Tag Archives: blood pressure

Monday 17th November 2025 – WE HAVE HAD …

… a showdown at dialysis this afternoon.

This outrageous fatigue is continuing to lay me flat out, so I decided to take the bull by the horns.

The chef de service was on duty today so I seized the opportunity. I explained my week to him – dialysis Monday, Chemotherapy Tuesday, Chemotherapy Wednesday, dialysis Thursday, Centre de Ré-education Friday and dialysis Saturday.

"When am I supposed to have any time for myself?" I asked. "As if I don’t have anything else to do." And so we had a lengthy discussion. Whether anything comes of it or not, I really don’t know. Probably not, because so far, I have the impression that I am talking to a wall.

It’s no wonder, with a programme like that, that I am thoroughly exhausted. If I could concentrate on my notes and finish them at a reasonable hour, that would be a start. But sometimes I’m too tired to concentrate.

Like last night, for example. It should have been an early night but what with one thing and another … "and until you make a start, you have no idea how many other things there are" – ed … by the time I’d done everything that I needed to do, it was 23:10 when I finally crawled into bed.

So much for my aim of being in bed by 22:30.

Once I’d managed to fall asleep, I was flat out until all of … errr … 04:10, and at one point I was seriously thinking of leaving the bed. However, I must have gone back to sleep because the next thing that I remember was the alarm going off at 06:29.

As seems to be the case these days, it took me an age to raise myself from the Dead and head into the bathroom. And then it was a very leisurely start to the day while I made my ginger, honey and lemon drink with which to take my medicine.

When I’d finished that, I cut the loaf into two and put one half in the freezer. And then I cut up the cake into squares and put them into an airtight container.

Isabelle the Nurse took me by surprise again, and I had to sit quietly … "if that’s possible" – ed … while she took my blood pressure.

Once she’d done that, she looked after my feet and legs, and then I made breakfast.

After breakfast, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. The Confederate Army had a kind of hospital where they put their. I was going there as part of the sick. One thing that I had noticed was that there seemed to be no sense of urgency in defending the fort, and no plan of what to do if the enemy were to attack. They didn’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to have everyone installed. The Union Army launched a campaign in that area and the hospital came under threat. However, it was the Union Army this time that prevaricated and seemed to waste every possible moment before launching an attack. Had it been a decisive attack quite quickly, it might have succeeded. The dream went on from there but unfortunately, I can’t remember it

What a shame that I can’t remember it. But it seems that I’m stuck in the American Civil War and I’ve no idea why. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that WE VISITED SEVERAL CIVIL WAR BATTLEFIELDS and we’ve been reading bits here and there, but I don’t know why it’s become so imprinted in my subconscious mind.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been reading AB-SA-RA-KA, LAND OF MASSACRE by Margaret Carrington, and at long last, after many years of searching, I’ve found that which I’ve been seeking.

In the back of the book is a large fold-out map of Wyoming and the Dakotas, with the various trails and campaigns marked out, along with the sites of the forts and the major battles.

It doesn’t fold out so well in a *.pdf but a series of judicious screen prints and a good graphics editing program has produced an impressive *.jpg image.

The book does not contain a list of all of the battles (she says that it would be far too long) which is a shame, and I’m sure that the map is not complete, but how I wish that I had had it with me on my various forays into “Indian Territory” over the past twenty-odd years.

Doing that took up most of the morning, and in the remaining time, I edited the radio notes that I’d dictated the other day.

When my faithful cleaner appeared, I went into the kitchen where she applied my anaesthetic. And then I waited for the taxi.

It was early today, so I was early arriving. I was connected up quite quickly, which is nice. However, I tried a couple of times to doze off to sleep, to catch up on the sleep that I’ve been missing, but everyone seemed to awaken me today. In the end, I gave it up.

Towards the end of the session, the chef de service came to see how I was. He gave me a brief explanation of what’s happening, and then he went to leave.

"That’s OK" I replied "if you don’t want to hear what I have to say."

That rather took him by surprise.

Now that I had his attention, I described my week to him. I also mentioned that despite having told the Centre de Ré-education that any more than three sessions per day is killing me, they gave me four last week, and there are four next Wednesday too.

What with the chemotherapy too, I feel as if I’m being kept alive simply for the purpose of being alive for the next medical appointment, and so on after that. There’s no quality of life any more, I have plenty of things that I would like to do that I cannot do because of all of this, and the way that my life is being run right now, I’ve become a slave to the medical system. It’s no surprise that, with all of this, I’m so tired.

His reply was "you are seriously ill and we are doing our best to keep you alive."

My reply was "but if this is the best that I can have, I simply don’t see the point. There’s no point in staying alive if all that they can promise me is another medical appointment the following day. We may as well call it a day, all of it."

Of course, he wasn’t happy. But then again, neither am I.

In the end, he put a note in my file to hand to the chemotherapy people tomorrow, and he says that he’ll send a message to the Centre de Ré-education. As for the dialysis clinic, he’ll chat with his colleagues and see if it might be possible to reduce my sessions to two per week.

Whether he does actually follow it up, and whether the hospital at Rennes and the Centre de Ré-education react remains to be seen, of course. But something needs to change because I can’t go much longer on like this.

And in case you think that I’m not being serious, I promise you that I am.

The taxi driver, the young chatty one, was waiting. He had another passenger with him and we had an interesting chat all the way home. We arrived early for once and after I’d gathered my wits … "with the amount of wits that he has left, I’m surprised that it takes him so long" – ed … I amended the running order of the tracks and re-paired and re-segued them, as I mentioned a week or so ago that I would…

Isabelle the Nurse came to take my blood pressure as usual. It was as high as 13.4 – that’s extreme hypertension for me and it shows just how worked up I’ve become over this affair. She had to wait ten minutes for me to calm down.

Tea tonight was mashed potatoes in butter with peans and a breaded spicy vegan burger followed by chocolate cake. And once more, I ate it all.

Now I’m off to bed, ready for chemotherapy tomorrow, I don’t think.

But seeing as we have been talking about the Wars in Indian Territory in the late Nineteenth Century … "well, one of us has" – ed … General Crook admitted to being impressed with the standard of horsemanship of the Lakota Sioux. He is on record, according to JG Bourke’s ON THE BORDER WITH CROOK as saying that they were "the finest light cavalry in the World"
When he finally met up with Chief Red Cloud, he asked him how they managed it.
"We’ve had plenty of practice riding horses over the last couple of Centuries."
"How come?" asked Crook.
"We had to" replied Red Cloud. "You try carrying a horse and see how far you can travel."

0

Friday 14th November 2025 – MY NEW OFFICE …

… chair is not as comfortable as I would have liked it to be.

Mind you, that’s not the end of the World, not at all. Firstly, if I can’t try it out before I buy it, I have to accept whatever I can find. And secondly, it’s far more comfortable than the previous one.

Anyway, my faithful cleaner and I had loads of fun late this afternoon assembling it and I’m now sitting in it, making the most of a seat that actually goes up and down as it’s supposed to do and a backrest that reclines into a comfortable sleeping position if ever I need it.

As you can gather, I’m feeling rather better this morning. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, sleep has always been my go-to cure for all evils.

Not that I had a good sleep last night, though. I was determined to push on and write up the notes for yesterday and the missing ones from the day before yesterday, before I went to bed, and although I managed it, it was not far off midnight by the time that I hit the sack.

And although I was asleep quite quickly, it lasted until all of … err … 05:10 when I awoke, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t go back to sleep.

In the end, round about 06:10, I gave up trying and had an early start to the day. Not that I was in any rush, though. I took my time having a good scrub up and taking my medication, including making another honey, ginger and lemon drink, and I wasn’t back in here any earlier than I might usually have been.

And so I transcribed the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night. I was in the tower block at work and had gone out for a quick coffee. However, there had been a couple of folk musicians playing in the café so I stayed around to listen for much longer than I really ought to have done. On the way back to my office, I found myself on the roof. It was November and it was a beautiful sunny day. There was a sandy kind of beach on the roof and you could see for miles, and the sea in the distance looked beautiful. I thought that I could bring my sandwiches up here at lunchtime to have a nice little relax. I looked back into the building through the fire escape. It seemed that the top floor stairwell had been completely redesigned over some kind of period and repainted. One of the senior officials who knew me was there, so I asked him when it had been done. He said that it had been done during the Luxembourg Presidency and made the building much easier to maintain and clean. I set off to walk down the stairs to my office but after about three or four floors, found myself on the ground floor. It was inside a little delicatessen type of place in the busy shopping street just outside. I wondered what had happened to all the intervening floors. I was being hours late back to work so I rushed to the lift and opened the doors, but there was a girl in it. I asked her “do you mind if I join you?”. She replied “yes, if you are going to do it today”. I asked her which floor she required but she gave a very non-committal answer so I set the dial to go to my floor and the lift set off. But there was the sound of a girl panting very loudly. It wasn’t the girl who was with me so I asked her if she knew what was happening. She replied that it was obviously some girl in a hurry so I asked “where is she?”. She replied “ohh, she’s around somewhere” and that made things even more confusing.

The tower block relates to a building in which I once worked for a short while in Manchester, although it didn’t have a beach on the roof and you couldn’t see the sea from there. There was no delicatessen on the ground floor either.

However, being horribly late back from a tea break or a lunch brings back a few memories of a very troubled time and I’m surprised that it has risen its ugly head once more after all these years.

And later on, I was at someone else’s house and my niece was there with one of her daughters and her daughter’s friend. They were messing around with an AI app and had managed to make the television in this room talk to them. They were discussing things like going out. It was a Sunday afternoon and fairly late and I would have expected them to go out much earlier because it was such a nice day. But they were talking to this app about going out, and in the end, one of them asked about when they could have a taxi. The app replied that he could be there in about ten minutes. My niece said “well, I want to get washed and get ready and everything” so I said “well, just go out as you are”. So they arranged to have this car come to pick them up via this AI app and they dashed upstairs to get ready. I went to look out of the window and there were crowds of people walking up and down the street, kids running around, and there was a huge dog, an enormous thing. Then there was a slightly smaller dog, all white like a polar bear, and there was a strange kind of deer that was also white. It had the two hind legs much shorter than the front legs so it was walking on a lead with someone in a kind of strange fashion. As I looked, a brown Cortina MkIII pulled up in the street at the bottom of the hill and went to reverse into someone’s drive. However, he hit a trailer that was parked on the pavement. I thought that if he’s the taxi, he’s going to be in a lot of trouble. But he parked in the drive and walked off. So then I went up with the television and found my mobile ‘phone, which was an old type of Nokia. The back of it didn’t seem to fit on the front. I noticed that I’d written some notes on the back about where all the data was stored on which memory stick. I didn’t remember doing that in the past, so I sat down and began to play around with this television and this AI map. However, it was long after ten minutes, the taxi hadn’t arrived and the girls still hadn’t come downstairs from getting ready.

The view from this house corresponds with a view that I had from a house that I used to visit in Neston on the Wirral fifty-odd years ago, although my niece never ever visited it. Talking Ai apps are all the rage these days, although I’m doing my best to avoid them. I prefer text that I can cut, paste and save rather than rely on my fading memory.

The animals were quite curious too and I don’t know what to make of them.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up and sorted out my legs. And then, in accordance with the prescription that I received yesterday, she took my blood pressure.

"If the blood pressure is less than 8.5" said the prescription. "telephone the dialysis clinic immediately."

And so she telephoned immediately. "Mr Hall’s blood pressure is 7.9!"

"Oh" came the reply. "That’s normal for him!"

After she left, I made breakfast and for once, I managed to eat everything as well as drink my coffee. And how I have missed a good mug of coffee!

Back in here, there was the uploading of a pile of little miscellaneous programs, some of which I’ve been using for over twenty years and which are difficult to find these days. Luckily, I’ve been saving all the installation programs but even so, there are one or two of the full executable programs that are no longer on line and in one case, the link to the executable program has been hi-jacked so I had to end up cleaning out all of the mess that it had created.

After a disgusting drink break, I made myself ready for the Centre de Ré-education and the taxi came to pick me up.

Having told them that three is the maximum amount of sessions that I feel able to do in a day, they had changed my programme to give me four this afternoon. And while it’s back to three next week, the week after, they have given me four again. I may as well talk to myself, I suppose.

The first session was sitting at something like a rowing machine, using my leg muscles (such as they are) to move some weights. A whole thirty minutes of it too and I couldn’t stand up afterwards. They had to lift me from the machine.

Secondly, I was with my physiotherapist who had me lying on my side giving me breathing exercises. She also suggested some exercises that I can do in bed, although I have my own ideas about those. That was when I realised that I was feeling better.

Thirdly, they strapped me to a machine that had me standing up. They kept on asking me every five minutes if I was still OK. I’ve no idea why, because it didn’t seem like any effort for me and I was enjoying the view out of the window.

Finally, the occupational therapist wanted to see me about hints and tips for the shower. However, that was really a waste of half an hour because he had no suggestions to make. And when he was talking about non-slip rubber mats, he was showing me examples at €150:00 or thereabouts. We’re doing the same job with a worn-out bath towel that one of my cleaner’s other clients was throwing away.

Back here, my cleaner helped me in and then we attacked the new chair. It was a complex piece of machinery to assemble but it seems to work really well. As I said earlier, it’s not as comfortable as I would have liked, but it’s definitely an improvement.

Tea was air-fried chips with salad and those breaded quorn nuggets that I like. And, regardless of there being only very small portions, for once I managed to eat everything. And it’s been a long time since that has happened.

So now I’m off to bed. With a repaired (I hope) washing machine, I shall be clothes-washing in the morning and then off to dialysis to see what delights they have in store for me there.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the girl in the lift … "well, one of us has" – ed … I did once meet a girl in a lift
"Do you mind if I join you?" I asked.
"I suppose so" she replied. "But honestly, I had no idea that I was coming apart."

0

Saturday 30th August 2025 (… continued …) – SO STARTING AGAIN …

… after the adventures reported in the previous entry, Saturday has not been a very good day for me, for a whole variety of reasons, and I’m glad that it’s over.

It started off with me still being at my desk working at some ridiculous time like 00:40, and long after that too. But you know how it is … "No. How is it?" – ed … Once you start something, it’s very difficult to stop it, and trying to download about 50GB of Artificial Intelligence data software is not the work of five minutes.

That was something that was going on and on and on, and I didn’t want to stop it and start again. I was working on the theory that if I’m really tired during the day, I can always have a good sleep at dialysis in the afternoon. In the end though, it was starting to become ridiculous so I simply switched off the screen, left the computer working away to itself and went to bed.

Despite the very late night, I was awake again a few minutes before the alarm went off but, as you might expect, it was something of a struggle to persuade myself to leave the bed and have a good wash, shave and clean up in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant … "if anyone from the dialysis centre finds this remark objectionable, my we ask why you have invaded Our Hero’s private life, in defiance of the Patients’ Charter, by hunting him down on the internet?" – ed…

After the medication, I ended up back in here, a good hour after having left the bed, and listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There was a Roman empress or the wife of a Roman emperor or the wife of a British governor who visited the office of one of the native tribes in England for some kind of interview, but things went so badly that the woman took out a dagger and slashed all of the horsehair-filled seats that were in the room, causing a lot of damage, so the tribal leaders tried to contact the Roman legions who would pay for the damage, but of course they wouldn’t and everything was left up in the air with a very bitter taste in the mouths of the British people and the tribe concerned.

Quite recently, I’ve been reading quite a lot about different Roman Emperors, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and there was also something going on in my mind yesterday about car seats. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that several years ago in Québec we went to visit the RIVIERE DES VASES which was where the eel grass, used to stuff car seats in the early days of motoring, was harvested and the discussion had turned round to horsehair seats in the UK

The nurse came in at his usual time today and caught me working at my desk, so he took my blood pressure here at my desk. He reckoned that it would be a much more accurate reading if I remained sitting here rather than standing up and going into the other room.

He sorted out my legs too, then after he left, I could make my breakfast and read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.

This morning, I didn’t go very far into the book because I went off on a tangent, following the trail of the Roman armies as they wandered peripatetically around what today is Scotland. There was also a little trail to follow about the collapse of the “Hen Gogledd” culture as the Romans pushed from the South and the Picts pushed down from the North, events recited in the Heroic Welsh ballad Y GODODIN.

After breakfast, I came back in here to see how the Artificial Intelligence downloads had gone. By the looks of things, everything was complete, but it’s going to take a good while to sort out. And after all of that, when everything is ready, I’ll probably find that I would have been much better off with Natural Stupidity because, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … Artificial Intelligence is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

However, having said that, it’s an old principle of computer programming, drummed into us when we were messing around with Machine Code at Night School in the mid-seventies, that the only equation in computing on which you can rely is GI = GO, which stands for “Garbage In” = “Garbage Out”, and it’s probably fair to say that … errr … “confusion” in a computer program is inevitably the fault of the person who has programmed it.

Once more, my faithful cleaner caught me unawares as she came to put the anaesthetic cream onto my arm, and she stayed for quite a while chatting. I’m not sure why I seem to be the “Flavour of the Month” right now. However, our chat was interrupted by the arrival of the taxi so we went outside to meet it.

Unusually, I was the only passenger in the car today, so I asked the driver about the lovely lady who usually accompanies me. However, he had no news of her, so we travelled alone.

For once, I was early arriving, but as usual, I was one of the last to be connected, which was a shame. And as I expected, for the first half-hour I was away with the fairies, although not in any fashion that would be of interest to the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine. When I came back into the Land of the Living, I didn’t really do all that much.

The doctor came to see me and I told her the story of the injections. She thought too that I’d be much better off going back to the old series of injections rather than this new one that had so upset my body.

Eventually, they came to unplug me after, for once, having had a full session of three and a half hours without a crisis of any kind. However, the woman in the next bed was not so lucky and they had to unplug her after an hour or so. When she’d recovered, she was whipped off to hospital for observation

Earlier on, I had asked one of the nurses if she knew why the lady who usually accompanies me on Thursdays and Saturdays was not present today. She had checked up during the course of the afternoon and while she was compressing me, she told me, to my deep shock, that she had died yesterday.

When I’d seen her on Thursday, I noticed that she didn’t seem to be herself, but to hear that she had died the following day was the last thing that I expected to hear.

On the way out, they weighed me as usual, and I am now the lightest that I have been for quite some considerable time. I can see that this is not going to end well, but I can’t think of what to do about it, with the lack of appetite and everything that I eat tasting heavily of salt since the chemotherapy began.

The taxi was waiting for me when I left, but there was another passenger who needed to be dropped off in Avranches, so what with all that had gone on today, I was far later arriving back home than I otherwise might have been, which was annoying. There was a rainstorm too that was rather annoying.

My faithful cleaner was waiting for me and she sorted me out quite quickly. She’d also brought two of the guitars downstairs, which was nice. The others will follow in due course.

After she had left, there was football on the internet. The game between Hwlffordd and Caernarfon had started half an hour ago but the advantage of being on the internet is that you can wind it back to the start.

Mind you, it wasn’t a very interesting match. For some reason, all of the liveliness and energy that had seen Caernarfon go to the top of the table and score a bagful of goals so far this season seemed to have disappeared and it was a very lethargic performance. Hwlffordd gave a workmanlike performance but didn’t set the game alight either.

A 1-1 draw was probably a fair result, and I have seen far, far better matches than this one. If Caernarfon wish to stay at the top of the table, they will have to play much better than this. However, perennial champions TNS dropped another two points with a tame draw down south at Barry Town and Penybont, who have shown some class and character over the last two or three seasons, were surprisingly beaten at home by Connah’s Quay Nomads.

At half-time, I paused the game and went to make some tea – pasta and veg with chick peas. And it was a big mistake because what with the nausea that I have been feeling these last few days, I ended up in some kind of severe difficulty. In the end, as soon as the football finished, I typed a terse note and went straight to bed.

Tomorrow is another day and we’ll see how we feel. My cure for everything at the moment is to go to bed and sleep it off.

But seeing as we have been talking about my poor fellow traveller … "well, one of us has" – ed … I told my faithful cleaner about her death. After all, she had met her a couple of times.
"How many of your fellow passengers have now passed away over the last year?" she asked.
"Three" I replied "and a fourth one now has to come by ambulance".
"You’ll do everything you possibly can to have a car to yourself, won’t you?" she said.

0

Friday 29th August 2025 – I HAD FORGOTTEN …

… all about the wind outside here.

When I lived on the first floor, I was at the back of the building and so my only encounters with the wind were on the rare occasions when I went outside the door – or couldn’t, because the wind was so strong that we couldn’t open the front door so I would have to go out of the back.

However, last night, I remembered all about it.

The wind had begun to rise as I was on my way home last night but I hadn’t really taken much notice. However, by the time I’d finished my notes and was preparing for bed, it was blowing quite hard, and then I realised that being in the front, overlooking the cliffs and the sea to the right, is not necessarily always a great advantage and that there are after all, some drawbacks.

But last night, I was so tired. I fell asleep a couple of times while I was writing my notes and no fewer than three times when I was … errr … contemplating the state of the nation. I was glad to make it into bed, when I fell asleep almost immediately.

And there I lay until all off … errr … 05:29. For once just recently, I awoke earlier than the alarm, and I was seriously contemplating raising myself from the Dead, but the next thing that I remember was the alarm going off at 06:29, so I must have gone back to sleep.

It was a real struggle yet again to find the energy and enthusiasm to leave the bed and sort myself out. Yet again, it was over an hour, all told, before I ended up back in here after the medication.

First thing was of course to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Last night, I was doing something with some kind of radio equipment, I can’t remember what, when a couple of my friends turned up. They weren’t going to stay for long so it was necessary to clear the sofa of everything so that they could sit down. One of them volunteered to put all of the clothes away even though there wasn’t room for them anywhere. In the end, they both managed to sit down. Later, after they had left, I had to look for the clothes again. They had been rolled up in bundles and put on the stairs, each bundle, and several had been put into other places. One had been hung inside a CD cupboard, with the CDs from the shelves in that particular column being merged into other shelves in columns elsewhere. I was thinking that that probably means that I have to sort all of these out into alphabetical order again.

That’s a task that I still have to do, because the records, CDs and DVDs seem to be in any old kind of disorder, and sticking the clothes back into places where they don’t belong is also something quite relevant at the moment.

Later on, I was on a Plaxton Elite coach, driving it, taking a load of English kids back to boarding school. When I went to join it, it was crammed full of children and I couldn’t understand at first what was happening. It turned out that these kids were all French refugees who had fled France during the invasion by the Germans in 1940 and were being taken to some kind of hostel. I was charged with distributing all the food around. That became extremely complicated as people were moving around, and I didn’t know who had had some food and who hadn’t. There were all these giant biscuit things that I was distributing. Every now and again someone would raise their hand and ask for some more food. If I had some, I would take them half of one of these biscuits. Earlier, I’d been talking to a couple of boys about how comfortable it is to be going back to school. When I met them on the bus at that moment, I asked them what they thought of it now but they didn’t say very much. There was a mass of clothing on one of the seats right by where these two boys were sitting. I asked them what it was and they replied that it was a little French girl who was asleep. In the end, this began to become more and more confusing as I was awaiting the signal to leave and handing out these biscuits. I thought that at one moment that these biscuits will run out and what am I going to do then?

It would be a good dream to be driving a Plaxton Elite in wartime, seeing as they weren’t introduced until about 1968. And once again, in a dream, I’m worrying about something that might never happen, and that seems to be a recurring theme these days.

The nurse came as usual, armed with his blood pressure tester, and once he had taken one of the measures of the three that he was supposed to take, his batteries went flat … "in the machine, not in him" – ed …

After he left, I could make breakfast and read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.

Once more, it’s hard to understand the thought patterns of our author, Montagu Sharpe. He’s spent several pages bewailing the loss of artefacts from the period, salvaged by all and sundry without any record being kept, yet on page 37 he tells us that when he spoke to the person who had discovered and uprooted the Ancient British stakes that guarded the ford across the Thames at Brentford, "He kindly gave me several specimens which I have since passed on to Museums and to interested persons.".

He goes on to add that "from the inner portions various articles as mementoes have been made".

A little earlier though, on page 32, he has a crisis of T Rice Holmesque proportions when examining some notes by JS Maitland on Caesar’s crossing of the Thames. He tells us that "Maitland, in his “History of London,” places Caesar’s passage of the Thames at Chelsea" and continues by saying "All that Maitland seems to have done in 1732 in support of his theory was to take a boat to sound the river for shallow places, and thirty yards west of Chelsea College found the “channel N.E. to S.W. was not more than 4 feet 7 inches deep.” ! ! He made no quest for the remains of the stakes which Caesar says lined both the bed and bank of the Thames, which have in great numbers been so found, guarding the great ford of the river at Brentford,"

That’s not what I would call a respectable academic criticism of Maitland’s theories.

After breakfast, I had a couple of ‘phone calls to make. The nurse is writing up his accounts for the end of the month and needs the prescription for the injection that he gave me on Monday. And so I telephoned the hospital at Paris. I tried on several occasions, but they didn’t answer the ‘phone, which is no good at all for an emergency helpline.

In the end, I e-mailed them, only to have it returned as my professor is on holiday. I had to resend it to his assistant.

But that gave me an idea. It was Monday when I had this new injection, and it was about Monday that my problems of nausea and dizziness began.

Accordingly, I rang the dialysis clinic, but once more, it took several attempts before I was able to speak to the doctor who saw me on Thursday. I explained to her that I’d had a new injection, and she confirmed that side effects of dizziness and nausea are quite common with this new injection.

My cleaner turned up early in the afternoon to do her stuff, and we had the nurse back at 16:00 to take the afternoon’s blood pressure, with new batteries this time.

After he left, the President of the Residents’ Committee came down to inspect the apartment. She loves it so I thanked her for giving me the tip about it going up for sale. Without her, I would never have managed to purchase it. She brought me a yellow tea towel, to match the walls, as a housewarming present. That was really nice of her to do so.

The rest of the day has been spent playing around with some Artificial Intelligence. So far, I’ve managed to run two Artificial Intelligence chatbots into endless loops, which goes to show, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that Artificial Intelligence is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

Something else that I’ve found is an Artificial Intelligence server that downloads to your own computer. Even as we speak, I’m having a play around with that and downloading it, to see whether I can program it to be more random than it actually seems to be. It takes about 50GB of space, so I’ll be here for ever doing that.

Tea tonight was vegan nuggets with salad and chips, and now I’m off to bed, long after midnight but I’ve been dealing with all kinds of things this evening that have run me up a variety of blind alleys. And I’ll have the howling gale outside to blow me to sleep.

But seeing as we have been talking about Artificial Intelligence … "well, one of us has" – ed … I remember an old Andy Capp cartoon that featured two men struggling unsuccessfully to move a large computer through a small door.
"No problem" said Andy Capp. "Just plug it in and let it work it out for itself."

0

Thursday 28th August 2025 – YET ANOTHER MORNING …

… when I slept right the way through until the alarm at 06:29. And once more, I had no end of a struggle to leave the bed prior to the alarm going off.

Last night wasn’t however as late as some have been just recently. I was actually, for once, in bed prior to midnight although it does have to be said that there can’t have been much in it.

Once in bed, I was asleep quite quickly and that’s all that I remember of anything until 06:29 when the alarm went off. It’s not very often that I sleep as soundly as that.

It took me an age to make myself ready this morning too. What with having a good wash, scrub up and shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, I went into the kitchen for my medication and didn’t come out again until 07:41 precisely. That was what I would call a “slow start”.

Yes, and “Emilie the Cute Consultant” … while I was waiting for my Doppler examination yesterday, with nothing better to do, I found a copy of the “Patients’ Charter” and read it. I do strange things like that every now and again.

Article 11 states that "a person who has been hospitalised has the right to express his observations on his treatment and on his reception." Consequently, if I have received an “over-generous” welcome from a member of staff, I shall say so, whether or not the doctor in charge of the service blows a gasket.

Even more importantly, Article 9 says that "every hospitalised person has the right to have his private life respected." It continues by saying that such a person "has the right to confidentiality respect of his …" communications.

Therefore, if the chef de service doesn’t like what I’m writing, I shall want to know why someone has been disrespecting my private life by hunting me down on the internet and reading my communications.

Frankly, I’m not in the least bothered about who tracks me down on the internet and who reads anything that I have written. But as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … if you have seen something that displeases you, no matter how you found it, there’s a “contact” button on the bottom right.

But if you are reading this and you aren’t supposed to, no matter what the reason, you only have yourself to blame.

Back in here, I listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. At some point during the night, I was at Aberystwyth watching Aberystwyth Town playing in the JD Cymru South League following their relegation from the Premier League. It was a completely new side with all their old favourites missing. It just wasn’t the same kind of team that it was before. Several of their former players who had left in the summer were there but seemed not to become involved or take any kind of side during anything that was going on. That was a disappointment again.

Amongst the players whom I recognised in the stand was Louis Bradford, Aberystwyth’s former centre-half, but also Alec Mudimu, someone who has no connection at all with Aberystwyth. He’s a Zimbabwe international defender who played in the JD Cymru League previously with Cefn Druids and after a spell playing in Eastern Europe, signed for Y Fflint the other day.

The nurse came at the usual time for a change today, and once more, he was full of jovial good humour. I really don’t know from where it’s coming, but I hope that he keeps it up. He’s a much more agreeable person when he’s in this kind of mood.

After he left, I made breakfast and read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.

Our author is still setting the scene but he’s now moved on to talk about hunting. And in the middle of his discourse, he stops to paint a very illuminating but fanciful account of a fictional hunt involving Cunobelinus and his “daughter” Helena, a personage just as fictitious as Montagu Sharpe’s description.

Sharpe talks about the wild "animals turned by the long line of bank and hedge now known as Grimm’s dyke, blindly rushing towards these outstretched leafy arms," of the hunting trap. And then he loses the plot completely as he talks about the "blast from a long bronze carnyx, the sportsmen scatter to their places, and with weapons ready".

Would anyone like to guess what might happen to a herd of wild animals if someone in their vicinity were to blow a note on a solid bronze anything?

Really, this kind of writing has no place in what is supposed to be a genuine and serious historical account.

Back in here, I had a few things to do but time caught up with me quite rapidly and my cleaner arrived to sort out my anaesthetic patches. After she’d finished, we had a very long chat and then she left me to await the taxi to take me to dialysis.

It was late coming this afternoon and the other passenger in the car with me had the air of being extremely unhappy. We were late arriving at Avranches and as you might expect, I was the last to be plugged in.

To make matters worse, having had the session interrupted on Monday, I had so much liquid to lose that I had to stay for four hours. And the internet was down all day too, which really put the tin hat on it.

Océane was looking after me today, which was nice. The first needle, I felt a sensation when she pierced the skin but that was all. As for the second, the one that gives me problems, I didn’t even realise that she’d injected me, so good was the puncture. She can do it again like that and I’ll be happy. And once she had finished, I crashed out for a whole forty-five minutes

The doctor came to see me at one point. They had had the report from the hospital. The implant is definitely faulty and they are discussing whether to repair it or replace it. That was not what I wanted to hear.

During the session, the blood pressure alarm kept sounding as my blood pressure dropped. With twenty minutes to go, it was down to just about eight so at that point, Océane stopped the session. She’s already seen me in a coma once and doesn’t want to see it again.

She raised the bottom of the bed to give my blood pressure the space to recover, and when my pressure was stable at 9.5 she uncoupled me. The doctor gave me a prescription for the nurse to monitor my blood pressure for the next couple of days.

The taxi driver was waiting for me, last out of the building as I was, and she brought me home. My faithful cleaner was awaiting me and what a relief it was to come back into my apartment without those wretched 25 steps.

After a good while to recover, I made tea – a leftover curry. And now I’m off to bed, exhausted once again. I don’t know what’s the matter with me these last few days.

But seeing as we have been talking about hunting … "well, one of us has" – ed … two guys are out hunting in the forests of Maine when they are attacked by a black bear. One of them escapes but the other one is badly mauled.
Eventually, the one who escapes goes back to his friend and sees the bloody mass on the floor.
Taking up his ‘phone, he ‘phones 911."My friend has just been badly mauled by a black bear. I think that he’s dead"
"Really?" asks the dispatcher. "Can you make sure?"
On the other end of the ‘phone, the dispatcher hears a “BANG”
"I’m really sure now" says the surviving hunter. "What do I do next?"

0

Thursday 10th July 2025 – I AM FED UP …

… of the dialysis centre and the je m’en foutiste of the doctor who always seems to be at the centre of any dispute that I may have.

Once more, we’ve “had words” and it wasn’t a very ideal situation. I’ve made my point but it will have made absolutely no difference at all.

In fact, it’s been a bad day all round. It started off badly by me being asleep yet again when the alarm went off. How many days is this? A far cry from the heady days when I was up and working at 04:30, things like that.

It wasn’t as if it had been an early night though. It was quite close to midnight when I finally crawled into bed, but once in bed, there I stayed without moving.

It was actually difficult to move because my right knee was covered in this heat treatment and I had an ice pack strapped to it too. “Kill or cure” is my motto for right now.

When the alarm went off, it took a while for me to gather my wits, which is a surprise seeing how few I have these days, and then I had an undignified stagger into the bathroom for a wash and scrub up in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon.

It was a very slow early morning in the kitchen sorting out my medication too. It seemed to take an age before I was back in here.

First task was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was with a football club that was preparing for a series of pre-season friendlies. The match that was coming up was against Manchester United and so everyone was quite nervous about how the score would unfold. However, when we took to the field we found that it was against another club and that the Manchester United game had already taken place. However, no-one could remember the result of that game. Then the whistle sounded for the kick-off but it wasn’t the whistle, it was the alarm sounding at 06:30.

There are so many pre-season friendlies going on right now that this could refer to just about anything, although it was interesting to see me having yet another bout of confusion.

The nurse turned up early again. I asked him if he could have a look at my knee so he gave it a cursory examination and reckons that it’s simply bruised rather than broken or chipped or anything. This heat treatment and ice pack is the way to go, he reckons.

After he left I made my breakfast and had to deal with a volcano in the microwave, because the surveillance of my porridge was interrupted by my faithful cleaner arriving to check on me, to see how I was.

After she left, I cleaned up the mess and sat down to eat breakfast while reading MY BOOK.

Today, we have been talking about the wealthy people whose donations to various charities enabled the poor of London to have a less mean existence. And when you see the amount of money donated by some people, you can see immediately, with the Margaret Thatcher "Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.", that modern-day society has collapsed, with the rich squirrelling away as much as they can in their offshore accounts.

Our author gives us a lovely example of how things were in the Sixteenth Century. There "were some small cottages … for some bed-ridden people … devout people … were accustomed oftentimes, especially on Fridays, weekly to walk that way purposely to bestow their alms."

What price that now?

Back in here, I read through my notes for the “Saturday Woodstock” programme, making a few corrections and additions ready to dictate the next time that I’m up early, whenever that might be. But the way things are going, it will be a while yet.

My cleaner turned up and fitted my anaesthetic patches, and after she left I came back in here to work. However, unbelievable as it may be, I dozed off.

The taxi awoke me and I staggered out into the lovely warm afternoon to drive down to Avranches. It was the chatty young female driver who took me so we had an interesting chat along the way.

At the centre, I was met with the bad news. Having insisted that I was losing weight and they denying it and insisting that these 200 grammes here, 300 grams there was correct, they performed another scan on me to determine my dry weight.

As I suspected, I have lost about three kilos just recently and I’m now officially below my preferred “inactive weight”. This also means that I had about four kilos of water to lose that they hadn’t extracted over the period that my weight was decreasing, and that means a stay of four hours.

All of the messing around meant that the procedure didn’t start until late either.

My blood pressure was horribly low so every fifteen minutes when the machine checked it, it sounded the alarm and the girls came running.

The je m’en foutiste doctor was there on duty so I complained to him. As usual, he didn’t seem to care so I expressed myself in somewhat … errr … forthright tones, but it made no difference.

While he was there, I also told him about my dizzy spells and the fall, but he didn’t seem to be too bothered either. He didn’t even examine me. He’s definitely in the wrong job.

The dietician came to see me too. They are all concerned about my loss of weight and in particular, the loss of protein. She was trying to persuade me to adopt a carnivorous diet, even though my body can’t digest animal fats and that I had a recurrence of my pancreas issues back in April.

These people really have no idea.

In the end, she told me to take as many as four disgusting drinks per day, and gave me several recipes to make it more palatable, including a recipe for a banana and orange milk shake, which totally threw me, seeing as about six months ago, she banned me from eating bananas and oranges because of the potassium.

The nurses came back and gave me some kind of electrogram test, although I don’t know why and neither did they.

During all of this, I was fighting off wave after wave of sleep but in the end I succumbed and poor Alexi had to awaken me to disconnect me.

Horribly late again, there was another passenger in the taxi and we had to drive miles through the Normandy countryside to drop him off, meaning that it was long after 19:30 when I returned home.

On the way in, I stuck my head inside the new apartment to see the work that the kitchen fitter had done, and it was so impressive. I can’t wait for him to come back and crack on.

My faithful cleaner has been busy too. She had been through my apartment here, tidying up and cleaning and it looks wonderful. Tomorrow, she’s going to blitz my bedroom so it all looks good for this photography session.

Tea was bangers and mash with vegetables. I don’t know why, but I had had a craving for them all-day. However, as is usual, they tasted much better in my imagination than they did in real life.

So now it’s bedtime, ready for a good day’s work tomorrow. There’s a lot to do and I can’t hang around. It won’t be done on its own.

But seeing as we have been talking about the je m’en foutiste doctor … "well, one of us has" – ed … during our chat, he told me "if you are really becoming fed up with being here for four hours, you can ask to be unplugged and then go home".

"If I could go home whenever I became fed up with dialysis" I retorted "I would never arrive at all"

0

Tuesday 2nd January 2024 – I DON’T KNOW …

… which one it is, but one of these new medicaments is having a strange effect on me.

It’s as if I’m drunk. My head is all light and airy and my co-ordination is gone. It’s quite a strange feeling really

There’s one of the ones that I take in the evening that is giving me these wonderful nocturnal voyages and whatever it is I’m not going to stop that one and miss out on a night of fun with Castor, Zero and TOTGA but the one that’s giving me this strange feeling, I’ll have to see about that.

When I was at the Centre de Re-education I mentioned it there to a couple of people and presumably it will pass to whichever doctor takes over my case now that Dr Sigaud has left.

There’s also the question of the Christmas pudding, as I mentioned the other day. Following my post the other day I had several suggestions as to what to do with it, some of which were physically impossible and that tells me more about my friends than it does about my pudding.

But I liked Sean’s suggestion best. “Why don’t you just eat it?” but he and a couple of other people suggested that I wrap it well and freeze it so, having had an extra helping this evening so it’s now down to half its size, I’ll probably try that. But the pudding was a perfect success and I was so pleased with it.

So this morning I was up as soon as the alarm went off, and I took my blood pressure. And something extremely embarrassing happened this morning. And I’m not going to say what happened so don’t bother to ask.

After the medication I came back in here to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I was in North America last night. I’d talked to my father that I was needing a new van. He said that he knew someone so I left it at that. I was upstairs with a friend of mine who was rather shy and timid and wouldn’t do anything unless he was pushed into it. He and I had a little chat. I understood that there was a girlfriend in the building in one of the floors below. We had to wait until these dancers either stopped or created a gap in their formation so that we could nip through. He went off to look at the girl. I went to the window to look at what was going on because my Canadian relative was running a garage and had all kinds of things in, like snowmobiles etc. He was expecting to buy a vehicle on a trailer – it might have been a small tractor or something similar, I can’t remember, so he was busy making room in his drive. But there were all vehicles parked outside. Suddenly someone nudged me and pointed to a queue of cars that were now being parked outside our house and next door’s house. At the end of the queue was a yellow transit series 1 so wondered if that was what my father meant. The driver exited and began to check the wheels and tyres, hitting them with a hammer etc. I was wondering about that. Then he must have come into the building because someone shouted that he was there. I quickly grabbed a few friends and made some chips. We had some cod in batter so we had cod and chips arranged and helping with this guy. We went down and met my friend and he joined us. I told him to go to telephone someone because we had a meeting arranged for this afternoon and it looked as if I was going to be unable to do it. He said “right-ho” and shot off. I thought “that’s not like him at all”. Anyway he reached the ground floor and we went over to the dance hall and began to talk to this guy. We were surrounded by a couple of young girls who were doing some dancing there. I was talking to the guy about the van. He gave me a price, which sounded quite realistic but I didn’t realise that this was his private vehicle which he only used in the winter for shovelling snow, and with a backplate on it, for towing other vehicles so I could understand the low mileage but I was worried about the treatment it had had as a towing vehicle and I wasn’t so sure about it now.

There was some dispute about the FA Cup. In the end the FA decided that they’d replay the previous round with all the clubs concerned still in it but they would give some kind of points adjustment from now on. Teams that were supposed to be really good would be given no points deduction and the lesser teams could be given as many as 12 on some kind of sliding scale. They decided that they’d play the previous round’s matches on this basis. The team for whom I played had a “minus 2” by the side of it. We went out to a game nut although we won it, it wasn’t enough to overcome the points deficit that they had. So I went back to work. People saw me come in and immediately asked about the result. I told them, and 1 or 2 people thought that it was funny as you might expect and 1 or 2 people were really seriously concerned

While I was transcribing I noticed that yesterday I was in Flagstaff, Arizona, and people were telling everyone else to be very careful about the town.

They aren’t joking either. John Bourke, the aide-de-camp of General Crook, was stationed there for a while as Crook and his army campaigned against the native Americans.

In his wonderful book ON THE BORDER WITH CROOK he describes several events and notes that "Man’s inhumanity to man is an awful thing".

It’s in Flagstaff that I had ONE OF THE STRANGEST MOMENTS OF MY LIFE, so strange and bizarre that I didn’t realise what was going on at the time. But I worked out what was going on quite quickly later on.

Anyway, this morning I came across a recording that I’d missed – a live football match featuring Caernarfon v Colwyn Bay. Of course, with no longer using social networks I don’t receive the updates and announcements that I used to.

But anyway, after years in the wilderness Colwyn Bay were unstoppable in the Cymru North division and were promoted to the Welsh Premier League this season.

However, as clubs like y FFlint, Airbus UK Broughton, Afan Lido and several others have found recently, the gulf between the second tier and the first tier is enormous, and Colwyn Bay, despite having made a few intelligent signings, are finding it tough going.

Caernarfon are renowned for having the best midfield in Wales and despite losing Noah Edwards and Rob Hughes in the summer, their replacements are even better

The defence has been rather fragile but the signing of Ben Maher and putting him alongside Dion Donohoe in the centre of defence has made them a much more formidable proposition.

Thy had no attack whatsoever last season but Jack Clarke from Chester and Adam Davies from Airbus UK Broughton, the power up front is impressive.

However there’s an injury and suspension crisis at the club right now and neither Donohoe and Maher were on the field.

The crisis has hit the goalkeepers too and between the posts was youth team keeper 16 year-old Hari Thomas. And when they have a “save on the Month” programme I’ll let you see the save that he made from Colwyn Bay midfielder Tom McCready. And if you can’t wait until the end of the month, go to 00:01:23:00 of THIS LINK.

Despite the injury and suspension problems there was really only one team in it but they made hard work of a 2-1 victory. I can’t understand why, with the signings that Caernarfon have made in the close season, why they are only 6th in the table. They should be doing much better than that.

After that, for the rest of the day while I’ve been here I’ve been dealing with the concerts that I’ve been sent from Shrewsbury, including one by Judy “I’ve Looked At Clouds” Collins – 82 years old and still able to rock a large crowd. Would you believe it?

Yes,
"So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way"
Except that it wasn’t clouds that got in my way

And
"Oh, but now old friends they’re acting strange
They shake their heads and say I’ve changed
Well something’s lost, but something’s gained
In living every day"
they are sentiments with which I can relate too.

However
"But now it’s just another show
And you leave ’em laughing when you go
And if you care, don’t let them know
Don’t give yourself away"
Doesn’t that bring back a few memories and regrets?

At midday I had a good wash and at 13:00 the taxi came for me to go to the Centre de Re-education. Two sessions today, one with the ergotherapist and the other with Severine on the couch.

While I was at it, I mentioned this problem with one of the medicaments and hopefully they’ll report it

There was some stuffing left over as well as the Christmas pudding, so I had a stuffed pepper today using the stuffing instead of the bulghour or quinoa that I usually use.

And do you know what? It actually worked and was delicious. Plenty left over for a taco roll tomorrow and a leftover curry on Thursday. I’m really doing well with my meals.

So now that I’ve finished my notes I’m going to bed. Tomorrow I’m at the Centre de Re-education almost all afternoon and there’s plenty of paperwork to do in the morning. I’ll be a busy bee for the next few days.

At least if keeps me out of mischief, so the story goes, But I can get into mischief regardless of any constraints. There has been years of experience.

0

Thursday 28th December 2023 – IN WHAT CAN ONLY …

… be described as a new, rather regrettable record, I was actually up and about, taking my medicine and preparing to start work at 03:20 this morning.

Feeling absolutely wretched and totally washed out, I was in bed early – at about 22:30. And I must have fallen into a deep sleep almost immediately because there was something on the dictaphone with a timestamp of not much later.

But then there were all kinds of strange things happening during the night and I ended up awakening at about 02:15. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t go back to sleep after that and in the end gave it up as a bad job.

Firstly, there was a strange entry on the dictaphone that I have absolutely no recollection of dictating. “All that seemed to be missing from last night’s adventures was a visit from TOTGA but we’ll just have to make do without that” was what I recorded.

And that was early on too. The one that I’d had almost as soon as I’d gone to bed went “we started off with a very long complicated and involved dream that I can’t remember now. It all seems to have disappeared from my mind but at one point there was a young girl in Nantwich waiting for a load of other girls for the local dance hall to open so that they could all go in. This would be in the early 60s when beehive hair and all of that was in fashion. Some older man came and began to talk to her, to chat her up. Another girl in the queue accosted the man and told him what she thought of him, and generally made him feel uncomfortable until he left. That girl was actually a very young Marilyn Munroe who had come to Nantwich for some kind or other of show promotion but was standing in the queue at the dance hall just like any other young girl of that particular age and behaviour at that particular time. There was nothing special about her at all” which has absolutely nothing whatever with what came after it.

However, I do have a vague kind of ethereal feeling that at some point during the night not only Zero but also Castor came to see me. And if that’s the case I’m surprised that I didn’t dictate it. Maybe it’s my subconscious blocking them out for reasons that I can only speculate, or else it’s simply that I don’t want to share my experiences with anyone else. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, with coming from a large family where nothing was ever my own, I don’t “do” sharing if it’s something nice like one of Liz’s vegan cakes, and I can’t think of anything very much nicer than having Zero and Castor around.

Zero as we know drifts in and out of my nocturnal rambles, doing her own thing and going her own way, what around here they call son bonhomme de chemin but as for Castor, I haven’t seen her in the flesh since that morning in early September 2019 when she turned her back on me and walked to her ‘plane to Ottawa on that windswept airstrip at the Coppermine River, just a short walk from where in 1771 Samuel Hearne had stood helpless and horrified as his Dene guides fell on and butchered an Inuit hunting party.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it puzzled and bewildered me for quite a while as to why she left me as she did. And it wasn’t until I had to say “goodbye” to someone in similar circumstances a year or two ago that I realised that sometimes, goodbyes have to be done like that.

Castor has been back during the night a few times since then, but not for quite a while. If indeed it really was she (and Zero) last night and I missed it, I’ll be helpless and horrified too.

However, it was what happened next that was the killer.

There was another dance taking place at Wistaston. There was a group of kids and I was going but I was going to buy a big motorbike and hopefully turn up on it to arrive there. Then I had a think about first of all, it wouldn’t be registered, then it won’t be taxed. And where would I leave it because there would be no burglar alarm or anti-theft device fitted on it. Much as I wanted to have it and take it there it would cause quite a few problems. I was listening to a couple of bikers talking. One was actually knitting while he was talking. he was talking about his travels out in the USA as a road racer around a lot of circuits in California. They were talking about his bike, how it would still pass an MoT in the UK after that. Their conversation was extremely interesting. They wanted to know about the amount of Marshall Aid that would be applicable to importing over something that they’ve had in the USA but I wasn’t able to give any help. This question of this big motorbike was something eating away at me – how was I going to bring it to this dance with all of the problems that I had to face? Many of them were insurmountable because they required a lot of input from a lot of other people in a short space of time.

“Another dance” indeed because there had been a dance at the Wistaston Memorial Hall on the Saturday night of August Bank Holiday weekend in 1973 and every moment of it is etched onto my brain as if it was yesterday.

At that time I was sharing an apartment with a guy who played synthesiser in a rock band and his group had been invited to play at the Windsor Free Festival on the Sunday.

Everyone was stony broke in those days and they couldn’t afford the fuel so they arranged the dance where they would play, as a way of raising some petrol money.

My friend from the Wirral had been to school with one of the musicians so I invited him along and he turned up on his motorbike, a 350cc Triumph.

It was at that dance that he met a girl called Jane, and I met Jane’s friend Sheila, someone who has appeared in these pages on a few occasions. There was nothing particularly serious about any of this, except that my friend fell rather badly, but I imagine for the two girls is was more of a case as Al Steward described in SWISS COTTAGE MANOEUVRES as "I could see myself nailed to a dormitory tale as a holiday night’s escapade".

However, Sheila and I went on for more than a night (not much more) and I’m glad that it did because apart from the fact that she was a nice girl, her father kept a pub, the Whore’s Bed in Walgherton and that was where I met Paul Elson, drummer of “Strife” and a big friend of her brother.

And not so long ago, Paul sent me a recording of a “Strife” concert that he’d found in all his old papers and I featured it on one of my rock shows.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … Wistaston Memorial Hall, at the end of the concert we loaded up all of their gear into the back of the old J4 van that they had and they they discovered that they were still short of money. And so for £1:00 per head they would take anyone who wanted to go to the Festival. You’ve no idea how many people piled into that van with all of the gear already in it.

My friend and I decided that we’d go down on the motorbike so we set off and went a different way to Windsor.

But those in the van had a nightmare. Going down the M1 a tyre burst and with all of the weight that was in the van they were all over the road until the driver could bring it to a halt. It was a miracle that it didn’t overturn.

Horrible thoughts of 12th May 1969 must have flashed through everyone’s mind – the night that Fairport Convention’s van overturned at almost the same spot killing drummer Martin Lambie and guitarist Richard Thompson’s girlfriend Jeannie “the tailor” Franklyn, to whom the Jack Bruce album SONGS FOR A TAILOR was dedicated.

We stayed down there all weekend, without any sleep whatsoever, and then came home on the Monday night. My friend fell asleep riding back so he asked me to ride the rest of the way home but when we hit a bump in the road he fell off the seat so in the end we had a couple of hours curled up leaning over a table in a Little Chef near Oxford.

That’s not my best memory of the Windsor Free Festival either.

When I was living at home a schoolfriend and I decided one summer that we’d go to one. Not wishing to let on to my parents where I was going I said that we were going camping, which was perfectly true.

All went well until I returned home to a pair of furious parents. The Festival had been on the news on the television and there on the 21:00 News on BBC that Sunday was Yours Truly staggering past the TV camera with a Watneys Party Seven can tucked under his arm, and all of the family, friends and neighbours had seen it.

Ahhh well. We all have memories of what and what might have been. Some more than most

"Childhood comes for me at night
Voices of my friends
Your face bathing me in light
A hope that never ends
Pages turning
Pages torn and pages burning
Faded pages, open in the sun
Better bring your own redemption when you come
TO THE BARRICADES OF HEAVEN WHERE I COME FROM
"

But anyway, after all that, I just couldn’t go back to sleep again.

So here I am, up and about, trying nicely and calmly to fit the blood pressure tester to my arm. And after several unsuccessful tries, Our Hero notes on the box that is says poignée. So put it around your wrist, you berk.

Going for a ride on the porcelain horse to calm down again, I come back and take my blood pressure.

"The aim is to have a blood pressure of below 14.0/9.0" and so with mine being 17.0/8.0, I can see that we are starting as we mean to go on.

And as for what it was at lunchtime, I forgot to take it. Start as we mean to go on indeed.

Then there were 15 pills to take and that was … errr … complicated. I earned my coffee and cornflakes after that.

So today I tidied up the kitchen area so it looks as if someone lives here, and in my spare time I made a start on the next radio programme – chosen the music, paired it off and written some of the notes. There have been a few visits and phone calls too.

But one unwelcome visitor was the taxi to take me to the Centre de Re-education. he came 20 minutes early today and I was as nature intended in the bathroom having a good scrub up

But they put me through my paces and I came back here for more spoonsful of cake and some hot chocolate.

Tea tonight was nothing complicated. Pasta and veg in a cheese sauce. Quick, simple and delicious.

With having an early start, I’ve had several moments where I’ve been away with the fairies but as usual, I’m now not tired enough to go to bed.

So which childhood voices of my friends will I hear tonight? And whose face will bathe me in light? If it really had been Zero and Castor last night, wouldn’t it be nice if they were to come back?

But it doesn’t happen like that, does it? I’ll take my blood pressure and go to bed, and probably meet some of my family heading my way. I’ve no idea why they keep on putting in an appearance like this but I wish that they’d clear off and leave room for people whom I really want to see.

0

Thursday 27th October 2016 – THIS WAS NOT WHAT I WANTED

I went to hospital this afternoon for my tests. I had the usual catheter fitted and blood sample taken. And then I had to wait.

My blood pressure is up again and my legs are starting to swell up. That’s a couple of things to worry about, but the lymph nodes that have bedevilled me – the doctor can’t find them. If they really have gone, that will be the best news that I’ve had for ages.

I had an echograph this afternoon and my kidneys appear to be quite normal as far as their make-up goes, but there is still a problem in that according to the urine sample that I gave, the protein loss from my body is accelerating.

But the worst news is about my blood count. That’s now down to 10.0, a loss of 9% over the last two weeks. Considering that while I was away in Canada for – weeks, then over that period of time I lost 10% of my count – that’s about a third of the current rate of loss.

That is causing them a considerable amount of concern and so the upshot is that I have to come back … next Thursday!

Yes, just one week, and that’s not even enough time for me to go home and come back again. How I hate all of this. But at least my little room in the hostel hasn’t been taken so I’ve moved back in and I’ll stay here. But what I’m going to do next if i’m on weekly visits I have no idea.

I had a difficult night last night – it took me hours to drop off. And then I had a very disturbed sleep. I was off on my travels too but as usual I forgot absolutely everything as soon as I awoke.

After breakfast I tidied up my room and then had a good shower and a change of clothes. And once I’d organised myself I went off to fetch Caliburn to load him up with the stuff from here. And I nearly squidged a cyclist who rode straight out of a side street without even a pretence at a glance at oncoming traffic.

I sat in the lounge here until it was appointment time and then walked up to the hospital for my appointment with destiny. 14:15 was the time of my appointment, and I was seen at … errr … 14:10. A far cry from the situation in the UK
“I needed an urgent appointment, and the hospital has made a special effort to fit me in. They are going to see me at 20:20”
“You mean at twenty past eight in the evening?”
“No – I mean in four years time”
Such is life with the British Health Service.

And I made all of 20 yards down the corridor on the way home with my catheter today. I’m improving.

And now I’m having an early night. I’m exhausted.

And fed up too.

0

Tuesday 30th August 2016 – WELL HERE I AM AGAIN!

That’s right, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed … "well, yes" – ed … here in the hospital, ready for my final session of mapthera.

And bright-eyed and bushy-tailed I ought to have been too, because I was asleep relatively early too. Not that it did me much good of course, because round about 01:00 we had a party of fellow-residents returning from a night out in the town and they certainly let everyone know that they were back.

Not only that, I had a nightmare too! How long is it since I had one of those? Things are definitely being rather depressing around here right now if that’s the level to which I seem to have sunk.

An early start and a reasonable breakfast in the bright morning sum did much to restore my morale and then after a little relax to gather up my wits, not that it takes too long these days … "you said that the other day" – ed … I set off for the long trudge up the hill to the hospital.

I was here early too, and soon installed in a nice room by a couple of my favourite nurses (but not the cute and sweet Tara as yet). It’s nice to be on my usual ward with everyone so friendly and helpful. And I had a new doctor too. It looks as if Hermione is now a thing of the past. No more Ericus Reparo.

And we’ve had some very bad news too. They took my blood count and it is DOWN – from 12.0 to 11.0. It’s true to say that 3 months ago I would have happily settled for 11.0 and gone home smiling and whistling, but not after I’ve been up as high as 12.0. Here I was, thinking that I was out of the woods. It seems however that I have merely moved into different woods.

On the other hand, they have now made a formal announcement of the illness that I have. It seems that I have Waldenströhm’s disease (I should have kept well-clear of Waldenströhm, I suppose). It’s quite rare, which is probably why they were having issues with dealing with it at Montlucon, but then again it’s not as if I’m likely to have anything plebeian, is it?

They talk about vision loss, which as regular readers of this rubbish will recall is something that I have mentioned frequently over the last year or so, and a change in mental state. Well, you can all make up your own minds about that one.

They also say that it’s incurable, and that there’s a life expectancy of between 5 and 11 years (now, of course, 4 and 10 years) and I don’t like the sound of any of that at all. But as far as you lot are concerned, at least it gives you all some kind of idea of how long you have to suffer theremaider of this rubbish that I churn out.

I had all of the antidotes and calmants and stuff like that, and then I had the mapthera. That didn’t take too long and by 17:00 I was all done and dusted, having had an hour or so away with the fairies meantime. Now I have to wait the 18 hours to check for the side-effects, and I do hope that my room-mate doesn’t snore. And I suppose that he’s hoping that I don’t cough.

Now here’s a thing. In the absence of the cute and sweet Tara, I’m being attended to by the just-as-cute and just-as-sweet Evie. And she wants to know why it is that whenever she takes my blood pressure, it’s always higher than when the other nurses take it.

Ordinarily, I would tell her – but not when my room-mate is listening and the door to my room is open.

0