Tag Archives: alison weihe

Tuesday 25th February 2025 – NOW THAT’S WHAT I …

… call a wasted day today. I have emulated my namesake the mathematician and done exactly three-fifths of five-eights of … errr … nothing.

Some of it has been my own fault, as you might indeed expect, but some of it hasn’t. I really need to motivate myself better if I am ever going to accomplish anything.

The most obvious excuse to use is that I was thoroughly, completely and utterly exhausted. The other day, returning from dialysis, I was in bed at 21:30 and last night it was 22:20. and I was lucky that I made it that far because I really wasn’t in the mood.

Once in bed though, going to sleep was another matter. “At least, being in a horizontal position is resting and relaxing” I kidded myself.

Eventually though I dozed off into oblivion and had yet another turbulent night. For a change though, following a dialysis session, I was actually asleep when the alarm went off at 07:00

At that moment I was with a friend of mine and we were trying to go into her office. There was a security reception desk and the girl on there was known to be rather strict so it was necessary to fill in an application form, and when you went for an eye test, the optical test, it would come up with several people similar and you had to guess which one you were. The aim was that I would find someone similar to me and say that I’d lost my card. She would give me a new card and I would go in. This however wasn’t working and there was nothing very similar to me at all so my friend had to think of another excuse. The girl at the reception desk took an absolute age to deal with all of this before she finally handed me a duplicate card. My friend said “this is just typical of this girl. She knows that this is a fraudulent application because we have thousands, and she’s just taking her time about it as she always does”. We went in a walked down a corridor, then we had to climb down into a courtyard and up the other side. Climbing down was fine but climbing up was almost impossible for me so I had to think of another way of doing it. At that moment a man came down and sat in the corner to begin to smoke a cigarette. I thought that the easiest way was to strike up a conversation. This place looked rather Asian so I talked about having a Japanese garden in here. My friend came back to look for me. He asked her “how long have you worked here?”. She replied “oh, years. I came here in August” and said which year it was. He asked “how do you find it?”. She replied “I made a mistake because I came here in a jumper and I regretted it”. She wandered off and he said to me “she’s a tough girl, isn’t she?”. I said “someone who had had the problems that she had had and survived, anyone would be tough”. He was looking at me and could see that I was disabled and said “oh please sit down”. I replied “I can’t because if I sit down I can’t stand up”. Then he began to panic saying “oh please sit down, sit down, sit down”. I wondered what was going on. This place where we were was like a volcanic crater although it was a garden with pavilion-type Japanese buildings in it, all ringed by a really jagged range of mountains in a huge circular form that looked just as if it was inside a volcano but with a garden inside instead of a crater.

That’s an interesting idea for Security, isn’t it? Being able to choose who you were. After all, NAMES ARE FOR TOMBSTONES, BABY. And I had a friend for a while in Brussels who had been a diplomat in Japan, but it wasn’t she. But if I’m going to be disabled and handicapped in my dream, then it rather defeats the point of them, doesn’t it? Not much point in escapism if you can’t escape.

Into the bathroom for a good wash and then into the kitchen for medication; Finally back in here to listen to the dictaphone because there was much more than just the above. I’d been working on a radio programme and I couldn’t ever make it right. It never seemed to go anywhere as how it was supposed to do. It was continually failing the quality control check. After several weeks of editing I finally had it something like and was ready to send it off. The recording engineer and some of the producers were however rather fed up of having this come up on their desks every week so they were determined to stop it but I sent it off anyway but they still came back and refused it. What should have been a deadline for the 28th of April was now running into May. They basically said that they wouldn’t edit it again and it was finished. I replied “well for failing it this last two or three times on tiny issues, it shows a serious lack of goodwill particularly when I have worked as hard as I have done over the past day or two to put the issue right. If there was nothing substantially wrong with the last one you should have accepted it” but they were still very unwilling to move on this particular issue and I could see this programme running on and on and on.

There have been radio programmes that have taken an age to do because the editing has been so complicated. There was the one a few weeks ago that took several weeks, and the worst part of it was that it overran so I had to edit it, and one of the bits that went was the bit where I’d had all of the difficulty

There was a girl from school directing a film last night. She was running through the scenes. I had a look at the scenes and towards the end of the film there were thousands of scenes every second, so many scenes to go through and they lasted a blinking of an eye. I was appearing as an extra in it and so was a friend of mine. We’d been to makeup and we’d been dressed up and put our costumes on. As the film was being filmed it was passed through some kind of computer animation so people became like cartoon characters as they were going through the motions for real. When I looked at my image and the vision of the girl who was with me, the images were horrible, the faces were all distorted and nothing seemed to be correct at all. We were standing on the set waiting to be directed. The girl from school came along, took one look at us, took one look at the screen effects and told us to leave the stage. We thought “that was a waste of an entire day. What a shame. Our chance for fame and fortune”.

This is another girl about whom I haven’t spent a day thinking since I left school. So why she would put in an appearance right now I really don’t know.

Later on I was with another girl. We’d stopped somewhere to look at something that we’d seen earlier. All of a sudden I had a horrible realisation that I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t have a clue as to how I’d arrived at this place, or the name of the place or what I was doing here anyway. I left the girl with the car and walked a little way up the road to see if I could see anything. On the left-hand side of the road was a funeral director’s place with gravestones in it but it was all closed, dusty, and hadn’t been open for years by the looks of it. I decided to turn round and walk back to the car and drive until we find a village and see the name. What I could also do later was to look through the dashcam videos and see if I could identify the route. As I was walking back a lorry that was coming up behind me stopped at the side of the road behind me. The driver alighted and stood by the side of his cab. A lorry that was coming towards me, he stopped too and he alighted from his cab. He was carrying a small puppy and he stood by the cab. I was effectively blocked in between these two lorries, and my car and my friend were beyond them. As these two guys stood there I had this horrible menacing feeling that something pretty awful was about to happen.

So who are all these girls who keep on appearing? I wish I knew. Some nice, charming, pleasant company would be just what the doctor ordered and to actually have them present and allow them to slip away so easily like this is something of a shame. And I know that regular readers of this rubbish will recall saying on many occasions that I never “know where I was” but in this dream it was for real. As for those two guys in the lorries, I know THE BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH THEM .

isabelle the nurse breezed in this morning, late as usual due to having to do all of the blood tests that her oppo doesn’t want to do. She had a few cheery words of greeting and then rushed back out. She’s been working on her float for Carnaval and making the costumes and she’s promised me plenty of photos after the parades this forthcoming weekend.

Then it was breakfast time and MY BOOK time.

Today we are discussing miscellaneous earthworks again and despite his dismissal of much that has been assumed or inferred on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, he seems to conclude that everything uncertain is “probably” something astronomical or astrological, or both. However, he is yet to post one single piece of evidence to suggest what it is that is supposed to be indicated or observed, and the position of the stars and planets in the sky hasn’t changed that much in the last 5,000 years. The earth rotates through something like 1° every 7000 years.

His “pottery works” on the shores of the Thames estuary in Essex was excavated in the 1930s and identified as an Iron Age or Roman salt evaporation site, and not only did I manage to find the report of the excavation, I found a treatise on the operation thereof and now I would be quite confident in running my own sea salt production facility if the need ever arises. It would have been the kind of thing that, had I found it 20 years ago, I would have gone to try it to see if it would work.

Back in here I had all of the replies to deal with, and you’ve no idea just how many there were. Do I owe you all money or something? Once again, a great big thank-you for your continued support.

No Welsh today, so I decided to deal with the “Taste of Woodstock” radio programme. First task is to see what “songs played at Woodstock” I have in my live music collection As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I can’t use material actually performed at Woodstock unfortunately.

The answer to that is “not as much as I need” so I edited what I had and then set out to hunt down more music but I was waylaid. One of my neighbours, the President of the Residents’ Committee, wanted to come to pay me a visit. She’d left me a birthday present yesterday, which was nice of her.

She came along and we had a very nice chat for a while and discussed several issues, one of which was, surprisingly, one of the topics that I’d discussed with Rosemary the other day. It seems to be something that’s on the minds of a lot of people right now.

Next was my little great niece (or is she my great little niece) who arrived back home in Canada last night from Ecuador. She showed me all of her photos and videos of her trip and I told her how impressed I was with her. And I am too. These opportunities for travel only come along once in a lifetime and you should seize the moment. Sitting there with her feet straddling the equator beats the one that I took of Alison straddling the driehoek – the three-cornered border between Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, and also beats the one of Rosemary, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and me straddling the Arctic Circle.

Had His Nibs and I been able to reach the North Pole in 2018 I might have trumped it but, regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we stopped 700 miles short. My niece has 50 years ahead of her to do that, and good luck to her.

And while we’re on the subject of Rosemary … "well, one of us is" – ed … she rang me again today for a short chat. And it was short too – only fifty-three minutes. She needs the birth certificates of her parents and didn’t know how to go about finding them. Consequently I had a very happy time delving deep into the bowels of the Public Records Office in Kew and to my delight, I came up trumps too. When I was in Wandsworth working in that Italian restaurant I spent a lot of time in the PRO

The radio programme for this coming weekend needed chaeking too. That’s now done and sent off, but there was no time left to carry on with any more work. I was late as it was. But making a taco roll with rice and veg followed by date bread and soya dessert doesn’t take long.

So now I’m off to bed ready for shower day tomorrow. And I hope that I have a more productive day than today was. I can do without too many days like that. However, I’ll never turn down an opportunity to talk to a friend when the opportunity arises. There are more things in life than working.

But while we’re on the subject of working … "well, one of us is" – ed … One of my friends had sent me a message for my birthday, saying "I hope you managed to lay your hands on something tasty for your birthday"
And so I replied saying "unfortunately not. The nurses at dialysis kept well out of my reach."

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Tuesday 15th October 2024 – AS YOU MIGHT …

… expect, last night was something of a disaster.

In fact, it was quite a disaster, if the truth was known. Wide awake at 04:00 drenched in perspiration, up and about at 05:00. Of course, I had dialysis yesterday. It seems to be every time I have dialysis that this happens.

What I’ll have to do is to talk to a doctor next time one of them comes to see me. I’ll have to see if it’s an anticipated side-effect or whether there’s something else going on.

If it’s Emilie the Cute Consultant, I can always request that she comes here to rock me to sleep but I imagine that if I were to ask for that I’d be told to clear off in the fashion that JAH Catton, editor of “Athletic News” described when discussing an outburst from Wales international goalkeeper Leigh Roose, as "not such as might be expected from a gentleman.".

But as long as they don’t give me a sleeping pill. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the only excitement that I have these days takes place in bed while I’m asleep, and I wouldn’t miss that for anything.

You would think that that would be the trigger for me to rush to finish everything and dive into bed as early as possible, but somehow it doesn’t seem to work like that. Take last night, for example. I might have finished my work at a reasonable time, but then we had the battle to lift myself out of my chair.

Eventually though I made it into bed, later than I would have liked, and once again it took rather longer than it has done of late to go off to sleep.

My memory tells me that I awoke once during the night and went back to sleep almost straight away but by 04:00 that was that. I was wide awake, perspiring profusely from my legs, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t go back to sleep.

In the end, at 05:00 I gave it up as a bad job and went to make myself a coffee and catch up with some personal stuff.

However, I had had a disaster. The toenail on the little toe on the right foot must have stuck in the bedding somehow and on leaving the bed I’d torn it off.

At first I hadn’t realised but I soon did, especially when I noticed the blood. Wrapping some tissue round it I staggered into the living and took one of the compress pads. I couldn’t reach to plaster it so I just wrapped it around the toe and hoped that it might stop the bleeding eventually.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too, and that surprised me. No Castor, no Zero and no TOTGA either unfortunately, but several other people whom we all know and love and who are pretty close to me. It was the birthday of someone whom we all knew. Alison, Jackie, Liz, Terry and I had been amongst the invitees to go to his birthday party. We’d all chipped in and bought some kind of present, something that had a long stalk on it. They asked me if I’d write some poems. I wrote the poems and circulated them around. Everyone liked them but Jackie asked me “what was this event that took place in January?”. I couldn’t think of what it was at that point so I mad some kind of light-hearted comment. Liz ‘phoned me up and we were having a chat on the internet about this but suddenly it went dead, the conversation, right at a crucial moment. That’s the problem with the conversations on the internet – they go dead because someone comes to the door or you lose connection and you never know. eventually we were all assembled there. I presented the present to him which he gratefully received. Then I took it back because I’d fabricated some kind of grip for the stalk, made out of elasticated material. I put it on but it was too lose so I borrowed a needle and thread and began to sew it so that it was tighter. Everyone made a few comments so I told them that if anyone thinks that they could do it better, I’m only doing this by default so I’d gladly give up the place to someone else. No-one did so I carried on and was about halfway through it when the dream ended.

I’m impressed that I can discuss the issues about internet connections in my sleep. And sewing too. I can certainly sew in real life, and knit too, but when I’m asleep? Is there no end to my nocturnal talents?

And then later on I was with some people. They wanted me to take a caravan and trailer down to the South of France and into Italy. Although I was in principle agreed the first problem was that I didn’t have a car. They said that a car would be sorted out for me somehow so I didn’t say much until the very evening they produced this car. It was in a shocking state and it was impossible for me to even consider taking this, never mind towing a caravan and trailer behind it. There was some heated discussion about this and they proposed a variety of solutions which I rejected. In the end they produced a motor bike, a 350cc Triumph. I thought that this was the most absurd thing that I’d ever seen. I wondered where they had found the motor bike. It turned out that they had stolen it. All kinds of alarm bells were ringing for me at that point. The first thing that I said was “what about the insurance?”. There they were, rummaging through the papers in the side of this motor bike and they came across an insurance document. In the end, much against my better judgement, I was persuaded. We were in somewhere on the south of Manchester . We coupled up the caravan to the motor bike then coupled up the trailer to the back of the caravan. It would just about move it but I knew that it was all going to lead to a huge disaster. I thought that the first issue would be to take it over the Pennines, all of this, and I’ve no idea how I’m going to do that. I had a think and could remember how the major road system went. I thought that if I went a little way north I could probably pass over there somewhere towards Sheffield and then on the M1. I set out, but when I came to a road junction I heard someone shout “Phil Miller”. “Did you hear that?” and one of the other people said “yes”. I said “you know who Phil Miller is, don’t you?”. They replied “no”. “He was the keyboard player in ‘Caravan’. I wish that I had the time to go to say ‘hello’ to him”. They said “why don’t you go?”. I replied “don’t be silly. I have far too much on my plate at the moment with all of this”. We set off again. They were unhappy with the way that I crossed a certain road but I didn’t care. The further I went down this street heading out of this town the more I know that I was just coming closer and closer to disaster. This is all going to go wrong before too long.

Apart from having all these people on a motorcycle, it was Steve Miller who was the keyboard player in “Caravan”. Steve’s brother Phil was a guitarist who, although he guested on Caravan’s album WATERLOO LILY is much better know for his collaborations with Robert Wyatt. Nevertheless, it’s still quite impressive that I could come out with that. And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when WE WERE IN NEWFOUNDLAND IN 2010 we encountered a car pulling a caravan pulling a trailer.

In case you’re wondering, by the way, the way to go south-east to the M1 is via Stoke on Trent and the A500 to Derby, but if I’m heading from the south of Manchester and want to keep away from traffic I’d go via Macclesfield and Leek, past my old stamping ground in 1975 of Bosley.

Having done a pile of work I stopped for a good wash and then waited for the nurse to appear.

He didn’t have much to say for himself, but he thinks that my left leg is almost back to normal so he’s going to try it today without any plasters to see if it holds out. And he put a small plaster on my toe where I’d torn off the nail. It had actually stopped bleeding but it’s better safe than sorry.

After a quick breakfast I came back in here and revised for my Welsh. And once again the lesson passed quite well and I enjoyed it. I was surprised at how much I could figure out, even if I didn’t understand everything. The key to understanding is not to understand and translate every word, but just to understand the gist of the conversation. I reckon that when you are having a conversation in your mother-tongue, you don’t hear three-quarters of the words that are spoken but you know what’s being said all the same.

No lunch today. I started work straight away and by the time I’d finished, not only had I chosen all of the music for the next programme, I’d written half of the notes too. And that was without really trying either

Once again, there was something that happened that made me realise that I must be feeling better than I have been for several months. That cheered me up a great deal too because I need to convince myself that I’m feeling better.

As for my chocolate cake, I had a slice with my hot chocolate this afternoon. And it really was delicious. The best cake that I gave ever made. But it was more done at the top than at the bottom. If only I could turn it over somehow and cook it upside-down for some of the time.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with rice, followed by apple cake and coconut-flavoured soya cream. That was delicious too and there’s no doubt – I might be eating simply but I really am eating well. If I ever lose my appetite or lose the will to cook then I will know that it’s the end.

So now it’s the end of my day and I’m off to catch up with my beauty sleep. And after last night I certainly need it. But then again I always do, especially with a dial like mine.

But before I go, I have been taken to task for what at least one person considers to be humour that really belongs in the gutter and not in a family-orientated web page
"Don’t you know what good, clean fun is?" I was asked.
"No" I replied. "What good is it?"

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Saturday 12th October 2024 – WE HAD A …

… crisis in the Dialysis Centre this evening. The hole in the implant in my arm refused to close up after they pulled out the needle and we ended up with the place looking like a slaughterhouse.

“That’s the kind of thing that happens occasionally” said the nurse. And they want me to do the dialysis procedure myself at home. They must be joking. There is no chance whatever of that ever happening.

There was however a good chance of my going to bed last night at some kind of respectable hour. It wasn’t 23:00 by the time that I finished everything that I needed to do and crawled into bed but it was pretty close. There wasn’t much in it at all

Soon enough I was asleep, hoping to catch up on the sleep that I had missed the previous night, but it wasn’t to be. It was another one of these turbulent nights of which I’ve been having far too many. When the alarm went off Nerina and I were sitting in one of these plazas and were surrounded by food courts somewhere in Italy. We couldn’t make up our minds in which place to eat. We were being harassed by a couple of waiters from one establishment who wanted us to eat there. They were obviously making suggestions all the time. Nerina wanted to look at all the other menus so I had to stand up and go to the next restaurant, pick up a new menu, bring it back, read it, take it back, take the next one, all the way round the food court, all the time that these two waiters were harassing us about this and about that. In the end we decided, or rather, Nerina decided that the pizzeria in the corner would be the place where we’d order our meal so these two waiters went over with me to this restaurant to tell them that I was their best friend, all this kind of thing, but I suspected that there was something going on here that wasn’t quite right, about them receiving a commission or bumping up the bill or something like that. It all seemed to be extremely strange to me.

In the past we sat at plenty of places like that all over Europe. We’d wait for our holidays until the brats were back at school because the weather was usually nice, everywhere was still open and we’d have all the time in the World without being harassed by impatient waiters trying to clear us out ready for the next lot of tourists.

In one restaurant in Brest in Finisterre I remember that we were the only diners. They put us in a window seat to make the place look busy from the outside and then took their time serving us so that we stayed put. No-one came to clear away the table or give us the bill so we stood up. Still no-one came, so I worked out roughly how much the meal was, put the money on the table,, and walked out. And still no-one came.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment I staggered into the bathroom, had a good wash and scrub up, had a shave and applied the deodorant in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and then loaded up the washing machine, forgetting to put my gants de toilette in there.

Once the washing machine was off on its way I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone notes, of which there were more than just a few. I was working a school holiday job down in the South of England as a teacher of some description. I can’t remember too much about this unfortunately but I know that there was something to do with a small child being carried by his mother into the showers. We were talking about trees, how deciduous trees all go to sleep in the autumn and the leaves fall off. I showed him another tree, which was a kind-of wire brush screwed to the wall of the shower which people would use to clean their football boots etc before rinsing them off. It was all extremely surreal and I can’t remember very much of it but that was it.

Me? A teacher? I think not. I wouldn’t be any good. I don’t “do” preparation but work it out as I go along and that would never work with a classful of screaming brats

Later on I had a nightmare about a whole pile of glass bottles on the table that was just on the point of falling off. I had a panic-stricken awakening to try to grab hold of them but what was actually happening was that my feet were sliding out of the bed at that point and just about to fall on the floor. Luckily I stopped that quickly enough.

That’s much more like my kind of dream, falling out of bed. I’ve fallen out of a few of them in my time, sometimes with no help at all and sometimes with some help from someone else.

So the alarm went off at 07:00. I left the bed and went to wash and dress. I happened to look at the watch and I was still in bed. It was 05:00 and all of that had been a lively, exciting, vivid dream.

Judging by the timestamp of the audio file it was actually 05:15 and it goes without saying that I didn’t actually leave the bed. But by the sound of things we had another phantom alarm during the night.

And finally it was in the immediate post-war period and I was wandering around Crewe. We’d seen a few tanks go through. As I went round a corner there was a motorcycle shop there, Paul Wolf Motorcycles. Outside was a Triumph Tiger Cub 200cc, one of the very early ones with the footboards and the accelerator pedal. It said “good home needed” so I thought “I wonder if this is for sale? Does he have anything else interesting?”. I went in, and it was a labyrinth inside, steps up and down into the bowels of the earth all the way down. There must have been thirty or forty flights of stairs to the level of the river where he had his kind-of garage and workshop. There was a huge row going on between him and a few other people about someone who should have come in to see something but hadn’t but he ws going to come in now. I saw a guy come in from the side door which was actually on the level of his reception desk about eighty feet below. I thought “that must be an easier way in”. Then I looked back behind me and realised that there were just as many steps back up as there were down. It was easier to go down than it was to come up. But then what if I couldn’t find my way back up from the ground level where his office was? I was beginning to have another one of these disturbed quandaries during the night.

It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these dreams littered with indecision. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that at one stage it was a regular feature like the cars scattered all over the town, so I wonder what’s bringing it back. I wish that someone would bring back Castor, Zero and TOTGA and even The Vanilla Queen.

And there was a Paul Wolf Motorcycles, in Market Street in Crewe in the old Co-op store years ago.

Isabelle the nurse didn’t have much to say for herself today. I think that she said it all yesterday. But after she left I hung up the washing on the clothes airer and went to make my breakfast.

The WANDERINGS OF AN ANTIQUARY have taken us to Bignor Roman villa today. Thomas Wright gives us probably the best account of how it looked when it was discovered and states that it was the largest Roman villa in the UK. But that’s before the full extent of the Fishbourne Roman Palace was known

Back in here I had a chat with Alison on the internet and reviewed the work that I’d done during the week ready for dictation tonight. I need to take more care of what I type but it’s difficult with my vision these days and so wfvr wzpq. Last time I dictated some notes I found myself in a frightful muddle because a mistype presented another word that completely altered what it was that I was trying to say.

My cleaner turned up to fit the anaesthetic patches for me to and the taxi turned up a little earlier too. This was a vehicle from the other side of Avranches that had dropped someone off at the Centre de Re-education and was no on its way to pick up someone from the hospital at Rennes to take them back home. I was apparently something to make the empty journey pay. Not that I mind, of course.

There were very few of us there today, both patients and staff. It was a weekend team and while they were efficient they were far from sociable. And it goes without saying that I didn’t get to see Emilie the Cute Consultant.

Once they’d plugged me in, I was left totally alone except for the doctor who asked if I was OK – five seconds of attention. I had plenty of time to study my Welsh, now that I have uploaded the correct book, and almost reach the end of the biography of Lewis Carroll

It’s difficult to know what to make of him. With the benefit of hindsight many of his remarks could be taken in the wrong way that would be quite alarming but in the late Victorian era were probably quite innocent. They certainly aren’t on the same level as remarks made by someone like Frank Harris.

And then when they took the needles out we had quite the drama. Compresses, anti-coagulants, you name it, we had it. It quite wore me out and I was just sitting there with my eyes closed.

It took so long that my taxi went with the other passenger and I had to climb into a later one that ended up going all around the back of beyond to drop off someone else. Not that I minded because it was one of the nicer drivers who had taken me to Paris once and I quite like her.

My cleaner was there waiting and she watched as I hauled myself up the stairs. Today I managed six steps without lifting my leg up with my hand. I’d lost another 1.3 kg today so that might explain it.

Tea was a burger on a bap with salad and baked potato, and I was ready for it too. So now I’ll dictate my notes and go to bed.

But the dreams tonight and the hospital remind me about the patient with a broken leg.
A new arrival asked him "what’s the matter with you?"
"Appendicitis" he replied.
"But all the plaster?"
"Ohh, that" he replied. "I fell off the operating table".

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Monday 30th September 2024 – I SAW EMILIE …

… the Cute Consultant this afternoon.

She came to see how I was doing and her first words to me were "have you considered having your dialysis done at home?"

It looks as if our little romance is over, not that there ever was one at the beginning.

After all, the Hippocratic Oath that all doctors are obliged to take goes something along the lines of "you can make a patient out of your Mistress, but not a Mistress out of your patient".

And, I imagine, these days with all of these female doctors, I imagine that the oath has now become unisex

Last night anyway I dashed off to bed in eager anticipation of a possible encounter today, but my encounter with my pillow was rather later than I would have liked. I still can’t find the way to my bed at any kind of respectable hour.

For a few hours I managed a decent sleep too but I awoke early and then just spent the rest of the time tossing and turning and occasionally falling asleep until the alarm went off.

At the sound of the alarm I was with a couple of girls in a café. We were discussing some obscure English. I was explaining to her about the diphthong “EA”, giving her the example such as “heather”. We were talking about that for a while. Then the subject moved on to the triangular sign that you would see on a cassette keyboard so we were reminiscing about the old cassette players, the triangular arrow and the two triangular arrows, one key with two triangular arrows going one way and another key with two triangular arrows going another way. Then there was the key with a square on it, a key with a red dot on it. We were talking about all of this. These girls had grown up in the era of media and those buttons wouldn’t mean very much to them.

That’s something with which I have difficulty coming to terms. Never mind computers, I remember life before cassette tapes. I forget how old I am and that many people don’t have the same experience. Back in the good old days before I moved into the Real World I was bringing a coach and a hostess back from somewhere and as we were empty I put on a tape.
"What’s this music?" she asked.
And so I told her what it was. And added "it was recorded in 1971"
"1971?" she exclaimed "I wasn’t even born then!"
God knows what a girl of 19 would make of my choice of music today.

In the bathroom I washed myself and then washed my socks and undies, picking a clean pair off my bathroom octopus that hangs from the shower curtain rail. And then I had a shave and applied a liberal helping of deodorant. Must look my best in case I meet the aforementioned.

Back in here I listened to the dictaphone to find out if I’d been anywhere during the night. I was out on the West Coast with Marty Balin and that lot. They wanted a bassist because their last bassist had had trouble with the USA Government so they called for me to ask me if I would come down. I went down and met them, and happened to mention that I was having trouble with the USA Government too. It considered me to be a citizen and wanted all my taxes and for me to go to join the Military etc. The Chinese guy who was there said that I had told him to put my name down on the form. I replied that that was the Census that wanted to know everyone who was where at a certain place at a certain time. We had a lengthy discussion about that. I was sure that nothing would ever come of it, but anyway … That night there was a party so I went to join in. I was more talking about business. I was with a girl who wanted to know that if she subscribed, what would she receive for her money. I didn’t really know myself so I tried to tell her some kind of vague story but she wanted some more precise details from that. In the meantime there was a stash of money about the place. This was in danger of disappearing so I took it and hid it about my person. I was sure that someone would be bound to say something about it and point the finger at me but I thought that it was all getting completely out of hand, just like anything on the West Coast when once the evil substances started to be passed around, then anything could happen and usually did, and it was usually to the detriment of those who were naïve enough to think that they were going to do the best for everyone.

In the past I’ve met loads of well-meaning people and almost inevitably, almost all of them have been taken for a ride by the more unscrupulous members of society. And as for life in a commune, my experience was such that I went to live in a van instead.

The nurse apologised for being late but she had a considerable number of blood tests to do. That made me laugh. It’s her last day and her first day was full of blood tests too. As I explained to my faithful cleaner later, I think that the clients of this little nursing circle have sussed out her oppo. I know which one of the two nurses I would rather have when it comes to sampling my blood and I reckon that all the other clients feel the same.

After she’d left I had breakfast and read MY BOOK

Our hero has now left Portus Lemanis and is now at Anderida, another “Saxon Shore” fort, this time at Pevensey just down the coast. Once more, he’s bewailing the lost treasures, the demolished walls and so on, and spends a lot of time theorising, much of which was confirmed by later excavations

Back in here I put a spurt on. Firstly I reviewed my Welsh from last week and completed the first part of the homework. Secondly I chose the first ten tracks for the next radio programme, and thirdly I reviewed the programme that will hopefully be broadcast this weekend and, satisfied, I sent it off.

While all of that was going on, our little travel group was having a good and lively chat. It’s nice to keep up with people, especially as I don’t see Alison as often as I used to, or, indeed, as often as I would like. And the same goes for the others too.

Mind you, I don’t know where that impressive burst of energy and concentration came from.

That took me nicely up to the arrival of my cleaner who applied my anaesthetic patches with her usual dexterity.

And her I upset her. I told her that I nearly spilled my breakfast porridge all over me because the microwave is not too high. So we worked out that we could lower its shelves three notches if we were to move the baking trays around and swap the rest of the stuff round on the two shelves.

The taxi came early again while I was in the middle of organising the baking bowls so leaving them on the worktop I hit the streets.

Today’s driver was the young, friendly one and we had a good chat all the way through the rainstorms to Avranches

Some of Saturday’s weight loss has stayed lost, I’m pleased to say. And the “plugging in” was quite a lot less painful that other times. One of the nurses wanted to try out her English so we had a few little chats.

Emilie the Cute Consultant came to enquire after my well-being. No more friendly, social chit-chat perched on the edge of my bed. Instead she gave me a very broad hint that I ought to clear off. Maybe she really is a regular reader of this rubbish.

To pass the time I began to tidy up a few of the directories and, deep in the bowels of the computer, I came across a football match that I’d recorded but never seen, dating from 2019, Y Bala v Airbus. So now I can file that under CS too.

After they unplugged me I weighed myself again and I’d lost the grand total of 300 grammes. I want to lose a lot more than that.

The taxi driver had to wait a while for me and she already had a passenger with her. Ahh well, can’t be helped. But we had a nice little chat on the way home.

Having texted my cleaner earlier, she was waiting for me and watched as I made it up the stairs. Even managing the first one without lifting my knee up with my hand.

In here we sorted out the shelves and its now much more reasonable, as I found out later while cooking my delicious stuffed pepper

Now it’s time for bed, ready for tomorrow and my Welsh lesson.

During our on-line chat this morning the others were laughing at me because I’ve applied the deodorant “in case Emilie the Cute Consultant is on duty”.
It remind sme of when a solicitor had been searching for me in Brussels for several years and finally caught up with me.
"Mr Hall!" he exclaimed. "What happened to you? We thought that you might have been dead for years!"
"No he isn’t" said his assistant. "He just smells like it"

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Sunday 22nd September 2024 – SUNDAY IS A …

… Day of Rest officially, but no longer these days for me. What with a nurse turning up at 08:30 every morning 7 days per week, I can no longer have the rest to which I was accustomed.

No longer lying abed until ridiculous o’clock, no longer lounging around in a dressing gown and not very much else.

There was an episode of “Gunsmoke”, the famous American radio programme where one of the actors said "Sunday is the one day of the week a man can get up at noon and sit around with his boots off without anybody hollering at him about it" and whoever it was, I had a strong affinity with him.

However, let’s look on the bright side. That extra three hours in the morning eats back into those 18 hours per week that I lose at the Dialysis Clinic. It’s an ill-wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good.

And whatever ill winds that were about last night blew me into bed at a reasonable time. Although I couldn’t make 23:00, it was still before 24:00.

And I’d dictated the notes for one radio programme and also the commentary for the concert that I’ll be broadcasting in due course too so I was quite impressed.

Even better, with the pain in my foot having subsided I could fall asleep with no problems, and so I did. And quite quickly too. No-one and nothing disturbed me until about 06:00 either, and it’s been a long time since I’ve had six hours of undisturbed sleep.

No danger of my leaving my nice clean pit at that time of morning though. I curled up under the bedclothes and went back to sleep.

When the alarm went off I crawled into the bathroom and had a good wash and scrub up ready for the nurse.

When he arrived I asked him about this dramatically increased dose.

The story about this is that for many years I’ve been taking a certain medication that has some side effects so they have been very careful, giving me the minimal dose, and even stopping it altogether at one stage, which led to other problems.

Back in the Summer they put me back on it, an increased dose. The doctor told me that he was worried about this increased dose and thought long and hard about increasing it.

But yesterday, I was given by another doctor a prescription that doubled the dose. So is it in error?

It took several goes with the nurse until in the end, frustrated by his prevarication, I asked him outright "so you aren’t going to answer me then?"
He replied "if the doctor prescribed it, then that’s what you have to take" and told me some cock-and-bull story about how much one of his other patients took.

He really is getting on my wick right now.

After he left I made breakfast and then settled down with a new book, WANDERINGS OF AN ANTIQUARY; CHIEFLY UPON THE TRACES OF THE ROMANS IN BRITAIN

This book, published in … err … 1854, is an account of a peripatetic and keen amateur concerning his travels to various sites that had their origins in Roman or early Saxon days

Being such an early work, it’s bound to be confusing compared to what has been discovered since but that makes it all the more interesting because we can see things from a completely different perspective.

Even then, he was worried about the effects of the “urban sprawl” upon many interesting rural sites and the need to save them, long before there was an official Government body like English Heritage. Everything depended on the generosity of the local landowner.

The first chapter concerns his trips around the slag heaps of the Roman iron smelting works in the Forest of Dean. He made the point that so imperfect were the Roman smelting techniques that even in the mid nineteenth Century there were companies that were exploiting the slag, or “scowle” and re-smelting it.

Incidentally, the Roman smelting works had foot-operated bellows, so he says. I bet you didn’t know that.

Back in here, I listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was in Nantwich and due to go back to Crewe but I’d already changed my bus ticket once and it was now coming up to 09:00 and I didn’t think that I’d be ready to catch the 09:00 bus so I wanted to come on the 09:15 instead so I ran like hell to the bus station and arrived there before and said that for some reason I want to cancel it and go on the next one but the filling in of the forms was so complicated that I nearly missed that one too. The guy in the ticket office was so confused as to why I wanted to cancel the bus ticket for a bus that I thought that I couldn’t catch even though I arrived in his office well on time to fill in a form to cancel it. I noticed too that my address was “Winsford” at that time, 330 New Road Winsford, but I was in such haste that it looked like another address completely on the form so this would certainly be a puzzle when it arrives at Head Office.

My dreams really are confusing at times. Can you imagine going into the bus station office at 08:55 to change your bus ticket for the 09:15 bus because you’ll be too late for the 09:00 one! And then taking so long to fill out the form that you’d miss the 09:15 too. Especially when there was no office on Nantwich Bus Station.

Stranraer FC was next and they were away at Forfar Athletic. And from 1-0 up and cruising comfortably, they once again rose to the occasion and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. With two moments of madness in defence.

And we had another one of our famous “let’s play it out from the back” moments, and you can see the inevitable result on STRAWBERRY MOOSE’S TIKTOK ACCOUNT

Yes, the World’s most famous Moose is going into multi-media. We’ll be working on his past travels around North America. There are dozens of his videos, especially of his Arctic travels, and it’s high time that he did something with them.

Over the next few days we’ll be having a trial run with a video or two but we opened his account with the video that I mentioned above.

After my salad butty for lunch I knuckled down and did some work. And rather slower than I would have liked, I ended up with two radio programmes, one the normal one and the other the concert that will be broadcast on Friday and Saturday far in the future.

And I do have to say that the concert will be well-worth the price of the admission alone because it’s excellent. I don’t know how I came by it. It must be one from the deceased son of a friend, but his group wasn’t the supporting act that night.

Alison was on-line for a while, sunning herself on the beach somewhere exotic so we “exchanged pleasantries”. And what wouldn’t I give to go somewhere like that? Anywhere, in fact? That is, apart from this blasted dialysis place.

At lunchtime I’d taken some dough from the freezer and it had been defrosting. later this afternoon I kneaded it and rolled it out, and when I’d finished working I assembled and baked it.

It’s not a legendary one like one or two have been just recently, but it was still good nevertheless.

So now I’m going to do some Welsh homework and then go off to bed.

But while there might not have been a ticket office on Nantwich Bus Station, there was a street map.
It was one of those maps with the little lights on it, and if you pressed, say, the “car parks” button, little lights would light up on the map to show you where the car parks were.
There were about twenty buttons altogether, with things like “public toilets”, “chemists”, all that kind of thing
There was also a big arrow pointing to the centre of the map that said "you are here"
And someone, a legendary hero in my schoolboy mind, suffering clearly from pangs of anguish, had written underneath in big black letters "Yes! But where are all the f@#king buses?"
Strangely enough, I can still feel his pain even today, 60-odd years later.

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Tuesday 17th September 2024 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

…night I had last night.

For a start, it was after midnight when, after I’d let it all hang out, I went off to bed. And if that’s not bad enough, I awoke again at about 03:30, and there I stayed, tossing and turning with one trip down the corridor, until long after 05:00. I have never been so fed up in all my life.

There was one moment round about 04:30 when I was actually thinking of leaving the bed and working, in an attempt to make up some of the lost hours, but it needs to be more sustainable than that if ever I do.

At some point I must have gone back to sleep, not that I remember doing so, because when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was fast asleep. So at least I’ve had some slumber somewhere.

In the bathroom I had a good scrub up to try to make myself presentable, and then I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. It was about 02:00 somewhere and I was wandering around the town. I suddenly bumped into one person after another out of my Welsh class. There were just three of us at first and there was something of a dispute between two of them about something rather trivial. One of them mentioned that he’d seen the others somewhere else in town and went off to fetch them. I went off to see if the little room in the café was free and we all met up there except the one who had been offended. He had disappeared and we couldn’t find him so we just ended up chatting amongst ourselves. This group slowly evolved into another group of my friends. We were upstairs on the top of a bus. I was sorting through some papers and had my personal, handwritten diary there. One of my friends grabbed it and began to read it. I asked for it back but she wouldn’t hand it back. I thought “well, never mind” and in something of a sulk went and sat somewhere else. I ended up having to go for a walk around the perimeter of the upstairs of this bus. I had STRAWBERRY MOOSE with me. It was quite crowded and we had to wrestle and fight our way through. By the time that I returned to where my friend was, she had almost finished my diary. I tried to take it from her and in the end she relinquished her hold. By this time I was in such a bad mood that when I noticed that she ws disappointed having to give it up I told her “well if it means that much to you, you carry on reading it!’ and I stormed off and went to sit somewhere else again. I found the place where I had sat before but just then a group of children in this real heavyweight pram pushed by these two women came past and crushed all the seats in under the tables etc. One of the little girls was sitting on my seat so I gave her Strawberry Moose, surprised that she hadn’t noticed him already. She began to feel all round him and I realised that she was blind. One of the other kids suddenly noticed the moose, began to cry and said something in Russian. I didn’t understand what it was that it had said but the woman replied in an American accent in English. I didn’t say anything but she made some kind of comment about the disturbance that she was causing and the mess that was going on. She said to me “and you should have grabbed me while the going was good”. I thought “well, yes, there’s not much chance of that, is there?” but I was still in such a bad mood about my friend hanging onto my diary and reading it

That is one of those dreams that the trick cyclist would have hours of endless fun examining. Freud would probably give you a completely different meaning and a third, say Nietzsche, would find another meaning. His involvement would be due to his famous phrase "out of chaos comes order" but he’d never looked inside my head at that point. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I feel really sorry for the person who draws the short straw and has to look inside my head

But that dream reminds me of one of Ambrose Bierce’s quotes – "A year is a period of 365 disappointments", and that dream seemed to be full of them

The chief nurse is back on duty today, complete with his sciatica, and maybe that’s the reason why he’s grumpy right now.

He told me that he used to work in a dialysis unit and began to tell me some in-depth information that I don’t need to know and I had to tell him three times to shut up.

Another thing he said was that if my legs continue to shrink widthways we will be able to dispense with the puttees and go back to these elasticated socks. We shall see.

Breakfast was next. And while I was at it, I was reading my book and we have reached a chapter about a Roman brickworks and Tile factory in my old neck of the woods just outside Holt in Wrexham.

It had been excavated at the turn of the 20th Century and my author, writing in 1923, was eagerly awaiting the published report. However he will have a long wait even today because after the archaeologist died in 1925 there was no trace of his notes.

The site is extremely difficult to spot from the air, unfortunately, but I checked it by overlaying a modern field map over the rough drawing, and to my surprise, if you go to an aerial map viewer like Google Maps and type or copy in the map reference 53.08382914907756, -2.8868042627705814, can you make out the trace of the Roman Road that went through the site?

Back in here I began to revise my Welsh – the correct unit this time – and then went for the lesson. There weren’t very many of us today and it was hard work. After my wretched night I felt awful too, so it was not my best lesson by any means.

But it was nice to see one of my classmates back after a long illness.

After the lesson I had work to do. Once more the fridge had iced up and before breakfast I’d switched it off. After breakfast I had emptied it and put some old towels (thanks, Liz) in the bottom.

Now I had the job of cleaning the fridge and mopping up everywhere, and that wasn’t the work of five minutes either.

Strangely, I always seem to be struggling for space in the fridge but just simply emptying it and refilling it seems to make plenty of room. I wonder if that would work for the freezer, but I’m not brave enough to try it. Every time I open the door, something inside closes it again.

There I was though, up to my ears in soggy towels and waterlogged floor and who should stick her head in with some supplies but my loyal cleaner. She shoved me aside and in five minutes flat had made the place habitable again.

But sticking that lino down on the wood floor in the kitchen area was a master-stroke

The rest of the day was spent choosing music for the next radio programme. That’s all done and the pairs of music are chosen and segued together. Tomorrow I’ll be writing the notes as much as I can, but I need to sort out a physiotherapist.

One of my UK bank cards and the new card reader finally turned up today so I had to configure them, make sure they work, and then set about transferring some money round and about here and there. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that there’s something on the go in the UK and we are about to start in earnest

All in all, despite being totally exhausted, I’ve accomplished a lot today.

The bad news is that the cleaner has talked to the pharmacist, and she doesn’t think that the anaesthetic cream is any better than the patches and that we should persevere. My answer to that is that it’s my arm that they’ll be persevering with, not hers.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with rice and veg followed by jam roly-poly and coconut-flavoured soya cream, and it was delicious.

While we’re on the subject of coconut … "well, one of us is" – ed … I sampled my coconut cake today – the first slice. And it’s simply delicious.

It’s a standard oil-cake but with some of the oil replaced by melted coconut oil, and a big heap of desiccated coconut mixed in it.

So what else would work in this? I can make chocolate and ginger, and now coconut. Anyone any more suggestions? I haven’t overlooked a spotted dick – just haven’t reached there yet.

So that’s it, I’m off to bed. I’ve done enough, I’m absolutely worn out with my rotten night

But before I go, there are a couple of mails that I’ve received from some regular readers of this rubbish. I haven’t overlooked to reply – I’m simply overwhelmed with things right now

If anyone else feels the urge to write and say hello, don’t hesitate. There’s a contact form at the bottom right. And if you have a google or gmail address, it will be Strawberry Moose who will reply to you.

All hits, requests, comments and suggestions are welcomed, even those suggestions that are physically impossible. At least it shows that you are awake.

Once not too long ago there was someone who sent their son to study at the Sorbonne in Paris with the aim of giving him a formal and profound immersion in foreign culture and languages
"And did it work?" asked a neighbour
"Ohh yes" replied the mother. "In no time at all he could write home to ask for money in six different languages"

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Wednesday 28th February 2024 – TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY …

… Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. But it was also when I retired from full-time employment.

For the first time, that is.

At 50 years of age we were pulled out of the front line at work. They considered that we no longer had the speed, the fitness and the reflexes to cope with the conditions.

That, of course, is nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with my reflexes even today and, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I was still running every night up until two years ago

But anyway, there we were.

For the following 15 years life would be driving around Brussels in one of the fleet of Berlingos delivering parcels between the various buildings or, in my case seeing as I had a PSV licence, driving the shuttle bus.

But badger that for a game of cowboys. If you ask me which is more stressful – driving 4.5 tonnes of armoured Open Omega down a German autobahn at 260 kph at 04:00 or driving a shuttle bus around Brussels during the rush hour – I know which one I’d say.

With redeployment looming, my boss having retired and with “early retirement” being bandied about with all these hordes of Bulgarians and Romanians queueing up to join at half the salary we were receiving, I made sure that my pancreas flared up again.

A spell of sick leave, and then that was that

What followed was a lovely year of rest and then, after going to South Carolina for Rhys’s wedding, I picked up the threads.

A spell on a CDI working for General Electric’s training school to cover for maternity leave followed by 11 months at that bizarre American company where I met Alison, and then I set out for the Auvergne to seek my fortune, and the rest is history.

It wasn’t an early retirement last night though. In fact, what with one thing and another – and once you make a start you’ll be surprised how many other things there are – it was later than usual, and that’s saying something considering how late things have been just recently.

And when the alarm went off, I was totally wasted. I never felt less like leaving the bed but I had to make an effort.

First thing was to check the blood pressure – 13.8/8.7. That’s low. Below the target figure in fact. And much better than last night’s 17.2/10.5. I wonder what happened during the night to bring down my blood pressure.

After the medication I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to see what had gone on during the night. With the fall in blood pressure I didn’t expect that one of my favourite young ladies had been to visit me, but you never know. I was back in school at the start of last night with a group of people. We noticed that there was a girl standing not too far away from us looking at what was going on. I knew the girl – she lived in Shavington. I was just on the point of shouting to her to be friendly when I awoke.

Awoke – yet again, just as I’m about to speak to a girl. There’s something strange going on these days about this.

Then there was a football tournament taking place with all of the big clubs taking part. Almost everyone was having a go at refereeing matches. When it was my turn I drew Tottenham Hotspurs against someone else, I can’t remember. I took the ball and walked down to the pitch. On the touchline was an old friend of mine so I said “hello” to him and talked about another adventure. I tossed a coin and called to Spurs to ask what colour they wanted. They guessed correctly “yellow” so I set the board out because the pitch was something like a chessboard. They complained that the board had been set out incorrectly. It should have been set out the other way round. I didn’t think that it made very much difference so I told them to shut up and get on with it. In the end they went to complain to the FA. Someone from the FA came down. He agreed that the pitch had been incorrectly laid out and as kick-off hadn’t taken place we could reset the board the correct way round and start the match. This was a decision that completely disappointed me. I thought that the FA would have at least tried to uphold my authority as referee instead of behaving like this.

And did I dictate the story about the little girl who was born? … "no you didn’t" – ed … It was Alison Something. She had a very sad life and died as barely a teenager. The Doors wrote a song about her which became famous.

If they did, I can’t think of the song. Plenty of “Alison” songs, but none by the Doors as far as I can tell.

So anyway I stepped back into this football match. As I went in Tottenham Hotspurs were playing and they won the toss for kick-off so set the board out for them to start to play but they thought that I’d set it out incorrectly – that the point should be on the row that started on the second row. I measured it al and it would be the same distance so there’s no problem so … fell asleep here …

When the alarm went off, I wondered why the dictaphone wasn’t in its usual place on the corner of the chest of drawers. It was down the bed still ticking over showing 2 hours and 15 minutes. That’ll teach me to fall asleep again with it in my hand.

One thing that I can tell you is that it’s not very interesting listening to myself sleeping. And I remember a couple of times when Percy Penguin elbowed me in the ribs and said “stop snoring!”.

“I never snore” I would reply. “You must be dreaming it”. And now having heard myself sleeping, I’m sorry for doubting you.

The nurse came round, gave me my injection and took a blood sample.

The results are back now. My haemoglobin is slowly rising, which is good news, but so is my carcinogenic protein, which is bad news. It should be between 59 and 106 units, and it’s gone up from 270.3 to 276.4 in a week. The active enzymes, which should be between 6.7 and 11.8 are actually 31.2

In other words, things are slowly deteriorating, which is what I expect so there’s no big issue there. However, it is the first time that I’ve seen the word “terminal” written on the results of my blood test.

With the cleaner coming round I tidied up somewhat as best as I could in order to give her the impression that I cared, and then wrote out some cheques to pay a few bills here and there. She’ll post the letters for me while she’s on her travels

And then regrettably I crashed out for a while, which is no surprise after my late night.

But it wasn’t the usual kind of “crashed-out” – it was more like a cataleptic fit of some description where I’m perfectly aware of my surroundings, such as the radio playing on the computer, but I’m totally unable to move or to react to anything

It’s not the first time that I’ve had one of these either, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

This afternoon I finished my radio notes ready for dictation and then after the cleaner had left I made the dough for my next lot of naan bread and left it to fester.

Back in here I had more things to do but crashed out yet again, properly and really deeply too. I remember absolutely nothing at all of anything. I was so deeply in that I almost missed my tea.

But my leftover curry and fresh naan bread were delicious yet again, especially after I remembered to put the garlic in the naan dough. It was all cooked to absolute perfection too.

But now I think that I’ll go and have an early night. Right now, Tom Petty is telling me "I await the day
Good fortune comes our way
And we’ll ride down the King’s Highway"

But I’m going to have a pretty long wait. Having driven down the King’s Highway, along the Carolina coast, once or twice, I can’t see me ever having the possibility of doing it again.

He also says a little later " don’t want to end up
In a room all alone"

But it looks as if that’s exactly how I’m going to end up, the way these blood test results are going.

But never mind. He goes on to sing "Sometimes I get discouraged
Sometimes I feel so down
Sometimes I get so worried
And I don’t know what about
But it works out in the long run
It always goes away
I’ve come now to accept it
As a reoccurring phase"

That’s certainly true too. if something else crops up now, it’ll have to wait for a couple of weeks until I can find the time to worry about it.

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Sunday 4th February 2024 – NOW THAT’S WHAT …

… I call a good Sunday morning.

The kind of Sunday morning when I slowly raise my head from underneath the quilt, blink in the daylight, glance at my fitbit and find that it’s actually 11:30.

Yes, we really need a few more like those.

Mind you, I’ve no idea what time I went to bed, but it was extremely late, that’s for sure.

There were the notes for three radio programmes for a start – the one that of which I made such an unholy mess last week, the one that I prepared this week just gone that would replace the Isle of Wight one, and the notes for the Hawkfest

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the last time that I tried to dictate so many programmes one after the other I ended up tying my tongue in knots a long time before the final programme, and this was what happened here. When I get round to dealing with it, I’ll probably find that it’s a complete mess.

But that’s for another time. Eventually I staggered off to bed.

The night was quite peaceful and I can’t remember too much about it except that I dropped the dictaphone and had to search for it. It’s amazing, the things that I can do in my sleep. I just wish that I could work so well when I’m awake.

But awake I was at 11:30 and having taken my blood pressure (18.1/10.9 this morning, 19.8/12.4 last night) I wandered off in search of medication. But I can tell you something for nothing, and that is that this blood pressure medication that I’m taking isn’t working.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. This apparently might be the last message that you receive from me because I might be able to try to become a Limited Company but that isn’t quite so sure but according to the Statutes laid out by King Edward I, II, III and IV and everyone else I might not qualify according to them and according to some others as well. But if so I shall have to keep much better accounts of my income and outgoings than I do now and that’s not going to be easy because me keeping strict and proper accounts of anything is almost impossible as regular readers of this rubbish will recall but you can but try. Instead of me being in the dock it will be the company of course but the company secretary and that is going to cause problems too. I could easily imagine that for this limited company of mine I would never ever find anyone to share the responsibility but we’ll have to see.

And I’ve absolutely no idea what that was all about, or even where it had come from. We had been talking about people using this big tax fiddle of setting themselves up as “service companies” but I’m not likely to fall into the category of people who would benefit from such an arrangement.

But any of that notwithstanding, it wasn’t my last message because there was a couple more.

Someone came along to give us a talk about vehicles. It was hosted by a famous TV personality he said that he’d now left the TV world and was working for Ford’s and would be on TV next week telling everyone why Ford’s was the best company for which to work. But another guy came along and talked about vehicles and their importance in society. He asked several questions, one of which was “how do we deal with them at the end of their life?”. People came up with the idea of recycling or dismantling or quite simply throwing away. He wanted to know a few examples of people’s activities. I was dying to talk to him about dismantling but for some reason he seemed to ask everyone else in the room except me. I had the idea of thinking about my time at Gainsborough Road when I was always doing stuff like that but he just never seemed to come round to talk to me.

And I wish that I had £1:00 for every Ford Cortina MkIII or MkIV I’ve dismantled in my back garden in Gainsborough Road during the 1980s. People would always be bringing MoT failures to me and I’d strip them for useful bits for the taxis and the rest would go under my gas axe.

Sometimes one would be in better condition than one of my taxis so with maybe a little welding they’d be back on the road. On one occasion Nerina and I drove all the way around Hungary in what had been an MoT failure at one time

The story of my welding equipment was interesting. I wanted to weld up a car so I borrowed a set of bottles, pipes and torches from someone who used to work with my father.

When I rang him back a while later, his wife told me "I’m sorry but he has died"
"Well I have some things of his here."
"Don’t worry about them" she said. "He won’t need them now where he is" so I acquired a complete set of gas-welding equipment.

Regrettably I don’t have it now. Just before I left for Belgium I lent it all to a friend. And due to circumstances that I outlined a few weeks ago I won’t ever see it again, along with a pile of other stuff.

But this story of going round the room asking everyone questions except me – that rings a bell.

After I’d retired for the first time I went to work for a bizarre American company where I met Alison.

They were shedding clients like nobody’s business and after a while they began to be concerned (probably about 10 years too late).

In the meantime I’d been making a list of how things could be improved and I ended up with a bulging notebook with all kinds of examples. And one day we had a big meeting to discuss the situation

The manager went all around the room asking for suggestions and when she came round to me, took one look at my notebook on the table and said "well, it’s nearly 17:00. We’ll call it a day at this point".

So I went back to my desk, took out all of my personal stuff from the drawers and walked out. They didn’t pay me enough to put up with this nonsense.

But this was not my first (and not my last) experience of Corporate America

There was a major problem with a printer set-up and I had to negotiate with the New York office about it. I was talking to the guy there on a Friday evening. It was 18:00 our time, 12:00 their time.

The problem couldn’t be resolved then and there so he said he’d think about it during his afternoon and call me back on Monday.

Monday came and no ‘phone call so I rang him up just before I went home at 18:00.

Someone in his office answered. "Oh, (so-and-so)? He was made redundant on Friday."

No notice, no warning, nothing. Out of the door more-or-less on the spot I would imagine.

Anyone who is opposed to the idea of Trades Unions ought to go and spend a few weeks working in Corporate America. The Americans in our office were totally paralysed with fear about their jobs.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed I was at work and feeling hungry so I went to the staff café but they had no sandwiches. I asked why and she said that the sandwich tray was on the floor above until 13:00 and it won’t come down until then. I contented myself with a cup of coffee for a while. Later on the woman beckoned me over. The sandwich tray had arrived but I couldn’t make out which sandwich to have. Then I noticed that for €3:50 (the price of 2 sandwiches was €4:00) I could have a kind of cheese platter with various types of cheese on it, some bread and even some additions like olives and onions to put on it and sauce in which to dip it. I thought that that sounded so much nicer than having a couple of sandwiches

And wouldn’t I love to have a cheese platter right now? Unfortunately it’s out of the question. No pancreas (or, at least, a non-working pancreas) means no animal fats of any description. Hence a vegan diet and the diabetes type 2.

That’s another issue with which I had to contend 30-odd years ago. What with all of my demons and everything else that I was fighting at the time, a major illness was the last thing that I wanted to face, but there I was.

But anyway, after lunch I had a very slow, desultory canter through one of the sound files that I recorded last night and eventually ended up completing to programme that I had assembled last weekend and which was a total mess.

But re-dictating and re-editing the notes, reassembling the programme in exactly the same was as far as I could remember I was short by … errr … 1.221 seconds short compared to what I’d assembled last week, and if that’s not impressive I don’t know what is.

That kind of time can soon be taken up and so that’s now ready, with two more to edit during the coming week.

Tea tonight was a vegan pizza and it was excellent of course. However it would have been so much better had I remembered to put on the cherry tomatoes. I really don’t know what’s the matter with me these days.

They say that the side effects of a couple of these pills that I’m taking is “confusion” but I don’t need any pills for that. I’ve been confused for most of my life. In fact when Led Zeppelin wrote DAZED AND CONFUSED they were obviously thinking about me. I’ve been dazed and confused for so long it’s not true.

In fact I feel rather like my hero the Irish politician Boyle Roche when he argued with his tailor and said "I told you to make one longer than another, and instead you have made one shorter than the other – the opposite"

Perhaps I ought to go to bed while I’m still awake.

0

Wednesday 10th January 2024 – IT’S AMAZING …

… how much of a big difference a couple of little actions can make. And that’s something that I’m going to remember for the future, that’s for sure.

This morning, they brought me two bread rolls for breakfast. And a couple of hours later they brought me a mid-morning coffee. You really have no idea and can’t possibly imagine how much those little gestures have meant to me and how much they have improved my morale from yesterday’s miserable efforts.

Mind you, I did have a shower and clothes-washing session in between. Years of living on the road has taught me to take advantage of every shower that comes my way because sometimes they are hard to find. And when you do find a shower, take your clothes in with you and give them as good a wash as you possibly can.

That’s an old tip that I learnt from the Bible –
"while shepherds washed their socks one night
all seated round the tub
the Angel of the Lord came down
and gave them all a scrub."

Something else that cheered me up were the messages that I received yesterday

Sean wrote to me to say what a horrible night Monday must have been and to keep my chin up for things can only improve. And he was right this morning, as I have already said. That bread roll and coffee, and your message, cheered me up immeasurably.

Grahame’s message cheered me up too. In fact it made me laugh. I’d been talking about hallucinating and Hawkwind, and he wanted to tell me about the time that he did both together many years ago. I thought that that was an avenue down which it was unwise to go any further.

But it did remind me of the time that Nerina took me to see Hawkwind at Keele University one night. Nerina is quite a bit younger than me so when the band came onstage she rushed to the front like all the young’uns do.

After a while she came to look for me and found me standing at the back
"Why don’t you come to the front?" she asked. "The view is so much better there"
"That’s as may be" I replied " but hey! The smell is so much better at the back, man."

Rhys wrote to me a short while ago but his message is buried under … gulp … 450-odd others that have come in while I’ve been busy sorting out transport and all that kind of thing.

He thinks that I’ll outlive everyone else who has had this illness and set new records. Well, I didn’t feel like that yesterday but a good night’s sleep and my bread roll and coffee fired me with a new enthusiasm, and who knows? It won’t be for the want of trying, and it won’t be for the lack of support either, medical or moral. Not that “moral” is a word that is usually used when I’m about.

But to be serious … "for once" – ed … Rhys was one of my close friends from University and I was lucky enough to be honoured to be best man at his wedding in South Carolina in 2005

The marriage didn’t last as long as it ought and poor Gretchen is no longer with us which is a shame for Rhys and her family.

But I remember the wedding – and more importantly, the weekend afterwards while they were away – vividly. I met a young Mexican girl at the wedding and we spent a lovely weekend together down at Charleston and then back at Columbia for a Widespread Panic concert on the Sunday night.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have a certain weakness for Southern Rock – groups where the lead guitar solos can sometimes go on for several weeks, groups like the Marshall Tucker Band, The Outlaws, Doc Holliday and Blackberry Smoke (who I photographed when I was official photographer for the Fredericton Jazz and Blues Festival in Canada).

But the leading group of all, surprisingly unknown in Europe, is Widespread Panic. I’d first encountered them when I was with Onion River Radio in Montpelier in Vermont years ago and I’d always wanted to catch them at a concert because like most Southern Rock groups, it’s simply not possible to reproduce on an album what they actually do onstage.

Anyway, there they were, topping the bill at the Three Rivers Festival that Sunday night in Columbia so Itzé and I blagged a couple of tickets (Press Passes always come in useful at times like this) and that was that.

Even now I still keep in touch with them and they’ve been kind enough to send me a few concerts to broadcast on my radio programmes

When I was on my marathon trek in 2017 saying goodbye to everyone whom I knew in North America, I managed to meet up with Rhys again and we had a weekend together. But the journey took so much out of me that afterwards I ended up at Myrtle Beach in South Carolina where I holed up for several days to recover my strength ready to go back to base.

Not the first time that I’d been to Myrtle Beach either. I’d been there in 2005 for a weekend too.

And that was strange. I thought (and still do) that Myrtle Beach is a bit of a dump – Rhyl with the sun, in fact.

But when I worked at that strange American company in Brussels where I met Alison, there was this woman going on about this brilliant place my the seaside where her husband had taken her for her honeymoon a couple of years back.

She espoused at great length about it and finally mentioned its name. Myrtle Beach. "Ohhh, Myrtle Beach" I said. "I was there last year. I thought that it was a bit of a dump. I’ll bring my photos in and show you"

Funnily enough, we never heard another word about Myrtle Beach. But the people there were strange. It was like being on another planet.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … hospital, I mentioned a “good night” a little earlier.

That was obtained by the simple expedient of putting the perfusion pump in the bathroom and closing the door. And for once, I had enough silence that I could have a good night’s sleep.

Well, not quite. There I was, asleep, listening to Hawkwind’s MOTORWAY CITY in my dreams when one of my sisters brought me a really strange kind of bun like a cupcake with chocolate over the top and one or two other decorations but it smelt of onions. I wondered what it was going to be. Just then I actually awoke because of something on the music to which I was listening. I awoke, to find that it was “Motorway City” actually playing so in the end I switched off everything and went back to sleep. But it was quite strange having this onion-flavoured bun given to me by one of my sisters.

By about 06:00 my reverie came to an end as someone came by to take a blood sample, and that was that.

It was an endless stream of medical staff doing all kinds of things in here today, but an ominous sign is the doctor saying that she’ll send a physiotherapist to see me. If I’m going home soon that would be totally unnecessary so it looks as if I’m in here for longue durée as they say around here.

Some of the morning’s activities have already been mentioned, particularly the messages that I’ve received. It’s nice to hear from my audience so if you’re a new subscriber, of which there are more than a few just recently, or a long-time lurker, send me a message to say “hello”. There’s a link to a form at the bottom right corner.

Just be mindful that if you have a gmail address, I can’t reply to you. I’ll either say something on here, or if it’s private, you’ll receive a reply from STRAWBERRY MOOSE.

The rest of the morning was spent trying to decipher where I’d been during the night. And I’d put some miles in too. A friend of mine lives in Canada just inside the border. Right by where she lives was a railway bridge, called “Cedar Bridge”. It was a prominent feature of the landscape so all the slaves and everyone escaping the USA would flood across the border and head for Cedar Bridge. That would be the symbol that they’d reached safety. It was an iron bridge over the railway built for pedestrians only. One night at some point but I can’t remember the date it was just swept away. Cedar Bridge was destroyed. It was a terrible loss as a symbol of freedom from persecution for a great many people.

And then I’d received an absolute mountain of paperwork from a hospital in Canada about my illness, a mountain of it. I had to go through it and scan it all which took for ever. Then I had to post some of it to somewhere and some of it to somewhere else so it became incredibly complicated. I was halfway through doing it when I received another e-mail with some more stuff and some stuff that cancelled some of the first stuff. I had to restart what I was doing but I’d forgotten where I was. I’d lost my place. Then I had to send some information to my brother. The only way that I could do that was to send it to my niece and ask her to contact him. That started to become even more complicated still. I was there with all these papers and all these e-mails with all of these forwarding and “copy to you” kind of stuff. It was incredible. I was just so confused with it all and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if anyone else was too. When it came to writing up my notes at night it just turned into a load of gibberish. I just couldn’t seem to make it make sense

That sounds about right. I’m submerged in paperwork from my hospital visits and can’t sort them out properly before I’m overwhelmed with yet more from another hospital stay which contradicts everything that I previously received.

Later on, I won a prize in a competition. It was a baby pig. How on earth was I going to cope with a baby pig? A group of us who had had to go our separate ways arranged to meet at the Cheshire Cat in Nantwich. I eventually found my way there with this pig screaming and squealing and wriggling in my hands so in the end I just let it go. I didn’t know what else to do. Then I saw a bus go past, a bus from my school. It had “Competitors” written on it. There were loads of schoolkids on it, many of the ones whom I was hoping to see in the Cheshire Cat. I thought “this is going to be a wash-out, isn’t it?”. I reached the door of the Cheshire Cat. There was a Bouncer o duty. I asked him how many people were in. He replied “about 2”. I said “I’d better go to buy a 3rd drink, hadn’t I?”. When I walked in I found one of my friends sitting at a table with 2 other guys. I asked my friend what he wanted to drink. He wanted a beer but these other 2 guys wanted rum and coke. I thought “2 beers and 2 rum and cokes is going to cost me a fortune too”. Instead of going to the bar the main way I decided that I’d take a short cut through the crack in the wall which I did and ended up in the middle of 2 girls having a dancing class. They were girls whom I knew so I thought “at least I’m going to have some pleasant company” because I’m going to end up chatting to these 2 girls, I hoped. But this was all turning into a complete, confused mess too. I thought to myself that with all this going on today and I’m not having any luck whatsoever. I was having all this work to do and I just don’t understand any of it.

“… turning into a complete, confused mess”. And that’s something with which I can relate at the present moment, right enough.

Back in that dream again later, I had to leave so off I went. It was a Friday and I couldn’t go back on the Saturday so I was back Sunday lunchtime thinking that I still had 2 drinks left in the tap that I’d bought on Friday. There were just 2 people in there so I left myself in the glorious arms of the folk singer Miss Colwill who has figured in these dreams in the past but I don’t know where she fitted into this dream tonight.

And who is Miss Colwill? The names “Ruth Colwill” and “Rebecca Colwill” came immediately to my mind but there’s no trace of either

But stepping back into a dream again. Why can’t I do that whenever I’m about to lay my grubby paws on Castor, TOTGA or Zero?

Everything came to a dead stop round about lunchtime when they brought me a glass of sodium sulphide. And for several hours afterwards I was away with the fairies.

In mid-afternoon a discreet mug of coffee smuggled into my room revived me somewhat And I carried on with my studies of Victorian methods of tree pruning. I’m not sure why because I won’t be pruning any trees ever again. But in these ancient, 150 year-old books that you can download for free fromARCHIVE;ORG there are tons of useful, long-forgotten facts.

Tea was rubbish as usual but somewhere along the line the needle in my hand had been dislodged so all the perfusion was running up my arm. In the end the nurse had to take it out and stick it in somewhere else.

In fact he asked me to tell him where I would like him to stick it and, do you know, I was sorely tempted …

More sodium sulphide has found its way into here so in a minute I’ll stick the perfusion machine in the bathroom, switch off the Hawkwind playlist that’s been playing for the last couple of days, and hope for another pleasant 5 or 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep like last night.

But whether or not I’ll get it is another thing. There’s too much going on here for that. So I’ll just hope for pleasant dreams

Look out Castor, TOTGA and Zero! Hee I come!

0

Monday 25th December 2023 – A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS …

… to all my readers. I hope that you had a lovely day and that Santa was kind to you.

This year I shall be changing the habits of a lifetime and I shan’t regale you about the public conveniences on Crewe Bus Station as I do every Christmas, for the simple reason that they are no longer there.

Like everything else in Crewe these days, they have gone the Way of the West and right now Crewe Town Centre is looking like Dresden in 1945 after an Allied air raid.

And that’s a shame about the public conveniences. I have many fond memories of them and in particular about how a careful study of the helpful diagrams on the walls helped me pass my ‘O’ Level Biology so convincingly.

But anyway, retournons à nos moutons as they say around here. Despite going to bed late last night I was up and wandering about at 07:45 this morning – after just about 6 hours sleep.

It beats me what is going on right now – the days when I could have 10 and even 12 hours sleep weren’t all that long ago, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Mind you, I did notice that for one of these medicaments that I’ve been having since my stay in October, one of the side effects is “disturbed sleep patterns” but I don’t think that it’s the sleeping patterns that are necessarily disturbed.

Once I’d organised myself, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Nerina and I were staying somewhere at a hotel, a fairly comfortable hotel. She suddenly announced that she was going to go swimming or to the cinema with some friends from work or something like that at about 23:30. That didn’t bother me but the place needed to be cleaned and tidied as we were leaving. She said that she’d do it when she returned but I told her not to bother. There’s no reason why I couldn’t do it while she wasn’t there. She seemed to want to insist but quite seriously I couldn’t see the point. Once she set out on her way to go I managed to find a polishing cloth etc and began to wipe down the surfaces and the tops of the chests of drawers etc. I had one of these old tape recorder radio things, a Grundig thing. There was a tape of Steve Marriott singing but I can’t remember which group he was in. I put that on to listen to it but the quality was absolutely awful and I couldn’t understand why. It was usually so much better than this. Even Steve Marriott instead of singing was having a really good complain about the quality. I could hear him in between the crackles and whizzes having a really good moan about the state of everything. I just didn’t know why this cassette wasn’t playing properly at all.

It’s been a couple of weeks since Nerina came to join me on a nocturnal ramble, so welcome back Nerina. I know (because it’s been said before) that some people think it’s strange that I’d welcome back Nerina into a nocturnal ramble, but it’s far from being strange in my opinion. Apart from the fact that I actually invited her to share my life all those years ago so she has more right that most to be there, we were in a very bad place at a very bad time with all kinds of very dark storm clouds hovering on the horizon back then.

And given a choice between Nerina and almost anyone else of my family coming along to keep me company, I know exactly who I’d choose

I fell asleep dictating this and I can’t remember where I’d reached. There I was cleaning the room and Steve Marriott on the tape deck of this big Grundig tape recorder-radio thing. The quality was dreadful and I couldn’t understand why it was so bad. Neither could he because while the speaker was crackling and popping I could hear him complain. Anyway I made a start but some people suddenly appeared. There was a recording that needed to be done and could Nerina and I do it? I explained that she wasn’t here at the moment and wouldn’t be back for a while. That didn’t seem to please them at all. They decided to stay. I decided that while he was staying and Nerina would be on her way home from this cinema or whatever I’d go to have a shower. It was one of those where you have to juggle the controls so that it would be correct and then climb over and in to it as if it was the base of a bath.

By the way, for the benefit of new readers, of which there are more than just a few these days, when I say “fell asleep” and “woke up” when I’m dreaming, that’s not actually what’s happening.

At the time that I’m dictating, I am in fact fast asleep but I’ve been doing this for 25 years and it’s become an automatism these days. When I “fall asleep” what happens is that the dictating starts to slur, it all goes quiet and then after about a minute or so we have the deep breathing and, occasionally, snoring (and I’m sorry for doubting you, Percy Penguin).

But when I’m “awake” I’m actually asleep but I’m somewhat conscious and aware of my surroundings and when I transcribe the dictaphone notes later I do have a recollection of some of the events.

On the other hand, sometimes, I transcribe some notes that mean absolutely nothing. I have no recall whatsoever of some of the dreams that I have, like the following, which means absolutely nothing to me. I had 2 overtime Gods or whatever fighting over me trying to drag me this way or that way to go along and work under them for some overtime etc. It was quite an extraordinary dream and it all evaporated when I awoke and took hold of the dictaphone but they were pulling me one way and another one another way offering me all kinds of inducements to follow them and do the homework that they had planned. Instead, I kind-of awoke.

Finally I was back in the Vietnamese jungle or some such. We were running a guerilla unit. I was in the stores somehow. We were sending out patrols. I was trying my best to keep our camp quite tidy but no-one else could be really bothered. Stuff was being dumped in the jungle and I was in despair because of this. Someone would have to come along in years time and clean it all away, old metal skips and everything just abandoned. We were expecting to be pulled out at some time. As we were discussing this the phone rang in the office. Someone went to answer it. I remember saying to people that it looks as if we finally have our orders to go. There was no cheering or anything like that from within the hut so I didn’t think anything of it. Then someone came dashing in saying “for God’s sake try to stop such-and-such a patrol”. It seems that someone has sent them off with the wrong gelignite and it’s 10 times more powerful, they stuff they’ve taken, than what they should have. If they are planting booby-trap bombs with that they are likely to become casualties themselves. Of course there’s no way of stopping a patrol once it’s gone out. As it happened, we were lucky. The captain of the patrol had decided that he would sample some of the gelignite to make sure that it worked correctly. When he did, he was astonished by its performance. A simple lump demolished a considerable part of the suburb of one of the towns that he was supposed to be attacking so he too came to the realisation that he had the wrong gelignite so he and his troop beat a hasty retreat before anyone of the opposition realised what exactly was happening and what had gone on.

So today I have emulated my namesake the mathematician and done three fifths of five eighths of … errr … nothing. I spoke briefly to Liz, Alison and my ill neighbour on the internet, and a neighbour came here for five minutes, and that was that.

So, what about my Christmas food? I know that you are all dying to know how it went

  • The Hash Browns – not the absolute disaster that they have been in the past but they were still a long, long way from where I would like them to be
  • The Christmas Cake – too dry and crumbly, but that’s always the case with eggless cakes. I think that Liz must have a special ingredient that she keeps secret. But despite that, it looked like a Christmas Cake and tasted like a Christmas cake, even if I did have to eat it with a spoon
  • Icing and Marzipanning – not my strongpoint. I can’t do icing to save my life. But the cake was covered with it so what I did worked to a point. All in all, the cake passed muster.
  • The Vegan Wellington – this was superb and a big thanks to Liz for sending me the recipe. There’s plenty left and I’ll be eating it for ever, I think
  • The Stuffing – the chestnuts having been discarded as unfit for human consumption and having to improvise, it could have been a problem. It was dry and crumbly but it looked like stuffing, smelled like stuffing and tasted like stuffing. What more do you want?
  • The vegetables – I was using the electric streamer which is rather hit and miss. Following everything that I usually do, they ended up overcooked. That’s a rare event
  • The Christmas Pudding – Leave the best until last. This was a masterpiece, it really was. Exactly how a Christmas pudding should be. I’m really pleased with this.

There’s no peace for the wicked. The Centre de Re-education is open tomorrow and I have three sessions, spread right out through the afternoon. There’s plenty of paperwork that needs sorting out but I’m in no mood to do it.

An early night sounds as if it might be a good idea but I don’t have the energy to go to bed right now

But that’s Christmas over for another year. I’m wondering if I’ll see the next one. If my health continues to deteriorate like this, it’s unlikely. No-one with this illness has lived longer than 11 years and I was diagnosed in 2015. Time is running out.

But not me. I can’t even stagger out at the moment.

0

Thursday 21st December 2023 – HERE I ALL AM …

… not sitting in a rainbow, but sitting on my comfy chair in my office/recording studio/bedroom (it’s not just STRAWBERRY MOOSE and me who do multi-tasking around here.

And I’ll refrain from quoting Golden Earring, Sean, just for you. I’ll just let everyone imagine it.

First of all, let me announce that the completed entries for the last three days are now on line so you can go back to Monday and read forward at your leisure.

But let me give you a little warning – if you are offended or upset by anything that I’ve written over those three days, I’m really sorry, but that’s how it is, I’m afraid.

For the whole of my life (yes, the whole of my life) I’ve been falling into the deep dark pit where the black dog lives and then climbing out again later on. And sometimes I fall into it deeper than other times and it takes me much longer than other times to climb out.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been in the pit but the other day I slid down probably deeper than I’ve been for 30 years and couldn’t climb out again.

At times like that I have a tendency to give vent to my feelings maybe more than I otherwise would, something like a safety valve blowing off excess steam.

People have asked me before why I don’t go back later and edit what I write. But the answer to that is for someone who is suffering from a long-term terminal illness, a control of the mental health is as important as a control of the physical health and I need to see how my mental health is evolving as the illness progresses through my body.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve been advised by many people … "and on many occasions too" – ed … to seek counselling as my health deteriorates more and more, to prepare me for “the end”, but counselling won’t solve my problems, and it won’t help anyone else who follows my trail.

And so you are stuck with these notes, for better or for worse. And if you read something that makes you raise your eyebrows, don’t worry about it.

As for my dreams, I have no control over them at all. And how I wish that I did.

A few people are actually quite adept at reading the signs in my postings. Almost immediately after I posted last night’s entry, Alison came on line and spoke to me for quite a while, for which I was extremely grateful.

So for the last few nights, I’ve had Alison, Rosemary and Jackie helping me along as I deal with all of these issues, and I’m very grateful.

So grateful was I after my chat with Alison that I awoke this morning feeling much better than I did when I went to bed last night. Mind you, it was 07:20 so I suppose that was partly the reason.

The nurses came and did their usual nursey things and told me that I’d be leaving today, critical blood count or not. But last night before going to bed, I had an injection of a product similar to Aranesp, the “last resort” for stimulating the red blood cells to fight against the carcinogenic protein.

They took the card that I gave them so that someone could ring up the taxi company to tell them to fetch me. I told them not to hang about because he has a 4-hour drive to come here for me.

And after breakfast I finally, at long last, had a good shower. And how much better I felt for it too.

The doctor waited until about midday to come to see me with an enormous sheaf of papers, including my permission to leave.

She also brought me the very bad news. If you want to see what the lumbar puncture and the thoracic puncture disclosed, you need to READ THIS

Of course, I’m not going to have any old common or garden complication to my illness, am I? It has to be something that is “an extremely rare neurologic complication”.

And as if I don’t have enough issues already with which to deal, without having all of this dropping on me over the last few days.

But no-one can say that they weren’t thorough.

While I was waiting for the doctor to come I transcribed the dictaphone notes. We were on board ship, a whole pile of us, kids from school. We’d gradually settled down into groups of friends. I was with a couple of people, other boys from other places. Someone suggested a game of cards. We found a pack of cards and went to the deck above to the games room where all of the card tables and all the other tables were. But there wasn’t a card table free. There was one table where there were some boys from the year above us, They were playing and said “we’re playing here”. I replied “I can see that you’re in the middle of a game. In the end they invited 2 of our party to join in with them to make up the numbers. That left a couple of us. We were trying to work out what we were going to do. As far as I was concerned I’d be quite happy to sit on the floor and play. The 2 other boys seemed to be much more interested in finding a table or something like that. I thought that that was rather unnecessary given the circumstances.

Later on there was a big battle in the American Civil War between the North and the South. The Southern forces were completely overwhelmed and the North was victorious. What happened then was that the North suspected that several women had been extremely active in helping the Southern forces. They rounded up these women and arrested them. The women had to go to General Headquarters so they were put on some kind of primitive bike each. A group of them set off. They came to a steep hill so they had to dismount and walk up the hill. When they reached the top they could remount and ride back down again. At the top of the hill they leapt onto their bikes and pushed off to start pedalling. Just at that moment the wife of a Northern military dignitary decided to cross over the street. As a result she collided with one of these women and was killed. The woman was then rearrested on a charge of murder and was taken away. Many people had seen the incident and agreed that she couldn’t possibly be guilty of murder – it was quite simply nothing more than an accident. They somehow found their way into the tribunal. When a vote was passed for whether or not she should be prosecuted it ended up being 325 in favour and 325 against. It was necessary then for another committal hearing to be held. She was still nevertheless taken off to a ladies prison. While I was watching her in the hallway of this big building waiting for the carriage to come, I awoke.

Did I dictate the dream about everyone coming upstairs to visit an apartment next to mine? … "no you didn’t" – ed … The interior was black and white. As they came up they kept on commenting on some signs that were there, like “Mrs So-and-So – 1st prize for baking” etc. One of the people said to everyone else that whoever lives there says that we’ll have plenty of nice home food, implying that she’d baked it but in fact it’s obviously her mother who’ll have baked all the food for them. So there was some general rumbling. I stepped out onto the landing to see what was happening. There were all these people. They asked me if I was a member of a certain church too. I replied “no, this isn’t a church. It’s a block of flats”. They all looked at me quite strangely.

Somewhere along the line I was planning on doing something or other but I didn’t know what. I wanted to make changes so I’d gone out for a walk to think. I’d seen a Volvo B58 coach parked in the yard of a coach operator. It had been completely stripped out of seats etc and the back panel was missing. I thought to myself “I could make myself a nice little car transporter and caravanette-type of thing out of this, the way it is at the moment. It was an old 53-seater, probably N or P reg Duple body. I had a quick look around. It looked clean enough so i went to ask for the proprietor. While I was looking for him I found a Morris Traveller that was also for sale. I had a really good look around the Morris and found that they wanted £650 for it, which I thought was cheap. Meantime I found the proprietor and he pointed out a woman to whom I had to talk. It meant jumping across a kind-of ditch. Of course I landed in the ditch all the way up to my knees but eventually found the woman. I asked about the coach. She said that it had been one of their tour coaches that they’d had from new. It’s a really good vehicle. They’d advertised it for sale as a coach for £2,500 but there were no takers so they began to break it for spares. They found that it was too good to break for spares so the idea was that one of the car racer people might like it. I asked how much and she replied £650. It needs an MoT that they can arrange and a few other bits and pieces. I thought “£650 is nothing for a coach like that”. I se off back for home thinking to myself “how am I going to break the news to Nerina that I’ve just bought her a Morris Traveller and there’ll be a big Volvo coach turning up at the house in a week or so. She won’t be too pleased about this and it might cause a few problems at home”.

A short while ago someone offered me a reasonably modern 53-seater coach for £1500 and had I had my health I could have been sorely tempted. I even drew up some plans to make it a 12-seater coach with kitchen and 12 berths for sleeping, and use it on my trips around Europe with my friends but it wasn’t at all a realistic proposition the way that my health is going.

I was then back in that dream again … "which one?" – ed … and we were all in Virlet, although it wasn’t the Virlet that I know. We were tidying up around my house, finding all the loose rocks that were lying around and either putting them in a pile or putting them back where they belonged in the fabric of the house. This huge group of people had come together as a result of issues in the previous dream, all marked “present”. The situation was explained to them. We began to tidy it up and were doing really well. We’d done two sides of the house but the 3rd and 4th side of my house are on a different level. I thought that we’d have stayed on this particular level where the other two sides of my house are and tidy up all around there before going down into the marshy morass and dealing with that. For some reason one of the women who was co-ordinating the party went down below and began to move the stones around. We tried to call her back but she took absolutely no notice and carried on moving the stones around down below. Some of them were really heavy and required 2 people to lift them comfortably but she was lifting them on her own. I was convinced that she was being deliberately stubborn and she’ll end up with a bad back at the very least at the end of all of this if she doesn’t stop, come back to us and co-operate with the pattern that we are trying to do. There were some other people involved in this dream who lived in a nearby house that was actually a chateau but I can’t remember what their actual involvement was.

The secretary came to see me after the doctor had gone. “Your car will be here between 16:00 and 16:30” she said, meaning that she had only just phoned for it. So I settled down to do some work and … errr … a little relax.

By 17:00 they all wanted to go home so they began to harass me a little and eventually they moved me into a waiting room outside. And 20 minutes later the ‘phone rang
"Where are you?" asked a voice
"Batiment Heuyer" I replied.
"Ohh, not where you were last time?"

It seems that no-one had told him where I was, even though I’d given the taxi company a copy of my convocation and the secretary had said nothing when she rang, so he’d been trying all of the doors in the building where I was last time.

Eventually we set off for home, right through the Paris rush hour and hit the open road. It was a good drive – I’ve had this driver on a Paris trip before and I’ll travel with him again – and we even had a 10-minute break.

At one point on the journey I dozed off, and then had one of those really dramatic awakenings that I have sometimes when I suddenly sit bolt upright. It scared my driver to bits.

What made me laugh though was the taximeter. Somewhere on the autoroute between St-Lô and Villedieu les Poeles it rang up over the €1000 mark and by the time we pulled up at my door at 21:45 it was showing €1178. It’s a good job that the Social Security has prise en charge the journeys.

First thing that I did was to make myself a big bowl of porridge and then collapse in my comfortable chair.

This weekend I’m not going on the bus to the shops. First task will be to go through all of the papers from the hospital and work out what to do. Then to check Liz’s vegan wellington, order the stuff (or ask my cleaner to buy it) and send off the next big order to LeClerc.

Right now I’m totally exhausted but as usual, after a journey, I can’t wind down enough to sleep. In the old days when I was chauffeuring, I’d go for a run and that would help me unwind but these days I can’t even go for a walk.

How the mighty have fallen, hey?

0

Monday 18th December – HERE I ALL AM …

… not sitting in a rainbow, but sitting in a seat against a window in a room on the second floor of the Batiment Heuyer of the Hôpital Pitié-Salpetrière.

That’s the Haematology department, so you can imagine why I’m here.

And we’ve just had another delightful verbal exchange, of the kind that you can only have in a hospital.
Ward orderly (about to take Our Hero’s temperature) "are you wearing a hearing aid?"
Our Hero "Pardon?"

Last night I ended up going to bed rather later than I intended. Alison was on line, I noticed, and I wanted to have a chat so it was nearer midnight when I ended up in bed.

Once I was in bed, I found it difficult to go off to sleep, as seems to be the usual case when I’m having to leave my bed early for something special.

When the alarm went off at 05:55 I staggered to my feet and set the wheels in motion. I’d made some sandwiches and packed last night but I had to sort out my medication, have a good wash change my clothes and so on.

There I was, all nice and ready quite early, but the taxi was late. Apparently my co-voyager is an inmate at the Centre de Re-education and having planned to be awoken at, coincidentally, the time of the change of shift, everyone there thought that everyone else had done awoken her. In the end it was the taxi driver who had to shake her awake.

And hadn’t he hit the jackpot? Not only did he manage to cram two different trips into one car on the outward journey, there was also a passenger to bring back. That’s the kind of day of which every taxi driver dreams, and good luck to him.

The other passenger had had a brain tumour and was blind, but its true what they say about other senses making up for those that you’ve lost, because she spoke enough to make up for it.

The driver was quite garrulous too, an older guy for a change, and it turned out that all three of us were cat-lovers so we had a really good chat all the way to Paris.

But I had more in common with the driver than the obvious. He too had lived with a woman and her child for several years and when they separated, he missed the little girl far more than he missed her mother. It seems that I’m not the only one who ought to have been a father. He certainly laughed at the story of Roxanne going off down the street several times on my Honda moped at 8 and 9 years old.

Despite being late, we stopped off for a coffee at a service area too. I had plenty of time to kill and the other passenger didn’t seem to be too bothered.

At Paris we dropped off our passenger at a hospital in the west side of the city and then headed across to the Porte d’Italie and my hospital.

My check-in time was 13:15 but I was here at 12:30. Nevertheless, my room was ready so I was installed here quite quickly.

The room is nice and comfortable, but it’s cold, as I expected and there is no internet.

All kinds of people came to see me so I didn’t really have a chance to settle down for quite a while.

It only took two goes for the nurse to put a catheter in my arm, so well done her.

We’ve had all kinds of orderlies and the like too, including a couple of doctors.

So thanks to the doctors, I now know what is the plan, and it is as I expected.

Apart from the usual tests that have been programmed, they are going to make a start on giving me this medication about which they talked the last time that I was here.

It has some serious side-effects and is not really recommended for anyone who has cardiac issues (which is probably why they never prescribed it at Leuven) but they think that it’s worth a try.

It’s only natural that they want to administer it under medical supervision. And so if you hear nothing more from me, you’ll know that the side effects were as serious as predicted and the cardiac team wasn’t quick enough.

They tell me that I’ll be here until Thursday but I’ve heard promises like that before.

Eventually I managed to find a quiet moment to transcribe the dictaphone notes. During the night I reached out for a green box that was on the bed with all of my shoe care stuff in it. Of course the box wasn’t there but I ended up with an absolutely enormous attack of cramp, thinking “what a way to start this flaming thing about Paris”.

And then there was Aberystwyth Town v Drenewydd in the Welsh Premier League. The Aberystwyth keeper Dave Jones had the ball and was bringing it upfield ready to clear it forward when one of the Drenewydd players tackled him and kicked him on the ankle. You could hear him cry out from where I was and the noise actually awoke me.

Later on, I climbed over the wall of a palace into the courtyard where all of this re-education was taking place. I found my particular body that was in there so I quickly took from it the elastic that was around the ankles and began to rock that particular version of me backwards and forwards to try to free off the movement in the legs but just then I awoke again

The hospital food is pretty appalling, as you might expect, but that’s not my major worry right now.

Having been off the Aranesp for a couple of months, my blood count has crashed down to 7.8. That’s below the critical level and will probably explain why I’ve been feeling so miserable just recently.

And so they have sent off to the laboratory for some blood and it’s likely that I’ll be awoken at some silly hour of the night for a blood transfusion.

It looks as if I can’t have a decent night’s sleep even when I’m in somewhere like this. I’ve spent most of the afternoon listening to Hawkwind so I’ll probably just carry on until I fall asleep or the world falls in on my head.

I definitely TOOK THE WRONG STEP YEARS AGO

0

Monday 4th December 2023 – WHEN THE ALARM …

… went off at 07:00 this morning I was well on my way through preparing the radio programme notes for which I dictated on Saturday night.

The other day when I awoke at something like a ridiculously early time, I ended up going back to sleep and having a pleasant half hour in the company of Zero.

Today though, being awake at 04:30, I couldn’t go back to sleep no matter how hard I tried and in the end round about 05:10 I gave it up as a bad job and arose from the Dead.

Last night I’d actually had an early night for once and I don’t suppose that it took me too long to go off to sleep.

But then I hauled myself out of bed at 05:10 and went for my medication.

Back in here the first thing that I did was to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I was being taken somewhere, either on board or off a ship. I was in a wheelchair and like that Brazilian company that I knew, they had 3 groups of numbers and lots of individual ranges in each group. They were checking through one particular group to see if I was in there because I was either leaving or joining the ship. I was dying to go to the bathroom but that wouldn’t make them hurry up this task any quicker and it looked as if I’d be there for ever

Later on I’d been back to visit Alison again. I was with a guy and a couple of his children, girls who were probably aged about 5 and 6. Just a couple of doors away from where Alison was living was a sign about some kind of Theme park of “Enchanted Magic” etc. I often wondered what happened there so seeing as I had 2 small children with me we took ourselves off. Eventually we managed to find the entrance because it wasn’t straightforward. We paid for the entrances – we could either have paid or opened an account which we’d settle on leaving but I preferred to pay as we went round. I went for a glass of water. There were several carafes of water that were in the direct sunlight on the windowsill so I went to look for one that was in the shade. We even talked about staying the night in this place because it was possible and the girls would love it. I happened to mention Alison and the guy said “yes we could even go out for a meal with Alison tonight”. I didn’t know what his plans were and what his intentions were but they were his daughters so I let him decide what was going on.

Finally, some famous travel author or similar was going on a walking tour through the mountains of one of these South Asian republics east of the Caucasus. He was looking for volunteers. In the end I decided after much thought that I’d like to volunteer and was accepted. It was something of a cheat in a sense because we travelled extremely light and had a support vehicle that carried the luggage for us for our overnight stops. We were walking through the foothills of these mountains. It was something of a disappointment in a certain respect because if we wanted to follow his exact route and stop exactly where he wanted it was great but if we saw something that was a little off the beaten track that interested us, he wouldn’t stop. We would either have to go ourselves and then run after him, which was complicated, or else ignore it. It happened to me on a couple of occasions, things that I would otherwise have stopped to photograph were left behind. We suddenly came round a bend in the track and came across some headstones. Most of them were American Army headstones from 1977 but a couple were American Army headstones from 1844, in the days before there was really an American Army of course. We could understand the 1977 ones but the earlier ones were a complete puzzle. I was determined to photograph them even if it led to an argument. In the end he set off and I took out my camera to photograph them but somehow a load of mud had come onto the lens. No matter how I tried I couldn’t clean the mud off the lens. I was there for ages trying to do this and he was going further and further away.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that having dreams about camera failures was something that happened quite often at one time in the recent past but we’ve not had one for a while.

Armed with a mug of instant coffee to fire up my enthusiasm I made a start on the radio programme that I mentioned. And once I’d added in the final track and the speech it over-ran by 3.6 seconds. But that didn’t take too long to edit down

Then I took myself off to look at the results of my labours yesterday.

One lesson that I learnt was that I should have lined my cake tin with baking paper before putting in the contents. When I sprung the hinge it left a few lumps stuck to the side.

Not that anyone will notice once it has the marzipan and icing on it of course. And in any case, I’ve made it to eat, not to look at.

Another lesson that I learnt was that my pudding steamer doesn’t make a perfect seal and I hadn’t wrapped up the pudding sufficiently. Steam get everywhere, into the smallest gaps, and my pudding looked rather damper than I would have liked.

In the end, I put the oven on low for an hour and gently dried the pudding inside it. Now it looks much more like a Christmas pudding.

That’s one of the (many) reasons why I keep these notes. You’ve probably noticed that there’s an index with keywords for each entry and there’s an *.sql database that controls all of the keywords.

So next year, I can just search the database for “Christmas Pudding” and call up all of the notes that I’ve made on the subject, read them to find out how I could have done better, and hopefully improve on everything next time.

With a memory like mine, you’ve no idea how much of a necessity it is.

One thing that I can say, however, is that the Christmas Cake is delicious. Those bits that stuck to the side of the tin didn’t go to waste. They made a nice breakfast.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent, when I haven’t been sleeping off my early start, finishing off the tidying up from yesterday and then sorting out the music for the next radio programme that I’ll be preparing.

The music took longer than it might have done because the programme will be broadcast on Rinus Gerritsen’s birthday. As far as I can tell, he never sang the lead on any of Golden Earring’s songs and he only wrote one or two of them.

With it being his birthday I ought to include something. It took me an age to identify a track that he wrote on his own, and even longer to actually find it and convert it for radio.

When I moved to Brussels and started running again, I had a huge cassette tape with all kinds of Golden Earring tracks that were the right speed for my running, but can I find it?

When I started running again here at night after Covid began, I think that I ran to the accompaniment of the Dead March.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg – just as good as ever. And there’s stuffing left for a taco roll tomorrow and probably to go into a leftover curry on Wednesday.

But we’ve hit a crisis in that my gas cylinder is empty, so no more sparkling water for me. Cylinders are available on line of course, but you have to pay the full whack, not just the exchange refill. And I can’t ask my cleaner to struggle back on foot from LeClerc with a refill

Tomorrow there’s the Welsh class and if the car comes for me, the Centre de Re-education. There are three sessions organised for me so I’ll be fit for nothing when I return.

If I have the chance, I’ll finish off writing the notes for this radio programme. After I’d finally sorted out the music I wrote half of them so it won’t take me long to finish them.

But right now I’m off to bed. I still haven’t recovered from my early start and I need to be on form tomorrow. But coming back up the stairs after three sessions at the Centre de Re-education will finish me off for good.

0

Sunday 3rd December 2023 – IF MY CHRISTMAS …

… cake tastes as nice as did the bits that bubbled over the top of the cake tin onto the base of the oven, I shall be extremely pleased. It was phenomenal!

And yes, Liz, “bubbled over”.

Trying to bake a cake with no self-raising flour or eggs and just using sodium bicarbonate and red wine vinegar to produce a chemical reaction is very much a hit-and-miss process.

The last time I tried, when I made my bread-and-butter pudding, it exploded in my face, presumably because it was insufficiently cooled and mixed before I added the vinegar, but today it went perfectly and I was so impressed

But I was also so tired too.

Not that a really late night had much to do with it, but the fact that all through the night I had the Return Of The Stabbing Pain.

It defies my understanding, all this that goes on with my body. I’ve mentioned in the past … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the fact that at times during the night there’s a stabbing pain in my right foot as if someone is pushing a hatpin into the sole of my foot, and last night it occurred probably almost every 5 minutes

It went on for ages too and when I finally brought myself into the Land of the Living today at about 11:40, it was still going on.

After I’d had the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. A group of resistance fighters of undercover British soldiers had been parachuted into the Occupied Territories to attack the headquarters of a German General. One of the people who worked in that office was a member of the Allied resistance and had been feeding them information. What they did was to make sure that this person made good her escape. Then they walked in and hauled a hand grenade through the door into the other office where the German General would normally work. The hand grenade exploded and there was a cry of agony from in there so they dashed inside. The General’s secretary was there. She’d been very badly injured by the bomb. She staggered out of the room into the office and saw that the office was empty save for these British soldiers. Her first thought was “where’s Madame So-and-so?”. It quickly became clear to her what had happened but no-one in the party of Allied soldiers had the courage to finish her off. 5 minutes later the German General came back in his car with a load of companions who’d been out somewhere. They stepped right into the middle of this carnage, rounded up the soldiers easily and led them away to be shot. During the whole of this dream the British soldiers made absolutely no effort whatever to resist capture and no effort whatever to try to escape or evade.

Several young children, both boys and girls, who had been dancing had come together under the tutelage of a well-known ballerina and were planning to put on a concert. It was called “The Icepedia of Madame Clifford”. She was busily arranging them into groups and teams etc, choreographing dances etc. These children were due to start any day now having their formal tuition in whatever this Madame Clifford wanted to do but just as they began, I awoke.

Later on, a group of 4 or us, 3 girls and me, had been away for a while on a kind-of touring holiday or road trip. As usual there was one girl whom I particularly liked but she was far too busy being friendly with the other 2 girls than she was spending any time alone with me, which was rather disappointing. When we reached the end of our journey there was some kind of issue or confrontation. The girl whom I liked ended up having lost her clothes so she was there basically with all that she had on. I noticed that she was wandering off to the car of one of the other girls so I went over to ask her if she was going to borrow some clothes from her. She replied “no” so I wondered if there was anything that I could do for her or to help her, give her a lift somewhere as she had no clothes, no money etc but she assured me that she’d be OK. I couldn’t actually see how but she was quite adamant. In the end I could hear the 3 girls making up some other kind of plans to meet somewhere on the way home. I felt rather annoyed that I was being left out of everything but I didn’t say anything. I got into my car, and then realised that I was going to be rather short of money for going home. Someone passing by pointed out that one of my tyres had a slow puncture so I wondered how I’d manage to resolve that too. Then the girl pulled up in her car alongside me so I began to talk to her. I had it in my mind to say that I was jealous of the fact that she spent more time with the others than she had with me etc but for some reason I just could not push the words out of my head and out of my mouth to say them. It ended up really unsatisfactory from my point of view. Then the other 2 girls turned up and talked about meeting somewhere in Munich or wherever. I realised that my timetable was going to be really tight and I couldn’t even make it if I was invited. I wondered how these girls were going to do it too. It turned out that they were going to be flying so where was the one with no clothes and no money going to find the money for that? I set off anyway, disappointedly and came to a road junction where there was a car waiting. I waited behind it but it didn’t move. I suddenly realised thet there was no driver in it so I pulled around it, checked that the road junction was clear and began to drive away.

A disabled boy with whom I used to work appeared in a dream somewhere and we talked about my illness. I told him that I had a lot of appointments unofficially registered on 22nd October and I was going to go to the hospital to talk to a few people about how things were going on. We’d been parked in Shavington outside the small parade of shops talking, then he pulled out of the parade without looking and nearly hit another car that was coming our way. Luckily he managed to stop in time but the car carried on driving. We ended up following it for a while then both it and we turned into Chestnut Avenue and began to go down the hill. He’d completely lost the thread of what he’d been saying and told me that that was a problem when his concentration was disturbed. He lost track of just about everything.

And then I was with Alison, Hans and Jackie. We were in Germany somewhere going for a meal. We all piled into one of the cars and someone drove to this restaurant out in the countryside. We went in and the restaurant was actually up some stairs but I struggled up. We eventually managed to find a place to sit. We had quite a good time talking about all kinds of different things. When the bill came mine was €30:06. While I was sorting out my money everyone disappeared. I heard them downstairs. Someone was saying something to Jackie about “shall I run you to the station now?”. That took me by surprise because I understood that we would all be staying together for the weekend. I went downstairs and to my surprise I walked down the stairs without my crutches. We were all milling around in the cloakroom gathering our clothes together. Hans told a joke that made everyone laugh. he said “that was one of Eric’s”. We collected all our coats and set off outside. It was pouring down with rain. Hans made a remark about how lucky we were that we had hats with us. He would be soaked to death walking to the car.

A group of us from the radio had gone to watch Man play in Brussels. The auditorium was packed but I managed to find a little place at the side of one of the mixing tables to put the ZOOM H1 so that it would record the sounds of the group. I wandered off to do something but when I came back there was a family sitting around this table so I went up to tell them that they needed to be very quiet because there was a live microphone recording taking place. They apologised and said that they hadn’t known that it was my seat. They stood up and left. Taking advantage of the empty seat I sat down. I suddenly realised that I hadn’t brought any spare batteries for the Zoom. it it goes flat I’ll be having a real problem. I switched off the machine while the preliminaries were taking place but just them all of the musicians came onstage. I had to switch it on again hurriedly. I’d done it so quickly that I wasn’t sure whether it was on or off. I had the feeling that this was turning into another complete mess. After the first couple of numbers I was chatting to one of the guys from the radio. I told him that if we have issues about space there are only two numbers that are absolutely essential in the recording. I told him of one but I couldn’t remember the name of the second. At that point the dictaphone began to go flat so I gathered up my things and left. After I’d been walking home after 10 minutes I realised first of all that I still had the elastic strap around my ankles and secondly, I didn’t have my crutches. I walked past the street fair and the place where people left food out for the live slugs and fish. I came to a set of steps but I thought that I better hadn’t push my luck too much with these steps without my crutches. I walked the long way round and headed home. I remember thinking that I hope that everything would be fine from now on because if I lose my crutches that’s really the end of everything. I’ve no idea what I’d do then. That was the thought that was worrying me for the rest of the way home.

Something like that actually did happen to me once while I was recording an outside broadcast. The batteries in the ZOOM H8 went flat and the spare batteries were just as dead.

Of course, I haven’t done any outside broadcasts since last Summer before I went to Canada, and for obvious reasons too.

Another reason why I’m exhausted, and probably the most relevant one, is that I’ve been on my feet all afternoon. So much so that my back, my thighs and the muscles in my calves are aching in places where I didn’t even know that I had places.

Firstly, I prepared the mix for the next batch of biscuits. Fresh ginger, fleur d’orange and ground almonds together with the usual spices

And anyone who has been following these pages for any length of time won’t need to be told about what happened just as I was up to my elbows in flour and vegan margarine. For the benefit of new readers, the telephone rang.

There was no other option but to answer it. It was my neighbour, the President of the Residents’ Committee, wanting to know how I was and what happened on Friday so I cleaned myself up and had a good, lengthy chat with her.

She was the one who tipped me the wink about the apartment downstairs. At one of the residents’ meetings the owner of the apartment just happened to mention quite casually that he was thinking about selling up.

She told me and the owner and I had negotiated a price, agreed a deal and I’d paid the deposit to purchase all before he’d even had time to consult an estate agent.

All I have to do now is to wait for the lease to end and the tenant leaves the property, and then I won’t have all these stairs to climb and I can install a proper kitchen and shower. And, it goes without saying, find a cat to adopt me

Of course, the tenant can always leave before the lease expires. “Negotiations are proceeding”.

Next step was to make my Christmas pudding. That was quite straightforward and it was all placed in the steaming container that I’d greased and lined with baking paper. Three hours of steaming in a bain marie to cook it, and seeing as I didn’t have one, I had to invent something.

But that’s now steamed and it’s currently cooling down before I open it to see how it’s looking. And I hope that it works.

Then there was the Christmas cake. That really took some mixing too but I do have to admit that my soaked fruit looked and smelt delicious. Anyway, it all went together, thanks to everything that I’d bought from LeClerc and fitted quite nicely into my moule à charnière.

You’ve no idea how difficult it is to find proper cake tins here in France so when LeClerc had brought in a pile of stuff for a baking sale a couple of years ago I bought two – a large one and a small one that fits into an air fryer.

Yes, I have a cunning plan about that.

Earlier on I’d taken out of the freezer the last of the pizza dough, and while the cake was baking I was busy defrosting and then assembling my pizza.

When I was satisfied that the cake was baked properly I put the pizza in to bake and while it was baking I rolled out the biscuit dough and cut out the biscuits.

Once the pizza was cooked I put the biscuits in the oven and while they were baking I ate the pizza.

So now I have a Christmas Cake, a Christmas pudding, 40 ginger and orange biscuits and a partridge in a pear tree and I’m totally exhausted. I really am.

What I should have done today is to edit a radio programme but I’ve not had time as yet and right now I don’t have the energy to even move. I’ll have a hot drink and then go to bed.

But while I was making my hot drink the phone rang yet again. For several years in the early 1970s I had a girlfriend whom I knew from school. However we ended up going our separate ways, as you do when you’re that kind of age.

In 2006 Liz (not “this” Liz but “that” Liz”) and I were on our way from a meeting of the Disabled Students Group in Bristol (Liz was in charge of Student Support and I was on the Disability Committee) to a University Region 9 Meeting in Newcastle upon Tyne.

We stopped off at a pub in between Shrewsbury and Oswestry for a meal, and who should walk in?

Quite honestly, you could have put her in her school uniform and she would have been exactly as I remembered her – not a single day older.

Since then, we’ve kept in some kind of desultory touch.

So now that I’ve had my hot drink I’m going to go to bed. A good sleep will do me good, as long as I don’t have the person with the hatpin again.

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Friday 17th November 2023 – AND I WAS DOING …

… so well too!

While I was out at the shops I really noticed some kind of improvement in my mobility. Not a lot, it has to be said, but definitely something.

And then, back here, I couldn’t climb up the stairs to my apartment. I really couldn’t. To make my way up 13 steps it took 20 minutes and a pile of gymnastics and I’m really not cut out to do this any more.

There had been plenty of gymnastics during the night. I didn’t go to bed until late because once I’d finished off everything I had a bad fit of nostalgia and fetched the acoustic guitar.

The last time that I had played CAREY seriously was on a windswept airstrip in the High Arctic when Castor and I were chilling out before her ‘plane came in to take her away – away for good after one of the most bizarre periods of my life and I was never the same again.

And, believe me – there have been more than just a few of those.

Of course after that there can only be ONE SONG THAT CAN FOLLOW THAT and it’s really strange that it wasn’t until a couple of years later when I was standing on an airport somewhere else that I realised that sometimes, goodbyes have to be said like that.

The painter Samuel Gurney Cresswell who had the unfortunate experience of accompanying Robert McClure during his expedition in the Investigator said afterwards when being interrogated by the Admiralty that "A voyage to the High Arctic ought to make anyone a wiser and better man".

That doesn’t seem to have worked for me, but then again we were only beset in the ice for 48 hours, not 18 months.

So having had a bad attack of nostalgia I went to bed with my legs strapped together in my elastic hoping that maybe Castor would come to pay me a visit during the night, but no such luck there. I’ve definitely lost the knack of summoning up people

When the alarm went off this morning I was in South Wales with a group of people who may well have been some kind of Welsh learners’ group. The discussion centred around sport – mainly rugby but also football – and one woman was talking about a “rugby trail” around South Wales, a tourist attraction to visit all of the famous sites in Welsh rugby that passed by her home in Merthyr Tydfil. Some of us were talking about football and the subject of a famous footballer who had had a difficult time in his youth with a couple of clubs came up. We had at one point to go out into a field, mark out a path and lay down some supplies but when we arrived we found that the field hadn’t been mown for years and was really just like wild hay. When we reached the spot where we had to leave these items it was impossible to see anything but the guy with me asked “should we just leave the things here now and come back for them again?”.

Nevertheless I struggled to my feet and went off in search of medication.

Having done that I came back here and transcribed the rest of the notes, of which there were more than just a few. For some reason I’d been on a voyage around an apartment during the night. The apartment was equipped with every kind of device known to man, to help someone handicapped raise themselves to their feet and move around. There was of course nothing that I saw that was of any use to me in my predicament but it was interesting to see what my subconscious in a dream thinks would happen to people in circumstances like this.

Some boy whom I’d known at school had phoned me and asked me to stop doing Hamas’s job. I asked him what on earth he was talking about. It turned out that we were all a big group of people from school working together for some organisation and someone had been phoning him with all kinds of strange phone calls while he was in the bath. He thought that it was me but I tried to reassure him that I hadn’t done anything at all like that. In the end the conversation gradually drifted round into something more light-hearted and friendly. He went through the whole list of phone calls on his phone for that afternoon and asked me if I knew any of the locations and if I’d ever been to any of them during the day. Of course I had to deny everything. But there was something in this dream that when I saw him leaving work that afternoon he had with him a double-necked 6-string guitar and amplifier so I wondered what on earth was going on with that but it had nothing whatever to do with these phone calls, I was sure of that and I knew nothing whatever about any of them.

There was another dream similar to the first one where someone complained that I’d been ringing them at all strange hours of the day and night. When we looked at the phone records I was nowhere near wherever these phone calls had originated. I’d never lived there and certainly hadn’t visited that area during that time so I’d no idea what he was talking about and why the guy thought that it might have been me.

At another moment it was as if a length of coiled spring had been inserted into the pavement every so often and you came along and stuck your crutch-end into the hole in one of these statue things and it tipped you off down the road to the next one. I thought that this was the strangest thing I’d ever heard but once again I had to go to great lengths to deny having made any of these phone calls that were so disturbing this guy so much.

Shavington, outside the Post Office on the corner, was another place where another one of these statues had appeared. Once again people were thinking that it was me but I had no idea why they thought so. I certainly hadn’t done anything about erecting any statues and I was sure that if they’d checked the phone number and the e-mail it would be totally different from any that I could access. I really didn’t have any idea as to who was doing all this, why they would want to do it and why they would want to use me as a victim.

I was back last night in that dream about Roosevelt, the baseball player. I’m not sure if I dictated it but there was a group of RAF pilots in South Wales during World War II right at the start. They’d heard that a Luftwaffe fighter had fetched up in Ireland and had been put on display by the Irish authorities. They took off on a scheduled flight with about 10 other people to fly to the airfield. The part across water went well but the part across land was complicated and ended up running out of time. It was a struggle to get down to the airfield at the correct moment. For some unknown reason I was flying behind on my own. They touched down and went into this hangar. There were some statues of American heroes who had come from Ireland. One was a guy called Roosevelt. Everyone immediately thought that it was the President but I explained that there had also been an American pilot in World War I called Roosevelt who came from Ireland and was a famous baseball player. I bet that the statue was of him. That led to all kinds of discussion and argument sand no-one would believe me. But there had been so much time spent messing around and trying to organise things that when it came to the flight back not only had they not actually seen the aeroplane but they were still nothing like ready to depart. You could see that everyone from the passengers down to the crew down to the airport staff were extremely annoyed about these RAf pilots who want to go to look at this aeroplane but just couldn’t organise themselves to do so. What didn’t help was that one of them knew a girl who happened to be there at the airport and spent far more time talking to her than he did to the rest of his colleagues.

Actually, the pilot referred to was an American of Dutch descent, Quentin Roosevelt, who was shot down and killed on the Marne in 1918 and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on our shuttle between Brussels and Virlet that we used to undertake regularly, we always drove past the memorial at Navarin Farm near Chalons sur Marne.

He had an airport on Long Island named after him and we went there to see the site of it over the New Year of 1999-2000 and where I was lucky enough to be allowed to sit behind the controls of the replica of Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St Louis”

Later on I was whisked off in this programme of investigating people’s immigration status, I suppose. There was a pink aeroplane that came along on which I was put. When we landed somewhere we were all ushered into a certain area where we had to produce our nationalities etc. I was extremely confused as to what was happening and couldn’t understand a thing. Of course quite naturally I’m of British birth and origin and have been all my life

After a good wash and setting to washing machine off on its travels I went out and caught the bus.

And on arriving at St Nicolas a most extraordinary thing happened.

Someone came over to me. "I see you at the Centre de Re-education" he said, and began to chat with me about our illnesses.

When I told him that I have a terminal illness he reached into his pocket, pulled out a phial of Holy Water, dipped his finger in it and made the Sign of the Cross on my cheek.

Marianne had gallons of Holy Water that she had collected from just about every Holy place in the World and she even blagged herself an Audience with the Pope when we were down in Rome for Holy Week 20-odd years ago, but it didn’t do her any good and I don’t suspect that this will do me any good either.

But sometimes, I’m quite amazed at the generosity, thoughtfulness and kindness of ordinary people whom I encounter on my travels around.

That Holy Week though was quite interesting. Apparently if we visited 7 particular religious sites scattered around the Seven Hills, we would be assured of permanent Absolution. Of course, that means nothing to me whatsoever but she was really keen to go so we went.

It was in the middle of winter too and the sites were really scattered about – one of them several miles outside the city on the Via Appia Antica but I insisted that if we were going to do it, we were going to do it properly so just like the Pilgrims of years ago, we walked all the way, past the catacombs and the tombs and everything else.

Mind you, there were many more cafés along the road than there were in former times.

So now, just to let you know, I am assured of permanent Absolution – not that it will do me any good.

At the Carrefour they had some bread that was going out of date, on sale for a pittance. As it happened, I’d seen a couple of days ago a recipe for bread-and-butter pudding made in the air fryer and seeing as I now have some dried figs to go with my raisins, sultanas and desiccated coconut, I reckoned that I’ll give it a try.

Loaded up with stuff and having had my coffee I made my way back to the bus stop and home, and my nightmare climb back up to safety.

First thing that I did was to hang up the washing, and you’ve no idea how difficult that is these days. Then I put away the stuff that I’d bought and made myself some soup to go with the crusty bread that I’d also bought.

Back here afterwards I was absolutely fit for nothing and spent much of the afternoon asleep. It’s really taking it out of me, all of this work and I know that I’m going to regret it before much longer.

In between everything I was having a chat with Alison. I asked her how the renovations were going on at Alison Wonderland so she sent me a few photos to show the latest developments.

Apparently the new kitchen will be there in a couple of weeks and she’ll be moving in in January

Whatever lese was left of the day I finished the radio programme that I started earlier and then paired off the music for the next radio programme and writing the notes. I’ve done over half of them and I’ll finish the rest tomorrow so that I can record them during the night on Saturday when it’s quiet outside.

Tea was salad, chips and some of those veggie nuggets, and that is that for today.

Now that I’ve finished my notes I’ll make myself a drink and then go to bed. I’ll try to avoid playing the guitar just before bedtime though. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

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