… that!

Hospital week is over and I can press on with more exciting things, like planning my hospital trip to Leuven next month.

But not this afternoon because while I didn’t actually crash out when I returned home, I wasn’t in much of a state to do anything.

It’s the bad night that I blame for all of that. In bed fairly early, what with one thing and another (and once you start, you’ll be surprised just how many other things there are), and then I couldn’t sleep for ages.

It was at 06:20 when I awoke and it wasn’t all that long before I was up and about. But then it’s not surprise that I couldn’t sleep all that well with the needle in my right hand and the pretty awful pain in my left arm. I was totally fed up.

Last night I couldn’t even undress and this morning I couldn’t wash properly either so all in all I was in a right mess by the time that Caliburn and I hit the road.

The Day Hospital at Avranches was really busy. There were four of us in a room set up for two and it was the same in the other rooms there with people coming and going quite rapidly. Only one bottle for me today so I didn’t have to hang around all that long.

The sad part about it was that thy couldn’t take any blood from the needle that they’d left in me overnight so they had to stick another one in my and now I know how a dartboard must feel.

But I’m totally fed up so I spoke to the head nurse and told her that if I really do have to come back, I want a catheter port putting in. She saw the damage that they have done to my arms over the last few days and agreed.

But I have to have a blood test next Friday and discuss the results with the nerve specialist here in Granville and he’ll tell me what the score will be. I suspect that I’ll be back in Avranches before too long.

From the hospital I headed off into town. I wanted to look around the shops and I ended up going to Noz, Aldi, Lidl and LeClerc. And I’m glad that I did because both Noz and Aldi were having baking days and there were lots of little stuff that were worth picking up for my baking activities.

Aldi also had some of that lemonade in those flip-top bottles that I like for when I make ginger beer. It’s bizarre really. The empty bottles cost €1:95 each and yet if you buy them filled with lemonade the complete outfit, both bottle and pop, comes to €1:60.

That’s something that I’m still trying to work out.

Back here I could only bring up half of the stuff but not to worry. I’d bought 2kg of carrots so I washed, diced and blanched them and when they were cooled down and dried off, I bagged them and put them in the freezer.

It should have been hot chocolate time but instead I had a coffee and went to bring up the rest of the shopping. Then I came in here and transcribed the dictaphone notes. Someone was planning on coming round to see me so I began to tidy up the apartment. I’d nearly finished doing what I wanted to do when I heard a doorbell ring. It wasn’t mine though but somewhere else in the building. They weren’t ringing mine so I made sure that it wasn’t them by waiting for another minute in case the bell on my door rang. When it didn’t I went back into the living room and began to read a book of short stories co-written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning while I waited for my visitor to put in an appearance. And I’m impressed that I could recall her name when I’m alseep

Then there’s an old type of claw-foot bath in this apartment somewhere. Someone goes for his shower by standing in the bath but there are no shower curtains so the water goes everywhere and soaks the OSB wooden floor and begins to make a mess of it. But the floor totally fails to match the rest of the apartment because it’s something very contemporary, modern and clean rather than old-fashioned like the rest of the apartment. The question came up of what happens during the rain. Someone said that they had actually seem people outside in the rain weeding the path. That sounded like something ordinary people wouldn’t do so I wondered if this place was actually some kind of prison or reform school for boys rather than a place where you go to seek help etc.

After that there was a new department store opening in New York something like Bloomingdale’s. Some woman owned it. She’d been bothered by a couple of visitors who were hinting at all kinds of things. It came out that she had a rather disreputable past and they threatened to expose her if she didn’t pay them a lot of money. As well as involving the Police because they could only do certain things legitimately, we could do other things not quite so legitimately. I recruited a couple of friends to come along. We laid a trap. Someone else involved in this was a big friend of this woman refused to step down and wanted to be involved. We had to have a meeting to divide up the roles again. We set the trap to catch the blackmailers and caught them red-handed. It was really like something out of an Eliot Ness story, this dream and was extremely interesting.

Did I dictate this dream … “no you didn’t” – ed … about the guy who was involved in some kind of sport with girls of about 4 and 5 years old?. I can’t remember very much about the dream but he had all kinds of trophies on his wall.

Later on I awoke and found myself making a radio programme pairing off a couple of tracks and splicing them together as I normally would.

Finally I was in Stoke on Trent last night on a council estate something like Abbey Hulton. I was ferreting around in someone’s back garden looking for something when they happened to come out and saw me. He asked me what I was doing so I came out with some lame excuse that he accepted. He invited me in for some food so I went in for a chat. We talked about working hours. He had some neighbours in and we talked about it. I was saying that I went to the University 30 hours per week in the afternoon but worked at B&Q to earn some money and did 40 hours per week there. That was 70 hours per week and they considered that to be a lot. They invited me to stay the night so I did. I waited until everyone else had gone to sleep then I got up to go out of the house to the back garden to carry on with what I’d been doing when they discovered me. I was making far too much noise moving a waste paper bin around. They guy of the house hadn’t actually gone to bed. He was making himself a meal late at night. I was worried in case he’d come out and catch me again at what I was doing.

That’s not all that was going on during the night but you don’t really want to know about the rest, especially if you’re eating your tea. But it’s no surprised that I’m exhausted after all of that. But Stoke on Trent and no Zero? Whatever next?

For what was left of this afternoon I didn’t do very much at all. I was trying to track down a Canadian folk singer from the 1960s called Daisy Debolt who was a big friend of Giorgio Gomelski and Strawberry Studios in Stockport. I did find that unfortunately she died of cancer in 2011 but I did manage to track down a couple of albums that she recorded with her boyfriend at the time, Allan Fraser, who was a big pal of Joni Mitchell and Buffy St Marie.

She was actually quite an amazing person. She spent one summer living in a grass hut in Canada growing all her own food and was quite an inspiration to many people.

Tea tonight was falafel and chips done to perfection in the air fryer with a lovely salad and I enjoyed every morsel of it. Tomorrow I’ll be having a burger on a bap with chips, I reckon.

But that’s tomorrow. I’ll have to nip down the road as well at some point for some mushrooms – the ones in Lidl looked awful and I forgot to buy some from LeClerc. Right now though I’m exhausted and I’m going to bed. I shan’t be doing much this weekend as I need to recover after all of the excitement.

It’s quite true to say that this week has taken a lot out of me and I’m far from being well. I’m not expecting too much to come from this hospital treatment that I’ve had and maybe the effort that I’m putting in is outweighing the effect of the treatment that I’m having. I’m not enjoying these needles one little bit.

But I’m relieved that they are taking it seriously and making an effort, which is more than you can say about some people. Let’s see what the next few weeks will bring me.