… how long I can keep this all going. Throughout the last few months I’ve had plenty of moments when I wished that I could just close the book, lie down and go to sleep. And believe me, I had one or two of those during the day today
It’s not anything physical – well, it is, my physical condition is deteriorating rapidly, but what I mean is that there’s no pain or suffering or anything like that, at least, not yet. It’s the effect that it’s all having on my mental well-being that’s dragging me down
Doing almost anything is a complicated affair, trying to work out how I’m going to do whatever it is that I have to do while manipulating … "PERSONipulating" – ed … a pair of crutches. My whole life has become one of simple logistics.
“Simple” was the word, nothing complicated last night about going to bed. I was in bed by 23:30 so with the alarm set for 08:00 for a Sunday, for once I was set to have something of a decent lie-in.
And so it goes without saying that I was wide awake at 07:00, up and about at 07:30 and when the alarm did go off at 08:00 I was already washed, dressed and at the computer.
The nurse came round at about 08:30 to sort out my legs. She showed me her photos from last weekend at Lyon and some of them were really good.
While she was here and in a receptive mood I told her (in polite, sensitive terms of course) that I felt that the two nurses ought to be keeping a closer watch on how my condition deteriorates, and how disappointed I was that they let me get into such an awful state a couple of weeks ago.
She explained that all of that should have shown up in the various blood tests that I’d had and had the hospital or my GP looked at them closely they would have seen for themselves without the need to look at me, just how badly things were going.
There is naturally some truth in this, but nevertheless I suspect that there’s also a certain amount of buck-passing there too.
After she left I had breakfast, and then I had letters to write.
Two of the letters were painful. One was to tell my tenant in the apartment downstairs that I won’t be renewing the lease when it expires next Spring – or, at least, instruct the letting agent to do so.
Then I can move in. On the ground floor too so I can move around outside easier. I’ll smash out the bath and have a walk-in shower, and there will be a “kitty corner” for a new sub-tenant who will no doubt pay her rent in dead seagulls.
What could possibly go wrong?
As for the second, I’d rather not talk about that but someone who follows these pages will know about it.
What completed the morning was going away with the fairies for an hour or two. In fact Rosemary awoke me because she wanted a chat.
She’s still gallivanting around Italy and wanted to tell me what a good time she’s been having. As a result, we had another one of our mega-chats that goes on for ever.
She was also telling me that she had, in a moment of reckless abandon, volunteered for midwife duties despite knowing nothing whatsoever about babies, children, giving birth and all of that.
We joked about that famous line in THE WILD BUNCH when William Holden says "What I don’t know about, I sure as hell am gonna learn".
A baby however is more complicated than a machine gun, that’s for sure.
While we’re on the subject of babies … "well, one of us is" – ed … for the last couple of days I’ve had an overwhelming desire for baked beans on toast. I’m certain that I’m not pregnant; nevertheless the feeling has been growing stronger and stronger.
Having travelled the World, qt least, the Northern hemisphere part of it, I can say without fear of contradiction that no-one, no-one at all anywhere in the World that I have visited, makes baked beans like the Brits. Not even the “British recipe” ones in Maritime Canada.
When Liz and Terry were here last year or whenever it was they brought a tray of beans and I baked a loaf on Friday so at lunchtime I satiated my desire. Mind you, nice though as it was, I could sit down and eat it all over again.
This afternoon I transcribed the notes on the dictaphone. I was working for a hardware place last night. It was one of these places that had a really structured format – people entered at the bottom of their grades and slowly worked their way up their grades, all the way through and out to the top. There were several young guys who had started a while back who were near the bottom but I’d been watching their progress a little and was quite pleased that they seemed to be very apt and very capable, very willing to push hard and progress so I encouraged them. Then a girl joined. She seemed to think that she was entitled to everything because she had a superior education. She made a few comments to these people which I thought was poor but I let them pass. One day there was a question of someone having to stay overnight so we agreed that we’d all do it. Someone said that they’d have to bring their child in. They brought in their child and tucked it up. And when their part of the night finished we tucked them up in the bed with the child and carried on working. Towards the morning the child awoke – awoke with a start – and was so worried about where it was, it had school and it was panicking around so we tried our best to reassure it but it was panicking. Suddenly its portable alarm went off, which added to the confusion. But the girl whom I mentioned who was having a few things to say about the situation so I reminded her that we were all trying to do a very difficult job etc. I happened to mention these boys and said that she needn’t think that she was the only game in town because they were pushing on. They were quite capable too so she shouldn’t be surprised if one day she found herself cornered out by these guys. She replied “oh, you’ve noticed too, have you?” and mentioned one of them, how good he was when he’d had his medication, which was something of a dig but again I let it pass. I could see that this girl was going to need some extremely careful handling. If she’s not careful she’ll end up running this department, running my job, I’ll be nowhere. I wasn’t convinced that her personality was the correct personality to make any progress in this company, being so pushy and aggressive when these other people are being so smooth and calm.
And we’ve all worked with people like that, who come into a business and think that they can run it from Day One by upsetting everyone and everything
This female officer arrived at our unit – tall and thin, dark hair and with something to prove, so she thought, and was determined to make her mark on us but we were old sweats at this. We knew full well that it didn’t work like that but we were prepared to give her a little rope. It concerned some kind of little battle that was noisy and violent but didn’t last long. She was wondering why she hadn’t been invited to take part. We explained that it was all over so quickly that there wasn’t really time to go in for an organised formation. We just had to defend our position ad lib which we did. By the time that she arrived the firefight was over. So she carried on talking but let it go, but made it quite clear that she wanted to go on our next operation no matter what it was and where it was to so we made a note. The next night we were asked to go on an armed reconnaissance in force into the trenches as far as a small village a mile or so away where we had to pin everyone down, including the chief of the defending army while our Army somewhere else did something different. We worked out all of our plans and arranged that this woman would be called at the very last minute and be expected to travel in the state in which she appeared because she didn’t look the type. She looked the type who needed an hour’s preparation for a photograph. We were all preparing and were on the point of calling her when she suddenly appeared and wanted to know why she hadn’t been called. I replied that we hadn’t been mustered to set off yet, it was our sole preparation time and we were preparing. She wondered why she hadn’t been asked to prepare. I explained that at the last meeting that we’d had, she explained to us that she was always ready so we assumed that if she said that she was always ready then she was always ready and needed no preparation. She could step into the car at the very last minute and come with us. She was not satisfied with any of this explanation but we made sure that it was our version that was written on the combat reports so that Head Office could actually see it
And here we go again with a similar situation, people coming in and not having the patience to look around and see how the system works and how everything functions. After all, it was functioning quite well before they arrived.
Later on we had to go to Disney to meet those people from yesterday By the time everyone had finished walking on the beach and preparing, we were about an hour late at the meeting point. But we turned up all the same and had to fight our way down the queues. There was a sign that read “entry today 60p” so we prepared 60p but when we reached the machine it was 89p. We all thought that that was highly illegal so we fumed and moaned but sorted out some cash instead, paid and went in, picking up our free tickets and vouchers. The coffee came in huge, enormous mugs but it was freezing cold . I don’t know where they’d had this coffee stored. The food was typical “Tricatel” stuff slopped on your plates. It seemed that no-one in my group was worried about meeting these two other people from yesterday. It seemed that there was no sense of time or sense of urgency. All one guy was doing was busy changing the label he’d put round his baby daughter’s face mark so he wouldn’t hit him in the face. No-one seemed to care. I thought that this was a very strange way to be running any kind of business – someone should have found these people’s phone numbers and phoned them but it was nothing to do with me. I let the other people make the arrangements and it was easy to be totally fouled up and what was worse was that no-one seemed to be bothered about it.
And which “people from yesterday”? This journey sounds like a typical cock-up organised in just the way that anything would be organised within our family. The importance of rendez-vous is “who, when and where” expressed briefly and succinctly , not this total anarchic chaos that seems to pervade just about everything and hoping for the best, something that never ever happens.
There was the question of the publication of a children’s book which had been done to a certain type of formula prepared by another Society. Halfway through the proceedings the other society had withdrawn its permission. Now it was taking on a whole new meaning as there had to be a whole new redesign of the work that had been done. Somehow was involved in this but I had a feeling that things were not going correctly, that one of our employees for reasons best known to himself was dragging his heels with this and making life difficult so we tried to chivvy him along but it didn’t seem to work. It was causing all kinds of problems. The document checks weren’t working out very well, standard phrases had to be re-written etc. In the end I finished a pile of work, put it in a container and posted it in one of these aerial vacuum systems somewhere. It fed into the circuit just as someone went into there to reach for a document. The whole thing of my work fell onto his shoulder. I thought to myself “he won’t do that again in a hurry, will he? He’ll know what to expect the next time that he’ll try to fetch something from the vacuum system”.
And there’s always one of those in every organisation too, someone who slows down other people’s creative spirit because he never thought of the idea first so he doesn’t want it to work at any price.
But having complained the other day about the poor quality of recent dreams, last night made up for a lot of it. All I need now is Castor, Zero and TOTGA to come and cheer me up.
It might have been possible for them to come this afternoon because I was away with the fairies yet again for a couple of hours, but no such luck.
But that’s what’s depressing me – this continual crashing out during the day. Rosemary thinks that I’ll feel much better once the dialysis begins. Quite frankly, I couldn’t feel much worse.
There was time to complete another radio programme before tea tonight. I edited some text that I’d dictated last night before going to bed, and then assembled a programme completely.
Grahame says that he’s surprised that I’m still bashing out the radio programmes, and so am I. There’s bound to be a point where my eyesight will fail completely or else I’ll be spending too much time asleep, but we’re not quite there yet.
Tea was of course a vegan pizza. I’d taken a lump of dough out of the freezer after lunch and when it had thawed I rolled it out and assembled it.
On that note I’ll clear off and go for an early night. But before I go I’ll leave you with another one of my heroes.
Not the Irish politician Sir Boyle Roche this time, but the baseball coach Laurence Peter “Yogi” Berra
When asked how he wanted his pizza sliced, whether in 6 slices or 8 slices, he replied
"You better slice it in six. I don’t think that I could manage eight slices."
