Yes, despite fighting off waves of sleep I managed to keep on going until about 17:30 when this anti-potassium stuff bit in and I was out like the proverbial light.

And I’ll tell you how deep the sleep was – that I had two people send me messages on my internet messenger service while I was asleep and despite the raucous racket that the alert makes, I didn’t hear a thing. I was absolutely and completely out of it, all the way to 19:28

But this stuff really is dangerous. I had no warning of going to sleep and not even any recollection of feeling ready to go to sleep, if that makes sense. It really was as if someone had switched off a light. Imagine if I’d been driving a car.

It was something of a surprise that I kept on going for as long as I did because I’d had yet another turbulent night

It was after midnight and I’d been letting it all hang out before I’d gone to bed. And then it was a night with quite a lot going on while I was asleep, as I found out when I went to transcribe the dictaphone notes later.

But when the alarm went off I fell out of bed and then took my blood pressure. 18.9/10.9 will give them something to think about at the hospital. My blood pressure figures are ridiculous though. Last night it was as high as 19.5/9.7.

But anyway I went to shovel down the medication , check the mails and messages and then back in here to check the dictaphone notes. And as I said, there was a lot to check. There was a dream about watching some kind of race with kids climbing up and down the steep side of a hill. We were all watching from the hedge or side of the fence as the kids were running up it. The person with me entered into a conversation with someone else who was watching there. I heard my name mentioned although they weren’t talking to me. I could see that she was explaining my situation to this person. Then a young girl came up. There was something about her pony tail so I had to take out the clip and put it back into her hair at a higher position. That seemed to bring out some comment from someone as well. For some unknown reason trains were mentioned. There were these single-coach multiple unit things, one of those, and attached to it was half of a two-coach unit so it was two coaches but you couldn’t walk between the two. There was something about that that was involved in the discussion too but it didn’t seem to make any sense or fit in anywhere.

Not that my dreams make any sense to start with of course.

There were then these two large creature-type things that were humanoid but basically just mouth and body. They were humanoid, coloured human and so on with human skin for what there was. They were in the corner talking about philosophy and the meaning of life etc when they suddenly realised that they were there with no legs and two very feeble hands. How are they going to move? Here they are, having spent the last so long running down the human race, how they were the masters and how they could control everything and they suddenly realised that they couldn’t move without the aid of the human beings to push them around. That was a rather humiliating experience for them

Did I dictate this dream about being ill and not being able to walk? … "no, you didn’t" – ed … I needed something doing so I telephoned the ambulance company to ask them if they could do it and bring it round here. So they did but a while later in a conversation with someone else we were talking about how I was feeling at that particular moment. The question of other people turned up. I said something strange, which was “can you imagine the feeling that I had when the driver turned up and it wasn’t the one whom I wanted?”. The person with me replied “yes” but he remembered a certain game of Blind Man’s Bluff where the same thing had happened – where someone had ended up touching him so he took off his blindfold to look at the person and was so disappointed that it was not a certain person who had touched him but someone else completely.

There are more than just a few points in that little dream with which I can relate too.

Then I was round at someone’s house. They had 2 children, one aged about 2 and the other aged about 4. It must have been the kid’s bedtime. To my surprise the parents made up their bed on the sofa in the living room which I thought strange. My host asked me “do you want to put them to bed Eric?” so I called the youngest one over and picked her up. Then all of this “gooey gooey” language that you use with small babies and children. I put her into the bed there, made sure that she was comfortable in between the sheets and that the blanket was good. Then I did the same for the other, carried her across the room from where she’d been standing and lay her on the sofa, lined her up and tucked her in. Now that we had these 2 kids on the sofa and we were supposed to be socialising, but it’s impossible to socialise without making a noise but this was what my host’s idea was. I was totally bewildered by this

We were talking about my contact lenses and I was supposed to wear them but I was just putting it off and putting it off. In the end one of my friends cajoled and encouraged me. In the end I went to see about them. I finally had a pair, had them fitted. They were on a 3-month trial. They were a kind of corrective contact lenses that are supposed to improve your eyesight. What they would do was to work on your eyes, massage the muscles etc. You had 3 months and at the end if there was no improvement you simply handed them back. Once I had them installed my friend said “there, you see? It was quite easy and you were making such a fuss of it” etc. Almost immediately someone came in and said that so-and-so was leaving. That was the guy who had been to collect my contact lenses and signed for them. When he came into our room I asked him when he was leaving. He looked terribly defensively and asked why. I said “so that you could apologise on my behalf to the firm that supplied the contact lenses. If you picked them up, you’re the one who has to return them. But not to worry” I said. “We’ll sort it out somehow”.

But as for contact lenses, I used to wear contact lenses until one heady day in 1997 bringing my boss back from a meeting in Luxembourg. Roaring back up the E411 on a warm autumn early-evening with my window open, a lorry on the opposite carriageway threw up a small stone that hit me squarely in the eye.

Without thinking I rubbed my eye, like you do … "like YOU do" – ed … and a piece of grit not only shredded my contact lens but scratched my cornea too

After I’d dropped my boss off I went round to our office’s Emergency Service. They confirmed the damage to my eye and sent me to an eye specialist in Antwerp.
“We can repair this with laser surgery” he replied. “But for an extra 6,000BF (£120) we can repair the sight in your eye too so that you’ll have good vision”
“What will it say on the receipt?” I asked
“Simply ‘laser surgery to repair eye defect'” he answered. He wasn’t stupid
“Well, as long as it does say that and only that, go ahead”.

And as it was classed as an industrial injury, it was reimbursed 100%

There was a follow-up to that too.

As I now had one perfect eye and one poor eye, I was having a lot of rouble with perception and depth of vision, which for a Ministerial chauffeur was a serious issue.

So after a lengthy discussion with our Medical service it was back to Antwerp to have the other eye done – reimbursed 100%

Laser surgery is the best thing since sliced bread and I’m really glad that I had it done. Of course, as I’m starting to reach a ripe old age, growing riper as I grow older, my near sight is going but there’s not a thing at all wrong with my distance vision.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed, when I was at work the local nursing home needed some cover. Seeing that I was due some time off I decided that I’d take it and go to work there. That was what I did. On my way home I didn’t feel like cooking. I thought that I’d order a meal. The only meal that seemed to be there was a potato and egg soup followed by something else. The soup of course wasn’t vegan but what did I care at that moment? I ordered it anyway. When I returned home it arrived. I decided to eat it and took it out of the container, looked at it and suddenly for some reason all my appetite completely disappeared.

When I’d checked my messages earlier there had been a couple on there that needed answering.

One of them concerned a project of work that needs doing in the building. It’s pretty straightforward really – contact Batiments de France to see if we can do it, and if so, then contact the relevant associations that deal with autonomy of the elderly and infirm to see if a subsidy might be obtained.

Batiments de France is the French equivalent of whoever looks after Ancient Monuments.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … this building is a listed building with Batiments de France – an ancient Monument and the fact that I’m living here is quite appropriate seeing as I’m an ancient monument myself.

In principle at least, you can’t even knock a nail in the wall without permission from Batiments de France, and certainly not in a public part of the building where anyone might see it.

Now the procedure that I outlined doesn’t sound complicated but you’ll be surprised (or maybe you won’t) at the Byzantine nature of French administration. This is not a job of 5 minutes.

While I was at it, I had to sort out some accommodation. Our little travel club has decided that its next meeting will be here in Granville in early June so three people from Central Europe are going to descend on me and they’ll need somewhere to stay.

Anyway, that’s all organised now. They won’t be sleeping under a hedge.

Having done all that (and you’ll be surprised how long it takes) I turned my attention to my own things.

Firstly, I made an executive decision – and for the benefit of new readers, of which there are more than a few just now, an executive decision is a decision that, if it turns out to be wrong, the person making it is executed.

"Better counsel comes overnight " said the German playwright and philosopher Gotthold Lessing.

So having given the matter some thought, what I’ve decided is that that mess that I loosely termed a “radio programme” that I prepared yesterday has now gone the Way of the West and I’ll do it all again. In a way it was a good decision too because the notes that I wrote under the influence of this wicked stuff were garbage and so I rewrote many of them this morning.

So having rewritten the notes and waiting for quiet moment (whenever that might be) to dictate them, I started on my Hawkfest.

My opening segue of three tracks is now all assembled and my final track is ready. I’ve tracked down several pieces of work from artists who have been at one of the Hawkfests and I’m up to 36 minutes. I need another 17 minutes and a guy in Congleton who was onstage at one of them will send me some stuff and then the difficult bit of tracking down whatever he hasn’t sent me begins.

Some stuff that I’ve received from an Australian band who were onstage at the second Hawkfest is pretty awful as far as quality goes though, but the music and its context makes it worth including.

At about 17:00 I broke off to go and have a really, really good wash. And I did too – a nice, deep scrub that made me feel so much better. But it was while I was sitting on the sofa changing my socks that I hit the wall.

When I awoke, it was teatime so I made a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg.

No bulghour so I based my stuffing around some couscous that seems to have been here from before the Dawn of Time. And that’s not an exaggeration either because I haven’t been in the shop that sold it since I went to live in Leuven.

However it did actually work and I was quite impressed. Just as well because there’s plenty left for a taco roll tomorrow and then to add to a leftover curry on Wednesday.

So right now, having been shaken about by Rosemary during an Internet text exchange, I’m off to bed.

There’s a Welsh lesson tomorrow but on this anti-potassium stuff I’ve never felt less like going. But we awaken tomorrow and plod on wearily towards the end.

"Dawn is ever the hope of men" said Aragorn, and it will have to be mine right now.

All that I can do is remember the words of Gildor when he said "Courage is found in unlikely places. Be of good hope" but I’m not sure what unlikely places there are here in my little apartment, because I won’t be going anywhere else for a while.

So what I’ll do now is to take my blood pressure. One of the unlikely places where I would like to be would be in the laboratory to see their faces when they receive the results.

The last time that I was in a laboratory was at one of the University’s laboratories in Milton Keynes. There we had a pleasant summer school for two weeks in 1998 where the highlight of our achievement was to discover a cure for which there was no known disease