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Friday 18th December 2015 – EEEUUURRRGGGHHH!

That’s how I’ve been feeling today.

Despite my very early night last night, and even though I was awake for about an hour or so (during which I wrote last night’s blog) I was well out of it this morning. In fact, I’ve had another day like I had a few days ago which, you will remember, I sat around all day and did nothing at all. Even Liz and Terry going out for an hour or so this morning to St Gervais, leaving me all of this time to get into mischief, failed to galvanise me into action.

The nurse as late too – 10:00 when he arrived. “A lot to do this morning” he said, and which for all I know may well be true and I don’t have a problem with that. I just wish that he had phoned to tell me, or mentioned it last night so that I could have seized the opportunity to have a lie-in. I would have appreciated it.

And so apart from spending most of the day being tired, what else have I done?

Ohh yes! I’ve moved myself and my possessions into the garret. The fact is that tomorrow night Liz’s daughter and son-in-law are coming tomorrow to stay for 10 days and bringing their two kids with them. The kids, aged 7 and 4, clearly need to sleep in the next room to mummy and daddy so that’s all of the rooms on the 1st floor occupied. I’m still here of course, simply because I can’t be anywhere else on my own right now, and so it’s the attic for me. Just like home, isn’t it? But not that it bothers me too much because there’s a rocking chair up there and a couple of agnostic guitars. But it’s a shame that, since I’ve been on the Prozac, I haven’t had the blues for months.

In other news, the results of my blood test from yesterday haven’t arrived. I don’t know what’s happened to them because they should have been here this morning – but that might explain why I’ve not been summoned to the hospital at Montlucon for a blood transfusion. I’ll doubtless have that pleasure to come.

And so apart from that, nothing special to report. I’ve not done much – I’ve not been out of the house. All in all, a pretty nondescript day. But tomorrow, while Liz is off to the airport to meet her family, there will be a list of tasks to perform and it looks as if I’ve drawn the “shopping” straw.

Aren’t I the lucky one?

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Thursday 17th December 2015 – ANYONE WOULD THINK …

… that it was me doing the tiling today, not Terry. Half an hour after lunch I was well out of it – two trips to Terry’s van and back with some stuff for here had finished me off. And back here, I was crashed out on the sofa at 18:00 and in bed by 19:15.

I’ve clearly seen better days – that’s for sure.

But a lot of this could be put down to the efforts that I had made during my nocturnal ramblings. I’d started off with something like a huge contemporary discussion about the qualities of different Roman emperors – and I can’t remember now with whom I was having this discussion. But from there I drove back (it’s good, this time-travel lark) to Stoke on Trent. None of the usual Clayhead characters out in an appearance unfortunately, but I do remember at a roundabout (it might have been one of the newish ones at Longton) I was confused by the exits, took the wrong one, and ended up on the road to Tunstall (a fictitious road of course but one that has featured on my travels before). It then occurred to me that there was one of these old-time sweet shops (just like there is in Longton) somewhere on this road and so I kept my eyes open for it. I ended up walking through this decrepit shopping centre-type of place to try to find it, to the accompaniment of jeers from several people lounging around – and what was that all about?
But back home I ended up chaperoning a young Shirley Temple-type of girl (as if I’d ever be asked to chaperone anyone of the female sex?) who was taking part in a singing competition that was to last all of the weekend. I asked her what would happen if she had to wait right at the end of the competition before it was her turn to sing, to which she replied that there were tons of things that we could do while we were waiting – have a party, go to the zoo, read stories.

No wonder I was exhausted!

So after my blood sample and a painful breakfast, we went off to Pionsat and the bank. I need to build up the fighting fund with all of this going on. Shopping at Intermarche was next, and there we met Clare, Julie and Anne who were off to Clermont-Ferrand for a fun day out. I fuelled up Terry’s van, seeing as how I had some money for once, bought my stuff for lunch and then shot off to the house for the tiling

When we arrived, the batteries were fully-charged already and the water temperature in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load for the surplus charge was slowly rising. That tells you everything that you need to know about the weather that we have been having just recently.

We had a visitor too! In the jungle that is Lieneke’s field opposite my front door we had a sanglier – a wild boar. We couldn’t actually see it but we could hear it grunting away and see all of the shrubs and bushes moving around as it prowled its way around. Magnificent beasts, these sangliers – I remember being up on my scaffolding when I was pointing the eastern wall and watching those two herds approaching each other and the eventual confrontation.

And while Terry carried on with the tiling, I did some desultory tidying-up. But my heart wasn’t in it and I couldn’t even cut straight today. In some respects I was glad when Terry decided to call it a day.

We’re a long way from finishing (I like the “we” bit, don’t you?) but the most difficult bits have been done. And I know that I promised you all a photo but Terry closed up the house while I was outside washing off the tools, so you’ll have to wait until next time.

And now back here, I’m in bed having an early night but I dozed off for an hour, woke up, and now I can’t go back to sleep again.

This looks as if it’s going to become a regular feature. I wish it didn’t, though, and I could have a decent 8-hours sleep.

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Wednesday 16th December 2015 – I WENT BACK …

… to my house this morning. And what’s more, Terry came with me.

Terry has no work on at the moment and I’m not in much of a state to do much right now, and so I made an executive decision (an executive decision being one in which if it all goes wrong, the person making the decision is executed) that perhaps we should go and do the tiling in my shower room. It’ll give Terry something to do, it’ll help me catch up with work at the house, and so on and so forth.

So that was what we did.

But it didn’t work out quite like that – for the simple reason that my shower room is very small. There wasn’t room in there for both of us and so after five minutes in which we had done nothing but get in each other’s way, I left Terry to it.

And we’ll go back tomorrow and do some more too because by about 16:00 it was far too dark do do anything.

But while Terry was tiling, I was tidying up on the ground floor. And you can now actually see the floor in there, a huge pile of stuff has gone out into the lean-to, I’ve sorted out most of the tools that are in there and so on, and now there’s actually a pile of room to move about. If I can do as well tomorrow as I did today, it will be quite impressive.

Of course, we’d parked the van in the little lane at the back of my house to unload it as there was so much to do, and so of course, not having seen the farmer for months and months, it’s today that he decides to bring his cows to the field, so we have to move the van. You could have bet your mortgage on that, couldn’t you?

On our way to my house this morning, we went into Pionsat. I have a huge pile of used needles from my twice-daily anti-coagulant injections and I need to dispose of them. The pharmacy seemed to be the best place to start, and he gave me a couple of boxes to put them in and take them … to the dechetterie.

And so we did. And there at the Council tip at Pionsat, a woman worker took the box off me and put it in a much bigger box of the same shape and colour, to join many other smaller boxes in there. Apparently, it’s what you do around here. We also went to the Intermarché for some bread for lunch, and I met Nada there. I haven’t seen her for ages.

But back to the shower room, I stuck my head in once or twice to pass Terry tiles, or trim something down with the angle grinder, but I haven’t had a really good look in. I’m saving that for tomorrow because although it will be far from finished, it’ll be good for me to be surprised – pleasantly, I hope. I’ll post a couple of photos too if I remember, but I won’t be posting a photo of the ground floor because it is rather a mess, even with it being tidied up. There’s still too much rubbish in there, although I’ve nowhere else to put it and I need to make some extra room somewhere – anywhere!

On the way back here, we were pursued down the lanes by Liz whose last lesson of the day at Montlucon was cancelled. She’d seen some nice Christmas trees and so after a coffee, she and Terry nipped back up to St Gervais to do the necessary. After all, with little people being around, a Christmas tree is essential.

So I’m off to bed for an early night. I have a blood test in the morning and I need to be on form. And I hope that my blood count holds up because if it doesn’t, I can see me in Montlucon on Friday having another blood transfusion and I’m becoming rather fed up of them.

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Tuesday 15th December 2015 – I WENT OUT …

… to Montlucon and the hospital today – and thereby hangs a tail. I arrived early at the hospital, before the patient who was in front of me in the queue, and as it happened, the echograph machine was free. “Okay then, Mr Hall” said the nurse “you may as well go in now”.

So in I went. “You’re Mr X” said the doctor
“No, I’m Mr Hall” I replied. “Apparently Mr X (or whatever his name was) isn’t here yet”

And the net result of all of this was that I was in, out and gone, and sitting in the hospital café having a mug of coffee even before the official time of my appointment. That’s not something that happens every day.

What does seem to happen every day, or, at least, has been happening every day quite recently, is that I was on my travels again during the night.

Last night, I was working in an office where we had to calculate the value of cars used by sales people and work out some charge for annual use of them. I was inspecting a Daytona-yellow Mark II Ford Escort built in, would you believe, 2008 and carrying an 08 plate. But the car was filthy with a good deal of surface rust and a huge dent on the roof down the offside that looked as if a scaffolding pole had dropped on it (we almost had this once with Caliburn). I reckon that to repair the damaged roof, it would cost about £800. I lifted up the bonnet and it was bright yellow painted-over-rust with a reasonably clean engine but with a major oil leak (just like my Passat). I told the owner that he needed to put a different oil in it, to which he replied that he wasn’t on the Mercedes plan!
And talking of Mercedes cars, four of us then went off to do some checking up on the road, and we were in my Mercedes (I do have a W123 240D around at my house somewhere). We ended up driving up a railway line, one track of which was in excellent main-line condition and the other track (where we were driving) being all abandoned and overgrown. As we were climbing up the hill, a beautifully clean and shiny green steam locomotive came charging down the hill pulling a huge load of shiny black oil tankers and being chased by a light locomotive. Of course we all wondered what was going on here and we reckoned that the light locomotive was chasing the train to try to catch up with it (as if that was ever likely to happen). It never occurred to us, even when we reached the top of the bank and saw the incredibly steep climb up which the train had travelled, that the light locomotive had been banking the train up the bank and had just come off. But as we pulled to a halt at the top of the hill to open a gate at the side of the line that would let us off the line onto a dirt track, we were overtaken by a wildly-out-of-control machine something similar to Cugnot’s famous fardier, also painted yellow. As the fardier pulled back in line, it overturned onto its side. I immediately dashed out of the car to take some photos, but all that I had was my mobile telephone and I just couldn’t get any of the photos to come out properly and I was so frustrated.

I was so engrossed by all of this that after the alarm went off, I went back to sleep and it was a wild panic that saw me dash downstairs 15 minutes later. And it’s a good job that I did because the nurse was early to give me my morning injection.

I had a shower after breakfast and then set off for the hospital.

After the hospital I went, would you believe, for a walk. The first time since I’ve been ill that I’ve managed to do that. There’s a huge new shopping precinct that’s recently opened just opposite the Carrefour and so I went in there for a wander around, and did some Christmas shopping too. And then off to the Carrefour itself to do some more Christmas shopping.

For lunch, I treated myself to a plate of vegetables and chips at the Flunch – a long time since I’ve done that but why not? I’m ill and I need to cheer myself up. And as an aside, diesel at the Carrefour is just 102:7 cents – when was the last time that you ever saw it at that price?

I went back home after lunch. I’ve brought upstairs another pile of wood and now there’s enough to keep me going for about a week once I return home. What with the food that’s already up there, I should be self-sufficient for a while. I also made a start on the tidying up and believe it or not, I can actually see a difference (even if no-one else might). However, there’s still quite a lot to do.

Back here, and it was raining too when I drove home. First time it’s rained for ages (or, at least, rained that I have noticed) and those new windscreen wipers that I fitted the other day don’t half do the business. I had the nurse soon after I returned and then I had tea. There’s no footy so I shall probably treat myself to an early night.

I think that I deserve it.

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Monday 14th December 2015 – WELL …

… that didn’t work out quite as planned, did it?

I told you that I was going back home this afternoon to have a tidy-up, but it didn’t really work out quite like that. I did make it home with no problems but the first job was to unload Caliburn. There was all of the tiles in the back, as well as three big sacks of tile cement and grouting, a pane of glass, some floorboarding and a pile of other stuff too.

But although I moved all of the heavy stuff out of Caliburn, and one or two other bits too, but that was my lot, I’m afraid. It rather finished me off. I did manage a little later to make a door handle of sorts for the front door though, so my afternoon wasn’t completely wasted.

I blame a lot of it myself on what was going on through the night. I’d had an early night and started to watch a film, and that’s almost always guaranteed to send me off to sleep, just like it did last night.

And then I was on my travels again. With a fitful night, I don’t remember too much about it. But what I do remember was exciting enough. It concerns something like a vampire on the prowl over London and some kind of surgeon being implicated as the perpetrator. Doctor Watson was leaning out of the living room window at 221B Baker Street whilst musing to Holmes and recounting the 31 departments (are there 31? There were last night anyway!) in a modern Victorian hospital to which a surgeon might be attached. But I was exploring another avenue, a thread that led past a group of teenagers. I somehow managed to filter a message down to them with just enough information to provoke them, so as to see if it might smoke someone out of their cover. And sure enough, some girl rang me to thank me for the information which had helped them greatly. I tried to engage her in conversation, as part of my plan, but the line went dead – either we had been cut off, or (more probably) she had hung up. But I do remember being in my bedroom (wherever this might have been) which was a total tip (as usual) in a bed on wheels so that I could paddle it about the room. And I’d woken up at the usual time despite having had a late night but it was now in mid-afternoon and I was still in bed, not sure how I was going to manage to go back to sleep and also thinking that in five minutes I could have this room looking really tidy, so why wasn’t I doing it?

But that’s enough of that. I crawled myself out of my stinking pit at just before 08:00 and it wasn’t long before the nurse came. I had my injection and also my blood sample (and he burst out laughing when I told them how many goes they had had at the hospital to find my blood) and then I spent the rest of the morning working on the notes for my trip to Canada.

Coming back from home this evening I bumped (well, not literally) into Nicolette. She was taking their new dog Snowy (a younger version of Siroy who is unfortunately no longer with us). We had quite a chat and then I came back here, with Caliburn storming up the Font Nanaud, clearly enjoying being a quarter of a tonne lighter.

So tonight I’m watching Leicester against Chelsea and then I’m off to bed. I have the hospital in Montlucon tomorrow.

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Sunday 13th December 2015 – YES FOLKS, IT’S SUNDAY!

And not only did I have to be up early, I was actually wide awake, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed long before the alarm went off. And on a Sunday too. How often does that happen?

What’s even more surprising is that I was well off on my travels during the night too. And because it was something of a fitful night too, with a couple of trips down the corridor, my memory of my voyages is only scanty. But they were phenomenal enough for a great deal of what happened to survive in order to make it down on paper.

We started off with me waiting somewhere on the south coast to meet a coach that was coming over from the Continent and I was to take over the driving back up north. And so I did, but I missed the entrance to the motorway, which meant that I had to go and find somewhere to do a “U-turn”. Across a staggered junction was a pub with a big car park and that looked just the place, but it turned out that this was the oldest pub in England. It seemed that the logical thing to do to cover up my mistake was to give my passengers 10 minutes to go to explore the pub and have a quick pint if they wanted. When the other driver said “good idea – there’s a cash machine here so I can get some UK cash” the cover-up was complete. I announced to the passengers that because he other driver wanted some cash, we would stop here and that would give them 5 minutes to look around. So I let them off, parked up the bus and then went into the pub – but I couldn’t find any of my passengers! They had disappeared!

I then drifted off again on my travels, into a hospital where it seemed that isolation and disinfection was the theme, and back out of the other side, and so on until I ended up back at home (wherever that might have been), packing with Nerina to go on holiday together. We had a pile of dolls to pack but one was far too big to go in Nerina’s suitcase so I said that I would put it in mine. We ended up on a plateau at the back of Lyon. Before we had left, we’d been given a few enigmatic and cryptic postcards of small bourgs – there was obviously a mystery involved in all of this but we didn’t know what it was and these postcards were the clues. We’d managed to work out where these villages might be (the plateau at the back of Lyon) but we couldn’t identify them, so the next step was to ask. The first person whom we asked knew the villages depicted on the postcards. We asked if there were any houses for sale there, with the idea that we’d have an estate agent take us there, but he said that he would take us up there if we would meet him at his office at the back of the church. And so we did, and it turned out that he was the local gendarme. He had to prepare his car, so he said, and so we went to give him a hand, and it was an old, rotten white Renault 19 with no glass and no wheels, and tied onto a trailer with ratchet straps. While we were preparing it to leave, the phone rang. It was the woman who was looking after George, my old taxi driver, while we weren’t there. She said that his catheter had come out and what was she to do. I told her to telephone the District Nurse but she refused flat – there had clearly been some kind of issue between them. “Well okay” I replied. “I’ll be home in a bit” which can’t have been much comfort because normally she finished at 18:00, it was now 20:00 and we were a world away, in the mountains at the back of Lyon in southern France.

So lying here for a while vegetating, and when the alarm went off at 07:45 I was ready to leap into action. Well, the spirit was – the flesh was a little weaker than that. Nevertheless, when the nurse came round for the injection, I was up and about, ready and waiting.

But apart from that, nothing much else has happened. I’ve torn myself just four times off the sofa where I usually sit – twice to go for a ride on the porcelain horse and twice for meals, and that’s my lot.

What I have done though was to find another course about the development of aviation in World War I and so I had a play with that this morning. And the verdict was that it was rubbish. It just glossed over the subject, spending a lot of its time on “token-womanism” which has nothing to do with World-War I aviation, a lot of time discussing the Wright Brothers (and not a single word about Richard Pearse and his ground-breaking work on ailerons), and being full of inaccuracies – the classic howler being the lecturer talking about the “Me-109” and not the “Bf-109”, which is its correct designation.

Yes, an awful course.

But as for me, I’ve decided that if the weather is as nice tomorrow as it was today, I’m going to go back home after lunch and tidy up my attic – try to bring a little order into chaos. We all know that Nietzsche said “out of chaos comes order”, but Nietzsche had never visited my attic.

But I think that I ought to make some kind of preparations about putting my house in order. I have no idea what the future might hold for me but it’s very likely that I’ll be back there sometime. At the moment I’m feeling reasonably healthy so if I can move another big pile of wood upstairs there will be enough for a week or two and that should help me out considerably. And then if the place is clean and tidy (or as clean and tidy as I can reasonably make it) then it will be fairly welcoming for when I have to go back.

I can’t keep on being a house-guest here for ever.

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Saturday 12th December 2015 – REMEMBER …

… that I talked last night about my early night last night and waking up in the small hours? It was at about 05:00 that I eventually turned off the light and settled down to sleep again. Of course, I was in the really deep sleep cycle when the alarm went off, and so that really was something of a waste of an early night.

After breakfast, I went and had a nice hot shower – the one that I should have had yesterday morning – and then I settled down to do some work. I had to finish off my revision, and that took ages for some reason or other – and then I had my exam.

The exam didn’t take too long to do and I ended up with 93% as my score. I’m quite happy with that of course, but I can’t remember now where it was that I dropped my missing points. I had to complete an on-line survey too, and that seemed to take longer than the exam.

I’ve now started transcribing my notes from my journey to Canada in the autumn. High time that I caught up with this, having neglected it for so long. I have four weeks until my next course begins so I need to make the most of the time available.

And the district nurse came round to inject me, and tonight it was really rough. He really hurt me and I was in pain for about half an our afterwards, and I can still feel it now. I’m really not enjoying this illness one little bit and it’s all down to the little things like this. I hate needles at the best of times but people really are taking the mickey out of me.

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Friday 11th December 2015 – EEEUUURRRGGGHHH

I had to go to the hospital today. And so that meant a 07:00 start. And never did I feel less like it either after yet another uncomfortable night.

When the alarm went off I crawled downstairs and made a coffee. Some muesli and fruit juice later, I was properly fed and watered but still not on the same planet as anyone else, I reckon.

As I drove to Montlucon I slowly started to wake up and by the time I arrived at the hospital I was maybe feeling as much as half-human. “Half-man, half-aardvark” I thought to myself. “I’ve clearly been varking too ard”. But at least my luck was in somewhere. I was 20 minutes early and there was a parking place right outside the door of the hospital.

One of the more friendly nurses was on duty at the day-hospital and she even found me a mug of coffee to go a little further in rousing myself from lethargy. But she has three goes at trying to put a drain in me, without much success, and went off to call a colleague to have a go. I thought to myself “hang on a minute – these b******s are playing darts with me!”. They were all having a good moan about not being able to find a vein with any blood in it. “Hardly surprising” I retorted. “You’ve already taken most of it!”

So I was there at 08:40 – I had a drain put in at 09:40, and the blood finally arrived at … errr … 11:40, by which time we were three people in a day ward meant for two. They managed to conjure up something for lunch too – mushrooms in tomato sauce with rice and bread, with a pear for dessert. Hardly the most appetising meal that I’ve eaten – I’ll take butties next time.

My first blood pochette was empty by 13:05 – and it took until 14:00 for them to couple up the second. As a result, I wasn’t able to leave until 15:30 and that annoyed me a little – I should have been long gone from here by then. But feeling like nothing on earth, I went for a coffee in the cafe while, apparently, all the time they were frantically searching for me to tell me that I need to come back on Tuesday at 10:40 for another series of tests.

So having recomposed myself a little I went back home – to Pooh Corner that is. I had a little relax, ate some biscuits and watched something on the laptop. And then I came back to Liz and Terry’s for tea and my evening injection.

None of this did anything to cheer me up and, being totally whacked and thoroughly fed up, by 20:10 I was off to bed. And it wasn’t long before I went to sleep either.

And the result?

Here I am at 04:00 updating my blog. I’ve been awake since about 02:15 and I can’t go back to sleep. I’ll probably be like this now until mid-morning when I’ll crash out yet again and this will mess up my revision plans for today – having had them totally messed up already for today. I’m never going to finish this blasted course.

I just really wish that I could bring a little order into my life right now, but that’s not going to be possible, so it seems.

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Thursday 10th December 2015 – IT WASN’T ANYTHING LIKE …

… as good last night as it had been for the previous two nights. It was another night of tossing and turning in bed for a couple of hours in the middle of the night and while I did manage to wander off on my travels, I don’t remember a thing about it.

The nurse came round early enough for my morning injection and also to take a blood sample. I have to go through this routine twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, as well as my twice-daily injections of anti-coagulant.

Later in in the morning, Terry had to sweep the chimney. It’s blocked up a little and the boiler here isn’t drawing to well. At least that’s his excuse. The real reason is that there will be a couple of Little People here over Christmas and Father Christmas will need to have a free passage into the house.

I think that I have it tough with having to stand on a step-stool and reach out of my attic windows with a very long brush to sweep the snow off my solar panels. To clean his chimney, Terry has to dismantle one of his attic windows, climb out onto the roof and then climb up onto the chimney stack. Then he can brush the chimney downwards from the top. He’s built a soot trap into the wall on the ground floor and all of the soot falls down into there where it can be shovelled out and vacuumed up.

After that, I cracked on alternating between having a doze and doing my revision. That kept me going until 18:30 when I had a most unwelcome phone call. It seems that my blood count is down again and I have to go into the day-hospital tomorrow for a blood transfusion.

An early start, a drive to Montlucon, an injection and then a blood transfusion. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow at all.

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Wednesday 9th December 2015 – I’VE BEEN OUT …

… on my travels today – the first time since I came back from hospital last Friday.

In fact, I was out on my travels during the night too. I was working in an aeroplane hangar and one of the jobs that I had to do was to fit a new wheel and tyre on the undercarriage of ar aeroplane. In fact, the wheel bore a very great resemblance to the wheel and tyre that I fitted the other week on my wheelbarrow. And each time I fitted it, the air pressure went down and the tyre went flat. Eventually I had a good listen and I could hear the air escaping from a puncture in the inner tube. But like a good Civil Servant that I was, I’d been told to put this particular wheel and tyre on the aeroplane, and so I did. Fixing the puncture was obviously too much like hard work.
But from there we moved on a little and I was part of an undercover police force that was investigating the theft of a very dangerous chemical from this hangar. It was one that dissolved almost everything with which it came in contact (so how did they find a container in which to keep it?) and was on the Top Secret list. And as we were searching this hangar for clues, there was a man, badly eaten away by the acid and with bits of his body like his left thigh missing and with yellow skin, trying desperately to hide from our view underneath a 50-gallon oil drum that was lying on its side. But having failed in our search, we did however know that something had been posted to someone, put in a letter box somewhere. We were all crushed inside an old Ford Y van, a red Post Office van, and we were looking at all of the letters that had been collected from various letter boxes. All of a sudden, one particular letter caught my eye so I opened it. It was addressed to a cycle maker, and seemed to be some kind of coding in a five-letter group on an old blue order form. We sent a woman with the order form to give to the cycle maker to see what happened, which she did. And a couple of days later, she was called back and gived a brand new specially-made kids’ cycle painted green and white and she looked totally ridiculous on itn being a rather large woman. But we were no further forward and so we retired to plot our next move.

And this is when the alarm went off and I had to struggle to find the phone which, in the meantime, was waking everyone in the house. And I was thinking what another good sleep I’d just had.

After breakfast and the visit of the nurse to give me my injection, I had a shower and packed my bag and then Terry and I set off for Montlucon, stopping on the way at Pionsat for fuel and my order from the pharmacy.

At Montlucon we went to the hospital for my 11:00 appointment, which turned out to be about midday before I was seen.

The good news is that I don’t have leukaemia. The bad news is that I have a form of lymphoma. There are several types of this illness, some of which are quite aggressive and others not so. It seems that I have one of the lesser kinds. There is a whole range of reasons why this might have occurred, and one of these reasons is due to something to do with an aggressive protein, and my blood count shows that there is a protein that has gone off the scale in the blood count. It’s not the “usual suspect” in this respect, but nevertheless it merits further enquiries and so I’m due for further tests.

But as an aside, two points raise their ugly head. If it is a protein issue, there are not the facilities to treat it at Montlucon and so I will have to go elsewhere. It looks as if I’ll be on my travels again in the New Year. And in the second case, I seem to be full of ganglions. Not that they are dangerous apparently, but their presence has certainly been noted and in all kinds of places too.

On the way back we stopped for a late lunch and then went to Neris-les-Bains in search of chocolates for Liz because it’s her birthday today. After that, I went back home, for the first time for almost three weeks.

We’ve had plenty of sun, plenty of wind and plenty of excess solar energy, 694 amp-hours in just 19 days and that’s impressive for a period approaching the winter solstice. I also had a good rummage around and found a spare door lock, and I fitted that onto the front door so that it can be opened from the outside. This might come in handy if people other than me need access to the house.

I hung around here for a while too because, although it was cold, it was nice to be on my own for a while and relax in the relative comfort and security of my own surroundings. As Barry Hay once famously said on the beach at Scheveningen about 25 years ago “I tell you what man, it’s good to be back home”.

I started up Caliburn, threw some spare clothes, soya milk and vitamin B12 drink into the back and set off for Liz and Terry’s. First time Caliburn has had a run out for a while of course. And I mustn’t forget Strawberry Moose who has been invited to spend Christmas away from home.

As I drove back here, I remembered thinking “wouldn’t it be nice if the next round of tests were to reveal that I don’t need these twice-daily injections and the district nurse didn’t have to come round so often” and then I thought “blimmin’ ‘eck – it’s 19:00 and if I don’t put my foot down I’ll miss the nurse!” I had completely forgotten.

But I was back first and here I am at Liz and Terry’s. All ready for Round 2, and trying to work out a cunning plan about going home. I managed to take a huge load of wood upstairs to my attic without stopping, and that was certainly better than before I went to hospital, so things are looking up. I’ll see what my next couple of blood tests tell me and then I’ll make a decision.

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Tuesday 8th December 2015 – I WAS OUT …

… of it completely today. I spent most of the day up in the clouds somewhere in the distant land between the sleeping and the waking. It’s been absolutely ages since I’ve felt quite like this.

Mind you, there are a couple of really good reasons for that.

Firstly, I was on my travels again during the night. We were interested in a really big and wealthy businessmen, the Russian oil magnate type. I suspected that he had been up to no good and I was interested in finding out more about him and his activities so I called him into my office and began to ask him questions. I’d been told by my boss that these people were “untouchable” and that we shouldn’t interview them, and that if we did, we wouldn’t be likely to get very much sense out of them, but I ploughed doggedly on nevertheless.
And this led to me being on the London Underground with a girl, smaller and younger than me with loads of black curly hair tied in a kind of bow at the back and she was wearing black-rimmed glasses. We went to the refreshment counter for something to eat and drink but a young boy pushed in front of us. He asked for four coffees but said that he wasn’t to say that he’d been here because last time they had done something nasty to the coffee and he told the other cashier that he wouldn’t ever come again. We had a coffee and a sandwich (I asked my companion if she wanted two sandwiches but she gave me a dirty look) and we took them back to one of the two double beds on top of this iceberg overlooking a kind of ice-beach. On the ice-beach was a guy in swimming trunks admiring the view, the water, the clear blue sky and the bright sunshine, but there was a young woman in a bikini creeping up on him and, much to the consternation of my companion, she pushed him right into the water and he began to struggle desperately while we watched, open-mouthed.

Strange as it is to say it, despite all of this going on, I had the best night’s sleep that I have had for weeks. Apart from a visit down the corridor, I was flat out until the alarm went off and it was all totally painless. I could have stayed in bed like that for a year.

But the second reason is not so good. I had the results of my blood test this morning and my blood count is 9.1. It’s a far cry of course from the 3.8 of three weeks ago, but it’s still a long way short of 13 that is the minimum for good healthy blood. After the 9 pochettesof blood that I’ve had this last couple of weeks, this figure is a major disappointment. It’s no surprise that I’m feeling a little down in the dumps.

And so I spent most of the day stuck in this never-never land, using whatever lucid moments I had in some kind of effort to revise for my end-of-course exam later this week. But I was clearly wasting my time in this respect so I called it a night and crawled off to bed

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Monday 7th December 2015 – HOW ABOUT THIS …

… for being brought back down to earth with a bump?

I can’t remember now what we were discussing but Liz came out with a “well, if you are still with us on Thursday …”, something that I thought was a delightful statement of pessimism. It turns out that what she means is that if I’m not detained in the hospital on Wednesday when I go for my check-up, but that was not how it sounded to me.

My late night last night meant that I was right out of it all through the night, and despite the odd trip here and there to go riding the porcelain horse, I don’t remember a thing. I do remember though waking up with cramp in my good arm, and that was pretty inconvenient. But at least it makes a change from having it in my legs.

The nurse was late too, and seeing as how I was having a blood test today I had to sit around starving until he arrived, and that didn’t improve my humour very much. That showed when I was doing my course work for my Hadrian’s Wall studies. Going back over what I’d written and submitted during the day, I can see that I’m becoming quite petulant in my old age.

I really need to cheer myself up a little, although I’m not quite sure how I can do that, especially given the present circumstances and my current state of health. New Zealand sounds quite enticing right now, sitting on a beach in the sun while everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is freezing to death, but seeing how I need injections twice a day, blood tests twice a week and the occasional control from the hospital, it’s clearly out of the question.

But this leads me on the a fantastic business idea which, I’m sure, would make millions. I’m certain that I’m not the only person to feel like this – there must be thousands like me – so instead of having a hospital, we had a floating hospital and all the sick, miserable and unhappy people like me just steamed off on a cruise somewhere on our floating hospital. Looking out of our “hospital” window one day and seeing Venice – the next day seeing the Acropolis (well, you know what I mean) and maybe even going to visit them – I’m sure that this would cheer up almost everybody. It certainly would cheer me up. There must be some mileage in this idea and I shall have to make further enquiries.

But I’ve effectively finished my course now. All that remains is the revision and then the exam, and then we shall see how I’ve done. But the issue then is “what am I going to do next?”. My animation course doesn’t start until mid-January and I need something to keep me out of mischief until then.

Perhaps I ought to write a book or something similar?

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Sunday 6th December 2015 – IT’S SUNDAY TODAY …

… and in what can only be described as a first for about a hundred years, I set an alarm for s Sunday morning.

Not that I wanted to, but the nurse is coming round some time between 08:00 and 08:30 to give me an injection of anti-coagulant and so I need to be here. Not much point in him coming if I’m still in bed asleep.

But I was glad that I awoke because I’d been on my travels during the night. You won’t be interested in them because I’m not. It was all about hospitals and injections and blood tests, and I’ve had a darn sight too many of all of that just recently. It wouldn’t have been so bad had a nice young attractive nurse featured prominently somewhere, but as if that were ever likely to happen.

We had some more excitement later. Terry and Liz have a Volkswagen Golf but it’s been off the road for a while due to an undetected fault. According to the ECU there’s nothing wrong with the vehicle, but it just won’t start. Several garages have tried (and failed) to get it to go. In fact, it’s just like Crawshay Bailey’s famous engine, and “going to Cardiff College for to get a bit of knowledge” would be about just as much use in this case too.

However, on the internet a week or so ago, there was a very low-mileage engine for sale at a very democratic price and so, to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … the engine turned up at lunchtime. With a bit of luck, God’s help and a Bobby, the new engine might be fitted this week some time and who knows? The car might even go!

Anyway, that was about all of the excitement for today. I’ve done a pile of stuff for my course on Hadrian’s Wall, and I’ve been told that in 5 weeks time my course on Animation will start.

Did I tell you about this course on Animation? As you know, I mess around with a 3D program on the computer, one where you can create your own models and perform simple animations, but I’m not much good at it. Whilst the poor specs on this laptop don’t help, a lot of it can be put down to my own lack of technique and so I’m going to be following this course to see what it can teach me.

And that’s really all today. We had the second helping of curry for tea tonight and it was even better, as predicted. And right in the middle of tea the nurse came round to give me my evening injection. Magnificent timing!

I had an early night too – the strain of an 07:45 start on a Sunday was far too much. But someone with whom I hadn’t spoken in ages came on line just as I was about to switch off the laptop and so that put paid to that idea.

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Saturday 5th December 2015 – AND SO …

… here I am, on Day One of my second period of rehabilitation, and I hope that I can keep going for longer this time than I did last time.

I had a nice, warm and comfy bed but something of a disturbed night. Not with pain in the arm of course but with just general restlessness and having to nip to the bathroom a couple of times. And the alarm took me totally by surprise too – it’s been a long time since I’ve heard that of course – but I had to set it as the visiting nurse is coming round sometime between 08:00 and 09:00 so I need to be up.

A leisurely breakfast and then, with it being Saturday, a pile of football on the television. That about sums up my day today. And I did enjoy having a good laugh at Chelsea. I can’t help it because it’s really nice to see, for once, a smaller club getting the “rub of the green” against a multi-million pound outfit.

As for food, while I was in hospital I had spent most of my time imagining all different kinds of meals, one of which was vegan cheese on toast with tomato rings on top. So when Liz asked me what I would like for lunch, then considering that the mobile boulanger had just passed by, there could only be one answer to that question. And it was delicious too.

For tea, Liz made the long-awaited vegan curry. We’ve tried to have this for the last couple of weekends but each time, a crisis (like me going into hospital) has intervened. The French have a saying Jamais deux sans trois – or “never two without a third”, whereas the British say exactly the opposite with “third time lucky”. This time, we were lucky and it was beautiful too.

Furthermore, there’s enough left over for tomorrow and as we all know, spicy food always tastes better the second day.

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Friday 4th December 2015 – I’VE LEFT …

…the hospital today and I’m back chez Liz and Terry. And the first thing that Liz did for me was to make me a tea of baked potato, vegan cheese, baked beans and a side-salad. And wasn’t it lovely to have some real proper food properly cooked for once? Never mind eating it – I could have dived into it and rolled around in it.

Last night, with my late night, I didn’t seem to get very much sleep. I lost count of how many times I had to go to the bathroom – it was at least 5 times and could easily have been more. And then we had the usual interruptions of people sticking their heads around the door, people coming to give me injections, all of that kind of thing.

But I did manage somehow to get out and about on my travels too. Not that I remember anything much about it, but I do recall a separated couple being involved, and despite having agreed as part of the terms of separation that they would refer to each other as vous , but we did notice, with smiles on our faces, that they were back to referring to each other with the more familiar tu.

So having had breakfast and so on, I went for yet another shower. I’m really making the most of this. And then we had the bad news. It seems that my medical appointment for later this morning has been cancelled. They still haven’t been able to complete the analysis of all of my examinations.

Mind you, this might be good news. I imagine that they would look for the most serious options first and then they would work their way up the ladder, and the longer that it takes to find the problem, the less serious it might be. But of course, I’m ruling nothing out.

But apparently I’m to have an anti-coagulant injection twice a day at home for the next THREE MONTHS, and a blood test twice a week, and I’ve been given a prescription for a lorry-load of medication. Not only that, Liz has bought some vitamin B12 tablets and some iron tablets, and has found a fruit juice that has B12 in it. I need to make the most of my recuperation and keep a close eye on my diet for a while while I sort myself out.

And I did query the “three months” bit too. Would I still be here in three months? But the doctor did confirm that, in his opinion, there was every likelihood that i’ll be here then, and long after that too. And that’s good news;

At the pharmacy in Pionsat, the bill – just for the first month – came to €474. That doesn’t include the smelling salts that they used to bring me round. This is going to be an expensive illness, I can see that.

So after a good evening’s relaxation, I had an early night. We’d bought an ice -pack and we’d had it in the freezer for a couple of hours, so I put it on my swollen arm to draw the heat and give me a good night’s sleep. But it was totally unbearable after about half an hour so I ended up taking it off. But never mind – it had done the rick and, at least for the moment, the discomfort had gone.

I did warn Liz and Terry to make sure though that when they went to bed to wear plenty of garlic around their necks, just in case I feel thirsty during the night.

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