… day this has been today. I really don’t know where to start.
Probably, I should start at the very beginning – a very good place to start. And the beginning was actually last night when I finally managed to crawl into bed. And that was at 23:17, much later than I’d intended. I really don’t know where the time goes in the evening.
Once in bed, I managed to go to sleep quite quickly, and there I stayed until all of … errr … 03:20 when I awoke. That’s about four hours of continuous sleep, and that’s the longest continuous sleep that I’ve had for a while. However, it’s still not long enough.
From then on, I was, as usual, drifting in and out of sleep until the alarm finally went off at 06:29 as usual. And then we had the habitual struggle to rise to my feet, which took much longer than it ought.
After I’d sorted myself out in the bathroom, including having a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon at dialysis, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out what had happened during the night.
And the short answer was “nothing”. I needn’t have bothered. That was only one of the many disappointments today.
There were plenty of other things that needed doing so I sorted them out until the nurse came. He didn’t have much to say for himself today, so once he’d sorted out my legs and feet, he cleared off quite rapidly and I could make breakfast.
While I was eating, I was reading some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.
Today, we’ve finished the Anglo-Saxon architecture, and, having made a whistle-stop tour of early mediaeval Germany, we’re now looking at post-Roman France. This seems to be one of his favourite periods, waxing lyrical about how the Gauls, the Burgundians and the people in the Midi in the Holy Roman Empire managed to improve on what had gone before.
Mind you, he’s managed to avoid controversy so far, quite possibly because I happen to agree with him to a certain degree.
However, breakfast did not pass without incident. Yesterday evening, I’d dropped a glass jar and had shards of glass all over the kitchen. This morning, a bottle of water fell out of the fridge, and I also managed to knock my orange juice all over the kitchen worktop. Still, start as you mean to go on, I suppose.
Back in here, I had a few things to do and then I started work on the next radio programme. However, round about 10:30, I could feel a wave of fatigue coming all over me, and although I tried valiantly to fight it off, I eventually …
ZZZZZZZZ
The next thing that I remember was my faithful cleaner shaking me awake. It was 12:18 and I’d been in a really deep sleep forever. It took me a while to come to my senses, and then I went into the dining area to have my anaesthetic applied.
The sleep hadn’t been wasted, though.
This presumably relates to a famous Beatles tour back in the early days when Ringo Starr was hospitalised with tonsilitis and there was a huge dispute between the other three about whether to cancel the tour or to find a stand-in drummer. Eventually, they found a drummer called Jimmy Nicol who knew the Beatles’ repertoire, and he flew out with them to start the tour until Starr became available again.
The taxi was a couple of minutes late today so he didn’t catch me in flagrante delicto. Today, I was the only passenger so we actually arrived at the dialysis centre early. 13:41 was on my weight ticket.
So 13:41 I was weighed, and no-one was more disappointed than me to find that I had to wait until 14:43 to be connected and up and running. And once more, it was going to be another mammoth session with the machine running practically flat out.
Once I was off, I was left pretty much alone during the session – the blood pressure only dropped once into the “critical” range. I could work pretty much without interruption, except that Stranraer was running a replay of a match that they had played against Alloa Athletic a year ago that I had missed.
When it was time to unplug me, I had to wait fifteen minutes or so for them to start, but at least the driver was waiting to bring me home when I was finally ready.
The roads were much clearer than Saturday last week, so I was home by 18:50, where my cleaner was waiting to help me into the apartment. She settled me down in a chair in the kitchen and passed me a disgusting drink before leaving.
Once she’d gone, I could make tea. A burger on a bap with salad and a baked potato, followed by two slices of fruit bread; It was all delicious and I surprised myself by almost going to cut a third slice of bread. Is my appetite returning?
After I’d finished and done the washing-up, I staggered into the bedroom and sat down at the computer. However, I hadn’t even started my notes before I was hit with an impossible wave of fatigue.
An hour or so later, after I’d awoken, I just rolled over into bed and went to sleep. The notes can wait until tomorrow.
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about dropping things … "well, one of us has" – ed … a drunk man staggered out of a pub to go home when suddenly he dropped his keys.
After half an hour, several other people leaving the pub joined in the search, but no-one had any luck.
Eventually, one of the searchers came over to him and asked "Are you sure that you dropped them around here?"
"Oh no" he replied. "It was over there but it’s too dark to see anything there."
