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LIVE: Friday 6th November 2026 – WHAT A DAY …

… this has been today. We seem to be back in the bad old days of six months or so ago, where I was falling asleep at the drop of a hat. And as for being stuck and unable to dismount from the porcelain horse, it all defies description.

Last night defies description too. Once more, being late to bed despite my best efforts to be finished early. It goes to show just how important it is for me to be home early from dialysis.

Anyway, once in bed, I stayed in bed and didn’t move, as far as I am aware. It helped having the heater on in here during the night and it made it feel so much better. I’d also turned on the heater that’s in the dining area so I”m hoping that it will be warm in there in the morning.

When the alarm went off, I’d joined the army and risen to the rank of adjutant. There was a group from our regiment going out on patrol, and they suggested that I went with them. So my commander let me go with them. There were some people who didn’t want to go at all, so they were sent back to base, presumably to spend some time in prison, and the rest of us carried on.

Then the alarm rang, and I awoke.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the chances of me being in the army are about zero. If there would ever have been a war when I would have been young enough to fight, I’d have been up and down Leadenhall Street until I found a merchant shipping company that had a berth going for a trainee seaman in the Merchant Navy.

Having said that, though, I would have loved to have been on one of these nighttime patrols in World War I.

It took hours to rise up off my bed this morning in order to move about. However, once I decided to stand up, it was easier than yesterday to rise to my feet. Whatever was wrong with me yesterday that had sapped my energy and prevented me from rising to my feet, I seem to have recovered.

After I’d unlocked the front door ready for Isabelle the Nurse when she comes, I went into the bathroom to make myself ready.

Back in here, I started on the notes from yesterday. There was much more than I anticipated, and it took an age. They still weren’t online when Isabelle the Nurse arrived.

She had a good look at my right foot and its wound and how they had dressed it at the hospital. I told her about the scan that I need to have, and the antibiotics that I need to take. She seemed relatively pleased with all of that.

After she left, I could make my breakfast, including my porridge and toast. I can’t live without those in the morning.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

We’ve still been discussing trees in Herefordshire, but now we’ve moved on to discussing the famous Ryelands sheep that have been reared here in Herefordshire and brought so much prosperity to the area back in the Middle Ages when “Lemster” … "today Leominster" – ed …. was one of the richest towns in England.

Unfortunately, these days the Ryelands sheep are so interbred with other varieties that their mutton is no longer as tasty as it was, and their wool is no longer as fine and as soft as it used to be.

Back in here, I managed to finish off the notes and put them on line. But it took much longer than it ought to have done because I kept on falling asleep while I was working. A little minute here, thirty seconds there, and so on. And what made it worse was that it went on like that all day and it totally put me out of my stride while I was working.

You should have seen the stuff that I was typing while I was asleep too. I’m beginning to wish that I could have kept it and shown it to you.

By the time that I’d finished everything else that needed doing this morning, it was time for the disgusting drink break and midday medication. My faithful cleaner had stuck her head in the door earlier to bring me my antibiotics – two tablets three times per day – so I took two of those as well.

Back in here, I had a chat with one of my friends. As well as everything else, he’s an author, and his latest books have been added TO HIS AMAZON STORE. It’s well worth a visit, especially to see PABLO THE WONDER DOG

Incidentally, throughout these pages, you’ll see links to Amazon products appearing every now and again. Being a sales associate of Amazon, I receive a small commission on goods sold via my links. It costs you nothing at all extra, but helps defray … "part of the" – ed … cost of my not-insubstantial web-hosting fees.

There are also links for AMAZON UK, AMAZON USA and since the recent “troubles”, AMAZON CANADA for the use of my numerous Canadian visitors, and now in response to a request that I received, AMAZON GERMANY. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I am extremely grateful when someone uses the links to make a purchase.

A couple of other people engaged me in chat too throughout the day, which was nice of them. Liz sent me some nice photos of some reminiscences, and my cleaner sent me a photo of some bottled chillies. They have been withdrawn from Leclerc’s delivery site … "the bottled chillies, not the reminiscences" – ed … but she found these in another supermarket where she shops for one of her clients. Seeing as I have recently run out, I said “yes” immediately.

She was early today, coming round to do her Friday cleaning session because she had to go with another one of her clients for an appointment somewhere. And while she was doing her stuff, we were chatting about this and that, and that held me up too. But I wasn’t bothered about that because I need to interact with more people and have more of a social life, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed …

So with all of these interruptions, which were all very welcome, I have to say, except for the “falling asleep” bit, which went on throughout the day, I’d only really managed to finish the editing of the notes and assembling only half of the programme, instead of doing all of it. But it can’t be helped, I suppose. I shall have to just work harder this weekend.

Another thing that didn’t help was going for a ride on the porcelain horse and falling asleep. Not just for five minutes either, but for forty minutes. And when I awoke, I couldn’t stand up because, of course, my cleaner had washed the floor. And I don’t know what product she uses, but it makes the floor slippery and my slippers can’t grip the floor. In the end, I had to take off my slippers and stand up in my socks. They gave a much better grip.

It was late for tea, so I had to rush or I’d miss the football. It was the usual tea tonight – baked beans with cheese and black pepper, vegan sausage and air-fried chips. And tonight, it was the best that I have ever tasted. I don’t know why because I haven’t done anything different, except maybe made the chips with a mixture of mint and parsley.

By the time that I’d finished my meal, washed up, grabbed a couple of biscuits and fruit and dashed back in here, I was just in time for the football.

Today was another day when I hesitated about which match to watch. In the end, I chose Rhydaman, a newly promoted team near the bottom, v Llansawel, an established team but not having the best of seasons right now. And what a good choice this game was.

For a long time, I’ve been advocating that teams under pressure should always keep one man in the centre circle. It means that the opponents have to keep two men back to guard him, and also that instead of wild panic-station clearances out of defence to nowhere, there’s someone to aim at, and it might lead to a breakaway goal. Rhydaman went one better than that today – they had two men always in the centre circle ready to receive the panic-station clearances, and it worked in spades.

As well as that, they had a change of tactic from previous weeks and were harassing the Llansawel players. Every time a Llansawel player had the ball, there was a Rhydaman player breathing down his neck trying to take the ball off him.

Add to that some stupendous saves, some at point-blank range, by Rhydaman keeper 18-year-old Thomas Wright, and a surprising and unexpected 3-1 win for Rhydaman was well-deserved. It now puts some considerable light between them and the bottom two clubs, Trefelin and Trefynnon.

When the game had finished, at 22:45, I began to write up the notes of the day, but I was overwhelmed with fatigue at some point later, and I couldn’t keep on going. I gave up and went to bed, and I’ll finish these notes tomorrow, if I’m lucky.

There’s another late match tomorrow evening, so it might be the same tomorrow, with the notes only half-finished and me in bed. And I hope that I’ll remember the antibiotics tomorrow night. I seem to have forgotten them tonight.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about forgetting things … "well, one of us has" – ed … somebody once telephoned his doctor in a panic.
"Doctor, do you remember those pills you gave me to improve my memory?"
"Ohh yes" replied the doctor. "What about them?"
"Can you prescribe for me another bottle, please?"
"Have you finished the first one already?" asked the doctor.
"No, doctor" replied the patient "but I can’t remember where I put it."

LIVE: Thursday 5th November – GUNPOWDER, TREASON AND …

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… plot! And one place that would be first in line to be on the end of the Guy Fawkes treatment, if I were well enough to do so, would be the dialysis centre, because we have had yet another run-in there today and having to fight with the personnel almost every session is not doing me any good at all. In fact, it’s getting completely on my wick.

It might have been better had I had an early night, but once again, things dragged on so long here that I heard the immersion heater switch on at 01:00 as I was leaving the bathroom, ready for bed. That was when I checked the time, and as it was far too early to raise myself from my stinking pit, I went back to sleep again.

When the alarm went off this time, it was the real one, so I sat up straight on the edge of the bed. After the second alarm rang, I tried to summon up the enthusiasm and motivation to leave the side of my bed and stand up, but once I was ready, I found to my dismay that I didn’t have the force. I had to adopt all kinds of silly manoeuvres to enable me to leave the bed.

After I’d unlocked the front door, I went into the bathroom to organise myself for the day, and I remembered this time to have a shave in case Emilie the Cute Consultant is there this afternoon. When I’d finished in the bathroom, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There was something last night about the roadworks in La Havaudière. And the road through the village had been closed for the last three or four nights while they did some work on it. There was an experienced kind of foreman there who had been researched by Chinese and Middle Eastern companies. Since he’s been here, which is four days, there has been a woman killed. She was found strangled in her apartment, and it was believed that this guy, Kane – his surname was Kane – had actually done it, and we’d both decided at the same time that we would research his guarantee and see what’s happened, because it could be that he was an Iranian guy who is living in a cottage. After the cottage, it was first one house, then another house and then another house, and he had three girlfriends, and one of them dies … fell asleep here … It was believed by us at least that he was seeing these women, becoming friendly with them, and having a key to their house or apartment. They would die of either natural causes, or he’d kill them, and with the key that he had, he would empty the house of anything that was worth anything. He made quite a lot of money by these people dying.

As you can tell by the content of this dream, it’s no surprise at all that I fell asleep in the middle of it. It’s another one of these really confusing dreams where a literal transcription of the content means nothing at all. And as if I don’t have enough of those already.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m quite at home driving around Eastern Europe, even when the Communist Party was on power, but I don’t know why it’s suddenly been transferred to this neck of the woods right now.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up, nicely on time. And before I let her loose on my legs and feet, I asked her if she would look at my right foot. It’s all gone a shiny shade of red, it’s hot, it’s swollen, and at the base of one of my toes, it’s weeping, and it’s agonising. She had a good look, cleaned it up with some disinfectant and wrapped it up.

She recommended that I let one of the doctors at Avranches have a good look at it. Naturally, I’ll do that, especially if it’s Emilie the Cute Consultant who is en garde – “on the alert” – this afternoon.

After she left, I made my breakfast and read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

Today, we were discussing the trees of the area, and I, as well as the members of the club’s committee, were led off astray by an article about the chapel of the Knights Templars of Hereford. They were knights charged with the protection of the road from the Palestine coast to Jerusalem, and as a result, they became rich, even richer than the kings themselves. So as a result, the King of France and some of his fellow monarchs set out to eliminate the order at the start of the fourteenth century. Several Templars were burnt at the stake, but the treasure fleet of the French chapter of the Templars disappeared, giving rise to ONE OF THE MOST FANTASTIC STORIES that you will have heard for ages.

So instead of reading the report of the Woolhope naturalists, I was reading all about the Templars in Herefordshire and the surrounding counties, which was much more interesting.

Back in here, I had things to do, one of which was to chop thirty-four seconds out of the commentary for one of my rock concerts. Five seconds is easy, and ten is quite comfortable too, but thirty-four presented something of a challenge. However, by the time that I had to go to prepare for dialysis, I’d actually managed it. And you won’t be able to hear where the cuts have been made either.

When the alarm sounded for me to go off to prepare, I scooted into the kitchen for my disgusting drink and midday medication and then began to put my travelling laptop away in my bag. My faithful cleaner arrived to apply the anaesthetic to my arm, and we had a little discussion about wood.

She wants to upgrade the wardrobe doors in her apartment upstairs and fit something more modern that she can paint in different colours. I have to say that had I been fit and healthy, I’d be doing the same because they are “very 1980s” with the plastic white finish that is difficult to paint. I’d love my doors to be dark blue, like the curtains and my favourite bedding. It would go nicely with the light blue walls. And I’d swap the doors in the apartment for the glazed doors that I bought from B&Q in England years ago to use on the farm.

After my cleaner left, I adopted my favourite position of being slumped over the table. And it seemed like just a minute, but it was in fact twenty minutes and more that I was crashed out, and the driver of the taxi gave me a rude awakening.

It was one of my favourite taxi drivers who came today, so I knew that we would be in for a very quick journey. There was someone else to pick up too, and she was quite garrulous, so we had a very animated drive down to Avranches.

We arrived at the dialysis centre a good twenty minutes early, but, would you believe, I had to wait almost an hour to be plugged in?

It was at the dialysis centre that my problems began.

The first person who came to see me was the dietician. She tells me that everyone in the dialysis centre is worried about the amount of fluid they are expected to extract. After a lengthy discussion, during which she totally failed to understand that if you have a water jug with a filter which is full at the start of the day, and you draw from the water jug all of your needs and then fill it up at the end of the day, and it takes one litre of water before it’s full, then you’ve used one litre of water, she wanted me to cut down my daily water intake by two hundred and fifty millilitres to seven hundred and fifty.

She also wanted me to increase my uptake of disgusting drinks from one or two per day to four per day, and I had to remind her that four disgusting drinks is eight hundred millilitres.

What kind of state is the dietary department in?

While she was here, I took the opportunity to complain about the missing snacks. They’ve changed the items available on the snack trolley recently, and my orange juice has been withdrawn. They’ve replaced it with an apple purée, which is the only thing on the trolley that fits my diet. However, even though the new snacks have only been in operation for less than a month, on four occasions they haven’t had them on the trolley.

Eventually, the nurse came to plug me in. It was one of the two je m’en foutistes – the nurses who do the barest minimum of work, so I knew that we were in for fireworks.

And so it proved. The excess liquid was more than it has ever been, and even a stay of four hours wouldn’t clear it. The difference wasn’t much, so I told the nurse to wind up the machine from nine hundred and fifty to a thousand, and that would do. After all, they ran it at over eleven hundred the other week, with no side effects reported, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

"Oh no!" she replied. "There’s a doctor’s instruction not to run the machine past nine hundred and fifty."
"There’s also a doctor’s instruction saying that I have to stay until I’m at my dry weight, so set it at four hours twenty then."
"Oh no" she replied. "I’m not staying here all night. I want to go home! Anyway, a couple of hundred grammes isn’t much."
"In that case, neither is fifty grammes."

Come the revolution, boys, I know someone who is in line for a good kicking.

And so, in a very bad mood, I watched the end of the game in the second division between Y Drenewydd and Bwcle. Y Drenewydd were winning 1-0 when I left the match on Saturday, and they were good value for their lead. In the final ten minutes, Bwcle threw everything, including the kitchen sink, at the Drenewydd defence with no success, and as you might expect, with just seconds to go, a Drenewydd player won the ball in his own penalty area and roared off upfield, which led to another goal for Y Drenewydd with almost the last kick of the game.

The next match was Airbus UK Broughton v Caernarfon, and as I haven’t finished that as yet, despite being there for four hours, I’ll report on it later.

What had interrupted me was the arrival of the doctor. Not Emilie the Cute Consultant, unfortunately, but the new female doctor who is still finding her feet in the service.

She might be still finding her feet, but she certainly found mine quickly enough. She whipped off my compression sock and examined my toe. She asked me a variety of questions, such as “have you ever dropped anything onto your foot?”.

The response to every question was a “no”, so she reckons that it’s an infection of some kind, so she booked me in for a scan on Monday at the hospital over the road. As well as that, she prescribed a series of antibiotics for me, and I hope that they will work better than the last lot that she prescribed for me.

After that, I wasn’t in the mood to watch the football. Instead, I worked on my shopping list for next Friday. However, I did go back to the game at some point, but the end of the session came round before it had finished, so I’ll tell you more about it when I’ve finished watching it.

My nurse came over at the end of the session and cleaned the machine again before she started to unplug me. Once she’d finished with me, I could scuttle off to the driver, weighing myself on the scales as I went past. And it was as I suspected – I’m five hundred grammes over my dry weight.

GRRRRR!

Tonight, I was on my own with the driver, so we had a fairly quick drive home. However, it was 19:45 when I returned home, and I don’t think that I’ve ever been this late before. My faithful cleaner was there waiting to help me into the apartment when I arrived, and she slipped a disgusting drink into my hand once I’d settled down in a chair in the dining area.

There was no question whatsoever of me making tea at that time, so I contented myself with some of those little toasted squares with spreading cheese, followed by a plum and an orange.

When I’d finished, I began to write the notes for today, but I was in real danger of falling asleep, so after one particular outburst, I decided to go to bed. The rest of the notes can wait until tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about starting a new job … "well, one of us has" – ed … two men were sitting in a bar discussing their prospects for the future.
One of them asks the other "I hear you have a new job"
"Yes," replies the first one, "I’m working backstage in a strip club, helping the girls dress and undress"
"Blimey!" said his friend. "that’s a good job. What’s the money like?"
"It’s fifty quid a week."
"That’s not a lot."
"No, but it’s all that I could afford."

LIVE: Wednesday 4th November 2026 – YET ANOTHER DAY …

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… when I haven’t accomplished anything like as much as I wanted to.

It was probably something to do with not going to bed until 01:20 – I dunno. Even though my notes from last night were comparatively short compared to how a few have been just recently, they seemed to take forever to complete, and I’ve no idea why. And then the stats needed much more work than usual because the reporting format, after about 27 years, has changed into a new layout, and it’s complicated trying to follow it round.

But anyway, I was glad to be in bed, no matter what time it was. And I actually managed, for once, to sleep right the way through until the alarm went off at 06:29. It was a shame that I wasn’t in bed earlier to make the most of it.

However, it was a very weary me who awoke when the alarm sounded, and I was extremely tempted to stay down the bed until the nurse arrived, but I can’t do things like that. I have to be up and about when the nurses come – except on Sundays.

Mind you, I’ve no idea what time it was when I finally took to my feet and headed off to unlock the door for Isabelle the Nurse when she comes, but it wasn’t early – I’ll tell you that.

Having done that, I staggered off to the bathroom to organise myself ready for the day, and then back in here, I listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There had been some kind of medicine that had been invented or discovered. We were hoping to find people to come to us as trialists so that we could try it out on human beings, but we didn’t seem to find anyone. I was refereeing a football match later, so I took this cream or ointment or whatever it was with me and used it to bathe the knees of one or two players when they were caught out injuring someone. However, the teams weren’t happy when I heard that this was a new experimental thing and this was going to lead to some problems.

If ever there’s football involved, it’s probably due to the amount of football I’ve been watching just recently. But the new medication is interesting because, over the years, I’ve had lots of that.

However, why would it be that the player committing the foul is the one who needs the treatment? That’s rather bewildering, isn’t it? And bearing in mind all of the issues at dialysis, surely we would be using a cold spray.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up as usual and sorted out my legs and feet. We had a little chat about nothing in particular, and then she shot off on the rest of her round, but not before telling me that I was the third of her patients so far this morning who had told her of how little sleep he’d had.

After she left, I made my breakfast, and while I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

We have left mycology now and gone on to the end-of-year meeting and presentation. But before leaving mycology, Dr Bull quotes from a book by Dr Charles Badham (deceased), a mycology expert, who says IN HIS BOOK, A TREATISE ON THE ESCULENT FUNGUSES OF ENGLAND that, speaking of the pleasure of searching for them, "I have indeed grieved, when I reflected on the straightened condition of the lower orders this year, to see pounds innumerable of extempore beef-steaks growing on our oaks in the shape of Fistulina hepatica; Agaricus fusipes to pickle, in clusters under them. Puffballs, which some of our friends have not inaptly compared to sweet bread for the rich delicacy of their unassisted flavour;" .

When I’d finished in the kitchen and dining area, there were still a few things to do, and then I came back in here to do some more work. Eventually, I managed to finish what needed doing and I could occupy myself with – firstly, to back up an old hard drive that I’d found just recently and which hadn’t backed up when I’d been going through the process not long after I’d bought this machine.

It took ages to figure out the drive, but I eventually managed to make it work, and even as we speak, it’s still working, uploading files ready for me to divide up for the various individual folders on the backup drives.

Secondly, once that was up and running, I was able to finish off the editing of the radio programme that I’d been working on yesterday.

It didn’t take long, and so I attacked two more after my disgusting drink and midday medication break. I finished one of them and that’s up and running already. The second one is almost finished and won’t take too long to be dealt with.

My faithful cleaner turned up to disturb me too, bringing in a recorded delivery letter that was waiting down at the post office. Another disturbance was for a ride on the porcelain horse, and then Rosemary called me. Rosemary and I were chatting for almost an hour today – a really sad come-down from our usual marathon sessions.

As well as all that, I was chatting to a couple of friends on the computer – just long enough to let them know that I’m still alive and kicking.

It was not long after that that it was teatime. I had pasta, veg and the last of those spinach mini-patties that I’d bought when they were on sale ages ago. When they were cooked, everything was all tossed in spicy tomato sauce, and it was totally delicious.

Another thing was finishing off the home-made ice cream with some more of the mixed fruit. Probably on Friday, if I have time, I’ll make some more of that ice cream. I have plenty of almond milk that I bought when I went with my friend to Noz a few weeks ago, and I’ll use that.

So now, having finished writing my notes, horribly late again, I’m off to bed. It’s dialysis tomorrow, of course, and I’m not looking forward to it. Not at all! Not for the least of the reasons that the promised cold spell has come upon us. It was 6°C outside when I awoke, and currently it’s 10°C outside and dropping quite quickly. On my thermometer here, it was 16°C in my room, so I’ve put the heater back on for tonight and we’ll see where we’re going once I’m awake tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about chatting … "well, one of us has" – ed … there were two old couples sitting in a bar chatting.
"On Sunday night, we went to this really good restaurant and had a wonderful meal" said one of the men.
"What was it called?" asked the other.
"You know – I can’t remember now."
And after a few minutes –
"Ohh yes, what’s the name of the flower that has the same name as a war, and people give it to their partners on Valentine’s Day?"
"You mean a rose?" said the second man.
"Yes, that’s right" and he turns towards his wife. "What was the name of that restaurant where we went on Sunday night, Rose?"

LIVE: Tuesday 3rd November 2026 – GUESS WHO …

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… is a nice, clean boy this afternoon?

That’s right. It’s not me. I’m certainly clean, but, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m certainly not nice.

And, what’s more, I have a nice, clean bed to slide into tonight. While I was in the bathroom having my usual shower, my faithful cleaner, who was in here this afternoon doing her stuff, sorted out some new bedding for me from out of the boxes under the bed. So I’m all set up.

It’s rather different than last night when I was running really late again and didn’t actually manage to achieve anything noteworthy before going to bed at a ridiculous time.

But once I was in bed, I was away with the fairies, although not in any manner that would excite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine, quite quickly. There were the vaguest of memories about raising myself from the Dead at some points, despite me being well asleep in the land of Plenty of Others, but they didn’t last long, and I was soon back to sleep.

When the alarm went off, I awoke completely, and sitting on the edge of the bed, it took a month of Sundays for me to head into the living room and unlock the door for Isabelle the Nurse when she comes. I went back into the bathroom to pretty myself up and then came back in here.

I was far too busy to do much this morning. I started off with the rest of today’s notes, wading through them at quite a pace, as there were plenty to add into them this morning. And I hadn’t finished when Isabelle the Nurse breezed into the apartment, much later than usual.

She’s always late the first day after her break. That’s because she has “the touch” when it comes to injections and blood tests, so there’s always a queue of people waiting for her when she starts back after her week’s break.

While she was sorting me out, she talked about her experiences over her week off work, including her trip to St Malo to see the reported disasters, including the losses at the start of the Route du Rhum, which were horrifying, so I’m told

After she left, I went to make my breakfast of hot black coffee, toast, porridge and fruit juice for me, and while I was eating, read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

A couple of days ago, I read that the Woolhope Naturalists had made a considerable contribution to the subject of mycology, or mushrooms. A paper by Mrs Key, read to the Woolhope Club by her husband, the Reverend H Cooper Key and recorded in the report that I’m reading, is clearly the catalyst for the start of this movement. It’s only after hearing this paper that Dr Bull, who had had a longstanding interest in mycology, was inspired to take the issue to the national stage.

Back in here, rather later than I had hoped, I reviewed my Welsh homework, saved it as a *.pdf and sent it to my tutor. Then I prepared for my lesson.

The lesson itself really seemed to drag today, but the lesson went well and I was satisfied with the work that I had done in preparation. The only problem that I have is making some of it stick to my teflon brain, but that’s an impossible task.

During the break, I had some of my medication and a disgusting drink, and then raided the freezer in the bathroom. The other day, while I was ferreting around in there, I came across a packet of that frozen bean tajine that I’d made a year ago. In fact, there were two packets, but I fancied one for tea tonight, so I pulled it out of the freezer and put it in the kitchen to defrost.

After the Welsh lesson, I sorted out some clean clothes for after the shower and then finished off the notes from yesterday. If you have missed them, they are now on line for your perusal.

There were the dictaphone notes to do after my shower, but I’ll include them in here while I’m at it.

There was something about agriculture and agricultural prices, but I can’t remember anything more about that.

For some reason, whenever I think about this dream, I can see the petrol station at the Intermarché hypermarket on the outskirts of St. Pair-sur-Mer that we go past on our way to Avranches, but I’ve no idea why that vision comes into our head. I can’t think of what’s going on there.

Then I was with Nerina, and we were in London somewhere. There was something going on with someone, and we were interested in that because it was something to do with us observing them. We followed them and ended up in a strange bookshop where there was a weird exhibition. Then we carried on walking outside, and then we decided to separate at this really busy square place in London. Nerina walked off, and I found my car, which was one of these old mini-mokes. I started it up, ready to move into the traffic, and Nerina came back. She asked me lots of questions about this car – where I’d been in it, who I’d seen in it, what I’d done with it. It was very, very difficult for me to answer, but in the end, I assured her that there was nothing untoward about the car, and so we carried on.

This is much more like a dream involving Nerina and me. We quite often acted like this when we were following someone with the aim of catching them in front of reliable witnesses when we had to serve a summons on them in respect of car accidents and the like. Nerina was quite good at being a decoy.

And if she ever did see me in a strange car (and a Mini-Moke would certainly have been a strange car for me to have), she’d certainly want to know all about it.

My faithful cleaner came in round about 14:00 as usual and prepared the bathroom for me. When it was ready, she shooed me under the shower. And today’s shower was really lovely. I feel so much better afterwards, and with a clean bed to climb into, I shall regale myself tonight, that’s for sure.

After she left, I could make a start on what I had been planning to do – namely, to deal with the outstanding radio notes that I’d recorded in … gulp! … July and assemble a few radio programmes. By the time that I knocked off for tea, I’d almost finished the first one. I’ll see if I can do two more tomorrow.

Tea tonight was, as I said earlier, the bean tajine mix with couscous and vegetables. It was all completely delicious too, I have to say that. The pudding of mixed fruit and home-made chocolate and coconut ice cream was really nice too. It made a fitting end to the meal.

And now my notes are written, I’m off to bed to prepare myself for another hard day at the office … "I don’t think" – ed …

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about home-made ice cream … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of my friends tasted my home-made ice cream and asked me where I learned to make it.
"That’s easy" I replied. "When I was little, my parents sent me to Sundae School."

LIVE: Monday 2nd November 2026 – THESE NOTES AREN’T …

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… going to be finished today. And if that is the case, they aren’t likely to be completed until tomorrow afternoon.

The reason for that is that it’s my Welsh class tomorrow, and with there being a week off since the last class, due to half-term, On the way to Avranches this afternoon, Bane of Britain suddenly realised that he hadn’t done his Welsh homework. Consequently, after tea tonight, I’ve had to crack on and do it before I forget again, so now it’s extremely late, and I was exhausted before I started.

Not only that, but last night, it was after 00:30 when I finally went to bed, and I won’t be able to do yet another night like that.

Once I finally made it into bed, I was asleep fairly quickly, and although I vaguely remember waking up once or twice, it can’t have been for very long at all.

Later on, though, I heard my alarm sound. But it sounded miles away, and so I wondered if it was another phantom alarm. But I was wide awake, and it was still sounding, somewhere away in the distance, and because of my rather unique alarm sound, it can’t have been anyone else.

The ‘phone is always placed on the bedside table behind the head of the bed, so I reached for it to see exactly what was going on – but it wasn’t there! I suddenly realised that I’d left it in the pocket of my trousers last night and they were in the bathroom, so I had to leap out of bed and go as quickly as I could to turn off the alarm before it awoke everyone in the building. And that was the quickest that I’ve been out of bed for a long, long time.

When the alarm was finally switched off, I went to unlock the door ready for the nurse when he arrives, and then I went to sort myself out in the bathroom in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon at dialysis.

Back in here, I switched on the computer and began work. I’d actually been in a dream when the alarm went off, and although I hadn’t dictated it, I could remember quite a lot of it.

Last night, I dreamed that I was a member of the Welsh parliament, and it was my job to think of a way to cool down the housing market, and what I came up with was certainly novel. I proposed that when someone came to sell a house, the sale price should be compared with the purchase price and the date of purchase. The purchase price should be adjusted to represent the increase in the cost of living since the date of purchase, and whatever the difference between the sale price and the adjusted cost of the purchase price would be, it should be treated as investment income and taxed accordingly. Of course, there would be the cost of repairs and improvements to be taken into account too in calculating the adjusted cost of the property.

However, it was all starting to become too complicated for me to work out in a dream, so I was glad in some respects that the alarm went off to wake me up. Nevertheless, it would be a novel way of controlling house price inflation, and people spending money on new kitchens, windows or replacing a roof to keep the profits down could only benefit the economy.

There was time too to listen to the radio programme that will be broadcast this weekend, to make sure that the programme was OK. And afterwards, when I was satisfied, I sent it off to the radio station for them to add into the list of programmes to be broadcast.

The nurse turned up as usual, but a little later today, and while he was sorting out my legs and feet, we were having a good chat, but right now, I can’t remember what it was about. It can’t have been that good.

After he left, I made my breakfast, and then while I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

Everyone is in a self-congratulatory mood today because their annual report from last year has been accepted into the library of the Natural History Museum and a few other similar places too. It’s quite true that these reports really are exceptional, but I think that they are overdoing it a little.

When breakfast was over, I went back into my little office and began to sort out things for the next radio programme on which I’d be working. However, I’d noticed earlier that the radio programmes that I’ve been sending off just recently are beginning to catch up rather quickly with the programmes that are prepared and ready to go, and if I’m not careful, I shall run out of prepared programmes before long.

Consequently, I’m going to make a start on dictating some more radio notes. I stopped dictating the notes when the cough that I had reached epidemic proportions and there was more coughing on the tape than there were notes. But now, since I’ve started this immunotherapy, the cough seems to have subsided for the moment, so I really ought to be cracking on and getting myself up to date.

A little later, there was a knock on the door. The president of the residents’ committee has sold her apartment and is moving away. She’s holding a little party for everyone, but because I would be unable to go because of all the stairs, she came to see me to say goodbye.

We had a good chat about her future plans, and she brought me a little memento – an oven glove and an oven pad with interesting cartoon drawings of Normandy. That was really nice of her.

When the alarm sounded to tell me that it was time to prepare for dialysis, that gave her quite a fright, and in the best traditions of a “News of the Screws” reported, she “made her excuses and left”, and I could crack on with organising myself, which included a disgusting drink and my midday medication.

My faithful cleaner put in an appearance to apply the anaesthetic to my arm too. We had a little chat, and then after she cleared off, I slumped down over the table in my usual “resting” position.

When the doorbell rang, I thought that it was only thirty seconds since I’d collapsed over the table, but it was in fact something over half an hour. I found it hard to believe, but there it was. I must have been really comfortable.

There were two passengers in the taxi, going to the private hospital in Avranches, and one of them very kindly ceded the front seat to me, and then we set off, only for me to remember that the Welsh class starts back tomorrow and I haven’t done the Welsh homework yet. I shall have to rearrange my plans for this evening.

This driver was another one who knew where the accelerator was, so the drive down to Avranches was completed in quite a fast time and I was quite early arriving. However, it was to no avail because I wasn’t plugged in and running until 14:25.

Once everything had settled down, I began to watch the football from the weekend.

The first match was the rest of Y Flint v Trefynnon. Trefynnon are hopelessly adrift at the foot of the table, and so were Y Fflint. However, since Y Fflint have had a change of manager, they have churned out some impressive results and have caught up with the pack ahead of them. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … Y Fflint are much too good a side to be languishing at the foot of the table, and so it is proving to be.

Although Trefynnon never threw in the towel and were still battling away at the end, the match finished 5-0 to Y Fflint. Trefynnon may only have been admitted into the league to provide cannon fodder and to produce an obvious relegation candidate to spare the more established clubs from relegation, but nevertheless, it was an excellent performance by Y Fflint.

The next game was the rest of TNS v Connah’s Quay Nomads, first versus second, played in front of a miserably small crowd as usual. For all of their performances and results and successes, neither club has managed to ignite the fervour of the local inhabitants in the same way that Caernarfon and Colwyn Bay have.

Before I’d fallen asleep, I’d watched up until the seventy-eighth minute, so I picked up from there and carried on.

The game was, as you might expect, more like a game of chess with neither side displaying any will or intention to grab the game by the throat. It was basically an exercise in protecting your own goal, and in this, Connah’s Quay, and in particular Dan Cowan, were excellent. The score finished 0 – 0, and anyone who succeeds in taking points off TNS will receive my fullest support.

The final game was the second division clash between Y Drenewydd and Bwcle that I’d begun to see on Saturday night before I fell asleep on my chair. I’d planned the timing to perfection, with this game finishing just a minute or two before my dialysis session finished. However, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men”, etc., etc.

As there wasn’t quite as much liquid to be drained today, I’d persuaded the nurse to set the machine to three hundred grammes over the limit, to give me a little more room to manoeuvre until Thursday. But when Emilie the Cute Consultant came by (and I had forgotten to shave this morning), she wasn’t very happy. However, the nurse said “Mr Hall insisted …” and, surprisingly, Emilie the Cute Consultant backed down immediately. I found that extremely interesting.

We had a long chat about why it was wrong to go over your limit, although she wasn’t going to change the setting (something else that I found interesting), and then we had a general chat about my health, but unfortunately it didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t know already.

She finished by asking me if there was anything else, so I told her of the situation of the rapid gain of weight, even though my trips to ride the porcelain horse are “productive”. I asked about the rise in blood pressure the other day, and the bleeding that restarted when I was at home. Unfortunately, she just gave me the generic answers, without going into my individual case, which I found disappointing.

After she left, it was time to unplug me, so I never managed to see the end of the game that I’d been watching. You’ll have to wait until Thursday now for a match report.

After I’d been unplugged, I had to wait a few minutes for my taxi home, and when it arrived, I was quite impressed. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in the summer, my taxi company bought a taxi company in La Haye-Pesnel. This company didn’t have the cheap Skodas that my company does – they have B-series Mercedes, and one of them came to pick me up.

Even though it had 276,000 kilometres on the clock, it was wonderful and comfortable, much better than a Skoda, and I enjoyed the ride home very much.

My faithful cleaner was waiting for me as usual, and she helped me back into my apartment. Once I was sitting down, she stuck a disgusting drink into my sweaty mitt and cleared off.

After I had recovered, I went into the kitchen for the other half of the broccoli stalk soup from last week. That went into a saucepan on one of the hobs and I put several handfuls of coquillettes, these small elbow-like pasta, to give it a little more body. While it was cooking, I put the two leftover homemade bread buns from last week into the microwave to defrost.

When the soup was cooked, I took it off the hob and added a pot of plain soya yoghurt and ate the soup with my bread. What a nice meal it made too, especially as pudding was mixed fruit and homemade chocolate and coconut ice cream.

After I’d finished eating, I washed up the dishes and tidied the kitchen and prepared myself to attack the Welsh homework. For some reason or other, the Welsh homework took much longer to do, and it wasn’t finished until 22:00. That didn’t leave much time for the notes of the day, and I was already tired out after dialysis before I’d even started.

As I suspected, I was nowhere near the end of my notes when I began to crash out, so I posted on line as far as I’d gone, and then I went to bed. I can finish off in the morning.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about moving house … "well, one of us has" – ed … my friend Rosemary was a volunteer with the Essex Social Services, and she was chosen to supervise the upbringing of a young Vietnamese girl who had lost her parents when they were fleeing Vietnam on their way to Europe.
"Why was it necessary?" I asked.
"well," replied Rosemary, "after leaving Vietnam for the west, the girl became disorientated."

LIVE: Saturday 31st October 2026 – AT LEAST, THINGS …

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… improved somewhat today at dialysis, although you might not have thought so. After all, any day at dialysis is a bad day from my point of view, and I would give all that I had … "and more besides" – ed … in order not to have to go there at all.

But that is, of course, another story. Today’s story really begins last night when, after the football had finished, I sat down to begin to write up my notes. And in a mad fit of enthusiasm … "God knows where that came from" – ed … I managed to completely finish them.

Once they were done, I had the backup and the stats, etc., to do, and by the time that I’d finished everything, on coming out of the bathroom, I heard the electric water heater switch on, so it must have been 01:00 at that moment.

Once in bed, I was asleep fairly quickly, but once again, it wasn’t for long, and although I drifted in and out of sleep, I was awake when the alarm went off at 06:29.

As usual, it took me a good while to raise myself from sitting on the edge of the bed and wander off to unlock the door for the nurse when he comes. And then I wandered off into the bathroom to clean and tidy myself up and even have a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon at dialysis.

Back in here, I had a few things to do, but I was interrupted by the nurse, who arrived early this morning. We had a very interesting chat about blood pressure while he was sorting out my feet and legs. He still has no idea why I have had such a low blood pressure for all these years, and why it has suddenly soared at dialysis.

After he left, I made breakfast, and while I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

The club is actually based in Hereford, but they called themselves the “Woolhope” Naturalists Club after an area close by the city where the limestone, dating from the Silurian period, then quarried for making lime, was revealing a whole host of fossils, many seen for the first ever time in the UK and even in the World. Today, they have gone back there for further investigations.

While they were at it, "availing themselves of the kind permission given by Lady Emily Foley, all the members and their friends, numbering nearly forty, passed through the park and gardens of Stoke Edith" where they chatted to the gardener who "did solve one difficulty for us. He accounted for the presence of the Anchusa sempervirens, the alkanet, which was found growing on the roadside near the station. He had cultivated this plant in the garden for the bees, and after the fire which occurred there last spring, he removed the broken bricks and debris of the fire to the roadside, and with them doubtless the seeds of this plant had been taken".

Back in here, I finished off sorting out the music in the temporary folder and transferring the relevant data of their appearances and possible future appearances into the relevant database for their particular folder.

To tell you how my system works, my music is divided into seven folders, numbered from AA to GG, plus “Live” and “Concert” folders. Then when new music comes my way, it stays in the temporary folder until I have 4 GB worth, then I transfer it firstly onto a memory stick and then into whatever folder on the hard drive that contains any previous music by the group or artist. If it’s a new group or artist, I put it into whichever folder has the fewest groups or artists.

On the spreadsheet that I keep, it contains details of which artists have played, what songs were played, which week they played and what notes were written. One week will be AA, the following week will be BB and so on down to GG, and then we start again from AA. And so if there aren’t enough anniversaries to fill a particular week, I’ll fill it out with music from whichever folder that relates to that particular week.

This took me up to the alarm to prepare myself for dialysis, so I cleared off into the kitchen for my disgusting drink and midday medication and then began to pack away the computer ready for dialysis.

My faithful cleaner turned up to apply the anaesthetic to my arm, and then we had a good chat about our various financial situations. It turns out that, for various reasons, neither of us is actually in desperate straits, and we both own our apartments outright.

There was a reason for mentioning this, and it’s in relation to what might happen here in this building in the near future. But more of this anon.

After she left, I settled down as usual to have a little doze, but I was almost immediately awoken by the doorbell ringing. It was the taxi driver, twenty or so minutes early.

He was a new driver who had never been here before, so I explained a few things to him, and then we set off. We had to go by Champeaux to pick up the usual Saturday passenger, and he had been told in the depot not to follow the satnav directions because he would end up being stuck in an alleyway too narrow for the car. That’s certainly true, so I guided him via the alternative way.

We were early arriving at dialysis, and I was plugged in and running by 14:15, which was nice. I could sit down and watch the live football without having to worry, thanks to the “start from the beginning” button.

Today’s midday match was Cardiff Metropolitan v Penybont, a mid-table v 3rd placed match.

And what a surprise this game was. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the Met play some lovely, technical football, and their games are usually very interesting to watch, but today, I’ve never seen them put up such a shambolic performance in all the time that I’ve been watching them.

Today, their defence was all over the place, certainly not where it ought to have been, and their attack down the wings was nowhere, with Zambian under-20 international Lifumpa Mwandwe being totally starved of any service up front. The final score, 5-0 to Penybont, just served to underline how badly the Cardiff Met defence played.

When that game was over, there was time after that to watch Y Fflint v Trefynnon from Friday night, but not enough time to finish it, so I’ll tell you about the game some other time when I’ve finished watching it.

In the middle of that game, I was interrupted by the chef de service. He asked me how I was doing, to which my response was “fine”. He ummed and ahhed for a while and looked at the machine.

After studying the read-out for a while, he asked me if I would like the machine turned down a little … "it wasn’t even anywhere near maximum" – ed … so I told him that never mind the eight hundred and thirty-four ml per hour, the other week I was being cleansed at over eleven hundred per hour regardless of his maximum of nine hundred and fifty, and there were no adverse effects at all, so he’s taking a far too pessimistic view of my ability to cope with the dialysis machine (which I’m certain that he is).

At that point, he cleared off. He didn’t even ask me if there was anything else, which meant that I was unable to tell him about the blood pressure, water tension and the bleeding issue, which, in my opinion, are urgent. But he really doesn’t like me at all, and he has no bedside manner either.

When I was unplugged, my driver, the guy who thinks that he’s the boss of the drivers, was waiting for me, and he took me home – and it was a gorgeous red sky where the sun was setting tonight. I was actually at home by 18:20, which was really nice. My faithful cleaner helped me into the apartment, and she stuck a disgusting drink into my hand as soon as I was sitting down on a dining chair.

While she was here, I didn’t drink it but put it on my trolley with a packet of crackers, some spreading cheese, some biscuits and an orange, and pushed it into the office here where I prepared for a footfest.

The first match was TNS v Connah’s Quay Nomads, which had kicked off half an hour ago, but thanks to the “start from beginning” option, I could watch it from the kick-off, the first time this season that I had seen TNS. The following match was a second division match between Y Drenewydd and Bwcle.

However, we had a calamity. With about fifteen minutes to go, I crashed out in my chair. I managed to see the start of the Drenewydd v Bwcle game, but with about ten minutes gone, I crashed out again.

When I awoke, it was fifty-six minutes into the game and I had never felt so ill in my life. I was in one of those situations where I couldn’t even move, I was so tired. Eventally, though, I managed to slide from the chair and go to bed. The blog can wait until morning.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about anaesthetic … "well, one of us has" – ed … a man from Crewe went into the local dentists and asked "how much is a tooth extraction here?"
"It’s £65:00" replied the dentist.
"Is there any way to do it cheaper?" asked the man. "That sounds expensive."
"Well, if you’re brave enough, doing it without anaesthetic will cost £50:00."
"That’s still dear. Would it be cheaper if a student dentist were to do it?"
"That would work out at about £40:00"
"And if we made it a training session with a load of students watching and maybe even trying?"
"In that case, it would cost just £10:00. But it won’t be a very pleasant experience."
"No" replied the man "but the price is right. So can I book the wife in for next week some time?"

LIVE: Friday 30th October 2026 – I HAVE JUST …

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… seen one of the most exciting and interesting games of football that I have seen for ages. What’s more, it was a last-minute decision to watch it too instead of the game that I had planned to see, so I was even more pleased.

Much more pleased, in fact, than how my day started off today – or should I maybe say “last night” instead?

You’ve no idea how ill I was during the night. And when I awoke, it took me hours to recover. Today was definitely another typical example of a day of two halves.

Last night, for example, I crashed out yet again while riding the porcelain horse. I was away with the fairies, although not in any manner that would excite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine, for well over an hour, and it took a while for me to recover afterwards. But I recovered so well that I sat down and dashed off the notes last night without even thinking about them.

After I’d finished, I was glad to crawl into bed, even if it was already midnight, and I was asleep quite quickly. And I only awoke once or twice, one time of which you’ll find out more as you read on further down, but I was soon asleep again until the alarm woke me.

Both those times, though, I was feeling really ill, with a dry throat and a really uncomfortable sensation in my stomach, and when the alarm went off at 06:29 and awoke me, I was still feeling quite unwell.

It took even longer than usual for me to return to the Land of the Living and stagger across the living room to the front door to unlock it ready for when the nurse comes later, and then I staggered back across the living room to the bathroom to sort myself out for the morning.

Back in here afterwards, my first job was to check the dictaphone to find out what had happened during the night.

I had another strange phantom awakening during the night. I dreamed that my cleaner had shaken me awake, so in fact I awoke. I felt so ill that I couldn’t move for a moment, and I thought that I would be still in bed when the second alarm goes off. However, the second alarm never went off, and when I looked at the time, it was 01:05. Before I was shaken awake, I was dreaming that something was going on during half-term at Eton Boys’ School, where the football coaches from Eton had taken in children from unprivileged backgrounds and were busy coaching them in football. There was a young girl who was there, and she was woken up and told to get out of bed, so she did a perfect cartwheel out of the bed. When she was upside-down, she stopped and stood there in an upside-down cartwheel for a couple of minutes before carrying on to finish it.

It would certainly be a fate worse than death if my cleaner were to shake me awake at some time during the night. But it was certainly one of the strangest “phantom alarms” that I have ever had.

Anyone who has read the book or seen the film GOOBYE MR CHIPS will immediately recognise the reference to the football setting, but the girl doing the cartwheel is part of yet another story that the World is not yet ready to hear.

There are also links for AMAZON UK, AMAZON USA and, since the recent “troubles”, AMAZON CANADA for the use of my numerous Canadian visitors, and now in response to a request that I received, AMAZON GERMANY. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I am extremely grateful when someone uses the links to make a purchase.

The nurse turned up this morning rather later than usual, and while he was sorting out my legs and feet, I talked to him about yesterday at dialysis and how ill I was feeling this morning. He was a former dialysis nurse, so I expected him to have a few answers, but he just gave me some “generic” replies that didn’t help the matter advance very much.

After he left, I made my breakfast, and while I was eating, I read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

They’ve finished being out and about, and in the short time that they have left before they need to take up their carriages to go to Craven Arms station for their train, they have gone sightseeing at the castle and church at Clun, just down the road.

As for me, I’ve been researching some of the very interesting names of people, places and fossilised animals that have cropped up in this short section, and that’s even more interesting.

Back in here, I had a few things to do, one of which was to check the statistics. And once more, I’ve had ChatGPT researching a web page of one of my sites, presumably to use as a reference to someone’s query. I’ve lost count of how many that is now.

When everything was done, I started work. and how much I rued my missing two afternoons earlier in the week, because it took less than ninety minutes to finish off writing the notes for the radio programme. I could have done that easily on Tuesday afternoon.

Once I’d finished, I went for a late lunch – to wit, a disgusting drink and the midday medication – and then I spent maybe twenty minutes tidying up the freezer in the bathroom. There’s plenty more to do in there too, and if I spend a short time in there each day, I should be able to make a lot of room in the freezer, I reckon.

This afternoon, I made a start on tidying up the music that I have stored on here. My temporary folder is flooded out with music and there’s much more than what will fit on a 4 GB memory stick, as I found out. I use 4 GB memory sticks because the hi-fi in the living room can’t handle more than 4 GB.

That took me up to about 19:00, and there was still more that could have been done, especially if I had had a few more 4 GB memory sticks … "he’s exhausted his stock now" – ed … I’ll have to find some more time and more memory sticks from somewhere to finish this off.

There had been the usual Friday afternoon interruption when my cleaner came to do her stuff. We had a good chat about things, and then she produced the 200 grammes of mushrooms that she’d bought me today. And when I went to put them in the fridge, I found that last week’s were still there almost untouched.

As there are three rolls of flaky pastry for croissant-making, I’ve decided that I’m going to make a mushroom pie on Sunday, to use up a roll of flaky pastry and last week’s mushrooms. I asked my chatbot if he knew of any decent recipes, and sure enough, he presented me with a mushroom and white bean pie filling that looked particularly nice. My white beans will need soaking over night so I’ll have to start this mixture off tomorrow evening.

Tea tonight was my usual air-fried chips, beans with cheese and black pepper, and a vegan sausage. And that was a lovely tea. I enjoyed every mouthful.

Pudding tonight was a pot of soya yoghurt, coffee flavoured, a handful of biscuits and a prune, and they were eaten back in the office after I’d done the washing-up, because there was football on the internet and I didn’t want to miss it.

My plan had been to watch Y Fflint v Trefynnon, but at the last moment, I changed my mind and watched Rhydaman v Hwlffordd.

As I said just now, this was a really exciting match that surged from one end to the other non-stop, and it was a find of exceptional interest, a really good showcase of the quality on show of the Novira Premier League. I was exhausted just watching it, never mind playing in it.

As for the score, I’ll let you find out if you like, because I’m hoping that other Welsh fans would sign in to watch the game – especially for the sting right at the end of the tail in this game.

And also, congratulations to Babucar Sauane of Rhydaman, the best player on the pitch, and by a country mile too.

So right now I’m going off to bed, ready to fight the good fight again tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about visiting churches … "well, one of us has" – ed … one Sunday, the Devil decided to visit a church in the UK. And as he walked in through the door, all of the congregation fled, except for one man.
"Aren’t you going to flee too?" asked old Nick.
"No, I’m not" replied the man.
"Even thoough I could kill you with just a couple of words?"
"No" replies the man.
"Why not?" asked the devil.
"You go and live twenty-five years with my wife" replied the man.

LIVE: Thursday 29th October 2026 – I HAVE NO …

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… idea of what’s happening to me at dialysis. All I do know is that something isn’t correct.

On Monday, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I was the lightest that I had been for a while when I weighed myself before we started. And it must have been correct because when I weighed myself afterwards, the weight corresponded with what it should have been given the amount of fluid removed.

As well as that, we had the blood pressure slowly creeping up and then, after a few hours back at home, we had that bleeding issue… "or that bleeding bleeding issue" – ed …

Today, I had the highest weight that I have ever had since I’ve been keeping records, and so I spent four hours there today. And heaven alone knows what it would have been had I not persuaded the nurse to take an additional three hundred grammes on Monday.

And then the blood pressure went through the roof – 13.0, which may be normal for you, but it certainly isn’t for me. Finally, after the ten minutes of compression at the end, the nurse relaxed her grip, and we had blood everywhere.

None of this is normal, not by any means, especially as I have no problems riding the porcelain horse, and the next time that I see Emilie the Cute Consultant, I shall tell her.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, last night I was terribly late going to bed again. But luckily, I was able to go to sleep quite quickly. I’ve no idea what time it was that I awoke, but I lay there vegetating for quite a while. Eventually, I decided that I may as well show some signs of life, but the alarm beat me to it.

And then, miserable failure that I am, I was still in bed when the second alarm went off, and it’s been ages since that has happened. I ended up being hours late unlocking the door ready for the nurse when he arrives.

In the bathroom, I sorted myself out and even had a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant later on.

Back in here, with nothing to download off the dictaphone, I found a few other things to do until the nurse put in an appearance, earlier than usual. And today, we discussed the weather while he was dealing with my legs and feet. It’s supposed to be nice this weekend, but I’ll wait and see.

After he left, I made my breakfast and read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

And here we go again. Today, our heroes have gone to visit the Bury Ditches Hillfort near Clunton in Shropshire. Our party leader explained to his group that he "had examined these earthworks since, and from their bold and perfect condition, he was of opinion that they could not be older than the Roman period. They might even be Roman, for it is now well known that the Romans made elliptical camps as well as square ones. There were, however, no authentic Roman monuments similar to this one, and this, therefore, was very doubtful. If not a Roman work, what is it? He considered it to be Saxon, of the very early period of the Saxons. He believed it to be—not a camp—but the house of a Saxon chieftan of great importance, dating probably from about the sixth century."

According to everyone else these days, it’s an Iron Age hillfort, as are almost all of these hillforts.

Back in here again afterwards, I had a few things to do, and then, oh! what might have been. I attacked the radio notes and in just about seventy-five minutes, I’d completed about sixty percent. If only I had worked this hard on Tuesday and Wednesday.

When the alarm went off, I headed into the kitchen for my disgusting drink and midday medication, and then I began to sort my things for dialysis. My cleaner came along as usual and applied the anaesthetic to my arm.
We had a good chat, and then after she left, I had a couple of things to do and then collapsed over the table.

And, as usual, I was just about to drift off into another comfortable dream when the doorbell rang. It was the young, chatty taxi driver who had come to take me to dialysis. He was ten minutes late, but as I was the only passenger, we made up a lot of the time. And at dialysis, we had the pantomime that I had mentioned.

After I was plugged in, I watched the last football match from the weekend – Caernarfon v Llansawel.

It took a while for Caernarfon to settle into their stride, but once they were up and running, they had much more in the tank than Llansawel and scored three really good goals.

But all through the match, Llansawel’s tactic of putting low crosses into the box was meat and drink to the Caernarfon defence, and I was screaming at them to put the ball in the air. With about three minutes to go, they finally got the message and began to pump high crosses into the goal area, and sure enough, in stoppage time, they managed to pull a goal back. But it was too little, too late.

For the rest of the session, I had some things to do, tidying up on the computer.

As usual, when I’d finished, I had to wait until the nurse (the other one of the two whom I mentioned a couple of days ago) finished cleaning the machine before she attended to me, and then there was the history about the blood. But eventually, I was ready to leave, the last patient in the building.

My driver, another chatty one, was waiting for me, and we had an interesting chat about religion on the way home. My cleaner was ready, waiting for me, and she helped me into the apartment.

It was almost 19:45 when I arrived, and there was no danger of me cooking at that time, so I had crackers and spreading cheese, followed by some biscuits and an orange.

Now that I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed in the hope of having a good night, but once again, I shouldn’t be so optimistic as it only leads to disappointment.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about blood pressure … "well, one of us has" – ed … I remember arriving at the hospital in Paris, and when they checked my blood pressure, it was through the roof.
"Your blood pressure is high today, Mr Hall" said the nurse.
"Well, I’ll tell you what," I replied. "You go for a drive around Paris with the chauffeur who has just brought me here and see what yours is afterwards!"

LIVE: Tuesday 27th October 2026 – HAVING REGALED YOU …

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… last night with a blog entry of a near-record three thousand one hundred and seventy-seven words, I shall try to be a little more concise tonight. After all, I don’t want you lot wasting as much precious time reading my rubbish as I seem to do writing it. But as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … my downfall when writing essays always was the word count. I’d reach the word limit before I’d even warmed up.

Anyway, I digress … "again" – ed …

Last night, I was in bed later than I would like to be, but not as late as some nights have been just recently. And for a change, it took longer than usual to go to sleep. That’s because I’d had something of a shock before going to bed.

When I’m around the house at this time of year, I wear a sweater, but when I go out, I change the sweater for a fleece jacket and change back when I come home again. When I changed back yesterday evening, I noticed nothing amiss.

However, when I was undressing last night, I noticed that the tubing on my arm that holds the compresses onto the pinholes in my forearm was drenched with blood. I had a feel of it and the blood seemed to be slowly drying out. It wasn’t bleeding any more, I reckoned, and as I had some old tubing that had lost its elasticity, I put a piece over the tubing on the arm to stop the blood staining the sheets and quilt cover when I’m in bed.

Nevertheless, it took me by surprise because I had felt nothing at all. And we’d been told at dialysis that at the rate the body will lose its blood through these pinholes, we will only have five minutes to react before it will be too late. And that’s no use at all if I’ve no idea that the clock has already begun to wind down.

That was the thought that was going through my mind as I tried to go to sleep.

At some point, I must have gone to sleep because round about 01:40 or thereabouts, we had another phantom alarm call that woke me. I recognised straight away that it was a phantom call so I didn’t react, but I didn’t go back to sleep either – well, not for a while.

After tossing and turning in my bed for ages, I went through another phase of this “sometimes I’m awake, sometimes I’m asleep, but I don’t know which is which”, and I was definitely awake when the alarm rang.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … being awake is one thing – being up and about is something else completely.

But once I was up and about – well, if ever you want to have an idea about what makes a “day of two halves”, you only have to read on and all the rest will become clear.

First task this morning was to unlock the front door ready for the nurse when he comes round, and the second was to go to sort myself out in the bathroom. The bleeding on the arm had stopped a long time ago, but some of the blood that was on the tubing had soaked through to the tubing that I had put on later. Luckily, it hadn’t soaked through onto the sheets and the bedding.

Back in here, first task was the dictaphone to see what had gone on during the night.

I was in another chaotic household with my mother again last night and with loads of people. Someone said that the family was going off on holiday next weekend. I asked whether that was true, and she replied that it was the end of November. I was sitting down in a corner with a friend of mine from Germany, and we were talking about a project that had been put to us all, my friend and me, about going off on some kind of educational course. We said that we hadn’t heard anything about this for ages, so we imagined that it had been abandoned. Then we talked about certain people whom we knew and certain businesses that we’d heard of, why they had all gone wrong and all these people who had gone wrong. She said that she could remember some of them before they tried to be in business. One of them was a “failed CV”, whatever that was. After a long discussion like this, I told my mother that I was going to bed. I walked up the flights of stairs to where my room was, and the guy who had the room next door to me, he came along as well. He asked if I was really going to bed, and I replied “no”. I was just going to sit in my room and listen to music or something. He asked me about a girl whom I knew. I’d mentioned her to him before. I suddenly remembered who it was, and I said that I’m afraid that she already has a boyfriend. He was extremely disappointed about that.

Being in “another chaotic household with my mother” is nothing new at all for me. It’s how we lived back in “those days”, and regrettably, I seem to have inherited it.

My “friend from Germany” was here with her daughter about eighteen months or so ago, and what we all had in common was that we went to the same university. Her daughter even became a lecturer there. The mother and I sat on some of the same committees, so having plans and so on was something that we always had up our sleeves.

The ramshackle stairs up to my room in the attic remind me of something, but I can’t think what, and the young girl with the boyfriend – I know who she is, but she’s in the wrong generation for this dream.

The nurse turned up, earlier than usual, and we had a chat about his week off as he was sorting out my legs and feet. And after he left, I made my breakfast.

As I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

Today, we are discussing erratic boulders. These are huge, isolated rocks that differ totally from the rocks around them, and our friends are debating how they might have arrived in their particular place today, hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from the rest of the rocks of their type.

Several people were taking wild guesses, but eventually someone came up with the answer that corresponds with modern-day thinking, and that is that they were brought down by glaciers and “dumped” when the glacier ran out of steam to carry them.

He tells us that these erratic boulders "were slowly carried along by the motion of the glacier, year after year, however great their dimensions, till, on arriving at the edge of the ice, which was always melting during the heat of summer, they were precipitated into the valley below, there forming masses of debris commonly called moraines."

Today, there are several types of moraine recognised by geologists – two of which are, firstly, lateral moraines that form at the side of the glacier, and secondly, terminal moraines at the end of a glacier. And you can tell how far a glacier has retreated by checking the succession of terminal moraines. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we had hours of fun exploring and scrambling over a terminal moraine of the Brother John Glacier in northern Greenland several years ago.

When I’d finished breakfast, there was some tidying up in the kitchen to do and then I came back in here to carry on work.

There were several things that needed my attention, and then I could continue with the task of reformatting the rest of the music that my friendly neighbourhood chatbot found for me yesterday. When it had all been done, I had to remix and re-edit it all and then choose the individual tracks to include in the programme.

That’s where my chatbot came in useful again. I told him to review as many reviews as he could find of each album that he had selected and to tell me which song had received the most positive reviews, why, and what the reviews said. In no time at all, he had identified most of the tracks and had a little cameo of a post about them that I can translate into French in due course.

That has also saved me a couple of days’ work.

There was enough time to deal with a few of them and prepare them for broadcasting, but then it was time, long after time, in fact, for my midday medication and disgusting drink. My faithful cleaner came in at that point and caught me once more in flagrante delicto having a break, but she also showed me what a heroine she is.

Talking to my chatbot the other day, we were discussing my bread and how I could improve on what I was doing and how I was making it. I told him about the sunflower seeds, occasionally brazil nuts and sometimes almonds that I included in the flour, and asked him whether or not there was anything else that was healthier that I could include.

The chatbot gave me a list that included chia seeds and several other grains, so I had given a list to my cleaner for her to keep a lookout.

She’d wandered around the “weigh it yourself” section at Leclerc this morning and managed to find chia seeds and a mixture that contained most of the other seeds that the chatbot had mentioned, and she’d bought a supply of them both for me.

As well as that, they had my favourite arrabbiata sauce on special offer – buy two and the second one is sixty-eight percent off – so I told her to buy four if she saw them. And sure enough, there were four of them on the kitchen counter next to the seeds.

Once she’d sorted everything out, I told her about the problem with my arm. She had a look and decided that it was suitably horrible, so she removed all of the blood-soaked dressings and cleaned my arm. She found some things to make a temporary dressing and then wrapped my arm in cling film.

The reason for the cling film is because it’s Tuesday today, and Tuesday means that it’s shower time. She then sorted out the bathroom for me so that I can shower in comparative safety.

When the bathroom was converted, I had hope to have had a flat floor, like a walk-in wet room, but when you have a floor made of solid grès de Chausey granite, installed in 1667, it’s simply not possible to do so. No-one can chisel their way into that so the base is fifteen centimetres off the ground. I need to have a couple of steps up. And as yet, there are no handrails in the shower, so my cleaner needs to take the portable handrails that fence in the porcelain horse.

The shower today was wonderful. I washed my undies and my night attire in the sink first, and while I was showering, I threw them in too so that the shower would rinse them. But the water was lovely and hot, and I took full advantage of it.

The bathroom was hot too. Although I turned the heating off after the first night, I switched the heating on in the bathroom before the shower with the temperature set to twenty-four degrees. The heated lightbulb was on, of course, and so it was even nicer stepping out of the shower too.

After I’d dressed, I went into the dining area, where my cleaner attended to my arm. It had bled a little more under the shower but it had stopped again. Nevertheless, she made a thorough job of patching the arm so that it wouldn’t bleed again, and if it were to do so, the number of compresses under the plasters would absorb the blood quite quickly.

At about 15:00, as usual, she cleared off to her next client, but she said that she would be back when she returns this evening to make sure that everything will be OK.

Back in here, I tried to restart work, but for some unknown reason, all my motivation and energy had gone. All my “get up and go” had got up and gone. That was a real disappointment, as I had so much to do. I just sat here and vegetated for a while instead of working.

None of this was getting the baby bathed, but it really was turning into a day of two halves.

At about 17:00 I decided to start tea. There was the broccoli stalk from Saturday’s Leclerc delivery, so I was going to make another broccoli stalk soup.

First, though, there was the bread. And seeing that I intended to make enough soup for two meals, I decided to make four bread buns. With chia, you need to use more water than normal, so instead of a hundred and thirty millilitres of water with my two hundred grammes of flour, I used a hundred and forty.

While the dough was proving, I chopped up the broccoli stalk and a potato into tiny cubes and put the mix on one side. Then a pile of mushrooms were chopped, and I put them on one side too, mixed with a handful of frozen garlic. Finally, I chopped up a couple of small onions.

My favourite saucepan has a really heavy base, so I fried the onions in it, and when they were well done, I added the mushrooms and garlic and gave them a few minutes too before adding the broccoli and potatoes, stirring everything around. Once everything had been frying for five minutes, I added enough vegetable stock to cover the food and left it to come to the boil and then simmer.

By now, the bread bun mix had risen considerably, so I added a spoonful or two of chai seeds and three or four spoonfuls of the seed mix and gave it all a second kneading before dividing the dough mix into four and making flat pancake-like lumps of dough, which I put on some baking paper.

While I was waiting for things to happen, I washed up everything and tidied up. And that’s not like me at all. Usually, I end up in a total mess with stuff all over the place and there’s no room to do anything.

While I’d been talking to my chatbot about bread, he’d given me some useful tips. Firstly, never mind the one hundred and eighty degrees – wind the oven up to two hundred and twenty. Then, put a big container of water … "like his metal pie dish" – ed … at the base of the oven. Finally, put the baking tray in.

When the oven “pinged” that it was ready, it was full of steam and the baking tray was scorching hot. But I put the buns and their sheet of baking paper onto the hot baking tray and put it back in the oven.

The chatbot had recommended parsley, chives and thyme as herbs for my soup, so I’d added those a little earlier, but now I poured the soup mix into my whizzing jug, and with the whizzer, I whizzed it all up into a rather thick liquid. Half of it went into the fridge in a sterilised jar, and the other half went back into the saucepan with several handfuls of these coquillettes, the small elbow-shaped pasta.

After fifteen minutes in the oven, I followed the chatbot’s advice, turned it down to one hundred and eighty degrees and removed the water. Then I left it all for another ten minutes.

As I took the soup off the heat, I added a pot of vegan soya and stirred it well in. And the bread buns were total perfection. I have never ever had a success like this. Two buns went into the freezer for the other half of the soup some time, and two, I dipped into my soup and cleaned my bowl when I’d finished.

Pudding was a pot of coffee-flavoured soya yoghurt followed by a prune. All in all, that was a really nice meal, but it had taken ages to prepare.

Back in here after tea, I began to write up my notes, and I’d reached the halfway stage before I was totally overwhelmed with sleep. It was late too – not too far short of midnight, so I posted on line what I’d done, added a “to be continued” stamp and then went to bed.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about making soup … "well, one of us has" – ed … afried of mine told me about the antics of a famous chef in a Mayfair restaurant in London.
"First, he diced some vegetables really finely, cooked them in water and added a couple of oxo cubes. Then he threw a hyena into the pot, and finally, he jumped in himself"
"Really?" I asked.
"Oh yes" she replied. "He made quite a laughing stock of himself, he did."

LIVE: 26th October 2026 – JUST FOR ONCE …

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… at dialysis, I had a session where nothing seemed to go wrong, and it passed this afternoon without the slightest of worries.

On top of that, the médécin de garde this afternoon was Emilie the Cute Consultant, and what could any man want more than that?

In fact, I had an idea that it was going to be a good day today. Although it wasn’t early when I went to bed last night, it wasn’t as late as many have been just recently. And once I was in bed, I went pretty much straight to sleep.

Although I have a couple of vague memories of waking up during the night, I must have gone more or less straight back to sleep because I don’t really remember very much at all until the alarm going off at 06:29.

As usual, it took me a while to rise to my feet, and the first task was, like it always is these days, to go to unlock the front door ready for Isabelle the Nurse when she arrives.

The second task was different today. It was to go to stir the chilli mix. It had been in the slow cooker all night, and it still hadn’t boiled at that point, I noticed. Consequently, I put it on “high” to give it a kick start and went into the bathroom to organise myself for the day, including having a shave ready for Emilie the Cute Consultant in case she examines me.

When I’d finished in there, I went back into the kitchen to check the chilli. By now, it was bubbling away, so I gave it a really good stir and turned the temperature down to “medium” and left it for a while.

Back in here, the first job was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

We were at some kind of meeting, and there were hordes and hordes of people there. We were sitting in seats and we were all crammed in. It was a really tight fit to have everyone in there and seated. There was virtually no leg room at all. I was sitting right near the back with a group of people around me and we were getting on really well. The final day of this meeting, they were taking everyone off into the city nearby for a sightseeing tour, but it had started to rain, and quite a lot of people had decided that they weren’t going to go, including a couple of our little group, so we were debating what we were going to do. I was interested in one of these girls, so I was wondering if she was going to stay here too or if she was going to go back to her room or whatever, but anyway, I got up and went for a walk around to stretch my legs, and despite the huge meal that we had had earlier, there was some kind of small running buffet where people could make sandwiches and so on. I noticed my Welsh teacher from last year sitting on the front row talking. So I had a quick glance at this food, and they had bourbon biscuits, so despite the meal, I helped myself to a couple of those and walked back to my seat to see what the other people in our group had decided.

Here I am once more with another little group of friends. But apart from that, there’s nothing in this dream that I can readily identify. However, it does have a very familiar ring to it and I’m sure that there’s been something like this happening before, but I just can’t place it.

The presence of my previous Welsh teacher is interesting too, although I’ve no idea why she’s there.

As for the bourbon biscuits, the cheap Tesco ones are in fact vegan, and on several occasions when I was over in the UK, I’d bring back several packets to keep me going. And that gives me an idea – why don’t I ask my chatbot if he can work out a good recipe for me? I may as well try.

… "And as a matter of fact, he did ask, and his chatbot came up with an excellent recipe" – ed …

There was also something else. My friend from the USA rang me and was talking about going to some kind of wholesale shop for things. But first, the story was about his vehicle that had been stolen. I said that it was probably in Canada or somewhere like that, being used by someone else, although I knew where it was, I knew who had stolen it, and I knew the reason why, so I wasn’t going to say anything. This person who had had it had inadvertently put the vehicle’s registration number on line in a blog entry. My friend said that he had looked for the vehicle on line and he hadn’t been able to see it, except for something in Canada, so that gave me a little relief. In the meantime, he said – he asked me if I could look up in a USA directory the way to get from his place to somewhere else in the area. I had to hunt down three or four maps and they were all the wrong ones. In the end, I found the correct one just as he was returning to the ‘phone. He told me that he was going to go to this wholesale shop using the card of someone else. She turned out to be a girl at this meeting with whom I was talking. I asked him how he had met her, and he said that he was at the meeting last year and that was where they hooked up for a while.

It looks as if I stepped back into that first dream later on, but this is another dream that means nothing at all to me. I’m not sure why the car would be involved, why I’d be expected over here in France to look at a map and why a girl in the UK would have a trade card for the USA that she would let someone else use.

I was in the USA last night with my van. I was driving down these roads towards Texas and there was a heavy fog approaching, so I didn’t want to be on the road when there was this heavy fog, so I pulled off by the side of the road, right by a cemetery. I went to have a look in the cemetery, and one of the things that I noticed was a huge monument on a grave, and I read it. It was by some guy who had died in Texas, and on his tombstone was written a quote that he had made, which was “don’t ever go to Texas because all you ever see are headstones and monuments in graveyards”. I walked back and climbed back on board the coach, and there were only two or three people there, so I asked them where everyone had gone. They replied that everyone else had gone to walk up and down a hill. I waited for them all to come back, and I asked the guy in charge where they’d been, and he said that they’d been for a walk along a canal. So I set off and carried on driving, and we were passing through all these small villages that looked very much like English villages. We ended up in a square in one of these places, which was magnificent, with a couple of archways in and a couple of archways out, and a pseudo black and white shop. I suggested to the guy in charge that we stop here and let people photograph for five minutes, so he gave everyone a fifteen minute break for a coffee, and I went to park up my motorbike outside a shop. The guy inside the shop came along and helped me padlock it too with another padlock on another hook. I asked him for a key, and he gave me twenty cents. I wandered off and took a few photos, and when it was time to go back, I went back to the shop. I unpadlocked one end and the guy unpadlocked the other. A third guy came over and asked me about Audis. I told him that they were expensive cars. He wanted to go over and have a look at my van, so he went over and had a look at it, then he went inside and told the passengers that I hadn’t given him a tip for holding the motorbike and that I was probably going to beg them for a tip at the end of the holiday. I threw him off and we set off again in the coach. We ended up by the sea. Someone had said that they could see the sea from where we’d stopped. But here, we came to a very narrow entry and pulled out onto a main road. The guy in charge asked me which way, but I said that I didn’t know because no-one had told me which hotel or even which town I was supposed to be going to. I drove the coach along a bit of the way and the road disintegrated into a kind of woodland. We climbed out of the coach and walked through the woods, and the coach followed us. We ended up at this big hotel that looked more like a hospital. This, apparently, was where we were supposed to be.

This one is the most weird of them all.

If I were to point out every inconsistency in this dream, we’d be here forever trying to explain them. But the most important is how my mode of transport changed from being a van, a coach and a motorbike and then back again, and then there was the image of a self-driving coach taking itself through the woods.

It’s probably best if I were to say nothing and let you try to work the rest of them out for yourselves. Perhaps someone can identify if this relates to anything else that has happened in the past.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up as usual, but a little late today. With her oppo taking over tomorrow, I imagine that there has been a rush for last-minute injections and blood samples. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … she has “the touch”, whereas her oppo doesn’t.

While she was working on my legs and feet, she told me of her plans for her week off. At St Malo over the weekend there’s the start of a single-handed yacht race – the Route du Rhum – between Brittany and the Antilles, finishing at Guadeloupe. She’s off to witness the start and to wish everyone bonne route. It’s a race that takes place every four years, and the record time is well under seven days.

After she left, I made my breakfast and while I was eating, I read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

And those of you who were perturbed by all of this mass slaughter of disappearing wildlife that I mentioned yesterday will be pleased to know that the fish had their revenge. Our author tells us that, on the train along the Wye valley near to Llangoed Castle, "you see from the railway the very pool where poor Mr. Holmes was drowned while fishing, in sight of his newly married wife."

When I’d finished breakfast, I went round into the kitchen and tipped a couple of handfuls of peas and a tin of sweetcorn into the chilli mix, gave it a really good stir, and then began to tidy away the breakfast things. While I was in the fridge, I pulled out two small tubs of soya yoghurt, and when the tidying was done, I switched off the slow cooker and tipped the yoghurt in, giving it a really good stir. Now I’ll let it cool down.

Back in the bedroom, I reviewed the radio programme for this week and sent it off to be added into the stream for the coming weekend, and then I set about reconverting into a format that I can use, the music that my chatbot found for me yesterday. And I hadn’t finished it all when my alarm clock sounded to remind me that it’s time to stop work.

So I sorted out my midday medication and a disgusting drink and then began to pack away the travelling laptop, ready to take with me to dialysis.

My faithful cleaner turned up to apply the anaesthetic to my arm, and I’m glad that she was here because one moment, I was sitting on a chair at the dining table and the next moment, I was lying on the floor with a pain in my head where it had apparently collided with the electronic drum kit.

Between the two of us, I managed to sit back into the chair so that I could finish off putting on my shoes.

After my cleaner had left, I did my usual “collapse in a semi-recumbent position over the table” until the taxi arrived. And it was my favourite Belgian taxi driver too, so we had a good chat. We had to go off into the sticks to find another passenger and then into Sartilly for our usual Monday passenger.

And going off into the sticks is no problem for me. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I’m going to parts of Normandy that I never knew existed until I started travelling with this taxi company.

As a result of everything, we were late arriving at dialysis, but it didn’t matter too much because I was seen more or less straight away and I was up and running by 14:25. It’s been later than that a few times even when I’ve been on time, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

To my surprise, especially after the last couple of weeks, there wasn’t much to be extracted, so I persuaded the nurse to wind it up by three hundred millilitres so as to give me a head start for Thursday.

I spent the afternoon watching football. The first game was the rest of Cambrian United v Airbus UK Broughton. From 2-0 down, Airbus won 3-2. This was a Cambian United-sponsored stream, so they had one of their fans commenting, and even he was forced to admit that once Airbus began to play with the wind in the second half, they were by far the better team. Cambrian’s “kick and rush” style of play into a headwind was taking them nowhere.

When that match was over, I watched the whole of Colwyn Bay v Cardiff Metropolitan. Very much against the run of play, the Met took the lead, and when the Seagulls had a player sent off in the thirty-first minute, we thought that it was “game over”.

However, then we had two of the most extraordinary goals that I’ve seen for a while. Defending a corner kick in a swirling wind, a Met player went to head the ball out of danger. The wind, however, swirled the ball round to the back of his head and another gust of wind took it into his own net.

Even worse, a few minutes later, the Seagulls had another corner. Kicking an inswinging ball into the penalty area in the same swirling wind, the ball beat everyone and went straight into the net. So from being 1-0 down, Colwyn Bay had gone to 2-1 even with being a man down.

However, in the second half, the Met had the wind in their favour and they managed to find an equalising goal, although it wasn’t as bizarre as those of Colwyn Bay.

Emilie the Cute Consultant came to see me. She wanted to know how I was getting on with the immunotherapy, so I explained that I seemed to be doing OK. She said too that she would see what she could arrange about this COVID vaccination, which was nice of her.

While she was there, I took advantage of asking her about the nighttime sessions of dialysis. She explained that it probably wasn’t for me, which is a shame. Firstly, you need to be autonomous, which I’m not. You need to be in good health and not require medical supervision, which rules me out too, and then you need to be able to compress your own wounds, and that definitely rules me out.

When it was time to be unplugged, I didn’t have to wait long, and the nurse came over to me with a nursing student just starting her second year. She’d come on a work placement to dialysis for a few weeks and it was her first day.

However, there was all kinds of chaos going on around me, with ill patients, rebellious patients, and machines sounding alarms all over the place, so I let my experienced nurse clear off once she’d unplugged me and I taught the nursing student how to do a compression … "is there no end to this man’s talents?" – ed …

My driver was waiting for me when I was ready, and I was home by 18:40. My cleaner helped me inside and then stuck a disgusting drink into my sweaty little mitt.

After she left, I made some rice and veg and then heated up a couple of serving spoons full of my chilli in the microwave. That was tea tonight and it was delicious, but I’ll know all about it tomorrow, that’s for sure.

Pudding was more apricot halves with home made chocolate and coconut ice cream, and that was as delicious as usual too.

After the washing up, I portioned out the rest of the chilli into individual servings, and then I had to tidy the freezer to be able to fit them in there. But now, they are quite happily freezing away, ready for use another time.

So now that my notes are written, there are just a couple of other things to do and then I’m off to bed. No Welsh course tomorrow, so I can relax a little.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about nursing students … "well, one of us has" – ed … a student nurse from Crewe went to do her first work placement.
Amongst the things that she had to check that she had brought with her was a red crayon.
"Why have you brought that?" asked her placement supervisor.
"Well" replied the student. "I’m not sure how else I’m expected to draw blood while I’m on this ward."

LIVE: Saturday 24th October 2026 – I HAVE BEEN …

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… sitting in here watching the football for the last two hours, freezing my nether regions off.

And at the final whistle, I checked the temperature in here. It was 16°C. No wonder I was sitting here in a pullover and a fleece and still freezing. Consequently, and with regret, I’ve put the heating on tonight, a whole week earlier than I would usually like to.

Still, it can’t be helped. I shall console myself with the fact that last year, it was the 13th October. The previous year was the 27th October. And so it’s not unusual to have it switched on before the end of October.

The reason why it’s suddenly gone cold after the wonderful early October that we had was that the weather has been so darned miserable these last couple of days. Last night, I could feel a chill in the air inside the apartment and I was glad to be in bed, notwithstanding the fact that it was after midnight and I was still letting it all hang out.

Once in bed, though, I was asleep quite quickly, and I lay there without moving for a good couple of hours. However, I soon awoke, thanks to the wind again, and after that I couldn’t go back to sleep again. I couldn’t persuade my lazy self to leave the bed for an early start, and it was only when the second alarm was due to start that I managed to sit up and put my feet on the floor.

But as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … having my feet on the floor is one thing. Being up and about is something else completely. It took me a good few minutes before I found the courage and motivation to stand up and go into the living room to unlock the door ready for Isabelle the Nurse when she arrives later.

From there, I went into the bathroom to sort myself out for the day, and I even had a good scrub up and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant later this afternoon at dialysis.

Back in here, with nothing on the dictaphone, I had a few things to do while I was waiting, and I noticed that during the night, once more, a ChatGPT chatbot had visited my site to look up some information to use as a source for a reply to a question. How many is this now, I wonder?

When Isabelle the Nurse arrived, we talked about the storm that was still blowing, the miserable weather, the damage all through the town and the fact that there are still several thousand houses in the suburbs still without electricity. You would think that someone would have done something about that by now.

After she left, I made my breakfast and read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

Our expert his finished his waxing lyrical discussion about primroses, and now one of the experts from the Naturalists Club is debating the matter with him, stating that he can’t agree. Although I can’t quite follow the argument, not knowing sufficiently about the subject, it’s good fun to watch the experts falling out amongst themselves.

When breakfast was over, I came back in here, but I wasn’t in here for long as Leclerc’s delivery driver came by with my shopping. She dumped it all on the kitchen table and left me to sort it out, which is normal practice.

The frozen food went away first, and then the fresh food that needs freezing. The juice, milk, veg and fruit, etc., went into the fridge or the vegetable drawer under the worktop, then the dry stuff, and finally the tins. There was quite a lot of stuff today – but then again, it’s been just over four weeks since my last order, so it’s no surprise. At least, I have everything that I need to make my aubergine and kidney bean whatsit on Sunday afternoon.

There was time to do a little more work before the alarm went off, and then I began to prepare myself for dialysis.

There was the disgusting drink and the midday medication, and my faithful cleaner turned up as usual to apply my anaesthetic.

Once she had left, there was no time for me to adopt my usual semi-recumbent position over the table while I waited for the taxi because a couple of people wanted to chat to me over the internet, and that was how I was occupied when the taxi arrived, bang on time at 13:00.

When I opened the front door to leave, the hurricane blowing off the sea was far too much for me, so I persuaded the driver to drive around the back of the building to the fire escape, where I only had a couple of paces to walk.

There was just me today in the taxi with the driver, and taking the shortcut to avoid the gilets jaunes, we were at dialysis at 13:35. However, expecting me to be coupled up quickly is a rather optimistic expectation, and it was 14:35 when I was finally connected up.

Today, there was no question of excess weight or excess time, so things proceeded as normal. However, I had one of the two nurses who do just about the minimum work required, cutting corners here and there, and there were continual interruptions and alarms as the machine complained all through the session about the quality of the connection until one of the other nurses came and did what was necessary to satisfy it.

Once everyone had settled down, I watched the live football match, Connah’s Quay Nomads v Llandudno. Llandudno’s early-season form has melted away and their dismal run of form continues. The Nomads, on the other hand, are on an excellent run, and it continued today as they beat Llandudno 2-0.

Like most clubs in the Novira Cymru Premier League, Llandudno’s problem is the lack of a front-line goalscorer. Earlier in the season, their forwards were making hay against the weaker clubs, but now, their fixture list has become serious, and they are playing against serious, established clubs who can exploit the weaknesses of the other teams.

When that had finished, I watched some of Friday night’s game between two newly promoted clubs, Cambrian United v Airbus UK Broughton. I hadn’t finished watching the match when it was time to go home, so I’ll tell you more about it on Monday evening when I’ve finished watching it.

In between everything, the doctor (not Emilie the Cute Consultant, unfortunately) came to see me. She told me that she had been looking at the details of my sessions for the last few weeks and had noticed that the black line (which represents the amount of fluid being extracted at that moment) had fallen below the yellow block (which represents the excess weight over my dry weight) on almost every occasion.

She had come to the conclusion that my dry weight was wrong and that she should increase my dry weight by 500 grammes. That’s a shame because I had come to like the new, trim me. And in any case, the new dry weight may well make a difference to the first extraction, but once I’m at the new weight, it won’t make a bit of difference to any subsequent extraction. Still, she’s in charge and may well know what she’s talking about, even if she does have to use a calculator to divide 3800 by 4.

When the time was up, my nurse concentrated on cleaning the machine rather than disconnecting me. And when she finally came round to disconnecting me, she compressed the wounds for just five minutes instead of the ten that are usually required, and then returned to cleaning the machine again. That’s not really satisfactory, but it’s what you come to expect when she’s working.

This early evening, I was really lucky. I saw my favourite taxi driver, whom I haven’t seen since the beginning of May in the garden centre in Granville. We had a chat for a couple of minutes, and then the driver who was to take me home emerged from the ladies’ … errr … rest room. She was another one of my favourite drivers, and we had a really good chat on the way home.

Back here at the apartment, the gale had started up again, and in spades too, so my driver dropped me off at the rear of the building again. Only a couple of paces then into the building and out of the wind.

My cleaner helped me back into the apartment, and once I was sitting down, she pressed a disgusting drink into my sweaty little mitt and then cleared off. I didn’t drink my disgusting drink then, but I put it on my little trolley along with a packet of crackers, some vegan cheese spread and an orange. There was no time to make a meal because there was more live football on the internet and it had already kicked off (thank heavens for the “start from the beginning” option on the live stream).

This was Y Barri playing against Hwlffordd in the driving rain and hurricane winds that made this match a total lottery. Y Barri, whose usual tactics are to play with the ball in the air, were bound to be second best to a Hwlffordd side who like to play with the ball on the ground.

And having watched the game, I was convinced that the referee and the two linesmen were refereeing a totally different game to the one that I, the Y Barri staff and most of the crowd were watching. There were several incidents in the Hwlffordd penalty area which, if I had been refereeing, I would have given a stonewall penalty, and the refusal of the referee to consult the VAR cameras made a mockery of having VAR in the first place.

The result was Y Barri lost 1-3, and their early-season form, when they were leading the league for a while, seems to have deserted them, just like it has at Llandudno.

After the end of the game, I began to write up the notes of the day but I almost fell asleep on several occasions, so in the end, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that I wasn’t doing justice to today, so I called it a day, published on line what I had done so far, added a “to be continued” stamp, and made myself ready for bed. I can always finish off the notes tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about gaining weight … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of my friends told me that it’s only natural for married men to gain weight.
"Why is that?" I asked.
"Simple" replied my friend. "When they are single, they come home, look at what’s in the fridge and then go to bed. When they are married, they come home, look at what’s in the bed and then go to the fridge."

LIVE: Friday 23rd October 2026 – THIS BLASTED HURRICANE …

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… or whatever you would like to call it, is still going on and showing no sign of abating. That’s about twenty-six hours that we’ve been battered, and the damage in the town and especially up here in the old town is “significant”. At least it was when my faithful cleaner went into town this morning. It must be much worse now.

At about 05:00 a gust of wind of 143 km/h was reported, and there have been others at 120 km/h, so I see from the site of the weather station down at the end of the rock. And in Finisterre, they’ve had gusts of over 150 km/h.

The prevailing wind all day has been from the north-west, and there’s nothing between us and the eastern coast of North America in that direction except the Atlantic Ocean, so there’s nothing to slow down the wind.

As I mentioned yesterday, the wind was getting up as I was coming home last night, but it really began to blow at about 20:30, and by the time that I went to bed, at about 23:30, it was really giving it a good go. I’m surprised that I managed to go to sleep. I was down the bed under the quilt, and I could still hear it howling.

But go to sleep. I did, although it wasn’t for long. At about 02:40 I had another phantom alarm call, and although it awoke me, it didn’t entice me out of bed. However, I couldn’t go back to sleep as the wind continued to roar with an intensity that I haven’t heard for a good few months.

When I looked at the time later on, I saw that it was 06:10, and I was tempted to make an early start but I thought better of it. However, at 06:25 I swung my feet out of bed and onto the floor, thus claiming an early start.

After both the alarms had gone off, I went into the living room and unlocked the door to let Isabelle the Nurse in when she arrived, and then I went to sort myself out in the bathroom.

Back in here, I attacked the rest of the notes left over from last night and they went on line when they were finished. At that moment, Isabelle the Nurse put in her appearance. She was supposed to give me my anti-flu injection this morning, but when she saw the state that I was in, with a streaming head cold that won’t go away, she wanted me to check with the doctor at dialysis that it’s OK to give it to me right now or whether we should wait a while.

She was soon on her way out to continue to fight the good fight with the hurricane outside, and I could go and make breakfast.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

We’ve finished the story of the Herefordshire Beacon, and now we have another expert waxing lyrical about the primrose and its various developments. “Well, in a cowslip’s bell I lie!” I thought to myself.

Once breakfast was over, I went back into the bedroom to send off my Leclerc order, but to my dismay, all deliveries are cancelled today because of the storm. I shall have to wait until tomorrow for my delivery to arrive. I hope that it’s before I go to dialysis.

My faithful cleaner sent me a video of the storm in the port this morning, the waves crashing over the harbour wall and causing nothing but mayhem in the outer harbour. It really was impressive, so I sent it on to a few friends for their perusal.

There were a few more things to do, as well as being engaged in several animated chats as a result of the video that I sent, and then it was time to start work on the notes for the radio programme.

It wasn’t long, though, before I had to stop for my midday medication and disgusting drink, and I was caught in flagrante delicto by my cleaner, who had come in to do her thing. We chatted for quite a while as she was working, and after she left, I carried on with work.

By about 18;00 I had finished the notes and they are ready to dictate, but I could have finished a lot earlier had I not crashed out at some point. And it seems that it’s not just Rosemary who has installed a camera in here, because as soon as I awoke, a friend sent me a message on the computer, and I ended up chatting to him for a while.

It’s a shame, though, because while I was asleep, I was away with the fairies, although not in any manner that would excite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine.

While I was asleep this afternoon, I was doing something with a group – something like Grand Funk Railroad. Then the group split up and I immediately joined another group but my former colleagues had not and this was confusing the authorities who did not understand that I was not out of work. There was plenty of other stuff too, such as being in a house and being in a department store, something like Woolworths, but as soon as I awoke, someone sent me a message on the computer and that completely destroyed my thought pattern and the dream disappeared.

That’s always a problem when dreaming during the day. At night, I’m usually uninterrupted … "chance would be a fine thing" – ed … but in the day, there are all sorts of things going on.

When I’d finished work, I summoned up my friendly neighbourhood chatbot, and between the two of us, we worked out some music for the next radio programme after the one that I finished today. This will be yet another one that will overflow my hour with more than enough artists and albums. My chatbot is becoming more and more efficient at tracking down what I would like.

Teatime was next – my regular Friday night tea of vegan sausage, baked beans with cheese and pepper and air-fried chips. For some reason, the chips were even better today – as perfect as they could ever be. This method that my friend showed me, of par-boiling the chips before putting them in the air fryer, is making some delicious chips and I’d wished that I’d known about this before.

No pudding tonight – just a handful of biscuits because we had football. The match that I’d chosen was newly promoted Trefelin, near the bottom of the table, and an established Y Fflint, struggling likewise near the foot of the table.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … Y Fflint play some really nice football and it beats me why they are so low in the table, but tonight, for the first half-hour, it was a kick-and-rush game. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m a big fan of this “long ball over the top”, and Y Fflint certainly have the goalkeeper in Jack Flint who can do it, but firstly, you need to be accurate with the ball, and secondly, you need a couple of quick forwards. Most of Jack Flint’s balls out of defence were going nowhere and to nobody.

Trefelin had by far the upper hand at first, but by the half-hour mark, Y Fflint had found their composure, settled down and began to play proper football.

Early in the second half, Y Fflint won a penalty and Trefelin’s keeper was sent off after he brought down an opposition attacker. The penalty was no trouble for Y Fflint’s centre-forward against the young substitute keeper, and the centre forward scored a second goal shortly afterwards when, unmarked at the far post, he turned in a cross from across the goal.

After that, it was all one-way traffic towards the Trefelin goal, but Y Fflint couldn’t increase the score.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that the idea of increasing the size of the league has just been to add some cannon fodder and to provide some easy relegation candidates to save the established clubs. And sure enough, the result in one of the matches tonight, an established club against a struggling new promotee, would have made a useful rugby score.

Now that my notes are finished, I’m off to bed before I turn into a pumpkin, and go to sleep, if the high winds let me.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the high winds … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of my friends from the USA asked me if anyone had ended up today like Lottie Michelle Belk of Chester, Virginia.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"She was walking along the promenade at Virginia City in a wind of 40 km/h when she died, stabbed to death by the pointed end of a beach umbrella that had broken free from its mounting."

LIVE: Wednesday 21st October 2026 – I HAVE JUST …

… woken up after having fallen asleep once more on the porcelain horse.

Well, not exactly “just” – it was a couple of hours ago, actually, but never mind. You see what I mean, though.

Not that it’s any surprise, though. Last night was another one of these crazy nights. Bedtime was nothing like as early as it might have been and as I would have liked, but I was soon asleep regardless.

Not for long, however. I had another one of these phantom alarm calls last night that almost had me sitting on the edge of the bed. But as the second alarm didn’t sound as it usually does, I checked the time, and it was 01:42.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I’m really puzzled by these phantom alarms. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that for an alarm call, I have BILLY COTTON and his raucous rattle waking me up, and the chances of anyone else in the vicinity using that as their alarm call will be about nil, I reckon.

So what’s going on?

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, once the false alarm had sounded, I couldn’t really go back to sleep. It was another night where I was drifting in and out of sleep, not being sure which period was awake and which period was asleep.

At one stage, I looked at the time, and it was 06:06 – just twenty-odd minutes before the alarm. I was actually contemplating leaving the bed at that time to claim an early start, but then I told myself not to be silly.

The alarm did go off soon enough (and it was a real alarm call too), and surprisingly, I was soon sitting on the side of the bed, and it didn’t take me as long as usual to raise myself from the Dead.

The first stop was to unlock the front door ready for when Isabelle the Nurse arrives, and then I went into the bathroom to sort myself out for the day.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There was some kind of party going on at school, like an end-of-year dance or something. I was there with Nerina and we were having quite a good time and enjoying ourselves, but for some reason, we left and ended up deep in the countryside. We’d seen a lot of people whom we knew while we were out there, and as we walked past, a group of boys came out of a house. They were from school and they’d been to the school dance too, so I was wondering what they were doing now out here in the countryside. We walked on a bit and came to some kind of hut, the white huts that they used for schools, and we saw three boys coming out. They had been to the party and had decided to leave and go home, and we were trying to convince them to go back, but in the end, Nerina and I went back on our own. We hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards from this place when a girl appeared. It was ****, except that it wasn’t, because instead of having black hair, she had blonde hair, so it can’t have been her, but I was sure in my dreams that it was. I tried to encourage her to go back to the party. I asked her how she’d been because I hadn’t seen her for ages. She said that she was OK, she had a boyfriend and so on. Then she said something about after her boyfriend left two weeks ago but I didn’t understand what it was, so I asked her a second time but I still didn’t understand it.

In the dream, I did actually mention the girl’s name. She was a certain girl who played a short but dramatic role in my life a few years later, long after I had finished school. However, I’ll keep her name to myself. Lots of people from my past have figured in my dreams ever since I’ve been recording them … "in 1997" – ed … and it’s bad enough that they know me, without being named and shamed because of it.

However, I do have to say that in a dream, it’s impressive that I can work out the difference between the girl I know and a girl I don’t know.

The story of the school dance is another story which the World is not yet ready to hear. We need to turn the clock back to 1971 and Nerina wouldn’t have been around then – she was still in primary school in Crewe. But there was certainly someone else with me and there was certainly something about leaving the school in mid-dance, but that was in connection with two bags of chips from Ted’s fish and chip shop in Welsh Row.

And we’ve talked about these white huts before, designed and assembled at schools that became overcrowded when the school-leaving age was raised from fourteen to fifteen in 1947. We had several at our grammar school in Nantwich too. They were called HORSA huts – HORSA being an acronym for the “Hutting Operation for the Raising of the School-leaving Age”.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up shorty after I’d finished, and as she was dealing with my legs and feet, we discussed injections. She’ll give me my anti-‘flu injection on Friday, but it’s unlikely that she’ll be able to give me my COVID injection. The packs of injections are only sold in multiples of five, and it’s doubtful that she’ll have another four patients who require the injection.

She tells me to ask at the dialysis centre, or else at the hospital when I go there on 23rd November. What I will do, though, is to talk to Emilie the Cute Consultant about it. She’s the one who’s insisting on me having it, so it’s up to her to find a solution.

My faithful cleaner said that they could do it at the chemists in the town centre, but while in principle, I could just about go there on the bus, I can’t come back.

You would think that it wouldn’t take many brains to work out that the bus stop by the big medical centre, where hundreds after hundreds of people suffering with ill-health would visit and where I would catch the bus home, would have been the first place to have had its pavement raised to bus floor height so that people could board the bus, but not only has it not yet been raised despite numerous petitions, but the pavement is horrendously low there and the bus doesn’t even stop at the pavement but out in the roadway where there are even more difficulties.

Never mind running a bus company, there are some people on the council who couldn’t even run a bath.

After Isabelle the Nurse left, I went and made breakfast and started to read THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

Before I’ve even gone very far into the book, I’m appalled at the lack of sensitivity of the “upper classes” of Herefordshire. In 1866, a few weeks before the period that this book covers, there was a devastating accident at the Oaks Colliery near Barnsley in which three hundred and sixty-one miners and rescuers were killed. That was the highest ever total of lives lost in a colliery in the UK until 1913, when the Senghenydd disaster cost four hundred and forty lives.

And while the recovery of the bodies was still taking place and rescuers were still dying from the effects of the methane in the “afterdamp”, our author tells us that "if this gas can be so bitted and bridled to its proper use, instead of venting itself in wild mischief, its value would be enormous." and "it appears that since the closing of the pit after the explosion, the whole mine has become one huge gasometer, giving off at times 50,000 cubic feet of gas per hour, a quantity sufficient to light up every thoroughfare in the neighbourhood."

After I’d finished eating, I came back in here to do a few more things that needed doing, and then I started work.

However, I was interrupted by my cleaner, who had been down to the chemist to bring back the rest of my medication for the month. She also told me the same as Isabelle the Nurse had told me about the chemist and the COVID injection. She reckons that if they won’t do it at the dialysis centre or at the hospital, we can work out a cunning plan.

The work that I’ve been doing today is hunting down the remaining music that I need … "he didn’t have it all yesterday after all" – ed … and then reformatting it and re-editing it, and then selecting the tracks that I need – and that wasn’t easy either because I’d never heard one or two of these albums before.

It might have been somewhat easier nevertheless if I hadn’t crashed out for forty-five minutes or so this morning.

Once I’d chosen my tracks, I had to remix them, pair them and then segue them, and that took a while to do too.

When all of that was done, I began to write out the notes, but I’d hardly started when I needed to go to ride the porcelain horse. I’ve no idea what time it was when I went, but the last time that I’d glanced at the clock on the computer, it was 18:03, and it can’t have been much later than that.

And to give you some kind of idea of how long I must have been asleep, when I went into the kitchen after washing my hands, it was 19:45.

As you might expect, I remember nothing whatever about going to sleep. I didn’t even remember going in there. When I awoke, I really thought that it was morning, but I couldn’t remember the alarm clock going off. And then I noticed that I was still in my day clothes, so I wondered if I’d gone to bed fully clothed, or was it the previous evening and I was on the point of going to bed?

This just shows you how confused I am when I awaken from these sudden, spontaneous crashings out.

Slowly, it dawned on me that it was still the early part of the evening and that I’d been working. And I was disappointed that I hadn’t continued to work and made more inroads into these radio notes that I’m writing.

When I stood up, the room was still spinning round and round, and I fell over into the shelving unit in the bathroom. I ended up falling back into a sitting position, covered in stuff that had fallen off the shelves that I had crashed into. Eventually, the room stopped spinning and I could stand up and put everything back where it belonged.

From the freezer I took half a loaf for my toast for the next few days and a slice of frozen lasagne for tonight’s tea. While the lasagne was in the microwave defrosting and warming up, I cooked some vegetables and made some cheese sauce, and when the lasagne was ready, I had that with the veg and cheese sauce.

For pudding, I had some more tinned apricots with home made chocolate and coconut ice cream, and it was just as delicious as yesterday. I’ll have to make some more vegan ice cream. I wonder if these drinking syrups would go with, say, almond milk and freeze properly to give the ice cream some flavour. There’s one way to find out, I suppose.

So having finished my notes, there are just a couple more things to do and then I’m going to bed, ready for dialysis tomorrow … "I don’t think" – ed …

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about chemists … "well, one of us has" – ed … my cleaner told me that while she was there at the end of the morning, a woman from Crewe came in.
She asked "could I have a packet of nothing, please?"
The chemist stopped in her tracks. "What do you mean? A packet of nothing?"
"Yes" replied the woman from Crewe; "A packet of nothing. You see, I have this headache."
"And what does a ‘packet of nothing’ have to do with your headache?" asked the chemist.
"I’ve seen the advertisement outside the shop" she explained. "The one that says ‘Headache? Nothing acts faster than Anadin’"

LIVE: Tuesday 20th October 2026 – GUESS WHO …

… dropped his tea down the sink this evening while he was trying to strain it?

And that was the end of the pasta and veg that I had prepared for the evening meal. Luckily, I hadn’t put the falafel in it quite yet, and there are always bits and pieces of food around here that you can stick into what remained of the pasta and veg that hadn’t fallen out of the saucepan, but what a thing to be doing when I’m feeling hungry for once.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, what happened in the kitchen is a very good indication that what happened over the rest of the day too.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s a waste of time going to bed early because all it means is that I wake up correspondingly early the next morning. It’s true that it wasn’t really all that early when I went to bed, although if you count the time that I spent asleep on the porcelain horse, maybe it was, but in any case, I was wide awake quite early. I’ve no idea what time it was because I didn’t look, but I do know that it was pitch black, and I lay there awake for what seemed like a week without going back to sleep.

When the alarm went off at 06:29, I was wide awake, but that’s not the same as saying that I was bouncing with energy and raring to go. It took me a good while, as usual, for the bedroom to stop going round and round and for me to find the energy and enthusiasm to raise myself from the Dead.

Once I was up and about, I went to unlock the front door ready for Isabelle the Nurse when she arrives, and then I went into the bathroom to sort myself out for the day.

Back in here afterwards, I began to write up the notes for yesterday. And in a mad fit of enthusiasm, which I wished that I had more often, I had finished it and posted it on line just before Isabelle the Nurse arrived. “What excellent timing!” I told myself.

While she was sorting out my legs and feet, she was telling me about her week off and the Halloween (over here, it’s called Toussaint or “All Saints’ Day”) decorations that she had been doing. What with pumpkins and mushrooms and things like that, her decorations are much more comprehensive than my stuffed bat in the window.

After she left, I made breakfast, and while I was eating, I was reading THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

The book is now finished, and I’m not sure whether that’s a disappointment or not. It started with a bang and went out with a whimper.

So now I’ve turned to my next book. And guess what! it just happens to be THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

This is going to be an interesting read because, apart from the fact that they go to quite a few interesting places, they will also be discussing the “Mappa Mundi” that is kept in Hereford Cathedral. It’s the largest known existing mediaeval map dating from about 1300 AD, and showing the known world as it was back then.

Its origin and purpose is not known (it’s certainly not a map for direction-finding), although there is a variety of suggestions. I’m waiting to see what the Woolhope Club members come up with.

After breakfast, I came back in here. The first thing that I did was to check over the homework that I did on Sunday, reformat my text file as a *.pdf file and then send it off to the tutor. After I’d done that, I spent the next hour or so revising for the lesson.

In today’s lesson, there were only three of us. Heaven alone knows what happened to the others. But we three had a really good lesson, which just goes to show the benefit of smaller classes. We pushed on quite a way along the track.

Next week, it’s half-term, so we have a week off. But not to worry – our tutor has given us some homework to keep us busy.

During the break at half-time, I’d had my disgusting drink and the midday medication, so I was intending to push on with work. However, my faithful cleaner came early today, and after she’d organised the bathroom, she shooed me under the shower. So tonight, we have a nice, clean … "well, clean, anyway" – ed … boy this afternoon.

She didn’t take long to do what she had to do, and then she cleared off elsewhere. She has quite a busy round, really. And I could push on with work.

My chatbot and I were researching songs for the next radio programme to be prepared, and I’ve managed to track down every song that I need. Most of them will need reformatting and re-editing, and they’ll all need remixing, pairing and segueing, not to mention the notes that need writing. So I’m going to be rushed off my feet for the next few days.

One of the artists to feature in that programme will be Mike Edwards. He was principal cellist in the Electric Light Orchestra, and he has a most unusual claim to fame. He was killed by a bale of hay. And if you don’t believe me, go and look up his biography.

But as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … utilising the powers hidden in my chatbot, I am saving hours of time in research. And we also have interesting chats about the musicians too, and I quite often pick up little bits of information that he casually drops into the conversation.

All of that took me up to teatime – and what should have been pasta, veg and falafel in tomato sauce with peppers, but turned out somewhat … errr … stretched. Still, the tinned apricot halves wth home-made chocolate and coconut ice cream made an excellent pudding.

And having finished my notes, I’ll be just finishing off what else needs to be done, and then I’ll be going to bed. It looks as if I have a long day of work ahead of me tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Mike Edwards … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of the albums on which he played for the Electric Light Orchestra was called “Eldorado”, their fourth.

Jeff Lynne tells us that "the plot follows a Walter Mitty-like character who journeys into fantasy worlds via dreams, to escape the disillusionment of his mundane reality.".

Remind you of anyone?

LIVE: Saturday 17th October 2026 – AND ONCE AGAIN …

… we had yet more problems at dialysis. And just to prove how polyvalent everyone is at dialysis, they were a completely different set of problems than the usual ones. It seems that my whole life is going to be spent encountering these dialysis issues, and when one is solved, we can simply pass on to the next one.

But I don’t understand at all why I seem to have so many problems at places like that. It’s almost as if someone thinks that I don’t have enough of my own at home, like sleeping, for example. It seems that I can sleep perfectly well when I don’t want to, like in the middle of the day, but when I want to, like at night, I don’t seem to be able to manage it.

Last night was a perfect example of that. I was writing my notes up after the football, admittedly at some kind of very late hour, and suddenly, I could feel myself starting to drop off. That was the cue to abandon the notes, post online what I’d done, and go to bed. And then, not be able to go to sleep for ages.

Eventually, I managed to drop off and go to sleep, but it wasn’t for long. I’ve no idea what time it was when I awoke, but it was definitely in the small hours. I know that I was still awake at 04:59 because I checked the time and debated with myself whether I should get up at that point, but the next thing that I remember was the ‘phone going off at 06:29.

Once more, it took a real effort to haul myself out of bed and off into the living room to unlock the front door ready for when the nurse comes, and then go into the bathroom to sort myself out for the morning. I even had a good scrub up and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant at dialysis this afternoon.

Back in here, I attacked the notes from last night, and I’d almost finished when the early arrival of the nurse confounded me.

While he was sorting out my legs and feet, we chatted about the weather. Apparently the temperature is going to drop dramatically over the next few days, and a proper autumn will be upon us quite rapidly.

After he left, I made my breakfast, and while I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Our author is still waxing lyrical about some of these trees, and I don’t suppose that he’ll ever stop. But interestingly, he talks about some fine young chestnut trees in the grounds of one of these stately homes in Herefordshire, and when I went to look it up on the internet to see how things are today, the hall is now in possession of the National Trust, who make some very favourable comments about the chestnut trees that are now one hundred and seventy years old.

Back in here after breakfast, I finished off the notes from yesterday and they are now on line, as you have probably noticed. And then I went to transcribe the dictaphone notes.

I was at a football match last night when the two teams playing, each one having a substitute who played in a reserve league who had never come into the first team. So the first team had their new player in defence and the other team had their player in attack, and the attack players and the defence players of the different teams had to be involved in finding space and waiting to be passed the ball and so on, and then be taught how to control it once they had already received it, because far too many balls were bouncing off them and going out of play and that sort of thing.

This dream about players finding space relates to a certain training session for a certain hockey team somewhere, but that’s yet another story that the World is not yet ready to hear.

In fact, the part about the reserve players coming into the team also relates to the same story. But as that story is something reasonably current, it’s no surprise that it’s coming up now in a dream.

There was some Eastern European guy whom I knew – he might have been Polish or something like that – and he worked as a bacon slicer in a meat factory somewhere or other in the area. He was telling me about his aim to become a motor mechanic. He had this yellow Mk IV Cortina which looked fairly nice but there were a few things that needed doing to it, and he told me that he’d done them. He took the car for its MOT. There was also someone who was going to fetch my injections for me. I was supposed to have two injections, one on a Monday and one on a Friday. I’d had the first two, but for some reason I’d forgotten to collect the next two, so some woman or other, an elderly woman, she had a bottle of the stuff that the first injection used, and she filled the syringe with it and injected me with that. Then I had to take the prescription down to the doctor to explain what had happened and get him to write a new one for the product on the Friday and for subsequent ones. I put them in a brown envelope and gave them to this Polish guy. I went down to the MoT station afterwards, and his yellow Cortina was there, and it had failed on four or five things, nothing very complicated, but I heard that this guy had handed in his notice at work and was going to start being a motor mechanic, working underneath cars in the street, that kind of thing. But seeing the work that he’d done on this Mk IV Cortina and it hadn’t worked, I could see his next adventure ending in tears at some point.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I used to have a fleet of yellow MkIII and MkIV Cortinas in the past, although I didn’t know anyone Polish like that at the time. And the garage certainly didn’t resemble the garage at the salt mine where my father used to work, so where it was, I don’t know.

The story about the injections is interesting too because regular readers of this rubbish will recall that quite a few years ago, I had to have a series of injections a couple of times each week and had to fetch them from the chemists regularly. That’s how I first encountered these nurses who come to visit me every morning.

I forgot to mention the confusion when I went down to that garage. I’d given all the paperwork for these injections to this Polish guy and put them in a brown envelope. I walked into the garage where his car was being MoTd – at the back of Bedford Street near the old police station. I pulled out and told someone “here’s the envelope”. They picked it up, and it was the wrong one. The second one was the wrong one. The third one was hanging up by a magnetic attachment thing on the workplace by where this Polish guy was working. He brought it over to me and this other guy. We had a look at the paperwork together.

If this is confusing you, don’t worry. It’s confusing me too.

That was all that I had time to do this morning, although I might have had more time had I not crashed out between 10:20 and 11:00.

When the alarm went off, I headed into the kitchen to have my midday medication and my disgusting drink, and then to start to pack the travelling laptop ready for dialysis. My faithful cleaner came down to apply the anaesthetic on my arm too.

After she left, I adopted the usual position of slumping across the table with my head resting on my arms so that I could have a little doze, but that wasn’t for long either as the taxi turned up at, would you believe, 12:40. Not that I’m complaining, of course, because, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the earlier I arrive at dialysis, the earlier I’ll be home, and that suits me just fine.

However, the best-laid plans of mice and men and all that, we first had to go to Champeaux to pick up someone there to take to dialysis, and then at the autoroute interchange at Marcey-les-Grèves, we ran into a barrage of gilets jaunes. And what annoyed me about that was that there was a warning sign in the centre of the village, just by where there’s a turning that goes through a village called Saint-Jean-de-la-Haize, and from there via a couple of narrow lanes, you end up just four hundred yards from the hospital.

Now if I know that, why didn’t our driver, who has been working for the taxi company for thirty years?

So after using all our powers of persuasion, we eventually arrived at dialysis ten minutes early. And this is where the fun began.

If you want to know whether I had a new nurse or an experienced one today, you only need to look at the plasters that she put on my arm when she took out the needles at the end of the session, and that will tell you all that you need to know. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen such a dog’s dinner in all my life.

But the fun began when she was trying to plug me in. The first needle, in the lower part of my forearm, went in fine. The second needle, in the upper part of my arm, well, not so fine. She ended up having two tries at it and they both failed. In the end, she had to call for the senior nurse and it was a case of “third time lucky” when she did it. But I now know exactly how a dartboard feels.

Further bad news is that my internet subscription at the dialysis centre has expired. It’s only good for a year and then I have to renew it. And of course, with it being Saturday, there’s no-one on duty at the tech department of the hospital. So, without the internet, I read a paper on Lack of Moral Fibre in the Royal Air Force in World War II.

Apart from that, there were no other interruptions. Not even from Emilie the Cute Consultant, who came into the ward and went to chat to almost every other patient in here, except me, of course. She clearly doesn’t love me any more.

But seeing as we have been talking about the other patients … "well, one of us has" – ed … my favourite patient who is usually in the bed beside mine was brought in this afternoon on a stretcher. Apparently she had developed a breathing problem and, even with a cylinder of oxygen, was having difficulty breathing. I do hope that she’s going to be OK.

Today, the nurse let the session run to the full time, which makes a change, but when the session finally finished, she spent ten minutes cleaning the machine first before she dealt with me, and that was disappointing too. I wanted to be away.

When I was finally free and the wounds compressed and sealed (with the plasters stuck on any old how), I went to weigh myself. And I was actually bang on my dry weight, which is where I should have been those three times before. And the driver was waiting for me – the same one who had brought me – and I was the only person in the taxi too, so I was home at about 18:30.

My faithful cleaner was waiting for me, and she helped me into the apartment where she stuck a disgusting drink into my sweaty little mitt. And after she left, I made some food – a baked potato, peas and carrots and a burger on a bap. It’s been quite a while since I’d had that for a Saturday tea, and it shows that, bit by bit, my appetite is returning.

Football was next, another match in the Welsh Cup, this time between Y Fflint and Caernarfon, a repeat of the cup final a couple of months ago.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … Y Fflint play some nice, tidy football and don’t deserve to be as low down the table as they are, so it was no surprise to anyone when they scored the opening goal after just five minutes.

However, Caernarfon scored an equaliser almost straight from the restart and gradually went on to impose themselves on the game. By the final whistle, it was all on-way traffic towards the Y Fflint goal, with Caernarfon winning 3-1.

So tomorrow early afternoon, we have the final match of our Welsh Cup trilogy when Penybont, third in the Cymru Premier League, leave Bridgend to travel down to the beach at Port Talbot to take on Afan Lido, tenth in the second tier.

When the football was over, I attacked the dictaphone notes, but I really didn’t realise just how late it was. When the waves of fatigue began to sweep over me, it was almost midnight and I didn’t want to be letting it all hang out much later, so I posted on line what I’d written so far, added a “to be continued” sticker and went to bed. I’ll finish off the rest of my magnum opus tomorrow morning.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about bacon slicers … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of my friends told me about the woman from Crewe who went into her local butcher’s and sat on the bacon slicer.
"What happened?" I asked.
"The butcher was most annoyed" she said. "he ended up getting behind in his orders."

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

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