Tag Archives: date bread

Tuesday 25th March 2025 – I HAD ANOTHER …

… good day in my Welsh lesson today and I’ve no idea what happened. In fact, we had another quiz and I finished in second place. That was something that took me completely by surprise. And had I realised quicker that I had to press “send” to register my results, I might even have finished first.

No danger of me finishing anything like first last night. Another long night dragged on and I was still letting it all hang out after midnight. In fact, it was shortly after 00:30 when I went to bed and, asleep quite quickly, I remember nothing whatever until the alarm went off at 07:00 – nothing at all.

When the alarm went off at 07:00 I was out and about on my travels, somewhere with some kind of tropical situation going on, I’m not sure exactly what and I can’t really remember very much of it now but it was certainly one of these tropical scenes with palm trees and all of that kind of thing

However, that was that. I can’t remember any more at all. However, I wonder if the tropical setting of that dream relates to the tropical years that we were discussing … "well, one of us was" – ed … yesterday.

In the bathroom I had a good scrub up and then went for my medication. Back in here there was nothing on the dictaphone – it really must have been an undisturbed night – and so i checked over my Welsh homework and sent it off

Hurricane Isabelle the Nurse blew in, later than usual on her first day after her rest, what with all of the injections and blood tests that people won’t let her oppo do. She was her usual cheerful self but didn’t hang around long, soon back out on her travels.

Once she’d left I made breakfast and read more of MY BOOK.

Having discussed the Tropical and Sidereal Years yesterday, we have moved on. Today, we started off by discussing the Metonic Cycle, which has nothing whatever to do with bicycles.

In fact, it’s an ancient Babylonian period of time of nineteen years, with twelve years of twelve lunar months and seven years of thirteen lunar months. According to Titus Livius a Roman historian, "in the twentieth year the days should fall in with the same position of the sun from which they had started".

We talked about the Hyperboreans just recently. It was said in the myth that Apollo visited the Hyperboreans every nineteen years. We also talked about the Antikythera Computer, and it is said that that machine could calculate on the basis of the Metonic Cycle in addition to its other functions.

Surprisingly, the Metonic Cycle was still being used as recently as 1752 for the calculation of Easter, although the inclusion of Leap Years subsequently has confused the cycle.

From there we went on to discuss the Callippic Cycle, discovered by the Greek astronomer Callippus who worked out that if we had four Metonic Cucles and took one day away from the final Metonic Cycle, it would be more accurate. Modern calculations indicate that the Metonic Cycle loses one day every 219 years, whereas the Callippic Cycle loses one day every 553 years

From there, we went on to discuss the Hipparchic Cycle, calculated by the Rhodian astronomer Hipparchus about whom we have talked recently. He took four Callippic Cycles of 304 years in total, removed one day, and thought that it would be totally accurate. Actually, it isn’t. It’s out by all of 33 minutes every 345 years, and not even modern calculations were not that accurate until NASA’s eclipse computer came on-line.

Back in here I revised my Welsh and then went for my lesson. It actually passed very well which was surprising. We’re discussing crime and punishment this week and the tutor gave us an assignment to discuss, about the times that we might have broken the law.

The examples were things like cycling on the pavement and that sort of thing and I was sorely tempted to throw a shark into the swimming pool.

However I restrained myself and talked about the time that I (at just seventeen) and my girlfriend (not quite fourteen) borrowed the ID cards of my sister and her husband to go to see Lindisfarne at the local nightclub. It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t realise that they wouldn’t go on stage until 22:45 and not finish until 01:00 (she had to be in by 22:30), or that my girlfriend had never drunk alcohol before that night. So at about 02:00 I was probably the most unpopular person in Wistaston and I never saw her after that.

After the lesson I had a disgusting drink break and then my cleaner put her sooty foot in the door. And what a marvel she is. A few weeks ago they had on special offer at LeClerc some large plastic boxes with lids, the kind that you hide under the bed. I’d given up hope of ever receiving any, but she turned up with four or five, which is marvellous.

So all of the cables and so on that are lying around here that I only ever use once every Preston Guild, so they can be stuck in a box out of the way and hidden under the bed until needed.

What I’ve been doing for the rest of the day is tracking down the music that I need for the next radio programme. One or two of the tracks were, as usual, difficult to find but eventually, by the time that I had finished, I had managed to lay my hands upon them and now I have a full selection from which to choose.

Tea tonight is, of course, taco roll with some of the stuffing, accompanied by rice and veg, followed by the last of the date bread. Tomorrow I’ll start on the ginger, orange and coconut cake.

The problem with what to do with all of the stuffing that I made yesterday has been resolved. LeClerc has tins of chick peas on special offer this week so I’ve ordered a couple. Tomorrow I shall throw in a tin that I have here, along with a jar of sauce that has been here since Noah brought it down from Mount Ararat, and there should be enough for several servings, some of which I can freeze for another time.

So right now I’m off to bed ready for a day of radioing and showering.

But seeing as we have been talking about me coming second in the Welsh quiz … "well, one of us has" – ed … It reminds me of Job, who in his Book, Chapter 23 Verse 10, said "I shall come forth as gold". Hovever he actually came fifth and was silver.

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Monday 17TH March 2025 – SOMEONE I KNOW ..

… IS GOING THE RIGHT WAY FOR A SMACKED BOTTOM AND I DON’T CARE WHO KNOWS IT.

She’ll know all about it though when I see her next. When I took the travelling laptop out of my bag when I arrived home from dialysis, "where’s the power lead?". One of the nurses had packed my bag for me while I was being weighed, hadn’t she?

It goes without saying that it’s my own fault for not checking but even so, I have every right to be annoyed by it. If I have another power lead for it around here, then all well and good but I’m not convinced that I have. I shall have to turn out a cupboard or two tomorrow morning.

It’s strange really that all these little things that come along seem to have such a dramatic effect. It’s like that old kiddies’ poem FOR WANT OF A NAIL.

The dramatic effect that relates to going to bed early is that it has been abandoned. It was another 00:30 night last night when I suppose, had I exerted myself, I could have been in bed much earlier. But after I’d finished writing my notes and backing up the computer I loitered around for a while, not really doing all that much.

Once in bed though, I was asleep quite quickly. And there I lay without moving until the alarm went off. I was away on my travels at that point but everything immediately evaporated.

Anyway, I was out of bed quite quickly for a change and then headed off to the bathroom for a wash and scrub up, a shave and a wash of the undies so that I’m all clean for dialysis this afternoon

In the kitchen I remembered to take my medicine this morning, seeing as I had apparently forgotten yesterday – both lots – and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out what went on during the night. I fell asleep as soon as I went to bed and was dreaming about doing some 3D modelling with people and objects but when I awoke a little later it had all disappeared.

Not that I remember awakening, as I mentioned earlier. I hope that whatever it was, it didn’t involve Castor, TOTGA, Zero or Moonchild.

And then I was somewhere in some village and had to put a huge flower pot outside on the street corner. Having manoeuvred it outside, the only way that I could manoeuvre it down the street was by going underneath it, raising up part of the roof with the back of my head and walking with the flower pot pivoting on the ground on just one part of the circle of the base. And so I set off like that. There were a few other people in the street. There was one woman putting the rubbish out, another one putting something else out, some kind of street furniture that she put out in front of the house opposite across the road. I carried on walking with this flower pot thing in a peculiar hunched-up position. I came to the restaurant on the corner and a little girl disappeared inside. I had a look in the window but couldn’t see her. After I dropped off the trousers to this …fell asleep here… I took a piece of cloth that was similar, I suppose, to what she was wearing and I forget what I did with it. I went into the restaurant. There was a girl whom I knew there who was sitting talking to another girl whom I also knew. I wondered what they were talking about

There aren’t half some strange goings-on when I’m asleep, that’s for sure. That particular dream seems to relate to nothing at all. But there’s too much of this falling asleep and dreams evaporating. I really do hope that I’m not missing anything exciting.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up earlier than usual today. Seeing as it’s her final day before her rest I had half-expected her to be snowed under with blood tests and injections before her oppo takes over tomorrow.

She brought me some very bad news about another patient of hers with whom I have travelled to dialysis. He won’t be going there again, unfortunately. That’s two of my fellow passengers who have disappeared and I’ve only been going six months. It’s the fate that awaits every single one of us, I suppose.

After she left I made breakfast and BEGAN TO read MY NEW BOOK.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a year or so ago we read THE DAWN OF ASTRONOMY by Sir Norman Lockyer, in which he discusses the alignment of Egyptian temples and pyramids with the stars, the moon and the sun.

His follow-up book applies the same principles to Stonehenge and other early British monuments and it sounds as if it’s going to be totally fascinating.

So far though, we’re having a basic lesson in the principles of astronomy, to set the scene, and that’s interesting too. So much so that I checked the book list and noticed that he had written a book called ELEMENTARY LESSONS IN ASTRONOMY. It goes without saying that I’ve tracked down a copy and downloaded it to my reading list for later perusal.

Back in here I did half of my homework for my Welsh lesson. I’ll do the other half next week. It couldn’t be finished off today because it involves something that we are going to be doing in class tomorrow.

My cleaner turned up on time to fit my anaesthetic patches and we chatted for a while before she wandered off again. I waited for the taxi which was late today.

It was a chatty female driver who had taken me before and we had an entertaining drive down to Avranches. Several of us arrived at the same time and so I had to wait.

Coupling up was relatively painless today and then I was left alone for quite a while. I could revise my Welsh, update the computer from the back-up and I can’t remember what I did after that. It can’t have been important.

What interrupted my train of thought was a whole list of items. My cleaner contacted me to say that they won’t serve me with any more patches. The clinic has changed it to cream only. And so I had a dispute with the doctor about that and he rewrote my prescription.

The nurse brought me some papers for the optician’s on Thursday morning and then my machine began to play up

Other news is that they have reset my target weight and I’m now going to be (hopefully) 1kg lighter, and that suits me fine. It seems that the water retention is still there but my underlying weight is reducing. In fact I’m only 1.5kg above my “non-athletic weight” these days if I could lose the water.

After I’d been uncoupled I had to wait a few minutes for the taxi and a very taciturn driver brought me home. This was when I discovered the problem with the travelling laptop cable.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg followed by date bread and soya dessert. And now it’s bedtime ready for my Welsh lesson tomorrow.

But seeing as we are talking about packing … "well, one of us is" – ed … it reminds me about the visit of the auditors to the parachute-packing company.
He was going through the books and asked "in which account do you note the parachutes that have been returned due to incorrect packing?"
"We don’t" said the cashier. "I’ve worked here for forty years and in all that time no-one has ever brought one back to say that it didn’t work correctly."

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Saturday 15th March 2025 – THERE WAS NOTHING …

… whatever of any interest happening today. I can’t think when it last was that I had such an uneventful day.

There was even a decent sleep for once. It may well have been late by the time that I went to bed, quite a while after midnight in fact, but I was soon asleep, which is no surprise after the difficult night the previous day … "??" – ed ….

Once in bed and asleep, I stayed asleep right the way through the night with no recollection whatever of awakening and it’s been a while since that’s happened too.

When the alarm did go off, I was away with the fairies – but not in any manner that would incite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine. I was doing something with a pair of lady’s shoes but I’ve no idea what because immediately that the alarm sounded I awoke and the whole lot evaporated completely.

Into the bathroom for a good wash and scrub up, some deodorant and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant later on at Avranches.

There was also some washing to do, and amazing as it might seem, having taken care to wash my clothes before another large pile builds up, there was still too much for the washing machine. This is becoming ridiculous – either my clothes are growing or the washing machine is shrinking . There certainly aren’t more clothes than before.

With nothing on the dictaphone this morning, I could crack on and do some more unzipping. There’s not all that many left to do now but I keep on finding more and more that I hadn’t found earlier.

Isabelle the Nurse was late as usual, no thanks to the roadworks in the town centre where they are rebuilding the square outside the Mairie. As well as that, they’ve suddenly and spontaneously decided to carry out more roadworks elsewhere in the town centre that’s blocking part of the one-way system and it’s a nightmare.

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

We’ve begun to discuss the influence of Christianity on folklore. He is of the opinion that "Christianity was both antagonistic to and tolerant of pagan custom and belief. In principle and purpose it was antagonistic. In practice it was tolerant where it could tolerate safely. At the centre it aimed at purity of Christian doctrine, locally it permitted pagan practices to be continued under Christian auspices. In the earliest days it set itself against all forms of idolatry and non-Christian practices"

He goes on to quote from Gibbon’s DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE saying that "in later days, after the fifth century it accepted both pagan practice and pagan ritual."

It’s interesting that he picks the fifth century. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410AD and by the Vandals in 455AD and in 476AD the “barbarian” Odoacer seized the throne of Rome. This influx of foreigners into the city of Rome doubtless weakened the grip of the Church .

Pope Gregory wrote in 601AD to Abbott Mellitus who was on the point of going as a missionary to England "because they have been used to slaughter many oxen in the sacrifices to devils some solemnity must be exchanged for them on this account, so that on the day of the dedication, or the nativities of. the holy martyrs whose relics are there deposited, they may build themselves huts of the boughs of trees, about those churches which have been turned to that use from temples and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting and no more offer beasts to the devil [diabolo], but kill praise of God in their eating, and return thanks to all things for their sustenance"

Our author adds "This toleration took the shape either of allowing the continuation of pagan custom and belief as a matter not affecting Christian doctrine or of actual absorption into Church practice and ritual."

In fact, judging by the deterioration of the pure Christian faith in the way that it is practised these days by many so-called Christians, there’s a very strong argument that suggests that rather than the Christian faith having absorbed some facets of paganism, it’s more as if paganism has absorbed some (and only some) facets of Christianity. The more uncomfortable aspects of pure Christian belief have been abandoned a long time ago, if ever they were there at all.

Back in here I attacked the Woodstock radio project and I now have all of the music that I need – at least one track from every artist (even the ones that I didn’t believe that I could find) except one. And that’s because Sly and the Family Stone don’t really fit into my programmes and I’ll have to omit one or two groups anyway.

My cleaner turned up later to fit my patches and then the taxi, driven by the boss, turned up to run me to Avranches.

Once more, I was one of the first there and had to wait until they had cleaned up from the morning. Once I made it to my bed I was the fourth to receive attention (I don’t move as quickly as the others) and then I could settle down to watch the football.

Welsh Cup semi-final today between Connah’s Quay Nomads of the Premier League and Llanelli of the second tier. The Nomads are having a wretched season by their standards and Llanelli are leading their division so it was always going to be a tight affair.

The gulf in class and quality was evident however but even though the Nomads had most of the possession they went in at the break 1-0 down because of a penalty. Both sides had hit the bar however.

Two inspired substitutions at half-time turned the game around for the Nomads. They were 2-1 up in a couple of minutes before Llanelli had had time to re-adjust but once they had adapted to the new situation they held on to the end, having had a couple of chances of their own.

It was another one of those really exciting games however, with plenty of entertainment for the neutral fans.

After that I began to sort through the music for the Woodstock project until it was time to be unplugged.

The same driver brought me home – early once again. I could relax and unwind for an hour or so with my disgusting drink.

Tea tonight was a chiliburger on a bap with salad and baked potato followed by date bread and soya dessert. The same as last week’s, and the week before etc, but still just as delicious.

So right now I’ll dictate my radio notes and then go to bed. I have a busy day tomorrow, bread making and so on

While we’re on the subject of pagan ritual and belief … "well, one of us iss" – ed … to tell a little secret, I had my suspicions that Nerina might have been in touch with things that we know not what. Not long after we had come together, we were out driving when she touched my leg. I immediately turned into a lay-by
It made me suspicious, especially when we were in the local supermarket once and she wanted to buy a new broom to sweep the yard.
At the check-out I told the cashier "don’t bother to wrap it – she’ll fly it home"

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Friday 14th March 2025 – A TAXI CAME …

… to pick me up at 15:30 for a medical appointment at the hospital in Granville at 16:00.

That was the first that I had heard of it. No-one had ever said anything to me. The taxi driver therefore telephoned the hospital, who confirmed that they had nothing down for me today and so the taxi driver left.

The burning question of the hour now is not O’Rafferty’s motorcar but who is turning round and round in circles waiting for a taxi that is not going to arrive to take him to a hospital appointment that he is likely to miss.

Something else that was confirmed today was the snow at Caen last night. Isabelle the Nurse’s husband had to go to Caen yesterday morning and he encountered it. It wasn’t just half a dozen flakes either but a proper snowfall. Several photos of the coverage have circulated around the internet as a result.

If it had snowed early this morning I would have seen it, because when the alarm went off at 07:00 I’d actually been up and about for an hour and a half, and awake for a lot longer than that.

That was after another late night too. Not feeling in the least tired after dialysis I wandered around through cyberspace and came across a match between Wales under-21s and Iceland under-21s that I’d missed. Even though Wales played for a good proportion of the match with just 10 men, they were never seriously under pressure and while a 1-0 score doesn’t look very convincing, Iceland never looked like scoring. The one chance they had, they needed a hand (observed by the linesman) to push the ball over the line.

So in bed at 00:30 and I took an age to go to sleep. But by 04:30 I was awake again, wide awake too, something that seems to be quite common after a dialysis session. By about 05:30 I’d given up any hope of going back to sleep and with plenty of things to do, I arose from the Dead and went about my business.

Plenty of business too. First of course there was the bathroom, and then the medication. And back here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And despite the short amount of sleep, I had actually been out and about. I was back in work last night. Before that, I’d been to Shavington and was taking a load of rubbish to the tip. Someone whom I met on the way who worked there asked me if I could take hers and her grandmother’s. I fitted everything into the car and went off. For the next day at work I didn’t see this particular girl for a while so in the end before I went home I thought that I would go into her room and mention it to her. I knocked on the door, opened it and went in. The room was in total darkness. You couldn’t see anything. I asked “is anyone there?”. A voice from behind the desk said “yes” but it wasn’t the voice of the person whom I was expecting to hear. Anyway she put on a light so that I could see her. I said “I think that I have the wrong room. I was looking for …” and then I couldn’t think of the name of the person. I had to try to think of someone else’s name. I came out with a name and she replied “there’s no-one of that name working here”. Then I realised that the name that I’d mentioned was that of someone who used to work there but had left. I thought that this meeting isn’t going very well at all. Then she began to put on a white dressing gown type of robe or something. It looked to me like one of these Japanese martial arts suits. I asked her if she was going to be doing some martial arts, and she smiled but didn’t say anything

It beats me why I spend so much of my sleeping hours in Shavington. We moved there in 1956 and my earliest memory is sitting on my mother’s knee in the cab of the lorry that took us there, going past the entrance to Mount Drive in Nantwich, and we left there in 1970 to go to live in The Land That Time Forg … errr … Crewe. But seeing as we are talking about Mount Drive … "well, one of us is" – ed … I didn’t know where it was of course when I was only two but I do remember my surprise and shock a few years later when we went past it on my way to see my grandparents in Wardle. I was astonished that I had remembered it so clearly and recognised it.

As for dreaming about work, why would I still be doing that?

Isabelle the Nurse was late again but it didn’t worry me because I’d been unzipping files out of storage. There are still plenty to go at but if I do a batch every day I’ll catch up with it.

One thing though, and that is that regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I first had this mega-computer in the office I went through all of the old disks that were lying around, copied all of the contents onto the back-up drive and slowly cleaned them out and linked everything up. There must have been one that I missed because I found a huge batch of files that had never been merged. I ran a batch-processing duplicate file detector through it and disposed immediately of 1.2GB of duplicated files.

Isabelle the Nurse didn’t have much to say for herself apart from the bit about the snow, and she was soon on her way, leaving me to make breakfast and read MY NEW BOOK.

A lot of ground was covered today. We started off talking about “cohabiting customs” and I admired his quaint way of expressing himself when it came to delicate subjects. When talking about the Arunta people, he tells us that "The father, de facto, is not father according to the ideas of the Arunta people. He is at best only one of a group of possible fathers according to the practices of the Arunta people."

Of the Semang people, he quotes a book that says that "Semang women are common to all men" but also quotes a Victorian-era observer of the tribe who rather delicately says that "I have not had an opportunity of personally judging"

While we’re on the subject of the Semang people … "well, one of us is" – ed … he tells us that "it often happens that a little [clan] or even a single family uses a form of speech which is differentiated from other dialects to be practically unintelligible to all except the members of the little community itself".

That’s not just true of the most primitive tribes in the Borneo and Malaysian jungle. A conversation between someone from Cornwall and a Geordie, or a Jock and a Scouser will have the same characteristics – but maybe it simply underlines his point and is not a very flattering tribute to the inhabitants of those UK regions.

After this, we moved on to discuss the migration of tribes, something that we mentioned yesterday. He is at a loss, as I am, to explain how it is that a society such as the Romano-British and all of their technical achievements, that we discussed several months ago, was wiped off the face of the country to an extent that, for example, it took 1,000 years for metal-smelting to even approach Romano-British standards, if it wasn’t wiped out by extermination, and how it is that the Nordic settlers of Greenland could be wiped so completely from the island that there has never been one single trace of Nordic DNA found in contemporary Inuit skeletons if the Inuit had not summarily dispatched the Nordic Greenlanders wherever and whenever they encountered them.

In explanation he quotes Max Duncker who, in his book,”History of Antiquity”, asks "How could the conquerors mix with the conquered ? How could their pride stoop to any union with the despised servants?". The answer to that question may be found on the plantations in the Southern United States in the 18th and 19th Century. According to an Artificial Intelligence search engine to which I have access, "By 1860, approximately 10% of the enslaved population in the United States was of mixed race. This significant percentage reflects the scale of sexual exploitation and resulting mixed-race births."

Back in here I attacked the notes that I’d recorded last Saturday night for the radio programme and that took a lot longer than intended because the new edition of sound-editing program that I use that I had downloaded was doing all kinds of weird things. I wasn’t the only one complaining about it either and a new improved version was distributed in a hurry and that seems to be so much better.

But I tried an experiment. In my best “radio voice”, cutting out the slips, errors and breaths, I’m speaking at something like 17 seconds per 300 characters. I quickly ran up a character-counting utility and a spreadsheet function and worked out that what I had dictated should have run, in its cleaned-up form, to eight minutes and thirty-four seconds. When I looked at the end of the edited sound-file, it was exactly eight minutes and thirty-five seconds.

The next time or two I’ll do this again and see if it remains constant. If so, this will speed up the process by being able to do the whole lot at one go rather than having to do an extra track to fill the gap later.

So by lunchtime the programme (apart from the extra track) was finished. I didn’t stop for lunch but carried on and made a start on my Woodstock programmes. By the time that I knocked off, I’d not only chosen all of the music, I’d even found, downloaded, converted and remixed most of it, even one or two tracks that I thought that I’d never ever find

That included a stop for my cleaner, the disgusting drink break and to talk to the taxi driver. I do have a lively, busy life (I don’t think).

Tea tonight was air-fried chips, salad and veggie nuggets followed by date bread and soya dessert, delicious as usual.

Very shortly I’ll be off to bed and hope for a good sleep. It’s hard to believe that after so little sleep I’m not really all that tired. But with dialysis in the afternoon and Connah’s Quay v Llanelli in the Welsh Cup, anything can happen.

But while we’re on the subject of paternity … "well, one of us is" – ed … little Johnny goes to his father and says "daddy, last night I had a dream and it was that you are going to die today".
Obviously, the father is really upset all throughout the day and is a very relieved man when he finally goes to bed.
Next morning on his way to work, he meets his neighbour. "I had a really bad day yesterday" he said. "My son had a dream and luckily it didn’t come true, but I was worried all day."
"You should worry" said his neighbour. "The guy who lives in the house next door to yours had a heart attack and died yesterday morning."

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Tuesday 25th February 2025 – NOW THAT’S WHAT I …

… call a wasted day today. I have emulated my namesake the mathematician and done exactly three-fifths of five-eights of … errr … nothing.

Some of it has been my own fault, as you might indeed expect, but some of it hasn’t. I really need to motivate myself better if I am ever going to accomplish anything.

The most obvious excuse to use is that I was thoroughly, completely and utterly exhausted. The other day, returning from dialysis, I was in bed at 21:30 and last night it was 22:20. and I was lucky that I made it that far because I really wasn’t in the mood.

Once in bed though, going to sleep was another matter. “At least, being in a horizontal position is resting and relaxing” I kidded myself.

Eventually though I dozed off into oblivion and had yet another turbulent night. For a change though, following a dialysis session, I was actually asleep when the alarm went off at 07:00

At that moment I was with a friend of mine and we were trying to go into her office. There was a security reception desk and the girl on there was known to be rather strict so it was necessary to fill in an application form, and when you went for an eye test, the optical test, it would come up with several people similar and you had to guess which one you were. The aim was that I would find someone similar to me and say that I’d lost my card. She would give me a new card and I would go in. This however wasn’t working and there was nothing very similar to me at all so my friend had to think of another excuse. The girl at the reception desk took an absolute age to deal with all of this before she finally handed me a duplicate card. My friend said “this is just typical of this girl. She knows that this is a fraudulent application because we have thousands, and she’s just taking her time about it as she always does”. We went in a walked down a corridor, then we had to climb down into a courtyard and up the other side. Climbing down was fine but climbing up was almost impossible for me so I had to think of another way of doing it. At that moment a man came down and sat in the corner to begin to smoke a cigarette. I thought that the easiest way was to strike up a conversation. This place looked rather Asian so I talked about having a Japanese garden in here. My friend came back to look for me. He asked her “how long have you worked here?”. She replied “oh, years. I came here in August” and said which year it was. He asked “how do you find it?”. She replied “I made a mistake because I came here in a jumper and I regretted it”. She wandered off and he said to me “she’s a tough girl, isn’t she?”. I said “someone who had had the problems that she had had and survived, anyone would be tough”. He was looking at me and could see that I was disabled and said “oh please sit down”. I replied “I can’t because if I sit down I can’t stand up”. Then he began to panic saying “oh please sit down, sit down, sit down”. I wondered what was going on. This place where we were was like a volcanic crater although it was a garden with pavilion-type Japanese buildings in it, all ringed by a really jagged range of mountains in a huge circular form that looked just as if it was inside a volcano but with a garden inside instead of a crater.

That’s an interesting idea for Security, isn’t it? Being able to choose who you were. After all, NAMES ARE FOR TOMBSTONES, BABY. And I had a friend for a while in Brussels who had been a diplomat in Japan, but it wasn’t she. But if I’m going to be disabled and handicapped in my dream, then it rather defeats the point of them, doesn’t it? Not much point in escapism if you can’t escape.

Into the bathroom for a good wash and then into the kitchen for medication; Finally back in here to listen to the dictaphone because there was much more than just the above. I’d been working on a radio programme and I couldn’t ever make it right. It never seemed to go anywhere as how it was supposed to do. It was continually failing the quality control check. After several weeks of editing I finally had it something like and was ready to send it off. The recording engineer and some of the producers were however rather fed up of having this come up on their desks every week so they were determined to stop it but I sent it off anyway but they still came back and refused it. What should have been a deadline for the 28th of April was now running into May. They basically said that they wouldn’t edit it again and it was finished. I replied “well for failing it this last two or three times on tiny issues, it shows a serious lack of goodwill particularly when I have worked as hard as I have done over the past day or two to put the issue right. If there was nothing substantially wrong with the last one you should have accepted it” but they were still very unwilling to move on this particular issue and I could see this programme running on and on and on.

There have been radio programmes that have taken an age to do because the editing has been so complicated. There was the one a few weeks ago that took several weeks, and the worst part of it was that it overran so I had to edit it, and one of the bits that went was the bit where I’d had all of the difficulty

There was a girl from school directing a film last night. She was running through the scenes. I had a look at the scenes and towards the end of the film there were thousands of scenes every second, so many scenes to go through and they lasted a blinking of an eye. I was appearing as an extra in it and so was a friend of mine. We’d been to makeup and we’d been dressed up and put our costumes on. As the film was being filmed it was passed through some kind of computer animation so people became like cartoon characters as they were going through the motions for real. When I looked at my image and the vision of the girl who was with me, the images were horrible, the faces were all distorted and nothing seemed to be correct at all. We were standing on the set waiting to be directed. The girl from school came along, took one look at us, took one look at the screen effects and told us to leave the stage. We thought “that was a waste of an entire day. What a shame. Our chance for fame and fortune”.

This is another girl about whom I haven’t spent a day thinking since I left school. So why she would put in an appearance right now I really don’t know.

Later on I was with another girl. We’d stopped somewhere to look at something that we’d seen earlier. All of a sudden I had a horrible realisation that I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t have a clue as to how I’d arrived at this place, or the name of the place or what I was doing here anyway. I left the girl with the car and walked a little way up the road to see if I could see anything. On the left-hand side of the road was a funeral director’s place with gravestones in it but it was all closed, dusty, and hadn’t been open for years by the looks of it. I decided to turn round and walk back to the car and drive until we find a village and see the name. What I could also do later was to look through the dashcam videos and see if I could identify the route. As I was walking back a lorry that was coming up behind me stopped at the side of the road behind me. The driver alighted and stood by the side of his cab. A lorry that was coming towards me, he stopped too and he alighted from his cab. He was carrying a small puppy and he stood by the cab. I was effectively blocked in between these two lorries, and my car and my friend were beyond them. As these two guys stood there I had this horrible menacing feeling that something pretty awful was about to happen.

So who are all these girls who keep on appearing? I wish I knew. Some nice, charming, pleasant company would be just what the doctor ordered and to actually have them present and allow them to slip away so easily like this is something of a shame. And I know that regular readers of this rubbish will recall saying on many occasions that I never “know where I was” but in this dream it was for real. As for those two guys in the lorries, I know THE BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH THEM .

isabelle the nurse breezed in this morning, late as usual due to having to do all of the blood tests that her oppo doesn’t want to do. She had a few cheery words of greeting and then rushed back out. She’s been working on her float for Carnaval and making the costumes and she’s promised me plenty of photos after the parades this forthcoming weekend.

Then it was breakfast time and MY BOOK time.

Today we are discussing miscellaneous earthworks again and despite his dismissal of much that has been assumed or inferred on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, he seems to conclude that everything uncertain is “probably” something astronomical or astrological, or both. However, he is yet to post one single piece of evidence to suggest what it is that is supposed to be indicated or observed, and the position of the stars and planets in the sky hasn’t changed that much in the last 5,000 years. The earth rotates through something like 1° every 7000 years.

His “pottery works” on the shores of the Thames estuary in Essex was excavated in the 1930s and identified as an Iron Age or Roman salt evaporation site, and not only did I manage to find the report of the excavation, I found a treatise on the operation thereof and now I would be quite confident in running my own sea salt production facility if the need ever arises. It would have been the kind of thing that, had I found it 20 years ago, I would have gone to try it to see if it would work.

Back in here I had all of the replies to deal with, and you’ve no idea just how many there were. Do I owe you all money or something? Once again, a great big thank-you for your continued support.

No Welsh today, so I decided to deal with the “Taste of Woodstock” radio programme. First task is to see what “songs played at Woodstock” I have in my live music collection As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I can’t use material actually performed at Woodstock unfortunately.

The answer to that is “not as much as I need” so I edited what I had and then set out to hunt down more music but I was waylaid. One of my neighbours, the President of the Residents’ Committee, wanted to come to pay me a visit. She’d left me a birthday present yesterday, which was nice of her.

She came along and we had a very nice chat for a while and discussed several issues, one of which was, surprisingly, one of the topics that I’d discussed with Rosemary the other day. It seems to be something that’s on the minds of a lot of people right now.

Next was my little great niece (or is she my great little niece) who arrived back home in Canada last night from Ecuador. She showed me all of her photos and videos of her trip and I told her how impressed I was with her. And I am too. These opportunities for travel only come along once in a lifetime and you should seize the moment. Sitting there with her feet straddling the equator beats the one that I took of Alison straddling the driehoek – the three-cornered border between Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, and also beats the one of Rosemary, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and me straddling the Arctic Circle.

Had His Nibs and I been able to reach the North Pole in 2018 I might have trumped it but, regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we stopped 700 miles short. My niece has 50 years ahead of her to do that, and good luck to her.

And while we’re on the subject of Rosemary … "well, one of us is" – ed … she rang me again today for a short chat. And it was short too – only fifty-three minutes. She needs the birth certificates of her parents and didn’t know how to go about finding them. Consequently I had a very happy time delving deep into the bowels of the Public Records Office in Kew and to my delight, I came up trumps too. When I was in Wandsworth working in that Italian restaurant I spent a lot of time in the PRO

The radio programme for this coming weekend needed chaeking too. That’s now done and sent off, but there was no time left to carry on with any more work. I was late as it was. But making a taco roll with rice and veg followed by date bread and soya dessert doesn’t take long.

So now I’m off to bed ready for shower day tomorrow. And I hope that I have a more productive day than today was. I can do without too many days like that. However, I’ll never turn down an opportunity to talk to a friend when the opportunity arises. There are more things in life than working.

But while we’re on the subject of working … "well, one of us is" – ed … One of my friends had sent me a message for my birthday, saying "I hope you managed to lay your hands on something tasty for your birthday"
And so I replied saying "unfortunately not. The nurses at dialysis kept well out of my reach."

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Tuesday 18th February 2025 – I AM FEELING …

… a little better today. I can tell that because earlier this evening I began to look forward to eating something. Maybe that’s because I didn’t have any lunch today, but then again I’ve not had lunch for a few days either and I’ve still not felt all that hungry in the evening.

Even though I was late going to bed last night, I didn’t hang around after I’d finished work and was soon tucked up in my little cot where I was asleep quite quickly.

Not for long though. At 00:39 (I checked the time) I was wide awake. And awake for quite some time as well but I’d obviously gone back to sleep at some point because I awoke again, this time at 05:44 (I checked the time again).

Despite everything that I tried I couldn’t go back to sleep this time and when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up and about. I seem to be making a habit of this.

After a wash and good scrub up, I went into the kitchen and sorted out the medication. While I was there I checked the loaf that I’d baked in the air fryer the previous evening.

This one is yet another candidate for the best ever loaf of bread that I have ever made – even better than the previous best. So much so in the sense that it had risen so much that I had difficulty lifting it out of its mould.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There wasn’t much on there, but after the wretched night that I’d had, I was surprised that there was anything at all. I was dreaming about the Middle Ages and the knights on horseback etc with some kind of fortifications in the centre of something going back to that particular period but again, when I went to reach for the dictaphone the story evaporated and I could hardly remember a single thing about what I had been dreaming of up until that moment.

Judging by the timestamp, that was at the first awakening at 00:39. I’ve no idea to what this dream relates but my book’s author Arthur Hadrian Allcroft is nowhere near approaching anything vaguely near the Age of Chivalry.

Later on I was doing some 3D modelling during the night based on some human figures. I was trying to make something extremely lifelike and I must have spent hours at this dream just looking at this one particular figure trying to make all of the parameters exactly correct but it just didn’t seem to want to go. I stood there looking at this feeling that the more I did, the more it was all going wrong.

That’s a situation that I know only too well. quite often trying to amend something simply seems to make it worse and I’ll end up with something irrecoverable. There have been more than just a few occasions in the past where I’ve ended up scrapping some work and starting again from scratch. I went on an on-line course several years ago to perfect 3D animation but that was not really one of my more startling successes, to be honest. I don’t really have the patience for work like that.

The nurse was early today. He’s heard that it has been suggested that I go four times per week to dialysis. He’s a former dialysis nurse and he reckons in his experience that I should resist at all costs. He’s not surprised that I’ve been feeling so ill after all of the extended hours and rapid pumping just recently.

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

Our author tells us on page 382 that "neither record nor tradition speaks of any walls of Ida or fortresses of Penda, and the name of Alfred himself attaches to no earthworks such as are claimed by Caesar, by the Danes, or by the Devil. Even the arbitrary imagination which allotted all ” camps,” round, rectangular, and oval, to Briton and Roman and Dane severally made no provision for the Saxon. ^"

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a couple of months ago we read the “mushroom report” of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Club and I quoted a discussion that had been reported there during one of their field outings, where at least one person claimed that some of the Iron Age hillforts around the Clun area of Shropshire were Saxon in origin.

Regardless of the fact that his opinion was dismissed at the time and subsequent events have shown that they indeed were not Saxon, Allcroft’s dismissal of “arbitrary imagination” making “no provision for the Saxon” is clearly unjustified.

Back in here I began to prepare for my Welsh lesson. What with one thing and another, at the dialysis centre I hadn’t done as much as I would have liked to have done so I was rather running behind.

However, we didn’t go very far into our course today. We’re running slightly ahead so we ended up having several very long discussions. I’m sure that we are shunted off into breakout rooms in little groups so that the tutor can go off to have a coffee.

That was the same with afternoon sports at school. When I learned subsequently of how much sports coaching children at other schools received, we were simply turned out onto the sports pitch and left to our own devices. I bet that the sports teachers disappeared inside for a smoke and a coffee too.

On the whole, the lesson passed really well and I was impressed. One of the things to which we had to listen was a television programme about sports for disabled people, and answer twelve questions. I really struggled with this but in fact not only did I come out top, but I even picked up a nuance that the tutor missed. I might not be doing too good overall with this course, but years of listening to these football commentaries is improving my aural skills.

That’s right, people. If I have my own trumpet I’m darn well going to blow it.

After the lesson was over I didn’t feel like any food so I had a relax for a while. Several whiles actually. I wasn’t in any hurry and I ought to be able to relax every now and again.

Later on though, I made a start on the next radio programme. This one is going to be complicated, and not helped by the fact that I don’t have to hand much of the music that I need. Even so, that won’t prevent me from planning it out and writing the notes. It’ll be a nice job to attack tomorrow, I reckon.

Tea was a taco roll with rice and veg. Not much of anything, but it was all the same nice to eat something that I enjoyed. The date bread and soya dessert was quite nice too, although the bread is too well-cooked on the outside. I was hoping that it would be something like a fig roll that I used to like. Never mind – Rome wasn’t built in a day.

For a change, I’ve finished everything quite early. I suppose that I may as well go to bed and try for a good sleep, and see how I feel in the morning. We’ll probably find that my health will pick up, only to be knocked back again in the dialysis centre when I go back on Thursday.

But while we’re on the subject of medieval knights and the Age of Chivalry … "well, one of us is" – ed … a few weeks ago I mentioned the story of the stately home just outside Crewe where a major pharmaceutical company has its laboratory.
With the big square tower on the corner, it’s ideal for these jousting tournaments that take place, and one of the regional heats of the North-West Area Jousting Competition was held there recently.
A few days ago I talked to one of my friends in the town. "How did it go?" I asked him
"Overall, very well" he said. "But the competitor from Crewe was disqualified"
"Why was that?" I asked him.
"Apparently he slew the damsel in distress and rescued the fiery dragon."

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Monday 10th February 2025 – I’M FED UP …

… of asking people questions and having a completely different response to that which would have answered the question and terminated the discussion.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall when in Québec I encountered Spruce Beer for the first time, so I asked "is this beer alcoholic?"

The response was neither “yes” nor “no” but "that’s over there"

Today at the Dialysis Centre I asked the doctor "have you prescribed me a sleeping pill?"

The response was neither “yes” nor “no” but "do you want one?"

Leaving aside the ethical question of patients self-prescribing their own medication with the connivance of doctors, what’s wrong with anyone answering a question simply and straightforwardly?

As you can tell, I’m in a foul humour this evening. And it started out so well too.

Last night, by the time that I’d finished my notes and done what I had to do, it wasn’t all that late so I headed to bed at something like a reasonable time for once. And that cheered me up.

Once in bed I was asleep fairly quickly and there I stayed until all of about 05:30 when I heard the phantom doorbell. At least, that’s what it said on the dictaphone round about that time. I have no recollection of that at all.

When the alarm went off I was away with the fairies (although not in any situation likely to bring forth comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine) and it was a very weary me who staggered off into the bathroom

It’s Dialysis Day today so I had a good clean-up, a shave and so on ready for if I encounter Emilie the Cute Consultant and then went for my medication, remembering not to take the medicine that I’m not supposed to take on Dialysis Day.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I had a girlfriend at school. She used to come into school later than we did so when I came in I would go to my classroom and about 08:25 she would turn up. But one day there was a load of people in our classroom who didn’t belong in there, some kind of managers or something like that. I imagined that they would have an awful lot to say about this girl coming into a different classroom in the morning. I was there waiting for her and round about 08:20-08:25-08:30 she hadn’t turned up but I had some things to do so I went into the boss’s office next door. I caught a glimpse of her and she smiled at me and went into our room. I took these things for the boss and went back into our room. There was my girlfriend on the scales weighing herself. Really disappointedly she’d reached 325lb this week and was very disappointed by that. I noticed that she’d filled out this white dress suit that she was wearing, filled it out rather too much. We basically agreed to see each other at lunchtime and then she cleared off. The teacher looked at me, looked at the people who were surveying the class, looked at me again and asked me some comment about the girl, then looked at these people again as if to say “just be careful what you say because they’ll be writing it down and noting it”.

Weighing yourself as you go into a room? What does that remind you of? It certainly does to me.

To each his own of course, but attraction is a very personal thing – as they say over here des gouts et les couleurs on ne discute pas – but my ideal kind of girl would be one whom I could throw over my shoulder and carry off to bed. Strangely enough, apart from once at school, I have never ever ended up with anyone at all like that. It just goes to show that life and fate sometimes deal out some very strange hands and you have to play them as best as you can. Whoever would have thought 30 years ago that I would have ended up in a relationship where there was a child present?

It’s true nevertheless that our school bus, which was the prolongation of a service route, always used to arrive first and a couple of girls with whom I spent some time used to travel on the last one to arrive. As for the rest of the dream, it rings a vague bell somewhere in the back of my mind that is best left there.

Having finished that I made a start on finishing off the radio programme that I’d started yesterday. However, Isabelle the Nurse interrupted me. We talked about Carnaval and her float while she sorted out my legs, and then she cleared off, leaving me to make my breakfast and read MY NEW BOOK.

We’ve moved on now to discuss the construction of an earthen fort, with helpful plans and diagrams. That will come in useful if the Romans ever attack us here, I suppose. But joking apart, it’s extremely interesting and I wonder what I’m going to discover next.

Before we leave the general pages, he mentions that "It would seem to be a legitimate inference from such a priori reasoning that, subject of course to exceptional circumstances, a camp is later in date according as it is less irregular in plan, less elaborately defended, and constructed upon a less elevated and less defensible site"

Anyone who has ever seen a Norman or Edwardian castle will know that this is far from the case. And while many of the forts that we visited in the USA were built accordingly, when Fetterman and Curser dug themselves in against the rampaging hordes of Native Americans, they both chose hilltops and promontories

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that in 2014 we WERE AT MONTSEGUR, the last refuge of the Cathars, and that is probably the most inaccessible, difficult-to-reach castle that I have ever visited, and I knew all about that climb for several days. None of your “constructed upon a less elevated and less defensible site” with Montségur.

Back in here I finished off the radio programme, chose the final track and wrote out the notes ready for dictation on Saturday night. Then I made a start on the remainder of the Welsh homework. That’s not yet finished, and heaven alone knows when I’m going to find time to do it.

My cleaner took me by surprise yet again as I was nowhere near ready, and she fitted my anaesthetic patches. We talked about cats, and it seems that I’m not going to find it as easy to adopt one as I might think. These days, these refuges are very picky and choosy as to who can adopt a cat and she reckons that I would fall down near the end of the queue.

If that’s not enough bad news for the moment, the taxi didn’t turn up until 12:45. It’s the school holidays of course and many drivers have taken time off. The car that came to pick me up was the wheelchair-carrier and we hadn’t gone half a mile before his ‘phone flashed a message “next job, wheelchair from the Centre Normandy – at 13:00”. So he had 15 minutes to undertake a 90-minute round trip to Avranches and back.

It wouldn’t have been quite so bad had we not encountered just about every problem possible on the road. And then when we arrived, there were seven vehicles all trying to unload at the same time – and we were sixth, so we had to wait our turn.

With everyone arriving at once and me being next-to-last I had to wait an age to be seen

The connection was as painful as it could possibly be and I suffered throughout the whole session. But the nurse did confirm to me that once the machine does start up, it’s not uncommon to have a wave of fatigue. It’s to do with the drop of blood pressure and strain on the heart.

The doctor came to see me as well, the unsociable one. We had our little discussion as I mentioned earlier and eventually he did confirm to me, as I suspected, that they had prescribed a sleeping pill. It has several other uses too which they think might be useful, which was why they prescribed it in the first place.

My response was that I was going to stop taking it as of now. He replied that I might find it difficult all at once and I should “taper off”, but if it’s a medication like that then I don’t want to be on it anyway so as of earlier this evening it’s off the list.

And so, incidentally, is the medication that they prescribed to counter some of the side-effects.

Unplugging me was just as painful as plugging me in, and then I had to wait. The driver who was to take me home had stuck her head in earlier but I told her that I would be fifteen minutes so as she had someone to pick up at the Clinic across town she decided to go there first.

She hadn’t come back by the time that I was ready so I waited. And waited.

Not that I minded because Emilie the Cute Consultant came past.

"Wiating for your taxi, Mr Hall?" she asked
“No, I’m waiting for N°11 bus to Marble Arch and Trafalgar Square” I would have said had it been anyone else but Emilie the Cute Consultant
"Yes I am" I replied "You don’t fancy taking me home, do you?"
"I don’t live in Granville any more" she said. "I live in Marcey, just around the corner"
"Well, you could always take me to Marcey with you"

She had the decency to laugh, but she wasn’t all that impressed. Ahh well …

A car suddenly screeched up outside, but it wasn’t my driver who hopped out. Nevertheless he had come for me.

He was one of the ambulance crew who was in the depot washing the vehicle when the call came through. Apparently my driver who had gone to the clinic discovered that there was a major problem there with the other passenger and she was obliged to wait. It’s a good job that I hadn’t gone with her.

We had a good chat all the way home, so much so that I forgot to warn the cleaner that I was on my way, and she had a mad scramble to meet the car. 19:45 when I finally arrived home.

Tea was a stuffed pepper with pasta followed by apple cake and soya dessert. But then I cut up the date bread that I had made, and if the rest of it tastes as good as the crumbs that I tasted, it will be absolutely excellent.

So fed up, in pain and glad that the day is almost over, I’m off to bed ready to fight the good fight tomorrow. I can understand what they meant in Leuven back in 2016 when they said "save your strength for the battle that lies ahead" because I can’t do with too many more days like this one.

But talking about going home just now … "well, one of us is" – ed … it reminds me of a guy in a pub in Nantwich.
He would sneak a photo out of his pocket, glance at it, put it back and then order a beer.
After three or four times curiosity got the better of the and he asked the customer about the photo
"What’s about the photo?" he asked
"It’s the wife" replied the man
"Do you always look at it just before you order a beer?"
"Yes I do" he replied. "When she starts to look beautiful, that’s when it’s time to go home"

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Sunday 8th February 2025 – WHEN I DON’T …

… have to go to dialysis, I can have some good days. And today was one of these, in many repsects.

Dictating the notes for the three radio programmes wasn’t so good though. There were loads of errors that I made and I don’t know why. I just couldn’t seem to get it together and once I slipped out of the rhythm I was gone completely. Some of the parts were dictated three times and there will be a lot of editing in the morning.

But one good thing about it was that it wasn’t all that long after midnight that I finished so with the lie-in until 08:00 in the morning I stand a good chance of having a decent sleep.

And I did too. After having sorted myself out ready for bed, once underneath the covers there I stayed, and I didn’t move a muscle until the alarm went off at 08:00.

What a struggle it was to tear myself out of my bed this morning. But I made it and just about finished washing and dressing as Isabelle the Nurse came in.

She told me that there isn’t a real problem about having eaten before the blood test and whether it might be 24 or 72 hours before the hospital visit instead of the prescribed 48. I’ll speak to the dialysis centre people on Monday and see what they have to day.

Seeing as it was Sunday she had plenty of time on her hands so she showed me some photos and videos of her skiing trip, just to make me jealous.

After she left I had my medication, made my breakfast and then went to read MY NEW BOOK.

We’ve now moved out of the hills and onto the plains and circular forts. These are, as their name implies, areas with circular defences down on the lowland and being mainly small, it implies that the area was occupied by some kind of closely-related agricultural period.

The difficulty with these is that, being a universal design, they could date from any era at all, even the modern age. But even if they are modern, they more likely have an ancient history, being erected on the site of a previous version of the camp.

If ever you drive up the A6 or M6 to Carlisle, up in Cumbria you’ll see farmhouses in the middle of fields closely surrounded by barns and other buildings, in a circular formation, and I’ve often wondered as I drove past whether they are modern equivalents of the circular camp. Being in an isolated spot near the border with Scotland, it’s almost inevitable that they were going to be targets for any Scottish raider crossing the border and bent on plunder.

One thing though – I’m not sure who his audience is by the style of his writing. I’m not uneducated (at least, I don’t think so) but even I am having trouble with some of his sentence phrasing and the meaning of some deep, hidden archaeological name.

Back in here we had a footfest. All of the JD Cymru League from Saturday including the Cymru North grudge match between Airbus UK Broughton and Colwyn Bay, a real top-of-the-table clash with probably the biggest crowd that has ever been at the Airfield.

That was followed by Clyde v Stranraer and our regular commentator Lawrence Nelson missed the game. He must have known what was coming because I have never ever in my life seen a team play so badly.

The score finished 2-0 to Clyde, and Stranraer were lucky to get nil. Clyde weren’t much better. They missed so many sitters that I gave up counting after seven. Had Clyde been any good it could have been an embarrassing scoreline.

This is a match that no fan of either team will want to see again but if you are feeling brave, THEN THE HIGHLIGHTS ARE HERE, complete with the Keystone Cops defending.

For lunch I had a lovely cheese salad butty. That bread that I made the other day really is exceptionally good and with vegan cheese, lettuce, tomato and salad dressing, it’s really good.

Back in here this afternoon I’ve been radioing.

The notes for the final track of programme 251024 have been edited and incorporated into the two halves of the rest of the programme. The music for the final track had been edited into the stream and so that programme is now ready to go.

The notes for programme 251107 were then edited and my little “discussion phrase” has been edited in. As it’s a concert these notes go onto the front of the music, which I had assembled during the week.

It ended up over-running by 36 seconds but that’s no problem to edit out. That’s now complete and ready to go to

Finally, the notes for 251114 need editing. That’s a full programme of 10 tracks (and one to come later) and I’d almost finished when Rosemary rang.

“Can you spare a minute?” she asked, and so 46 minutes later …. . Yes, only 46 minutes. We’re losing our touch.

There had been a few other interruptions too. There was my 16:15 mid-afternoon pause and after that I had a few things to do.

First was to make some pizza dough. That was absolutely excellent and it rose up like a train. Once it had proofed I divided it into three balls – two into the freezer and a third ready to use

Next was some date bread. I’d bought a pile of dates for Christmas and hadn’t even opened them so I must use them soon. I found a date bread recipe that is quite similar to an oil cake, so seeing as I can make one of those, then why not?

I then rolled out the lump of dough on the table and put it in the pizza tray ready for later.

After I’d finished with Rosemary I dashed into the kitchen to check the date bread and it was perfect. I’ll tell you all tomorrow how it tastes. And I assembled quickly the pizza and bunged it in the oven.

30 minutes later I had the best pizza that I have ever made. Really and honestly. If I could make them as good as this every time I wouldn’t be bothered by anyone or anything.

But seeing as we have been talking about rhythms … "well, one of us has" – ed … I was once asked "what name is given to people who practise the rhythm method of birth control?"
"I don’t know" I replied. "What name is given to people who practise the rhythm method of birth control?"
"We call them ‘parents’."

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