… we have made to this apartment today. My faithful cleaner and I have been through the apartment like a dose of salts. Tonnes of stuff has gone down to the rubbish bins and there is actually a lot of unused space on the shelves now.
This is what I’ve been hoping to do for quite a while, and I’m glad that we managed to do it today.
Yesterday was an exciting evening too. I finished everything that I needed to do by 23:00 but organising myself for bed took much longer and I bet that it can’t have been much earlier than midnight before I climbed into bed.
For a change, I was asleep quite quickly, but I awoke at 04:00. Try as I might, I could not go back to sleep, and just when I was thinking of getting out of bed, the alarm rang. It was 06:29.
First thing that I did was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. However, to my dismay, there was nothing on it. Instead, I found plenty of things to do in order to pass the time, including an interesting chat with a chatbot, would you believe, about the Oregon and California Trail and the fate of the Donner Party
Isabelle the Nurse turned up this morning. She was quite late, which is no surprise for her first day back. Of the two nurses in this practice, she’s the one with the “touch” for blood tests and injections, so anyone who needs one of those and it’s “the other one” on duty will usually wait until she starts her week.
After she left, I made breakfast and then carried on with Vera Evison’s book AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY AT HOLBOROUGH, KENT while I was eating.
The book didn’t last long – only 87 or so pages – and so when I’d finished, I turned to the next one. EBURACUM OR YORK UNDER THE ROMANS by C Wellbeloved.
It was written in 1842 so the introduction goes on for ever, it’s full of flowery prose and phrases along the lines of “would the gentle reader please excuse any faults that he has found …?”
Up to now I’ve not found any worth mentioning, so I came back in here to revise my Welsh.
At 11:00 I went for my lesson and it all passed quite well, even if the tutor didn’t send us the coursework until five minutes before the start of the lesson so we couldn’t review it.
At the end of the lesson, I sorted out the bathroom and some clean clothes, and when my faithful cleaner arrived, she shooed me under the shower.
The shower was really hot today and I enjoyed every minute of it. In fact, I wanted to stay in it for much longer. And this was also the second time that I managed to go into and come out of the shower without the help of my crutches.
Once I’d organised myself, I went to join my cleaner in the living room. We attacked the shelving and I sorted out one of the bags and the shopping trolley that we brought in last week. Quite a lot of the stuff went the Way of the West, but everything else was sorted and boxed quite quickly.
We then turned our attention to the bedroom and the cupboards in here have been emptied of much of the stuff they contained and the photography equipment moved to the top shelf over my desk. There are shelves galore free now.
By the time that we finished, I needed an energy drink. I was completely dazed and confused.
After my cleaner finally left – after an hour of overtime, I suppose – I found a few other things to do, including restarting the radio programmes and hunting down some music.
All of that took me up to teatime, which was a taco roll filled with one of the frozen leftovers that my friend cooked, lengthened with mushrooms, tomatoes and tomato sauce with peppers, all on a bed of rice and vegetables. And how nice was that?
Right now, though, later than ever, I’m off to bed. I’ve had a tough day.
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Welsh … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once met a boy from Wales who had been an “unexpected birth”.
"But didn’t your dad use precautions?" I asked.
"Yes" he replied. "He used a Welsh letter"
"What’s a Welsh letter?"
"A French letter with a leek in it."
