Tag Archives: dionysus lardner

Wednesday 13th August 2025 – THIS TIME NEXT WEEK …

… will see me installed downstairs, if all goes according to plan. It won’t be everything down there of course – just the essentials like the bed, the office and the kitchen. That’s the important part of everything. The rest will arrive when it arrives.

But it won’t be without its vicissitudes though. I’ve had the “summons” to attend hospital on Tuesday next week for chemotherapy, staying over until Wednesday afternoon. And it’s to Paris again. It seems that my plea to be treated at Rennes has fallen on deaf ears.

Something else that has fallen on deaf ears – my own this time – is my plea to be in bed by 23:00. Once again, it was after midnight and I was still letting it all hang out

For no good reason, except that yesterday I appear to have written WAR AND PEACE instead of the usual notes, and that must have taken an age. And by the time that It’d taken the stats and backed up the computers, it was probably closer to 00:30 than anything else.

That’s not the worst of it. I was wide-awake at 01:50. So wide-awake that I was giving serious consideration to leaving the bed. However, second thoughts prevailed and I curled up under the covers again, where eventually I managed to go back to sleep.

Not for long though, because I had one of these dramatic awakenings at – would you believe – 04:10.

This time I couldn’t go back to sleep and so round about 05:00 I called it a night and raised myself from the Dead. When the alarm went off at 06:29, I was in the bathroom having a good wash, having already dictated the radio notes that I’d written the other day. And not dictated them once, but twice. I made something of a pig’s ear of the first attempts and it was easier to start again.

After the medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. We were in dialysis, but we were allowed to be up and about while we were being pumped around. There was one guy there who had a tablecloth over the top of his table and it looked as if he was baking. He was weighing out certain quantities of this and certain quantities of that. The guy who was in charge of supervising the dialysis section told him basically to stop doing that and to concentrate on being dialysed. However, the guy didn’t listen and carried on so the guy in charge began to make a few sarcastic remarks, such as “it looks as if you are making the tea for your mother” etc. In the end, the guy said that he was passing the time making this whatever it was and he doesn’t see why he shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever he likes during the period of dialysis provided that he doesn’t upset or disturb the other people. It looked as if the guy in charge was going to have some kind of argument, but the first guy said “if you had been here a couple of hours earlier, you would have seen three women here from the other group making folders for different purposes. At that point, I stuck my hand up and said that if everyone were allowed to do all kinds of different things and people could do all kinds of different things during dialysis, I think that the period of dialysis would pass so much quicker than it seems to do at the moment”. The guy in charge wasn’t very impressed. He just put his head down and just totally ignored everything after that

Dialysis is quite literally the bane of my life. It really is three and a half hours wasted each time because there is nothing that one can do. We lie in bed, not allowed to move in case we disturb something, and no exercise of any value, nor any entertainment other than a TV is provided.

One thing about which I have been badgering them is to provide things like pedicures, bed-yoga sessions so that we could profit from the time that we are there, but that seems to have fallen on stony ground too.

Isabelle the Nurse was in a good mood this morning. Only three more days and then she’s off on holiday for a fortnight. That’s good news for her, but not so good for those of us remaining behind because we have her oppo for two weeks.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of THE DIARIES OF SIR DANIEL GOOCH.

Today, we’ve had our first meeting with Dr Dionysus Lardner. He was the Magnus Pyke of his day, one of the very first people to take science out of the laboratories and put it on the breakfast table in the ordinary home.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t always accurate in the events that he predicted. He told a tribunal hearing once that if the brakes failed on a heavily laden train going down a slope, it could reach speeds of 120 mph. Gooch and his boss, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, had to remind him that there are such things as friction and wind resistance, and these would slow the train down considerably.

He also predicted that the larger the steamship, the more fuel it would need, and there wouldn’t be the space on board for all the coal, failing to understand that if you double the breadth and width of something, you increase the volume fourfold.

Try it yourself – for example, if you have two metres width and two metres length, at one metre high, you have four cubic metres of space. But if you double the length and width, i.e. four metres width and four metres length, at one metre high you have a volume of sixteen cubic metres.

And so there’s plenty of room for extra coal.

Further along in the book, I stumbled upon one of my favourite quotes. Gooch talks about the early days of railway operation, saying "When I look back upon that time, it is a marvel to me that we escaped serious accidents. It was no uncommon thing to take an engine out on the line to look for a late train that was expected, and many times have I seen the train coming and reversed the engine, and ran back out of its way as quickly as I could. What would be said of such a mode of proceeding now ?"

Yes, "What would be said of such a mode of proceeding now?" How many times have I said that when reminiscing about my adolescence and young adulthood?

We have however reached the interesting part of the book. He’s off on the Great Eastern laying the telegraph cables along the sea bed from Valencia in Ireland to Heart’s Content on the island of Newfoundland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we VISITED HEART’S CONTENT ON OUR MEGA-VOYAGE AROUND NORTH AMERICA IN 2017 when I went to say goodbye to all of my friends in Canada and the USA. Who would have thought that I’d still be here eight years later, defying all the odds

Back in here I attacked the radio notes that I’d dictated and despite several interruptions, they are all now finished and the radio programmes assembled. Tomorrow, I’ll move on to the next one.

Seeing as we have been talking about interruptions … "well, one of us has" – ed … the first one was the man who came to repair the electric door opening device. In a fit of pique and bad temper, I sent a somewhat … errr … intemperate mail to the building’s management team and, to my surprise, they reacted.

My cleaner turned up to do her stuff too, and that included putting me in the shower. Do you realise? That was the last time that I’ll have to clamber into the bath to have a shower. Te next shower that I have will be in my shower downstairs.

That is, if the plumber extricates his digit. He’s not the fastest of workers and he’s not going to have this finished by the time I come home from Paris. Mind you, he seems to be making a very thorough and solid job of everything.

Sadly, I also crashed out today, which is no surprise seeing how little sleep I’ve been having just recently. It was the hospital that awoke me, telling me the news about chemotherapy. And it was tough trying to follow the conversation, seeing that I was still somewhere up in the clouds.

Tea tonight was a delicious leftover curry. One of the best that I have ever made, I reckon. And now I’m off to bed for a really good sleep ready for a good afternoon at dialysis. There’s nothing like optimism, is there?

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about my pleas falling on deaf ears … "well, one of us has" – ed … I mentioned the situation to my niece in Canada, with whom I have been talking today.
"That’s no surprise" She said. "The rest of the family thinks that you are a miserable pleader – or something like that, anyway."

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Sunday 24th December 2023 – AFTER ALL OF …

… the effort that I went to so that I would be up and about at 08:20 – and on a Sunday too – the nurse didn’t turn up until 09:20.

And it wasn’t Yoan either. It was his weekend off so he sent his sidekick Isabelle to deal with today’s issues, including sorting me out.

That was actually quite nice because I like Isabelle. One of her children was on a University exchange programme in Dublin last year so they met up in Belfast and went for a wander around for a week. I suggested a few places for them to visit.

My memories in Belfast aren’t quite so pleasant as that. I used to do deliveries there in the mid-70s in a van with British number-plates and on one occasion I was “detained” by a military patrol while my bona fides were checked.

Mind you, it was coming back from one such delivery that I had my encounter with that student from Lancaster University that I recounted a couple of months or so ago – the girl who didn’t like Tuppence, my old black cat.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, it wasn’t really all that much of an effort to raise myself from the Dead in time for Isabelle. In fact, I was actually up and wandering about at 07:45 this morning.

And that’s not something that happens every Sunday, is it?

Once Isabelle had gone (and come back to see if I actually had some injections in stock, and then departed again) I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. The first was another dream of which I’ve forgotten most. They were talking about putting me under and they were asking which side of my body I wanted to come round on. I misunderstood the question and replied something to do with strawberries because I had a fancy at that moment to eat something like that. The discussion went on about the hospital. They asked me how I liked being there. I replied that it was far better than I imagined. The treatment that I’m having here couldn’t be better anywhere else. Again there was a lot more to it than this but unfortunately it all evaporated while I was trying to dictate it.

Those are sentiments that I would certainly echo about the Hôpital Pitié-Salpetrière – if only the food were better and they’d turn up the heating.

And then I’d been with my friends from the Wirral on a motorbike voyage somewhere for a while. We ended up back at their house. I was having to travel on back to my house but for some reason I needed to unwind because the final leg had been extremely difficult – even though we had been on motor bikes we’d had to lower our baggage down some kind of cliff somewhere in order to reach the bottom which was extremely complicated. While we’d been in Wrexham there had been some kind of riot or disturbance and they’d actually blown away a whole cliff so that there was a view from the town right the way down the Dee valley into the mountains there. We made our way down these mountains and this cliff. The husband caught something in a pool – he’d wandered off to a pool and was there with his hands in it. We ended up back at their house. They went and sat in their living room and I just slumped into the kitchen for a while. Then I noticed that what he had done was that he’d caught some kind of small fish and put it in a bowl. I knocked on the door of their sitting room and they opened it. I told them that one of my cats has a pet goldfish. I recounted the story of how it caught it and brought it home, then it had actually fished another one out of a pond and brought it home too. Then I began to prepare to leave. Foolishly I took off my boots and then I couldn’t put them back on again as my feat swelled up. I noticed that I was wearing odd socks – one was a dark brown and the other was a slightly lighter shade of brown.

Back into another dream that I’ve had in the past. We’re discussing railway locomotives. It turned out that not only did one railway company put a locomotive at an experimenter so that he could make his experiments, it put a whole fleet out to one guy and allowed him to experiment all up and down their main line with a fleet of locomotives. These were interesting because although they were coal-fired they actually started up on oil. To make them start you lit an oily rag and stuck it under the chassis at the air intake. This was at the height of World War I. There was a huge casualty sorting station – I said that it was at Valenciennes but it can’t have been because that was behind enemy lines – where they would take all the wounded prisoners and soldiers from the front line back to a field hospital. Anyone who was injured there and taken away was really lucky because the locomotives and the field ambulance trains really worked extremely well and all kinds of experiments went on. I should have been working there and helping these people shift coal around but I was far more interested reading books about this and talking to some of the workers. We even made whole charts of how much more efficient it would be taking all factors into account, including the factors of children killing donkeys – if a donkey was old and overworked it was put into a field to recover but all of the children would climb all over it and there were several instances of donkeys killed by over-enthusiastic children. There was one particular incident where I was reading a book when I should have been moving coal. Some woman dropped a few things as she was carrying the coal and told me to stand guard over it until she could come back to pick it up so that no-one else would take it.

Yes, lighting oily rags and holding them up to the air intake while someone else turns the motor. I remember very well doing that for my father in the winter of 1963. Gardner 5LW and 5LX engines were notoriously difficult to start in the cold and there was always an endless collection of old Fodens parked up outside our house at night in those days.

The winter that year was so cold that at times we had a paraffin heater underneath the fuel tank to stop the diesel from freezing, and I’ve seen fires lit under fuel tanks too.

But as for experimental trains running wild on main lines, the Great Western Railway company lent an experimental train to a Doctor Dionysus Lardner and the train would turn up unannounced at all kinds of strange places.

When Brunel was asked what he would do if he encountered Lardner and his train coming towards him on the same line, Brunel replied "I would increase my speed and rely on my superior velocity to drive him off the rails".

When Sir Daniel Gooch wrote his memoirs just before he died, he commented on the incident and said "whatever would be said of such a mode of proceeding today?"

So having dealt with all of that, I’ve had a very quiet day today. I’ve made my hash browns, for better or for worse, and despite following the instructions carefully, they don’t seem to be any better than any others that I’ve previously made.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, of course. They’ll be on the breakfast menu tomorrow along with beans on toast, vegan sausage and mushroom paté on toast and we’ll see how it goes. But I really don’t know why I can never make hash browns properly

So, tune in tomorrow and I’ll tell you all about them, if I haven’t died of food poisoning in the meantime.

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