Tag Archives: dream

Tuesday 10th January 2023 – JUST FOR A …

… change, especially just recently, I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night last night. And neither did I start work at some ridiculous hour like yesterday.

But I don’t want anyone to go thinking that I changed the habits of a lifetime and had a decent sleep. There was that mush stuff on the dictaphone that I must have travelled miles during the night. There was a dream that someone was pushing a pram or pushchair about on a street. Someone else noticed that there were several dents and scratches on the side of a car that corresponded where this person had been pushing this pushchair. There was another couple in thie street too with an almost-identical pushchair. It wasn’t very clear at all who it was in fact who had done the damage. Which of these 2 couples pushed their pushchair into the side of these parked cars.

And then I was working in a mine or quarry. We were having to send out different priorities of ore. I had the calculations wrong and instead of ending up with 4 different categories I only ended up with 3 and one of them was short. Someone else pointed out the mistake and I had to go back to review it. It was a very complicated transaction. In the end I agreed that I’d missed something out and I had to rework it and repack the order. Before I did I had to have someone else tally it for me to make sure that it was correct this time. I asked someone in a neighbouring workroom if they could tally this order for me and chack that I had everything that I needed.

At some point I was staying an a rented apartment for a weekend. While I was there I had to visit some other people. I had an appointment for maybe 09:00. I’d been awake a couple of times earlier than that but I thought “another 5 minutes would be fine”. All of a sudden it was 08:19. I had to leap out of bed, quickly take my computer and shove it in my travel bag etc and prepare to leave quite hurriedly without having done anything. I thought that it was lucky that I was staying here the night that I can tidy up and clean up tomorrow morning before I leave otherwise I’d be having some real problems about trying to leave here and making this appointment.

I stepped back into this dream later on where I’d been running late. I got as far as one railway station in Stoke on Trent and had to drive to the next one. There was that much snow about that I couldn’t see the road markings. I was sure that I was in the wrong place. At one stage I felt that I was going down a one-way street the wrong way. Dragging my suitcase through the snow (I was no longer in a car by this time) I reached the main road and only had 15 minutes to reach the other railway station. I thought that this is going to be a long way and I’m really going to have to get a move on if I’m going to catch this train. There were all kinds of little things, people bumping me as they came out of shops etc slowing me down. I thought that I’d never arrive. I’d be sitting on that station and everyone else woud turn up to meet me and say “why didn’t you just stay in bed and make the most of it?” like they did. I could see that this was all going to end up as a great big failure.

There was also something to do with one of the Yugoslav republics like Croatia joining the EU. There were reports about how much corruption there was in a place like this. Someone was recounting the story of his dreams as if that was any particular evidence. The dream included this coach and car. They were racing each other down this set of steps – you’d go down 20 steps and then there would be a flat part, then another 20 steps. I’m not sure what that had to do with anything.

For a brief moment too I was with TOTGA and one of her friends on a bus going to Stoke on Trent. They were talking about Crewe and Stoke on Trent and I was sitting on a seat. I don’t think that they noticed that I was there. I was eating a very large bag of crisps at the time while they were talking away. I was really quite anonymous as if I wasn’t there and they hadn’t seen me but I was on board that bus and listening just the same

The alarm going off at 07:30 awoke me but it was more like 08:30 when I finally left the bed. I didn’t want to push my luck with the Welsh lesson looming. Anyway, after the medication I spent an hour or so preparing for my lesson before it began.

Once the technical issues with the old laptop had resolved themselves I joined the lesson. There weren’t all that many of us today but it passed off well enough. Preparing for the lesson certainly helps. Depsite another technical issue rearing its ugly head in mid-lesson, I managed to stick it out right to the very end without falling asleep.

Almost as soon as it finished I had a ‘phone call. The physiotherapist was actually in the building seeing someone so could he come round when he finished instead of at 17:00?

It’s no problem for me so he was here at about 14:00. He’s noticed a slight improvement in the right leg now which is encouraging. But we are still a very long way from being anywhere close to where I would like to be. I still can’t manage more than half a dozen steps without having to stop to catch my breath and adjust my balance.

Nevertheless, if I feel a little better later in the week I might have another go at going to the supermarket in the town. We shall seel

Rosemary rang me today as well and we had another one of our marathon chats. She’s off on a voyage in a couple of weeks’ time . It’s a shame that I’m not feeling up to travelling because a little voyage around Indo-China would probably have done me a worls of good. But I need to concentrate on getting myself into some kind of order before I attempt anything else.

Tea was a taco roll with some of the stuffing left over from yesterday. There’s a little more left too so I’ll make a curry with that for tomorrow, the rest of the mushrooms and a potato. For the rest of the week there’s a burger and a slice of pie, maybe suasage and beans plus whatever else I can find in the freezer. Somewhere in there is a box of vegan sausage rolls and it won’t do any harm to go on an expedition into the depths of darkest freezer to see what else I can find.

Making room in there isn’t a bad idea actually as come the weekend I’ll be baking bread and fruit buns and some of all that will need freezing.

God knows where I’m going to put it all.

0

Monday 9th January 2023 – IF I WERE …

… to tell you that my radio programme was finished, up and running by 07:30 this morning, you’ll probably be quite astonished, and wondering what on earth was going on.

The fact is though that it was bad news that brought all of this about, not good news.

As is usual on a Sunday evening I was in bed by 22:00 ready for a nice long sleep until the alarm at 06:00. I fell asleep quite quickly too but by the time that 01:00 came around I was wide awake again.

After that, I just couldn’t make myself comfortable, tossing and turning around trying to make myself comfortable but without success.

Round about 03:30 I had to wander off for a stroll along the parapet, and I made an executive decision (and for the benefit of new readers, an executive decision is a decision that if it is incorrect, the person making it is executed) that now that I’m up, I’m staying up. And I attacked the radio programme.

When I’d finished I had some cornflakes and coffee and then made a start on doing some work for a change. And I kept it up for a couple of hours too, much to my surprise.

Round about 10:30 I couldn’t keep going and gave up, going back to bed.

Having dozed off for a short while, an endless stream of phone calls kept me awake. It culminated with a ‘phone call from my doctor saying that he would be coming to see me “within the hour”.

That was enough to rouse me from wherever I was, and I went and had a quick shower and clean-up ready for my visit. I don’t mind being reasonably unkempt when I’m here on my own but with visitors, it’s different.

When he came we had a good chat and he’s sending me off to have one of these electrical tests where they check the flow of electricity down my nerves. He asked me if I’d had one before and while it’s true to say that I have, I told him that I hadn’t.

The reason for my “economy with the truth” is that when it was done before, it was done in Leuven and the report was printed in Flemish which my doctor didn’t understand. From this laboratory here in granville, the report will be in French which is far better.

Secondly, if I have it done here, any follow-up will be done here or hereabouts too and as I can’t make it to Leuven, then local treatment has to be an advantage, especially as I’m entitled to free transport.

Thirdly, a second opinion is always worth having, to make sure that everyone is working from the same page. My doctor seems to have the right kind of idea about my treatment anyway as he seems to be recommending the same as they did at Leuven.

After he left, then armed with a taxi voucher I rang up an ambulance service and booked a car to take me to my consultation on the 20th. If it’s free I may as well take advantage of it.

So next week I have the Social Services coming to see me on Tuesday and then the appointment on the Friday – things are moving quite rapidly around here. I wish that one or two other things would hurry up though.

There was quite a bit of stuff on the dictaphone too so I sat down this afternoon and transcribed it all. Yesterday’s notes are now updated and then I turned my attention to today’s. Some friends pf mine had played in a rock opera about Christmas. There was a professional performance of it taking place somewhere so I decided that I’d go along to see it. I bumped into someone whom I knew there. he was there with his wife and a couple of daughters. We all ended up sitting together but as the programme continued these 2 girls started to shout comments from the crowd up to the stage. This started to become quite embarrassing. He told the 2 girls to go and sit somewhere else if they were going to do that, so they did. It didn’t stop them so in the end he went and rounded up everyone and they sat in another row behind where I was sitting. This still carried on and it was probably one of the most embarrassing moments of my life being there listening to all of this going on. I want to go and chat to the bassist afterwards but I thought that I couldn’t do that as he would associate me with these other people. Why the rest of the crowd didn’t say anything or turf these people out I really don’t know

Later on I was in a big house last night full of people, children and a couple of adults. The place was so untidy with all of these children in there. I’d been stroking a cat, then another one came up to me. I couldn’t see it properly but I picked it up and stroked it. The way that it was behaving, I was absolutely convinced that it was my old black cat. I was stroking it for 10 or 15 minutes, then I walked into a room where there was a light on. It wasn’t my black cat at all but a big ginger cat. I’d no idea how come I’d makde a mistake about this. I put the cat down. One of the women who was in charge of the house just kept on bringing more things into the room with these children. The place was becoming really out of control. I had a feeling somewhere that this place was on the Isle of Thanet somewhere near Margate or Ramsgate, somewhere like that but I don’t know.

Rosemary and I had a quick chat this evening too, and then I went for tea. A stuffed pepper with rice and, for a change these days, vegetables. It was quite nice too and I’ll get to enjoy it even more as there is quite a lot left over. There will be a taco roll tomorrow of course and then I’ll have to make a left-over curry with the remains on Wednesday.

Now though, I’m off to bed. I have a Welsh lesson tomorrow followed by the physiotherapist to I need to be on form. I really could do with a good sleep but that’s not always possible, especially these days. And tomorrow I can’t go back to sleep so I’ll have to keep on going as best as I can.

That should be quite interesting.

0

Sunday 8th January 2023 – JUST BECAUSE I …

… didn’t leave my bed until about 11:00 this morning doesn’t mean that I had a really good sleep. Even if I was in bed by 22:30.

It didn’t take me long to go to sleep; that’s for sure, but by 01:00 I was wide awake again. I was sill wide-awake at 05:00 too. Four hours of tossing and turning and wishing that I was somewhere else, without any success whatsoever.

However at some point I did manage to go back to sleep again because 10:30 came round rather quickly after that.

Once I’d finally hauled myself out of bed I had a chat on-line with a couple of people and then paired off the music for the radio programme that I’ll be preparing tomorrow. It’s high time that I got back into the habit of working again.

Brunch was cornflakes and toast with the last of the mushroom paté from Christmas, and then for a couple of hours I had a little relax where I did nothing at all. It is Sunday, after all, so I’m entitled to have a Day of Rest, even if I have had more than my fair share of those just recently.

Later on, in the absence of anything better to do, I began to write out the notes for the radio programme and I’ve done about half of them right now. What I should have done was to transcribe the dictaphone notes, but I forgot until much later. During the night I was rooting around in the cupboard and came across a giant cat tree built on the base of a rocking chair. My mother was dismissive of it but I took it out all the same, assembled it and put it in the corner of the room. The young male kitten was straight in there fighting his way through everything ready to climb up and into it. The older female found another way in. There they were, both in this cat tree like kings and queens. By now it was Nerina with me. She made some kind of remark but I thought that the cats were clearly enjoying this. They have as much right to live here as we do. If they can have some pleasure out of this thing that’s been in a cupboard then so much the better.

And then I was on the taxis last night. There was usually a job to take where we had to go to Liverpool to pick up some documents to bring back. But this particular night there had been a fire and the job had been cancelled. Then it turned out that one of my distant relatives had died and the funeral was taking place at about 04:00 at Wardle. I wasn’t going to do anything – I ended up sitting through most of the night chatting to Nerina who was in bed. We were discussing everything but it was time for me to go. I’d taken a previous job to Liverpool and had to drop a guy off at one of the railway stations there. She asked me if I knew where the railway station was, if I’d found it. I replied yes because I knew where most of the railway stations were. I laughed and said that it’s a good job that I didn’t have these documents to pick up, wasn’t it? otherwise I’d have been in Liverpool and back again and then gone straight out to Wardle to the funeral. It seemed a really strange and weird time to have a funeral at 04:00 in the pitch-dark. It was raining outside – it really wasn’t the right kind of weather. I’d asked Nerina on a couple of occasions to see whether it wasn’t really 16:00 but she was quite adamant that it was 04:00 so I went to the bathroom and prepared to leave.

I was also off on a road trip in mid-west USA but it was nothing like the mid-west that I knew. I had the camera with me. I came across a small town where there was a lot of building work and road-widening. I thought “hang on – I’ve been here before. I’m sure I have”. As I drove into the centre I wondered whether or not this was the place where I fuelled up once many years ago. I parked the car, got out and went for a walk round to see if there was any interesting things to photograph. I came across buildings with strange statues on the roofs and abandoned buildings from the 18th and 19th Centuries. Then I realised that I didn’t have my camera with me so I couldn’t take a photo anyway. I wondered whether I should go back to the car, fetch the camera, look for this petrol station to see if it really was here and then start again taking a few photos. Maybe go back outside to where the roadworks were and take a photo of that.

Then later we were kitting out an aeroplane to fly out on a commercial run between the UK and mainland Europe. I was busy trying to peel off some kind of old radio from somewhere and install it into this aeroplane. The pilot was watching me intently as I delicately tried to cut everything and unpeel the track bars etc, asking me quite a few questions, none of which were particularly important. In the end I took it off. He seemed to be so pleased. I gave it to him and told him to refit it.

At one point I was wandering around a square in London. It was all to do with the economy and finance, the history of the coffee houses of London in the 18th Century etc. We talked about how Italian banks would buy security and buy each other to stop themselves being the subject of hostile takeovers etc, how business was flowing out of this square now to businesses that were set up on its periphery and outside in the main streets.
Tea tonight was a pizza and I didn’t really enjoy it which was a surprise. It tasted rather differently than some that I’ve made in the past and I’m wondering if it’s maybe the dough that hasn’t kept so well in the freezer.

So with a 06:00 start in the morning, I’m going to go to bed. Hopefully I’ll fall asleep just as quickly as I did last night but that I’ll sleep through until the alarm goes off. With having done some of the notes for tomorrow I’m hoping that it will be rather a quick programme but there is always something that comes up to disturb me.

0

Saturday 7th January 2023 – I’VE DONE SOMETHING …

… today that I haven’t done for quite a while, and that was that I went back to bed this morning.

Not that I’m really surprised because despite going to bed after midnight, I was wide awake at 04:30 and try as I might, I couldn’t go back to sleep.

In the end I gave it up as a bad job and made a start on the day.

Something else that I did that I haven’t done for quite some time was to have some breakfast. Not really a surprise given my really early start. A bowl of cornflakes and soya milk went down really nicely at that time of the morning.

A little later Liz was on the internet so we had a little chat for a short while too. It’s nice to keep in touch with good friends.

Round about 10:00 I could feel myself drifting away and spent a few minutes trying to fight off the wave of sleep but in the end I gave it up and hit the sack. It goes without saying that a short while later I had a phone call. It was one of the neighbours asking me if I needed anything from the shops. But having had a good shopping session on-line yesterday, there wasn’t anything that I needed.

It was round about 13:00 when I awoke again and after some toast and coffee I watched the football on the internet. Penybont swept aside a poor Caernarfon side 5-1. I’m not sure what has happened to Caernarfon but for a team that over the last couple of seasons has been so competitive, this season they have gone right off the boil.

That really is a surprise because although their defence hasn’t been up to all that much for a while, they have a very talented midfield that can usually carry the attack to the opposition but the fire seems to have gone out.

One of the things on the shopping list yesterday was 1.5kg of carrots. They have been washed, diced and blanched and are now sitting in the freezer quietly freezing. Well, actually in the freezer compartment of the fridge because the freezer itself is full to overflowing. Despite everything that has come out of it this last year or so, there is still no room.

At least there is plenty of stuff in there right now, including frozen vegetables because I had another salad for tea with my baked potato and vegan burgers. It was a good plan to treat myself to a salad this weekend as part of my order.

But with a little luck there will be some more room in there by the end of the weekend as a lump of pizza dough will go and some fruit buns will be taken out too. I’ll probably find something else to fill it though.

During the night, even though I didn’t have much sleep, still went on a voyage here and there. I was with my Greek friend. We were in Crewe making a curry. We had a little room in this factory complex where we lived. We had this curry going and it was simmering away, on “very low” so we planned on going to bed and letting it simmer away through the night. Just as I was getting into bed the alarm went off at the factory as if an intruder had come onto the premises. I looked out of the window but couldn’t see anything. Eventually I could hear one or two people walking towards the gate, like security staff. When my friend awoke I told her about this. We had a bit of a laugh about this security system. But this curry was all starting to go wrong. It was simmering away and looking really nice but it kept on rising up in the pan even on the lowest heat and threatening to overflow everywhere. She became quite angry. I was quite disappointed, particularly as some curry had gone on her clothes. She said that she would coat all my clothes in curry and see how I liked it but after a couple of minutes of this she started to smile and pat me on the shoulder as if either she wasn’t being serious or if the crisis had passed and we were friends again.

Even though I’d had a good sleep later in the morning and another one … errr … at some point in the evening, I didn’t go anywhere else.

But even if it is early, I’m going now, and that is to bed. Despite all the sleep that I’ve had I’m feeling pretty exhausted and miserable and a good sleep will do me good. A nice lie-in if I’m lucky, followed by a nice, strong coffee and I might feel better. I wish that I could find some energy from somewhere to sort myself out because nothing is being done right now. Everything is just too much of an effort.

0

Friday 6th January 2023 – I’VE HAD MY FIRST …

… home delivery from the supermarket today.

They said that my delivery slot would be between 18:00 and 20:00 and so it turned up at … errr … 17:15 before I’d made room to put everything away.

There were several things that didn’t work out.

Firstly, there’s a minimun limit of €50:00 and so despite the cupboards being quite bare in here, I had to scratch around to make up a worthwhile order. At least I now have plenty of rice, pasta, tomato sauce and stuff like that.

Secondly, prices are somewhat elevated. I’m paying a fair bit more than I would in the shop and so, added on to the €9:95 delivery charge, my shopping bills are going to be expensive for a while.

Thirdly, some of the stuff isn’t what I ordered. For example, the soya has come with added vanilla rather than the variety that has added calcium. And I don’t like vanilla in my soya.

However, everywhere is now stocked up which is good news. And I had a lovely tea tonight. Burger on a bap with chips and a salad and for the next couple of weeks I reckon that my meals will go back to being quite exciting again.

What I’m going to do though when stocks run down is another issue. There’s only so much bulk goods that I can store. I suppose that the next load, in a couple of weeks’ time, could have a supply of coffee as I’m starting to run low on that. But then I shall haveto have a good think.

And who knows? Maybe I’ll be better by then and can go and do the shopping on my own.

But one thing that I can say, and that is that this idea of ordering food to be delivered is actually an idea that is practical and it works well enough to stop me starving to death.

It should be said though is that perhaps in the past I’ve had the finger pointed at me by some people because of the amount of tinned stuff that I’ve had on hand here. I made the point that it’s all here for an emergency and it’s just as well that I had it here when I came back from hospital. That was what I called an “emergency”.

Perhaps last night should have been an emergency too because nothing seemed to go according to plan. I don’t know why but I just wasn’t tired at all. I was still up working at 05:00 this morning.

At some point rather later than that I did go to bed. I switched off the alarm because there was no point trying to heave myself out at 07:30 but even so, I was awake at 09:20. I couldn’t go back to sleep either and so I gave it up at about 10:00 and made a start.

To my surprise, there was even some stuff on the dictaphone so I must have had some kind of decent sleep at some point. I had a cat at at one moment during the night but can’t remember anything about it.

Later, it was carnival and fête time. There was a carnival and fête at Crewe and also at Nantwich. I was at the one at Nantwich round by the White Horse. Everyone was having a tremendous time. I’d arranged to meet my sister and her family back at her house with the idea that she could go to the hairdresser’s and then come on to one of the fêtes afterwards. After a while and I hadn’t heard from her I contacted her. She was ‘oh crikey! Oh I’m really sorry. I haven’t done it yet” etc, going way over the top making wild excuses. In the end I told her that what I wanted to talk to her about was the fact that with the Nantwich Carnival being so good we should all go round to Nantwich after. She thought that that was the best idea. But it was another one of these occasions where everyone was taking so long to be ready that I was convinced that by the time we were ready to go back everything would be all over.

It tok me a while to warm up, as you might expect, and then I finished off the radio programme that I’d been trying to do yesterday. That’s done now which is just as well, and starting Monday I’ll be doing two each week in order to catch up with where I want to be. I like to have about 6 months of programmes in advance because no-one knows what the future has in store for me. Seven weeks in hospital sending off radio programmes that I was unable to replace with others has made quite a hole in my little stock.

Having done that, I went through my order for the supermarket and sent it off. The plan was then to make space on the shelves so that I’d have somewhere to put it when it came but that fell by the wayside somewhere.

There are also developments with my little project that is simmering away in the background. I’ve been copied into an e-mail between two other people that shows that there is considerable progress going on behind the scenes. Maybe before too long I’ll have something to report in this respect.

At some point in the early evening I crashed out for half an hour. That’s no surprise given the rough night that I had What was a surprise was that it was for only half an hour.

Tea was delicious, as I mentioned earlier. The salad made quite a change and it won’t do any harm to have a couple more here and there. I don’t want to eat all of the frozen veg too quickly.

Tomorrow I’m going to have to make some plans. There are 1.5kg of carrots to peel, dice, blanch and freeze for a start although I’m not sure exactly where I’m going to put them as the freezer is once more packed to the gunwhales. I really should have bought a bigger freezer but I suppose that I would have filled that just as quickly too.

And at least there’s plenty of food here again and I can relax a little about that for now. Looking back over my last few meals I’ve been eating really well despite the limited supplies here. Things should start to become interesting now that my shopping order has come.

0

Thursday 5th January 2023 – I HAVEN’T SET …

… any records today with preparing my radio programme. Unless it’s for the slowest one on record because I haven’t finished it yet. I’m a long way short. Everything is written and dictated and I’m in the middle of editing it.

Actually, I have an excuse for this. And that is that I didn’t leave the bed until lunchtime.

And I have an excuse for that too. Gradually, over the course of the evening the pain in my right foot became worse and worse. And by the time I went to bed I was having stabbing pains in the sole of my foot every couple of minutes or so.

That was disappointing of course because having tidied away all of the paperwork etc yesterday, I could fall into bed without actually having to move anything so I was looking forward to a nice, deep, comfortable sleep.

But this pain kept on going and going. I was certainly still awake at 04:30 because I checked the time, and I was awake long after that too. I’d dozed off by the time that the alarm went off, but only just and I just couldn’t haul myself out of bed.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone, which was surprising, so I must have gone off to sleep at some point. We started off on a Friday evening. I was working in an office and everyone started to go home. A group of people where I’d been working had been passing a box of biscuits around and for some unlnown reason no-one had offered me any. After they had left I went and found a box of biscuits, opened it and saw that it was empty. That was pretty bad newz. By now I was starving so I had a hunt around. Eventually I found a box of biscuits open on someone else’s desk. Just as I took 2 of them someone walked in and said that they were looking for a file. I had to act very nonchalantly and help them look for this file with these 2 chocolate biscuits melting away in my hand.

Later, I was working at a building company, something to do with old lorries. There was a discussion going on about some bungalows being built a few years ago that weren’t built correctly. My mother was going through a few things and showed me a packet of red liquid. I asked what it was and she replied that it had something to do with Morse Code that one of her distant relatives had found and sent to her because they thought that it might be of some kind of historical interest for her. She was interested in having a play around with it. There was a lot more to it than this but I can’t remember at all now.

Finally, I was in Shrewsbury last night driving around, having to dictate some kind of information about the route. These 3 roundabouts near the slaughterhouse were different than all the others because they had been installed in a different programme from a different budget. Of course I was having a laugh about this kind of thing. I was having a quiet 5 minutes trying to transcribe my notes but the vehicle was vibrating and rocking so much that I wasn’t able to do it. I could tell that my ribald comments were disturbing one or two other people in this vehicle. They weren’t happy about the levity in which I was treating the subject of these 3 roundabouts. It was just typical to me that there would be all this strange talk about different budgets for this and different budgets for that, different budgets for something else but they were all in fact doing the same thing

With all of that, the night can’t have been all that bad although when I finally awoke the pain was still there.

Once I’d sorted myself out somewhat, I had a shower. And getting into the bachtub was a little easier than it had been on Tuesday. I think that I must be right about this improvement that I’ve been noticing. It’s not much, and I still can’t walk very far at all, but it does seem to be a little easier.

This afternoon I made a start on the radio programme but had to stop because the physiotherapist came. I mentioned the problem with the foot and he showed me an exercise. And at least, fot the moment, it seems to have worked. Whether it will continue to work is another thing.

He also mentioned that the doctor is planning on coming to visit me again in due course. presumably he’ll be in touch with me.

The Mairie from Virlet has been in touch with me too. They need to talk to me about one or two things and will be in touch with me in due course.

Tea tonight was a vegan burger with pasta and veg. That was quite nice, as usual, especially as I put some chili powder in the tomato sauce. That will put hairs in places where I didn’t even realise that I had places.

Having had a late morning today, I can’t sleep now. It’s actually quite late – or early – and it’ll be dawn shortly. I may as well keep on going though because there’s no point going to bed and not sleeping. There’s always something that I can be doing that means that I don’t have to do it another time, but sleeping would be nice.

We’ll have to see how tomorrow unfolds but as long as I can finish my radio programme I’ll be no further behind than I already am.

0

Wednesday 4th January 2023 – MY SHEPHERD’S PIE …

… was absolutely delicious this evening. With the left-over pie filling from Christmas, the left-over mushrooms from the weekend and topped with potato mashed in milk and butter( vegan, of course), and not to mention made with real shepherds, it was really nice with vegetables and gravy.

This is going to be something that I’ll have to work on for the future – although I doubt that it will be every day that I have a mugful of lentil and tofu pie-filling lying around left over from a previous project.

It was much better than the sleep that I had last night, that’s for sure. I have a problem with an ingrowing toenail on my left foot and last night it began to play up – to such an extent that I had first to take off my elastic stocking and seeing that it didn’t resolve the problem, to take off the plaster that was protecting the toe.

That didn’t seem to help very much either, but at some point I managed to doze off into sleep. I ended up with the guys off The Navy Lark, Pertwee, Johnson and someone else. It was my birthday so I’d been round to see if they would come out with me but for some unknown reason the 2 girls didn’t realise that it was my birthday, they were busy or they didn’t want to come or something so in the end it was just the 4 of us. Just as we were leaving Pertwee’s apartment the telephone rang so we nipped back upstairs to see if it was anything for him. No it wasn’t, and nothing to do with any of us. They asked me where I’d like to go so I suggested that in the Chaussée de Wavre down the road there was a good Italian restaurant. Actually there were 2 but I meant a different one. They said “yes, let’s go there”. We walked down the Boulevard towards the Chaussée de Wavre and suddenly ended up in a restaurant, just the 4 of us, no-one else. The place was empty but it looked really nice, nice paintwork, curtains, tablecloths etc, very much the pastoral Italian place. I thought that if the food’s as nice as this place looks we should be OK here. We settled down at a table where there were 4 chairs by a fire.

When the alarm went off at 07:30 I was already awake but I wasn’t in much of a mood to leave the bed. I missed the second alarm too but when the third one went off at 08:00 I was actually up and about. High time that I showed willing.

Once I’d managed to come round into the Land of the Living, whenever that was, I made a start on tidying up in here. I was hard at it too and managed not only to put everything away and file away the pile of papers that had accumulated over the last few months, I wrote a couple of letters that were necessary – a couple of bills had come in at some point and I’d overlooked them.

All of that was enough to make me crash out for half an hour and I didn’t feel any regret because it does look so much better in the bedroom and I won’t be afraid or embarrassed to let people see inside here. In the run up to going away I had rubbish just about everywhere and nothing had improved since I’d been back. Quite the contrary, in fact.

My freidnly neighbourhood cleaner came round at 14:30 and spent an hour here. And she accomplished far more in the apartment in an hour than I have accomplished in all the time that I’ve lived here. She found tons of stuff that I’d missed as well and that was good news. I did wonder where half the stuff in this apartment had gone.

So it’s looking quite nice in the place at the moment. And as she catches up with the arrears it’ll look even nicer. I can’t wait for this place to look as if someone lives here.

Just now I mentioned tea. It really was nice and as I said yesterday, I ought to spend more time looking after myself properly as far as food goes.

And while I was at at, I had another look at my shopping list. I’ve decided that Friday afternoon is when I’ll send off my order to the supermarket and see how I get on with that. I’ll probably order a delivery every couple of weeks and in the meantime ask my cleaner if she’ll pick up some mushrooms for me on the weeks when I don’t pass an order. That was I can keep on top of everything.

And who knows? At some point I might even have another go at going to the shops myself if my walking improves. You never know.

But that’s for later. Right now, much later than I was hoping, I’m off to bed. Whether I sleep or not is another thing because I now have a pain in the other foot. It’s non-stop, isn’t it?

0

Tuesday 3rd January 2023 – I’M NOT SURE …

… whether I’m imagining this but I seem to be moving just a little easier today.

Getting into and out of the bath in order to have a shower didn’t take me as long as it has done in the recent past, but whether that’s because I’ve found a new way to do it or whether it really is easier is something that I haven’t quite worked out.

If it’s anything to do with the amount of rest that I’ve been having just recently, then that might explain something because it was at about 10:45 when I finally arose from the dead today. A little earlier than yesterday of course but seeing that I was actually in bed over 90 minutes earlier, then it’s nothing really that’s worth raising the roof.

Some stuff on the dictaphone too from during the night. The most astonishing thing during the night was like a deltaplane. There were probably 10 or 12 people underneath it pedalling away to get up some speed. All these people cycling, they were in a kind-of foot-forward position, 10 or 12 of them in a V-shape underneath this wing, really low down. Suddenly the rear end lifted off the ground, they went up this ramp and over the sea wall. The thing actually took off and flew. I was there with my camera trying to take photos of it but for some unknown reason the shutter wouldn’t click and I couldn’t take a photo of this most extraordinary thing that was going on during the night.

And then I was in Bangor in North Wales. There was a hurrican blowing absolutely everything about. I was waiting there for the Shearings coaches to turn up to see whether they needed a driver for something or other. There was someone there with a couple of pieces of paper and I noticed that he put one down but it blew away. Eventually I ran after it and caught it. I was actually addressed to me and concerned a coach trip that I’d taken a couple of weeks earlier where I’d had to collect some money off people. I’d collected the money but I couldn’t remember what I’d actually done with it. It was a huge piece of old dot-matrix computer print-out stuff that had been heavily edited and tippexed out or felt-penned out and overwritten, everything, listing the people, how much they should have paid etc. I seemed to remember that what I’d collected had been nothing like as complicated as this. But this wasn’t the right time to read this with all of the confusion etc so I folded it up and put it in my jacket pocket thinking that I’d find a quieter moment when I could concentrate, have another read of it and see what I could sort out and whether I could make head or tail of it.

Apart from having a shower today, I’ve tidied up the bathroom as well. Some stuff has been thrown away and if I could make it comfortably out to the rubbish bins more stuff would be gone too but that will have to wait.

However, having done the bedroom (after a fashion) yesterday and the bathroom today, whatever will I accomplish tomorrow?

The physiotherapist came round this afternoon too and put me through my paces. He seems to think that there’s a slight improvement too in how I’m moving about and has given me a few more tips and hints. Nevertheless, one swallow doesn’t make a summer and I’ve a feeling that if things are ever to improve (which is not certain) it’s going to be a long, long time.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with the left-over stuffing from yesterday. And tomorrow I’m going to have a curry made with the leftovers of everything that is in the fridge. High time that normal service is resumed around here. And then I can get on with ordering what I need for the next round of stuff.

Just one more slice of my Christmas cake to finish as well. That’s for tomorrow of course so I’ll then have to think about what to do next. I have some fruit buns in the freezer that will need defrosting and I’ll also have a think about baking some more bread as I’ve run out of that too and I’m not in a position to go out and buy a tasty baguette for the weekend – one of my rare luxuries.

With all of the foregoing, I can see that I need to begin to organise myself. I can’t sit around and mope and do nothing, even if I don’t feel like doing anything special. I still have to eat and I ought to devote more time to making myself some nice stuff.

But ohhh: For a decent oven instead of the one that I have here. That would make a nice difference.

0

Monday 2nd January 2023 – I’M HAVING ANOTHER …

… late night tonight.

Not as late as it was last night and hopefully not as late a start as … errr … 11:30 this morning when I finally crawled out of bed, but I’m still not in any rush and I’m not really tired either.

And ?I’ve no idea why that might be because this afternoon I vacuumed the bedroom – the first time that i’ve done that for quite a while.

And if that might sound like a surprise, it certainly was as far as I was concerned because I had no idea just how tiring it was to do that. It didn’t take me long to do it, but I had to have a good sit down afterwards, and for quite a while too.

But I digress for the moment. There was tons of stuff on the dictaphone from last night. And surprisingly, several of my little voyages followed on one from another. There was a Carry On film going on last night. Most of the actors of the Carry On team had been arrested by some kind of Greek people going back to traditional times. Charles Hawtrey dressed as a Roman centurion was sent to rescue them. He landed ashore and walked up this valley with all these people lying in wait to capture him. When they leapt out from behind a rock they had the masks and sacks over their own heads rather than putting them over his head, so wondering why they never succeeded in being able to capture him. Of course he was taken aback and burst out laughing while these people were groping around trying to find out what had gone wrong.

Then later on there were these little girls about 8 or 9 dressed up in some kind of green and yellow dress like elves or something, dancing around this kiddies’ playground place where I was standing

And next time it was a similar scene with similar girls except that they were dressed in blue for the next time they ambushed another girl

Back here again and there was another bunch of similarly dressed kids, young girls in elvish clothes in Crewe somewhere round about North Street, somewhere like that, again dancing around on the station this time. And if anyone is wondering, which I’m sure they are, the railway station there was only there for three years – from 1837 to 1840. And yes, that is almost 200 years ago, not that I would remember it.

We still haven’t finished here yet. There was a small boy, about 3 or so, on the petrol station on North Street on the corner of Underwood Lane with another boy, a little older. They had all of these dancers as miniatures on white leather leads. He was holding a bunch of these leads. As I came out he held the leads up to me to show me what he’d caught

As for the final bit, I’m not quite sure what that was all about. But all of that on North Street was really impressively real, especially when it came to going to the Post Office with all of the dancers but I can’t remember much about that but it certainly seemed real to me.

There was a ‘phone call from Leuven this afternoon, but they hung up before I could actually answer the call which was just as well. I wasn’t in any mood to speak to them. And there was also a ‘phone call from the chemists about the bill that I haven’t paid. I shall have to get on with that, and quickly too

But really, that was all of the excitement. All of the Christmas food has now been eaten except for the last few crumbs of the Christmas cake, such as it was. The next two days will see the end of that and then I shall have to bake a loaf of bread.

That reminds me that I need to order some flour, and so I’ll need to send off my order for food from the supermarket. I shall have to do that on Friday too. So I shall have to have a further think just in case there is anything else that I might have forgotten. At €9:95 a delivery, I can’t afford to be doing this every day.

Tea was a stuffed pepper with some really nice stuffing. Not as nice as the stuffing that I made with kidney beans and I shall have to remember that for whenever I have no mushrooms, because that was really something special.

And now I’m off to bed. No alarm, because it’s late and I need to do my best to catch up with whatever it is that’s wearing me out. The physiotherapist is coming tomorrow and Thursday, the cleaner on Wednesday, so I need to have another think about doing some more cleaning so that the place looks at least respectable.

Not that “respectable” is a phrase that anyone might usually associate with me, but here we are.

0

Sunday 1st January 2023 – EVEN AS I …

… type, it’s just coming up to 02:45 tomorrow.

Not that I’m complaining because having spent the last couple of months in such an air of indolence, if I end up doing something I may as well carry on as long as I can. After all, it’s high time that I did some work some time.

Not like last night though. I was busy doing nothing until about 00:30 when I finally staggered off into bed and there I stayed until 11:00 this morning. I’d awoken a couple of times during the night, including having another one of these night sweats that I used to have so regularly.

That was always something that worried me to a certain extent. Whenever I went to the hospital, they used to ask me the same 20 questions, one of which was “do you have night sweats?”. And whether I replied “yes” or “no”, it didn’t seem to make any difference with what they were doing to me so I didn’t know why they ask.

Still, they aren’t going to ask me tomorrow, for the simple reason that I’m not going to be there. Firstly, transport is quite limited today and secondly, I can’t walk that far.

Breakfast this morning was beans on toast with sausage and home-made hash browns followed by toast with mushroom paté. That’s almost all of my holiday food eaten. Just the last of the beans and some of the mushroom paté to finish off tomorrow.

Strange as it might seem, I fell asleep this afternoon. Even after all of the sleep that I had. But I did manage to pair of the music for the next radio programme that I’ll be preparing. Not that I’ll be doing it tomorrow though because I’m having another lie-in to catch up on the fact that it’s both a Sunday and a Bank Holiday today so I’ve really missed the Bank Holiday lie-in.

No neighbours today. In fact no-one disturbed me at all which makes a change considering the way that things have been just recently. It was quite a peaceful day.

Tea was nice – vegan pie with vegetables and gravy. That pie that I made for Christmas was a resounding success and I’l have to remember the recipe. There’s some stuffing left so I might even push the boat out and have a shepherd’s pie – made of real shepherds of course.

Some stuff on the dictaphone from last night too. There was a group of us going out to visit some submarines last night, probably I dunno about 20 of us. We all boarded some kind of pilot boat and set out from shore to the deep water. The sea was quite rough and there was plenty of spray going about. We sailed over a couple of submarines that we could see below us and then a pile of World War II bomber aircraft that had obviously crashed into the sea for scrapping that we saw down below. Then we were out in the bay about a mile or two and it really was rough. We pulled up alongside some kind of submarine. I had to call out the full names of the submarines one after the other so that people could sit in the right kind of position on board this pilot boat. Everyone was becoming soaked to death being taken off their boat onto this submarine thing. There were people with dogs. I wanted to make sure that the dogs were on board first before I moved otherwise that would be chaotic. Eventually we managed to have everyone moving and sorted out

And later I was in Canada last night driving, somewhere down the coast. There was a girl or woman hitch-hiking so I stopped to pick her up. She was going to the local supermarket to buy some stuff So I said that I’d run her as I had time. As we drove a little way along this road to where she told me to turn off I could see the signs for Miramichi so I knew where I was and was able to drive some of the way. I was torrential, pouring down with rain, a downpour. I took her so far. By now this passenger had turned into a guy. We were talking about old cars. He took me to some kind of abandoned street where there was a whole row of derelict houses. He took me down a pathway in between two derelict houses. I could see an old American car that I thought at first was a Peugeot 403 parked there. The closer I looked, I could see that there was probably about a dozen old cars there like an MG Allegro, a BMC MG1100, all kinds of things, all in various stages of disrepair. Some were quite valuable and interesting. Others had been cut up with an angle grinder. We talked about these. I asked if I could take some photos of them. He told me that I could but to leave one particular car out. He was by now this woman again. She asked me why I didn’t come down here every Saturday to have a play with them. That idea appealed to me somewhat for a variety of reasons. By now there were lots of other people down there, members of my family, so I took my camera and asked them all to stand still while I took some photos. It had to be a very long exposure because it was dark. For some reason the photos wouldn’t take. I was there for several seconds with my finger on the shutter trying to take these photos but they were just coming out blurred because the shutter wasn’t clicking off. I had to try on several occasions but nothing that I coud do would help me take some really good photos of these old cars.

So now I’m going to bed, even if I’m not tired. No alarm tomorrow so I’ll wake up when I wake up, unless they ring me from the hospital to ask me why I’m not there. They probably ill do something like that, especially as I’ll be sleeping.

But it’s a silly idea to expect me to be there at 10:20 the day after a Bank Holiday when there’s no transport.

And a Happy New Year to everyone too. I’ve not said anything to celebrate the season because I’ve not been feeling very festive just recently and I’ve had plenty of other preoccupations.

I’m sure that you’ll all understand. It’s difficult for me to summon up any enthusiasm, when I have nothing to be enthusiastic about.

0

Saturday 31st December 2022 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… miserable, rotten day today and how I’m fed up with these right now. Nothing seems to be working my way.

Yesterday was a fairly early night and for a change I had one of the better sleeps that I’ve had just recently. That’s probably the nicest thing that I could say about the events of the day.

There was time during the night for me to go off on my travels too. I was working at the Fish Processing Plant last night and a young family came up with some shellfish. They dumped their bucket on the counter so I showed them how to do it all, explained to them to put it in a sieve and shake the loose soil out and to weigh it on a balance. It came to 5 units of something at €0:39 per unit. There was a little girl there who was quite chatty. I asked her what was her favourite colour. She told me and I gave her a lollipop to suck that was that colour.

And then I went to the library but when I arrived the place was in darkness. I switched on a couple of lights and found that there were plenty of people working away in there, referring to the books. I went to look for a book and ended up with a book about steam locomotives up to 1940 that included a collaboration between the British railway companies and the French railway companies and how they diverged after the invasion of France. I took the book with me to a quiet corner but that meant climbing up a kind-of ladder or shelf things. I realised then why in the past I’d worn a backpack and not carried a bag in my hand. I settled down there to work and all the lights went off again. It looked to me as if I’d been locked in there for the night and everyone had gone home and not thought to find out about where I was.

Once again, I didn’t bother about the alarms and it was … errr … somewhat later when I finally arose from the bed. And from then on I didn’t do much else except slept because that’s how my day has been spent.

There have been a couple of interruptions though. Firstly my mushrooms and peppers came, brought by my neighbour of the fourth floor.

And then another neighbour ‘phoned me up to ask if he could come to see me. I wondered what on earth was going on and why would anyone want to come to see me but it turned out that it was simply for a chat and that’s quite surprising. I’m not usually the kind of person with whom people like to pass the time, not being of a sociable turn.

And so after he left I was still none-the-wiser. One thing that I did notice though was that I could ease myself out of the settee a little easier than I did on Thursday, and also that I seem to be walking slightly easier. Only slightly, but anything is an improvement.

So that’s that really. Nothing else of any importance has happened today and I don’t really care either. I’m going to bed with no alarm set for the morning because it’s Sunday and also a Bank Holiday and so it’s going to be a similar day to today.

But I’ve taken the stuff for brunch out of the freezer so that’s currently defrosting so I won’t be going hungry when I finally awaken – whenever that might be.

0

Friday 30th December 2022 – I HAVE BEEN …

… out and about this evening socialising.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that there’s something going on in the background here in this building that might burst out into the open at some point in the future. Consequently I’ve been out to see one or two people in the building for a meal and for a good chinwag while we work out a cunning plan.

It certainly pays dividends to have the right people on your side at moments like this because you end up on the inside track when it’s all filtering through. But how things develop, we shall have to see because there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.

One of the slips was that I nearly didn’t make it. When it was time for me to go I was actually asleep on the chair in the office and I had quite a job to drag myself out and upstairs.

Not that you would have thought so because I was in no rush this morning to leave my bed. WHen the alarm(s) went off I could hear the howling gale roaring around outside. And so in the words of the old song, REMEMBERING MORNINGS, SHILLINGS SPENT, MADE NO SENSE TO LEAVE THE BED.

It was actually about 09:00 when I finally did leave the bed and for a change I had no pangs of guilt whatsoever. It’s clearly getting to me, this strange mood in which I find myself.

First things first – I had to do the finances for the end of the year to see how I stand. And to my surprise, I can actually afford my little project without making too much of a special effort.

And no-one is more surprised than me. When I embarked on this plan back in early November while I was lying in hospital I thought that I might be pushing out the boat a little too far but apparently not. So let’s get on with it. Unfortunately it doesn’t really depend on me – I’ve done all that I can for the moment and I’m waiting on others to extricate their digits.

When the streets had quietened down for lunchtime, I went out for a play in the pouring rain with Caliburn. He struggled into life again so I took him for another good run, but it’s still not made starting any easier. It sounds to me as if the starter motor must be on its way out. I’ve put the spare battery on charge and at some point I’ll swap them over to see whether that improves things.

In case you are wondering (which I’m sure you are) I’m not going far in Caliburn in busy times because with having no force in my right leg, braking is proving to be something of an issue. I’m having to leave plenty of space in front of me just in case an emergency arises

This afternoon I’ve had to register with URSSAF, the body that deals with minor self-employed people. My “cleaner” (and how embarrassing is it for me to admit that I have one?) is actually employed under these regulations and so I have to pay URSSAF for her services and they deal with all of the paperwork and any tax liability for all of her clients.

There’s some good news about this too (and it’s been a long time since I’ve had any) and that is that because I’m over 65 and suffering from a serious illness, I can actually claim part of my payments to be offset against my income tax. The French Social Security system is certainly up to the mark.

Although it had taken me ages to go off to sleep last night, I must have fallen asleep at some point because there was this huge, long rambling dream about me being in Crewe with STRAWBERRY MOOSE, my three sisters and all their kids and dozens of cats etc. I even ended up at a couple of their houses. I’ve no idea what was going on there but it was one of these things that went on for just about ever.

And then I’d been on my travels later on last night. I bumped into Claude and his daughter and her kids. It turned out that there had been some kind of water fair near where I’d been living and they’d been to see it that morning. They’d even bought some boats and had been sailing around on the canal. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t gone, never mind not seen them. One of the things that was taking place was the throwing of some kind of mechanic’s tool like a set of Stilsons and embedding it in a door. This had all finished but I was throwing one or two things about and having some good results. I felt a shame that I’d missed the early part of this where it had been competitive and I might have had a good score. In the end after much messing around someone gave me a set of Stilsons to try. I threw it and it bounced off the door into the canal. I had to go to fish it out. Eventually I had to leave. It was like leaving one of these spaghetti western type of things with the plains and the shot in the distance, riding on a horse across the plains up the side of a hill into the mountains and disappearing out of the shot.

When the alarm went off for the first time I was with Beth I used to know from my time on the Scottish borders trying to relax her for an interview that she was due to take. I would have loved to know how all of this unfolded.

When I came back from my evening out I watched the football. Y Drenewydd were playing Aberystwyth and the least said about this the better as Aberystwyth were simply swept aside. It was really no contest and how the score was only 1-0 at half-time was one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

But 10 minutes of madness shortly after the restart saw Y Drenewydd rattle in 4 more goals and they scored a sixh later in the game that was the result of some of the worst defending that I have ever seen in my life. Aberystwyth scored a goal out of nothing in the dying minutes of the game but the game was long-since finished by then.

Tomorrow I’m having a little shopping done for me. Some mushrooms and peppers ready for my meals next week but that’s about it. Walking around today, I seemed to be moving a little easier and I might have been tempted to have another go on the bus into town had it not been a day when we might have the crowds out in the streets doing their shopping for the New Year.

And i’ll try to make an effort to haul myself out of bed at some reasonable time too, except that its already much later than it ought to be. I’m going to have to organise myself much better than this.

0

Thursday 29th December 2022 – I HAVEN’T SET …

… any records today for the preparation of a radio programme – except, maybe, for the slowest time on record. It was nothing more than a leisurely stroll through the undergrowth, stopping along the way to pick a few flowers and to smel the air as I wandered along on my way.

It was as you might expect a very leisurely start to the day as well. I didn’t manage to beat the two alarms at 07:30 and 07:45 but to my surprise, and to yours as well I bet, I managed to beat the alarm that went off at 08:00.

And having gone to bed fairly early (at least, for just recently) I had a reasonable night’s sleep once I finally managed to drop off into the Arms of Morpheus. There wasn’t all that much on the dictaphone. I had been in North America. We were talking about cars. My brother (again!) was saying that hire cars had never been particularly good but I explained that that was because they probably hadn’t had a good run out for several years. I told him about the one that I had rented that i’d picked up in New York and then driven non-stop all the way to Colorado and how much better it was once it was thoroughly warmed up. This conversation went on for quite some time. Suddenly my brother had a look at his watch. It was 08:50 and I had to be in work at 09:00 so I had to run all the way down the stairs and out into the car park then get into my car which was a Crown Victoria saloon. It struggled to start but I set off driving at about 50mph across the car park. There was a noise coming from the rear end as if there was a tyre that was flat. I thought to myself “here we go now. I’m definitely going to be late for work if that’s the case. I’ll probably even be late for work if I stop to have a look”.

Now what would I be doing with a Crown Victoria?

So the leisurely stroll through the day was interrupted by a shower at some point early in the afternoon. And clambering into and out of the bath to take a shower is becoming more and more difficult. I’m really going to have to take some dramatic, drastic action about this at some point in the near future otherwise I’ll be restricted to stand-up wahing. That’s no recipe for a long-term programme.

There were a couple of visitors today. Firstly, I have to say, with some kind of sigh of despair, that I’m having a cleaner starting here on Wednesday. The lady upstairs came round and we had a chat with the result that every Wednesday at 14:30 she’ll be round to clean up after me.

It’s a horrible thought having to depend on someone to to the basics of what I ought to be able to do for myself, but the fact is that if something falls on the floor around here, I can’t pick it up and have to go through all kinds of manoeuvres if it’s anything important.

And then the physiotherapist came round. Strangely enough he put his hand on a place on the right-hand side of my lower back and asked if ever it hurt there. In fact, if I walk for any kind of distance or if I sit awkwardly for a while, that was indeed exactly where it hurts.

He reckons that it’s a symptom of how I use (or don’t use) my right knee when I’m moving around or sitting on a chair. But anyway, at least it shows that he has a good idea of what he’s talking about.

While we’re on the subject of making things easier for myself I’ve signed up for a home delivery shopping service from LeClerc. I’ve had a look through the site and I’m busy making some kind of desultory list of what I need ready to have it delivered.

This idea of trying to hitch a ride to the shops with local neighbours hasn’t worked, I can’t go on the bus as well as I would like, and so I have to think of another plan. It might cost much more in the long run but I have to eat. I’m not going to send it off yet because I keep on thinking of other things that I need. And in any case the delivery charges are so expensive that I need to make sure that I have a decent order to make it worthwhile.

The vegan selection there isn’t all that interesting and so I’m going to have to hunt around for a good source of mail-order vegan food. Amazon’s isn’t all that much better so I’m going to have to cast my net wider and wider for that kind of stuff.

Tea tonight was a burger with pasta and veg, and then I came in here where I … errr … crashed out for a while.

Tomorrow I have an appointment for tea and I also have to sort out the money side of things. Things are going to become rather different here over the next few months and I need to make sure that things might happen as I would like them to.

But that’s tomorrow. Tonight I’m off to bed and hopefully I can have another decent sleep. At least I actually managed to accomplish something today. Here’s hoping that I can keep it up.

0

Wednesday 28th December 2022 – I’VE JUST BEEN …

… completely crashed out on my chair in the office. Out of my tree completely.

Anyone would thing that I must have had a hectic day but actually nothing could be farther from the truth. The most strenuous thing that I’ve done today is to eat my taco roll and rice for tea.

Strangely enough, I’d had a lie-in this morning too. never mind the 07:30 alarm going off – I didn’t get out of bed until the wrong side of 08:30 and if I hadn’t had to go for a ride on the porcelain horse I’d probably still be in bed.

During the night I’d been on my travels too, although nothing like the travels of yesterday. We started off at some kind of school, a science laboratory or something. I can’t remember anything like all of this at all but there was someone involved in this who shouldn’t have been involved like a Mafia boss or something. It all had very strange complications. Something had happened in there and they asked me for my opinion of it. That was that seeing as the lab was currently closed for investigation they should develop some kind of rocket-assisted propulsion, use it and get back to sync with it and propose to that Mafia boss some kind of advantage from the invention like a getaway vehicle so he would see a need for the lab to keep on his good side etc without any issues that they might expect once the investigation had gone under way and all things were covered. But there was much more to it than this that I can’t remember.

And then I was round on the Pyms Lane area of Crewe on a few council estates with a bus picking up and dropping off schoolkids. It was lunchtime and there were school buses parked everywhere. It was quite a nightmare to get through. In the end we ended up being on board a dustbin lorry. The driver tried a short cut but there was a bus blocking the end of that so he had to reverse out. I had to get out and direct him. The bus wouldn’t move and a Thames Trader lorry came along and got in the way again. I finally managed to climb back aboard this dustcart. It was brand new and was really nicely trimmed inside. One of the girls said that we out to get the group’s van trimmed like this but I mouthed “new vans” because the vans that they had were old. It was my plan to split the gear into two, first of all the heavy stage gear that would go in one van and then the musicians, their instruments and light stage gear in the other. The one wouldn’t have to be dependent upon the other. That led to a bit of a discussion.

Finally, there had been a bus route that had gone out of town down Victoria Avenue and round to West Street back into town that way. I was trying to have this bus rerouted so instead of going down Wistaston Road it would run down Gainsborough Road past my house. That seemed to be some kind of logical way to go, where there were more passengers but I wasn’t having any luck with that at the moment.

The highlight of my day was chatting to Liz on the internet. And then one of my neighbours rang to ask if I needed anything from the shops – so I now have a kilo of onions. Pretty vital stuff as far as I’m concerned. I can’t live without them.

And that is that. All the excitement of my day today. No reason whatever for me to be so tired, except presumably that I’m not very well. Although I ought to be doing so much better than this.

One of these days I’ll have the answer to all of this, but right now I can’t even work out whet the question is. I’ll just go to bed instead and start again tomorrow. When I’m feeling like this, things can only get better.

0

Tuesday 27th December 2022 – I HAVE BEEN …

… a little more motivated today.

Not by very much, I have to say, but at least I’ve managed to do a couple of things today.

Not that you would have thought so the way the morning unfolded because I spent more of it in bed than I ought to have done. No chance whatever of me leaving the bed when the alarm went off at 07:30. It was much more like 09:00 when I finally broke surface today.

Mind you, that’s not a surprise judging by the amount of travelling that I did during the night. I was running some kind of school but it wasn’t a boarding school, it was a front for something else. However it was such fun having this boarding school teaching the kids English etc that it actually became the principal occupation rather than whatever it was that we were intending to do. We taught the boys and girls poetry. We had a couple of them write out poems. I had to go to print them so I sent one boy down to the printer while I printed them off so he could bring them back. For some unknown reason I couldn’t remember the key combination to print and the screen was too far away for me to read. It took me ages to remember the CTRL+P shortcut to make these things print off

Later on, I stepped back into this dream, took the school up again and these pupils there. One of the pupils had to write out a poem so I let him do it. He was comfortably over the limit of words but it sounded so good that I tried to have him write another. His parents were away with the British Civil Service so he was staying at our boarding school. He sat down to write a second one but was shot in the rigging as he did so and all his possessions that he’d found had all been wiped out and broken

Then later still I was back in there yet again. We were checking photos of these kids at this school. There was one of a boy and girl. They each had a sticker in their ear. One had a green sticker, one had a red sticker in it. The girl’s said “gaffer” or “boss” and I can’t remember the boy’s but it implied that the girl was in charge and he was just her servant or something.

And now for something completely different. When I went into the shed after having been out for a day or two I found this motorbike and sidecar in there. It was an old fore-and-aft V-twin that somehow I had an impression that it was a BMW although it wasn’t. I was trying hard to identify it but but I couldn’t see any maker’s name on it at all. It was black and quite old, probably from the 60s and looked as if Laurent and Xavier had dropped it off on me. It was really the most impressive beast that I’d ever seen. I’d been talking to them about motor bikes a few days ago. I’d no idea how come this had appeared in my shed but it was an unidentified V-twin fore-and-aft. Everything about it said BMW but there was no plate on the engine or on the frame or tank to say what it might be. It was completely blank.

After that I was with a boy and a girl. We ended up at a cottage. There was a huge pile of Mary’s paperwork. While the boy and girl were sitting in front of the fire keeping warm I was going through the paperwork finding all kinds of things. I sorted out as much as I could but there was still a big pile of unsorted stuff. It was 03:00 and I said that I had to go. I said to these two “whatever you do, you mustn’t leave until the fire had gone right down because we don’t want the place burning down”. They agreed to stay. I couldn’t find my guitars. They thought that they had been taken by someone else into the hall so I had to hunt around for them at the very last minute before leaving. It was about 03:15 before I was finally ready to go.

Surprisingly, I stepped back into this dream too. One of the things that we found in these papers was a document dated April 1940, a handbook for farmers issued by the Farmers’ Union. For a start, the back pages were in Dutch so it was intended for an audience of Dutch farmers coming to settle in Nantwich. It included articles like “love your slave” and all kinds of outdated stuff like that which even for the 1940s was extremely near the knuckle. I read it out to these people with me and they were astonished. Then it became time for me to go and do a couple of deliveries and then I’d been told that I could go home after that so I prepared myself to go. But this document was astonishing, 1940 as well and aimed for everyone in the Farmers Union in the Nantwich area.

Once I’d finally managed to drag myself round into the Land of the Living, the first thing that I had to do was to deal with the questionnaire that I had been sent yesterday.

That involved printing it out, completing it, scanning it, scouring around for the supporting documents and then sending off everything. By e-mail of course because I can’t walk down into town and the Post Office.

You’d be surprised how long all of that took to do as well. Nothing is as easy or as straightforward as it might be and I have a variety of good and valid reasons why my information is not as easy or as straightforward as anyone else’s.

Next stop was the bathroom and a shower. And you have no idea how difficult it’s becoming to climb into the bath in order to take a shower. This can’t go on for much longer and something certainly needs to happen in order that I can deal with this, and quite soon too.

There is plenty of rubbish that has accumulated around here and that needed to go to the bins across the road. It was a nice sunny day, if a little windy, so I decided to have a bash. It was a little easier to head that way but I was soon exhausted and the rest of the trip was a nightmare. But I made it in the end.

On the way back I passed by Caliburn and wound him up. He struggled into life so I let him run for a while. While he was ticking over I disconnected all of the ancillary electrical circuits that I wired in when I bought him. I want to see if the battery will charge better with it all disconnected.

We had a few bright sparks while I was doing it, and shame as it is to say it, a job that would usually take me just 2 or 3 minutes with no complications whatever took me half an hour.

The woman who lives upstairs who does cleaning too was in the corridor so I mentioned to her that I’ll be needing her services in due course. She’ll make arrangements to come to see me.

Back in here I sent off that incendiary letter that I’d written a few days ago, mentioning in passing that I’m not going for my appointments next week. Half an hour to the bins is longer than it used to take me to walk to the station. How on earth can I make it as far as Leuven, and on a Bank Holiday too?

The physiotherapist came round later and gave me a little work-out. He thinks that he might have found something and gave me a few instructions about massaging a muscle in my upper thigh.

Tea tonight, power cuts included, was a little different. Stuffed pepper with veg and rice but with no mushrooms I tried a small tin of kidney beans. It certainly made a difference, and a pleasant one too. I’ll try this again.

But I’m running short of onions now and that’s fatal. It looks as if another struggle to the Carrefour is on the agenda at some point.

However that’s for again. Right now I’m going to go to bed for (hopefully) some pleasant dreams. Tomorrow is a day with nothing planned so I might go round to see my neighbour and pay her for the shopping that she did for me last week. I need to pay my debts.

0