… "always a difficult task" – ed … if I went outside yesterday. And the answer is that I did, briefly, to buy a loaf of bread when the mobile baker came round. That was the sum total of my adventures outside in the snow today.

But there wasn’t much in the way of snow. The promised downpour during the night never came and instead we had maybe half an inch and that didn’t last too long. The gritter finally found its way down here too this morning so at least it’s possible to travel around, if you wanted to.

But no-one wanted to. We all had a day in watching England dispose of the South African Test team in what can only be described as an eventful day’s cricket, and then watching the football. And probably the most exciting Premier League match that I have seen in years – the second half of Aston Villa v Leicester. A game that was played in exactly the fashion of how a good old First Division match of the 1970s would have been played instead of the boring, monotonous garbage that’s served up today where teams will pass the ball all the way back to the goalkeeper from the opponent’s penalty area if it means keeping possession of the ball rather than going on an all-out attacking rampage.

I’ve caught up with the second week of my animation course too. Back right on schedule although I’m the first to admit that I’ve not done the practical work. I don’t have the facilities here to do any of it so I’ll have to wait until I return home, whenever that might be. Furthermore, they make available the animation software that you need, but only for an i-Phone and my phone is a long way from being one of those.

But here’s something amusing. The postie came by this morning and brought three letters, all of which were for me! One was my blood test results and the other two were the long-promised letters from the hospital. I now know what is wrong with me and what they intend to do with me, and I also know that it’s going to be of long durée. so after this operation, I won’t be out of the woods – I’ll just have moved into different woods instead.

But it’s pleasing to know that I don’t have Hepatitis C, I’m not HIV-positive and that there are no traces of alcohol, tobacco or … errr … toxic substances in my blood. Not that there ought to be any of those things of course, but you never know what it is that’s going on when you are being injected with needles at least twice per day and receiving pints of blood from unknown sources.

So having had a nice, restful day, I can tell you about my nice restful night because for once these recent nights I didn’t get up to all that much. I started off doing something with one of the kids characters that I’ve created with the 3D modelling program that I use but I can’t remember what it was and which character it was (it was very likely K4). Anyway, someone (it might have been Cécile or Nerina) came around so see what I was doing but I explained that I don’t like people looking at my work until it’s finished so I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the idea. There was a new release of poses (for those who can’t create their own) for the character but these had to be applied only under certain circumstances. I applied them under all kinds of different circumstances regardless, but the characters came out all very wooden. I was wondering whether this was because I’d applied the poses in the wrong circumstances, or whether something else was going on.
I can’t remember where I was after that but it was Manchester or somewhere like that, at a concert venue below street-level and Man were due to appear. Instead of hanging around waiting for them, I went for a little wander around in the immediate vicinity and found another concert hall almost right next-door and this attracted my attention for a while. Then, returning to my venue, I could hear the music drifting upstairs so I dashed down, just in time to miss the last number! Drat! So I went to buy a beer (I haven’t had a beer in over 25 years, by the way) and there, sitting on a stool behind the counter as if he was supervising the place, was a boy who lived in the same village as me and who was on the same educational path and whom I haven’t seen for probably 40 years. But to buy a beer, you had to queue down a line of trestle tables until you reached the end, which was right up against the wall of the building, but the seats were so close to the trestle table that it as quite a squeeze to come back with your full beer glasses.

What? Me drinking beer? This really is becoming quite nostalgic. I’ll be eating cheese next, you just wait and see.

AND JUST IN CASE YOU ARE WONDERING why your comments on these postings aren’t appearing automatically these days – WordPress (which supplies the technical support for this blog) is being hit badly by another mega-spam-surge and we are being overwhelmed with spam-comments.

I’ve therefore had to delete the “automatic approval” setting for now and approve (or otherwise) all comments manually until the panic dies down. Normal service will (hopefully) be restored in early course (if I can remember how to do it).

Don’t let this hiccup stop you from adding your pearls of wisdom to my remarks.

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