremely complicated affair. My friend fuelled up while I went for a wander around. I ended up at the hire car depots. In a waste bin there was a pile of stuff that obviously people had bought and thrown away, one of which was a 25-litre fuel carrier. I went over to my friend to ask if it was of any use to him. He replied “yes” so I went to fetch it but there was a hole in it so I put it back. In the meantime some guy from the service area came over to me to ask if I was a mechanic. I replied “yes” so he went over to my friend. They ended up having an argument because apparently only licensed mechanics are allowed to work on cars on this site. Of course my friend was having none of this and told the guy exactly what he thought. In the end the guy slunk off with a flea in his ear.

There was also something about a house that Nerina and I went to see. It was a bungalow that had some kind of front garden, a drive all the way down the side of the house and then a back garden. There was a sign up at the parking space at the side of the house that said “scrap cars here”. I noticed that there were a couple of old car axles lying around so I thought that this would be a great place to buy because if he’d been scrapping cars here there would be some kind of inherited rights. I could quite happily mess around in the drive, put up a car port and a fence between me and the neighbour, and Nerina would have a nice tidy garden at the back anyway. We went to look at it. IN the back in the garden he had a whole pile of axles. There was a load of asbestos brake dust. Somehow he’d rigged up two kinds of hubs as pulleys and he explained how he removed brake shoes with them. This was beginning to interest me more and more. I was hoping that Nerina would be interested in the bungalow itself and impressed enough to want to buy it.

I ended up going back into that dream about Michael’s family. It was a Sunday morning, we were all there and having a lie-in in bed. Round about 10:00 a film came up on the screen, one of these films line “American Grafitti” or similar. I watched it but must have fallen asleep again because I awoke with a start a short while later. In the meantime Nerina came into my room panicking. “Have you seen the time?”. I thought that with the film starting at 10:00 it was probably about 10:10 or 10:15 but in fact it was 12:35 and we’d slept all the way through the morning. There was so much work to do and we were supposed to be visiting somewhere else but Nerina and I didn’t have time and we’d have to leave but there was all this panic going on about getting things ready, going here and going there and having left the bed so late so late this morning

And when the nurse awoke me this morning Nerina and I were doing something with kittens but it all went completely out of my head as soon as I sat up.

Actually, there’s quite a story about kittens. When Tuppence was getting old we decided that we’d have another cat to keep her company, but it was definitely “no kittens”.

Anyway, the cat of someone whom I knew had just given birth and out of politeness I went to see the offspring. This tiny all-grey kitten crawled up my leg and curled up on my lap while I was drinking a cup of tea, and of course, that was that. You don’t choose a cat – the cat chooses you.

So having explained things to Nerina, I finally persuaded her to go to look at it to see what she thought of it. When she came back she told me “there was this tiny all-ginger kitten that climbed up my leg and sat on my lap …”

And that was how Sooty and Sweep came to live with us.

But I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that the world is far too small for my liking. The doctor who came to perform my lumbar puncture told me that she came from Belgium. She was born in Mons but came to live in Brussels as a child.

She told me the school that she attended, and it was the one just down the road from where I used to live in Jette She actually knew the complex of buildings where I lived.

So while I was lying down recovering from the lumbar puncture my neighbour who is still in Paris came to see me and it was quite awkward talking while I was lying down.

After lunch and a coffee (that I had to ask for three times before I received it) I was visited by the chief doctor and a whole pile of interns. She asked me loads of questions about all kinds of things.

The doctor from Belgium was with them and she understood Flemish so she was able to read all of the reports that I’d had from Leuven. Luckily the hospital has computerised all of its records for its patients, and you are able to access all of yours by inserting a special code. So I gave her my phone and told her to get on with it.

That was all of the official visits that I had today. There was the usual stream of nurses and the like coming and going but when I wasn’t asleep I managed to choose the music for the next couple of radio programmes, and I’ll be using the rest of the time here selecting more and more.

There were also several phone calls to deal with. The first was from the Mayor of Virlet. There’s some tidying up that needs to be done at my property and was I in any fit state to do it?

Of course I’m not and that was what he thought. So would I be willing to pay someone for half a day’s work to do it on my behalf?

Actually it’s far cheaper for me to do that than spend money travelling down there when I can’t even drive right now, so of course it was the obvious answer. I told him that next time there’s anything to do down there, not to hesitate to engage someone to do it again.

And then there was the Centre de Re-Education in Granville. That’s where handicapped people go in order to learn how to cope with everyday life taking into account their disabilities. Would I like 20 consecutive half-day afternoons starting on Tuesday next week?

Do bears go to the toilet in the woods?

Tea was the usual kind of industrial institutionalised factory food but I have to eat it because there’s nothing else. Luckily my neighbour brought me some bananas which was very nice of her.

So I’m going to go to bed now. It’s quite early but there’s nothing else to do and I can be quite comfortable under the blankets listening to the old-time radio.

And I wonder what they have in store for me tomorrow.

Monday 23rd October 2023- I MADE IT …

… in Paris, and I have to say that if I in a cowslip’s bell were to lie I’d probably be more comfortable because there’s no heat in the room.

There was no heat in my apartment this morning either – I’ve not switched it on as yet – but with solid granite walls 1m20 thick, it’s not as important as it would be in some of this jerry-built modern stuff.

And as usual, even though I’d set the alarm for 05:20, I was up and about by 05:00. I always have a bad night when I have to be up early and last night was no exception. I hardly slept at all.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone however. I was in the witness box in Court for some reason, and the subject of Percy Penguin came up. I found it very hard to convince everyone that it was just something to relax and to sit there in the quiet, the reason why I wanted to see Percy Penguin. I had to do everything that I possibly could to try to avoid being rearrested or imprisoned etc while at the same time being frank and open to the Judge. I wasn’t sure how to go about doing it.

Later on we’d been to Nantwich shopping and decided that for once in our lives we’d take a taxi home. Someone in a Ford Cortina estate came to pick us up so we piled in. When we reached where Smiths was in Nantwich by the church the driver stopped to fuel up. Two shots rang out. We don’t know where the first one went but the second one went through the roof of the taxi and hit my mother in the head. The ricochet hit my youngest sister. Immediately, a crowd gathered. I was absolutely appalled so I left the car and shouted at the people “for God’s sake have some dignity and let my mother die in peace”. When the ambulance arrived I took my sister out of the car and tried to clean the blood off her etc. She was crying and really upset. I felt absolutely helpless because I hadn’t any idea at all what to do or what I was going to do.

When I awoke I had another one of those thirsts that you could photograph. I ended up drinking two large mugs of my patent blackcurrant, honey and lemon drink. You can tell that we are approaching winter if I’m back on that.

Next task was to make some sandwiches and to finish the packing. I had planned to have a shower but I didn’t fancy trying to climb in and out of the bath while I’m trying to keep to a tight schedule.

Instead, I had a good strip-down wash and was ready when the car came for me.

On the face of it, it was a good idea to have a car to take me to Paris, because I really couldn’t do it on the train. Not at all. Whether it will be a good idea if I have to end up paying for it is another thing entirely

But the downside was that the car was a SEAT and it had done my back in before we even reached Caen.

The journey went quite well with just one or two hold-ups, and we stopped for 15 minutes for a coffee and pit stop

At the hospital I was shown to my room without even having to check in. And then we had the usual pantomime about trying to fit a catheter in my arm. 2 nurses had a total of 5 goes and it’s still not done.

Next task was to be shoved through one of these Stargate time tunnel things. I had to walk much of the way there and back, which upset me, and then they had to have three goes at passing me though the machine as apparently I was moving my head too much.

Back here again and another nurse had 3 goes at my arm before she could finally take a blood sample.

A couple of doctors have been to see me and discuss my treatment plan, and they have confirmed that my health is deteriorating. They don’t think that I could withstand another series of perfusions and in fact they suspect that that’s why the hospital in Leuven has stopped doing them and has been relying on Aranesp injections

The food is rubbish as usual so my neighbour, who is in Paris this week and popped her head in to see me, says that she will bring me some bananas

So now that everything is finished and the computer is backed up with the latest copies of the files, I’m going to bed. I’m tired after my exertions today and I’ve already crashed out twice, but it’s more to do with the fact that it’s the only way that I can think of right now to keep warm.

Sunday 22nd October 2023 – I WASN’T ACTUALLY …

… far wrong with what I said yesterday. Much of the morning was taken up with a very lengthy exchange of correspondence with someone about a task that needs to be undertaken in the near future.

It’s a task that might involve me spending a lot of money, but it’s not something that I can do myself and the sooner it’s done the better. And in view of the travelling involved that I won’t have to do, I will probably end up saving money in the long run too.

And so it’s very important that the issue is very clear and unequivocal – hence the lengthy discussion.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment I dictated the notes for the final radio programme in this backlog, had a listen to them, binned them and then started again.

As a result, I was in bed later than I intended.

Nevertheless, by 09:30 I was up and about and sorting out issues here and there. And then I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There was some kind of race going on last night. It involved me dressing up in some kind of clothing as if for Halloween… "it’s called drag racing" – ed. I was being chased down some stairs by a little girl. When I reached the bottom, I’d run round the corner and then back up the stairs, reach the top, run around the corner and then back down again and so on. I was in front of the girl and she raced after me. This went on for a couple of minutes when suddenly she stopped running. I hadn’t noticed until I suddenly appeared on the landing at the same moment that she was there. That was the end of the game. I was convinced that she had cheated. It was really quite an uncomfortable moment. The conversation carried on about something else. It ended up being some kind of prize-giving for novels. Some guy had written a novel that was quite in-depth technically and longer and even changed into fifth gear but the one that won was another that was not so complicated and only had four gears. This was something else that caused a great deal of controversy during the night about why the winner was not so technically advanced as the one that came second.

There was also another kind of fancy-dress competition. It involved dressing up in clothes that we already had and then some kind of parade around where they would choose the winner. For some reason or other, even though I had a complicated outfit that it took a while to fit into and looked really good it didn’t come as high as another dressing-up outfit that wasn’t as good as mine and had been done much quicker. Of course, as you can imagine, I was extremely disappointed that my work wasn’t worth any more than the teacher had given me.

later on I was on Crewe railway station waiting for my train, an old 2-coach multiple unit. Someone was complaining about something and I couldn’t understand it at first. It suddenly clicked for me that there had been a change of the time of the train. The usual train that we caught to go to work was leaving 5 minutes earlier. I had to scramble around the station and onto the correct platform. Instead of going to sit in my usual place on the train I sat right at the front. When I boarded the train there it was actually quite crowded and there were very few seats left. One seat was next to some kind of woman whom I recognised so I went to sit there. I was hemmed in by this woman and three other people. They were all speaking Welsh and began to talk in Welsh. They were actually doing their Welsh homework ready for the lesson. Much as I didn’t like at all where I was sitting, I reckoned that a presence like this, doing the same kind of course that I was and willing to discuss it like this, these people have to be worth knowing. Maybe I ought to do my best to catch this train again.

And then I’d been doing something down in south-west England. On my way round I’d passed a small fishing village in a little cove on the border between Devon and Cornwall. Checking my plans for the return, I saw that I’d have to wait for a day or two before coming back but there was a bus that left that village that would bring me home. I thought that it sounded like a really good plan. I made arrangements to book myself on this coach back. I went to hire a car for the weekend, which seemed to work fine with no problems. I went to pick it up. On the way out I talked to the guy in the movement control at the door, saying “I now have this car for 48 hours. See you when I return”. He replied “no – you had this car booked for yesterday and today”. I replied “that can’t possibly be the case – I’ve only just booked it”. This led to quite an argument. In the end he agreed that I could leave with the car. I wasn’t happy about leaving because I had the idea in my mind that once my back was turned he’d forget about altering the booking and I’d end up having to pay a hefty excess charge for not bringing the vehicle back during the day on the Sunday

Finally, I’d gone to Algeciras for something and was standing on a high cliff. I could see all down the African coast in the mist. I could see the mountains of Africa in the distance and all the boats coming through the Straits of Gibraltar. There was one of these high-speed catamaran ferries coming up. We reckoned that it had come from Morocco heading into port. There were loads of ships too. The people with me decided to walk back into town but I was so mesmerised by what I’d seen that I just stayed there and watched the view.

And so compared to last night it was quite quiet.

After that I’ve been sending off requests for brochures. We’re talking about a chairlift in this building to go up the stairs to where the lift begins and my cleaner had collected a few adverts from various companies. My task was to arrange for some brochures to be delivered.

Later on after lunch I attacked the radio notes and eventually ended up with a completed radio programme. That’s taken me up to 10th May next year and now I can crack on with some more.

You’re probably wondering why I’m so far ahead with the programmes. The answer is that I’m never sure when I’m no longer going to be able to prepare any more, for obvious reasons.

And then of course, we could always have a repeat of last year when I spent 13 weeks in hospital without any possibility of preparing any more while I’m away.

On the subject of hospital, I packed my bags for tomorrow morning and wrote a few letters. Finally, I backed up the computer onto the portable USB stick that I take with me on my travels

Tea was another delicious pizza, and now I’m off to bed.

Tomorrow morning I have to be up at 05:20 at the latest and I’m not looking forward to that. And then I’ll be having a week of being torn apart.

As for when I’ll be back, I have no idea. I have been told to “set aside a week” but that could be anything from “back home the same night” to another three-month stay.

But I shall just be glad of a rest. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any.

Saturday 21st October 2023 – I HAVE SET …

… a new record today.

When I checked the dictaphone today I found no fewer than THIRTEEN sound files. It must have been an extremely mobile night last night.

What’s surprising though is that I haven’t crashed out at all, despite all of that. This could well be the cue for a decent night’s uninterrupted sleep, but you know how well my prophesies unfold in this respect.

leaving the bed was the usual struggle, and then I had a good wash and scrub up. After the medication I had a few things to do and then the nurse came round for my blood test.

He didn’t have much luck today. It took him three goes to find some blood and once again I’m feeling like a dartboard after all that.

It took a while to recover from that and then I attacked the dictaphone notes. There was something going on last night about members of my family but I can’t remember anything at all about it except that I was having to identify who was who on the basis of their ankles and lower calves. That was really quite difficult.

Later on I was doing something about the railway stations in Paris, the advantages and disadvantages of going to the Gare St Lazare instead of Montparnasse. No matter which way I looked at it, it didn’t seem to make any difference because both involved a lot of walking between various taxi pickups and so on in any case. It was just becoming more and more complicated all the time

Later still there had been some kind of attack on several cities by kamikaze pilots flying aircraft and crashing them deliberately into different things as the Japanese did in World War II. It caused an enormous tidal wave which began to engulf the low-lying areas. There was a lot of film report about it much of which looked as if it had come from the San Francisco earthquake but where we were, we were blocked by a rising lake that was threatening to cut off our escape. In the end we had to retreat higher and higher. I was in my van so I was told that I had to retreat the furthest away and park at the side of the road. Even then the water began to lap around the bottom of Caliburn and slowly rise higher. The people who had watched me move thought that it was quite funny that I was suffering like this but but gradually it began to affect them too. Strangely enough the city that had been most affected by all of these attacks was Bombay because a great many others had managed to have been shot down or otherwise dealt with before they crashed.

We were on board ship at some point and the water level was rising higher and higher. In the end we were forced to abandon the ship and we ended up in a sort of lifeboat. The water was rising quite rapidly and eventually we were cut off, floating in this boat. I was singing a few sea shanties until people told me to keep quiet. Gradually we were higher in the sea as the water rose. This began to be extremely serious and it didn’t look as if we were going to touch down properly and have a relaxing arrival. We’d all be completely at the mercy of the van that was following us and the people in it.

This one concerned a ginger cat called Rusty who lived in a supermarket somewhere. This was something else that was affected by the rising water levels etc. I could see that although people had built some kind of wall of produce to keep it out it had managed to jump through and knock over a lot of these items and had ended up in difficulties. I really can’t remember the rest of this.

We were then on board a bus and the water level was rising. Several of the passengers were panicking. One of them had sent a text to his mother to ask her what he should do. She replied that she had seen some straps hanging from the ceiling, the type that standing commuters take hold when the bus is swaying around. She told him to take hold of one of those. At least he’d be steady and upright while the waters continue to rise.

I was back in these floods watching an English football referee called Stanley Baxter swim around refereeing a football match becoming slowly more and more engulfed in the water until he eventually sank in it.

There was an island off the Arctic coast of Canada where there was a Canadian politician who used to attack people and tear at their clothes and generally thrash about at them. The fact was that he had to be airlifted in and out of this island like a baby.

There were parts of the UK mainland where you could have your injections for free. There are people there who had been injected who were living until they were 103

Later on I flew out of Brussels and ended up in the Falkland Islands although it was nothing like the Falkland Islands that I ever knew. I was walking around there looking for somewhere to eat. The more I walked, the further I seemed to go out into the country. It wasn’t until I’d been walking for a mile or so that I realised that I didn’t have my crutches. I was walking normally. After a little while I noticed that there was a major road in the distance. I thought that if I were to take this road back it might lead me back in town again. There was a detached house with a garage. It seemed to be the public footpath and everyone was passing through it to reach that road. I followed a few people and there was a family in there playing. As I went out of the back door of the garage there was a young girl there with a big fluffy white cat. I bent down to stroke it. It immediately began to rub itself against me purring really loudly. The people looked at me and seemed to be extremely pleased about the cat being so friendly. The woman asked me if I was allowed to have a cat where I am. I replied that cats are certainly allowed wherever I am. The little girl then asked “were you on the flight from Brussels out to here on Monday?”. I replied “yes”. Se replied “so were we. I thought that I recognised you. We were sitting at the back talking to the stewardess and a woman with a baby”.

Later on I was back in that dream again. I rang up the house and spoke to the girl. She said that she was very sorry about her sister because apparently I made her cry. I said that I couldn’t understand how I could possibly have made her cry. If I did, it certainly wasn’t my intention. After we’d talked for a while I asked “by the way, would you like to come out to a milk bar or something with me one day?”. She replied “I don’t know if my parents would like it”. I replied “they don’t really need to know, do they?”. She had a little laugh about that.

There was a British woman working down on the border between Switzerland and Germany during the war. 2 tourists came along to have a look around the area for some skiing. They gradually worked their way into the confidence of this woman. She gave one of them some information that was important. After several adventures these 2 men flew away. Just at that moment the German police turned up to arrest them. They took hold of this woman and tried to drag her away but she wanted them to wait for a moment. Then the plane with these 2 men flew over, waggled its wings at her and then flew off presumably back to the UK. Later on the was imprisoned. her cellmate was talking to her about the event. She said “did you think that these British people managed to get away? Do you think that the British Government got what it wanted?”. The cellmate looked at her and said “the British Government might have done but I don’t think that you and your friend did”.

And finally I was back in a family last night. although it wasn’t mine – it was a happy family. There was talk about relocating to Iceland and becoming Icelandic nationals. This meant applying for all kinds of documents etc. We set about collecting the documents for them. The most important document was the police statement, that we hadn’t been involved in any nefarious activities. I seem to remember that at the time that gave me a lot of hope and optimism and cheered me up, although there were several questions in my mind about other issues that might cause a problem with the Icelandic authorities. Nevertheless it was still another one of these very happy dreams

I really don’t know what to say about all of that.

Later on I attacked in a rather desultory fashion the radio notes that I’d dictated before going to bed. That programme is now completed and there’s just one more of the backlog to do. That’s tomorrow’s project.

Tea was one of those strange veggie burgers with salad and chips. It was actually quite nice too. I don’t know what I’m going to do when the supplies from Noz runs out.

Later on I chopped up a few more sound-tracks and once I’ve dictated the radio notes for the final programme I’ll be going to bed.

After last night I deserve it too.

But before I go, there was something that I forgot to mention about yesterday.

When I was round at Rosemary’s three years ago there was a feral cat roaming around outside.

When I was around there last year it was “keep the door shut – I don’t want that cat to go inside the house”

Last night it was “I’ll have to get out of my chair to fetch that. Just let me take Myrtille off my lap”.

No-one I ever knew won a fight with a cat.

Friday 20th october 2023 – I’M ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED …

… that some people have been put on this earth for no other reason than to cause as much inconvenience, chaos and disruption to people’s lives as they possibly can.

This saga about these documents that I have to send off for my hospital visit is rumbling on and on and on.

When I returned from the shops this morning I found an e-mail that had been sent to me with a request for a whole pile of documents. It ended up being a pile of 19 documents that they wanted, several of which had already been sent.

Having collected the ones that I had and scanned in the rest I sent them off, only to receive a reply asking for more and more.

And so it went on during the day until 16:47, 13 minutes before the Assurance Office closed, asking me
1) why am I going to the hospital? What are they planning on doing to me
and
2) why am I going to a hospital so far away.

And so I replied
1) "On page 5 of document 2 it clearly states ‘we propose a further stay in hospital to supplement the investigation ….’" (and then a whole list of tests that they propose).
and
2) "If your doctors would be so kind as to look at page 2 of document 2 they will see that I have ALREADY been to a local hospital who were unable to identify the problem and the condition has since deteriorated. Therefore there needs to be a further investigation in depth"

By the time that my reply was ready the Assurance Office had closed – which means that they won’t now reply with a decision until after I’ve left – and so, being in a totally foul mood, I added a few other bells and whistles to my letter and finished it off with a "if there is anything else by which I can waste even more of my time by repeating to you information that is already in your possession, please don’t hesitate to let me know".

Many years ago, I was totally and utterly stressed out and would lose my temper at the slightest provocation. You’ve no idea what used to go through my mind back in those horrible days and it took an enormous effort to get a grip of things.

Living in splendid isolation in the mountains of Central France miles away from all kinds of interaction with people worked wonders and although things would occasionally crop up, I’d just fly to Canada, hire a car and go and sit in the wilderness and the peri-arctic tundra until sanity returned.

Back in 2019 I was walking along the old Emigrant Trail through South Pass in the Rockies, thinking just how peaceful and calm things are around here, and how I ought to spend more time in places like this. But unfortunately, these days, I can no longer run away and hide

Meanwhile, back at the ra … errr … apartment …

Last night was a slightly better night. There was still plenty going on but I managed to ignore a lot of it.

It was still a struggle to raise myself from the dead, and after I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages I had a listen to the dictaphone. I’d talked to a few people about how I was going to change the kitchen round in my house. One of my friends began to talk to me about the kitchen that I had, what it was like etc so I explained. I explained that I’d probably be wanting to dispose of it completely, even down to the pipes etc. he said that he would like to have it. I said that that was fine by me. He asked if he could come to pick it up the next day. I burst out laughing and said “I haven’t even organised anything yet or ordered anything, let alone had it delivered etc”. He replied “your niece’s daughter is going to be rather upset because she’s planning on taking a day off tomorrow and coming to help me do it”.

And later I was going through the collection of solo poses for my 3D characters, picking out the individual poses and making some kind of giant collage with them all superimposed. I’d done three and was on the way to finishing off a fourth when someone came to the door. They asked me what I was doing so I explained. They thought that it was a pretty pointless task because I wouldn’t have the benefit from doing it. I’d be long gone before this project was particularly finished

Finally I’d been out drinking (so that was obviously a dream) with a couple of people from Crewe and we were on our way home. We called at a pub on the way back and outside the pub next door was a guy whom we all knew. We had a chat with him. I asked my two companions what was happening this weekend. They didn’t really come out with much. I needed to use the bathroom so I went to find it. It was in a terrible mess with toilet paper everywhere etc. I tidied it up as best as I could. I found that the door wouldn’t close. There was no bolt so in the end I teased a nail out of the wall and slipped it in where the bolt should be. That managed to close it. The next step was to sit down but the toilet seat fell off. In the end I thought that I’d abandon it as a bad job and just go home.

Deciding last week to go to the shops at St Nicolas was a really good decision. The bus whisked me off and dropped me off on the raised kerb, and then I had a slow wander around the Carrefour just picking up one or two things that I need quite quickly, like tomatoes, lettuce and mushrooms.

With plenty of time before the bus came back for me I had a nice hot coffee and then sat and watched the world go by.

As I said before, I think that I’m moving a little easier after the exercise so I can’t wait for this rehabilitation course, that should have started last week, to begin.

After my bread and soup we had this totally shambolic afternoon of dealing with all of this paperwork and fielding probably about a dozen phone calls for one reason or another.

The only one that was really welcome was Rosemary, and we had a good chat for a while.

Last night I’d dictated the notes for one of the radio programmes but when I listened to them I decided that they weren’t up to much so I re-dictated them. They are no edited and in the process of being assembled.

If I’m lucky, I might finish it tonight and even dictate the notes for the next programme in the list.

Tea was a baked potato, salad and one of those breaded quorn fillets that I like so much.

So when I’ve finished what I need to do, I’ll go to bed. I have my blood test tomorrow and then I crack on with the notes that I’ll dictate in a minute.

Many years ago, “Bomber” Harris used to greet members of the Air Ministry whenever he met them with “and what have you done to impede the War effort today?”. I had so much to do, some of which was quite important, but I’ve not done any of it, what with one thing and another.

So who’s going to come along and impede my efforts tomorrow?

EPIC HALL

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

Friday 3rd November 2023 – SO MUCH FOR THAT …

Thursday 2nd November 2023 – I WAS RIGHT …

Wednesday 1st November 2023 – THERE WON’T BE MANY …

Tuesday 31st October 2023 – BANE OF BRITAIN …

Monday 30th October 2023 – OHHH! THE EMBARRASSMENT!

Sunday 29th October 2023 – NOT ONCE, NOT TWICE …

Saturday 28th October 2023 – FOR THE FIRST …

Friday 27th October 2023 – THE PREVIOUS DAYS’ …

Thursday 26th October 2023 – THE GOOD NEWS …

Wednesday 25th October 2023 – I’VE HAD SOME …

Tuesday 24th October 2023 – THEY STILL HAVEN’T …

Monday 23rd October 2023- I MADE IT …

Sunday 22nd October 2023 – I WASN’T ACTUALLY …

Saturday 21st October 2023 – I HAVE SET …

Friday 20th october 2023 – I’M ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED …

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