Tag Archives: eric hall

Sunday 18th January 2026 – WHAT A LOVELY …

… way to start a Sunday. A slow, gentle awakening and a gradual sliding out of bed into the daylight – at 10:00 this morning. I really should do it more often.

Especially if I can manage to be in bed before 23:30 the night before.

Last night, though, I didn’t quite manage it. As usual, I dillied and dallied and dallied and dillied while I was trying to finish off everything, and in the end, it was about 23:50 when I finally made it into bed.

Although I was asleep quite quickly, it was something of a disturbed night and I awoke on several occasions. Mind you, I was fast asleep when the nurse breezed into the bedroom to deal with my legs. I actually took no notice so he did what he thought was necessary and then breezed out again. He can’t have been here longer than two minutes.

It hadn’t really disturbed me, and I was soon asleep again, right up to my rather gentle awakening at 10:00.

My clothes were in here from last night so, for a change, I didn’t bother with the bathroom. I dressed and went into the kitchen to make breakfast.

Porridge and piping-hot coffee, and a couple of my homemade croissants warmed in the microwave. What a lovely breakfast that was too!

While I was eating, I was reading some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE

Today, James Curle has been emptying the various wells and pits around the fort and camp. So far, he’s examined no fewer than one hundred and seven, and that’s an enormous number.

Some of them are empty of relics, some have a few, some have more, but some are astonishing.

Take Pit I for example – "Near the surface a fragment of an inscribed table. At § feet, a piece of twisted silver wire, part of a penannular brooch, two bronze rings, and twelve links of a small bronze chain. At 8 feet, a human skeleton, near it a bronze penannular brooch, as well as two pieces of bronze, perhaps part of a second brooch. At 12 feet, an altar dedicated to Jupiter, and below it a ‘first brass’ coin of Hadrian. From 14 feet downwards, bones of animals; the skulls of oxen (Bos Longifrons), and of horses were-frequent ; also soles of shoes, fragments of leather garments, and deer horns. At 18 feet, fragments of stone moulding, pieces of amphorae, and small bits of undecorated Terra Sigillata; also two pieces of deer horn fitted together like a rude pick. At 21 feet, an iron bar. At 22 feet, a human skull complete and part of another skull near it, remains of scale armour of brass, also the necks of five large amphorae, and the bottom of a cup of Terra Sigillata (Type Drag. 33), with the stamp PROBVS-F. At 25 feet, the upper stone of a quern, an iron knife with a bone handle, an iron knife, a linch pin , a bar of iron, a sickle, portions of an iron corselet mounted with brass; the staves and bottom of an oak bucket, 7 inches high, 8 inches in diameter; the iron rim of a large bucket; a large block of sandstone having a rudely-sculptured figure of a boar on one side; a small fragment of stone, with a figure of a boar in relief; five arrowheads of iron; pieces of chain armour; the iron umbo of a ‘shield and fragments of brass, perhaps belonging to its decoration; a brass coin of Vespasian or Titus; a stirrup-like holdfast of iron; a fragment of wall plaster, necks and sides of several amphorae"

That’s just one example of a well-filled pit.

He makes the point that it seems to be the earliest pits that have all of the relics. That would fit in with the idea that the abandonment of the fort was a panic-stricken flight and whatever couldn’t be carried away was cast into the pits and quickly filled in, in the hope that it could be recovered at a later date. However, with the passage of twenty years before the return of the Roman Army to the area, the generation that had hidden it was gone and the whereabouts of the caches forgotten.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

My friend from Wellington was around last night. He’d come to see how I was and to see how my house move was going. He was having a look and he saw that I had a toolbox. He asked me about the toolbox – it was a dark green cantilever thing. I said that I’d picked it up for a couple of quid with one or two tools in it and I’d gradually been expanding it. I now had about three or four of these toolboxes with different tools in them and more complete toolkits etc. He seemed to be quite interested in it. In the end, he asked me what we were going to do so I replied that we would rearrange the living room and sort out the furniture in there. We decided to go in, and we were looking at the big, black wall unit with mirror doors. I was thinking of putting it across the door to protect everything from the draught but pulling it about four feet forward so that people could slalom around it in comparative ease

The cantilever toolbox that I have here is a light green, but there are several others back on the farm. There isn’t a dark green one though. And my friend from Newport (not Wellington) did come over here to help me design the plans for the new apartment. The large black wall unit with mirror doors didn’t fit in with the plans and that was taken away by the charity shop people. When it was upstairs though, it was across the doorway but pulled a few feet forward. It protected me from draughts when I was sitting at the table.

Did I miss the end of that dream about my friend from Wellington? We went into the other room to rearrange the furniture. We thought that with the black and white shelf unit which was much too close to the porte, it would have been interesting in bringing the certifed form ending and the final reel over to my new address and sharing oil one night. But for some reason, it became very complicated … fell asleep here

This quickly degenerated into a pile of whatever, didn’t it?

When the nurse came, I was somewhere in the Alps. I’d been there before, years ago, and I had plenty of photos, including photos of the boats that were on the lake right up in the mountains. There was even an imitation Spanish galleon on this lake. Don’t ask me how it arrived there. There were several pleasure cruisers. I remember talking to one of the guys in a rowing boat who was just sitting there, lying on his back enjoying the freezing cold weather as his boat followed the current through this lake. This inspired my German friend to go there once he’d seen all of my photos so we’d arranged to meet one day. But he’d met someone the previous day who had some kind of horse-drawn contraption. He became friends with him, and asked him if he could borrow this horse and cart, or whatever it is, and go off camping for the night. We made some kind of strange remark about leaving a holiday in order to go on another holiday, a holiday within a holiday or something. He eventually turned up, and all that he had was a metal chair. He had to try to make himself comfortable on this metal chair during the night but it had casters on it. He was afraid that during the night, if he moved, it would begin to roll and he would be over the edge of the cliff so he was looking for things to try to chock the wheels to make sure that it wouldn’t move while he was asleep.

As for this, I’ve no idea to what it refers, although I have vague recollections of being somewhere similar in a dream several weeks ago. It wasn’t as detailed or as complicated as this, though.

There was also something about being on board a ship. I was the captain of it. It was a cruise ship, that sort of thing. I’d been receiving secret messages by the time the ship went into port, it would go slowly along the docks until it reached its berth and someone would walk alongside the dock and tell me these messages. But when it came to berthing down, the cabin for the captain was also the cabin for the First Officer so we had to share. So I grabbed the bunk on the ground floor for mine and I thought that I’d let the First Officer climb up the ladder to the one on top. It turned out that the First Officer was a woman. I thought that this was going to be rather complicated but neither of us really cared and we both went to bed. We had a little chat about this and that. But while I was trying to fall asleep, I was rummaging through the lockers at the side of the bed. There were all kinds of things in there. There was a huge homemade battery clamp, there were other kinds of bits and pieces in there, but I was going through it, trying to take an inventory while I was waiting to fall asleep.

The First Officer, I can see her now. She was the driver who brought me home on Thursday from dialysis, although why she should pop up here, I don’t know. Walking along the shore at the side of a ship reminds me of being AT THE WELLAND CANAL IN 2010 where I did just that. The rest is about my preoccupation with the untidy state of this apartment, I imagine.

After that, there was football. Greenock Morton were away to Stenhousemuir in the Scottish Cup yesterday, and I have to say that I have never in my life seen such an inept, incompetent display from a professional club.

Giant-killing acts in cup matches occur so frequently that it’s hardly ever worth mentioning them, but when a full-time professional club in the second tier of Scottish football comes up against part-timers in the third tier and loses, it’s not really headlines, but to lose 4-0? It’s an embarrassment. Morton were really lucky to get nil, that’s for sure.

The rest of the day has been spent working on the next radio programme. It took an age to find all of the songs that I wanted, and then they needed to be reformatted, remixed, edited, paired and segued. By the time that I knocked off, it had all been done. It just remains now to write the notes, which I shall do during the week.

There was time to make the pizza base for tea – not a loaf, though, because there’s plenty of bread in the freezer that needs using. And for a few minutes, I reviewed my Welsh for Tuesday.

The pizza was delicious, and there’s a half left over for tomorrow night. Right now, I’m off to bed, ready … "I don’t think" – ed … for dialysis tomorrow.

But seeing as we have been talking about the Welland Canal … "well, one of us has" – ed … the Welland Canal was built to by-pass Niagara Falls.
While I was there, I went into Niagara where I heard a story about a couple, a 95-year-old man and a 94-year-old woman, who were there on their honeymoon.
"Did they have a good time?" I asked
"Not really" was the reply. "They spent the whole two weeks trying to get out of the car."

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Saturday 17th January 2025 – HERE WE GO …

… late again this evening!

Not that I’m complaining, though … "for a change" – ed …. I’ve had a lovely tea tonight. It took an age to prepare, but it was well worth the effort.

It was a late night too last night. I ended up being in bed at about 23:30 after everything that needed to be done. I could have finished a long time before I did but, as usual, I was sidetracked by all kinds of odds and ends that spun it out forever.

Once in bed, despite the non-stop coughing fit, I managed to fall asleep quite quickly, and there I lay until all of … errr … 04:20. Not that it bothered me for long because I was soon back to sleep again, and I was dead to the World until the alarm went off at 06:29.

As usual, it took an eternity for me to summon up the courage to leave the bed and I was late going for my hot drink and medication. That took longer than it ought to have done too.

Mind you, the nurse was late today, so I had plenty of time to transcribe the dictaphone notes after the medication.

We were living in some kind of chaotic circumstances, a huge group of us. The place was untidy etc., and no-one seemed to be making an effort to tidy up. We were told that there was going to be a huge spell of nice weather. I remembered that last year, I had a tomato plant that I’d put by the back door. It wasn’t very successful but I was hoping that this year, it may be better. I went to find it, but it was looking rather sad but I watered it heavily and fetched a foot pump and began to pump it up. People were encouraging me, saying that these plants needed a start to be going. But while I was there pumping it up and people were there watching me, I noticed that there seemed to be much less soil than usual, so I said that I’d need some more soil. Then they replied that I just needed to sweep the soil that was stuck around the edges of the pot – it was one of these huge, oblong pots. So I went and knocked it in with a small spade and it really did fill the bac and a couple of people who were sleeping in it were swamped and made some kind of remark. So that was my tomato plant, and I went and installed it by the door. Then I went for a walk down the garden, and I could see the derelict parts of the house, derelict parts of the building and what a mess it was looking. I was wishing that I lived somewhere else. In another part, just the other side of the raised-up ring road, there was a huge, derelict complex going back to the seventeenth century. I could see the date that was written – 1655 but in Latin. There was a big name on the side of one of these buildings, something like LA MAGNALAISE. There was a plaque fixed to the building with some names on it, so I supposed that “La Magnalaise” had been a battle or something and this was a plaque in memory of the people. The building was all overgrown with weeds and mould etc. and it looked in a terrible mess. It made me feel rather depressed to see it. But then one of the people began to sing “Happy Birthday.” It was the birthday of a retired naval officer who lived with us. It appeared that they had all had a whip-round to buy him a present. What they’d bought him was a tiny hand-brush for brushing the hearth or a coal or wood fire. He seemed to be delighted to receive it, but if I had received it as a present, I’d have been insulted. I could see that all of this was starting to make me depressed.

The idea of pumping up your plants with a foot pump sounds interesting and I wish that it would have worked when I was living down on the farm. But living in chaotic, untidy circumstances is nothing new anywhere around me.

It’s certainly true too that there are a great many memorials scattered around all kinds of different areas that are ignored by the locals, who either don’t understand what they represent or, worse, couldn’t care less what they represent.

There was also something else about a new hospital that had been built somewhere along the coast in South Wales. It had just opened, although the works on the road outside hadn’t been finished. As I was walking along this road past the hospital, there were loads and loads of buses coming from South Wales, and they were having to do a U-turn in the road to drop off their passengers. I thought “there’s a roundabout one hundred yards further on. If they went one hundred yards further on, they could swing round the roundabout and come back down the hill, but they wanted to turn round in this place outside the hospital. I was in my taxi and wanted to go back up the hill but the number of buses coming up and swinging round in this place made it extremely difficult. At one point, I had to drive on the pavement because a bus was blocking the road and a coach was coming down the hill and went onto the wrong side of the road to pass everything. While I was there, I was having to drive on the pavement to drive round all these obstacles and I remember saying to whom I was with that this is going to be absolute chaos in the summer season and I can’t think what on earth was going through their minds when they built a system like this.

A new hospital – now that’s a real dream, isn’t it? But I can still see one of the buses. It was a red “Leyland” double-decker from the early 1960s with “18 – MARGAM” on the destination blind. And the coach coming down the hill was a white, Duple-bodied vehicle from the early-mid 1970s.

And it goes without saying that I’m back in a taxi at one point too.

The nurse eventually turned up and asked me how I was. I told him that I’m freezing cold. I actually have been for a couple of days and I just can’t warm myself up. According to the thermometer, it’s twenty-four degrees in my bedroom/office but I’m shivering.

Actually, I don’t know why I told him because nothing will ever happen about it. As a nurse, he’s not actually all that involved in the evolution of his patients’ illnesses, even though I suppose that he ought to be.

After he left, I made breakfast and read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE

James Curle is currently excavating the old wells and pits, and has found evidence (skeletons, skulls, broken weapons, charred beams etc.) to suggest that at least one of the earliest of the five periods of occupation ended in violence, after which the fort was abandoned for at least a generation.

This suggests that it was sometime in between the end of Gnaeus Julius Agricola’s expeditions into the Highlands of Scotland in the period 83-87AD and the campaign that led to the construction of the Antonine Wall in 142-143AD

The construction of the first phase of Hadrian’s Wall in 122AD implies a retreat from places farther north, and if we knew why they retreated and built the wall, this might explain the destruction at Trimontium. The timeline would fit nicely, with both the destruction and the reoccupation on the march north twenty years later.

However, while he was exploring a well in what seems to be the communal bathhouse, I couldn’t help but laugh. He tells us that the likely shape of one of the rooms is due to "having at one end a bath of warm water, and at the other a great vase or basin filled with cold water, with which to douche the bather before he passed out again."

It must have been really hot in the caldera – the “hot room”.

Back in here, there was a football match to watch. I’d forgotten that Stranraer were playing Ayr United on Tuesday, so I caught up with the match this morning.

Stranraer lost 4-1, which is no surprise as Ayr are several layers up in the pyramid, but I’m convinced that the referee was refereeing a completely different game to the one that the commentators and I were watching. If you like, you can SEE THE HIGHLIGHTS HERE and let me know what you think.

The rest of the day had been spent editing the radio notes and assembling the two halves of the programme. Then I chose the joining track and wrote the notes for it.

That was another job that took much longer than it ought, but I had a couple of interruptions.

This weekend, I’ve been expecting a package, containing my equipment to convert my internet to fibre-optic, to be delivered. It didn’t turn up yesterday as promised, but when my faithful cleaner checked my mailbox, there was an avis de passage saying that the postie had been but had been unable to deliver the package.

Yet I’d been in all day and had heard absolutely nothing.

So this morning, I wrote a notice and stuck it on my door. The notice read “knock hard and give me time to come to the door. I can’t run as I’m on crutches. If you can’t wait, open the door, come in and shout”.

Round about 13:30, a note on the internet (not in my mailbox) said "the postwoman tried to deliver your parcel. She rang the doorbell, but there was no-one at home".

So if she rang the doorbell, how come she didn’t see the notice on the door? I suspect that she wanted to be at home early, so she only did half of her round, so I went on the warpath with everyone with whom I could.

Eventually, the manageress of the post depot rang me back and promised to have it delivered by Monday midday at the latest.

There was also a break to make some really fresh bread – to bread rolls, in fact, because for tea tonight, I was going to have soup.

There were some leeks left over from Christmas so I made a thick leek, potato, mushroom (I had plenty of those), onion, garlic and soya yoghurt soup with small pasta elbows.

With the fresh bread, it was delicious, and there’s enough soup left over for another meal too.

But right now, having finished my notes, I’m off to bed and hoping for a lie-in tomorrow. The nurse can wake me up if he likes, but I don’t care.

But seeing as we have been talking about the Roman bathhouse … "well, one of us has" – ed … the baths were usually a male prerogative.
However, on one occasion, ladies were allowed in.
After she came out, I asked a friend of mine how she found it
She replied "well, I found out that the Bible is incorrect"
"How do you mean?"
"This ‘all men are created equal’ – it’s not true at all."

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Friday 16th January 2026 – AS I HAVE …

said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s a waste of time going to bed early, because all that it means is that I wake up correspondingly early the following morning.

Take last night, for example. I went to bed at some time round about 21:00 and I was wide-awake again at 03:20.

Yes, I was totally wasted last night, and I’ve no idea why. However, it seems to be connected with my dialysis sessions. But anyway, I couldn’t keep my eyes open and after having fallen asleep I don’t know how many times, I gave up everything and went straight to bed.

And there I stayed until all of 03:20 when I awoke. Not that I left the bed at that time, of course. I lay there drifting about in a haze for a while and at one point did actually manage to go back to sleep.

But not for long. At about 05:25 I was wide-awake again and at 05:40, I fell out of bed.

With plenty to do, I took full advantage of the early start. I dictated the notes for the joining track of a radio programme that needs finishing and then dictated the notes for another programme, leaving just the joining track to be done now, when I know how long it needs to be.

When the alarm went off, I went for a good scrub up and then into the kitchen for my hot drink and my medication. I do like my hot honey, lemon and ginger drink.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There were a load of TV cameras around Nantwich last night. In fact it was a Sunday morning, and it was a kind of street racing thing for motorbikes. The motorbikes had come from all over Europe and probably the World to see these races, and the streets were crowded. It started off with a race by quads. They started in the town square and went out by Hospital Street. Once they were out in the country, they were racing through fields, etc., where there was plenty of mud and sliding, etc., and then back along Millstone Lane and Beam Street and into the town centre again via the market hall. The first quad race was won by someone or other, but the second race was won by someone from Nantwich, which was quite a surprise and was well applauded. There were all kinds of these races. One of the races involved horseboxes, lorries transformed into horseboxes rather than towed ones. That, apparently, was total carnage as they kept on slipping and overturning in the mud. There was someone who managed to complete the run in record time, but no-one else managed to return for quite some considerable time. It all ended with a football match in the mud. Stanley Matthews was playing for Blackpool. He had a beautiful header that went to someone from Huddersfield Town. One of the attractions was a Lotus Cortina used as a rally car in the late 1960s. It was on display, and someone was saying that it cost £2,000 when new, but it’s probably worth a hundred times that now. The car transporter that was bringing it was at the garage having a hose-down because it was rather dirty.

This would have been an exciting event to see, and no mistake. But competing with St Mary’s Church on a Sunday morning would have invoked Divine retribution without any doubt at all. But where did the football match fit in?

However, there did used to be a world-championship-class motorcycle scrambling venue at Hatherton, just outside Nantwich, in the 1960s, and my brother and I would cycle there regularly to watch the races. But unfortunately, motorcycle scrambling is very much a thing of the past today.

There were three criminals who had broken into a house. Their aim was to take away the safe that was on the first floor. They planned to do this by cutting away the ceiling underneath it and letting it drop onto the ground floor. As the householder was in, how on earth they expected to do it without waking him, I really don’t know. They set out to be extremely silent but they began to make a little noise so one of them went to position himself at the foot of the stairs. Sure enough, the householder came downstairs and he reached the bottom stair. The crook who was there hit him in the face with a shoe, knocked him unconscious and then ran. Eventually, his friends caught up with him. They were disappointed because with the householder now being unconscious, they could have gone ahead and removed the safe. However, the guy reminded them that the safe weighed fifty-two tonnes, so how were they going to move it? They replied that they had a block and tackle and could lift it into the back of a van. He felt that at fifty-two tonnes, that would be absurd. The police became involved but couldn’t identify any of the crooks, even though that one particular crook was very well-known to the police. But something that was interesting was that one of the other two was having an unofficial relationship with the Asiatic wife of this householder, and they had been seen together on a couple of occasions after this attempted burglary.

Wherever this dream came from, I’ve no idea at all. It doesn’t seem to relate to anything that has happened recently. But trying to fit a fifty-two tonne safe into the back of a van is a clear absurdity

The nurse was early yet again and didn’t hang around long, so I could push on and make breakfast.

And read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE.

Our author, James Curle, has begun the excavations and at the moment he’s uncovered a couple of skeletons lying on the floor under sixteen hundred years of accumulated soil and two severed heads tossed down an abandoned well. Fun times indeed on the Roman limes.

After breakfast, I had a few things to do and then pushed on with finishing off the radio programme that I’d started the other day. That’s all written now (except for the joining track) although it took a while because there’s almost no information anywhere about the groups that played at this particular festival. In the end, I had to resort to setting an artificial intelligence searchbot off on the hunt.

My work was interrupted by the arrival of my faithful cleaner who had come down to do her stuff. I noticed from the shopping that she had left that she had been down earlier, but I hadn’t heard a thing.

Anyway, she shooed me into the shower and now I’m a nice, clean boy with nice, clean clothes. And that makes me feel better.

She carried on with her stuff while I was sorting myself out, and after she left, I finally finished my notes. To round off the day, I edited the notes that I had dictated for the joining track for one of my programmes and assembled the programme. That’s now ready to go.

And with what time was left, I carried on with editing the next lot of notes, but I didn’t manage to go very far because with the new version of my sound editor, one of my favourite effects, “adjustable fade” seems to have been dropped and now I’m stuck.

Tea tonight was sausage, chips and home-made baked beans followed by Christmas cake. But the beans aren’t really as successful as I would have liked, and I’ve pretty much decided that if I don’t have any visitors from the UK in the near future, I’ll have to order a tray of beans online.

So now having finished my notes, I’m off to bed.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about motorcycles … "well, one of us has" – ed … we were once riding through the Wirral on a friend’s Velocette 500 when we were stopped by the police.
"What’s up, officer?" asked Ray
"I’m going to have to give you a ticket. You’re riding with three people on the seat"
"Three? Three?" asked Ray, incredulously
"Yes, three" insisted the policeman
"Blimmin’ ‘eck" said Ray, looking at the rest of us. "Can anyone remember where Alvin fell off?"

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Thursday 15th January 2026 – I’M FED UP …

… of all of this, that’s for sure.

This afternoon, I arrived at the dialysis centre at 13:50. I was finally plugged in at … errr … 15:10. That’s one hour and twenty minutes that I had to hang around like Piffy on a Rock. As if I don’t have anything better to do than to wait on their convenience.

That’s how it has been today, one thing after another after another. It started off last night when I ended up going late for tea and not actually finishing until 23:30 or thereabouts everything that I needed to do.

With this racking cough that is still not improving and a nose that’s flowing like a stream in full flood, I didn’t really have all that much of a good sleep either. I did in fact go to sleep rather quickly, but I kept on waking throughout the night with a desperate desire to cough.

When the alarm went off, it was a desperate struggle to leave the bed and it took me quite a while to summon up the energy and make an effort to go to the bathroom, where I had a good wash and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant.

After the hot drink and the medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out what had gone on during the night.

I was in the hospital again. I’d been staying there for a while and they had changed my mattress around so that it would have sides of even wear rather than all going to be bogged down on one side. However, as soon as I changed my position to the other side of the bed, it was like being in a different bed and I ended up with a second lot of flowers, which was not what I expected. I didn’t really know what to do and how to react to this kind of thing, and especially the two deliveries of flowers, one for each side of the bed, that I’d had. That was becoming complicated.

That’s the problem with my mattress here. I turned it once, but now both sides are worn and it really does need replacing. As for the hospital and the flowers, I wonder what they are doing here.

Later on, I was driving my taxi around Shavington in the Basford neighbourhood, I suppose. There was something about a couple of red roses in the middle of the road. I’ve no idea why, and that’s all that I remember of this particular dream, unfortunately.

So I’m back to driving taxis again. I’ve not done that for a week or so. But flowers yet again. There’s definitely something happening today with those.

And then there was a third dream. It was about a university meeting, and there were hundreds, if not a couple of thousand, people there milling around. They were talking about plans for the forthcoming year etc., and then we had to go along and choose a place to stay on a student exchange for two weeks. They had all kinds of guides to help you choose, notebooks and music etc. I went straight over there and began to liberate all of the RUNRIG cassettes because where I was hoping to go was that I’d heard that there was an exchange to the Outer Hebrides or to an island almost out as far as the High Arctic. I was determined to be on that regardless. Once I’d collected all of these cassettes, I wandered round but couldn’t find any tutors. I asked a couple of people but no-one else could find them. They had all disappeared, so I wondered what was going to happen next – we needed to be allocated rooms, we needed to be fed etc. Then I suddenly realised that I’d been walking around without my crutches so I went back to where I’d been sitting. The girl who had been sitting next to me was there so I gave her a wave and said to her “you’re in trouble”. She asked why, and I explained that it was for letting me walk around here like this without my crutches. We had a little comment about it. Then I saw that the food was arriving so I went, but it was only the dessert. I couldn’t really see any vegan desserts so I had to hope that what I’d chosen was a dessert. Then the main course arrived, but it didn’t look very healthy. It was mashed potatoes and a kind of meat stew, something like that. It was strange that they had put the dessert first and the main course second. I couldn’t help it – I was nibbling away at my dessert rather than helping myself to a main course. I noticed that there was a vegetarian option but no vegan option. Everyone seemed to be taking lumps out of the vegetarian one rather than the vegan. There was also a starter there that was placed in the third position but that had nothing but cheese on it. There was no vegan cheese either. I couldn’t help but nibble on my dessert instead of trying to organise a main course. I was beginning to feel extremely frustrated by this time – not being able to find a tutor, not being able to register my choice of student exchange, not having any real meal to eat, and finding myself automatically nibbling on a dessert first. This wasn’t the kind of situation that I was hoping for.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have visited this island in the past during a nocturnal ramble. It doesn’t have a name but it’s right out of place, where it was during that previous dream.

But how many times is this that I’ve dreamed of walking without my crutches? It’s probably a good dozen or so. And then having one of these attacks of uncertainty that I have sometimes during the night. But dreaming about food is an unusual twist to this.

The nurse turned up early again and sorted out my legs. He didn’t stay long and I could push on and make breakfast. And to read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE.

James Curle has now started his excavations but is still setting the scene. He has, however, now worked out that the reason that the Roman fort wasn’t put in the most logical place, as I mentioned yesterday, was that there are the remains of a huge Roman camp there. and he’ll be excavating that in due course.

After breakfast, I gave in an inch to fear and went one better than David Crosby. Probably because, having had the ‘flu for Christmas, I’m not feeling up to par and it just increases my paranoia, like looking at my mirror and seeing a police car.

Back in here, there was post to deal with, a package that needed returning and a few other bits and pieces. Once I’d done that, I began to do some more work on the radio programme that I’d started the other day.

There wasn’t much time to do very much but nevertheless, I made a certain amount of progress before my cleaner came in to apply the anaesthetic on my arm. While she was here, she busied herself with a few small tasks about the place, seeing as she hadn’t been here on Tuesday, and then she wandered off, leaving me to wait for the taxi. I came back in here to carry on with the radio programme.

The taxi was a couple of minutes late coming for me, and then we had to drive out to the back of beyond to “rescue the perishing” – pick up someone else and take him to dialysis too. Consequently, we were several minutes late arriving.

Once I’d weighed myself, I installed myself in my bed and waited. And waited.

There was another new girl there today being given instruction by one of the experienced nurses. Consequently everything was done by the book with procedures rigorously obeyed. On top of that, another one of the patients, already plugged in, had a crisis so everyone downed tools and rushed to her aid.

The delay was such that the afternoon coffee was served long before I was even plugged in, so I had to sit and look at it while I waited.

Eventually it was my turn to be plugged in and, once more, it was all done by the book. As a result, it was 15:10 when my machine was finally switched on and running. I’d been waiting one hour and twenty minutes. To add insult to injury, the internet there was down so there wasn’t a great deal I could do, except to drink my now-cold coffee and read a few papers about ancient roads.

Actually, that was quite interesting because the author contends that roads such as “Dere Street”, once north of the Roman outpost camps north of Hadrian’s Wall, are not Roman at all but ancient prehistoric trackways used by the Romans. He contends that they do not show the typical characteristics of Roman roads, and they aren’t mentioned in the Iter Britanniarum.

He seems however not to have considered that if the Iter Britanniarum had not been written during the reign of Antoninus Pius but later, as several people suspect, it’s likely that the Antonine Wall between the Clyde and the Forth had been abandoned by the time the Iter Britanniarum was written, and so there wouldn’t be any Romans likely to be going beyond the outpost forts so there would be no need for a route guide for those roads.

During the session, the new nurse kept on asking me if I was OK, not that it made any difference, and although Emilie the Cute Consultant was the doctor on duty today, she sent a messenger to ask me how it went in Paris. I replied that it was as expected – there had been a deterioration in my condition – and I expected that once the news reached her, she would come dashing to my side to soothe my fevered brow. But she clearly doesn’t love me any more.

Eventually, they unplugged me, totally by the book of course, and by then it was 18:50. I’d been there for five hours for a session of three-and-a-half. As if I don’t have anything better to do with my time. Luckily, my chauffeur was waiting and she drove me home quite rapidly.

It beats me what’s going on there at times, because it always seems to be that no matter what time I arrive and in what order, I’m almost always the last to be connected and it really is getting on my wick.

There was a howling gale again and a driving rainstorm outside when we arrived so I was dropped off at the back outside the fire escape where there are only three or four paces to walk into the building. And being helped by my faithful cleaner, it was quite a comfortable walk.

After my cleaner left, I made tea, horribly late again after all of this. Rice and veg with a taco roll full of spicy Mexican beans and mushrooms. However, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have done because I fell asleep three times while I was trying to eat.

Back in here, I made a start on the notes for the day but having fallen asleep twice while trying to type and seeing that what I was writing was a load of gibberish … "nothing new there" – ed … I threw in the towel and went to bed.

But seeing as we have been talking about cutting our hair … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of once being at work when I absented myself for half an hour and the boss wondered where I had been.
"Having my hair cut" I replied
"What? In the company’s time?"
"Well, it grew in the company’s time, didn’t it?"
"It didn’t all grow in the company’s time"
"Well, I’ve not had all of it cut off!"

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Wednesday 14th January 2026 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone this morning.

However, although that may be a surprise to some, the fact is that last night I had probably the best night’s sleep that I have had for a long, long time.

What with the football and everything, I had quite a late night again. By the time that I’d written my notes, taken the stats, and backed up everything, it was after 23:30 when I finally crawled into the bed underneath the covers.

Once I was warm and comfortable, I went straight to sleep, and the very next thing that I remember was the alarm going off at 06:29. I was so surprised that I sat bolt upright and slid sideways out of bed in a panic.

Usually, during the night, there’s some kind of very vague memory of something, either me turning over in bed or having a coughing fit, but last night, there was absolutely nothing. It really was the Sleep of the Dead.

Sitting upright on the bed with the feet on the floor is one thing. Standing up and heading to the bathroom is something completely different. It took me a good few minutes … "as usual" – ed … to summon up the energy to leave the bedroom again this morning.

However, I was early into the kitchen after my scrub up, and I made my hot drink with which to take my medicine. And back in here, with nothing on the dictaphone, I checked my mails and so on.

The nurse was early today — actually before 8:00. He asked how things went in Paris, so I told him the news. He had the air of being disappointed, but then again, so am I. He sorted out my feet, and then he cleared off. It didn’t take him long.

Once he’d left, I made breakfast and began to read A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE again.

It’s been so long since I last read it that I’d forgotten where I was in the book, so I started all over again. At the moment, we’re walking along Dere Street, the Roman road that leads from Hadrian’s Wall up to the Antonine Wall in Scotland, and we’ve just arrived in the vicinity of Newsteads.

James Curle is at the stage of wondering why the Romans didn’t build their fort on the promontory commanding the area, instead of halfway up the slope. However, once his excavations make a start, he’ll find out why. And it becomes much more exciting when he does find out why.

Back in here, I began to install the office correctly. I’m now just using the new laptop as a desktop work unit, with the desktop screen plugged in. Some of the external drives are plugged into an adapter that is plugged into one USB port of the machine, and there’s another adapter in the second USB port with the mouse and keyboard from the desktop plugged into it. And that’s a much better way to work.

After all of that, I had a footfest with the highlights of all of the matches from last night, including Y Bala’s most improbable win against Y Fflint. That kept me busy for a while, and then there was some post that needed my attention.

Eventually, I could push on and do some work.

The next radio programme is going to feature a rock festival, so I had to track down the groups that played there, try to find their setlists for the festival and then see if I actually had any of the songs in my collection.

That took much longer than it ought, but then again, as usual with these festivals, many of the groups are quite unknown outside their orbit, and their music is unavailable by conventional means.

However, I eventually managed to round up enough music, including at least one very rare track that the group concerned only ever played live once and never ever recorded on an album. That should be of interest when it crawls into the public domain. But then, having a friend whose son was once sound engineer for the Pink Fairies has conjured up all kinds of rarities in the past.

So now, all of the music has been selected, converted to the correct format, remixed, re-edited, paired and segued, and I’ve even started to write the notes for it all.

That took me up until teatime tonight (a rather late teatime, it has to be said). I had peas, carrots, a mash of sweet and ordinary potatoes and gravy with a slice of my new vegan pie, followed by a slice of Christmas cake.

The vegan pie is wonderful, and I shall be looking forward to trying the other seven slices. I cut the pie into eight, and the other seven are now in the freezer ready for later.

But right now, late again, I’m off to bed. Dialysis tomorrow, and I expect that Emilie the Cute Consultant will ignore me again. She definitely doesn’t love me any more.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the frontier … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone once asked me "how many ears did Davy Crockett have?"
"Three" I replied. "His left ear, his right ear and his final front ear. Now you tell me how many ears Captain Spock had"
"I don’t know" he replied
"He also had three" I answered. "His left ear, his right ear and Space."
"Space?" he asked
"Yes" I answered. "Space, the final front ear."

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Tuesday 13th January 2026 – I DON’T KNOW …

… why they send me on these wild goose chases halfway around the country and back so that some specialist in some hospital somewhere can tell me exactly what I already know and have known for several months.

As if I don’t have enough to do with my time.

And especially if it means crawling out of bed at some ridiculous time like 05:00.

Yes! 05:00! So last night I went without any food for tea, dashed through my notes, which were on-line at 20:27 precisely, the earliest time … "and by a long way too" – ed … that they have ever so been. And by the time that I finally made it into bed, it was just coming up to 21:00.

And when was the last time that I’d been in bed that early when I’ve not been feeling unwell?

However, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s an absolute waste of time going to bed early, because all it means is that I awaken correspondingly early the following morning. So there I was, tossing and turning in bed, trying desperately to go back to sleep at just before 02:00.

That was a waste of time too, and I lay there, semi-comatose, until the alarm went off at 05:00 when I hauled myself out of bed and staggered off into the bathroom to make myself look pretty.

And that was also a waste of time.

The taxi came a few minutes early and luckily, it was one of my favourite drivers, the one who “presses on” like an old-school taxi driver and always has plenty to say for herself. She helped me finish my packing and then we set off.

So far, I’d been without food for almost twenty-four hours and without drink for about fifteen hours. I work on the principle of “what doesn’t go in won’t want to come out during the journey” — after all, four hours or so in a taxi is a long time. Nevertheless, I packed a couple of slices of my “energy flapjack” and a small bottle of water in case I have a diabetic crisis along the way.

We had a good run and a good chat all the way as far as Mantes-La-Jolie, in between Rouen and Paris, and that was where we hit the traffic and the farmers’ demonstrations. A wrong turn on the prif led us out on the autoroute towards Rungis and Orly further complicated affairs, and what was looking at one stage like an easy 09:45 arrival for my 10:30 appointment turned out to be a panic-stricken 11:25.

Having to find me a wheelchair (it’s a different building so I didn’t know where the doctor was and how far I’d have to walk, and we were already hours late) and having to understand the unnecessarily complicated system of lifts didn’t help matters.

While we were stuck in traffic, I’d telephoned the doctor to say that we’d be late, so he let in several patients ahead of me, which was quite natural. Consequently, it was 12:25 when I was finally seen.

He poked and prodded me, put all these needles into my muscles and passed an electrical current through them to test my nerve reactions, and then examined the results.

Before he began to test me, he asked me how I was feeling and whether there was any sign of improvement. I told him that I was feeling lousy as usual and I was sure that there was a definite deterioration since my examination last January.

His conclusion was "I’m very sorry to say that there is no improvement, and you are right about the deterioration."

As I said just now, I could have told him that without having to go all the way to Paris. What a waste of a day!

While I was there, I asked him about the stabbing pain in my foot. He told me that as my nervous system is slowly breaking down, things like this are to be expected and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. He actually put it into a more scientific explanation, but that was the gist of it.

My chauffeur was waiting for me when I came out, and after I’d been to warm my feet, we headed to the car. Getting out of the wheelchair was exciting, but in the end I managed it and we headed for home.

On the way back, I fell asleep twice, which is no surprise considering my bad night, and we arrived home to disappointing weather. In Paris, it had been bright sunshine, beautiful clear blue skies and quite warm for the time of year. Here in Granville, it was overcast, raining, windy and cold. At least we’d had no hold-ups on the road to delay us.

My faithful cleaner was waiting to help me into the apartment and instead of a disgusting drink, I had a caffeine-packed energy drink. And I needed it too after over twenty-four hours of nothing to drink.

Having disposed of that, I came in here to listen to the dictaphone notes. I was actually surprised that there were some.

I can only remember fragments of this dream but there was something about being at home. We were in Vine Tree Avenue and there was something about the weather, but I can’t remember what. Then, my mother came into the living room to find out what we’d been doing. In this little box, I had a very, very small puppy. My mother asked about it and I replied that I’d found it somewhere. She had a look at it, and she agreed that it was really small, and because of its small size, we could keep it. There was much more to it than this, but I can’t remember anything once I awoke.

What interrupted my reverie, as I found out later on, was that in reaching for the dictaphone, I dropped the battery charger and all of the spare batteries onto the floor from off the little table behind the bedhead I shall have to pick that up in due course. But me with a puppy? Not that that’s ever likely to happen. Dogs and I just don’t get on. Give me a cat or two … "or three or four" – ed … any day.

Tea was the other half of Sunday’s pizza, which I wolfed down because there was football on the television, Y Barri v Llanelli. Y Barri scored a goal after two minutes but surprisingly, Llanelli, well-adrift at the foot of the table, managed to equalise.

It was only delaying the inevitable though, as Y Barri scored four more before the hour was up. You could see than Llanelli had effectively abandoned the game after that because their heads went down and they lost interest in chasing the ball, but Y Barri, once more, refused to turn the screw and played possession football for most of the rest of the game instead of going for the jugular.

That was disappointing.

And so, with aching foot and totally exhausted, I’m off to bed.
granville
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about my trip to Paris and the Neurology department … "well, one of us has" – ed … the doctor told me "there’s some good news and some bad news#34;
"What’s the bad news?" I asked.
"The bad news is that you are going to be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of your life"
"And what’s the good news?"
"I can get you a fair price for your crutches."

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Monday 12th January 2026 – AS I HAVE …

… said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … a good night’s sleep is the cure for all ills.

And so this morning, on awakening, I was feeling rather better than I was yesterday. And it kept on going for some considerable time too, something that surprised me.

Last night, though, I wasn’t well at all and fell asleep as soon as I’d finished my notes. And there I sat on the chair for a good half-hour, dead to the World before I awoke. Consequently, I was rather late going to bed.

Mind you, I managed to sleep right the way through until about 06:10, and I could, I suppose, have forced myself out of bed and had an early start. However, I decided to make the most of the extra twenty or so minutes in bed and lay there until the alarm went off.

It was, as usual, a struggle to leave the bed and to stagger into the bathroom; however, I had a good wash and a shave just in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon at dialysis.

In the kitchen, I sorted out the medication and made my hot drink and then put into the fridge the vegan pie and the half-pizza that remained. They had been cooling overnight on the worktop.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There had been some kind of meeting going on in Granville and we all ended up in the local town entertainment hall place. There was an enormous number of us, probably one hundred and fifty people all crammed in, and the woman in charge said that she would telephone our next-of-kin so that they could come to pick us up. This was late at night so we all sat there and waited. Time began to drag on and by the time that it was daylight, no-one had left and we were all sitting there waiting, a huge crowd of us. Round about 08:30, a girl came in to pick up another girl whom I knew. When she picked her up, they somehow managed to cram into this really small container like a vacuum cleaner thing and drifted off towards the door. I got down on my hands and knees and wished her good luck, because I knew her, and asked if there was any room inside for me and she could drop me off at my place, but she didn’t reply and drifted round to the door. Then I felt that I couldn’t stand up again and it took me an awful amount of effort to pick my way back to the chair on which I had been sitting. The two people sitting next to me were discussing the situation. They felt like no-one was going to come for us at all and that we’d end up being taken to lunch somewhere in the vicinity and it was all part of the plan, which totally confused me. I didn’t understand what was happening. I tried to attract the attention of the woman who seemed to be managing the affair to ask her if she’d telephoned for my taxi because they were usually fairly reliable to come to pick me up, but no matter how hard I tried to attract her attention, she wouldn’t come over, and I couldn’t stand up to go along to see her because of all of my mobility problems, so we were all just sitting there.

Once more, I meet a girl whom I know but can’t think of who she is. This seems to be becoming a recurring feature too these days. However, the rest of the dream is rather surreal and obviously means something somewhere, but I’ve no idea what.

Isabelle the Nurse was early today, and she had time for a little chat. She’s off now for seven days and she’ll be working on her costume for Carnaval. I don’t want to know what it is though. I prefer to be surprised when she takes photos of herself and her float out in the parade.

After breakfast and my nice nut bread, I came back in here to do a few things and the rest of the morning, I spent doing my Welsh homework. It’s a shame that I won’t be at the lesson tomorrow but Paris calls.

My faithful cleaner turned up to apply my anaesthetic, and then I had to wait for the taxi.It was late arriving today, mainly due to there being a new driver who hasn’t been here before and so had lost the way.

Consequently, we were late arriving at dialysis.

It was the new girl who attended to me and in the end, she needed help to plug me in. I told her not to worry because we all have to learn somewhere and somehow. And then they left me alone.

Emilie the Cute Consultant came to see me, but she didn’t stay long. There wasn’t even time to tell her of all my problems, which was sad. However, I doubt if she would have been willing to soothe my fevered brow.

The taxi was late coming to pick me up too, but it can’t be helped. It was one of my favourite drivers so we had a nice chat all the way home.

My cleaner was there to help me into the apartment, and after she left, I came here to write up my notes. No food tonight though. With an 05:00 start and an 06:00 pickup for four or so hours on the road (and then four or so hours back) I’m going straight to bed when I’ve finished this.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about vacuums … "well, one of us has" – ed … a girl from Crewe was appearing on “Mastermind”.
One of the questions was "if someone made a sound and you were in a vacuum, would you hear the sound?"
She replied "would the vacuum be switched on?"

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Sunday 11th January 2026 – I HAVE HAD …

… a miserable day today. Partly for reasons that I’ll mention in due course, and partly for reasons that I won’t mention. Either way, once more, it’s quite obvious that I’m ill again.

With this new computer, everything happened so much faster, as I briefly mentioned last night. Instead of grinding out the time until after midnight, everything was finished by 23:10 and I was soon in bed under the covers.

And there I lay, with something of a disturbed sleep. I’m not sure exactly how many times I awoke, but it was more than just a few. Even so, I was fast asleep when Isabelle breezed in on the latest storm. And it was a storm too – not quite on a par with that a couple of days ago, but even so …

She hardly awoke me, which was good. She peeled back the quilt, did her stuff and then left, while I went back to sleep.

It was 09:35 when I finally left the bed, and after a quick wash, I went into the kitchen for breakfast.

First task was the croissants. And I remembered to fold them the correct way today. They didn’t come out too badly, I suppose, for an amateur process. I had two with my porridge and coffee and left the other four for subsequent Sundays.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

I was in hospital, and I heard about the plan to restrict the password to exclude certain patients who were presumably no longer of any medical value. It’s a password that the nurse uses when she comes on Sundays for that really long word with whatever it is that is supposed to awaken me. They couldn’t work out which word to use instead of it. There were several that they also used on Sunday morning so there wasn’t really one that was memorable or instantly used in the way that 999 was so they weren’t able to access it.

This is an intriguing dream. I can see some kind of logic in it, but I’ve no idea where it came from or where it was going.

There was a girl from school whom I was seeing. I’d just started work and we were still drifting around together. After lunch, on my way back to the office, I’d get whoever it was who was with me to drop me off at her house so that I could say “hello” and have a little chat, then I’d dash on down the street to try to make up the lost time. This went on for several weeks. But one day, I was running a little late and when I turned up at her house, her mother was there but she wasn’t. She was in one of the bedrooms, standing on a ladder doing something in the attic and saw me arrive. So she came downstairs and said that she’d gone into town with someone. It wasn’t her father or something like that but I can’t remember who. She was on a red bicycle and the other person was on a bicycle of some odd colour. At that point, her father arrived. He gave me a really heavy pair of gauntlets and wheeled out a form of three-wheeled tricycle, with a seat at the back on which to sit and pedal and a seat in between the two front wheels facing forwards for a passenger. He urged me to climb in but for some reason, I took some time and he made a sarcastic comment, and then he pedalled off with me, trying to find where this girl had gone, his daughter.

This is another intriguing dream. Who is the girl? The girl whom I was dating after leaving school while whe was carrying on was one of the girls who came to see me a few weeks ago. She was three years younger than me. However, I’m certain that it wasn’t her, even if she did fit into one or two of the characteristics of this dream.

As for the rickshaw, a friend of mine in Munich has – or had – a 1920s rickshaw that he used for running around the town, and I’ve been driven around a local town in it.

Did I dictate that dream about the girl whom I used to go to see at lunchtimes? I’m sure that I did, … "yes, you did" – ed …but later on in that dream we were all sorting out a few kinds of things and my stepbrother Paul had had a bang in the back of his car so we’d been ordering bits and pieces for it as well as ordering other things. And sure enough, little by little, the packages came. I was half-expecting to have a package from this girl who had disappeared because I didn’t know if I’d said that I’d gone up there once afterwards and the house was empty and they had all gone. I never heard from her after that. So these parcels kept on arriving and my mother was rather frustrated because she was having to run around. One day she came in with an enormous parcel tucked under her arm. We said “oh, that’s the rear valance”. but when we unwrapped it, it wasn’t just the rear valance but the whole rear panel. It was painted the correct colour for the car and the number plate was already installed. It even had “Jaguar Ford” written on the back in some kind of stylish graphics instead of just the plain, ordinary “Ford” Of course, we all made some kind of remark about that to my step-brother, about the posh car that he was going to have There was a rear bumper too, and he looked at it and said “no-one’s going to bend this if they drive into it” Then he started to make arrangements with someone whom we knew to cut out the old, damaged bodywork. And then up the back gardens from down the street came some young woman. She looked at us all and said “lounging around again, are you?” She saw me with a mug of coffee in my hands and said “and time for tea for you”. So we all had a little social chat for ten minutes.

The colour of the car is actually the colour of my father’s MkV Cortina, which is languishing down the field on my farm waiting for me to pull out the engine and gearbox, although this will never happen now, of course. The back panel has another significant meaning, and it breaks my heart to think of how stupid I must have been one evening in 1983, when I acted decisively without thinking things through, and made the totally wrong decision that ended up costing me far, far more than I saved. If I could turn the clock back in time, it would have been to that moment.

As for my stepbrother, he was a lovely guy and would do anything for you. However, he fell in with the wrong crowd, was taken to the cleaner’s and died of a brain aneurysm, the same as his father.

I didn’t dictate that dream about that girl leaving. I’d gone up to her house to see her but she’d gone, the house was all closed etc. so I had to set off for home. What I had was one of these butcher’s bikes, the tricycle thing with the seat at the back and in between the two wheels was a large box where the butcher would put the meat in for deliveries, etc., one of the earliest versions of the bakfiets. I had to go home, and I was trying to think of how to go home without encountering any hills because it was difficult to manoeuvre up and down and I came up with a way back via Warmingham without going up any hills. So I set off, and I’d been going a couple of hundred yards when I thought “this is crazy because I’ll be going about seven or eight miles round and my house is only about a mile and a half from here, if that, so why don’t I just go home and struggle with the one hill that’s in between it?”. So that was what I decided to do. When I was back home, I didn’t remember how I’d actually arrived. I couldn’t remember the route or anything and I didn’t recall being out of breath. But this was when these parcels began to arrive, and I was there, hopeful that something would happen with a parcel for me. But there was something somewhere about after I’d been to that girl’s house and gone to the end of the street, there was a huge slope down to the left. You’d have to go down this cutting, down this slope to reach the railway station, which was one of these provincial things with just two platforms. If you were to cross the line to the other platform, that was actually down on top of an embankment because the slope was that steep and the embankment was quite high too. At the bottom, there was a road and I walked down this road somewhere somehow, and there were lots of people walking up it. There were the substantial ruins of a castle, one of these medieval, fourteenth-century Edwardian castles, and they were almost intact. You’d see all the carvings in the brickwork to make it look like a piece of beauty as well as a fortress, and lots of people were making comments about it and so was I. It looked wonderful, but I carried on walking and I’m not sure where all of this fitted in.

It’s disturbing me deeply, this story about the girl who keeps on appearing in my dreams and then disappearing. I’d love to know who she is. The butcher’s bike is quite an interesting object to appear in this dream, that’s for sure. I worked out that I was somewhere round by Hungerford Road in Crewe, so I could have come down and up Macon way which is much less steep than either Mill Street or Edleston Road. And then, even less steep, I could have gone the other way down to Crewe Green roundabout and then along Crewe Green Road.

The medieval castle and the footpath alongside it relate to the city walls at Leuven, although they are alongside a river, not alongside a railway station in a Welsh valley, the name of which totally escapes me at the moment.

This took me up to a disgusting drink break, following which I dismantled an external drive box to rescue the hard drive which has now handed in its hat and which I’ll have to rescue one of these days, and carried on with the updating of this computer.

There was football too – Forfar v Stranraer. And while the Loons had the lion’s share of the play in the first half, Stranraer wiped the floor with them in the second and were 2-1 up and cruising, only to be undone by a sucker-punch deep into injury time.

After that, there were the bread and pizza to make. And for a change, instead of sunflower seeds, I ground up a large handful of Brazil nuts and used them.

While I was at it, I baked the vegan pie and that looks lovely too. I’ll slice it into eight in the week and put seven slices in the freezer ready for another time.

The bread looks wonderful and the pizza was nice too, although I only ate half of it again.

Right now though, I’m off to bed. Dialysis tomorrow afternoon and then Paris on Tuesday. We seem to be back where we were a couple of months ago.

But seeing as we have been talking about medieval castles … "well, one of us has" – ed … a couple of tourists were being shown around Caernarfon Castle not so long ago..
"This castle is unique in history" said the guide. "In the seven hundred years that it’s been here, there have been no repairs and no restoration project carried out on the building."
"That’s an amazing coincidence" said one of the tourists. "It must have the same landlord that we do."

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Saturday 10th January 2026 – THE NEW COMPUTER …

… has arrived. And I can see that I’m going to have to be very careful with it. Not only is it lightning-fast, but it’s also very sensitive. You only have to let an action key have a whiff of the cursor anywhere in the vicinity and it goes into action, whether you want it to or not.

In fact, I wish that the cursor would come within whiffing distance of me so that I would go “into action, whether you want it to or not”, because I’m feeling rather lethargic at the moment — not that anything usually does come within whiffing distance of me. Well, not more than once anyway.

Last night was another late night, due in the main to the steam-driven computer taking just about forever to perform a few simple tasks. However, it was 23:50 when I finally crawled into bed and pulled the covers over my head.

And there I lay until all of 06:29 when the alarm went off, and this was another one of those mornings where I had a great amount of difficulty leaving the bed.

Still, with no dialysis today, I didn’t have to pretty myself up … "a hopeless task anyway" – ed … so I could move on quickly for my hot honey, ginger, and lemon drink and my medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

Nerina and I were living in some modern apartment block like the Cronkinson Oak estate in Nantwich. There had been something going on and we had been attending it. Then we walked over to the door of the building, just to go to stand by the door. It was late at night. There was a kind of double door entrance to it like an airlock thing. We noticed that there were three policemen there at the door, manhandling two young men. One of them they propped up against the wall in between these two doors and one of them brandished his machine gun at him and then walked off and left him. Nerina said “he shouldn’t go brandishing his gun like that at people”. I replied “it doesn’t really matter”. Then she said “look at the guy. He’s obviously drugged to the eyeballs or something”. We opened the door for him to come in but he just stood there against the wall with a vacant stare on his face, so we left him. I began to give Nerina a cuddle and in the end, we decided that we’d go back to our apartment.

–
Despite what people might think, it is nice to see Nerina. After all, you can’t live with someone for nine years and not like them at all – at least, I can’t. We could have made beautiful music together but it was the wrong place at the wrong time, unfortunately. And I did once nearly live in an apartment on Cronkinson Oak, which would have been lovely, but they sent me to Elm Terrace in Crewe which was not so nice.

I’d taken a bus out to Chester, and I’d walked from Chester out to Queensferry one Saturday afternoon. What I was doing was going to Queensferry Auctions to see if I could pick up a car. When I arrived, the auctioneer was announcing to everyone that if they were to buy a car and drive it home, to make sure that they would have an insurance certificate for them and the car. I seemed to remember thinking that it would come in handy later on. I didn’t remember what happened after this except that I was in a grey Ford Cortina MKIII estate, one of the early ones with the sloping dash but I can’t remember how come I came to be in it.

Many a time I’ve walked in the opposite direction, from Queensferry to Chester when I was dropped off there hitchhiking back from the Wirral when I lived in Chester. I always drove out to the Auctions at Queensferry though. At one time, I did have a grey MkIII estate, a “J” registered 2,000 cc one, one of the first, and with the sloping dash. But I’m “dashed” if I can remember what happened to it.

An electricity company was selling a Renault Trafic van so I went round to have a look at it. It wasn’t in all that bad condition for the money that they wanted for it, so I decided that I’d give it a go and arranged to buy it from them. While I was there, I asked them a question about their PA system but I saw that they were busy trying to mask off a part of it so that we could paint it, presumably to paint out the previous owner’s name and business. He had to go to answer the telephone. While I was talking to him as he was answering the ‘phone, the ladder fell over and I was clinging on to the gutter by my fingers. Luckily, I wasn’t too high off the ground so I could drop myself down. I asked him a couple of questions about the group’s PA system, and he showed me a quick connector on the rear valance, just above the rear bumper that was normally hidden when the door closed. What I liked about that too was that there was another button on there that you pulled. It was a remote starter and I thought to myself that it’s going to be useful. I thought that the interior of the van needed painting but I could soon do that. Then he began to talk about a few other problems that he’d had with the Inland Revenue over a car that he’d bought from a well–known Vauxhall supplier who had gone into liquidation because Vauxhall had begun to invest in a member of their family who had set up business on his own. He was telling me this story and I was agreeing, but I had no idea how much truth there was in his story or not. It sounded quite far-fetched to me.

This sounds just like me, falling off a ladder when there’s no-one around. Been there, done that. I’d have no interest in a Renault Trafic van either. Renaults are not my favourite vehicle, and by a long way too. The question that I was asking (I can still remember it now) was that if the impedance of the PA speakers is eight ohms, would an on-stage monitor passed across both left and right channels be four ohms or sixteen ohms?

The rest of it is the usual meaningless jumble of nothing.

Isabelle blew in like a gale this morning, which was a surprise seeing as the wind had now disappeared completely. And she blew out just as quickly too. She’d been held up on her round and there was someone waiting at her office for a blood test, so she didn’t have time to chat.

Once she’d left, I could make breakfast. Just a small breakfast today, and I managed to eat everything.

After that, I came back in here and had a few things to do. And then I finished off writing to notes for the radio programme on which I’d been working.

At 12:03 precisely, the postie turned up with the new computer. It took me a while to unpack it and then set it up – I had to restart it a couple of times. But to my dismay, the taskbar is locked at the bottom of the screen. I can’t unlock it, rotate it around vertically and pin it at the right-hand side. And judging by the hundreds of posts in the appropriate forum, I’m not the only one by any means who misses this facility.

But nevertheless, we carry on, and I’ve been uploading programs all afternoon. Waterfox doesn’t seem to want to run on it, but a couple of the other stripped-down browsers seem to manage just fine.

At 16:30, I knocked off to make some pastry. I’ve run out of vegan pie and there was some more pie filling in the freezer so I made pastry and filled it. It’s all in the fridge now, waiting for the baking session tomorrow when it will be first in the oven.

Tea tonight was baked potato, veg and one of those breaded quorn fillets that I like. It was the smallest meal that I’ve ever had, and yet there was still some left on the plate.

And that’s the trouble. I was feeling quite well today up until 17:00 when I felt myself beginning to slide downhill. I fell asleep I don’t know how many times in the dining room eating my meal. So here’s hoping that cleaning up tonight will be quick with the new computer and I can go to bed promptly.

A good lie-in will do me good.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about lemons, tax collectors and all of that … "well, one of us has" – ed … where we lived in South Cheshire, about eight miles away, was the winter quarters of Gandey’s Circus. When they came off the road in October, they would park up there in Arclid and stay until Easter.
One day I was chatting to the circus strongman, who told me a strange story. One of his tricks was to squeeze a lemon in one hand until there was no more juice coming out. Then he would challenge anyone in the audience to improve upon his efforts.
No-one ever did until one day, a weak and weedy little man in pin-striped trousers and bowler hat, put down his briefcase and came to have a go. Sure enough, half a dozen drips and a couple of pips emerged.
"Good grief!" said the strongman. "Are you a circus strongman too?"
"Oh, no" replied the weak and weedy little man. "I’m an Income-Tax collector."

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Friday 9th January 2026 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about the storm.

Having abandoned everything after tea and gone to bed, I settled down underneath the quilt and fell sleep quite quickly. And there I lay until all of … errr … 02:39.

The wind that awoke me was the noisiest that I have ever encountered – and believe me, I’ve heard some noisy ones. It sounded as if it was definitely at its climax and it carried on like that for at least two hours. Sleep was impossible

Round about 05:00, having lain awake for a couple of hours, I left the bed, had a wash, went to take my medicine and to make my hot drink, and then came back in here to write up yesterday’s notes. They are all done and dusted now and posted online.

It took much longer than expected, due to this steam-driven computing that I’m using at the moment, And that led me to think of a cunning plan, more of which anon.

Isabelle the Nurse blew in with the breeze and didn’t stay long. She mentioned that she had not encountered any fallen trees on her circuit so far, or seen any visible sings of damage. One thing that she mentioned though was that just up the coast at Cherbourg, a gust of 213 kph had been recorded, and surely that’s a record for this area.

After she left, I made breakfast – the usual porridge, toast and coffee. However, it left me with the most terrible stomach ache and I really was feeling quite ill afterwards.

With the wind having died down slightly, it was quieter in the office and so, the early start having caught up with me, I went to lie down for a while to catch up with my beauty sleep and to try to sleep off this stomach ache.

So there I lay until all of … errr … 11:45. That was a good two hours, and I felt as if I’d needed it too. There was plenty of work to do, tidying up files and the like, but the most important was to start another batch of home-made baked beans.

Rather than try again with soaking dried beans, I’d bought a large tin of beans soaked in brine. I want to see if these are any more successful – i.e. less hard. That first batch that I made really were too hard.

The beans themselves are too big for baked beans. They are about twice the size of normal ones, but you have to go with what you’ve got, I suppose.

In the meantime, I’d had a parcel delivery. It was a laptop computer, but not the one that I want. It was the one that I’d tried to cancel and which should, according to the supplier, be still at the factory. So what’s going on here then?

All that I know is that it will be going back on Monday once the confirmation of receipt is lodged at the supplier’s office. In the meantime, I’ll wait for the other.

That took me up to my cleaner arriving, and the first thing that she did after she’d organised the bathroom was to shoo me under the shower to make up for that which I didn’t have on Tuesday. While I was washing, she picked up the huge pile of paper that was lying on the floor following my tidying-up the other day, and rushed it to the bin across the road.

After she left, I put my cunning plan … "see above" – ed … into action.

What I did was to take out the desktop computer from the cupboard where I’d put it the other day, and I began to strip it down.

The aim was to take out the power pack, see if there was a built-in fuse, and if not, to note the details of the pack so that I could order a new one.

After a lengthy struggle, I finally managed to locate the securing screws and remove them, and then to deal with taking out the power pack. But this is where "the best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men gang aft agley an’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain for promis’d joy".

Unbelievably, the cables are hard-wired into the transformer rather than being plugged in. And whoever had assembled it had obviously done so before the motherboard had gone in, because there was no way to move the cables without dismantling practically everything.

Nevertheless, we did have a Plan B. If I have a motherboard, a case, a processor, 96GB of RAM, a DVD drive etc, I’m halfway to an office computer anyway. Disks are easy to obtain , so is a power pack, and so would be an uprated processor.

Consequently, I sent an e-mail to the computer technician at the radio, to involve him or one of his friends into helping me rebuild this one into an even leaner, fitter, fighting machine. We’ll have to see if he replies. It’s certainly going to be quicker and cheaper than the only quote that I’ve had to date. I’m still trying to recover after that one.

While I was a-dismantling, I had a message on the ‘phone. "Can you spare a minute?"

It was Rosemary with a little problem and needed some quick help. So there we were, one hour and sixteen minutes later, still chatting about not very much. She seems to think quite highly of my theory, a theory that I have had for some time, that Caligula, Putin and Xi in China have had an agreement to divide up the World between them – Caligula in the Americas, Putin in Europe and Xi in Asia.

This explains Caligula’s mad panic about Greenland. He’s suddenly realised that when Russia occupies Denmark, it will also inherit Greenland as a colony of Denmark. And when Russia is installed in Greenland, it can control the North Atlantic and also the North-West Passage to the Pacific, and he’s scared stiff.

That, in my opinion, was one of Hitler’s two big mistakes – the first was not pushing on and taking Gibraltar and the second was not landing several divisions of troops in Iceland and Greenland while he had the upper hand.

Hard at work later, I suddenly realised that I’d forgotten to transcribe the dictaphone notes, so that was the next task.

There was something about my cousins in Whitchurch in Shropshire and something else that involved some kind of stately home owner, a Lord or something or other. I remember saying to him that really, he should have been able to have his own car. He replied that he did at one time, before all of this happened, but that’s all that I seem to be able to remember of this

My father’s sister and her husband had ten children (I think that my family was trying to start a new race of humans) and their progress around from farm to farm can be plotted by where her children ended up. Some are in Bronington still, some are in Whitchurch, some are in Barbridge and some are in Crewe. I lost count a long time ago of who is where.

All of that work had worn me out and I ended up crashing out again for twenty minutes. That took me up to tea time so I wandered off into the kitchen.

Tea was sausage, chips and home-made baked beans followed by Christmas cake for pudding. The beans were OK, I suppose, but they aren’t like real baked beans and I’ll have to do my best to liberate some more real ones, I suppose. A tray of twenty-four tins from a leading manufacturer costs €53:99 delivered, and I suppose that I shall have to bite the bullet one of these days.

But not now of course, because I’m off to bed. The wind has died down considerably from earlier and it’s a lot quieter now. Looking at the data from the weather station down the road, we had gusts of wind at the apogee of the storm blowing as much as 140 kph and that’s some going. And although it’s gusting a lot less, it’s still wreaking havoc. It should have been the final round of matches in the first phase of the JD Cymru League tonight but every single one has been postponed until Tuesday night. So there’s nothing else to do but go to bed.

But seeing as we have been talking about Caligula … "well, one of us has" – ed …, three men met in a prison cell in Leavenworth, Kansas, after the next Presidential election in 2028.
They ask the first one why he was in prison. "I’ve been here since 2025" he replied. "I was a bitter opponent of Caligula"
They turn to the second one. "And you?"
"I’ve been here since just after the recent election. I was a fanatical supporter of Caligula"
They turn to the third one. "And you?"
"I’ve only just arrived" he replied. "And I am Caligula."

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Thursday 8th January 2026 – WE HAVE ALL BEEN …

… bombarded with alerts and warnings from just about everyone, from the French National Government down to the corner shop, about the storm that is heading our way. And the siren … bombarded with alerts and warnings from just about everyone, from the French National Government down to the corner shop, about the storm that is heading our way. And the siren sound that the Government and Préfecture use on your mobile ‘phone to alert you will do much more than John Peel’s “View Hullo!” ever did to awaken the dead and the fox from his lair in the morning.

But anyway, more of that anon.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … err … apartment, it was another late night for no particular reason. Everything seemed to drag on and on and to complete some of the tasks, this steam-driven computer is simply not rapid enough. For example, I’m having to type my notes into a text file and then upload it via “cut and paste” because it’s quicker than watching the cursor crawl along as I type into the interface.

So it was 00:10 when I finally made it into bed last night, and I can’t say that I’m sorry. And although I awoke once or twice during the night, I was flat-out asleep when the alarm went off at 06:29.

As seems to be usual these days, it took a while to pluck up the courage to leave the bed and head to the bathroom for a wash and shave, in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon at dialysis.

After the hot drink and medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And despite it being only a short night, I had travelled miles.

I was with one of the nurses from dialysis last night. We were discussing religion. She was concerned about the number of visits that priests and people were obliged to make to their congregation, rather than the congregation going to see the priest. I explained that, in general, the people who required the visit of the priest were the dissenters. She asked what I meant by that. I explained that these were people who did not necessarily believe in the literal word of the Bible and didn’t take the literal word to be the exact truth. I gave her a couple of examples, such as when Jesus said “go forth and multiply”, that didn’t mean that you had to leave the meeting and go out and have sex, or anything like that. It was a case of putting some kind of logical interpretation onto those words. As we were doing that, we were walking round the side of the church, then round and into some kind of hall. There were lots of people there, and I noticed that a couple of them were girls whom I knew. They were secretaries for someone or other, so I wondered what they were doing here and why they had come. Had they come with their boss or anything like that? However, the dream drifted away before I reached the point of asking them.

Religion is, for some reason, a very touchy subject for some people. The number of people in the World who have been killed because of religion must be horrendous. It’s sad that many religions that preach “tolerance”, “understanding”, “respect”, “peace” and “love” will massacre at the drop of a hat anyone who interprets the religion differently. Everyone reads their sacred text and interprets it differently, and there is not one single way that is “right” or “wrong”.

We were going to watch a Welsh Premier game between Y Bala and another team. It was the biggest crowd that I’d seen for years. There were probably three or four thousand people there. At one corner of the ground, there was a group of noisy fans who were chanting and shouting, and creating a great atmosphere. I even saw my oldest sister’s husband. I thought that this would be something if he’s coming to watch a game in Wales. Y Bala ran out onto the field, to lots of applause, but the other team came out in some sort of horse-drawn caleche. When it reached the centre of the field, a group of about eight or nine people went to take the body off the wheels to put onto the floor, but it was too heavy and at one end, they dropped it, so of course everyone cheered. Eventually, the teams lined up for the start and the game kicked off. I was standing on the side of the ground. The game had only been going for about five minutes when suddenly, there was a huge torrential downpour. There wasn’t very much in the way of cover at this ground so the whole crowd practically dispersed. I went and stood inside some kind of in-let in a wall, chatting to someone else who was there. Gradually, my attention was distracted by some kind of newspaper article about, how at Wells Green, a huge quantity of gold had been dug up. Apparently it was the contents of some kind of ship and had been collected between the period 1810-1816 and had been buried when there had been some kind of problem with the ship, whether it was towing another one or whether another one was towing it. I thought that it was an astonishing thing and I was determined to find out more about it. In the meantime, the rain stopped and the crowd slowly gathered again, but the players were off the field. Presumably it was half-time. When a player came out from the back behind the bar and was ready to merge into the crowd, someone asked him what the score was. He said that it was sixty-five for six sixty-seven for eight, whatever that was supposed to mean. We couldn’t understand it. The player was dressed in his civilian clothes, almost as if he was no longer going to take part in the game, and no-one seemed to have an explanation for that either

You aren’t ever likely to find a big crowd at a game played at Y Bala. With a population of only two thousand or so, they could all fit into the ground at Maes Tegid, and with plenty of room to move around. The fact that the club has made it to the Welsh Premier League is an achievement in itself. You will, however, find plenty of rain. It’s one of the wettest places in the UK , with, on average, about fifty-three inches of rain each year.

Incidentally, Wells Green is about sixty miles from the sea, so any ship that found itself there really would have a problem.

I was doing another pick-up for Shearings, picking up in three or four towns. I had the coach ready and was ready to go. It was a route that I knew quite well and I’d done it on several occasions. I knew that today there were going to be problems because in one of the towns, there was a market and all of the town centre was closed up, so I was trying to work out how I was going to arrive at the pick-up place. One of the guys from the office came along and said “never mind. I’ve drawn a plan for you and I’ve put it in your paperwork”, which was nice of him. So I set out and went to the first stop where half a dozen or so people boarded. On the way to the second stop, I had to stop at a road junction, but for some reason the brakes were really heavy on this vehicle. I just managed to slither to a halt right on the line. Some tractors coming across from the right-hand side of this junction had their indicators on for turning right, but instead of turning right into the road that was directly opposite mine, they turned right into a particular field on that corner. Then, we set off when the lights changed and I had this really long sweeping curve which I took far too wide and almost ended up in the hedge but I managed to keep going. We stopped for two minutes at someone’s house, I’ve no idea why. The mother came out to talk to the daughter who was on board the coach, but the coach was now a little Renault 4 type of van with a rollback canvas hood. I went round and quickly dusted off the vehicle, which caused some amusement from this mother. I explained that it had to be done. Then, ready to go again, I climbed into the vehicle and looked at the map that this guy had drawn for me. It was nothing like useful because he’d assumed that I went into the town a certain way, but he’d just shown me a quick diversion around one particular street, but that was nowhere near where I actually do go into the town. I go in a different way. This map that he’d drawn was of no help to me whatsoever. So we set off, and we were coming into the edge of this town. We could see all of the ancient fortifications and the city walls, a really heavy, complicated thing all overgrown with mould and ivy. As we approached the city wall, ready to go into the medieval town, I was still wracking my brains as to how I was going to arrive at this pick-up point.

This is becoming a regular theme these days, isn’t it? Driving coaches to towns where there are all kinds of chaos in the town centre on a market day or something like that.

I had a vague memory of Emilie the Cute Consultant. She was telling me that my weight had climbed right back up again. I replied that I was convinced that the weight reading the last time was incorrect, rather than being a problem with my weight. However, I didn’t write that down and that’s all that I seem to remember of that.

This is connected to a discussion that I had on Monday. There is less and less liquid to extract these days. It’s true that I’m controlling my liquid intake very carefully, but that’s not the whole story. I’m eating less and less so I’m sure that my “dry weight” is going down. But as they only check it once a month, I shall have to wait for the next control.

Isabelle the Nurse was late arriving today. Apparently, she’d bumped into my cleaner outside and they had had a little chat. I have heard a little rumour that all is not well in certain quarters and that there is a story likely to unfold at some point.

She caught me in the bedroom working, and that was inconvenient for me, but there is no argument when she has made up her mind about something.

After she left, I went into the kitchen to make breakfast, and managed to eat everything today, which makes a change. But I was running late for just about everything. There was plenty to do after breakfast, which meant that there wasn’t much time left to work on my radio programme before my cleaner turned up to apply the anaesthetic.

It was round about then that the ‘phones went berserk with alerts. Major storm warning, batten down the hatches, 18:00 curfew, no-one moves. Gusts of wind up to 160 kph expected.

Bearing that in mind, she applied the anaesthetic quickly and shot off to do her afternoon’s work to be back before the storm hit.

As usual, when there’s a rush on, the taxi was late. We also had to go to pick up someone else so we really were late arriving at dialysis.

Luckily, I was seen quite quickly and I managed to persuade Emilie the Cute Consultant to reduce the time. After much discussion, she agreed to knock fifteen minutes off, so that I would be finished before 18:00.

No internet today for some reason, so I watched NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH, another Launder and Gilliatt film with the dynamic duo of “Charters and Coldicott”, followed by half of ROME EXPRESS starring one of my favourite actors, Gordon “Inspector Hornleigh” Harker.

In the end, I was disconnected at about 17:50, which made a nice change, but the panic amongst the taxi companies to deal with the unexpected flood of passengers meant that I had to wait half an hour for mine to turn up. Luckily, it was one of my favourite drivers so we had a nice chat all the way home.

At Granville, the wind had already sprung up, so I had to be dropped off at the rear entrance to the building where there is the fire escape. The car can come right up to the door there, so it saves me the twenty-metre walk in the teeth of the gale.

My cleaner helped me into the building (and I needed it too) and after she left, I made tea – pasta and veg in tomato sauce with a vegan burger. But once more, I left some on my plate.

Back in here, I had a little “relax” for fifteen minutes, and then, hearing the wind increasing in velocity, I made an executive decision, which for the benefit of new readers, of whom there are more than just a few these days, an executive decision is a decision that if it turns out to be the wrong decision, the person who made it is executed, and decided that I’d go to bed while the going was good. If the velocity increases, the chances are that it will be too noisy to sleep later on.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the wind … "well, one of us has" – ed … they were still out on the golf course playing away as the wind velocity increased
One player was taking an age measuring up his shot, calculating the wind and the direction from which it was coming.
"Get a move on, can’t you?" urged his partner
"My wife’s over there" said the other. "I have to make this shot absolutely perfect"
"Does it really matter that much?"
"Ohh yes. If I don’t get it right, I might miss her."

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Wednesday 7th January 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone again when I awoke this morning.

That was quite a disappointment to me, because I’d managed to have more sleep than the previous night.

Mind you, seeing as there was no sleep at all on Monday night, anything is an improvement on that, especially a nice, balmy, early … errr … 00:30

The notes, the backup, and the stats were finished at a quite reasonable time, but there’s always some housekeeping to do before I go to bed. And this is where I became really annoyed because what would usually take ten minutes with the big desktop computer took forever with the steam-driven computing of the travelling laptop. The laptop is OK for when I’m out and about, but here at home trying to do some real heavy-duty work with it, it just grinds to a halt.

The day shall be cherished when the new laptop arrives, and when I can finally find someone who can build a decent office computer for me, I shall be delirious … "you mean that you aren’t now?" – ed … It’s disappointing that between all of us, we’ve not been able to lay our hands on one reliable supplier, or worked out a way to have one received in the UK and sent on over here.

Anyway, I was in bed at about 00:30 and fast asleep at about 00:31. No coughing fit or agonising pain in the foot awoke me, so I slept right through until the alarm went off at 06:29.

Once more, it was a struggle to leave the bed, but I made it into the bathroom where I sorted myself out, and then into the kitchen for the hot ginger, honey and lemon drink to go with my medication.

When I’d finished that, I put away the rest of the shopping from last night, and that was a task and a half too. I hadn’t realised that there was so much.

Back in here, there was nothing on the dictaphone to transcribe, as I said earlier, and it was just as well because Isabelle the Nurse arrived.

While she was sorting me out, I explained about my fainting fit yesterday. She’s of the opinion that it might have been low blood pressure, but that would be a surprise because usually, I can withstand some pretty low blood pressure readings, such as the 6.8 of the other week, without any problems.

Once she’d left, I made breakfast. Not a lot, but I managed to finish it today, which makes a big difference. Still nothing to read, so it didn’t take long.

Back in here, I checked my e-mails. And here was a big disappointment. The new laptop, which should be arriving today, is held up at the factory and is still awaiting delivery. The estimated new arrival time is “not known”. After what I said earlier, that is a tragedy.

Instead, I surfed through the internet pages to see what else was on offer. My eyes alighted on a laptop that had much higher spec than the outstanding one, made by a more reputable manufacturer, and for not very much more money, so I bit the bullet. And even as we speak, it’s in the post heading this way.

Although the mail that I received about the other one said that I could cancel it at any time, when I went to cancel that order, it told me that cancellation was “no longer possible”, even though it’s still at the factory. So never mind. When it arrives, it will be going straight back

The next task was to rewrite a couple of sections of code for my web pages. And how much *.html, *.css and *.js have I forgotten? A task that would have taken me ten minutes ten years ago took me a good couple of hours and it’s still not exactly how I want it. This is really sad.

After a disgusting drink break, I rang up Paris to find out what time I’m expected on Tuesday. And when they told me, I went for a lie-down.

After recovering from the shock, I rang up the taxi company
"There is some good news and some bad news for you. The good news is that I have to go to Paris on Tuesday. you have plenty of authorisations left, and it’s for a consultation so I’ll be back the same day."
"So what’s the bad news?"
"The appointment is for 10:30"
"Oh dear – that means leaving at 06:30."
"Probably earlier than that if there’s snow on the ground. We know what happened on Monday"
So I’m being picked up at 06:00. God help us!

There were a couple of other things to do, and then I attacked the next radio programme, which will also be a concert. I edited the soundtrack and remixed it, cutting it down to about 58 minutes, and then dashed off some text for it.

It could have been finished too, except that I was … errr … away with the fairies … "although not in a manner that would have caused the editor of Aunt Judy’s magazine any excitement"- ed …

And properly too.

I was with my youngest sister. Somehow, we’d found our way into a kind of rich man’s home, which was at the top of a very steep hill. He had influential guests to come to see him, all of whom were criminals or crooks or something. When they arrived at the bottom of this steep hill, they would be accompanied up to the house up this really steep roadway by a group of people in some kind of 1950s Rolls-Royce or Bentley that was painted a bright mid-blue. We saw a couple of cars arrive like that. For some reason then, we were discovered, and we had to run. We came to the top of the bank where there was a really steep staircase of, ohh, hundreds of steps. My brother appeared, and he was in some kind of threatening mood, as if he belonged to this place. I looked at my sister, she looked at me, and the clipboard that I had in my hand, I threw it down the stairs, and we both ran hell for leather down the stairs. The clipboard only made a short distance, and then I had to pick it up every so often and throw it further down, and we’d continue running. On one occasion, I almost managed to catch it in mid-air as we arrived where the clipboard as before it had touched the ground. In the end, we reached the bottom, totally out of breath. I said “well, shall we ‘gang wham’ then?” in some kind of Geordie accent. She didn’t understand what I meant at first so after I’d repeated it a couple of times, I said “going home?”. She replied “oh no! You have to take me dancing and dining” and all these kinds of things, to which I laughed and said “I didn’t realise that I was supposed to be looking after you in that way”.

My brother, being menacing and threatening, is nothing new, although he was something of a paper tiger in that respect. However, being conspiratorial with my youngest sister might have been something that we would have done many years ago when she was a child, because she really was a good sport in those days, she grew out of it quickly with the stresses of work, marriage and family, as many people do

The Bentley, or Rolls-Royce, was interesting though, and I can still see it, even now.

Tea tonight was the last of the vegan pie, with mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, carrots and leeks. It was a struggle to eat it but I managed. And I forgot to have a dessert. But the vegan pie was nice and I’ll make another at the weekend.

So now, if the computer lets me, I shall be going to bed. I hope that this closing-down sequence doesn’t take another two hours.

But seeing as we have been talking about good news and bad news … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of a conversation that I overheard between a doctor and a patient at dialysis.
"I have some bad news for you and some worse news for you."
"Go on, doctor, tell me the bad news."
"I’m afraid that you only have twenty-four hours to live"
"Good grief! So what’s the worse news?"
"I forgot to tell you yesterday."

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Tuesday 6th January 2026 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone this morning.

But that’s not surprising. After all, if you don’t go to sleep, you can’t dream, can you?

Last night, I remember saying “The biggest problem right now is the pain in my foot, and it’s killing me. It’s the worst that I’ve ever known it to be”. And I was not wrong either. It really was total agony.

What was the worst thing about this was that it really was an early night. I’d put a lot of effort into finishing off my notes etc and was in bed by 22:15, looking forward to at least eight hours of beauty sleep … "and he needs it too" – ed …

However, being wracked one minute by a fierce, stabbing pain in the foot and the next minute by an intense coughing fit, I just lay there in agony, watching the clock go round and round. When it reached about 05:30, I thought “I’m bound to fall asleep at some point” so I switched off the alarm, thinking that I’d at least sleep through until Isabelle the Nurse would come.

That didn’t work, though, and at 07:25, I couldn’t stand it any more and sat on the edge of the bed.

It took a good fifteen minutes to raise myself to my feet, and then I cleared off into the bathroom to sort myself out, and then went for my hot drink and medication. Surprisingly, I began to feel a little better after the hot drink. I wonder if I’m being dehydrated too much at dialysis, or whether the liquid is coming from the wrong place.

Back in here, I’d barely sat down to restart work when Isabelle the Nurse came in. While she sorted out my legs, she showed me some photos of her daughter in Paris yesterday. It wasn’t the daughter she wanted me to see but the snow. And it was impressive, although not as impressive as my galvanised steel dustbin, nor as impressive as all of the snow around St.Lô that my taxi driver had shown me yesterday.

After she left, I made breakfast. But strangely, and for the first time ever, I didn’t finish my porridge. I wasn’t in the mood for it and I don’t know why. Usually, it’s the food that I most look forward to. I didn’t even finish my toast, complete with the last serving of mushroom pâté, but that was for a different reason.

What happened instead was that my head slowly began to spin around and I started to feel light-headed. I decided that the best place for me to be would be in bed, so I tried to stand up.

The first attempt was a miserable failure, so I breathed deeply and made a superhuman effort to try to rise to my feet, and then all the lights went out.

Some time later, I awoke. I was lying on the floor, surrounded by a fallen chair and a few other bits and pieces.

“This isn’t going me much good” I said to myself, although there wasn’t really much that I could do about it. I can’t rise to my feet at all if I’m flat out on the ground. And my ‘phone was in the bedroom. So I went on all fours into the bedroom to find the phone to send a message to see if my faithful cleaner was still at home. But no, she’d gone out.

In the end, I rolled over onto my back and, pushing with my feet against the office chair that was wedged against the desk, I managed to slide up and onto the bed It took me twenty minutes to do it, though.

To recover, I lay on the bed for a while until I felt better. And that was when I noticed, to my dismay, that there were only twenty minutes to the start of my Welsh class and I’d done no revision yet. I was seriously thinking of abandoning it today, but I did what I could and then I went to join it.

Surprisingly, it all went quite well and I actually enjoyed it. It’s a shame that I won’t be present next week, but I have to go to Paris for the news about how the chemotherapy went. Not that I need to be told, because I already have a good idea of that they will tell me.

Once the lesson was over, I sent my order off to the supermarket. I saw that the only delivery slot left was between 16:00 and 18:00 so I booked it quickly before it was taken.

My faithful cleaner turned up at about 14:15 to do her stuff and to put me in the shower, but I declined. It’s not a sensible idea for me to shower if I’m unsteady on my feet as I am right now. “We’ll see how I am on Friday” I told her.

Margaret Thatcher once said something like "anyone can do a good day’s work when they are feeling like it. The secret of success is to do a hard day’s work when you aren’t feeling like it."

And so it was today; even though I was feeling wretched, I attacked the next radio programme. And by the time that I’d finished, I’d edited a concert track down to about fifty-eight minutes and written enough speech to cover about two and a half minutes. That’s plenty to be going on with. There was even time to start the next one too, which is also a concert.

The LeCLerc order should have arrived by 18:00 at the latest. They had telephoned me at 17:56 to say that they are running late, which is no surprise in this weather. What was a surprise was that they turned up at 19:35, just as I was taking a bag of frozen food out of the freezer. Never mind though – I put the cooling and cold stuff in the fridge or the freezer and I’ll tackle the rest tomorrow, and I continued.to make tea.

Tonight, it was a taco roll with beans à la mexicaine, but not as à la mexicaine as I like them, of course and veg, followed by Christmas cake. Once more, it was a struggle to eat them, although I managed it. And right now, I’m off to bed, hoping yet again for another good sleep and another hard-working day on the radio. The new laptop should be coming too, which should make things a little easier.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about falling down … "well, one of us has" – ed … I was in a pub once where there was a man staggering around, falling over, not being able to stand upright.
The landlord came over to throw him out, but I intervened. "Let me see if I can find his address and I’ll take him home."
So I reached down and rummaged through his pockets. I found an address. It wasn’t too far away so two friends helped me carry him to his doorstep.
His wife opened the door so we explained what had happened, about him staggering about, falling over and not being able to stand up, so we brought him home to save him the disgrace of being thrown out.
"Very good" she replied. "Now, where’s his wheelchair?"

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Monday 5th January 2025 – WHAT A NIGHT …

… that was!

When i checked the time at one point, it was 02:15 and I was still up, working. And it’s been a very long time since that has happened, a very long time indeed.

The irony of it all was that it could have been an early night. I’d finished my notes early and had done everything else quite rapidly that I’d needed to do, but I was … errr … detained.

Earlier in the day on Sunday, I’d been doing some housekeeping on the hard drives and I ended up with a massive 335 GB that needed to be transferred from one external drive to another.

However, I had unfortunately forgotten just how slow this computer is compared to the desktop one. A task that would have taken three or four hours went on – and on – and on, and by about 22:45, when I was thinking of going to bed, it was still grinding away with hours still to go.

It was really out of the question to stop it, because I’d just have to start all the way from the beginning again, so I decided to let it run its course and to find something else to do while I was waiting.

So there I was, trying to find a lot to do because it just kept on going. Round about 02:20, it finally ground to a halt and no-one was more relieved than me to crawl into my bed after all that. I didn’t need much rocking, that’s for sure.

When the alarm went off at 06:29, I decided that that was rather over-optimistic so I switched it off and curled back under the bedclothes. I’d reset it for 08:00, but when that went off, I did likewise.

The nurse, surprised to find me still in bed, awoke me to sort out my legs, and then threw the covers back over me and left. I was disappointed that he didn’t read me a bedtime story, but I don’t suppose that you can have everything.

Back to sleep I went, to awaken finally at about 10:00. It took me a good half-hour to summon up the energy to leave the bed, and I crawled off into the bathroom for a wash and shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon at dialysis.

It was rather late to think about breakfast, so I just had half a bowl of porridge and a coffee to keep the lupus from the porte, as they would have said in Ancient Rome.

Back in here, I transcribed the dictaphone notes, and no-one was more surprised than me to actually find something.

I was in my Welsh class last night and we were doing some revision. We came across a revision exercise and I’d had a look at it beforehand so I knew a little bit of the answers. She asked this woman the first question, but th woman couldn’t think of the Welsh word for “couple”. The teacher in the end suggested dyllint or something. So she answered the first question, and I was expecting the second question to be passed on to someone else but instead, she asked the same woman. I thought that if she’s asking the same person all these questions, what does she have lined up in store for the rest of us? If I haven’t revised it, I’m going to be looking very foolish. I was sitting on a bench by the docks and there were fishing rods and everything all around me. There were two little girls sitting on a bench. I knew who they were but i just couldn’t put a name to them. I noticed that every now and again, one of them was giving a glance at me so I gave her a little wave and next time, I gave her a little wave again. She said “Eric, could we come to sit by you?”. I said “well, I have a class exam at the moment but you can come and sit on this bench with me afterwards if you like when I’ve finished this exam.

This must be a premonition because I didn’t have time to revise my Welsh this morning ready for class tomorrow. I’ve no idea who the little girls were, but they obviously knew me. And As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … what would I be doing with fishing rods?

By the way, the Welsh word for “couple” is cwpl

Once I’d done that, I went into the kitchen to prepare for dialysis. My cleaner turned up as usual to apply the anaesthetic, and in return I gave her the other half of her Christmas present that had been delivered yesterday, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Believe it or not, I’d forgotten that I was going early for this X-ray. But it made no difference because the taxi was late arriving. Apparently, in all the snow that we were having, my driver had taken ninety minutes to come from St.Lô instead of the usual forty-five.

There were two other people to collect too, one in Sartilly where the roads hadn’t been cleared at all, so the time was just out of control.

To make matters worse, there was no-one at reception when we arrived at the hospital and we had to wait fifteen minutes for someone to appear.

There was no-one at X-ray either so it was another long, uncomfortable wait for someone to appear. So never mind my 14:00 appointment at dialysis – it was 15:09 when I was finally plugged in.

While I was there, I was introduced to Julie the Cook’s replacement. Unfortunately, she doesn’t bake so we’ll have to find other things to talk about.

Emilie the Cute Consultant came to see me, which was nice. She’d seen the X-ray and there’s no obstruction or infection, so she’s at a loss what to do next.

Eventually, I was liberated and ws able to come home, hours later than usual. It was the young chatty guy who brought me home so we had an interesting conversation all the way home.

My faithful cleaner was waiting for me in the sub-Arctic conditions and she helped me home. And after she left, I had the other half of yesterday’s pizza followed by a slice of Christmas cake. I must finish that off too. However, we’re back at the “everything tastes of salt” stage and it was all most unpleasant.

Right now though, even though it’s tremendously early, I’m going to bed. I’m hoping for a good sleep to make up for last night, but I doubt it very much. We can but hope. The biggest problem right now is the pain in my foot, and it’s killing me. It’s the worst that I’ve ever known it to be.

But seeing as we have been talking about Emilie the Cute Consultant … "well, one of us has" – ed … when she told me about the results of the x-ray, I asked her "so how do I stand now?"
"Well, " she replied, after a moment’s thought, "having watched you staggering about on your crutches for the last eighteen months, I’ve been wondering that myself."

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Sunday 4th January 2026 – I HAD A …

… parcels delivery this morning, on a Sunday! What kind of strange idea was that? There was nothing in my e-mails to suggest that one would be arriving today.

Not only that, I wasn’t anything like prepared for its arrival either. What with one ting and another, like a late restart after tea, falling asleep on my chair for almost an hour, all of that, it was long after midnight and I was still letting it all hang out. It was probably 00:30 when I finally crawled into bed.

That’s why I was so surprised and disappointed to be awake at 03:20. There was something about being in a strange place and some American expected me to be in charge of the gentlemen’s restroom when I knew nothing at all about the exact situation.

The next time that I awoke, it was 07:50. I was in two minds whether to leave the bed at that point but I decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle and went back to sleep.

At about 08:15, there was this insistent ringing on the doorbell. The nurse usually rings when he arrives to make sure that I’m about, but I ignore it as he has a key to the building and my door. And then it rang again. “Don’t worry” I thought. He’ll work it out.

But a third time? And a fourth one? At that point, streaming profanities and vulgar abuse, I began to leave the bed but the door opened and in came the nurse, carrying a parcel. I quickly nipped back under the covers.

"Parcel delivery for you".
"Where was it?" I asked. "On the doorstep?"
"Oh, no" he replied. "The courier was ringing your bell to deliver it when I arrived"

So a courier delivering parcels at 08:15 on a Sunday morning? Whatever is going on here? It’s rather an extreme way of behaving, dragging people from their beds at silly times on a Sunday morning when all respectable people should still be asleep.

The nurse fitted my socks while I was lying in bed, and after he left, I have it a few minutes and the left the bed.

This morning, I didn’t bother with a wash. I just sorted myself out and then went to make breakfast – porridge, coffee and the last of the inside-out croissants. I must make some more next week, but I’ll make them the correct way round this time.

Back in here, there was some football from last night. I started off with Connah’s Quay beating Y Barri 3-1, despite being 1-0 down with only twenty minutes to play. And that’s as far as I went because this computer is just not up to watching streamed programmes

Instead, I transcribed the dictaphone notes.

There was some kind of party going on in Stoke-on-Trent and I’d been invited by my friend. So I turned up, and I was in my van. I had some things in the back to drop off. He noticed the spare wheel in the back and the large sheet of wood – pallet wood made into a sheet.I explained that one of my tyres was down somewhat on tread so I need to replace it. He said that it’s no surprise that it’s down on tread because it’s always sagging down to one side He had a look inside and said “yes, we have a jack. Yes we have a wheelbrace. There’s a DC socket in the back for the compressor and a few other things”, and he said that we’ll deal with it, but right now, there were other things to do. We had to go round to the front, but people kept on appearing with things wrapped in towels. They were unwrapping the towels and handing them to us. There were all kinds of different food supplies, piles and piles of stuff, loads and loads of loose mint sweets in wrappers. There was so much that we were just dropping it on the floor because we couldn’t carry it all at once. We decided to make a couple of runs and then come back for it, hoping that no-one else comes back for it in the meantime. Some of the people coming back were my youngest sister and her husband. They were dressed as if for Hallowe’en, with blackened faces. I went in to drop off these things, and all my family was in there. My mother said “oh Eric, you’re looking smart today”. I replied “meaning that I don’t look very smart any other day?”. There were all these children around, children whom I knew, children and grandchildren of all the people whom I knew in my circle of friends. There was one particular girl whom I would have liked to have seen, but she hadn’t come. I was particularly disappointed, but so was everyone else. However, she had sent a letter saying “don’t think that I am being rude but ..” and I didn’t manage to hear the rest of it. I was quite disappointed. We dropped these things off, and all these children whom we knew milling around. A couple of young teenage girls came over to chat. I thankedt one of them for doing something for me in the past, but I can’t remember what it was. She went to pat me on the chest and I replied “be careful. I have a catheter port in there” so she apologised. We began to chat, and that was that.

“all my family was in there” – how about that for a scary nightmare Hallowe’en scenario? But this was a dream with all kinds of things going on. A friend and I had had been talking about her children and grandchildren a day or two back, and this probably is where the scenario about all these kids comes from.

As for the missing girl, I am sure that you can all guess who it was, so I’m going to award Zero marks for that.

Caernarfon were playing in the Welsh Premier League and were very close to the top. With the final game to play, it was extremely important. If they were to win, they would qualify for Europe. However, they were hemmed in and surrounded by a large force of Apache warriors and i was very difficult to do anything under these events. The captain of the fort found two of his players fighting . He broke them up, and gave them a lecture about tomorrow being the most important day in the club’s history, all of this, In the meantime, he sent two people out during the night through the enemy lines. They were successful and managed to meet up with a large force of cavalry that was heading their way to try to relieve them. Having been told of the forces and their positions etc, the cavalry commander decided to sleep the night in a dry gulch in the immediate area so that his troops would be fresh and rested ready for battle that he would give on the first of the month as soon as it becomes daylight

If you think that the previous dream was all mixed up, then this one was even worse. The root of the word “Caernarfon” – “Caer” – implies a Roman fort or camp of course and there was a Roman camp there, but they were hardly likely to be defending it against Native Americans. The idea of resting after a march and launching an attack at daybreak was quite a common US Army military tactic in those days.

Did I dictate the dream about the guy going on the bus to the neighbouring town? … “No you didn’t” – ed … He was disabled too, just like me, and couldn’t walk properly. He had no force in his legs. He managed to climb aboard the bus and it set off. Its destination was this town and was going no further so it didn’t pick up anyone as it entered the town. When it came to the edge of the pedestrian area, the bus stopped and everyone alighted. The disabled guy went up to the bus driver and asked if this was where they would come back on board later. He replied “yes” so the guy said that he wouldn’t manage to climb back aboard. The driver recommended that he go to one of the bus stops a little further out of the town centre where the pavements were raised. In the meantime, back at home, there was an absolutely tremendous shower of snow. Within half an hour, there was maybe half a metre of snow everywhere. Some was some poor guy, a footballer, standing by the door of his apartment looking very miserable because he had been planning on breaking some kind of record for his team that afternoon but all the matches had been postponed. People began to shovel, but it wasn’t really much good because the snow was coming down too fast. They wondered if they should bring in some professional snowmen. They thought that that might be a good idea, but they remembered reading that one professional snowman had been killed a couple of days earlier during an incident involving heavy snow. Someone else had the idea of picking up a couple of laptops and taking them outside to put on chairs so that when the snow fell down, the warm laptop would actually melt it and it would be somewhere for people to sit while they were taking a little break from shovelling snow.

We’ve had a few dreams abut buses in built-up areas just recently. And having difficulty climbing aboard a bus is another one of those issues. Here in Granville, some of the pavements have been raised to bus-door height but, ironically, the ones outside the medical centres and in the town centre, where most disabled people are likely to go, have not.

Leaving a laptop outside to melt the snow that falls on it is an interesting idea. It might work for te minutes, but it would be an expensive way of doing it.

The rest of the morning and the early part of the afternoon were spent doing some housekeeping on the travelling laptop and the external hard drive, trying to tidy everything up before the new computer arrives.

Later on, I tried a different way of making bread. I’d seen a “no-knead” recipe for making bread in the air fryer, so I thought that I’d give it a try.

It’s very long-winded and takes a fair bit of time and the result wasn’t anything spectacularly good. It was only half a loaf too (my air fryer is quite small) so I might persevere and next time, make a full-sized loaf but bake it in the conventional oven.

While I was at it, I baked a small pizza and managed to eat half of it. I’ll save the other half for tea tomorrow night. But it was a weird pizza, because I had no fresh mushrooms. My cleaner hadn’t been to the shops this weekend.

Instead, I used frozen mushrooms, a great big handful, and I simmered them to dry the water out. And when I’d finished, there were hardly any mushrooms left. You’ll be amazed at how much water thee is in frozen mushrooms.

So right now, I’m off to bed, if the pain in my foot will subside. Dialysis tomorrow, unfortunately. We are back in our usual routine. And my new laptop might be here for Wednesday so that I can start working again. Steam-driven computing is not an ideal way forward.

But seeing as we have been talking about dreaming … “well, one of us has” – ed … one of my friends told me about a dream that she had.
"I dreamed that I was to have a new washing machine" she said. "If I went to sleep on my right side, I dreamed that I would have an Indesit, but if I went to sleep on my left side, I dreamed that I was t have an Electrolux."
"So what happened?" I enquired wearily
"I woke up my husband and told him"
"And what did he say?"
"He said ‘if you lie there on your back like that, quite still, I’ll give you a hotpoint"

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