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Friday 21st August 2026 – TODAY HAS BEEN …

… a little better than the relapse yesterday, although the hallucinations are back. It’s amazing how they just appear when I’m doing something and I end up being distracted.

Not that I was distracted last night. It was a very determined me that went to bed at the end of the day, round about 22:30 or thereabouts. I didn’t hang about very long.

It wasn’t very long before I was asleep either. Well away in the Land of Nod, I was. At least for a certain time, that is. However –

The alarm went off this morning, and I awoke and switched it off. I thought that in a couple of minutes, I would have to get up again. But it didn’t feel at all like getting-up time. There was no “tired” situation or anything. So after a few minutes, when I finally agreed that it was darker inside the house than outside, I’d have a look at the bathroom fittings. It turned out that some of them were modular types and others were these “push-on” suction types, so I thought that rather than being some kind of suction type, I’d wait until I could get them all in one go and buy a complete set of pushers.

The alarm really did awaken me back then, and while I didn’t actually get up this time, something strange must have gone on afterwards as the dream descended into all kinds of things that make no sense at all … "no change there then" – ed …

Shortly afterwards, I awoke again – or, at least, I think I did. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I’m finding myself in these situations where I don’t know if I’m awake or not … "nothing new there either" – ed … if I’m dreaming or having one of these hallucinations.

I must have been asleep at some point because the alarm awoke me at 06:29 – a proper alarm and a proper awakening. We had the usual ten minutes or so while I tried to awaken myself and find the enthusiasm to stand up, and then I went to the bathroom for a good scrub-up, etc.

Back in here, I had a listen to find out what else was on the dictaphone.

It was in the early 1930s, and in the ramshackle car that we had, two friends and I went to Montréal from the USA. While we were in Montréal, there was an announcement of a huge earthquake, so everyone ran for their lives. This led to some kind of indiscriminate looting and pillaging of the town, and we ended up with quite a few things. I carried something heavy with me all the way, and when I came to the car, the two guys there told me to throw it away again. I was surprised after carrying it all that far, but I put it down and watched it roll away, and then we drove off. They told me that it was a barrel of whisky and, obviously, in Prohibition and I’d bought that back to the USA, we’d have been in a lot of trouble. We arrived back in the USA and I went and caught a tram home. There was some young guy on there so we ended up having a long chat with him.

Part of this dream that I can still see and which doesn’t seem to be recorded is that when we were pushing the car through the crowded streets in a column of other vehicles, occasionally, we had to stop because of an obstruction ahead. And all the time, someone was shelling the city and the shells were landing quite close to us. At one point, we stopped and then moved on again, and the car immediately behind us was hit by a shell exactly at the spot where we had been waiting for five minutes, not two seconds before.

This dream could be anything related to any one of the hundreds of old black-and-white films that I own, but the bit about the vehicles in the queue being shelled reminds me of a scene from THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, except that my viewpoint last night would have been diagonally across the road from where Clint Eastwood was watching the queue go through the town where he was.

Incidentally, throughout these pages, you’ll see links to Amazon products appearing every now and again. Being a Sales Associate of Amazon, I receive a small commission on goods sold via my links. It costs you nothing at all extra, but helps defray … "part of the" – ed … cost of my not-insubstantial web hosting fees.

There are also links for AMAZON UK, AMAZON USA and, since the recent “troubles”, AMAZON CANADA for the use of my numerous Canadian visitors. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I am extremely grateful when someone uses them to make a purchase

Later on, Nerina and I came back to Crewe. We had another Mark III Cortina estate this time. We came back to Gainsborough Road and went in. It was all dark and gloomy and hadn’t been lived in for years. We saw what kind of state it was, so we went round to the DIY place with a couple of friends. We bought some things that we needed and I was picking up all the wood offcuts, including some very long ones. I had no idea what I was going to do with them, but they were free. We went back home with all these huge nails, planks of wood, etc., and put them in the house, which was already full of tonnes of building material to start with. I had a look at the house and there was mould everywhere coming up the walls. I thought that I was going to have to do a lot of work on this place. Then it was Christmas and we had a pile of friends round celebrating. We did one of those line dance conga things all the way around the house and back out into the streets. Then, everyone decided that for an hour, they would go to find someone who needed help and give them some help for an hour or so. Nerina knew some kind who needed some help with reading, but I didn’t know of anyone who needed any help. It had been a long time since I’d been here.

This is very similar to a dream that I had a long time ago when I had also come back from years away elsewhere.

But the state of the house could so easily have been the same at Gainsborough Road had luck not gone my way at the most unexpected times. And Mark III Cortina estates all around the place? It does sound like home, doesn’t it?

The nurse came round as usual to sort out my legs and feet. He didn’t have much to say for himself except to tell me to rest today, and then he left.

After he left, I made breakfast and read some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.

He’s still doing his best to keep clear of controversy by not mentioning anything to do with foreign locations, so it’s becoming rather boring. However, I am continuing to add to my knowledge of architectural terms as he introduces more and more strange words into his book, and I’m having to do more and more research. Hammer beams, anyone?

Back in here, I had a few things to do, and once they were out of the way, I could carry on with the radio programme.

That’s now finished, but it took much longer than it ought to, due to the fact that I had to redo part of the music. I did wonder why I had only forty-one minutes of music when I’d calculated forty-six and a half. Now I know.

There were the usual interruptions – the disgusting drink break and then my cleaner turned up to do her stuff and to have a chat too.

After she had left and I’d finally finished the radio notes, I had a relax for half an hour (somehow avoiding falling asleep), and then I started the next – not one, but two – radio programmes.

It’s a bit of a cheat really. The first one will be a concert. It’s one hour and thirty-eight minutes long, so it needs to be cut down to about fifty-seven or fifty-eight minutes to give me time to introduce everything. However, there was no running list with this concert so I had to listen to it all and make my own.

And while I was listening to the concert, I was looking at the next programme, trying to find out what music I’ll need.

At teatime, I knocked off and went to eat. As seems to be usual on these Fridays, tea was air-fried chips, vegan sausages and baked beans in cheese and fresh ground black pepper. And it was beautiful as always.

After tea, we had football – Hwlffordd, usually a challenger for the European spots but struggling right now at the foot of the table with no points and no goals, v Cambrian United, the team from the Rhondda Valley, newly promoted and looking quite impressive so far.

This was another exciting game that roared from one end to the other at a hundred miles and hour, and there was plenty of skilful football being played. It was nothing at all like the midfield mauls that we’ve seen just recently.

Cambrian scored a goal not long after the restart, and as the game went on, Hwlffordd began to throw the kitchen sink at them. However, that left them vulnerable at the back and Cambrian fully exploited it, not just once but twice. The latter being with the penultimate kick of the match from a guy who had only been on the pitch five minutes.

It does have to be said, though, that while Cambrian fully deserved their victory, 3-0 is a rather flattering scoreline for them.

After that, I started to write the notes for today but ran out of steam. Eventually, having fallen asleep twice, I headed for bed. I can finish my notes tomorrow and you can see them in the morning.

But just a little notice – there’s a game tomorrow evening, so you might not have the complete notes until Sunday late morning.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about drinking … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone once walked into a pub and asked "where are the books, please?"
"There are no books here" replied the landlord. "We don’t sell books, we sell alcohol."
"Not a problem" said the customer. "Do you have ‘Tequila Mockingbird’, please?"

Friday 14th August 2026 – WHAT A BIZARRE …

… night that was last night!

It was one of those strange nights where nothing seemed real at all, and I don’t have a clue about what was going on.

Although I wasn’t feeling much like it, I actually managed to finish and post on line my notes from yesterday. I don’t know where I found that strength and energy, that’s for sure. And after the notes, I had a few things to do. It can’t have been much short of midnight by the time that I crawled into bed.

Once in bed, I remember nothing at all about going to sleep. Usually, I have some kind of idea as to whether I went to sleep quickly or whether it took a long time, but not last night.

Whatever it was, it can’t have been for long. I awoke because of another mega-coughing fit, but I couldn’t be bothered to check the time, so I’ve no idea what time it was. And then after that, I had no idea what was going on. I know that I coughed a lot, but whether that was in a dream or not, I don’t know

In the past, there have been a few evenings and nights where I was never really sure of when I was awake or when I was asleep, and this one was certainly one of the best examples of that.

One thing that I do know for sure is that I had another one of these dramatic awakenings when I sit bolt upright. Although it was dark, I checked the time and found it to be 06:19. Still dark! How times have changed over the last four weeks. Anyway, I took full advantage of this and had my feet firmly on the floor of my bedroom when the alarm went off at 06:29 so that I could claim an early start.

Having my feet on the floor is one thing, being up and about is something else completely different. It took me quite a while to negotiate my way into the bathroom to sort myself out for the day. But eventually I was washed and dressed, and I came back here to listen to the dictaphone to see what had happened during the night.

I was in the middle of Crewe with a friend of mine, and we were looking around at the shops. I was saying that when you live here all the time, you don’t notice the changes. Gradually, one shop moves, another one closes down, something takes over, and it keeps on going like that. But if, like me, you’ve been away from Crewe for well over thirty years, I immediately notice the difference. We were discussing this, and there were these two men standing nearby us, tall, blond and in raincoats drinking coffee. I happened to mention something about Eastern Europe, so this guy stuck a coffee in my hand, one of these two guys, and a piece of money. I looked at it, and at first I thought that it was Croatia, but when I looked closer, it was Poland. Anyway, these two guys had cleared off. The coffee that he gave me was disgusting, and I don’t know how anyone could drink it. Anyway, we carried on walking and we bumped into these two guys again. They told us that they had heard us talking about Eastern Europe, and one guy seemed to fasten onto me and the other seemed to fasten onto my friend. The one with me said “come with me,” so I followed him and we had a chat about different things and ended up in the police station. We went up several flights of stairs and at the top under the eaves were a few bedrooms. He asked me what I thought about this and I replied “it’s a little more comfortable than a cell, isn’t it?”. He had loads of interesting books and papers, and I was having a read of some of them. Then, he dropped the coffee that he had made all over his most important papers and had to run off downstairs with this paper to try to save it. Then we went back out onto the streets where he met a few people whom he knew and said “hello” to them. We were just walking around and walking around until we were out on the edge of the town. Then he said “come and meet my mother” so we went back into town and met the people to whom we’d been talking just now. He asked one “is she in?” and this woman replied “yes”, so he went into a building and I followed him, and we went up these creaking, rickety stairs, each stair having a huge flight to it. It was more like mountaineering than climbing stairs. He just walked into this dingy room where this little old lady was sitting. I followed in, and this woman had this old black cat. I stroked the cat and picked her up, and I began to talk to the woman about my cats.

The first part of the dream is certainly true. For someone who knew the town intimately after all these years as a taxi driver, every time I see a photograph of the town, I have to look it up to see where it is. Crewe is nothing at all like I remember it.

As for the two guys, even in the dream, they are the type of people who stand out a mile in any crowd and have “Police” written all over them. I wonder what their interest in my friend and me might have been.

And even now, I can see the interior of this dingy building, with all of the notices written by disgruntled tenants talking about the dangers of living in this building, the stairs being just one. And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I first came to Granville in 2017, I stayed for a week in a house that had stairs like that.

The British Government was planning on taking some kind of action against another country for some reason and was busy out there trying to drum up allies. I was with a friend of mine and we were having a chat about this, noticing that not a single country had rallied round to whatever cause it was that the UK was trying to fight, and the battleship that they had sent out to sea in an effort to make some kind of spectacle to attract the people was just sitting there in the open doom, I think. Then, it was announced that the Queen was going to hold a garden party at Windsor Castle on one of the days that this marine event was going to take place, so everyone was far too busy laughing at the complete failure of the British to actually go ahead and do something concrete about this

This story is somewhat along the lines of a discussion that I was having yesterday with the taxi driver who brought me home. Regardless of your feelings about Brexit (and mine are still as strong as they were in 2016), the days of the independent nation-state are long over. With aggressive globalisation and selfish power-grabs, you have to be part of a powerful economic alliance to survive these days, or the big boys will pick you off one by one.

I know that we were in our car planning to go somewhere, and we set out. My friend noticed that we had no warning lights whatsoever and wondered what else in the electrical circuit had broken down. I wanted to push on and get to where we were going, but he insisted on stopping to try to find out what this electrical problem was and to see whether we could repair it.

This story could relate to almost anything that I’ve ever done in the past involving motor vehicles. Back in the old days when things weren’t as strict as they are these days, I shaved all kinds of corners off the road traffic regulations and done other things that I wouldn’t even dream of doing these days

Isabelle the Nurse turned up to see to my legs and feet. She’d been doing her accounts last night because tomorrow is her last working day this month, and she needed my health card. However, because my 100% disability ran out at the end of July, the card was no longer valid. She asked me to have my cleaner sorted out today and she’d deal with my card tomorrow.

After she left, I went to make my breakfast, and while eating, I read some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.

Once again, apart from banging the drum for “England”, he’s steering well-clear of controversy today. That’s a shame, because I’ll have nothing to moan about.

Back in here, I had a few things to do, and then suddenly, I awoke and saw that it was 11:05. I must have dropped off to sleep without even realising it, and I’d been gone for about an hour. With the wretched night that I’d had last night, it’s no surprise that I’d gone to sleep again. However, it looks as if we’re having a return to the bad old days of pre-dialysis when I’d go off for an impromptu and unexpected sleep at the drop of a hat at any old time of day.

Once I was awake, I carried on with what I was doing, and when I’d finished, I attacked the radio notes, and despite the usual interruptions of a disgusting drink and midday medication period and the arrival of my friendly neighbourhood cleaner to do her stuff, not only had I managed to finish and have the notes ready for preparation, but I’d also found some time to sort out the next programme too.

The next programme after the one I did today is going to be a concert. I only have an hour for my radio programmes, and for this concert, I have almost two hours’ worth of music and introduction, and I need to cut it down to about fifty-eight minutes so there will be room for my commentary on the front.

So far, after careful snipping and editing, I’ve got it down to about fifty-eight minutes and fourteen seconds, and it will end up even smaller than that once I segue the five pieces of music that I have selected.

Then it was teatime, and the usual sausage, chips and baked beans with black pepper and cheese, followed by two of my slices of home-made fruit bread

When the tea things were cleared and washed away, it was time for the football. Airbus UK Broughton v Rhydaman. These two promoted sides are having very different fortunes in the JD Cymru League. Airbus seems to be doing OK – they’ve already beaten their points tally and number of victories from when they were in the league the last time a few years ago. Rhydaman, on the other hand, are struggling near the foot of the table with just one point.

This was another game played at a frenetic place where I ended up out of breath just watching it. And Airbus had a lovely spell of ten minutes, shortly before the half-time whistle, that I really enjoyed watching.

All in all, Airbus won 2-0, but that doesn’t reflect their superiority. They had two goals disallowed for offside and hit the woodwork three times as well.

Rhydaman also had a glorious opportunity. An attacker, just outside the penalty area, was in possession of the ball when the Airbus defence just froze. It looked as if the attacker had a week to make up his mind what to do with the ball and, in the end, his shot hit the woodwork with a shot so loud that you could hear it here in the apartment without the aid of a TV camera.

Even better, there are two live football matches to be broadcast tomorrow. Y Barri v Cardiff Metro – a win for the Mets will see them back on top of the table – and Caernarfon Town v Colwyn Bay. That game last season attracted the fifth-highest league crowd ever, and I imagine (or hope) that it will be another bumper crowd with the two best-supported teams in the league, only an hour or so away from each other, facing off against each other.

When everything had finished, it was 23:15, so later than usual, I headed for the hills. Here’s hoping that I can have a decent sleep for once.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about policemen … "well, one of us has" – ed … two policemen were called to investigate a shooting.
Shortly afterwards, they radioed back to the station "some old woman here has just shot her husband. Apparently he walked on the kitchen floor while she was cleaning it"
"Have you arrested her?" asked the dispatcher.
"No" replied the policeman.
"Why not?"
"The kitchen floor’s still wet"

Friday 7th August 2026 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S DISASTERS …

… today is ,somehow, slowly returning to normal, although I do have to say that I haven’t been working very hard … "if at all" – ed …

But seriously, you’ve no idea how bad I was feeling yesterday evening, and as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … sleep is my favourite medicine at times like this, so at some ridiculously early time last night when it was still broad daylight outside, I simply went to bed.

The plan was that I’d go to bed, then wake up in about an hour and carry on as usual, but it wasn’t to be. It was 01:30 when I awoke again – a five-hour sleep, which is the longest that I’d had for a while. And although I remained awake for a couple of hours, it didn’t take much effort to go back to sleep again afterwards.

When I awoke, it was still fairly dark, although dawn was beginning to break. But then the alarm went off a couple of minutes later to tell me that it was now 06:29. I couldn’t believe how dark it was compared to even a week ago when 06:29 was in bright sunlight. The nights are definitely getting shorter.

As usual, it required a huge effort to motivate me to stand up, but at least it wasn’t like yesterday, where I was physically unable to do so. I didn’t have any such problems today.

After I’d sorted myself out in the bathroom, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

It was a very scattered dream about dialysis last night and having to go there and there was so much water to take out and I had to stay for hours, but we didn’t know how it would fit in and all of that sort of thing but I can’t remember it really and a lot of it has evaporated

By the looks of things, yesterday’s events at dialysis have become something of a preoccupation of mine, but one thing that I did wish was that a lot of yesterday’s water, not last night’s dream, had evaporated before I reached the dialysis clinic.

I was with my father, and we had MY A60 VAN. We were trying to get some bits for a Ford Sierra, like a door. He’d tried one or two places on a Saturday morning and had had no luck. He asked me if I knew of anywhere, so I told him of the three or four places that might. He said that we need to go on one of these big expeditions to look for all the bits. But it was getting rather late now, and anyway, I ended up in London with my brother and one of my sisters. And my mother was with us too, or it might have been my elder sister. She had a whole lot of shopping to do, so we moved out of the way so that she could go to the counter. I went to sit on a bus to get my strength, but suddenly, the bus pulled out and I was trapped on it. I made myself comfortable and began to listen to music on my telephone. Then I took the battery out of the hi-fi player or whatever and put it into the telephone and called up. My younger sister vaguely answered, so I said where I was in case they could receive me and that I would be getting out in a couple of minutes. I’d wait for them at this bus stop, and they should bring a few things in between. I was waiting there, and I heard my younger sister call me, so I went to answer her back, but I dropped the radio and one of the memory sticks broke and the keyboard needed pressing back in and a few other things. As it happened, the memory was the same as some that I happened to have in my pocket, so I was able to repair the computer. I talked to my sister, and she and the other person turned up and we began to walk towards London.

Somehow, a big bunch of my family seems to have found its way into yet another dream. At one time, they were coming along quite regularly as bit-part actors doing their best to spike whatever good luck I might have been having. Last night, they seemed to be playing a rather substantial role. I wish that they wouldn’t because I can do without them making any kind of appearance at all.

The part about the bus driving off relates to an incident on the London Underground when I was there with Liz (“that Liz”, not “this Liz”) and she stepped onto a train just as it pulled out, leaving me standing there on the platform like Piffy On A Rock. However, it didn’t faze her at all – she simply got out at the next station and waited for me.

The part about the mobile ‘phone, two-way radio or computer or whatever doesn’t seem to relate to anything, although if anyone is ever likely to be walking around with a memory stick in his pocket, it would be me. There’s one permanently attached to my key ring, in fact.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up slightly later than usual. She asked how I was, so I told her about yesterday. Her response was "take it easy and have a good rest". Perhaps I’m talking to the wrong people, but if the doctors at dialysis won’t come to see me, what can I do?

After she left, I made my breakfast and read some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.

Or, rather, I didn’t. I went off on a tangent again researching Ely Cathedral, of which I have a pile of photos taken a long, long time ago, long before digital cameras ever came into existence, and then, as Nansen once said, "the more extensive my studies became, the more riddles I perceived – riddle after riddle led to new riddles, and this drew me on". I’ve no idea where I ended up, but it was somewhere in a range of early Anglo-Saxon kings.

Nevertheless, I did stay with him long enough to read "Every one must have admired the sweep of the elaborate architraves in which those mouldings are best displayed, with rounds and hollows succeeding in an almost endless series, wave over wave ; hollows cut with such careful and laborious workmanship, that the round is attached only by a narrow isthmus. When we come to two or three such hollows filled with the bold projecting tooth-ornament, and the same exquisite decoration filling up the space beween the marble shafts below, standing forth in the perfect beauty of band, and base, and floriated capital, all distinct and yet combining together : we may safely say that we have found the perfection of mere workmanship and detail, among the countless forms of grace which art has supplied for the admirer of pure loveliness to revel in". I shook my head in disbelief.

Back in here, I had a few things to do, and then I started to write the notes from yesterday. And that took much longer than it ought because I was busy fighting off wave after wave of sleep yet again. However, I managed to keep going, although, as the Duke of Wellington said after the Battle of Waterloo, it was "the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.".

When I’d finished, I went into the kitchen for a disgusting drink break and the midday medication, followed by a peach. I’d almost forgotten that I’d ordered half a dozen of those from LeClerc two weeks ago.

This afternoon, I’ve been weeding out my mailbox. There are tonnes of stuff that don’t need to be there, and so they have gone the way of the west. And I’ve also found some e-mails to which I haven’t replied, one going back a couple of years. I’ve replied to one or two, and I’ll get round to the rest over the weekend.

There were, however, a couple of interruptions. First, my faithful cleaner came in to do her stuff.

Secondly, Rosemary rang me for a chat, but only a brief one today – forty-five minutes. We are definitely losing our touch. But she’s struggling in the heat and her vegetable garden is ruined. The water table where she lives has dropped so low that she doesn’t even have any water in her well.

Later on, after another disgusting drink, I went to make myself some tea. Tonight, it was chips, baked beans (with cheese and freshly ground black pepper) and vegan sausages. And as usual, it really was delicious.

Back in here later, we had football. Airbus UK Broughton v Cardiff Metropolitan. The Met had risen to the top of the pile after last weekend’s 6-1 demolition of Trefynnon, but newly promoted Airbus can be pleased with their 1-0 away victory against Hwlffordd, the first time a newly promoted side has won away from home on the opening day of the season for nineteen years.

Airbus were at home so, while watching the game, we were distracted by the aeroplanes taking off and landing from the airport behind the pitch, but this was a game that I wanted to see because of how the teams played last weekend.

The first half was played at a tremendous pace, and it took a really wonderful strike from the Met’s Ryan Reynolds to separate the teams at half time, although George Peers had earlier missed a sitter for Airbus.

Airbus had even more of the game in the second half, but they were hit by a sucker punch just a minute or two before the final whistle that summed up their entire game. One thing that I do have to say about this match, though, was that the quality of the crosses was total rubbish. For Christ’s sake, put them in the air!

Anyway, right now, I have a few things to do and then I can go to bed. I need a beauty sleep before I go to dialysis tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about buses … "well, one of us has" – ed … two girls from Crewe were waiting at the bus station trying to work out which bus they needed.
"Excuse me sir" they ask a passer-by "which bus goes to Middlewich?"
"You want number 31" he told them.
An hour later, the passer-by walks back past the bus station and sees the two girls still standing there. "Didn’t you find your bus then?" he asked them.
"Not exactly" said one of the girls. "We’re only up to number 26. Five more before ours comes in."

Friday 31st July 2026 – I HAVE HAD …

… a somewhat better day today, not that you might think so at first glance. However, anything has to be better than yesterday, I suppose.

Last night, I was in bed at something like 22:00, I suppose, not that I looked, and once more, I’m sure that I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. And I managed to stay asleep for a little longer last night. It wasn’t until about 03:00 that I awoke.

Despite everything that I tried to do, I couldn’t manage to go back to sleep and by 05:50 or thereabouts, I’d completely given up all hope. That’s why, when the alarm should have gone off … "which it didn’t because he’d switched it off" – ed … I was sitting at my desk working.

Before that, though, I had to go into the kitchen. I had a thirst that you could photograph so a couple of mouthfuls of water with lemon juice

Back in here, what I should have been doing was transcribing the dictaphone notes from the night, except that there weren’t any, which, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed …is an extreme disappointment to me. But never mind. There were the notes from the previous evening, so I transcribed those instead and integrated them into yesterday’s notes.

There were still a few other things to do, and I was interrupted by the arrival of Isabelle the Nurse, who was early. We had a little chat about what’s going on in the town and then, when she’d finished, she cleared off on her rounds.

That left me free to make my breakfast, and while I was eating, I was reading some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.

And he’s still going on … "and on, and on" – ed … about the superiority of the Northern races over the “Mohammedans”. "The Crusaders then imported, not Gothic architecture as a complete style, but certain forms thrown away on their possessions, but which northern genius at once felt itself capable of employing to some better use".

Be that as it may, a few lines later, he adds "The Arabian architecture in Spain does not present so close an approximation to Gothic forms as that of the east ; to go no farther, the round arch is retained in its most sumptuous buildings. The Spaniard then had not the same opportunities for learning Pointed forms in his own country as were possessed by the French or English pilgrim to the east".

Back in here, I had yesterday’s notes to complete and then post online. And once again, that wasn’t easy, due to me collapsing with fatigue on several occasions. It took me much longer than I thought and I was glad in the end to go for my disgusting drink and midday medication.

The next job after that was to look at the football news – I’d forgotten to do that last night. And the first thing that I noticed, apart from the last-minute transfers before the season begins, was that UEFA HAS WITHDRAWN FROM FIFA and won’t participate in any more worldwide competitions.

It’s not the only continental football authority to withdraw either. CONCACAF, the umbrella organisation for North and Central America and the Caribbean, is also making plans to join in.

The issue is over the “sale” of the World Cup competition to commercial marketing companies, one of which is a venture capital company run by Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s brother. UEFA has announced that “the World Cup is not for sale at any price” and in my opinion, quite rightly too.

It’s all about the supporters and the teams, and the disgraceful milking of supporters over the last few weeks in the USA has shown what can happen when greedy profit-mongers lay their hands on everything

The scenario that I have imagined is that Trump has, I imagine, seen how much money the World Cup has brought in and has worked out a way of bringing in even more, with his extended family being one of the main earners in this scheme.

On the other hand, it might just as easily be UEFA’s way of revenge for how the FIFA President overturned a red card decision against the American team when their star player was permitted, despite being sent off in the previous game, to play against Belgium after pressure was put on FIFA by Trump.

Then I turned my attention to the radio programme on which I’d been working.

The other day, I mentioned that I had found all the songs that I need. but that, I’m afraid, wasn’t the case. Because of my inability to count correctly, I found that I was two albums short so I had to scour the World for copies, and I eventually, after much binding in the marsh, was able to find them.

Once I’d managed to secure them, I had to reformat and re-edit them and then extract the songs that I needed. Now, at last, I had all eleven.

They have all now been paired and then segued, and all that remains are the notes to write. That’s going to take a while and it’s almost certain that I shan’t have them finished before Monday.

Things might have gone easier and quicker, but my cleaner popped in to do her stuff as usual, and that knocked me out of my stride for a while as we chatted about all kinds of things.

At teatime, I had sausage, beans and chips again – the beans cooked with cheese and black pepper, and it’s delicious. Probably my most favourite meal of all.

After washing up, I was back in here for the football – LLansawel v. newly-promoted Ammanford. The game was quite good, with Llansawel deservedly winning by 2-1, but this new TV company with whom the FAW has gone into partnership is, in my opinion, a total shambles.

There’s

no pre-match introduction
no team sheets
no match commentary
just one inexperienced camera crew who didn’t use their zoom lens until right at the very end
only one camera
no cameras behind the goals or in other positions on the fields
no action replays
no subtitles to announce the goalscorers
no subtitles to announce the substitutions

and probably a dozen other things that were wrong with it too that I’ll remember in due course

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we often go to Stranraer to watch the football. They are a small fourth-tier club in Scotland with crowds of about five hundred if they are lucky. Yet their match highlights and commentaries are among the best in the World. If Stranraer can do it, then a society such as NOVIRA should be able to out-do Stranraer quite easily.

After the match, I started to write my notes, but with the game finishing at 22:55, tiredness and fatigue beat me to the end, so I posted what I had written to date and I’ll finish it off later tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the World Cup … "well, one of us has" – ed … an English guy who was planning to go to he World Cup to watch Ingerland play was dismayed to find that the third-placed playoff was arranged on the day of his marriage.
Reluctantly, he put an announcement in the local newspaper – "due to a clash of schedules between my marriage and the England game against France, I’m not able to go. Anyone who would like to go in my place, please contact me."
Someone rang him up and asked "where’s it taking place?"
He replied "St Stephen’s church and her name is Sandra"

Friday 24th July 2026 – THERE HAS BEEN …

… some astonishing news released today in respect of the Welsh football pyramid. One of the all-time greats is back – and he’s fifty-three!

The news is bound to upset former million-pound striker Lee Trundle, who’s still turning out for Cwmbran Town at fifty and who has been the oldest player in the pyramid for quite some considerable time.

Marc LLoyd Williams was a legendary player in the Welsh Premier League for over two decades, as well as several spells in the English football league with clubs like Stockport County, Halifax Town and York City. He played 467 games in the Welsh Premier League and scored a record 319 goals in that time. In the 2001/2002 season he scored 47 goals, a total that would have won him the European Golden Boot had it not been for Wales’s low coefficient.

He retired at the end of season 2013/2014 and since then has been a TV pundit and coach for some of Wales’s youth teams but the news today is that he has signed for Locomotive Llanberis as a player. All I can say to him is “good luck. Nice to see you back”

That’s a nicer thing that I said to myself when I awoke this morning at … errr … 02:30. It may well be that I’d gone to bed last night at 21:45 or something like that that had caused me to be awake so early, but that’s not what I was thinking at all.

So at 02:30, there I was, trying hard to go back to sleep but with no success whatsoever. I lay here and slowly watched the day begin to dawn. However, at one point I must have gone back to sleep because I suddenly awoke, bolt-upright, at 06:18.

When the alarm went off, I was already sitting on the edge of the bed claiming my early start. But, as usual, summoning up the strength and enthusiasm to go to the bathroom was something else completely.

First off, though, was that I had a thirst that you could photograph, and so I went into the kitchen for a drink of water with a good squeeze of lemon in it.

Once in the bathroom, I sorted myself out and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

Our little travel club had gone to London because one of the girls was living there. We went to see her and have a good chat to make up old times, but she was saying that she had to go to pick up her new car today, and everyone whom she’d asked to drive her there had let her down. I said that there wasn’t very much that we could do because we didn’t have a car, but she went on for quite a while about this. In the end, she said “come on, let’s go” and walked out. There was her car, a white four-door Fiesta. I noticed that one of the doors wasn’t fitting properly so I asked her about it. She said that it’s not been bolted in. It’s just wedged in. She explained that she’d had a problem with one of the doors, and some English guy who ran a car repair place in Belgium had sorted out a door for her for five pounds. So we went into London and ended up where this event was taking place but it was not really good at all. There was nothing much happening, so we decided to leave. For some reason or other, I’d been eating a whole pile of paper, and all of a sudden, I had to spit it out. I just opened the door and spat out all this paper that I’d eaten and another huge load besides. I was sure that everyone thought that I was being ill. Eventually we found a private members’ club and we were able to order drinks there. Then we had to catch a bus right across London to Victoria Station to find our way home. I felt terribly disappointed because I thought that we all might have been asked to stay but we had to leave … fell asleep here … We were lucky because we found four seats on the tram and the tram was packed to the gunwales with everyone on it, people trying to leave through the “in” door by the driver. It was a total mass of confusion. There were two girls for some reason standing in the pathway of a tram on an adjacent line to ours. It was raining and pouring down, so our tram and theirs had their windscreen wipers working. Eventually, we arrived at where we were going, and one of the girls took us all up these side streets, which I probably thought was a short cut to the station but we’d have to see about that. There was a car pulling out of the kerb so I had to walk round it. The one that was behind it pulled out of the kerb and hit me, so we made a really impressive impact on the driver of that vehicle. The guy who had sold one of us that door, he asked if I’d had my van fixed. I replied “no” so he said that he’d be available after August if I wanted him.

There are a lot of things in this dream that mean something. My three friends, for a start. We’ve travelled miles together, one way or another, all over Europe.

The car, too, currently means something, complete with the missing door. And so does moving between Brussels and London

Many other items fit into events in real life, too numerous to explain, so I reckon that this dream is all about me sorting myself out one way or another.

The nurse turned up as usual, and we had a good chat about bikes and responsibilities while he was dealing with my feet. And then he cleared off, and I could push on and make my breakfast.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.

We’ve reached the end of the summary, having to wade through page after page of nonsense such as "Much of Europe was still pagan ; during a long portion of this period the Church among many Teutonic nations retained a missionary aspect; and even in Christian countries the Church had not arrived at her full influence. Finally, towards the end of the period the civil and spiritual powers came into open collision, the dispute on investitures roused Europe to its very centre."

There was also "its glorious successor speaks of days when the Church had leavened the world, and, instead of missionaries labouring and dying among Pagan Danes and Saxons, sent forth from those very lands the warriors of the Cross to fight for the holiest spots of their religion.".

It seems that even the church and its ministers, such as Freeman have totally forgotten what is the message of Jesus, Exodus chap. 20 verse 13 and Deuteronomy chap. 5 verse 17.

Right now, we’ve passed on to Arabian architecture. I was expecting all kinds of offensive comments about Arabian architecture from him, and I wasn’t disappointed. We started with "But considered as a real work of architecture, any second-rate production of Grecian, Romanesque, or Gothic art, must rank far above their most splendid monuments. Their splendour is mere barbaric magnificence superadded to fantastic and inconsistent forms, lifeless germs which existed for ages without developing into the features which would seem to be their natural results" and it all went south from there.

Back in here, I had things to do, such as check the Leclerc order that I was about to send off, and then I could finish off the notes from yesterday. Although not without a struggle. You’ve no idea how many times I went to sleep and almost fell off my chair while I was working

Just before midday, I suddenly had this flash of memory – “the washing!” I’d promised my cleaner that I would do the washing today, ready for her to hang out when she comes this afternoon to do her stuff. I usually start it at 10:00 because it takes an age to do, so I hope that it has time to do its cycle.

Round about 13:00 I stopped for a disgusting drink break and the midday medication, and I was caught in flagrante delicto by my faithful cleaner. She set about doing her stuff, and we chatted for a while before I wandered back into here and set about doing some work.

But not for long, though. At 15:25 Leclerc turned up with my load of shopping. And although there wasn’t much, it still took a load of manoeuvre to fit all the frozen food into the freezer and the cool stuff into the fridge. And there was plenty other stuff to put in the cupboards and shelves. It’s becoming quite an art to pack it all away.

Round about 19:30, there was a calamity somewhere. All of the police cars turned up in the car park near us. There were sirens blowing, people shouting, policemen shouting and using the little new loudspeakers and microphones. I’ve still no idea what they are up to, but my cleaner thinks that it’s some kind of demonstration or rehearsal for something

Tea tonight was delicious sausage and chips with baked beans cooked with cheese and black pepper. It’s absolutely wonderful, especially when followed by two slices of my fruit bread.

So now that I’ve finished my notes and checked over everything that I need to do, I’m off to bed before I fall asleep again.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Ten Commandments … "well, one of us has" – ed … Moses came down from Mount Sinai, and all the people gathered round him. “It looked like the Crewe Carnival procession” he said later.
"Come on, Moses" they urged him. "Tell us the news."
"There’s good news and there’s bad news" he replied.
"Tell us the good news, Moses"
"The good news is that I’ve got him down to ten"
"What’s the bad news, Moses?"
"The bad news? Well, he wouldn’t budge on adultery."

Friday 17th July 2026 – AFTER THE DISASTER …

… of yesterday, today has been a much more satisfying, and a much more productive day, and for once in a long, long time, I am happy with what I have accomplished.

Not that you might have thought so during the night. What with one thing and another … "and until you make a start, you have no idea just how many other things there are" – ed … it was 23:45 when I finally crawled into bed last night, looking forward to my long, uninterrupted sleep.

And there I stayed, too, until all of 02:03 (I checked). At that point, an enormous coughing fit awoke me (yes, the antibiotics stopped a week ago) and I couldn’t go back to sleep again.

At some point, though, I must have done, but it wasn’t for long and I was awake again, watching the darkness gradually turn into daylight as the sunlight slowly began to creep round the edges of the shutters.

The alarm shattered my reverie, and to my surprise, it didn’t take long for me to have my feet on the floor. Mind you, having my feet on the floor is one thing. Standing upright on them is something else completely.

Once I’d summoned up the enthusiasm and the energy, I went to sort myself out in the bathroom and then came back in here.

I had my CX500 out, so I thought that I’d go to see my friend on the Wirral. I went all the way there, but he wasn’t in. It turned out that he was in the local bar, so I went to look for it and there, I joined him. We were chatting about things and he mentioned that there was some kind of motorcycle rally taking place over the weekend in his area. We carried on chatting for a while and then I asked him if he wanted me to come up on the weekend to go to this rally, but he said “no”. I thought “there’s not much point carrying on this conversation” so I went to begin to go home. But I had no headlight on the motorbike. There was a sidelight but no headlight. First of all, I went down to another pub and had half of bitter. That was absolutely packed and I had trouble trying to find a seat. There was someone in there saying “God, this place is just packed with people drinking” so I shouted out “so what did you expect to find in a pub?” that brought a whole roar of laughter from most of the people in there. When I went to go, I climbed onto the motorbike and made sure that the sidelight at least was working, started up the bike and headed for home. But I was halfway down Electricity Street and Alton Street before I realised that I was going the wrong way, so I turned the motorbike round and headed for home. I stopped off on the way at a friend’s house in Winsford. He found a headlight bulb so I went to try it in the motorbike and it actually worked. I thanked my friend and my father. This other guy was here, he from the Wirral. He said to my dad and his friend “do you want to see two motor scooters?”. They had no interest in that so they said “no”, but it turned out that they were two types from Eastern Europe. One was a Korno but I don’t know what the other one was. Eventually, they went to see them but they were distracted by four kittens that came out of the garage. One of the kittens I knew, but I didn’t know the three others. When he went away to do something, my father, his friend and I just stayed there looking at these kittens.

There’s lots of mileage in this dream.

My father and his friend are here again, after making an appearance a couple of days ago. My father, I can understand, but not his friend, about whom I haven’t thought for something like thirty-five years.
As for my friend, there is a pub just around the corner from where he used to live. And there is actually a funny story about it, but the World is not yet ready to hear it.
He was also extremely moody and his rather abrupt “no” wouldn’t have been any surprise in real life.
Why I would be in Alton Street and Electricity Street (in Crewe) when I’m supposed to be on the Wirral, and coming home via Winsford is totally mystifying me.
The friend with the lock-up garages (and the kittens) is a different friend completely than the one on the Wirral.
In that particular friend’s garages, you might well be likely to find a couple of rare motor scooters from Eastern Europe, but as far as I have been able to find, there was nothing called a “Korno”. However, there is a village of that name in the Czech Republic.

And probably much more besides.

There was also a dream about me having a very tight timetable for the place where I worked. There was talk that I’d be having a few days off from the Wednesday to the following Tuesday to go to see a concert by a German composer, somewhere on the north coast of Scotland on the Saturday night. Nerina would be going with me and so would my brother and his wife. We met in a pub to discuss what I thought was the trip but it turned out that they had no intention whatever of going. They couldn’t recall mentioning it in the past, but I was certain that they did. But I’d warned everyone at work, but obviously we aren’t going now so it doesn’t matter.

Not that I’m likely to be going anywhere with my brother and his wife, a classical music concert wouldn’t be of all that much interest to me.

But the idea of organising everything and having it all fall apart at the last moment is nothing new whatsoever, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. It’s something that happened frequently in the old days. As for working to a tight schedule, I’m sure that you have seen plenty of evidence of this.

But there was one boy who was fed up with having porridge and things like that for breakfast and was agitating his parents to have sandwiches. I hoped that that didn’t happen because I enjoyed my porridge in the morning.

This is something that I dread happening. Breakfast, with my porridge and toast, is just about the only meal I really enjoy these days and it would be an absolute catastrophe if I were to lose my appetite for it.

And that reminds me – regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve been talking a lot about the loss of my appetite following the chemotherapy sessions that I had. While I was browsing through these pages looking for something in particular, I came across this quote –
"At lunchtime, I had some vegan cheese on my butty and I’m a little disturbed because the taste seems to have changed. It hasn’t – it’s that my taste buds have changed since I’ve had chemotherapy and that’s disturbing me. It’s one of the reasons that I’m off my food right now. I don’t really fancy anything to eat and the idea of eating anything greasy makes me queasy."

That’s a quote from the first time that I had chemotherapy, and in particular the ENTRY FROM 10th APRIL 2016 – over ten years ago. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.

The nurse was a little later than usual today, and he wittered away about nothing in particular while he dealt with my legs and feet. After he left, I could make breakfast and read some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.

At the moment, he’s having an interesting discussion on the difficulties that people had back in his day almost two hundred years ago, telling the difference between Anglo-Sacon and Norman stonework.

If you ever see them close together these days now that we know so much more, there’s no difficulty in recognising the differences

You can see the difference here in this photograph that I took of St Mary Magdalen Church in Geddington. The Anglo-Saxon stonework is on the left and straight ahead over the arch. Then round to the right, where it all becomes so much neater, that’s the Norman stonework. The Normans had much more experience of stonework than did the Anglo-Saxons, what with everything that they built in Normandy prior to the Battle of Hastings.

Back in here, I had the usual few things to do, and then I attacked the notes for this concert on which I’d been working. They are now all written and ready for typing.

After that, there was one that I started a week or two back, and that’s now all done too and ready for broadcasting, although that won’t be for a while just yet.

There were the odd interruptions while I was doing that. First of all, there was a disgusting drink break with the lunchtime medication, and then my faithful cleaner turned up to do her stuff.

While she was here, I had her take two of the drawers out of the freezer, and I sat on the chair and went through them, sorting them out. Some stuff was binned but the rest is now organised and I know what I’ve got and where it is. And doesn’t that make a change?

Back in here and after the radio stuff was finished, I began to tidy up the mass of papers that was hanging around in here. That’s mostly now done too. As I said, it’s been a very productive day.

However, I didn’t ‘arf have a fright. While I was looking at something out of the window, a big bird, probably a seagull, flew slap-bang head-first right into it. The noise was astonishing and I thought that the window had broken, but it remained intact.

I told my cleaner about it, and she went outside to look but there was no evidence of anything.

Not like the owl that flew into the window of a place where I was staying in Leuven.

The poor bird – an owl by the looks of things – quite clearly left his mark on the glass there, and I don’t think that he could have survived a collision like that. But on my window, there’s not a trace.

Later on, it was time for tea. Chips, sausage and baked beans – the beans cooked with freshly ground black pepper and vegan cheese. Delicious as always.

And for pudding, I had some of the fruit bread that I made a few days ago. It’s a little dry, but the taste is magnificent and I’m really happy with that.

So now it’s bedtime, ready for dialysis tomorrow … "I don’t think" – ed …

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about appetites … "well, one of us has" – ed … a young guy takes a young girl out for a meal. To his surprise, she orders almost everything on the menu. And then she gulps it down.
"Blimey!" said the boy. "Do you eat like this at home?"
"No" she replies. "No-one wants to sleep with me there."

Friday 10th July 2026 – I MIGHT HAVE …

… known how today was going to turn out. It’s a day after dialysis, isn’t it?

So last night, having made myself ready for bed during a half-time interval, I was able to fall into bed at the final whistle of the Penybont – Santa Coloma game. I’ve no idea what time the match finished, but it was certainly quite late.

As far as I can remember, I was asleep even before my head touched the pillow and that was that until all of … errr … 01:20, when I awoke.

And that was that. Never mind how hard I tried, I was still unable to go back to sleep. So I lay there for ages, watching the dawn slowly lighten up the sky until the alarm went off as usual at 06:29.

You’ve no idea how difficult it was for me to leave the bed at that moment. And it took an absolute age for me to find the enthusiasm to stand up. At one point, I was seriously thinking about going back to bed, but I managed to fight off the temptation.

Eventually, I managed to stagger into the bathroom to sort myself out ready to face the day, and then I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out what had gone on in the hour or so that I’d been asleep.

I can’t remember what my friend and I were doing but it involved a lot of waiting around, during which we were doing some of these competitions in these old newspapers. As the dream progressed, it became more and more intense, and we were spending much more time on these competition things, and they were becoming much more complicated. I remember that I was on the receiving end of some extremely abusive language over something to do with one of these questions. I don’t know where it went after that because I’ve forgotten what was happening.

That’s not really very helpful, is it? Forgetting most of the dream.

The competitions don’t mean anything to me but being “on the receiving end of some extremely abusive language”, although not about “something to do with one of these questions” reminds me very much of an incident almost fifty years ago in Nantwich, when my response was simply “ohh for God’s sake! Grow Up!”

Isabelle the Nurse turned up, at a much more reasonable time today. She was again in quite a chatty mood and we talked about not very much. However, she did ask me how I was and I replied “dreadful”, so she told me to rest. It was a very tempting offer, but I decided to stay up, try to stay awake and fight it out.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.

And his gratuitous polemic is really beginning to get on my wick. Today we have "No architecture can, as mere art, be more thoroughly worthless than such a hopeless confusion as the Roman style henceforth presented. It is simply the exceeding excellence of the two elements — the perfect loveliness of Grecian detail, corrupted as it was by its Roman imitators, and the magnificent boldness of the genuine Roman construction — that saves any of its productions from absolute hideousness … I shall only briefly allude to some of the strange and often ludicrous ways in which the two principles are sought to be combined."

It’s becoming really tiresome.

Back in here, I had things to do, like write up the notes from yesterday, and they are now on line at long last.

After a disgusting drink break at lunchtime, I turned my attention to editing the rest of the radio notes that I’d started yesterday. And not only are they now all edited, I’ve even assembled the two halves of the programme, chosen the joining track and written the notes for it.

There were several interruptions this afternoon, though. My cleaner turned up to do her stuff but she was clearly unwell and after thirty minutes, abandoned and went back upstairs to sleep. Not that I can blame her – the temperature reached 39°C outside this afternoon and 27.5°C in my room. I’ve had the fan going full-tilt all day.

As well as that, I’ve been persistently falling asleep this afternoon and that’s wasted a lot of time. That’s probably also due to the heat – either that or the after-effects of dialysis. But later on this afternoon, I had one of those high-energy drinks and for a change, it actually had some effect and I felt much better.

One thing that came to light quite unexpectedly while I was doing some research into a shipwreck was a Korean guy. Going back three or so months ago, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we had someone called Eddie Chan Fook Pong appearing in these pages. Today, it’s the turn of HUH YONG-BUM to make his debut.

Tonight’s tea was sausage chips and beans, the beans cooked with freshly ground black pepper, cheese and mushrooms. And having once again followed the recipe of my friend from Munich, the chips were absolutely delicious, as was everything else.

So now, back in here, I’m finishing off my notes and then there are a couple of other things to do, following which I’ll crawl into bed, and this time, I hope that I manage to sleep.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about foul and abusive language … "well, one of us has" – ed … an old spinster inherits a parrot that used to belong to her seafaring brother.
The only problem is that with having spent all his life at sea, his language was extremely deplorable. She consulted the vicar who suggested that she put the parrot in the freezer for an hour to cool him down.
So after about an hour, she takes the parrot out of the freezer and he’s shivering with cold.
"Jesus Christ!" he exclaims. "That was flaming cold, and I was only in there for an hour. But what I want to know is what the hell did that chicken and those two fish do?"

Friday 19th June 2026 – THERE HAVE BEEN …

… some pretty bad days just recently – several of which have been candidates for “the worst day ever”. However, I don’t think that any of them were as bad as last night or today.

It was, as I expected, a busy night last night. The second half of my pizza went into the bin after three or four mouthfuls of what tasted like pure salt, as I said yesterday. Instead, I took a small packet of biscuits into the bedroom.

That didn’t seem to help matters much, and halfway along the road, I just quite simply blew up.

When I awoke, it was 22:40, curled up in my nice, comfy chair, so there wasn’t any point in carrying on. I just crawled into bed and that was that.

It was back to the usual “sleep, cough, sleep, cough” throughout much of the night, although I was asleep when the alarm sounded. It took me a good while to find the motivation and energy to dress and slide over to the computer. I was feeling dreadful.

Nevertheless, once I’d finally arrived there, I switched on the machine and began to transcribe the dictaphone notes.

There was some kind of part-exchange of household scheme going on for older houses where you could exchange your house for another type of house somewhere else in the country or maybe even in the same town. I was interested in this because I thought that I needed a change of scenery so I’d been down to look at a couple of houses, and one that pleased me greatly was a Wolseley 1500, so I set about negotiating for it, but the owner dug her heels in about it so I thought that I’d better find another. I found a really nice one and I was actually due to sign for this but then suddenly, a voice came out … we were down there and then as soon as we came out of this house, the house had been withdrawn from the market minutes before we were due to sign so that was something that really upset me all together.

One thing that I have always thought is that whoever has the capital and finances to launch a house part-exchange system, like we do with cars, is going to clean up and make an absolute mint. And I’m really surprised that no-one has gone into it in a big way. But I can’t see what a Wolseley 1500 would be doing in there.

And having the rug pulled out from underneath me when buying houses is, luckily, something that has never happened to me.

Seren and I were baking and, as usual, there were probably more ingredients on the floor than on the worktop. From there, it was pretty confusing, but we were going to have some kind of visit from some kind of alien. They reckoned that this wouldn’t help matters, our tidiness, very much, so we should probably be doing something else round about now rather than confronting artistic masterpieces as made for the purpose quite simply of causing problems.

Why this dream disintegrated into a pile of confusion is totally beyond me. But the question about an alien being involved in this dream is well-known. Whenever anyone asked “you won’t guess what happened at school/college/work/the pub, etc., today”, the answer always was “a spaceship landed and two little green men climbed out and asked to be taken to your leader.”

The nurse turned up as usual and asked how I was feeling. “Dreadful” was my reply. "Make sure you have a good rest today then" he answered, did his thing and wandered off to complete his morning round.

When he was out of the apartment, I made my breakfast, and while eating, I read some more of EBURACUM OR YORK UNDER THE ROMANS by C Wellbeloved.

By the time I was ready to leave the kitchen, we’d finished “artefacts”, spending, as usual, a long time discussing pottery and coins. They seem to be the major source of artefacts in every book on Roman history.

Back in here, I had a few things to do, including writing up yesterday’s notes, so I made a start. However, I just couldn’t keep going. After several minutes of writing what seemed to be nothing but total gibberish, I set the alarm for 12:30 and climbed back into bed. And I didn’t need much rocking either.

When the alarm went off, I managed to switch it off and said to myself that I’ll be up in a minute. The next thing that I knew was that it was 13:35 and my cleaner was at the door chatting to me. She closed my bedroom door and went about her business while I went back to sleep again. When I finally awoke, at 14:45, it was like the Marie Celeste in here. My cleaner had gone and the place was looking really tidy.

Having had my disgusting drink and my afternoon medication, I came back in here to start writing my notes at long last. And it took much longer than I was anticipating too. Whatever is going on with me right now is just ruining my whole concentration.

When they were finally finished, there were one or two things that needed doing and then it was teatime. Tonight, I used the baked beans with cheese and pepper left over from a while ago, with a vegan sausage and some chips.

Tonight’s tea was delicious and I managed to eat all of it. So after the washing up, I came back in here to start writing my notes. But once more, I was overwhelmed by fatigue. It was another night when I crashed out on the chair instead of working. I’ve no idea what time it was when I awoke, but one thing that I knew for sure was that I was so exhausted that it was a real struggle to find the effort to stand up and go to bed. I didn’t even have the energy to write a note on my blog about the delay.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about aliens … "well, one of us has" – ed … a group of aliens came back to their planet after surreptitiously visiting Earth.
"And they’ve developed nuclear power, and they have these really impressive nuclear weapons." said one of the returning aliens.
"Wow!" said one of the other aliens. "They must be really intelligent!"
"Not at all" replied the first alien. "In fact, they are totally stupid. They’ve built all of these nuclear weapons and they are pointing them at each other."

Saturday 13th June 2026 – I HAVE BEEN …

… out and about yet again today, keeping my promise to my friend and my cleaner to do 200 steps on days when I’m not going to dialysis

That’s the view in the other direction, the second part of the building. And just look how close we are to the sea. That long wall at the edge of this path actually marks the clifftop and the tide, when it’s in, comes right up to the foot of the cliff.

If you look carefully to the right, you’ll see the Normandy coast going northwards, and on a really clear day, you can see the island of Jersey on the horizon, fifty-eight kilometres away.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, last night was another late night when I was hoping to be in bed quite quickly. Somehow, I ended up being confused, and I consequently snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and went to bed a little after 23:30.

It didn’t take long for me to go to sleep, and there I stayed for several hours. When I awoke, it was still dark so I managed to go back to sleep until the alarm went off at 06:29.

This morning, I was dressed quite quickly, and then I slid over to the computer to transcribe the dictaphone notes.

There was something about a group of people being in bed. They all had had to make or construct something, like a bungalow or something like that. My job was to go round, look at them and approve them. In order to approve them, I would use a special codeword. After a series of inspections on houses, I went to see this group of people and began to talk to them using the codeword because it was obvious to me that someone had built their house based on the exact and precise legislation, but they couldn’t possibly have seen the forms. They were on their beds and they were quizzed with this particular codeword to see what they knew. I would disguise it into half a sentence, and they would reply with another half. I would do my best to include this secret word in the reply that I gave, to see if there was any reaction.

This is another one of these dreams that means nothing to me. There is no real connection with anything that has happened recently, although “the people in beds” could quite easily be the dialysis patients, I suppose.

I was in bed, and when I looked up, there were two official women standing by my bed, both carrying clipboards. They were asking questions about my latest film – where did I have the idea? How did it come? all that kind of thing, because apparently, what I’d ended up growing was so very close to some copyrighted baby plant somewhere. They were concerned that I’d been stealing the plans. I showed them around the house and they left, and that was that.

The two women with clipboards seem to relate to an incident that took place in Crewe a couple of days ago, although that’s a story that the World is not yet ready to hear. And “showing them around the house” was also part of this story. The rest is the usual rubbish that seems to infest many of my dreams.

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in at her usual time. She was her cheerful self, telling me about the patient who was taken to hospital the other day. She told me that the delay was due at first to the patient not wanting to ‘phone for an ambulance, despite Isabelle the Nurse’s insistence.

"I don’t know how he had the courage!" I said.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of EBURACUM OR YORK UNDER THE ROMANS by C Wellbeloved, or “The Reverend Charles Wellbeloved, chair of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, so I have learnt.

He is now talking about archaeology and excavations, but the excavations, regrettably, aren’t being carried out for research, they are being dug to make cellars, and whatever Roman remains that are found are being smashed up and thrown away. They even found a rare tablet of the god Mithras, known to have been found a hundred years ago and subsequently lost, being used as a paving stone in someone’s footpath, turned upside down to hide the image from view.

After breakfast, I came back in here to finish off this project that I’ve been doing for someone, and it’s now up and running and works fine.

There were several interruptions to my day, the most important being a chat with Rosemary. Just a short chat today, a mere one hour and nine minutes. We’re obviously losing our touch these days.

About half an hour before I’d finished the project, my cleaner messaged me. “It’s a beautiful day outside. Don’t forget your walk”. I was busy just then so I replied "bientôt". When I’d finished, I hit the streets.

Firstly, I met a neighbour coming in who wanted a chat, but I set off valiantly afterwards, hauling myself over the concrete obstructions and counting my paces all the time until I reached a hundred. There, I stopped to soak up the sun and take a photograph. While I was there, I was joined by two neighbours and had a chat with one of the neighbours from her window.

The route back took a hundred and ten paces somehow, and I had a fall too, going through the front door. However, I managed to twist as I fell backwards and ended up falling against the doorframe.

Back in here, I made my croissants for the next few weeks and put them in the fridge, waiting to bake them tomorrow, and then I made tea, a burger on a bap with baked potatoes and finally, the baked beans with cheese and black pepper. And it was all delicious, as usual. The croissants will be too, I bet.

So right now, I’m off to bed, hoping for a good lie-in tomorrow. We shall see how that unravels, though.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about showing people around my house … "well, one of us has" – ed … I mentioned to one of my friends that I often had to show people around in the past.
"Which bit did they like best?" she asked.
"Never mind what bit they liked, the bit that I liked best was when I showed them the door."

Friday 20th March 2026 – WHAT A MESS …

… my bedroom/office is in this evening.

You can’t move in here for computer bits, boxes, packaging, cables and all of that. It’s going to take hours to sort out all of it and make the place tidy enough that I can even crawl into bed.

Consequently, it won’t be anything like as early a night as last night was.

And “early” is certainly the word. Having abandoned tea at some ridiculously early time last night, I came back in here and dashed all the way through what needed to be done, with hardly a pause. That’s why I was in bed at 21:48, and I wish that it was as early as that every night.

However, regular readers of this rubbish will recall exactly what happens when I try to have an early night, without me having to explain it in anything like any detail.

Searing pains in the foot, intense fits of coughing – they would be guaranteed to awaken me at any moment without the extra assurance of an early night. And so, from about 04:00 onwards, I was going through phases of sleeping, dozing and awakening all the way through to the alarm going off at 06:29.

And as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … there have been very, very few times when I have felt less like leaving my stinking pit than this morning.

Eventually, though, I was in the bathroom for a good wash and then into the kitchen for the hot drink and medication, all the time wondering how long it will be before I’m back in bed. Totally ridiculous, seeing how early I was in bed last night.

Back in here, I managed to avoid the bed and instead, had a listen to the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night.

There were Royals under attack again last night. This time, it was the turn of Prince Michael to face the music when he asked someone in the crowd what they knew about a certain organisation. They replied that they were the people who sponsored the prize given by the Prince for some kind of good social activity. That took the Prince quite by surprise, as it was as well-known as it seemed to be. But with a lot of attention on the Royal Family in these recent times, it’s hardly surprising that a lot of these little facts are creeping out into the open when they were hidden before.

The Royal Family is still making the headlines these days, even if the Press has moved on from AFKAP – The Andrew Formerly Known As Prince. They now seem to be concentrating on others, and I really do wonder when someone else is suckered into the Epstein web. Not that it’s likely to be Prince Michael, of course. He keeps himself well out of the limelight and out of controversial situations.

I’d joined some kind of club on the internet about something or other, and although there was a list of about seven or eight people who were supposed to be officiating this site, I had my suspicions that it was being done by artificial intelligence, so what I proposed to do was to sit down and draw some 3D models of people that would represent this mysterious committee. I began to draw one, and I was giving some people a few lessons on the anatomical arrangements, the clothing, etc., but it was coming close to midday. I had some cheese with me, but I wanted some bread or something like that to go on it. Seeing as we were at the seaside, I went to a few of the stalls to see if they would sell me a bap or something, but they would only sell me a bap if it had something on it. In the end, I had to settle for a really basic kind of salad bap with just lettuce and tomato on it. It cost me thirty shillings, which I thought was enormously expensive, but I thought then that at least I’d have something to eat with my cheese at the moment.

Yesterday, I had a posting removed from a British newspaper comments section. My comment contained a word that is completely innocuous in British English but means something completely different in American English. It seems that their comments “moderator” is an artificial intelligence program from the USA because it was zapped almost immediately.

And it’s been an age since I’ve done anything with my 3D program, but the story that no-one would sell me an “empty” bread roll is one that occurred on several occasions in the distant past.

I was back in the Auvergne at Cécile’s place. I’d put an advert in the local paper about wanting to form a group. I had a couple of replies, and the first person to turn up was a female keyboard player. The second was a guy with a guitar. We began to talk about what we wanted to do and what we intended to do, and it seemed to gel a little. We didn’t have a drummer, but that can come later, I suppose. The guy explained that he was something of a novice, but that didn’t matter because we’d improve as we went on. When it came to late at night, these other two people decided that they would have to go, but they said that they would be back in the morning. They actually left together, so I thought that at least, those two were going to get on really well. Then, it must have been Cécile who mentioned something about tea. We hadn’t eaten, so she was going to make a great big bean salad, and she wondered if I’d help too. The way that she was giving out the instructions, it looked as if I would be going to be making all of it. Then I remembered that I’d bought some bean salad dressing from Canada and I couldn’t remember where I’d left it, so I thought that I’d run down to the shop on the seafront and see if they had any. But I’d forgotten how late it was, and, of course, all the shops along the seafront were closed, so I had to come back empty-handed. As I was passing the police station, I noticed that there was a woman standing outside with a baby in a pushchair. The woman was smoking a Turkish cigarette right in front of the baby. There were a couple of people remonstrating with her about this, but she didn’t seem to care at all.

Cécile used to play the guitar, and so when we were together, I did actually put an advert in one of these ecological papers to see if there were any drummers about. We did actually have a response too, but Cécile had to go off to the Ile d’Yeu to look after her mother, and so that put an end to that project before it had even started.

All of the shops being closed is another recurring story from the past, but I’m not sure where the cigarette episode fits in all of this.

And back at the seaside again? Hmmmm.

I was trying to organise a football team, so I’d sent out an open invitation for players to come to trials. One guy, who played in the centre of defence, had brought along his wife, who also played in central defence, and asked if she could have a trial too. I put her on the field alongside her husband at the start of the game. Although, like most trial games, it was very bitty and disjointed, she had a really good game and, in fact, performed better than her husband. Anyway, I kept them both on for the next round of trials.

When FC Pionsat St Hilaire was due to play against another team one Saturday night, the opposition turned up with only ten players. There was a girl with their supporters, and she offered to play for them. We couldn’t see why she shouldn’t, so she ended up on the field with them. And she was quite a useful player too.

But the third and fourth dreams recurred all the way through the night, coming back on several occasions. It’s been a good while since I’ve had a dream like that.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up as usual and was disappointed that I hadn’t found a doctor whom I could berate. And she made a bad move with her hand, right on the base of my foot exactly where the worst pain can be found. I was in agony after that.

After she left, I went to make breakfast and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

Today, we’ve finished the Latin occupation of Greece, and we’re now dealing with the Ottomans. Surprisingly, life for the Greeks under the Ottomans is in some respects easier than under the Latins, so our author tells us. They are allowed freedom of religion, the power to appoint their own governors and all kinds of things like that, things that they were never allowed to do under the Latins.

And surprisingly, there is very little repression of the population.

Back in here, I revised for my Welsh and then went for the lesson. And for a change, it was one of the best lessons that I’ve had, and I wish that they would all go like this one.

After the lesson, my faithful cleaner turned up to do her stuff. She sat me down at the kitchen table, took all of the boxes off the shelf unit by the door and told me to sort them out.

It took an age, as you might expect because tidying up is not my forte, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. However, it’s almost all done now. There’s just one box of stuff that I wouldn’t know how to sort, and there’s a box that I brought in here, full of stuff that should, by rights, belong in the bedroom.

Surprisingly, even though I used more boxes than were there before, not only is the unit much tidier, there seems to be much less stuff on it. I’m not sure how that happened.

After she left, I came back in here and unwrapped my late birthday present.

As you might have guessed, it’s a new computer – or, at least, a reconditioned one.

The first thing that I did was to take the case off and installed the hard drives from the old one and uprated the RAM, but to my surprise, there’s no HDMI socket for the screen.

On the graphics card, there are four ports that look as if they might be USB ports but they are about twice the size. Some kind of HDMI adapter came with the computer and it plugs into the ports on the graphics card, but when I plug in the HDMI cable, there’s no screen display.

The screen is working fine because when I plug it back into the laptop, it works fine. So I’ll have to find a solution, and if not, I shall hope that the graphics card from the old computer will fit into this motherboard.

However, as you might expect, I have boxes, cables and computers all over the place and I can’t go to bed until I tidy them away somehow.

Tea tonight was chips, sausage and beans with cheese, followed by vegan cheesecake. Only a small tea tonight as I’m still off my food. It looks as if it’s going to be another period of semi-starvation right now.

Anyway, that’s enough of that. I’m going to tidy up and at some point, if I’m lucky, I might even be able to find some room on the bed for me.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the pain in my foot … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once told one of the doctors at dialysis about it.
"It hurts so much in several places, doctor" I said."What do you advise?"
"Well" he replied. "My advice is to stop going to those places."

Friday 6th March 2026 – GUESS WHO …

… has been a busy boy today?

It’s difficult to understand where all of this energy has come from, but it was certainly there today and I hope that it will still be there for the weekend too and I can keep it up.

Last night, though, it didn’t look as if it would be a good day today. Once more ♬ I dillied and dallied and dallied and dillied, lost my way and don’t know where to roam ♬ and ended up being quite a bit later than intended going to bed. If I’d rushed, I could have been in bed by 22:30, I suppose, but it was in fact 23:30 when I crawled under the covers.

At least, I went to sleep straight away, which was one thing, but it was rather sad to awaken at 05:00. I could have done with much more than that. A good few minutes were spent deciding whether I should leave the bed at that point but instead, I curled up in the warmth of my quilt and went, surprisingly, back to sleep.

But not for long. I don’t know what time I awoke after that, but the alarm went off a short time afterwards and I tried my best to raise myself from the Dead.

Eventually, I was able to stagger into the bathroom for a good scrub-up and then I went into the kitchen for my medication and hot drink. And DISASTER – no fresh lemons. I had to make do with processed lemon juice, and it’s not the same.

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

There was a huge meeting of some kind of Gamblers Anonymous thing where people were invited to comment on how they stopped gambling. There was one guy who gave a lengthy speech about how he’d managed to stop gambling etc. and everyone applauded him. He was taken as being one of the shining examples of this meeting. Later on, while he was with his friends, they all went off somewhere and left him on his own. It was then that someone else came round to bring him a prize that he’d won when he’d been gambling. It was a huge prize too, and there was no possibility of hiding it. The people who had brought him this cheque decided that they’d take him out for a meal, and they ended up presenting formally this cheque to him in a restaurant where his friends were actually dining at the time. That proved, of course, to be something that was most embarrassing to everyone. Of course, his friends were really angry at having supported him at this Gamblers Anonymous thing. They went over to the table later where he was sitting, or he went over to theirs and they had a most acrimonious argument or discussion about this whole affair.

This was a strange dream. It’s another one that seems to have come out of nowhere, with nothing that has happened in recent times provoking anything like this.

I’d met a girl walking around Granville and I began to chat to her. She was part of a large family whose father had died and they had been evicted from their house where they were living and were basically on the road looking for somewhere to stay. They were heading in the Rennes direction. It turned out that the previous night they’d spent in a hotel just down the road from where I was living, one of these cheap village hotel-type of things. I felt really disappointed that I hadn’t seen her then. After we’d had a really good chat and she had wandered off, I went down to look at the street. I thought that what was this big hotel had been all boarded up and padlocked. There was no possible way in to it, so I didn’t say or do very much. I realised then that she was actually at the house next door because I could see the tables being laid out for breakfast the following morning, so I loitered around there but she didn’t turn up, and neither did any of her family, so I wondered if they had moved on. At some point a little later on, I met her again. She said that they were leaving and were going towards Rennes. I was spending some time chatting to her. She had this very large family and one of the children was underneath my bed, stuffing stuffed toys up underneath the mattress, so I had to chase her away. I was chatting to this girl when this old, strange minibus turned up. She basically said “goodbye” to me, and I felt terribly disappointed that she was leaving. They all crowded into this ancient minibus, one of those that had the luggage underneath the floor, and they set off. I decided that what I would do would be to try to hitchhike down towards Rennes to see if I could catch up with her at some point. So I set off and arrived at Rennes. I was on an airfield when this strange aeroplane came in to land. It nearly knocked down an officer, who made some kind of gesticulation at it, but I thought that he shouldn’t have been walking across the landing strip anyway. I wondered if this was the family arriving, so I ran towards the aeroplane, but it had crash-landed, sticking up with the tail in the air, landing on its nose. There was some kind of riot going on around this ‘plane and the police were called to quell it, which upset the commander of the base because he didn’t think that it was appropriate for the police to intervene in some kind of military affair. But there was a description of the airfield somewhere, and somewhere, people were talking about the different places where the aeroplanes were parked etc, but I didn’t take much notice because I was hoping that this was the ‘plane in which the family had arrived and everyone in it, especially her, were all OK.

And I was going to say that this was another one too, but meeting a girl in the street and staying in one of these shabby village-type of hotels of the kind that you would have found in every French village fifty years ago but are now long-gone reminds me of my hitchhiking trip around Finisterre in the mid-seventies when, in Morlaix, I was staying in such a place, I did meet a girl while I was walking around the town, and we did have quite a chat.

Furthermore, the streets in which this dream took place resembled very much some of the streets in the Quartier St Paul of Granville around which we drove yesterday looking for one of our passengers.

The rest of the dream would seem to be pretty meaningless, especially the part about the airfield and the part about the little girl shoving stuffed toys up underneath my mattress.

Isabelle the Nurse wandered in as usual and organised my feet and legs. She had a little more time today so we had a little chat. She seems to think that I ought to buy some garden furniture so that I can sit outside. And I would, believe me, if only I could lift myself out of it afterwards.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

The period of the Frankish occupation of Greece is coming to an end, due to the marauding Turks, and we’ve been discussing the Battle of Nicopolis when a reinforcing army coming from the West to relieve the besieged Franks in Greece was annihilated by a Turkish army, ending all hopes of salvation for the besieged. The End Is Nigh, right enough.

Back in here, I had things to do as usual, one of which was to send off an order to Leclerc because I’m now about to run out of soya milk. One thing that I really did fancy was a butternut squash because I wanted to make some butternut squash soup for next week, but it had gone out of stock since yesterday, which was a disappointment.

When I’d finished what I needed to do, I attacked the next radio programme and now, all of the notes are written, ready for dictation.

There were several interruptions too. I went to set the washing machine off with a load of clothes. I’m no longer able to hang the clothes up on the airer so I’ve arranged with my cleaner that I’ll do the washing on Friday lunchtime and she’ll hang it up when she comes in on Friday afternoon.

After she’d hung up the washing and done some cleaning, we emptied the top shelf in the wardrobe in here. There were plenty of bags, backpacks and so on, but we also found a large plastic box full of tools, screws and all kinds of similar stuff. I’d been looking for some of this stuff since the day that I first moved in here when I needed to erect the shipping radar aerial but couldn’t find it anywhere. So that’s another box to sort out this weekend.

Rosemary called me for a chat today too. Only a brief one – a mere fifty or so minutes – and, as usual, we didn’t discuss anything of any importance.

With what time was left, I began to prepare the following radio programme. This one will fall on the anniversary of the Day of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and you’ve no idea how many songs I have in my library that include the word “child” or “children” in the title. I could make a really good radio programme with all of those.

Tea tonight was baked beans with cheese, chips and vegan sausage, followed by the last of the apricot halves and some more of my delicious home-made ice cream. Tomorrow, I can start back on my birthday cake and finish it off during the coming week.

But right now, ordinarily I would be going to bed but onto the playlist has come a COLOSSEUM CONCERT FROM 1971. This is a really strange concert, because every time it comes round on the playlist, something dramatic happens. It appeared on the playlist on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR in 2018 when I met The Vanilla Queen, and also in 2019 when Castor suddenly appeared on the scene, and we know how dramatic those encounters were. I was never the same again.

There are also links on the sidebar for AMAZON UK, AMAZON USA and, since the recent “troubles”, AMAZON CANADA for the use of my numerous Canadian visitors. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I am extremely grateful when someone uses them to make a purchase

But before I go and listen to the rest of Colosseum, seeing as we have been talking about Gamblers Anonymous … "well, one of us has" – ed … there’s a similar society for people who suffer from alcoholic issues.
"Is that called ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’?" asked one of my friends.
"Knowing the people whom I’ve met and known" I told her "it’s more like ‘Alcoholics Unanimous’."

Friday 27th February 2026 – WHAT A DAY …

… I’ve had today. And if I did crash out for fifteen minutes towards the end of the afternoon, I can only put it down to the after-effects of some very hard work.

Last night was quite hard work too. Once again, despite my best efforts, I didn’t seem to make much progress, and by the time that I’d finished everything and was ready for bed, it was 23:30 and how I wished that it was an hour earlier.

Once in bed, though, I was asleep quite quickly, and there I stayed until the alarm went off at 06:29. Surprisingly, when I awoke, I found myself in exactly the same position as I had been when I went to sleep, so it’s not a surprise at all that I remember nothing at all. I can’t have moved a muscle all the way through the night.

When the second alarm went off at 06:33, I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet on the floor – which is what counts for “beating the second alarm” – but that’s a long way short of saying that I was actually up and about.

The first thing that I have to do is to wait for the room to stop spinning around before I can even think about standing up. That can sometimes take a good few minutes.

Eventually, though, I found my way into the bathroom, and after a good scrub up, I went into the kitchen for my hot drink and medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone, but to my dismay, there was nothing at all on there. It really must have been a deep, sound sleep. I had to find a few other things to do to fill in the time before the nurse arrived.

But as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … not having any dreams to which to listen is extremely disappointing. It’s just about the only excitement that I have these days.

The nurse didn’t stay long today. He was being harassed by one of his boys about some clothes to wear at a paintball rally in the firing range and so needed to return to sort them out. That meant that I could start my new book, THE DEBATABLE TERRITORY WHERE GEOLOGY AND ARCHAEOLOGY MEET by A Lodwick.

This is a book that re-examines the excavation reports of Calleva Atrebates of 1909 and the collection of new evidence for the flora of the site in the prehistoric age.

Although I’m not much of a botanist (regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the only reason I passed my Biology ‘O’ levels was thanks to the helpful drawings on the walls of the Gentleman’s Rest Rooms at Crewe Bus Station) this is a fascinating book, as it talks about the expansion of the British crop pool during the Iron Age and early Roman period and suggests that many seeds common in the modern era were actually introduced into England by the Romans.

After breakfast, I started a new project. I went to make vegan ice cream.

In the fridge, I’d found some banana-flavoured milk and some coconut cream. So with some maple syrup, a pinch of salt, vanilla essence and a pile of chopped chocolate from the slab of cooking chocolate that I found, I went to work, whisking all of the ingredients together.

While that was doing, and in between going into the kitchen every hour to give the ice cream a stir to stop it freezing in one solid mass, I was editing the next lot of dictaphone notes.

There was an interruption when my cleaner came round to do her stuff. And a discussion. Apparently, Mme la Presidente of the Residents’ Association had had the engineers round to install her fibre optic system, but the engineers had declined, for the same reason that they had declined at my place.

Perhaps they’ll all believe me now.

Anyway, it led to a flurry of e-mails, and I couldn’t resist throwing my weight in.

However, I’m appalled by all of this. The conduit for the telephone, through which they’ll be passing the fibre cables to the apartments, has been blocked for over twenty years, and everyone knew this.

Nevertheless, the estate agency that manages the site gave everyone the go-ahead to apply for the installation. I was the first to apply. I had the engineers round who couldn’t install the cable because the telephone conduit is blocked, so on the 21st January I wrote to the Estate Agency to tell them.

Since then, nothing has happened. The estate agency hasn’t sent out a letter to people telling them of the problems, and as a result, there have been countless hours of technicians’ time lost, countless frustrating hours of residents’ time lost and the fabric of the building, a listed building of the “Patrimoine de France”, has been irreparably damaged by the two impatient residents who had technicians drill through the listed walls of the building.

Later on, a couple more technicians turned up to see me, to make a written report as I had asked. However, there was no need. I grabbed hold of another resident and Mme la Presidente and sent them off to speak to the technicians.

And surprise! Surprise! The technicians said exactly the same thing as those this morning and those who came to see me twice before.

Perhaps they’ll all believe me now.

After everyone left, Mme la Presidente came in for a chat and a piece of ginger cake, and once she’d left, I finished off editing the notes, assembling the radio programme, choosing the joining track and writing the notes for it.

This week, I’ve only actually written one programme instead of the two that I’ve been trying to do, but I’ve prepared two others, and tomorrow, I’ll try to prepare a third from the notes that I’ve dictated in the past. Then next week, I’ll go back to writing two more.

The stress and effort today were such that I crashed out in my chair as soon as I’d finished, and so tea was late. Beans with vegan cheese, chips and sausage followed by ginger cake and homemade ice cream. It’s not much of a success, texture-wise, but the taste is terrific, and I’ll make some more like that if my faithful cleaner can find some more of that banana-flavoured soya milk. The ground chocolate really added something special to it.

And that made me start thinking … "which is dangerous" – ed … I have some of these fruit cordials here of the type that you use to make fizzy drinks. How about a coconut milk-based one with chocolate and a stream of mint cordial running through it? There must be plenty of mileage with stuff like that, if the cordial won’t curdle the milk.

But that’s tomorrow. Right now I’m off to bed, to sleep, perchance, to dream. Or, as Lee Jackson put it, YOU WOULD GIVE A SMALL FORTUNE TO GET BACK IN YOUR DREAMS

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about ice cream … "well, one of us has" – ed … at the ice cream van at the park where I used to take Roxanne on Sundays, an old man hobbled over, obviously in great difficulty walking.
"An ice cream cone please," he asked
"Certainly, sir" replied the vendor. "Crushed nuts?"
"No" replied the old man. "I always walk like this."

Friday 20th February 2026 – THAT WAS A …

… better day today and I actually managed to accomplish a fair amount of work, which makes a change from how things have been just recently.

Mind you, it didn’t look much like it last night. Once again, things dragged and dragged and it was quite late once more, probably not much before 23:30, when I finally crawled into bed

And wasn’t I glad to be in bed too? As I said yesterday, I had fallen asleep quite embarrassingly and at that point I was all ready to throw in the towel and go straight to bed. However, I did manage to persevere (only just) and finish what needed to be finished.

Once in bed, it took me a few minutes to go to sleep. However, I awoke at some point, totally disorientated, and it took me a while to settle down and even longer to go back to sleep. And there I was when the alarm went off.

Although I was totally dead to the World, I did manage somehow to put my feet on the floor and sit upright before the second alarm went off. Eventually, I could stagger off into the bathroom to sort myself out and have a good scrub up.

After my hot drink and medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There was something going on in some kind of big house, and there were several families living there, including ours. In one of the families was a young girl and I was quite taken by her so I began to chat her up. Although she didn’t actually encourage me, she didn’t tell me to clear off or anything like that so I just tried to be nice and tried to talk to her. After a while, she ended up opening up and we had quite a nice little chat. And then my mother turned up, and as usual, she joined in the conversation to such an extent that I could see the tears beginning in this girl’s eyes and she walked out of the room. I waited for ten seconds or so and then went to follow her. And there, sitting by a wall, one of the interior walls, was a cat. Somehow, I knew that this cat was this girl so I crouched down and began to talk to it, to tell the cat that she mustn’t take any notice of that kind of thing. Then I picked it up and began to stroke it.

Now, this was rather a strange dream. But it seems to be par for the course when you consider how things were a couple of years ago, when I had these recurring dreams when I was just on the point of Getting The Girl after a lot of hard work, when someone from my family would come along and heave a spanner into the works. I hope that it isn’t going to become a recurring theme

But as for her turning into a cat, I must admit that I would love a cat here in this apartment but I’m not sure how feasible it’s going to be. For a start, I can’t travel anywhere to collect one.

There was also a dream about a woman who was separated from her husband. She had two children. Her husband wanted to come round to see her so my friend decided that he would hide in this woman’s apartment in case anything went wrong. For some reason or other, I was there too. We arranged one or two things that we arranged quite easily what was going on by putting things in various positions. One of the things was a hidden camera that was in a plastic bag on a shelf. When he came, he asked what was in it, but we’d had the forethought to put a couple of tins of pop in there, so she simply produced a tin of pop. The discussion went on, and then he began to attack her. I had a flask of really hot coffee for some reason, so I remember opening the top of this thermos flask and throwing the coffee all over him, which stopped him in his tracks. Then my friend came along from where he was hiding and dealt with the rest

This is a dream that seems to have come out of nothing, but why do I have the feeling that my friend was hiding in the thermos flask that I was holding? That’s a thought that I can’t push out of my mind

There was also some kind of vague memory about a dream concerning AFKAP – the Andrew Formerly Known As Prince – but I didn’t dictate anything and I can’t recall it now.

Obviously, this wasn’t a very arresting dream.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up, earlier than she did yesterday. She told me that it was her birthday yesterday too so I wished her a happy birthday. It’s a shame that she hadn’t told me beforehand.

After she left, I made my breakfast and read some more of MAIDEN CASTLE EXCAVATIONS AND FIELD SURVEY 1985-6 by Niall Sharples.

We’ve now moved on to discuss bronze and iron working at the hillfort and this is a really interesting section.

He tells us that "Although sheet-bronze working appears to be at present a preserve of the hillfort, some aspects of metallurgy are shared with others, and, having considered the evidence of ironworking slag in the Iron Age deposits at the hillfort, "it is likely that at least 200 kg of iron artefacts were manufactured at Maiden Castle in the Late Iron Age".

This leads his team to the opinion that "it is clear that the ironworking site in the eastern gateway is one of the most important artefact production centres discovered in southern England."

Now, this makes me wonder if we are approaching some kind of idea of the purpose of hillforts in the Bronze and Iron Ages.

It has often been suggested that rather than being a defensive site against an enemy, a hillfort is the home of some kind of elite, with the peasants living outside it. Could it be that maybe the “elite” were the “elite” because they monopolised the important aspects of bronze and, later, iron fabrication, and the purpose of the defences was to protect the industrial site from being pillaged by envious locals who had no alternative but to obtain the sheet bronze and iron from the “elite” in the hillfort in order to fabricate their necessary articles?

Of course, the defences are somewhat extreme and the number of man-hours needed to build them must have been astonishing, and also the area covered by a hillfort is rather large. And as yet, it’s doubtful if the bronze and iron have been shown to have been fabricated in sufficient quantity in the hillfort to justify such a theory. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting idea that is worth exploring.

Back in here, I had a few things to do and then I pushed on with the radio programme on which I’d been working.

Taking rather a leisurely ramble, it was eventually finished, with plenty of time to go. And so afterwards, I edited the notes that I had dictated for the joining track for an earlier programme and ended up assembling that. So that’s now complete and ready to go.

There had been an interruption too. One of the net curtains here in the bedroom fell down. They are held up by hooks on these sticky pads, and the stickiness wears off after a while. However, we had bought some net curtain rails that came with some metal screw-in hooks, so my cleaner and I went round the apartment and replaced all the sticky pads with the screw-in hooks. I hope that they don’t fall out.

Tea tonight was chips, falafel and baked beans with cheese. French baked beans, which I don’t like at all. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I shall have to bite the bullet and order a tray of British baked beans online.

That was followed by tinned apricots and vegan sorbet, followed by a dismantling of the freezer when a pack of food fell down behind the bottom drawer.

So now, I’m off to bed, ready for a lazy weekend now that everything that I need to do has been done. However, I suppose that I’ll find plenty of things to do, as usual.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about cats … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once had to take Tuppence, my old black cat, to the vets because she was not very well.
The vet picked her up and gave her a really good examination. After ten minutes, he said "I’m afraid that I’ll have to put your cat down."
"Good grief!" I exclaimed. "Is she that ill?"
"Oh no" he replied. "She’s just so flaming heavy."

Friday 13th February 2026 – DID YOU KICK …

… any black cats today? Or break any mirrors? Or walk underneath any ladders? Today was, of course, one of those days when you don’t need to do any of that to bring bad luck upon yourself.

Take my faithful cleaner, for example. She walked out of the building this afternoon at 14:30 only to be drenched in a torrential downpour that began ten seconds later.

My bad luck today … "so far – the night is still young" – ed … has been with this perishing fibre optic cable installation, but more of this anon. Let’s start with last night.

And last night was bad enough. I forget how many times I fell asleep trying to write my notes and doing everything else that I needed to do before going to bed. As a result, what should have been a reasonable time for going to bed turned into a rather late one, much to my regret.

Once in bed, though, I was asleep quite quickly and that’s all that I remember until the alarm went off at 06:29. And what a time I had trying to haul myself out of bed. It’s definitely becoming more difficult as each day goes on.

Anyway, I was eventually in the bathroom having a good scrub and a change of clothes too because I’m going to run the washing machine later.

In the kitchen, I made my hot drink and had my medication and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was round at a woman’s house. She had a son in his twenties who was one of these manic depressive types. This woman and I were talking, and she pulled out from underneath her pillow a box which had a collection of gold coins. She called her son up and he came, and she showed him this box. She asked “what do you think of these?”. He looked at them and he was completely disinterested, and in the end, he went away. His mother said “I told him this morning that I was going to have someone round to knock a few nails into the foot of your bed but he’s obviously not made the connection and he doesn’t know what these are” so we carried on talking. A while later on, the son came back in. He told us a story that he’d met a famous actress. It was while he was canoeing on a lake with a friend. The wind rose up, and these two girls in this canoe were feeling very uneasy and wanted to be helped, so he and his friend helped them. He’d been on a date with this woman once or twice but this affair was in the throes of petering out because he wasn’t willing to take things any further. His mother tried to encourage him but it didn’t really work and he couldn’t seem to generate a spark of enthusiasm. Later still, we were in her room again and her son was there. He was a guitarist, quite well-known with a recording contract who’d opened one of these fundraising events for charity along with a few other big names. Again, he wasn’t particularly enthusiastic but he suddenly realised what this box contained and he’d come back up to talk about it again and to talk about the money that he has that he hardly ever spends. His mother gave him a huge box of chocolates but instead of eating it, he just took a few and said that he didn’t want the rest so the woman ate a few and gave me one or two too. We were then going to tidy up around her bedroom so I pulled a pile of paperwork down from a shelf on the top. It was all her university coursework with exams, assignments and everything. I noticed that a few were in different names so I asked her about them. She replied that her mother was a typist and her mother had intended to type all of them out so that they were neat and proper but unfortunately, her mother hadn’t survived.

In the past, I actually knew a guy like that, but there would have been no chance of him dating a famous actress, and neither would he have been a guitarist. And any romance of his would have petered out sooner rather than later.

The pile of university paperwork is extremely familiar from the past, and the gold coins are presumably something from the various excavations described in the books that I’ve been reading.

A few of us had in the past been talking about buying an island. While I was chatting to someone on the internet, it turned out that he owned an island off the coast of Newfoundland and was interested in selling it. I found out some more about the island and said that I wanted to talk to my solicitors, to which he agreed. However, I realised that I was in no health whatsoever to do that kind of project, but I would still have a share in it, simply as a foothold if I were able to recover, which would be nice. So I started to tidy up everything away and found some things that I’d bought from the shops, a loaf of bread, some carrots, things like that, and began to reorganise everything. I’d realised that I’d paid over the odds for carrots because there was a flood on the market and the price was coming down, but everyone is keeping the price high for the moment. I also sent a letter to my friend in Newport telling him about this island and expecting a few comments coming back. I’d finally sorted out everything that I needed, and then I had to change. I had some scruffy clothes lying around and also some much more tidy, casual wear that I could wear while I was getting dirty rather than my best clothes. I put that on and then had a look at the map to see where I would have to go to drop off some of these things, but the map wasn’t very clear and there was a printer’s error down the centre of the page that confused everything so I had to look very closely to find out where all of this was going to go. Then I could go out to the van ready to load it up, put some petrol in and do these deliveries.

Buying an island is actually something that several of us have been considering. It would have been a good plan fifteen or twenty years ago, but not today, unfortunately.

The story about the carrots seems to relate to a news item that I read the other day about potatoes. It’s been such a bumper year for potatoes that Europe is awash in them and prices have tumbled dramatically.

There’s also an ongoing project involving my friend from Newport too.

Did I mention that a group of us had decided to go to Edinburgh for a wander around? … "no, you didn’t" – ed … I’d been doing something with my Welsh, like cutting and pasting a few exercises which in part talked about Edinburgh. Then someone decided that we’d go. We all met up, and I had a big picture under my arm. It was something that I’d seen in a shop that I thought would be really nice in my apartment so I was carrying that around. Everyone was interested in the fact that it was quite heavy and we’d probably planned a whole day out, and this was going to be something of an obstacle but we carried on and we were walking around a couple of shops, looking at different things when the alarm went off. There was something in the middle of this dream about meeting up with cars and because there were so many of us, we’d have to use two cars but we could park them up at the top end of the city somewhere

Edinburgh was a city that I used to visit often with Shearings. Shearings had an arrangement with National Express Coaches in the past and occasionally ran a duplicate service overnight from Manchester to Edinburgh via Motherwell, Glasgow, Airdrie and Falkirk, with the return the following afternoon. If I didn’t have anything better to do, I would volunteer for it and I went up there quite a lot. It was a lovely run through the night.

It beats me, though, where the cars and the picture fit in with this, but the shop reminds me of the dream a couple of weeks ago … "22nd January" – ed … about being in Montreal.

The nurse was early today. He had a lot of work to do, so he said, so he couldn’t hang around. That suited me fine, because I had things to do too. For a start, I went and made breakfast and began to read my new book.

It’s called MAIDEN CASTLE EXCAVATIONS AND FIELD SURVEY 1985-6 by Niall Sharples. It related to further archaeological excavations that were carried out at Maiden Castle, to re-examine and develop the work by Mortimer Wheeler.

They aren’t just excavating the hill fort but are also casting their net much wider into the surrounding farmland and chalk downs.

And after reading the first few pages, I regretted having criticised Wheeler’s rambling preamble because it has nothing on the preamble in this book.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve commented in the past … "and on many occasions too" – ed … about the criticism that Wheeler received about his claims of battles and war cemeteries taking place at Maiden Castle, with people denying that there are traces of battle up there.

However, one of the comments in Sharp’s book is that, examining the sites of arrowheads discovered up on the chalk downs, "the distribution of arrowheads in the present survey can be seen to cluster around Maiden Castle", which you might expect if the place had come under heavy attack.

One interesting fact about this distribution that, surprisingly, he seems to have missed is that there’s another concentration of arrowheads around a ford over a river down in the valley. He seems to think that this was the site of a settlement and they may have been lost by the inhabitants over a period of several centuries.

However, it also seems to be possible that any attacking army coming from the north would try to cross the river wherever there was a ford and any group of defenders would do their best to stop them crossing. Hence the concentration or arrowheads.

That was something that I would have loved to pursue but I was interrupted, and before I’d finished my breakfast too. The man from the fibre optic turned up to have a go at installing the cable. And just like the first one, he was confounded, and at exactly the same point too.

The person at the estate agency who manages the building had given me her ‘phone number to ring if there is a problem, so we rang it. And as you might expect, there was no reply. Consequently, I telephoned the President of the residents’ committee and let her speak to the technician.

This question of fibre optics isn’t my problem. It’s a problem relating to the infrastructure of the building and that’s a problem for the residents’ committee and the estate agency to resolve. And it’s a problem that has been known for years, apparently, and no-one has lifted a finger to resolve it in all this time.

Over this past couple of weeks, I’ve wasted enough of my time, enough of the technicians’ time and enough of my internet supplier’s time. It’s long past the time that the people who have stood for election and the people who are being paid to manage it should have taken it in charge so they had better make a start before I become completely fed up.

This is the kind of thing that I’ve seen happen so many times before, and I know exactly how it’s going to end up because it all follows the same pattern. This time, however, I’m too ill to take on the running of the show myself, as I have done in similar circumstances in the past, but I’m not too ill to deliver a few hefty kicks into the nether regions of a few people and propel them into action one way or another.

So still seething after yet another good rant, I came back in here once everyone had gone, and begun to work on the next radio programme. And by the time I was ready to knock off, I’d finished it – at least, to the point where I’d written all of the notes. The next time that I have an early start, I’ll dictate them.

There were a couple of interruptions to my day, though. Firstly, I filled the washing machine with all of the clothes that were lying about, and set the machine off to wash them. Secondly, my cleaner came along to do her stuff and she brought with me another neighbour who wanted to know how things went. And had I still had a spleen, I would have vented it at that moment, but I managed to restrain myself.

Once the neighbour had gone, my cleaner hang out the washing. That’s another job that I can no longer do unfortunately.

Tea tonight was chips, sausage and baked beans with cheese and black pepper. It was the tin of French baked beans that I’d bought last week, and I do have to say that they aren’t a patch on British baked beans. They use these large beans that I tried but didn’t like.

The only answer then is that if no-one is going to come over from the UK in the near future to visit me, I shall have to bite the bullet and buy some online.

But that’s something about which to worry another time because I’m going to bed ready for tomorrow; And for once, I’ve already finished all of the work that I needed to do so I can have a weekend catching up on the arrears.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Friday the 13th and good and bad luck … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of a club that I visited once, many years ago, and there was a bingo game going on.
The caller was on the stage calling out the numbers
"clickety-click, sixty-six"
"two fat ladies, eighty-eight"
"the Brighton line, fifty-nine"
"unlucky for some …"
"HOUSE!" shouted a voice from the assembled multitudes.
"House called on ‘unlucky for some, number twelve’" said the caller
"What do you mean?" roared the voice. "’Unlucky for some’ is number thirteen! Twelve’s not unlucky!"
"It is for you, madam."

Friday 6th February 2026 – I HAVE THROWN …

… away another huge pile of food today. And that included the leftover Christmas cake and mince pies.

And what a tragedy that was – all of my Christmas stuff consigned to the bin. It just shows you how ill I’ve been over the last couple of months that I couldn’t bring myself to eat all that much of it.

But last night, as I said, I was beginning to feel better. For the first time for a long, long while, I’d managed to eat a proper-sized meal, and that is definitely progress.

So back in here afterwards, I wrote up my notes, although I’m still not as well as all that because I managed to fall asleep a couple of times while doing them. In the end, by the time that I’d finished everything that needed doing, it was about 23:45 when I finally crawled into bed. And it didn’t take long to go to sleep either.

But here’s a thing.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall me saying that I was convinced that it was the after-effects of the dialysis, particularly the following morning, that were causing me so many problems with my sleep, leading me to wake up at some silly time of the morning. However, last night I slept all the way through to the alarm at 06:29 without moving a muscle.

So much for that idea.

Anyway, another desperate struggle to leave the bed, followed by a stagger into the bathroom and then into the kitchen for the 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 with a woman and her daughter – it might have been Laurence and Roxanne. We’d been for a drive somewhere, just aimlessly driving around the suburbs of this city. I remember that we came to some traffic lights and I was waiting for them to change, but I was busy talking. Suddenly, the car behind me beeped and overtook me. I could see that the lights had changed and I hadn’t noticed. We turned into the main road, and there was a side street on the left that I had never ever been down. We went down there and came to this really magnificent parking area. It had kind of wooden pavilions, lock-up garages and trees, these monkey-puzzle tree things, and there was a lake. The lake was enormous and there were quite a few people sitting around there enjoying it. Whoever I was with, she knew the owners of this lake. They were extremely rich people and this was part of their property, although people were allowed to go on it. We had some flasks, so we went to sit down by the water’s edge. One thing that we noticed was that there were several families. One of them was a small child, younger than the girl who was with us. That child was standing there, arms folded, in a real sulk. We wondered what could possibly have been wrong with this child, given the absolutely beautiful view that we were having.

The road, the traffic lights and the parking place with the lake are so familiar to me but I just can’t put a name to them. I’m wondering if it might have been when I was at FORT NIAGARA IN OCTOBER 2010.

As for the child sulking, I’m not going to embarrass someone who might (or might not) be reading these pages by reminding them of an incident at Pegwell Bay in Kent in 1966 or 1967.

Isabelle the Nurse was rather later than usual this morning, and she didn’t hang around very long. But she was in an exceptionally good mood today which was quite surprising.

After she left, I could make breakfast and read some more of Mortimer Wheeler’s MAIDEN CASTLE .

Now that he’s left his rambling preamble behind, his notes of his excavations are much more orderly, although not on a par with those of James Curle. It’s still rather difficult to follow his timeline for the occupation of the site.

But, going off on a tangent as I usually do, I ended up reading a critique of Wheeler’s work. He hasn’t yet reached the cemetery, as far as I have read, but someone, in his critique, has posted to the effect that Wheeler has posted “some kind of fanciful description” of a battle that took place at the site between the natives and the Romans but says that there is “no evidence to support it”.

Leaving aside completely the fact that “absence of evidence” is a totally different concept than “evidence of absence”, our critic notes that Wheeler uncovered some kind of ad hoc cemetery with twenty-odd skeletons in it, many with wounds that can only have come from battle, one of whom has a Roman ballista arrow embedded in his spinal column, but notes that “there is no evidence that they actually died there”.

Now, I’ve commented before on Wheeler’s flights of fancy, but even so, nothing in this World is going to convince me that these people with battle wounds died elsewhere and that some people hauled them all the way up to the camp from wherever it was that they died, simply to cast them any old how into a series of hastily-dug, poorly prepared graves.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … office, I had a few things to do this morning and then I had to prepare my shopping order for LeClerc as I’m running low on a few things. After that, I finished off the radio notes for the programme that I’d started earlier in the week.

Having done that, I then began to research the next programme. That took some doing too, but having found out what I needed to do, I had to track down some music, and that wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

When my cleaner turned up, I had to knock off because we needed to make an inventory of the apartment and work out what we need the joiner to do when he comes back here for a day’s work. There’s quite a lot to do, and I’m sure that anyone who has visited this apartment can think of a few other things.

As my cleaner was leaving, she bumped into the delivery man bringing the food, twenty minutes early. And so the next hour or so was spent putting away all of the food and cleaning, dicing and blanching a pile of carrots ready for freezing. Only a kilo today rather than two because there are some left, although not enough to last until the next order.

While I was blanching, the ‘phone rang, so while the carrots were draining, I checked to see who had called.

It was Rosemary, who wanted a “little chat”, so there I was for one hour and nine minutes having this “little chat” with her. And once more, we talked about nothing much at all. But she was shocked to learn that my bill from the supermarket for three weeks’ worth of food was just €69:00. But it’s true, give or take the odd few mushrooms for the Sunday pizza that my faithful cleaner brings me.

There was time afterwards to finish selecting the music, reformatting, remixing and re-editing it and then pairing and segueing it. I even managed to write some of the notes for it.

Tea tonight was chips, sausage and beans with a pile of cheese melted into it, followed by some of the fruitcake from before Christmas with a soya dessert. It was a fair-sized meal, not the largest that I’ve had, but I still managed to eat it all, which, I suppose, is progress.

While I was messing around in the fridge, I threw out a pile of stuff that was long past its sell-by date and, as I said earlier, all of the uneaten Christmas stuff followed it into the bin. It really is a disaster, but it can’t be helped. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s not like me to throw away food. I really must have been ill over that period.

After finishing the washing-up, I put the water in which the carrots had been blanched into a glass bottle and put it in the fridge to use to make my leek and potato soup next week (I bought some fresh leeks today) and then put the carrots into the freezer to freeze for future use.

And now that I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed, late as usual. I wonder if I’ll sleep as deeply as I did last night, or was that just a one-off? We shall see.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about those skeletons in that cemetery at Maiden Castle… "well, one of us has" – ed … Tessa Wheeler asked her husband Mortimer "fancy letting themselves be killed like that. Why didn’t they fight back at all?"
"Well, darling" said Mortimer "people like that just don’t have the guts to do it."

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: baked beans

Friday 21st August 2026 – TODAY HAS BEEN …

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Friday 31st July 2026 – I HAVE HAD …

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