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Saturday 8th February 2025 – I HAVE HAD …

… just about enough of this dialysis.

These four-hour sessions didn’t last long. Today, they gave me four and a half hours, and they still haven’t extracted all of the water from me that they ought to have extracted. So how long is it going to be when I go back on Monday?

One thing’s for certain though, and that is that if they keep on pumping the stuff out of me at this rate, I’ll be pushing up the daisies quicker than I think.

Ordinarily I would have complained, except that the doctor on duty was the miserable one who hates his job and loves his patients even less. I imagine that I would have been sent away with a flea in my ear had I gone to see him

In fact, it’s true to say that I am having as much luck with the senior hospital staff as I am about going to bed early because for no particular reason last night it was another late night by the time that I’d finished everything. It was a very weary me who staggered into bed at about 00:30 this morning.

And even though I was fast asleep straight away and didn’t move for the whole night, at 05:35 I sat dramatically upright, wide awake. I’ve no idea what awoke me either because I couldn’t hear any noise.

Try as I might, I could not go back to sleep and in the end gave it up as a bad job. When the alarm went off at 07:00 I was having a good scrub in the bathroom, followed by a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant.

Once I was ready, I filled the washing machine with all of the clothes that remained and se it off on its cycle (a very clever machine, mine) and then went into the kitchen for my medication, remembering not to take the anti-potassium stuff and not the sunlight pills either

Back in here I began to transcribe the dictaphone notes but there were so many that I hadn’t finished by the time that the nurse came.

There were the usual banal questions and then I wished him a very happy holiday. It’s his turn to go skiing now. Isabelle should be back tomorrow.

Breakfast was next, and then I read MY NEW BOOK.

We’re still moving on with our discussion of contour forts and he gives a few example of them. With regard to several of them he makes the pertinent observation that "the fortress seems to be too large to have been defended by any force which it could shelter."

That is of course perfectly true but it’s a moot point because if the defenders are not likely to be very numerous, neither are the attackers, so the defenders wouldn’t have to defend all of the perimeter. Instead, they would just concentrate on the point where the attackers are launching their particular offensive

No-one has any idea of the population of Britain in 500BC but it can’t have been more than half a million, so it’s not as if you could gather a large army at one place and at one time.

Back in here I finished off the dictaphone notes. I was in the living room of a semi-detached house. I’d been off with this girl and her parents weren’t very happy. We’d had a confrontation when I’d brought her home. We had managed to pass over the confrontation and we were saying goodbye to each other in the hall when the dream faded away

Apart from the fact that there I was, just about to Get The Girl and the dream dies, there’s a great deal more to this dream that anyone would imagine or realise, and I would care to admit. And parents being unhappy was just about par for the course back in those days.

There was also something about the ceremonial exchange of keys for a car that I ended up buying from a garage. The exchange was something that was reproduced in India at the same times. If you were buying something in India you would have to step back for thirty seconds so to convince everyone that it was OK. It was during that period that the recourse would take place, that the former wife of a friend of mine, would come along and do something instead of whatever her name was and me.

So who is “whatever her name was”? And why can’t I remember the first part of this dream? f there’s a girl involved, I ought not to go around forgetting or missing out..

I was out with a friend and we were wandering around a fairground. There were two of us, a guy and a girl. We walked around this fairground and ended up in a place where we could have a hot snack. One of my friends wanted a hot snack so we went round there but the hot snack place was closed. There was a tape across it. We ended up having a coffee. The coffees were tiny, a tiny expresso type of thing and they had to be drunk in the cafeteria on the first floor. ….battery flat .. So we bought a coffee and we had to go up the stairs to drink it to the café. There was a spiral staircase, very tight, very steep and I couldn’t walk up it so we were there with these coffees wondering what to do

So who were my friends? Do I have any?

Then I was with a group of gendarmes. We were going somewhere to pick up something and we had to go there very quietly but we suddenly discovered that something had gone wrong. When we looked at one of the objects that we had that we’d bought at this café we could see the maker’s name. That suddenly rang a bell with one of the gendarmes. He told the others, who suddenly realised what it was. We all piled into the car and we drove. It was driving through Crewe down a few of the side streets. We came in to the bottom end of Delamere Street. We drove down to the bottom. We were looking for a number something like 148 but there weren’t that many houses in that street, not at all, so we didn’t know or I didn’t know where this was going to be. They identified a house – at least, the guy in charge did – that was nowhere near that number and he said to the driver “park a little further down the street” so we did . Someone exited the car and there was some kind of commotion outside so I left the car to go to see. The guy who had exited the car was helping a pedestrian stand up who had been knocked down. I suddenly realised that our car was driving forward. I shouted to “put the brake on” but no-one paid any attention to it. It kept on rolling forward and forward and forward. Suddenly it stopped. I shouted “for God’s sake put the brake on!”. Someone in the car said “well, it was on, but we didn’t know what was going on”. I said “you were rolling forward and you knocked someone down!”. Anyway one of the gendarmes went up to the house. He had a key in his pocket and unlocked it. He walked in and we followed him. It was a filthy, disgusting, untidy house. I have never seen or smelled anything like this . It was full of cats. At first though there was nothing. There was no-one to be seen and he walked around shouting. In the end he walked through this curtain that was hanging over the doorway into what was the kitchen. It was filthy and disgusting, and smelly. There were these cats everywhere. Suddenly two girls appeared. One was about twelve and the other was about nine. The younger one was blonde, the elder one was dark. I suddenly realised where we were because I’d sent birthday presents to these kids. They were the family of one of these gendarmes. They were trying to make some coffee, he was asking them where such-and-such was but they didn’t know. He was looking around for papers and came across some papers about two matching pieces of furniture. He said “this might explain the mystery because they were bequeathed to the two of us and it looks as if the guy has just taken one which he thinks might be his share but we were so totally in the dark and totally bewildered about this.

The house is still clear to me even now. If anyone knows Crewe, it’s just before where the old white single-storey buildings and the belisha beacons and zebra crossing used to be. But the stench in that house was so strong I could actually smell it at the time. Apart from that, it was just like a sketch out of one of the GENDARME DE ST TROPEZ films.

And finally we had a nightmare. I’m not sure where this fitted in anywhere but at one point I dreamed that my cleaner went to take off my plasters and found that one of my puncture holes was still leaking after all this time. There was blood everywhere all over this plaster and all over my lower arm

That really is my worst nightmare of all of this and I shall hate the day when it happens

After typing out my notes, I crashed out, believe it or not. Never mind about being upset about crashing out, I can’t believe that I crashed out so early on in the day. I might at least have had the decency to have waited until I was on my bed in the dialysis centre.

Once I awoke though, I finished off the notes of the next radio programme and was busy involved in doing a few other things when the cleaner turned up. I told her about my nightmare and prepared her to be standing by just in case … .

The taxi was late again, but not as late as it might have been. Just me as a passenger with a friendly, peasant driver and we had a nice drive down to the centre.

For a change, I was first to be seen and that boded ill for the rest of the day. And it hurt just as much as it had on previous days.

There was football on the internet too – TNS v Penybont, 1st v second. At one time Penybont were pushing for the Championship but they have fallen away quite badly just recently, and were well-beaten by TNS, even with TNS playing the final 10 minutes with just 10 players.

One of the nurses came by with the bad news about the extension to the session (the doctor, I suppose, didn’t have the nerve) and so at the end I was the last out of the centre. I mentioned my nightmare to the nurse who unplugged me so she put extra plaster strips on my dressing.

And with the taxi having to drop off someone at Avranches, it was miserably late when I arrived home, tired, fed up and completely exhausted.

You have no idea how much a dialysis session takes out of me, never mind a four-and-half-hour session.

Tea was a burger on a bap with salad and baked potato followed by apple cake and soya dessert, and that’s it for tonight. I’ll dictate my notes and then I’m off to bed. Quite frankly, I don’t have the courage or the energy to do anything else.

The secret of these increased dialysis sessions was explained to me later. Apparently one of the doctors (I’ll leave you to guess) is fed up of me chatting her up all the time
She told the girls to increase the suction time to take more water out at each session
"Isn’t that dangerous?" asked one of the nurses
"Who cares?" answered the doctor."If we extract at a rate of 5 kilos per session, in 16 sessions he’ll be gone completely."

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Friday 7th February 2025 – IT’S BEEN A …

… slightly better day today (only slightly). I haven’t managed to crash out and not only have I actually done some work, I’ve actually felt like doing it too, rather than having to grit my teeth and force myself.

But then this is bewildering, because when I’m here I don’t feel as if I’m about to crash out (and that’s a change since last Summer) and yet when I’m in the dialysis centre, as soon as the machine starts off, I’m away with the fairies (and hopefully not in a manner that invite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine).

What I’ll have to do when I’m there on Saturday is to make enquiries to see if it’s a normal situation. I’m sure that it isn’t though. There are nine beds in our ward and I’m the only one who seems to crash out.

So after I’d finished my notes last night I had to do the backing-up, and then do it again because I’d forgotten to back up onto the USB key on the keyring, the one that I use to transfer data between the big office computer and the travelling laptop.

So rather later than usual I headed off to bed, where I fell asleep almost immediately

Once more, I awoke bolt-upright at 06:15 and by the time that the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already sorting myself out in the bathroom.

Into the kitchen next for the medication and then back in here to find out where I’d been during the night. I was at the Power River last night, by the motel in which I stayed IN 2019 where we saw (or where you will see when I upload the photos) the remains of those Conestoga (or were they Studebaker?) covered wagons – real “prairie schooners”. I’ve no idea what I was doing there though because, as usual, as soon as I reached for the dictaphone the whole dream evaporated and that was, unfortunately, that.

The Powder River really was lovely though – typical Wyoming and Montana “dust bowl” country full of historical battlefields from where the Native Americans were desperately trying to cling on to their traditional way of life. History around every bend. I drove down the valley on my way from Wounded Knee – the site of (almost) the final confrontation between the Native Americans and the European American military – and Fort Phil Kearny, where the Native Americans wiped out a patrol of 81 soldiers let by Captain William Fetterman. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we walked all over the site where Fetterman and his troops met their end, and even blagged our way onto a coach trip going around the various sites of confrontation in the area.

But this isn’t doing me much good, is it? I’m becoming all nostalgic and broody about travelling, going back to North America, finishing off my tour of the old wagon route across the USA in the 1840s, all the things that I didn’t do when I was there before and said that I would do some other time.

Some hope.

The nurse came around early again today. The first question he asked me was "have you ever been to Montréal?". Not much I have, and he knows it well enough.

So he asked me all kinds of questions about the city

"Are you planning on going there?" I asked
"Yes, maybe in three or four years" he replied
"Well, you shouldn’t have any trouble" I replied. "The nursing profession is one of the professions that receives maximum points on the immigration scale"
"I won’t be going as a nurse" he answered. "I’ll be finding something else to do"

Well, I always said that his heart wasn’t in his job

After he left, I made my breakfast and then carried on reading MY NEW BOOK.

We’re having a really good discussion about contour forts with several examples used as illustrations. And when you see that people in recent times consider that Iron Age forts with four rings of concentric walls, ditches in between of fifteen feet deep, covering twenty and thirty acres, perimeters of 2 miles, all that kind of thing were but “status symbols” of authority when they were living hand-to-mouth and barely had the time to cultivate their crops and herd their beasts, it defies all logic.

It’s also just how amazing the date of “between 400-450BC” crops up in the conversation when we talk about building these forts or refurbishing old Neolithic ones. That date corresponds with what is believed to be the arrival of the Celtic race who came to suppress and overwhelm the Belgae. The similarity of dates can’t be a coincidence. Building status symbols when they were in the process of being invaded (the Belgae) or trying (the Celts) to overwhelm an existing race of inhabitants. I need a lot more convincing that the modern reviewers have offered so far.

In a modern report on Maiden Castle, a hillfort in Dorset, we are told that "Hoards of carefully selected sling stones have been found at" each entrance, "One area of the cemetery featured burials of 14 people who had died in violent circumstances including one body with a Roman catapult bolt in its back", and then goes on to say "there is little archaeological evidence to support … that the hill fort was attacked by the Romans"

The author of this modern report that I read makes the point that "although 14 bodies in the cemetery exhibited signs of a violent death, there is no evidence that they died at Maiden Castle", a comment which, if T Rice Holmes had read it, would have provoked an explosion. The idea that someone would find a dead body killed by a Roman bolt and then carry it however many miles and then right up a steep hill into the fort in order to bury it surely can’t be a serious proposition. And in any case “absence of evidence” is a completely different affair than “evidence of absence”

So abandoning yet another good rant for the moment, I came back in here and for much of the day I’ve been working. I’ve chosen 10 tracks for the next radio programme, edited them, remixed them, paired them and the segued them, and then I’ve been writing the notes. I’ve almost finished too. Another hour or so will see it all done tomorrow morning, I reckon.

There were the usual interruptions – lunch, the cleaner, my mid-afternoon break etc. but those are only to be expected. Apart from that, it’s been another quiet day where although I worked hard, I could have worked even harder.

But I’ll worry about that tomorrow because I’m off to bed.

But seeing as we have been talking about Broadus … "well, one of us has" – ed … the town was founded in 1900 after the massacre at Wounded Knee had removed the last of the native Americans from the area
But in the dying days of the old West an American cowboy turned up at the saloon, totally stark naked, on a native American palomino horse.
"What on earth happened to you?" asked the innkeeper
"My horse died about 30 miles away so I set out to walk here" began the cowboy.
"Then this native American girl rode up on her horse. She said ‘cowboy take off your shirt’ so I took off my shirt
Then she said ‘now cowboy take off your pants’ so I took off my pants
Then she said ‘now cowboy, take off my shift’ so I took off her shift
Then she climbed down off her horse, lay on the ground and said ‘OK cowboy, now go to town’ so here I am!"

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Thursday 6th February 2025 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day I have had today!

Or, more importantly, what a horrible afternoon. Everything that could conceivably go wrong this afternoon has gone wrong. It seems that I’m destined to have this albatross hung well-and-truly around my neck like the Ancient Mariner.

"Ah! well a-day!"

Last night, as I expected, I was horribly late going to bed. I’m surprised that I kept on going as long as I did though because I was absolutely exhausted. And again I’m not sure why either because it wasn’t as if I’d done that much.

Once in bed though, just like Maréchal MacMahon, "j’y suis, j’y reste" – “here I am and here I stay”. No danger whatever of me moving under any circumstances.

And there I did stay too. When the alarm went off I was still in exactly the same position as I had been when I went to sleep. And no-one had it any more difficult than me to leave my bed before the second alarm. I know that I’ve had a few struggles in the past but this one beats all of them.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and scrub up, forgetting to have a shave for a moment, and then went into the kitchen to sort out the medication for the morning, remembering not to take the medication that I’m not supposed to take on Dialysis Day.

Back into the bathroom to remember to have a shave in case Emilie the Cute Consultant is there this afternoon, and then back into here to sort out the details of any voyages last night. I was at a school somewhere. One of the teachers was at the entrance to the school chatting to a few people. He had a green sports car like a 1930s Bentley only smaller. I happened to glance at the registration number. It was WEE and then three numbers (or maybe the other way round). Whatever it was, if read in a certain way it made something quite indecent. It was obviously not the original number of the car so I was first of all surprised that the Department of Transport would allow such a registration number to be issued and secondly, surprised that a schoolteacher would buy it and fit it on his vehicle.

It really was surprising too to see this registration number, and I wish that I could remember now what it was. But I know exactly where it took place – in between the canteen and the steps up to the front of my old Grammar School. I can still see it now.

The nurse came round and I asked him about this prescription whether it should be done before breakfast before I have anything to eat. "Don’t worry about that" he replied. "They’ll do it anyway".

What I’ll do is to ask Isabelle the Nurse and see what she thinks about the affair.

After he left I made my breakfast and carried on reading MY NEW BOOK.

We’ve finished promontory forts and are now tackling contour forts, those that encompass a hill, with defences all round. These are really difficult to date as their position, commanding a wide expanse of countryside, means that they may well have been used by many different waves of civilisation.

Before leaving the promontory forts though, he makes an interesting observation. While they may be good at keeping invaders out, they aren’t much good at keeping cattle in, and many of them have no interior fencing of any kind.

His supposition is that people don’t abandon their possessions lightly, so if they were designed for defenders, the defenders must have been in desperate straights to have to take flight there leaving all their beasts behind.

The alternative suggestion that he puts forward is that they were built as strongholds by invaders who had yet not had the opportunity to recruit any cattle, and the speed at which a promontory fort could be built when compared to a contour fort, is certainly suggestive.

Back in here again I carried on writing the notes for this radio programme, and they are almost finished. Half an hour tomorrow will see them done and then I can push on with the next lot.

It wasn’t my cleaner who interrupted me today either. I noticed (for once) that time was rolling on so I went into the dining area and began to prepare things for leaving.

My cleaner was running late today so we were in something of a rush. But she was soon off out to her next client, and I wait here to wait for my taxi.

And wait. And wait.

At 13:00 I rang them up to find out where they were and it seems that they have cancelled (I hope) the Wednesday taxi that shouldn’t be coming but forgotten to reinstate the Thursday one. So they’ll arrange for someone to fetch me.

The car that turned up (20 minutes later) was one from St Hilaire du Harcoët on its way back from the Centre de Re-education, with three passengers already inside. So it was a rather cramped car that made its way down to Avranches. But needs must.

It goes without saying that my anaesthetic patches had long-since lost their efficacity by the time that I was finally seen and I’m sure that everyone in the street down the hill knew about it, because I certainly did. I’ve had some painful issues, but not quite as painful as this one this afternoon.

Once I was settled into my bed, plugged in and wired up, I had the crash-out to end all crash-outs. Well into the bad old days of last summer. I’m not sure why that should be either, unless it’s something to do with the fact that I’m in a bed, semi-recumbent.

But it was terrible. During the whole session I couldn’t concentrate on anything at all, I was so tired. Even so, I performed the major back-up that I wanted to and the travelling laptop is now as up-to-date as it can me. That’ll last for about a week, I reckon, before it will fall by the wayside once more.

But that did remind me – there’s still the laptop that I bought IN NORTH DAKOTA to update too. I haven’t used that since I fitted the 1TD SSD into it and it could do with some updating. Still, that’s one more task to add to the list of things that won’t ever be done.

Unplugging me was just as painful as plugging me in. I could see that the girls were edgy about things, wishing to leave in a hurry and I can’t say that I blame them. I was by far and away the last patient in there tonight. And I was glad to be out of there too.

It was this senior driver who was waiting for me tonight but he wasn’t in a talkative mood again this evening. I don’t know what I have done to him to upset him.

Mind you, in some ways I was glad because I wasn’t in any real mood to converse. Tired, exhausted and in pain, I’d had enough for the day.

The climb up here was difficult tonight and I only just about managed it, but there was no time to relax because I had bread to make.

After making and kneading the dough I made tea while it was proofing. It was another “Mr Carmichael” moment when SUPPER WAITS ON THE TABLE INSIDE A TIN. I was way past caring by this point. At least my loaf of bread is the best that I have ever made, and I mean that too.

So right now I’m off to bed. I’m shattered and I can’t keep on going like this. One day my luck will have to turn, and I hope that I will still have time to enjoy it.

But going back to the story about promontory forts, a group of Belgae natives were holed up inside a promontory fort as several hundred people were advancing on them
The captain of the fortress couldn’t make out at the distance who they were so he asked his lookout "are they friends or foes?"
"Friends, I reckon" said the sentinel
"You must have wonderful eyesight" said the captain. "How can you tell?"
"Well" replied the sentinel "they are all laughing and joking together and look as if they are engaged upon a common purpose"

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Wednesday 5th February 2025 – WE ARE GOING .

… to have yet another very late night. I’m not sure why but to cook and eat my tea and to clean up afterwards has taken me two and a half hours. I’ve no idea what I was doing for most of that time but then unkind people say that I have no idea what I’m doing at the best of times.

But if I’ve been unconsciously relaxing this evening, it’s no surprise, and I deserve it because I’ve been hard at it all day. I have accomplished a lot of work today too.

It all started last night. When I’d finished my notes and was preparing for bed, I noticed how quiet it was outside in the street. Not many caravanettes down on their parking ground down the road near the lighthouse, I reckon. So seizing the moment, I grabbed hold of the ZOOM H8 and re-dictated the notes that were all messed up on Saturday. That’s one job less to do.

Eventually I made it into bed, much later than I anticipated but never mind. Once I was in there, that was it. I was away with the fairies almost straight away and I’ve no idea if the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine was there, observing and taking notes. If so I wish that she would tell me how I did.

When the alarm went off I was dead to the World and what a struggle it was to rise up to my feet and head into the bathroom. But I had a good wash and scrub up before going into the kitchen to take my medicine for the morning.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out how I did during the night and to see if there had been any call for the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine to be concerned. But unfortunately not. There had been some kind of crisis and the local speedway team had been evicted from its home ground by the local council. They were wondering what to do as they had a match arranged. I was on my way to the bar where everyone met. I was walking down a road that I recognised as the main London road in Church Lawton. I walked past this semi-derelict motel. I noticed that the road that went from the office up through the cabins to the far end was actually divided off by a line. Obviously they had had two different loads of concrete. One had set before they had put the other down so they had a line that went right across the road that went between the cabins. I had a good look at that. Then I went into the bar. Everyone was there and the riders were there in their leathers, all wondering what to do about it so I told them about this concrete and the line that went across it and said quite simply “why don’t you go to race up there between the cabins? You could use the line as your starting point. You’ll all finish at the hedge but it would work. I reckon that the Council would give you back your ground in five minutes if they knew where it was that you were going to perform. Everyone left the bar and went to look at this concrete road and the line that I’d mentioned. I was sitting there thinking “I do hope that it was there and not a figment of my imagination with all of these people going to look at it”.

It was however quite impressive that I could say in a dream that the road looked like the main London Road in Church Lawton. The only problem though is that it didn’t. It resembled that run-down motel in which I stayed near Myrtle Beach in 2005 when I was awoken by the sound of a couple of South Carolina’s finest dragging someone out of a nearby cabin. And you certainly wouldn’t find a semi-derelict, run-down motel anywhere near Church Lawton. A speedway race taking place in a straight line would be interesting too. You wouldn’t make four laps out of that.

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about the speedway. Crewe had its own team for a while during the speedway boom of the late 60s and early 70s, and I used to go on Friday nights with a friend on his motor bike to Wolverhampton to see the Wolves. And of course, when I lived in that squat out in the sticks I was within walking distance of the Hatherton moto-cross field where we’d see people like Arthur Lampkin, Dave Bickers and Vic Eastwood doing their stuff through the swamp

The nurse was early again. He’s told me that this blood test that I have to have forty-eight hours before I go back to Paris, whenever that might be, I can have it done at the Dialysis Centre.

"What happens if it’s not forty-eight hours but 24, or 72 hours before I go?" I asked.

"It makes no difference" he said. "They can do it and it will be OK"

He’s absolutely flatly refusing to carry out any blood tests now. No wonder he’s so early and his oppo is so late when she comes. She’s the one who has to do all the blood tests.

So after he had finished asking me all kinds of stupid questions he left and I could go to make breakfast and read MY NEW BOOK.

We have finally made it into the meat of the book and we’ve begun to discuss “promontory forts”.

These are Neolithic or Iron-Age fortresses at the end of peninsulae or promontories where there is just a fortification on one side – the other three are protected by sharp inclines that no army could reasonably climb.

He’s commented in general on forts of this era. Chalk uplands are a favourite location in which to find them and there’s plenty of evidence of primitive field-systems hard by. Today though, these areas are fairly dry and barren and so he conjectures that the climate was damper in those days and the water table was higher, leading to a better environment in which more produce would grow.

That’s as maybe, and he could well be correct, but regular readers of this rubbish will recall from 2019 when we visited all of the old US forts in “Indian Territory” in North-West USA that the soldiers would rather gather crops and wood etc closer to the fort, even if they were of lesser quality, rather than venture further from the fort and from the protection that it offered in order to gather better-quality stuff further away. The promontory forts and other forts of the same era are (in my opinion) a sign of a hostile environment, regardless of whatever modern thought may say, and maybe the same considerations applied with the Neolithic and Iron-Age inhabitant – “produce whatever we can as close to the fort as possible”.

After breakfast I edited the notes that I’d dictated last night. And then I had to prepare the programme.

It ended up being a massive 01:16 over the one-hour spot so it was necessary to engage in some ruthless editing. But now it’s all done and I have my one-hour programme for the end of October. It’s a good one too.

Having put that one to bed, I began to tackle the next. So how to reduce eighty-seven minutes of music to about 57 minutes, to allow time for some introductory speech.

Several tracks were ruthlessly axed, some applause was edited out and I even swapped some of the running order around because it sounded much better in a different order.

So now I have a fairly decent live concert that lasts for 57:59, meaning that I need just two minutes and one second of speech. My note-tab is configured to three hundred characters per line and my speech is three hundred characters per seventeen seconds, so I need just over seven lines of speech.

By the time that I’d finished, I had five and a half lines of speech. I could have finished it but there were several interruptions throughout the day.

Firstly the taxi came for me again. Trying to convince them that the Wednesday trip the other week was just a one-off is difficult. I felt sorry for the driver but I rang up the taxi office to remind them not to send anyone on a Wednesday and to remember to send someone for me on a Thursday.

Lunch was next and I was caught in flagrante delicto once more by the cleaner who came to do her stuff.

She also stood and watched as I climbed into (and out of) the bath to have my shower. It was a lovely sensation and I’m all nice and clean, but I can’t wait to be in the apartment downstairs, smash it all about and have a walk-in shower instead

With having finished the Christmas Cake yesterday it was back to the crackers and hummus. But of course, no chocolate drink. My mid-afternoon drink is now this horrible protein stuff. I suppose that I have to drink it and like it.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry with the nicest naan that I have ever made. The curry was delicious too, as was the apple cake with chocolate soya dessert. No idea what I’m going to make for tomorrow though. I shall have to have a think.

Tomorrow is another day, though. Right now I’m off to bed.

But seeing as we have been talking about the moto-cross at Hatherton, I went there once on my old Suzuki M12 with my brother on the pillion. We were late for the start and so we were travelling at a somewhat-excessive speed.
Going down the bank at Wybunbury we were stopped by a police radar trap
"Going rather fast, aren’t we?" asked the policeman. "That’s what I call a dangerous speed"
"Have no fear" I replied. "The Lord is with us."
"In that case" said the policeman "I’m going to have to book you. Three up on a motorcycle is not allowed."

0

Tuesday 4th February 2025 – I HAVE DECIDED …

… that the notes that I edited at the Dialysis Clinic for that radio programme are going into the bin.

As I said before (but only once) I had to dictate it in two parts. However, for a reason that I have yet to understand, the parts sound so different that no amount of editing and remixing is going to make them sound similar.

All this afternoon I’ve been working on it without success and if I spend any more time on it I’ll go spare

The stage has been reached where I’ve downloaded some Artificial Intelligence to see if that comes up with any better luck than I’m having, but I doubt it very much. What I need is a copy sampler where I can analyse automatically a sample of one batch of sound and transfer the settings to the second to equalise the tracks but that’s unlikely, so I reckon it’s either the time to learn all about AI or else re-dictate the notes.

But anyway, that’s for another time. Let’s turn our attention to last night and, for a change, I wasn’t all that late going to bed.

It was 23:20 when I hit the sack but I was totally exhausted. I wasn’t sorry at all to be in bed at that time.

Once I was in bed and settled down I wasn’t long in dropping off to sleep. And there I stayed until the alarm went off, although I do have a vague recollection of being awake for a moment at 04:00.

It was a desperate stagger to beat the second alarm this morning but I did (somehow) manage it, and I had a good scrub up in the bathroom before going into the kitchen for the medication.

Back in here I listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was at work and for some reason I had the diary open. There was something going on on one particular date about some meeting or other. having seen whom it concerned, I wrote something rather indecent in the entry instead. Just then however the boss came along. He saw me writing and then rapidly closing it, and insisted on seeing it. I thought “this is going to be the end of the line now, isn’t it, for me in this place?”. In the end, the diary fell over haphazardly and there was a comment in there from another day that was that was fairly indecent but nothing quite as bad as that which I had written. He had a look at it, and I said “yes I know, and I’m ashamed of myself for doing it”. He wanted me to carry out a few tasks and gave me some things to do. Then I happened to mention a friend of mine who had been involved with one of our sister offices in the rural area. He had been telling me how they were all big supporters of a certain political party. The boss said “there’s no accounting for taste is there?”. I replied “no. It’s going to be pretty much of a shame if they ever find their way back into power”.

As to what this relates, I have no idea. I do know that one of my “contacts” has revealed himself to be an out-and-out Tory of the extreme type and is flooding with all kinds of extremist nonsense a page on the internet that he keeps, far worse than ever I have seen any left-winger or immigrant type

But as for writing anything abusive at work, then despite all kinds of provocation when I was at work I managed to restrain myself, and just thought abusive thoughts instead. I was going to say that “your thoughts never got you into trouble”, but while that may well have been true fifty years ago, it’s certainly not the case today, with the Thought Police out in force everywhere you go. and, believe me, you will even find yourself in trouble if they THINK that you are thinking, whether you are or not. And ask me how I know.

There was also something about Roxanne last night. I’d been away somewhere for a fair while and when I came back Roxanne threw her arms around me and hugged me.

And how nice to see Roxanne in a dream. 26 years it is since I’ve seen her in real life, so she’ll be 35 now, married I suppose, with a couple of kids. We had loads of fun together during that three years that I was her father. It made me realise what I was missing but as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the big issue about this would be enticing me into the delivery room. I just couldn’t do it.

And finally I was in the USA with a friend. He had some kind of waste land, a demolition site that was a former service station. We were sitting there talking and the question of guns came up. He was talking about something about obtaining new licences for his guns. Another guy who was there said something along the lines of “your guns already have licences for Alabama and Arkansas. If you want another licence you’d have to hand some of those back”. We’d been out for a walk and came back to his property. There was a young girl sitting there. This guy totally ignored her so I did too. We began to discuss about where I certain place was in Ireland so we found an atlas and had a look down on the south-east coast but couldn’t see it. Then we went to have a look to see where this place was in the USA. We looked on the map but the map was such a short scale that it was totally useless. Then he was telling me about his life back at home and how he’d somehow managed to accumulate £10,000,000 and he was hoping to buy some property in the UK because the whole of the city centre was being demolished and he thought that it was being crazy. In the end we agreed that we would go for a walk. We set out and after a while I asked who this girl was. He replied “that’s one of Lesley’s mathematics clients. She teaches maths to her but the problem is that she has so many things going on in her mind that she can’t sit and concentrate at all”. As we carried on walking I was thinking “this demolished service station here – I need to keep in contact with the owner because if ever I have to come to the USA again I could drop a static caravan onto this place. That would act as a home for me for quite a considerable time”.

There’s a lot going on in this dream that can have some kind of connection in real life. For a start, the town centre of Crewe, having been demolished ready for an HS2-funded rebuilding and regeneration HAS BEEN SCRAPPED with the cancellation of the HS2 project, so Crewe Town Centre will be a hole in the ground after all.. And that makes a change, because up until recently it’s just been a hole.

There are several other items in there that have a meaning for two or three people who follow these notes, and they know who they are, but as for a mobile home on a demolition site in case I ever visit the USA, I’m going nowhere at all except to the Dialysis Centre and to the apartment downstairs, and that latter only if I am lucky. I have to work out how this move will take place. I have a couple of people who have kindly volunteered to help, for which I am extremely grateful, but it’s still going to be a nightmare, I reckon.

That’s not all that was in the dream, but you really don’t want to know the rest, especially if you are eating your tea right now.

The nurse was early today and once more, didn’t hang around long, which is good news. So I made breakfast and read MY NEW BOOK.

So far, it’s been two days since I began to read it and we’re still in the Introduction. It seems that our author is not in a hurry to discuss the subject but is more interested in setting the scene, down to the minutest detail. Never write one word when a hundred would do the same job … "and you don’t, I suppose?" – ed …

But I have a basic disagreement with modern research into hillforts. You look at them with their three and sometimes four concentric rings of fortification, deep ditches, scarp slopes, drystone walls, strong gates made of oak and all of that. I cannot see them as anything but defensive works, and major defensive works at that.

Neolithic and Iron-Age man didn’t have any free time. Their life was a desperate hand-to-mouth struggle. If they had to abandon food production for as long as it took and all of the effort that was required in order to construct their strongholds as they did, they must have been seriously concerned, if not frightened, for their own safety. It’s doubtful that any attacking force could have overwhelmed a determined defence in what they managed to build, until the arrival on the scene of Roman siege artillery. These forts are impressive even now, never mind what they must have been like 2500 years ago.

Back in here, I revised my Welsh lesson and then went to class. It wasn’t a rousing success today but it wasn’t a dismal failure either. It’s all a question of concentration and memory and I have neither right now. In fact, it’s been quite a while since I last did have any. We had a quiz today on identifying Welsh foods. It goes without saying that I was not at the top.

When the lesson was over I went for a break for a while and then came back to play with these sound files. There are two of them because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I had to stop the dictation in midstream and rewrite part of it.

What I don’t understand though is that the tone of each part is so different, and no amount of post-production will equalise it. Consequently, after several hours of trying, I decided to abandon it while I still had some sanity left … "??" – ed …

My cleaner stuck her head in the door this afternoon. She’d brought more cheese and a few other things from the supermarket, as well as a letter from the hospital in Paris. It’s the results of the EMG test that I had, and they tell me that there’s no improvement – just a very slight deterioration. This nervous attack that has wiped out my leg muscles is completely baffling medical science.

Before I went for tea I checked a few other sites that I visit, and discovered that, after Y Drenewydd’s signing of a Philippine International the other week, Connah’s Quay Nomads have signed a Sri Lankan International. The JD Cymru League is definitely looking up these days.

But that signing is not really a surprise. The manager of the Sri Lankan national side until Christmas was Andy Morrison, former manager of the Nomads.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with rice and veg, just as delicious as always. And there’s plenty of stuffing remaining for a leftover curry tomorrow. So I must remember the naan bread.

It’s shower day tomorrow too, so I might even be clean by tomorrow night. That’s some hope, isn’t it?

But while we’re on the subject of the hospital and baffling medical science … "well, one of us is" – ed … there’s a big stately home just outside Crewe that’s used as a medical laboratory by a well-known pharmaceutical concern
There were some headlines in the local newspaper "major medical breakthrough in Crewe".
Being bewildered, I contacted my friend in Crewe to ask him what was going on.
"You won’t believe this" he said "but they have developed something that will completely transform all medical science and procedures for the future"
"What’s that?" I asked
"One of the laboratory assistants has invented a cure for which there is no known disease"

0

Monday 3rd February 2025 – THAT WAS NEVER …

… four hours under the thumb of the dialysis machine today.

This evening I was back home even earlier than on many occasions when I was only having three and a half hours. There was something quite strange about that today and I wish that I knew what it was.

But at least I had a visit today. Not Emilie the Cute Consultant unfortunately but the doctor with no bedside manner whatever. He asked me if I was OK so I replied that I was, and so in the best traditions of the reporters of the much-lamented and very-much missed “News of the Screws”, he “made his excuses and left”.

But last night, even though I didn’t have many excuses to make, I still had difficulty leaving my comfortable chair and once again it was a rather late night by the time that I finally managed to tear myself away

After having had a bit of a scrub up and so on, I came back in here, fell into bed and that was the last that I remembered.

When the alarm went off, I was still absolutely dead to the World and it was quite an effort to raise myself up and stagger off into the bathroom. But all cleaned up, and ready to go, I went into the kitchen to attack the stores in the European Medication Mountain, when I forgot that I wasn’t supposed to take the anti-potassium stuff. Ahhh well …

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone and, to my dismay, there was nothing on there from the night. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I depend on my nocturnal peregrinations to supply me with what bit of excitement is ever likely to be present in my life.

Having been someone who has led a very lively and exciting life, I’m finding a great deal of difficulty adjusting to being housebound and disabled. Not that I am contemplating it, not by any means, but I can see why many disabled people (and healthy people too) resort to artificial or chemical means of stimulating the senses.

The nurse was early today. He had the usual couple of minutes of banal chat and then wandered away leaving me to go to make my breakfast.

Before I began to read my new book, I read a recent leaflet about a discovery of what would seem to be the camp of Caesar when he came ashore in 54BC, right near to my old stamping ground as a child at Pegwell bay.

Whilst the leaflet is of considerable interest, it’s even more interesting to see what the writer, a researcher at Leicester University, has to say about our old friend T Rice Holmes, because this latest discovery calls into question Rice Holmes’s theories.

The author tells us that Rice Holmes was "concluding vigorously that ‘it has been demonstrated that he did land in both in 55 and in 54 B.C. in east Kent’ ", although “vigorously” is hardly the adverb that I would use

He goes on to quote Rice Holmes’s theory, complete with his gratuitous commentary that Caesar landed firstly, "between Walmer and Deal Castles, in the latter north of Deal Castle. That some will still for a time dispute these conclusions is likely enough, but not those whose judgements count. For them, the problem is solved’", commenting that "The thoroughness of Holmes analysis was matched only by the confident abrasiveness of his critique. He brooked no argument. "

Never mind “confident abrasiveness”. “Arrogance” would have been a good word to emply.

So having moved that out of the way, the next book on the list to read is EARTHWORK OF ENGLAND, written by Arthur Hadrian Allcroft and published in 1908.

The book has been said to be “a standard work of reference” of its type but it’s probably well-out-of-date now. Nevertheless, it’ll be another one of the type that we have read recently, with hopefully plenty of interesting facts and, hopefully, a bibliography.

But how times have changed. Talking about some remains that were uncovered in Northern England, he tells us that "the erection of a new factory near Allendale -Town, causing the heather upon the adjacent moors to perish, revealed the perfectly preserved outlines of a great camp"

Can you imagine that today? Allcroft’s comment was quite matter-of-fact as if that kind of thing was perfectly normal, and it probably was too.

Back in here, I had a listen to the radio programme that I would be sending off for broadcast at the weekend and found, to my horror, that I’d made something of a pig’s ear of this one. I don’t know what on earth I must have been doing.

So while the computer was backing up onto the memory stick, I was chopping and changing the radio programme. It was really complicated to reassemble and ended up being sixteen seconds over, but as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I can soon lose sixteen seconds.

When I’d finished, I made a start on the Welsh homework but didn’t go all that far before my cleaner came to fit me with my anaesthetic patches.

And we were taken by surprise by the taxi arriving. These new Social Security regulations are playing havoc with everything. There was another passenger having to go to the big clinic so I was thrown in with him and as his appointment was before mine, I had to have the round trip.

Not that I’m complaining though, because it was my favourite driver, although she was rather subdued today and I don’t think that she raised her voice to another motorist once. Someone else who seems to be losing her touch.

However, she did confirm my suspicions about one of the other drivers and told me to guard my tongue. I’d worked that out the other day when he’d asked me one or two questions about one or two of the other drivers.

In the Centre we had to wait for a while before we could be let in so it can’t have been that early that I was plugged in and wired up.

Today, the first puncture hurt just slightly and the second hardly at all, but all of that changed as the anaesthetic wore off.

Today, I tidied up the laptop’s directories, backed up most of the files and then dealt with the sound file that I’d recorded for the concert.

It’s not by any means easy to edit sound-flies on the laptop but I managed it, which is good news. I shall have to persevere because if I can use the time profitably while I’m there, then so much the better.

After they unplugged me I walked outside to find my taxi waiting, and I had a very taciturn driver who gave me a very quiet ride home. Not that I’m complaining, because I was in no mood to chat. I feel as if I’ve been sucked dry by a vacuum cleaner after all that they crammed into what was surely a shorter session.

My cleaner was surprised to see me, but she was there and watched as I strode all the way up to the top of two flights of stairs to arrive here, and promptly collapsed into my chair.

later on I made a stuffed pepper with pasta, tomato sauce and veg followed by apple cake and soya dessert, and now I’m off to bed, totally wasted, but hoping for a better night with a lot of mileage to cover during the hours of darkness.

However, seeing as we have been mentioning the unsociable doctor … "well, one of us has" – ed … he was the one who was dismissed from the fertility clinic .
The clinic itself was in Paris, and at one certain moment he was in charge of the sperm donor section, but it was a total failure, so I heard.
"Why was that?" I asked the nurse
"They only had three candidates and there were, apparently, transport difficulties." she said. "Two of the donors came on the bus but the third one missed the tube"

0

Saturday 1st February 2025 – I REALLY MUST SHUT …

… up and stop moaning about this dialysis. If I were to tell you that we had another four painful hours of life coupled up to the machine you would very soon become as fed up as I am about the whole affair. I really can’t believe that everyone else suffers as much as I do about all of this.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

After I’d finished my notes last night I had a few things to do and once more it was quite late by the time that I finally went off to bed. Not that I’m bothered too much. Times have changed these last few months.

Once in bed thought, it was totally painless. I didn’t feel a thing for the whole six hours or so until the alarm went off the following morning.

And that was an effort to leave the bed before the second alarm. I’m having to push myself along as best as I can at the moment and hope that I can keep on going. It’s now my shoulders and my back that are giving me major problems

In the bathroom I had a good wash and scrub up, with a shave and plenty of deodorant in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant. And then I attacked the washing.

“Attacked” is the correct word too. There were piles of it. So much so that even with the washing machine loaded to the brim, there was still plenty that wouldn’t fit in which will have to wait for another time. This is becoming ridiculous.

In the kitchen I had all of my medication, not forgetting the Vitamin D supplement, and then I had to tidy up the empty shopping bags that were lying around all over the place.

It’s not been a very happy morning so far, has it?

If the nurse had turned up two minutes earlier he would have caught me in flagrante delicto. I’d just finished tidying up when he came. Of course he had to do his “cocorico” after Friday’s rugby, but that doesn’t bother me. I have no interest whatever in the game, except to say that it’s a sport played by men with odd-shaped balls.

He was in and out in a few seconds today. he didn’t stay around at all. That suits me fine and I could make breakfast and read my book.

We’re reaching the conclusion and it is as I suspected – a great deal of construction done quite rapidly around 400-380BC, periods of calm, increase in wealth and a relax in tension, followed by spells of more rapid overhauling of the forts until, in the words of the writers, "this is now an architecture of intimidation …. alongside a ‘deliberate closing down’ of the wider agricultural landscape, including animal slaughter"

Not just animal slaughter either. There’s evidence of warfare, such as heaps of slingshot pellets in readiness by the gates, and also, regrettably, piles of skeletons of men, women and children, clearly victims of a battle, cast into a pit.

This all started with some iron relics that were found in a caravan. And they have now identified them as a convex bowl on a spike that would be thrust into a tree-trunk to act as the pivot for a gate, sitting in a corresponding concave bowl set in a sill-beam in the floor.

That’s not all either. to stop the tree-trunk from splitting, a couple of iron bands were heated and strapped around the end of the tree-trunk. They would shrink and contract the wood, and the spike would be rammed home, with the bands preventing the wood from splitting

And if that’s not clever for Iron-Age engineering 2500 years ago, I don’t know what is.

Controversy has at last reared its ugly head. But it’s expressed in a much more scholarly way than T Rice Holmes ever did. The authors tell us "It seems worth stating here that there are so many problems with Avery’s (1993, App. A, 146 ff.) understanding of Varley’s work that it is in some ways safer simply not to consult Avery "

Back in here, first task was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was with Steve Knightley at a concert. He was organising one of these entertainments. It was a shame because there was only about a dozen people attending them. I’d been on the stage during one of his songs to do something so during a pause he was doing an entertainment having half a dozen people up on the stage for something like a quiz. He looked at me and said “you’ve just been up, haven’t you?”. He couldn’t find enough people to make up the team that he wanted on the stage. They were about to ask him the prize to start to answer the questions. Someone asked him “what are the prizes?”. He ummed and ahhed and didn’t say anything. Then he took all the people off the stage before the quiz had started and then led them out into the car park. We walked through the car park. Someone worked out that “ohh the first prize is marriage” to which one of the women said ” it can’t be that. I’m already married”. And then she looked at Steve Knightley and said “unless there’s a nice, gallant man who is going to arrange it for me”. We walked down to the far side of the car park and there were four or five cars parked down there. I recognised mine, and there was a Black Tulip BMC 1100-type of car. His was an Austin A40, a dirty green metallic and the whole of the bottom was rusting away. The wheels were rusting. He told me that he was a concrete examiner during the day. I thought that he’d been driving the car through the concrete. He said “yes, it needs something doing to the paintwork to stop it rusting further” he said. Why do’t you come down on Friday and do it for me?”. I thought “he lives the other side of Bristol”. He said “oh by the way my wife likes to have her one flat tyre each week so she’s probably have that while you’re down there”. I thought “well, I don’t suppose that I’m doing anything on Friday but even so ..”

Even though I remember nothing whatsoever of this dream, I can see the car park and see my car. It was a black Ford Consul MkI, a car that I have never owned, but would have given my right arm to have had at the time. Steve Knightley is much more well-known for being one third of the group “A Show Of Hands” whom I have never seen live but I have several of their concerts sent to me by a friend who works at a folk festival. He would really be quite good as a game show host I reckon. Judging by the cars though, this was set in the early 1970s when life was so much different. I’m not saying “better” because TB, rickets and waking up to ice on the bedroom window in the morning wasn’t good at any moment in history.

Next stop was to finish off the radio notes from yesterday. They are all done and dusted now ready to be dictated. It didn’t take me too long. But there are quite a few that need dictating tonight so I have better hurry up and finish my notes.

When the cleaner poked her head into the apartment I was backing up the computer, so once more that fell by the wayside. I’ll do this full back-up onto the travelling laptop yet.

She put the patches on my arm and then I had to wait for my driver so I tidied up in the kitchen.

It was my favourite driver today, so we had the whole running commentary, complete with gesticulations, all the way down to Avranches. And at Avranches we had the usual painful procedure that’s enough to drive me wild.

Once installed though, I could settle down to watch the football. Penybont v Hwlfforth is a match of second v third, with both teams keen for points – Penybont to stay clutching on to the coat-tails of TNS and for Hwlfforth to fight off Caernarfon for the coveted third place.

But I’m not sure what game I was watching because, apart from the fact that its quality can best be described as “agricultural”, I don’t think that either goalkeeper had any serious work to do. The match finished 0-0, with both sides lucky to get nil and if they are still playing now I reckon the score would still be 0-0.

The rest of the time at the hospital I spent backing up the computer, with still a long way to go. But when the buzzer goes off and the girls come to disconnect me, I just want to go home.

They guy who brought me back was the one who, I reckon, has some part in running the affair. We had a little chat on the way home and he dropped me off in the capable hands of my cleaner.

Now that the stair handrails have been fixed I strode personfully up all twenty-five steps to my door, and then collapsed inside.

Tea was a burger on a bap with vegan salad and baked potato, followed by apple cake and caramel soya dessert. Life doesn’t get much better than that And now that I’ve written my notes I’ll dictate the notes for the radio programmes and then go to bed.

But seeing as we have been talking about Steve Knightly and his small crowd … "well, one of us has" – ed … it made me smile. I once told someone that I played in several one-man shows
"I thought that there were three people in your two most famous groups" she replied
"Indeed there were" I replied. "but when I talk about a “one man show” I’m usually referring to the size of the audience"

0

Saturday 31st January 2025 – BROCCOLI STALK SOUP …

… is back on the menu … "PERSONSu" – ed … for Sunday lunch.

LeClerc has made a delivery this afternoon, and one of the options on special offer was a head of broccoli at €0:99. Consequently the head has been divided into its individual florets, blanched and is now in the freezer freezing. The stalk is being kept out of harm’s way in the fridge, along with about half a litre of water in which the broccoli was blanched. That will come in handy for making the soup.

While I was at the Dialysis Centre yesterday I reviewed my LeClerc shopping list, added a few things, subtracted a few things and prepared it ready for blast-off.

After I’d finished my notes last night and backed up everything (now that I’m having to take two back-ups) I reviewed my shopping list once again to make sure that I had everything that I needed, adding a few things and subtracting a few things and prepared it ready for blast-off.

Consequently it was another late night last night. But not because I was going over my shopping list. In fact I probably would have found something else to do instead to waste the time.

Once I’d finished everything I didn’t loiter about though, and was in bed quite smartly. If only I could show this kind of motivation when it matters

Once in bed it took a while to go off to sleep but once I was gone, I was gone. I seem to be having a few deep sleeps these days. I wonder if one of the medicine that I’m taking in the evening has this deep-sleep effect. I’ll have t look at the side-effects and if so, I’ll have to go back to taking it in the morning, whichever it is..

When the alarm went off I fell out of bed and wandered off into the bathroom for a good wash and scrub up, and then into the kitchen for the morning’s medication. This is really getting on my nerves right now but there’s not too much that I can do about it.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. No sign of Moonchild, or any of the other Fearsome Foursome for that matter, which is a shame, of course. But anyway I’d been in hospital. I was in a ward. I was lying there. Something that I’d been doing had been giving me some kind of exercise so I was quite tired at one point. A doctor came in to examine me and asked me to sit up. Sitting up was at first extremely difficult. In the end I managed to sit up and he could examine me. But this brought back some memories of a few other people who had been in my ward a little earlier but I can’t remember very much as to who they are and why they came.

Never mind not remembering who came in beforehand, I can’t even remember this dream – not at all. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m usually in a deep sleep when I’m dictating, but even so, when I’m transcribing, something awakens in the back of my mind about what had gone on. But not in this case. Hospital dreams though are two-a-penny. It is after all where I spend most of my life.

Later on I went back to sleep at some point … "you didn’t even know that you’d been awake" – ed … and there was a story about a nine-year old girl who had been found dead in a hospital in a bath in her own particular ward. They were wondering why this had happened but that was all that I remember of this.

Like I said, hospital dreams are two-a-penny

There was also something about being at a concert somewhere where a friend of mine was playing drums. He had a black pearl basic drum kit with faces of native Americans painted on the skins. The drums were far too loud and were drowning out everything else on stage, but I wondered later whether that might have been due to the position of the monitor mikes that were picking up more of his sound to relay to us in the wings.

That’s not all either, but you wouldn’t thank me for telling you the rest, especially if you are eating your meal right now.

There was a friend of mine who had a drum kit like that, and it is he who figured in this dream. But he wasn’t known for his loudness when he played so I can’t think why he would be drowning everyone else out. As for sitting in the wings, for several years I did help a guy who was a sound engineer at concerts. He had all of his equipment but couldn’t drive, and I had the traditional Ford Transit and could help lift the gear. And, of course, slip a discreet C90 into the tape head on the mixer desk.

And that reminds me – on the music site from where I obtain most of my equipment, they had a lovely budget-priced table-top mixer with USB and Micro SD capability. Get thee behind me, Satan!

It’s Isabelle the Nurse’s last day today for a while. She’s off to the ski slopes tomorrow morning, lucky person. And there’s no room in her suitcase for me. Ahhh well!

After she left, I made breakfast and read my book. The three guys who investigated the Eddisbury Hillfort are now comparing it with a few others, notably Hembury and Cadbury.

Because of similarities in the construction and reconstruction of the three hillforts they are able to give some kind of date for the commencement of the major fortifications. They put it at something round about 400BC, which corresponds with the arrival of the Celtic people. Presumably the forts are built by the Belgae to defend themselves from the Celts, or by the Celts to defend themselves from counter-attack

There are subsequent stages of abandonment, with reoccupation and repair, indicating that there were a few really turbulent moments in the next few centuries. Unfortunately, the absence of any written record makes it difficult to date anything or to give some kind of coherent history.

But there is one interesting fact that comes out of all of this. There are, generally speaking, several types of hillfort. Despite being in a zone where the “Northwestern” design is most common, Eddisbury bears a much more startling resemblance to the hillforts of Southwest England. So what was happening here?

The person who excavated Cadbury in the 1970s was called Leslie Alcock and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in an earlier version of this rubbish we talked about Leslie Alcock’s book while I was reading it. His work has subsequently been amended by later research and I managed to track down a copy.

At least, I tracked it down to where it was stored. And you’ve guessed it – at Cambridge University Library and they want me to pay £19:00 to read it. I shan’t go into a rant this time though. I shall just sit and seethe quietly. If I had a spieen I would vent it.

Back in here I had a ‘phone call from Paris asking how I was. I told them that they ought to be telling me how I am, seeing as they have the results and I don’t. But the specialist is away on holiday this week so the results might be a few days.

They also told me that I will have an appointment soon.

"Days? Weeks? Months?" I asked

"Certainly not months" I was told. So expect an appointment in July some time.

Today I’ve been editing a rock concert. There’s a reasonably famous concert that was recorded live for an LP back in 1982 but it’s a little-known fact that the group did a dummy-run of the concert a week or so earlier.

What’s even less-well-known than that is that the concert was recorded, which is significant for the fact that one of the tracks that they played lasted almost 50 minutes in the first concert, and cut down dramatically in the second that was recorded onto the LP.

The reason why was that some of the changes within the track were so difficult that they kept on fluffing them at the practice conference, so they decided to leave them out. Unfortunately, this tape that I have has passed through a couple of hands before it came my way and a few people have had a play at editing it to leave out the fluffed parts and make a seamless concert, but they haven’t done it so well and each subsequent editing has made it worse. The bits that were cut out have been lost a long time ago, so I’ve been trying to create a seamless concert with what I have.

It wasn’t easy but I’ve managed it and it doesn’t sound too bad at all compared to how it was when I received it. In fact it sounds quite good and I’m reasonably pleased with it. And if anyone wants the 24 seconds in total that I cut out, I still have them.

Having done that, I began to write the notes. And for a concert that runs for 58:27, I don’t need much in the way of notes. Just 1:33 which at 17 seconds per line, works out at five and a half. Well, it did when I went to school. Heaven alone knows what it is now.

There were the usual interruptions. There was lunch of course, when I realised that I hadn’t sent off my LeClerc order, and then my cleaner who interrupted my lunch. So once the dust had settled I had to attack the LeClerc stuff. I have to eat. So I added a few things, subtracted a few things and off it blasted

There was Christmas Cake break, and there is some Christmas cake being left until Sunday, which is quite handy, I suppose because I can plan something else to make then if necessary. If not, it’s back to the crackers and hummus

But before the Christmas cake there was LeClerc. “After 17:00” was my delivery slot so he turned up at 16:10. "In a rush to get off for the weekend, are we?"

All of that had to be put away and the broccoli blanched. And now, after several weeks of calm, the freezer is full again. Full to the brim.

There’s not much left now to do for the notes of the concert, so I’ll finish that off tomorrow morning ready to dictate tomorrow night. I went for tea instead.

Tonight’s tea was chips and vegan salad with the other half of that strange vegan thing from a couple of weeks ago, followed by apple cake and caramel soya dessert. That should keep the lupus from the porte as they used to say in Ancient Rome.

Yes, with all of this stuff I’ve been reading about Julius Caesar and T Rice Holmes’s showing-off, it’s rekindled the Latin that I haven’t learned or used since school. Whatever next? Puer amat mensam I suppose.

But before I go to bed, seeing as we have been talking about Satan … "well, one of us has" – ed … I was talking to someone who asked me if I knew about the dyslexic devil-worshipper
"Was he the one who didn’t believe that there was a Dog?" I asked, smart @rse that I am
"That’s right. Him" said my friend. "He ended up selling his soul to Santa"

0

Thursday 30th January 2025 – ANOTHER FOUR HOURS …

… coupled up to the machine, and I’m not sure which hurt the most – the pain in my arm once the anaesthetic wore off or the stabbing pain in my heel that arrived mid-session. It was another one of those days.

And can you guess the medical staff’s reaction to both? Of course you can. "Would you like a Doliprane, Mr Hall?". Yes, this whole country seems to float on a lake of Doliprane.

But seeing as we are talking about floating … "well, one of us is" – ed … I don’t know what I was floating on the other night when I managed a fairly early night but I wish that it had come back to float me off last night.

Even though I’d finished at a not-unreasonable time it was still a good while later when I could manage to find the courage to rise up and go to bed. It was probably only the hope that in bed would be the only way that I would be able to see Moonchild again, or one of the other Fearsome Foursome, that drove me on.

Once in bed though, I didn’t hang around and was soon asleep. And there I stayed until the alarm went off in the morning at 07:00.

It goes without saying that I wasn’t in any kind of mood to raise myself from the Dead but I did manage to beat the second alarm into the bathroom where I had a good wash and scrub up. While I was there I also applied plenty of deodorant and had a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon.

In the kitchen I had the morning’s medication, remembering not to take the medication that I’m not supposed to take on Dialysis Day. But the bad news is that I’ve run out of my anti-cancer portable chemotherapy stuff that’s been keeping me alive for the last couple of years. I hope that there was a bottle in the last batch of medication that my faithful cleaner brought me. If not, I’ll be pushing up the daisies much quicker than even I think.

Thinking about it though, I should have asked for a new prescription when I was in Paris just now (they can’t prescribe it in Avranches) but I was hoping that I’d manage to see my consultant when I was there. But with the results not being anything like ready (they had hardly finished all the tests) I’m having to go back some time soon.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And I’ve no idea of anything at all about anything out of this. We had another phantom alarm at 02:50. It sounded so real that I did actually rise up and begin to leave the bed. But I’d been in some kind of folk group and had been playing an instrument and it had been the case of hitting my knees with my hand in the rhythm of the music, something like that. Anyway they stood me up and took me and we just – Rick – and at that traffic lights that was that hippo that was Rod Wayne’s and at that meeting I had to drive all the way back to Crewe when I could be posting but then having to think about disposing of her. Where will I dispose of her and then I said “if you are going to take me to this troublesome bear-y and dispose of Linda at the end of the programme so that we could have a little life? We had a girls’ school at first and looked after it. It was a very shabby and run-down area (…fell asleep here …)

Apart from the fact that none of it makes any sense … "so what in your dreams actually does?" – ed … I can’t remember a single moment of it. However, the utter gibberish and falling asleep indicate that I must have been really tired while all of that was going on.

Isabelle the Nurse is counting down the moments until her ski holiday. She’s promised to show me the photos but that’s no good at all. I need to see the real snow, and feel in under my skis. It’s probably a dozen years since I’ve last been skiing and how I really used to enjoy it.

After she left I made my breakfast and then began to read my new book.

To most of you, it’s probably not very exciting. And it’s not a book either. In 1936 an archaeologist named William Jones Varley excavated an Iron-Age Hillfort at Eddisbury in Cheshire. Although he had made a couple of initial reports, he died in 1970 with his in-depth report unfinished.

In 2006 when his wife died, a box in her caravan was examined and found to contain some very rusty pieces of iron which, judging by the quality of the ironwork and welding, were believed to relate to the Iron Age.

These were passed to a group of researchers who, comparing the pieces with Jones’s written notes, believe that these pieces of ironwork are the pivot points of the gates of Eddisbury Hillfort.

They published their own report a few years later after an extensive examination of the pieces and a re-examination of the site, and I’ve managed to lay my hands on a copy. So far I’m on about page 26 and no-one has managed to insult or abuse anyone else, even if the authors do disagree with some of Jones’s conclusions, so it makes some nice, calm reading

Back in here I had things to do, such as to finish off the missing notes from the next radio programme. So that’s all done now and it’s ready to be dictated on Saturday night.

The rest of the morning was spent on this question of backing-up that’s going to be the bane of my life over the next few weeks because there isn’t enough room on the USB key that hangs on my keyring.

“So why not use a portable drive like I used to in the olden days?” The question that I need to ask before that is “can I make a portable drive work with one hand?”. Remember that when I’m in the Dialysis Centre I had pipes and tubes going into one arm and the arm is clamped into a mould to hold it still, clamped to my leg

My cleaner was rather late coming to fit my patches, so as you might have expected, the taxi was rather early. He didn’t like having to wait for me, which was no surprise seeing as he had someone else in the car with him.

It was a slinet drive down to Avranches and we were really early there so I had to wait 20 minutes. Still, the earlier we start, the earlier we finish I suppose.

My bed was down in the far corner today which is always something of a struggle, especially when there’s almost 5kg of water to remove today

In the end, they agreed that they would only remove 4.5 kg. What they are going to do with this excess water, now that they are already on the maximum (1.1kg/hour at a maximum of four hours), I really don’t know. And neither, I suspect, do they

Once I was comfortable I began the back-up but then had one of those dramatic crash-outs that I used to have in the bad old days. But there I was a little later, being shaken awake by none other than Emilie the Cute Consultant.

"Mr Hall!" she said. "I thought that you were having a crisis!". She obviously doesn’t know about these diabetic comas.

And you should be even more proud of me that you were a few days ago. It took a great, immense effort but I managed to avoid saying "next time you want to awaken me, don’t shake me. Just roll over and give me a gentle nudge."

Before I was plugged in, I reminded the nurses that I needed a prescription of all of my other medication. They’d printed it off on Monday but there was no doctor there to sign it. Anyway, while she was hovering over me, I reminded Emilie the Cute Consultant that I needed it.

Ten minutes later one of the nurses came back waving a prescription signed by one of the doctors, and five minutes later Emilie the Cute Consultant came in carrying one too.

"Ohhh" she said. "I see that you already have one" and began to turn on her heel.

"In fact, I’d rather have yours" I replied. "It has your nice handwriting and signature on it" and she blushed again.

Once more, I was the last to leave. I hadn’t lost all of the liquid, which is no surprise. But it’s not going to help. What’s the betting that within a year I’ll be permanently coupled up to a dialysis machine?

The taxi was waiting for me when I came out. There was another lady to travel with me who lived in Avranches but this time we went up the old road that is probably one of the steepest roads that I have ever travelled. And then I had a lovely view of the old city walls and castle on the way past after we’d dropped her off.

She had mobility problems so I’d sat in the back of the car … "as if you don’t!" – ed … and after she left, I didn’t have the energy to move into the front. It was a very quiet and subdued drive home.

My cleaner was waiting for me and she watched as I climbed all 25 steps to my door – the stair handrails are now fixed.

We had a little chat and she promised to have the prescription framed, with Emilie the Cute Consultant’s signature in full view

After gathering my breath and having my protein drink, I made tea. Steamed vegetables and vegan sausage in a vegan cheese sauce. It was absolutely delicious. And my apple cake and caramel soya dessert was magnificent. The cake is as good as I thought it would be.

Bedtime now, and more work to do tomorrow. It’s a never-ending cycle, isn’t it? One of these days it will stop, but only when I’m pushing up the daisies.

But going back a little, seeing as we have been talking about archaeologists … "well, one of us has" – ed … have you ever noticed how so many of the people on the site are female?
On day I was passing an archaeological site and noticed this so I asked the team leader.
"We always engage women when we can" he replied. "And usually married women"
"Why’s that?" I asked
"Because they are so good at it" he explained. "There is nothing like a married woman for digging up all the past"

0

Wednesday 29th January 2025 – MY APPLE CAKE …

… is magnificent.

In the oven, it rose up like a lift – the first cake to ever do that in all the time since I’ve started baking.

It’s a basic oil cake but instead of it being all-vegetable oil I substituted some coconut oil in place of about half of it, slowly melted in the microwave. In the cake itself are two eating apples, minced up with my big whizzer and also some desiccated coconut and spices such as cinnamon and nutmeg.

It’s now in the fridge, cut up into sixteen slices and ready to eat as of tomorrow night with the soya dessert because the chocolate cake is now all finished.

But talking of the beautiful cake … "well, one of us is" – ed … I’ve had a really good day today, which is a surprise considering how much moaning I’ve done just recently. But there’s a reason for that – I had a visitor during the night.

But more of that … "anon" – ed …

First of all, in yet more surprising news, I was actually in bed early. Not before 23:00 I hasten to add, but by 23:40 and that’s quite an early time for me these days.

But once in bed I remember nothing at all until the alarm went off. I was really soundly and comfortably asleep.

Once more, it was a struggle to rise to my feet but, beating the second alarm (only just), I headed off into the bathroom to sort myself out.

Into the kitchen afterwards to take my medicine, all of it (except the Vitamin D supplement) this morning, and then back into here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I was during the night.

And look at this! There was a football club that had recently undergone a change of manager. It was the first game under the new manager last night. The commentators were talking and were saying that this is a very important match for this manager to win because with him being new he will have set his stall out and the club that he was managing, which was Peterborough United was a big club with many fans who all used to go to the ground on one occasion but attendances had dwindled. I had a look at the attendances and found that they were in the nine thousands, which I thought for a town like Peterborough with a team like theirs is actually pretty good going in any case. If he could bring it up to eleven or twelve thousand that would be exceptional. This apparently was not an unrealistic dream and the commentators were fully behind him as he sorted out his team and would take advantage of his new position and take them to win the game. Somewhere amongst all of this, Moonchild was there. I distinctly remember speaking to her although I didn’t say very much of any interest but she was certainly there last night looking at the situation and looking at me on this commentary team talking about Peterborough United.

Yes, Moonchild came DANCING IN THE SHALLOWS OF A RIVER … PLAYING HIDE AND SEEK WITH THE GHOSTS OF DAWN, WAITING FOR A SMILE FROM A SUN CHILD and put in an appearance, How lovely to see her. It may not be a satisfactory appearance, her being on the fringe of a dream, but she was there none-the-less. I shall have to work much harder and try to entice her further towards centre-stage.

However, what’s all this about Peterborough United? That’s a team that has absolutely no significance in anything that I have ever done, so I’ve no idea why the club should figure during a night-time voyage. But then again, if I hadn’t gone there I wouldn’t have seen Moonchild.

Later on, there was a group of disabled people, me included, that were being examined for reassessment etc. Just as it was about to be my turn and everyone was going for a coffee or something like that, it was the end of the day and everything was quietening down, my alarm began to sound. everyone looked at me and said “Eric! How could you!” in an air of bitter disappointment. It wasn’t until about 30 seconds later that I realised that it actually was my alarm going off.

That was somehow prophetic, wasn’t it? But I’ve had plenty of dreams where the subject matter has fused into something that was actually happening simultaneously in real life.

Isabelle the Nurse and I had something of a chat. She’s off to the ski slopes on Saturday but unfortunately there is no room in her suitcase for me. I really need a holiday right now but that’s impossible.

If they had told me last summer that I wouldn’t have ever gone far again for the rest of my life, I’d have booked a cruise or something, or gone to a special home or resort where I could relax and stretch out. I enjoyed the voyage on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR and I’d happily do it again. At least I fulfilled a few of my lifetime ambitions, such as crossing the Atlantic by sea and then sailing the North West Passage.

After Isabelle the Nurse left, I made my breakfast and read MY BOOK.

At long last, I’ve finished it, and I can’t say that I’m sorry. He’s spent page after page after page in complicated calculations, such as on which date did Caesar sail, only to tell us that it doesn’t really matter. I’ve come to the conclusion that he has plenty of knowledge (which is impressive) and I’ve enjoyed sharing in it but how he loves to flaunt it, quite often unnecessarily. And how he loves to insult his contemporaries who don’t have the same knowledge as he does, and don’t have the time to find it.

Here’s hoping that my next book, whatever it is, is less confrontational than this one was. It was really hard going.

Back in here I had bills to pay. Once more, the standing order that pays my taxe foncière – my local authority rates, has failed and I’ve no idea why. But anyway, these days we can pay on-line so once I’d found my wallet, off I go.

There was also the Property Tax on my place in Canada to organise.

Buying that place in Canada was a shrewd move. There are no identity cards in Canada so evidence of habitation is served by the possession of a Property Tax assessment. And armed with my Property Tax Assessment I could open a bank account, buy a mobile ‘phone, buy a pick-up, take out car insurance and a thousand and one other things.

Once I’d sorted myself out it was almost lunchtime but I made a start on choosing the music for the next radio programme.

Lunch was a slice of flapjack and some fruit which was nice, especially the flapjack. Mixing the ingredients in the big mixer is definitely the way forward. That mixer was a shrewd investment too.

Back in here I had to resort the music as I had mistaken one musician, but eventually all of the stuff was chosen, remixed, edited, converted, paired and segued.

At this point, the cleaner came along to do her stuff. And that included helping me into the shower.

First though, I have to hand-wash some clothes and then throw them into the bath where they will be rinsed. And then I climb in. It’s still quite a laugh that the company who came here to “help” me wanted €300-odd for a machine to help me that didn’t work, and my cleaner and I rigged up a system with one chair and two wooden boxes, cost €0.00.

After she left I began to write the notes for the music but it was soon Christmas Cake time. Just one more helping of Christmas Cake, which will be on Friday, and then it will be back to the hummus and crackers again

When my little break was over I made my cake. And as I said, it’s wonderful. It took even longer to bake than previous cakes but it’s risen really well, and really equally too. I’ll start eating that tomorrow with my soya dessert and if it tastes as nice as the crumbs that I ate, it really will be nice.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry, but there wasn’t much left over so a handful of lentils went into it. No naan either because I forgot to take some dough out of the freezer at lunchtime. Still, it really was nice all the same.

So right now I’m off to bed ready to finish off my music notes in the morning, and then continue this downloading..

But seeing as we have been talking about Canada … "well, one of us has" – ed … Canada is lovely, the people are lovely (especially my family in New Brunswick and Ottawa as well as Castor of course) and I could have quite happily emigrated there.

However, I fell into that gap – over 55 means no work permit and you can’t be an aged dependant until you are 65. I was 57 when I applied, and when I was 65 I was too ill to go.

But someone told me a lovely story about Canadians. It went "how do you make 200 rowdy, rioting Canadian men to leave a bar at closing time? "
"Go on" I replied. "I’ll buy it. How do you make 200 rowdy, rioting Canadian men to leave a bar at closing time?"
"Simple" replied my interlocutor. "You ask them."

0

Monday 27th January 2025 – I’VE BEEN DOING …

… my impression of Mr Carmichael today and SUPPER WAITS ON THE TABLE INSIDE A TIN tonight. I have had a fraught, exhausting day and I’m too tired to move. And seeing that that’s my normal state of affairs these days when there isn’t any nonsense, this one is going to be good.

Last night was another typical night in this new order of things where I was in no rush to go to bed. The days when I used to be so stressed out about meeting a deadline are over and I’m now much more relaxed about it.

And so I loitered around doing not very much of anything for a while before I finally lost whatever enthusiasm I might have had, and crawled off into bed.

And there I lay, fast asleep until the alarm went off this morning at 07:00 when definitely the worse for wear, I crawled out into the light.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and shave, and even applied the deodorant in case Emilie the Cute Consultant were to come to see me, and then did some hand-washing of clothes again. Not that they needed it, I suppose, but I have to keep on pushing forward.

Into the kitchen for the medication and then back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was away somewhere on some kind of trip from work on a business training course. When I arrived at the hotel and put my things in my room I went for a walk around. In the basement there was a shop and they had about twenty racks with LPs on, “Best of…. and B-sides”, the title of the whole range of albums that were on sale. They were on sale at¨£2:49 each. I began to have a rummage through and found an album that had the cover of IN SEARCH OF SPACE by Hawkwind, but when I looked at it, it was an album by Country Joe McDonald and the Fish. Then I found an album by one of these new wave bands like “Frankie Goes To Hollywood” or something. The further I dug, I found a couple of albums by Curved Air. I thought to myself that I’m going to be in Paradise here. I’m going to spend my night now searching through all these shelves and I bet that I can go away with a couple of hundred Pounds-worth of LPs to take with me on the way home. Then I began to think about CDs. I don’t use albums any more, I have CDs and, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, my album collection was digitalised several years ago. So yet again, I was caught in this huge mesh of indecision.

How many times have we been here? If it’s not snatching defeat from the jaws of victory or the family putting le baton dans la roue or a collection of Cortinas without MoTs scattered around the town it’s the indecision that is a thread that’s running through my dreams. And I was so intrigued by this idea of the cover of “In Search Of Space” that I actually checked. I can still see the album cover that was in my dreams and sure enough, it IS the cover of “In Search Of Space” and if that’s not an impressive thing to happen in a dream, I don’t know what is.

The nurse turned up and we had yet another animated discussion. He hadn’t told me yesterday that it’s his last day for this month today, so today he needs my health card for the details. I don’t have it at the moment because my faithful cleaner has it for when she goes to the chemist’s later. "No problem" he said. "I’ll go and knock on her door. In which apartment does she live?"

Ohh no you won’t, my friend. Not at 08:30 in the morning and not when it’s nothing to do with you. If you had told me that you needed it today it would have been here. You’ll have to make some other arrangement. My cleaner is entitled to her comfort and privacy.

So after he left, I made breakfast and read MY BOOK

And here we go again. On page 681 where there is a dispute between the narrative of Caesar and that of Seneca and someone prefers the latter, which disagrees with his own point of view, he asks is if we really "are to prefer the authority of Seneca to that of the general who fought the battle"

On page 648 however, when he notes another disagreement between two narratives and he prefers the one that contradicts Caesar, he asks if one of his colleagues had "forgotten the discrepant statements that were made by officers who had watches in their pockets as to the hour at which this or that episode occurred in the campaign of Waterloo?". Caesar’s "estimate may have been right : but also it may have been wrong ; and anyhow it is folly to stake the whole argument upon its accuracy."

Despite his criticism of his colleagues, he’s also doing his fair share of cherry-picking of facts and ideas, but I bet that his colleagues and contemporaries were much nicer about it that he was.

After breakfast I came in here to do the second part of my Welsh homework. We had to write n essay about one of our relatives who fought in a war.

So do I write about my cousin who was in the Army in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s or my mother who was in the Royal Air Force in World War II who told us when we were small that she flew Spitfires but I bet that she peeled the spuds in the cookhouse, or my Great-Grandfather who having retired once from the army at 45, dyed his white hair black, lied about his age (and not just by a couple of years either) and went to France with the Canadian Army?

Instead, I decided to do something rather different and talk about a cousin of my maternal Grandmother who was sentenced to be SHOT AT DAWN for refusing to pick up a rifle.

Yes, we have ’em all in our family.

When I’d finished my magnum opus I began the mega-backup of my travelling laptop but as usual, I ran out of time. My cleaner came along to interrupt me and to fit my patches. And she had brought with her the first big load of medication.

After she’d performed her task and left, I began another project of mine which involved trying to bring some order into chaos in the kitchen. Of course, Nietzsche is quite famous for saying that "out of chaos comes order" but he had never ever been to visit anywhere where I was living.

Not that I actually made it very far with my plans because the taxi arrived. And this time I checked to see if there was anyone on the back seat of the car before I committed another indiscretion. And lucky that I looked too.

Still we had an interesting chat all the way down to Avranches.

Today is the first day of my four-hour sessions. They wanted to remove 4.2 kilos of water from my body, and that’s a far cry from the 2.7 that they wanted to remove on the first day. I’m definitely not doing so well.

And when it’s painful for three and a half hours, can you imagine how painful it is for four hours?

There was a visitor too today. Someone from the Re-education Department who wanted to see how much I knew, and talked to me as if I was two years old or some doddery, senile old fart (and you can shut up too!)

So with the pain in my arm, seething from this blasted visit, totally fed up, having been ignored by the duty doctor who passed my bed three times without even glancing in my direction, and with no coffee anywhere in sight, it was rather unfortunate that just at that moment a nurse brought round a “customer satisfaction” survey form to fill in.

Four hours under the dialysis is long enough. It’s exhausting, tiring, painful and shattering. But it’s not all over yet. After having waited ten minutes for the taxi, we then had to go right across Avranches to the Clinic to pick up someone else, to come back right past where we started and then head out to Granville.

It was 19:30 when I returned here, totally exhausted and fed up, but I made it up the stairs and then up to here. There was bread to make next, so you’ll understand why I gave it all up and made supper out of a tin, just like Mr Carmichael had to.

Right now though, I’ve had enough. I really have. The events of today have dragged me back down into the pit from which I had just climbed out. I said to my cleaner that in all honesty, I can’t take too many of these four-hour sessions. I’m wiped out after the first one. What am I going to be like in a couple of weeks? There’s no end to it either.

But these patronising, condescending people really get on my wick. It reminds me of the time (well, one of the times actually, but that’s another story) when I saw the trick cyclist.
She showed me a photo of a splodge with green edges. "What’s this?" she asked.
"It’s image number six of the Rorschach Test" I replied
"And this?"
"Image number two of the Rorschach Test"
"And this?"
"Ohhhh" I replied. That’s a horrible, evil mass of flesh that sucks the blood out of every living soul and brings gloom and despondency in its wake."
"The picture is over here" he said. "You’re looking at a photo of my wife there"
"Was I correct?"
"Pretty much".

There’s a RORSCHACH TEST on line that you can have fun with it. I answered it seriously and carefully, and the result is that I’m "SOUND AND WELL-BALANCED", which just goes to prove, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that these trick cyclists don’t have a clue what they are talking about.

0

Saturday 25th January 2025 – HERE WE GO THEN.

"Mr Hall. As of Monday you’ll be required to attend dialysis for four hours each session".

That’s all that I needed to know, thank you very much. So from watching people come and go for two and a half hours, mine that was originally thought to be three hours and became three and a half before we’d really got going, it has quite quickly become four.

As I said to the driver who brought me home tonight, "I may as well move my bed and computer in there permanently".

Things seem to be going from bad to worse around here.

At least I have my dreams to which to look forward, I suppose. And after the sudden, dramatic appearance of Moonchild the other night I was planning on going to bed full of optimism. But like the old woman with her cock linnet,
"I dillied and dallied, dallied and I dillied
Lost me way and don’t know where to roam"

Trying to summon up the energy to go to bed and I still haven’t unwound from the drive is something that I just wasn’t able to do. Back in the old days when I drove my taxi and still had a few hours to spare, to unwind I’d go running in the evening around the housing estate in Winsford where I lived, but all of that went pear-shaped when I moved back to Crewe in early 1982.

It was round about 01:30 when I finally made it into bed. I was toying with the idea of switching off the alarm and having a long lie-in but I have too much that I want or need to do. And in any case, what if the nurse does decide to turn up? So I set the alarm back to 07:00 etc.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in the past I had some very restless nights. And so they might be surprised to hear that I don’t recall moving at all during the night. I was dead to the World.

When the alarm sounded I staggered to my feet and went off to look for some clothes so that I could have a good wash and scrub up in case Emilie the Cute Consultant is there. After all, I wouldn’t expect to find my cute little Romanian doctoress anywhere in the vicinity.

And despite having had a clothes-washing session last weekend, the amount of dirty clothes is increasing rapidly. I need to do something about that. But in the meantime I hand-washed the undies and so on as usual.

In the kitchen I sorted out my medication and made sure that I took my anti-cancer stuff seeing as it wasn’t available in the hospital so I’ve missed a couple of days of that.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. There was a group of very young children with a woman who was probably a teacher. I was there. They were having to sort out some shoes for one of them but when they arrived in Nantwich everywhere was closed so they went for a walk around. The woman talked to them about the different things that they could be doing. Collecting wild flowers was one of them but someone piped up that it was against the law to pick a wild flower these days. They were walking around, and she said that they could go into a meadow and pick the wild flowers but anyway she’ll talk to them about the wild flowers. I said “it’s probably better that she went and took the kids to the shoe shop now”. She asked why that was. I replied “if you’re going to tell them a lot and then go to the shoe shop and come out again they’ll forget all about it and you’ll have to start again. The shoe shops are now open so you may as well go there, buy the shoes, and then with the kids you can start from a more convenient point rather than halfway through the thing and they’ve forgotten all of the beginning”.

As to what’s happening here, I have no idea. I know that hunting for shoes for us as kids was a very taxing operation as my mother dragged us around from one shop to the next looking for a pair of shoes at the cheapest possible price. But then again, feeding all of us must have cost a fortune and every penny counted. As for the issue of kids and concentration, people don’t realise how easily a kid can be distracted, not even some teachers. It’s a real task to keep them focused.

And then there was something happening about football, Wales and a certain goalkeeper. They were translating some document from English into Welsh but there were some words in the vocabulary that they didn’t quite understand that concerned this particular goalkeeper. Again this was one where the alarm went off right in the middle of everything and totally destroyed my concentration and I’ve forgotten most of this.

Now I’m wondering about this dream. The news was announced yesterday that Y Drenewydd, who have had a string of disappointing goalkeepers after parting with David Jones, have signed the Philippines International goalkeeper. He’s been without a club, apparently, since the end of their season and if the story that I’ve heard is correct, he needs to find a club and play regular football to keep his place in the International side. But how come he’s ended up in mid-Wales I really don’t know. But he’ll be quite at home in a league where there’s the New Zealand International keeper and Internationals from such giants of World football as The Comoros and Guinea-Bissau and many other countries too. In fact, at the last count there are 23 International players playing in the JD Cymru League and that took me by surprise too.

It goes without saying that having made a special effort, the nurse didn’t turn up so round about 09:00 I gave up and went for breakfast and to read MY BOOK.

A few days ago I promised to stop posting extracts from his book because I’m sure that I’m as fed up as you are of his abusive manner of writing. But I couldn’t pass over a quote on page 637 where he tells us that one author, "Having obtained, as he tells us, ‘ more accurate information,’ … accordingly transferred Caesar’s landing- place to Hythe … Thus the ‘ explanation ’ which he discovered with such pride collapses".

There really is no place for such catty, abusive remarks like that in what is supposed to be a serious academic work, especially when he is guilty of exactly the same issue.

Back in here I attacked the radio notes that I’d started the other day and in a mad fit of enthusiasm I finished them all off ready for dictation tonight when it all goes quiet.

My cleaner crept in quietly just as I was finishing off and caught me in flagrante delicto yet again. She put on my patches and while we were waiting for the taxi we sorted out the medication and made an up-to-date inventory. Nothing had changed à propos the medication that I need to take so we can go ahead and make an order.

Once again I was on my own in the taxi and the driver and I had a good chat all the way down to the Clinic. We had to stop to pick up someone who lives half a mile from the Centre but that’s OK.

While I was waiting to be seen I saw the guy who usually comes with me. He is indeed on a stretcher and he doesn’t look at all well.

There weren’t many of us there today so I was quickly plugged in and settled down to watch Caernarfon v TNS which was played on Friday night. Only I wasn’t. The game had been postponed due to “storm damage at the Awful Stadium”. I had visions of the grandstand having collapsed but further enquiries revealed that a floodlight head had become unsafe.

Luckily the television lorries had picked up the news and had ground to a halt in … Y Drenewydd. By pure coincidence the home team, second from bottom, were at home to Llansawel, fourth from bottom and so they hastily rigged up something for us to watch

Despite the lowly positions of the teams, we were treated to probably the best football match that I have seen in years. And I really mean that too. I won’t spoil the game by giving you a run-down. Instead you can watch the highlights HERE or the full game HERE if you are feeling enthusiastc. It really is worth it.

After my nurse unplugged me had to wait 10 minutes for a car but it was one of my favourite drivers so we had a good chat on the way home in the rain.

My faithful cleaner was waiting for me and supervised as she watched me up the stairs. It was a little more energetic than one or two have been just recently when I’ve been feeling quite tired

Back in here I made some naan dough and then had the leftover curry that I should have had in midweek. All my meal plans are up the spout what with this trip to Paris. I need to reorganise, I reckon, and regroup

But the curry was delicious and the garlic naan bread was the best that I have ever made. It would have been even nicer had I remembered to put the garlic in, but you can’t have everything.

So that’s it for tonight. I have some dictating to do and then I’m off to bed. Tomorrow I’m editing and then I have to think of a work plan. I can’t let twelve hours go by at the Dialysis Centre without doing anything. But it’s hard to do very much with just one hand and the other hand clamped by the side of your body, as I discovered when I tried to do a screen print this afternoon.

But on the way to the football on Friday night a group of supporters on the way to Parc Latham in Y Drenewydd were overtaken by a funeral cortège, and one of the supporters took off his hat and bowed
"What a nice gesture" said a friend
"Well, it’s true that we did have 25 happy years together" said the other "but the club wouldn’t postpone the kick-off until after the interment was over."

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Friday 24th January 2024 – HERE I ALL AM …

… not exactly sitting in a rainbow but sitting at my desk in the comfort and safety of my own apartment (well, someone else’s but I live in it) after without any doubt the quickest drive home that I have ever had.

It was an ambulance that brought me home, and there are a couple of advantages of being in an ambulance in Paris. Those two advantages are blue and they flash. Hence we didn’t have too much trouble fighting our way through the rush-hour traffic.

One of the big advantages of having thrown in my lot with the biggest taxi, VSL and ambulance company in Normandy is that they have vehicles everywhere. So when the hospital administration ‘phones them to say that I’m ready to go home, it’s not “okay, I have too find a driver first and then it’ll be a four-hour wait while he drives there”, it’s “we have an ambulance in Paris already, dropping off someone at another hospital, so when they are free, we’ll send it round”.

And so they finished with me at 16:40 and by 17:40 we were just about on our way home

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Last night after I had finished my notes it was late – very late. But never mind. I went to bed, put my headphones back on and listened to some more good music for hours and hours.

Eventually I fell asleep, awoke again and switched off the computer, and then went back to sleep.

But it was a horrible night. It was as if my left shin had caught fire and eventually I had to give up and I called for the nurse. She smothered it in cold cream and that seemed to ease the pain for a while, and eventually I went back to sleep.

At 07:00 I had one of those dramatic awakenings that I sometimes have. I decided nevertheless to stay in bed and tease the nurses again, but it was a different crew today. They were nice and cheerful too, and that really makes a difference.

It was breakfast in bed yet again but I restrained myself from asking if the young student nurse would feed me with grapes.

After breakfast I went and had a good scrub up in the bathroom. I asked for a chair for the bathroom so that I could have a shower and eventually it turned up, just after I’d given up waiting and dressed. Never mind – I’ll have a shower later.

Back in the bedroom I transcribed the dictaphone notes. It’s a surprise that there actually were some, the way that the night had gone. And look at this! Moonchild came to see me last night. She came DANCING IN THE SHALLOWS OF A RIVER to see me in a folk music group. We were playing at Dungeness at the extreme south-east of Kent. I was playing some instrument or other. She wanted to come along and see what happened and see what went on and so of course I agreed to take her. Although she was in this dream she was very much in the background and it wasn’t really about her at all, more about this group I suppose.

But I’m still shaking my head in bewilderment about what’s going on here. Not that I’m complaining of course – in fact regular readers of this rubbish will recall that Moonchild has been rapidly promoted into the top tier of favourite nocturnal invitees along with Castor, Zero and TOTGA, and hasn’t worked anything like as hard as the others to be there, but I don’t understand why her dramatic appearance should have taken place at all. At the actual moments in real life when Moonchild was present, they was of no significance whatsoever. The folk festival is of some significance and so is the idea of taking her somewhere, but her fading into the background is, shall we say, disappointing at the very least.

And not playing bass? This probably relates to a decision that I made a day or so ago, and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have been to Dungeness ON A COUPLE OF OCCASIONS, including the famous occasion when I had to repair a Spitfire, and I bet that you think that I am joking too.

Later on we were talking about – there was a girl from work. Another one with long, blond hair. I’d been chatting to her for quite a while and it seemed that she had been becoming much more attached to me than perhaps she ought, not that I was objecting but she had a boyfriend. There was some talk about work, going away on a mission somewhere. Of course she was going, and I was going too. Our conversation developed into something quite intimate and it was suggested that this was one way that our employers could save the cost of one room. We were going home from work and ended up walking around Frank Bott Avenue, Underwood Lane area of Crewe. As we walked up towards West Street and the old railway works we began to discuss how close we were going to be. It was quite obvious that both of us had plans. The talk came round to how nervous people are the first time that they take each other to bed, how things never worked out as they were planned to do etc. So she just stopped, looked at me and said “does your weekly budget run to the cost of renting a room in a hotel for a night where we could go?”. I was stunned by this, but of course I replied “if it didn’t, I would make it”. At that point we walked hand-in-hand down West Street. We came past a hotel and we noticed that the side door was open. We walked in through the side door, walked upstairs, found an empty room and went in. A couple of weeks later, still before this trip, we were organising a party at work and were having fancy dress clothes etc. Of the costumes, there was only one left when I went into the changing room. It was something that I don’t suppose was particularly appropriate and it was small but I had to put it on. She was sitting on the top shelf of a cupboard laughing and joking. I asked her if I could change my clothes in there because there was nowhere else. She wondered why I had asked her and no-one else. I explained that I thought that she was part of the organising committee like me, although with an undertone that implied that she was probably much more friendly with me than anyone else there. She was with her boyfriend at the time, laughing and joking. In the end she climbed down from her shelf and went off. I climbed into her shelf and began to change. Then I was thinking that has what happened just now changed anything that might otherwise have happened at the place where were going away. Have I once more managed to rip defeat from the jaws of victory?

Getting the Girl? How often does that happen in a dream? It can’t have been more than a handful of times during the 26 or so years that I’ve been undertaking this project. Where are the members of my family who usually come along and stick le baton dans la roue at the crucial moment? They always used to do that in real life and, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, they do it quite often in my dreams too. But I’m impressed that I can remember phrases like to “rip defeat from the jaws of victory” in my sleep although, of course, “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” as I did right at the end here in this dream is also par for the course.

I was having a really long, complicated dream when all of a sudden at 07:00 exactly I awoke and sat bolt-upright and the whole thing disappeared except for right at the end when I was sitting at a table about to give a presentation. One of the women sitting at a table sideways on to me also on the stage asked if she could close the curtain so that she could be hidden from view. I told her that that would be fine provided that I could use the plug at her feet to plug in one of the machines that I needed for my presentation. Then I was thinking that perhaps I ought to make some kind of flying lead so that I could plug that into the floor at my feet and plug in a couple of appliances to that.

In the past I’ve given several presentations, like the one on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR when I talked about the changing shape of maps in the High Arctic due to the melt of the Polar ice-cap and the one in France when I gave a lecture on my drive around THE TRANS-LABRADOR HIGHWAY but they’ve usually passed off with the same amount of polite and genteel passive disinterest

One task that I had set myself, TO PROVE MYSELF WORTHY was to deal with the outstanding correspondence, of which there was more than enough.

So no-one should be waiting for a reply from me now because I hope that I’m up-to-date. If you still haven’t had a reply to anything that you have sent to me, then drop me a reminder. And if you haven’t written to me but want to drop me a line, there’s a “contact me” button down at the bottom-right of your screen. I love to interact with my audience

My nice cute Romanian doctoress came to see me and reminded me of the biopsy, which will take place at abut midday. So no time to take a shower.

Lunch came on time, and considering that I had signed a form to say that I was a vegan, lunch today was fish –
IT’S FISH EVERY FRIDAY
IT’S FISH TWO FEET WIDE
IT COVERS UP YOUR PLATE
AND HANGS OVER THE SIDE

Round about 13:00, waiting for the biopsy, I began another project which was to track down *.pdf copies of some of the books that I downloaded years ago when this Gutenberg/Google project wasn’t as organised and it was all in *.txt format.

Some of them haven’t as yet been converted but others have so I was downloading those that I could find. It’s important to have the *.pdf copies if they are available because the *.txt copies didn’t, obviously, include the maps and illustrations.

Round about 14:00 my cute little Romanian doctoress came to tell me that the biopsy will be at 15:00 as the person who performs it is busy. So no time for a shower right now.

It was 16:00 when she finally put in an appearance, with my cute little Romanian doctoress trailing along behind. She wanted a slice of a saliva gland from my lip so first she gave me a local anaesthetic.

The actual sectioning of the gland was totally painless thanks to the injection, and they were very happy with what they had taken. They wandered off, leaving me lying on the bed waiting for someone to come back and sort me out.

Eventually my cute little Romanian doctoress came back with a huge pile of paperwork, and told me that I was free to go. They won’t have the results now until Monday and there’s no sense my staying there. The senior doctor in charge of my case will call me back for a discussion in due course.

Thinking that “at last I can have my shower because there will be four hours before the taxi arrives” she told me that they’d be here in half an hour. So no time for a shower.

Most of my stuff was already packed so I put the rest away ready for when my driver turned up. Only it was two of them. What had I done to deserve an ambulance?

This was when they told me about the person whom they were bringing. No shower then, but at least I’ll be home at some respectable time.

And so I was too. We dashed through the rush-hour traffic and then sped down the motorway. I have an app. on my ‘phone that can follow a route and it displays the speed at which we were travelling. Down the motorway in the pouring rain at 139kph will put hairs on anyone’s chest.

When we arrived and I told them that I was impressed with the speed, the driver apologised and said "I couldn’t go as fast as usual because of the conditions". I’ll travel with him next time in the sunny daylight them and compare notes.

Getting in and out of the ambulance is fun though. To climb in, I have to sit on the floor, swivel my legs in, press them up against the bulkhead and use the force of my arms and shoulders to lever myself up into the seat in the back. Exiting the vehicle is the reverse of the procedure

Back in here my cleaner helped me unpack and here I am, ready to fight another day. I’ll have the results of everything in a few days and then we’ll know where we are going with all of this.

But the story behind this ambulance is that someone called the Emergency Service.
He said "send an ambulance to 6 rue Monseigneur Aethelbaldric Essioriaeth. My wife has been taken seriously ill"
"Certainly sir" said the operator. "How do you spell the street name?"
"Wait a minute" said the caller. And then there was silence
"Are you still there?" asked the operator
And a heavy-breathing voice replied "Yes I am"
"Where have you been?" asked the operator
"I couldn’t spell the street name" said the caller "so I dragged her around the corner and she’s now on the pavement in the Rue Haute."

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Wednesday 21st January 2025 – THIS TIME TOMORROW …

… I shall be having my fevered brow soothed by a bevy of nubile nurses while I’m tucked up in my comfortable bed in The Land of Grey and Pink – I mean, the Hospital Pitié-Sampetrière in Paris.

Actually, I probably won’t be, but there’s no harm in wishful thinking, is there? As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s only my imagination and my dreams that are keeping me going.

To tell the truth, I will almost certainly be in a bed in a hospital in Paris, assuming that we don’t have a calamity along the route. But as for the rest of it, who knows? And who really cares? As long as I have my imagination I can continue my desperate struggle against reality.

And the desperate struggle against fatigue too, because I have to be up and about at 06:00 in the morning. I have dialysis tomorrow before I leave for Paris, so that means a taxi at 07:45 and a session on the bed in the dialysis centre starting at 08:30.

At 07:30 this morning though I was still struggling to come to terms with being on my feet. When the alarm had gone off at 07:00 I was deep in the Arms of Morpheus and it was a real struggle to rise to my feet. However I made it into the bathroom just in time before the next alarm call went off.

There had been a lot of perspiration during the night so I needed a good wash. Emilie the Cute Consultant told me that the perspiration was usual, but if it carries on, I shall need a water bed. Then I can sail into the bathroom. Or paddle my own canoe. Or be up the creek without a paddle. I dunno.

After the medication I came in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. My brother had a MkIV Cortina. He’d had an accident in it and damaged one wing. He came to see me to see if I had another MkIV wing. At that moment I had about three MkIV Cortinas, a pale blue one that I was using as my run-around which was something of a wreck. It had no MoT or insurance. Then there were two others, one of which was a reasonably good car and the third one that I was planning to rebuild. He came round to ask if I had one so I replied that I hadn’t. Everything that I had was spoken for. Nerina said “why don’t you give him the one off the blue one? You’ll be scrapping that soon and it’ll save you the time in dismantling it if he were to take that”. I replied “that’s the car that I’m using to drive around at the moment. I can’t give him that”. We had quite a big discussion about t which became quite heated. In the meantime my brother was wandering around in the garage and came across a wing for a MkIII Cortina. he said “I’m going to break your hearts now” he said “and I’m going to take this”. I said “come here” and went into my workshop. Scrabbling around on the worktop I found the washers and bolts that had been used to hold it on. I was scrabbling around and ended up with about ten at that particular moment. He said “that’s OK, I’ll take those”. I sorted out some washers for him but he didn’t seem to want very many. I thought that a MkIII wing on a MkIV would invite lots of comment but he didn’t seem to care. But there was a question that he’d asked me about “was Ford bringing out a new car to replace the Granada?”. I replied that I’d not heard anything. There had been no executive meeting so no-one seems to know as yet.

In theory of course, a MkIII wing will fit a MkIV Cortina because they have the same chassis and A-post arrangement but as I said, it’ll look rather strange.

But I was, and still am, a big fan of the Cortina MkIII, IV and V. Practically the same car from 1970-1982 with all the mechanical parts interchangeable, they did me proud when I had my taxis. Not only did I have the cars, I’d pick up MoT failures, dismantle them for spares, sometimes repair them and until I had my health collapse after my big car accident, I was always ahead of the game.

There are still several Cortinas lying around. There’s an almost-immaculate MkV estate keeping a MkIII 2000E Cortina and a Citroen “traction avant” company in the warehouse in Montaigut, a “rare as hens-teeth and worth a fortune” MkIII 2000E estate in the barn on the farm, and an old rotten MkV saloon down the field that was going to be cut up for spares but it’s lost in the undergrowth now.

All the same though, that dream was disappointing. Nerina was there, as of course she is entitled to be, but once more we were arguing. We spent so much time arguing in real life – if only we’d stepped back, breathed, and began to talk to each other, things would have been so different. And my brother was there once again. How disappointing is that? Why can’t I summon up any one of the Fearsome Foursome to come to me during the night?

As for the Ford Granada, that relates to something that is running in a thread through my mind somewhere right now, relating to nothing in particular. But no MoT or insurance on a Cortina is a thread that’s been running through my dreams for ages, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

The nurse was early today. It’s His Nibs starting his seven days. He’s not impressed with my early start tomorrow (neither am I as it happens) and told me to keep my socks on during the night. That’s not a sound policy – not at all.

After he left, I made breakfast and read more of MY BOOK.

As I suspected, I’m right about him working up to a crescendo. With no sense of embarrassment or responsibility he’s laying in to all kinds of people. Not even the Astronomer Royal is exempt from his scorn. It really is quite shameful and how his publishers accepted it I really don’t know.

Back in here I revised for my Welsh class and then went for the lesson. Once more, it seemed to pass off quite well. However, that was then, when everything was fresh in my mind. Give me half an hour and it will all have evaporated from my teflon brain.

After lunch I had a few things to do and then I pushed on with this radio programme that I’ve been trying to finish since Sunday. Now it’s all done as far as I can, the 11th track is chosen and notes written ready to dictate on Saturday night when it’s quiet.

The next trick will be to finish the one that I started at the end of last week and have it ready for dictation on Saturday night too. I need to snap out of this depression and lethargy and push on.

And that’s the first time that I’ve said that since dialysis started.

While we’re on the subject of the radio … "well, one of us is" – ed … there was the radio programme for this weekend to review and send off, so I listened to it to make sure that it was OK.

It’s just as well that I do this because I’ve been caught out before by people dying in between the recording of the programme and its transmission. And not that I’m bragging, but this programme was recorded in May 2023.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with some of the leftover stuffing followed by chocolate cake and soya dessert. Delicious as usual.

But then I had more food to make. The food in the hospital is dreadful, I’ll be arriving late, there’s never any food that I can make. So I’m in the process of making some bread and I’ve cooked a lentil and potato mix that’s in a plastic container that they can bung in the microwave when I arrive. I have to be prepared.

Right now though, I need to be prepared for bed if I’m going to be up at 06:00. I don’t fancy that in the least, but I can always sleep while dialysis is going on.

But in our Welsh class today we were discussing War poets. And one thing that most of us had in common was that we all had had to study War poets for our ‘O’ Level English Literature exam, and without exception, it destroyed any love of poetry that we might have had.

We all agreed that it was so depressing and so miserable, but it seemed to us that the examiners were working to their own very private agenda. It wasn’t until I discovered the works of AE Housman that I began to develop a love of poetry, but I never ever want to hear another War poet again as long as I live, if I live that long.

On the other hand, I can listen to this all night and next day too – one of Housman’s poems SET TO MUSIC

Another thing that we were discussing was the early television programmes. And I remember when the BBC, in an economy drive, was selling them off to independent producers.
At one meeting the Director asked the Sales Department for the accounts.
He asked them "What did we get for ‘Larry the Lamb’?"
"According to our accounts" said the accountant "we got four shillings per pound"
"And the guy in the historical records" said the Director. "What did he get for ‘Muffin the Mule’?"
"Eighteen months, I think" replied the accountant.

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Monday 20th January 2025 – YET ANOTHER THREE …

… and a half hours under the dialysis machine today, and that might soon be changing. They are talking about increasing the dose to four hours. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … we seem to be moving slowly towards a climax and the overall prognosis isn’t that good.

In fact, things must be even more serious that I imagined, because they sent Emilie the Cute Consultant to break the bad news to me. And considering that she has been doing her best to steer clear of my bedside these last few weeks, that must have been some effort.

It was some effort for me to go to bed last night too. It was even later than normal when I finally hauled myself out of my chair and went into the bathroom to prepare for the night. I was definitely not feeling like sleeping and I lacked the motivation and energy to haul myself out of my comfortable chair.

Eventually I managed to make my way into bed and there I lay trying to go to sleep and trying to chase the black thoughts from my mind. And as it happened, I did neither. So there I lay, being tormented, for several hours.

When the alarm sounded I was fast asleep so I must have dropped off at some point. And what an effort it was to haul myself from my bed. It’s a good job that the nurse is coming, for I could quite easily have stayed in bed until I don’t know when.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and shave and even applied the deodorant in case Emilie the Cute Consultant should come to see me, and then went to take my medication.

Back in here I went to listen to what was on the dictaphone but to my dismay there was nothing at all, and that’s really disappointing. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the only excitement that I have these days is what goes on (or comes off, but I should be so lucky) during the night.

Isabelle the nurse came around, her last day for this round. She had a few things to say, but nothing of too much importance. She’s going to spend the week packing for her ski holiday soon and also working on her Carnival float.

After she left I made my breakfast and read MY BOOK.

Our author has spent probably 100 pages attacking the idea that Wissant was the port from which Caesar sailed to Britain (not that it matters much, as the book is about Britain, not Caesar), insulting the people who believe that it might have been, and lampooning the people who have changed their opinion over time.

And here we are, on page 579; with a statement "for I myself once argued that the Portus Itius was at Wissant. But my knowledge was then imperfect.". Not a word about why his knowledge was imperfect, not a word about why he once believed that Wissant had been Caesar’s port, not a word of the factors that he had considered at that time, not a word of why he had rejected them, not a word of criticism of his own ideas and not an apology to those whom he had lampooned for changing their mind.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I shan’t be sorry to reach the end of this book. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of interesting facts in there but by God! What a struggle it has been to wade through the mass of invective, insult and abuse to find them.

It seems to me that he is working himself up into a crescendo and I wonder how it’s all going to finish.

Back in here I had things to do, like my Welsh homework for example. I like to do half of it in one week and the other half the following week so as to spread it out. But what I’m going to do at some point is to read through all of the homework that I’ve done, and make a dictionary of words that I have already forgotten. As if I don’t have enough work to do.

My cleaner took me once more by surprise. She was late but I’d lost track of time anyway. And we hadn’t even finished when the taxi came for me. There was someone with an appointment at Avranches at 13:00 so these new Securité Sociale rules means that because my trip falls within this 45-minute window, I have to grin and bear it.

Not that I am complaining, because as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s all free, and this is the only country in the World as far as I am aware where such a service is provided for the likes of me.

One advantage of being there early was that not only was I the first of the afternoon shift to arrive, I was first in bed and consequently first to be plugged in. And strangely, the first pin didn’t hurt at all and the second only marginally so, even if they had to take out the pin and reinsert it.

Having said that though, I began to know more about it as the anaesthetic wore off.

Emilie the Cute Consultant came to see me, and we had an interesting chat. "How are you today, Mr Hall?"
"Very well now that I’ve seen you" I replied. And she had the decency to giggle and blush

So we chatted, all about work though, not one of those intimate personal chats that we had last summer, and she broke the bad news to me. But at least she confirmed that Saturday’s dialysis is no different than any other day so it’s not that which is disrupting my sleeping patterns.

"Would you like me to prescribe a sedative for you" She asked.

It seemed to me that that referred to my earlier comment so I restrained myself, with great difficulty I promise you, from saying something like “what I really need is someone to keep me warm and cosy in bed. When’s your next day off?”. You should be proud of me.

Instead I replied "no thanks". All that I have left these days are my dreams and they seem to be fading right now which is a shame. And never mind restraining myself, it will be other people restraining me if I carry on like this. But ask me if I care.

While we’re on the subject of dreams … "well, one of us is" – ed … I crashed out as usual once the pump started sucking my blood out and went away with the fairies (although I did nothing worthy of any comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine)

There I was, in some building in which I’d been before. Someone came to pick me up and when he took me outside I found that he was to take me away on a motorbike. He had left the engine running so I told him that that had been a very dangerous thing to do around here

The building reminded me of somewhere in (I think) either Cleveland or Buffalo … "IT WAS BUFFALO" – ed … in the USA where I’d passed through on my mega-voyage around North America after having dropped off Kit at her University at Windsor.

And as for motor bikes, we’re either talking about motorcycle taxis again or else it’s to do with crossing the Atlantic on a motor bike, something else that we’ve mentioned recently.

When I’ve been awake, I’ve been tidying up a long-forgotten site on the internet. That all started with a search for someone whose name cropped up there and when I followed it up, I was surprised at how out-of-date this site was. So I did some of it, and there’s plenty more to do.

Don’t you ever become fed up of finding all of these tasks that you need to do that totally distract you from what you were trying to do in the first place?

With starting early, that usually means finishing early. And I was certainly unplugged early. But all of the rest went haywire as the compression burst and we red-washed the entire wall of the Clinic by my bed.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the taxi that came for me had to wait another ten minutes to take someone else too.

So once more I ended up being late home but at least it was the nice female taxi driver, the one with twins at the school here, so we had a nice chat. I hope that she’s the one who takes me to Paris, either her or my favourite lady taxi driver who gives me a running commentary throughout the whole route.

It’s freezing outside again here so I was glad to be indoors again. With about 20 minutes to spare I edited some more of the outstanding radio programme that I should had completely dealt with on Sunday.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg followed by chocolate cake and soya yoghurt. Plenty of stuffing left, but I’ve no idea when I’ll finish it, what with going to hospital in Paris later this week

So now it’s bedtime, ready for my Welsh lesson tomorrow. And hoping that I’ll have pleasant dreams involving Castor, TOTGA or Zero, or Moonchild whom I shall add to the Terrible Three and make a Fearsome Foursome.

But before I go to bed I’ll give you an exclusive scoop, one that you’ll hear nowhere else, on the handover discussion between Trump and Biden in the Whitehouse (and that’s not a spelling mistake, although that will soon change) this afternoon
"You just watch" said Trump. "I’m gonna be a goddam Emperor"
"You can’t do that" said Biden. "An Emperor is someone who rules an Empire, and the USA isn’t an Empire"
"Well in that case" said Trump "I’m gonna be a goddam King"
"You can’t do that either" replied Biden. "A King is someone who rules a Kingdom, and the USA isn’t a Kingdom"
"Actually" continued Biden "with you in the White House, Donald, the USA will be just fine as a country"

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