Tag Archives: helena

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."

Thursday 11th January 2024 – THERE SEEMS TO BE …

… some confusion about when I might be going home.

The doctor who came to see me this morning told me that if all goes well and my improvement continues, I might go home at the end of the weekend or on Monday.

The orderly who has just brought me my evening meal tells me that I might be going home as soon as tomorrow.

And if the evening meal that he brought me is anything to go by, tomorrow isn’t soon enough. On the other hand, if my medical condition isn’t up to it, then the longer that I stay here, the better, even if it means drinking more of the dreaded sodium sulphide.

They gave me another dose of it at midday, and I was out like a light again for several hours. I think in all honesty that they do that simply to sneak in here and turn down the heating while I’m away with the fairies. I wondered why it was going cold here.

So apart from being cold and being away with the fairies, I’ve been a busy bee today. Rhys and Helena have been sending me messages to which I’ve been replying.

Helena is one of my oldest friends and we go back well over 50 years to our school days in Nantwich. She, along with Robert, is part of my personal on-line medical staff, having been a nurse in Yorkshire for quite a while.

A couple of neighbours from Granville have spoken to me on the internet too and my neighbour who is currently in Paris spoke to me on the phone.

There have been the dictaphone notes to transcribe as well. With our amazingly busy schedule Nerina and I had hired help to do some of the more mundane tasks around the house. One of them was cutting all the lawns and there were specific days to do it. We were walking through Willaston one afternoon when it was a lawn-cutting day. Th guy who was cutting our lawn was there with our lawn mower and had just gone into a shop to buy a cup of coffee. So evidently I walked nonchalantly into the shop and said “hello” to him. His jaw dropped completely to the bottom. He’s obviously been doing someone else’s lawn and claiming payment for it as well as claiming payment for ours that he never did. He simply left, and left me with the lawnmower equipment which I had to pick up and bring back to the house

Later on, I was asleep in my hospital room when a machine started up, started to make its alarm noise. I waited a minute to see if it was the case then I rang the bell for the night porter like you do. It was actually for real. It really was bleeping and I really did ring the bell. The night nurse appeared. Of course my dream disappeared completely because what I was dreaming was actually the thruth about what was going on yet I’d done it all in my sleep.

I had a kind of field somewhere that needed cutting. I’d talked to a young Filipino boy whom I knew who worked as a coach driver for a local company taking schoolkids around. His boss had one, a tractor with a grasscutter so we agreed that he’d borrow his boss’s tractor and go to cut our grass one morning. I don’t know whether he’d discussed it with his boss or not but that wasn’t my particular concern. We drove him up there that morning but he was in quite an emotional state, going on about how he hated the job, how he hated the coaches, how he hated the boss, how he hated everything, how the boss had paid him £70:00 short on his wages once. It was a real emotional tirade from this young boy. I was sitting listening because if he really was going to throw in his job, that might make a vacancy for me. Talking about tatty coaches – I’ve driven tatty coaches in the past and it’s never bothered me. Tatty bosses, that’s never bothered me either too much so I was listening to all of this. We turned up at the buses place. The tractor with lawn mower attachments was still there. We all stepped out of the car and walked over to it

Having said that during the night, I was always very careful about whose coaches I drove. It was mainly for Shearings and its subsidiaries and one local coach company. And if I was operating “on my own account” the coaches only ever came from one company.

From several other companies I respectfully declined work, including the company who shared the yard from where our taxis operated.

Loads of medical staff have been by today. The doctor has stopped the perfusions because my legs are swelling and regrettably, after all my efforts, I’m gaining weight. So there will be probably something else that will keep me awake during the night now.

But it’s like I say – they give me some medication to cure something and it just creates a problem somewhere else in my body. I don’t think that I could have been assembled correctly in the factory.

The physiotherapist came round, took me for a walk, and then gave me plenty of exercises to do while I’m sitting down, many of which I was already doing.

So while I can certainly criticise the food, I can’t criticise the care that I’m receiving.

While all of this was going on, I’ve been listening to “Help Yourself”.

Effectively an artificial band created by Famepushers, the Entertainment Agency, as a support for singer-songwriter Malcolm Morley, they might be a London band but they have always been considered as honorary Welshmen following their participation in the “All Good Clean Fun” tour, their appearance at the Patti Pavilion with a whole host of Welsh bands at Christmas 1973 and the fact that on the drums was Dave Charles, who for many years was sound engineer at Rockfield Recording Studios in Monmouth.

Due to a failing memory I can’t remember where I met them but it was in the days when they had Ken Whaley and not Paul Burton on bass guitar, although it was Burton at the Patti Pavilion, I seem to remember.

Their claim to fame is the legendary track REAFFIRMATION on their album BEWARE THE SHADOW that just goes to prove that you don’t need to play a lead guitar solo of 10,000 notes in 10 seconds to produce something that is one of the best, if not the most bizarre, lead guitar solo in the history of rock music.

So right now that I’ve finished my notes I intend to go to bed, where I’m hoping to have the best, if not the most bizarre, dreams possible. Not that there’s too much chance of that with all of the noise that goes on around here, but we can always live in hope.

And tomorrow I’ll find out more about going home. But I can’t wait to be back there, if not for the food and decent internet.

Using a bluetooth tethering system is like going back 30 years to the days of dial-up and 14.4 kbs external modems. Click on a link and then go for a coffee and a walk around the village while it opens.

It really is doing my head in.

Monday 28th August 2023 – I’VE BEEN UP …

… to my ears in paperwork today.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been letting the paperwork pile up while I’ve been busy doing other things so today I set down and sorted it all out.

One great pile ended up in the recycling, another pile went into the file, a third pile related to my Welsh course over the last year or two so I’ve organised that, and a fourth, more important part of it, went into my medical folder to take with me on Wednesday.

And surprisingly, later on I actually found the most important piece of paper that I had actually forgotten, and I would have been quite embarrassed had I set out without it on Wednesday.

Tomorrow, I shall be carrying on with my organisation because I have my rail tickets for Leuven in a week or so that need booking, some paperwork that needs to be sent to the hospital for Wednesday and also some stuff that needs ordering from the internet.

One thing is for sure, and that it’s all keeping me out of mischief.

Whatever might have been going on during the night was also keeping me out of mischief, because by the looks of things I didn’t go far during the night.

In actual fact I was awake at 06:30 and was thinking about getting up, but I must have fallen asleep again because the alarm awoke me again at 07:00

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I went and had a shower to prepare myself for the arrival of the nurse to give me my weekly injection. He was however late and that upset my plans somewhat.

As well as sorting out the European Paper Mountain I’ve been going through and carrying on my little project involving tidying up the hard drive in the computer. I’ve cleared out over 10GB of space on my C Drive and over 80GB from the second drive in the computer.

And that reminds me – going back to the other night and the dream about your computer program spying on you, how many of you have your personal data stored on your C drive in the folders “suggested” and “installed for you” by the operating system, therefore in a file path that it known by almost everyone in the World who has ever used a computer?

Something else that I’ve been doing is talking to one of the daughters of my niece. She’s the one with whom I have the most in common.

She’s marrying in late November in Michigan and I’ve been invited to the wedding. Ordinarily I would move mountains to be there but going alone on crutches, being unable to carry anything with me is going to make it totally impossible.

If the wedding were to take place at the family home, that wouldn’t be so bad because I have clothes and everything there in a big plastic box so going there with nothing wouldn’t be a problem. But Michigan on my own is out of the question.

There was a little stuff on the dictaphone from the night. Not much, so I must have had a calm night for once. I was back working for Shearings last night at the depot in Holmes Chapel. I’d just taken over a coach and the tourists were already on it for the next holiday. I went to check one or two things and found that the ashtrays on the coach were full of rubbish which disappointed me. I thought that the previous driver would have cleaned it. I fetched my little bucket and paintbrush and began to empty the ashtrays. Suddenly the coach set off. I turned round and asked who was driving the coach. Someone said the name of a girl whom I knew from school (and with whom I’m still in touch). She had come to the depot with me to have a look round. I went down and asked her what was happening. She replied “the guy in charge told us to go”. I said something like “I had the shock of my life when I was emptying the ashtrays and the coach set off like that”. I asked her if she had a PSV. She replied that she’d worked for a Charity or something where they put some people through their PSVs. She’d ended up spending a week with Shearings to learn. She asked where we were going. I replied “down the motorway, coming off at Cannock and going down the A5. We came to the motorway and ended up in a big building, the 2 of us, like an old wooden market with closed doors etc. We couldn’t find our way out, wandering around here. We asked one stallholder but he replied with a load of gibberish that we didn’t understand and he wandered off. We sat there looking at each other thinking “how are we going to return to the coach and continue with this trip?”.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper as usual. I’ve no idea what happened but this was the best one that I’ve made. A fresh one, cooked (of course) in the air fryer to perfection. I’ve really got the hang of this now for certain things

So tomorrow I’m going to be really busy ready for my trip on Wednesday so I need to be on form. It’s already later than usual so I won’t have too much time to rest on my laurels but as long as I have some good companions during the night I’ll be fine I hope.

While we’re on the subject of food preparation … "well, one of us is" – ed … my fruit buns were also the best that I’ve made so far too. I’ll have to make some more like that.

Thursday 3rd August 2023 – YOU CAN TELL …

… what kind of night I had last night simply by looking at the dictaphone and counting the number of times I dictated something. We actually reached double figures, and it’s not every day that that happens.

Furthermore, I was actually up and about before the alarm went off too.

Only by a matter of a handful of seconds, it’s quite true, but nevertheless, it still counts. When I opened my eyes and saw that it was 06:59 on the fitbit I thought that I may as well make the effort.

One thing’s for sure is that I won’t be up early tomorrow. We had football tonight – Hwlffordd v B36 Torshavn in European competition.

1-0 down from the first leg, they rode their luck all through the first half and with half an hour to go actually managed to score a goal that made the score equal over the two legs.

The game went into extra time but Torshavn scored what can only be described as a “controversial penalty” to knock the Welsh side out. Manager Tony Pennock was quite right to be incensed but I notice that he kept very quiet about the penalty that I and the commentators would have awarded against his team earlier in the game to which the referee waved “play on”.

The post-match interviews were quite entertaining. Pennock came out with a few comments that reminded me of Ron Atkinson and his famous quote of “I never comment on referees – and I won’t break the habit of a lifetime for that prat!”

Centre-forward Ben Fawcett, who scored Hwlffordd’s goal, reminded me of Jim Finks, one-time coach of the New Orleans Saints gridiron team who once famously said “We’re not allowed to comment on the lousy officiating”

So with extra time being played, the game didn’t finish until long after 23:00 so it’s going to be a long night tonight.

It’ll be just like today when it took me an absolute age to actually start work – after a very late morning coffee.

And the first thing that I did was to sort out the music for the next radio programme. That took much longer than it ought to have done.

One thing that took the time was that I had to track down a certain track that I needed. In this programme, whenever it will be broadcast, we’ll be celebrating the birthday of a rather obscure musician.

Her partner plays a major rôle in our radio programmes and she actually wrote the words for one or two of his more rare songs and played keyboards on a couple. We can’t actually celebrate her birthday without playing some of her music.

While I was at it, I wrote the text for some of the music that I’ll be playing and I’ll write some more tomorrow. With a bit of luck, God’s help and a Bobby, I might have two radio programmes to prepare on Sunday.

And then there was the dictaphone. And I couldn’t believe the amount of stuff that was on it from the night. I was at the football last night. The town where I was living was a small French town roughly the size of Granville but in the interior down south. They were playing a game of football. I went along to watch the match. There was a lot happening that I’ve forgotten but something that sticks in my mind was that I was chatting to a group of people some of whom were young girls, schoolgirls or whatever. At one point the ball came over our way. I got off my chair and went to pick it up to throw it back in but then I found that I had real difficulty getting back to my feet. When I did, some girl had sat in my chair. I made some remark about it. She said that she’d sat in there first. I thought “never mind”. There was a couple of empty chairs around here and there so I took one of those, sat next to them and continued to watch the game. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember now.

When the alarm went off I awoke with a real start. I was in such a deep sleep. I didn’t know where I was for a minute. When I looked round I thought that the cleaner was here. She was trying to tell me that she has to cut down her hours because one of her family needed help. I was trying to get my head round all this information. I looked at my watch and saw that it was 04:00 and I’d obviously dreamt the alarm somehow. That’s really surprising. It sounded so real too. It goes without saying that there was no cleaner here etc, just me waking up spontaneously for no good reason so I turned over and went back to sleep. I really couldn’t believe it.

Then a surprise for a friend of mine. We’d heard from a restaurant in St Malo that a well-known brand of gravy actually contained animal products. I went to make further enquiries and discovered that it was indeed true. I swapped a meal of greasy sausages and things like that for another kind of meal but I can’t remember what the other meal was now. I’m having a real problem remembering my dreams at the moment. I don’t know why that is.

There was another dream where I was having to see a heart specialist. He’d given me an appointment at 08:10. I went to see him and was there early. There were a couple of other doctors’ surgeries in the same place. One woman came in to sit down. Someone else came in, probably a doctor because he went into one of the side rooms. He then came out and began to talk to this woman about Patagonia and going to have an operation done there. That immediately appealed to me. I began to think about life in Patagonia, how I would go there, how I was going to travel, what I was going to do. I was all building myself up in this dream for a trip to Patagonia on the basis of absolutely no evidence whatsoever.

We were wandering around a place in rural Spain. I wanted to go to use the bathroom. I set out to find it. I went past a guy who had a box. He had 4 small logs in it. Sitting across the logs was a French bread pizza. He was trying to light the logs presumably to cook his pizza so I told him what a wonderful thing it was. He didn’t understand so I tried to say it in Spanish. He still didn’t understand me. Everyone with me asked me what I was doing so I explained. I found the bathroom and walked in. To my surprise it was just a communal room with about 6 WCs in it, no partitions or anything. You just sat there or stood there in full view of everyone else and did what you had to do. There was no blushing or anything like that from anyone except from me of course.

That was actually the first time that I’ve had a dream in Spanish.

There was a sequel to this dream as well. A young Spanish boy whose father went to discipline him. He suddenly had a huge pain in his groin that doubled him up. He was rolling around the floor in agony. While this was going on his son was there. This pain didn’t ease off until the guy decided that he’d change his mind about punishing his son. Once he’d made that decision the pain stopped

There was also something about a football match in Spain. While the father was doubled up in pain the opposition team grabbed hold of the football and tried to take a quick free kick and roared off down the field before the referee stopped them and brought them back. It was those two new players from Hwlffordd, Crossdale and the other one … “Owen” – ed … who were doing this.

There was something about cricket too, trying to explain it to a new player about how he could learn the game by watching so when his team was in he’d be out there and he could watch what was happening, then get himself out and come back in, then prepare to go back out again when his team was in, all kinds of stuff like that, this particular dream that I can’t remember the fine details now

And finally there was another dream that I’ve had before. I was with Nerina who was on a bike and I was on foot. We were chatting as she was cycling. We were in Stoke on Trent and came to a steep hill. Something had happened that she had done something that had not been the kind of thing that I would do. People had believed that we had separated. Nerina had strung them on a little. When we came to the steep hill there was a short cut for people on foot so I took it and she continued along the road. She fell in with one of these people who then began to ask her questions about what she was up to. When the short cut re-joined the road we joined up again. By now I was running up the hill and she was cycling. There was a couple of people standing on the pavement ahead of us, one of whom I recognised. A car that was coming up the hill suddenly mounted the pavement and hit these 2 people knocking them flying and drove off again. By now we’d all arrived at this particular point and we tried to ask one of these guys what exactly had happened

It’s no surprise that there was no time to do anything else other than this. There was tea of course, a leftover chili sin carné that was as delicious as ever, and then I dashed in here for the football.

Now the game is over and my notes are finished, I’m off to bed. I’m nipping into town on the bus tomorrow for a little shop and then I’ll probably be flat out asleep in the afternoon recovering from the effort.

That assumes that I wake up in time to go to the shops. Another night like last night and I won’t wake up for a week.

Sunday 31st October 2021 – JUST LOOK AT …

… this gorgeous loaf of bread that I have made! I think that I’ve finally after all this time mastered the technique of having the correct shape.

And I hope that it tastes as good as it looks. Why shouldn’t it? The pizza that I made was one of the best that I have ever made so the bread ought to be the same. I can’t wait until tomorrow to try it.

But let’s turn our attention to today instead. And for once in my life in recent times, I actually had a really decent night’s sleep. I fell into bed at about 00:30.

Apart from one or two brief moments I slept all the way through to 10:40 too – or 11:40, because we changed the time today. I hope that you did too. Put the clock back one hour if you live in the real world.

But if you live in the United Kingdom under the Tories, set your clock back 200 years to workhouses and foundlings’ homes, kids working up chimneys and underneath weaving looms, abandoned kids living on the streets and desperate women prostituting themselves in order to be able to earn some money to buy food.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had promised to eschew politics on my pages, but sometimes it’s just not possible.

Having taken my medication it took me a while to sort myself out as usual. I was living with Nerina last night and we had our house. I’d actually parked a car on the lawn to do something while she was out and then put the car back. She came back and thought that she’d detected the trace of a car. I assured her that there wasn’t and I hadn’t done. The next-door neighbour came round and was talking to Nerina. She went totally berserk afterwards because of the car that the neighbour had mentioned. I had a huge row with the neighbour and Nerina had a huge row with me. The neighbour had a door from my garage that went into her house which she didn’t normally use but she decided that she was going to start to use it so I decided that I would fit a bolt on the door to stop her. This led to Nerina packing her bags. I had a heart-to-heart talk with her. I don’t know whether the situation cooled down. She went through to the kitchen to talk to this woman while I started to make this bolt to assemble to put on the door anyway but everything was hanging in the air.

Later on I was in Canada with my niece and her husband and talking about library books, taking them back. There was a box with some old library books in it that were for sale as no longer used. One was a Haynes manual for Cortinas MkI and MkII made in Canada. of course I was extremely interested in this and went to take it. All I needed now was a car to go with it. He started to tell me about a couple of old cars that he knew of round near where he lived but it was a question of whether they had any Cortinas and whether I could prise any away from their owners.

Having done that I paired off the music for the next radio programme that I’ll be preparing tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll get a good start on it as I’m not going anywhere until later in the afternoon.

Once that was finished I uploaded last night’s photos to the computer and checked them through. Not very many – a mere 163 of them all told. That is going to be a lot of work to edit all of those, but it needs to be done, and soon too

After lunch I made a start on the journal entry from yesterday but I didn’t make much progress. After about an hour or so I had to knock off to go and make the dough for my loaf of bread. I need something for my salad to go on tomorrow lunchtime.

having finished the dough and leaving it to proof, I wandered off outside for my afternoon walk.

Down to the end of the car park I went for a peer over the wall to see what was happening on the beach. There weren’t very many people down there this afternoon, and a couple of those seemed to be on the point of leaving it.

That was quite probably because there wasn’t all that much beach to be on right now. the tide is well up by now and those who are staying down there will need to get a move on if they want to leave with dry feet.

It’s not just the tide that is going to be causing them a problem either.

Although the wind is nothing like as bad as it has been, there’s obviously something major going on somewhere out at sea because just look at the height of these waves coming in.

These will roll onto the beach and push up a lot higher than they ordinarily would in calmer weather, and many people don’t seem to take that into account when they go onto the beach with a rough sea like this.

The weather that had created these waves seemed to be so intense that I had a look out to see what was going on over at the Ile de Chausey.

You can see that something is happening there judging by the haze or mist that’s out there obscuring the view. And that white boat out there was playing “peek-a boo” with us. Sometimes you could see it, and other times it was hidden by a big wave.

On the path down to the headland there were plenty of people, and I seem somehow to have lost or misplaced my facemask and I couldn’t remember where I’d put my other one so I was without. I hope that this isn’t going to be a sign of anything.

Across the path and the car park and down to the end of the headland I was catching the full effects of whatever it was that was going on.

And it wasn’t just me who was taking advantage of it either. There were a couple of people who had just come down the steps and they were presumably waiting for someone else to join them.

If they were to sit down on the bench there, they would have a grandstand view of events. Just look at these waves, and I bet that they look even more impressive from even closer to.

That reminded me that I ought to go to check the sea wall at the outer harbour. It was something of a damp squib last time I looked, so I was hoping for something better today.

Off along the path on top of the headland, I stopped at a suitable place to see how the waves were doing. And I didn’t have long to wait.

This isn’t the best that we have seen – far from it – but it’s still better than what we’ve been seeing just recently. And I bet that those people standing on the sea wall were enjoying every minute of it.

They say that it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow anyone any goos, and certainly someone’s not having the best of it.

That’s the air-sea rescue helicopter that has just gone flying by overhead on its way back to base. I wonder it it’s been out on an emergency rescue.

Back here I gave the dough a second kneading and shaping and then started to prepare my pizza. As well as all of that I scrubbed, diced and blanched 2 kilos of carrots that I had bought yesterday, spoke to someone on the internet about the somg “Grasshopper” that I’ve mentioned quite often recently, and spent all of the evening chatting to a friend (I do have one) in the UK.

So now, everything is done, my notes are written and so I’m off to bed. An early start in the morning and I have a lot to do. So I need my sleep.

Monday 11th May 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… the photos of this evening’s beautiful sunset, let me tell you a little about my rather less-than-successful day.

It actually started off exactly as I predicted. Pretty much beautiful weather throughout the detention à domicile and when it was lifted somewhat, at midnight, we were in the middle of a howling gale and torrential rainstorm.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall, having followed my adventures for any great length of time, MANY SIMILAR OCCURRENCES in the past and should, if they had had any sense, have cleaned up at the bookie’s, having bet their mortgage on this happening.

When I awoke … errr … somewhat later than planned, the rain had stopped. But the howling gale was still howling away outside. And it kept it up all day too.

After the medication I went to have a listen to the dictaphone. And sure enough, I’d been off on my travels again. I was talking to one of the girls at work and trying to build some kind of relationship with her. It wasn’t until we were talking about going to a football match so she dressed in a blue denim jacket and blue jeans that I realised exactly who she was – someone who I once trained at a job that I had briefly in the 1980s and that was a name from the past.

As it happened, I did quite like her, but she was already married so that was that. ironically, a few weeks after I’d left and moved on to pastures new, she and her husband separated.

A little later on (during the night, not during the 1980s) I was off again.

I’d come down to breakfast in a posh hotel where I’d been staying. There were already quite a few people down there even though it was early and I wasn’t the first. We all had a good chat and had some kind of breakfast and the place slowly filled up. I decided that I wanted to take a coffee to my room which was one of the options offered by the hotel so I hunted down the reffer – a girl walled Maria, a Slavonic type of blonde girl and she’s someone I know but I can’t think who – it wasn’t the pretty Polish girl who I knew in Stoke on Trent – so I asked her about the coffee . Sh said “yes, where’s your chit?”. She had to sign it and I asked if I had to sign it as well. She said no, her signature was good. So off she went. Then I awoke and I was lying here for about two minutes wondering what had happened to my coffee and when was I going to get it before I realised that it had been in a dream and no it wasn’t.

It really was that realistic, and there have been a few like that just recently, as regular readers will recall.

As an aside, someone else whom I know, a girl with whom I was at school, is also taking part in this project.

She contacted me first thing in the morning.
“You appeared in my dream last night, Eric”.
“Did I?” I enquired
“No” she said. “I fought you off”.

I’ll get my coat.

After breakfast, I made a start on the next radio project.

And organising myself like I have done, it was certainly a lot easier to choose the music. In fact, I was rather spoiled for choice and that’s a very good sign.

By the time that I knocked off for lunch I’d

chosen all of the tracks (except the last one)
combined them into pairs
chosen a speech for my guest
written part of the text for the broadcast

It’s not finished though, and it won’t be finished tomorrow either.

Tomorrow morning I have the first part of my Welsh course (it’s amazing, isn’t it – I’ve signed on for three on-line courses to pass the time during the detention à domicile and they all wait to start until it’s over) and in the afternoon I’m baking. The bread is almost running out and I need more apple purée too.

This afternoon I started off my doing some coursework for my Welsh lesson. My grandmother is Welsh and all of the little words she used to say to us when she dandled us on her knee were, as I subsequently learnt, terms of endearment in Welsh. I can still remember her saying a word that sounded like “cooch” when she used to hug us, and that of course is the Welsh word “cwch”.

When she died, my grandfather threw away her family’s Welsh bible with all of the family tree in it (it stopped in 1912) and I went to rescue it.

A coach driver with whom I worked was a native Welsh-speaker and he taught me quite a lot of basic Welsh and I worked my way slowly through the Bible, comparing it with an English one, but I’m determined to learn Welsh properly.

Where we lived as tiny kids, in that part of Wales known as “Part of Flint” until we moved to Cheshire, it was very angiicised. No-one there spoke Welsh and there was even a movement at one time to attach the area to Shropshire during the Local Government reorganisations of the early 1970s.

But you only had to look at my father, small, dark-haired, to know that he was a Celt, not a Saxon or a Norse.

Da iawn

That was the cue for, at last, going out for an afternoon walk.

The footpath down aunderneath the walls below the rue du Nord was open and there were quite a few people there admiring the wicked wind that was whipping up the waves into a foam of frenzy just offshore.

On the lower right-hand side of the photo you’ll see the stone walls of the medieval fish trap.

Water would overflow that during high tide and bring in a pile of fish. As the tide receded the water would seep out through the gaps in the rocks but the fish would be trapped.

People would just go down at low tide and pick up the fish.

Talking of tidal traps, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that here at the Plat Gousset there is a tidal swimming pool, but over the years it’s fallen into neglect and disrepair.

But it’s clear that they are anticipating that firstly, the beaches will reopen sometime soon and secondly, we are going to have an influx of visitors this summer.

They have a digger down there digging out years of accumulated sand and silt. And then, I suppose, they’ll repair the leaks in the walls and it’ll be back in business again.

A few days ago, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we noticed that Marité had moved to a new mooring and I said that I’d see if I could find out why.

My walk continued across the Square Maurice Marland where there’s a point that overlooks the harbour. But there was no evidence of anything at all to suggest that she has had to move.

The two Joly France boats are down there and look as if they have encroached upon Marité’s mooring, but that can’t be the reason why she’s moved.

Back here I amended today’s web page, fixed the one for the other web site and then attacked some photos from July 2019. I’m now at the Storhordi Nature Reserve on the island of Heimaey off the coast of Iceland.

Halfway through I was interrupted by a phone call. It seems that in these times the Jehovah’s Witnesses are conducting their Ministry by telephone.

We had a very pleasant half-hour’s worth of chat during which I tied him up in a big theological knot.

There was the usual hour on the guitars and I was feeling more enthusiastic again about it, and then I broke off for tea.

There was some stuffing left over from Saturday so I tipped in a small tin of kidney beans and tomato sauce, and had taco rolls and rive for tea.

More pie for pudding with that Alpro almond soya dessert and it was just as delicious as before.

The evening rune were something of a nightmare with the wicked, howling gale blowing about.

The run up the hill was a real struggle and I felt every inch of the way. There were quite a few people out there, not as many as I was expecting, and they were watching the activity out at sea.

This fishing boat was certainly providing a lot of entertainment.

She’s been fishing out in the baie de Mont St Michel and she evidently has a full hold on board.

You can tell that by looking at the gulls surrounding her. There must be well over a hundred out there following her in and I hope that the crew are all wearing protactive headgear.

My run down the Boulevard Vaufleury, the longest one, was aborted tonight. The gale was such that it was a struggle to even walk down there, never mind run.

But as soon as I went out of the wind I could run again and I ran round to the viewpoint on the rue du Nord.

That’s where all of my sunset photos were taken this evening, as it sank behind the clouds just above the horizon.

After watching it go down, I turned round and ran on back here.

Bedtime now and I’m not sorry. Our detention à domicile has ended and in some ways I’m rather disappointed. I was doing so well in organising myself and catching up with the arrears.

Let’s see how the future unfolds.

Monday 9th March 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about those piles of gravel that had been appearing over the last couple of days on the quayside down in the harbour.

This blurred and illisible photo (I still have a lot to learn about the NIKON 1 J5) shows a ship that I have every reason to believe is Neptune moored at the loading bay by the conveyors where they ship the gravel on board.

At long last we’ve had a gravel boat in the harbour and I shall go out tomorrow (and try to be early) just to confirm that it is indeed she. It would be just my luck for her to have a rapid turn-round and for me to miss her.

But here’s something else quite interesting.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that bad parking is a regular topic in these pages, particularly in the boulevard Vaufleury which is on a service bus route, is just 50 metres from the High School and is an access road for the fleet of school buses that come in the opposite direction to the service buses.

Where Madame (it is indeed a Madame) is parked is
1) the wrong way round
2) half on the pavement
3) blocking the buses
4) at school chucking-out time
5) just about 20 FEET from a huge free car park
so finally, at long, long last, the local police are doing something about it and they are making her move her vehicle.

That is pretty much encouraging news.

What else is encouraging news is that I was awake before the first alarm went off, and I was out of bed before the final alarm. Crashing out half-way through last night’s entry and so giving up and going to bed was good news in that case.

After the medication, I had a look at the dictaphone. Apparently I was in this labyrinth of a theatre complex last night all the way through this underground reception hall place with doors going off leading into theatre auditoriums and all kinds of things. There were all kinds of announcements about the place, many of them were out of date, 2011 I noticed. There were all kinds of things happening here. But I was just wandering through listening to the radio. They were talking about “hypocrites of the year” I suppose – some guy who was telling us all about how keen he was for this and how good he was going to be for that but while he was doing that he had increased all your library charges. Someone else was going on about how brilliant a cricketer he might have been, all this kind of thing, but he made one fatal mistake and that was heroin. I was drifting through this auditorium that had a couple of very faded leather chairs and the leather was worn out in certain places. Something to do with catching a London Underground train somewhere. There was a thing too about caring for your vans if you were on a limited income, like a hippy, and a warning that the supply of LDV vans even in scrapyards was drying up now – the van that was chosen for an example was a silver LDV M-reg.
A little later I was outside with someone who was supposed to be Liz’s husband but he was more like the father of a couple of friends of mine. He had Liz’s daughter with him. She’d been on a student exchange and she had a student back with them. He was saying “you’ll have to come round for a game of pinocle or something one of these days. We’ll have an evening of five people”. He indicated roughly a place in eastern Manchester, Hyde or that area Stalybridge where he was living but he didn’t go into any further details about that. I was wondering who this “five” was because I knew that he was on his own, the daughter had her friend and there was me, so who was the 5th? I couldn’t think.

After breakfast I had a look at the digital sound files. I managed to unsort three of them too. One of them however needs much more attention because for some unknown reason there’s a load of “additional music” which seems to be a mixture of selections of various tracks, so I’d like to know what was going on there.

It isn’t the first one like that that I had found either.

By now it was time to go for my shower and to clean myself up somewhat, and then head up into town.

Not that I actually got very far before I was interrupted.

Remember yesterday when I photographed all of the pontoon-supporting pillars on the quayside and I mused that they might be assembling them in two rows of four?

Here’s the big floating pontoon travelling across the harbour with one of the pillars within its clutches almost at the place where one would expect to see it if we were going to have a fourth pillar in that row.

And the scaffolding too. We talked about that as well.

My attention was drawn from a distance that the masts of Marité were not where they would usually be. And that was strange because she doesn’t usually roam around the harbour but stays put in her habitual little corner.

But she’s definitely moved, and the reason for that is that they’ve put the scaffolding, complete with OSB wallboards, in her usual berth and there are a couple of guys down there doing something.

So at least I know that the scaffolding is actually a working platform for some kind of task.

From here I headed down into the town centre and up the rue Couraye towards LIDL.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that several weeks ago we watched them fit some kind of protective shuttering around the front of the boulangerie here and start to smash out the old window.

The protective shuttering has now gone and, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, the new shop front is in glorious display. That’s quite a nice job that they’ve done there. It looks quite good.

Now for the first time ever in my whole life, I’ve seen every till open at the same time in a LIDL. And that will give you some kind of indication of just how busy it was in there today.

No cucumbers, which is a problem, and nothing else of any real interest as far as I was concerned. All in all, a little disappointing. 3-kilo bags of apples was about the closest that I was to a bargain. And they won’t last long now that I’m making my purées myself.

On the way back I headed to La Mie Caline for my dejeunette but i was held up outside the shop as Birnam Wood went past on its way to Dunsinane.

There was actually a tractor and trailer parked around the corner with several large plants stacked thereupon, and presumably this machine was busy distributing them around the town.

It’s certainly a different approach to beautifying the town. I’ve said often enough … “indeed” – ed … that there isn’t enough greenery in this town and we ought to have some more.

Having picked up my dejeunette I headed back home again.

Only half-way up the rue des Juifs before I was distracted yet again. Not that I would know much about these things but they look pretty much like new pontoon supports and new pontoons over there on the west wall of the harbour.

What with one thing and another, I can see that I’m going to be quite busy tomorrow having a look at all of these things. But at least the harbour gates will be closed again by 09:30 or thereabouts so it doesn’t have to be an “early” early.

And in other news, there’s activity in the chantier navale today too.

It’s been quite busy in there up until very recently, but regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the boats have been going back into the water one by one until just now we had none whatever left.

But that’s all changed now. There are two boats in there now, one of which is a large yacht that might actually be La Granvillaise. I’ll go for a stroll over there this afternoon to check on that.

Back at my apartment I made myself a coffee and then split up a fourth music file. Pretty straightforward except that there were three extra tracks on it that aren’t on the LP that I have, so I had to track down which version of the master tape I had obtained so that I could identify the tracks.

There was still time before lunch to send off my project for this weekend and to start a new one to add to the stock.

After lunch, I carried on with the radio project but didn’t get too far before I was overwhelmed with a wave of fatigue. I didn’t quite crash out but for about 15-20 minutes I was teetering on the edge and didn’t actually do any work or anything while I was sitting there

By now it was raining outside when I went for my afternoon walk.

Neptune was due to come into port, that I knew, so when I saw an object the same colour as Neptune far out to sea in the English Channel I took a photo with the intention of enlarging it back in the apartment.

Which I did, and it wasn’t Neptue at all but one of the fishing boats heading back to the port. Neptune must still ne well out of range, which wouldn’t be a surprise because there’s a while yet before the harbour gates will open and she won’t want to sit around outside waiting.

She might not want to, but everyone else is.

The tide is well out and the little creek that leads up to the side of the fish-processing plant is only just starting to fill with water. It’ll be another half an hour or so before she’ll be deep enough to accept the fishing boats but they are all starting to congregate just outside.

There were at least 10 of them out there – maybe more but I had run out of fingers by this point and I wasn’t going to start taking off my shoes and socks. Mind you, had I had my hands in my pockets, I might have been able to count up to 11.

While I was walking round across the lawn by the War memorial, I noticed this.

We haven’t had an earthquake or a landslide or anything. That house is actually built like that. It’s what they call a trompe l’oeil – “something that cheats the eye” and it’s the window thats aligned strangely to follow the contours of the roofs rather than being in the hotizontal/vertical plane.

What’s bewildering me right now though is why I never noticed that before. It’s not like me to miss out on something this.

Anyway, enough of this. I continued on my way around the headland to go to see what was going on in the chantier navale.

And I was right here too. It’s my lucky day, isn’t it? The “G90” painted on the side of the yacht tells us that it is indeed La Granvillaise down there on blocks.

Crowds of people milling round her too so there’s clearly something important going on with her. At least, I imagine that the people are there for her. It’s unlikely that a fishing boat would receive that much attention unless she had caught the Loch Ness Monster.

Yesterday, you’ll recall that we saw a couple of kayaks out there in the baie de Mont St Michel.

And so when I saw something else quite small out there in that general direction, I reckoned that it might be another one so I took another photograph of it to examine back in the comfort and safety of my apartment.

But it wasn’t a kayak at all but one of the small flat-bottomed boats that they use for transporting the boxes of seafood to the quayside from boats that have for one reason or another not been able to moor at the fish-processing plant.

And earlier this morning we saw the large flaoting pontoon carrying one of the pillars across the harbour.

A short while later the noise of the pile-driver started up and it’s been going on for most of the day. And so I had expected them to have made substantial progress, and I was quite right about that.

It’s been pounded quite well and quite deeply into the bed of the harbour and I imagine that they’ll be connecting up some pontoons to it in early course.

It’s certainly interesting.

And while I was musing on this, I witnessed the “police interaction” that I mentioned earlier.

Back here I did a little more to the radio project but ended up having an hour or so playing with the bass guitar and the 6-string electric/acoustic. It’s been a good while since I had a decent play about and I must work harder on this and make more of an effort.

Tea was a delicious stuffed pepper with rice, followed by some apple pie and coconut soya stuff. And despite the absence of spices, it was really nice. I’ll have to make a few more like that one of these days.

But I’m really going to have to buy a bigger fridge and a bigger freezer.

For my evening walk I went to see what was going on with the winds.

The tide is well out now but the wind is still causing the waves to smash against the wall down on the Plat Gousset. I bet that they didn’t do much repair work on that wall today.

My two runs weren’t a problem, except that my first run had to be on a different course due to waterlogging. And then I went to have a look at Neptune.

Now i’m back here and ready for bed. I’ll finish (I hope) the radio project tomorrow and then I can deal with another outstanding matter.

However did I find the time to go to work?

Friday 24th January 2020 – THAT ISN’T …

… the news that I was hoping to hear. Not at all.

My blood count is down to 8.8 – something that will not surprise any regular readers of this rubbish because they will recall that I’ve been mentioning over the last couple of weeks the fact that I’ve not been feeling myself … “just as well” – ed.

Worse though is the fact that my kidneys are now playing up again. They want me to see a kidney specialist the next time that I come.

It looks as if I’m starting to break up. But that was something that was always on the cards. People start to die of this illness after 5 years, and although I was diagnosed with it only 4.25 years ago, there’s no telling how long I had been suffering before I was taken to hospital.

Last night, despite the comfortable bed, I had a very mixed sleep. Tossing and turning around, waking up, all of that. There had been time to go on a voyage or two though.

We started off on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour again and we were all having to get off to go for a coach drive. There were crowds of people in this square waiting for the buses and there was a lot going on. Some people who we were with decided that they weren’t going to do as they had other things that they really wanted to do. Anyway it was to see the statue of Sir John Slessor . They asked me if I knew anything about Sir John Slessor. I said “yes, he was an Anglo-Irish guy who was associated with Polar Exploration at one time”. I told a bit about a story but I can’t remember the bit now. There were crowds of people milling around and someone came up to me and asked me if we were going on a train. I said “no, we’re going on a bus”. Someone else asked the same question. There were loads and loads of Arab kids around and every time that I got up to go somewhere they would sit at my seat and I would have to go and grab my seat back again from him. We were sitting there waiting for these buses to come. I had some rare church relics with me – a box of something and a china – porcelain cross, white with blue edgings and I was afraid that one of these days I was going to break these, the way that I’m picking them up and putting them down. I can’t remember who I was with now but I was with some woman or other on this trip.
Later on, I was at the radio and I’d interviewed a rock band. It was an interview that I had done by chance with no plan in mind and I’d had a call or something for one of these programmes so I sent them that.

The alarm went off as usual and I was out of bed before the third alarm which is good news. And after the medication and breakfast, seeing as my appointment isn’t until 13:30, I attacked some radio stuff.

Not one project, but in fact two. The music for the first one is chosen (except the last track of course) and I’ve chosen half for the second one. I may as well use my free time here profitably.

There was a break while I went to the Spar shop for some bread.

At the back of the Condo Gardens here in the Windmolenveldstraat it doesn’t look good at all – or at least, it didn’t. But it seems that they are making a concerted effort to tidy it up so that it looks pretty.

The new fence looks really nice – and what a pity some low-life character has decided to leave his mark on it. That’s the kind of thing that makes me quite fed up.

A little further on down the Tiensestraat there are some exciting signs of activity.

They are using a stone-cutter to slice huge chunks out of the pavement and they are installing tactile pavement right by where the kerb drops are for the pedestrian crossings.

As an aside, I once had a female friend who worked for the Royal National Institute for the Blind and she reckoned that she had some of the responsibility for introducing tactile pavement into the UK.

Back here, I made myself a butty or two and round about 12:00 I headed off up town.

Straight away, back in the Tiensestraat, I was interrupted by an old car.

We haven’t seen an old car in a while so I reckoned that I had better photograph it. According to the badge, it’s a Lotus 7, and according to its front number plate, it was registered in 1965.

But these are things that you can’t take for granted. Many Lotus 7s were sold in home-assembly kits and there were several other clones doing the rounds too. So you accept with care the “evidence” of the badge.

There’s the little open-air fruit and veg market today in the Herbert Hooverplein.

That was my immediate destination as I wanted an apple and a pear to take to the hospital with me. But having waited for about a week while the assistants served a couple of the slowest customers that I’ve ever seen, I rather lost patience.

Yes, I gave it up as a bad job and abandoned my prospective purchases and carried on the the hospital.

Regular readers of the rubbish will recall what I’m going to be discussing next because we’ve been keeping an eye on these.

We’ve looked at the Hospital Sint Pieter here in the Brusselsestraat. It was built for the French community here in Leuven apparently but they left to go to Louvain-le-Neuve.

This became a huge white elephant and was never ever used to its potential. The respite care was here and so were the guest rooms, where I stayed for a while when I first came to Leuven.

Now it’s empty and they have made a start in demolishing it.

We’ve also seen the big hole in the car park in the Sint Jacobsplein.

As to what they were doing with this hole, I really have no idea. And I don’t suppose that I shall ever find out either because by the looks of things they are now filling it back in again.

Had I come by here two weeks ago when I should have been at the hospital, I might have noticed. Anyway, it will probably be fully restored the next time that I come.

This is something that we haven’t seen before.

The road by the traffic lights in the Monseigneur van Waeyenberghlaan is closed off and they have been digging up the road right here. It looks as if they are doing something to the drains and sewers but I’ve no idea what.

It does make me wonder if it is connected in some way to the hole that they dug in the St Jacobsplein car park. That would make a lot of sense I suppose.

The final thing of note is also in the Monseigneur van Waeyenberghlaan.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that sometime last year they completely gutted this block of flats – stripped it right back to the bare concrete. They now seem to be well-advanced with the renovation, and there was a lorry delivering a load of insulation.

The ground floor has been done out into shops so I’ll be interested to see who moves into them when they are ready.

At the hospital they are giving me yet another new treatment. Something called IQYMUNE which, according to Helena, is the bee’s knees. So we shall see.

And it had better be too if it’s to arrest this sudden decline.

Most of the time that I spent here, I was asleep. And it took the doctor an age to awaken me when he needed to talk to me about my kidneys.

My butties had unfortunately disintegrated inside my bag so I ate what I reasonably could, and then spent 15 minutes in the toilet on the way out cleaning bits of tomato, lettuce and hummus from the inside of my rucksack. What a mess!

On the way home I didn’t loiter. Just picked up my fruit and a tin of lentils from the Delhaize and came straight back. One of the side effects of this new medical stuff is “fatigue” and if I don’t have enough problems with that already!

Tea was the second burger with pasta, tomato sauce and vegetables. Followed by peach halves and mango sorbet. Totally delicious, it was too.

And then the football. Rhydaman v Caernarfon Town.

Rhydaman had comfortably disposed of Carmarthen away in the previous round and while Caernarfon are a different proposition to Carmarthen, the home advantage should normally count for something. Especially when I saw just how packed the ground was.

But Carmarthen were undone by four magic moments of Trundlemania and when we saw that Lee Trundle wasn’t playing tonight, then any advantage evaporated.

The game was littered with errors from start to finish and Caernarfon will have to improve dramatically and work on these silly mistakes if they want to push on into Europe. But even so, they had more in the tank than Rhydaman did.

They were 2-0 up by half-time and later in the game when Rhydaman tired, Caernarforn went on the rampage and scored 2 more, exactly as I had predicted to Johan Gallon in my interview with him a few days ago. Not even the introduction of the veteran Andy Robinson by Rhydaman could turn the game around.

Anyway, as this medication is responsible for fatigue and tiredness, I’d better hurry up and finish this before I …

ZZZZZZZ.

Saturday 21st July 2018 – FOR THE FIRST TIME …

… in several weeks I actually managed three meals today. I’m not sure why, but this evening I could have eaten a scabby horse, and then gone back for the rider.

But overall, the day wasn’t quite so impressive. As I said yesterday, I was going back to my desk in the evening to carry on working. And I did too, and I certainly didn’t expect to be still hard at it at 03:35 either It is getting just like old times again, isn’t it?

The alarms went off at 06:20 and 06:30, and I did here them too. But it was round about 07:35 when something in the street really woke me up. And that was enough for me to crawl out of bed.

A friend of mine has had some devastating news this last week and is receiving no help – in fact quite the reverse – from her husband. We’ve been chatting on and off for the last few days and she was on-line again. But at least she’s cheered herself up a bit now and things don’t look quite so gloomy.

And then another friend was on-line too and decided to tell me all about her bowel disorder just as I was sitting down to breakfast. Thanks very much!

I had a shower and a general clean-up and then headed off to the shops, negotiating the new barrier to the car park now that they seem to have that working.

LIDL came up with nothing special, but then it was off to the dechetterie to unload the European Cardboard Box Mountain. Caliburn moves around quite quicker now.

NOZ came up with, apart from the usual stuff, a new rucksack. Mine is really good quality but it’s too small and awkwardly packed. There were some big 60-litre rucksacks in there today, waterproof too, at just €19:95. It doesn’t have the useful pockets that the other one has, but it’s the size that counts and how the stuff is prportioned. The rest I can invent.

LeClerc didn’t have too much special either, although I did buy a new decent set of nail scissors. The ones that I have are about 30 years old and slowly giving up the ghost. These new ones are great.

But the media centre there came up with the goods. They were selling 32gb micro-SD cards for just €11:99 so I bought another three. And a good computer mouse too so that the really good one can go into the office and I can use the new one in the laptop on the sofa.

I was so enthralled by the micro-SD cards that I totally forgot that I’d gone in there to buy a new SD card for the big Nikon. I’ll have to do that next week.

Back here I made mu butties and then went to sit on my wall in the sun, with my book and not one, not two but three lizards now for company. I’ll have my own herd by the end of the summer won’t I?

There was a load of excitement too in the port.

The company that runs the ferries to the Ile de Chausey has two ships, one of which sometimes goes off on tours of the bay.

And with it being summer, we have one going out on a voyage while the other one is on its way itno port.

And then some tidying up. And the place does look different too now after that. I shall have to press on next week and make even more improvements.

I started some work too but, shame as it is to admit it, it wasn’t long before I was laid out on the bed fast asleep. For a good couple of hours too, and I would probably still be there now had I not had two really wicked attacks of cramp.

But when I awoke I was starving, hence the meal. Stuffed pepper with spicy rice. And it’s nice to have some proper hot food for a change.

Now, I’ll go back to working again. But not until 03:35. At least – I hope not.

Thursday 24th May 2018 – OUCH! THAT HURT!

Yes it did too. Dead to the world for an hour and a half this afternoon, and still a little unsteady on my feet even now.

Something of a late-ish night last night. And dead to the world until the alarm went off. And then it was something of a struggle to leave my stinking pit.

But after the usual morning routine I had a shower and a clean-up and then phoned the garage. Caliburn is ready so I could go to pick him up.

It’s a long walk – almost 6kms to the garage and no point in hanging around, so off I set.

There was quite a bit going on in the town today. There’s a cycle race taking place at weekend so the local council was out putting up all of the bunting and other street decorations ready for the (af)fray.

And I’m glad that I went early because the sun didn’t start to heat up for a while. The first half of the journey was quite pleasant.

Not so the second half once the sun was full out, and I had to stop a few times to get my breath.

First stop was at the motorcycle shop just for a nosy around. There wasn’t anything of interest – not that I expected there might be, but worth a look all the same.

Second port of call was a new Bio shop that I hadn’t noticed before. It’s pretty much like the Amaranthe in Montlucon but with only a quarter of the stock. And as for the vegan selection, well, they needn’t have bothered. That was a waste of time too.

Third port of call was the cheap electric shop that had done the business for me before. And yet again, I didn’t leave empty-handed. Tomorrow, I’ll take a photo of what I bought and you can see it for yourselves. But I never expected to see one of these in a shop like this.

Ironically, last year when I was wandering around on foot with Caliburn’s service last year, I stumbled upon an oven. That’s rather a strange coincidence.

Biggest surprise was at the garage. Caliburn has his controle technique on Saturday morning so he needs a service and a check-over before he goes. And for all of that, the bill came to all of €110. That’s the cheapest service and pre-controle technique that Caliburn would ever have.

All they found wrong was a numberplate light bulb not working and nothing else. I asked them to check the steering and front suspension but they found nothing wrong there.

Seeing as I was up at that end of the town I did my mid-week shopping at Leclerc and then came home for a coffee and a chat on line with Liz. After that, it was outside for my butties.

There was a lot going on there too. Not much in the way of people but they had a guy on a sky jack pressure-washing the building behind me. And every so often the spray would drift over to where I was sitting.

He had to stop every time a car or a pedestrian went past so it took him longer than it might otherwise have done.

Butvery so often the spray would drift over to where I was sitting and it was actually quite pleasant and cooling in the sunshine.

There was also quite a lot of activity going on down below in the port.

The tide was on its way in and so were all the fishing boats. They were queueing up several deep at the wharf by the fish processing plant waiting to unload their catch, with a few more on their way in to the harbour as I watched.

Still, it keeps them out of mischief, I suppose.

Now that Caliburn is organised (or he will be on Saturday morning) I had some plans to make, and I spent a while up to no good and chatting to a couple of friends on line. And then that was that.

I missed my afternoon walk yet again, but I still managed to have the session on the guitar.

Tea was a burger in a bap with a potato and veg done in the microwave with some vegan margarine spread.

And I managed to make it outside for the evening walk, which was just as well because it really was a beautiful night.

Instead of going around the walls I went around the headland instead and there was a beautiful view across the bay towards Jullouville and Carolles although there was a sea mist that was obscuring the far coast itself.

Nevertheless, the colours came out really well in this photo. You would never imagine that it’s almost 21:00.

And so 108% of my daily total today, and it feels more like 1008%. I feel dreadful but I have to keep going. One thing for sure though – I won’t be doing much tomorrow.

Wednesday 9th May 2018 – AND SO DESPITE …

… all of the racket going on around me last night I must have gone to sleep at some point because I remember being awoken by the alarm at 06:20.

And not only that- I’d been on my travels during the night too. I’d been in a car accident and was filling out a form to claim my losses from the other driver. I wasn’t sure about something so I went to seek advice from a qualified person (I can’t remember now who it was but I have a feeling that it was someone connected to the defendant). She told me that on no account must I fill in this form. This form related to actual, tangible losses only and if I were to submit it, I would be nullifying any claim to abstract losses such as compensation for the pain and suffering and the inconvenience etc.

Funnily enough, when I awoke this morning, a friend of mine came on line to talk about the issues that she was having with regard to the sequel to a car accident that she had had a couple of months ago. Small world, isn’t it?

We had the usual morning pantomime and then I leapt under the shower for 5 minutes. A quick scrub does me the world of good.

There were a few things to do around here and then I headed off for the hospital. It was grey and misty when I set out but I hadn’t been out long before the sun broke through. And by the time that I arrived at Castle Anthrax I was half-undressed and sweating like a horse.

But I did stop off along the way in the Brusselsestraat to take a photograph. And you might have to look at this for a while before you work out what’s wrong with it.

It’s the kind of thing that you only ever find in Belgium

10:50 was my appointment, and at 10:50 I was already being seen to. My monolingual nurse again so we did it all in Flemish and that cheered me up no end (although it would have cheered me up even more if Doctor Piglet and Doctor Winston had been there to practise their art.

Once I’d been all wired up and plugged in (and I’ve lost another kg which has surprised me considering everything that I ate in North Africa) I was stuck in a chair and left to get on with it.

Eventually the doctor came round to see me. While my protein count continues to be really depressing (and even more so) there’s some good news on the blood count front. Last month it was 9.0. This month it’s 9.4.

They are quite happy with that, so it seems – to such an extent that they fixed up the final three appointments. 7th June, 5th July and 2nd August. That means that a trip that I have planned for the end of June may well come to pass, and also that an early trip to Canada might possibly be on the cards.

But I’ll need to find out what their plans are after August. If it’s a 2-month visit I shall be laughing. Even more so if it’s a three-month visit.

Once they kicked me out I walked on back into town and did a little shopping in the Delhaize and the Loving Hut, picked up an ice-cream sorbet to celebrate, and then came back here where i … errr … relaxed for a while.

Having … errr … relaxed at the hospital I reckoned that I might have got away with it, but it’s obviously the heat.

later on I went to the fritkot on the railway bridge. And when I say ‘no tomato sauce on the veggie burger” I really do mean “no tomato sauce on the veggie burger”. Bar-steward!

A little walk around a couple of the back streets afterwards because I don’t really know the area behind the railway station.

But never mind that for a moment. My attention was drawn to this car that was parked up here. I’ve no idea what it is and there was no maker’s badge or anything to identify it. I thought at first that it might be a Subaru, but that’s not a Subaru emblem on the grille.

But whatever it is, its number plate tells me that it’s quite modern.

Arriving back here, I was attacked by the hotel cat yet again.

Bed-time now. An early night. A long day ahead of me tomorrow as I return to the Land of thr Undead.

Sunday 13th March 2016 – PHEW!

When was the last time that I was up and about and eating breakfast long before the alarm went off? And on a Sunday too! And what has surprised me more than anything else is that after all of the travels that I was on last night, that I managed to make it back here in time.

But start as you mean to go on. And before you start, I perhaps ought to warm you that the sum total of my travels last night comes to something about 2200 words.

You have been warned.

I started off last night by falling asleep watching a film on the laptop last night and it wasn’t long after that at all before I was on the road. It started off at first as if I hadn’t done a great deal because I’d been away with a group of people. There was a timetable for us and on the first day we had to inspect half a dozen countries and on the second day another half-dozen, on the third, yet another half-dozen and so on. This didn’t leave me much time to be going off on a nocturnal ramble but then I found myself in Chester. I don’t know exactly where I was living but it was on top of a bunk-bed somewhere and this was quite a long way off the ground and difficult to climb on to. There had been a young girl that I had quite fancied in the past when I was younger, and so had a few of my friends, but she had started to go out with a boy who was older than us and quite a bit older than her. There was some kind of correspondence that had taken place between the two of them, and one of these letters had fallen into my hands. I was busy parcelling up this letter into a brown envelope and trying to write a letter to one of these friends of mine to tell him about this letter. Obviously the contents of this letter were interesting and I reckoned that it was worth a couple of quid for me to give him this letter to read and I could buy myself a pint of beer. The difficulty that I was having was to make my letter sound sufficiently encouraging and interesting to make him part with the money and it was taking me hours to think of the ideal form of wording.
The next port of call started off to be quite amusing. I was out and about with a dwarf and we were trying to book ourselves into a hotel. While we were there at the reception desk, a message came downstairs to the effect that a woman in one of the rooms required a companion. Of course, the ears of the dwarf and I pricked immediately up, imagining full well what might have been meant by that and so as soon as we had finished registering ourselves into our room, we shot off to the room that had been mentioned. In the room we found a girl who was totally surprised by our intrusion because that wasn’t the kind of companion that she meant. She wanted a companion to talk to and confide in. All three of us were taken by surprise at what had just unfolded. The dwarf then left the room to go back down to reception and arrange a room for himself I started to chat to this girl and it seemed that she was intending to stay not for just one night but until the middle of next week and so I jokingly suggested that I could check myself into her room for a couple of nights and see how it goes. I slid quietly into her bed (it was a big double-bed)while she was adjusting her hair and her night attire and she didn’t seem to mind at all.
I’m clearly going to have to keep up these injections and anti-allergy patches and so on if this is the kind of thing that happens to me during the night. I’ve never had this kind of luck when I’ve been on my travels in real life.
Anyway, after all of this, I made a guest appearance as Sherlock Holmes (not for the first time just recently either) in the case of a girl who had been murdered. There were five people who had been arrested in connection with this and the newspapers were making ever such a fuss about all of this, how there was some really rough street in Leicester (why Leicester?) where all of the criminals seem to live and how this case was connected with this. But it turned out that only one of these five people was connected with this street
I next found myself out and about with Terry and Liz, but it wasn’t Liz but my friend Helena from when she was quite young (and making her debut in these voyages too). We’d all been for a drive out and had stopped somewhere in the salubrious surroundings of somewhere that looked like a gent’s restroom and changing rooms for a sports ground, but somewhere that had clearly seen better days and was creosoted rather like an outdoor toilet of the 1950s. We were all hot and sweaty, having been for a really good walk and we were all thirsty. Terry produced a tangerine for himself and Liz (or Helena) said that she was going to have something else and no-one asked me what I wanted. This depressed me a little, but then Helena produced an orange, a really nice juicy one, peeled it and gave it to me, which I thought was really nice. She asked me to save her a segment, which of course I was only too happy to do. While we were here, we were listening to the radio. Speaking was Mike Harris, the chairman of the TNS football club. The club used to play at a ground in the village of Llansantffraid but had moved up the road to the old army football stadium at Park Hall near Oswestry. He’d offered to sell the ground to the local community on some kind of share basis, £10 per share. This was of course about 10 years ago and property prices had risen dramatically since then and now the local council was trying to buy the ground at the price that Mike Harris had asked for it 10 years ago, presumably to sell on for redevelopment and make a profit based on today’s values. It goes without saying that Mike Harris was not at all willing to sell it under those terms and conditions, and this discussion was the basis of the radio programme that was being broadcast. What was interesting about all of this is that from where we were, we could see the old football ground across the valley behind a shopping precinct in the distance (which incidentally bears no resemblance whatever to the actual site or situation of the ground). I immediately dashed to the car to fetch my camera because what was going through my mind was that if this broadcast was live, everyone would be down at the football ground right now and the ground would therefore be open. After all, the old ground at Llansantffraid is one of the places that I’ve yet to visit while I’ve been on my travels around the various Welsh football grounds (this is in fact actually the case). The others saw my camera and wondered what I was going to do, and so I explained. But I had to go to the bathroom first, and this was when I awoke – right at that moment, because I actually did have to go to the bathroom. And once more, I found all of my bedclothes all over the floor. Rushing to the car for the camera must have been the reason for that.
After the bathroom break, which was actually the Easter break for me, I found myself back at work. The first thing that happened was that one of my colleagues said “hello” to me, which took me completely by surprise. And all of the new vehicles had arrived – new white vans of various shapes and sizes (and “H”-registered too, which was something of a complete surprise). We were to swap our vehicles for the new ones but I couldn’t find the one that had been allocated to me, and I couldn’t find a place to park my own either as the car park was full. So I went back to my desk and started to chat to Anne-Marie, a chat that went on for ages while I was trying to do some work. And someone had put a pile of files on my desk with all kinds of post in there dating back to 12 months and even more, all kinds of legal stuff and so on, a problem that I solved in the good old-fashioned and well-tried way of simply “losing” the post somewhere inside the file and filing the file away on the filing racks, where they would be lost for quite some time. Once Anne-Marie had wandered off, I went to take my coffee things back but I couldn’t leave the office by the front as it was all closed in with windows rather like the front end of the upper deck of a double-decker bus. Walking back up the other end I came upon Anne-Marie and her two friends Caroline and Theresa, lounging about on one of the side-on seats that you find over the rear wheel of the lower deck of a double-deck Lodekka type bus. I said “hiya, girls”to them but they all turned their backs to me which I thought was rather impolite. What had I done now? So downstairs with my coffee things, I found myself out on the edge of a cricket ground where a match was due to be played sometime soon, somewhere out towards Stafford. There was a huge discussion taking place about this match and about the players. I hadn’t been selected (I don’t think that I expected to be) but it seemed that a couple of footballers from FC Pionsat St Hilaire, Gregory amongst them, were going to be playing and the person who was organising it, none other than Mark Dawson, was urging the rest of the team to welcome them. Mark had been waving around a yard brush which had a plastic handle, but people had been stubbing out their cigarettes on it and burning the handle, so I took it from Mark and put it back up against the wall. “It wasn’t me” said Mark. “I don’t smoke”. I replied that I knew that he didn’t, but nevertheless it was marked and so I put it out of everyone’s way. There was someone else there with a Velocette Venom which had become the subject of some discussion. The owner said that it had cost £129 new but now it’s worth about £66,000. The bike was being pushed around and so I put it up on a piece of hard-standing right by this little building where we were congregating. Someone said that we had been told not to park motorbikes up there but I replied that it was OK because it had its centre-stand up on a paving slab. From here I was heading off onwards down south past Stafford and I noticed that Mark didn’t have transport and so expecting him to be heading now for the cricket pavilion, I asked him if he wanted a lift. I was in my big old Senator so I opened the door for him and he told me to drop him off near the town hall in Stoke on Trent, about 10 miles away through the traffic in the opposite direction and that will cost me a couple of hours in time. But a promise is a promise so I bit my lip and set off.
And I still haven’t finished yet either. Because all of this ramble about me being at work seemed to have started off with me being on a wide-bodied jet aeroplane (and I do mean “wide” – it was rather like a cinema auditorium). I seemed to be the first on board so I chose my seat in the central part but against the aisle, and put my black fleece there. There were four air hostesses in a bunch over on the other side in the aisle and they waved me over, so leaving my jacket behind, I went over to see what they wanted. “Ohh, come over here and sit by us” they said. “Why? What’s up?” I asked. “Am I the only passenger on the aeroplane?” “Ohh no” they replied. “But you’re first on so you can sit here if you like”. And so I went and fetched my jacket, and then came back to sit by these air hostesses. I’d boarded this plane by chance, really, just looking to get away for a few days and this was the first plane in. It was flying out to the Channel Islands somewhere on this Friday late afternoon and was coming back on Sunday evening, which suited me fine for a short break.
No wonder it was a surprise to find me up and about so early this morning after all of that.

So with all of this effort I had another day of sitting and vegetating. I mean – it took me all morning just to type up my notes from through the night.

But this afternoon, I finished all of the notes from September 2015 and I’ll soon be ready to start on the ones for August. And then, I have 2014 to do. Then, I can take the 2013 notes and merge all of them together in the appropriate places. It’s not going to be something that will be over in a day or so.

But with it being Sunday, Liz has been cooking. For lunch, we had home-made mushroom soup (made with real home-made mushrooms of course), followed by vegan carrot-cake for our afternoon snack, and then for tea we had home-made nut roast followed by home-made vegan chocolate chip ice-cream. As I have said before … "and you’ll say again" – ed … whenever (if ever) I’m fit enough to leave here, I’ll immediately try to find something else wrong with me.

And so on that note, I’ll leave you all. I’m not even going for a walk because I need the early night as I’m off to Montlucon and the hospital early in the morning and I’ll be doing more than enough walking while I’m there.

And if you’ve managed to read down this far then congratulations because it’s a mere 2474 words, a new record posting for a blog entry, and by a country mile as well.

Good night!

Wednesday 17th July 2013 – WELL YOU MISSED …

… all of the excitement last night, that’s for sure.

I didn’t though.

At about 03:30 I was awoken by the most almighty crash. My first thought was that, after singing the praises of my stone wall to Helena last night, that the lean-to that I rebuilt last year had collapsed. It was definitely that kind of noise.

So heaving myself out of my stinking pit I went for a good walk around my property, taking a torch with me. and there’s nothing missing or damaged that I can see. So after that I went to bed, even though it was impossible to sleep.

This morning though, the old abandoned house stuck in the abandoned jungle plot next to the spring doesn’t seem to be there.

I can’t get to it to check, but the last time that I looked, back in January if I remember, it was certainly on its last legs, and so that may as well be that.

The proprietors are Parisians and they’ve been trying to sell it for years. I made the odd enquiry about it, but they want to recoup the money that they paid for it back in the 1960s, even though they haven’t been there to visit it for 30 years.

In that time, house prices here have collapsed, and now it looks as if the house has too.

I was a little optimistic about my plans to finish the shower room today.

I’ve finished the false wall by the shower, along with a slight amendment to detail, and fitted the sheet of plasterboard.

I’ve also fitted the rails around the wall from which the false ceiling (yes, tongue and grooving, in case you were wondering – which I’m sure that you aren’t) will be fitted.

From then on, though, I was busy making the framework for the false wall by the composting toilet.

And I’m not at all sure where the time goes because I haven’t finished cutting the joints, never mind assembling it, and it was 19:40. I dunno where the time goes, though.

I haven’t stopped working today and yet I didn’t seem to accomplish much. It’s a mystery.

Too tired to carry on, I had an early night (last week I would have said that 19:40 was a flaming late night – how times have changed over a week) and came up here.

For the radio programmes I wrote just over 1500 words on collecting mushrooms and almost 2800 on salient points to remember in the different types of relationships in French family life.

That took me from about 09:00 to 12:30 and from 19:45 until 21:00.

Then I finished for tea, and that is that until tomorrow…

-7

Sunday 5th June 2011 – HERE’S AN INTERESTING …

… notice.

I was always under the impression that the 21st Century was going to be all about doing away with sexual and gender discrimination, and promoting equality and all of this lark.

So what part in modern society does a “gender-discriminative” event such as this have to play?

And not only that, it is a blatant ageist-discriminatory event and even worse, it discriminates against single parents who are prevented by this ageism from bringing along their children – but yet no childcare or creche facilities are on offer.

The Sheffield City Council and its employees should hang their heads in shame. An event such as this has no place in modern society

This was photographed at one of my habitual haunts – the Forestry Commission car park at the Ladybower Reservoir. That was where I spent Saturday night.

We’ve been here on many occasions in the past as it is one of my favourite spots. And you’ve been lucky enough to have seen the photographs in winter when there have been no leaves on the trees to obscure the view.

But I’ve known this area for much longer than that. It was here that the 1971-72 North West Schools Orienteering Championships took place and Yours Truly finished 18th – and no, there were many more than 18 entrants.

Having dropped Caroline off last night, I come over the top via Axe Edge, Buxton and Castleton to arrive here. A beautiful drive in the dark and even better in the daylight.

It was quite late by the time that I arrived so I treated myself to a lie-in (well, it IS Sunday) and then off to Towsure in Sheffield for some gas and some other assorted bits and pieces.

One thing that I wanted was a new mounting for the jockey wheel on the Sankey trailer. I want to tart that up a little this year. It’s showing its age

This afternoon I went to Morley, just off the M62 to meet Helena, one of my friends from school. Something else for which Social Media has a lot to answer.

We haven’t seen each other in … oohhh … 38 years I suppose; so we had a lot of news to catch up on over a coffee or two.

Of course Strawberry Moose took the moment to have a photo opportunity like he does. He’s quite a hound for publicity.

Right now I’m at the Motorway Services at Washington on the M1 not too far from Newcastle-upon-Tyne heading to the seaside at Whitburn where I’ll be staying the night if all goes well.

Tomorrow His Nibs is being reunited with his sister. It’s been a good few weeks since they have seen each other and he has some things to give her.

-1

Wednesday 27th April 2011 – The best-laid plans and all that …

… yes, I didn’t get very far with the greenhouse today.

This morning I dd the usual couple of hours on the website and then went outside to do battle. I’ve measured up everything and done my design, so I know how I’m going to build it, but the weather, which was pretty fair this morning, gradually deteriorated and by lunchtime we were having the showers, and I’m not talking about anything to do with OUSA either.

After lunch thr showers were persistent and it was clear that working outside was impossible and so I retired to the barn, where I spent all of the afternoon tidying up in there and making more room to store stuff. And it’s amazing what I found in there as well – tons of stuff. I also went through a couple of cardboard boxes from the garage at the old apartment and I’ve found all of my old songs that I wrote in the days when I used to be a rock star, and wasn’t that a long time ago?
“33 years” … ed

I also made another startling discovery in there, and that’s going to take someone by surprise. 1973 was a long time ago!

It’s still raining now, but I’m not worried. It will fill up the water butts and it’s not as if there isn’t anything else to do. Tomorrow’s programme depends on the weather.

-2

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

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