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Saturday 9th May 2026 – I HAVE TO ADMIT …

… that I was feeling much better this morning. Not exactly sprightly, unfortunately, but much better than I was a few days ago.

What I put it down to is the course of antibiotics that I’ve been given. I know that one swallow doesn’t make a summer and two tablets out of the ten that I’ve been given don’t count for a lot, but I awoke several times during the night, and to my surprise, I wasn’t coughing.

Last night, I started to write out my notes quite early in an effort to have yet another early night, and it was just before 21:00 when they finally went online. There were a few other things that needed doing afterwards, including taking my evening medication, but it can’t have been much after 21:30 when I finally crawled into bed.

As I mentioned just now, it was a turbulent night when I awoke on three or four occasions. I’ve no idea what time because I didn’t look, but it was dark and the electric water heater was working.

The final time that I awoke, there was bright daylight streaming in around the edges of the shutters so I wondered if I’d overslept through the alarms. But when I checked, it was 06:25 – four minutes before the alarm was due to go off. The nights are getting shorter.

In theory, I could have put my feet on the floor and claimed an early start, but I couldn’t be bothered. Instead, I lay in the warmth under the covers and waited for it to go off.

It didn’t take quite so long to summon up the enthusiasm to go into the bathroom this morning, and then I went into the kitchen for my energy drink and medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And I was surprised at the distance that I seem to have covered.

I was somewhere in some kind of school or college. We were doing a kind of science fiction film and everything like that. There was a group of us, or we were divided into small groups or something, and we were wandering around in our group. One of the other groups came along and began to attack us with these weird science-fiction type machines. It became something of an aerial display or bombardment or something from these really rapid, powerful and fast machines flying overhead all the time, going mainly in one direction and then presumably turning around somewhere and coming back in the same direction and so on. It had us, well, not pinned down because it wasn’t aggressive, but it was a flying display of all kinds of these strange machines. We were trying to work out whether they were remote-controlled or whether there were people flying them or something, because there were far too many to be flown by this one small group. This went on for ages and ages with these plane-type things flying over our heads. Eventually, they all disappeared. We were somewhere along the track of an old disused railway. Once they had all gone, one of the people with us decided that he was feeling hungry and was going to eat something. He asked about the rest of us, so I replied that I’d just nip back to school for a moment and fetch some biscuits from my bag. I went back to school and there were kids everywhere. There were all kinds of equipment and so on relating to these science-fiction things. I went to my bag for some biscuits but there weren’t all that many. Someone gave me some kind of cable but I already had four or five different ones in my hand so I had to go back to my room to sort them out, to make sure that I had what I wanted, and the one that that other person had given me, I’d leave behind on the bed for later.

This must have been a fascinating dream. I can still see the flying machines even now, and they would have been too small to carry a person. They reminded me of the very primitive attempts at gliders or kites such as those built by the Frenchman Clément Ader, with bat-like wings, and they were yellow, red or green. But there were thousands of them.

I spent a lot of time last night roaming through the junior levels of the Welsh pyramid. There were two cases that came to mind – the first was a girl who had been administered a vitamin supplement twice – first by her former team and then by the team that she rejoined later. This was put down to a confusion of paperwork between the two clubs so no action was taken against anyone. The second was a similar kind of case between three small boys. This was ruled to be due to a change of personnel or something like that, and someone who had left hadn’t noted something in a file. There were no charges brought against any of the clubs for misbehaviour or anything like that. It was all due to negligence or carelessness or something.

Interested as I am in football in Cymru, I’ve no idea of anything at all about this dream. And the idea of three small boys is nothing special. Drug testing in football over there is routine these days, and the Football Association of Wales controls all football from under-11 upwards, and I’ve seen 9-year-olds playing in under-11 games in the past.

There was a girl at work with whom I’d been at school. Somehow, we found ourselves in the same supermarket after work. She bought one or two things and so did I, and I gave her a lift home in my van afterwards. Next day at work, we were working away quite happily but then, in the afternoon, I had to go somewhere to do something. I went down to my van and found half a baguette in there that I’d bought, another half-baguette and a loaf of bread that this girl had bought. I picked up the loaf of bread and thought that when I go back to the office, I’ll take it to her and give it to her. I set off on foot on this errand and began to walk down Welsh Row in Nantwich. I ended up walking miles, and it was all through streets and lanes around Nantwich. Then I was in Brussels, walking through Brussels. It seemed to take ages to do what I was trying to do, with walking all around these places. It was sunny, it was sweaty and I was walking up a pedestrian alley, but someone had tied a rope across it as if to close it so I just opened the rope and walked through. Some Dutch guy began to have an argument with me about moving the rope so I told him to clear off, but he didn’t and this argument carried on. In the end, I used a couple of really vulgar Flemish terms and it looked as if he was going to come over and fight with me, but instead, he just wandered away. I found myself in a park, and after walking through this park for five minutes, I realised that there was a huge drop over the wall and I wasn’t sure how I was going to find my way out. Suddenly, I came to an entry that I didn’t know was there so I went through an entry onto the road and began to walk towards Nantwich. There was a house with a ginger cat so I went to stroke the cat but it wouldn’t come to me. It ran away. Eventually, I found myself back in Brussels again, walking up from Woluwe St Lambert into the centre of the city and into work again. There was one lift that you could only take, that went all the way to the top so I went in there, came out and went into another lift and went back down to my floor and found that I was in the wrong building. I had to go across to the next lift, which was exactly the same – straight to the top – and back down again into the office. I still had this loaf of bread with me but when I came into my office to sit down, I couldn’t see the girl at that moment.

The girl concerned in this dream unfortunately died shortly after leaving school. When a group of us heard that she had become seriously ill, we went round to her house but her parents wouldn’t let us come in. At first, we were quite annoyed by that, but as time has gone on and I’ve seen people die, I can understand how she and her parents must have been feeling.

And a lift again, just like the previous night. I wonder why these are suddenly appearing during my dreams. It’s not as if I’m ever likely to encounter any these days. However, wandering around Brussels in my dreams is nothing new.

The nurse turned up as usual and asked how I was. I told him that I was feeling better than yesterday, but he didn’t have much to say for himself. He was soon gone and then I could make breakfast and read some more of REPORT ON EXCAVATIONS MADE UPON THE SITE OF THE ROMAN CASTRUM AT PEVENSEY by Charles Roach Smith.

And here we go again. He tells us that "the mortar, that important ingredient which Saxon, Norman and English architects only imperfectly understood, was made by Roman masons on a principle so sound and unvarying that its tenacity is unimpaired by age and its solidity is nothing inferior to the stones and tiles it cements together"

He then goes on to mention that "it is nothing unusual to find Roman mortar used as facing stone in the walls of our medieval churches".

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I wonder what happened to the people who built the stone walls so well and made the mortar that has lasted for all these years. If they had been pushed into Wales or over to Brittany, as has often been suggested, why aren’t there any of these types of stone buildings there dating from the early mediaeval period? And if they had been absorbed into the Anglo-Saxon population, why didn’t the use of stone and mortar continue?

It really beats me why ethnic cleansing has been ruled out by most authorities.

Back in here, there was football to watch. Arbroath v Dunfermline, with Arbroath failing to overturn the 1-0 deficit from midweek. So Dunfermline march on, one step further towards the Scottish Premier Division.

Afterwards, it was the National League playoff semi-finals – Carlisle v Boreham Wood and Rochdale v Scunthorpe. With both games ending 2-1, we’ll have a final between Rochdale and Boreham Wood to see who plays next season in League Two.

With all of that out of the way, I had another look at the radio programme that I mentioned yesterday. This is going to be a complicated affair but I cracked on all the same. In the end, after much binding in the marsh, I was able to identify, from a list that I had to make, which ended up containing 451 albums of all genres and of all different kinds of obscurity, about twenty that I actually owned, by fourteen different artists.

At that point, I went into the kitchen for my afternoon medication and ended up spending an hour tidying out the fridge. I really must be feeling better!

Having done that, I made a taco roll with some of that vegan cream cheese and salad. And it was really nice too. I shall have to order some more of that next time I’m online shopping.

Back in here again, the sunlight was streaming in through the windows, the temperature was 24°C and it was lovely. I thought that I’d just close my eyes for a few minutes and soak up the heat, so there I was, thoroughly enjoying myself until I fell off the chair seventy-five minutes later. What a waste of time, but it really was nice.

Pushing on, I finished sorting out the music for the radio programme and I had even chosen more than half of the tracks and remixed and re-edited them by the time that I knocked off.

So right now, I’m off to bed, looking forward to a good sleep and a lie-in tomorrow until the nurse wakes me up … "he hopes" – ed …

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about these flying machines … "well, one of us has" – ed … it remind me of a scene from UP THE CHASTITY BELT as Frankie Howerd prepares to leap from the top of the castle tower, wearing his bat-like wings.
"Oh look!" exclaimed Lady Lobelia. "It’s Lurkalot. He flies again!"
"Ahh, Lurkalot!" exclaimed the boxer Billy Walker, playing the part of Chopper the Woodsman. "His flies be his undoing."

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