Tag Archives: aubergine kidney bean

Thursday 5th March 2026 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since I first told them at dialysis that I’d cut down dramatically on the food that I ate?

It all started after a couple of sessions of chemotherapy when all of the food began to taste of nothing but salt, so let’s say “August 2025”.

Anyway, as usual, no-one took any notice of anything that I had to say, and so little by little, the quantity of liquid to be extracted from my body has diminished and diminished. Today, for example, it was just 200 grammes – a far cry from twelve months ago when they were extracting well over 2,000 grammes at each session.

But today, we have finally had a reaction. When the figure of just 200 grammes came up, they fetched the electricity resistance meter to measure the water in my body, and they came up with a staggering 3,800 grammes. In other words, since they last used the meter on me, and I really can’t remember when it was, I’ve lost 3,600 grammes in weight.

What they have been doing is calculating the liquids to be removed based on the previous “dry weight”.

If you had asked maybe a year ago, losing 3,800 grammes of water in a dialysis session would have been OK, but not having had that much to remove for quite a while, my body wouldn’t withstand the shock all at once. And so they are going to remove an extra 1,000 grammes per session until I catch up with where I ought to be.

But what a performance! No wonder I’ve been feeling so tired just recently.

Anyway, I digress … "again" – ed …

Last night, I managed to be in bed before 23:30. But only just, as it was 23:15 when I finally crawled under the covers. Not as early as I would have liked, because I’m trying to be in bed before 22:30 to give me eight hours’ sleep, but most of the time, that proves to be an unrealistic target.

So once in bed, it didn’t take long to go off to sleep, and while I remember waking up a couple of times, I was soon back to sleep again. And there I stayed until the alarm went off at 06:29.

Eventually, I managed to stagger off to the bathroom where I had a good scrub-up and a shave – I’m not sure why because Emilie the Cute Consultant doesn’t love me any more – and then I went off for my hot drink and medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

We were living in some kind of house with people of every nationality in it. My room was just across from where the Russians were. Every time that I went out, I had to take my crutches from against the wall and they used to bang on the latch of the Russian door. I’m sure that they were annoyed by it, but this was happening every time. We’d been using our rooms as kinds of sales places for selling our national products. Books were one of the most important things and I’d been having book fairs in my room, but on this particular occasion, I picked up my crutches and they banged on the latch of this door, and someone came to the door to see what was happening. It wasn’t anyone from the Russians but it was a friend of mine from the UK. I went in and apologised, but I could see that the Russians were in one part of the room and someone else, much younger, was trying to sell a book to an ordinary person. It seemed that there had been an evolution in how trading was taking place for books and I hadn’t noticed. Then, they began to talk about this other book, and the person, or the victim, I suppose, couldn’t seem to find it so I pointed it out to him. It was above his head on a shelf, but it took him a good few minutes to realise that. There was also something else about other people there who were needing some kind of help when it came to buying and selling books. They were sitting more like passengers in a motorcycle combination, which was at the side of everything rather than behind it.

This is another dream that seems to have come out of nowhere at all. There’s nothing in this dream that seems to relate to anything that I’ve been doing or thinking just recently.

Having said that, though, I did spend about ten minutes last night trying to remember some of the Russian that I used to know and practising a few of the words that I used to know.

Isabelle the nurse was very late arriving today, so I had made a start on the next radio programme while I was waiting. And when she finally did turn up, she was in such a rush that she couldn’t hang around and was soon gone.

That enabled me to make my breakfast and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

The Frankish Crusaders have now arrived in Greece and are busily dividing up the country between the leaders of the Crusade, creating small duchies that alienated the local population and led the locals to make some rather strange alliances in order to try to drive the Franks out – something that created a period of disorder for a couple of centuries.

Back in here, I carried on choosing the music for the next radio programme. Some of it took some finding too, but it’s now all collected, remixed, reformatted, re-edited, paired and segued, and the notes started. Where has all this energy come from?

My cleaner turned up as usual to apply the anaesthetic to my arm, and then the taxi turned up, early again. Mind you, there were two other people to pick up on the way, so we weren’t any earlier arriving.

And I was really impressed by the number of flowers that have appeared by the roadside these last few days. It’s all looking impressively beautiful out there now.

At the dialysis session, we had the pantomime, as I mentioned earlier, and then I was left pretty much alone to complete my shopping list.

There was, as usual, a delay in unplugging me from the machine, and by the time that the nurse had finished compressing my arm, the taxi driver was here. He wasn’t particularly chatty, so we had something of a silent voyage home.

And isn’t it nice to be back home in the daylight?

My cleaner was waiting for me and she helped me into the apartment.

Tea tonight was going to be a vegetable korma out of the freezer, but while I was rummaging around in the freezer, I came across an aubergine and kidney-bean whatsit dated, would you believe, November 2023. I decided to eat that before it walked out of the freezer on its own

So right now, I’m off to bed, ready for a good radioing morning tomorrow. I have my shopping list to send off and a pile of washing to do. I hope that I remember to do them all.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the stuff in my freezer … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of my friends once said that she had problems taking something out of her freezer.
"Why was that?" I asked
"Because every time I opened the freezer door, something in there reached out and closed it again"

Thursday 26th February 2026 – TOTAL, ABSOLUTE CHAOS …

… at dialysis today. Everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong and I had one of the latest departures that I have ever had. Consequently, I am running hours late, and it’s debatable whether I’ll finish my notes or not before I have to retire.

Last night wasn’t much better either. Despite having no tea, except for a slice of cake, I still couldn’t manage to complete everything at a reasonable time, and it was about 23:00 when I finally settled down in bed.

One thing that can be said, though, is that I stayed asleep until just after 06:00.

At that time, I suppose that I could have forced myself into an early start, but I soon put that silly idea out of my head and waited for the alarm to sound. And although I sat up quite promptly with my feet on the floor when the alarm went off, that was as far as I went for at least ten minutes.

Eventually, in the bathroom, I had a good wash and a shave. I’m not sure why, seeing as Emilie the Cute Consultant no longer loves me, and then I went into the kitchen for my hot drink and medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was in bed, having a lie-in one morning when a girl on crutches came into my room. She was being quite offensive about me still being in bed, saying that I had to get up and have breakfast etc. However, I had no plans to leave the bed for quite a while yet, but she became so insistent that in the end, I left the bed. The first thing that I did was to take one of her crutches, dismantle it and throw all of the different pieces off to different corners of the room. Then, I took the other one, dismantled that, and did the same again. And then I went back to bed.

What a rotten dream! I must really have been in a bad mood that morning. But it did remind me of Jethro Tull and –
"REMEMBERING MORNINGS, SHILLINGS SPENT,
MADE NO SENSE TO LEAVE THE BED.
THE BAD OLD DAYS THEY CAME AND WENT
GIVING WAY TO FRUITFUL YEARS"
– a song that includes one of Martin Barre’s best-ever solos that sends a shiver down my spine each time I hear it; it’s so good. And Glenn Cornick on bass, the best bassist that Jethro Tull ever had, playing one of his best-ever bass lines. I can listen to this track time and time again.

Later on, I had to go to drive somewhere. I said to a girl in my apartment that I’d be back later. We discussed food, and I said that I’d make something when I came back, to which she seemed to agree, so I wondered if she was going to be staying there by the time that I returned. However, I was absolutely overwhelmed by hunger at that point and on my way out to wherever it was that I had to go, I stopped at a supermarket and went in. I noticed that they had hot cross buns at half price – not hot cross buns but currant buns at half price, these packets of four – so I picked up a packet and one or two other things. I thought that this would keep me going until I returned

When I used to go wandering around the UK for weeks on end, back in the past, sleeping in the van, breakfast would almost always be a pack of fruit buns, a pack of hot cross buns or a malt loaf. Fruit buns at half price would be my paradise.

There was also something about football matches. In South Wales, some team had qualified for promotion to the next layer, from the third tier to the second. A girl who was with me who had something to do with this football club had to go to a meeting to discuss promotion, so I went with her. However, it seemed that the situation was simply being decided by choice, and when she arrived, most of the teams had already chosen where they were going to be. The only spots available for this particular team involved some considerable travelling distance, which made her quite disappointed and it led to some kind of discussion about people going to see football matches on public transport, someone saying that public transport and the connections were so bad that it took three hours for them to go to see their local football team by going on the bus. I reminded them of a football club in the north where a bus used to arrive fifteen minutes before kick-off, which gave everyone a good chance to go, but had been retimed just recently and was now at fifteen minutes past kick-off, which meant that no-one could go at all. This girl was still talking about this promotion, and she saw someone who appeared to be the secretary of this organisation who was packing things into her car boot as if she was going on a car boot sale. She asked a few questions but didn’t receive any kind of sensible answer, and that led to me making a comment that this looks like the quality of the organisation of this particular football league; it’s not a surprise that it all seems to be in such a mess. The woman with this car and the stuff in the boot was very, very unhelpful and didn’t seem to be interested at all in what she was supposed to be doing. She was more interested in packing her stuff for this car boot sale.

Judging by what happened in the dream, it was from the fourth tier to the third, and it would have been just like the Football Association of Wales twenty years ago to be more interested in organising a car boot sale than a football league. As well as that, the story about the bus timetable changing brings back a memory of a dream that we had a long time ago about a match on the border in North-East Wales.

There was another dream too, but the World isn’t ready to hear it, especially round about when everyone is eating his meal.

The nurse was late today, for a change, so he didn’t hang around. He was soon in and out, leaving me to breakfast and MAIDEN CASTLE EXCAVATIONS AND FIELD SURVEY 1985-6 by Niall Sharples.

We’re approaching the end, and it won’t be long before we’re in the summary, which should be interesting. However, I couldn’t pass by a remark such as "It has been argued (J Evans, Rouse, and Sharpies 1989) that, because of the socially dangerous nature of the ritual activities that would have taken place in this enclosure, such enclosures would be situated away from the settlement area."

This all sounds extremely interesting, and I wonder why these activities might be considered to be dangerous. Whatever must have been involved?

One thing that he does mention, which I found extremely interesting, is that during the Middle Iron Age, as the reconstruction and remodelling of Maiden Castle advanced, other hillforts in the area declined or were abandoned. Is this maybe a sign that the occupants of Maiden Castle had managed to impose themselves upon the settlers elsewhere and forced them to abandon their defensive sites?

There’s evidence that the style and quality of pottery changed round about this period too. Is this indicative of new arrivals bringing with them a different culture from elsewhere?

Back in here, there were things to do and then in a mad fit of enthusiasm, I attacked some radio notes that needed editing. Not only are they done, but the two halves of the programme are assembled. All it needs now is the joining track and the notes to go with it.

My cleaner turned up as usual to help me with my anaesthetic and then I had to await the taxi to take me to dialysis. And with just me today, we arrived at dialysis at 13:50.

Nevertheless, with several people arriving all at once, I was late receiving attention. And then the connection failed. This meant that they had to unplug me, compress the punctures in my arm, reload and recalibrate the machine and then plug me back in. By now, the anaesthetic had worn off and the cold spray can only do so much.

That was bad, but the guy in the next bed, his system simply stopped functioning. It took an age and three nurses to deal with his problems and then he had to restart too.

As a result, even though it was 18:35 when I was finally unplugged, there were still one or two people waiting patiently for their sessions to finish.

The taxi was waiting for me when I’d finished, but even so, it was 19:40 when I arrived back home. And I treated myself to an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit from the freezer, followed by fiery ginger cake and custard for afters.

Right now, though, I’m off to bed. But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about nurses … "well, one of us has" – ed … the receptionist telephoned the dialysis unit to say that the Invisible Man needed an urgent appointment.
"We have no room for him here" said the administrator. "Send him to the ICU."

Tuesday 23rd September 2025 – HERE I ALL AM …

… not exactly sitting in a rainbow but sitting all alone in my nice apartment. My visitors have flown the nest this evening due to wanting to put some tarmac underneath their wheels. They have an appointment in Limoges tomorrow evening and so want to break the back of the journey this evening.

They had a lovely lie-in this morning, though. My alarm went off at 06:29 – yet another morning where I slept right through, out like a light – and as there were no signs of life coming from elsewhere, I cracked on and wrote yesterday’s blog entry.

By the time that I had finished, I heard sounds of movement so I went and made some coffee for everyone. While it was brewing, I went to the bathroom to sort myself out and then we sat around drinking coffee and chatting.

One thing that I learned was that my camp bed was not very comfortable. In fact, not at all comfortable. I shall not be proposing that to anyone in the future unless the unlucky recipient brings an air mattress.

The nurse was surprised to see me with a house full of women. Nevertheless, he sorted out my legs and gave me the first of this series of five injections that I have to have a week after the chemotherapy.

When he left, my visitors took turns under the shower, and the first one in found out all about the length of time it takes the hot water to run through from the water tank.

After they had showered, I had to give a couple of porridge-making lessons to my hungry visitors and we sat down and had breakfast.

Almost immediately afterwards, the bowls were whipped from the table and the washing-up was done before I could even blink an eye. I told my visitors that they can certainly come again.

We had another long chat afterwards, and then I mentioned the sheet of chipboard that needs to be … errr … lost. A brief flurry of text messages, and it was cut in half with my circular saw and stuffed into a car from where it will end up in Limoges at some point.

After a coffee, my guests wandered off for a walk, and I came in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. This was another one of those dreams where something went on at one of the testing stations while we were stopped en route somewhere and I didn’t have enough room for all my things. They were on one of the carts. This led to an argument and one of the inspectors was knifed but I was convinced that it wasn’t me who did it.

This is another one of those dreams of which I remember nothing at all. I like the bit “I was convinced that it wasn’t me who did it”. As if I would need convincing.

We were discussing the treatment of captured women spies by different States of the USA. There were some States, like, say, South Carolina who would really just interrogate them and then let them go where there were other States that were farther north like New York that would take them very seriously and execute them. But that’s all that I remember of this particular dream because the batteries went flat in the middle of dictating it, and by the time that I’d wired it up again, all of the memory that I had was gone.

It makes me wonder what the rest of the dream that I had forgotten was all about. I suppose, however, that this dream relates to what I have been reading about the American Revolution.

One of the players on the opposite side was called for a foul, and the referee called him over. She began to talk to him about the incident but he took absolutely no notice at all. She began to become a little sterner with him but again, he just totally ignored it. She began to take out her notebook, which was an electronic notebook, but he just took it from her. A couple of us tried to intervene to take the notebook back but in the end, he just hung on to it. She was obviously not able to deal with him so she sent him off but he refused to leave, so she called the police. In the meantime, he took the notebook and went into the buffet. There was an oily salad in there. We heard him inside there, soaking this notebook in the oily salad and then taking it into the kitchen and boiling it into the pan of orange juice that someone had left. We all thought that this was the strangest thing that we had ever seen. We then heard a car pull up outside and the sound of tramping feet but it wasn’t the police at all but something else. However, they didn’t come in, so we were sitting there in this kind-of impasse waiting for the police to arrive.

Yesterday at dialysis, I was watching an old football match in the Cymru Alliance – I can’t remember now which – where female referee Cheryl Foster was officiating. A mass brawl broke out and in the end when things had calmed down, she sent off one of the players

When the alarm went off, I had some kind of metal plate, an oval type of metal plate with three screw holes in it. What I was trying to do was to screw it to something like a porcelain dish or porcelain plate. I’d already done it once in the past because there were three screw holes in the plate. However, it’s really complicated to screw into something solid and hard like that, so I had to find the exact three screws that I used last time, so I was searching through my box of loose screws, trying to find the exact three screws. The aim was that this plate would have this bracket on it, and the bracket would support a tripod, a small desktop tripod, but I had no idea why I wanted to do this.

There is actually a mini-tripod on my desk. It belongs to the webcam but since I moved down here, I’ve positioned the webcam elsewhere. But screwing something into a porcelain plate is certainly a novel idea.

When my visitors came back, I showed them where the bread and salad were, and they made themselves some cheese salad sandwiches for lunch. I settled for a disgusting drink.

We had another long chat, reminiscing about all kinds of old times from school. We were so engrossed that it took us all the way up to tea-time.

My faithful cleaner had dropped in earlier to give me some sunflower seeds and an aubergine that I had asked her to buy. The sunflower seeds, I put on one side for future bread-making activities but with the aubergine, I made an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit for tea, which went down very well.

Once more, the empty plates were whipped off the table and washed before I even had time to think.

Finally, my friends left me for Limoges, with a promise to come back to see me again. And I really do hope that I do. I don’t have anything like enough visits these days, although it’s certainly more than it used to be.

But before I go to bed, making a sandwich reminds me of a conversation that took place in the film HELLZAPOPPIN’.
One of the actors was talking on the ‘phone –
"That’s good – that’s bad – that’s bad – that’s good – that’s bad – that’s good – that’s good …"
"Who are you talking to?" asked his sidekick
"I’m talking to my sister" replied the first.
"But what are you doing?"
"Why, I’m helping her sort a box of strawberries!"
If you want to know where shows like Monty Python and the like obtained their ideas, have a look at HELLZAPOPPIN’.

Wednesday 27th August 2025 – AND ONCE AGAIN …

… when the alarm went off at 06:29, I was still fast asleep.

It’s no surprise really, for when you don’t go to bed until after 00:30, there really isn’t all that much time for sleeping. It is, however, disappointing to say the least. I was hoping that this series of very early starts would go on and on and on.

Yes, it was after 00:30 when I finally went to bed last night. I know that what with one thing and another, it was a late night but I hadn’t realised that it was that late until I checked the time.

Once in bed, though, I remember nothing at all. I must have gone to sleep quite quickly and stayed there until the alarm. Being as tired as I have been over this last week or so since chemotherapy, the good (well, for me, anyway) sleep probably did me some good.

Mind you, I didn’t feel like leaving the bed when the alarm went off. Once again, for two pins I would have gone back to bed. I had a real struggle to leave the bed before the second alarm went off.

It really was a slow start to the morning. It took an age to sort myself out in the bathroom and I didn’t rush to take my medication. It was about 07:40 when I finally made it back into here.

First thing that I did was to check the dictaphone, “just in case”. I was travelling miles in my sleep but I can hardly remember anything of it because the alarm awoke me yet again. However, I do remember that on one occasion I was going back into a place where I worked, trying to smuggle out a textbook or instruction book or something so that I could do some work at home on the Thursday or Friday and have the book back in the office for Monday morning. I also remember doing something with a sheet of newspaper, rolling it up into some kind of spiral like the kind of thing that you’d make if you were lighting a fire. That’s all that I remember about what was going on during the night.

And isn’t that disappointing too? Having a really interesting dream, only to find it evaporate away like that.

The nurse was early again and he was once more in a spirit of amiability. I hope that this keeps up, rather than his usual depressive state

After he left, it was breakfast time. However, I had hardly started it, never mind finished it, when there was a ring on the doorbell. I’m not sure that I mentioned yesterday that the dialysis centre wants me to go for a Doppler examination on the implant in my arm. It had been arranged for 09:30 this morning here in Granville, so I wasn’t expecting the taxi at 08:45.

We arrived at the hospital at 09:05, in plenty of time for my appointment at 09:30, so it goes without saying that I wasn’t seen until a little after 10:00. My taxi driver had already been once to pick me back up but she found me sitting there waiting to be called.

The doctor who performed the examination was someone whom I have met on several occasions in the past. A small lady of “a certain age”, she would make a very good companion to my favourite taxi driver, for she is another one who gives a running commentary of “a certain kind” while she is working. Those two working together would make a wonderful combination.

She had me there for well over half an hour, and the result is exactly as I knew it to be before we even talked about going – namely, there’s a fault in my implant right where the second needle goes, and the fault has been there for months, exactly as I said that it had.

That is the responsibility of the clinic that tried its best to rob me of €1667 or thereabouts last summer, and for which I had to fight over four months for it to be returned. I am now awaiting the formal report before I decide my next move.

However, I shall be having words with the doctors at the dialysis centre too. I’ve been complaining about this implant for months, and no-one has done anything about it. It’s a shame that I had to write to the dialysis centre’s head office so that something could be done, and despite the objections of the chef de service who, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, took great exception to my letter, my letter has produced some kind of results.

When I left the radiology booth, my poor taxi driver was still awaiting me. I felt terribly sorry for her but there wasn’t all that much that I could do about it.

It was 10:55 when I arrived back here and I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that was that it was lovely just to walk back all on my own across the courtyard to the front door, into the building and straight into my new apartment without having to worry about how I’m going to climb 25 stairs.

First thing that I did when I was back here was to reheat my porridge and coffee in the microwave and then finish my breakfast, at long last.

The second thing was to say hello to my faithful cleaner who came in carrying an urgent letter. And so it’s official that Tuesday 16th September I go to Rennes for my next session of chemotherapy.

It looks as if it’s just for the day too. Plenty of mention about what I need to bring, but nothing at all about an “overnight bag”. Of course, I’ll telephone to check. However, if it is just a day visit, that will cause a few other problems because I don’t think that I’ll be in much of a state to travel afterwards, if the previous sessions have been anything to go by.

Much of the afternoon has been spent beginning to unpack my office and installing my external drives. There’s a lot to do in this respect and it will take a while to do it all.

However, the good news is that I have had my first shower. And it was gorgeous too. It worked just as I wanted it to and I was so impressed. However, climbing in and out of the shower is difficult. The step up is just a little too high for me.

But I have a solution to that. Lying around here are all kinds of offcuts of scrap wood from the kitchen, and if I put two or three together and screw them so that they don’t move, they would make a nice step up of half-height and so I should be able to manage the ascent so much better.

What kind of state am I in these days?

Later on, we had another foot-fest. I’d missed the match between Stranraer and Clyde at the weekend, and last night Stranraer had taken on Glasgow Rangers Youth in the Scottish League Cup.

The match at the weekend was a tame 1-1 draw but last night’s match was … errr … interesting, to say the least. Stranraer won 4-1 but, big Stranraer fan that I am, their third goal was scored from the softest ever penalty award that I have ever seen which in 99 games out of 100 would have been waved away, and as for the fourth goal, you can show me that again as many times as you like and from every kind of angle too, and I will still say that the Stranraer forward was half a mile offside.

However, Stranraer has in the past been on the wrong end of several dubious decisions in the past so I suppose that things eventually even themselves out.

Tea tonight was an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit out of the freezer with pasta and vegetables, and in a return to normality after the upheaval of the last week or so, I read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES by Montagu Sharpe.

Sharpe has been discussing the Iron-Age occupation of Middlesex by the various Celtic tribes and that has led me on a chase around cyberspace for buried treasure. Quite literally too, because the subject of buried hoards from the Iron Age came into the discussion.

Of course, I went off on a side-track and in the words of Fridtjof Nansen, "the more extensive my studies became, the more riddles I perceived – riddle after riddle led to new riddles and this drew me on."

And that, dear reader, is the answer to why it takes me so long to write up my notes, and why my Degree studies were not as they ought to have been. I am side-tracked far too easily by things that, to me at least, are much more interesting than whatever I am supposed to be doing.

So late once more, even though at one stage it promised to be quite early, I’m off to bed, wondering if I’ll have another “lie-in” until the alarm goes off.

But despite my having the first decent meal tonight since before chemotherapy, it’s been something of a bad day. On several occasions, I’ve felt my head spinning round and I’ve had to hold on to something to stop me falling. I’ve still not recovered from chemotherapy, I reckon, and I have no idea for how long this is going to continue.

But seeing as we have been talking about Fridtjof Nansen … "well, one of us has" – ed … he is of course famous for his epic hike across Greenland in 1888. During his trek he came across an Inuit building one of these little round houses out of ice blocks.
"What do you call this building?" asked Nansen
"It’s an ig" replied the Inuit
"Don’t you mean ‘igloo’?" asked Nansen
"Oh no" replied the Inuit. "There’s no plumbing up here on the Greenland Ice Cap."

Tuesday 17th June 2025 – I HAVE NO …

… idea what’s going on here, but I’ve had yet another morning when I awoke at about 05:10.

How many times is that now that I’ve suddenly woken up at that time? There must definitely be something going on somewhere because it’s far too much of a coincidence.

It wasn’t as if I’d had an early night last night either. It was well after 23:30 when I finished my work for the day, and after a brief trip to the bathroom (and an even briefer return to pick up my night attire) it was probably closer to midnight when I finally made it into bed.

For the first time for ages, I had a very restless night and I don’t think that I slept at all. I was constantly tossing and turning and trying to make myself comfortable, without very much success, despite how tired I was feeling after my exertions at the dialysis centre.

At some point though, I must have gone off to sleep because I certainly did awaken at 05:10 this morning, the fourth time this year (in fact, the fourth time this month) as if someone somewhere in the vicinity is doing something regularly at that time.

However, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … being awake is not the same thing as being up and about. I had to wait a good twenty minutes before I finally plucked up the courage to leave the bed.

With everyone else being fast asleep, I had a few things to do and then I began work on the notes for the radio programme that I’d started the other day.

Not for long, though, because everyone else slowly began to rise, and so after I’d sorted myself out in the bathroom I went to join everyone and drink some coffee.

The Hound of the Baskervilles decided to take his master out for a walk so after they went I began to contemplate what I might be doing but Isabelle the Nurse turned up to deal with my legs. She was her usual bubbly self but she didn’t hang around long. Probably there were plenty of blood samples and injections to do after a week of her oppo.

The others turned up here a little later and we had breakfast while we made plans. While we were doing that, I was tidying up and came across the remote control for the car park for which I’d been looking for quite a while.

Making the most of the glorious weather, we went outside where we noticed a briefcase on the car park. Someone had put it down to open their car door, and then driven off and left it behind.

My friend picked it up and I was able to identify the owner so I sent her a message to say that we had it. Then we climbed into our car and cleared off.

First stop was Noz, but the coffee that we bought a while ago is all gone. However, they had some breaded vegan burgers there so we bought a pack to try out.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s important for me to vary my diet as much as possible and Noz is a good place to do that, so I need to go as often as I can. All I need now is a bigger freezer.

Next stop was Brico Cash but they didn’t have a curtain pole, so they said. They were not very helpful at all, and it was close to lunchtime closing so we didn’t have too much time to go for a wander around in there. However, they did have some white gloss paint and a paint brush, for my friend is going to paint the inside of the wardrobes on Thursday afternoon while I’m at dialysis. It’s not quite “singing for your supper” but it’s near enough.

On the way back, I had a ‘phone call. Someone had been to talk to me about the apartment several weeks ago and he had promised to ring me back on 3rd June to arrange an appointment to come to look, seeing as I’d stressed the urgency of the affair. I’d had no response so I’d “gone elsewhere” to find people to do the work. Anyway, he rang me back today, two weeks late, and was most put out when I told him that the work had been passed elsewhere

It’s not as if I hadn’t stressed the urgency when we had spoken earlier. I can’t afford to wait around for people.

Back here, I carried on with the tidying up while my friend had lunch, and then my neighbour came for her briefcase so I handed it over. She was very grateful, so I told her that had there have been anything of value in there that I could have sold, she would never have seen it again.

The two of us had a general chatter about all kinds of things before the Hound of the Baskervilles dragged him off for a walk. I came back in here to carry on with the radio programme, and by the time that I was ready to knock off, I’d finished all of the notes ready for dictating, which I’ll do on the next very early morning, whenever that might be.

For tea tonight, I made an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit in tomato sauce, and I tried some of that new soya mince that I’d bought a few weeks ago. It was extremely delicious, that’s for sure.

So right now, I’m going to bed, later than I would like but that can’t be helped. Here’s hoping for a better night’s sleep tonight. I’ve felt my head beginning to sag once or twice today although I’ve kept going. One of these days it’ll sag too far.

But seeing as we have been talking about Noz … "well, one of us has" – ed … I told my friend that it’s not the same in Noz these days when I used to go in there with €10:00 and come out with tins of stuff, several packets of coffee, a pile of crockery and several D-i-Y tools
"Why not?" he asked
"These days, they have installed all of these security cameras."

Tuesday 15th April 2025 – I HAVE HAD …

… a Day of Rest today.

Our Welsh class is on an Easter break this week and next week so I was planning on having a leisurely day today for a change.

What contributed to that particular idea was the fact that I had another very late night – long after 01:30 when I went to bed. But there again, a Marshall Tucker Band concert came round on the playlist and as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I have something of a weakness for Southern Rock and lead guitar solos that can sometimes last for as long as several weeks. After all, how many other Southern Rock bands can you name WHO CAN MUSTER UP A FLUTE?

So eventually I made it into bed and settled down for a good sleep only to awaken in a real panic when the alarm went off – sheets and bedding flying everywhere. For some reason or other I was convinced that I’d heard the alarm go off previously and that this was the second alarm.

As it happens, it wasn’t, because it went off five minutes later. So whatever that was all about, I really don’t know.

The sad part about that was that I was off on an interesting little voyage at that particular moment and in the panic, the whole lot was wiped away completely and I can’t remember anything at all about it.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and then into the kitchen for the medication. It’s a non-dialysis day so I remembered the disgusting powder that I have to mix with water.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. We had a car parked on the lawn somewhere and the front end of it had sunk into the grass. We were debating on ways to manoeuvre it out. I would have expected that we would have raised up the front, put it on a couple of planks underneath the wheels and then pulled it backwards. My father though was going on about changing the gearbox. Even if it had been a practical proposition to change the gearbox, I didn’t understand how that was going to help to move the car out of the trenches that it had dug for itself.

The car, I can still see it now. It was my red Cortina Estate that I came in when I immigrated to Europe, all of my wordly possessions that remained, crammed into the back. I still have the car today – inter-galactic mileage and needs the valve guides replacing but apart from a spot of rot on the scuttle underneath the windscreen the bodywork is perfect and, rare for a Cortina, has never been welded. It’s sitting in my warehouse in Montaigut quietly gathering dust with the 2000E saloon that Nerina bought me once and my Citroën “Traction Avant”.

The nurse turned up early for the start of his week’s shift. No surprise, because he doesn’t have the injections or the blood tests to do, by popular request of his clients. He was complaining that he didn’t have much sleep last night, but that’s a quite common state of affairs around here.

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

We’ve finished our visit of Helmsley Castle and after a remarkably brief passage by Hereford Castle – a mere dozen pages devoted to one of the strongest fortifications in the Marches – we’re now visiting Hertford Castle.

Our author is once more tying himself up in knots. When talking about Helmsley, he tells us on page 106 that "it is possible that the whole may have been the work of Robert Fursan, especially as, remarkable as it is, it is not named in Domesday nor any early record"

However, on page 121, when talking about the town of Hertford, he tells us that the town of "Hertford was so held of the Confessor, and so accepted by the Conqueror, and entered in Domesday, which, however, as was not uncommon, makes no mention of the castle,"

So why is it remarkable that some castles such as Helmsley Castle aren’t in the Domesday Book, but not uncommon that others such as Hertford Castle are omitted?.

After breakfast I had some paperwork that needed attention and then I had quite an idle morning not doing anything except searching for items of personal interest on the Internet.

Something else that I did was to have another in-depth look at some Artificial Intelligence programs. Every day it seems that there are more and more slowly coming onto the streets every day. The latest one seems to be an automatic story writer. All you need is to write out the very basic outline of your plot, your main characters and their characteristics, press “send” and sit back to let the machine type out a book for you.

You can type as much – or as little – as you like for the story outline and so I had a little fun with it, testing out its limits and finding out what it could – and couldn’t or wouldn’t – do. But it’s going to spoil all kinds of creativity and imagination once it all becomes on-line.

While we are talking about Artificial Intelligence … "well, one of us is" – ed … I was told of a discussion between two people on the Internet about how someone, unable to find any secretarial assistance anywhere on the island where he lived, had engaged an AI bot to do all of the work for him and it seemed to be working fine.

Interesting as all of this might be, I couldn’t keep on doing that all day and in the end I began to concentrate on programme 260227 for the radio. First of all though, I checked over programme 250418 and sent it off for broadcast this coming weekend.

For 260227 I didn’t have half of the tracks that I needed so I had to hunt them down. One or two were quite obscure and took some finding but I found them in the end thanks to help from my Artificial Intelligence-powered search engine.

So all of the tracks are sorted out, re-edited and re-mixed, paired and segued. Tomorrow while my cleaner is here, I’ll write out the notes ready for dictation on Saturday night. For the rest of the week I can make a start on Saturday at Woodstock. There will also be a LeClerc order to prepare.

For tea tonight I searched through the freezer and found one of my aubergine and kidney-bean whatsits and cooked it with some pasta and veg, followed by orange, ginger and coconut cake and soya dessert. There is just one more slice of that cake, and then I’ll be into the chocolate cake.

Something else that I have to do tomorrow and not forget is to bake some hot cross buns. We can’t have Easter without toasted hot cross buns. The batch that I made last year weren’t particularly well-made but they tasted delicious all the same. I’m hoping that my new improved technique will improve things this year.

But now that I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed

But seeing as we have been talking about Artificial Intelligence … "well, one of us has" – ed … before I go I’ll tell you about the chat that I have just had with an Artificial Intelligence chatbot.
What I did was to ask it to tell me the funniest joke that it knew.
It came back with "A man takes his sick Chihuahua to the veterinarian. They’re immediately taken back to an exam room. After a while, a Labrador walks in, sniffs the Chihuahua for 10 minutes, then leaves. Next, a cat comes in, stares at the Chihuahua for 10 minutes, and leaves. Finally, the vet arrives, examines the dog, and prescribes some medicine.
The man is shocked and says, “That must be a mistake! I’ve only been here 20 minutes!”
The vet replies, “No mistake. It’s $100 for the lab test, $100 for the cat scan, and $50 for the medicine.”"
It finished by telling me " If you want, I can share more like this!" but I don’t think that I’ll bother. At least, when I remember a joke from the old “Plymouth Polytechnic” days (and that’s a story in itself) I don’t forget half of the story like my AI chatbot has just now. Artificial Intelligence is not all that it’s cracked up to be. I’ll prefer natural stupidity any day.

Monday 4th November 2024 – ANOTHER BAD DAY …

… in the Dialysis Clinic.

Mind you, it was much less painful than the last couple of times, to be sure. However I think that I’m sickening for something and consequently I’ve not been in the mood for anything.

Last night I actually made it into bed before (“just” before) 23:00 which made a nice change but it took a long time to go to sleep for once.

That might however have something to do with the Kefir that I drank before going to bed. It’s been fermenting for several years in its airtight bottle and I’m surprised that I awoke at all this morning. It was still functioning however when I opened it last night because when I flipped the stopper out it came out with a “pop”.

It was another night of tossing and turning, as seems to be the case these days, but when the alarm went off I was definitely deep in the arms of Morpheus. In fact I’d just been to a motor auction with a near-neighbour from Winsford. There were four lorries there. The first lorry that went through was a Foden Chinese six, one of the “space cab” models. There was a full MoT on it, it was rather old but it didn’t look too bad at all. The auctioneer asked for bids on it and my neighbour offered £500. Much to everyone’s surprise, including his, it was knocked down to him. The rest of the auction went on and they turned round to some Yugo saloons, little tiny things. They were only two years old and had belonged to a newspaper company. They were up for auction too. There was about a dozen of them. They were not very popular cars. I’d had one as a hire car once years ago. They were cheap, tinny, plasticky but they did a job. The auctioneer put them up for sale and for the first one, asked “what am I bid?”. I replied “£200”. Mine was the only bid and I had this car knocked down to me, a bright red two year-old Yugo 45 saloon for £200. I paid him a cheque, climbed into the car and drove it away. It was night, the lights were bright and everything seemed to work. It was a little rattly like most of these Yugos but it seemed to be OK. I thought that for £200 I had an absolute bargain here.

The former neighbour of mine lost his job as a driver at Tesco and was not able to find another. However he did come across someone who had a contract delivering pre-cast concrete garages and a lorry with a HIAB, but was unable to carry on working, so my neighbour leased his equipment and carried on with the contract. Having his own lorry would have been a dream for him and an old Chinese Six (with two axles at the front and one at the rear) Foden S-series would have been a superb lorry for him to go hauling

But as for the Yugos, it was actually when I worked for that Italian restaurant in Wandsworth that I encountered the Yugos. They had two for deliveries. They weren’t bad cars either. They did what was expected of them, no more, no less and if I wanted a cheap runabout, I could have done worse than buy one of those, especially two years old for £200.

So into the bathroom I staggered and sorted myself out in there, washing my undies as I went along. And then into the kitchen to put away last night’s culinary efforts. The nurse will be coming by shortly and while I could tell him and his inane comments to clear off if he makes any silly remark, there’s no point going looking for issues

The ginger cake fell apart when I took it out of the mould. The top had risen and cooked to the point of burning, but it had detached itself from the bottom, the bottom hadn’t risen at all and wasn’t cooked. I’ll try to find a circular 18cm silicon cake mould and give it one more go and if that doesn’t work I’ll abandon the idea.

Not that I’m downhearted though. Experimenting with new ovens, new recipes, new procedures and so on – there’s bound to be the odd failure along the way.

Back in here I listened to the rest of the dictaphone notes. I was in the office again last night. I’d been going through some things with someone in the basement. We’d been sorting out some screws, nuts and bolts. I had a handful of nuts, bolts including some small round washers from a previous time that I’d been working, and took them up to my office because in there we were in the old cookery room and the kitchen was at the side of our place and we had a three-burner stove. I went in – it was early in the morning and one of my colleagues was already there. I wished him good morning and put the things in the saucepan, put the water in and put it on a ring. he asked me what I was doing so I told him. He asked what I had in the saucepan. I replied “just water” so he answered “that’s OK. But what do you notice on the boss’s desk?”. I had a look on his desk and it was completely different from before. I suddenly realised that I could see across the office. I said “his computer’s gone, hasn’t it?”. He replied that it had. I asked “what’s he going to do Now?” but he walked away so I shook my head and carried on trying to clean these nuts and bolts.

Once again, I can’t keep out of the office. But it does remind me of the old sixth-form common room at school. It was the old cookery classroom and the oven was still there. So lunch for three or four of us was a large can of baked beans and a sliced loaf of bread. We had wind-powered lessons in the afternoons.

The nurse came early yet again and once more, didn’t hang around for very long. He was soon gone. He looked at my legs and told me that he thought that there was a great deal of improvement. And on looking at them, I thought so too. They are almost as they used to be.

Breakfast was next, and so was reading this thesis. Our American friend is now puzzled over why any “incursion” by the Normans into Wales would be made from the more rusticated Shropshire rather than the heavily-fortified Cheshire.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve answered that a few months ago. Any glance at any topographical map will see that the valleys of the Severn and the Dyfi make a natural avenue into Wales all the way to the coast and split the country in two. It’s been a route for invaders for a couple of thousand years and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a couple of weeks ago we visited a Roman marching camp at Caersws, halfway along the path.

Anyone going that way could cut the country in two and then deal with each half at his leisure. A series of independent Princelings isn’t likely to be able to mount a co-ordinated attack on any invader. Invading by the north coast from Chester would just push the Welsh up into the hills where they could (and did) stay for ever.

In here I had a few things to do that took much longer than I was thinking and I’d hardly started work before my cleaner turned up to apply my patches.

She was on her was to town via the Pharmacy so she took the whole bundle of prescriptions with her and she promised to have the Chemist go through them to work out which ones are valid and which ones are expired.

After she left, I put on one of my Arctic undershirts. If I’m going to spend several hours in Ice Station Zebra I shall dress for the part.

The taxi came for me on time and neither the driver nor the other passenger would say a word the whole way down to Avranches. I tried to engage them in conversation but I gave up after a while. Clearly wasting my time.

It was quite a speedy, aggressive drive down there and when I arrived, I was ushered into a side ward on my own. I must have been naughty last time.

That’s what I thought, and it was confirmed when it was the male nurse who came to attend to me. I had to wait a while for the machine to go through its cleaning cycle before they could couple me up.

As I said earlier, it was less painful than the last couple of times, but I was having some tingling sensations all up my arms, I felt like I was having the wind, and then, for the first time for several weeks, I crashed out – and crashed out definitively.

Hardly surprising really. I have been told that these are diabetic comas, and when they checked my blood sugar level it was 0.63. Consequently for the rest of the afternoon I was being force-fed orange juice.

While I was awake I passed the time trying to read some entries in the Domesday Book. I have a hard-copy here of course, but access to an on-line copy when I’m in the hospital is a useful thing to have.

In contrast to the journey to Avranches, the journey home was non-stop conversation. The driver was a young guy and he was leaving his job at the end of the year to go travelling in New Zealand for a year. He wanted to pick my brains about everything.

But as I came to leave the car he asked me a strange question – "when you were travelling about, did you ever feel lonely and depressed being on your own?"

Well, first of all, I was never alone. For a start, I had STRAWBERRY MOOSE to keep me company and laugh all you might, talking to him was good therapy, I promise you.

And then there’s the old saying “You’re never alone with schizophrenia”. There was always one of the other mes who live inside my head that would pop up for a chat.

But what would inevitably cheer me up would be to wonder how things would be if I had a member of my family with me. That made me glad that I was on my own.

The climb up here was difficult but I managed all thirteen of the first flight again, but I was glad to be back in here and to sit down.

Tea was pasta and an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit followed by a couple of lumps of failed cake with soya cream. The cake might look a mess but it sill tasted really nice.

So bedtime now, ready to fight the good fight tomorrow. It’s Welsh lesson so we’ll see how much I’ve forgotten.

But talking of travelling on my own, I’ve had some strange encounters, like the time RUPERT THE BEAR either on his way to a picnic or to use the bathroom, planted himself in the middle of my path

There have also been some interesting people too, most of whom failed to understand my sense of humour, which was a shame
Once though I remember saying to someone that while most people usually end up with someone else or in a group I always seems to end up on my own and I could never understand why.
"That’s easy" she replied. "If you had a best friend he would tell you. Now B.O."

Monday 28th October 2024 – I’M FED UP …

… of this blasted dialysis and the pain that it’s causing me. Everything that could go wrong at the Clinic did go wrong today and during my three and a half hours coupled up to the machine I was wracked with non-stop pain.

What made it worse was that of the three teams there, it was the team that I consider to be the best that was there on duty this afternoon.

There’s going to have to be some dramatic improvement in the way that things work in there because if it carries on like this, I shan’t consider the 18 hours per week that I waste going to the Clinic to be worth the effort.

It’s all very well saying that they are doing their best to keep me alive, which I’m sure they are, but if I have to spend the rest of my life in pain like this three times per week, then I’d rather not bother.

One consolation though was that I was in bed before 23:00 last night, which was really nice. In fact, it was a good half-hour before and that was something for which I’d been longing.

However, I failed to make the most of it. There I was, wide-awake at 06:00 and when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up and about.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and scrub up, even applying a liberal helping of deodorant. I know that Emilie the Cute Consultant doesn’t love me any more, but that’s no reason not to make an effort. I even changed my clothes.

Back in here I had a bash at transcribing the dictaphone notes. This was another one of these chaotic houses with lots of things happening and lots of people living there, all their lives intertwined etc. People kept on changing beds and bedrooms for some reason or other. I know that a couple of girls changed their bedding and ended up in a bed where I had slept. I pretended to forget that it was a bed where I was no longer sleeping, and I ought to be ashamed of myself, but I’m not!. Next morning there were the usual things that needed doing but I was quite looking forward to the evening because I hoped that the beds would be like they were last night and I could carry on. I had a whole variety of tasks that I needed to perform. Round about mid-afternoon I decided that I’d sit down and put my feet up for five minutes because I was tired after having had very little sleep the previous night. I sat down and put up my feet, and the next thing that I remember, it was bright sunlight and there were a lot of people about. I looked at my watch and it was 07:35. It must have been the following morning and I’d slept. I went in and everyone was having breakfast. I thought “I’ve missed my chance again, haven’t I?”. While I was wandering around looking for people I ended up in some woman’s room. She was sitting there. She’d had an accident, her glasses were broken and roughly where her glasses were broken there was a huge scar in her head. She looked quite a mess. I told her what had happened but of course I left out the part about in bed, just the part about me falling asleep. She thought that it was quite funny and told one or two other people. It was really quite funny too, especially the way that it stopped me doing what I was hoping to do.

Actually, it wasn’t all that funny. For once in my life I managed to Get The Girl … "not ‘arf ‘e did!" – ed … and then miss out on the second occasion due to crashing out. It really is unbelievable although regular readers of this rubbish will recall the unbelievable part of it being that I actually had some good luck for a change. Quite usually the second part of that affair is par for the course where I snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. But chaos? It sounds just like home.

And then the vogue of child painting was starting to come into effect, people having their children painted by well-known artists. Where we were living there was the occasional quest, seeing as my wife could do painting and I could write verses etc. Then of course we began to receive real-life commissions. One of them was this small child aged about three. I sat him down and tried to make him calm etc but it was clear that mathematics was just not his thing. He yowled and yowled all through this ceremony and made a right mess of this photo because there was never ever a correct moment to take it

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … although I’m asleep when I’m dreaming and dictating, I usually have some kind of vague recollection that is triggered when I’m typing out the notes. But for this dream, I have no recollection at all. Not a single bit. I’ve no idea at all what to make of this.

Finally, another dream in the long-running saga of new houses. I finally moved into my new house and was slowly settling in. I’d had a look at the one that I’d had in Winsford and they were in a terrible state so I had a look at the windows of mine and they could do with some attention if not replacing so I took out the two at the back of the house, the dining room and the rear bedroom. I began to clean up the one in the dining room and made a pretty nice job of it. I fitted it back in ready to paint but I noticed that now the sun had gone in and there were really heavy storm clouds. It was starting to rain so I took the ladder to go to fit the window back in the bedroom but the rain beat me. We had this torrential rain but I continued, trying to make this ladder work against the rear of the house but I was having so much trouble because I can’t do with ladders very well. The rain went and the rain stopped so in the end I tried to go round to the front of the house but I couldn’t work out how to get there. I tried a couple of ways but there was no obvious way to go round to the front.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve had several dreams about new houses, in one of which I had actually bought two new houses and couldn’t make up my mind in which one to live. But it did remind me of my house in Winsford and while I was at the Dialysis Clinic I came over all nostalgic about my little house. I wonder how my life and my future would have panned out had I not moved to Gainsborough Road in Crewe and stayed in Winsford.

But that’s not all, although you wouldn’t thank me for posting anything else, especially if you are eating your meal right now. As Thomas Allen Reed once said, "It was fortunate for my reputation that it never afterwards saw the light"

Isabelle the nurse came round and she collided with my cleaner, and they both came in together to assail me. My cleaner wanted my health card for the chemist and the nurse wanted to deal with my legs. They both did what they needed to do in here and left together.

After they had gone I had breakfast and read my book. We’ve now finished the speeches and we are having a lecture on geology. And I have to say that if anyone wants to take up the study of geology, they’ll do much worse than read this lecture because it’s fascinating.

In fact it’s the first geology lecture that I have ever seen where mathematical calculations are well to the fore, but if you don’t want to carry out the calculations you’ll have just as much interest looking at the diagrams.

Back in here I spent some time going through my live concerts and dating them as best as I can, and then I made a start on my Welsh homework. Even though there’s no lesson tomorrow (half-term) I want to crack on.

My cleaner came early to fit my anaesthetic patches, and it’s just as well because the taxi was early once more.

And here hangs a tale, because it was a driver who has taken me before. She’s usually quite chatty but today she hardly said a word and was rather snappy when she did. She had one of those auras that I could sense before she even said anything, and it wasn’t a good sensation at all.

At the Dialysis Clinic the nurse connected me up painlessly, but the machine didn’t work and nothing that she tried would make it.

With the aid of the portable x-ray machine they worked out that the needles hadn’t gone into the tube in my arm so they took them out and tried again. By this time though the anaesthetic had worn off.

Eventually they had a good contact but the machine still wouldn’t fire up. They eventually managed it but only if the pipes were in a certain position so they taped them in that position to my arm. At one stage I had five nurses and three nursing assistants standing round my bed and it’s a shame that I was in no condition to enjoy it.

That’s all very well, but you try lying like that for three and a half hours without moving your arm even half an inch. Eventually, they were so fed up of coming to deal with the plaintive wails of the machine every time I winced with pain that they rigged up a cradle with some kevlar padding.

Then I had no choice but not to move my arm

When I could I read through my Welsh and then finished off my “Curious Church Customs”. I’ll have to find a new book to read, something like HORRID CRIMES OF BYGONE CHESHIRE to see if any of my relatives are in it, and not as victims either.

The trick cyclist came by. She asked me if I was OK and when I replied that I was, she cleared off elsewhere and left me alone, which suited me fine.

With all of the excitement everything was running late, and when they came to unplug me, the compression on my arm failed again and once more the place was like a slaughterhouse

It’s no surprise that I was glad to see the back of the place and climb into the taxi to bring me home. It was another new driver and I ended up having to give directions after she took a wrong turn

My faithful cleaner was at her post again to help me out of the car but I managed the first flight of all thirteen steps without using my hand to lift my leg. If I can do that for a whole week I’m going to try the second flight up to my front door

And she had some news for me. One of the medicaments that I need is on special order and the chemist has had to send away for a box. So what’s the betting that that will be changed in a few days?

In the absence of a pepper, I made an aubergine and kidney-bean whatsit for tea. I had one helping with pasta and veg, and there are three more that are destined for the freezer

The apple-cake has almost all gone now, so I might persevere with a cake in the air fryer. The chocolate cake which I cooked and which is almost all gone now, ended up being something of a success despite the misgivings that I had at the start.

So now I’m going to be brave and go to bed, even though my arm is quite painful. I’ve warned my cleaner to take her ‘phone to bed and expect a phone call because I’m not convinced at all about how this compression is going to work. I don’t suppose that I shall have a wink of sleep.

But there’s a guy who comes to the Dialysis Clinic in an ambulance because he has lost both his legs.
He was looking on with interest at this pantomime this afternoon and eventually we struck up a conversation
"have you been coming to the Dialysis Clinic for a long time?" I asked him
"Ohh no" he replied. "I lost my legs during the War."

Thursday 26th September 2024 – SO THAT’S ANOTHER …

… visit to the Dialysis Clinic done and dusted and out of the way.

Mind you, it’s no use counting them because they’ll go on for as long as I do, and if I have to keep on climbing up these blasted stairs that won’t be much longer. Roll on the end of May next year when, if all goes according to plan, I can finally plan to move downstairs.

After the events of the other night, I was actually in bed at something very much like 23:00 which was really nice for a change. It’s certainly better than 03:20, that’s for sure.

Even better, I fell asleep straight away, and there I stayed, curled up like a bug in a rug, until all of 04:20 when I had a rather dramatic awakening. However, I’ve no idea what it was that rocked me awake.

Eventually I could go back to sleep and there I stayed until all of 07:00 when I awoke. At that moment I was actually away with the fairies somewhere but I’ve no idea where because the moment my eyes opened, it all evaporated.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and scrub up and even a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and then came in here to listen to the dictaphone. I was going somewhere with this girl. She and I were not actually a couple but it was very clear to everyone that there was something between us. When we came to a particular place one of the guys insisted on trying to chat her up which was most inappropriate. When we returned to the car he sat in the back where the two of us were sitting so I sat in the middle of the back seat with the girl on the other side. He had a good moan about that but I thought that he was behaving completely inappropriately. When we reached the airport we all ended up having to sit on separate seats. She was near the back, he was in the middle and I was at the front. He came and had a few words with me so I had a few words with him. He went off and sulked . The girl went and sat next to him to try to console him. I thought that that was rather inappropriate too. Later on we were somewhere in the van. I was trying to give the girl directions. She said “don’t worry, I’ll look at it on the map”. She was looking on the map and giving me directions. We were supposed to be in the mountains but this wasn’t very mountainous to me. I tried to look at the map while she was holding it but I couldn’t see exactly where we were so we were having a discussion about this. Suddenly we came into a village and I recognised it as Pipe Gate (in actual fact it was Madeley). I thought that there’s nothing for it now except to head home. We entered the motorway and began to drive North. I was wondering whether I should stop the car for five minutes with the girl, or ask her f she wanted to go straight home or to stop somewhere or something like that, but quite honestly I wasn’t really in the mood – this incident with that guy had spoiled the whole evening

So here we go again, people putting the spanner in the works, me snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, all of the usual clichés. But this “sitting in separate seats on an aeroplane” does remind me of a real-life event. And never mind strangers trying to chat up my bird, I had a friend who used to do that too. He thought that no-one else should have a girlfriend if he didn’t have one so he thought that he should have yours, and even if he did have one, that still didn’t stop him.

The nurse came round a little later and sorted me out. Her usual bouncy, happy self. They are quite a pair, she and her oppo. She brings joy and smiles wherever she goes, and he brings it whenever he goes. She had a lot to say for herself but nothing of any great importance.

After she left I made my breakfast and then read MY BOOK. while I ate it.

We started off this morning still at Verulamium, reading the account of the discussion that the author Thomas Wright had with the person who excavated the amphitheatre there.

There’s tons of interesting anecdotes about that which never seems to have made it into the official report and it’s fascinating to have all of this unfold before you.

And the more I read of him, the more I’m admiring his work. He has learned that a society has bought some land in old Verulamium and plans to demolish what’s left of the Roman remains in order to build houses there. Our author’s comment is –
"I can only offer up a prayer that some unforeseen event may interfere with their ruthless and unpatriotic designs"
As you might expect, I’m liking this author more and more. For a comment like that to be committed to writing in the early Victorian era, that would have actually been quite startling.

After we left there we went to Ramsgate, my mother’s old stamping ground in the south-east of England.

In the early 1840s one of the many railway companies down there was building a line from Canterbury to Ramsgate and digging out a cutting, came across an early Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Ozengell Grange.

An archaeological team (such as they were then) was called in to investigate and our hero, hearing of the events, went along to spectate. We’re just beginning to reach the exciting bit.

A little later, I went to carry out some modern research onto what was going on down there. And even today they are still coming across bodies buried in parts of the cemetery that they didn’t uncover.

And regrettably, one of the modern reports refers to the excavations at which our friend was present, and calls it “a very poor excavation”, which it probably was, bearing in mind the fact that our team from 1847 had no radar, no resistance meters and none of the modern techniques that are available to archaeologists today.

Yet with the relentless commercial pressure in those days and no Government body to protect them, it’s a miracle that it was done at all.

Back in here I was tagging films again and lost all track of time until my cleaner burst in at 12:00 to put on my patches. We had a little chat and a laugh about last night and then after she left I packed my bag and waited.

The driver who came for me was a young girl who had quite a lot to say for herself, and it was quite interesting too. She even took me on a little sightseeing tour.

She was a traveller and had spent a lot of time on the roads around Europe. So I suppose being a VSL driver was … errr … right up her street … "groan" – ed …

After she dropped me off I weighed myself and found to my dismay that the weight that I’d lost the last time had come back on again.

So I installed myself on the bed, the girls plugged me in with just a little less pain this time, and they left me to it.

To pass the time I tagged some of the videos on the portable laptop and had a probe into the depths of one of the graphics programs that I use

When they kicked me out I weighed myself again and the weight had gone once more, so it must be water retention that’s doing this, so my kidneys aren’t improving.

A friendly but rather taciturn lady driver brought me home and my cleaner helped me upstairs and we made plans for the future.

After a little rest I made tea – an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit out of the freezer followed by spotted dick and the last of the coconut soya cream. That made a nice change. I like surfing through the special offers at LeClerc on-line because sometimes they have some nice stuff in there that makes a change.

So now I’m off to bed. It’s a day with no outings planned but I have bread to make first thing before I can organise myself as I’ve run out

But that dream that I had reminded me of a girlfriend I had once who insisted that she could read a map, even though she couldn’t.
Once we were driving somewhere and I was convinced that wed become hopelessly lost
"Where are we now?" I asked
"Just here" she said, stabbing her finger on the map. "Driving down this road here"
"On that blue road?" I asked
"That’s right" She said
"That blue line, dear" I said "just happens to be a canal."

Thursday 18th January 2024 – JUST IN CASE …

… you are wondering, after last night’s rather intemperate outburst, I’m still here today.

Not all here, of course, but anyone who has been following these pages for any length of time will have worked that out a long time ago.

In fact I’m feeling a little better in myself and for the first time since I can’t remember when, I actually managed some breakfast today. Only cornflakes with lovely, ice-cold soya milk followed by bread pudding and hot, strong coffee, but it was something

Something else that helped was that I actually had a better night’s sleep last night and wasn’t anything like as tired as I have been of late. I can’t have travelled far during the night because there was only one thing on the dictaphone. I was out in the Midwest USA. There was some kind of car show on. I’d spent the night at a hotel and set out next morning. I was in my red Ford Cortina estate again. I found this parking with all these vehicles pulling onto it so I thought that I’d join in. I had a good seat on the front to watch these like drag racing but it wasn’t that. I watched for a while. I kept disturbing my neighbours by having to go to the bathroom. They said one or two things so I apologised, saying that I was a foreigner. They asked where I was from and I replied “not round here”. They said something about local manners but weren’t particularly unfriendly. When it came to leaving I let the crowd go then walked over to my car. I thought about how I was going to fit a stereo in and came to the conclusion that it would have to go on the bulkhead behind my head (although there wasn’t a bulkhead of course in a Cortina). As I began to leave there was this really ancient Lada estate, long before the ones that we knew in the UK and was in terrible condition. It had an MG Owners Club sticker in the back window so I thought at first that it might have been something British … "in fact it was a Moskvich 401-424E" – ed … There were plenty of old British cars around here, Austin A55s etc. An old woman went into it and began to drive. I wound down my window and shouted “you’re brave, aren’t you?”. She replied something like “I thought you might be a gentleman”. I replied that I was a gentleman but I was totally astonished that she was in this and it was keeping going. The woman said something to her companion in the passenger seat. I suddenly realised that following this woman, I was going out of the wrong entrance. I had to perform a U-turn at a road junction nearly ploughing down a pile of spectators standing at the corner so that I could head back the way that I had come and look for the exit that I particularly wanted.

But I’ve done some miles during the night in the red estate – probably more than I’ve done in Caliburn and it’s certainly travelled all over the USA during the hours of darkness.

In the daytime it still resides quietly along with a 2000E saloon and a Traction Avant in my warehouse in Montaigut en Combrailles and if you remember the diesel Escort van that I mentioned a while back, that diesel engine was destined to go into the estate but like everything else down in the Auvergne, that project is now consigned to the dustbin of history

But I do say that there was only one thing that I dictated about the night. I really am beginning to wonder whether I really am missing anything and if so, is it important? I can’t go around missing visits by Castor, TOTGA and Zero.

Having adopted a new tactic of charging up the phone during the day, it was by the bed last night so I didn’t have far to reach when it went off this morning.

And then it took me, would you believe, 15 minutes to put on my trousers. What kind of state am I in? Just as well that I checked my blood pressure before I began to dress.

Then I had to sort out the medication and watch the pile of morning medicine grow before my very eyes. Swallowing it takes some doing these days and my half-litre of water flavoured with fruit juice doesn’t seem to be enough

It took an absolute age to pull myself together today and feel something like anything but I eventually managed it, much to my own surprise. The hot coffee didn’t help much – in fact I crashed out for a while not long after drinking it

Later on in the day though I decided that I’d have a really good wash before the taxi came for me but as you might expect, it came early today, and at a most embarrassing moment too. It’s a good job that the large disabled persons’ conveniences at the Centre de Re-education were empty when I arrived.

There was half an hour of gentle musculation followed by an hour with Ophélie the ergotherapist where we didn’t accomplish much, and then half an hour with Séverine on a massage table.

Highlight of the day though was the climb back up the stairs. I actually managed four steps on my own before I needed help from the taxi driver and if that’s not progress after yesterday, I don’t know what is.

But look at this! Four steps and I’m celebrating. Are we really down to these depths?

My cleaner popped round today too. She’d been into town for this anti-potassium stuff and I bet that you can’t guess what it is – although you probably can.

That’s right – it’s this dreadful cement mixture that they gave me in the Land Of Grey And Pink. I told my cleaner about how awful it was and she suggested flavouring it with something. I’m sure that if it is meant to taste good it would have something already in it but what the heck – I have some sirop de cassis, some sirop de menthe and in honour of HIS NIBS, some sirop de fraise.

Tonight’s tea was a lazy tea. I didn’t feel like doing much so I had a frozen aubergine-and-kidney-bean whatsit with pasta and veg.

That’s a throwback to my chauffeuring days in Brussels. The hours (and days) we worked were so irregular and long that it was impossible to maintain any kind of timetable.

In my apartment in Jette I had a huge freezer which Liz will remember. Whenever I had a free afternoon I’d cook full woks of curries, chilis, all that kind of thing and bag it up in portion-sizes and put it all in the freezer

Then if ever my boss was at a meal or an event in the evening in Brussels or the vicinity (the apartment at the Avenue de L’Exposition was right by a motorway interchange) I’d nip home, throw a potato, a handful of frozen veg and a bag of frozen something into the microwave and then grab a shower, by which time tea was cooked. It would be eaten and I’d be back on the road before he’d finished his cheese and biscuits.

Despite the somewhat itinerant lifestyle, I always tried to maintain a healthy diet back in those days.

But now I’ find myself in a quandary. There’s a pile of medication that needs to be taken, and my blood pressure too. But the instructions on the blood pressure machine say “take your readings when you are relaxed … ” (yes, quite) “… just before going to bed”.

And than it goes on to say “take your readings before you take your medication”.

The amount of medication that I need to take, it will be a long time before I go to bed, so not even the makers of this tensiometer have a clue what’s going on with some people.

What hope do I have?

It’s rather like Eomer in LORD OF THE RINGS. "Do not trust to hope. It has forsaken these lands"

Thursday 16th November 2023 – I AM ABSOLUTELY …

… exhausted.

You have no idea just how tiring even putting away the shopping can be. And what didn’t help was having to clean, dice and blanch 2 kilos of carrots for the freezer.

Actually, today was just one long continuation of how the night had been because at one point I’d been lying awake for several hours in the middle of the night trying to go back to sleep after a really bad attack of cramp.

Last night I tried a new approach.

When my legs were functioning properly, I had some tough rubber bands that I used to build up my leg muscles when I was going running. Last night I dragged one out, put it around my two ankles and went to bed like that.

My nights are really quite mobile, as you can imagine, so while my legs are moving around in my sleep they are actually acting on each other and that might do something about the leg muscles. It can’t do any harm

And it actually seemed to work – ay least, judging by the way my legs were moving during the night.

At some point I must have gone off to sleep because I was flat-out when the alarm went off, and I staggered to my feet before the second alarm.

After the medication and checking the mails I ended up having a chat on the internet with one of my neighbours. There are several things around here that need attention and there will be one or two workmen coming into the building. As I’m here for most of the time these days, would I be a point of contact to let people in and out of the building?

In theory, it’s no problem to me but as usual, it’s the kind of thing that will happen just at the moment when I’m likely to be busy.

Next thing was to order a few things off the internet. Usually I would go to the shops for things like this but even if I could travel there on the bus, I wouldn’t have the strength to bring the stuff home.

Then there was the shopping from Leclerc. And such was my surprise when I found out that this week there were only the pears that weren’t available. I ended up having to take some stuff out of my on-line basket.

There’s a minimum order of €50 for delivery so I have my priority list and my “extras” list and I move things around depending on availability. So when almost everything in my priority list is available, I put some of the “extras” back ready for the next time in case the next order falls short

The problem was that there was no delivery window until the afternoon.

And so what I did was to go through some of the drawers in the kitchen, sort things out and … gulp … throw some things away that I no longer need. I’m clearly not feeling very well.

What prompted this was having ordered some ground ginger 2 weeks ago as I had run out, while I was filling up the cumin seeds last night I found three packets of ground ginger at the bottom of the box in which I keep the spare spices. High time that I sorted that out and made a list of what I have – and what I don’t have.

Luckily I have plenty of Indian spices so I’m not going to be short of spices for a while but with not going to Leuven and “Exotic World” – the Asian wholesalers – any more, things might become complicated in the future.

But anyway, I ended up with one kitchen drawer completely empty, and I have much more of an idea about what’s in stock here. Quite a few people have “made remarks” about the amount of food in stock around here, but there have been several times in the recent past when I have been totally unable do do anything about buying in food and the stock has come in useful.

While I was having a drink I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. There were all kinds of things like food crumbs all over the bed because I’d strapped my legs together and had gone to bed like that so that in the exercise that I’m forced to do during the night, one foot would affect the other and give it a kind of workout. It wasn’t quite as easy as that during the dream because I could hardly move and wasn’t able to tidy up or clean up and the place was deteriorating quite rapidly. I was extremely dismayed but there was nothing much that I could actually do about it.

When I saw my mother gliding across the room I asked her if she was on her way to dictate her first thought of the day, which was a silly thing to do because she replied that it was her second or third. The act of actually asking her made me completely forget what it was that I was going to dictate. But this thing about keeping my legs tied together is working to a certain degree but not to a certain other. I had a terrible attack of cramp in my left leg at that moment but it will ease off after I’ve had a few agonising moments. We’ll see how it goes on.

And later we were building some kind of framework to go in a gap in the bricks, like a window frame. Because I was unable to do anything someone else was helping me. It was so frustrating because he was doing this kind of thing in a very slapdash way trying to cut out lengths of wood with a cheap tooth-saw etc. When it came to trimming 20mm off something or other he did it by eye and it looked as if he was cutting off a whole centimetre. That would have defeated the whole purpose of this framework. In the end I had to stop him. I asked “wouldn’t you be better with a jigsaw doing that?”. He replied “if you have one” so I immediately produced one. Then I produced a battery-powered circular saw and asked “wouldn’t this be any better?”. I sat down and began to measure everything up and put a batten down to follow with the circular saw so that it would cut accurately. I was just so astonished by this guy trying to do this job without measuring properly or without any kind of proper tools – something that was so important.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my DiY skills are nothing to write home about, particularly right at the beginning when I made a start on rebuilding the farm, but at least I knew how to measure up and cut with guides.

And some of the stuff that I was doing just before I fell ill was really impressive. My bedroom down there was magnificent.

It was really quite funny, actually. When I finished rebuilding the walls and putting the roof on and I began to fit out the attic and I thought that it was really good. But the further on I pressed, the more I wanted to go back to where I started, rip it all out and start again.

That’s one thing that I can say about the farm – I may not have been much good but I certainly learnt a lot.

When the shopping came I was … errr … resting, so it was a rather rapid struggle to my feet to open the door to let him into the building.

After I’d put away the frozen food I attacked the carrots. I hadn’t expected them to be available – the 2kg “econopacks” aren’t there all that often – so I was rather caught unawares. But the big soup tureen thing comes in handy for that.

They also had the econopacks of peppers so one went into the fridge for next Monday and the other was cleaned and trimmed and put in the freezer for another time.

To my surprise, the econopacks of aubergines were availabile too so now that there is some space in the freezer I did something that I haven’t done for ages and made one of my mega aubergine and kidney bean whatsits

There was enough for 5 meals so I had one for tea with pasta and veg, and the other four were packed ready for the freezer.

The freezer is in something of a disreputable state so I took out the vegetable drawer, cleaned it, repaired it and packed everything back in it, including the carrots that I’d blanched. It’s amazing how much room there is in the freezer when you tidy it out.

Here and there, I’ve been editing those radio notes that I dictated before going to bed last night. I was hoping to finish the programme today but I was overwhelmed by events as you can tell.

That should be a task to finish for tomorrow and then I’ll have to start the next one, hopefully to record on Saturday night.

Even though there’s some time before bed though, I’m not going to do it tonight. I’m thoroughly exhausted and after my blackcurrant, honey and lemon I’m off to bed.

While I’m asleep I’ll be trying that trick of the elastic strap around the ankle. Exercising in my sleep seems to be the way to go right now.

Thursday 30th September 2021 – FISH AND SHIPS, ANYONE?

A couple of trawlers were setting out for the fishing grounds this afternoon as I was walking around the headland.

As I watched, this one skirted the marker lights on the rocks lying off the Ile de Chausey and set sail into the sunset.

This one, and the one that you’ll see in a moment, are a couple of the lucky ones. Today is the day that Jersey is supposed to issue the permits for French fishing boats to continue to exercise their rights under the Treaty of the Bay of Granville to continue to share the waters and the fishing grounds.

A total of 217 boats applied for licences to fish.

47 have already been granted, 64 were granted last night, and another 31 have been issued with a provisional licence valid for three months while their appeal against rejection is being considered.

That leaves 75, about a third of the French fleet in the bay, who have been refused permission to fish, with no hope of appeal.

Will this mean that there will be losses and redundancies, or will there be some kind of industrial action? How this is going to pan out now is going to be very interesting.

What was very interesting from my point of view was that even though the night wasn’t as early as I would have liked, I couldn’t sleep. I was tossing and turning throughout the night and it seemed as if I hadn’t had any sleep at all.

Mind you, I must have done because at one point I was back at school. Miss Howlett the history mistress had noticed that my brother had skipped a history lesson. He’d been up to no good for a while an this was probably the final straw. She sent him out of the back of school where there was actually a beach and sea to wait there until she sent for him. Then she spoke to me and told me that basically he can either be expelled or take a severe detention. The choice is up to him. I called him over and explained the situation to him, made him aware of what the situation was. She called him over and started to admonish him. We were onn a boat at one time and he’d been singing in a concert. It turned out that it was right up on the highest deck where he’d been singing. He was looking with astonishment at the arrangement of the boat, where he’d been. This teacher was telling him as well about how good he was, whatever, and he had a good career ahead of him if only he would behave. They were talking about hippos and rhinoceros and everything. When we’d all been out in the zodiacs earlier, one zodiac had been followed by a hippo and another one by a rhinoceros, everything like that.

Later on there was something going on in South Cheshire last night and I can’t remember what it was. We ended up being in a house. There was a girl there learning to type. She was having to use some kind of strange printer that built up ink squares that showed the letter. It took ages to type out one letter because of the way the ink built up. We were chatting about something and she was being ever so frustrated. She kept on telling us to be quiet while she concentrated. We quietened for a while and then the conversation carried on, and she started again. As this was going on it was taking hours for her to type out just one letter on this strange printer.

Today, I have spent almost every minute of normal office hours on the telephone. Yesterday I received a rather strange letter to say that my vehicle insurance had expired on 20th March 2020 and there was a substantial fine to pay.

What I was interested in knowing was “if that’s the case, what’s this letter right here in front of doing, saying that my insurance was renewed on 23rd May 2020?”, “why is there an identical letter saying that my insurance was renewed again on 26th May 2021?” and “why there are two sums of money debited from my account that correspond with the amounts demanded for vehicle assurance?”.

Have you any idea just HOW difficult it is to receive a straight answer from anyone on this question? And I had the phone cut off from underneath me four times while I was at it.

One thing that I did manage to do though was to make some bread dough. And then having made it, I was so carried away with all of these phone calls that I forgot to put it in the oven until far too late

Lunch was late because I was on the telephone at lunchtime, and the same thing happened at walkies-time. Believe me – I wss heartily sick of it all.

As usual, first thing was to go for a wander down across the car park to have a look at the beach.

There wasn’t really all that much beach this afternoon but a couple of people were down there taking full advantage. Trousers rolled up to their knees like day trippers on the beach at Blackpool, they were paddling around between the rocks.

That was really all that was going on down there. And apart from the two trawlers that we saw earlier, there wasn’t anything else going on out at sea this afternoon. It was all rather boring from that point of view.

There was something else exciting happening on the car park though.

It looks as if we are going to ba having some work done somewhere in the vicinity in early course because right in the middle they have erected a workmen’s compound.

They have already dropped off a load of stuff into there so what I’ll do tomorrow on my way back from the physiotherapist (if I remember) is to go and have a closer look.

That should tell me much more about what they plan to do with it all. I hope that it’s to repair the crumbling wall over there because that’s been out of bounds for quite a while now.

My route along the path was pretty untroubled this afternoon. There weren’t too many people about at all.

No aeroplanes about either to overfly me this afternoon, and no Birdmen of Alcatraz either, but one of our local sparrowhawks was hovering around the edge of the cliff, trying to find himself a tasty snack.

It’s really quite impressive watching them. There’s a howling gale that comes over the headland but they are there hovering completely stationary despite the wind waiting for an opportunity to swoop down after their prey.

There wasn’t very much going on at the end of the headland either this afternoon which was no surprise given the wind.

But today we did strike it lucky with as many as four people down there admiring the view of nothing at all. One couple sitting on the bench in front of the cabanon vauban and the second couple looking as if they have just arrived.

And winter drawers on as well, by the looks of things. Overcoats seems to be the order of the day, especially by those sitting on the bench. It must have been quite uncomfortable out there taking the full blast of the wind so it’s no surprise.

There were moments when I too was hanging on to my hat.

This general air of nothingness seems to have extended just about everywhere this last couple of days.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been keeping some kind of desultory eye on a rather large yacht that was down there being painted.

The last time that I saw her, she was in primer and masking paper but they must have put on a really impressive spurt, finished her off and packed her back out to sea. Either that or else she’s shrunk when they went to hose her down

But to be serious … “for once” – ed … I wonder what they will be doing with that little fishing boat that’s down there in its place.

The other day on the way back from town we say a large mobile crane messing around with some machiner, and I said that the first chance that I would get, I’d go to see what was going on.

This is obviously what was going on – they’ve been assembling some kind of dredger down there. She’s almost certainly a dredger because you can see the grab on the front and the discharge pipe at the back

No what are they going to be doing with that? I didn’t see anything in the local paper to give me a clue. This is going to be quite interesting too.

Things are definitely livening up in here right now.

Back home, I had a coffee and then sorted out my paperwork. Laurent had offered to take me to the radio meeting which was very nice. I put my proposition to the assembled multitudes and it met with favour, so Yours Truly now has his work cut out until Christmas.

As if I don’t already have enough work to do – but I mustn’t stagnate and get myself bogged down in self-pity.

Maryline who lives round the corner from me brought me back home. We had a nice chat on the way too, I like Maryline.

Back home I made tea – pasta and veg with an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit. And much to everyone’s surprise, including mine, I didn’t finish my plate. I think that my appetite might be going, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

But never mind, a baked potato, a few falafel and the left-overs from tonight will make a nice meal. And quick too, which is just as well as there is football on the internet tomorrow evening – Y Fflint v Y Bala.

So you might be getting a “plceholder alert” tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’m off to bed to catch up on the beauty sleep that I never had. I have a lot to do tomorrow, including writing to Father Christmas and also to my favourite Inuit

Thursday 23rd September 2021 – WHAT A BEAUTIFUL …

… day it was today – at least, the afternoon of it.

The sky was as clear as a bell and you could see for miles, way out to sea and all along the coast too. With the sun now shining brightly, and down at a lower angle, it had lit up the town of Montmartin sur Mer as if it had been in a spotlight on a stage.

And when I blew up the photo, I could even make out some people on the beach, and that’s pretty good going for that kind of distance.

The view was just as good further out to sea as well.

It was another one of those days where not only was Jersey really clear on the horizon 58 kilometres away, we could even make out some of the buildings at St Helier.

The big tower over to the left is very intriguing. It really could be anything – the “Marine Peilstand 1 Tower” which was a German Army artillery ranging point or La Tour de Vinde, a Napoleonic-era Martello tower, or even the tower the name of which I have forgotten that overlooks St Brelade’s Bay.

Further on around to the west, the Ile de Chausey was looking quite good too.

The colours weren’t as brilliant or as visible as we have seen them on the odd occasion here and there but the little white cottages at the foot of the lighthouse stand out quite clearly against the dark background of the hill on which the lighthouse is situated.

There wasn’t much going on out at sea though this afternoon. There was just a yacht drifting about rather aimlessly and what looks like a motor boat on the extreme right, but that was about everything.

Finally, finishing off our arc from north-east to due west, from my vantage point on top of the bunker at the back of the lighthouse the view was even better.

Right out there in the distance, 70 kilometres away, the lighthouse and fort at Cap Frehel were visible with the naked eye this afternoon, never mind with the camera’s zoom lens.

And we could even see the headland around at the end of the next bay, which I think is the Ile de Brehat at the mouth of the River Trieux

There’s a trawler out there as well, and we can even see that it has its nets out this afternoon. That’s what I call a really good day.

But I’m glad that some people had a really good day today because I had an absolutely awful one.

The night wasn’t as early as I was hoping and when the alarm went off at 06:00 I was right out of it, absolutely and completely. And having another feverish sweat as well.

There wasn’t even time to finish checking my mails and messages before I had gone west and I ended up, to my complete and utter dismay, back in bed and under the covers again. Twice in three days, after going for a couple of years without doing so. That’s a sign of how I’m feeling right now.

It was about 10:20 when I finally staggered out of bed and I’m not sure if I wasn’t feeling any worse either. It took me an age to pull myself together.

But once I did, I made an Executive Decision, and for the benefit of any new reader (of which there are more than just a few these days), an Executive Decision is one where if it’s the wrong decision, the person who made it is executed.

And the decision is that I’ve changed the time of the alarm from 06:00 to 07:30 to give myself an extra 90 minutes in bed, until this situation resolves itself one way or another. Just on Mondays will I be having an 06:00 alarm call as I have the radio stuff to do.

Once I’d had a coffee I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I had to go to meet my aunt off the ferry that was coming in at 06:00 so I had to get up early. There was half my family in my apartment and that was uncomfortable for a start. When I set off, I didn’t realise actually where I was going to have to go to meet everyone. I ended up at the shop and was in there when suddenly my mother walked in. There was some discussion with the shopkeeper about tickets to go to meet people, all this kind of thing, tickets to come back from the ferry terminal on the bus to where they were dropped off at his shop. He said “if my aunt comes, she’ll have a ticket and we can all arrange it them”. Then I had my mother and my brother trying to argue with me. I said “look, for the last 20-odd years I’ve lived on my own. I’m not used to all these people”. That led to a few ribald remarks from my brother and one or two other people. As we walked back to my apartment I found myself thinking “I wish there were some other apartments in this building vacant where I could stick them and get them out of my hair”. There was something as well that I’d told one of my sisters about a book about a Chinese disc jockey that summed up quite a lot the way that I’d been feeling. All the way back we had “my sister couldn’t be bothered to read that book” all that kind of thing and it was a most uncomfortable dream.

I was out with TOTGA last night, of all people. I’d been to go to a Conference on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday so I went to the hotel which was near Birmingham and booked myself in for the Tuesday night to start on Wednesday morning. There were another 2 people there booking and they were only booking for the Wednesday night and Thursday on the same course. He asked me why, and I recognised one of them. I knew that he lived fairly locally so I said that I imagined that he would come straight from home for the conference and then come back here for the next two nights. I can’t remember how it went on from there but there was some time to kill so I ended up going for a walk with TOTGA. We were hand-in-hand walking and chatting. She asked where I would like to go but I didn’t really have much of an idea. She said “how about the cinema?”. I’d never been to the new cinema in Crewe so I said “yes, fine”. We walked along Wistaston Road. There was a queue outside the cinema and it slowly started to move. The tickets were £27:00 to go in, so I thought that I’d pay for her but she was renewing her annual subscription so she said that she’d pay. I insisted on paying but the woman at the counter said “you know that hers is £999, don’t you?” I replied “right, in that case I’d better let you pay”. We arranged to meet one lunchtime as well. She asked me where we’d meet so I replied “why not the cinema?”. We agreed that we’d meet on the lunchtime at the cinema. Then there was the case of making a snack. She had bought me a pizza from here once so I thought “right, we’ll have a pizza”. Apparently you made your own. The cheese though was like a spread that you spread over the base of your pizza and put your topping on top which I thought was an extremely strange way of going about things but I started to do that.

I’d been working on repairing an old MkII Ford Consul. We’d had the engine all stripped down in situ and reassembled it. The owner, my father, was not very happy about everything. He saw petrol lying around in cans and he went and took them away. I had to clean all of these parts, and in the end someone went and fetched the petrol back so I cleaned all of the parts of the carburettor and reassembled it. There were still a few bits and pieces left to do including fuelling it up because there was very little petrol left in it but someone had brought a portable bed and gone to sleep right up against the car where the fuel filler was so I couldn’t reach it. In the end my father came back and asked how we were doing. I replied that it was almost done. He made a few remarks about a few bits that were missing, all this kind of thing. I said “it’s not trouble at all, they aren’t really necessary until we find out how the car runs”. We went to start it and it started first time and sounded nice. He got into it and took it for a little drive around the block. He said “yes, this is fine”, then drove off somewhere else. I remember saying “he’s not going to get very far with the few bits that are missing off it and there’s no petrol in it” And he should know about the petrol because ha was the one who stopped us filling it”.

But in the middle of all of my blasted family coming around to annoy me like they do, it must have cheered me up to have had an afternoon or evening out involving a Close Encounter with TOTGA. But in real life she had far too much sense to involve herself with me to that kind of extent.

What with one thing and another I missed out on having lunch, because, even though I didn’t feel like it, I had a task to perform

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a couple of weeks ago I bought a new printer to replace the one that was only printing in blue. I hadn’t installed it yet but this afternoon someone sent me an important communication that I needed to sign and send back, so I had to unpack it and install it.

Although it’s the same make and model as the old one, it’s an upgraded version so it took me a while to figure it out, and when I’d finished installing it, even though it would print, it wouldn’t scan.

Eventually I discovered that despite it being one of these multi-function printers from a major manufacturer, the scanner drivers aren’t included in the installation package, something that left me totally bewildered, so I had to go on-line and hunt them down.

And then I couldn’t make the machine work as I wanted. The control panel is quite complicated but seems to be lacking in functionality. I was surprised that it hadn’t installed a “scan” button on the computer desktop.

So after much binding in the marsh, I eventually discovered that the original “scan” icon for the old printer now points to the new one and once I’d realised that, it was all plain sailing.

All of this made me quite late for my afternoon walk, and when I finally made it outside, I bumped into a neighbour who kept me chatting for half an hour. Not that I had the time to spare, but I can’t spend all my life being totally unsociable with everyone.

While we were chatting, there were all kinds of stuff going on in the air. The powered red hang-glider went by overhead, followed by a couple of Nazguls, a light aeroplane and even the air-sea rescue helicopter, but you can’t interrupt your conversation to take a few pictures. It’s not very polite.

One we’d parted company and gone our separate ways, like the Knights in THE HOLY GRAIL? i tried to make amends.

The field from where the Bird-men of Alcatraz take off is right next door to the cemetery, which I always thought was a good idea because if they make a mistake on take-off or landing they won’t have far to go, so I took a random photo to see if I could see anyone.

But they must have come in and untangled themselves from their equipment quite quickly because by the time that I looked, the field was pretty much deserted. The bird-men had flown.

Instead, I concentrated myself on what was going on down on the beach this afternoon.

Plenty of beach to be on today of course with the tide being out, but not too many people on it taking advantage of the warm, almost windless afternoon.

Meanwhile, further over at Donville les Bains, they are out there in force at the bouchot beds – the beds where the mussels grow on strings rather than in the sand. You can see the tractors and trailers out there as they harvest today’s catch

While I was here, I had a look to see how the repair work on the old medieval city wall at the Place du Marché aux Chevaux was going on

It’s been a while since we’ve had a close look, so I was hoping to see some substantial progress today. But all that I could see was that some white protective sheet had been erected to cover the scaffolding at the far end.

There are however a couple of guys on the scaffolding down at this end working on the wall so if I can get away early on my way to the physiotherapist tomorrow afternoon I’ll go for a closer look and see how they are doing.

While all of this was going on, I was having a good look around out at sea.

As I mentioned earlier, Jersey was standing out quite clearly this afternoon. With some digital enhancing we can see plenty of boats out there this afternoon, like the fishing boat over to the right that might even be the same one that we’ve seen in the bay for the last couple of days.

And it’s not all that usual that we see the eastern end of the island so clearly, yet here it is today. I was trying to identify some of the buildings there by reference to an aerial photo, but without very much success.

A little further around to the west there’s a really good view of several boats leaving the harbour at St Helier.

The one on the extreme left of the image caught my eye. Blowing up the image as much as I could, I could see that it has some kind of winching gear on the stern, but it looks too big to be a trawler.

However, there was nothing arriving at or leaving the port round about that time that corresponded with a ship of this nature.

And then we have another couple of trawlers heading our way

With nothing else going on over here (as if all of this isn’t enough) I went to have a closer look at Cap Fréhel, which I could see with my naked eye today, and then across the lawn and the car pary around to the end of the headland.

In the past, I can’t recall having seen fishing boats working in the strait here between Granville and Cancale over in Brittany, but that all changed fairly recently when we noticed them starting to try to exploit this area. There’s a trawler out there this afternoon trying to see what it can pull up out of the sea bed.

As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … I wonder if this constant search for new fishing grounds is due to the issues over fishing rights further out in the Baie de Granville.

A little earlier I mentioned how nice the weather was today and how clear the sky was.

Down at the foot of the Baie de Mont St Michel, while we can’t actually see the Mont until someone removes the Pointe de Carolles and the Cabanon Vauban that sits thereupon, we can see the hotels on the mainland this afternoon.

If you look just slightly to the right of the foot of the Pointe de Carolles you’ll see a few white or light grey buildings. These are where anyone who comes to visit the Mont and stay overnight will usually stay because prices actually on the Mont itself are quite simply out of this world.

And there on the mainland they aren’t really all that much better, I suppose. It’s pretty much a captive audience over there.

Meanwhile, it’s “all change” at the chantier naval this afternoon.

As I walked along the path on the top of the cliff towards the port, I could see that things were looking quite different down there this afternoon. And it looks as if there has been a massive clear-out today.

The only boat that is left today is L’Omerta. The other boats that were in there – Hera, Le Pescadore and Catherine-Philippe – have now gone back into the water.

The next question is “who is going to come into the chantier naval to take their place?”.

It’s a lot more normal over at the ferry terminal this afternoon.

The new ferry Belle France and the little freighter Chausiaise are moored over there this afternoon. The two Joly France boats are probably out at sea somewhere. And they’ve closed up the jib of the crane as well, which is good news for the hydraulic seals.

Meanwhile, in other news, there’s some kind of jogging team out there on the quayside going for a run. They’ve turned off and are starting to run along the wall around the port de plaisance.

And I’m intrigues to find out what will happen when they reach the end, because there’s a large gap in the wall. Perhaps it’s the start of a triathlon and they are all going to leap into the sea and swim across.

Back in the past, I took part in a triathlon, but only the once. I was busy doing the water leg when I suddenly thought to myself “this is silly. I’m getting the bike all rusty here”.

Over the last few days we’ve seen interesting developments taking place in the Rue du Port.

We have the chicane of course, and the marquee that they erected yesterday. But now a couple more marquees have sprung up on the car park of the Fish Processing Plant. This is all starting to become interesting.

And we can see that Marité is back in town as well. She’s been absent for the last couple of days. Well, in fact, she hasn’t really. She’s been nipping out early on the morning tide for a lap around the Ile de Chausey or over to Cancale and not come back until the evening tide.

Hence my mid-afternoon walk has missed her.

Meanwhile, In other news, we have a couple of new visitors in the port.

The white yacht on the extreme right next to the blue Aztec Lady is called Capo di Fora. Despite her Italian-sounding name, she’s actually flying the Belgian flag, as, incidentally, her neighbour Spirit of Conrad, the yacht on which we went up and down the Brittany coast last summer.

The large grey yacht is called Mini Y, registered in the UK. She’s a “Baltic 85” yacht built in Finland in 2018 of fibre and composite construction and weighs in at just 50 tonnes.

She’s been cruising along the North European coast for the last few days and just recently has been roaming around St Malo and the waters between there and here

Back here in the apartment I had a few things to finish off and then I was just on the point of starting some work when Rosemary called me again.

Once we’d finished, it was long past my tea time so I grabbed an aubergine and kidney-bean whatsit out of the freezer and had that with some pasta. That tasted really nice, and it would have been even nicer had I not dropped the bottle of tabasco sauce in it.

***Note to self – put toilet roll in fridge tonight ***

And now I’m off to bed – going to make the most of my lie-in for the next few days to see if it makes me feel any better. Although I have a feeling that I’ll need more than this to liven me up.

Thursday 26th August 2021 – THERE HAS BEEN …

… a calamity!

This morning I dropped a full mug of coffee onto my keyboard.

It goes without saying that that has now been filed under “CS” and the rest of the morning was spent hunting down the spare one that I have here.

After a good search I came across two, a very flaky old Belgian one and a more recent French one with “NumLok” stick permanently in the “On” Position. (And it could have been worse – it could have been stuck in the “off position”).

When I had finished lunch I tried to work out why the new keyboard was totally misbehaving and doing all kinds of strange things. That turned out to be a stuck “CTRL” button which I freed off.

All I need to do now is to find out why the “N” doesn’t work, and I’ll be in business. I’m using a keyboard shortcut for now so if you find any missing “N”, then you know why.

Thinking about it later, it would probably have been quicker to have driven to LeClerc and bought a new one instead of all of this messing about.

Strangely enough, the flooded keyboard had a fault with the “N” too. There was a delay in the “N” appearing when I touched it so I found myself often ending up with “GN” instead of “NG” if I wasn’t careful.

But I digress … “again” – ed …

Despite yet another late night, I was out of bed as the first alarm rang and the went off for my medication.

After that I came in here to read my messages and as soon as it was light I dashed outside with the NIKON D500

And without falling over a bollard this morning I headed off to the viewpoint overlooking the port.

And it seems that I should have bee here 30 seconds earlier because they had been loading Chausiaise. I’d seen the crane swinging around as I was coming down the street but as I made ready to photograph it, they closed it up.

Parked behind Chausiaise is one of the Joly France boats that runs the ferry service to the Ile de Chausey. the older one of the two, I think, with the rectangular windows in landscape format.

And here’s the pride of the harbour for the moment.

When I first saw her name I misread it. She’s actually called the Galeon Andalucia and is a replica of a 17th Century Spanish Galleon. She was built in Punta Umbría as a typical “Galeón de Manila” at a cost of about €450,000.

She was launched in 2010 and went out to represent Spain at the Universal Exposition in Shanghai. Since then she’s been visiting various ports around the world, including a couple of weeks in early July in St Malo, and I wonder if that coincides with that mystery sailing ship that we saw.

Seeing as I was up quite early, the sun was quite low to the east so we were having all kinds of unusual views that we don’t often see.

The chantier naval was nicely illuminated this morning by the low rays of the sun. You can see quite clearly all of the seven boats that are in there, and they all look pretty much like the seven that were in there yesterday.

Away in the distance on the horizon we can see the town of Cancale quite clearly. I’ve made no effort to enhance this photo so even at this range today, the views were pretty good.

And that wasn’t the best of it either.

There’s a high hill away in the distance somewhere a little way into the interior of Brittany and I can’t recall having seen that more than once or twice. Today though, it was probably about the clearest that I have ever seen it.

The coastline was pretty clear too this morning. And I’m not sure if it’s a trick of the light but that looks like an enormous flotilla of yachts out there in the distance over by the coast.

Much closer to home there were other things going on.

The harbour gates were now open (I’d only just made it down to the port in time) and already half of the local fleet (that bit that isn’t in the chantier naval) had headed off into the sunrise. One of the last to go out was this little shellfish boat, Calean.

You can the shellfish boats by the covered awning over the open hold. That’s to stop the seagulls diving down and pinching the catch on the way back from the beds.

Leaving the port, I wandered over to the other side of the headland to have a butcher’s at the Baie de Granville to see what was going on over there.

And out at sea many of the fishing boats had taken up their positions and were starting work, like this blue and white one here.

One thing that I had always wondered is “how do they decide which boat fishes where?”. They can’t all surge out en masse and fight for a spec in a glorious free-for-all. There must be some kind of organisation.

Do they draw lots? Or do they take turns on a rota for different specs?

Now here’s a thing.

While I was looking out at sea at the trawlers I noticed something else heading my way, and as it approached me, I reckoned that the silhouette was quite familiar so I photographed it for a closer look when I returned home.

Back here I had a close look at the photo and had something of a play around with it. Sure enough, it’s Normandy Trader, one of the little Jersey freighters, on her way into port. I wonder what she and her crew will make of a Spanish galleon here in port.

Having done that, I edited the rest of the morning’s photographs and also the ones from last night. Then I began to update the journal to add the details of last night’s meanderings.

Round about 10:45 I knocked off for breakfast – coffee and my fruit bread. The bread was fine but it was round about then that I had my calamity.

Accordingly, the rest of the morning and early afternoon was spent messing around with the computer.

None of the foregoing stopped me from having my afternoon walk of course.

You will have seen the glorious morning that we had earlier today, but by now there had been a dramatic change in the weather. It was cloudy, overcast and cold, just like any late October day.

It was no surprise therefore to see that the beach was totally deserted. There wasn’t a soul down there that I could see. The weather had finished off the holiday season in a way that no-one will ever forget in a hurry.

There’s even a rainstorm by the looks of things a few miles out to sea to put the tin hat on it.

When I said that there wasn’t anyone out on the beach, that’s not strictly accurate.

Away in the distance out at Donville les Bains the bouchot harvesters are hard at work. They have all of the tractors and trailers out there this afternoon bringing in the shellfish from the beds that are to the right of this image.

And in the background there are a few people walking around on the beach. Probably tenants of the holiday park just along there. They will be walking along the beach because, to be frank, there isn’t anywhere else for them to walk around there.

So I’m sure that you are now wondering where all of the holidaymakers have gone if they aren’t on the beach.

The answer to that is that they are all on the path that leads down to the semaphore and the lighthouse at the end of the Pointe du Roc. Hordes and hordes of them too.

And they weren’t all holidaymakers either. While I was walking around on top of the cliff overlooking the sea, I fell in with one of my neighbours and we had a really good chat.

While we were chatting, we were overflown by a helicopter, our friend F-GBAI and also the sparrowhawk but you can’t be rude and interrupt a conversation by taking a photo.

Just my luck, isn’t it?

Mind you, I didn’t have long to wait before someone else flew by overhead.

The familiar rattle in the distance gave me a clue as to who it might be and it wasn’t long before the red microlight who we have se so often came fluttering by.

Interestingly, it just went a mile or so out to sea, turned round and headed for home.

Bizarre.

Nothing else flew by so I carried on to the end of the path and across the car park, which was crowded yet again.

The other day I asked the question “what do you do if you head back to port and find the port gates closed with the tide.

Almost on cue, we saw a yacht riding at anchor about half a mile outside the harbour. And here today we have another one. And I wonder if he has also missed today’s window of harbour gate openings.

There doesn’t seem to be anyone on deck so maybe they are riding at anchor an gone below for a cuppa. However, they are supposed to display a signal – a black ball – if they have their anchor out but I can’t see anything of that nature hanging from the mast.

A little further around the headland there was a group of people out on the beach and rocks underneath the harbour wall.

My first thought was that they were doing a bit of peche à pied but a closer look failed to convince me. And apart from the fact that there’s no sun right now, that’s no place to go sunbathing.

Meanwhile, in the chantier naval there was no change in occupancy since this morning. Everything was the same as yesterday except for an infernal racket from down there as if someone was doing some heavy-duty sand-blasting.

In the inner harbour I noticed that Normandy Trader had already left. That was a quick turn-round.

Galeon Andalucia on the other hand was still down there with a huge crowd of admirers around her.

And well there might be too, for she’s a gorgeous machine. She’s 38 metres above the water (and 3 metres below it) and her three masts carry almost 2,000 square metres of sail.

Altogether, there are 6 decks which amount to 315 square metres of usable floor space. She looks as if she could launch a broadside of 14 guns

Sadly, she also has an auxiliary engine.

Back here I finished off yesterday’s notes and then went for tea. Aubergine and kidney bean whatsit with pasta.

Finally, I managed to find time to listen to the dictaphone. I was in Villedieu les Poeles last waiting to catch a ferry to go somewhere and there was a talk about how this town was one of the most important in the area as a fishing port, which considering that it’s 20 miles inland, is pretty good going (and I fell asleep here). It was a story on the radio about how important it was and how it was about the 4th most important bridge in France. I thought that it was the first and I was looking for a few reasons out of UP POMPEII to substantiate it. Then I was going through people’s different houses (and I fell asleep again). There was more to it than this but I can’t really remember now which is a shame

later on we were on the top of the cliffs looking down onto the village at Villedieu and the ferry and there was a bridge there as well (yes, I’ve stepped right back in where I left off, haven’t I?). We had to go down to the bottom and somehow fight our way across on rubber boats or something to the other side. We all charged and it was quite a bloodthirsty do with fighting everywhere. Eventually I managed to reach across to the other side of the river, cheered and pushed on. A few of us overwhelmed everything and we were all extremely happy that we had done this and survived and conquered this town.

Now that I’ve finished today’s notes I’m off to bed. I’ve been having too many late nights just recently. I have to put a stop to that.

Thursday 12th August 2021 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about the place out here being a hive of activity at the morning tide while I’m still plucking up the courage to drink a mug of coffee

This morning started off with a couple of blasts on the siren from one of the Joly France ferries , the older one of the two as she reverses out of the ferry terminal with a load of passengers on board.

They all do that when they reverse out, because they never know what is coming around the corner behind them, and I imagine that the sounding of the siren is the result of bitter experience.

And it’s just as well that she did because she had company right behind.

The very newest Chausey ferry, Belle France looks as if she’s been an early bird this morning.

She’s on her way back into harbour having presumably already dropped one load of passengers off at the island, and coming back for more, bringing with her, I imagine, holidaymakers who want to return to Paris on the midday train.

And so it looks as if it’s going to be a busy day for them out there today with them starting early like this.

Jamais deux sans trois – never two without a third, as I said yesterday.

And in behind all of them, somewhat later and at a much more leisurely rate, comes Chausiaise, the little freighter that they use for running the supplies and the luggage out there

All we need now is the other Joly France boat, wherever she may be, and the Loch Ness monster and we’ll have a full house today.

And if you think that that was all of the excitement this morning you are very much mistaken.

One of the big issues about living in a medieval walled city is that deliveries are somewhat complicated. The heights and widths of the gates weren’t made for modern lorries.

Anyone who has anything delivered here in a lorry like this will need to have some kind of trans-shipment facility for their purchases if they expect their goods to arrive at their front door.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … harbour we have another visitor in here this morning.

The Normandy Trader seems to have come into port with the evening tide yesterday and by the time that I got round to see her she was busy being loaded up with a pile of building material that must also have arrived quite early.

According to her skipper, she’d already been over to St Malo on her way out from St Helier so they are keeping her busy.

And while I was at it, I went to have a look on the north side of the headland when I came back from the shops.

And here, sailing around the bay was Marité

We had seen her at her mooring earlier when we saw Normandy Trader but by the time that I came back both of them had cleared off into the sunset.

Normandy Trader had long-since disappeared into the distance but Marité kept me entertained for quite a while.

And we had another surprising sight right out to sea just leaving the harbour at St Helier and the camera did really well to pick this up.

A quick check of the fleet radar told me that just about 20 minutes before I took this photo, Condor Voyager, the big superfast ferry whom we had seen the other day, had set out from St Helier on her way back to Poole in Dorset, where she arrived at 14:43.

She was the only ship out there who fitted the description and the size of what I was seeing so I reckon that it’s she.

Yes, I’ll go out again when the tide is right.

But anyway, I’m getting well ahead of myself.

And after last night’s adventures, all that I can say is that there’s no point whatever in killing myself to go to bed at a reasonably early time if I spend most of the night tossing and turning and not being able to sleep properly It was a rather dismal night in fact.

Nevertheless, I did manage to go off on several travels and it’s these that are probably wearing me out the most. Last night I was living at the top end of Crewe in Victoria Street and I had a little ginger kitten. One day I let it out and it shot off at a right pace. I was calling it and running after it praying that it wasn’t going to be knocked over by a car or something as it had never been out at all in the past. Eventually I caught it playing around by the railings that led up the steps to one of the shops on Hightown. I picked it up and thought “I’m on the way to the hospital but i’m going to have to carry the cat because I can’t just put it down and let it run around like this. It will drive me mad and be ever so stressful

Later on I’d arranged to meet one of my Canadian friends to go to the cinema but somehow I’d forgotten. I’d ended up going to bed. But the phone rang to ask me where I was “God! I’ve forgotten!” She replied “we’re just going in now”. She’s met someone and they were going to be on the balcony in the cinema. I dressed quickly and dashed into town, went up into the cinema and had a look round. Eventually I found them and went to sit next to them. There she was, then this guy then me then another woman. This was a B-feature and the lead film was a film abour economic analysis and everything. Of course I was fascinated by this and sat and listened to it. This woman started to talk about something that she had planned for her thesis to do with making glucoses on plants and transposing them to trees. I said “you should speak to my friend’s friend because he’s into genetics”. That sparked off a lively incident. This film then started to talk about someone who had developed some babysitting rings in South London with a couple of friends, about how they had started this but were doing it while studying and hadn’t let on. Their friends were starting to shun them because of the implications about what would happen to their studies if they found out that they were working.

Some time later a couple of us were hemmed in on a car park by a car and a lorry on a car park in Granville. We had to go to pick someone up from the seafront a little later and the gale was howling. It was really strong. I was trying to eat something but it was all falling apart. In the end I turned to whoever it was I was with and said something like “shall we go?”. I swept all of the ruins of whatever it was I was eating into a bag and I saw the cheese sandwich and said “God! Sorry!” to whoever it was we were meeting. We set off to go to see the storm.

A little while earlier at some point I’d been on a bike and I’d come to some roadworks and I’d had to wait while we were ushered through. The ushers were dealing with some kind of incident involving a lorry so we were there for hours. The we were let through and I had to cycle behind the girl on the bike who was leading everyone through. I’d switched my lights off and I couldn’t get them to work again. In the end I cycled off and by now I’d transformed myself into a car. I was heading back home to my place in Virlet. Although I’d come a different way I suddenly found myself back on the road that I knew so I was able to put my foot down and go that way. In the night with the lights and everything we could see all of these ancient buildings with all old dates carved into these buildings, hundreds of dates, all reflected in the shadows of the car’s headlights. It was the first time that I had ever seen them so clearly.

It’s no wonder that I’m totally exhausted with all of this going on, is it?

Having organised that I went and had a shower and went one better than Graham Nash – I actually DID cut my hair, although my not feeling up to par is not because I had the flu for Christmas – it’s something else completely.

Then I hit the streets – not that I feel much like it but on Tuesday I have to go for the train and so I may as well see how I feel.

You’ve already seen some photos and I’ll show you a few more quite soon once I’ve disentangled myself from the chat with the itinerant who hangs around the town.

There was a clothes shop for kids in the Rue Couraye but it moved to different premises not so long ago.

Just recently the windows have been covered over to stop people peeking inside, and today they’ve had a delivery of stock.

Hachette is wholesale book distributor and it’s their name on the packaging, so are we going to be seeing a bookshop open in the town?

Watch this space.

On the way up the hill my knee gave out again and that reminded me that as I was going past the new physiotherapists’ clinic I should pop in there and make an appointment. I have a doctor’s prescription for a course of physiotherapy.

At LIDL I didn’t buy very much at all today – it was the exercise that I went for more than the shopping, so I was soon heading back.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we watched them demolish the old café on the corner of the Rue St Paul and the Rue Victor Hugo.

They erected a crane shortly afterwards and I said that they would get a move on now because hiring a crane is expensive. So since then they haven’t done a tap of work.

Of course it’s August and everyone is on holiday right now, but in that case why bring the crane in and not wait for September when everyone is back at work? It seems rather strange to me, but there again many things around here do.

At LIDL I’d bought some energy drink to fuel the climb up the hill to home, so I stopped to drink it right by the Square Potel.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, late last year they demolished the staircase and closed it all off to the public, and today I noticed that a notice had been erected at the site.

Basically, work is going to start here next autumn, so they say, and so it’s not worth anyone’s while making the place look presentable at the moment, only to have to rip it all out in early course.

So at least we know when things might be starting. When they might be finishing is something else completely.

Outside the building was a neighbour so we had a chat, then I came in to put away my frozen peas and then … errr … hit the chair for a while. And no surprise there.

As a result there was a rather late lunch and I wasn’t in the mood for doing all that much afterwards for a while. Eventually I did some more Greenland photos to keep things ticking over.

When it was time for my afternoon walk, somewhat later than usual, I wandered as is my custom these days down to the end of the car park to have a look at the beach.

And we’re right at the turn of the tide by the looks of things judging by the beach, and there are quite a few people down there this afternoon making the most of it.

Plenty of sunbathers and and even quite a few people taking to the water. It was certainly one of the nicer afternoons that we’ve had for a while.

A few yachts out there in the distance too and beyond them are the bouchot beds that we saw yesterday. They aren’t as clear today as they were.

But on the subject of things being clearer, the air is certainly much clearer than it was yesterday.

The difference between the view of the Ile de Chausey today and the view YESTERDAY WHEN WE SAW MARITÉ is quite considerable.

Unfortunately she’s not out there now, she’s gone somewhere else out of my view. However there are quite a few other yachts over there in the distance, one of them being Spirit of Conrad, the yacht on which we went down the coast last year.

And while we’re on the subject of going down the Brittany coast … “well, one of us is” – ed … the view down the Brittany coast was quite good today.

Right out there on its headland we can vaguely see today the lighthouse at Cap Fréhel, about 70 kilometres from where I’m standing. Not the best view that we have had – we’ve had days when we’ve seen it with the naked eye – but pretty good all the same.

And I haven’t forgotten that I have a few close-ups on the lighthouse to show you one of these days when I find enough creative spirit to write something up about my journey down there.

If the view out down the Brittany coast is good, there’s a fair chance that the view out to sea might be good too (although quite often it isn’t).

Out there today, we have a really good view of the island of Jersey and the port of St Helier, even down to being able to see plenty of the buildings around the town. It’s very rare indeed that we cans ee them as clearly as this.

The big white building with the round dome on top is as far as I can tell, the Fort Regent Leisure Centre but I can’t really identify the others. One of these days I’ll have to go for a sail out there, but I bet that it will be raining and foggy and I won’t be able to see a thing.

At this particular moment I was overflown by an aerial duo.

The white one on top was, presumably, mummy seagull and she seemed to be taking one of her babies, the browny-grey one underneath, for its maiden flight around the clifftops.

And judging by the noise that baby was making, she was not one very happy seagull at all. The younger ones have this very distinctive squeaky call that sounds like an unhappy toddler.

And by the way, if ever you come to Granville, bring a hat. The seagulls have an accuracy that puts Bomber Command to shame.

And while I’m on the subject of being overflown, it’s getting to be more and more like Play School here.

Today we aren’t going to be deciding which window to be looking out of, we’re going to be deciging which one of the microlight aircraft will be oveflying us.

Last time, it was the red one, so today then obviously it has to be the turn of the yellow one to come and pay me a visit, rattling its way past overhead.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen the yellow autogyro so maybe that’s his turn tomorrow.

Surprisingly, that was the only aircraft today that went anywhere like close enough to be able to take a worthwhile photo. There were a couple of others but they were either too far out or too high.

Having dispensed with all of the activity out on the north side of the headland I went to see what was going on round the corner because i’d seen some things moving out there.

Across the car park went I, down to the end of the headland and just as I did so, a speedboat went right past in front of me.

We’ve had everything else today so why not a boat full of fishermen? Not doing very much fishing because they are travelling at some speed, from where I don’t know because all of the slipways are out of the water right now.

They are going to be having quite a long wait until the tide comes in far enough for them to go ashore.

When I said just now that things were moving out there, I was only speaking figuratively because here’s someone who clearly isn’t.

This is the best way to spend a quite sunny afternoon – anchored off the coast (you can see his anchor chain extended off the port bow) taking in the rays and waiting patiently for the tide to come in.

It doesn’t even look as if he is doing any fishing, and that is surely heresy around here right now.

There’s a few other things to see around the corner so i’ll wander off that way.

Plenty of excitement yet again in the chantier naval this afternoon.

The portable boat lift has been pressed into operation today and it has a small trawler-type fishing boat in its evil clutches. And there’s a guy standing behind it with a pressure washer presumably removing the barnacles from her hull

And I suppose that you’re wondering why she’s still in the boat lift despite the tide being well out right now, and not dropped down onto a set of chocks as they usually do as soon as they take them out of the water.

Well, read on.

And here’s your answer. There simply isn’t anywhere to put her.

It’s been a really busy morning down at the chantier naval by the looks of things and we have no fewer that seven boats in there. There’s Charlevy of course across the other side, and Trafalgar nearest the street, and then four in a line with the seventh in the portable boat lift.

This is probably a record number of boats for me in there and I don’t see how they could hope to fit any more in their place.

And the excitement will begin when they need to use the portable boat lift to drop a boat back in the water, with nowhere to drop the one that’s in the lift while they do it.

We saw Chausiaise coming back into the harbour after her run out this morning, but she’s now back where she was moored yesterday.

Maybe that’s her work finished for the day, unless she has to go over and bring back some luggage tonight.

And in the background there’s another class taking place in the pool over there by the beach at the Grève de Hérel. It looks as if it might be kayaks this afternoon.

But I came back for a cold drink and to stir some papers around. Despite having felt a little better, I’ve still not been able to concentrate at all.

For tea I made a huge pile of aubergine and kidney-bean whatsit, with no pudding as I wasn’t all that hungry. I had no breakfast either so my appetite seems to have gone.

But now I’m off to bed, rather late, and hoping for a better, more productive day tomorrow. High time that I extricated my digit.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: aubergine kidney bean

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Tuesday 23rd September 2025 – HERE I ALL AM …

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Tuesday 17th June 2025 – I HAVE NO …

Tuesday 15th April 2025 – I HAVE HAD …

Monday 4th November 2024 – ANOTHER BAD DAY …

Monday 28th October 2024 – I’M FED UP …

Thursday 26th September 2024 – SO THAT’S ANOTHER …

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