Tag Archives: curried fried rice

Thursday 2nd November 2023 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about the weather last night. It did become rather windy. Not that there was very much about which we needed to worry – the gusts of wind didn’t go any faster than a mere 207 kilometres per hour as measured at the weather station by the lighthouse at the end of the road.

As well as police patrols on the cliffs to keep people away, several roads were closed, including the one that goes along the promenade near the sailing school where the waves were washing over the wall into the car park opposite.

At 06:00 the emergency services and the council workmen were called out to begin removing the trees that had blown down everywhere and to re-erect the signposts that had been uprooted.

It didn’t help my sleep very much either. It seemed that almost every time that I was off on a nocturnal ramble around and about, a large gust of wind awoke me and that was that.

Nevertheless when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was flat out asleep and it was something of a struggle to raise myself from the dead.

Later on I tried to telephone the garage about Caliburn’s Controle Technique but there was no-one answering. I imagine that they were among the many people who didn’t make it into work today. I know that my cleaner never made it into town. She gave up after going 150 metres.

Armed with a mug of coffee and a home-made fruit bun I had a listen to the rather depressing voyages on the dictaphone and to reflect on what might have been. There was something about meeting people via the internet last night. I can’t remember all that much about it except that there was a warning that if you encountered anyone taller than 5’8″ you had to communicate the fact to the organisers rather than proceeding as you might normally do. It wasn’t quite as simple as that – it was a complicated affair about meeting people and not simply a dating site or something like that.

We set out later from somewhere in the North to go somewhere down South in one of the hospital taxi vehicles. It looked as if the paperwork for my stay in hospital to sort myself out had been accepted and I could now travel that kind of distance instead of being stuck to a hospital that was much closer to home but maybe isn’t as specialised.

And then we were discussing ways in which our department could improve its output. Among the many suggestions was one that we should work closer with the local authorities. I set out a four-point plan of what I felt that the local authorities needed to do with out work, which was continually being interrupted by the guy in charge. There was a fifth point that I mentioned that each side should show the other some respect. For some reason he blew up at that. he began to list all the things that he said had happened including the fact that one of my colleagues had spent several weeks preparing something to be worked on by the local authority. I asked him “if that’s the case why are we having this meeting today to discuss ways of doing it if our colleague has already done it?” to which he blew up even more. He made it clear that he had no interest whatever in listening to anything that we had to say. In the end I told him that if he’s going to call a meeting simply to listen to our complaints and then shoot us down in this kind of fashion there’s no point at all having the meeting and I was going to do some work that was more productive rather than waste time around here. Somewhere in this discussion there was a situation on a roundabout where there was a system of wooden stakes that had been installed on it. Everyone wondered what they were. Someone actually identified them as stakes used to hold bodies still when the bodies are being cremated. That had everyone puzzled as to why they would want to put something gruesome like this in the middle of the roundabout in the town.

We were back discussing the hospitalisation of a young girl, what we’d need to do to make her stay as practical as possible but a gust of wind awoke me just as it began.

And there I was back at the hospital again, back as a young teenager in the Admissions section ready to be given a bed etc. While I was checking in another gust of wind sprung up outside awoke me and made me lose my train of thought.

Back at the hospital yet again trying to enrol this young girl onto a course of hospital treatment but just as we were filling in the forms yet another gust of wind awoke me while I was in the middle of counting something and it disappeared.

At another moment some woman wanted a sink or wash hand basin installing in her house so I had a word with someone whom I knew and took all the material down there ready for him to start but he never turned up. This woman did nothing but moan all the time about why he’d never turned up, what she was missing etc. In the end I sat down and began to do the installation but apparently that wasn’t good enough either. We had everything that we needed in the end in the same place, the electricity, the water, etc. We could screw the sink to a batten somewhere. I was doing my best to have the job done quickly but she was making so much of a nuisance of herself etc that it was just making it impossible. Even doing things like asking her to read me the M number off the top of the bolt – she just handed me the bolt and told me to look at it myself which wasted more time regardless of how impolite it was etc – all kinds of situation like that. In the end I just did the job any old how. I could have done a much better job that I did but it was just taking so long with her continual interrupting me etc so I was glad to leave the house afterwards.

And finally we were back trying to get this young teenage girl into hospital ready for treatment but the noise of the wind was such that it was making it impossible for anyone to hear what anyone else was saying to whoever. It was all becoming extremely complicated. We ended up having to experiment with a diesel multiple-unit, a modern type, having it flying just a couple of feet above the railway line to see whether it would fit underneath the infrastructure etc ready for it to come into service as quickly as possible. Again there was all kinds of confusion with the noise of the wind and no-one could hear anyone else. We were having real difficulty completing these reports.

All of that and, for the first time, not a single person whom I recognised. That was disappointing. It’s been ages since Castor put in an appearance so I imagine that she’s now gone for good along with the Vanilla Queen whom I met in the Arctic in 2018. But it would be nice to see Zero or TOTGA again.

Usually though, it seems to be my immediate family who keep on appearing.

With going out to visit my neighbour this afternoon I had a strip-down wash (I’m not up to climbing into the bath for a shower after my fall the other day) and then changed all the bedding at long last.

Back in the bathroom I went one better than Dave Crosby. I’m not sure why because there’s no danger of me having the ‘flu for Christmas because Isabelle the district nurse came by to give me my ‘flu injection.

However, there could be several other reasons why I’ll probably not end up feeling up to par. But I won’t be looking in my rear view mirror and seeing a police car because I can’t drive these days.

Before I went to my neighbour’s, I put the bedding and a few other things into the washing machine and then at my neighbour’s, I showed her the letter that I’d written.

She suggested a few amendments so I’ll retype it later and then post it tomorrow if I succeed in making it to the shops. She also mentioned that we’ve been invited to another neighbour’s tomorrow lunchtime.

Back here I took the washing out of the machine and then shook my head wondering how I’ve managed to survive as long as I have.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the struggle that I had a couple of weeks ago to take a basket full of damp clothes to the clothes airer. When I came to Granville I bought a little trolley-type of thing, basically a plank with 4 castors, because I thought that I’d left the big one back on the farm.

As it happens, I hadn’t. It was in the back of Caliburn so I left the new one in a cupboard here. So today, I fetched it out, put the basket of clothes onto it, and then pushed it along with my crutches. If only I’d done that last time.

After that I came back in here and finished off all of the notes for the second radio programme and then went for tea – fried rice with some of those Chinese whatsits.

When they run out and I can’t buy any more, I’ll have a go at making them. Some of the stuffing that I make for my stuffed peppers maybe made a little differently and I can buy some of that thin brick pastry on-line. It should be interesting to see how they turn out

And that’s it for tonight. The wind has dropped so I might well have a decent sleep tonight in my nice clean bedding. And then depending on how I feel, I’ll head on the bus to St Nicolas and the shops to see what’s happening there.

It’ll do me good to go out and about

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Thursday 21st September 2023 – DESPITE HAVING …

… spent most of the day dashing around doing things, it doesn’t seem as if I’ve accomplished all that much.

It’s quite true that for a while round about the early afternoon I was … errr … resting, but it wasn’t as if it was for hours on end.

This morning when the alarm went off I was flat out deep in the arms of Morpheus and it was a desperate stagger into the bathroom before the second alarm went off.

The letter from the hospital about my admission told me that I have to abstain from several medicaments. I couldn’t work out which ones they are so I’ve basically cut down to the bare minimum and hope that that’s the correct thing to do

Tomorrow I’m planning to go into town on the bus. There are some letters that need posting so I’ve had to collect up everything. It also involves a trip to the bank so that’s going to be interesting for sure.

There’s also a trip to the chemist’s as I’ve run out of Aranesp. That’s only available by special order so I had to telephone them to make sure that they have it in stock for tomorrow.

Something else that I’ll need to do is to have something of a more important shopping session in town. I’ve made an executive decision – which, for the benefit of new readers is a decision that you make that if it goes wrong you are executed – that I’m not going to the supermarket on Saturday. If I’m off to Paris on Monday I won’t need any shopping for the week.

So having written a pile of letters and made some plans I had a listen to the diictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was round at some girl’s house. She was extremely unhappy to see me, as if it was obvious that I shouldn’t be there. But with her having no parents there at that time I came in and stayed. Because she was so unhappy I kept to a small room upstairs. First of all there was a delivery of food with which someone in the house dealt. About 20 minutes later there was a knock at the door. I heard a voice from outside asking “is your dad in?”. Someone came up to shout for me. I went downstairs and saw that it was a man delivering two packets of soya milk and two packets of banana-flavoured soya milk in a couple of fancy little containers. I thanked him and said to the girl “don’t let such and such a girl see this. If she sees the banana-flavoured milk it’ll be gone within seconds”. It didn’t bring a smile out of her. All of this going on was extremely uncomfortable.

And a little later downstairs I went because someone else had come to the door. They’d brought some kind of special vegan food for me, followed a few minutes later by someone who had brought some vegan fruit but they’d disguised this as potatoes or something like that so I was making some kind of strange comments about these potato-looking vegetables. This girl who was there who seemed to be something to do with the owners of the house was extremely uneasy while I was there. I could certainly feel that atmosphere a great deal

There was another lengthy, really involved dream as well but I had a bad attack of cramp in the middle of it and it completely evaporated. I can’t remember a thing.

Later on I was going on an expedition to the Amazon. There was a group of us living in some kind of temporary accommodation near Edinburgh sorting out everything we would need and everything we were going to take. Once again, the thing that was worrying me was that there was no provision for any vegan food as far as I could see. That can’t have been right. We were all sitting around. Outside someone had put some tree trunks that they’d set alight that were a really bright light as they burnt. I asked for my shoes and socks back that someone else was wearing. he took his feet from his sleeping bag and gave them to me, and put on his own barefoot-type of shoe. We set off and I thought that we were going to the railway station across the road. Instead we walked for a while and boarded a train going somewhere else. I couldn’t understand why. They gave me a long complicated explanation about this. We alighted at a station and had to climb these stairs in this wrought-iron place like a Paris Metro. On the platform above we had to look for our tram to take us to wherever we needed to go. We couldn’t go to the platform until our tram was called. We waited there, then a TGV suddenly pulled in there. I asked if this was a tram but no-one seemed to be interested in replying. We wanted something like Tram 73 but this was Tram 9 so we had to wait for it to load up and clear off. It was really most extraordinary thing to see, a kind-of tram stop in a railway station.

Finally, we were in the foyer of a cinema or something waiting for something to happen. They were playing a piece of music that I recognised, a piece by Van Der Graaf Generator (as I thought in the dream) … “actually Alquin” – ed … I was humming a bass line along to it because there was no bass line. The girl with me looked at me and asked me what I was doing. I explained and she replied “yes, I was wondering what this would be like with a bass line added to it”. She said that the guy with us who wasn’t there at that particular moment knew Peter Hammill. She’d have him talk to Peter Hammill about playing it with a bassist. I replied that Peter Hammill wasn’t a big fan of bass guitar and quite often played without one. I didn’t think that he’d take very much notice. We were having this really intense discussion when the alarm went off.

Interestingly, I met Peter Hammill a few times when I lived in Manchester in the mid-70s and we had a good chat one night in Brussels when he was appearing in a café there one night not long after I moved there. And he didn’t like bassists all that much either. When Nic Potter, one of my heroes, left Van der Graaf, Hammill didn’t bother replacing him and had Hugh Banton play the bass parts on the foot-pedals of his organ.

While I was at it I waded through another pile of arrears on the dictaphone. Only 2 days to go and then I’ll have finished the stuff from Leuven last week. And then I have the stuff from the hospital last year to deal with. Despite all the time that I spent lying in bed during that couple of months, I couldn’t summon up the energy or enthusiasm to deal with them.

As for the rest of the day I’ve been going through the music again and I’ve sorted out another pile of stuff. Having had to load up this machine’s new hard drive from scratch I seem to have incorporated a great many duplicates into the mix and some of the stuff is in the wrong section of the hard drive.

That left some time to write out some more notes for the radio programme. They should be finished by tomorrow and then I can think about dictating them. Things are dropping slightly behind but when I come back from Paris and have finished with all of this health stuff I can concentrate better.

Tea tonight was fried rice and veg with some of those Chinese vegetable things. Fried in vegan margarine with piles of soy sauce it really was delicious.

So tomorrow I’ll be out and about, which means that I’ll be crashed out at some point somewhere. But once I come back from the shops I can pack my bags ready for Monday morning. That 04:30 start is going to kill me.

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Thursday 7th September 2023 – BY THE TIME …

… that you read this I probably won’t be here.

Well, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m not all here and I haven’t been all here for quite a while but tomorrow I shall be somewhere else.

What I have been doing today is preparing for my journey. And it’s taking some preparation too.

There is however some good news. You might think that the idea that my neighbour isn’t going to work tomorrow morning so can’t drop me off at the station on her way meant that I’d have to make other plans.

Before I phoned to book a taxi (yes, I really am that ill) I checked the bus times. The bus from outside here doesn’t for some reason that only the dispatcher will know, go into town or near the railway station. I have to change buses.

There are three places where it’s possible to do so and in the past, I’d miss a bus to the station by a couple of minutes. However I checked today and found that they seem to have adjusted the timetable, meaning that I have a 20-minute wait at the port for a connecting bus.

There’s only 15 minutes to leave the bus at the station and board the train before it departs, so I shall have to hurry as best as I can. But it seems to be the most logical way to go to the station.

If ever I had anything to say about it, I’d have a major re-route of the bus network. It defies all understanding that here in the walled city, where the population density is heaviest, the bus doesn’t go to the town centre, the railway station and the hospital, and stops a good few hundred metres away from the largest supermarket.

So be that as it may, I’ve been quite busy today.

last night was rather depressing because I went on several little voyages that completely evaporated out of my mind when I tried to dictate them. My brain is really turning to spaghetti right now.

When the alarm went off I was dead to the world and had something of a scramble to rise to my feet.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I had a chat with Alison and with Liz on the internet and we had a few things to say to each other. Rosemary also sent me an e-mail to say that the internet was down at her place. The Auvergne is definitely “The Land That Time Forgot”.

First thing that I needed to do is to book my train from Brussels to Leuven. I’m not going to have much time in Brussels to buy a ticket when I arrive and, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m not as mobile as I used to be.

Once I’d done that, I had to track down all of my paperwork and print it off, and then organise my medical folder. I don’t need the stuff that I took with me to Paris last week.

But it really is a sign of the times that even one unnecessary piece of paper in the backpack makes such a difference in my mobility.

There was the backpack to pack too. And we had a slight catastrophe because I can’t find my box of medical stuff that I take with me. I’ve no idea where that might be. I’ve put it somewhere but I can’t think where.

That’ll teach me a lesson. I’m the world’s worst at organising myself so I have to have a place for everything and everything has to be in its place. And if it isn’t, than I am totally lost.

So now that my bag is packed as much as possible, complete with food to sustain me on my journey, I backed up the computer onto the USB key that I take with me when I travel.

And not having backed up the portable computer since my last trip to Leuven, which was in May, there will be tons of stuff to amend and append when I’m on the train tomorrow morning. A mere 2,338 files, to be precise.

There was even time to finish off sorting out the music for another programme. But I’ve not written any notes for it as yet as I’m going to have several days when I won’t have anything to do so I can catch up with it then.

A little earlier I talked about my nocturnal voyages. We were doing a remake of EL DORADO last night. I was accompanying John Wayne on his travels on his horse. Our version was much better than John Huston’s … "actually Howard Hawks’s" – ed. We did so much more in the film and went into it in much greater depth. It was another one of these that went on for absolutely hours but I ran out of steam while I was in the apartment of the girl who was trying to give him false information. It was nothing like the cabin in which the girl was living – it was an office block in a huge complex and an apartment above the Bank that was there, all modern glass and chrome etc. The person who gave John Wayne his information at the sheriff’s office, which was a huge place with lots of small offices was actually one of his ex-wives. She struck me as being quite a nice woman. But I ran out of steam while we were confronting the woman about the disappearance of the gang that we were trying to hunt down.

There was another long rambling dream, however as I mentioned earlier, I’ve forgotten almost all of it. The interesting thing about it was that we encountered the wife of a friend of mine. Her birthday was 5th September. I had another friend who was also a nurse. Her birthday was also 5th September. I thought that that was the most amazing coincidence.

Later on, there was another dream that I’d forgotten, one in which we encountered the body of a friend of ours in the Stores in a castle. She’d obviously been very unhappy and she’d committed suicide but I can’t remember any more of this.

However a little later I had something of a recollection of a few things relating to that last dream. There was something to do with hire cars. Whole fleets of cars had been hired out by big reputable companies but some were so old – quite a few “G” registration cars there as in the mid-80s. They had been hired out for this event. I was interested to know whether they’d hire them out again but the person concerned with whom I was talking didn’t know. All my colleagues at work were making remarks about the vehicle that I’d hired and about me driving it which I thought was awful but never mind! There was also something involving a bowlful of the dirtiest water you could ever imagine but I don’t now where that fitted in.

Tea tonight was fried rice and vegetables with some of those Chinese whatsits that I bought a while ago. It was a really nice tea too and i’ll have some more of those when I can

Actually I ought to have a think about making them myself. They are basically tofu and vegetables wrapped in some of that brick pastry stuff. I suppose that I could make them like sausage rolls and slice them into smaller lengths.

And that reminds me – I need to think about making my sausage rolls at some point.

Before I finished, I diced the remaining carrots, blanched them and put them in the freezer. There weren’t many of them but it would be a shame to throw them out.

So I’m off to bed, ready for tomorrow. I shall be in a rush so I need to get a move on. And it will be a long, tiring day which won’t end for quite a while. At least I can sleep on the train, if I’m not too busy with those 2,338 files.

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Thursday 27th July 2023 – THERE WAS ANOTHER …

… football match tonight.

Hwlffordd, after their heroics last week, were away in the Faroe Islands playing B36 Torshavn.

With 6 Albanian, 1 Latvian and 1 Afghan international in their side and a fairly successful history in Europe it was always going to be a struggle for Hwlffordd and when they were 2-0 down with 30 minutes to go, that looked as if it was going to be that.

But late in the game, during what was probably their only serious attack during the entire 90 minutes, to everyone’s surprise they managed to score a goal – being in the right place at the right time with a lucky ricochet in the penalty area.

So all is not lost. They are still within touching distance for the second leg back in Wales next week. And who knows? It’ll be most unlikely if they manage to pull it off but stranger things have happened.

And stranger things have happened too. Like I seem to have had a reasonable night’s sleep. It took me a while to go to sleep, even though I was in bed early, and I don’t recall waking up until about 06:30.

After waking up I somehow managed to go back to sleep again and had to fall out of bed when the alarm went off.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages, it took me quite a while to go wind myself up and start work, and today I’ve spent much of the day in Canada back in 2017.

So far, I’m somewhere down the Trans-Labrador Highway on my way to Goose Bay.

Part of my trip involved having a read of the controversial AP Low’s book written at the end of the 19th Century. He explored the Interior of Labrador on behalf of the Government of Newfoundland and of Canada, missed much of what was important and drew a rather inaccurate map that led several explorers to their deaths.

On the subject of maps, I’ve been having a close look at a hand-drawn map by a Moravian missionary called Reichel who visited the area in 1872.

What’s interesting about his map is that he draws on it the location of all of the isolated cabins, who lived in them and whether they were European, Inuit, Innu or Métis. It’s the closest thing that there is to a Census of Labrador in the 19th Century.

There was also the dictaphone. I was in North America. We’d been to see someone in a Social Security department about some Unemployment Benefit or National Assistance etc because my partner was unable to work and neither was I. We were in this waiting room. Eventually my partner was seen and was told that she’d have to go to Mexico so we set out for there. We ended up in a waiting room in a Government office there that was 10 times worse and 10 times more crowded than anything in the USA. She had a ticket with a number on it. It was all extremely chaotic. We were talking to a couple of people, one girl in particular who kept on being called to the front then having to come back to chat to a couple of her friends who were there. I made a joke to my partner “it seems that the response to when you’re being served is that it’s always going to be next time, you’re the next one”. She didn’t understand what I was trying to say and asked me to explain. Of course it’s very difficult to explain a joke like that. We were sitting there in this crowded, uncomfortable waiting room, waiting to be called to the desk. It looked as if we were going to be there for ever.

Later on there was the dream where I was being tortured by that guy dropping rocks on my head somewhere or other. Every now and again there’s a dream that I don’t write out because of its gruesome nature but this one was so distressing that I couldn’t even bring myself to dictate it. And that’s not happened more than a couple of times in the whole of the 20-odd years that I’ve been doing this.

It makes me wonder if this was the reason why I had one of the worst night-sweats that I’ve ever had.

Some of the time was also spent crashed out on my chair again and I’ve really been doing far too much of that just recently, especially as this was one of the better nights of sleep that I’ve had.

Tea tonight was some of those Chinese whatsits with vegetable fried rice, delicious as usual, and then I had to rush to watch the football.

Now I’m off to bed hoping for a good night’s sleep again. I’m going into town tomorrow, on the bus as it happens, but I reckon that I’ll still be flat out on the chair in the afternoon. I’m rather fed up of all this.

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Thursday 13th July 2023 – NOW THAT’S WHAT I …

… call a much better football match.

In the Europa League Penybont who finished 3rd in the Welsh Premier League last season were playing Santa Coloma from Andorra.

Santa Coloma were the obvious favourites with 4 Andorran internationals in their side and their football was quite attractive but Penybont were full of grit and determination. What Santa Coloma had in skill, Penybont matched them toe to toe with a more physical style and never ever looked second-best even for a moment.

The match was played in a fiercely competitive but totally fair manner, which makes a big change, and the final score of 1-1 was about right.

Considering that these two teams are quite low down the club rankings in the overall scheme of things, it was an excellent advert for European football and it’s a shame that one of these clubs will be eliminated after the second leg in Andorra next week.

At least the football makes up for my rather depressing night. For practically the whole of the night I was wracked with attacks of cramp, and in both my legs too. That was what I call miserable.

However I must have gone to sleep at some point because there’s some stuff on the dictaphone and also because when the alarm went off I was miles away in the next world somewhere and it was quite a shock to be awoken.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages, first thing that I did was to transcribe the dictaphone notes from the night. I was reading a story in a newspaper or magazine about a Welsh pirate. While I was doing so I dropped a toilet roll. It fell down towards the deck of the boat but I couldn’t catch it. I began to look for it but couldn’t see it. Every time that I seemed to be within touching distance of it, it moved position and went further away again. I thought to myself that this is stupid. Here I am reading something complicated like this from the 16th Century without any problems at all but I can’t manage to control an errant toilet roll on board the ship on which I’m travelling.

I’d been round to the home of a friend from school but I’m sure it was actually the home of someone else. We were going to be doing something but it turned out that there was a football match on the TV. He had it on so I settled down to watch it. I could see that he was frustrated but I wasn’t sure what were his actual plans. he hadn’t really suggested anything. Everything was really going wrong apart from feeling a kind of atmosphere coming from him. He’d asked me to go down to the shops to buy some stamps which I had but while he was sulking he’d gone out for a while and come back. Then he started to stick some stamps on these envelopes. I said that I didn’t realise that he’d been out to buy them himself because he didn’t think that I’d bought them so I produced them. I had the feeling that this whole evening was going totally wrong from start to finish. It was one of those evenings that I wanted to be over as quickly as possible and we can start again some other time.

Then there was something about having some complimentary tickets on the railway. There was a special series of Bank Holidays and I had these complimentary tickets. The railways were working anyway so I thought that I’d go down to the ticket barrier to see one of their clerks there to see whether he knew anyone going through who might want to buy them from me. When I arrived there all of the barriers these days were automated. There was no-one to whom I could talk about my complimentary tickets for these four days of special Bank Holiday.

Next thing was to finish off the notes for the radio programme. I forgot yesterday to do the ones that I’d planned to do then so I ended up doing two lots this morning and that’s that, all ready for dictating. I might even do that tomorrow.

The rest of the time was spent revising for my lesson today. That actually went quite well too so I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting better or whether it’s because I haven’t had time to forget anything yet. Tomorrow is the last day and then there’s a couple of weeks off before I undertake this mega-course.

And if I don’t know it by the end of that, then I never will.

Yesterday, I mentioned that we have fallen behind with what we were supposed to be doing, and I’ve found out how we’re going to be catching up. He asked us to do a mountain of work after the lesson ended. That took up the remainder of the afternoon.

With the football being on, I ended up with an early tea. Fried rice with some of those Chinses thingies that I bought from Noz a few weeks ago. They were quite nice, although nothing particular to write home about. It makes a different meal, and it was done quite quickly too which was just as well.

And there was a change in my habits for tea. I vowed when I moved here that I would only eat my meal sitting at the table in the dining room. Try to be a little civilised for a change. But today it was on a tray on my knee at the computer watching the football. Maybe I should have had pie and chips.

Tomorrow I was going to nip out early and go for a quick run into town for a little shopping. But it’s a Bank Holiday here, the shops are closed and there are no buses. That’s upset my plans.

So sausage, beans and chips, I reckon. That should make a nice change. But I’m beginning to run low on proper, real baked beans. I shall have to organise some supplies from somewhere. Anyone fancy a little run out?

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Thursday 6th April 2023 – MY CURRIED FRIED RICE …

… was delicious tonight.

The other day I mentioned that due to the success of my Chinese fried rice with soy sauce, I’d try some curried fried rice one of these nights. And as I was rummaging around in the fridge I came across some outdated millet burgers that were rather bland but obviously needed eating.

And so having cooked my rice and veg, I fried it in some vegan margarine and olive oil with cumin and coriander. And that reminds me – when I go back to Leuven on the 11th of May I need to stock up on spices like that because I can’t buy them around here

Well, I can, but have you seen the price? Amazon has fennel at €8:50 for 250 grammes and I can buy it at the Asian warehouse in Leuven at €1:29 for 150 grammes. Fenugreek seeds are at €5:00 per 100 grammes and exactly the same packet will cost me €1:49.

Better news than the prices of spices on Amazon was the fact that when the alarm went off at 07:30 I was already up and about. Last night was still something quite depressing but when I awoke quite dramatically at 07:15 this morning I thought that I’d push myself onwards and upwards.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I carried on with writing the notes for the radio programme that I’d started yesterday and now they are finished.

Next stop was to go outside to Caliburn to look for the strong black tape, but no luck there. I don’t know where that has gone.

But the good news from that point of view is that I can come back up the stairs without holding on to the hand rail. There’s not sufficient force in my right leg to push myself up the steps with it but the left leg seems to be working. I had the crutches with me of course but I didn’t really need them and it was the quickest that I’ve been up and down the stairs for quite a while.

Despite the lack of strong sticky tape I took out the two freezer drawers that needed repair and just superglued them, hoping that the glue will hold them together. I had a good sort through and found a couple of interesting things that will need eating quite soon. I might even make a start on Saturday seeing as there are a couple of those small breaded quornburgers that I bought a while ago.

But I managed to make some room in there, not the least reason being that I took out three of the stock of hot cross buns ready to defrost and eat over the Easter period. What would Easter be without hot cross buns?

Armed with a coffee and some cheese on toast (I found half a baguette in the freezer) I transcribed the dictaphone notes, of which there were plenty. There was a rock concert on somewhere or other. I’d invited one of my little friends to go with me. It was a Thursday night. At first she wasn’t very keen but we went anyway. We really enjoyed the concert, a Southern Rock band so of course I really enjoyed it. What was interesting was that for their lead guitar solos, they flashed the music up on the projector so that everyone could see it. It didn’t occur to me until much later in the concert that “why don’t you take a photo of it and go home and learn to play it?”. Then they announced that there would be a pause. Everyone was quite exhausted. I looked at my watch – it was 02:15. I asked her “have you seen the time?”. She was doing some kind of work for a coach or bus company for school holidays. She wasn’t really all that interested. Everyone was feeling tired so everyone including us lay down on the floor and went to sleep. I had a disturbed sleep tossing around there because what was going through my mind was first of all what would her parents say when they go into her room to awaken her in a couple of hours and she’s not there but with me, and what’s she going to say her work etc. I could see a whole mass of trouble ahead with this. She wasn’t bothered about it by the looks of things so I wasn’t either any more than that. Anyway she awoke after about half an hour and I gently probed her to see how she was feeling, whether she should go home now or whatever like that but she didn’t seem to want to bring the matter into discussion. She was just quite happy being there. I thought “well, it’s not for me to say anything is it really if that’s what she wants”.

She was a lovely girl. While she was at school she worked in the library at Nantwich on a Saturday and she’d go through the new records that the library would purchase, and smuggle out the ones that she knew would interest me so that I could tape them, and then she’d smuggle them back in the next Saturday and repeat the cycle.

Her parents hated me though and I think that they were glad when we split up.

What went wrong was Christmas 1976. I was flat broke, living in a squat and in an effort to liven up our Christmas we spent the last of our money buying card and glitter and the like to make some nice Christmas cards.

Audlem was a funny village. It really was a village of two halves, one half being the farm labourers and the other half being the rich, dazzling suburbanites. We went around the latter with our cards. “Ohh how nice and thoughtful. Do come in. have a mince pie. Have a glass of sherry”. We were wasted by the end of the evening and her parents took a very dim view of it all.

A few years later I was driving a coach for Salopia and stopped in Whitchurch to go to the bank. Guess who was serving behind the counter?

Unfortunately I couldn’t stay long enough for a chat but the at the next opportunity I went back. However she wasn’t there.

Instead I buttonholed another cashier and asked about her. At first no-one remembered her but then someone said that she was in fact a new recruit who was there in that branch simply to gain some experience, and no-one knew where she had gone from there.

And that was that then.

Later on I stepped back into that dream. I was with her again driving around somewhere. We went past the house of an ex-girlfriend of mine. I had 2 headlights for the car there. as the headlights on this one were fading and pretty bad I thought that I’d go and pick up these. I parked at the side of the road. She said that she’d stay in the car which was probably a good thing as I didn’t want any confrontation and secondly I wanted someone to look after the car. The pavement wasn’t wide enough to be completely clear of the road. There was a garage across the road where we’d just been. I thought that we’d park at the back of the garage and fix these headlights but there was very little space. Next to it was a public car park. I thought that we’d go on the public car park, aprk there, fetch the headlights and change them over on there. It’s a pay one but at this time of night no-one will bother too much. When we pulled on there every single space was a disabled persons space. There were quite a few people lounging around on the lawns there. The saw me drive slowly around and asked me what was happening. I said “apparently I’m not disabled enough to park here”. They replied jokingly “step out of your car and we can arrange that”. I drove around. There were even holes being dug for graves here on the lawn and I still couldn’t find a place to park the car

Anyway, it really was nice to be among charming company again for an evening. It’s a shame that I can’t do it more often, and in my waking hours too.

The rest of the day has been spent working on a cunning plan. The 14th of July is a Bank Holiday to celebrate the Fall of the Bastille, and it’s also a Friday.

Consequently, I’ve been working on a special radio programme. The Beatles have called for a Revolution to overthrow Curved Air’s Marie Antoinette. So as Alvin Lee and Ten Years After Want To Change The World, Hawkwind’s Urban Guerillas are going to the Bastille with Simple Minds to Kick It In.

With a little effort I can run this thing on for an hour, if you get the picture.

Ironically, the following Friday is the anniversary of the Moon Landings and that’s when Elton John’s Rocket Man is going on board the Hooter’s Satellite with Guns and Roses’s Rocket Queen for Bebop Deluxe’s Honeymoon on Mars from where, with REM’s Man In The Moon, they can Look Into The Sun with Jethro Tull to see Hawkwind’s Children of The Sun. I’m sure Steve Hillside-Village and Khan can write a Space Shanty about that.

Now what other interesting dates are there that fall on a Friday? We had an Armistice Day special last year.

Yes, I’m hoping to be much more imaginative and inventive for my radio programmes in the future instead of playing music haphazardly. I didn’t put too much thought into them at first because to be honest I never expected to be still here. But I seem to be fighting back right now.

Tea was, as I mentioned, quite delicious and now that I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed. No lie-in for me despite it being a Bank Holiday because the physiotherapist is coming round. What with the nurse to inject me on Monday morning, it’s going to be a pretty miserable Easter break for me.

Thank Heaven I have my hot cross buns.

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