Tag Archives: stuffed peppers

Monday 12th June 2023 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S …

… rather depressing day, today hasn’t been any better.

It was another day during which I spent a lot of time curled up on my chair asleep

It beats me what is going on right now. I went through a phase of this a while back and I thought that I’d managed to pull through it. But it seems to have come back with a vengeance.

Despite what I said, I didn’t go to bed all that early. When I’d finished everything that I had to do I went and checked over what I’d written about my trip to Canada in 2017 and added a few extra notes. I was still in bed in plenty of time though

What didn’t probably help was that it was a very mobile night. There was quite a lot going on. I started off by having a dream about some isolated community in Newfoundland and Labrador. The whole thing was a really exciting and interesting dream but it all just evaporated. All I could remember was me telling someone that it was their fault because they’d become involved in it. The rest of it completely disappeared and that was extremely disappointing.

Next off I was walking around and suddenly overcome with an attack of whatever it was that I have when I’m about to drop onto the floor when my knees all fold up. The funny thing was that I was asleep in bed having a dream and it happened in the dream but it really did feel realistic that I was going to crash to the floor any minute. In this dream I was teaching in a school of very small children. Something came up about an opportunity to go on a travel somewhere to North America. Someone came down to talk to the children about it. His manner of speaking was for much older children and adults so my children didn’t really understand it so I had to practically interpret. Afterwards when he was still in the classroom with the children and I’d gone out, I was looking through the paperwork and found more things that the children needed to know about this so I had to keep going back to talk to them even though he was in there just being sociable. Things like “if the parents had difficulty understanding the forms they could come to see me and we’d fill them in together”, those kinds of problems that I was finding

At one point here I was in Hogwarts again trying to write an ending to the story. Hermione was there in the ladies’ bathroom talking to a mirror that was all fogged and confused. The two boys walked in so she had a little chat to them about how she was feeling and how they’d been over all this before, everything like that. It was a shame that their last spell at Hogwarts would end up like this

There was also someone’s taxi that was not charging the battery. he had a problem with the electrics or something. I had a go at fixing it but then there were no dashboard warning lights. It must have been a fuse. I took the fuse out to clean it and put it back in but still nothing. I fetched my circuit tester and saw that there was definitely a circuit going in and going out again at the fuse box. I then had to hunt for my fuses in the barn. That was extremely difficult. I looked everywhere. We were talking. I said “I know that I have some for every time I used to go to the scrapyard I’d look under the bonnet of a car and take a handful of fuses”. As we were talking I suddenly had a flash of inspiration and looked on one of the shelves in the barn. There was the fuse container that I had so I took a fuse from there and took it over to his car.

When the alarm went off we were discussing cross-Channel ferries, one in particular called Berengaria, named after the Queen of Richard I. There was actually an ocean liner called Berengaria. She was the old German Imperator that was seized as war reparations after World War I and sailed for Cunard under the command of Arthur Rostron, he formerly of the Carpathia and who saved the passengers from the Titanic.

After the medication I went to have a shower and pretty myself up ready for the nurse to come. He gave me my injection and I reminded him that next time he comes, he needs to give me the blood test so that the hospital can see how I’m doing and whether there are any complications

After he left, I’ve been working on my notes from Canada 2017. Despite spending a lot of time asleep I’ve pushed on quite well with the notes. I’ve been all around Red Bay, visited the wreck of MV Bernier and I’m now pushing on through the interior towards the coast at Mary’s Harbour.

Despite my Welsh lesson tomorrow and the visit from the physiotherapist, I’ll push on with my notes. I should make it to Port Hope Simpson tomorrow, where I spent the night on my way around.

That’s an interesting settlement. Created in the 1930s as a logging camp to hose the workers working on the timber concessions there, it was one of the places chosen by the controversial Prime Minister of the Province, Joey Smallwood, to house the people from the coastal settlements that he had cleared out under his even more controversial resettlement programme

So of course, it goes without saying that once everyone had settled there, the operator of the logging concessions closed down the business and the people were left with no work.

And how many times have I heard that story? People whisked away from their traditional hunting and trapping grounds, dumped in a strange new settlement and abandoned with no prospects whatsoever?

It wasn’t quite so bad for the people of European and Métis descent but for the Innu and Inuit it was devastating and has led to an enormous social and domestic problem in these communities.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta. The pepper came out of the freezer and cooked for 16 minutes at 160°C in the air fryer cooked it to perfection

So I’m going to bed now. I’m hoping for a better sleep tonight if I can. I should be fighting fit tomorrow for my lesson – fighting for breath and fit to drop.

Monday 5th June 2023 – LAST NIGHT WAS …

… somewhat better than the previous one.

But that’s not difficult. Almost anything could have been better than that.

Feeling as tired as I was, I went to bed early and was asleep quite quickly. Just the occasional tossing and turning here and there.

Mind you, I did awaken early and when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up. Not quite “about” but I was sitting on the edge of the bed dressing.

After the medication I went and had a shower. It was something of a struggle to climb into the bath but only because of the pain in the lower calf, not because of any underlying health issue that might have affected my climbing into the bath in the past

The nurse came round at 08:20 and gave me my injection. He went afterwards to my neighbour who had the bad fall. Apparently things are not looking so good for her and that will be quite a shame.

And the nerve specialist finally phoned me back early this morning too. He can fit me on on 20th June at 10:15.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent travelling through Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island and on the ferry across the Gulf of St Lawrence. We’re now pulling into port at Argentia ready for Strider, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and me to drive up to Saint John to see my friend who lives there.

Argentia is quite an interesting place. The slow Transatlantic convoys – those with prefix SC – in World War II set out from Sydney, from where I’d just sailed, and the destroyer patrols that guarded the convoys in the early stages of their journey sheltered here in Argentia.

The village itself was demolished to make room for the naval installations. Even the bodies in the graveyard were dug up.

On 10th August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt met in the harbour on board a ship in the harbour to discuss issues concerning the conduct of the War to date and how the USA could help to further the UK’s War aims.

When I was HERE IN 2010 it was in the middle of a torrential rainstorm so I didn’t have much of a look round. And when I was there in 2017 I was in too much of a rush.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from last night too. I was keeping a diary. One of the entries on which I was working was about my trip to the hospital where I’d ended up being in some kind of class that was doing something like an eye examination test where everyone was being asked questions about eyes etc but in a more vernacular rather than a scientific sense. I wasn’t asked any questions but I still had to take part in it. I was writing it up in the diary. There were lots more than happened on that particular day but I can’t remember much of it now

There was another dream about a circus, Silcock’s Circus but I can’t remember how it went. But then I was with my friends from the Wirral and another one of my friends but the woman with him was neither of the women with whom he has been married. We’d all met up once for my birthday but it was time to go. We walked back to the bus stop in Weston. The couple from the Wirral were walking ahead so I was walking with the other two who were bringing up the rear. I said my fondest goodbyes to them and that I’d see them again but I wasn’t sure when, then walked off to say goodbye to the others. The Wirral couple cut me off and headed that way. The other two went to speak to them. I thought “never mind. I’ll wander off anyway and leave those four to it”. Eventually the 6 of us (so who was the sixth?) were together at the bus stop. I pointed out the new views of Crewe with all of the redevelopment and cutting down of trees you could see so much more of the town from here than you could 30 years ago. We talked about all of the changes that had taken place in the area. Mrs Wirral asked me if I could fly by aeroplane. I told her that I had done but the problem with aeroplanes was the transfers. If I go by bus it’s basically door to door with no wandering around unnecessarily whereas with the aeroplane I’d have to walk miles and that was what was the problem with that. It wasn’t the question that I couldn’t afford it. That was something else.

I was an explorer back in the early Middle Ages. I discovered Paris on behalf of the French. That led to huge dances and celebrations all over the country. I was at one of them. For some reason King George ended up displeased and I was arrested. Crowds of people still came out to the exit to watch me take my exercise. I was thinking that one day they would decide to cut off my head at the end of all this. They were presumably letting things drag because nothing at all seemed to be changing.

At some point during the morning I dozed off for half an hour. I’ve clearly not recovered from Saturday night and my lack of sleep.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper, made with one of the peppers out of the freezer. And I cooked it in the air fryer on a low heat of 160°C for a total of 17 minutes, and that cooked it to perfection. It really was done to a turn.

And on the subject of things being cooked to perfection, my fruit buns were certainly delicious. It was an excellent batch that I made yesterday.

So tomorrow I have a Welsh lesson so I need to prepare for it. And the physiotherapist is coming round tomorrow afternoon too. I’m not sure what he’ll have to say about my leg and the little incident on Saturday morning, but with having had the nerve specialist contacting me again, it looks as if things are slowly moving forward.

it just makes me wish that I was.

Monday 29th May 2023 – I’M GOING TO HAVE …

… to stop watching all of these HARRY POTTER films.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, while I’m eating my tea I’ll be watching a film on the DVD, gradually working my way around my collection of DVDs. Right now, the film that’s on the machine is HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE.

And so during the night I had to go to a wizards’ conference to learn something or other on a course. Wondering how I was going to go there, someone turned up and said that they’d take me. They had an umbrella that was like a helicopter blade. I hung onto them, they hung onto the helicopter blade and off we went. We flew past the house of someone whom I knew. I always suspected that they were rather strange and there were 5 people hovering over their house on broomsticks. I waved. Suddenly we came down to earth. The guy said “I’m going out of my area now so you have to get off and walk”. I asked “how go I come back?”. He replied “you come back to this spot and I’ll pick you up”. “So how do I come back here?”. he replied “you could always call a taxi”. I said goodbye to this guy and set off to walk. When I arrived at this place they were burying a cat that had been hit by a car. I thought that the collar might have special magic powers so I was wondering if I could have it. But they were obviously intent upon burying the cat wearing the collar so it was probably inappropriate to ask. They carried on with their plan to deal with the cat while I prepared myself for this weekend course.

It’s actually a film that I remember very well, having been to see it with Marianne when it was doing the rounds of the cinemas. And I remember thinking, when Dumbledore took out his wand to clean and rebuild Professor Slughorn’s house, that I would give all that I own and more besides to have a wand that would do that

A couple of weeks ago, it was the 10th anniversary of her voyage to meet her maker. It’s bizarre how quickly time flies. It seems like only yesterday but a lot has happened since then.

So retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, and in particular, about today.

It all started off with me once more raising myself from the dead before the alarm went off. And once I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages, I made a start on the radio stuff that I’d dictated on Saturday night.

There wasn’t any rush today so it took a while, but in the end I finished up with two more programmes completed. There are only notes for two more, and then I can begin work on the next batch. But I’ll have to take it easy because I’m now 9 months in advance of broadcasting. I know that I want to be well ahead, because you never know when the bell might toll for me, but this is becoming rather excessive.

Being that far ahead isn’t really a good idea. I remember back in the old “Radio Anglais” days when I wrote and recorded a programme about Chris Squire, only for him to shuffle off this mortal coil the morning the programme was due to be broadcast. I don’t think that there’s been a radio programme rewritten as quickly as that one was.

Anyway, eventually I managed to finish the programme, despite the interruption from the nurse who came to give me my injection this morning.

One thing that I was going to do was to take out the rubbish to the bins but we have another hurricane blowing around outside. That’s the problem with living in what is one of the windiest places in Europe.

Mind you, it used to have its compensations. In this kind of weather I’d be out on the headland with the camera taking photos of the sea roaring over the sea wall into the harbour but these days I can’t even open the door of the building.

Instead, I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I’ve already mentioned one of them but there were still several others. I was just dropping off to sleep when I heard the physiotherapist shout to me. I don’t know what happened there but there have been a few times here and there over the years that I’ve had this phenomenon of people calling my name when I’ve been asleep and it’s awoken me with a start. I’ve never worked out why.

But strange things happen when you are asleep. I knew someone who dreamt that he was awake, and when he awoke, he was!

Later on I had to take my overtime sheet to the supervisor to have it signed so that I could submit it for payment. She began to ask me all kinds of strange questions about my hours etc that really weren’t anything to do with overtime. Then she asked me about lunches. How did I cope with lunch?. I replied “every so often I’d go to buy some meal tickets and hand over a meal ticket when I picked up my lunch”. She said something like “your brother will buy a spaghetti with his lunch money. Why don’t you do that?”. I couldn’t understand what was the issue or why she was making such a fuss out of something like this. All I wanted was my overtime sheet signed and none of this had anything to do with that.

At another moment I made a start writing a humorous book about an estate agent as well during the night but I didn’t get very far with that unfortunately. And when I awoke I couldn’t remember any of what it was that I’d written in my sleep.

With what time has been left, I’ve been sorting through the notes for 2017. It’s going to be a very long and laborious effort because Strider, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and I travelled about 12,000 miles during those 5 weeks.

Right now I’m in Pictou in Nova Scotia on my way to see my niece’s daughter who was at University in Antigonish at St F-X.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg. And we had something of a calamity in that the pepper was too tall to fit in the air fryer. That’s something that I need to watch for the future. Frozen peppers wotk well enough in the air fryer but the microwave makes them sodden and the oven would take years for them to bake from frozen.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t the disaster that it might have been, and there’s still plenty of stuffing left over for a taco roll for tea tomorrow.

There’s no Welsh lesson tomorrow as Coleg Cambria is having a week off. I might do some revision for a change and then continue with my 2017 notes. I’ll be pushing on up the Cape Breton coast towards Sydney and the ferry to Newfoundland.

And then I’ll be pushing off.

Monday 22nd May 2023 – WHEN I AWOKE …

… this morning, I was actually fully clothed flat out on top of the bed. I’ve no idea what happened there but I must have been really tired.

However not so tired that I didn’t get up early. Once more, when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up and about.

Yes, that was one strange night.

Once I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages I started work. And by the time I finished at tea-time, I’d finished two radio programmes.

Had things been different they would have been finished a lot earlier too but there were plenty of interruptions.

Firstly, the nurse came round and gave me my fortnightly injection. It’s supposed to perk me up and keep me going for another two weeks but it doesn’t feel like it. The effects of the product are definitely not working as well as they did at first and wearing off quicker.

They’ve already increased the dose from 40mg to 60 mg and I suppose that the next step will be to have the injections every 10 days instead of every 14.

The “release and retained” lists for the clubs in the Welsh pyramid were released today as well – 9 days early and already, players are on the move around. Consequently I’ve had to start to update my lists earlier than usual.

And then someone with whom I wanted to have a word came on line so we were chatting for some considerable time too.

Going back to the radio programme, when I was in France during my schooldays I met a Swiss bassist called Walter Fröhlich. He was one of the bassists who, along with Felix Pappalardi and Gerry McAvoy, inspired me to play bass in the days before I heard “Quadrophenia”. Wandering around in the depths of my back-up drive I came across one of the songs on which Fröhlich played so of course I had to include it in one of the programmes.

All in all, I accomplished a lot today although it doesn’t much look like it.

Tea was a stuffed pepper with pasta and vegetables. Yes, pasta. I said I would, and there was some nice spicy tomato sauce to go with it too.

There was the dictaphone too. I had my own apartment in Granville somewhere last night. It wasn’t by the sea at all but in the St Nicolas area. I’d spoken to Percy Penguin (who doesn’t appear in these pages half as often as she deserves) about coming round but she was with another guy and said “the two of us would come round”. She put her boyfriend on the phone and he spoke to me. We agreed to meet up at 20:45. He asked what the weather was like because it was pouring down with rain. I said that it’s really wet under foot but not waterlogged or anything like that so it’s OK to move around. He replied “yes but the big difficulty is that Percy Penguin is the same height as you so we’d end up with 3 of us on my motor bike”. My response was “that’s OK. We can go out in Caliburn. I decided that the best thing was for me to go round at 21:00 and pick them both up. They were living here in this building at the time so I thought that it would be nice for Caliburn and me to come back.

And later on I was at a strange kind of roundabout or road junction somewhere. To negotiate it was extremely complicated and I ended up flattening a couple of trees that had been planted because of the way that some vehicles had been parked on it. A car and I merged in together on this junction but the other driver felt that he should have had priority although there wasn’t a road sign anywhere. It certainly wasn’t clear. When I stopped he left his car and came to start an argument. I explained the situation as I’d seen it but he carried on and on and on. I said “look, something happened there and something wasn’t correct but it doesn’t make any difference. No-one had any problems. The vehicles didn’t touch each other” but he still carried on. I went on saying “if you become upset like this every time you see something happen that’s not what you think is correct then I’m surprised that you ever get anywhere”. But so it continued.

The interesting thing about it was that all of this took place in French.

So I’ll be off to bed in a minute. There’s a Welsh lesson tomorrow so I need to do some revision and be ready to go. But I don’t feel like it. In fact I don’t feel much like anything right now. But I dunno. It’ll all work out in Boomland, as T2 told us back in 1970. And that reminds me – where the heck is my copy of that? I haven’t seen that around for absolute ages.

Monday 15th May 2023 – AFTER ALL THAT …

…I said last night about my radio programme, I did actually finish it today, and before tea too.

Mind you, it was a case of “only just”. There wasn’t all that much time left.

As I said yesterday, the trip to and from Leuven is really tiring and trying to do it in three days instead of four (missing out on my day of recovery following my treatment) is just contributing to the problems.

However, knowing that the walk from the hospital back to the station is possible, the shorter walk to and from the old place where I used to stay will become theoretically possible. The major issue though is that it’s far away from places to go to eat, and even farther from the shops if I wanted to buy my own food.

However, there’s bound to be a solution somehow, I reckon.

Anyway, when the alarm went off this morning at 07:00 I was stark out and isn’t that a change? In fact, by the looks of things I must have had a good night. I can’t really remember too much in the way of disturbances.

After the medication I made a start on the radio programme. But I wasn’t really in the mood and there seemed to be plenty of distractions to divert me from the job at hand.

One of them, which will come as a huge surprise to many people, is that I rearranged things in the bathroom.

Having gone overboard at the weekend stocking up on bathroom products that I didn’t really need because I’d stocked up the last time that they’d had a sale, I was running out of place to put them. And so that was a nice little job for a while.

And I do stress the word “little”. The way things are at the moment, I can only work for about 10 minutes and then I have to go to sit down for an hour to catch my breath.

No physiotherapist today. he sent me a message to say that he’ll be coming on Tuesday and Friday this week. That’s despite me saying to him that I’d like him to come on the same days and at the same time all the time. I can’t do with this continual disruption. Of course, I didn’t get the message until I’d had a shower and a good clean-up, but I don’t suppose that prettying myself up is a bad idea.

Another thing that I’ll have to do tomorrow, straight after my Welsh lesson, is to bake some more biscuits. I used the last ones today. I have plenty of fresh ginger and plenty of honey, so I might go for some kind of honey and oatmeal biscuits. But I don’t think that anything will be as good as those chocolate biscuits that I made a while back. They were special.

So with the radio programme finished, I had a listen to the dictaphone. But that was rather disappointing. There was something to do with a calendar and some cats last night but that’s really all that I remember. I can’t remember a thing apart from that.

And then I was on my travels again later on and that evaporated too as soon as I took hold of the dictaphone. I’m really not doing very well at the moment remembering all of these and I’m really puzzled as to whether any of my favourite companions have been coming to see me and slipping away without me remembering. Wouldn’t that be a tragedy?.

Finally, I’d heard a noise outside my apartment so I went out to see. There was a small kitten in the gutter, a tortoiseshell kitten that was crying. It looked as if it had been abandoned and was starving. I went over to look at at and while I was looking at it, another one appeared. A group of people assembled. They said that they hadn’t noticed these kittens around before. I went to go back into my apartment but noticed that I’d left the front door open. I walked in and could see kitten footmarks in the hall. I followed them into the living room. These 2 kittens had come inside and had started to make themselves comfortable. I couldn’t grab hold of them and put them outside so I had to sit down and ponder my next move. One of them came to sit on me and began to purr. I thought to myself “it looks as if I’ve acquired a couple of cats, doesn’t it?”.

One of the plans that I have for my new apartment is to think about whether I can have a cat. If I’m not going on any more mega-voyages to North America and not going so often to Leuven, it’s something that wouldn’t be impossible.

But the amount of time that my subconscious has been dwelling on the question of cats, maybe there will be one or two here sooner rather than later. Some people whom I know in the USA have a Serval, an African savannah cat, and that would be something really interesting to have around the area. Have you seen the size of them? It would scare the tourists and holidaymakers to death.

Tea was a stuffed pepper, the pepper coming from out of the freezer again. But in the air fryer at a lower temperature but for a longer iime, the stuffing wasn’t cooked sufficiently. I’m going to have to spend more time working on this to do it properly. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

But that’s enough for tonight. I’m off to bed, later rather than earlier, and I’ll probably dream about cats again, I dunno. It would be nice to have some kind of company round here seeing as I don’t go out very often these days, and cats certainly aren’t demanding.

Monday 1st May 2023 – TODAY HAS BEEN …

… a Bank Holiday of course and so I have celebrated it by imitating my namesake the mathematician and doing three fifths of five eights of … errr … nothing.

And when I say “nothing”, what I actually mean is that I switched off the alarm last night before going to bed and so, despite waking up here and there on several occasions, I didn’t actually leave my stinking pit until 11:55 this morning.

That’s what I call a lie-in.

And I did actually transcribe the dictaphone notes. I was going to say that I left it until after lunch but lunch was of course taken quite quickly after raising myself from the dead.

And didn’t I travel miles during the night? I was in a hotel room somewhere. In the distance I could hear a woman shouting but it was very muffled as if it was a voice coming through a phone. I then heard my brother answer. A heated conversation went on for a couple of minutes. There was then a pause. Afterwards he came into the room. You could see that he was extremely emotional. I asked him “who was that shouting on the phone?”. He mentioned a couple of guys’ names. I said “no, the woman”. He mentioned a friend of his. I asked him what was going on. For some reason he wouldn’t tell me. In the end I went out for a walk. Putting the conversation together I had the impression that my brother was extremely short of money. I remembered myself about how I used to be short of money and how I always used to go out to find a part-time job or something. For some reason he didn’t feel like working very hard to pull himself out of a hole.

Later on we were in an office somewhere. It was actually quite dark even though it was the middle of the afternoon. You couldn’t really see very much. We went outside because we had to drive to our other office. I’d never seen a sky so black and clouds so heavy in all my life. It was a real, proper torrential rainstorm type of clouds. We drove to the other office. A couple of people in the car were talking. One said that they were going to buy a television. I thought that she was buying it for home but apparently it was for the office. I asked about it. She said that one of these price war places on the internet was selling TVs that were only tuned in to Channel 4. Their aim was to have one in the office with the Channel’s rolling news service playing, either talking or watching, so they could see where they are and find out what was happening in the world exactly when it happened. I thought that a surprise because these were young people who didn’t seem to have too much interest in current events.

And then I was driving in a car through part of Texas last night. The roads were absolutely awful, full of pits and everything. At a certain point, without realising it I crossed the border into Spain (or do I mean Mexico?) following another car. We drove down this dirt road that had taken us over the border which came to a dead stop by 3 enormous hangars hidden in the trees. Seeing a railway line I wondered if there would be some railway locomotives. I took my camera, left the car and walked to one of these hangars. I ended up following a corridor that took a lot of twists and turns. In the end I decided that it was pointless to keep on going this way. I turned round. At one point I must have taken a false turn because I started to find myself up against all kinds of historic artefacts, business machines, typewriters etc from the 1930s. I thought “I didn’t remember these, coming along here”. I came to where there was a set of steps with half the steps missing. I had to lower myself over the edge onto the stairs down below and drop down into a room where there were old bicycles from the 1930s. I thought “I seem to have found myself in a museum now”. It was a strange museum with heaps of stuff piled everywhere with no explanation. I quickly worked out the way to go and ended up at the front door. I didn’t recognise the view from there at all, and it was locked. A woman came over to see me, talking in Spanish which I didn’t understand. She pointed the other way from which I’d just come. I had the impression that the museum was closed to new visitors and the people in there were having to leave. Just then an announcement came over saying something like “it’s now 21:00 and everyone has to go”. I thought “21:00 – I have no hotel, I don’t know where the car is, I’m in a strange country, nowhere to stay”.

I stepped back into this dream later. I ended up walking around with a young guy in the Czech Republic somewhere looking at al the buildings in this town. He asked me questions about the building – whether things in the Czech Republic had improved over the last 30 years. I said “in the big cities and major centres of population things have certainly changed but not so much in the rural areas. The emphasis at the moment is on key industries and commerce. Social needs are being somewhat left behind”. We climbed over a pile of rubble that was being used to regenerate the town centre. He started to ask me whether it would be possible for us to maybe see each other again for another talk as he had to leave. I made a non-committal reply to that.

That’s one thing that I actually noticed with my frequent visits behind the Iron Curtain in the old days and then how things changed once the Wall came down. How quickly things changed. And how quickly they adopted the worst aspects of capitalism too. I loved the east in the old days and even took Nerina there on our honeymoon. There was an innocence and naivety there that was quite appealing and 10 or 12 years later it had all gone completely

And later I was walking through a town in Germany. I’d left my rucksack at the airport and gone to do something, then I had to return to pick up my rucksack because it was late. I couldn’t work out how to get to the airport . I was wandering aimlessly around the countryside and came to a town with a beautiful church or something perched on a hill. I stopped to take a photo with the NIKON D3000 but the photo came out all dark. I went to try to take it again but it was difficult being on crutches etc. I couldn’t really feel the camera controls. Then I bumped into my friend from Munich. He took me into a hotel where he was staying. The girls were there as well so we began to walk round these stone passageways. We came to a place where there was a cupboard in the way. We couldn’t go through. I climbed over the cupboard and so did he. We bumped into one of the girls. I ended up having to crawl underneath a bed to enter the room. I thought “this looks wrong to me”. It turned out to be a room in a hostel with about 30 beds and desks etc in it. I had a look around. The people looked reasonably respectable wo I thougth “I’m going to try to book a room here but I don’t want a room in a hostel”. My friend said “they are very expensive”. I said “if everyone else is staying here I’ll stay here but not in a hostel”. I had to walk around the corridors to try to find the reception. There were all kinds of exhibition cases with expensive guitars. I heard a familiar voice. It was another friend of mine, one from my Manchester days, giving a conducted tour of the castle. I thought “that’s strange. He’s only been here 5 minutes and he’s doing conducted tours already as if he’s been here 100 years”. I asked him where the reception was. He pointed in some general direction and said “it’s in an office in between 2 floors over there” so I headed that way to book in.

While I was out driving around I heard yet another friend on the radio. His wife had been doing some knitting and she had a ball of yarn left over. She was going to give it away to anyone who might find some kind of pleasure from doing something with it during lockdown. There was quite a chat about this ball of yarn. I couldn’t understand why because it was a case of “who wants it”. A short while later when I was back home he turned up. He’d brought some things for me that his wife had. I misunderstood because there was something said about eggs. I had some eggs in my fridge. I thought that he was after them for her because I thought that they were hers. I gave him the eggs. While I was going through the dishwasher I found some meat stands, metal things with prongs that you use to put your meat while carving it. I have them to him to him too because they’d be much more use. I don’t use things like that for cutting bread or cake anyway.

So a lot of my friends were out and about with me last night and it was nice to see them all. No Castor, TOTGA or Zero unfortunately, but everyone else was most welcome.

Something else that I did was to have a little look through one of my playlists that will be on the music player later in the week and making sure that it was up to date

Tea was a stuffed pepper. A frozen one out of the freezer. However I turned the heat down on the air fryer to make sure that it was cooked better but that way it didn’t dry out the humidity. There’s obviously a fine line between heating it through and boiling off the water and I’ve not found it yet. I need to practise more.

But right now I’m off to bed. No Welsh in the morning as it’s a holiday over there. So who knows? I might even do some homework. I have to crack on.

Monday 24th April 2023 – THAT WAS DIFFICULT!

With nothing much better to do today, I decided that I’d do this radio programme about the 14th July.

It wasn’t easy because I had all of the music, including the very, very last track already in my mind so I had to make sure that the speech fitted all of the gaps in between the music. I know that with the way that I speak, 300 characters of text is the equivalent of 17 seconds of speech so I can make sure that I’m always somewhere in the right kind of area, but that doesn’t take into account the fact that song lengths are often not as published and there’s quite often a silence at the beginning or end. And so it can quite often be rather hit-and-miss, especially if my maths aren’t up to much.

So no-one was more surprised than me to find myself almost a minute short of where I needed to be.

Luckily, when I’d been preparing the programme I’d made a reserve selection of appropriate songs of various lengths and so with a little judicious editing I managed to fit in Lindisfarne’s “Bring Down The Government” with some explanatory text.

It still wasn’t right though and I ended up having to re-dictate a couple of speeches and then do yet more editing. What with one thing and another (and once you get started you’d be surprised at how many other things there are) it was 21:00 when I finally finished.

It was some real good fortune that I actually felt like doing it too because I had another wretched night. I was in bed reasonably early but once again it took me an age to go off to sleep. I awoke again at 04:15 and couldn’t go back to sleep. I watched the dawn slowly rise but I must have gone back to sleep at some point because when the alarm went off at 07:00 it was a real shock to the system.

With the nurse coming today to give me my injection I had to have a shower otherwise he wouldn’t have come in through the door. So of course he has to come quite early today while I’m still soaking myself. That was rather embarrassing.

And he has to come back on Thursday to take a blood sample, so later on this week I’ll be doing another dartboard impression. At this rate I’ll be more comfortable sleeping on a bed of nails but I bet that someone would tell me to fakir off.

Next task that interrupted me was the dictaphone, to see where I’d been last night. Nothing like what I’d been up to on previous nights but then again it wasn’t as if I’d had much sleep. I was out with Steve Winwood last night for some strange reason. There was talk of forming a group but nothing ever came of it. We went to an Indian restaurant somewhere, one that I’d been told was good. As I didn’t know how to go to it, it was in a completely different town, we had to go all around the houses. We arrived and they began to serve us. It was a very strict place. Everything was very formal. We ordered our starters and he went to go to the bathroom. Someone on another table obviously recognised him and asked him what numbers he was going to perform with his new band. He mentioned a few songs and then walked off. I could hear him talking to someone in the distance but I couldn’t see him, going on about the restaurant and how he didn’t expect such a posh, formal place etc. One of the things that I asked him was that I read somewhere that the very first chord he ever played on a guitar was Dflat. I asked him why. He said that it sounded good. I asked if it was the opening chord maybe to a song. he made a very non-commital reply to that which I thought was bizarre.

Later on a group of us was walking up a mountain pass. At the side of the road there were 4 or 5 cars that were parked. Then there was a very sharp bend. Round this bend coming towards us was a cattle wagon, a big heavy thing that was fully-loaded. he took the bend really wide because of his length and almost knocked the wall down into the valley then drove straight into the back of one of these vehicles. he didn’t stop. He kept on trying to push this vehicle forward into all the others to push them to give him more room to turn. Someone shouted “camera” so I took out my camera and began to take a couple of photos. It was only then that he stopped and got out to inspect the damage. By now he’s transformed into a yellow school bus. 3 people came with a huge bag and had to clamber onto the roof at the back of the coach in order to put the bag on the roof rack. Another girl appeared. She went round to the front and said to the driver something like “I was on this bus yesterday and I think that I might have left something on board”. This was probably the most surreal thing that I’d ever witnessed

And then, in between everything else, I dealt with the radio programme.

Tea was a delicious stuffed pepper. And what I did was to turn down the air fryer 20° and to cook it twice as long as I did last week. That cooked it to perfection.

Plenty of stuffing left over for a taco roll tomorrow and for a leftover curry on Wednesday. That’s what i’m looking forward to more than anything because, of course, I have a naan bread awaiting me. I’m really impressed with the naan breads that I made and I’ll make another batch of them.

What I’ll have to do though is to remember that the dough expands considerably so instead of making the batch into three lumps, I’ll have to make it into four or even five.

But never mind – it’s still delicious.

Tomorrow I have my Welsh lesson so I need to be on form, and then on Wednesday I go to sign the purchase agreement for my new apartment.

And then the fun will begin.

Monday 17th April 2023 – MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE …

… hospital, they only kept me there for a couple of hours. I was expecting it to be all day.

When I arrived, I signed in and then went to the Day Ward. The nurse weighed me (and my weight is still slowly sinking down towards my best target weight) and gave me an electrocardiagram. They found that I had a heart which is good news as it proves that I’m not a Conservative.

They fitted a drain into me (which will stay in for the entire week) and then gave me a couple of bottles of intravenous drip.

That is in some respects disappointing. They gave me tons of that stuff while I was in hospital in Belgium and it didn’t seem to do me all that much good. I was expecting that they would be doing something else to help me overcome these issues that I’m having.

Still, I’m not turning down any treatment. I’ll take all that I can get if they think that it’ll do any good. And in any case, if it doesn’t work out I’ll be well-placed to receive more treatment of a different kind. I have to start at the beginning.

The intravenous drip was finished by 11:45 and then I was kicked out on my way home.

In some respects (but not in others) I was glad that it didn’t take all that long because I wanted to get home. I’d had another bad night, just when I thought that I’d got over those. In fact, setting the alarm at 07:00 counted for nothing because I was already up and about by then, having been awake for quite a while.

There was time to grab a shower before hitting the road. After all, I have to make myself look beautiful.

Once they threw me out I headed for home, a coffee and some corn flakes. I was hungry. But before I could come back into the apartment I was ambushed by a couple of neighbours and we had a chat for a while.

Once I’d organised my food, I had a bake-in. After all, I’ll need some food for lunch if I’m going to be back home at this time every day this week. So now I have a fruit and nut loaf along with a big pile of fruit and nut biscuits. And they are all delicious because I sampled them.

Biscuits seem to be quite easy to make really. There’s a base recipe of sugar, butter and flour in a ratio of 4/8/10 and then you add whatever flavouring you like. I found this afternoon that if you add a banana you deduct half the weight of the banana from the weight of the butter.

It’s also got me thinking about cocoa powder. I bet that I could make some nice chocolate biscuits with some of that creamed into the vegan butter.

Once again the air fryer was pressed into play because there were too many biscuits for the shelf in the oven. The air fryer bakes them quite nicely, but I can’t wait to have a bigger oven.

The effort was far too much for me though and once I’d settled down in my comfy chair I crashed out for well over an hour. I was clearly well out of everything after my exertions.

One reason why I was so tired, I reckon, was because of the kind of night that I’d had. Despite not being in bed for all that long, I’d been out on a considerable number of little voyages during the night that had kept me going. There was something to do with being on board a ship and fishing but I can’t really remember what that was. There was a boy who came up to me after I’d been giving a talk, a foreign boy whom I knew. He asked me in broken English “is it wrong to influence a judge?”. I asked “in what way? What do you mean?”. He replied “if I want her to come to bed with me”. I replied ” of course it’s not in that situation. Tell me about it”. He told me a little. I said “the best way to start is that people like to be talked about so you need to compliment her. Say how nice she looks. But don’t go too much overboard. If you do that it all sounds very false”.

And then I had to go off to work one morning. Another boy in the house had had an accident. He was in the Turkish baths steaming it off. Apparently he was far too ill to go anywhere. There was all kinds of discussion about who should do what when and where. Who needs a lift to work etc. I said “I’m quite happy to go and say goodbye to him and walk in to work”. In the end after a lengthy discussion this woman who might have been my mother I dunno said that she would go to clean out the Turkish bath when I’d finished saying goodbye before I went to work. One or two other people were there as well who had to leave. Generally it was total chaos that morning with all of this happening.

There was a family where there were several daughters. Daughter n°1 wanted to marry but her mother was totally opposed to her choice of husband so she even arranged with the preacher not to turn up at the wedding so she wouldn’t be able to marry him. Luckily she managed to find some other kind of itinerant preacher who married them. This was the story of the family gossip when everyone was together to celebrate the 35th anniversary of their marriage that her mother had thought wouldn’t last a week. They wanted her to be like her sister who as far as they were concerned married the perfect husband but the husband was away from home visiting his wife’s family when he received a text message from his wife, daughter n°2, that said “come home darling. I miss you. I have something for you that I want you to have”. It all sounded romantic so he dashed home only to find that he was given his divorce papers because she’d found out that he’d been cheating on her throughout all of her marriage.

I was back running another taxi business later on. I had some black Vauxhall Transcontinentals working for me. They had been in really bad condition when I’d bought them all quite old but I’d welded them up and they were quite good vehicles. I liked them very much. I was going off shift and cleaning my car out. It was absolutely filthy with bottles of pop and everything all over it. It was a real mess and it had taken ages for me to tidy it up. Then someone came over for a chat. I asked “do you want to see something funny?”. I showed him a paper that I’d received from a garage about this vehicle’s MoT along with some things that had failed it. He asked me “what did I do?”. I said “I took it to another garage because I didn’t believe half of what was written on this note”. He asked what they did and I answered that they charged me 30p to fix something and it passed. I shan’t be going to that first garage again.

There was another dream about a vicar in a church. In his parish some horrible crimes had been committed. The police investigation had gone on and on for ever. One day one of the parishioners, a very respectable upright man, came into church to look for the priest, presumably wanting a talk or maybe even wanting confession. The priest was down in the cellar sawing so he started to climb up. Just as he reached the top a couple of policemen pounced on the man, handcuffed him and dragged him off as if it was he, a most respectable family man, had been the one committing all these horrible crimes.

There was also something about a couple of twins whose parents were divorced. At the time they were living with their father. He’d taken them into work on a very quiet day because he had things to do there. While they were there some fellow employee kidnapped one of them. In fact he kidnapped them both but when a chase began he couldn’t carry them both so he dropped one and ran with the other. There was a big chase all the way through the factory. It went on for ages and he made his way out into the open heading for the car park. He was attacked by another employee and knocked unconscious. It was only then that the little girl realised that there was something wrong. There was a big discussion afterwards about this guy. He had previous convictions for all kinds of weird things. They wondered why a company like that had actually employed someone with his kind of history. His wife wasn’t surprised at all about her husband grabbing hold of this little girl and running away with her. That was a surprising thing as well that she treated it as something quite normal I suppose.

That’s not everything either. I was also out with a few people whom I know but you really don’t want to know how that particular story unfolded, especially if it’s tea time where you are.

While we’re on the subject of tea … “well, one of us is” – ed … I forgot to wind the heat back up in the air fryer after I’d baked my biscuits. Consequently the stuffed pepper that I’d baked from frozen hadn’t baked all the way through. The top hadn’t burnt, which was good news, but the bottom could have done with another 20° of heat.

Still, you can’t win a coconut every time and one of the things about making mistakes is that if you are lucky and have a good memory you can learn from them. I’ll have to try my best to do so.

So even though it’s early and I’m not all that tired after my sleep this afternoon, I’m going to bed. A good relax will do me good and we’ll see how things get on tomorrow. I’m hoping for a longer day at the hospital tomorrow with more treatment but I probably won’t get it.

But one thing that I’ve noticed from a map of Avranches is that all of the important shops are within staggering distance of each other. If I get away early on Friday I might do a lap around the shops there on Friday afternoon and see what they have to offer that might be different than what I can find in Granville.

That should be interesting.

Monday 10th April 2023 – SO MUCH FOR …

… the idea of having something of a little lie-in this morning.

When the alarm went off this morning at 07:40 I’d been awake for a couple of hours and been up and about for quite a while. It’s not as if last night was an early night either. If anything, it was maybe a little later than a normal night might have been.

No question of having a good sleep either. As usual I was tossing and turning around for quite some time.

Anyway, after the medication I checked the mails and messages and then carried on with the radio programme that I’d started over the weekend. It was a desultory, slow stroll through the work that needed doing rather than one of these hard-working and super-concentrated efforts and so it took quite a long while to complete.

The nurse came round to see me as well to give me my injection. He wasn’t here long, but I gave him one of the biscuits that I made yesterday. If he’s still alive on Thursday to come and give me my blood test, I’ll know that they are good.

No more hot cross buns now unfortunately. I used the last of those this morning and it was really sad because even though they didn’t look very nice, they tasted exactly as a hot cross bun should taste and that’s the important thing. I’ll make some more like that.

After my lunchtime fruit I went upstairs to my neighbour’s apartment, having been invited. And I went without my crutches to see how I’d do. It was a little unsteady but I made it up there and back down again and that’s the kind of thing that would fill me with a little optimism. After all, it was two floors up.

It was important that I went, because it was the President of the Residents’ Committee who had invited me, and she was the one who very kindly put me “in the know” when the owner of the apartment downstairs was talking about selling up. That was a very big favour that she did me and I shall be forever grateful.

The plan was that I would be there for just an hour or so to show the flag, but I ended up being there for over three hours. But it was worth it because I learnt quite a lot that I shall need to know when the ink is finally dry on the purchase agreement.

Back here I made some hot chocolate and had a handful of biscuits and then had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was going out with a girl last night. It might have been a certain girl who was in my class at school. We wanted to go somewhere but her mother said that she’d arranged for two seats at the local cinema. We set off but when we arrived it was absolutely crowded. One of the assistants found us and said “yes, we have 2 seats. I’ll show you where they are but we’re so busy that you can’t even stay for the entire performance. There’s a lot of people coming later on and you’ll have to go”. He took us into the auditorium. There was a lot of confusion about our seats because the tickets weren’t clear at all. We worked out eventually where we should be but there was a row of suitcases and some people sitting in it. We had to shuffle them out of the way. They were being quite difficult about it. The only one who seemed to be quite normal, as I said to my girlfriend, was a young boy. With all of this disturbance and with us sittign down we ended up being on board an aeroplane. I’m not quite sure how. As the film hadn’t started yet I said that I’d better take advantage of this and nip to the gentlemen’s rest room. We were sitting right behind the pilot’s seat so I pushed it forward and opened the door so that I could hop out of the door by the pilot’s seat. For some reason all the signs etc were written in Dutch so I began to wonder exactly where I was.

Somehow the subject of apprenticeships came up at another moment. I went off to do an apprenticeship. It was the first day and at lunch so I had to go to have my lunch somewhere. There was a room with 3 other guys sitting in it. I thought that I’d go there. I only had my left shoe on, not the right one, and I was limping. I went up to the door, knocked and went it. The 3 of them looked at me so I introduced myself. I said that I’m the new apprentice and not to worry that I only had one shoe. The other was in the machines somewhere. It made them laugh. I sat down and started to sort out my sandwiches.

Finally, there was an exciting, riveting dream but when I went to dictate it I found that I couldn’t remember a thing at all about it, not a thing. I was really disappointed because this was something that had been so exciting while I was asleep. That’s what I call a really dismal, depressing situation.

And, regrettably, I crashed out for a short while as well. It’s been a while since I’ve done that.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with rice. It was quite nice too and the stuffing was pretty good too. Plenty left as well for a taco roll tomorrow and the rest to go into a curry on Wednesday. And I remembered to buy the vegan yoghurt as well at the weekend so I can make some naan breads for the curry.

That should be interesting. After all, I have plenty of garlic butter in the fridge that will go quite nicely with the naan breads.

Tomorrow I have a radio programme to repair. It’s one I did ages ago but having a good listen to it, the quality of the speech is awful so I’ve decided to redo it. I’m not sure why it all went so wrong that it sounded so bad.

But that’s tomorrow because right now I’m going to bed. Not that I’m particularly tired but a good sleep when I can is always welcome. I might even feel better tomorrow if I can keep it up.

Monday 3rd April 2023 – THAT EXPERIMENT …

… that I was going to try about taking a frozen pepper, filling it full of my own-brand stuffing and then baking it from frozen in the air fryer is definitely going along the right lines.

That pyrex bowl that I bought a week or two ago came in handy for that. I put that inside the basket and cooked the pepper in it so that the stuffing didn’t boil over and make a mess. But 8 minutes is probably too long though because it scorched the top of the pepper.

However, as I said, the principle is what counts and the pepper ended up cooked quite nice and crisp, not like when it’s cooked in the microwave and goes rather on the soggy side.

And so we had some good news for once, which makes a change after last night which was rather a disaster.

With an early start at 06:00 on a Monday I’m usually in bed by 22:00. At least, that’s the plan but last night I didn’t go to bed until midnight and then I couldn’t go to sleep either. In fact I don’t really remember going to sleep at all.

However there was something on the dictaphone from last night so I must have gone to sleep at some point. I was at a meeting with a friend of mine, a colleague I should say, a young girl and a few other people. We were waiting outside a door not doing very much in particular when a guy appeared. I thought “I know him”. On a closer inspection it was the footballer Pele. I nudged everyone and said “this is Pele”. A lot of people said “who?”. As soon as he came past I went up to him to shake his hand. I said “hello”. A friend of mine went over and shook his hand as well. One of the young girls went over too rather shyly and shook his had. She had a beautiful smile from him. he went on into this meeting. I was saying “wow! Pele has just gone in there” and all these people were asking “who’s Pele?”.

When the alarm went off at 06:00 I staggered out of bed feeling like the Wreck of the Hesperus and drifted “a dreary wreck” into the living room for my medication.

After checking the mails and messages I made a start on the two radio programmes that I wanted to prepare this week. Two because next week it’s a Bank Holiday on Monday and I’m having a day off work.

But badger these Bank Holidays for a game of soldiers. Usually I have a lie-in to celebrate Bank Holiday but on Friday the physiotherapist is coming at 08:45 and on Monday the nurse is coming round to give me the injection at some crazy hour of the morning.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … err … office, I dashed through one and a half of them quite quickly, having already done much of the donkey work. But the second one, I chose a track that was exactly to the second the right length to finish off the programme only to find that I’d chopped the track in the wrong place and I was 27 seconds short.

That’s far, far too much of a gap to pad out so I had to choose another final song and then retype, re-dictate and re-edit the text to fit.

As a result it took rather longer than it ought to have done.

This afternoon I merged into my run of music all of the music that I’ve been editing over the last few months here and there. I hadn’t realised that there was so much. In fact, I’m giving some consideration to making a seventh run of music instead of the six that I have at the moment.

Another thing that I’ve done is to have yet another play around to elongate yet another song. It’s one that fades out after the final verse so I copied the solo out of the middle seeing as it was nice and long and then edited it into the ending. A song that started off as 3:03 is now at 4:25 and you can’t hear the joins.

It was rather more complicated than the others that I’ve done so far because the tone and volume was different at the end and I had to edit all of that around.

Once I’d organised that I chose the music for the next radio programme. I really wanted to chose another two but as usual I was distracted by not very much in particular.

Tea was a success as I said, especially as it was followed by the last of the apple pie, defrosted and heated once more in the air fryer. I’m beginning to have my money’s worth from that and I’m even more convinced that it was one of the best €29:00 that I’ve ever spent.

However, the evening was disrupted by a blocked sink and I had to empty out the cupboard underneath to disconnect the drainpipe and clean it out. It’s happening far too frequently these days.

So having had a nice chat to Alison on the internet I’m off to bed. No Welsh lesson tomorrow – we’re on holiday for two weeks – but I’m going to try to motivate myself to do some revision.

Another thing that I was going to do was to sort out the issues that i’m having with procrastination, but that’s a task for another time.

Monday 27th March 2023 – IT SOUNDS AS IF …

… I’m going to have a visitor here tomorrow afternoon at 14:00.

This afternoon there was a ‘phone call from a painter and decorator. “Is it OK if I come tomorrow afternoon?”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Your landlord says that I have to paint your front door”.

That’s the first that I’ve heard about it and if I wanted to stand fast to my rights and principles I could have told him to clear off as I’m supposed to be given plenty of notice that the landlord or his agents want to come round, but it’s no skin off my nose that he’ll be here.

Not that the door actually needs it. But in fact the door on my new place could do with a good coat of paint and I need to find out the paint code and so asking a painter sounds like a good plan whenever I can lay my hands upon one. And it’s no skin off my nose if he comes here tomorrow.

There’s my doctor’s appointment in the morning and the physiotherapist at the end of the afternoon so as long as he fits in with those plans it’s fine by me.

So I’ll try to plan a decent night’s sleep for once because last night’s sleep wasn’t much to write home about. Even though I was in bed early I couldn’t go off to sleep, which probably isn’t much of a surprise seeing as how late I actually awoke yesterday

And apart from that it was quite a restless night as well, and wasn’t helped by the batteries in the dictaphone going flat at a crucial moment.

But anyway I struggled to my feet when the alarm went off and once I’d dealt with the medication and my mails and messages I attacked the radio programme.

Once again, it was rather a desultory stroll through the work rather than a rapid rush, but it could have taken much longer than it did had I not been lucky enough to have dictated the speech for the final track at almost the exact length required to fit the bill.

And as I always include in the final speech some stuff that I can cut out quite easily that won’t affect the value of the speech in any way, it was even better.

Now, people won’t get to know that the Billy Bremner who was a session guitarist at Rockfield Studios at Monmouth is not the same Billy Bremner as the former Leeds United footballer. But you can’t have everything.

Once I’d finished I listened to the programme and also to the one that I’ll be sending off, to make sure that they are good enough for broadcast and don’t contain any major errors, like talking in the present tense about a musician who has died since I recorded the programme.

It wouldn’t be the first time …

Next stop was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was on one of the little Neva buses with my mother and a third person going to Pionsat. I had an appointment at the hospital there. When we reached the edge of the town we dropped off some passengers at a bus stop and the driver then did a U-turn. We asked where he was going so he said that he was going to Plas Derwyn, a big stately home type of place on the outskirts of the town. He said that they were contracted to provide a service to Plas Derwyn twice an hour. If we were to alight there we could catch the Bus 28. My mother looked at her watch and said “that’s a 25 minute wait and we’ll be late”. he apologised but said that there was nothing he could do. We reached the place which was like a huge children’s holiday camp-type place. My mother and the other person alighted. Just as I was about to alight – I was taking my time – he started to move so I had to shout. he stopped and I eventually alighted. We had to fight our way through all these kids to enter this place. There was some kind of discussion going on between a few of the kids and one of the staff talking about the place being overrun with cats. This teacher-type person said “don’t worry if there are too many things here. We’ll shoot the kids instead of the cats”. She looked at me and said “and here’s a guy who would do it too”. We went in to try to see someone.

And then I was with a woman and a little girl with a dog last night. I had to go to the hospital which was about a 15-minute walk away. I took something with me like a stuffed toy on wheels that I had to rub along the floor backwards and forwards as I went but I don’t know why. This took hours and I thought to myself ‘I’m going to miss my appointment doing this. I’ll forget this cleaning the pavement thing”. I looked around and the girl and dog had gone. I asked “where have they gone?”. The woman replied “she’s gone across the road”. I was really annoyed at this and ran after her. I couldn’t catch her and kept on shouting to her to slow down so I could catch up with her but she was running really fast for a small child saying “we’ll be late at the hospital – we’ll be late at the hospital”. I had the devil’s own job to try to keep up with her

It seems that this trip to the hospital, or, rather, missing the appointment, is beginning to prey on my mind, although I don’t know why because during my daylight hours I’m not bothered at all about it.

Finally I was on a coach tour last night with Shearings as a passenger. As we were going down the road towards Batley (or Bramley – I couldn’t make up my mind apparently) we saw what looked like a miniature narrow-gauge railway alongside the main line. We were told that it was a connector between the town and a wellness centre a couple of miles outside the town, a kind of tramway. Several people were interested at that so we pulled into the town centre of Bramley (or Batley) near the railway station. There was already a coach parked on the visitors’ car park so we went next-door to a yard where there were some kind of lock-up garages. There was a West Indian proprietor and in exchange for fuelling up the coach he let us leave it on his property. We fuelled up and everyone set off to this railway station to look at the start of this tramway. It took me a couple of minutes to alight because of my disability. Then I grabbed my crutches and began to shoot off following them to Bramley (or Batley) Railway Station.

And it seems that my mobility issues are now coming to the fore too.

The rest of the day has been spent sorting out music for future radio programmes.

Having spent a week or so revising my databases into a different way of working, choosing the music is so much quicker these days, and much more logical too. It’s taken me over 200 programmes to end up in a much more efficient way and I bet that there is still plenty of room for improvement.

The “frozen pepper” experiment was not a great success. They had frozen nicely but when the one that I’d taken out had defrosted, it had gone all limp and you wouldn’t believe the amount of water that came out. There’s that much water in these peppers, so it seems.

And that got me thinking again – that if I filled it while it was still frozen and then baked it in the air fryer rather than in the microwave, that might dry it out better. I’ll have to try that next week.

So on that note I’m off to bed. It’s a busy day tomorrow with the doctor and the Welsh lesson, the painter and the physiotherapist. However did I manage to find the time to go to work?

Monday 20th March 2023 – IT DIDN’T TAKE …

… me long to finish off the radio programme this morning.

Had I been more motivated I could have finished it even quicker but I had a leisurely stroll through what I needed to do and it was all done and up and running by 09:30. I don’t suppose that I can complain too much about that.

On the other hand, there was plenty to complain about last night, if I were the complaining type … “perish the thought” – ed. Going to bed quite early was one thing, but going off to sleep was something else completely.

When the alarm went off at 06:00 I crawled out of bed wishing that I could stay in bed for another 12 hours because I felt absolutely awful and I couldn’t see how I would keep going for the rest of the day.

But kept going I did, and I bet that you are surprised. I know that I was.

First thing was to go for my medication and then to check my mails and messages. And then to attack the radio programme. Luckily I’d done most of it, including dictating the notes for it. It was just a case of editing the notes, assembling the sound files, selecting a final track, dictating the notes for the final track, editing them and finishing off the assembly.

The programme ended up being 5 seconds over so I had them to find some text that I had included that I could go back and edit out

While I assembled my thoughts I had a listen to what I’d done and then had a listen to the programme that I’ll be sending off to be broadcasted this weekend.

That took me up to a rather late breakfast and the fruit buns that I made yesterday are the best that I have ever made.

The next step was to listen to the dictaphone notes from the night, for I had been off on my travels. There was some kind of strange dream about a couple. I can’t remember anything about it except the boss of this woman’s husband telling her to go home and wait for her husband to arrive and she’d send him on home and the husband would know about what happened to the cousin. That’s all that I remember about this.

But really I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m forgetting all my dreams at the moment. There was another one where I was working in an office (this is something of a recurring dream, isn’t it?). I had a file out before me belonging to someone. I was going through it and noticed that all the details in this person’s file had changed. Even the file number was no longer correct. Looking through the file it seemed that he had actually been to prison for killing someone. I made sure that the front of the file was prominently marked “murderer” or whatever then referred it to whoever I should have referred it to, to make sure that they were aware. At some point I was talking to Rosemary. We were discussing a few things about this and that, I can’t remember what. I was on my way to see her. I was speaking to her on the ‘phone while I was driving. She was saying that when I slowed down or stopped she could hear all the animals in the background. As I went round the side of a mountain she suddenly said “I can hear you so much clearer now”. I replied “that’s because I’m in Shavington”. We continued our chat and she said “one thing’s for sure that if ever I’m made redundant I think that the two of us would get on very well”.

A little later on I stepped back into that dream again about the guy but this time I was looking at another file about a guy who had been under some kind of enquiry since 1927 when he’d been the heritee in a Will but there had never been any trace of him. People now started to enquire about his antecedents but he’d chased off everyone who had come to visit him on his farm and shop. He’d died and his estate had been wound up because of all these issues that he’d had. His daughter was a dancer and she was in all kinds of issues. I was on the verge of retiring and only had this one file left that I needed to sort out. I was sitting at a desk by my Irish friend. There was all kinds of stuff coming up on my computer on a big overhead screen above my desk and I’d be much happier if she didn’t see it, although how she could avoid doing so I really don’t know. It was then time for me to leave. At lunchtime I’d been getting in my car, going for a little drive and sitting somewhere quietly in a lane. Then I was on my way home. To go into this lane I had to stop at a T junction. There was nothing coming so I just pulled out into the lane and drove. Then I was overtaken by a whole stream of motorcyclists who came to the next junction and were turning left. One of thes emotorcyclists had stopped to act as a marshal to show all his friends which way to go

At lunchtime I had some fruit and then I had to ring up the solicitor. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve been sending money in dribs and drabs to this solicitor for the purchase of this apartment. All of the money has now been sent and I had a pile of receipts sent to me in the post.

As I checked them over, I found that there was a payment that I had made that hadn’t been receipted so I phoned them up. The accountant there acknowledged that they had received it, but the missing payment had arrived the day after they had sent out the receipts and I should receive a receipt at some time in early course.

That was something that cheered me up. I wasn’t at all happy about this money aimlessly ambling around in cyberspace.

Also in the post was a summons to the hospital in Leuven on 4th May. I’ve heard on the ‘phone that I’ll also have an appointment in another department there on the 11th but the confirmation for that hasn’t arrived. When it finally turns up, I’m going to have to ring up to try to swap things around so that all my appointments are on the same day.

If it’s not possible, then I might have a little think about a few days at the seaside in Oostende in between, but that’s not going to be much fun on crutches. Let’s hope that this little improvement that I’m noticing keeps on going.

Something else that I did was to choose some more music for another radio programme in the future. I need to keep on going with these for as long as I can.

There was still plenty of time left so I’ve been tidying up the databases for the music that I use for broadcasting. I’m trying to make things much easier for myself as I go along and I keep on having these little ideas about how things can be improved.

There’s also a little plan in the pipeline to change things around somewhat but more of that anon

Tea was another delicious stuffed pepper with plenty of stuffing left over for a taco roll tomorrow and to go into a curry on Wednesday. We’ll slowly have everything sorted out.

Now I’m off to bed. Hoping for a good night but doubting very much whether I’ll have one. I’m not doing too well with that right now. But I’ll have to try nevertheless. I have a Welsh lesson tomorrow and I need to be on form.

Monday 13th March 2023 – IT WAS HARD …

… this morning to get out of bed.

Despite going to bed at 22:00 last night as is usual on a Sunday, I couldn’t go off to sleep. That’s astonishing really because I’d had an early start (for a Sunday anyway) and gone all day without falling asleep as well. Anyone (including me) would have expected me to have been stark out by bed time.

But anyway I did actually drop off to sleep at some point because there was a note on my dictaphone about my travels during the night. I was fighting with an overflowing toilet at someone’s house at some point. It left a trail all the way out of the toilet down the hall to the living room. As soon as I’d finished I had to dash off and find a mop, a bucket and a few things. I could find a bucket but not a mop. I was hunting around for everything. The owner of the house started to make some kind of sarcastic comments. That really wasn’t what I needed at that moment so we ended up having a verbal slanging match while I was still trying to find the stuff to clean up.

And when the alarm went off I was actually wandering around somewhere on a different plane but the moment that I awoke it all completely evaporated and I remember nothing whatever about it.

That isn’t actually all that went on during the night but you really don’t want to know the rest, especially if you are eating a meal.

First job, once I’d checked my mails and messages, was to finish off the radio programme.

And that took much longer than it ought to have because what was going to be the final track was actually a track in the middle of the recording instead of right at the end. The musician whom I had in mind didn’t actually have a track of a realistic size and I had to trawl all over my “usual sources” to find one because the artists that I’m using for this week’s radio programme are not exactly thick on the ground.

And then it ended up 10 seconds or so short so I had to be imaginative to make it one hour long. But eventually it was finished and I could send it off for broadcast on Friday.

One thing that interrupted me was the nurse coming to give me my injection. He should also have taken a blood test but he forgot and didn’t bring his equipment so he’s going to come by tomorrow morning. I hope that i’ll have the results for my hospital visit on Thursday.

And while we’re on the subject of hospitals … “well, one of us is” – ed … I had to ring up the hospital at Leuven and tell them that I wasn’t coming today. As I said the other day, I can’t keep on going there and back again for no good reason. I have asked them to try to combine my appointments because I can cope with that, but going there for one thing, coming home and then going back a few days later to carry out some meaningless tests is pointless.

Alison was on line too so we had a little chat. It’s been month since we’ve seen each other.

The rest of the day has been spent on the radio stuff.

First thing was to choose the music for another radio programme in the future and that took a while because I’m slowly revising the databases that I keep as I come to them. There are ways to make things easier and I need to develop it.

And while I was wandering around I came across another couple of digital soundtracks for albums that I own. These are ones that I have long-since given up hope of finding, not the least because the fire at Universal Studios was devastating, but every now and again something else is rescued.

And then I came across another interesting database that was previously unknown as far as I was aware. It lists the publishing dates of several thousand of the more popular rock albums. That should be of a great deal of use as far as I’m concerned because it fits in nicely with another idea that I have about my radio programmes.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper. And it looks as if I’ll be OK for a while for peppers because with having bought a bag of 4 small ones on Saturday, I stuck two in the freezer to see how they would work. I gave them a quick check while i was taking stuff out of the freezer and they looked OK.

There’s another fresh one for next week and then I’ll try one of the frozen ones to see if it works. And I hope that it does because small peppers don’t seem to be available individually. There are just the monster-sized ones and not even I could polish one of those off.

So tomorrow I have the nurse coming and then I need to revise for my Welsh lesson. There’s someone coming to talk to me about showers in the afternoon and then I have the physiotherapist. It’s going to be “all go” tomorrow so I need to be on form.

That calls for an early night.

Monday 27th February 2023 – IT DIDN’T TAKE …

… long for me to finish off the two radio programmes this morning. They were all done and finished and up and running before 09:00.

And had I been more determined than I was, I might even have had them finished well before that too but I wasn’t in very much of a hurry today. I could afford to take it easy.

It had been another bizarre night too. In bed nice and early as is my wont on a Sunday evening but once more it took an age to go off to sleep.

When I finally did, it was another quite mobile night, as I discovered later in the morning when I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I was with someone, although I don’t know who it was. It wasn’t anyone significant though. A bow and arrow set belong to one of my siblings had come into our possession. We’d been out one night playing around with it. We were rubbish because it wasn’t as easy as it might sound. We’d spent a whole night trying to improve our performance but to no avail. In the end we gave it up. Next morning the messenger from work was away so they asked me if I’d run the deliveries between the various offices in Crewe. I worked out where I needed to go and set off on foot. For the final one which was quite a distance away from the others I ran all the way. I femt so much better having done that. Having dropped off what I had to drop off I was back at the house of my sister and her husband which was very close to Crewe town centre in Tollitt Street. I went round the back and gave back the bow and arrow. We were discussing this and my brother came in. He asked in a menacing tone if I’d brought everything back. I told him that I had and I told them all that they aren’t going to find this easy. If they are going out looking for good results quite quickly they are going to be very disappointed.

Later on I was round at the house of one of the people for whom I used to drive coaches. We were chatting in general about the employees. I was saying that it was a good job that all the employees whome he had were nice and friendly. He quoted the name of someone and said “he’s not. He’ll have his face pumped in by some passenger or other before much longer” which made me wonder why he kept on employing him. It turned out to be my father. I was reading a pile of old local newspapers. Some of the stories were extremely interesting to say the least. We were chatting about a couple of them. I was then thinking that maybe it’s time for me to go home as I have to be at work at 06:00 but time was drifting on and I was still lounging around there not doing anything thinking that at this rate I could see myself staying sleeping on his sofa and going away from here straight into work so I really ought to make a move to go home but I just couldn’t summon up the energy to be gone

And then I arrived in Brussels. I was changing trains to go on somewhere else. I had to wait the night so I tried to find a hotel. The first 3 or 4 that I tried had no room. I couldn’t go very far because of course I wasn’t very mobile with my suitcase. One hotel receptionist rang round 3 or 4 different hotels for me. She couldn’t find a room. She made it quite clear that that was all that she would do for me. I replied “right, I’d better go and find a railway arch”. Then I couldn’t find my suitcase. I started to search around the foyer of this hotel among all these people who were there but I couldn’t find it at all. I awoke in the middle of having a panic attack and that was quite uncomfortable. It was actually quite realistic

What else I’ve been doing is something that I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while. I don’t use my 3D program anything like as much as I used to and I’ve probably forgotten a lot of things that I knew how to do. But while I was looking for something else I came across a new image-editing program that’s freeware.

It’s used by the 3D programmers for editing objects because of its good transparency add-ons. I use Paint Shop Pro and have done for almost 30 years but it has its shortcomings when green-screening so I’ve been itching to try something that might work better. Consequently I downloaded this program and I’ve been playing around with it today to try to make it work.

It’s actually quite complicated and the layout and instructions aren’t logical. I found a tutorial but it’s for an older version and the interface is different and doesn’t relate to the version that I downloaded. So I’ll have to continue and see if I can figure it out as I go along

As well as that, I’ve made arrangements for my little trip out on Wednesday – booking my travelling arrangements. Coming back on Friday isn’t easy because there’s not very much time at a connection and if we arrive late I’ll miss it. So i’m not booking the second part of my return until I actually arrive.

And then there’s the music for the next couple of radio programmes. I’m starting to run low on opening tracks and ending tracks now, being at Programme 202, so it takes a while to sort them out. And then I have to make a running time of about 48’30” with 10 tracks and that’s not as easy as it sounds either.

It’s quite an art form to do it properly and it certainly keeps my brain ticking over. That’s quite important with advancing age. I’m within touching distance of my three score years and ten and my brain will seize up if I stop using it.

Tea tonight was one of the best stuffed peppers that I’ve ever made. The stuffing was delicious and the pepper was cooked to perfection. There’s not much stuffing left because after all I won’t be here on Wednesday night for my leftover curry. Wednesday night’s tea will be potatoes and lentils with peas and carrots out of a tupperware-type bowl.

So now I’ll hunt down some more music and then I’ll be off to bed. I’ve a Welsh lesson tomorrow so I need to be on form. As well as the usual preparation there are piles of words that I’ve picked up from the football matches over the last couple of weeks that I need to learn There’s no point watching the football if I’m not going to learn anything.

That’s how I started to learn Flemish when I moved to Belgium in 1992, and I’m not alone in this idea. A woman I know has a daughter who is just 11 and a big football fan. These days she’s only allowed to watch football on the TV if she watches it in a foreign language and she has to take a list of new words to show her mother at the end of every game.

It’s catching.

Monday 20th February 2023 – AND IN WHAT IS …

… turning out to be a desperate run of dreadful nights, last night was probably about when I reached the nadir.

Although I was in bed quite early bearing in mind my 06:00 start, there was no possibility of going to sleep.

Hordes of people swarming up and down the street outside at all kinds of hours on their way back to the caravanettes parked on the car parks around here. Even at 05:00 they were still coming back from whatever was going on down in the town.

And when I did manage to go off to sleep at some strange time of night, I went on so many travels that I’m surprised that I ever made it back home again afterwards. A girl from school came to see me last night. I can’t remember who she is now. We were both learning Welsh together. During the lesson she’d been exhibiting photos and writing captions for them. We had a translation to do and our teacher was wondering why it took us so long. I explained to the girl first of all that we have to identify the words and then translate them and then arrange them into some kind of lucid sentence. I showed her 3 or 4 books that I’d bought recently that didn’t seem to help me at all with any grammar or any vocabulary. I remember one that I showed her and said “that was 50p wasted wasn’t it?”. We had a bit of a laugh. She said “I don’t think the teacher understands exactly how difficult it is for non-native speakers to grasp the principles of a foreign language”. I wish that I could remember who she was.

There was someone else at some point trying to import a Moldavian diesel engine for a project that he was building that had been interrupted by the war. He described everything that he had to do, such as take out Moldovan nationality etc. But as I started to dictate this I had the stabbing pains in my foot again so I missed an awful lot of most of what he was saying. I know that it was an incredibly complicated procedure.

This next one was a dream where many students at a school in a class had to find a Will because someone had allegedly died. They found a Will but after investigation it turned out that it didn’t belong to that person at all. There was also a tv remote there that wouldn’t change the television. They found out in the end that it was the wrong remote. There were all kinds of strange things going on about removal and substitution of documents and things. These students turned out the classroom but couldn’t find what they were looking for so they started hunting down through the school. I made a few suggestions. I doubted that the document had been destroyed because it had value other than for what they were trying to use it etc. It was a really weird supernatural kind of dream involving all these children and went on for what seemed like hours while they searched for everything and tried to make sense of what was going on with these substitutions

And later we were back in that dream again. There was something about the discovery of a motorbike in the forest and something to do with the casserole lid off the huge casserole frying pan. I can’t remember what was going on in this second part of the dream very well either.

Then I had a garage somewhere on the Pointe du Roc where the zigzags are that climb up the hill. A little yard on the right where you can park 3 cars. It wasn’t very convenient but that was where I was. In this particular dream i’m left the carpark outside this particular building. There was a police car there dealing with a pedestrian and another vehicle. I went off in the Senator, discussing with someone about the yard, saying that it was very small but it was all that was available etc. When I came back into the car park the policeman was still there but one of these guys was wandering around. I asked him what the policeman was doing. He replied that he was waiting for someone else to come. I was wondering what was happening about this with the policeman being outside our building trying to sort out whatever was happening.

And we’re still going onwards. It was late at night. I had to go to do some shopping. The only place was the petrol station so I did some shopping there, a few bits and pieces. I didn’t think much of the pears. They also had banana bread but it was sold in packs of 10 or 20 loaves which was far too many for me. I collected what I wanted. To check out you had to go to a window and hold up your products while she scanned them. I asked her if she found it extremely difficult, which she did because she was never sure if she’d scanned everything that the customer had. I moaned about the bananas and this bread. In the end I cashed out and started to go home.

Finally I was in my apartment building. It was a completely different building and a completely different apartment than this, much more modern. I had to go down and out again. When I came back I lost my way. I couldn’t remember where the lift was. Eventually I found it and went upstairs. I suddenly remembered that I had Marianne’s apartment that she’d left to me. I’d started to decorate it a while back but had somehow run out of energy. That was still waiting to be worked on. I could be doing that instead of messing around. Then it was the Annual General Meeting of the House Owners’ Association. There had been arguments about people weairing striped shirts and a few other things so there was a huge rebellion at this meeting. Everyone was coming along to overthrow some of the ridiculous rules about what you could and couldn’t do. It was so busy that I put my coffee down on this seat and couldn’t find it again because there were so many people all around. I was chatting to someone about my coffee. They said that I should be careful because I’m likely to be sued if it burns someone. I remember having to go to fetch endless cups of coffee because I was so thirsty. I had about 3 or 4 cups of coffee during this meeting.

How about that lot for a series of nocturnal rambles?

The crowds going past here at 05:00 awoke me (I must have been asleep at that point) and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t go back to sleep. So by the time the alarm went off at 06:00 I was up and about, medicated and working on the radio programmes to finish them off and get them out of the way.

And when I’d finished them I made a start on choosing the music for the next radio programme or two but at some point I dozed off to sleep again, which was no surprise given how much sleep I didn’t have during the night. I was away with the fairies for about an hour or so and I was surprised that it wasn’t for any longer.

However, before I dozed off I managed to have my toast and coffee for a late breakfast. And I do have to say that the break that I baked in the air fryer on Sunday, although it wasn’t as aerated as it might have been, was absolute perfection. The best that I have ever made, I reckon. I was really proud of that.

There’s another bread roll as well but I’ll be having it on Wednesday because tomorrow I’m going to have a bash at making pancakes for breakfast and see how they work out.

So with the music for one programme chosen, remixed and paired off already I turned my attention to the dictaphone notes, and that wasn’t the work of five minutes, as you can tell. It took quite a while to type them all out. But what was interesting was that no-one from my family came to visit me in all of that.

But there again, neither did any of my favourite characters and that’s a disappointment. Still, you can’t have everything. Mind you, I wish that I knew who that girl was. The name “Simpson” rang a bell but I can’t remember any girl with that surname whom I might have known at school.

Tea tonight was another stuffed pepper. Quite delicious as well. I’m getting to be quite good at making the stuffing for these. It was only a small one, so I was rather glad that I’d had some soup with pasta at lunchtime. It had been a very long day today and I was actually quite hungry.

There are a couple of things that I have to do right now and then I’m off to bed. To dream about making pancakes and hoping that they turn out as well as I would like them to.

But before I go to bed, I’ll just leave you with a woman who has just posted in a “Shipping” group on my Social Network that her father worked for Cunard. I replied that my father put a great deal of effort into his work as well.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: stuffed peppers

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