Tag Archives: dream

Monday 26th December 2022 – WELL THAT WAS A …

… waste of a morning.

It’s not every Bank Holiday where I set an alarm to awaken me, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but today it was something of a necessity because the physiotherapist was due to come round at 09:00 or so.

But where he got to I really don’t know because he never actually came here and I could have had an extra couple of hours in bed. It would have been much more comfortable than the hour or so that I spent curled up asleep on the chair.

It’s not really a surprise though that I crashed out because I didn’t go to bed until after midnight (I was too buy letting it all hang out, I suppose) and I was wide awake at 07:00.

Some stuff on the dictaphone too from during the night. I can’t remember very much about the first one but I was off on my travels again. I should have gone by car but I ended up walking but that’s all that I remember about that

Later I was working on my old Cortinas. I had the blue one and the green one somewhere and I wanted to finish things. I had the engine out and everything. When Nerina came home I asked her if she knew where I could find a rotisserie from, where I could drive the cars in and tilt them up and down to weld them while I was standing up rather than lying on my back underneath. She couldn’t see the advantages of this even though her mother worked buying and selling garage equipment but the advantages of that for me were evident. Of course my father was involved as well. We all went out of the house and got into one of my Cortinas to go somewhere. This discussion about this rotisserie went on and on and on.

As it happens, a rotisserie was high on my list when I was thinking about equipping my garage to rebuild the cars in there. I’d seen a home-made one where the pivots simply bot into the chassis where the bunmpers would normally fasten and you can spin cars round so you can weld on them standing up. When I used to weld cars back in the 80s, I’ve done far more than my fair share of lying on my back welding up underneath a car.

But all of that was a very long time ago.

This morning I didn’t do anything at all except sleep, and I didn’t really do all that much more this afternoon. Certainly not a radio programme.

There has been a ‘phone call though. I mentioned a few days ago that I have a project on the go that if it actually comes off it would be a fantastic coup. And judging by the ‘phone call and the mail that I had to follow it up, it looks as if it actually might heppen too.

There’s a lot of water that needs to flow under the bridge though, and it won’t happen overnight , but things are certainly moving forward.

Tea tonight was another slice of pie with vegetables and gravy and it is certainly impressive. There’s plenty more that’s gone into the freezer for sometime in the future and it seems to me that the quicker I try to empty the freezer, the quicker I end up filling it again. Emptying the freezer is rather the reverse of Cleaning the Augean stables.

Perhaps I should also have mentioned the football this afternoon. Connah’s Quay Nomads v Y Fflint.

Played in a hurricane on a swamp, it was always going to be the kind of game where the ball in the air would be blown out of the ground so you would keep it on the floor and it would stick in the mud. Not a game for the purists and a rather sad throwback to how things used to be in the league 20 years ago before the money from the national side’s cup runs was ploughed back into a dramatic upgrade of facilities.

Even though Akpa-Akpro had a fantastic effort well-saved by Andy Firth early in the game, there was only ever going to be one team in this game and it was all a question of time.

Nevertheless it took the Nomads long enough to break down the Flint defence and the two late goals that the Nomads scored were no more than they deserved.

But the Nomads need to do much better than this if they want to push TNS closer for the title. There is nothing much wrong with their defence particularly since they signed Andy Firth from Glasgow Rangers to stand between the sticks, but the lack of firepower up front has been a worrying factor for several years. The only time they ever mounted a serious challenge was when they had Jamie Insall up front but those days have long-since gone too.

And so have I too. I’ve gone to bed ready to make a new start tomorrow. I have a couple of things to do and I need a good sleep to do it but I’m still not as well as I have been. I’ve been going downhill dramatically for quite a while and I’m not able to pull myself back up.

Sunday 25th December 2022 – A MERRY CHRISTMAS …

… to all of my readers. And no mention of the public conveniences on Crewe Bus Station this year because they are just a dim and distant memory.

There was a story going round about how someone filmed a film about a nuclear explosion where the explosion was created without any CGI whatsoever. It’s a little-know fact that the aftermath of the nuclear explosion was filmed in Crewe Town centre, also without any CGI. The modern shopping centre in Crewe that I remember being built when I was a small child has how been completely flattened in an act that even the Luftwaffe would have been proud to accomplish.

Talking of the Luftwaffe, another little-known fact is that in 1941 there was a Luftwaffe attack on Crewe that caused £14,000,000 worth of improvements.

Anyway, I digress.

Today I have emulated my namesake the mathematician and done three-fifths of five-eights of … errr … nothing. It is Christmas Day after all and with nothing whatever happening anywhere that I can go to see, there wasn’t really much point in doing anything else.

In fact my most exciting activities took place during the night. I was involved in another fight or argument with my brother over all kinds of stuff, usually about breakfast food. I ended up insisting that I was going to have what I wanted to have and it was too bad if he didn’t like it or wanted it himself. We were in a big house and it was full of people and pets and very unhygenic sitting there trying to eat this breakfast cereal in the middle of all of this was extremely uncomfortable. I wished that I was somewhere else without having to put up with all of this nonsense that I was having.

Later on I was trying to bake some bread or something. In the end it ended up erupting like sourdough and going all over the place making an absolute mess. It took me ages to clear it all up away from everywhere. Then I threw it into the fire as a way of disposing of it. It was awful, a horrible mess. At that moment there was a knock on the back door. I went to open it and the 4 little girls who had been to dancing class came in. They went to sit in the living room. I thought “thank God I managed to dispose of the worst of the stuff”. I asked them how they got on. The eldest one who was about 11 said that she hadn’t done very well. She’d ended up biting people. I thought that I’d find a quiet moment and have her sit on my knee and she can tell me all about it. I’ll see if I can’t come up with some suggestions about what the problem is.

Finally there was me, the parents of Zero and someone else round at Zero’s’s bungalow somewhere. We’d all been working and were quite dirty. The question of a bath came up. Zero’s mother made a bath in the living room by the fire but told me not to go in it until the agenda was covered. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. We prepared to go into the bath. I went to go in but she said that the agenda wasn’t covered yet, which probably meant that people could still see. I said that I’d wait. She passed me a couple of items of clothing,including a T-shirt. She asked me to put the T-shirt in the bin as it was dirty on both sides. I went outside to the bin to put the T-shirt away.

How many times is this now that a dream has shuddered to a halt without Zero putting in an appearance when the rest of her family has been there? Someone is trying to tell me something and I wish that I knew who it was and what was going on. Somehow, though, members of my family manage to rear their ugly heads uninvited and I can’t seem to shake them off.

For brunch I had toast with beans, sausage and potato cakes followed by chocolate cake and for tea I had my vegan pie with veg and gravy.

So that’s it. I hope that you all had a more exciting day than I did. Tomorrow I have a few things going on, not the least of which is the physiotherapist coming to see me. I’m supposed to be radioing as usual but not on your Nelly when it’s a Bank Holiday. I’ll still have to be up early though but I shall be having a little rest at some point. I had a brief 15 minutes doze before tea and I don’t mind having another tomorrow.

Saturday 24th December 2022 – I WAS REALLY …

… late going to bed last night. That’s because before retiring last night I changed al lthe bedding.

And while it smelled rather damp, it was beautiful to nestle down into something clean and comfortable for a change and I must do this more often.

It therefore goes without saying that I took no notice whatsoever of the alarms this morning and it was round about 09:40 when I finally crawled out of bed. And quite right too.

Some of the morning was spent tidying up in the kitchen. Not very much though. I could do about 10 minutes and then I’d have to go and sit down for an hour to recover and, on at least one occasion, crash out for 20 mintes.

There was a pile of plastic, metal and glass rubbish that needed to be taken down to the bins. I put it in the new shopping trolley and set off. And I do have to say that that’s not going to work as well as I would like either. In fact it took me over half an hour and it’s only just across the road from here.

However, when Laurent from the radio came round to see me the place did actually look better and I felt much more comfortable in having people round.

That’s just the living room and part of the kitchen though. The rest is pretty appalling. I’m hoping that Social Services will contact me soon about having some assistance because I can’t manage on my own.

But I’ve had another ‘phone call. A different physiotherapist wants to come to see me on Tuesdays and Thursdays in addition (apparently) to the first one who wants to come round on Mondays. So what’s kindled his excitement?

Tea was a baked potato with veg and a couple of these small breaded quorn fillets that are really nice. And on that subject the delivery from Amazon with the vegan food in it turned up today too. So mushroo pâté on my toast for breakfast tomorrow.

Some stuff on the dictaphone too. I was retiring from work (and that’s a recurring dream, isn’t it?). With getting everything ready I wanted to go to say goodbye to the people with whom I used to work in Chester years ago in the early 70s. I recalled that I’d bumped into one of them a couple of years ago telling him that I was thinking of moving on. He said not to forget to call in. It was a fraught journey. I had to catch a train to Chester that arrived at about 08:20 but with all of the roadworks and diversion and new one-way systems it took an age and an age to actually make our way across the city to Stanley Place where the insurance company used to be situated. I thought at one time that we would never ever arrive. Some woman had come with me, a girl, and I was talking to her about it. I kept on having flashbacks to remember different bits of this story. All the time we were walking I was gradually piecing things together about how it had come about that i’d met this guy again after all these years and he’d invited me back. Even then I couldn’t recall the complete story and we were still wandering around the city trying to find a way to reach where we wanted to be with things having changed so much that I hardly recognised anything of the route these days.

And then it all became confusing. The next thing on the list was that I was back in this dream again – but which dream again – about going on this camping thing. We’d stopped at the side of the road to have something to eat and to check all of our possessions. By now the vehicle in which we were travelling had become a 4-seater saloon rather than a 2-seater van with a guy sitting in the back. We couldn’t find half of the stuff. Some of it was missing etc and we couldn’t find anything that we needed for certain tasks. The woman suddenly remembered that on one occasion we’d even taken the doors off the railway carriages to construct a shelter. I said “for God’s sake don’t mention that to anyone or you’ll have no idea what they are going to take off. Let’s hope that no-one else on this trip actually remembers .

A little later I remembered some more of this other dream that I’d woken up back into. It was about me showing some people around the southern part of Brussels. There was a mural on a wall about someone who had been killed in a trapeze accident. We ended up back in my apartment which was a tip even worse than it normally is. I’d made these people a coffee but it was as weak as hell, there was no sugar etc. We decided that we would set off somewhere to go on a camping trip, me and a woman sitting in the front of this Escort van and a guy who was sitting in the back of it. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember now.

So I was clearly becoming all mixed up in my wanderings last night, which is no surprise.

It’s Christmas Day tomorrow and I want to apologise in advance for my lack of festive spirit. I’m not feeling in the least bit Christmassy with all of this going on right now and it’s all too much of an effort.

Rest assured though that I appreciate all of your help and support and wish you all a very Merry Christmas, even if I’m not feeling much like it myself.

Friday 23rd December 2022 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… miserable, depressing, dismal day today.

This is probably the worst that I’ve had for years. Not only did I fail dismally to beat the second alarm, I have spent most of the day curled up on my seat not moving, and even asleep for considerable periods.

The fact is that moving is so much effort. That’s part of the problem. Instead of things easing up the more I walk, things seem to be deteriorating. Being in an awkward position with my right leg, I now have aches in my right foot that weren’t there before.

And when I try to ease the knee joint, I just have a pain in my back. So I’ve no idea what’s happening here.

And just walking around is becoming pretty much impossible. I may well have treated myself to a shopping trolley but I wonder if I’m going to have the opportunity to use it.

Having said yesterday how much of a better night I’d had and how much I was looking forward to another one, it goes without saying that last night was quite miserable and is probably the reason why I was so exhausted.

Although I was asleep early, I wasn’t asleep for long and spent several hours later tossing and turning around trying to make myself comfortable – without any appreciable degree of success. It ws for that reason that I wasn’t rushed to leave the bed this morning, although any excuse will probably do.

As for work and the like, all I’ve done today is to have a shower, cut my hair (the first time since late September) and ice my sponge cake. The icing didn’t work particularly well, but then again it never really does. I don’t have the hang of doing the icing. However with having let the cake cool down overnight, at least the icing didn’t go all over the place and slide off.

The chemist came as well and brought me a couple more injections. With there being an increased doze, the price has gone through the roof.

Tea tonight was pasta with falafel and it was quite delicious as usual. The freezer is slowly thinning out and if I’m not careful I might even be able to fit these frozen carrots in there instead of leaving them in the ridge’s freezer compartment. I’m really going to have to buy a different, bigger freezer.

Next plan was to type out the dictaphone notes. I was somewhere in Europe planning on travelling. It was the mdweek sometime and there were a few people loitering around who were travelling too. We ended up standing by a bus stop somewhere in the street. Far below us, lower down in the street, a door opened and a train came through. I said to these people that if they want to catch a train they were standing in the wrong place. This is a bus station. We all picked up our things and moved a bit further down the hill where this other group of people were waiting. There was a huge crowd there. This train pulled in and I swarmed on board. I couldn’t see any of these other people so I wondered if they were all having some kind of fun at my expense or whether they were still going by bus regardless or something. I felt that I was the only one of this group of people who had been together at the beginning who had actually boarded. Someone else said something and I realised that a girl and her daughter had boarded the train too. The train set off and I was having to stand going to Montreal, that I had to stand until 23:00 tomorrow. For some reason we ended up around a Council estate in Crewe, the Brookhouse Drive estate, on foot. We were heading towards another bus stop. I was taking this girl and her daughter. I knew all the short cuts so I was taking them through these short cuts on this council estate. She said “we’ll get well ahead of all the others by the time we reach the bus stop”. We were having to go somewhere like Wybunbury or Audlem or Market Drayton. I couldn’t remember the times of the buses but I thought that even if there wasn’t a direct bus we could take a bus from here that would take us to Nantwich and then work our way on from that way to see how we could progress. But I was certain that we’d make progress and quite rapidly too going like this.

Later on I stepped right back into this dream again. We’d been on this train and I alighted at some point with this woman and her daughter. We were walking towards the bus stop to catch the bus to go the rest of the way. I remember hoping that my leg would hold out because I was starting to have these pains and cramps in my right leg again, the type that I have been having. I thought that this isn’t really the time to go down with a cramp like this when we are in between bus stops in a rush to catch the bus to take us further on.

And then I can’t remember very much about this but there was a woman who had run down some animal or something. She was extremely distraught. Some of my friends from Canada were in it but I don’t know why or what they were doing

Finally we had football. Y Fflint v Caernarfon. Y Fflint are on a woeful run despite having looked really good at the start of the season. They took the lead early in the game but gradually Caernarfon pulled themselves back into the game and equalised after 55 minutes.

But what a different story it might have been had the two stonewall penalties that I would have awarded to Y Fflint had been awarded by the referee. In fact I was convinced that there were times when I was convinced that the referee was officiating at a different game to the one that I was watching.

With 20 minutes to go, a couple of substitutions on either side ignited the game and we were treated to a really exciting spell of football as the game swung from one end to the other. A deciding goal was well on the cards but it was all a case of who would score it as either team looked quite likely.

Y Fflint’s centre forward from the Cote d’Ivoire had missed a couple of good chances and when another of his attempts was well-blocked by Josh Tibbetts in the Caernarfon’s goal just as we came up to injury time, I thought “here we go again” but Akpa-Akpro stuck out a foot and just about managed to divert it back to the far post where Larnell Cole sidefooted it into the net.

So justice was done because Y Fflint were in my opinion the better side and deserved something from the game, especially after some of the decisions that went again them.

Tomorrow I have to summon up some energy and tidy up as I’m expecting visitors. I’ve no idea how I’m going to do this after the past couple of days but I’ll have to do my best. Let’s hope that my best is good enough.

Thursday 22nd December 2022 – WHAT CAN BE EASIER …

… than buying something, arranging for it to be picked up and shipped to a different address?

Absolutely everything, by the looks of things.

This blasted sunroof that I ordered, paid for and collected (one of my reasons for going to Canada just now) and then arranged to be taken away and delivered to France by a freighting company has now turned up back at the point of collection.

The box has been opened too and all of the special packaging that kept it safe from damage all the way from the manufacturer is “missing”.

It already took 6 weeks for it to be collected by the freighter and then it was away for just about a week or so before it ended up back.

The story (for what it’s worth) is that Customs had to inspect it before it went on board the aeroplane (I’m not quite sure why) and as a result it missed its flight. The freighter will “arrange for it to be picked up again” but we shall see about that.

What is quite upsetting is that it’s no longer in its secure factory packaging, and sending a glass sunroof by air mail without the proper packaging is going to be somewhat problematic.

This shoud have been something sooooooo easy to arrange but that’s not the case. I keep on saying that I ought to stop doing things for other people as I find it so stressful but I always manage to find myself “suckered in” because it’s “so easy”. But for reasons that I don’t understand, it never is.

At least I’d had a decent sleep for a change. I remembered being awake for two or three moments here and there but not for any significant time. Once again I didn’t manage to beat the second alarm but there wasn’t all that much in it. I suppose that that’s optimistic for the way things have been just recently.

Once I’d come round into the Land of the Living I made a start on the radio programme that I wanted to prepare for today. There were several interruptions though so I didn’t set any records today.

Firstly, I have joined the rank of the Old Biddies. My shopping trolley has arrived so I had to go downstairs to collect it, and then assemble it. But although it makes me feel as if I’m about 100, it’s safe to lean on when I’m walking and gives me a little support here and there.

It’s quite large too so doing some shopping in the town may well prove to be a little more easy in the future. We’ll have to see after Christmas when I’ll make another foray down to the Carrefour.

Liz was on line too so we had another long chat, and then I prepared the onions and garlic and mixed up all the filling for my pie. It needs to be cooled before I can put it in the pie shell so I thought that if I were to do it early, it would have time to cool down.

And then, rather regrettably, I dozed off for half an hour at some point too.

This afternoon I’ve had a baking fit, but not, I have to say, with a great deal of success.

My pastry wasn’t up to all that much. I’m out of practice, I reckon, and it wouldn’t roll out properly. It ended up as something of a bit og a bodge but it worked.

Next was to make a chocolate sponge cake. That rose quite nicely in the oven but then it collapsed again in the centre. However it’s better than nothing and I’ll cut it in half, join the two halves together with a layer of jam and then ice it. That’s going to be my Christmas cake for this year. It’s the best that I can do.

Next stop was a pile of fruit buns, and I forgot that I had no bananas. Nevertheless, that lot looked as if it might have worked.

Finally, I had a go at making potato cakes for breakfast over the Christmas period. These aren’t a great success but then I’ve never had very much luck with these. But making them in little silicone muffin cases in the air fryer was a good idea.

It was while all of this was going on that I had to deal with the fall-out from this parcels delivery and it’s all very confusing.

For tea tonight, I had something different. While I was searching through the stores I came across a couple of packets of instant chick-pea curry. I tried one with some rice and veg. It was different and I’ve tasted better, but things like this need to be used. I tried to make myself an ad-hoc naan bread to try with it. And while that wasn’t a success either, it wasn’t disagreeable.

There were a couple of things on the dictaphone too from last night. I was on board a ship serving as a crew and the telephone rang. Someone answered it although it was my job to do so so I took it to interrupt him. In the end he said the name of the ship and he said my name and then passed the ‘phone over to me. It was the Institute of Diabetics inviting me to a meeting. Basically I had no interest whatever going to see the Institute of Diabetics. It turned out that these were taking place on board a submarine and I had absolutely no interest whatever in going on board a submarine either but this other sailor had. He was having to work out his plans etc to see how he could possibly fit it all in etc in order to negotiate an invitation for himself. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than going on board a submarine for something like this.

Later on there was a girl called Dianne, a Ukrainian girl with black hair who wanted a portfolio of photos taking. I’d looked on a website and she’d done plenty of portfolios before but I couldn’t actually see what it was that she needed. I was wondering whether it was a case of her redoing some of the earlier ones. I had a sort-around and tried to get a few things together but we had an appointment at 20:00 that was quite important, a contentious one. I had a few things to finish and round about 19:40 I’d done that so I said to Nerina “we have 20 minutes before this appointment so while I make a few sandwiches, can we talk about our plan”. She was puzzled about the sandwiches so I asked what we were going to eat. It seemed that she hadn’t thought anything about sandwiches at all or any food. She could think vaguely about where she could find a sandwich but not anyone else. I could see that this whole situation was going to turn into a nightmare. I knew that the night before I’d been out somewhere. It was really late when I was coming home, in the small hours of the morning. As I walked past Warner’s shop in Shavington there were some lights on and some people in the shop. I stuck my head in and opened the door to ask if they were open. They replied “not really” but what did I want? I just had a bar of chocolate just to get me home. They sold me a Mars bar. This was when I first started thinking about thse photos, when I was on my way home with my Mars bar after that. The rest took place the following day. But I was amazed that no-one else was prepared or had a plan or had anything organised – all down to me again and I only had 20 minutes. It was plenty of time for what I wanted to do but for what everyone else wanted it was nothing at all and it was going to be chaos.

Later on I got back into that dream about Dianne with the two “n”s. That flared up again from the very beginning and we went through that again.

Strangely enough I once met a girl, many years ago, called Dianne (with two “n”s and long black hair) but she was from South Asia somewhere like the Philippines or Indonesia, somewhere like that. Whatever would she be doing suddenly making an appearance in my travels?

So now I’m going to try to have another early night. I’m pretty much ready for this too and see if I can manage another decent sleep. Tomorrow I’m going to have a shower and change my bedding, and then I have a neighbour to see. I have to pay her for the stuff that she bought for me the other day. I’d better have a really good clean-up.

Wednesday 21st December 2022 – I’VE HAD A …

… horrible, really horrible day today. In fact I’ve spent most of it fast asleep on my chair with no enthusiasm to do anything and much of the stuff that I planned to do today has remained undone.

It actually started off quite well too. Although I didn’t beat the second alarm to my feet, There wasn’t much in it and I was good and ready if the pharmacist decided to bring me my injections. But, as you might expect, she didn’t come past.

Someone who did come past though was one of my neighbours saying that she was going shopping. I passed an order for potatoes, carrots, sprouts, pears and clementines. It cost a fortune but now I’m set up with everything in the fruit and veg line for the next two or three weeks.

In the time that it took for her to go and come back, I was flat out asleep on the chair in here. I really have never felt so awful as I did this morning and I’ve no idea why. I reckon that the effects of yesterday were just far too much for me.

This afternoon I’ve been asleep for quite a while too but when you look at what I’ve managed to do, it looks impressive nevertheless. Like tidying up, for example. The place looks a little better now that I’ve cleared a few things away.

And a big load of washing too. Surprisingly that’s all up-to-date now and it’s been a while since I’ve been able to say that.

1kg of sprouts and 1.5kg of carrots took some peeling and blanching, but they are all done now too. The sprouts went into the freezer but there was no room for the carrots so for the moment they are in the ice box in the fridge. It’s not ideal but I wasn’t going to miss out on the opportunity to stock up.

For my Christmas meal, seeing as I don’t have anything special, I’ve decided that I will make a nice pie. So I put a cup full of lentils in the slow cooker. When they boiled up, I drained and rinsed them and put them back with some tofu and a pile of herbs and some garlic. They will marinade on a slow heat overnight and should be delicious.

Tomorrow I’ll fry some onions and add the tuff from the slow cooker and then add porridge oats to bind it all together. And when it’s cooled, I’ll make a nice tasty pie. But I can’t find the pie dish that I want to use and I have a feeling that I might have to invent something for that.

Ingrid telephoned me too and we had a chat. Not quite a Rosemaryesque chat but a long and interesting one nevertheless. She’s just as appalled as everyone else about what went on in the hospital in Leuven.

So this afternoon, I’ve been a really busy little beaver despite the fact that I didn’t feel at all like it and didn’t think that I’d done all that much.

Although I didn’t make any progress with the radio programme that I’ll be trying to prepare tomorrow, I managed to find the energy to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I started off taking a coach tour party to Blackpool. We made it as far as a motorway service area where we’d stop for half an hour although I forgot to tell everyone that it would be just half an hour. It was so tight in there that I had to get off the coach, shunt the other coaches around so I could find myself into a place to park. So there I was, heaving and mauling on these coaches. Eventually I put mine into a decent place. There was a guy with me who was looking at it. I said “it’s a good job that I can do this on my own, isn’t it? I used to be married”. We had a little chat. Gradually the passengers started to drift back. We ended up having another talk about monsters and that kind of thing, how gruesome and everything these slimy creatures were, the kind of stuff that I wouldn’t normally print on my blog but I seem to be doing it a lot just recently.

This next one is a story about a group of kids and adults, all extremely wealthy except 2 boys. 2 young girls move into their neighbourhood and the two boys seem to be more interested in the new girls than these women and girls who had been here before in this rich type of scenario. It starts to cause a load of problems.

So tomorrow I’ll be having a go with making my pie. I also have to make some more fruit buns as there are only enough for breakfast tomorrow. What i’m going to do with the ones that I don’t eat quickly I really don’t know as there is now no room in the freezer.

But that’s a problem for tomorrow. Right now I’m going to bed even if it is early. It’s been a horrible day – the kind that you just want to switch off and start again. But I’ve had a quick taste of my simmering pie filling and it is rather special. provided that I can find a pie dish it should work out really well.

Here’s hoping.

Tuesday 20th December 2022 – THERE I WAS …

… deep in the arms of Morpheus observing some kind of exciting spaghetti western and someone rings the front doorbell.

Still, serves me right for deciding to have a lie-in this morning instead of springing to my feet with alacrity.

Last night, I’d even gone to bed reasonably early as well and was looking forward to a decnt 8 hours sleep but it never quite worked out like that. There was the usual tossing and turning that seems to have become a regular feature of the way things are these days.

So having kept my doorbell-ringer hanging on the door for several minutes while I threw on some clothes, I staggered (and I DO mean “staggered”) down the stairs to find the pharmacist who had brought me my medication. The doctor had dropped off the prescription at the pharmacy yesterday.

My injections haven’t come yet. They need to be ordered specially and will arrive when they arrive. But I’ll make sure that I’m up early tomorrow.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I had plenty of things that I needed to do but it didn’t quite work out like that today. There’s a project, quite a serious one, that I have on the go and about which I’ve alluded in the recent past and that has occupied much of my day today.

It’s something that if it comes off it will change my life dramatically for the better and so I’m keen to push things along as quickly as I can. So when people want to talk to me about it, I’m not going to be obstructive.

One thing that I promised to do was to try to go into town and the Carrefour supermarket at the port. So despite the heavy rain, I made an attempt.

Getting to the bus stop itself just 10 metres from the front door was enough to convince me that this was not one of my better ideas, but I pushed on all the same.

Hauling myself up onto the pavement by clinging onto the wall, I managed to board the bus. I even managed to alight but the walk to the supermarket, all 50 metres of it, was a nightmare.

Luckily I managed to find almost everything that I needed, except the vegan mushroom pâté. And then the walk back to the bus stop, even though it was only half the distance, was dreadful. When the bus came to pick me up and take me home, he stopped well away from the kerb and his wheelchair ramp wasn’t working. And so you can imagine how much of a problem it was to board the bus to come home.

That finished me off. The walk back from the bus to home even more difficult and I was glad to return home in the end. I had to have an energy drink to recover but at least I had my frozen peas and beans, tomatoes, taco rolls and a couple of other things too. There were a few carrots and sprouts too so when I’d recovered somewhat I peeled, diced and blanched them. They are now in the freezer freezing.

Rosemary and I had a chat too and the question of on-line shopping came up. And to my surprise Amazon came up with my mushroom pâté as well as a few other interesting things so I assembled an order. I even ordered one of those wheeled shopping bag things, thinking that I might be able to move a little better if I didn’t have things to carry and I had something on which I can lean.

There was plenty of stuff on the dictaphone too from the night. This was something of a nightmare. I was in a kind-of swamp and there were all these primeval small creatures in there that were trying to eat all of the human beings who were trying to wade their way through it. Eventually we managed to extricate ourselves from it and sit in trees etc while these small creatures prowled around underneath. Then these other animals started to appear out of the shrubbery when it was dark and we watched the animals start to attack those and carry them off into a quiet corner where they could eat them. In the end we were finally called to where we were supposed to be. We had to make a run for it and eventually reached some kind of safety. But this was a nightmare and horrible while we were sitting in these trees watching all of this going on.

And then we had a dream where I’d lost the use of my legs but had to go into town. I’d somehow got on the bus and bought some stuff and was on my way back. The bus did an emergency stop. A few of us went flying up the bus but held onto our possessions etc. When the bus finally stopped we were greeted with a round of applause for having been so good at doing that. Interestingly, that felt as if it was 03:00 in the middle of the night when I was trying to go to sleep rather than in the morning when it was supposed to have been and I was up and about going shopping with the bus and my things.

Later on we were back at Nantwich Grammar School again. Me, my German friend and a group of others. The whole system had changed. There wasn’t the assembly followed by the lesson – I don’t know what they were doing but we could see that everything had changed since our day. Even the school uniform was a kind-of pale green blazer. We decided that we weren’t going to take any interest in this. We would go and play cricket on the tarmac at the back of the gym. A group of us, 3 or 4 of us, set off and walked down the boys’ corridor past all the boys sitting in the changing rooms and out of the back. Suddenly this golf club came whizzing past. it was my brother playing golf. My German friend was going on about how it was obvious that all these changes about sport – no-one was playing any sport or games any more. It’s obvious that the school playing fields are going to be the next to go and the kids won’t have anywhere to play, never mind whether they wanted to or not. My German friend took up a position at some invisible stumps, my brother kept wicket and I took a nice long run up. I suddenly set off on my run down to what was the other wicket and my legs just gave way underneath me. I fell flat on my face.

When I awoke a little later I had an enormous pain in my knee. That was strange.

later still I was back on the taxis last night. For some unknown reason I awoke really early and Nerina was organising one or two things. There were a couple of jobs in so I said that I would go and do them. First of all I had to go round to see the girl who drove for us in the daytime, if she was still ill. She lived in High Street, n°3. I drove round there in this beautiful sunny morning really early. There were 2 surnames on the door that were the same. I didn’t know which one so I pressed one of them but she answered. I could see that her issues, a lot of it was physical, some of it was psyschological. I had the impression that she just had a great depression so I started to talk to her to see if I could be of any help

Finally I was in the middle of a spaghetti western with the goodies shooting up the baddies and the baddies slowly disappearing into this old wooden shack like in any good Clint Eastwood film. There were a couple of women one of whom was holding a stash of jewels for one of the baddies but another woman found it and managed to hide it under her clothing. When it wame to the time for them all to leave she made sure that she had the fastest and best horse and began to out-ride the other one and make good her getaway. Just as we were getting to the climax when the front doorbell rang. It was the pharmacist.

But as you can see, my walking difficulties are now working their way into my dreams. That’s rather a worrying thought.

Tea was a stuffed pepper, and there’s enough stuffing left over for a taco roll, now that I have some. And now I’m off to bed. I want to be early because I might have the pharmacist coming round in the morning and I need to be ready. Things had all the potential of being rather embarrassing this morning if I’m in a state of only semi-awareness.

Monday 19th December 2022 – APART FROM A …

… fruit bun thing at about 10:30 I’ve had nothing to eat all day until about 22:00 – and then it was a packet of crackers.

When it was teatime I was chatting to Liz on the internet but never mind, I can wait for half an hour. That’s what friends are for.

And the moment that we finished, Rosemary rang me (I’m convinced that she has a camera installed in this apartment, God help her!) and we had another one of our marathon ‘phone calls. By the time we finished, I was too tired to cook anything. I’ll be off to bed very shortly.

It’s actually been quite a busy day today, not the least activity of which was during the night. I was later going to bed than I had anticipated but even so I was awake a couple of times during the night and by 04:45 I’d given up completely.

When the alarm went off at 06:00 I surprised myself by actually leaping out of bed (well, maybe not exactly but you understand what I mean) which considering just how difficult it has been just recently to raise myself from the dead at a normal time, is pretty astonishing.

After having had the medication and checked my mails and messages, I sat down to deal with the radio programme today.

No records were broken today – in fact, far from it. I had a break for about half an hour when I went for a shower as I’m having visitors later, and then the events that I mentioned towards the end of last week are starting to unwind and it won’t be long before my active involvement will be requested. I need to be prepared.

Once the radio programme was completed I actuallly fell asleep for a short while and then had to wait around for the doctor to arrive.

Trailing his student around with him, he came to examine me and to give me some advice about how things might unfold. e had quite a chat about a few other things too, more of which anon.

Later on, the Social Services department telephoned me. The woman to whom I spoke gave me a couple of phone numbers whom I need to contact so that I can have some assistance about the place. That’s a job for tomorrow as it was rather late in the afternoon.

A short while later, the physiotherapist came round. The doctor had contacted him too. He thinks that the problem lies in my thighs and hips and he gave me some exercises. He’ll be back in a week to see how I’m doing.

Once everyone had finished with me I could turn my attention to the dictaphone. There wasn’t an awful lot on there from last night. There was something about a block of flats where there was a place to sunbathe. Someone was pointing this out from quite a height, looking down onto it. We could see that a large glass carafe of water or something had fallen obviously from a great height and smashed to smithereens right in this place. If anyone had been sunbathing there they would have had the full weight of all of that right on their head.

Having spoken to Liz and Rosemary I’m now ready for bed. No Welsh lesson because we’re on holiday but if I remember, I’m going to do some revision.

What else I’m going to try to do is to catch the bus into town and try to find some frozen food to tide me over. It would have been a good day to take Caliburn out for a run with the temperatures having warmed up dramatically to 10°C today but there just wasn’t the time available and I’ll have to try that some other time.

Not right now though because I’m off to bed. Anyone would think that I’ve had an exhausting day but it’s just the way that things are going right now when I’m becoming tired out for no good reason. Let’s see how things unfold tomorrow.

Sunday 18th December 2022 – JUST IN CASE …

… you were wondering, it was another miserable night last night.

It was actually fairly early when I went to bed and I managed to go to sleep fairly quickly but once I awoke later, then that was that. Staying in bed until 10:05 is all ver well, but not really if you’ve spent much of the preceding 6 hours wide awake.

Sleeping pills may well be the option for that of course, as someone will probably remind me, but the only pleasure that I have out of life at the moment is what goes on during the hours of when I’m asleep and I don’t want to miss out on that.

And while we’re on the subject of what goes on during the night … “well, one of us is” – ed … I was out walking across London last night. I started off at the south-west and was heading into places like Brompton and the Royal Albert Hall, that area, and I could see everything in the distance. I came across a river but of course the river is nowhere near there. I had to walk around the river to find my way across on a bridge. By this time it had become Paris. I was walking again through Paris. There was something to do with a school where there were a couple of teachers and a few boys. At the end of the war the teachers had liberated themselves and abandoned the boys. The boys typed “Liberation” up on the door. By this time I was with someone else and we’d entered their apartment building and gone into their apartment. We could see the railway line at the back of their house. We were trying to find out what was the matter with them because it was quite obvious that things weren’t right

And then I was with Nerina. We were doing some kind of dissertation each. I was researching someone called the Duc d’Emory who was a French minister. He was someone renowned for being very thorough and going in depth into things. There was a certain legal case that came up at the time that he was in power. I’d managed to find a pile of notes that he’d written. I was going through this. She was doing something else and came towards near finishing. I was pretty much near finishing so I asked her how many pages she thought I ought to do. She replied “probably about eight”. I said “well, I’m cooked then” because I’d done probably double that and more. In the end she said something like “well it doesn’t really matter as long as you haven’t put in any superfluous words or anything like that”. I was really proud of what I’d managed to find out and write about him in this particular case.

Finally, there was a car race for small boys pushing cars around a circuit. I was asked to judge it. At first it was all going quite well but gradually the circuit became smaller as the boys started to cut the corner. I’d already worked out which one of them was going to win because he was better than the others but he was one who was taking so many short-cuts as well that I thought that I’d let him stew for a while before I actually announced the winner. He did far more than the 8 circuits going round but quite right too. I waited for a while before I called him the winner.

Once I was up and about I didn’t do too much at all (after all, it IS Sunday) and then I went for lunch. Coffee, toast and porridge.

The plan was that if the weather warmed up I was going to go outside and play with Caliburn after lunch. It was indeed warmer – we had a balmy 3°C outside – but it was gusting gale-force winds and it was teeming with rain. So I abandoned that idea for today. Instead I paired off the music fr the radio programme that I’ll be hopefully preparing tomorrow.

With it being Sunday, it’s pizza day today. There was no dough left over so I made another batch this afternoon and it ended up being quite a good mix too. Nice and smooth.

The dough was split into 3 lumps and two lots were put in the freezer. The third I put on the pizza tray, assembled it and when it was tea-time I baked it.

Delicious it was too. How I’ve missed not having a pizza this last few months.

Now it’s bedtime. Nice and early too because it’s an 06:00 start. But I better had feel better about it than I do right now. I can’t seem to get my motivation going for some reason – the story of my life these days – and I have to do better.

After all, let’s face it – I can’t be doing much worse.

Saturday 17th December 2022 – I SUCCUMBED …

… to temptation today.

When the alarm went off at 07:30 I was actually fast asleep, as I was when it went off at 07:45. And for once, with no sense of shame or guilt, I just turned over and went back to sleep.

It was probably something to do with having one of my better (at least, in recent times) nights of sleep last night. Although I vaguely remember waking up a couple of times, I didn’t actually have to go for a stroll down the during the night.

It might also have something to do with the fact that I didn’t go to bed until after midnight, and that’s quite late for me these days. I’ve still not recovered from all of my exertions from while I was on the road back from Leuven and early nights seem to be the norm right now. It’s been several years since I could stay up until 02:00 and then be up and about as fit as a fiddle at 06:00.

There was a pile of stuff on the dictaphone too so it really must have been something of a disturbed night one way or another. I can’t remember much about this first little voyage except that I was suffering from whatever it was from which I’m suffering with all of the limited mobility as well yet there were other people who were completely fully mobile. Somehow I was able to move about but I don’t know how, why or when.

However I could remember something a little later. I found a stone or an extra something or other down the bed. That helped me add up to something more normal, more realistic.

There was an election taking place somewhere. I wrote a long eulogy for one of the candidates. After I’d prepared it I was told basically that it wasn’t needed. I was wasting my time and no-one liked my work anyway. Going back to the office afterwards I told whoever it was that I’d had enough. I was going to retire. They asked whether I was old enough to do it so I replied that to tell the truth I was past the retiring age by a couple of years and this is a recurring dream, isn’t it?. When we finally entered this room where this party was taking place, the kettle was boiling and the girl making the tea was running around. There were a couple of people whom I knew and I was trying to be nice to them but it wasn’t working. I was just generally fed up.

Later on I was in hospital busy trying to work out how I was going to go home. There was a shortfall of about half an hour in my journey and I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to move myself for that half-hour to complete the journey properly or whether I was just going to be falling short again. There was some famous footballer who came onto the wards and was walking around talking to all the patients. He was quite enjoying it and so were they. I had a few words with him but I can’t remember what I said now.

And then we were at a restaurant. I asked an innocent question of a woman on my table “what does your husband do?” which provoked piles of guffaws from everyone. I thought to myself afterwards and then I said “perhaps as well as several other tables in this restaurant they ought to have an ‘innocent babes’ table where we can go to sit and ask innocent questions without everyone taking them as double-entendres” but it was actually quite funny.

Finally, I should have gone to the hospital to hassle them over something or other but in the end I ended up having a nice, long lie-in in bed. I then decided that I was going to go home. I went out of the door to leave and found that my sister was round the back of the house tidying up in the garden from her birthday. I sneaked this kind-of barrel organ thing round to the back to start to serenade her but to play it was much more difficult than I thought. It ended up being a load of rubbish. She smiled and thought that it was funny. She showed me everything that she was having to clear up and put away from her birthday party the previous day. Considering that there hadn’t been many people there was an enormous pile of crockery and cutlery set out on these tables that she had piled up ready to bring into the house

It was actually just after 10:00 when I finally saw the light of day. And it’s a good job that I did because my neighbour rang me again. He was on the way to the market and did I need anything? So now I have some mushrooms and peppers too. I might go back into my old habits tomorrow and make a pizza. It’s been an age …

Another neighbour came round too – Pierre, the skipper of the Spirit of Conrad, the yacht on which we went down the Brittany coast another whole lifetime ago. He’d heard that I was back in town and wanted to see how I was. I seem to be quite popular just now.

After my toast and coffee I sat down to work on a letter that I need to write. And by the time that I was ready for tea, I’d written the first draft. It’s quite an incendiary letter because the events of the past few weeks have taught me that trying to be polite in a certain sphere has got me absolutely nowhere – except backwards – and I’m past caring now about whatever certain people might think.

Nothing much will change – I’m quite certain of that – but if I can blister the paint in a certain office then I’ll feel so much better. The knowledge that my doctor is coming to visit me on Monday inspires me with some kind of confidence that I can take drastic steps and have some element of support.

Tea was, as usual on a Saturday, some of these breaded quorn fillets with potatoes (now that I have some) and frozen veg. Only enough frozen veg now for one more meal so sometime either Monday or Tuesday I need to experiment by trying to catch a bus to the Carrefour supermarket.

That should be an exciting day out because not only do I have to make it to the supermarket, I have to make it back to the bus stop with my purchases and then climb up the stairs with them to my apartment.

The sooner I can knock all of this on the head, the better.

Friday 16th December 2022 – I’VE DONE SOMETHING …

… today that I’m very probably going to regret doing, but I can’t go on like this much longer. Going downstairs took me an absolute age yet again, nothing on my body is freeing off and nothing is becoming any easier. And to give you an idea of how hard I tried, I’ve done 15% of my daily activity today.

And it’s been a very long time since I’ve done anything like that.

So what I have done today is that I have bitten the bullet – and if it comes off it will be for the largest sum of money that I have ever spent at one go in my life. And that’s not like me go go around spending any money, is it?

You’ll have to wait for a while to find out what it is because nothing is ever completed, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, until the ink is dry on the paper. But if we ever do reach that stage, then believe me, you lot will be the first to know.

We were a long way away from there though this morning.

It was another early night and for a change I managed to fall asleep quite quickly. But round about 01:45 I awoke and that was that for at least an hour and a half. And I know that because I checked.

Consequently when the alarm went off I was dead to the world once more and it was only the need to visit the bathroom that saw me beat the second alarm.

Plenty of stuff on the dictaphone and a welcome return for TOTGA who put in an appearance during the night. As I said yesterday, it’s been a long time since she paid me a visit during the night so it was very pleasant to see her again. I was on my way home down the Boulevard Lecampion and I saw her going past on the far side of the street. I stopped outside my apartment which was actually in Boulevard Lecampion, went into my building and started to unload my car, leaving the door open so that she could go past and see, which she did. She came over to talk about something or other. Alison was there and saw her, not saying anything at the time but after the conversation had finished and I’d gone upstairs she asked if that was TOTGA. I replied “yes”. She said “she’s only my age but yes! She was obviously appoving of whatever it was she approved. Something then was happening and I had to go out somewhere in the evening. Of course as soon as it was the case that I had to run this errand I dashed off outside because I was hoping that I could get to go to somwhere like Halifax and have a really nice evening meal and then come back. The times of trains made it extremely difficult for that. I reached the bus station just as a bus for Stockport pulled in. I thought that I could at least go to Stockport and have an Indian meal but that pulled through and drove round onto the other side of the bus station and I wouldn’t have time to walk over there before it would drive off again. I was sitting there then wondering what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to go to the office but that closed at 20:00. If I set off even then I wouldn’t be there for 20:00 so it seemed rather pointless in the end actually going out because there wasn’t really anywhere I could actually go that was of any real interest to me at that particular moment.

And later, I was keeping shop somewhere in an old industrial town. I’d had a Press Release that some camping gear and exploive equipment had been found on an industrial estate at the back of an arms manufacturer and one or two other places like that. I was busy writing out a note to display in my shop when some guy walked in. I asked him if he could hang on for a minute while I wrote out my sign and he made some comment. Then he asked for the “big gasket” for a tractor. We eventually found out what tractor it was but he was being extremely vague about the gasket. I had to run through all of the gaskets with him and talk to him about them and what he might find where, everything, to try to satisfy myself exactly what gasket he’d want. To make things worse I hadn’t taken over this shop long. There was a pile of gaskets of all sorts and I hadn’t had time to go through them and find out to what they related. There was probably one in this pile somewhere but heaven alone knows which one it was.

Once I was up and about it took me, as you might expect, a good while to come round to my senses which, seeing how few I have these days, is rather remarkable. But I eventually struggled to some form of life and even managed to make some bread dough because I’m right out of bread.

And then I had a phone call. A few weeks ago I’d heaved a stone into a rather large pool and the ripples were still rolloing outwards. Nevertheless I was surprised to receive the call and it ended up being something of a considerable amount of horse-trading that took quite a while.

So now we’ll see what happens.

The weather had warmed up dramatically today and we were in the balmy semi-tropical realms of 5°C. Caliburn once more struggled to life and wo I went on another one of these 20km runabouts in the hope of pumping some life into the battery. I don’t know whether or not he would have started again had I stopped at the shops – I didn’t want to tempt fate.

But I have managed to work out a way of getting onto the pavement by the bus stop so at a push I might be able to board the bus. Now if only I could walk we might be back in business in this respect too.

Back here I had another ‘phone call to make. If you’ve experienced any difficulty getting into this site just recently, there has been a major server change that involves a new mainframe host and there’s always a lag between changing the DNS settings and them actually taking effect. So that will explain that.

And that phone call took much longer than it ought to have done too, but for reasons which you really don’t want to know. I certainly didn’t.

After tea, we had football on the internet. In the Welsh Premier League most of the matches were postponed because of the freezing weather in Wales, including the featured match, but there was one match taking place, conveniently just down the road from “Sgorio” headquarters in Cardiff.

We had Cardiff Metro v Haverfordwest in minus 2°C and everyone, including the referee, was feeling the cold. The Met went one goal up early one through a penalty but honestly neither side looked as if they could hit the nether regions of a ruminant animal with a stringed musical instrument.

In fact the commentator made the point that in the Met’s last 6 home goames, they have scored 4 goals, namely – own goal – penalty – penalty – penalty- and only three of their players have actually had their names on the scoresheet all season.

And how cruel is your luck? Former Hull boss Tony Pennock finally managed to find his team’s on/off switch with 5 minutes to go and they sprang into life, only to be undone again by a breakaway down the whole length of the field with just 30 seconds remaining on the clock.

A 2-0 defeat was something of an exaggeration.

But I’m off to bed now anyway. I have to think of several cunning plans to raise a few quid here and there. I shall probably end up selling my body on Boots Corner. Not like the lady who tried it once and came home with £19:10.
“Who gave you the 10p?” asked her husband.
“Why, all of them” she replied.

Thursday 15th December 2022 – TONIGHT’S TEA …

… was sausage, beans and chips. And how beautiful it was too. I really enjoyed it.

One of my neighbours was going for a walk down to the shops this afternoon and he saw my note on the door so he came by to ask if I needed anything. Of course, if someone is going down to town on foot they can’t bring back very much of anything so a bag of potatoes it was.

At least my desire for chips is satiated for now and there’s enough for tea on Saturday night.

And in other news, I’ve had to make a start in tidying up the apartment as I’m going to have a visitor on Monday at lunchtime. I’ve finally managed to contact the doctor and he’s going to make a house call on Monday.

It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out once he comes round. What he’s going to say and what he’s going to suggest. At least it’s a start, but then again as I used to say back in the 70s when I was attending auctions as a buyer, it’s not where we start that’s important, it’s where we finish.

And to tell the honest truth, I’m probably finished already.

While we’re on the subject of finishing … “well, one of us is” – ed … I finished early last night and was in bed quite promptly looking forward to a good sleep.

Not that it worked out that way because I still had to leave the bed to go for a stroll down the corridor, and then apart from that I went off on quite a few little voyages during the night. We were living in Shavington and it was all quite primitive. We only had a cold water tap in the downstairs sink so I was trying to work out how I could make some kind of hot water tank underneath the sink with a candle to heat the water. I had a rough idea in my head but but it wouldn’t be particularly good. I spoke to my brother and said that maybe we ought to give it a go. My mother and my sister had been out somewhere. They came back in. We’d been watching a cowboy film but they switched over to watch The Clitheroe Kid. Then the two of them were in bed and were fighting over a sandwich that my sister was trying to eat in bed so I said something like “fancy swapping the TV over on our programme and then not going to watch it”. She said that we could swap back. It was right at the end, a Western something similar to one of the EL DORADO trilogy of films where the fight was over and the young boy was leaving. A young girl who had obviosly been close to this boy was practically in tears about him going but he said that he had to leave. “We’ve had 3 or 4 years of good times but it’s time to move on”. She was totally distraught about the whole idea of him leaving and rather than it being a happy ending it was a really sad, dramatic one. Even in my sleep I could feel how powerful the ending was.

Later on I had some money so I was going to invest it by buying a property in PIonsat, some apartments but it had to be a good quality apartment (not that there’s anything quite like that in Pionsat). I didn’t want to buy any old rubbish. There were several decent buildings in the town so I had a wander around and ended up at the bank. That was almost fraught because there was a traffic hold-up and a lorry decided that it would reverse down the High Street, nearly knocking me over as I crossed the road. In the bank I had to queue. It looked as if someone had forgotten his carrots but he walked off without them so I asked the guy in front of me if they were his. He said “no”. It was then my turn and I started to chat to this girl. This guy slipped a piece of paper “I know all about you” it said. “Don’t do it”. I asked “what on earth is this about?”. He said that someone chatted up a bank cashier and ended up meeting her in an alleyway and finished by murdering her. I said “I don’t remember this”. He replied “no, it was in 1968 so just you be careful”. I couldn’t understand what this guy was talking about. He was clearly not in the same world as the rest of us.

And then it was this summer and I was deciding to go into work very early, having spoken to someone who worked the early shift once this year. It would start at about 05:45 that meant that I would be in there by then. Of course my mother threw a fit, saying that I was never at home to help out. I told her that I was at home 24 hours per day 7 days per week except when I was at work, and going to work was normal. We had quite a row about it. When I arrived at work, rather than find the place empty there was someone around sticking up posters about the Roman excavations taking place in the wood. I was expected to go to work on some kind of bricklaying supervision. I tok myself out and was watching these bricklayers work while I was supervising this little group that I had with me. I felt that I was talking to myself all the time about what these bricklayers were doing. I thought that these few people here must have thought me totally crazy. When I concentrated on the work I found that we had a dip in one of the courses, a quite bad dip. There was no way that it could be rectified and we were going to have to take it all out again. There was one woman from work whom I came across as I was on my way into work who was sitting in a chair at the side of the road. She said “hello” to me so I said “hello” to her and didn’t think anything of it. Then I saw in the paper that she’s actually been in prison and was on some kind of rehabilitation course so I don’t know what she was doing at that particular moment, just sitting by the side of the street saying hello to passers-by unless it was part of her rehabilitation.

As you might expect, we have the family back in the equation but none of my favourite characters. That’s something that I find quite depressing.

When the alarm went off, I was in no mood to leave the bed. In fact if I hadn’t had to go down the corridor one more time I’d probably still be in there now.

Having slowly come round, I made a start on the radio programme that I wasn going to do, but my heart wasn’t in it. It took me much longer than anyone could ever imagine to complete it, not helped by crashing out on a couple of occasions and then a break to call the doctor.

When my neighbour called, I was fast asleep yet again. That seems to have been the story of my day, but I’m glad that he awoke me because tonight’s tea really was delicious.

After tea I had a long chat with Liz on the internet where we put the world to rights for a good while.

So right now I’m off to bed early again, in the hope that one night at least I’ll have a really good night and a good sleep to go with it. And if one of my three favourite young ladies could come and keep me company, then so much the better.

Wednesday 14th December 2022 – MY LITTLE NOTICE …

… on the door didn’t produce any response today, regrettably. But it’s early days yet and I remain optimistic. Where there’s life, there’s hope.

But one of the reasons why is probably the same reason why I haven’t set foot out of the door at all today. And that is because overnight we’ve had a snowfall and just like in HOLY GRAIL “the snows of winter cover the land”.

Not anything like an epic Auvergnat snowfall. There’s a light dusting on the roads. Nevertheless that’s enough to bring all public transport to a shuddering halt. No service buses, no school buses and it’s all been as quiet as the grave. God alone knows how these people would function in a metre of snow and -16°C.

But I’m going soft in my old age. It was really cold when I awoke and, for a change, I awoke a good while before the alarm went off. That’s what comes of going to bed an hour early but I was wasted last night. So much so that I still couldn’t drag myself out of bed when the alarm went off.

During the night I’d been on my travels as well. I was with my friend from the Wirral last night. I’d seen all of the flyers and a lot of the leaflets and publicity for the Cropredy Festival so I asked him “how do you fancy a weekend away this coming weekend?”. He replied immediately “yes” – in fact he was going away. He and his wife were flying to New York on Friday. He asked me why so I told him what I’d seen. He said that really that’s all that there is to Cropredy. He started to tell me all about it. You just turn up on Friday evening and pitch your tent where you fancy, sometimes around a raconteur who is well-known, sometimes with a group of people who you know and gradually things start to happen with music etc throughout the weekend. I made up my mind that I was going to watch it. Then of course I had the question of my health issue. What do I do about that? But I didn’t get that far, unfortunately.

Once I’d vaguely come round into the Land of the Living I went for another gymnastic display in the batchoorm as I tried to put my sooty foot into the bath so that I could have a shower and look something like clean in case a neighbour knocked on my door.

After the shower I had a chat with Liz and then I had some work to do. There’s an important e-mail that needs writing – well, quite a few actually but I mean one in particular – and that also meant speaking to someone from this building, which resulted in a series of e-mails. All in all it was quite a “brisk exchange”.

But one thing is certain, and that is that the more I learn, the less I understand.

Having dealt with all of that I organised some more stuff relating to the radio and paired off another selection of tracks because I’m going to have a go at doing another programme tomorrow. I’ve been letting my stock run down and I need to build up a healthy reserve.

No 06:00 start though – I’m not that dedicated. It’ll be the usual 07:30 start and I’ll see how I get on.

For tea tonight I fancied something different. And so a tin of mushrooms, a tin of chick peas, a tin of veg and I made an impromptu curry. Not as good as my vindaloo from the other day but it was different.

And so if I’m lucky I’ll be having another early night. Totally wasted yet again – these days of 3% effort on the fitbit are killing me off. God knows what I’ll be like if I ever go back to living anything like a normal life.

Tuesday 13th December 2022 – WHAT A STATE …

… to be in! Downstairs on the front door there’s a notice “if anyone is going to the shops, could they take me with them?” Can you imagine how things have worked out for me over the last few months?

This afternoon I went out to try to start Caliburn and eventually after much coaxing, he staggered into life. I set off for a drive and probably went about 30 kms trying to warm him up and charge up the battery.

However it didn’t seem to do much good because when I pulled into LIDL car park to see whether I could stagger over to the trolleys, I tried the starter and it was a desperate moment as I almost ended up walking home.

That was enough for me and I decided that if I didn’t leave the engine running and go home now, I never ever would get home. I can’t believe that I’d gone so far and the battery was even more dead than when I started.

As well as that I had to park where there was a kerb because I don’t have the strength to haul myself into the cab off the ground.

And so you can see, there’s a very fine line to walk between discretion and valour and God knows where it is right now.

Last night was another miserable, depressing night with me tossing and turning and I really don’t know what’s happening here either. When the alarm went off at 07:30 I was in no fit state to leave the bed and it was a real struggle for me to sort myself out.

The Welsh lesson though went reasonably well because I managed to prepare for it and I feel so much better when I can do that. However I’m not making the kind of progress that I would like. I’d be the first to admit that.

After the lesson I went for my run around in Caliburn and then came back to listen to the dictaphone. And there was tons of stuff on there from the night. There was a group of us packing to go somewhere. The conversation drifted round to all sorts of things. Several of the people were being extremely difficult in my opinion. One woman was really taking her time filling out a form. Everyone was explaining the difficulties that she was having but I didn’t think that they were anything at all. A few of us were talking about insurance and how it was sometimes quite catastrophic. I told them about how I worked in an insurance company (… and I did too …) and someone a few years later had T-boned my car. They actually worked for that insurance company and had their insurance there and how it was an endless tale of delays. We were discussing this. Suddenly I remembered the girl’s name who I worked with who this girl who was talking knew. I said her name and of course it cut the conversation. I felt extremely guilty about this. We were all sitting there trying to organise this and that one woman was taking so much time filling out a simple form. I was of the opinion that we weren’t ever going to get away at this rate
This meeting where there were people on about this insurance company and everything like that was where that guy stood up to make that announcement that his girlfriend was pregnant or they were getting married or something. That was really raining on everyone else’s parade at that particular moment. They were all disappointed that their thunder had been stolen.

There was some kind of tropical storm hitting the Carolinas and everyone had taken shelter. I’d gone with a news party to have a look at the situation inside one of these bunkers because the roof was damaged and water is getting in. I found several women, one of whom I knew very well, busy rolling up tissue and cloth in order to make some kind of something or other that would pass the time. This particular girl was working so quickly that she was way ahead of everyone else. While I was talking to her I looked up. A young girl who had come with her into the shelter was walking past on her way to the corner to lay down. I drew this woman’s attention to it. She invited the other one over to come along and join her to fold up tissue. Of course they started chatting like a couple of people in this situation would.

It was Friday night. I’d finished work and gone home. There was a story on the radio about how business was suffering from big bankruptcies and P-registered Cavaliers were being sold for as little as £3,000. I was wondering whether to go round to see a friend of mine and his wife, and of course Zero but thinking that I’d been round there every night this week I imagine that they must be becoming pretty fed up. The last thing that I wanted them to do was to stop me going round at all. So much as it hurt me, I decided that I’d stay at home tonight and start to sort through my toolbox. While I was doing that the TV was on. There was something happening about relief supplies involving DiY equipment. A whole pile of Opposition amendments were taking place to ensure that the Queen paid VAT on everything. They were all being passed so obviously there was some kind of mini-revolt going on in the House of Commons. Ordinarily that would have been just the kind of thing that I would have talked about with my friend but with having made a vow not to go round tonight I decided to keep to it and stay at home. I started to go through my toolbox making up kits of things that I might need in the future like electric sockets and so on

But imagine that? How many times is this that during the night I’ve turned down an opportunity to go and see Zero. I must be ill or something.

Tea was falafel with pasta and veg. I was hoping to have some potatoes so that I could have sausage, beans and chips tonight but that was something of a failure due to the issues that I had at LIDL. I hope that some good comes of my sign because I can’t go on living on my stocks of food. Rosemary and I talked about that on the ‘phone earlier and this was one of the things that galvanised me into making my sign.

And so we’ll see. It’ll be nice if it works and I can get some stock back in. The cupboard will be bare before I know it if I’m not careful.

Monday 12th December 2022 – YOU MAY NOT …

… believe this, but Caliburn actually started up this morning on the battery that was on the van. And that’s astonishing, especially as he hasn’t run for over 11 weeks. There’s a small leak in the electrical circuit somewhere that slowly drains the battery so I was expecting it to be dead by now.

What wasn’t nice though was that I’d left open the window in the driver’s door. It had rained in somewhat but one of my neighbours had stuffed a black plastic bag in the door and taped it up to keep the worst out.

Nevertheless, fancy Caliburn starting. I gave him a couple of laps around the block to warm him up and charge up the battery but I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that driving him in my condition is a nightmare.

And so as you can imagine, I’ve been outside this morning, and in the freezing fog too. I had to take some rubbish to the bins across the road and even though it is just “across the road” it took me an agonising 25 minutes to do it, going in baby steps. I thought that having had a good relax and a gentle easing off of the stiffness would have made things better, but far from it.

This trip to Leuven for 2nd January is therefore looking less and less likely.

In other news, Strawberry Moose is back home. On eof the reasons why I put a battery on charge last night and then went to start him today was that a couple of guys from the radio had told me that they would be around today at lunchtime.

It was my intention to ask them to help me carry the battery downstairs and to couple it up in order to start him but that wasn’t unnecessary. But they brought back my suitcase completr with His Nibs.

It was interesting too because they work for the local council and they were able to give me some useful hints about dependent living. Having had some kind of impromptu interview, they told me that someone would be in touch.

And I’ll need it too after last night, which was another awful, horrendous night. I kept on waking up, went for one or two walks down the corridor and so on. I was also on my travels quite considerably during the night in another sphere as well. I was with my friend from the Scottish Borders last night. To my surprise she was heavily involved in Black Magic and Spiritualism. She had one of the original books from that period and she had lent it to me. Every time I tried to make a start on reading it someone came past and I wasn’t comfortable about reading this book in full view of whoever it was so I kept it hidden below the desk or down the bed or something until that person had gone. After a while my friend became frustrated and quoted some phrase in the book about “whoever has taken me from my possessor” or something like that. I explained that I hadn’t actually done that. I’d explained what I was doing but she thought that I had to be a lot more forthright about reading the book even though I was uncomfortable. In the end there was always a piece of music that I played that stopped us arguing. She handed me my guitar and asked me to play this piece even though I hadn’t played for quite a while. My performance was bound to be suspect but I thought that I’d give it a go, although I felt that this was just a sticking plaster over a wound and wasn’t actually solving the problem of me getting down to actually reading this book. Whether or not I has an interest in Spiritualism I had an enormous amount of curiosity and I was intrigued just as much as anyone else to see what was in this book and how everything would unfold. However just glancing through a couple of pages made me seem to think that she had at one time or another said something about almost everything that was in there

There was something in there as well about working in the suburbs of Brussels, how some people were complaining that it was expensive. The question was then asked “why don’t they move even further out? That way they could find somewhere more affordable”. The reply came back about the cost and time of commuting which would put them back to Square One even if they were to do that.

Percy Penguin sent me a text to ask me if I could run her to a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon. I replied “yes I would” but then I had a realisation that there was no MoT or tax on the car. I had to send her another e-mail straight back. She said that she had cancelled her transport at work so now I was pretty-much obliged to take her unless I could find someone else or someone else would volunteer. Then I was with friends walking around Middlewich. I was pushing something like a pram or a push-chair or whatever. We came off the street around some kind of semi-circle parking place to try to get through to where Walgrens and Marks and Spencers was. We’d been talking about the traffic problems being caused by people turning into their car park. I said that they should get all the nouveau-riche pretentious people, put them in Marks and Spencers and Walgrens and then drop a bomb on the place. That didn’t go down too well with my friends. We were trudging round this semi-circle car space with a cinder base thing. I suddenly wondered if we could get through to Walgrens from here. They replied “no, we should have gone through somewhere else”. On the skyline 100 yards ahead of us were these most peculiar buildings, tall and really narrow. They looked most unsafe. It turned out that these were single-bedroom flats for single occupancy. We were thinking that maybe Percy penguin could find a place there. Then we thought that they looked so delapidated that they would be bound to be closing down these places and demolishing them soon. Nevertheles we went in. There was only a small ladder on the ground floor on the inside. I thought that we had to climb up this ladder, look out of the top by poking our heads through the roof to look out over the top to see how we could get to where we wanted to go. If this ladder wasn’t tall enough for us to be able to do that then we would have a great amount of difficulty. I didn’t fancy leaning too much against the wall of one of these buildings in case we pushed it over because it was really unsafe.

I was also having a dream involving Rosemary. A Government had arbitrarily cut some kind of rate on bankruptcies. She couldn’t see a problem except that someone else had noticed and pointed out to me that it had wiped out the whole market for Insolvency Practicioners. This led to a big discussion about the acounts already agreed with Brussels. The only difference was that the dissident who was supposed to have been held in Moscow at some time but turned up eventually in China. She had a talk that they had a benefit concert for this guy in China but the two people who contributed most in bringing his name to the forefront never actually turned up for it. That name rang a bell with me.

When the alarm went off at 06:00 I felt absolutely awful and I was all ready to stay in bed but I forced myself out. I’d already written half of the notes for my radio programme so I finished the rest, recorded and edited them and then assembled everything.

For a change, I was working backwards so I fell about a minute short so I had to expand my notes and re-dictate some of them. Therefore I didn’t really save as much time as I might otherwise have done.

Then I had Caliburn who required attention, and then my visitors.

Once everyone had gone I had a play around on the computer but fell asleep on my chair. That prompted me to go to bed, something that I have been trying not to do but there was no alternative as I have never in my life felt so tired, as all of … errr … 7% of my daily target will testify.

When I finally crawled out of bed (due mainly to a need to go and take a ride on the Porcelain Horse otherwise I’d probably still be there now) I ended up doing … shock! Horror! … some tidying up. Not much but just enough to take me up to tea time.

So now I’m off to bed. I have a Welsh lesson tomorrow so I need to be on form and then I’ll (hopefully) take Caliburn for another spin. See how I feel and maybe in a few days I’ll pluck up the courage to go to the shops.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: dream

Monday 26th December 2022 – WELL THAT WAS A …

Sunday 25th December 2022 – A MERRY CHRISTMAS …

Saturday 24th December 2022 – I WAS REALLY …

Friday 23rd December 2022 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

Thursday 22nd December 2022 – WHAT CAN BE EASIER …

Wednesday 21st December 2022 – I’VE HAD A …

Tuesday 20th December 2022 – THERE I WAS …

Monday 19th December 2022 – APART FROM A …

Sunday 18th December 2022 – JUST IN CASE …

Saturday 17th December 2022 – I SUCCUMBED …

Friday 16th December 2022 – I’VE DONE SOMETHING …

Thursday 15th December 2022 – TONIGHT’S TEA …

Wednesday 14th December 2022 – MY LITTLE NOTICE …

Tuesday 13th December 2022 – WHAT A STATE …

Monday 12th December 2022 – YOU MAY NOT …

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