… about the storm.
Having abandoned everything after tea and gone to bed, I settled down underneath the quilt and fell sleep quite quickly. And there I lay until all of … errr … 02:39.
The wind that awoke me was the noisiest that I have ever encountered – and believe me, I’ve heard some noisy ones. It sounded as if it was definitely at its climax and it carried on like that for at least two hours. Sleep was impossible
Round about 05:00, having lain awake for a couple of hours, I left the bed, had a wash, went to take my medicine and to make my hot drink, and then came back in here to write up yesterday’s notes. They are all done and dusted now and posted online.
It took much longer than expected, due to this steam-driven computing that I’m using at the moment, And that led me to think of a cunning plan, more of which anon.
Isabelle the Nurse blew in with the breeze and didn’t stay long. She mentioned that she had not encountered any fallen trees on her circuit so far, or seen any visible sings of damage. One thing that she mentioned though was that just up the coast at Cherbourg, a gust of 213 kph had been recorded, and surely that’s a record for this area.
After she left, I made breakfast – the usual porridge, toast and coffee. However, it left me with the most terrible stomach ache and I really was feeling quite ill afterwards.
With the wind having died down slightly, it was quieter in the office and so, the early start having caught up with me, I went to lie down for a while to catch up with my beauty sleep and to try to sleep off this stomach ache.
So there I lay until all of … errr … 11:45. That was a good two hours, and I felt as if I’d needed it too. There was plenty of work to do, tidying up files and the like, but the most important was to start another batch of home-made baked beans.
Rather than try again with soaking dried beans, I’d bought a large tin of beans soaked in brine. I want to see if these are any more successful – i.e. less hard. That first batch that I made really were too hard.
The beans themselves are too big for baked beans. They are about twice the size of normal ones, but you have to go with what you’ve got, I suppose.
In the meantime, I’d had a parcel delivery. It was a laptop computer, but not the one that I want. It was the one that I’d tried to cancel and which should, according to the supplier, be still at the factory. So what’s going on here then?
All that I know is that it will be going back on Monday once the confirmation of receipt is lodged at the supplier’s office. In the meantime, I’ll wait for the other.
That took me up to my cleaner arriving, and the first thing that she did after she’d organised the bathroom was to shoo me under the shower to make up for that which I didn’t have on Tuesday. While I was washing, she picked up the huge pile of paper that was lying on the floor following my tidying-up the other day, and rushed it to the bin across the road.
After she left, I put my cunning plan … "see above" – ed … into action.
What I did was to take out the desktop computer from the cupboard where I’d put it the other day, and I began to strip it down.
The aim was to take out the power pack, see if there was a built-in fuse, and if not, to note the details of the pack so that I could order a new one.
After a lengthy struggle, I finally managed to locate the securing screws and remove them, and then to deal with taking out the power pack. But this is where "the best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men gang aft agley an’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain for promis’d joy".
Unbelievably, the cables are hard-wired into the transformer rather than being plugged in. And whoever had assembled it had obviously done so before the motherboard had gone in, because there was no way to move the cables without dismantling practically everything.
Nevertheless, we did have a Plan B. If I have a motherboard, a case, a processor, 96GB of RAM, a DVD drive etc, I’m halfway to an office computer anyway. Disks are easy to obtain , so is a power pack, and so would be an uprated processor.
Consequently, I sent an e-mail to the computer technician at the radio, to involve him or one of his friends into helping me rebuild this one into an even leaner, fitter, fighting machine. We’ll have to see if he replies. It’s certainly going to be quicker and cheaper than the only quote that I’ve had to date. I’m still trying to recover after that one.
While I was a-dismantling, I had a message on the ‘phone. "Can you spare a minute?"
It was Rosemary with a little problem and needed some quick help. So there we were, one hour and sixteen minutes later, still chatting about not very much. She seems to think quite highly of my theory, a theory that I have had for some time, that Caligula, Putin and Xi in China have had an agreement to divide up the World between them – Caligula in the Americas, Putin in Europe and Xi in Asia.
This explains Caligula’s mad panic about Greenland. He’s suddenly realised that when Russia occupies Denmark, it will also inherit Greenland as a colony of Denmark. And when Russia is installed in Greenland, it can control the North Atlantic and also the North-West Passage to the Pacific, and he’s scared stiff.
That, in my opinion, was one of Hitler’s two big mistakes – the first was not pushing on and taking Gibraltar and the second was not landing several divisions of troops in Iceland and Greenland while he had the upper hand.
Hard at work later, I suddenly realised that I’d forgotten to transcribe the dictaphone notes, so that was the next task.
My father’s sister and her husband had ten children (I think that my family was trying to start a new race of humans) and their progress around from farm to farm can be plotted by where her children ended up. Some are in Bronington still, some are in Whitchurch, some are in Barbridge and some are in Crewe. I lost count a long time ago of who is where.
All of that work had worn me out and I ended up crashing out again for twenty minutes. That took me up to tea time so I wandered off into the kitchen.
Tea was sausage, chips and home-made baked beans followed by Christmas cake for pudding. The beans were OK, I suppose, but they aren’t like real baked beans and I’ll have to do my best to liberate some more real ones, I suppose. A tray of twenty-four tins from a leading manufacturer costs €53:99 delivered, and I suppose that I shall have to bite the bullet one of these days.
But not now of course, because I’m off to bed. The wind has died down considerably from earlier and it’s a lot quieter now. Looking at the data from the weather station down the road, we had gusts of wind at the apogee of the storm blowing as much as 140 kph and that’s some going. And although it’s gusting a lot less, it’s still wreaking havoc. It should have been the final round of matches in the first phase of the JD Cymru League tonight but every single one has been postponed until Tuesday night. So there’s nothing else to do but go to bed.
But seeing as we have been talking about Caligula … "well, one of us has" – ed …, three men met in a prison cell in Leavenworth, Kansas, after the next Presidential election in 2028.
They ask the first one why he was in prison. "I’ve been here since 2025" he replied. "I was a bitter opponent of Caligula"
They turn to the second one. "And you?"
"I’ve been here since just after the recent election. I was a fanatical supporter of Caligula"
They turn to the third one. "And you?"
"I’ve only just arrived" he replied. "And I am Caligula."
