Tag Archives: al stewart

Thursday 16th October 2025 – HAVING JUST FALLEN …

… asleep at the dining table in mid-meal, I suppose that I’d better hurry up, write my notes and go to bed before another disaster overtakes me. I’ve been having far too many of them just recently.

At least, last night wasn’t as late as some have been just recently. For once, I was actually in bed by 23:00. That was really nice. After all, a nice long sleep will do me the world of good, I reckon.

Ha ha! They were famous last words, weren’t they? Although it wasn’t until 06:15 that I actually awoke definitively, I’d had a very turbulent night and had awoken on several occasions.

Once more, it was another struggle to leave the bed and go to the bathroom. It was clothes-washing day too, with not having had a shower yesterday, so I gave my undies a good going over. I have to keep abreast of things like this.

After the medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And I was surprised to have travelled so far. I was going on a mission to work somewhere in a town centre. With the town centre of this place being very tightly controlled for parking, I’d written a letter to the local council to explain what I’d been doing and asking for authorisation to park there for free during the period for which I was there. The day that my work started there, I set off and arrived. I went to the council’s offices and was met by a young girl who was in charge of the official parking. She told me that they had received my letter and that I could leave my car in the official car park, but it needed someone to let me in all the time. So she went with me. I saw a room with all kinds of machines in it, ticket machines for this, ticket machines for that. She went to one of the machines and presumably pressed a button to override it, but nothing happened. She ended up going back to her desk for something. She came back and said “you might just sit here for a moment”, pointing to an empty seat by someone’s desk. “You can watch a James Bond film if you can understand the language”. I looked, and it was a fight between James Bond and some evil character but I didn’t recognise the subtitles so I didn’t know in what language it was in. She came back a little later and allowed me to go in. She told me that the letter that I had sent, which was in the office inside the car park, I was to put that on my windscreen so that people who didn’t recognise the car would see what was happening. I drove in, and saw that this fight with James Bond and this character was actually taking place on the staff car park.

Wherever James Bond fits in with all of this, I don’t know. But the story of the car park presumably refers to the situation in Crewe at the moment where a pile of car parks are being or have been developed, replaced by one multi-storey car park in which it costs the earth to park.

And next, I had to go up north, to wherever my landing was taking place. But it was the Navy that was in charge of the boundaries of this city, not the Army, so I thought that my likelihood of being given a pass to travel into the war zone would be about absolutely zero.

This doesn’t seem to relate to anything either.

It was the first round of the Nations Rugby Cup. We were all in hospitals so we didn’t really have a chance to see any of the game but we’d heard vaguely that the results had gone our way. Our game was to be played this evening and if we were to win it, we would qualify for the semi-finals. At that moment, it was Emilie the Cute Consultant who appeared. She was doing her rounds. As she was leaving, I called her over and asked her if it was true that we stood a really good chance of making the semi-finals. She said that there didn’t seem to be any reason why we shouldn’t, and we had a little chat about everything. It turned out that the final was being played on the rugby ground across the road from where we lived on Davenport Avenue. I said that if we made it to the final, I’d fight for her to have a really good place on the touchlines where she could watch it. However, she pointed to her stomach and said “well, it would be rather difficult by the time that the final is played”. I replied “don’t worry. I’ll make a trolley for you and I’ll push you over” which made her laugh.

So this is the first time that I’ve dreamed about Emilie the Cute Consultant. This is astonishing. Much as I like her, she hasn’t made anything like the impact on me that has been made by most of the other regular nocturnal visitors.

It’s most unlikely that I would be going to watch a rugby match when there are other more exciting things to do, such as watching paint dry and watching the grass grow. There was a sports field over the road from where we lived in Davenport Avenue (it’s now a housing estate) but it was a cricket ground and football pitch.

But while I was out there on that sports field, there was a girls’ school that was having its sports on there. I was wandering around giving some help and advice to different people. One young girl came over to me and said that she wanted to talk. I asked her what was the matter, and she told me that she’d completely lost all of her interest in this. While at one time she was receiving really, really good marks, she was now just receiving average marks – yn aml, she said – for most of her subjects and she was really disappointed. She wished that she could find her motivation from somewhere. So we began to have a really long chat about this.

Now, yesterday I was looking through some of my photos from a famous trip that I made a few years ago, and they brought back certain memories of a couple of incidents that occurred and which relate to this dream more closely than anyone could imagine.

By the way, yn aml means “often” in Welsh, and Welsh wouldn’t be a language that the subject of this story would have ever used.

Later on, I was back in work. I’d arrived late, about 09:12. I wasn’t very happy about my choice of clothes. I had oil on one of the shirt cuffs, and I was having real difficulty in moving. Trying to make my way to my desk, I was disrupting everyone else’s work because I was swaying about from side to side. I could see that some of my colleagues were becoming rather short-tempered. To finally make my way to my desk was extremely complicated. One of the guys was complaining that I was knocking his papers everywhere so when I tried to stand myself upright better, it was making things worse. Eventually, I could make my way to my chair by disrupting just about everything, but noticed that my computer was missing from my desk. As I sat down, the boss’s secretary came over, starting to hand over slips of paper about things that needed to be doing. She came to me and mis-pronounced my name, saying that a medical report would be required on me because for the last few weeks, I’d been eating nothing but vegetables. I was sitting there, thinking “whatever this report comes up, it’s no loss because I should have been retired a long time ago”. But at that point, just as the dream was becoming interesting, I awoke.

At one time, dreams about being over the age of retirement in a miserable working environment were an everyday feature of these notes, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. It’s been a while though since the last one.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up as usual, sorted out my legs and then cleared off, leaving me to make my breakfast.

Once I’d finished, I went one better than David Crosby because, although it wasn’t Christmas when I had the ‘flu, I am still not feeling up to par. It makes quite an improvement though, this new, trim me.

Back in here yet again, I finished the notes (Isabelle had interrupted me) and then began to prepare the next radio programme.

My cleaner came along to sort out the anaesthetic and then I had to wait for the taxi. And wait. And wait. 13:35 it finally turned up, so we were hours late arriving at dialysis.

On top of that, there were dozens of tests to perform, and then my internet account there had expired and needed renewing, so today took forever

At least Emilie the Cute Consultant came to see me again. And you won’t believe this but she now has an infection. I apologised profusely but she didn’t think that it was the same as the one that I have. It ruled me out of offering to console her. Imagine a cocktail of infections in my state of health.

So, horribly late, and with a collapsing blood pressure, I ended up leaving, to find that it was the cute taxi driver whom I like very much who was waiting for me. We had a lovely chat on the way home, talking mainly about cats.

My faithful cleaner helped me in and after she left, I emulated THE CARMICHAELS and "supper waits on a table inside a tin". Once more, I left some on my plate and, as I mentioned earlier, I fell asleep at the table.

But now, I’m off to bed, thoroughly exhausted and desperate for a good sleep.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Emilie the Cute Consultant … "well, one of us has" – ed … I told her "I dreamed about you last night"
"Did you?" she asked.
"No" I replied. "You fought me off."

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Thursday 17th July 2025 – MY KITCHEN DOWNSTAIRS …

… is looking wonderful, it really is.

It’s not finished yet – it probably needs another full day’s work – but even so, it’s quite impressive as it is. The oven and microwave are installed and the hob will be next, and then it will just be a case of the final touches. But it really is impressive.

It will be another five weeks or so before I’ll be moving in. It seems that the weekend round about 22nd, 23rd and 24th of August is when a few volunteers have offered to come along to help, although I’ll be hoping to move a pile of stuff before then, if I can. So if anyone is at a loss for a few things to do one week or one weekend in the near future…

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, it was another late night last night by the time everything was finished. Or, rather, it wasn’t finished because I had forgotten, would you believe, the backing up of the computer.

But anyway, once I was finally in bed, there I stayed until 06:27 precisely, two minutes before the alarm was due to go off, and I managed to struggle to my feet to beat the alarm. But if that’s not impeccable timing then I don’t know what is.

After a good wash and my medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was having some kind of injection because of all these foreigners who were coming to play football around here. Many people were disillusioned by the fact that they had signed a lot of the youth players from English clubs because they were thinking that the academies of these clubs were of absolutely no useful purpose at all – it was simply a paperwork exercise to show that the club has some kind of development certificate and there was no possibility of these young boys ever being included in some kind of first team round-up and some kind of Premier League involvement in due course. Most of these lads were destined to have the job when they reached the end of the age group.

This actually refers to a discussion that some of us were having on a football news forum yesterday, talking about how many under-17, under-18, under-19 etc football academy players, even youth internationals, are now playing part-time in non-league or minor league football, saying that these football academies are really nothing but window-dressing for the clubs concerned, simply to abide by certain rules and regulations with absolutely no intention at all of promoting local youth talent.

Isabelle the Nurse came in to see me and gave my knee some heat treatment, and then she attended to my legs.

After she left, the kitchen fitter put his sooty foot in the door. I organised him and he wandered off to start work. I made breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

Our author is still giving us the conducted tour of various churches. He tells us that in the Church of St Mary Woolnoth there is a memorial to"Thomas Roch and Andrew Michael, vintners, and Joan, their wife." And I’m definitely eager to find out more information about that cosy set-up.

Interestingly too, he tells us that "in divers countries, dairy houses or cottages wherein they make butter and cheese, are usually called ‘wicks’.". A “wich” is quite often associated with a salt town and has other meanings in Norse and in Anglo-Saxon too, but Stow’s interpretation of the ending is certainly food … "groan" – ed … for thought.

After breakfast, I came back in here to sort out the radio notes that I dictated yesterday. In total, there is about twenty-five minutes’ worth and that’s going to take an age to edit. I shall be here for the next two months doing that, I reckon, and miss the actual programme dates if I’m not careful.

My faithful cleaner came along and sorted me out with my anaesthetic patches, and I came back in here to carry on working.

The driver who came to pick me up was the Belgian girl and I like her very much so we had a lovely chat all the way down to Avranches, except for the time when she was having an argument with one of her children on the telephone. I suppose that a pair of eleven-year-old twins would be a handful for anyone.

My luck was in at the dialysis centre. I was attended to by Julie the Cook who showed me some photos of her latest culinary creations. And wonderful they are too. But she had a lot of trouble coupling me up to the machine today and for quite a while, my machine kept on sounding the alarm.

One of the doctors came to see me today to ask me how I was. I told him that it’s pointless asking me because they don’t do anything about what I’ve told them already. So he departed with a flea in his ear.

The dietician was next to come along, with a prescription for forty-eight samples each of four different varieties of a new protein drink. I wonder what all of that will be like.

And then all Hell let loose. There’s a patient who has a four-hour dialysis session who is currently in hospital at Granville. His session is due to start at 14:00 but the ambulance didn’t bring him until after 15:30, meaning that the girls have to stay until about 20:00 this evening. It goes without saying that they were not too happy about it, and they expressed their displeasure quite forcibly to the ambulance crew.

There’s another person there who is … errr … well, he <DOESN’T HAVE BOTH PADDLES IN THE WATER. He was an endless source of trouble and stress to the nurses this afternoon and in the end, one of them had to sit with him for quite a while to keep an eye on what he was up to.

For once, I was unplugged quite quickly and the taxi was waiting for me too so we were soon on our way home. We came back via the town centre so that we could have a look at the chaos with the rebuilding paused for the summer, and then the driver dropped me off at home where my faithful cleaner was waiting.

First thing that I did was to go to inspect the kitchen and to chat with the kitchen-fitter and his wife who was helping. And my kitchen does look lovely. He’s done a really good job and I’m well-impressed. It will be even better when it’s finished.

Mind you, I had a very late tea tonight because I had to wait for an age while he finished off and packed up his tools.

He also presented me with a bill to date, and after I’d paid it, I had to go to lie down in a darkened room for a while.

Tea tonight was just like The Carmichaels, as SUPPER WAITS ON THE TABLE INSIDE A TIN. It was too late to cook a proper meal.

So now I’m off to bed, later than I would like. And I need to be on form as there’s a lot to do tomorrow. There’s the Sunday Woodstock notes to continue to edit and also June and Catherine are coming round to see me before they head off back to South Germany.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the kitchen fitter … "well, one of us has" – ed … I asked him if he would like to install a mirror for me in the kitchen.
He thought for a while and then replied "ohh yes, why not? That’s just the kind of job that I could see myself doing."

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Thursday 6th March 2025 (cont) – NOW THAT THINGS … .

… are back to normal (well, as normal as things ever could be around here) I can carry on and do what I ought to have been doing, and update everything.

And had I known how things were going to have worked out, still being on my feet (well, OK, on my chair) at 02:00 I would have had an early night instead of being up to all hours watching Stranraer, after several weeks of impressive football, go back to their old, miserable ways and be easily beaten by the bottom club in the league who spent most of the night playing with just ten men.

That was as embarrassing as the defeat aginst Clyde a couple of weeks ago and was really depressing after the last three or four performances.

So anyway I went to bed eventually and had another perspiration-laden night where I was only really half-asleep for most of it.

When the alarm did go off I hauled myself to my feet and headed off to the bathroom for a scrub and even a shave. After all, you never know if Emilie the Cute Consultant is going to be there today.

No medication right now because you also never know if the nurse might actually want to come along and do this blood test this morning and it has to be done à jeun so I listened to the dictaphone instead to find out what had gone on during the night. There I was, lying here asleep and a girl was trying to load some ink or something into my mobile ‘phone so that it could print a document. I tried to pur some fat into it but the fat was in a chip basket thing. Of course, every time you tilted it to pour it the liquid would seep out through the holes so I wasn’t having any success with my cooking last night.

Can you imagine trying to lift molten fat out of a chip pan with the chip basket? I’ve no idea what goes on inside my head at night, but there again, I don’t have all that much more idea about what goes on inside my head when I’m awake.

Later on I was out in North Wales looking for an address. I ended up somewhere beyond Conwy in an area that I didn’t know very well but I couldn’t find it. I ended up on an extremely steep hairpin bend. Trying to walk or cycle up there was extremely complicated. When I reached the top there was a waterfall. The waterfall was where some kind of primitive dam had been that had been broken and the water was cascading over it down into the valley where it joined the main river. There was a main road off there to the right and there was a lot of traffic coming that way so it was complicated to cross the road. I did cross the road but still couldn’t find this address. In the end I saw a map with the shape of where it was and I identified that I should have been four miles beyond Abergele so I had to retrace my steps and try to return across the road on a pushbike was even more complicated with all of the traffic that was coming straight on down the main road. Once or twice someone paused and that was the signal for someone to nip over but I had to wait for a while and found myself in the end with about a dozen vehicles on the central reservation waiting for a gap in the downhill traffic again. Once we set off there were all these vehicles passing so closely and I was then freewheeling down the hill listening to the news about a bicycle race. There were two people in the middle of the road, a man and a woman with bikes and they didn’t seem to be paying any attention to me as I came hurtling down and I missed the woman by a matter of millimetres.

As it happens, I recognise this road too. It’s out of Llangollen heading down into mid-Wales and I was there 20-odd years ago with Nicole when we came to pick up the old LDV. The dam is very much how I would have imagined one of the “Dambusters” dams to have been after it had been blown up. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we WENT FOR A LOOK AROUND the dams few years ago on our way to Colditz and STRAWBERRY MOOSE‘s famous escape attempt.

Incidentally, four miles beyong Abergele up a steep mountainside is one of the Iron Age hillforts to which Arthur Allcroft took us a couple of weeks ago, but there was nothing about any hillforts anywhere last night.

When the nurse did finally turn up he did actually take the blood sample and I knew all about it because, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … he just doesn’t have “the touch”.

After he left I made breakfast and carried on reading MY NEW BOOK. We’re discussing exciting subjects today, such as men marrying their daughters and the young killing off the old folks once they stop being productive and become useless mouths to feed.

He’s actually done some research into this and has found plenty of examples back in history and in more remote parts of the World where those customs were still current when he was researching his book. All I can say is that for someone whose day job was a clerk in London County Council, he had some strange pastimes and hobbies.

However, he has proved a point over which I have been puzzling. If people back in ancient history were so concerned about having useless mouths hanging around eating the produce, the produce must have been so scarce that not even family ties could hold the people together and stop them killing each other. So I remain totally unconvinced by the modern way of thinking that these hillforts were nothing but symbolic. The huge amount of effort that went into the construction of these immense defensive works and the amount of time they had to spend away from the fields or from the hunt, they really must have been scared almost to death by what might have happened had they not spent all that time and effort in their construction.

Back in here later I had a few things to organise and sort out but was interrupted by the telephone. "Is it OK if I come a little earlier, like 12:00?". It was my taxi driver.

What has happened was that last week these new Social Security regulations came into legally-binding force and so this is how it’s going to be from now on – taxis turning up at any time they like if they are obliged to combine trips. Not that I’m complaining because, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed …, it’s a free service and in any case the sooner we arrive, the sooner I can leave and so I sent a message to my cleaner to inform her.

Poor thing, she had to scramble here to fit my anaesthetic patches and was still here when the taxi arrived – at 11:47. The Sécu has instructed that a timespan of 45-minute either side of the booked time is acceptable under these new regulations and by my reckoning the car was actually 43 minutes early. That’s cutting it fine.

We had to pick up someone else on the way of course, someone who had a hospital appointment for an operation. "As we’re so early we may as well drop madame off at the hospital first."
"She’s going to hospital in Rennes"

When I arrived at the dialysis centre I was so early that they hadn’t even finished dealing with the morning’s patients but Julie the Cook saw me and she quickly finished off setting up my machine (patients have their own individual settings) and I was installed and up and running by 13:15.

She tried a new trick this afternoon. While she was setting up the machine she slapped an ice bag on my arm. And that actually might have helped a little – at least until the effect wore off.

Apart from the coffee, no-one bothered me at all until it was time to unplug me. Julie the Cook had gone home a long time before and one of the others came to sort me out. For some reason I was rather unsteady on my feet at first. It can’t have been low blood pressure because that was OK.

So it was 17:30 when I staggered out of the centre and the taxi was already waiting for me. We had someone else with us to drop off along the way but even so I was back at home by 18:15, much to the surprise of my cleaner

That was when I discovered the catastrophe in here, with the big desktop computer spinning around in BIOS mode complaining “I can’t find any disk with an operating system on it”.

Luckily I had a spare 1TB SSD that I’d dismantled from another machine so I formatted that in a disk caddy with the help of the travelling laptop and set about dismantling the big computer. It’s always good to perform a clean installation every couple of years because you’ll be surprised (or maybe you con’t) at the amount of rubbish that accumulates over the passage of time.

While I was doing that, I actually found what I suspect is the fault. There’s an internal power lead with three connectors for disk drives. The one that was connected to the SSD system drive has a crack in it and what seems to have happened is that the crack has allowed the internals to flex and they have shorted out.

No problem. I just disconnected the internal back-up drive and plugged the new SSD System drive into that connector. I’ll have to order a new power lead from somewhere in due course to connect everything back up on a more permanent basis.

While it was sorting itself out I made a quick tea – just like THE CARMICHAELS and "supper waits on the table inside a tin".

Back in here afterwards, I settled down and steeled myself ready for what is going to be a very long night

But while we’re on the subject of Colditz Castle … "well, one of us is" – ed … I’m reminded of that legendary “Two Ronnies” sketch from years ago.
"We’re making a film about prisoners escaping from a camp in Germany"
"What’s it called?"
"The Colditz Story"
"What are you making next?"
"A film about life in a South Wales mining village"
"What’s it called?"
"The Coal Tips Story"
"And after that?"
"We’re doing a film starring Raquel Welch who will be playing the role of an Inuit"
"What’s that called?"
"We haven’t decided yet"

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Thursday 6th February 2025 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day I have had today!

Or, more importantly, what a horrible afternoon. Everything that could conceivably go wrong this afternoon has gone wrong. It seems that I’m destined to have this albatross hung well-and-truly around my neck like the Ancient Mariner.

"Ah! well a-day!"

Last night, as I expected, I was horribly late going to bed. I’m surprised that I kept on going as long as I did though because I was absolutely exhausted. And again I’m not sure why either because it wasn’t as if I’d done that much.

Once in bed though, just like Maréchal MacMahon, "j’y suis, j’y reste" – “here I am and here I stay”. No danger whatever of me moving under any circumstances.

And there I did stay too. When the alarm went off I was still in exactly the same position as I had been when I went to sleep. And no-one had it any more difficult than me to leave my bed before the second alarm. I know that I’ve had a few struggles in the past but this one beats all of them.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and scrub up, forgetting to have a shave for a moment, and then went into the kitchen to sort out the medication for the morning, remembering not to take the medication that I’m not supposed to take on Dialysis Day.

Back into the bathroom to remember to have a shave in case Emilie the Cute Consultant is there this afternoon, and then back into here to sort out the details of any voyages last night. I was at a school somewhere. One of the teachers was at the entrance to the school chatting to a few people. He had a green sports car like a 1930s Bentley only smaller. I happened to glance at the registration number. It was WEE and then three numbers (or maybe the other way round). Whatever it was, if read in a certain way it made something quite indecent. It was obviously not the original number of the car so I was first of all surprised that the Department of Transport would allow such a registration number to be issued and secondly, surprised that a schoolteacher would buy it and fit it on his vehicle.

It really was surprising too to see this registration number, and I wish that I could remember now what it was. But I know exactly where it took place – in between the canteen and the steps up to the front of my old Grammar School. I can still see it now.

The nurse came round and I asked him about this prescription whether it should be done before breakfast before I have anything to eat. "Don’t worry about that" he replied. "They’ll do it anyway".

What I’ll do is to ask Isabelle the Nurse and see what she thinks about the affair.

After he left I made my breakfast and carried on reading MY NEW BOOK.

We’ve finished promontory forts and are now tackling contour forts, those that encompass a hill, with defences all round. These are really difficult to date as their position, commanding a wide expanse of countryside, means that they may well have been used by many different waves of civilisation.

Before leaving the promontory forts though, he makes an interesting observation. While they may be good at keeping invaders out, they aren’t much good at keeping cattle in, and many of them have no interior fencing of any kind.

His supposition is that people don’t abandon their possessions lightly, so if they were designed for defenders, the defenders must have been in desperate straights to have to take flight there leaving all their beasts behind.

The alternative suggestion that he puts forward is that they were built as strongholds by invaders who had yet not had the opportunity to recruit any cattle, and the speed at which a promontory fort could be built when compared to a contour fort, is certainly suggestive.

Back in here again I carried on writing the notes for this radio programme, and they are almost finished. Half an hour tomorrow will see them done and then I can push on with the next lot.

It wasn’t my cleaner who interrupted me today either. I noticed (for once) that time was rolling on so I went into the dining area and began to prepare things for leaving.

My cleaner was running late today so we were in something of a rush. But she was soon off out to her next client, and I wait here to wait for my taxi.

And wait. And wait.

At 13:00 I rang them up to find out where they were and it seems that they have cancelled (I hope) the Wednesday taxi that shouldn’t be coming but forgotten to reinstate the Thursday one. So they’ll arrange for someone to fetch me.

The car that turned up (20 minutes later) was one from St Hilaire du Harcoët on its way back from the Centre de Re-education, with three passengers already inside. So it was a rather cramped car that made its way down to Avranches. But needs must.

It goes without saying that my anaesthetic patches had long-since lost their efficacity by the time that I was finally seen and I’m sure that everyone in the street down the hill knew about it, because I certainly did. I’ve had some painful issues, but not quite as painful as this one this afternoon.

Once I was settled into my bed, plugged in and wired up, I had the crash-out to end all crash-outs. Well into the bad old days of last summer. I’m not sure why that should be either, unless it’s something to do with the fact that I’m in a bed, semi-recumbent.

But it was terrible. During the whole session I couldn’t concentrate on anything at all, I was so tired. Even so, I performed the major back-up that I wanted to and the travelling laptop is now as up-to-date as it can me. That’ll last for about a week, I reckon, before it will fall by the wayside once more.

But that did remind me – there’s still the laptop that I bought IN NORTH DAKOTA to update too. I haven’t used that since I fitted the 1TD SSD into it and it could do with some updating. Still, that’s one more task to add to the list of things that won’t ever be done.

Unplugging me was just as painful as plugging me in. I could see that the girls were edgy about things, wishing to leave in a hurry and I can’t say that I blame them. I was by far and away the last patient in there tonight. And I was glad to be out of there too.

It was this senior driver who was waiting for me tonight but he wasn’t in a talkative mood again this evening. I don’t know what I have done to him to upset him.

Mind you, in some ways I was glad because I wasn’t in any real mood to converse. Tired, exhausted and in pain, I’d had enough for the day.

The climb up here was difficult tonight and I only just about managed it, but there was no time to relax because I had bread to make.

After making and kneading the dough I made tea while it was proofing. It was another “Mr Carmichael” moment when SUPPER WAITS ON THE TABLE INSIDE A TIN. I was way past caring by this point. At least my loaf of bread is the best that I have ever made, and I mean that too.

So right now I’m off to bed. I’m shattered and I can’t keep on going like this. One day my luck will have to turn, and I hope that I will still have time to enjoy it.

But going back to the story about promontory forts, a group of Belgae natives were holed up inside a promontory fort as several hundred people were advancing on them
The captain of the fortress couldn’t make out at the distance who they were so he asked his lookout "are they friends or foes?"
"Friends, I reckon" said the sentinel
"You must have wonderful eyesight" said the captain. "How can you tell?"
"Well" replied the sentinel "they are all laughing and joking together and look as if they are engaged upon a common purpose"

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Monday 27th January 2025 – I’VE BEEN DOING …

… my impression of Mr Carmichael today and SUPPER WAITS ON THE TABLE INSIDE A TIN tonight. I have had a fraught, exhausting day and I’m too tired to move. And seeing that that’s my normal state of affairs these days when there isn’t any nonsense, this one is going to be good.

Last night was another typical night in this new order of things where I was in no rush to go to bed. The days when I used to be so stressed out about meeting a deadline are over and I’m now much more relaxed about it.

And so I loitered around doing not very much of anything for a while before I finally lost whatever enthusiasm I might have had, and crawled off into bed.

And there I lay, fast asleep until the alarm went off this morning at 07:00 when definitely the worse for wear, I crawled out into the light.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and shave, and even applied the deodorant in case Emilie the Cute Consultant were to come to see me, and then did some hand-washing of clothes again. Not that they needed it, I suppose, but I have to keep on pushing forward.

Into the kitchen for the medication and then back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was away somewhere on some kind of trip from work on a business training course. When I arrived at the hotel and put my things in my room I went for a walk around. In the basement there was a shop and they had about twenty racks with LPs on, “Best of…. and B-sides”, the title of the whole range of albums that were on sale. They were on sale at¨£2:49 each. I began to have a rummage through and found an album that had the cover of IN SEARCH OF SPACE by Hawkwind, but when I looked at it, it was an album by Country Joe McDonald and the Fish. Then I found an album by one of these new wave bands like “Frankie Goes To Hollywood” or something. The further I dug, I found a couple of albums by Curved Air. I thought to myself that I’m going to be in Paradise here. I’m going to spend my night now searching through all these shelves and I bet that I can go away with a couple of hundred Pounds-worth of LPs to take with me on the way home. Then I began to think about CDs. I don’t use albums any more, I have CDs and, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, my album collection was digitalised several years ago. So yet again, I was caught in this huge mesh of indecision.

How many times have we been here? If it’s not snatching defeat from the jaws of victory or the family putting le baton dans la roue or a collection of Cortinas without MoTs scattered around the town it’s the indecision that is a thread that’s running through my dreams. And I was so intrigued by this idea of the cover of “In Search Of Space” that I actually checked. I can still see the album cover that was in my dreams and sure enough, it IS the cover of “In Search Of Space” and if that’s not an impressive thing to happen in a dream, I don’t know what is.

The nurse turned up and we had yet another animated discussion. He hadn’t told me yesterday that it’s his last day for this month today, so today he needs my health card for the details. I don’t have it at the moment because my faithful cleaner has it for when she goes to the chemist’s later. "No problem" he said. "I’ll go and knock on her door. In which apartment does she live?"

Ohh no you won’t, my friend. Not at 08:30 in the morning and not when it’s nothing to do with you. If you had told me that you needed it today it would have been here. You’ll have to make some other arrangement. My cleaner is entitled to her comfort and privacy.

So after he left, I made breakfast and read MY BOOK

And here we go again. On page 681 where there is a dispute between the narrative of Caesar and that of Seneca and someone prefers the latter, which disagrees with his own point of view, he asks is if we really "are to prefer the authority of Seneca to that of the general who fought the battle"

On page 648 however, when he notes another disagreement between two narratives and he prefers the one that contradicts Caesar, he asks if one of his colleagues had "forgotten the discrepant statements that were made by officers who had watches in their pockets as to the hour at which this or that episode occurred in the campaign of Waterloo?". Caesar’s "estimate may have been right : but also it may have been wrong ; and anyhow it is folly to stake the whole argument upon its accuracy."

Despite his criticism of his colleagues, he’s also doing his fair share of cherry-picking of facts and ideas, but I bet that his colleagues and contemporaries were much nicer about it that he was.

After breakfast I came in here to do the second part of my Welsh homework. We had to write n essay about one of our relatives who fought in a war.

So do I write about my cousin who was in the Army in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s or my mother who was in the Royal Air Force in World War II who told us when we were small that she flew Spitfires but I bet that she peeled the spuds in the cookhouse, or my Great-Grandfather who having retired once from the army at 45, dyed his white hair black, lied about his age (and not just by a couple of years either) and went to France with the Canadian Army?

Instead, I decided to do something rather different and talk about a cousin of my maternal Grandmother who was sentenced to be SHOT AT DAWN for refusing to pick up a rifle.

Yes, we have ’em all in our family.

When I’d finished my magnum opus I began the mega-backup of my travelling laptop but as usual, I ran out of time. My cleaner came along to interrupt me and to fit my patches. And she had brought with her the first big load of medication.

After she’d performed her task and left, I began another project of mine which involved trying to bring some order into chaos in the kitchen. Of course, Nietzsche is quite famous for saying that "out of chaos comes order" but he had never ever been to visit anywhere where I was living.

Not that I actually made it very far with my plans because the taxi arrived. And this time I checked to see if there was anyone on the back seat of the car before I committed another indiscretion. And lucky that I looked too.

Still we had an interesting chat all the way down to Avranches.

Today is the first day of my four-hour sessions. They wanted to remove 4.2 kilos of water from my body, and that’s a far cry from the 2.7 that they wanted to remove on the first day. I’m definitely not doing so well.

And when it’s painful for three and a half hours, can you imagine how painful it is for four hours?

There was a visitor too today. Someone from the Re-education Department who wanted to see how much I knew, and talked to me as if I was two years old or some doddery, senile old fart (and you can shut up too!)

So with the pain in my arm, seething from this blasted visit, totally fed up, having been ignored by the duty doctor who passed my bed three times without even glancing in my direction, and with no coffee anywhere in sight, it was rather unfortunate that just at that moment a nurse brought round a “customer satisfaction” survey form to fill in.

Four hours under the dialysis is long enough. It’s exhausting, tiring, painful and shattering. But it’s not all over yet. After having waited ten minutes for the taxi, we then had to go right across Avranches to the Clinic to pick up someone else, to come back right past where we started and then head out to Granville.

It was 19:30 when I returned here, totally exhausted and fed up, but I made it up the stairs and then up to here. There was bread to make next, so you’ll understand why I gave it all up and made supper out of a tin, just like Mr Carmichael had to.

Right now though, I’ve had enough. I really have. The events of today have dragged me back down into the pit from which I had just climbed out. I said to my cleaner that in all honesty, I can’t take too many of these four-hour sessions. I’m wiped out after the first one. What am I going to be like in a couple of weeks? There’s no end to it either.

But these patronising, condescending people really get on my wick. It reminds me of the time (well, one of the times actually, but that’s another story) when I saw the trick cyclist.
She showed me a photo of a splodge with green edges. "What’s this?" she asked.
"It’s image number six of the Rorschach Test" I replied
"And this?"
"Image number two of the Rorschach Test"
"And this?"
"Ohhhh" I replied. That’s a horrible, evil mass of flesh that sucks the blood out of every living soul and brings gloom and despondency in its wake."
"The picture is over here" he said. "You’re looking at a photo of my wife there"
"Was I correct?"
"Pretty much".

There’s a RORSCHACH TEST on line that you can have fun with it. I answered it seriously and carefully, and the result is that I’m "SOUND AND WELL-BALANCED", which just goes to prove, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that these trick cyclists don’t have a clue what they are talking about.

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Thursday 9th January 2025 – IN A STARTLING …

… new development, putting the pins for the dialysis machine into my arm was totally painless. I’ve no idea what went wrong or went right, but here we are.

Mind you, that was at first. When the anaesthetic began to ease off I knew all about it. And so if it proves anything at all, it proves that this anaesthetic does actually work. And that’s good news too because I was beginning to have my doubts.

As for going to bed before 23:00, it’s not a question of having my doubts but more one of an absolute certainty that I’m never going to make it into bed by then.

A concert from the Marshall Tucker Band stopped me dead in my tracks last night, and it’s not just the Southern Rock music, but Southern Rock played sometimes on a flute, and in that, the Marshall Tucker Band is unique. But of course, what helps are the songs. Good old country-rock songs played with an energy that you don’t find in many places, and with Toy Caldwell on guitar.

If you’ve never heard them live, have a listen to BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAIN SKIES. "CAROLINA’S WHERE I’M AT, AND I’LL ALWAYS LAY MY HAT …". And I wish that I was at Carolina right now, for not the least of reasons that I can catch up with Rhys. It’s years since we last saw each other.

Anyway, have a listen to SEARCHIN’ FOR A RAINBOW. I can listen to Southern Rock music all night.

After the Marshall Tucker Band I went to bed, and there I stayed until about 06:55. I say “about” because I didn’t know the time. I’d just awoken and was musing on the idea of showing a leg but instead the alarm beat me to it.

After a trip to the bathroom for a wash and shave I went into the kitchen to take my medication, remembering to forget the anti-potassium powder that I’m not supposed to take on Dialysis Day.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. This was another one of these dreams that goes on for ever. It concerned a group of people, probably in their 30s. There was one woman quite in love with one of these guys but somehow or other they never quite hit it off. They had some kind of business together, this entire group did, and it involved cars. One Monday morning they went to check the cars and they found that her car had travelled 7,300km that weekend. They checked the tacograph and found that the tachograph had been removed. They checked the time, and it had been removed at something like 04:00 so they were trying to figure out exactly where the car had gone. They worked out that Vietnam was halfway of the distance so the car could have gone to Vietnam and back. There was certainly someone whom this woman knew in Vietnam so they were busily trying to work out how to approach this when they had another incident that required them to send another car to Vietnam. They thought that they would send this girl to see if she could repeat this journey. This Vietnam journey was more complicated because the woman to be picked up might not want to come. A couple of hours later they saw the woman and without saying anything about the tachograph they explained this new job to her. She understood it and seemed to be happy to go. They said that this woman must get into the car at all costs. “You should be prepared for difficulties but you shouldn’t hit her too hard”. This woman’s eyes opened and exclaimed “too hard?!?”. They explained again that “it’s because she has to climb into the car at all costs and you shouldn’t feel squeamish about having to persuade her. You have to do exactly what’s necessary to make her get into the car no matter how unpleasant it might possibly be to you”.

If someone can drive from Europe to Vietnam and back in a weekend they deserve a medal. And in any case, Vietnam is a darn sight more than half of 7,300kms away. However, that dream really was a vivid one and for some reason or other it’s stuck in my mind. I can’t see what relevance it has to anything that’s been going on around here.

The nurse was late coming today. He was armed with his blood-testing kit so that means that not all of his patients have given up on him and are waiting for Isabelle the Nurse. Apart from that though, he didn’t stay long and was soon gone. I could get on and make my breakfast.

MY BOOK is grinding along slowly. The author has spent this morning pooh-poohing the theories of several other writers on this theme, who probably at the same time were expending their energies pooh-poohing his theories.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall a reviewer who said that his book was "a flurry of argument and counter-argument" and I can certainly see what he meant.

Back in here afterwards I spent some time tracking down some music for the next radio programme. That’s all remixed and re-edited now but it needs to be cropped down as it’s likely to overflow my one-hour slot. Once I’ve done that tomorrow morning I can write the text, and then dictate everything on Saturday night.

Once again, I was caught unawares by the cleaner who came without my realising what time it was. She fitted my patches and then I had to wait for the taxi to arrive.

It was a new driver today so he was late, and wasn’t sure where I lived. Then I had to show him where our other passenger lived. Once we were all together we had a good drive down to Avranches.

With late starting, I was late arriving but as everyone else was early they were already plugged in so I didn’t have long to wait.

The dietician came to see me this afternoon, and someone brought me the details of an appointment that they have made for me with the heart specialist – in June. They believe in keeping up to date with everything. But that date is after I will have regained possession of my apartment downstairs. Look how quickly time is approaching.

But apart from that, they left me pretty much alone and I spent the time preparing an order for LeClerc which I’ll send off in the morning.

The girl who compressed my arm after the dialysis was over had volunteered because she wanted to talk to me about air fryers. And we had quite an animated and lively chat.

Being late starting meant that I was late finishing, but that was good news in a way because the driver who brought me home was a lovely young girl, complete with long brown hair, whom I hadn’t seen before. She was a very lively character and insisted that we speak English so that she could practise.

She has a love of travelling but hasn’t been far yet and is afraid of flying. However she has a burning desire to visit Canada, and I resisted the temptation to say that I’d carry her in my arms all the way there. Had I been 40 years younger and in good health, I wouldn’t have needed asking twice.

Back here my faithful cleaner watched as I made my way upstairs. And once I’d settled down I made some dough for bread

For tea tonight, I was doing my “Mr Carmichael” impressions and SUPPER WAITS ON THE TABLE INSIDE A TIN. I couldn’t think of anything else to do tonight – I wasn’t in the mood

So right now I have things to do and then I’ll go to bed. The bread has finished baking so that’s one less thing about which to worry I suppose.

But this talk about carrying the girl across the Atlantic in my arms reminds me of when I stumbled upon that woman at that lighthouse in Labrador.
She looked at me, looked at the car, a Chrysler PT Cruiser, looked at me and asked "have you driven from Baie Comeau in THAT?!?" – bearing in mind that the road from Baie Comeau to the Labrador coast was 1800kms of the worst-ever roads in the World.
"Ohh yes" I replied. "It’s not the car on roads like this, it’s the driver who makes the difference. And for my next visit to Canada, I’ll be crossing the Atlantic on a motor bike."

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Thursday 15th February 2024 – I REALLY DON’T …

… know what’s happening to me right now.

Once again, I was absolutely flat-out this afternoon, sleeping quietly on my chair for a good 90 minutes. And nothing whatever disturbed me, not even a message on the ‘phone from Rosemary, and regular readers of this rubbish will recall the racket that this ‘phone makes whenever I receive a message or ‘phone call.

It was just like yesterday in fact, where I was well away with the fairies on the way home from Paris.

One thing that I can’t blame is tiredness. Just for a change I was in bed early and actually had a comfortable night’s sleep without waking too much.

Mind you, I could have done with another couple of hours when the alarm went off. It took me several minutes to work out what was going on (and that’s not unusual, is it?). What I mean by that is that I had the impression that there were several beds in here with several people, and a whole series of alarms was going off to awaken different people. I had a hard time believing that my alarm call was real.

But anyway I slid eventually to my feet and went for the blood pressure machine. 17.2/10.6 this morning. But as for last night’s, where did I record the figures? They aren’t written on my little booklet thing where I record them so I don’t have a clue.

They’ll turn up one day so I left them to it and went for my medication. Tons of it as usual and it’s really becoming quite ridiculous, but never mind. 10 tablets or powders in the morning and 5 at night before I go to bed is where we’re at right now.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I was having a dream last night about the words dim ond da – that’s “not but good”, messing around with them, trying to fit them into different sentences that I’d written. Then we came across some of the radio notes that I’d written and just dictated. I decided that they were horrible and needed amending. I added in some bits but they were even worse, but then I couldn’t remember how to return to the original. That confused me for quite some time. When I did, I found that I’d still missed some out. Nevertheless the programme sounded better but there were so much more that I could do with this particular programme that I thought that I was going to start to rewrite it and dictate it again but that would have to be something that would have to be done later and not now.

And there have been more than just one or two occasions where this kind of thing has happened in real life when I’ve been writing a radio programme or editing a website, ending up forgetting all kinds of important things that I had included and somehow seemed to have managed to wipe out some important stuff that I really wanted to include.

This was another night where I was with my former friend. We were chatting to two other people whom we knew who we’d met some time previously. We’d arranged for this meeting so they came round . We showed them how to climb into my attic up the electric cable but the guy’s girlfriend was afraid to do it so my former friend’s wife stayed down with her and the other four of us climbed into the attic which was full of rubbish as usual. We spread ourselves out to make ourselves comfortable to talk. This started in the attic but ended up standing in Nantwich Road by the old police station. We were as usual discussing cars. My ex-friend was talking to him about several cars including one with a particular registration that would suit his wife but not while they were living in Porthcawl because it was a dangerous place to be apparently, according to him. I was talking to the other guy, telling him that I was having to dispose of some of my cars because I’d sold my house and had nowhere to keep them. I was renting a warehouse at the moment but that was precarious. However there was also a car that I wanted to buy, a yellow Ford Zephyr 6. While this was all going on there was a road rally taking place and all these old historic cars were going past. While I was talking to him about that particular one, I could hear something going past running on 5 cylinders instead of 6. It was this Zephyr so I pointed it out to him. I told him the story about how the driver had taken it out for a run 2 weeks ago but the insurance wasn’t correct at the time and he’d had a collision with a police car. As the policeman was looking round his car and preparing to nab him for no insurance, there was another bigger accident immediately right by them. The policeman went over to that and waved this guy away which was probably about the luckiest break that he’d ever had in his life

These days I seem to have a thing about Ford Zephyr 6s. There was one in my dreams a couple of nights ago and I’m sure that there have been others. They are MkIII Zephyrs, the kind that my father had in the late 60s and early 70s. Lovely, comfortable roomy cars with plenty of woomph.

A couple of nights ago I mentioned the one that I had – a MkIV model – that caught fire after a Jethro Tull concert in Manchester.

However, the story about “no insurance” rang a bell with me. When I was living in Winsford I bought a Rover 2000 at the auctions at Prees Heath and took a chance on driving it home. It goes without saying that I was pulled over by the police and asked for the documents for the car, like the MoT and the … errr … insurance.

Not having any of course, I pleaded ignorance and so was given the dreaded white slip “to produce your documents at your nearest Police Station within 5 days – or else …” – “or else” being anything from a slap on the wrist to three months at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, and in my case, it would be nearer the latter than the former. The Cheshire Constabulary and I didn’t get on very well.

Two days later I had a phone call – “this is PC Grindlay here. I stopped you the other day in that Rover. I forgot to write the date on the copy of the white slip. You will write it on for me, won’t you?”.
“Of course I will” I said, lying through my teeth. I could just picture the scene in the Nantwich Magistrates’ Court. “Five days from WHAT date, Your Honour?”.

But to be on the safe side I promptly put the Rover through the auctions at Queensferry so that someone else, presumably in North Wales, would have more headaches than I would.

Queensferry Auctions was quite fun though in the old days. Having little money we once bought a Citroen Dyane from a scrapyard for £25, drove it to Queensferry and put it through the auctions where it fetched £35. A few of those used to keep us going when we were hard-up

Another thing that we used to do when we were broke was to wander round the scrapyards and take the back seats out of cars. You’d be surprised at the amount of money that had slipped unnoticed out of people’s pockets.

It wasn’t just money either – all kinds of things were “salvaged” including, on one occasion, a really complicated food tester with temperature probe.

Anyway, I digress … "again" – ed …

Once I’d returned to the Land of the Living I started on the notes for the radio programme. There were several that I hadn’t written so I worked my way through them and now they are all ready for dictation on Saturday night. Hopefully all of the Carnivalers will have gone home by then and we’ll go back to being quiet again.

THis afternoon I was doing paperwork. It was the middle of October when I last filed away my papers so there were piles here in all kinds of heaps all over the place.

Anyway, they are now all sorted away, bills paid, actions taken and quite a few filed under CS. The place is looking much more like home now in my bedroom/office.

My cleaner came round too. Yesterday I’d given her the prescription that I’d had from Paris and she’d been this morning to the chemist’s. Now you can’t move around here for medication.

Then there was another task that needed doing now that it was after 09:00 in North America.

My Canadian bank card expired in March last year and of course I hadn’t been to North America this autumn and so didn’t have the new one.

After six months I had the dreaded “your account is now placed in suspense” notice so that was that. And then I had a letter from Service New Brunswick about paying my property taxes on my place there, which, with a suspended bank account, will be extremely difficult.

Consequently I had sent my niece along to ransack my mailbox and she found it under a pile of rubbish, and she posted it to me – the card, not the rubbish.

Now I needed to unfreeze the account and that was not the work of five minutes either. I shudder to think how much the ‘phone call will cost me at the end of the month but it needed to be done. So now my Canadian bank account is working, my bank card works, and the letter from Service New Brunswick wasn’t even the demand for payment in any case.

But buying that place in Canada was an ace of a move. No-one asks for Visas, your right of residence in Canada, that sort of thing in Canada. You can buy cars, take out insurance, open bank accounts, have mobile phones, absolutely everything as long as you can produce a property tax certificate.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve blagged my way through all kinds of situations that would have forestalled many other people, thanks to my little piece of Canada. I might have the noisiest, most mentally-unstable neighbours in the World on my southern border, but so what?

After that I went for my hot chocolate and then came back in here ready to work but as I mentioned earlier, I went off with the fairies instead. And I can tell you where I ended up too. I’d been running some kind of football training sessions for boys and girls. I’d heard a complaint that two boys had been overheard saying that they couldn’t wait to see a certain girl use the toilet again so I went to check and was confident that no-one using the toilet could be seen from outside. The rumours continued so I arranged for a piece of white canvas to be fitted to block the window arranged in such a way that it would shield the toilet but still allow light in. I was sure that there could be no possibility of anyone being seen from outside but the rumour gained ground again, I checked the toilet and was confident, so I didn’t really know what I could do now apart from bricking up the window. And I wasn’t convinced that that would stop the rumours either.

Tea tonight was that vegan sausage-meat patty with baked potato and a tin of mixed peppers that I’d found on the shelf. I felt rather like Mr Carmichael and SUPPER WAITS ON THE TABLE INSIDE A TIN.

The patty wasn’t a success. Not that it didn’t taste nice, but that in the fridge it hadn’t really kept its shape and consistency. But never mind – it was a rather ad-hoc thing using up some left-over stuffing. I’ll just have to work on it and improve my technique.

So right now I’m going to work on my sleep and improve my technique there. Having felt like Tommy Cooper this afternoon and "I knew a man who dreamed that he was awake, and when he awoke, he was!", I want to dream of nicer things.

However, rather like Barbara Follet, "my dreams are going through their death flurries. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money" and that will be the end of the World if that does happen. It’s only my dreams that keep me going these days

And as Dietrich Bonhoffer said "the only fight that is lost is that which we give up" so I’ll go and fight the good fight in bed right now.

See you all tomorrow.

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Thursday 8th February 2024 – WE’RE BACK TO …

… where we were a few months ago with the freezer, and how it’s now jam-packed to the brim with food.

Actually, that’s quite good news because it means that I don’t have to worry too much about from where my next meal is coming.

Having said that though, there are half a loaf, a bread finger and four bread baps in there that are taking up some of the place and if I were to eat those there would me more room in there, but I’m not ready to do that yet. As long as I can continue to make bread, I’ll make it and if there’s any left over, I’ll freeze it for another time with all of the rest that’s in there.

That will give me something about which I can think the next time that I’m lying in bed tossing and turning 1.e.not a night like last night where, despite having a late night I was out like a light and remember nothing at all until I awoke.

First job was to check the blood pressure + 17.4/10.5, a bit of a change from 18.2/11.6 this morning. There were also some note to tape to the dictaphone because when the alarm went off I was on another planet somewhere

After the medication I came back here to start work – or, at least, to try to, but once more it was really difficult to get going this morning

Once I’d come back round into the Land of the Living I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. This time, I had managed to go for a wander. There was a Led Zeppelin song going through my head last night. I was singing it and needed to know whether there was a background music being played with it or not. If the song had background music being played to it, it would be liable to tax. I’d have to pay money but how would I know whether there was any background music being played to it or not at this time of night when I’m asleep?

And I wasn’t surprised that I dictated that last night because I’ve given up being surprised by what goes on during the night

Later on there were two of my assembled pizzas. I had two of them done and they were in the fridge. They’d been in the fridge for several days. What I needed to do was to take them out and put the tomato sauce on. I was in the kitchen but it wasn’t mine. A small girl came along to help but I don’t know why she did that either.

So if I’m dreaming about my pizzas during the night that’s a sign of something, I’m sure. But putting the tomato sauce on top? No thank you very much

When the alarm went off I was dictating the notes for a radio programme. They included a young girl bassist. I was writing all kinds of notes about her and what she’d been doing. She was quite young. I’d made my way down from the start and I think that she was one of the ones who was almost near the end of the programme

All of that reminded me OF MATT MINGLEWOOD’S BASSIST whom I met when I was photographer for the Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival in Fredericton. As I believe I said at the time, she could come round and have a strum on my instrument any time she likes.

On the subject of radio programmes, that was today’s task but first I had to deal with a phone call. And it was exactly as I suspected it might be. "Mr Hall, we’ve had the blood test results. You have to stop taking medication X and take medication Y instead. I’ll send you a prescription."

So the prescription duly arrived, and then I had to change all of the print cartridges in the printer which is now printing and missing lines to I had to clean all of the print heads. So you ever have the feeling that it’s just not your day?

While I was printing off the prescription I printed off some paperwork about Strider. He’s now no longer officially mine and I hope that he has found a good home with his new owners.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s a shame about Strider. We travelled tens of thousands of miles together from the semi-tropical climate of Georgia up to the frozen peri-Arctic wastes of Northern Labrador, as far as it’s possible to go by road northwards.

He’s just the right height for me to slide in and out and using the cruise control, I can drive him with just my left foot. But I’m over here and he’s over there and that’s that.

And Liz has been very helpful too. She sent me a little parcel that arrived today with a knee support in it and also a vegan cookbook, the same one that she used when she was starting out.

It’s all an early birthday present for me and she says that she hopes that I find the cookbook helpful. Secretly though, I think that she’s fed up of me asking her all these silly questions, but I know that you love me really.

Who was next to interrupt me? Ahhh yes – I had to send off my Leclerc order as I’m running low. And so are they with this farmers’ dispute. Quite a few items of the dairy line are not available and there are no substitutes

But that’s not a real problem if I run out of desserts. Strangely enough, as it happens, I have been fancying a rice pudding for ages so when I bake my bread for the weekend tomorrow morning, I might put a rice pudding in with enough to keep me going for several days.

So halfway through writing up my notes for the radio programme the Leclerc delivery came and so I had to sort out everything and put it away, as well as de-coring and de-pithing a couple of peppers to go into the freezer. I have to build my stocks back up.

Earlier on, I’d sent a message to my cleaner about the new prescription and she popped down to pick it up and tell me the latest gossip about the building.

Back at work and I’d almost finished the radio notes when Rosemary rang for a chat. Just a short chat this evening, only 52 minutes. Barely enough time for an exchange of pleasantries

By now it was tea-time and I fancied steamed veg with falafel and cheese sauce. But I found some veggie balls made out of kidney beans that needed eating and they went down with cheese sauce just as well as falafel.

While I’ve been typing up my notes, I’ve been listening to Al Stewart again and SWISS COTTAGE MANOEUVRES came round on the playlist.

Right near the end of the song are the words "and I couldn’t say what I had won or I’d lost, or even just what I had seen. But when I’m alone I just think of her once in a while". Does it remind you of anything?

It certainly reminds me of something. I’m still shaking my head over that three days in the High Arctic. It was the strangest period of the really strange life that I have led, and there’s still no explanation that I can work out about what was going on.

Let’s face it – I’m well aware of my own limits and this was way beyond anything that would have been contained within them. I certainly couldn’t explain whether I’d won or lost, and I certainly couldn’t explain what I had just seen.

But many of Al Stewart’s songs are like that. These are of some kind of vague pining for a lost adolescence that might have been, if only we had been older and wiser, and doesn’t that apply to most of us?

It’s often been said about “how I wish that I’d had all of my adolescence back, but with all the experience (and the money) that I have today. Wouldn’t things be different?”.

Mine certainly would have been, but I don’t think that it would have been better. It wasn’t until I left Crewe and came over here that I really began to encounter real life in a much wider cultural setting. But as Paul Pena wrote and Steve Miller sang in BIG OLD JET AIRLINER – "you know you gotta go through hell before you get to heaven"

And while this certainly isn’t heaven, living in Crewe was certainly hell

0

Monday 7th February 2024 – THERE WAS NOTHING …

… at all on the dictaphone from last night. And it’s been a while since that happened.

And it wasn’t because I’d had a really good night’s sleep either. In fact quite the reverse. I don’t think that I slept for more than 5 minutes.

It wasn’t one of those nights where I lay tossing and turning for most of it but in fact there was all kinds of things going on in my brain – such as it is – and there were all kinds of images and things flashing up behind my closed eyelids.

It really was quite an extraordinary situation and I’ve never known anything like it. There was no point in grabbing the dictaphone to record anything because it was all happening so quickly.

But anyway, it was rather a waste of the nice clean bedding if I wasn’t going to enjoy and make the most of it.

So when the alarm went off I fell out of bed again, totally dead to the world, and went to take my blood pressure. 18.3/9.5, compared to 18.8/10.8 at bedtime last night.

Having done that I went off to take my medication, all of it, and then came back in here.

With no dictaphone notes to transcribe I tried my best to stay awake. It’s Yoan’s turn to come round to inject me with the Last Resort and to take my blood sample and last time that he came, he found me stark out.

He had the usual battle to find a vein and then wandered off, leaving me to it.

And so today I’ve been alternating between working and fighting off waves of sleep, probably more of the latter, but not too successfully either.

Anyway, I’ve finished off the notes for the radio programme that I started on Monday, and then I’ve been tracking down music for the next one.

That one is going to be much more complicated and I didn’t have half of the music that I needed. Knowing that I didn’t have it was one thing and tracking it all down was something else completely.

And when I’d done it I had to work out a way to download it and then to convert it all to the correct format. It took me an age, especially as I was half-asleep for much of the time.

Eventually though I had all of the music that I needed and it’s all paired off ready for me to write the notes for it over the next few days

The cleaner came round today and decided to clean one of the shelves in the kitchen because she found a few stains. It appears that a can of fruit has burst somehow and the syrup has been leaking out making a mess everywhere.

But cleaning the shelves is one thing, putting all the stuff back is another, and then me looking for stuff and trying to find it later is something completely different again.

One thing that I learnt at a very early age was never to put anything away in someone else’s garage or kitchen.

When I’m at my niece’s in Canada I’ll happily wash up and dry the dishes but I won’t put the stuff away. You do that and you put it in what you think is the correct place but it isn’t and they can never find it again.

Yes, in the past I’ve spent hours looking for stuff that people have helpfully put away for me. Mind you, I’ve spent hours looking for stuff that I’ve also put away, so there’s no real difference.

The blood test results are in. Having stopped the anti-potassium stuff the potassium is now back above the upper limit.

As far as the rest of the measurements go, while the blood count is holding up for now with this “last resort” injection, the platelets count is now falling well below the acceptable limit and my carcinogenic protein, which should be less than 104.0 is now at 240.5 . The “active” part, that should be less than 11.8 is now at 27.2.

So I told me cleaner to stand by tomorrow for a new prescription changing more things round, or even giving me yet more medicine.

Tea tonight was a delicious, really delicious left-over curry with soya yoghurt and a naan bread. It really doesn’t get much better than that, honestly

As well as that I’ve had the guitars out – the bass as well as the acoustic. I’ve been listening to Al Stewart again and having a play around with a couple of his numbers.

We all know about ZERO SHE FLIES, to whom it relates, this “girl, she’s almost a woman” and the man “from the mountains watching her, biding his time”.

That’s a lovely track to play on the acoustic guitar and the bass line is really good too, if only I could get it right. The lyrics are really nice to sing but I can’t sing them and play bass at the same time – as yet.

Another track that I’ve been playing is MODERN TIMES.

Many of Al Stewart’s songs talk about the pain of growing up, of your teenage years, and we can all relate to them to a certain degree. “Modern Times” is a fantastic song for people like me desperate to cling on to whatever bit of youth they have left, and how our teenage friends have grown up quite differently to how we would have liked them to be

It’s probably the greatest song of its type, not to mention the lead guitar solo at the end of it.

It’s a song that I could play, either on the acoustic or on the bass, all night.

But not tonight because I’ve already crashed out once this evening after tea while I’ve been typing these notes. I’m going to bed and hope for better luck tonight with my nocturnal voyages.

But I have to laugh at some of the lyrics in “Modern Times”, where
"the red light girls were coming after me
For a forty dollar show"

Not long after I moved to Brussels one of my friends with his coach contacted me. There was a problem with it and he needed help.

In the middle of winter so I was dressed in my overalls and all kinds of woolly clothes of all shapes and descriptions to keep warm while I went down to help him change his starter motor.

Being underneath a coach for half an hour I was covered in oil from head to foot as we did it, and was in a right state when I set out to walk home.

And as I went underneath the arches at the Gare du Nord, a “lady of the night” emerged from the shadows and said to me, plastered in old engine oil and in dirty, filthy old clothes, "hello, sexy lover boy"

Despite knowing Brussels like the back of my hand, I hadn’t realised until then that the “ladies of the night” of the city all suffered from a visual impairment.

0

Thursday 28th December 2023 – IN WHAT CAN ONLY …

… be described as a new, rather regrettable record, I was actually up and about, taking my medicine and preparing to start work at 03:20 this morning.

Feeling absolutely wretched and totally washed out, I was in bed early – at about 22:30. And I must have fallen into a deep sleep almost immediately because there was something on the dictaphone with a timestamp of not much later.

But then there were all kinds of strange things happening during the night and I ended up awakening at about 02:15. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t go back to sleep after that and in the end gave it up as a bad job.

Firstly, there was a strange entry on the dictaphone that I have absolutely no recollection of dictating. “All that seemed to be missing from last night’s adventures was a visit from TOTGA but we’ll just have to make do without that” was what I recorded.

And that was early on too. The one that I’d had almost as soon as I’d gone to bed went “we started off with a very long complicated and involved dream that I can’t remember now. It all seems to have disappeared from my mind but at one point there was a young girl in Nantwich waiting for a load of other girls for the local dance hall to open so that they could all go in. This would be in the early 60s when beehive hair and all of that was in fashion. Some older man came and began to talk to her, to chat her up. Another girl in the queue accosted the man and told him what she thought of him, and generally made him feel uncomfortable until he left. That girl was actually a very young Marilyn Munroe who had come to Nantwich for some kind or other of show promotion but was standing in the queue at the dance hall just like any other young girl of that particular age and behaviour at that particular time. There was nothing special about her at all” which has absolutely nothing whatever with what came after it.

However, I do have a vague kind of ethereal feeling that at some point during the night not only Zero but also Castor came to see me. And if that’s the case I’m surprised that I didn’t dictate it. Maybe it’s my subconscious blocking them out for reasons that I can only speculate, or else it’s simply that I don’t want to share my experiences with anyone else. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, with coming from a large family where nothing was ever my own, I don’t “do” sharing if it’s something nice like one of Liz’s vegan cakes, and I can’t think of anything very much nicer than having Zero and Castor around.

Zero as we know drifts in and out of my nocturnal rambles, doing her own thing and going her own way, what around here they call son bonhomme de chemin but as for Castor, I haven’t seen her in the flesh since that morning in early September 2019 when she turned her back on me and walked to her ‘plane to Ottawa on that windswept airstrip at the Coppermine River, just a short walk from where in 1771 Samuel Hearne had stood helpless and horrified as his Dene guides fell on and butchered an Inuit hunting party.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it puzzled and bewildered me for quite a while as to why she left me as she did. And it wasn’t until I had to say “goodbye” to someone in similar circumstances a year or two ago that I realised that sometimes, goodbyes have to be done like that.

Castor has been back during the night a few times since then, but not for quite a while. If indeed it really was she (and Zero) last night and I missed it, I’ll be helpless and horrified too.

However, it was what happened next that was the killer.

There was another dance taking place at Wistaston. There was a group of kids and I was going but I was going to buy a big motorbike and hopefully turn up on it to arrive there. Then I had a think about first of all, it wouldn’t be registered, then it won’t be taxed. And where would I leave it because there would be no burglar alarm or anti-theft device fitted on it. Much as I wanted to have it and take it there it would cause quite a few problems. I was listening to a couple of bikers talking. One was actually knitting while he was talking. he was talking about his travels out in the USA as a road racer around a lot of circuits in California. They were talking about his bike, how it would still pass an MoT in the UK after that. Their conversation was extremely interesting. They wanted to know about the amount of Marshall Aid that would be applicable to importing over something that they’ve had in the USA but I wasn’t able to give any help. This question of this big motorbike was something eating away at me – how was I going to bring it to this dance with all of the problems that I had to face? Many of them were insurmountable because they required a lot of input from a lot of other people in a short space of time.

“Another dance” indeed because there had been a dance at the Wistaston Memorial Hall on the Saturday night of August Bank Holiday weekend in 1973 and every moment of it is etched onto my brain as if it was yesterday.

At that time I was sharing an apartment with a guy who played synthesiser in a rock band and his group had been invited to play at the Windsor Free Festival on the Sunday.

Everyone was stony broke in those days and they couldn’t afford the fuel so they arranged the dance where they would play, as a way of raising some petrol money.

My friend from the Wirral had been to school with one of the musicians so I invited him along and he turned up on his motorbike, a 350cc Triumph.

It was at that dance that he met a girl called Jane, and I met Jane’s friend Sheila, someone who has appeared in these pages on a few occasions. There was nothing particularly serious about any of this, except that my friend fell rather badly, but I imagine for the two girls is was more of a case as Al Steward described in SWISS COTTAGE MANOEUVRES as "I could see myself nailed to a dormitory tale as a holiday night’s escapade".

However, Sheila and I went on for more than a night (not much more) and I’m glad that it did because apart from the fact that she was a nice girl, her father kept a pub, the Whore’s Bed in Walgherton and that was where I met Paul Elson, drummer of “Strife” and a big friend of her brother.

And not so long ago, Paul sent me a recording of a “Strife” concert that he’d found in all his old papers and I featured it on one of my rock shows.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … Wistaston Memorial Hall, at the end of the concert we loaded up all of their gear into the back of the old J4 van that they had and they they discovered that they were still short of money. And so for £1:00 per head they would take anyone who wanted to go to the Festival. You’ve no idea how many people piled into that van with all of the gear already in it.

My friend and I decided that we’d go down on the motorbike so we set off and went a different way to Windsor.

But those in the van had a nightmare. Going down the M1 a tyre burst and with all of the weight that was in the van they were all over the road until the driver could bring it to a halt. It was a miracle that it didn’t overturn.

Horrible thoughts of 12th May 1969 must have flashed through everyone’s mind – the night that Fairport Convention’s van overturned at almost the same spot killing drummer Martin Lambie and guitarist Richard Thompson’s girlfriend Jeannie “the tailor” Franklyn, to whom the Jack Bruce album SONGS FOR A TAILOR was dedicated.

We stayed down there all weekend, without any sleep whatsoever, and then came home on the Monday night. My friend fell asleep riding back so he asked me to ride the rest of the way home but when we hit a bump in the road he fell off the seat so in the end we had a couple of hours curled up leaning over a table in a Little Chef near Oxford.

That’s not my best memory of the Windsor Free Festival either.

When I was living at home a schoolfriend and I decided one summer that we’d go to one. Not wishing to let on to my parents where I was going I said that we were going camping, which was perfectly true.

All went well until I returned home to a pair of furious parents. The Festival had been on the news on the television and there on the 21:00 News on BBC that Sunday was Yours Truly staggering past the TV camera with a Watneys Party Seven can tucked under his arm, and all of the family, friends and neighbours had seen it.

Ahhh well. We all have memories of what and what might have been. Some more than most

"Childhood comes for me at night
Voices of my friends
Your face bathing me in light
A hope that never ends
Pages turning
Pages torn and pages burning
Faded pages, open in the sun
Better bring your own redemption when you come
TO THE BARRICADES OF HEAVEN WHERE I COME FROM
"

But anyway, after all that, I just couldn’t go back to sleep again.

So here I am, up and about, trying nicely and calmly to fit the blood pressure tester to my arm. And after several unsuccessful tries, Our Hero notes on the box that is says poignée. So put it around your wrist, you berk.

Going for a ride on the porcelain horse to calm down again, I come back and take my blood pressure.

"The aim is to have a blood pressure of below 14.0/9.0" and so with mine being 17.0/8.0, I can see that we are starting as we mean to go on.

And as for what it was at lunchtime, I forgot to take it. Start as we mean to go on indeed.

Then there were 15 pills to take and that was … errr … complicated. I earned my coffee and cornflakes after that.

So today I tidied up the kitchen area so it looks as if someone lives here, and in my spare time I made a start on the next radio programme – chosen the music, paired it off and written some of the notes. There have been a few visits and phone calls too.

But one unwelcome visitor was the taxi to take me to the Centre de Re-education. he came 20 minutes early today and I was as nature intended in the bathroom having a good scrub up

But they put me through my paces and I came back here for more spoonsful of cake and some hot chocolate.

Tea tonight was nothing complicated. Pasta and veg in a cheese sauce. Quick, simple and delicious.

With having an early start, I’ve had several moments where I’ve been away with the fairies but as usual, I’m now not tired enough to go to bed.

So which childhood voices of my friends will I hear tonight? And whose face will bathe me in light? If it really had been Zero and Castor last night, wouldn’t it be nice if they were to come back?

But it doesn’t happen like that, does it? I’ll take my blood pressure and go to bed, and probably meet some of my family heading my way. I’ve no idea why they keep on putting in an appearance like this but I wish that they’d clear off and leave room for people whom I really want to see.

0

Saturday 4th November 2023 – I WON’T BE …

… sorry to go to bed later on tonight. I’ve had a horrible day.

Even though I was in bed at a reasonable time last night and managed to struggle to my feet when the alarm went off, I was still totally out of it and I’ve been asleep on my chair in here for several hours on a couple of occasions during the day

It’s probably the after-effects of my wandering off around the shops yesterday and going visiting later. You’ve no idea just how much all of this takes out of me.

But at some point or other I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. We started off by planning a rail trip for some reason. In order to connect ourselves up to the system we had to press on a link on our computer and drag it into another link. That way it would connect. We were there in our room trying to connect these two links together but it wasn’t happening. Everyone was starting to panic. Suddenly the link connected and we had the screen. We saw an ancient 1960s-type of diesel multiple unit in the railway station in the centre of the town of Llanidloes (in fact nothing like Llanidloes and actually the railway station there has long gone and taken the line with it) in the snow, with people running for it and leaping aboard as it pulled away. We were sitting there thinking “if we’ve connected why weren’t we taken on board?”. We discussed that for a couple of minutes until in the end we realised that it was only a single track and the train that we’d seen had been heading towards the west but we really needed the train that was heading towards the east.

And then I was with a famous actor last night, interviewing him for the radio. At the end there was a pile of photos so I asked about them. He explained that they were his so I asked if I could look through them to choose a few. I asked if they were in any kind of order. The guy with me suggested that they were in reverse order. The actor himself began to have a look through the clothes that he was wearing which by now were heaped on the side of the bed in layers. He thought that they were in the order of “oldest first”. We ended up having a lengthy discussion about his pyjamas, how modern pyjamas are much lighter and much more aerated and generally much better for the skin in your sleep. But I couldn’t help noticing that going through his pyjamas from all those years ago up until today how the size had changed. It may not look like it on the film but this guy for the last 20 years had been putting on rather a lot of weight that he’d been doing very well to try to hide.

Finally, we’d been performing some experiments, my partner and I, on some certain products, setting up this chemical experiment and letting it run to see what happened. It was a Friday evening and I thought that we’d have plenty of time but judging by how it was unfolding it would be 03:00 or 04:00 by the time that it finished, if by then. I began to wish that maybe I should have done it on a Saturday night when I could have had a good lie-in on a Sunday morning instead of getting up at 07:00 on Saturday morning. We carried on doing it all the same. I was having some kind of brief desultory chat with my partner while I was overseeing this experiment. I suddenly decided that I’d like a cup of tea (yes, it MUST have been a dream). I asked her if she wanted a cup of tea but she said no – she’d be going to bed in a moment so I was sorely tempted at that point to abandon the experiment for the night and go to bed with her but as usual it was one of these situations where I was caught in indecision again.

At one time these dreams that were riddled with indecision used to be a fairly common occurrence but we haven’t had one like that for a while.

What else I’ve been doing is some tidying up in the dining area and the kitchen. It’s true to say that only the basics are being done round here, like keeping the place clean, but the lack of tidiness is starting to spiral out of control and I need to do something about it.

And that’s something else that is taking its toll. It’s totally exhausting doing things like this and it takes so long too. I can only work in bursts of a couple of minutes and then I have to go to sit down to recover for a couple of hours.

Another thing that I’ve been doing is to chop up a few more sound-files. There’s stuff here that I recorded back as far as 2019 with which I’ve done nothing at all. It’s high time that I caught up with everything.

There’s only another … gulp … 31 hours to chop up and then I can get on with some more stuff. But there will probably be a lot more after that hidden away in the bowels of my computer.

For a start, there are probably a dozen or so soundtracks of Louis de Funes films and there will be dozens of soundbytes to be cut out of those. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall, if they have listened to my radio shows, that Louis de Funes is a special guest on my programmes and we present them together.

Another task is to go back to when I was in hospital last year and add in the dreams. I’d finished transcribing them a good while ago but I’d never managed to find the motivation to add them into the relevant entries. Anyway I made a start and I’ve now done a dozen or so.

But reading through the notes of my hospital stay – all two months of it – it’s interesting to watch how my thoughts changed over that period. They swung all the way across the whole spectrum of emotions from relief to sadness to depression to anger to incandescent rage

One of the (many) reasons why I keep these notes is because they are an important gauge of how my mental health is doing as I battle this illness. At one time it was interesting to watch my health swing back and fro, but over this last 18 months or so it’s been all downhill.

While I was going through my notes, I came across a reference to ZERO SHE FLIES.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that this “girl, she is almost a woman” refers to someone whom I knew very well and who, every so often, comes along to visit me during the night. She unfortunately had a lot of baggage attached, none of which was her doing and she struggled on valiantly despite everything, but in the end the baggage overwhelmed me.

Quite often, I’ve wondered what became of her and what she would be like today. I remember in 2016 being in a café in Belgium drinking a coffee when in walked a girl who would have been the spitting image of how I imagined her to have looked just then. I was so surprised that I dropped my coffee.

And then, in 2017 I was on board ship going across the Strait of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and Labrador when I bumped into a girl who was exactly as Zero was when I remembered her. And that surprised me too

So this afternoon I did something that I haven’t done for a while, and that was to have a play about on the acoustic guitar. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that after having spent all that time with Castor up in the High Arctic teaching each other the ukulele and the guitar, I started to play again quite seriously.

When we were on Spirit of Conrad down the French coast I was giving concerts and I even went and treated myself to a new 5-string fretless bass to go with the big amp that I picked up in that pawn shop in Ottawa.

But the bass is now too heavy for me to hold and while I can still play the old EB3 and the acoustic guitar, I just can’t find the time or the motivation.

The difficulty is that even the most simple tasks are taking so much time and so much effort that I can’t manage anything else right now.

So instead of continuing to feel sorry for myself and brooding on the infinite, I went and made tea. Baked potatoes from the European Potato Mountain cooked in the air fryer, a vegan salad and a burger from the European Vegan Burger Mountain.

And now I’ve finished my notes I’m going to dictate the radio notes that I wrote out during the week and then go off to bed. Tomorrow I’m going to be baking biscuits, so I need to cheer up .

What went on in the past can’t be changed so it’s pointless brooding on it. Here’s looking forward to my chocolate and coconut biscuits.

0

Sunday 27th November 2022 – SO HAVING GONE …

… off to sleep at some kind of early night and I was in the middle of a dream but I can’t remember, although at one point I was being pulled somewhere by someone. Then I awoke to find that it was the nurse pulling on my hand trying to connect me up to some kind of antibiotic fluid that she’d put up on my portable patient thing. I thought “didn’t I feel funny and silly trying to resist whatever was going on?”.

But anyway, that could have been quite an interesting moment had I been the kind of person who talks in his sleep.

Half an hour or so later just as I was about to drop off to sleep the nurse came back and disturbed me by uncoupling me and then I settled down again to try to go back to sleep but really that was that as far as sleep was concerned.

In the WORDS OF AL STEWART, “.. all that is left is the clock on the shelf
as it ticks one day into another”.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, back in the old days when I had fewer preoccupations in my life I had regular visits during the night from three young ladies, one of whom was nicknamed “Zero” after the “girl, she’s almost a woman” IN THE SONG and there are more truths in this song than you would ever realise.

Yes, it was getting to the stage of Warren Zevon and “A RED-HEADED GIRL
IN THE RED SILK DRESS
YA’ KNOW, I’M ASKING HER TO DANCE WITH ME
SHE MIGHT SAY YES”

By 03:00 I had given up everything and had the laptop up and running with the Old-Time Radio going. First up was an episode of Paul Temple, and there’s nothing quite like THE CORONATION SCOT at 03:00 to stir the spirit.

And I settled down later under the bedclothes with the headphones and the computer still going ready for the alarm at 06:30 and wondered how deep asleep I would be right now had the doctor yesterday not decided to wreak her petty revenge on me last night by disobeying standing instructions by telling me about my operation later in the day

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have requested no knowledge whatever of any surgical intervention. I prefer that they say nothing, creep up behind me with a length of 4×2 and deal with whatever surgery is required while I know nothing about it.

At about 05:00 I was shaken awake by a group of nurses wanting to take a blood sample and reminding me of my operation, which I now know is going to be at 07:30.

Apparently the catheter in the back of my hand isn’t the right kind of catheter to take a blood sample. They had to insert a needle somewhere else in my arm to continue the work of trying to transform me into a pin cushion or a junkie or something.

When they finished the sample they dumped a pile of washing stuff in the bathroom and told me to get washed. I don’t know if I replied with an expletive but if I did, I wouldn’t be surprised.

When the alarm went off at 06:30 I grudgingly staggered off towards the bathroom.

At 07:00 a nurse came to see me, one of those who had awoken me at 05:00. She asked me if I was ready for the operation. I ran through the timeline of what had happened during the night and expressed my feelings in no uncertain terms.

She beat a hasty retreat and for once I was left alone.

Only until about 07:15 when a nurse came to weigh me. I made her wait while I went to the bathroom. She retaliated by cleaning my catheter port with a force that doubled me up and connecting me to an antibiotic. So I’m not going for my operation at 07:30.

Anyway at 07:30 regardless of anything else they came to fetch me, antibiotics and all, and wheeled me off down into the basement and I saw parts of the hospital that I never new existed.

Eventually I arrived in some kind of holding area where I waited. And waited. And waited.

At about 08:00 they came to fetch me. And in the operating theatre –
Our Hero – “am I the first patient of the morning?”
Assistant Surgeon – “in this theatre, yes”
OH – “well let’s get going while the knife’s still sharp”.
But as Kenneth Williams and Alfred Hitchcock once famously remarked, “it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners”.

They actually used a laser on me to remove my infected and damaged catheter port. And now I know what burning human flesh smells like even if, because of the local anaesthetic I couldn’t feel it.

When they had finished (in an operation that had lasted 28:55 according to the stopwatch on the ceiling) I was put in another holding area where they took my blood pressure. and I reckon that 94/67 is pretty low in anyone’s calculations.

It was 10:15 when I arrived back after a lengthy stay in the Recovery Room, and you’ve no idea how much I was looking forward to coffee and breakfast. And as you might expect, it was strawberry jam this morning.

They had taken a sample of blood a little earlier this morning which showed a blood count of 6.6. I wasn’t aware that I had lost so much blood during the operation and I told the little junior doctor so. She asked me if I’d been bleeding anywhere else so I told her the story of the carcinogenic protein and gave her a small lecture on basic volumetrics.

While I was at it, I did ask her about what’s going to happen now that we know that the story about “being too full of virus for an operation”. She replied that “this was a different type of operation” so I took great delight in showing her last night’s blog entry.

She thinks that I need to see one of the doctors who sees me during the week but regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we don’t see them every day.

And as she left, I couldn’t help but say that “well, we both knew that this story about ‘too full of virus to operate on me’ was a load of nonsense, didn’t we?”

All very juvenile and childish of me I’m afraid, but you can imagine how I was feeling.

With breakfast being so late, I wasn’t in much of a mood for lunch especially in the middle of a blood transfusion. But at least that’s over now.

Having had a really bad morning I spent much of the afternoon asleep or else chatting with my friend in Eastern Kent – or is it my Eastern Kentish friend? I can’t remember which is which.

After my rather stressful day it’s time now for me to settle down under the covers ready for the rigours of tomorrow.

It’s strange, isn’t it, that I was worrying about having a very quiet day and it turned into one of the most difficult to date. Tomorrow will have to go some to match the events of today

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Thursday 6th January 2022 – LOOK WHO’S BACK!

lorry trailer minidigger porte st jean Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022And he’s brought a friend with him too.

It seems that I was exceedingly premature the other day when I said that they must have finished down at the roadworks by the Rue St Michel, because ever since then, the lorry with its trailer and machines has been back every day.

And in the past I’ve mentioned about the difficulties that large vehicles have of passing underneath the Porte St Jean into the old town. It’s usual therefore for there to be a means of trans-shipment using a smaller vehicle, and today there’s a pick-up by the side of the lorry unloading stuff that it’s brought from within the walls

This morning I needed a pick-up to move me from my bed into the living room because I certainly wasn’t capable of doing it under my own steam.

It had been another “nuit blanche” – a night without any sleep. At least, that’s what it felt like and the fact that there was nothing at all recorded on the dictaphone tends to give that idea some credence. I suppose that the awful afternoon that i’d had yesterday was preying on my mind.

After the medication and so on, I came back in here feeling sorry for myself and not doing anything at all. And that’s how it went for a couple of hours.

But a strong mug of coffee at breakfast time gradually seeped down all the way through my muscles and I began slowly to feel more like it. I even went out and did the “end of the month” back-up onto the memory stick that I take to Leuven with me that I use to update the travelling laptop.

And feeling a little more like it after that, I set myself a little task, to prove that I am worthy.

There’s been a persistent … well, not a fault, but something that I would like to change in my notes and I’d made a start back in November and all subsequent entries have reflected it.

It’s to do with a song by Al Stewart that I heard while I was preparing a radio programme and it reminded me of something going back to 2006-07 that I did that I had forgotten, inspired by the same song. The lyrics were … well … extremely appropriate at the time.

Anyway, being up-to-date with that from November, there were entries going back all the way to the start of this journal to amend and so I made a start. Not every day of course, maybe one every few weeks (although just recently they have been a lot more frequent than that) and I made it as far back as the end of October 2020.

And if I have time tonight I’ll do a few more too because it’s quite therapeutic. Al Stewart has a lot to answer for.

Another strong coffee brought me even more into the land of the living and I attacked the soundfile that I started the other day.

With a pause here and there and a pause for my afternoon walk, I was well-advanced. Over 10 minutes of this interview has already gone the way of the west leaving me with, at the moment, just about 15 minutes, of which there will be more following its friends into oblivion.

There is at the moment 8.5 minutes of how I want it to be, so I’m looking as if I’m going to end up with about 12 minutes in total.

It won’t be done tomorrow morning though because I have bread to make. and now that I have a new whizzer, I need to finish off making this large batch of hummus.

In fact there would have been much more of this sound file edited but Rosemary rang me up for a chat and we had another one of our marathon sessions.

As for the afternoon walk, well, it was like a March day outside – not cold, not wet, not particularly anything.

people on beach rue du nord Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022First place to go to is the wall at the end of the car park where I can look down onto the beach to see what’s going on down there.

And there was plenty of beach for all kinds of things to be going on, but there weren’t many people down there going on with it. In fact, for the whole length of the beach, I could only see one person, although there was some movement down by the bouchot beds at Donville les Bains.

While I was there, I had a good look out to sea to see whether we might have any kind of maritime activity, but there wasn’t a sausage out there this afternoon that I could see, and it was quite clear this afternoon again.

light aeroplane 50sa pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022There might have been nothing going on out at sea, but there was something going on up in the air this afternoon.

As I walked down the path I was overflown by an aeroplane that had taken off from the local airfield. No need to look for a flight plan because it’s our old friend 50SA and, being an ultra-light aircraft, she doesn’t file one which is a shame.

And it’s my intention to go out to the airfield when I come back from Leuven to make further enquiries about these planes and find out what I can about them. But I bet that there will be no-one there to ask when I arrive.

cap fréhel cap erquy brittany coast Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022Yesterday, I mentioned that the views out to sea were amongst the best that we have ever had.

That’s certainly the case today and the view of Cap Fréhel, 70 kms away, even with the naked eye, was quite impressive. Not only that, if you look carefully at this image you can see the headland beyond it.

If I’m correct, that headland in the background to the right of the lighthouse is Cap Erquy and that’s a further 10 or 12 kilometres further on.

Yes, the views were really impressive, but it was a shame that there was only me out there enjoying them. There wasn’t another soul about this afternoon, and that suits me, with another 261,000 infections. I’m dreading going to Paris next week with all of this.

gerlean trafalgar chantier naval port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022No-one down by the bench at the end of the headland so I carried on along the path towards the port.

And there’s been another change of occupant in the chantier naval as well since I was last here. Pescadore and La Bavolette II now seem to have gone back into the water and in their place is the trawler Trafalgar whom we have seen in there before.

On the othe rhand, Gerlean is still in there, having a lot of work carried out on her. But I’ll refrain from saying “it looks as if she’s in here for a long stay” for that’s the cue for her to be back in the water when I come by tomorrow.

joly france chausiase ferry terminal port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022Joly France boats, the older one of the two unless I’m much mistaken, is still over there as she has been for the last while, but she’s been joined today by Chausiaise, the little freighter that runs out to the Ile de Chausey occasionally.

But wouldn’t it be nice to see the Channel Island ferries back at the ferry terminal? It’s been almost 2 years since they last went out (apart from that little window in the early summer 2020) and with the infection rates being so appalling, that’s not likely to change any time soon.

On the way home, I passed by the lorry and its trailer and little friend, and came back here for a coffee and to carry on work, until Rosemary called.

Tea tonight was pasta and burger with vegetables. Very nice and it made me feel much better. In fact, I’ve not had too bad a day today despite how it started (and how yesterday finished).

Baking bread tomorrow, making hummus, and whatever else I can find to do.

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Sunday 21st March 2021 – I WAS RIGHT …

naabsa fishing boats fish processing plant port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall… about this fishing boats breeding or multiplying or whatever.

We started off with one moored at the Fish Processing Plant and abandoned to go aground as the tide went out and yesterday we ended up with four of them. That was when I mused that they must be multiplying and it looks as if I’m right because today there’s a fourth one down there that is going to be marooned by the tide in half an hour’s time.

The Fish Processing Plant seems to be all closed up so that fourth one hasn’t come along to unload and in any case it’s leaving it rather late to move.

So what’s all going on there then?

ile de chausey Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallNo prizes for guessing what’s going on here, is there?

There probably isn’t anyone who, having seen the beautiful weather that we had yesterday, would believe that it would continue for the rest of the weekend so nobody should be in the last surprised by the fact that the weather has closed in again today. It’s gone cold and the fog and mist are closing in.

So much so that I’m glad that I missed almost half of today. I might have been awake at 08:30 but no danger whatever of me leaving my stinking pit at that time on a Sunday. 11:15 is a much more realistic time for me to show a leg.

After the medication I attacked the dictaphone. I always like to listen to where I’ve been during the night and, more importantly, who has come with me. Even though I’ve been starved of good, pleasant, charming and erudite company just recently, what goes on on my travels during the night is usually much more exciting than anything that happens during the day when I’m awake, sad as it is to say it.

But not last night. I would really like to have some financial stability and I had some money invested in a company called Global Marketing. I’d had a whole pile of information from them that I was busy going through when suddenly the Chancellor of the Exchequer, not Sunak but someone else turned up on my door. He was telling me of all his bullish plans for this and that and I said quite frankly “I don’t believe very much of this at all”. he sat down, plugged in a tape recorder and played a speech back. I said “that’s you speaking, isn’t it?”. He replied “yes it is”. I replied that I’d be much more convinced if it was the EU or someone like that speaking to me. He noticed the paperwork and he went through it. “Is this what you’re doing in your retirement? organising items for these?” I asked “don’t you know who these people are?”. He replied “no. I’ve never seen them until I saw these papers” so I was about to tell him who they were when I awoke.

After I’d gathered my wits (which takes an awful lot longer than it ought to bearing the reduced amount of wits that I possess these days – but then I suppose that they have more empty space in which to roam around) I attacked the photos from July 2019.

By the time that I knocked off I’d arrived in East Forks, Minnesota, USA where I spent a couple of very ill days. However, I had had a little drive around Winnipeg and been to see MY GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE – or, at least, the house where she lived during her very short marriage.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my great grandparents emigrated to Canada in 1906 and my grandmother, who was a music hall singer, married a musician from Winnipeg in July 1918. Their marriage lasted barely 4 months as he died in the influenza epidemic in November 1918.

When my great grandfather died in 1923 (we went to SEE HIS GRAVE 20 YEARS AGO) my great grandmother returned to the UK bringing the unmarried children (including my grandmother) back with her.

The married children remained behind and that’s how come I have family in Montréal and Ottawa (and probably elsewhere too).

Anyway, you haven’t come here to hear all of that nonsense. It’s time that I was clearing off outside to see what was happening.

beach rue du nord plat gousset donville les bains Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallAnd the answer to all of that was that down on the beach there was nothing happening at all. Just one or two people walking around there.

And as I said earlier, I can’t say that I blame them either. You can see by how dark it is down there, just how depressing the weather was this afternoon.

Dark, depressing and gloomy. But that’s enough about me – the weather was just as bad. The mist is closing in yet again and it wasn’t very nice at all so I shrugged my shoulders and set off at a pace around the headland while the going was good and before the weather became any worse.

lighthouse coastguard station semaphore pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallAs you can see, I wasn’t alone out there this afternoon. There were quite a few people walking around on the footpath this afternoon braving the weather.

And they needed to be brave too. Just now I mentioned that I needed to push on before the weather deteriorated even more and if you look to the right of this image you can see a rainstorm approaching rather rapidly and I didn’t want to be caught out there in all of that.

So I pushed along the path, across the lawn at the end by the lighthouse and then across the car park to the end of the headland. There was nothing whatever happening out to sea as far as I could see (and I couldn’t see very far at that) so I wandered off along the path on top of the cliff.

microlight ulm pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallYesterday we were having something of an aerial day seeing as the weather was something of a plane-spotter’s delight. But no such luck today. The thick clouds that we were having put a stop to that.

But we did have one of these microlight powered hang-glider things floating around over my head as I walked along the path so I took a photo of it as it went by overhead, but that was my lot. I wanted to be home before the rain arrived.

No change in occupancy in the chantier navale and we saw earlier the fishing boats at the Fish Processing Plant so with nothing else going on, I headed back home again for my coffee. There were plenty of things to do.

One of the things that needed doing was the baking for today.

There isn’t much bread left right now so I needed to make a loaf. But not a big one because I’m off on my travels on Wednesday and there’s no room in the freezer. So just a small one would have to do. Consequently, immediately after lunch I’d made up 250 grammes of flour into a dough – using the wrong flour as you might expect.

At the same time, I’d taken a lump of pizza dough out of the freezer and that had been thawing out during the afternoon.

When I returned from my walk I have the dough its second kneading and shaping and left it to proof again this time in its mould. Then I kneaded the pizza dough, rolled it out and put it on the pizza tray and left everything to proof.

While I was doing all of that I carried on with the Central Europe stuff. There’s now another day finished and IS NOW ON LINE. Just 3 more days to do now, but one of those days is the one where I ran aground in the first place all those weeks ago so that isn’t going to be easy.

By now the dough was all ready so I bunged the loaf in the oven and assembled the pizza. When the bread was done I put the pizza in the oven to cook.

home made bread vegan pizza place d'armes Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallHere are the finished products. The loaf is small but it looks and feels quite good. As for my pizza, it was delicious yet again.

No pudding this week as I’m not here to eat it. I’ll be taking stuff out of the freezer for the next couple of days. There are plenty of frozen pies and so on in there that need finishing. It’ll make more room in there for other stuff.

While I was writing up my notes I was listening to music as usual. There are certain tracks that I can only listen to when I’m in the right mood to hear them and that, unfortunately, isn’t right now, for a whole variety of reasons with which I won’t bore you.

So of course, it goes without saying that Al Stewart’s MODERN TIMES came round on the playlist, didn’t it? Hard to think that I was working out the chords for this earlier in the week and I could play it then. But not today.

That’s because the track that came up on the playlist immediately before it was GRASSHOPPER by Man. What was I doing the night of 1st/2nd September 2019 that I can’t even now, 18 months later, bring myself to write about and which I probably never will.

One thing about it though and that was that I was never the same afterwards. Mind you, I was never the same beforehand so it doesn’t make very much difference anyway.

Anyway, on that note (well, we are talking about music) I’m off to bed. I need my beauty sleep of course, but I need much more than this. I have a radio programme to do and I’ve nothing prepared for it. And it’s a programme of fairly new stuff and thse ones are always the most difficult to write.

It won’t be an 11:15 finish tomorrow, that’s for sure.

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Monday 15th March 2021 – I’VE HAD A …

… much better day today.

Due without doubt to crawling wearily into bed at about 22:45 and sleeping right through until the alarm went off.

There was plenty of time for me to go off on a nocturnal voyage or two. I was out somewhere during the night. I went to see a house. I walked in there and walked out in disgust because it was pretty expensive. They wanted €16 per week until 2008. I thought that that was a lot but as someone pointed out, at least it’s a roof over my head even if it’s only temporary. Just then my personal manager guy who looks after me came past and we walked off together and were talking about things. It might have been a friend of mine from way back. We got into school and I’d had a can of drink on the way and this guy had paid for it. I said that I would give him the money back when we got to school so we got there and bumped into a girl who was in my year at class of all people. She’d had a bottle of drink and there had been a strange clip on the bottle that she had to hand back. I’d seen someone walking off with a clip of that sort but it didn’t really click for a minute what it was. After her drink she had a hunt around for this clip but couldn’t find it. She went to ask the girl at the till if she had seen it. They talked about this and she said something about “what have you done with your little friend?”. She looked up and saw me and went all red and blushed. This girl said something so I replied “it’s OK. I’ve had worse than that”. Then she came out with something about the school over the last couple of years has been really good because there’s been no-one foreign in it. No Irish and no foreigners. I replied that foreigners are more exciting and interesting so we had a talk about that.

Later we were on the THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR trying to go through the North West Passage but there had been an incident and we had lost our mast so we were proceeding with diesel engines. There was a port nearby but we didn’t know which one it was so we’d head there anyway. One of the guys with us broadcast a silly message about how well we were doing and so on. We came into this town along the road on the ship and it didn’t look right at all because it looked far too green, somewhere like the north of Scotland. We pulled in and I thought “this is a big town. It has a Co-op and loads of shops so this isn’t somewhere in the North-West Passage at all. The street signs were in English with Chinese writing as well and all of the accents were northern Scotland. We parked where we thought the port was and there was a ramp going up into like a pub. He wandered off, the guy who was with me and I wandered around for a bit. he went off looking in the shops and he started to complain about the rugby pitch that he had seen. I looked out of the window and we were quite high up. There was a big valley down below us with gas holders in it. I thought “well, this is nothing like a port at all”. I walked up this ramp but it turned out that it was into a pub. I thought “we’ll never be able to get our boat up to here. There were no boats or anything and I thought “where the heck have we arrived now?”.

After the medication I made a start on the radio programme for this week and having chosen the music and paired it while I was in Leuven, I’d finished and had it running to listen to by 11:15.

It’s a good jo that I had because while I was listening to it and trying to organise myself Rosemary rang and we had one of our lengthy chats. As a result I was quite late in going for my lunch.

After lunch I had something important to do – to make further enquiries about what I need to do to upgrade the big computer as I would like it to be. I’ll run the one that I repaired for 72 hours non-stop while I’m in Leuven next week and if it runs fine, I can use that while I have the big office machine in pieces.

man wading in water in waterproofs beach place d'armes Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallThe weather was fairly cold and threatening rain when I went out for my afternoon walk so I dressed accordingly when I went out for my afternoon walk.

Not as accordingly as this guy down here on the beach out by the Rue du Nord. I just had on my winter jacket and cap. This guy seems to be in his oilskins and waders, and he probably has his sou’wester in his pocket in case it comes on to rain, which it might well do at some point, judging by the sky.

Mind you, he was the only person down on the beach who was dressed to such an extent. There were three or four other people down on the beach at different locations but they were dressed more … errr … casually. I’ve no idea what they were all doing down there and I didn’t hang around long enough to find out.

f-gsbv Robin DR400 180 pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallThere was plenty of activity in the air today too. While I was walking along the footpath I was overflown by a light aircraft.

Despite the poor quality of the photograph due to the distance that it was out at sea I could see her registration number. She’s F-GSBV, a Robin DR400/180 of unknown date. She’d taken off from Granville Airport at 15:53 and flew a figure-of_eight around the coast and landed back at the airport after just 11 minutes, her second flight of the day.

There wasn’t anyone else out there this afternoon so I had the path all to myself. I pushed along in the wind as far as the lawn near the lighthouse.

roofing college malraux place d'armes Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallFrom here, there’s a good view back to the College Malraux where I could see what was going on with the roofing that they were doing.

They don’t seem to have advanced very far over this last couple of weeks. They’d had that corner of the roof stripped off when I came back from Leuven two and a half weeks ago. They need to be working quicker than that if they want to finish it sometime soon.

Nothing else was happening here, except for the Council grass-cutters, so I walked on across the car park to the end of the headland. There wasn’t anything happening in the bay and the Brittany coast was rather obscured by clouds so I headed off along the path on top of the cliffs.

workmen at ferry port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric HallRegular readers of this rubbish will recall that a week or two ago we saw some workmen unloading a pile of builders’ bags onto the quayside over by the ferry terminal.

Those bags disappeared quite quickly and I never did find out what happened to to them, but today we have some more workmen over there. They seem to be doing something over on the far side of the wall and one of these days when I have a moment, whenever that might be, I’ll have to go over there and have a look for myself.

Down at the chantier navale there was no change in occupancy. The four large yachts and the trawler were still in there up on blocks and thy look as if they will be there for a while yet. And there’s not much room in there for anything else if the need arises.

trawler naabsa port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric HallOne thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall noticing is that these days we seem to be having rather a plethora of NAABSA (not always afloat but safely aground) fishing boats over by the Fish Processing Plant.

It used to be very rare to see one – they’d all be taken inside to the wet harbour and moored there. But just recently we’ve seen a few abandoned over there to the mercy of the tide and I’m not sure why either.

Back here, I had my afternoon coffee and then tackled the photos from Greenland. Another 20 bit the dust in the time available. We’re still at the foot of the Sermitsiaq Glacier that runs off the into the Maniitsoq Ice Cap Evighedsfjorden or Kangerlussuatsiaq Fjord but all told, there is just 300 or so to be dealt with for the month of July 2019.

The guitar practice went OK and I finally managed to track down the chord arrangement for Al Stewart’s MODERN TIMES, something that I’ve been trying to find for quite a while, with one of the best guitar solos of all time right at the end.

With having a late lunch I didn’t fancy much for tea – just a baked potato with beans.

Now that my notes are written, it’s off to bed as I have my Welsh lesson tomorrow. Surprisingly, I haven’t crashed out today and that’s a surprise. That sleep must have done me some good.

Another one just like that would do me even better.

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