Tag Archives: doctor

Thursday 3rd July 2025 – REGULAR READERS OF …

… this rubbish will recall that when they pass by during the night, those from the far-flung corners of the Globe (and a few from closer to home too), they usually find that the latest instalment has managed to crawl on-line at some point, and they can sit and peruse it at their leisure while those readers closer to home are still in the Land of Nod.

And so last night, or this morning, they are probably wondering what has happened that there was nothing on-line for them to read.

The truth was that I was in bed, and had been since 19:30 in fact, for at dialysis yesterday afternoon I had another malaise and went into a coma again.

Not that any of that is a surprise. It was well after midnight when I finally went to bed last night, and I was awake again at about 02:40. This time though, I didn’t manage to go back to sleep and lay there tossing and turning until about 05:30 when I finally gave up the struggle and arose from the Dead.

It’s dialysis day of course, so I went to have a good scrub up and shave just in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and then I went into the kitchen to take my medication so that I would be ready to Fight the Good Fight.

Back here, I had a listen to the dictaphone, but as I was expecting, there was nothing on it. That’s no surprise, seeing that I only had two and a half hours’ sleep. Instead, I found a few other things to do while I awaited the arrival of Isabelle the Nurse.

When she arrived, she gave me the next of this series of injections. If it is indeed to stimulate the red blood cells in their fight against the carcinogenic protein in my blood, it’s a mystery as to why they are only giving it to me for five days, without any other kind of control. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when this cancer was first diagnosed back in the winter of 2015-2016 when I was also taking this Retuximab, they were injecting me twice per day

After she left, the plumber turned up and we had a lengthy discussion about my plans. He seemed to be much more amenable to my ideas so I gave him the keys and let him loose downstairs to do his thing.

Now that he was downstairs, I went to make breakfast, but I found myself confronting a major problem. The fridge door was part-open, an enormous mound of ice had grown inside and the door wouldn’t close. Add to that the fact that the soya milk inside had “turned”.

Fearing all other kinds of problems, I turned off the fridge for the moment and made breakfast, and then sat down to eat it and read MY BOOK.

Our author tells us that "Henry I built his manor at Woodstock, with a park … He placed therein … divers strange beasts to be kept and nourished such as were brought to him from far countries, as lions, leopards, linces, porpentines and such other" – presumably, the UK’s first safari park.

He goes on to say that "King Edward II … commanded the sheriffs of London to pay to the keepers of the king’s leopard in the Tower of London sixpence the day for the sustenance of the leopard and three halfpence a day for the diet of the said keeper … More, in the 16th of Edward III, one lion, one lioness, one leopard and two cat lions in the said Tower were committed to the custody of Robert, son of John Bowre."

So London Zoo has a very long history indeed.

After breakfast, I had to empty the fridge and attack the ice mountain with an old hair-dryer, but I couldn’t do it for long because, with my head upside down, I was losing blood pressure and my head was spinning round.

There were several interruptions while I was trying to work. First, the plumber came up to give me a progress report, and then Rosemary ‘phoned about a problem that she was having with a tyre on her car.

After half an hour I had to give up the cleaning of the fridge until my head cleared, so I came back in here to do some work on the radio while I calmed down, but I could feel a wave of ill-health slowly sweep over me.

When my cleaner came to fit my anaesthetic patches, she noticed the mess in the kitchen so after having sorted me out, she waded into the kitchen, took all of the food off the worktop, and said that she’d be back later.

The taxi came early for me, and I was soon at Avranches with a very chatty driver entertaining us (we were two passengers) with conversation almost all of the way down to Avranches.

For a change, I was early at the dialysis centre, and for another change, I was connected up quite quickly. However, I didn’t even have time to switch on my laptop before I’d gone into a coma – blood pressure down at 8.8, apparently.

When Fleurette noticed, it brought her running and she quickly flattened my bed and raised my feet, and that was how I found myself ten minutes later, totally unaware of what had happened.

Everyone was, as usual, quite concerned about me and did their best to do something to help the situation, but I just wanted to go to sleep, which I did for about ninety minutes. But one of these days, I’m going to go into one of these comas and not wake up out of it.

The doctor came to see me and changed my prescription, telling me to cut out the blood pressure medication on the grounds that it’s working too well, and to see what happens over the next few days. I don’t know why they even gave it to me in the first place.

When it was time to unplug me, they were all worried once again and tried to make me use a wheelchair but I refused yet again. And for once that I was ready quite early, the taxi was quite late. I had to wait over half an hour before it turned up and that was just about the end.

It was the young, chatty guy who brought me home to where my faithful cleaner was waiting, and we went to have a look at the bathroom in the new place.

And what a shambles it is. Behind the bath, the plasterboard hasn’t even been skimmed – it’s just bare hydrofuge. The floor under the bath hasn’t been made good either, never mind tiled, and the pipework is all non-standard size, as if someone has wanted to use up a batch of ancient out-of-date pipe.

On the wall behind the bathroom cabinet, the plasterboard hasn’t even been skimmed and in places, not even painted.

All in all, I don’t think that my Barratt House of 1979 was as poorly-prepared as this.

Not that I’m complaining, of course. When I work out how much I paid for the place, I still have a bargain, and the work to put everything right is work that I would have had done anyway when the shower unit is built.

By now, I was feeling so ill that I could only struggle up the first flight of stairs, and I failed dismally on the second. I ended up having to go up from the half-landing in the lift and come back down the stairs from the half-landing above.

Once back in here, I had a brief look at the nice clean fridge that my faithful cleaner had cleaned while I’d been in dialysis, and then I went straight to bed. That was about that for the day.

Seeing as we have been talking about my bathroom … "well, one of us has" – ed … I shall have to bite the bullet and have it painted, I suppose.
And when I see the cabinet-maker who is going to paint everywhere, I shall have to tell him to put on two coats.
"Why two coats?" he asked.
"Well, it needs to be ready for winter."

Monday 30th June 2025 – WE ARE NOW …

… alone, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and me.

At lunchtime, The Hound of the Baskervilles dragged his master off into the sunset and the last that I heard, they were sitting in a hotel in Le Mans eating plastic pizza, ready to go for a blast down the Mulsanne Straight first thing tomorrow morning.

It’ll take me a while now to adapt to the quiet in the apartment and my accustomed solitude.

There was plenty of solitude in my bedroom last night, although I didn’t notice it. By the time that I’d finished my notes and gone through the usual routine, it was 22:30 when I finally crawled into bed, dead to the World, and I remember nothing whatsoever after that.

It was about 06:15 when I awoke this morning, with no memory of anything that might (or might not) have occurred during the night. There was nothing on the dictaphone either, so I took advantage of the situation by reviewing the radio programme for the coming weekend and sending it off.

Round about 07:00 everyone else began to stir so I went to join them in the living room after having had a good wash and shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon.

We sat around chatting and drinking coffee for a while until the nurse came to see me. It’s the last day of his round today – tomorrow Isabelle the Nurse begins her round so he reminded me to tell her about the injections that start tomorrow. I can tell that he was pleased that he doesn’t have to do them.

The Hound of the Baskervilles dragged his master off for walkies and I stayed around to sort out a few things. When they returned, we had breakfast and then my friend packed away all of his gear into the car ready to leave.

My cleaner turned up as usual to fit my patches but spent more time saying goodbye to the Hound of the Baskervilles than she did attending to me.

After she left, we did a quick lap around the apartment to make sure that there was nothing left behind, and then we went downstairs to wait for the taxi.

It was my favourite driver today, which was nice, so we said goodbye to everyone and the two of us set off for Avranches.

Just for a change, we were early although it took quite a while to be coupled up. It was Alexi, the baby of the team, who dealt with me today. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her so we had a really good chat to catch up with events.

She told me that she’d just come back from holiday – in Japan – and that her father had bought her an olive tree for the garden at her new house now that she’s finished arranging it.

The bizarre news is that although it’s evident that I have some water retention, the amount of weight to be lost was “nil”. This lack of appetite seems to be having a good effect on my weight.

Alexi set it to 350 grams all the same, but when the doctor came by, he set it to 1kg, so Alexi came back to set it to 1,200. If I can push ahead, I will.

While he was here, I spoke to the doctor about the chemotherapy.

He thinks that fifteen sessions is far too many, so I asked him what he thought about going to the University Hospital at Rennes for the chemotherapy.

They could do the Retuximab at Avranches, but not the overnight chemotherapy. However he seems to know for a fact that they would do it all at Rennes.

The way I see it, it’s four hours in a car to Paris, four hours back that’s killing me off, on top of the treatment itself which is vicious, and the climb up the stairs here which, I hope, will soon be a thing of the past.

The idea about going to Rennes is that it’s only 90 minutes away so it’s far less travelling time. Then, if I’m really feeling dreadful, I can stay for a Wednesday night to recover and then come back on Thursday. And as Avranches is in between Granville and Rennes, I could be thrown out at Avranches for my dialysis on the way past.

That makes much more sense to me.

That’s how the doctor sees it too, and he told me to chat to them at the hospital in Paris about it when I go back for the next session.

Alexi unplugged me and compressed my implant, and when I weighed myself, I was the lowest weight that I have been for several years – only 700 grams above my “non-sporting” target weight and only 5.7 kilos above my athletic weight.

Alexi accompanied me to the taxi to hand the driver my bag, and I was disappointed that I couldn’t persuade her to come home with me to pander to my every whim. "I’ve too much work to do" she said, which I suspected was something of a cop-out.

The driver who brought me home was the one who spends all this time texting on his ‘phone as he drives. He’s going to come a nasty cropper one of these days, and I hope that it’s not when I’m in the car.

My cleaner was waiting for me back here, and she helped me stagger up the stairs into my apartment, and I have never felt less like doing it than today. It took me a whole half-hour to come round afterwards.

Although I wasn’t feeling hungry, I thought that I’d better eat something so I made a handful of pasta with veg and a vegan burger. And it was a struggle to force it all down, even though there wasn’t a lot of it.

So right now, early as it may be, I’m off to bed to sleep the Sleep of the Dead. I need it tonight.

But seeing as we have been talking about losing weight … "well, one of us has" – ed … a girl from Crewe went to the dietician to talk about losing weight.
The dietician told her "it’s not really a problem. Just take three sesame biscuits with a cup of mint tea at mealtimes."
And so the girl goes off home but half an hour later she rings up the dietician
"These sesame biscuits and cup of mint tea" she said. "Do I take them before or after the meals?"

Saturday 28th June 2025 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about this weight gain thing on Thursday.

The doctor seemed to think that there was something dramatically wrong with my metabolism that had caused the weight gain, and wanted me to come in early today for a four-and-a-half hour session to try to bring it under control.

On the other hand, I don’t know what she was expecting, but if you have 2 litres of chemotherapy fluid pumped into you, then your weight will naturally increase, but nature will take care of that over time. That was my opinion.

Anyway, what do I know about it all? I’m just a mere patient, so I bowed to her superior wisdom. I didn’t have any choice.

But anyway, last night, what with one thing and another, and once you make a start you have no idea how many other things there are, it was almost 01:00 when I finally made it into bed. It was not a very successful night either, because I spent much of what there was, tossing and turning about trying to make myself comfortable

Round about 05:42 I gave up the struggle to go back to sleep. There was this disgusting taste in my mouth (it’s still there by the way) and, as usual, I was feeling quite dreadful. It took about ten minutes to rise to my feet and had I had my way, it would have taken a lot longer.

The first thing to do was to transcribe the dictaphone notes from last night. I was back in Paris last night, preparing myself for another session of dialysis at the hospital. Fortunately the dream didn’t last long because I managed to awaken quite quickly but it really would have been my nightmare, I suppose if it had gone very further but luckily I awoke before the dream had progressed very much into it

Then I was preparing to go to dialysis again. I had organised my session for 12:00 so the taxi came and picked me up to run me down to the centre. There, sitting in the trees was a parrot that was clutching one of my large peppers. I thought to myself that I’d hoped that I’d ordered some peppers from the supermarket this week so that I’d still have some for next week

Finally, I was back in dialysis yet again. They were going to couple me up to the machine. My body weight was quite light there but they had this huge, heavy ball of things. I had a feel of it and it was really heavy and they told me that this was the amount of water that they had to take out of me today. It was enormous. Once again it was at that moment when I awoke.

There isn’t anything of the foregoing – the trip to Paris, the dialysis, the pepper from the supermarket, the rapid panic-awakenings to cancel out the dreams; that needs any explanation at all. Neither does the fact that it’s all preying on my mind when I’m supposed to be asleep and relaxing.

It seemed to be a rather late awakening for everyone this morning. Almost 08:00 when I heard signs of stirring coming from the kitchen, so I staggered off to the bathroom for a wash and brush up.

As you might expect at moments like this, the nurse arrived early today. He caught me in flagrante delicto and had to wait around for a few minutes while I finished whatever I was doing.

After he left, we had a coffee and then I made a little breakfast. I would ordinarily have done without this morning seeing how I was feeling, but they would only go berserk at the dialysis centre when they check my diabetes level.

One thing that I wanted to do was to write out my letter of notice for this apartment. I know that I said that I wouldn’t run the risk of the one downstairs not being finished. However, as I said yesterday, I can’t go on much longer like this, and I’ve lived in worse circumstances than what there would be down there, even with no kitchen. I’ll manage much better down there as things are rather than continue to struggle on trying to climb up here.

All of this called for more coffee (well, I didn’t) and a chat until my faithful cleaner came, earlier than usual because of my extended appointment, to fit my patches and to have a chat.

At 12:30 we went downstairs to meet the taxi driver, whom we met at the foot of the stairs just as he was about to come up, so we were away quite quickly. We picked up our other usual Saturday passenger and then I slept all the way down to Avranches. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … sleep is my “doliprane”.

For a change, I was one of the first to be coupled up. It was Anaïs and Océane who dealt with me today and Océane held my hand again. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I don’t know what she is after, but I don’t have it any more.

But I’m not going to complain under any circumstances. She can hold my hand as much as she likes … "and so can Anaïs, Alexi, Julie the Cook, Justine, Héloise, Amandine etc etc" – ed …

When they weighed me, they found that there was just 1.8kg to lose today, well within my three-and-a-half hour limit.
"But the doctor said four and a half" said Océane.
"The doctor doesn’t know what she’s talking about " I replied.

In the end, we agreed on a compromise of four hours.

However, when the doctor in charge came round, he took one look at the figures and reduced the time to three and a half hours.

This meant that I would have been able to be home early, and had the taxi been there instead of twenty minutes late, I would have been. Instead, we had to fight our way through all of the crowds going to the start of the town’s 10km road race just round the corner from here.

It was another struggle up to my little apartment, but at least my friend made me some tea, which was very nice.

We had a play with this recording desk afterwards, and then I sat down to write my notes for the day.

Now that they are done, I’m off to bed, and I can’t say that I’m not sorry. I’m still suffering the effects of the chemotherapy and I’m going to have to do something about it.

But seeing as we have been talking about losing weight … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of a girl from Crewe whom I knew who wanted to lose weight.
The dietician told her "it’s simple really – just eat normally for two days, skip a day and then eat for two days, skip a day and so on"
After a couple of weeks the dietician sees the girl from Crewe and asks "how’s it going?"
"I had to stop" replied the girl from Crewe
"Why was that?" asked the dietician
"On the sixth day I wore out the rope."

Thursday 26th June 2025 – REGULAR READERS OF …

… this rubbish will recall that I usually upload my daily notes round about 23:00 (Central European Time) or thereabouts just before I climb up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire.

And so those of you who pass by during the night (because, of course, the time in Australia, Canada, the USA and other places where some of my regular readers hang out is totally different) will have come here in vain, and for that, I apologise.

The fact is that by 23:00 I had been in bed for at least three hours. We’d had yet another “health issue”. And now I’m beginning to understand why, when they sent me to the Universitair Ziekenhuis Leuven in 2016 for the first round of chemotherapy, they insisted that I stay within arm’s reach of the hospital and in a hostel where, at least, breakfast would be provided so that I would be assured of at least one meal per day, if I were too ill to make myself some food.

There was absolutely no indication this morning of any of this (or, rather, yesterday morning, but let’s not let ourselves be carried away with semantics here).

It was, as usual, a late night as I seem to have lost all of my motivation for pressing on for an early finish. However, for the first time since I don’t know when, miserable failure that I am, I was still asleep when the alarm went off at 06:30. And it took me a good ten minutes to find the energy to throw back the covers and rise up.

Whatever went on yesterday must have totally worn me out and I can see me being like this for the next couple of weeks … "prophetic words, those" – ed …

When I awoke, I had a thirst that you could photograph and an incredibly dry throat. And no water in my room. Whatever I’d brought in here last night I’d drunk before going to bed. And so this is going to be a real problem if it carries on.

The pain in my foot is still there. It’s becoming beyond a joke and I’m going to have to grab hold of the neurologist to see exactly what they intend to do about it, seeing as I’ve mentioned it in passing on several occasions and no-one seems to be taking any interest at all in it.

The first task was to check the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I was doing something at work, looking for an address for a guy called “Address”. I couldn’t find one anywhere so in the end I wrote to him at the address that I had for him. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I found out that his name was “Naddress” beginning with an “N”. Once I’d found out exactly his real name I then went and found his address so I thought that I was going to have to start this all over again. Then one of my colleagues from work came over and asked if I’d found anything for this “Address” person. For some reason I didn’t want to say that it was a mistake so I just said that I’d sent a letter out to whatever address that I had. She decided that she would do the same. I thought that I really ought to tell them the exact position and save everyone else a lot of work but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

So here I am, dithering about once more, trying my best to make a simple job turn into something much more complicated than it ought to be. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that seems to be the story of my life.

It might have been something of a lie-in for me, and it seemed to be for everyone else too because it was 07:30 when we all assembled in the kitchen for morning coffee. My taste buds are still distorted after that last bout of illness and so I’m having what they call, a café allongée – half coffee, half boiling water.

A café allongée is still stronger than the kind of coffee that you find served up in petrol stations in the USA. I remember the first time that they gave me a complimentary coffee at an American petrol station. "What do I do with this?" I asked. "Wash the car’s windscreen?"

However, I digress… "yet again" – ed …

The nurse came along, having ‘phoned to see if I were back (despite me telling him that he should come on Thursday as usual jusqu’à nouvel ordre). I told him the bad news, which was that starting on day 6 after my chemotherapy, there will be a series of injections to carry out for a week.

He didn’t seem impressed at all, as I expected, until he realised that it would be his oppo, Isabelle the Nurse, whose tournée it all fell into.

For a change, I wasn’t feeling like breakfast (and if I’m off my food, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I really am ill) I still felt that I ought to eat something, otherwise the diabetic register reading (as if I don’t have enough medical problems) will be below the floor and that will lead to many more problems at dialysis.

So half a bowl of porridge and a thin slice of toast found its way down. And, as subsequent events were to reveal, I’m glad that they did.

We’ve run out of bread again, (at least, I thought that we had) so I kneaded some dough for a sunflower-seed loaf and set it to bake when it was ready.

In between everything, in view of the fact that the freezer up here is full to the brim and has been since eternity, we sorted through it and chose a pile of stuff that could go downstairs into the new freezer, seeing as it has now been plugged in for a couple of days. We may as well see how it works, and take the opportunity to try it out.

That was when we found three well-frozen lumps of bread in the freezer

And that reminds me – we have to change the doors over on it because they are the wrong way round, hinged to the right instead of hinged to the left as I would like them to be.

My cleaner turned up rather later than usual to fit my anaesthetic patches, and so obviously the taxi turned up much earlier than it should.

My arrival at Avranches was much earlier than my appointment so I had to hang around for a while, but it was a combination of Justine and Julie the Cook who coupled me up, and it was one of the most painless that I have ever had. "fait avec l’amour" – “done with love” they said, and now I really am becoming worried, what with the secretary at the hospital the other day too.

When they had weighed me, they found that I was the heaviest that I had been for a while, which was no surprise with the two litres of liquid that they had pumped into my veins at Paris. And so they told me that I had to stay for four hours today. That was disappointing, but not unexpected.

The doctor on duty was the one with whom I had the argument the other week. She came and took my papers from Paris to go through them, and asked me several questions. She seemed to be quite satisfied, and then I could press on and work, preparing an order for LeClerc as we are getting through the supplies quite rapidly.

But I didn’t work for long.

After about two hours, I began to shake, shiver and tremble, and went deathly cold. And shortly afterwards, my machine’s alarm began to wail. The wailing went on intermittently for a while, with nurses coming to check and to switch off the alarm – until after about three hours, it shuddered to a halt.

That brought all the nurses running. Apparently, I’d been having a fever, my temperature had soared to 38°C (just 0.3°C below the critical limit when they have to summon the emergency services) and the blood in the needles had coagulated, blocking the circulation.

After a lengthy discussion with the doctor, they decided to stop the procedure and send me home (not that it would be any earlier, what with all of the discussions). “Could I come back on Saturday much earlier and have a session of four and a half hours?”.

Well, if I must, I must, I suppose.

It goes without saying that I was asked the six-million dollar question "would you like a doliprane?"

The taxi to pick me up hadn’t arrived so I had to wait ten minutes, during which period I saw Emilie the Cute Consultant. But she clearly doesn’t love me any more (in contrast with Justine, Julie the Cook and the secretary at Paris) because she found the greatest difficult in mumbling a bonjour. Nothing like our intimate chats last year in hospital, with her perched coyly on the edge of my bed. How times have changed!

Back here, I had a great deal of difficulty hauling myself up the stairs and into the apartment. And then into bed, with no food and no disgusting drink to console me. All I wanted to do was to sleep. Sleep is my “doliprane” – the miraculous cure for everything.

But seeing as we have been talking about my high temperature … "well, one of us has" – ed … when they were feeling my forehead, they mentioned to the doctor that my temperature was raging out of control.
"Well, don’t just stand there!" said the doctor. "Go and fetch the kettle! I could really do with a cuppa right now.".

Monday 23rd June 2025 – I HAD A …

… special visitor during the night last night – someone who hasn’t been to see me for quite some considerable time.

But more of that anon. This time tomorrow I shall be … well … not sitting in a rainbow, but sitting in a hospital bed in Paris where they will be starting this Rituximab cancer treatment.

Or, rather, restarting it, because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that was the product (or Mabthera, a generic thereof) that they gave me right at the beginning back in February 2016 after the chemotherapy failed.

And it worked at that moment too. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I was unable to walk and so ill that I had to live with friends because I was unable to cope by myself, yet six months later I was in Canada. I’m not expecting the same miracles this time, but any little help and relief that it might give me will be most welcome.

And in other news, it looks as if this apartment move will be taking place during the week of 18th-25th of August. That seems to be when the usual suspects are collecting themselves together, and I’m recruiting further volunteers if anyone else would like to join in. All are welcome and I do not practise any kind of discrimination at all. I hate everyone equally, regardless of race, creed, colour or sexual orientation.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, had I exerted myself last night I could have been in bed well before 23:00 but as usual, dillying and dallying about, it was about 23:30 when I finally crawled in underneath the covers.

When I awoke at 05:20 I was somewhere about in the dialysis centre but whatever it was that I was doing evaporated from my mind immediately … "not that there’s much in there to hold it in" – ed … which is just as well because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I don’t like to dwell on that place when I’m not there. It’s bad enough that I do when I am.

The first task that I undertook when I finally settled down at the desk (at … errr … 05:50) was to listen to the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night. And, as I said earlier, I had a special visitor come to see me. There was a group of us in a house somewhere and who should come in but our old friend (or mine, anyway), Zero. And what a long time it’s been since she last put in an appearance. I wanted to say “hello” to her but she walked right through the front of the house all the way to the stairs. I pretended to chase after, and she saw me, let out a squeal and ran upstairs. Her mother said something about going to frighten her away and that I had to look after her at that end of the room. My brother was upstairs in his room at the time and I could hear him and Zero talking to each other. I thought “how am I going to look after Zero at this end of the room if she has already gone upstairs?”. I thought in any case that he was supposed to be busy doing some things that he needed to do rather than sit around talking, but apparently not.

So here we go again. Zero having far more sense than to hang around chatting to me, and a member of my family turning up in my nocturnal rambles to spoil all my fun. I thought that we’d put all of that behind us, but apparently not. Presumably, some psychiatrist somewhere would come out with a few interesting remarks about this kind of situation, but it would all be news to me. There’s no other logical explanation for it, although whatever logic would have to do with what went on in my head during the night would also be news to me.

Round about 07:00 everyone else began to surface so I went for a good wash and scrub up ready for dialysis and Emilie the Cute Consultant, although I forgot to shave. And then we sat around waiting for Isabelle the Nurse to come to see me.

Almost as soon as she left, the taxi came round to take me to the Medical Centre to see the doctor about my heart.

At first, I saw his assistant who coupled me up to an echograph machine with a rapidity that took me quite by surprise.
"That’s not the first time that you’ve done this, is it?"
"Oh no" she replied. "Only a few thousand times.".

When she’d finished, she took me into the doctor’s room where he gave me a thorough examination.
"It’s not your heart that’s causing your problems" he said. "That’s working fine."

And that’s just as well because it’s only my heart that is keeping me going. With my low blood count and low blood pressure, my heart is having to beat about twice as fast as anyone else’s. Anyone’s heart can do that for a while, but mine’s been doing it for almost ten years. When it gives out, I’ll be gone in an instant.

But at least he found my heart and I still have one. I’ve not turned into a Conservative yet.

"Where’s all your paperwork?" he asked.
"No-one told me to bring any" I replied. "The dialysis centre arranged this appointment. I imagined that they would have sent you whatever you needed"
"You should always bring all of your medical paperwork with you when you come" he said
"I’ll remember that" I replied. "Do you know where I can hire a fork-lift truck?"

But as Kenneth Williams and Alfred Hitchcock once said, "it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners."

Back here (in the rain) I was halfway through eating breakfast when the ‘phone rang.
"What are you doing tomorrow?" a voice asked
"Not a lot" I replied.
"Good. Come to Paris and we’ll start the Rituximab"

So there we are. Now a frantic ringing-round to book taxis and obtain permission from the Securité Sociale.

My cleaner turned up as usual to fit my anaesthetic patches and then we waited around for a while. As the weather was now back to sunshine, we went downstairs to wait outside.

The taxi was bang on time with our other passenger already in, and we shot off to Avranches at the Speed of Light, me with my eyes closed. It’s not very often I feel nervous as a passenger these days.

And as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … there’s no point being ten minutes early anywhere if you have to spend that ten minutes washing your underwear.

When we arrived there were three ambulances ahead of us unloading the horizontal patients so I knew how this would pan out. And when one of those ahead in the queue had a crisis and everyone had to rush to help, I knew that that was that.

Having a trainee didn’t improve my morale much, and my 13:30 arrival turned into a 14:30 coupling up.

The doctor came round to see me to ask me how I was.
"OK at the moment but it won’t be for much longer if you keep on prescribing me these" and I showed him one of the boxes of tablets that I’d been prescribed on Saturday, a product that contained lactose.
"And your doctor moaned at me a few weeks ago when I had that attack of pancreatitis"

He didn’t stay very long after that.

The dietician came to see me too, to ask how I was getting on with the disgusting drink that she prescribed for me.

When I told her that I was taking it as instructed, she replied "Good" and renewed the prescription for another three months. I should have said nothing.

Julie the Cook was back from her holidays and she had ten minutes to come to sit on my bed for a chat, which was nice. She’s a really nice, bubbly, cheerful girl and always has a smile on her face. She can also perch on my bed any time she likes.

When I was uncoupled, I went out to the taxi but we had to wait (and wait, and wait) for another passenger who needs a lot of assistance. And who is dropped off first so it was at 19:37 when we finally arrived home.

My adjustable stool had arrived this afternoon and so things are looking much more positive downstairs. The stool will certainly ease my cooking issues, as I can now sit down while I’m at the worktop cooking, and take the weight off my knees.

Tea tonight was baked potato, salad in balsamic vinegar and a mix of falafel and veggie balls. It was delicious as usual.

Tomorrow I have bags to pack, sandwiches to make and food to rustle up, seeing as I don’t know how long I’ll be staying. They say that I’ll be back on Wednesday, but we shall see. I’m really grateful that my friend is here to deal with the kitchen that will (hopefully) arrive.

But first, I’m off to bed in the hope that Zero will come back.

Seeing as we have been talking about the doctor’s surgery just now … "well, one of us has" – ed … the patient before me was complaining about having a very sore throat
"Right" said the doctor. "Go over to the window, stick your thumbs in your ears and stick out your tongue as far as you can."
"Will that make me feel better?" asked the patient
"Oh no" replied the doctor. "My wife’s standing on the pavement outside."

Saturday 21st June 2025 – I KNOW THAT …

… many of you spend the whole of your day gripping the edge of your seats in eager anticipation of the next instalment of my memoirs, and so I can imagine that those of you who made repeated visits here throughout the night to catch up with the news will have had a sense of dismay and disappointment on finding these pages performing a rather passable imitation of Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.

The fact is that I have spent almost the whole of the last twenty-four hours in bed. Alone, unfortunately, but it was probably just as well and it might even have done me some good.

There wasn’t the slightest indication of this last night when I went to bed. And so much has happened subsequently that I can’t even remember what time it was. It wasn’t early, I’m pretty sure of that, but I do remember that I was tired and that I didn’t stay awake for very long once I was under the covers.

It was 06:15 when I awoke, which is probably one of the latest times yet since my sleep patterns have been so disturbed, and the first task that I undertook was to have a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been. I was at school last night, in the final year of my sixth form. We should each have been doing some kind of independent work on our own during our free study periods. However, I had been doing something, something to do with the football. At first, I considered it to be a waste of time and tried to forget it and do something much more academic but in the end I went back and carried on doing these statistics and organisation of this football league. Then I thought that it’s just as good an education as doing anything else. However, I was talking to someone about it because we were living in Belgium at the time. The question of Georges Simenon came up and I explained that this is all about the metro station at Simonis. Where the name came from for Simonis was a derivative of the Belgian family name “Simenon” implying that their family in the past and maybe even today as far as I know had some kind of connection with the place.

Simenon was of course the author of the “Maigret” novels but he is probably more famous for his somewhat entangled web of relationships with which his long-suffering series of wives had to cope. The metro station “Simonis” which is the one to which the local bus would take me when I lived in Jette is named after Eugène Simonis, a Belgian sculptor who lived in the immediate area in the 19th Century.

There were some kind of works going on at Southampton Docks last night so all of the containers and container traffic for all the ships for export and the tunnel across the estuary there had to go north to a small port somewhere higher up the estuary. They had a video surveillance of the port to keep their eyes open for anyone who didn’t understand the message that everyone had received, and they noticed that there was a lorry that had been queueing for a couple of hours at the entrance to the port. They sent him a text message asking him what he was doing there. When he replied that he was trying to wait for the ferry, they asked him whether he had received the letter or not, or the e-mail, and he’d have to push on and go north to wherever this was. There was a long line of HGVs and containers heading north up this road towards the mouth of this tunnel and the little port that was there.

This doesn’t seem to relate to anything that I recall and as far as I can tell, has no significance.

I was about to go to a doctor’s appointment somewhere in South London. It was a complicated place to find, and in the end I ended up climbing over a wall of the hospital into the hospital grounds, finding the correct building and having the appointment. Next, and shortly after that, one of the girls in the house where we were lodging had to go. She was rather a sad girl so I decided that I’d go with her to cheer her up and one or two others did, so we had a minibus instead of the usual taxi to take us. This took us to the hospital, down a hill and into the car park. There, once in the car park, we had to swing out across the road, blocking the traffic, nearly hitting a green Ford Cortina and then reversing backwards in through the gates over these concrete teeth things. The girl climbed out and I wished her luck. I was hoping that she wouldn’t ask me where I went and how I arrived there but she didn’t. She seemed to know her way. One of my friends who was in there with us made a remark about having been here too. While we were waiting for her to come back, we were talking about one of our friends from school. Someone was talking so I asked “what was his place like?”. Someone said that he had three telephone coins just outside the side door. I asked “what on earth was he doing that for?”. He replied “that was how he came in and went out of his jail, by that way” so we were discussing that for a couple of minutes.

This area of South London is one that we have visited on numerous occasions during our nocturnal voyages, and one that I can’t understand because the only area of South London in which I’ve ever lived in is Wandsworth when I was working in that Italian restaurant one winter, and it’s certainly not there.

Everyone else began stirring at about 07:00 so I went for a wash and a good scrub-up in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant today, and then went in for coffee.

Isabelle the Nurse was soon along, and we had another example of her hidden side when she began to talk about why I wasn’t here the previous day. She keeps this side of her character well-hidden but just occasionally, a little glimpse of it is revealed.

By now it was about 09:00 and I could feel myself beginning to slide away. By 09:30 I couldn’t keep on going any longer and decided to go to lie down for a while. And just to make my day, the stabbing pain in my foot began again, and it’s still going on.

There I lay in bed, dead to the World, until The Hound of the Baskervilles barked to let me know that we had a visitor.

My faithful cleaner had come down to do her stuff and found me in bed. Nevertheless, she enticed me out and fitted my anaesthetic patches, then telephoned the dialysis centre to tell them that I was having another one of my crises.

She waited with me until the ambulance came, gave the driver his instructions, and we went down to the centre.

Because we’d been standing outside our building waiting, we were early arriving and although I was far too early for my appointment, they let me in and I was coupled up quite quickly.

They kept a close eye on me today, checking my blood pressure every 15 minutes, and I just slept right the way through the session – except when the doctor came to see me. And to my disappointment it wasn’t Emilie the Cute Consultant who had come to soothe my fevered brow but the doctor with whom I’d had that argument a few weeks ago.

There’s no point being early at the dialysis centre if the taxi is late coming to pick me up, and with a prescription issued by the doctor we had to go to two chemists before we managed to find all of the medication that we needed, so we were no earlier arriving home than we might usually have been.

It was a desperate stagger up the stairs and a desperate fall into bed, and that was how my day ended. And why you’ve had to wait until this morning to read this rubbish.

But seeing as we have been talking about the doctor … "well, one of us has" – ed … when she came to see me, I told her "I don’t know what’s the matter with me but I looked in the mirror and I looked absolutely dreadful"
"I’ll have to examine you to find out" she said "but I can say that there’s nothing wrong with your eyesight".

Friday 20th June 2025 – WE NOW HAVE …

… a plumber to do the shower. He charges much more than I was expecting but he’s available and willing to do the work. The only thing that I have to watch is that he wants to do his project in my bathroom rather than my project in my bathroom. That’s the kind of thing that irritates me intensely, so I shall have to keep a close eye on him.

And on Wednesday next week we shall have a kitchen – well, at least, a delivery of all of the flat packs that will need to be assembled and fitted. It’s all ordered and paid for, and paying for it was an adventure in itself, more of which anon.

So, retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, last night I was totally and utterly wasted. I don’t think that I’ve ever been so tired. I staggered through the notes, the back-up and the statistics etc, feeling less and less like it as time went on.

In the bathroom I fell asleep while I was … errr … riding the porcelain horse and it took some effort to make my way beck here where I fell straight asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow. It was only 22:45 too, which makes a change.

And there I lay, fast asleep and didn’t move a muscle until all of … errr … 05:20.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … being awake is one thing. Leaving the bed is quite another thing completely. It was about 05:50 when I finally dragged myself out from under the bedclothes and saw the light of day.

First task was to transcribe the dictaphone notes. There was some drink that I was supposed to be drinking and its chemical composition was really precise. I’d stir it every day with a metal spoon. One day, I’d left the metal spoon in there. When I went to pull the spoon out, I noticed that half of the spoon had dissolved into the liquid and wasn’t there any more. I was wondering “what on earth is this caustic substance that I’ve been prescribed that I’ve been drinking two of these each day?”.

This sounds like the disgusting drink of which I’m supposed to take two every day. I shudder to think what it might be doing to my insides if its chemical reactions are as bad as its tastes.

Everyone seemed to wake up early this morning so I didn’t have long to spend in here. I went and had a good wash and then to drink some coffee and have a chat.

However, we were all interrupted. A taxi turned up to take me for a medical appointment.

Don’t ask me why, because I was convinced that the appointment is on Monday, but apparently not. So I quickly put on my shoes and went downstairs with the driver.

It was nice to be outside in an early summer’s morning so I wasn’t complaining, although I did wish that there had been someone there to greet me at the doctor’s when I arrived. And after waiting half an hour and having tried the doors and found them all locked, I telephoned the dialysis centre. They confirmed that it is indeed today.

When the driver turned up to take me home, one hour later, the doctor still hadn’t arrived. We went back downstairs anyway to speak to the receptionist of the medical centre. She told me that the doctor wasn’t in today. She checked my appointments on the central medical website and there it was – for Monday, as I had thought. And so we went home.

It goes without saying that I’d missed the nurse. I did ring her up but it was the answerphone that answered the ‘phone.

At least, I could now eat breakfast and drink some more coffee. I certainly needed it.

The next task was to contact the kitchen fitter to remind him that we were waiting. I gave him a gentle nudge with an e-mail and he rang me back as I hoped that he would.

We had another lengthy discussion about everything that we needed and he promised to send me a final schedule later in the afternoon.

The postie turned up in the middle of all of that and dropped off a couple of parcels. All that I seem to be awaiting now are the microwave oven and the kitchen stool. The kitchen stool will be a boon because I really am now struggling to stay standing up for any length of time.

After lunch, the cleaner turned up, closely followed by the plumber. We showed the latter round the bathroom and he seems to think that it’s straightforward, although somewhat complicated.

He doesn’t like my idea of a wall and thinks that I should have a glass panel, “so that there’s more light” – not that light has ever bothered me, and that I should run the pipework behind a false wall rather than embedded in the new wall. He also wants me to change the toilet for a new one.

However, unless there’s a very good reason (which we won’t know until we remove the bath) my plans are staying put.

It took him a while to sort out everything that he needed to know, and then we agreed a price. Or, rather, he told me his. It’s useless giving me an estimate because we don’t know what’s involved until we remove the bath but I know his daily rate. Had I had any more time left to find someone else I would maybe have thought twice, but if he can do the job by the middle of July, which he thinks is eminently feasible, then I shall have to bite the bullet. Each month longer that I stay here, I’m having to pay an extra month’s rent.

With it being such a nice day, my friend and I went for a walk outside afterwards. I went over to the clifftop and watched the sea and the boats for a while until the heat drove me back inside again.

By this time, the kitchen fitter had sent me the list. He’s going to order the stuff from the DIY shop, but I need to order the stuff from IKEA.

That took a while and I blanched at the price that came out of it all, but it has to be paid. I’m probably over-engineering the kitchen But I’m only ever going to do this once and it has to have an island, if, for the only reason, to stop me falling over.

When it came to pay it, the struggle for position of The Worst Bank In The World took a new turn as the Crédit Agricole refused to make the payment.
Consequently, I telephoned them, and they told me "it’s over your transaction limit".
My reply was "I don’t care about the transaction limit. I want to make the payment. What are you going to do about it?"
"We’ll send you a form. Sign it and send it back and we’ll raise your limit temporarily"
"So I have to wait for the post to bring it, and the post to return it?"
"I’m afraid so" she replied.
"How much money do you have of mine in your bank?"
So she told me exactly
"Good. I’ll take it all out and find another bank who wants it and who will do what I want"
"I’ll have the manager call you back"
It goes without saying that the manager has yet to ‘phone.

However, I have been in this position before and it’s not for nothing that I also have bank accounts in Belgium, the UK and Canada. Consequently, the kitchen is all paid for and the things will be here on Wednesday.

In between everything else, I was editing the radio notes that I dictated the other day. They aren’t quite half done but I’ll keep on going with half an hour here, an hour there until they are finished. But it’s difficult to work when you have visitors.

There was also some time somewhere for me to make a loaf of bread, seeing as we had run out. I don’t know where all of this energy came from – or all of this time either, but I’ve certainly been busy today.

Tea tonight was sausage, beans and chips. And very nice it was too. I certainly enjoyed it and so did my friend.

And now I’m off to bed, ready for dialysis tomorrow I don’t think.

But seeing as we have been talking about the Crédit Agricole … "well, one of us has" – ed … an old farmer went into the bank to speak to the manager
"I need to take out a loan" said the farmer. "I need a new tractor and trailer and a few other bits and pieces"
"And how long will you need it?"
"I can pay you back over fifteen years"
"We can’t do that" said the banker. "To be honest, I doubt that you’ll live that long to repay it."
"Well, if I die" said the farmer "God in his Heaven will reward you when I arrive there."
"And what if you don’t go to heaven but go to hell?"
"In that case," said the farmer "I can give you the money myself when I see you."

Monday 16th June 2025 – I AM WASTED …

… tonight. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt as tired as this. I certainly won’t need much rocking tonight, that’s for sure.

Much of it is probably due to dialysis – it always takes it out of me, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but some of it is probably also due to last night.

By the time that I’d finished doing what I needed to do, it was quite late. Once more, I was side-tracked considerably during the course of the evening writing my notes, and by the time that I went to bed, it was once more long after midnight.

Once in bed, I fell asleep quite quickly, but not for long. The Hound of the Baskervilles in the next room was dreaming and he spent about five minutes having a very tired and feeble barking session. Perhaps I should have lent him my dictaphone so we could have found out what it was that was going on.

After he’d finished, I did manage to go back to sleep but once more, not for long. At 05:10 I was awake again and at about 05:40 I hauled myself out of my stinking pit.

There was something that I needed to do as soon as I awoke but back in here afterwards, the first thing that I did was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was doing a coach trip to Canterbury. Somewhere round about Canterbury I was giving a talk to the passengers but I hadn’t managed to have the coach totally clear of the road. It was in a kind of dog-leg up against the kerb. A road-train of coaches, a machine pulling along a couple of carriages, coming past caught my mirror up, tangled it in its mirror arm and with the mirror arms tangled together, mine snapped and the other coach disappeared, taking it away … fell asleep here … although I could see the look of regret on the driver’s face. Later on, after my party was installed in their rooms, I went down the corridor to the room where this other coach party was lodged. I opened the door and was just about to step in when I realised that I should have knocked so I knocked and stepped in. There were people sleeping everywhere on the floor of this room. One or two people moaned and said something. At the very head of the table, at the top in the dark were all of the important people, and one of them must have been the coach driver. I asked if any of them had seen what had happened to the mirror arm that had become entangled up in the arm of their coach. A voice replied that as far as he knew, according to what had happened in the past, the mirror is still on the bus wrapped up in the other one’s mirror arm. It’s still there on the bus and tomorrow they will go down to pick it up and bring it back to me. I was hoping that at least it was still going to be there because anything could happen in a couple of hours overnight in a strange country.

At one time I was spending quite a few nights driving coaches in my sleep, but the incident of losing a mirror and arm on the road actually did happen to me once when I was taking a coach party to Llangollen. It’s also true that anything can happen in a couple of hours overnight in a strange country, as I explained to a group of Austrian policemen once when I had to take the European Union’s lorry to Vienna once in 1998 and they wanted me to park it at the side of the road a mere cock-stride from the Slovakian border.

There was also something about a pair of shoes last night. Someone had bought a pair of shoes from me when I was running a shop. They were one of the last pairs that I had and they wanted a guarantee that I’d reimburse them if they were to bring them back unused, which I gave them. But they needed a lot of convincing that it would work. Sure enough, a few days later, she was back and spoke to me in pidgin French like “theeeese ….. shooooes ….. noooooo ….. gooooood”, pointing that she wanted to bring them back. I don’t know what was the matter with her but I gave her back her money. Then she saw another pair of shoes and asked if she could take those instead. Those shoes were €153 so she could take them if she paid me €153. It ended up with quite a lot of discussion and argument but eventually she gave in and took the new shoes at the appropriate price.

This also reminds me of an incident that took place years ago in real life, but the World isn’t ready yet to hear it.

When everyone was awake in the other room I went to sort myself out and then join them for a coffee and a chat, interrupted by the arrival of the nurse who once more failed to take into account the Hound of the Baskervilles. Consequently, he was in and out in a matter of a couple of seconds and we could make breakfast.

After breakfast, the Hound of the Baskervilles took his master for a walk and I listened to the radio programme that I’ll be sending off this week for broadcasting at the weekend.

When everyone came back we sat around making plans until the cleaner came to fit my anaesthetic patches. She hung around, chatting for a while, and after she left we went downstairs to wait outside in the glorious sunshine for the taxi. And wait. And wait.

13:45 was when it turned up, 45 minutes late, with another passenger in it. It was a quick drive down there, but even so, it wasn’t until 14:45 that I was coupled up, with the usual second pin being much more painful than the first.

Once more, I was left pretty much alone except for when they thought that I’d gone into another diabetic coma and they all came a-rushing over. It seems that I’m not even allowed to have a little … errr … relax these days.

However, Emilie the Cute Consultant came over to chat with me for a while which was nice, and Anaïs sitting on the foot of my bed chatting for five minutes was nice too. I think that they did it just to make sure that I stayed awake.

While I was there, I replied to the edition of WAR AND PEACE that my kitchen fitter sent me, and I hope that we can sort it all out now so that I can push on with the ordering while I have someone here to accept delivery. I’m in a rush to be started.

When i’d been uncoupled, I had to wait for the taxi to arrive. There was another passenger in there too who required dropping off at Kairon so we weren’t back here until after 19:30. I’m certainly seeing parts of Normandy that I never knew existed, thanks to these new Social Security rules.

There was quite a reception committee waiting for me, and they all helped me upstairs. And I needed it too.

Tea tonight was broccoli stalk soup with fresh bread – another delicious meal. We really are eating well here.

Right now though, I’m off to bed. I can’t keep my eyes open. I’m really exhausted tonight.

But seeing as we have been talking about buying shoes … "well, one of us has" – ed … a woman from Crewe went into the shoe shop one Saturday to buy a pair of shoes, and chose a nice pair.
As he was cashing her up, the assistant said "you’ll find these a little tight at first. You might have a pain in your foot for the next couple of days."
"Well, that’s no problem" said the woman from Crewe. "I won’t start wearing them until Wednesday."

Monday 2nd June 2025 – WHAT AN ABSOLUTE …

… debacle this afternoon was. Almost anything that could have gone wrong did go wrong and I ended up being one extremely tired, unhappy bunny.

You are probably thinking that I seem to dwell on the depressing side of life, but that seems to be all that’s happening right now. The solution to this would have been, in the past, to changer les idées as they say around here, but how do I do that when I can’t go anywhere or do anything?

Last night was another one of those nights where I seemed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and what should have been an early night ended up being much later than intended. I just can’t seem to concentrate on anything right now and it’s driving me berserk.

When I finally made it into bed though, I was asleep quite quickly and there I stayed until … errr … 05:50. It took me a few minutes to gather my wits, which is a surprise seeing just how few I seem to have these days, and then, in a magnificent fit of enthusiasm, I dictated the radio notes for the eleventh track of the radio programme that I was organising yesterday.

Having done that, I wandered off to the bathroom to sort myself out and make myself look pretty in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon. And in the kitchen, as well as the medication, I cut the bread that I’d baked yesterday and put half of it into the freezer.

After the medicine I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And no-one was more surprised than me to discover that there was actually something on there from the previous night when I was convinced that I hadn’t been anywhere at all.

First task therefore was to transcribe those notes and add them in to that day’s entry. If you’re interested, you’ll have to go back and have a look.

Having done that, I could turn my attention to last night’s notes. There was a girl I knew who had been staying as some kind of paying guest at a house somewhere in the countryside. She’d taken with her some of her urban habits to which they were not particularly accustomed. On one occasion she had to go to try to find a job somewhere. She went for an interview of which she seemed to take control, and when she returned, she told the owner of the house all about it. She told me later that she was horrified that she’d been behaving like that because it was not the kind of behaviour to which he was accustomed, although of course she and I had a joke about it and a laugh. After staying there, she came back to live in temporary accommodation in the town again where she could pick up with her usual habits and way of life, and not be out there on a limb in such an extraordinary position.

This reminds me of a girl whom I used to know in Brussels. She was a free-lance worker for one of these NGOs and her work was interesting, but irregular. On one occasion she had no money to pay her mortgage so I agreed that she could come to stay with me for twelve months and let out her place to a tenant on a short let in order to catch up with her arrears of mortgage.

She would have been the type to have taken control of an interview, and she was also the type who seemed to do nothing but complain about how far out of town my apartment was. I did offer to push it closer to the city centre for her but the humour went right over her head. After she left, she didn’t speak to me after that and I’m still waiting for her to make some kind of “gesture” towards the accommodation. Not that I was expecting any but a gesture would have been nice.

The nurse turned up and organised my legs, with more of the banal talk that gets on my nerves. Luckily it’s Isabelle the Nurse for a week starting tomorrow, which will cheer me up.

After he left, I could make breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

We’re now on a whistle-stop tour of various castles as we dash towards the end, not hanging around long in any of them. Our author seems to be losing his interest in them, judging by the lack of clear description, and I can’t say that I blame him.

He tells us on page 490 that for Taunton Castle, "The inner court is further subdivided into two parts, of which the eastern half seems to have been raised into a sort of platform upon which probably Ine’s actual residence was placed.".

Just a handful of lines further down he tells us that "The walled part is roughly triangular, the base being the east side, arid the truncated part open to the west. This area seems further to have been divided by a cross wall into two parts, the keep, hall, and gatehouse being in the western, and in the eastern, the earthworks, which favours the notion of this having been the old English citadel.", totally forgetting that he mentioned that just a few lines previously.

On page 498, with regard to Tickhill Castle, he tells us that "The outer front of the first floor is ornamented with four stiff rude pediments". I don’t know about you, but my imagination is working overtime.

Back in here I attacked my Welsh homework and finally finished the outstanding unit ready to send off. I also reviewed the radio programme that will be broadcast this coming weekend and sent it off. It’s a concert that came from Germany in 1982 and it’s certainly interesting.

My cleaner put her sooty foot in the apartment and sorted out my patches, and then I waited for the taxi. And waited. And waited. And waited.

It was 13:11 when it finally turned up and I was not in a very good humour. We arrived at Avranches at 14:00 and it was, would you believe, 14:45 when I was finally coupled up.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had vowed to “have a discussion” with them about this fiasco of changing the dates, and so regular readers of this rubbish will recall that, knowing my luck, it would have to be Emilie The Cute Consultant on duty today.

She explained basically that it was only an idea, apparently not understanding that it’s the kind of decision that involves not just me but half the town as everyone else has to shunt their appointments around. She definitely doesn’t love me any more now.

No-one else bothered me at all. They were far too busy organising a new visitor who was not co-operating with them. I tried to revise my Welsh but I couldn’t keep going and drifted off into oblivion, to be shaken awake by the little student who told me that things were finished.

Nevertheless, they took their time sorting me out and the little student drew the short straw so uncoupling me took longer than it should. Weary and exhausted, it was 18:50 when I finally staggered out to the taxi and it was 19:35 when I finally sat down in my apartment.

And so I’m just about done for the day. It’s an afternoon that I would like to forget, and the quicker the better too.

Right now I’m off to bed where I would like to sleep for a hundred years but I’m up early tomorrow to go to Paris. I am not looking at all forward to this trip. Not in the least. But before I go to bed, I’d better check on my stiff, rude pediment and make sure that it’s OK.

But this idea of moving my apartment towards the city centre reminds me of the American tourist who staggered into a pub in Dent and asked the landlord "why did they build the railway station so far from the town?" (it’s three miles away).
After thinking for a moment, the landlord replied "they probably thought that it was a good idea to build it at the side of the railway line."

Monday 28th April 2025 – HERE I ALL AM …

… not sitting in a rainbow, but sitting at my desk in my office.

And there’s a huge red mark on my file “Leaving the Hospital Against Medical Advice”.

What has happened is that they want me to stay for another scan on my stomach. So I telephoned the hospital myself and spoke to the scanner and asked him "when could I have an appointment for a scan? I have a prescription from Doctor …" (luckily it wasn’t Emilie the Cute Consultant who saw me)
He paused for a minute and said "The next appointment is 1st of June".
My response was "Doctor … says that it’s urgent".
"It doesn’t matter" he said "We can’t do it any earlier".

So if anyone thinks that I’m going to sit around for five weeks kicking my heels in a hospital when I have so much to do, they are out of their tiny minds.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the medical staff and I have different aims. Their aim is to keep me alive as long as possible, clinging on by the end of my fingertips while they pump me full of morphine to deaden the pain. For my part, I wouldn’t care if I were to die tomorrow if I had had a full and active life up to that point.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the hysteria that took place at Leuven in 2019 when I told them that I was abandoning my treatment for three months while I went on an expedition to the High Arctic.

Anyway, that’s another story completely. Last night I had a much better night and after I finished my notes etc I went almost straight to sleep and there I stayed until all of 06:00 when they awoke me for a blood test.

After that I actually went back to sleep and stayed there until about 07:55.

When I awoke was in my Ford Transit. I’d been talking to my youngest sister. She wandered ff saying that she’ll be back in a minute. Ten minutes later she still hadn’t returned so I drove round to the club on Nantwich Road where she had gone. After another ten minutes she still didn’t come so I buttonholed one of her mother’s friends who was standing by the door. He told me that she was busy and wouldn’t be finished for a while. I was extremely angry and told the guy to tell her that she would have to stay there because I had things to do, and drove off down one of the side streets on the south side of Nantwich Road.

That sounds just like my family, but again, that’s all water that floated under the bridge a very long time ago. But I’ve still no idea why I’m spending so much of my time dreaming about Crewe. In total, I only lived there for about 12 years of my life.

After I’d washed and shaved (and went in search of my gant de toilette that the cleaner had taken by mistake) they served me breakfast. And once again, it was starvation rations and there was nothing that I could do about it. Apparently, the staff had been warned.

Next were the dictaphone notes. And there were piles of those last night. I was doing something with … I can’t remember what now but it was involving my brother and his wife and it was something to do with being disabled and someone at the centre turned up. In the end no matter what we were doing a friend of mine, a young girl who had a car, she said that she would take us all home. I was sitting in the back with someone and the girl was sitting in the front and there was a seat next to her. The disabled woman came out. She said that she could travel with us so she put her walkframe in the back of the boot so she told her that she could sit in the front so she ran round to the front so what she was doing with a walkframe ….. She had a big stool with her but found that it wouldn’t fit in so we said “why don’t you give it to us and we’ll hold it?”. So she climbed in and the girl drove and dropped off the two of us who were sitting in the back and went on to take Mrs Whateverhername is back to her bungalow. And the thing about this is that I was telling my brother about the dream and he was in it, telling exactly this dream to him

My family again, God bless them. And one of the women now from dialysis. This story is going out of hand, there’s no doubt about that. The interesting part though is that I was dreaming within a dream. That’s not something that happens very often with me. However, it does show that my nocturnal rhythms are settling down after a major period of disturbance.

There has been a lot of further contact between people in many of these dreams and that dream just now involved a girl who could play the violin. I didn’t particularly like her all that much but we needed a flute player as well and this girl could do them both so we had to be nice to her. That meant that she’d even come to see me in the hospital and when she went back to the hospital administration offices at the other side of the road from here there was no way of going home so we offered to drive her if she was feeling willing

There’s an interesting story about the girl with the violin but the World is not ready to hear it. However, her second instrument was the piano and maybe some power chords on a Fender Telecaster. I can say though that if in the dream I said that I didn’t like her, that is being somewhat “economical with the truth”.

And later on I’d gone to volunteer for certain hospital tests and they were busy taking some pulse from me. I was told that it would be a morning session and an afternoon session so I’d gone in the afternoon and time was really dragging on, like it was 18:00, 19:00, 20:00. I mentioned this to the doctor who was taking some samples from me. He eventually went to the ‘phone, by which time it was about midnight and telephoned someone. He told them the situation and I heard the reply, which was “these people come as volunteers and volunteer for certain tasks and so they have to stay until they are done. If he doesn’t like it he can clear off and never come back again, particularly after all of the trouble that we had last time with him”. I tried to think of the last time that I was here and what trouble I had caused, but I couldn’t think of any. Then I was put into a car, the car that does the hospital transfers. We drove into the town centre. There was a taxi parked at the side of the road. I wondered if the taxi had been ordered for me to take me home and they would drop me off here or whether I was expected to stay in the one that I was with and carry on. However the traffic lights were red and we had to stop and wait until they turned green before we could move on

It beats me, the significance of this dream. I’ve offered my services as a guinea pig to a couple of hospitals where I’ve been staying, but when it presents to you the possibility of having several handfuls of student nurses crawling all over you, who wouldn’t?

Later on I was in Chester. I was talking to some guys about music. We were working out some songs with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. We decided that the big solo that he would play would make a great track on its own so we were busy thinking of ways to expand the first track. I walked down by the river and walked to the car park and there was my car there, the old Mercedes that I had once. Parked next to it was a sleek black limousine with a chauffeur by it. I looked at the driver and I knew him from when I was chauffeuring. He looked at me and said “chauffeuring again?. I said “yes”, yes because I was driving for. So I told him that there was a British trade delegation. He looked at the car, this old Merc, and I said “yes, because they don’t have very much money because they didn’t do very much. I opened the door and there was a couple of people inside – the boss and one of the girls. I asked them if they were ready to go. They replied “no” – they were waiting for a third person. Meantime, the little girl who was in there, she opened her rucksack and pulled out a computer. “It’s not mine” she said. “It’s one of the training ones. I said “you’ll have to take it home and look after it tonight and take it back in the morning”. She was annoyed by that because she had all her contacts on it for chatting etc. I replied “it can’t be helped. You should really check your things if you put them away in the bag.

There is also a story about walking down by the river but the World is not ready to hear that one either. As far as Ian Anderson goes, the Ian Anderson may well be another Ian Anderson, a folk singer with whom I have had some correspondence at one time. He has an interesting claim to fame which listeners of my radio shows at the end of August may well discover. The story about the chauffeuring and the computer is bizarre and I don’t know to what that relates, except that I still have my old Mercedes, festering down the field on the farm next to a Ford Cortina and a Ford Transit ditto.

Meantime, the doctor came to see me. I told her that I wanted to leave after dialysis this afternoon
"You can’t" she replied
"Can’t I?" I said. "You just watch"

And then the argument began.

She gave me a very long speech about everything, the highlight of which was "this is not a prison, but …". When she finished, I replied "I’ve listened carefully to you and I’ve understood everything that you have said. But nevertheless I am still leaving."

The truth of the matter is that I have had news that my locataire loaded up a van with half of her possessions early this morning. She might even (although it’s doubtful) finish tomorrow and leave the apartment. Secondly, I have a visitor coming from this evening for a few days. Thirdly, I have a builder coming round on Wednesday morning. Fourthly, I’m going to Paris for a week at the other hospital on Monday.

And so the argument raged on and on until in the end she left. She came back with a sheaf of my discharge papers with the prominent red stamp upon it.

It was an ambulance with a stretcher that took me over the road to the dialysis centre where, apparently, amongst the nurses my rebellion is headline news. Julie the Cook, my allocated nurse, came for a chat to “make further enquiries”.

But proof that the hospital regime has done me some good is that there was only 1.4 kilos of water to remove from me so it was a three-and-a-half hour session. And afterwards, I had never felt so well for quite some considerable time.

While I was there I was in an exchange of messages with a friend of mine. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have an ongoing major project in the UK and a friend of mine from my Manchester days is handling it. He has a few days spare so he wanted to come over to see me.

He turned up at the dialysis centre just as I was being thrown out and he brought me home. We came the pretty way by the coast because it’s been a while since I’ve passed that way.

My faithful cleaner helped me up the stairs and after I left, I made stuffed peppers for two followed by chocolate cake and chocolate soya dessert, all of which went down a treat.

Right now though, I’m off to bed ready to Fight The Good Fight tomorrow.

But seeing as we have been talking about walkframes … "well, one of us has" – ed … I remember a friend of mine telling me "Sony has brought out a new product for our generation"
"Ohh yes?" I replied, bitterly regretting it thirty seconds later
"It’s called ‘The Sony Walkframe’"

Thursday 24th April 2025 – ONCE MORE, JUST …

… like yesterday I was op and about before the alarm went off. Not quite as early though. It was about 06:20 when I hauled myself out from underneath the bedclothes.

Considering that it was almost midnight when I went to bed last night, that’s some good going too. After my Herculean effort in the morning, staying awake and up and about until then was pretty good too.

So after I finished my notes, the stats and the backing up, I loitered around for a few minutes … "more than a few minutes" – ed … before crawling off to the comfort and safety of my own bed.

Once in there I was soon away with the fairies (although not in any fashion that would incite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine) and only have the briefest of recollections of anything going on during the night.

It was a different matter round about 06:05 when I awoke. I couldn’t go back to sleep and I was actually crawling out from under the covers when I heard the water heater switch off.

In the bathroom I had a good scrub and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon. And then into the kitchen for the medication.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Nerina had a Ford Cortina MkIII, a gold one. She wanted to keep it or she wanted to sell it – she couldn’t make up her mind so I advertised it for her to have some people come round to look at it to see what they thought, to make an offer and she could decide and take it from there. But everyone seemed to think that there were some pieces missing from it. I explained that we did actually have everything – it probably just wasn’t to have at the moment. I’d be able to sort it out in a short space of time

That’s something about which I know a great deal. I have four Cortinas down in the Auvergne, three of which are basically quite good. There are plenty of bits to fix those that need fixing but ask me where they are. I know that they are all there somewhere.

Later on, when I awoke I was back at home, Shavington or Davenport Avenue, with a huge bunch of screaming kids, some of whom were ours and some of them weren’t. One of them seemed to take quite a fancy to me and hung around with me for a while. However I awoke in the middle of all of that and so never found out what was going on.

With plenty of time left before Isabelle turned up, I did some housekeeping on the computer to bring that more up-to-date. But like most things around here, I seem to be taking one step forward and two straight backwards.

Isabelle breezed in and didn’t stop long, just enough time to deal with my legs and admire my new compression socks.

When she left, I made my breakfast and read MY BOOK. We’ve finished Leicester Castle, breezed through several minor piles and now we are at Lincoln. I’ve no idea what we are going to find there but we probably won’t be there long trying to find it.

Back in here I attacked the notes for the radio programme and in a mad fit of effort I almost finished them too. That was some effort, I can tell you.

My cleaner was late today and so it will come as no surprise to learn that my taxi was early. I was nothing like ready when he arrived and we had to keep the two other passengers in the car waiting for a while.

We arrived early at the hospital but then again so did everyone else so I was still last to be coupled up. Luckily it was Julie the Cook who saw to me.

They set the blood pressure alarm higher than usual so every half-hour or so, one of the nurses came over to check me. It was just as well because I hadn’t been feeling well at all all day, aching in every bone and muscle, out of breath and so on.

One of the doctors (not Emilie the Cute Consultant) came to see me today. I managed to obtain from her a prescription for an occupational therapist to come to my new apartment to give advice about installations for the handicapped and disabled.

This evening I was one of the last to be unplugged, and then I had to wait around for fifteen minutes for the last person to finish so that we could leave the dialysis centre and drop her off on the way home.

My faithful cleaner was there and watched as I staggered up the stairs into my room. First thing that I did was to have a disgusting drink break seeing as the taxi came early and prevented me from having one before leaving.

Something else that the taxi prevented me from doing was taking a naan dough out of the freezer. And so I’ll have that and my leftover curry for tea tomorrow. Tonight I had sausage and mash with vegetables and it was delicious.

It’s really early but I’m still not feeling very well so I’m off to bed where I intend to sleep for a week if I have the chance

But seeing as we have been talking about Ford Cortinas … "well, one of us has" – ed … I remember when I was welding up the floor in someone’s Cortina when she was off to her mother’s.
She saw the legs sticking out from underneath the car so in passing, she reached under and … well … you can imagine.
When I came out of the garage with a G-clamp she had gone and my friend John from Stockport was nursing a lump the size of an egg on his forehead.

Monday 21st April 2025 – YOU ARE PROBABLY …

… that is – the night-owls who only come out after the Hours of Darkness (of which there are more than just a few these days) – wondering what happened to the usual “just before I go to bed ….” update earlier this evening.

The answer to that is that I was probably unconscious again. That’s right – “again”. It wouldn’t be the first time today (or, rather, yesterday).

All in all, it’s been something of a chaotic, catastrophic day, just as I thought that things were getting better. And it started off so well too.

It wasn’t a particularly late night either. By the time that I’d finished everything that I wanted to, sorted myself out and climbed into bed, it was midnight. So I was looking forward to having a good seven hours sleep.

When the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already in the bathroom on my way to the kitchen for the medication. I’d been tossing and turning throughout the night trying to make myself comfortable without all that much success and in the end I gave up the struggle when I heard the immersion heater click off at 06:20.

After the medication I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. And to my surprise I had travelled miles. I started off by taking Roxanne around Crewe showing her a few of the places that were in the town. One of the things though was that there was some kind of measurement about the ribs of the town and that the ribs had only two types of measurement. Whatever they were, it was difficult to interpret what it was supposed to represent as far as the town was concerned. Certainly it was something to do with the fact that it was just an ordinary person and not actually a built-up area or anything like that so I’m not sure how Roxanne and I managed to see things all on our way around it, especially when we’d been told to just stay near the chest and not wander very far away.

It must have been an exciting trip, going round trying to show someone the sights of Crewe. And sights there are a-plenty too, but not the kind that would usually attract visitors. You can’t even have the guided tour of the public convenience on Crewe Bus Station (2/6d, or 2/7d if you want to see all of it) because that was flattened a year or so ago. As for the rest of the dream, it simply degenerated into the usual nonsense.

Then we went back into that dream again … "which dream?" – ed … and were building a new prison so all the female warders were interviewing the men about what the men thought about the new arrangements in the prison and whether there should be any improvement. There was an Artificial Intelligence chatbot standing there. He would give his opinion on the comments of the other patients.

It seems that Artificial Intelligence is becoming the theme of the moment. As we have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … AI can’t do anything that a human can’t do. However, it does it much quicker and much more thoroughly than a human. As we have seen though, it’s not infallible. Not by any means.

Later on I’d been driving taxis around Brussels. We’d gone into the office to cash up. It was my first day so I didn’t really know what to expect or how to do it so I was watching everyone else. They had already done all their calculations before they’d gone into the office. I hadn’t even handed my prices in over the radio. I thought that I’m going to have to learn to do this quickly. I was chatting to the other drivers while I was waiting. Then I suddenly realised that I hadn’t brought my clipboard up with me with all my jobs and prices on it so I had to go back downstairs to fetch it. One of the other drivers said “don’t worry. It’ll still be there. They’ll know who it is”. Someone else said “yes but if you leave stiff in a car with some drivers around here you wouldn’t ever see it again”. I’d taken off my shoes and socks . It takes me a while to put them back on again. I thought “should I nip down in my bare feet but the garage is dusty and filthy”. This was where I was back at some indecision again.

So I’m back to driving taxis again. I’ve had a couple of nights off just recently, which is more than I ever had when I really was driving taxis. One of the options after I retired from work in Belgium in 2004 was to go to drive for the limousine hire company. Another one was to go to drive for the local bus service, but I was overtaken by events when I went into the Employment Agency to see if they needed assistants for the 2004 Travel Fair in the Exposition Centre.

Did I dictate the dream where I was invited all of a sudden to play bass in a group that had a booking at my old school? … "no you didn’t" – ed … The person who invited me was Alan Dean. He was a bassist so I wondered what was going on here but I agreed and began to talk about rehearsals. Their response was “it’s all stuff that everyone knows and you should know it”. They didn’t even tell me the set list so I was going to be completely in the dark about this. I tried to find out more information but nothing was ever forthcoming. I turned up at school and everyone was there. Apart from him I didn’t recognise anyone else. We began to wait for the organisers to have the stage ready for us to put out our gear but no-one seemed to be doing very much at all. The school dance was going on and it was becoming late, towards 22:30. I thought “we’ll never go on at this rate”. In the end we all went for a lie down because this was going absolutely nowhere. One by one we awoke. This confusion and this school dance was still going on, people still dancing, the stage still cluttered and no-one had been to see us or to talk to us at all, when we would be expected to go on, what we would be expected to do. I didn’t know the set list even. We were just waiting around and no-one seemed to be doing anything whatever. I thought “this is the weirdest situation in which I have ever been”.

Why Alan Dean should come onto the scene when I haven’t given him a moment’s thought since 1975 I really don’t know at all. But the last two dreams are a repeat of the chaos and confusion that seem to happen quite often during the night. There is definitely an undercurrent of something going on in my subconscious about something and it’s not doing me much good. My survival depends on a stress-free environment because at the speed at which my heart is pumping, it can’t go on forever.

The nurse didn’t have too much to say today. He was in and out in a couple of minutes. It’s his last day today so I imagine that he wants to finish work as quickly as possible.

After he left, I made breakfast – porridge and the last of my delicious hot cross buns toasted and smothered in vegan butter – and settled down to read MY BOOK.

We’ve left Cydweli Castle and are now at Kilpeck in Herefordshire. This is another site that is not well-known and there is not much architecture left to examine. We aren’t going to be here long.

After breakfast I set out to make all these ‘phone calls that I promised but soon came to a shuddering halt. It’s a jour ferié – a Bank Holiday – isn’t it? You won’t find anyone answering their ‘phones today, that’s for sure.

Instead, I had a cunning plan about my radio programmes and began to do some research.

My cleaner turned up on time to fit my patches, and then I waited for the 12:30 taxi. And waited. And waited.

Round about 13:00 I rang them up … "what did you say just now about people answering their ‘phones?" – ed … I asked them if they had forgotten me.
"Oh merde!" came a voice. "I’ll send a car!"
To be on the safe side, I ‘phoned the dialysis centre … "what did you say just now about people answering their ‘phones?" – ed …and warned them that I would be late.

While I was climbing into the car I looked at the time. 13:55. It’s a good job that I had telephoned the centre to say that I would be late.

With all of the holidaymakers in the area the centre was full. They had had to rearrange the wards and the bed that they found for me could not have been farther away from the entrance if they had tried.

It’s a good job that it would only be a three-and-a-half hour session today because it was 15:00 when they’d finished plugging me in. I had had visions of being here all night.

What with one thing and another, I couldn’t concentrate on anything and was drifting in and out of sleep. With about five minutes to go, my head began to spin and I blinked my eyes. When I opened them I was surrounded by all of the medical personnel, the bed was flat rather than upright and my legs were raised.

"Thank God you’re back!" exclaimed one of the nurses. Apparently I’d been unconscious for several minutes. My blood pressure had been hovering around the 87-88 mark instead of the more usual 120-130.

It took quite an age to recover and they had to take me to the taxi in a wheelchair. It was a very quiet, sombre drive home.

The 25 stairs were too much for me tonight. I staggered up to the half-landing and then had to take the lift to the half-landing above and then walk down to my door. Once inside, I sat down and couldn’t move.

After my cleaner left I went straight to bed, fully-clothed, and there I stayed, totally dead to the World, until 00:05. And I didn’t leave the bed then either

Starving and tired, I managed some pasta and tinned mushrooms, and now having written my notes, I’m going back to bed. The nurses though are worried. They have a feeling that one day I’ll have one of these unconscious fits and not wake up.

But seeing as we have been talking about guided trips around Crewe … "well, one of us has" – ed … there was once a tour that took American visitors around some of the selected bungalows in the town.
One of the Americans said "bungalows, bungalows, bungalows! Why can’t we see any houses?"
"We can’t" replied the guide
"Why not?"
"Ahhh – that’s another storey"

Saturday 19th April 2025 – THAT WAS EXHAUSTING.

Four hours in dialysis with the machine going full-tilt. It’s enough to finish anyone off. But at least I’m down to my target weight so with a little luck I might only have to stay for three and a half hours on Monday. We shall see.

Things might have been different and I might have been less exhausted had I gone to bed earlier instead of hanging about until some stupid kind of time, but there we are … "or were" – ed ….

To make things worse, it was a miserable night and I don’t think that I had much sleep, waking up here and there every half hour or so. At one stage I was even planning on leaving the bed but I gave up that idea quite quickly.

When the alarm went off I was however fast asleep and it was, as you might expect, a desperate stagger to my feet to beat the second alarm. And in the bathroom I had a good wash ready for Emilie the Cute Consultant at dialysis, and I hand-washed my socks, undies and night attire.

After the medication I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone and to my surprise, I had actually been out and about on my travels during the night. A girl was being examined for some kind of issue with her legs. She’s on a kind-of operating table on her back with her legs in the air and they are examining them. The doctor tells her to put them into the neutral position which she tries. After a little manipulation … "PERSONipulation" – ed … the surgeon or doctor manages to put her legs into some kind of neutral position. He tells her “well, that’s much easier, isn’t it? Perhaps you should have done that at some kind of earlier point in the examination or even beforehand, but I’ll make a mark now to let them know where it’s all correct”.

It’s much easier for me – I simply press “CNTRL-Z” and that puts any selected 3-D object or character into a neutral pose. That dream did remind me somewhat of some of my 3D work when I was living down on the farm.

And then I was back in that dream … "which dream?" – ed … later on. Some thieves had stolen a train with the ammunition on it. They were heading off for wherever it was. They were taking their time, not in any rush, and had stopped to have a meal somewhere. In the meantime, a group of Indians had been removed from a town and were not happy. They found these men and explained to them what was happening and that there was a train on its way towards them. What they did was that they started up the train and set it to going back down the line with all aboard at the maximum permitted speed of seven mph. When they were just a few hundred yards away from a collision they leapt off the footplate and the trains ploughed into each other. Carriages were destroyed, carriages went everywhere. They were saying that over 200 people were killed, including 131 in one carriage. All the wagons ran loose and even sheltering behind the rocks was not saving them from the wagons rolling up on them. There was even a railway wagon that had come from Russia on board this train and it rolled to a stop right at the feet of one of these robbers.

That plot sounds just like a cross between the plot of THE WILD BUNCH and that of A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE, two films that spend a lot of time on my playlist. As for the wagon though, whilst Russian wagons ring no bells with me, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we once encountered a railway box-car with “Alaskan Agriculture” on it.

Now there’s an oxymoron if ever I saw one.

The nurse was chatting to me this morning, telling me what I should do about the situation in the apartment downstairs. When he finished, I told him that I had a letting agent who was doing all of that. "But still …" he said, and started again.

After he left I made breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

We’re still in Kenilworth Castle where, on page 147, this rather peculiar paragraph caught my eye. What do you make of this? "The character of the ground makes it probable that the Norman fortress had but one entrance. This could not have been on the east, west, or south fronts, as the ground was low and marshy ; nor on the north, where the ditch is wide and deep."

The next thing that caught my eye was on page 150 where he tells us "the succession of great events which led to the death of the earl, and the celebrated siege of Kenilworth, belong to the history of England rather than to that of Kenilworth, and form one of its most interesting and most valuable chapters. The subject has fallen under the pen of Mr. Green, and has found a place in the pages of the Archaeological Journal (vol. xxi. p. 277), where the course of the events is disentangled, and very clearly narrated, and their political significance and bearing upon the constitutional history of our country treated in a manner both brilliant and profound"

He then devotes several pages to telling us about the Siege of Kenilworth.

Back in here, I carried on with the remote repairing of Rosemary’s computer. She is now connected to the internet with the aid of an Ethernet cable (but not the Wi-Fi) and has an antivirus installed. She ran a scan of the computer which came up with nothing (which was a pity because I had hopes for that) and when my cleaner arrived to fit my patches and I had to go, she was performing a deep scan.

After the cleaner had fitted my patches I had to wait for my taxi and was packing my bags for my next Paris hospitalisation when it pulled up. It was the boss again and we had a chatty drive down to Avranches.

Late in meant late coupled up and with a four-hour session I could see that it was going to be late. The blood pressure is set to be tested every half-hour and every half hour the nurses had to come running because of the wailing machine, complaining about my unbelievably low blood pressure today

In the end they set the machine to every fifteen minutes, so they had to come twice as often.

While all of this was going on, I was trying to watch the football. Caernarfon were playing Cardiff Metro for the privilege of finishing fourth. There wasn’t as much skill as I would have expected but it was an exciting game that roared from one end to the other.

And if ever there was a game of two halves, this was it. The Met had most of the play in the first half and were leading 1-0, quite deservedly, at half-time. But whatever Richard Davies put in his team’s half-time cuppa, I could do with a swig of that myself. The Cofis came out of the blocks at an incredible rate, had most of the play in the second half and eventually won 2-1.

And I’ll have to be careful what I say at dialysis in the future. A nurse and I were talking about my diet and Emilie the Cute Consultant heard it from across the room and came to join in. I hope that she can’t hear me call her “Emilie the Cute Consultant” when I’m here and she’s there.

It was a very, very weary me who staggered to the car to come home and I was glad to be back. Coming up the stairs was a very long, hard trudge tonight.

So having had my tea of baked potato, salad and breaded quorn fillet followed by chocolate cake and soya dessert, I’ll dictate my radio notes and go to bed. I don’t think that I’ll be awake long tonight and I’ll be surprised if I awaken early, but dialysis is a funny thing.

But seeing as we have been talking about acute hearing … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of the snail, the tortoise and the sloth having a party when they run out of beer.
They draw lots and the tortoise loses, so they send him to buy more beer.
Three weeks later they begin to complain. "We should never have sent that tortoise" said the snail. "He’s so lazy and bone-idle"
"I know" said the sloth. "For all the good that he does, he may as well not be here"
Just then a voice from outside the door shouts "if you lot continue to bad-mouth me like this, I shan’t go for the beer at all!"

Monday 14th April 2025 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about it going to be four hours today at the dialysis centre. It wasn’t anything complicated to work it out. However, it was a pretty close thing and they could, if they had turned up the machine a little, gone for three and a half hours.

However, I have a three-day break and it’s important for me to have as much water evacuated as possible beforehand so that I can have a head start when I go back on Thursday.

Four hours is probably all the sleep that I had last night too. Although I finished everything that I need to do – the notes, the statistics, the backing-up – at a not-unreasonable hour, there are always other things that I can find to do when a good concert or two come round on the playlist.

Last night, it was Robert Calvert’s final concert with Hawkwind, at the Ramsgate Marina Park in Ramsgate on 28th May 1984, all one hour, forty-seven minutes and forty seconds of it. The best front-man that Hawkwind ever had, and with Huw Lloyd-Langton on guitar, what more could anyone want?

Once it finished, I staggered off to bed at a little after 01:00. And ask me if I care.

Despite the short night it was fairly turbulent and I didn’t have all that much sleep, or so it seemed. When the alarm went off I fell out of bed and the dictaphone fell out with me so I must have been doing something at that point.

However, I went into the bathroom for a wash and a shave (in case I meet Emilie The Cute Consultant this afternoon) and then into the kitchen to sort out the medication for the morning. And my chocolate cake, that had been cooling overnight, smelt delicious.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out if I’d been anywhere during the night. I’d been looking at new apartments. I’d seen different apartments and I found myself in a car with my cleaner or was it Rosemary? As we pulled up outside this old building we were going to have another look at that apartment that she didn’t like at all. We went in, and the door was difficult to open so I put my weight against the door to open the way into the building. Then we found the apartment and went in. There were some people in there doing some things and it was becoming dark so I turned the lights on but they didn’t work. It was as if the whole current was earthing out somewhere and absolutely everything electrical went completely dim. I could see the kitchen in the distance that looked huge. This room was a big, tall, Gothic place. I wasn’t really sure about this at all. Another girl there tried to open the door to go out but she couldn’t manage it. I said “lift up the catch” so she put her hand around the door frame and had a feel for the lifting bracket but I had a huge, big old mug hanging from there that I had in France when I was a teenager. She knocked that off and it cascaded down through the stairwell and hit the ground about three floors below. I said “that’s my old mug gone then, isn’t it?”. I was really disappointed. There was someone down there who went to have a look at it but they didn’t say anything. We were there in this apartment trying to sort something out, trying to arrange the kitchen, trying to think about these lights. It was another one of these dreams that went round and round in chaos as we were trying to sort out all of these things.

It seems to be the thing right now, looking at new apartments, but I’m hoping that my search for a new home all of my own will finish in two months time. But I can’t understand why I’d be travelling in a car with my cleaner. Rosemary is a much more likely prospect, especially as my cleaner doesn’t drive, but even so, Rosemary won’t be coming around here any time soon. She has other preoccupations. Even more interestingly, I did have a coffee bowl given to me when I was in France as a teenager but I imagine that it was left behind at home when I moved out

Later on I was back into that dream. It was something about everyone having to be careful because the scales were measuring in grams weren’t accurate unless the scales were in a certain position and the load was placed in a certain way

What the idea about scales and weights has to do with looking for an apartment, I really don’t know. But I suppose that that was my hope when I saw what figure the scales had registered last Thursday.

There was a song that appeared last night in a dream but I can’t remember what it is now. I recognised it at the time and knew which album it was from. We had to search through all of the music files to see if we had anything by this particular group. We had, and it turned out that it was something to celebrate our second anniversary together … "second anniversary together? With whom?" – ed …. I thought that maybe I could play this programme again with the special referencing included. I set out to try to adjust the sound for what I wanted but it didn’t seem to want to work … fell asleep here …

I was right about something happening with the dictaphone during the night when it fell out of bed with me. I fell asleep (well, you know what I mean) while I was dictating and I was presented with a sound-file that ran for two hours and twenty-six seconds. It only stopped because the memory on the machine was full, so I had to clear that up and back it up. But it was my second anniversary with whom? I wish that I knew

Isabelle the Nurse’s chatty mood continued this morning. And in mid-conversation I happened to mention my tenant wanting to stay on for a few more weeks. Her reaction was quite violent and told me in no uncertain terms not to even think about it. I’m beginning to wonder whether some people know something that I don’t

After she left I made breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

We left Hawarden this morning and are now at Helmsley Castle in Yorkshire. And for a change, he has not said anything controversial today, apart from taking up a position in the School of “Saxon” Hill forts. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that that position was roundly stamped upon by most of the members of the Woolhope Naturalists in 1867 and by many more people since.

After breakfast I set about drafting another letter ready to give to my faithful cleaner to hand in at the letting agency. I’ve decided to let them deal with it all and not become involved. It is, after all, what I pay them for.

When my cleaner came to fit my patches I had barely finished what I was doing and so I had to hurry. And after she left, I began to cut up my chocolate cake but the taxi came early and I left it half-finished.

There were two of us in the taxi with the driver and I was dropped off first, early yet again. This time I was second to be coupled up and it would have been nice had it only been for three and a half hours.

There was quite a crowd around me while they were plugging me in – three nurses and Emilie the Cute Consultant, who had come along to watch and to chat about things. She came back later for a good chat too which I appreciated.

Julie the Cook was in the other ward and she came by to say “hello” too. I seem to be very popular right now. Do I owe them some money maybe?

It wasn’t all milk and honey though. Although I didn’t have a dramatic collapse like the one the other week, my head was spinning round now and again and it kept up for several hours.

When I was unplugged and ready to go home, we had a crisis as someone’s patch gave way. And we had to wait for fifteen minutes while they cleaned the floor and let it dry

Back here, still feeling unsettled, it was a slow, weary climb up here and my evening disgusting drink while my cleaner sorted out the medication that she had brought back.

Tea tonight should have been an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit but when the frozen lump that I had taken from the freezer defrosted, I saw that it was a Vindaloo Curry. It was even hotter than when I made it but still enjoyable.

But seeing as we have been talking about that Hawkwind concert … "well, one of us has" – ed … Robert Calvert told me later that he was certain that he saw a familiar face in the crowd
"That was Leonard Cohen, I’m sure of it" he said.
"What did you do?" I asked him
"At the end of the song that we were playing I pointed to him and asked over the PA ‘are you Cohen?’ "
"What did he say?" I asked
Calvert replied "he said ‘Too right I am. I’ve heard more than enough of this rubbish’ ".

Saturday 12th April 2025 – WE ARE BACK …

… amongst the painful dialysis connections. After a few sessions of comparatively painless connections since Emilie the Cute Consultant did her stuff, they have been gradually worsening and today we were back in the agony stakes. So I’ve no idea what’s going to happen now.

Another thing about which I have no idea now is this story about early nights. I cracked on rapidly to finish everything last night and managed somehow to finish relatively early. However I was as usual side-tracked by a couple of really good concerts on the playlist and it ended up being long after midnight when I finally crawled into bed.

For a change it was a comparatively decent night. I slept right though until the alarm sounded with only the vaguest memory of awakening in mid-sleep.

It was a struggle to rise to my feet when the alarm went off but I staggered into the bathroom for a good wash and even a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon.

After the wash I set the washing machine off with a load of clothes. For once, I managed to fit everything into it but it probably wasn’t a good idea because it struggled with the weight. I need to wash my clothes more frequently – or wash fewer clothes more often.

After the medication I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I should have been going into work with Nerina. We were on our way to catch our bus at the top of Mill Street. I was walking on my crutches and Nerina was with me. Nerina suddenly remembered that she had a prescription to pick up at the chemist’s across the road. She said that she would go and pick it up. I told her to be quick so she dashed off while I continued as quickly as I possibly could, which wasn’t very quick at all. I saw the bus come up Mill Street to the traffic lights and turn right. I knew that I wasn’t going to catch it. I saw Nerina come out of the chemist’s and run across the road. I thought “at least she’s caught the bus”. When I reached the bus stop she was standing there. She was saying that she had seen that I wasn’t there and so had waited for me. I told her that that was a silly thing to do. She should have caught the bus and gone on into work anyway on time. I would follow as best as I could. She would have been on time but now we are both going to be late and there isn’t another bus for hours so we are probably going to end up missing half a day. That was a strange decision.

Why I should be going to work on the K43 to Nantwich (that was the bus route where I was) is a total mystery, as is why I would be coming from the general direction of the railway station. And I wouldn’t be on crutches in Crewe either. Furthermore, I reckon that Nerina would have had far more sense than to have missed the bus in order to wait for me if I were going to miss it.

There was also something about being on board a yacht. There was some boy there who seemed to be very well-educated from a good family but that was far from the case. He was very insistent on his rights etc. He was going on wanting this, wanting that and everyone was annoyed with him in the end. They decided that they would teach him a lesson. When he made some more demands, someone reminded him that he was hoping that we’d move back into more traditional ways that were all good and proper a hundred years ago. They put him on a bed face down, removed his trousers and spanked him with a slipper. Every time he protested, they reminded him that he was hoping for a return to the Good Old Days and isn’t this just the kind of thing that he would have wanted? When his parents came back they were outraged by what they saw but everyone on board said “well, he was asking for this – it was literally what he wanted, a return to the Good Old Days of a hundred years ago and he’s receiving exactly what he wanted. None of us can see what the problem is”.

There have been some very, very strange dreams in the past but I don’t think that there has ever been one quite as strange as this. It quite possibly relates to an argument that broke out on the Internet a while back when someone posted "the problem with today’s children is that they don’t seem to have the sense of fear that the sound of a leather belt being withdrawn quickly so a series of belt hoops on a pair of jeans would instil into them.".

Isabelle was in quite a chatty mood today and talked incessantly about nothing whatever as she organised my legs.

Breakfast was next, with more of MY BOOK. We have left Harlech and are now at Hastings Castle, discussing the finer points of corbels and arches, with the odd flying buttress thrown in for good measures. A flying buttress is the equivalent of half an arch, leaning against the outside of a heavy stone wall to stop the wall falling outward. But does our author tell us that? Of course he doesn’t. He describes the buttress’s more elegant points from an artistic point of view and that’s about it.

Back in here I spent a couple of hours drafting a complicated letter to my tenant downstairs, but after having had a couple of chats with a couple of people and having had second thoughts, it’s all becoming far too complicated for words and so I’ve decided that she will leave at the end of the current lease. I’m too old, too tired and fed up to start to negotiate complicated deals and arrangements.

My cleaner turned up on time and fitted my anaesthetic patches and then I tidied up the kitchen while I waited for the taxi. I didn’t have long to wait either. And I was the only passenger in the car so we arrived at the dialysis centre quite early.

For a change I was second in and second to be coupled up. Despite the patches and despite the new procedure and despite the ice pack, it still hurt, and it was hurting throughout the session.

The good news is that if they had the machine on max and ran it for three and a half hours, it would leave 200 grams behind. After a discussion with the doctor today, I decided that it would make more sense to go with three and a half hours, and have a look at how things are on Monday. Four hours would probably be better then, and bring me down to an ideal weight ready for my three-day break.

There was football on the internet as I mentioned earlier – Y Drenewydd v Aberystwyth. And for once in my life in the Welsh Premier League, I saw a team play the way that I would play my team against any team that has a rather pedestrian central defence.

Y Drenewydd were desperate to win to keep alive any possible hope of avoiding the drop, so they went on an all-out attack, However Aberystwyth, who have clearly been reading my training manual, played with the rapid winger Niall Flint at centre-forward. Every time Aberystwyth won the ball in defence they kicked it upfield over the head of the central defenders and Niall Flint ran after it.

He was causing panic in their defence all through the game. And while Y Drenewydd scored two goals, Niall Flint scored two of his own for Aberystwyth, he hit the post twice and only some desperate defending kept him out on another couple of occasions. And when Aberystwyth scored a third as the game drew to a close, that, I’m afraid, was that for Y Drenewydd.

During pre-season I’d seen Y Drenewydd play against Hednesford Town, and what I saw prompted me to enter into correspondence with the Drenewydd club secretary. On the 5th of August I finished my correspondence with "I can see it being a long, cold season ahead"

At least the Chairman of Y Drenewydd was quite frank after the game. "We lost some very good players in close season but didn’t replace like with like". That is no surprise at all. What is a surprise is that he didn’t do anything to redress the balance.

The boss was waiting for me when the dialysis was over and he brought me home through the immense traffic queue as the Parisians desert their city for the Easter break. Despite dropping off another passenger, I was at home for 18:15 and I wish that I could do that every time.

My cleaner watched as I climbed my weary way upstairs where I relaxed for an hour or so.

Tea was as usual baked potato, vegan salad and breaded quorn fillet, followed by cake and soya dessert. Now I’m having a little break before dictating my radio notes and going to bed. A lie-in until 08:00 in the morning and then I have baking to do. Bread, more bread and a chocolate cake. Let’s see how the new water measurer copes

But seeing as we have been talking about football … "well, one of us has" – ed … tomorrow there’s a live football match in the Women’s League Cup – Caerdydd V Llansawel.
In the previous round Llansawel beat a team representing the Walt Disney Fan club. It was quite an easy match for Llansawel so I asked them why
"It was as if that Disney team only played with ten players" explained the Llansawel manager. "They had a player on the pitch called ‘Cinderella’ but she spent the whole ninety minutes running away from the ball"

EPIC HALL

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