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LIVE: Tuesday 3rd November 2026 – GUESS WHO …

… is a nice, clean boy this afternoon?

That’s right. It’s not me. I’m certainly clean, but, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m certainly not nice.

And, what’s more, I have a nice, clean bed to slide into tonight. While I was in the bathroom having my usual shower, my faithful cleaner, who was in here this afternoon doing her stuff, sorted out some new bedding for me from out of the boxes under the bed. So I’m all set up.

It’s rather different than last night when I was running really late again and didn’t actually manage to achieve anything noteworthy before going to bed at a ridiculous time.

But once I was in bed, I was away with the fairies, although not in any manner that would excite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine, quite quickly. There were the vaguest of memories about raising myself from the Dead at some points, despite me being well asleep in the land of Plenty of Others, but they didn’t last long, and I was soon back to sleep.

When the alarm went off, I awoke completely, and sitting on the edge of the bed, it took a month of Sundays for me to head into the living room and unlock the door for Isabelle the Nurse when she comes. I went back into the bathroom to pretty myself up and then came back in here.

I was far too busy to do much this morning. I started off with the rest of today’s notes, wading through them at quite a pace, as there were plenty to add into them this morning. And I hadn’t finished when Isabelle the Nurse breezed into the apartment, much later than usual.

She’s always late the first day after her break. That’s because she has “the touch” when it comes to injections and blood tests, so there’s always a queue of people waiting for her when she starts back after her week’s break.

While she was sorting me out, she talked about her experiences over her week off work, including her trip to St Malo to see the reported disasters, including the losses at the start of the Route du Rhum, which were horrifying, so I’m told

After she left, I went to make my breakfast of hot black coffee, toast, porridge and fruit juice for me, and while I was eating, read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

A couple of days ago, I read that the Woolhope Naturalists had made a considerable contribution to the subject of mycology, or mushrooms. A paper by Mrs Key, read to the Woolhope Club by her husband, the Reverend H Cooper Key and recorded in the report that I’m reading, is clearly the catalyst for the start of this movement. It’s only after hearing this paper that Dr Bull, who had had a longstanding interest in mycology, was inspired to take the issue to the national stage.

Back in here, rather later than I had hoped, I reviewed my Welsh homework, saved it as a *.pdf and sent it to my tutor. Then I prepared for my lesson.

The lesson itself really seemed to drag today, but the lesson went well and I was satisfied with the work that I had done in preparation. The only problem that I have is making some of it stick to my teflon brain, but that’s an impossible task.

During the break, I had some of my medication and a disgusting drink, and then raided the freezer in the bathroom. The other day, while I was ferreting around in there, I came across a packet of that frozen bean tajine that I’d made a year ago. In fact, there were two packets, but I fancied one for tea tonight, so I pulled it out of the freezer and put it in the kitchen to defrost.

After the Welsh lesson, I sorted out some clean clothes for after the shower and then finished off the notes from yesterday. If you have missed them, they are now on line for your perusal.

There were the dictaphone notes to do after my shower, but I’ll include them in here while I’m at it.

There was something about agriculture and agricultural prices, but I can’t remember anything more about that.

For some reason, whenever I think about this dream, I can see the petrol station at the Intermarché hypermarket on the outskirts of St. Pair-sur-Mer that we go past on our way to Avranches, but I’ve no idea why that vision comes into our head. I can’t think of what’s going on there.

Then I was with Nerina, and we were in London somewhere. There was something going on with someone, and we were interested in that because it was something to do with us observing them. We followed them and ended up in a strange bookshop where there was a weird exhibition. Then we carried on walking outside, and then we decided to separate at this really busy square place in London. Nerina walked off, and I found my car, which was one of these old mini-mokes. I started it up, ready to move into the traffic, and Nerina came back. She asked me lots of questions about this car – where I’d been in it, who I’d seen in it, what I’d done with it. It was very, very difficult for me to answer, but in the end, I assured her that there was nothing untoward about the car, and so we carried on.

This is much more like a dream involving Nerina and me. We quite often acted like this when we were following someone with the aim of catching them in front of reliable witnesses when we had to serve a summons on them in respect of car accidents and the like. Nerina was quite good at being a decoy.

And if she ever did see me in a strange car (and a Mini-Moke would certainly have been a strange car for me to have), she’d certainly want to know all about it.

My faithful cleaner came in round about 14:00 as usual and prepared the bathroom for me. When it was ready, she shooed me under the shower. And today’s shower was really lovely. I feel so much better afterwards, and with a clean bed to climb into, I shall regale myself tonight, that’s for sure.

After she left, I could make a start on what I had been planning to do – namely, to deal with the outstanding radio notes that I’d recorded in … gulp! … July and assemble a few radio programmes. By the time that I knocked off for tea, I’d almost finished the first one. I’ll see if I can do two more tomorrow.

Tea tonight was, as I said earlier, the bean tajine mix with couscous and vegetables. It was all completely delicious too, I have to say that. The pudding of mixed fruit and home-made chocolate and coconut ice cream was really nice too. It made a fitting end to the meal.

And now my notes are written, I’m off to bed to prepare myself for another hard day at the office … "I don’t think" – ed …

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about home-made ice cream … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of my friends tasted my home-made ice cream and asked me where I learned to make it.
"That’s easy" I replied. "When I was little, my parents sent me to Sundae School."

LIVE: Sunday 1st November 2026 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S DISASTROUS …

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… finish to the day, things seem to have settled down to something vaguely resembling normality today.

It’s probably only a short-term solution, because, of course, there’s another dialysis session lined up tomorrow night, and then we’ll be back where we started, I suppose. This is a never-ending cycle of dialysis – bad night – troubled sleep – day of recovery – troubled sleep – feeling much better but dialysis – bad night, etc., etc. It’s really getting on my wick, this is.

Last night, I quite literally fell in bed after waking up on my chair, and the sad thing about it was that I couldn’t go to sleep once I was in bed. There were all kinds of things going through my mind that were disrupting my thought patterns, even down to the behaviour of the doctor-in-charge yesterday at dialysis

However, I must have gone to sleep at some point because I have never ever been so far out of it when I heard someone in the mists of ‘I don’t know what’ call my name – insistently – for three or four times.

When I opened my eyes, the nurse was standing at the foot of the bed, duly armed with the cream to massage my legs and feet. And no-one was more surprised than me. I hadn’t heard a thing about his entry into the apartment or ringing the bell beforehand. It must have been a really deep sleep that I was having.

After he left, I had to pluck up the courage and the motivation to leave the bed, and after I’d sorted myself out in the bathroom, it was 09:27 when I finally made it into the kitchen.

The first job was to put the white beans in the slow cooker on “high”. They need to boil up quickly because later on this afternoon, I’ll be using them.

And next, I had to make the croissants. That involved brushing a roll of flaky pastry with butter, using the pastry cutter to cut it into six “pie slices”, put a teaspoon full of apricot jam in the middle of each slice, and then fold the slice up, with the pointed bit on top. Brush them with milk and then eighteen minutes at 180°C.

While they were baking, I made the rest of my breakfast – porridge and black coffee, with juice to wash down my morning medication. And not only was all of that delicious, the croissants were magnificent too. I had two of them, warm, straight out of the oven, and the other four are in the fridge for the next couple of weeks.

While I was eating breakfast, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

Today, they are at one of the meetings that follows up one of their field trips, and the subject at the moment is the trees of Herefordshire. Last year, they examined some of the more famous yew trees of the county, and today, they are discussing the question of the oak trees, commissioning photographers, etc., to photographically record the larger ones.

After breakfast, I checked the white beans. They had absorbed the water and were busy bubbling away, so I took them out, rinsed them with cold water, put them back with fresh water and reset the slow cooker on “slow”. I’ll check them when I come back in for my midday medication.

Back in here, I made a start on yesterday’s notes. And they seemed to take ages to write this morning, I don’t know why. And I didn’t post them on line until about 15:20, and that was my day effectively gone, just like that!

What kind of time was this, then, to go for my midday medication and disgusting drink? And the white beans were only warm when I checked them, so I turned them up to “medium” to cook them quicker.

There was football to watch from Saturday. Firstly, Stranraer were at home to Clyde – top (by goal difference) v second. It was quite an entertaining match, even though it finished scoreless. Still there’s absolutely no change at the top of the table, although Elgin City, in third place, won their match yesterday to close the gap a little.

Then we had Greenock Morton, second from the bottom of the table, away at Partick, the league leaders. And after Morton’s dismal start to the season, the bookies had put Morton at 11 to 1 to win the match. And I know that a couple of my friends had put a fiver on it, just to show solidarity with their team.

And I bet that they went home happy last night. No-one, a couple of weeks ago, would ever have expected Morton to have won this match 3-2. What on earth was Ian Murray doing with this team earlier in the season that they played so dreadfully? Under their new temporary management since Murray was sacked a few weeks ago, Morton have now won three games on the run.

It was now time to go into the kitchen, and I began by chopping up 250 grammes of mushrooms and an onion. The onion went into the wok, followed by some frozen garlic, and then the mushrooms went in. When they were done, I added a tablespoon of cornflour and then 250 ml of vegetable stock and stirred it round and round to thicken.

While it was simmering away, I began to make the dough for the bread. It turned out really well, so I put it on one side to prove, and then I went back to my mushrooms and onions. I added the white beans from the slow cooker and then everything else from the recipe that my chatbot had found for me.

While that lot was simmering away in the wok, I found a small pie dish, and I cut another one of the flaky pastry rolls and lined the pie dish that I had greased. I cut another piece of the pastry roll for the lid and put it on one side.

When the stuff in the wok had had a good simmer and mix, I put it in a glass Pyrex bowl and put it into the freezer to cool down quickly while I gave the dough a second kneading, adding some chai seeds, some of the mix that my cleaner had found for me, and some of my sunflower seeds.

Once the dough was all kneaded, I put it onto the bread mould for a second proving, rescued the pie mix from the freezer and assembled my pie, brusing it with milk and putting some steam holes in the top.

The temperature of the oven should be 200°C, so I had to wait for the oven to heat up. When it was ready, I bunged the pie in for twenty-five minutes, and in the meantime, I’d been doing the washing up and making the place look respectable.

At the end of its time in the oven, the pie came out a lovely golden brown, and when the oven was empty, I wound it up to 220°C. When it reached the correct temperature, I put the bread in for eight minutes and then turned the oven down to 180°C for another thirty-two minutes.

The bread, when it had finished, looked wonderful, complete with a lovely thick crust and I can’t wait to try it. However, there’s plenty of bread left from last week, so it might be a few days before I can get my teeth into it.

Back in here again, I began to write up my notes, and they are now finished, even if it is horribly late again. I can’t keep on going to bed at this time of night.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about baking … "well, one of us has" – ed … a man walked into a bakery with a 50 lb pike under his arm.
"Excuse me, but do you make fish cakes? he asked.
"No we don’t" said the baker.
"What a pity" said the man. "It’s his birthday tomorrow."

LIVE: Saturday 31st October 2026 – AT LEAST, THINGS …

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… improved somewhat today at dialysis, although you might not have thought so. After all, any day at dialysis is a bad day from my point of view, and I would give all that I had … "and more besides" – ed … in order not to have to go there at all.

But that is, of course, another story. Today’s story really begins last night when, after the football had finished, I sat down to begin to write up my notes. And in a mad fit of enthusiasm … "God knows where that came from" – ed … I managed to completely finish them.

Once they were done, I had the backup and the stats, etc., to do, and by the time that I’d finished everything, on coming out of the bathroom, I heard the electric water heater switch on, so it must have been 01:00 at that moment.

Once in bed, I was asleep fairly quickly, but once again, it wasn’t for long, and although I drifted in and out of sleep, I was awake when the alarm went off at 06:29.

As usual, it took me a good while to raise myself from sitting on the edge of the bed and wander off to unlock the door for the nurse when he comes. And then I wandered off into the bathroom to clean and tidy myself up and even have a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon at dialysis.

Back in here, I had a few things to do, but I was interrupted by the nurse, who arrived early this morning. We had a very interesting chat about blood pressure while he was sorting out my feet and legs. He still has no idea why I have had such a low blood pressure for all these years, and why it has suddenly soared at dialysis.

After he left, I made breakfast, and while I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

The club is actually based in Hereford, but they called themselves the “Woolhope” Naturalists Club after an area close by the city where the limestone, dating from the Silurian period, then quarried for making lime, was revealing a whole host of fossils, many seen for the first ever time in the UK and even in the World. Today, they have gone back there for further investigations.

While they were at it, "availing themselves of the kind permission given by Lady Emily Foley, all the members and their friends, numbering nearly forty, passed through the park and gardens of Stoke Edith" where they chatted to the gardener who "did solve one difficulty for us. He accounted for the presence of the Anchusa sempervirens, the alkanet, which was found growing on the roadside near the station. He had cultivated this plant in the garden for the bees, and after the fire which occurred there last spring, he removed the broken bricks and debris of the fire to the roadside, and with them doubtless the seeds of this plant had been taken".

Back in here, I finished off sorting out the music in the temporary folder and transferring the relevant data of their appearances and possible future appearances into the relevant database for their particular folder.

To tell you how my system works, my music is divided into seven folders, numbered from AA to GG, plus “Live” and “Concert” folders. Then when new music comes my way, it stays in the temporary folder until I have 4 GB worth, then I transfer it firstly onto a memory stick and then into whatever folder on the hard drive that contains any previous music by the group or artist. If it’s a new group or artist, I put it into whichever folder has the fewest groups or artists.

On the spreadsheet that I keep, it contains details of which artists have played, what songs were played, which week they played and what notes were written. One week will be AA, the following week will be BB and so on down to GG, and then we start again from AA. And so if there aren’t enough anniversaries to fill a particular week, I’ll fill it out with music from whichever folder that relates to that particular week.

This took me up to the alarm to prepare myself for dialysis, so I cleared off into the kitchen for my disgusting drink and midday medication and then began to pack away the computer ready for dialysis.

My faithful cleaner turned up to apply the anaesthetic to my arm, and then we had a good chat about our various financial situations. It turns out that, for various reasons, neither of us is actually in desperate straits, and we both own our apartments outright.

There was a reason for mentioning this, and it’s in relation to what might happen here in this building in the near future. But more of this anon.

After she left, I settled down as usual to have a little doze, but I was almost immediately awoken by the doorbell ringing. It was the taxi driver, twenty or so minutes early.

He was a new driver who had never been here before, so I explained a few things to him, and then we set off. We had to go by Champeaux to pick up the usual Saturday passenger, and he had been told in the depot not to follow the satnav directions because he would end up being stuck in an alleyway too narrow for the car. That’s certainly true, so I guided him via the alternative way.

We were early arriving at dialysis, and I was plugged in and running by 14:15, which was nice. I could sit down and watch the live football without having to worry, thanks to the “start from the beginning” button.

Today’s midday match was Cardiff Metropolitan v Penybont, a mid-table v 3rd placed match.

And what a surprise this game was. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the Met play some lovely, technical football, and their games are usually very interesting to watch, but today, I’ve never seen them put up such a shambolic performance in all the time that I’ve been watching them.

Today, their defence was all over the place, certainly not where it ought to have been, and their attack down the wings was nowhere, with Zambian under-20 international Lifumpa Mwandwe being totally starved of any service up front. The final score, 5-0 to Penybont, just served to underline how badly the Cardiff Met defence played.

When that game was over, there was time after that to watch Y Fflint v Trefynnon from Friday night, but not enough time to finish it, so I’ll tell you about the game some other time when I’ve finished watching it.

In the middle of that game, I was interrupted by the chef de service. He asked me how I was doing, to which my response was “fine”. He ummed and ahhed for a while and looked at the machine.

After studying the read-out for a while, he asked me if I would like the machine turned down a little … "it wasn’t even anywhere near maximum" – ed … so I told him that never mind the eight hundred and thirty-four ml per hour, the other week I was being cleansed at over eleven hundred per hour regardless of his maximum of nine hundred and fifty, and there were no adverse effects at all, so he’s taking a far too pessimistic view of my ability to cope with the dialysis machine (which I’m certain that he is).

At that point, he cleared off. He didn’t even ask me if there was anything else, which meant that I was unable to tell him about the blood pressure, water tension and the bleeding issue, which, in my opinion, are urgent. But he really doesn’t like me at all, and he has no bedside manner either.

When I was unplugged, my driver, the guy who thinks that he’s the boss of the drivers, was waiting for me, and he took me home – and it was a gorgeous red sky where the sun was setting tonight. I was actually at home by 18:20, which was really nice. My faithful cleaner helped me into the apartment, and she stuck a disgusting drink into my hand as soon as I was sitting down on a dining chair.

While she was here, I didn’t drink it but put it on my trolley with a packet of crackers, some spreading cheese, some biscuits and an orange, and pushed it into the office here where I prepared for a footfest.

The first match was TNS v Connah’s Quay Nomads, which had kicked off half an hour ago, but thanks to the “start from beginning” option, I could watch it from the kick-off, the first time this season that I had seen TNS. The following match was a second division match between Y Drenewydd and Bwcle.

However, we had a calamity. With about fifteen minutes to go, I crashed out in my chair. I managed to see the start of the Drenewydd v Bwcle game, but with about ten minutes gone, I crashed out again.

When I awoke, it was fifty-six minutes into the game and I had never felt so ill in my life. I was in one of those situations where I couldn’t even move, I was so tired. Eventally, though, I managed to slide from the chair and go to bed. The blog can wait until morning.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about anaesthetic … "well, one of us has" – ed … a man from Crewe went into the local dentists and asked "how much is a tooth extraction here?"
"It’s £65:00" replied the dentist.
"Is there any way to do it cheaper?" asked the man. "That sounds expensive."
"Well, if you’re brave enough, doing it without anaesthetic will cost £50:00."
"That’s still dear. Would it be cheaper if a student dentist were to do it?"
"That would work out at about £40:00"
"And if we made it a training session with a load of students watching and maybe even trying?"
"In that case, it would cost just £10:00. But it won’t be a very pleasant experience."
"No" replied the man "but the price is right. So can I book the wife in for next week some time?"

LIVE: Tuesday 27th October 2026 – HAVING REGALED YOU …

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… last night with a blog entry of a near-record three thousand one hundred and seventy-seven words, I shall try to be a little more concise tonight. After all, I don’t want you lot wasting as much precious time reading my rubbish as I seem to do writing it. But as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … my downfall when writing essays always was the word count. I’d reach the word limit before I’d even warmed up.

Anyway, I digress … "again" – ed …

Last night, I was in bed later than I would like to be, but not as late as some nights have been just recently. And for a change, it took longer than usual to go to sleep. That’s because I’d had something of a shock before going to bed.

When I’m around the house at this time of year, I wear a sweater, but when I go out, I change the sweater for a fleece jacket and change back when I come home again. When I changed back yesterday evening, I noticed nothing amiss.

However, when I was undressing last night, I noticed that the tubing on my arm that holds the compresses onto the pinholes in my forearm was drenched with blood. I had a feel of it and the blood seemed to be slowly drying out. It wasn’t bleeding any more, I reckoned, and as I had some old tubing that had lost its elasticity, I put a piece over the tubing on the arm to stop the blood staining the sheets and quilt cover when I’m in bed.

Nevertheless, it took me by surprise because I had felt nothing at all. And we’d been told at dialysis that at the rate the body will lose its blood through these pinholes, we will only have five minutes to react before it will be too late. And that’s no use at all if I’ve no idea that the clock has already begun to wind down.

That was the thought that was going through my mind as I tried to go to sleep.

At some point, I must have gone to sleep because round about 01:40 or thereabouts, we had another phantom alarm call that woke me. I recognised straight away that it was a phantom call so I didn’t react, but I didn’t go back to sleep either – well, not for a while.

After tossing and turning in my bed for ages, I went through another phase of this “sometimes I’m awake, sometimes I’m asleep, but I don’t know which is which”, and I was definitely awake when the alarm rang.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … being awake is one thing – being up and about is something else completely.

But once I was up and about – well, if ever you want to have an idea about what makes a “day of two halves”, you only have to read on and all the rest will become clear.

First task this morning was to unlock the front door ready for the nurse when he comes round, and the second was to go to sort myself out in the bathroom. The bleeding on the arm had stopped a long time ago, but some of the blood that was on the tubing had soaked through to the tubing that I had put on later. Luckily, it hadn’t soaked through onto the sheets and the bedding.

Back in here, first task was the dictaphone to see what had gone on during the night.

I was in another chaotic household with my mother again last night and with loads of people. Someone said that the family was going off on holiday next weekend. I asked whether that was true, and she replied that it was the end of November. I was sitting down in a corner with a friend of mine from Germany, and we were talking about a project that had been put to us all, my friend and me, about going off on some kind of educational course. We said that we hadn’t heard anything about this for ages, so we imagined that it had been abandoned. Then we talked about certain people whom we knew and certain businesses that we’d heard of, why they had all gone wrong and all these people who had gone wrong. She said that she could remember some of them before they tried to be in business. One of them was a “failed CV”, whatever that was. After a long discussion like this, I told my mother that I was going to bed. I walked up the flights of stairs to where my room was, and the guy who had the room next door to me, he came along as well. He asked if I was really going to bed, and I replied “no”. I was just going to sit in my room and listen to music or something. He asked me about a girl whom I knew. I’d mentioned her to him before. I suddenly remembered who it was, and I said that I’m afraid that she already has a boyfriend. He was extremely disappointed about that.

Being in “another chaotic household with my mother” is nothing new at all for me. It’s how we lived back in “those days”, and regrettably, I seem to have inherited it.

My “friend from Germany” was here with her daughter about eighteen months or so ago, and what we all had in common was that we went to the same university. Her daughter even became a lecturer there. The mother and I sat on some of the same committees, so having plans and so on was something that we always had up our sleeves.

The ramshackle stairs up to my room in the attic remind me of something, but I can’t think what, and the young girl with the boyfriend – I know who she is, but she’s in the wrong generation for this dream.

The nurse turned up, earlier than usual, and we had a chat about his week off as he was sorting out my legs and feet. And after he left, I made my breakfast.

As I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

Today, we are discussing erratic boulders. These are huge, isolated rocks that differ totally from the rocks around them, and our friends are debating how they might have arrived in their particular place today, hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from the rest of the rocks of their type.

Several people were taking wild guesses, but eventually someone came up with the answer that corresponds with modern-day thinking, and that is that they were brought down by glaciers and “dumped” when the glacier ran out of steam to carry them.

He tells us that these erratic boulders "were slowly carried along by the motion of the glacier, year after year, however great their dimensions, till, on arriving at the edge of the ice, which was always melting during the heat of summer, they were precipitated into the valley below, there forming masses of debris commonly called moraines."

Today, there are several types of moraine recognised by geologists – two of which are, firstly, lateral moraines that form at the side of the glacier, and secondly, terminal moraines at the end of a glacier. And you can tell how far a glacier has retreated by checking the succession of terminal moraines. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we had hours of fun exploring and scrambling over a terminal moraine of the Brother John Glacier in northern Greenland several years ago.

When I’d finished breakfast, there was some tidying up in the kitchen to do and then I came back in here to carry on work.

There were several things that needed my attention, and then I could continue with the task of reformatting the rest of the music that my friendly neighbourhood chatbot found for me yesterday. When it had all been done, I had to remix and re-edit it all and then choose the individual tracks to include in the programme.

That’s where my chatbot came in useful again. I told him to review as many reviews as he could find of each album that he had selected and to tell me which song had received the most positive reviews, why, and what the reviews said. In no time at all, he had identified most of the tracks and had a little cameo of a post about them that I can translate into French in due course.

That has also saved me a couple of days’ work.

There was enough time to deal with a few of them and prepare them for broadcasting, but then it was time, long after time, in fact, for my midday medication and disgusting drink. My faithful cleaner came in at that point and caught me once more in flagrante delicto having a break, but she also showed me what a heroine she is.

Talking to my chatbot the other day, we were discussing my bread and how I could improve on what I was doing and how I was making it. I told him about the sunflower seeds, occasionally brazil nuts and sometimes almonds that I included in the flour, and asked him whether or not there was anything else that was healthier that I could include.

The chatbot gave me a list that included chia seeds and several other grains, so I had given a list to my cleaner for her to keep a lookout.

She’d wandered around the “weigh it yourself” section at Leclerc this morning and managed to find chia seeds and a mixture that contained most of the other seeds that the chatbot had mentioned, and she’d bought a supply of them both for me.

As well as that, they had my favourite arrabbiata sauce on special offer – buy two and the second one is sixty-eight percent off – so I told her to buy four if she saw them. And sure enough, there were four of them on the kitchen counter next to the seeds.

Once she’d sorted everything out, I told her about the problem with my arm. She had a look and decided that it was suitably horrible, so she removed all of the blood-soaked dressings and cleaned my arm. She found some things to make a temporary dressing and then wrapped my arm in cling film.

The reason for the cling film is because it’s Tuesday today, and Tuesday means that it’s shower time. She then sorted out the bathroom for me so that I can shower in comparative safety.

When the bathroom was converted, I had hope to have had a flat floor, like a walk-in wet room, but when you have a floor made of solid grès de Chausey granite, installed in 1667, it’s simply not possible to do so. No-one can chisel their way into that so the base is fifteen centimetres off the ground. I need to have a couple of steps up. And as yet, there are no handrails in the shower, so my cleaner needs to take the portable handrails that fence in the porcelain horse.

The shower today was wonderful. I washed my undies and my night attire in the sink first, and while I was showering, I threw them in too so that the shower would rinse them. But the water was lovely and hot, and I took full advantage of it.

The bathroom was hot too. Although I turned the heating off after the first night, I switched the heating on in the bathroom before the shower with the temperature set to twenty-four degrees. The heated lightbulb was on, of course, and so it was even nicer stepping out of the shower too.

After I’d dressed, I went into the dining area, where my cleaner attended to my arm. It had bled a little more under the shower but it had stopped again. Nevertheless, she made a thorough job of patching the arm so that it wouldn’t bleed again, and if it were to do so, the number of compresses under the plasters would absorb the blood quite quickly.

At about 15:00, as usual, she cleared off to her next client, but she said that she would be back when she returns this evening to make sure that everything will be OK.

Back in here, I tried to restart work, but for some unknown reason, all my motivation and energy had gone. All my “get up and go” had got up and gone. That was a real disappointment, as I had so much to do. I just sat here and vegetated for a while instead of working.

None of this was getting the baby bathed, but it really was turning into a day of two halves.

At about 17:00 I decided to start tea. There was the broccoli stalk from Saturday’s Leclerc delivery, so I was going to make another broccoli stalk soup.

First, though, there was the bread. And seeing that I intended to make enough soup for two meals, I decided to make four bread buns. With chia, you need to use more water than normal, so instead of a hundred and thirty millilitres of water with my two hundred grammes of flour, I used a hundred and forty.

While the dough was proving, I chopped up the broccoli stalk and a potato into tiny cubes and put the mix on one side. Then a pile of mushrooms were chopped, and I put them on one side too, mixed with a handful of frozen garlic. Finally, I chopped up a couple of small onions.

My favourite saucepan has a really heavy base, so I fried the onions in it, and when they were well done, I added the mushrooms and garlic and gave them a few minutes too before adding the broccoli and potatoes, stirring everything around. Once everything had been frying for five minutes, I added enough vegetable stock to cover the food and left it to come to the boil and then simmer.

By now, the bread bun mix had risen considerably, so I added a spoonful or two of chai seeds and three or four spoonfuls of the seed mix and gave it all a second kneading before dividing the dough mix into four and making flat pancake-like lumps of dough, which I put on some baking paper.

While I was waiting for things to happen, I washed up everything and tidied up. And that’s not like me at all. Usually, I end up in a total mess with stuff all over the place and there’s no room to do anything.

While I’d been talking to my chatbot about bread, he’d given me some useful tips. Firstly, never mind the one hundred and eighty degrees – wind the oven up to two hundred and twenty. Then, put a big container of water … "like his metal pie dish" – ed … at the base of the oven. Finally, put the baking tray in.

When the oven “pinged” that it was ready, it was full of steam and the baking tray was scorching hot. But I put the buns and their sheet of baking paper onto the hot baking tray and put it back in the oven.

The chatbot had recommended parsley, chives and thyme as herbs for my soup, so I’d added those a little earlier, but now I poured the soup mix into my whizzing jug, and with the whizzer, I whizzed it all up into a rather thick liquid. Half of it went into the fridge in a sterilised jar, and the other half went back into the saucepan with several handfuls of these coquillettes, the small elbow-shaped pasta.

After fifteen minutes in the oven, I followed the chatbot’s advice, turned it down to one hundred and eighty degrees and removed the water. Then I left it all for another ten minutes.

As I took the soup off the heat, I added a pot of vegan soya and stirred it well in. And the bread buns were total perfection. I have never ever had a success like this. Two buns went into the freezer for the other half of the soup some time, and two, I dipped into my soup and cleaned my bowl when I’d finished.

Pudding was a pot of coffee-flavoured soya yoghurt followed by a prune. All in all, that was a really nice meal, but it had taken ages to prepare.

Back in here after tea, I began to write up my notes, and I’d reached the halfway stage before I was totally overwhelmed with sleep. It was late too – not too far short of midnight, so I posted on line what I’d done, added a “to be continued” stamp and then went to bed.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about making soup … "well, one of us has" – ed … afried of mine told me about the antics of a famous chef in a Mayfair restaurant in London.
"First, he diced some vegetables really finely, cooked them in water and added a couple of oxo cubes. Then he threw a hyena into the pot, and finally, he jumped in himself"
"Really?" I asked.
"Oh yes" she replied. "He made quite a laughing stock of himself, he did."

LIVE: Sunday 25th October 2026 – THIS WAS HOW …

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… a proper Sunday should be organised, and I enjoyed every minute of it, for a change.

Despite not finishing my notes and going to bed instead, it was by no means early when I hit the hay. It might not have been after midnight, but I bet that it wasn’t far off.

But never mind. Sunday is my Day of Rest and my aim was to sleep for as long as I could and be awoken by Isabelle the Nurse when she arrived, especially as today we were all treated to an extra hour in bed.

Although I awoke a couple of times during the night, I was soon asleep again, and it was indeed Isabelle the Nurse who awoke me when she came into my bedroom. I didn’t hear her ring the doorbell or open the front door to come in. Considering that I’m supposed to be a light sleeper, what use would I be if someone broke into my apartment overnight?

She gave me my anti-flu injection and then dealt with my legs and feet. Once they had been oiled and massaged, she had to hang around because there was a wait time of fifteen minutes to see that there were no unpleasant side-effects with this injection, so we had a cosy little chat about dialysis.

After she left, I raised myself from the Dead and went into the bathroom to sort myself out. Then, into the kitchen for breakfast – porridge, black coffee, juice for the morning medication and the last of my delicious home made apricot jam croissants. I’ll make some more like that next Sunday too.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

Today’s topic concerns a visit of the group to Llandrindod Wells, and the first item is that of salmon fishing. Apparently a bunch of salmon poachers had been arrested in the river there, and the leader of the group was lamenting the fact that these days, salmon in the upper reaches of the Wye and its tributaries were few and far between.

However, he tells us that "as we have lately seen new and wise fishery laws passed, giving a much better chance to the upper proprietors than they ever had before, by the removal of fixed engines, a weekly close time for nets, and the prohibition of all fishing by nets after the first of September—all which regulations are very much in their favour—we may hope now for a better spirit to prevail. We have heard from more than one member of the Board of Conservators that there is every disposition on their part to act in the fairest and most liberal manner to the upper proprietors, and on the other hand it is fair to expect that they, the upper proprietors, will assist all they can in protecting the breeding fish"

On the following page, he records with pleasure of "Sir J. Bailey’s fishing cottage, then by the Nydd and its far-famed salmon catch of Cavan Shwn Lewis, where it is said Mr Charles Stretton killed twelve fish in one day".

With equal pride, he adds that "A salmon was taken as high up as Newbridge by angling, 39.5 lbs., and several over 20 lbs., and at Holm Lacey, four miles below the city of Hereford, the monster fish of 56 lbs. was caught by the nets …. Two other salmon were caught at the same draught, one 11 lbs. and the other 12 lbs. Numbers of others, varying from 35 lbs to 15 lbs, have been taken, and this season the capture of a 25 lb fish has been an ordinary occurrence."

It seems very much to me that his supposed admiration of the “new and wise fishery laws” and his crocodile tears over the salmon being “few and far between” were really nothing more than window-dressing.

Back in here later, I attacked the outstanding notes, and they are now on line. They took quite a while to do because there was so much of them. I don’t know how, out of a boring day like yesterday, I could have written so much.

One thing that I noticed, though, was that it was warm in here. In fact, the thermometer was showing 23°C. Consequently, I turned all the heating off to let things cool down a little.

After the outstanding notes were on line, it was time for the disgusting drink and the midday medication, and then I was back in here transcribing the dictaphone notes.

I was mixed up with a group of people who were in all kinds of different things, like actors and so on. One or two of my friends had arranged for a weekend in Dublin. I thought that that would make a pleasant surprise for Nerina because it’s her birthday very soon. We all got down to making plans about it, and during the week, we ended up with about eighty-odd people. I mentioned to Nerina that we were going away for the weekend. When she asked where, and I replied “Dublin”, she went berserk and, for some totally unknown reason, completely lost her head about this idea. We had a huge row, which was complicated by the fact that I just couldn’t understand her reaction. Anyway, I went back to sort things out with my friends to see what they were doing and how they were going on, hoping that Nerina would cool down. However, she ended up taking a room in a really posh hotel in the immediate vicinity of where we were. Once we’d finalised all these details about Dublin, I went over to the hotel to see if she’d woken up yet, and the receptionist pointed outside, and Nerina was waiting by a set of traffic lights in Earle Street. I thought that from the position that she was in, she was not going to Dublin. I said “I suppose that you have finally decided not to go”. That triggered another huge argument. She said something like “I hope you have fun there”. I said “if you’re not going, then I’m not going, and we’ll go home”. “Right,” she said. “In that case, I’m not going home”, and stormed off. I was busy trying to scratch my head about all of this because I didn’t understand her totally unreasonable attitude about this.

.
This is not an unreasonable dream because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we did have a travel club, a little group of us … "certainly nothing like eighty though" – ed … but it’s not been as active as it used to be since I lost the use of my legs and began dialysis.

Actually, in real life, the “traffic lights” were the zebra crossing in Earle Street between Tiko’s café and the Cheese Hall pub. However, there’s certainly no luxury hotel across the road from there. There’s a very cheap building with what used to be the old Victor Value supermarket and with government offices on top.

As for Nerina, it really was her in the dream. Her mother was Italian, and Nerina had inherited not only her mother’s cooking but also her mother’s Italian character. It took me a while to come to terms with her somewhat flamboyant emotional side, but once I’d understood the psychology behind it, I found that married life was refreshing and exciting, and, to be frank, since I’ve met other women afterwards, I really wish that things between Nerina and me had worked out better. Anyway, this dream went way, way beyond anything that I had ever experienced with her.

It’s hard to explain what was going on in this dream, but this was one of those rare dreams that seemed to be completely real when I was asleep. And although there is nothing in the dictated notes about this, I can still remember going with Nerina up a set of stairs over a shop to a small, candlelit restaurant with red furnishings and heavy dark oak furniture in the Victorian style, and also getting on board a train made up of individual carriages, although I was with just one other person on that train, who wasn’t Nerina.

And the bit about “busy trying to scratch my head about all of this” – this afternoon, I noticed a scab of some sort on the back of my head as if I had been scratching it so much that it had bled. That wasn’t there yesterday.

Later on, we had more football – this time it was the Scottish Cup between Stranraer and non-league Tayport, played in a monsoon at the bottom of a waterfall in a tornado.

Tayport played with the wind in the first half and made the most of it, going in 1-0 up at half-time.

But class will out in the long run, and in the second half, Stranraer scored three, with this site’s favourite forward, Robbie Foster, scoring one of them.

Greenock Morton’s game against Ayr United was postponed due to a waterlogged pitch.

While all of this was going on, my chatbot was busy researching music for me, and he came up with piles of interesting stuff. He’s done about two days worth of my research for me while I’ve been doing other things, and that’s one of the benefits of artificial intelligence. And based on what he’s found, this programme is going to be a really interesting one, I reckon.

Later on, it was time to go a-baking, and a sunflower-seed loaf was first on the agenda.

While the was proofing, I began to prepare the ingredients for the recipe for the aubergine and chilli whatsit that my chatbot found for me the other day. And after I’d added the sunflower seeds into the bread and left it to prove for a second time, I fried the onions, aubergine and garlic lightly and then tipped them and everything else into the slow cooker on “low”, where they will be festering all night.

The loaf was magnificent. It had risen the highest that I have ever had a loaf of bread rise, and it’s cooked to perfection. As for the stuff in the slow cooker, it tastes wonderful, although before I have a helping of it, I shall have to remember to put the toilet paper in the fridge first. It seems that the measurements for the chilli powder are somewhat exaggerated.

While the bread was cooking, I had a bite to eat – the first food on a Sunday night for ages. It was a small helping of this vegan chilli meal that was on special offer at Leclerc, with a generous helping of steamed vegetables tossed in butter. It was nice, but if it had been sold at full price, it would have been expensive for what it was.

So with the notes now written, there are just one or two more things to do, and then I’m off to bed, ready for dialysis tomorrow … "I don’t think" – ed … with the heating still switched off and the thermometer showing 18°C.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about playing football in heavy rain … "well, one of us has" – ed … I remember discussing a football match at (thinks) Llanberis several years ago which was postponed because there was three feet of water covering the pitch.
Whoever the opponents were, I can’t remember now, but they were keen to play the game.
When I asked their manager why, he replied "Llanberis can switch on the floodlights, and we’ve brought a full complement of subs."

LIVE: Friday 23rd October 2026 – THIS BLASTED HURRICANE …

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… or whatever you would like to call it, is still going on and showing no sign of abating. That’s about twenty-six hours that we’ve been battered, and the damage in the town and especially up here in the old town is “significant”. At least it was when my faithful cleaner went into town this morning. It must be much worse now.

At about 05:00 a gust of wind of 143 km/h was reported, and there have been others at 120 km/h, so I see from the site of the weather station down at the end of the rock. And in Finisterre, they’ve had gusts of over 150 km/h.

The prevailing wind all day has been from the north-west, and there’s nothing between us and the eastern coast of North America in that direction except the Atlantic Ocean, so there’s nothing to slow down the wind.

As I mentioned yesterday, the wind was getting up as I was coming home last night, but it really began to blow at about 20:30, and by the time that I went to bed, at about 23:30, it was really giving it a good go. I’m surprised that I managed to go to sleep. I was down the bed under the quilt, and I could still hear it howling.

But go to sleep. I did, although it wasn’t for long. At about 02:40 I had another phantom alarm call, and although it awoke me, it didn’t entice me out of bed. However, I couldn’t go back to sleep as the wind continued to roar with an intensity that I haven’t heard for a good few months.

When I looked at the time later on, I saw that it was 06:10, and I was tempted to make an early start but I thought better of it. However, at 06:25 I swung my feet out of bed and onto the floor, thus claiming an early start.

After both the alarms had gone off, I went into the living room and unlocked the door to let Isabelle the Nurse in when she arrived, and then I went to sort myself out in the bathroom.

Back in here, I attacked the rest of the notes left over from last night and they went on line when they were finished. At that moment, Isabelle the Nurse put in her appearance. She was supposed to give me my anti-flu injection this morning, but when she saw the state that I was in, with a streaming head cold that won’t go away, she wanted me to check with the doctor at dialysis that it’s OK to give it to me right now or whether we should wait a while.

She was soon on her way out to continue to fight the good fight with the hurricane outside, and I could go and make breakfast.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

We’ve finished the story of the Herefordshire Beacon, and now we have another expert waxing lyrical about the primrose and its various developments. “Well, in a cowslip’s bell I lie!” I thought to myself.

Once breakfast was over, I went back into the bedroom to send off my Leclerc order, but to my dismay, all deliveries are cancelled today because of the storm. I shall have to wait until tomorrow for my delivery to arrive. I hope that it’s before I go to dialysis.

My faithful cleaner sent me a video of the storm in the port this morning, the waves crashing over the harbour wall and causing nothing but mayhem in the outer harbour. It really was impressive, so I sent it on to a few friends for their perusal.

There were a few more things to do, as well as being engaged in several animated chats as a result of the video that I sent, and then it was time to start work on the notes for the radio programme.

It wasn’t long, though, before I had to stop for my midday medication and disgusting drink, and I was caught in flagrante delicto by my cleaner, who had come in to do her thing. We chatted for quite a while as she was working, and after she left, I carried on with work.

By about 18;00 I had finished the notes and they are ready to dictate, but I could have finished a lot earlier had I not crashed out at some point. And it seems that it’s not just Rosemary who has installed a camera in here, because as soon as I awoke, a friend sent me a message on the computer, and I ended up chatting to him for a while.

It’s a shame, though, because while I was asleep, I was away with the fairies, although not in any manner that would excite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine.

While I was asleep this afternoon, I was doing something with a group – something like Grand Funk Railroad. Then the group split up and I immediately joined another group but my former colleagues had not and this was confusing the authorities who did not understand that I was not out of work. There was plenty of other stuff too, such as being in a house and being in a department store, something like Woolworths, but as soon as I awoke, someone sent me a message on the computer and that completely destroyed my thought pattern and the dream disappeared.

That’s always a problem when dreaming during the day. At night, I’m usually uninterrupted … "chance would be a fine thing" – ed … but in the day, there are all sorts of things going on.

When I’d finished work, I summoned up my friendly neighbourhood chatbot, and between the two of us, we worked out some music for the next radio programme after the one that I finished today. This will be yet another one that will overflow my hour with more than enough artists and albums. My chatbot is becoming more and more efficient at tracking down what I would like.

Teatime was next – my regular Friday night tea of vegan sausage, baked beans with cheese and pepper and air-fried chips. For some reason, the chips were even better today – as perfect as they could ever be. This method that my friend showed me, of par-boiling the chips before putting them in the air fryer, is making some delicious chips and I’d wished that I’d known about this before.

No pudding tonight – just a handful of biscuits because we had football. The match that I’d chosen was newly promoted Trefelin, near the bottom of the table, and an established Y Fflint, struggling likewise near the foot of the table.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … Y Fflint play some really nice football and it beats me why they are so low in the table, but tonight, for the first half-hour, it was a kick-and-rush game. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m a big fan of this “long ball over the top”, and Y Fflint certainly have the goalkeeper in Jack Flint who can do it, but firstly, you need to be accurate with the ball, and secondly, you need a couple of quick forwards. Most of Jack Flint’s balls out of defence were going nowhere and to nobody.

Trefelin had by far the upper hand at first, but by the half-hour mark, Y Fflint had found their composure, settled down and began to play proper football.

Early in the second half, Y Fflint won a penalty and Trefelin’s keeper was sent off after he brought down an opposition attacker. The penalty was no trouble for Y Fflint’s centre-forward against the young substitute keeper, and the centre forward scored a second goal shortly afterwards when, unmarked at the far post, he turned in a cross from across the goal.

After that, it was all one-way traffic towards the Trefelin goal, but Y Fflint couldn’t increase the score.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that the idea of increasing the size of the league has just been to add some cannon fodder and to provide some easy relegation candidates to save the established clubs. And sure enough, the result in one of the matches tonight, an established club against a struggling new promotee, would have made a useful rugby score.

Now that my notes are finished, I’m off to bed before I turn into a pumpkin, and go to sleep, if the high winds let me.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the high winds … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of my friends from the USA asked me if anyone had ended up today like Lottie Michelle Belk of Chester, Virginia.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"She was walking along the promenade at Virginia City in a wind of 40 km/h when she died, stabbed to death by the pointed end of a beach umbrella that had broken free from its mounting."

LIVE: Tuesday 20th October 2026 – GUESS WHO …

… dropped his tea down the sink this evening while he was trying to strain it?

And that was the end of the pasta and veg that I had prepared for the evening meal. Luckily, I hadn’t put the falafel in it quite yet, and there are always bits and pieces of food around here that you can stick into what remained of the pasta and veg that hadn’t fallen out of the saucepan, but what a thing to be doing when I’m feeling hungry for once.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, what happened in the kitchen is a very good indication that what happened over the rest of the day too.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s a waste of time going to bed early because all it means is that I wake up correspondingly early the next morning. It’s true that it wasn’t really all that early when I went to bed, although if you count the time that I spent asleep on the porcelain horse, maybe it was, but in any case, I was wide awake quite early. I’ve no idea what time it was because I didn’t look, but I do know that it was pitch black, and I lay there awake for what seemed like a week without going back to sleep.

When the alarm went off at 06:29, I was wide awake, but that’s not the same as saying that I was bouncing with energy and raring to go. It took me a good while, as usual, for the bedroom to stop going round and round and for me to find the energy and enthusiasm to raise myself from the Dead.

Once I was up and about, I went to unlock the front door ready for Isabelle the Nurse when she arrives, and then I went into the bathroom to sort myself out for the day.

Back in here afterwards, I began to write up the notes for yesterday. And in a mad fit of enthusiasm, which I wished that I had more often, I had finished it and posted it on line just before Isabelle the Nurse arrived. “What excellent timing!” I told myself.

While she was sorting out my legs and feet, she was telling me about her week off and the Halloween (over here, it’s called Toussaint or “All Saints’ Day”) decorations that she had been doing. What with pumpkins and mushrooms and things like that, her decorations are much more comprehensive than my stuffed bat in the window.

After she left, I made breakfast, and while I was eating, I was reading THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

The book is now finished, and I’m not sure whether that’s a disappointment or not. It started with a bang and went out with a whimper.

So now I’ve turned to my next book. And guess what! it just happens to be THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.

This is going to be an interesting read because, apart from the fact that they go to quite a few interesting places, they will also be discussing the “Mappa Mundi” that is kept in Hereford Cathedral. It’s the largest known existing mediaeval map dating from about 1300 AD, and showing the known world as it was back then.

Its origin and purpose is not known (it’s certainly not a map for direction-finding), although there is a variety of suggestions. I’m waiting to see what the Woolhope Club members come up with.

After breakfast, I came back in here. The first thing that I did was to check over the homework that I did on Sunday, reformat my text file as a *.pdf file and then send it off to the tutor. After I’d done that, I spent the next hour or so revising for the lesson.

In today’s lesson, there were only three of us. Heaven alone knows what happened to the others. But we three had a really good lesson, which just goes to show the benefit of smaller classes. We pushed on quite a way along the track.

Next week, it’s half-term, so we have a week off. But not to worry – our tutor has given us some homework to keep us busy.

During the break at half-time, I’d had my disgusting drink and the midday medication, so I was intending to push on with work. However, my faithful cleaner came early today, and after she’d organised the bathroom, she shooed me under the shower. So tonight, we have a nice, clean … "well, clean, anyway" – ed … boy this afternoon.

She didn’t take long to do what she had to do, and then she cleared off elsewhere. She has quite a busy round, really. And I could push on with work.

My chatbot and I were researching songs for the next radio programme to be prepared, and I’ve managed to track down every song that I need. Most of them will need reformatting and re-editing, and they’ll all need remixing, pairing and segueing, not to mention the notes that need writing. So I’m going to be rushed off my feet for the next few days.

One of the artists to feature in that programme will be Mike Edwards. He was principal cellist in the Electric Light Orchestra, and he has a most unusual claim to fame. He was killed by a bale of hay. And if you don’t believe me, go and look up his biography.

But as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … utilising the powers hidden in my chatbot, I am saving hours of time in research. And we also have interesting chats about the musicians too, and I quite often pick up little bits of information that he casually drops into the conversation.

All of that took me up to teatime – and what should have been pasta, veg and falafel in tomato sauce with peppers, but turned out somewhat … errr … stretched. Still, the tinned apricot halves wth home-made chocolate and coconut ice cream made an excellent pudding.

And having finished my notes, I’ll be just finishing off what else needs to be done, and then I’ll be going to bed. It looks as if I have a long day of work ahead of me tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Mike Edwards … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of the albums on which he played for the Electric Light Orchestra was called “Eldorado”, their fourth.

Jeff Lynne tells us that "the plot follows a Walter Mitty-like character who journeys into fantasy worlds via dreams, to escape the disillusionment of his mundane reality.".

Remind you of anyone?

LIVE: Sunday 18th October 2026 – I HAVE JUST …

… seen a most extraordinary incident in a football match – the kind that will be played back on these “blooper” videos on social networking channels for years and years to come. And it won’t be any surprise because I had to look at it twice and still find it hard to believe, and so did the commentator and everyone in the crowd too.

But more of that anon. Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

Last night, by the time that I’d finished everything that needed doing and was about to crawl into bed, it was long after midnight, and I’d been letting it all hang out until 00:30, I suppose. And that kind of time for going to bed is doing me no favours at all.

However, with no alarm clock and being awoken in bed by the nurse, at whatever time he comes on a Sunday, that’s much more positive.

Always assuming that I sleep right the way through, which in these days is highly unlikely, of course. And so it proved last night. It was about 04:30 or so when I awoke, and after that, it was one of those early mornings when I’m drifting in and out of sleep without anything being definitive. I was awake at 06:20, which I know because I looked at the time, and the next thing I remember was the nurse coming into the apartment round about 08:30.

He sorted out my legs and feet while I was still in bed, and then he cleared off until tomorrow. But I couldn’t go back to sleep, so a short time later, I threw off the covers, and when I eventually summoned up the courage and energy to stand up, I headed into the bathroom to sort myself out for the morning.

When I’d finished dressing, I went into the kitchen to make breakfast. It was only 09:15 too, so it wasn’t actually all that late compared to a weekday.

Breakfast was quite good today. There was the usual porridge, juice and cafe, and two more of my home-made croissants filled with apricot jam. Yes, they were really delicious. There was no book today, though. The travelling laptop is still in my bag, as it will be going with me tomorrow to the day hospital before dialysis. The time has come round for the second instalment of this product that stimulates my white blood cells. And if it gives me the same kind of boost as the first one did four weeks ago, it will be pretty good.

And when it’s all over, across the road I go, off to the dialysis centre without a break and, more importantly, without breakfast. And that will hurt the most. That is, unless, once more, the nurse who looks after me goes for lunch, forgetting that she has to put the anaesthetic on my arm. That will hurt much more when I go to dialysis and they come to plug me in.

After breakfast, I came back in here to carry on with yesterday’s notes, and you may well have noticed that they are now on line, almost two thousand four hundred words of them. That meant that I could now transcribe the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was round at my niece’s house last night, and it was the usual chaotic place with all of their families and friends there. I was having to leave that evening as I was somewhere near Stranraer. My niece’s husband was talking to me about an oak that he’d been growing since it was an acorn, and now it was ready to be cut down, and he told me that I could have it. He explained that he’d been curing it with mushrooms and everything like that. I kept on asking for him to tell me where it was, but for some reason, he was very reticent. Then they all decided to go to someone’s party up in town, but I was planning to leave that night and I had a lot of things to do. One of the things that I’d promised to do was to take all the scaffolding and piping that was by the front door and put it somewhere, so I’d already put it in my van. My elder sister, she should have been helping me as she promised, but she went to this party too. Now that the van was all ready, apart from the piping that I’d put in it – this tubing that I’d put into it – and I didn’t have the address of this tree and had stuck all these tubes in my van, so in the end, I went down to where this party was and took hold of my sister. I said “are you still going to help me move these things?” She replied “oh yes, I’ll help you tomorrow”. I answered “you know I’m leaving tonight” so she reluctantly came out of the party. I asked my niece’s husband if he had the keys to these two garages that he had across the yard at the bottom under the trees, and he gave them to me. They were two half-keys that you had to fit together in order to open the door. So I picked those up and then went outside. I saw my sister walking around the street, so I drove over to pick her up. She came over extremely reluctantly as if she had no interest whatsoever in giving me a hand to move these tubes and piping in the van, even though they were for her daughter’s husband.

There have been quite a few dreams in the comparatively recent past about being at my niece’s house, all of which have put the house in an unreal situation, somewhere a long way from its actual position in real life, and all of them recounting stories that have absolutely no basis in fact.

But the significance of Stranraer is easy to explain, seeing as I watch Stranraer FC’s matches almost every weekend and sometimes when they are playing in midweek too. We’ve also been going to parties on a regular basis through the night just recently too.

The oak tree is significant too, seeing as I’m reading a chapter on special trees in Herefordshire in my morning book right now, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. However, I bet that the oak in this dream wasn’t ready to be cut down quite yet either. They need a few hundred years to mature first. And the mushrooms relate to that chapter on parasitic mushrooms that we read too.

The scaffolding and tubing is interesting as well. Regular readers of this rubbish in a previous version will recall, I own quite a bit of scaffolding that I bought from that huge painting project in Liverpool City Centre when I was in the UK once, and I also bought some heavy duty tubing from Stoke on Trent to use as wind turbine masts and so on. My van was full of the stuff when I came back from the UK that time.

And, of course, there’s the usual visit of someone from the rest of my family. They always seem to pop up when they aren’t required

This took me up to today’s football – Afan Lido, tenth in the second tier v Penybont, third in the first tier.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Afan Lido’s ground. They haven’t been in the first tier and televised matches since they were relegated at the end of season 2013/2014, and although it’s a fairly new ground, it was looking rather tired and neglected back in those days. However, it looks as if it’s had a refurbishment and a few good coats of paint and looks much nicer.

As for the match, I don’t think that there was ever a doubt about who was going to win it. Penybont was by far the better team and had, I reckon, about two thirds of the play. At times, Afan Lido were struggling to get out of their own penalty area. However, they held on for a good forty-odd minutes before Penybont scored their first goal, a header by a Penybont defender from a corner.

And then we had a calamity!

The very same defender who had scored the goal, about thirty seconds later intercepted a loose ball down by his own goal line. His keeper was up near the penalty spot, so we all expected a pass to the keeper. Instead, the defender, calmly and nonchalantly, kicked the ball into his own net to give Afan Lido an equaliser, and no-one watching the game could believe what they had just seen.

Whatever Penybont’s manager, Rhys Griffiths, had put in his team’s half-time cuppa, I’d like a drink of that myself because within three minutes into the second half, Penybont had scored two more goals to go 3-1 up. However, Afan Lido woke up quite quickly and managed to keep the Penybont attackers out for the rest of the game, albeit with some desperate defending at times.

Afan Lido had some good moments of their own too, and with a few minutes to go, they won a corner. The ball pinged around inside Penybont’s six yard area for a few seconds, then hit a Lido player and went into the net. I don’t think that he knew anything about it – he was just in the way – but it was a goal for his team and they were now just one goal behind.

As the game came up to the final whistle, the Lido won yet another corner. This led to a game of head tennis, and the same player as just now put the ball in the net. But while he and his team were dancing around to celebrate, the linesman had his flag up for offside.

So Penybont won the game 3-2, meaning that Afan Lido were just so close, but on the balance of play, the result did rather flatter Afan Lido.

There was yet more football after that. The first match was Stranraer away at Spartans. And the Stranraer juggernaut rolls on with yet another win, this time 2-0. Still top of the table, on goal difference from Clyde, and those two have opened up a five-point gap to third place. The next few months will be interesting.

There was another 2-0 scoreline too, this time in the game between Greenock Morton and Queen’s Park. And since having sacked their manager a couple of weeks ago, Morton have become a different team. The players have finally gained some confidence and are looking as if they are enjoying themselves, and they had more shots on target in this match than they had in all of the matches under Ian Murray. They fully deserved their victory this afternoon. Here’s hoping that they can keep it up.

Two other important tasks remained to be done. The first one was to freeze the remains of my shepherd’s pie. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that several days ago I had invited comments from my readers. Most of the suggestions that I received had nothing to do with the shepherd’s pie, and they were physically impossible anyway, but Seàn sent me a couple of ideas, for which I was grateful.

However, in the end, I found some small ice cream containers that Marianne had had. They were 900 mg instead of 1 litre, and the portions of shepherd’s pie were just about the right size to fit in. They are now in the freezer, freezing away.

The final job was my Welsh homework, seeing as I’m not here tomorrow morning. That’s all done now, and I’ll review it on Tuesday morning before I send it off to be marked.

So now my notes are also finished, so I’ll just finish off everything else before I go to bed. Hospital tomorrow morning, and I don’t really want to go. Here’s hoping that the effects of the perfusion make it worthwhile.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about pies … "well, one of us has" – ed … a well-known cook from one of these celebrity TV programmes went to Australia, and while he was there, in front of an invited audience, he made a lemon meringue pie, and all of the audience cheered.
He stood there, scratching his head in bewilderment.
"What’s the matter?" asked the producer.
"Everyone cheered" he replied. "I don’t understand it."
"Why’s that?"
"Because back in the UK, I was told that Australians like to boo meringue."

LIVE: Saturday 17th October 2026 – AND ONCE AGAIN …

… we had yet more problems at dialysis. And just to prove how polyvalent everyone is at dialysis, they were a completely different set of problems than the usual ones. It seems that my whole life is going to be spent encountering these dialysis issues, and when one is solved, we can simply pass on to the next one.

But I don’t understand at all why I seem to have so many problems at places like that. It’s almost as if someone thinks that I don’t have enough of my own at home, like sleeping, for example. It seems that I can sleep perfectly well when I don’t want to, like in the middle of the day, but when I want to, like at night, I don’t seem to be able to manage it.

Last night was a perfect example of that. I was writing my notes up after the football, admittedly at some kind of very late hour, and suddenly, I could feel myself starting to drop off. That was the cue to abandon the notes, post online what I’d done, and go to bed. And then, not be able to go to sleep for ages.

Eventually, I managed to drop off and go to sleep, but it wasn’t for long. I’ve no idea what time it was when I awoke, but it was definitely in the small hours. I know that I was still awake at 04:59 because I checked the time and debated with myself whether I should get up at that point, but the next thing that I remember was the ‘phone going off at 06:29.

Once more, it took a real effort to haul myself out of bed and off into the living room to unlock the front door ready for when the nurse comes, and then go into the bathroom to sort myself out for the morning. I even had a good scrub up and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant at dialysis this afternoon.

Back in here, I attacked the notes from last night, and I’d almost finished when the early arrival of the nurse confounded me.

While he was sorting out my legs and feet, we chatted about the weather. Apparently the temperature is going to drop dramatically over the next few days, and a proper autumn will be upon us quite rapidly.

After he left, I made my breakfast, and while I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Our author is still waxing lyrical about some of these trees, and I don’t suppose that he’ll ever stop. But interestingly, he talks about some fine young chestnut trees in the grounds of one of these stately homes in Herefordshire, and when I went to look it up on the internet to see how things are today, the hall is now in possession of the National Trust, who make some very favourable comments about the chestnut trees that are now one hundred and seventy years old.

Back in here after breakfast, I finished off the notes from yesterday and they are now on line, as you have probably noticed. And then I went to transcribe the dictaphone notes.

I was at a football match last night when the two teams playing, each one having a substitute who played in a reserve league who had never come into the first team. So the first team had their new player in defence and the other team had their player in attack, and the attack players and the defence players of the different teams had to be involved in finding space and waiting to be passed the ball and so on, and then be taught how to control it once they had already received it, because far too many balls were bouncing off them and going out of play and that sort of thing.

This dream about players finding space relates to a certain training session for a certain hockey team somewhere, but that’s yet another story that the World is not yet ready to hear.

In fact, the part about the reserve players coming into the team also relates to the same story. But as that story is something reasonably current, it’s no surprise that it’s coming up now in a dream.

There was some Eastern European guy whom I knew – he might have been Polish or something like that – and he worked as a bacon slicer in a meat factory somewhere or other in the area. He was telling me about his aim to become a motor mechanic. He had this yellow Mk IV Cortina which looked fairly nice but there were a few things that needed doing to it, and he told me that he’d done them. He took the car for its MOT. There was also someone who was going to fetch my injections for me. I was supposed to have two injections, one on a Monday and one on a Friday. I’d had the first two, but for some reason I’d forgotten to collect the next two, so some woman or other, an elderly woman, she had a bottle of the stuff that the first injection used, and she filled the syringe with it and injected me with that. Then I had to take the prescription down to the doctor to explain what had happened and get him to write a new one for the product on the Friday and for subsequent ones. I put them in a brown envelope and gave them to this Polish guy. I went down to the MoT station afterwards, and his yellow Cortina was there, and it had failed on four or five things, nothing very complicated, but I heard that this guy had handed in his notice at work and was going to start being a motor mechanic, working underneath cars in the street, that kind of thing. But seeing the work that he’d done on this Mk IV Cortina and it hadn’t worked, I could see his next adventure ending in tears at some point.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I used to have a fleet of yellow MkIII and MkIV Cortinas in the past, although I didn’t know anyone Polish like that at the time. And the garage certainly didn’t resemble the garage at the salt mine where my father used to work, so where it was, I don’t know.

The story about the injections is interesting too because regular readers of this rubbish will recall that quite a few years ago, I had to have a series of injections a couple of times each week and had to fetch them from the chemists regularly. That’s how I first encountered these nurses who come to visit me every morning.

I forgot to mention the confusion when I went down to that garage. I’d given all the paperwork for these injections to this Polish guy and put them in a brown envelope. I walked into the garage where his car was being MoTd – at the back of Bedford Street near the old police station. I pulled out and told someone “here’s the envelope”. They picked it up, and it was the wrong one. The second one was the wrong one. The third one was hanging up by a magnetic attachment thing on the workplace by where this Polish guy was working. He brought it over to me and this other guy. We had a look at the paperwork together.

If this is confusing you, don’t worry. It’s confusing me too.

That was all that I had time to do this morning, although I might have had more time had I not crashed out between 10:20 and 11:00.

When the alarm went off, I headed into the kitchen to have my midday medication and my disgusting drink, and then to start to pack the travelling laptop ready for dialysis. My faithful cleaner came down to apply the anaesthetic on my arm too.

After she left, I adopted the usual position of slumping across the table with my head resting on my arms so that I could have a little doze, but that wasn’t for long either as the taxi turned up at, would you believe, 12:40. Not that I’m complaining, of course, because, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the earlier I arrive at dialysis, the earlier I’ll be home, and that suits me just fine.

However, the best-laid plans of mice and men and all that, we first had to go to Champeaux to pick up someone there to take to dialysis, and then at the autoroute interchange at Marcey-les-Grèves, we ran into a barrage of gilets jaunes. And what annoyed me about that was that there was a warning sign in the centre of the village, just by where there’s a turning that goes through a village called Saint-Jean-de-la-Haize, and from there via a couple of narrow lanes, you end up just four hundred yards from the hospital.

Now if I know that, why didn’t our driver, who has been working for the taxi company for thirty years?

So after using all our powers of persuasion, we eventually arrived at dialysis ten minutes early. And this is where the fun began.

If you want to know whether I had a new nurse or an experienced one today, you only need to look at the plasters that she put on my arm when she took out the needles at the end of the session, and that will tell you all that you need to know. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen such a dog’s dinner in all my life.

But the fun began when she was trying to plug me in. The first needle, in the lower part of my forearm, went in fine. The second needle, in the upper part of my arm, well, not so fine. She ended up having two tries at it and they both failed. In the end, she had to call for the senior nurse and it was a case of “third time lucky” when she did it. But I now know exactly how a dartboard feels.

Further bad news is that my internet subscription at the dialysis centre has expired. It’s only good for a year and then I have to renew it. And of course, with it being Saturday, there’s no-one on duty at the tech department of the hospital. So, without the internet, I read a paper on Lack of Moral Fibre in the Royal Air Force in World War II.

Apart from that, there were no other interruptions. Not even from Emilie the Cute Consultant, who came into the ward and went to chat to almost every other patient in here, except me, of course. She clearly doesn’t love me any more.

But seeing as we have been talking about the other patients … "well, one of us has" – ed … my favourite patient who is usually in the bed beside mine was brought in this afternoon on a stretcher. Apparently she had developed a breathing problem and, even with a cylinder of oxygen, was having difficulty breathing. I do hope that she’s going to be OK.

Today, the nurse let the session run to the full time, which makes a change, but when the session finally finished, she spent ten minutes cleaning the machine first before she dealt with me, and that was disappointing too. I wanted to be away.

When I was finally free and the wounds compressed and sealed (with the plasters stuck on any old how), I went to weigh myself. And I was actually bang on my dry weight, which is where I should have been those three times before. And the driver was waiting for me – the same one who had brought me – and I was the only person in the taxi too, so I was home at about 18:30.

My faithful cleaner was waiting for me, and she helped me into the apartment where she stuck a disgusting drink into my sweaty little mitt. And after she left, I made some food – a baked potato, peas and carrots and a burger on a bap. It’s been quite a while since I’d had that for a Saturday tea, and it shows that, bit by bit, my appetite is returning.

Football was next, another match in the Welsh Cup, this time between Y Fflint and Caernarfon, a repeat of the cup final a couple of months ago.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … Y Fflint play some nice, tidy football and don’t deserve to be as low down the table as they are, so it was no surprise to anyone when they scored the opening goal after just five minutes.

However, Caernarfon scored an equaliser almost straight from the restart and gradually went on to impose themselves on the game. By the final whistle, it was all on-way traffic towards the Y Fflint goal, with Caernarfon winning 3-1.

So tomorrow early afternoon, we have the final match of our Welsh Cup trilogy when Penybont, third in the Cymru Premier League, leave Bridgend to travel down to the beach at Port Talbot to take on Afan Lido, tenth in the second tier.

When the football was over, I attacked the dictaphone notes, but I really didn’t realise just how late it was. When the waves of fatigue began to sweep over me, it was almost midnight and I didn’t want to be letting it all hang out much later, so I posted on line what I’d written so far, added a “to be continued” sticker and went to bed. I’ll finish off the rest of my magnum opus tomorrow morning.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about bacon slicers … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of my friends told me about the woman from Crewe who went into her local butcher’s and sat on the bacon slicer.
"What happened?" I asked.
"The butcher was most annoyed" she said. "he ended up getting behind in his orders."

LIVE: Friday 16th October 2026 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone this morning, which is something of a disappointment. Not that it’s any surprise, of course, because if you don’t go to sleep, you can’t dream, can you? Well, I can, as events in the recent past have proved, but not many other people can manage it.

And it’s also looking very much like I’ll have nothing on tonight either, because Bane of Britain … "fool that he is" – ed … dropped both sets of his night attire into the washing machine this morning without thinking.

It’s also gone very cold in here now. I’ve put on a sweater today for the first time this end of the year. The temperature is definitely dropping, even as we speak. It looks like I’ll be wearing goose pimples through the night tonight rather than anything else.

So let’s go back to last night, when all of this seemed to start.

Last night, I fell asleep in my chair again while I was writing out my notes. I was out for a good hour, if not more, and when I awoke, I had to edit out all of the nonsense that I’d typed while I was asleep. However, I missed a line, and I bet it gave you all quite a laugh when you read it.

But when I did wake up, I was doing no good at all, so I posted on line what I had written, added a “To be Continued” sticker and went to bed.

Incidentally, you may find a “To be Continued” on this posting too, but that’s for another reason entirely. I’ve been watching a Welsh Cup match on the internet until quite late this evening.

However, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s a waste of time going to bed early, because all that it means is that you wake up correspondingly early the following morning. And that was definitely the case this morning.

Whatever time it was that I awoke, I have no idea. It was still dark, that’s for sure, and it stayed dark for ages. And when I was totally and utterly fed up with just lying there trying to go to sleep and failing, I checked the clock. It was 06:00, so I thought that I may as well claim an early start for once.

So, by the time that the alarm should have gone off, I’d organised myself … "as best as he could" – ed … in the bathroom, unlocked the front door for the nurse when he arrives, and was back in here having started work.

The first task was, of course, to finish off the notes from yesterday. There were piles to do, as you probably noticed, and I hadn’t quite finished when the nurse arrived, quite early again.

While he was sorting out my legs and feet, we had a chat about the weather and how it was going to cool down now over the next few days as we move closer to winter. And I have a feeling that it’s going to be a bad one this year.

After he left, I could make my breakfast and read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Our author is still talking about the famous trees of Herefordshire and, as far as I can tell, steering well clear of controversy for the moment. But not to worry, I’ll catch him out again one of these days.

When breakfast had finished, I went one better than David Crosby, probably because I’d had the ‘flu for Christmas and wasn’t feeling up to par. Consequently, I didn’t give in an inch to fear and went on the attack.

And “attack” it was, too. You have to go back to 6th July since the last time I was similarly engaged.

With that being out of the way, I turned my attention to the washing. Would you believe that I’m on my last pair of trousers – well, decent trousers anyway? So I collected up all of the dirty washing and put it in the machine to wash. These days, I can’t hang up the washing myself to dry, so if I do it on a Friday morning, my faithful cleaner hangs it up for me when she comes in the afternoon, and that helps me a lot.

Back in here afterwards, I had yesterday’s notes to finish, and now they are on line, all two thousand-odd words of them.

It’s a good job in a way that there was nothing on the dictaphone, otherwise I’d probably still be there now transcribing them. However, there were a few other things to do too, and by the time that they were all out of the way, it was time for my midday medication and disgusting drink.

There were the radio notes to start when I came back in here. I’d made a start the other day but I’d barely scratched the surface. And with several new groups and artists featuring in the programme. It would usually take much longer to research them than it does for artists who have featured before. That’s why I was rather apprehensive about whether I’d ever finish it or not.

So, if I don’t ever start, I won’t ever finish, so I made myself comfortable and then I began. And with some kind of superhuman effort, I’d actually finished a good while before the end of the afternoon, despite the interruption from the cleaner when she came in. Yes, I keep on forgetting about the power of artificial intelligence and my friendly neighbourhood chatbot who these days does most of my research for me.

There was even time for the two of us to come up with a list of albums released, musicians who were born and musicians who have died on the day that the following programme will be first broadcast. My “births, deaths and releases” file is pretty comprehensive, but my chatbot can dig deeper than I can.

However, that programme is going to be complicated because I usually play eleven records, but I have thirteen candidates for inclusion on that day.

Tea tonight was my usual Friday night tea – sausage, beans with cheese and black pepper, and air-fried chips. That’s a meal that I could eat even when I was right off my food. I seem to remember that I was living for a couple of months on porridge, toast and the aforementioned.

One thing that I still can’t manage, and I don’t know why, is my Sunday pizza. But who knows? That might make its reintroduction to the menu one of these weekends.

After the washing-up, I managed to make it back in here just in time for the kick-off off tonight’s football.

It’s the Welsh Cup Round Two this weekend, and tonight, the televised match is Llansawel v Afan United, a very lopsided first-tier v fourth tier game.

It beats me why this game was chosen to be televised when most people could already predict the result and when there are several much more competitive games being played elsewhere throughout the country. The least that can be said for it, I suppose, was that Afan United didn’t lie down and die.

In fact, they had a game plan and they stuck pretty much to it, even if the Llansawel goalkeeper didn’t have much to do. And I was also impressed by the speed of Afan United’s two forwards, even if they were far too lightweight for this level of competition.

And a word must be said for Afan United’s goalkeeper, Liam Sheehy. He might have been a bit shaky at the start, and his team did concede five goals, but as the game went on and his nerves settled, he had an outstanding game, made several crucial saves and even saved a penalty.

So he and the rest of his teammates can walk off the field with their heads held high, especially as this is probably the first time they’ve ever played in front of a large four-figure crowd.

Tonight’s match should be much more competitive, and played on a better pitch too. It’s a repeat of last season’s cup final between Y Fflint and Caernarfon. Caernarfon’s form has been somewhat erratic of late, and Y Fflint, who always play nice football, have a new manager who has already ushered them to two victories.

Although the match didn’t finish until 22:45, I attacked today’s notes. However, I only made it so far before fatigue caught up with me. I didn’t crash out, despite the very short night’s sleep last night, but it was on its way, so I posted up as far as I had gone and went to bed. I could finish off the rest of it tomorrow morning.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about having nothing on … "well, one of us has" – ed … the local nudists in South Cheshire used to (I don’t know if they still do) hire one of the local night clubs in Nantwich one evening to walk around, dance, socialise and generally display their wares.
One night, I was driving my taxi around Nantwich when a girl, as naked as the day she was born, stepped out of the shadows and flagged me down. "Take me to Crewe" she said.
So there I was, sitting there, and not being able to take my eyes off her, even for a moment.
"What’s the matter with you?" she asked. "Surely you’ve seen a naked woman before!"
"It’s not that" I replied. "I’m just wondering where you’re keeping the money to pay me."

LIVE: Tuesday 13th October 2026 – I HAVE JUST …

… had one of the worst days of my life.

But I’m not talking medically, because I’m actually feeling quite good right now … "makes a change" – ed … but I mean as far as work goes. I’ve done nothing, finished nothing, accomplished nothing, and all in all I have totally wasted a complete day.

To give you some idea of what I mean, I was still writing up the dictaphone notes (something that I usually do before breakfast) at 21:05 tonight. That’s how far I am behind. I really am going to have to stop being so nice to people in the hope that they stop taking advantage of my good nature.

Nature seemed to take advantage of my good nature last night. I was in bed round about 22:45, not too much later than my ideal curfew time of 22:30, and I was looking for a really good sleep so that I’d be refreshed for my Welsh class later this morning, but it was not to be … "no surprise there" – ed …

Even though I’d gone to sleep quite quickly, thanks to that little mantra that I used to recite a few years ago, round about 03:50 or something, I awoke, and that was the end of any ideas of sleep that I might have had. I tried my best to go back to sleep but that was impossible.

When the alarm went off, it took a few minutes for me to pull myself up and sit on the edge of the bed, and then about ten minutes for me to rise to my feet. Once I was up and about, I went to unlock the front door, ready for the nurse when he arrives later this morning, and then I went to the bathroom to sort myself out.

Once I was looking and feeling a little more reasonable, I came back in here, where my first job would be to finish off the notes from last night that I had abandoned when sleep overwhelmed me rather dramatically.

Whatever it was that held me up, I really don’t know because I hadn’t made much progress when the nurse arrived. While he was dealing with my legs and my feet, we were chatting about his week off, and he was asking me questions about what I’d been up to, not that any of it really mattered.

After he left, I made my breakfast of porridge, coffee, toast and juice, and the morning medication that I need to take, which is probably enough for a meal on its own. I should have been reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870 except that I was hopelessly side-tracked.

The party of Woolhope Naturalists are descending from Croft Ambrey camp to Croft Castle, lower down below the camp. I read about the history of the castle, and that started off on an adventure that led me, for some weird twist of fate, as far as the German “Albatros C1”, to which I’ve just arrived. I shall have to try to get back to the book tomorrow.

Back in here after breakfast, I had to prepare for my Welsh lesson and send off this week’s homework. I’d done the homework yesterday so it simply involved checking it over, converting it to a *.pdf and then sending it off.

The revision passed really well today. It was comparatively straightforward without any complications, so I attended the lesson in an air of optimism. And the preparation had done its job because for the questions that we had to do in the middle of the lesson, I got almost all of them right.

There was a stop in midstream for a paned, or “cuppa”, when I had my disgusting drink and midday medication, and by the time the lesson was over later, I was feeling that I’d actually made a useful contribution to the lesson rather than being a passenger.

Then there were the blog notes to finish off and bring that entry to a conclusion, however, I didn’t get far – not that I was expecting to – because my faithful cleaner turned up to do her stuff and to chase me under the shower. And a really nice shower it was too. I really feel like a nice, clean boy now, although where I’m going to find a nice, clean boy at this time of night, I really don’t know.

That led to finishing off … "yet another attempt" – ed … the notes from last night. That, however, was a task that took much longer than it ought to have done, and in the end, when it was finished, I rejoiced somewhat, and as the waves of fatigue were already washing over me, I called for an energy drink instead of another disgusting drink.

Right now, I could turn my attention to the dictaphone notes at last.

There had been some kind of festival taking place, and as the crowds were leaving, my brother and I were cleaning everything up. We had a pile of it and set it on fire. The more things we found, the more we added to the flames, and at one stage it was burning quite well. But there was something happening with my health, and I reached the point where I wasn’t able to really do much more. My brother was teasing me about that kind of thing but I noticed that he had stopped adding things to the fire too, so we had to shovel the fire around to make sure that it burnt everything that was in the fire and didn’t leave anything unburnt or simply charred. But that was another big, difficult thing to do as well for me and I wasn’t quite sure what was happening.

This actually sounds like the very first Glastonbury Festival. At Woodstock, they simply dug a big hole and bulldozed all the waste into the hole, whereas at the first Glastonbury Festival, they did go along and pick it all up to burn. Rumour has it that three or four festival-goers, still asleep in their sleeping bags, were thrown into the fire, but then again, they said that at Woodstock with them being bulldozed into the hole.

But the story about my health giving out has a very sound base to it. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that back in 2015, I was with a friend and we were cutting down a big tree. Or, rather, he was cutting down a big tree and I was removing the wood in a wheelbarrow. When I was halfway through, I began to lose my breath, and later on, it all went completely. I could no longer work and no longer breathe, and I didn’t have the breath to climb the stairs at home. That was when I went to see the local doctor, and that was when they discovered that I was seriously ill and all of this lot began.

The next interruption was from someone who wanted a chat, so I was there until 18:30, thinking as the discussion came to a close that I’d have thirty minutes to finish the dictaphone notes and then I could go for tea.

But that didn’t work out because Rosemary wanted to talk to me. She was having problems doing a scan, and she’d also lost a Word file that she’d just saved. Could I help as it was urgent?

So how long do you think that I spent helping her? Five minutes? Ten minutes? Not a bit of it. I was there on line with her for one hour and fifty minutes, we didn’t find the files and I’m still at a loss as to what she’s doing and where her files are going. We tried everything to find them, even down to creating some more and savng them into a known directory, but when you are trying remotely to help someone four hundred and fifty kilometres away and you can’t see their screen, you’re relying completely on what they are telling you. And what she was telling me made no sense at all.

In the end, I’m glad that her ‘phone rang, otherwise I’d still be there now, I suppose.

But the answer to all of this is simple. I’m going to have to stop being so nice to people and somehow stop them bothering me like this. I can’t do anything, I can’t get anything started, never mind finished. I have so much to do and I’m living on borrowed time. Dialysis is taking up far too much of my time and I need everything that’s left so that I can push on with my own life, but all of this is driving me up the wall.

And that includes the food. For once in my life, I was actually feeling hungry, but look what happened to my mealtime. Instead, there I was at 20:30, when I should have been doing other things, putting half a dozen falafel balls into the air fryer, a diced potato in the microwave and adding them all to the rest of that nice potato salad that I made last week. What a meal that wasn’t.

Once I’d finished eating, there was the rest of the dictaphone notes.

There were three guys who were having a lesson in my apartment with a particular woman teacher. This lesson turned out somehow to be a rather nasty lesson and this woman left in quite a bad temper. Anyway, these three guys decided to set out and go after her. I tried to dissuade them but they just went out anyway. I made sure that the house was tidy and went out a little later on. saw these three boys going back, but they were each somehow sitting at a table and chair with wheels on it. They had a coffee or something, and they were pushing themselves along with their feet to go back to my place, so I avoided them and headed to the corner where my friends were due to meet me. They were all there, even the kids, and even this woman was there and she was most upset. There had been some kind of confrontation. Anyway, we all agreed to go back to my house, and when we arrived, there were these three tables and chair things parked in a car parking space in the street. It was the day of a strike or something, and someone was trying to pay for a parking fee without success, so we told him that there was no parking fee today. Anyway, we went into my apartment and I could hear music coming from one of the bedrooms, so I went, and these three guys were in there. One of them was in my bed and the other two were lounging around on it, so I told them that they would have to go now as I was having company, so they simply packed up, went downstairs and left. Then the people began to come in. One woman was smoking, so I told her that smoking was not allowed in my apartment but she made some kind of gesture and carried on, so I thought that I would deal with her in a minute. Everyone came in, including one actor-type guy. He was being his usual expansive self and he asked “what’s going to happen now?”. I said “you can always help in the kitchen making us some food”. He looked at me and said “no”. Then he went to find this woman and said “do you know what that man said to me? He said that I had to work in the kitchen, so I told him ‘no I’m not'”. She said something like “it’s OK” and then she said to me “well, don’t worry. He never helps anywhere”. I thought “well, if he doesn’t help anywhere, I can’t see him being allowed back to my apartment again”.

Believe it or not, I do actually know a thespian (or who thinks that he’s a thespian, anyway) who thinks like this. “I’m exceptional” and “I’m special”. And, in fact, he won’t be coming around here any time soon (not that he would anyway because he doesn’t live around here). My friend are lovely people, and we all chip in to do the work that’s necessary wherever we are.

It’s the same with the cigarette smoker. I know people like that too, and they won’t be coming to visit me either. There’s this thing called “respect”.

As for the rest of the dream, it doesn’t mean much to me, although the woman teacher could be my old friend Marianne who died in 2013. And I’ve been in an apartment like this before in a dream too, where there were loads of children hanging about. But that’s about it, I suppose.

There was something in that dream about a girl who had a Chrysler V8 sewn onto her jeans. I said that if I wanted to do that, I’d get one off my niece’s husband’s truck. She asked what he had and I replied that it was a big Dodge 5.8 diesel pickup and so we were talking for a while about these big American pick-ups after that.

My niece’s husband in Canada does have a V8 diesel, but it’s in a Chevrolet lorry, the one that I drove down to New Hampshire in the USA to drop off that racing engine that had shot a con-rod through the side during a tractor-pulling event. And I don’t recall it having a badge like the one on this girl’s jeans, but what does that matter.

Anyway, now that I’m starting to calm down and cool down after my outburst just now, and my notes are finished, I’ll finish off whatever needs fnishing and then go to bed. I have a hospital appointment in the morning and I have never felt less like going to it, but I supose that I must, although I’m not sure why.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about thespians … "well, one of us has" – ed … I’m reminded of the famous pathologist Dr Keith Simpson, performing an autopsy in front of a class of university students.
"In real life," he said "this man was an actor …"
And someone shouted up from the back of the class "well, if he’s acting now, he’s bloody good!"

LIVE: Saturday 10th October 2026 – I REALLY MUST …

… pull out of these dramatic sleeps that I seem to be having. They really can’t keep going on like this because they are devastating my life right now and I don’t seem to be able to snap out of them. It wouldn’t be so bad if I were having them in bed where I can enjoy them, but that seems to be the only place where I don’t have them.

The other night, for example, falling asleep while riding the porcelain horse – that really is the nadir of all of this, isn’t it?

Anyway, I eventually went to sleep last night, not straight away like I was hoping. And once I’d fallen asleep, I didn’t stay that way for long. I was soon awake, although I have no idea at what time. It seemed as if I was tossing and turning for hours. I went through the Welsh course question book in my head while trying to go back to sleep, hoping that I could answer the verbal questions from Head Office when they arrive, but no-one at all contacted me with the questions … "and that sounds like a dream too" – ed ….

When the alarm went off, I had to struggle to leave the bed as usual, but once I was up, I dragged myself to the front door to unlock it for when Isabelle the Nurse arrives.

The next stop was the bathroom for a good wash and scrub up, and even a shave in case Emilie the Cute Consultant comes to see me today at dialysis.

Back in here, I carried on with writing up the notes from yesterday, and although I made good and rapid progress … "which makes a change" – ed … I hadn’t quite finished when Isabelle the Nurse put in an appearance. We had a little chat about nothing in particular, and after she left, I could make my breakfast.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

“Famous Trees” is still the topic of conversation today, but there’s nothing of any special interest in there, although the author of the report is trying to identify historical storm damage to some of the oldest trees. He seems to be quite confident in identifying damage as far back as the early-mid seventeenth century and has suspicions of damage even further back than that. But, of course, nothing is proven.

Back in here after breakfast, I finished the notes from yesterday and they went on line. Now I was free to attack the dictaphone notes.

I dreamed that I was walking again without crutches. I had some kind of dramatic improvement over one evening. I’d stayed behind at school one evening to see a few Shakespeare plays being rehearsed. I walked out of there and walked downtown. By now, it was morning, and I really fancied some croissants but I carried on walking and I crossed the river into the town centre. I saw two people eating croissants that made me jealous, that kind of thing, and I can’t remember now. I can’t remember now – it’s just gone. Yes – that’s right – we were in a DIY shop, and I was looking at the greenhouses with the plants in them and tried to price up the greenhouses when one of the servers came up to me and said “you’re our squash expert, aren’t you?”. “Well,” I replied. “Not really”, so he sent a man over to me carrying a small racket, with the strings being replaced by a wooden lattice-type of work. He asked me if this would be any good for playing squash. I replied “no” and pointed him to where the squash rackets were. Then it came down to when we came to the entrance to that shop and we walked past a plate with free croissants on it for the morning, so I helped myself to one and so did someone else, then a third person, and we chatted about that, but I can’t remember now what happened after that.

There’s no doubt in this dream that when I was walking away from the Shakespeare plays and across the river into the town centre that I was in Nantwich, so it must have been my old grammar school where the rehearsals were taking place.

And it’s a big surprise to me that I was watching the play rehearsals. It’s hard enough to persuade me to go to watch a real play, never mind some rehearsals. The theatre – or plays, at least – is simply not my thing at all.

And at one time, I used to play a lot of squash and was even on a squash ladder … "but not very high up" – ed … in a local club in Crewe, but I certainly wouldn’t call myself an expert. When I was living in a van, it used to be how I’d manage to shower regularly. But finding me in a DIY shop was an everyday situation, and there even was one in Montlucon, “Brico Depot”, that used to open at 07:30, and they did have free coffee and croissants for the early arrivals.

The next task was to have a quick look at my e-mails. And I do mean “quick” because there wasn’t very much time. I was amazed at how long it actually took to finish everything off.

And there was an e-mail from Grahame, who had seen my notes yesterday on the two oak trees, “Adam” and “Eve”. Eve was the famous hollow oak at Moreton-on-Lugg, Herefordshire. Struck by lightning in 1839, its shattered upper trunk was later thatched and fitted with a door and stove, serving as the railway station’s booking and stationmaster’s office.

Grahame sent me a photo of “Eve” in its role as station master’s office and booking office at the railway station, where you can clearly see the storm damage and how it has been converted.

If you click on the image, you’ll see a larger … "although not very much larger" – ed … image where you can probably see things in better detail, including the chimney at the rear which is connected to the stove inside the tree trunk, and also the thatched roof that covers the part where the upper part of the tree broke off.

So thank you very much for that, Grahame. And a quick note to all the other regular readers of this rubbish – I’m always pleased to interact with my audience, and “comments” on this blog are now enabled if you have something to say. And if you don’t want to “go public”, there should be a “contact me” feature in the bottom right corner of the screen. Don’t hesitate to use it.

And if you can’t see the “contact me” feature, SEND ME AN EMAIL

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … office, the alarm rang to let me know that it was time to head for the kitchen for my disgusting drink and midday medication. Once I’d done that, I began to sort myself and my things out for dialysis.

My faithful cleaner turned up too to apply the anaesthetic to my arm and to have a little chat about nothing in particular, and after she left, I had my usual crash-out over the table in the dining area while I awaited the taxi.

Properly crashed out, I was beginning to have a lovely dream when the doorbell rang, and the dream evaporated immediately. I thought “blimey, that’s early” and it was too – at 12:50, but it seemed that I’d only been there a minute, not almost thirty minutes.

Today, I was the only passenger, so we arrived early at dialysis. However, so had everyone else, so it was still 14:25, almost fifty minutes after my arrival, when I was finally coupled up. And woe is me! I had one of the two nurses who have been there for centuries but do the barest minimum of work to comply with the regulations rather than going very far out of their way.

Once everything had settled down, I started to have a footfest, something that went right on until bedtime, would you believe?

The first on the agenda was to watch the rest of Llansawel v Colwyn Bay from a week ago. It was 1-0 to Llansawel when I left it, and surprisingly, that’s how it finished up. Despite Colwyn Bay’s superior skill and tactics and their lethal strike force of “perm any three from Jack Kenny, Adam Davies, Jordan Davies and Louis Robles”, they were simply unable to break down the resolute Llansawel defence and their goalkeeper, Will Fuller, even though Llansawel were reduced to ten men after an hour.

That’s definitely three points thrown away by Colwyn Bay as they drop to fifth in the table and Llansawel climb further away from the bottom and are now in eleventh out of sixteen places.

The next match, which I saw in its entirety, was Cardiff Metropolitan v Trefelin. Trefelin, second bottom in the table with no wins and just three draws, and the Met, seventh with six wins and three draws from twelve matches, looked like the kind of game where we would be expecting one-way traffic towards just one goal. However, it was rather different than that.

Whatever Trefelin manager Andy Hill had put in his team’s pre-match cuppa, I’ll have a drink of that myself because it seemed to work wonders. Trefelin came out of the blocks at an alarming rate and took the match straight to the Met.

And after eleven minutes, we had a really controversial moment. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday, I discussed the idea of “let’s play it out from the back, lads” and how I reckoned that it was nothing but nonsense. And we had a lovely example of this today.

The Met were awarded a goal kick, so former Port Vale keeper Arron Davies took it quickly and passed it to one of his defenders who was in the goal area with him. The defender, not realising that his keeper had played the ball, picked it up to find a suitable spot to take the kick. Obviously, a penalty was awarded, from which Trefelin scored.

They scored a second later on, and although the Met pulled one back, Trefelin scored a third with ten minutes to go to make the game secure. And that was a surprising result, to be sure.

The third match was Hwlffordd v Caernarfon, but I didn’t finish that, so I’ll tell you all about it on Monday evening.

Having seen and noted the instruction about “letting him leave at his dry weight”, the nurse, despite my insistence, stopped the procedure ten minutes before the end, and for why I have no idea. Consequently, I left yet again at 200 grammes over my dry weight, and I’m getting totally fed up of this.

It’s as if, at the dialysis clinic, I’m talking to the wall instead of to a doctor and a group of nurses. It’s high time that I did something about it, and I know what I’ll do, but let’s see what happens on Monday.

The taxi arrived as I was making my way to the door and as I was the only passenger, we were here for 18:20. There was that much wind that the driver dropped me off at the back door – he can park alongside that so I only have to take three paces and I’m inside, instead of the twenty-five metres round the front.

My cleaner was waiting and she helped me inside and to my apartment, where once I was sitting down, she stuck a disgusting drink into my sweaty little mitt.

After she left, I found some of those square toasted biscuit things and took a packet – the last one – into my office along with some of that vegan spreading cheese and an orange. I made myself comfortable and watched the live game of Y Fflint v Colwyn Bay. I’d missed the kick-off by half an hour, but there’s a function “start from the beginning” on the streaming site.

It actually was quite a good game, and as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I don’t know why Y Fflint are only third from bottom because they do play some very nice, tidy football and Jack Flint, their goalkeeper, is one of the best in the league.

They conceded a goal in the twenty-sixth minute but that was the extent of the scoring. Colwyn Bay could and should have had a few more, except for Jack Flint, but Y Fflint couldn’t get a shot over the goal line. A really good and lively striker would make a world of difference to this team.

By now, I was thoroughly exhausted as a result of my dialysis session, and although I made my best effort in writing my notes, I’d written about 300 words before sleep finally overwhelmed me. When I awoke, I posted on line what I’d written so far and went to prepare myself for bed. And what should have been an early night turned out not to be so after I’d fallen asleep yet again while riding the porcelain horse.

When I eventually fell into bed, I didn’t even have time to make myself comfortable before I fell asleep, and that was that.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about trees … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone once asked me if I knew how many trees I’d cut down in the forest on my farm in Virlet.
"One thousand three hundred and forty-seven" I replied
"How do you know that kind of figure exactly?" he asked.
"It’s easy" I replied. "I keep a log."

LIVE: Friday 9th October 2026 – YET ANOTHER DAY …

… where time seems to have flown by and I’ve hardly accomplished anything of what I wanted to do. I seem to be wasting far more time than is good for me right now.

Last night was rather unfortunate when I fell asleep in the comfy chair and ended up going to bed rather later than intended, with the notes for the day being well-unfinished.

And seeing as we have been talking about unfinished notes before bedtime … "well, one of us has" – ed … these notes will probably be unfinished too, but that’s because there’s a football match on – Cambrian United v Rhydaman – and it doesn’t finish until late.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … err … office, I was in bed later than I wanted to be. and I awoke earlier than I intended. However, there was a good reason for that. I must have been lying on my right shoulder in the wrong place, and I had the most horrible ache in my upper arm. It was really painful.

The pain was such that I couldn’t go back to sleep, and so I lay there, tossing and turning and suffering. After a few hours of that, I reckoned that I may as well rise up and do some work. However, the alarm at 06:29 beat me to it.

When I awoke, I was absolutely exhausted, and it took me even longer to raise myself from the bed than normal. And somehow, when I was trying to stand up, I must have stubbed my toe on the comfy office chair that I use as an aid to getting up, because when I came back in here later, there was a trail of blood leading out to the front door where I had gone to unlock it and a trail back into the bathroom where I’d gone to sort myself out afterwards.

However, now that I was back in here, the first thing that I did was to attack the notes that I’d left unfinished last night. And I’d almost finished when Isabelle the Nurse came along.

While she sorted out my legs and feet, I talked about the mess at dialysis yesterday, but she didn’t seem to be interested, which was a shame.

After she left, I made my breakfast, and as I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

We’ve now moved on to the interesting trees of Herefordshire, and the speaker, described as “A Commissioner From The Woolhope Club”, talks about the outstanding trees to be found in the county.

He talks about two very large oak trees, known as “Adam” and “Eve” at Moreton-on-Lugg. “Adam” blew down on 7th January 1839, and “Eve”, although she was still standing, lost all of her branches. All that remained was her trunk, completely rotten and hollow inside. And when the Shrewsbury and Hereford Railway was built in 1853, they put a thatched roof on her and a stove inside her, and she was used as a lodging and office for a while by the stationmaster of Moreton-on-Lugg Railway Station.

Back in here, I finished off the notes for yesterday and posted them on line. However, that took much longer than it ought to have done because I kept on drifting off to sleep while I was writing. And not only that but I was back to having these hallucinations again, and when I “came round” and looked at what I’d been writing, I had to wipe it out and start again.

These hallucinations are really interesting, though. They are so real that when I do “come round”, I’m actually looking for whatever it was that was going on. It’s something so weird that it’s difficult to explain.

In the end, I finally managed to finish, and then I attacked the dictaphone notes from the night.

We had some new neighbours – Mr and Mre Murphy they were – and we were at Gainsborough Road. And the first thing – through their letters – we noticed that they were “Mr and Mrs Murphy” and underneath, they put “Religion – In The Coming of Christ”. I thought “what kind of people are these going to be?”. So we didn’t really have a great deal to do with them, but the guy came round once or twice and asked for a little bit of advice about this and that, and I used to give him a thing about it. Then one day, another one of our friends turned up … fell asleep here … but this guy Murphy used to go on about how he was a well-respected member of the community and there was no-one chasing him for debts or anything. Then another one of my friends, who works in the same kind of business, came and told us that he was being chased by several video companies for the quality of the work that he had done and returning the deposits that they had given him, that kind of thing. And then we had a bit of evidence about that because he was doing some electrical work at his house and there was an explosion. He ended up with wires sticking in his heel.

Nothing in this dream seems to relate to anything in real life … "except the falling asleep" – ed … but I did have a chat yesterday with the friend who figured in this dream… "who is not an electrician" – ed … and part of our discussion did concern Gainsborough Road.

Nothing else fits anywhere.

There was also something as well about a friend and me. We were in the underground garage at my place in Belgium. There was a car in there that had been in there for years, covered up in a tarpaulin, but the tarpaulin had come off, and it was an “X” registered Volkswagen Passat underneath there, dark red and all covered in dust. But we’d gone down there to see my latest car, which was some kind of sports car like a Porsche, but not as good as that. It was bright yellow, and I’d paid €350:00 for it. But he was talking to me about parking in Brussels, saying that it’s becoming more and more difficult. Now you need to have an app where you book your parking place ten minutes before you arrive, and then, automatically, it’s paid. I thought that that’s going to be complicated because someone could be taking your place in that time. He told me that you’re better off buying a card to do this outside the city, but once you have it, you can do your shopping inside the city.

This is the same friend from earlier, and he does have a thing about interesting and old cars.

But parking in Brussels has always been impossible, even before apps and all of that. When I was coming in to Brussels after I’d stopped living there, I’d park at one of the shopping centres on the edge of town and take the tram, metro or train (depending upon where I was) into the city.

There was certainly no car, wrapped in a tarpaulin or not, that had been parked in our underground car park for any length of time. But interestingly, I can still see it now, and it had British plates on it.

By now, believe it or not, it was after my disgusting drink and midday medication time, so I went off to fetch them. Then, after a little break, I carried on.

This afternoon, I’ve been researching the music for the radio programme that I’ll be preparing next week. My chatbot has been helping me as usual because, once more, there will be loads of obscure groups and artists featuring, and asking my chatbot to do the research saves me hours of work.

We now have a good collection of music, much of which I’ve already downloaded and reformatted. And while I was at it, I asked the chatbot to review what I’ve written for the one that I’d prepared yesterday, and he made loads of suggestions and corrections.

In the middle of all of this, Rosemary telephoned me for a chat. I’ve no idea how long the chat was because, shame as it is to say it, I fell asleep while I was talking to her and I didn’t awaken until 17:30, by which time she’d become fed up of waiting and had ended the call. And I can’t say that I blame her.

Back in the Land of the Living, I carried on working until teatime, when I went into the kitchen to make my usual sausage, beans with cheese and black pepper with air-fried chips. And, as usual, it was totally delicious, especially when followed by a peach soya yoghurt and a plum.

The time was such that I had to hurry, but I made it back into here just in time for the kick-off of tonight’s football.

The match that I’d chosen was another one between two newly promoted teams, Cambrian United and Rhydaman. The Cam Army are doing reasonably well for a newly promoted team and are currently in lower mid-table, But Rhydaman have been struggling, and we had to wait until they played Trefynnon just now for their first win.

Rhydaman opened the scoring in dramatic fashion. I’ve been urging teams to stop this nonsense of “playing it out from the back” and go for the direct route, causing chaos in the opposition defence, and tonight, Rhydaman’s keeper launched a long kick downfield, the centre-half missed it, his mate in the centre of defence couldn’t quite get his foot on it, and a Rhydaman player ran on to the loose ball and beat the Cambrian keeper.

After that, the game settled down. Rhydaman opted for the “kick and run” tactics, but Cambrian played some really nice, technical football. Nevertheless, they could still be playing this time next year, and they would never break down Rhydaman’s defence, which was outstanding, even after they had their centre-half sent off. Nothing on earth would ever get past that defence, which is surprising seeing how low Rhydaman are in the table.

Anyway, Rhydaman hung on for their second victory, and with that three points, they are catching up with the pack in the lower mid table, something that was looking most unlikely three weeks ago.

When the football finished, I sat down to write out today’s notes, and I was halfway through when I was suddenly overwhelmed by fatigue. I couldn’t go on from there, so I posted on line what I had written so far, but a “to be continued” sticker on it and prepared for bed.

However, when I was sorting myself out for bed, I fell asleep while … errr. riding the porcelain horse, and how embarrassed is that? That will explain how come I was so late going to bed. But here I am, hoping for a good, really long sleep like the other night … "ha ha" – ed …

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Belgium … "well, one of us has" – ed … a Belgian policemen once stopped a car with five Dutch men in it.
"What kind of car is that?" asks the policeman.
"It’s a Renault Four" replied one of the Dutchmen.
"Exactly" replied the policeman. "One of you will have to get out."
"But the ‘Four’ is the model, not the carrying capacity" says one of the Dutchmen. "Check with your boss!"
The policeman calls up his boss and receives a reply
"Don’t bother me now. I have these three Italians in this Fiat Uno …"

LIVE: Tuesday 6th October 2026 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

… one of those days where I’ve not been able to accomplish much, much to my regret, of course, but I seem to have gone from one interruption to another.

Those interruptions started last night, as I’m sure that you will remember – typing out the notes quite efficiently until I crashed out at the desk, and the worst thing about it was not knowing that I’d crashed out until I awoke.

As I mentioned yesterday, when I awoke, I went more-or-less straight to bed, hoping for a good sleep.

And so I thought, but I had not one, but two phantom alarm calls during the night. The first one was sometime round about 02:30 and I managed to ignore that one pretty much. The second one, round about 04:30, I took much more seriously. I found myself sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for the second alarm. And after a while, when it didn’t come, I checked the time and it was 04:38, so I climbed back into bed.

However, the damage had been done with the call at 02:30. From then on, I was just drifting in and out of sleep. I was definitely asleep at 04:30 or so, but I was awake before the alarm went off at 06:29.

Once again, we had the same old struggle to rise up from the bed and to unlock the front door, but I managed it eventually. And then back into the bathroom to sort myself out, ready for Isabelle the Nurse.

Back in here, I had last night’s notes to finish, so I buckled down and bashed them out, but just before I could put them on line, Isabelle the Nurse arrived. She asked me about my week while she was on her break, so I told her, but that didn’t leave much time for her to tell me about her week.

And she gave me a lecture about dialysis too, saying that I was expecting too much if I wanted things to go as normal every time. There could have been a hundred reasons why it all went wrong and she told me some of them. However, that’s not really the point. The point is that they didn’t tell me about them, so I couldn’t argue about the situation then and there.

After Isabelle the Nurse had left, I made my breakfast and read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Today, they are still discussing the safety concerns relating to the local weather, but something they mentioned caused me to go off on a tangent again and begin to search for the sinking of the Dublin Packet Boat in 1770, with the loss of all hands, without very much success.

Back in here, I finished off the notes and posted them on line, then I began to revise for my Welsh lesson. The revision went really well and I managed to finish the first unit, so I was looking forward to the lesson.

And the lesson went really well too. I did quite well, except for a couple of mistakes that I made, and I was quite happy with my progress. Sad as it is to say it, much as I loved my previous teacher and wished that she was still teaching our year, the current teacher, apart from being really scatty, seems to be more efficient, and I’m learning more with her than I did with her predecessor.

When the lesson was over, I wrote up the notes from the dictaphone last night – and about time too.

We were in a big city that might even have been London. In fact, it probably was, and we were walking down that street that we walk along quite often in a dream but this time, going the other way, from the city centre out to the suburbs. There were three of us, and we were fooling around a little. One of them wanted to go to use the toilet, but there was nowhere, so in the end we found a pub that was open early in the morning, and he allowed them to go to the bathroom there. I was much more interested in an old car across the road. Eventually, my friends came out and we carried on walking and chatting until, in the end, we came to a café where we thought that we’d go and have a coffee. We went in and sat down at a table and we noticed a couple of kids watching us. Suddenly, one of the kids blurted out something in English, so I mentioned it to Nerina and said that you can’t go anywhere, can you? Anyway, these people came over. She looked at my camera and asked if I was me. I said that I was, and she told me that I’d commented on a photo of hers ages ago, and she said that she was very pleased to see me. We chatted for quite a while, and then they invited us to come on their boat in the river. We began to get ready, but this couple was really strange. She insisted on appeal because, being polite and very well-dressed, but not on her own children. Eventually, we sat on this boat. We thought that we’d been on this boat before, so we wanted to know what else was going to happen. Then they began to put a few films on, and these films were dubious, to say the least, and … fell asleep here …

What a dream that was!

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall a dream a week or two back about Nerina and me being in New York for something to do with her work. This boat was moored on the Hudson River in New York, roughly where we were in the previous dream, although the crew of the British freighter were all for buying the boat and doing some privateering on the way home.

Apart from that, there’s the street in London that we know so well, although not this end. We know much more about the far end, which is presumably in Edmonton somewhere and where we buy our chips and pastries.

But, as usual, the dream is just an example of the kind of nonsense that I can conjure up when I try.

The cleaner turned up next to do her stuff, but she sorted out the bathroom first and then chased me under the shower for my weekly scrub.

Back in here, I did some work on my radio programme, and the music is really taking shape. For the last two or three weeks, I’ve had to search for loads of music that I don’t have to hand, and this week is no different. But as of tomorrow, I’m going to have to crack on if I want to finish it before the weekend.

When teatime came round, I went into the kitchen and made myself some mashed potato with onion, peas and carrots and the last slice of my vegan pie. That was delicious, and I’m going to have to make another one at some point. A slice of that makes a nice, traditional meal.

It was followed by a raspberry soya dessert, and they are quite nice too. I’ll have to order some more of these when they next come round on special offer.

Back in here, Rosemary ‘phoned me. Her external hard drive had arrived, but she wasn’t sure how to use it. We ended up just having a quick chat – a mere 00:53:48 today – and helped her install the external drive and perform her first complete backup. With a bit of luck, God’s help and a bobby, she won’t lose any more files.

Once I’d finished with Rosemary, I could crack on and do the notes for the day, and now, they are finished. There are just the stats and my back-up to perform, and then I can go to bed.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about alarms … "well, one of us has" – ed … I heard a story that one of my friends had bought a new alarm clock earlier that day.
It had come by post from the Tourettes Society, and we were having a good discussion about it.
At least, we were, until one of my friends said "well, he’s going to be in for a rude awakening tomorrow morning then"

LIVE: Saturday 3rd October 2026 – ANOTHER MYSTERIOUS AFTERNOON …

… in dialysis today. But I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that I’m going to do my best not to fall asleep in dialysis again so that I can keep my eye on what’s going on behind the scenes.

Another thing on which I wish that I could keep an eye on is what’s going on with my sleeping patterns. Anyone who checked my blog between about 22:00 and midnight and then went to check it later will be bound to be confused by what they read.

Round about 21:30, I fell asleep in the chair here, and when I awoke at about 22:00, I just posted on line what I’d written to date and added a “TO BE CONTINUED” sticker to it.

Before I fell into bed, though, I went for a ride on the porcelain horse, and when I came back in here, I found that I was wide awake somehow, so I finished off the blog, overwrote the “TO BE CONTINUED” sticker and posted the completed entry on line.

And then I fell into bed and went straight to sleep.

At some point during the night, I awoke again and was tossing and turning around for what seemed like an eternity, trying to go to sleep, but without any success. But I must have managed it at some point because I was dead to the World when the alarm went off at 06:29.

We had the usual struggle with ourselves to leave the bed, and then I went into the bathroom to sort myself out. While I was there, I had a good scrub up and a shave, in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon at dialysis.

Then I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out what went on during the night.

There had been something in the news about adoptions. There was a family from Preston who had adopted a boy from a Preston children’s home, and a couple of other people who had done the same thing too. There was even someone who had taken an abandoned child from a children’s home with a view to adopting him, and escaping to Vietnam. That had me thinking about whether, as a single man, I could adopt a child too. So I went away from here and had a think about it and then went back to the office to talk to them. It was only later on that I realised that I was living in a one-bedroomed apartment, so if I did adopt a child, then where would it sleep?

There’s certainly some mileage in this dream. Some “friends of friends” have recently adopted a child from a local children’s home, and that’s what has probably inspired this dream. And then adopted child and Vietnam has a story behind it too, but it’s another story that the World is not yet ready to hear.

As for adopting a child, I’m quite ready, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, to adopting a cat, preferably a female cat. And it’s true that I only have a one-bedroom apartment, so adopting a child would be out of the question, even if I were not ill.

Then I was at work, and it was a Sunday morning and there was plenty of overtime to be done to clear some arrears. I went in and there were quite a few other people in as well. There was a guy sitting next to me, and suddenly, a pile of people’s files turned up on my desk, so I asked him if they were his, and he said that they were, so I put them onto his desk somewhere and began to make myself comfortable. A girl came in extremely late, and everyone cheered her, so she came out with some story about having been locked in somewhere over the weekend, and how would we have liked it? We said that, well, we were certain that we could have rolled up our sleeves, done something and swam to somewhere. I began to look at everything on my desk, and it was a complete and utter shambles, so what I had in mind was to leave quietly on Friday and not go back to the office.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that these dreams of being in work after my retirement date and threatening to walk out without notice used to be a regular occurrence, but they seem to have died off a while back. However, as I said the other day, they are slowly making a comeback.

And the untidiness of mine in the office is nothing new at all. I was always like that, wherever I was and whatever I was doing.

We’d gone skiing somewhere in one of these big resorts. The car that we used was one of these big Transcontinental Vauxhall estates. There were five of us in this car, and the amount of stuff we’d brought with us was astonishing. After we’d packed, for example, I found my old ski boots and all kinds of things like that, so when we arrived in a town near the border to be inspected by the police, we were fully loaded and it took quite a while. I found later that we’d brought all the books with us from home, all that kind of thing. We went skiing, and then we decided to put our chalet up for sale. Someone in the town responded immediately, so we had to do a lot of clearing up and tidying up before we could let him in. When we let him in, he was big and he was active, bouncing around, and we were busy trying to put our ski things away and stack these books somewhere. We ended up stacking them against the wall next to the fireplace. I found a camera that didn’t work because the batteries were flat in it, all kinds of things like that, and getting them into my bag was going to be complicated. Someone came up to my girlfriend and asked me about the car. Before we were leaving, someone else came up to us and asked about the car. My girlfriend didn’t know much about it, so I told him. He said that he was really impressed with the amount of luggage we had in there. He cancelled an order for a new car so that he could buy one of these Transcontinental Vauxhall Estates.

In case you’ve forgotten what a Transcontinental Vauxhall estate looks like, there’s one HERE. It’s the beige one, SPU903M. Strangely enough, of all the cars that I’ve ever owned, I’ve never ever had a Vauxhall. The closest I ever came to one was having a Bedford CA van for a short while.

However, in the past, we never went to any fashionable ski resort, except that I went once with an Italian girl to a ski resort in Italy. Most of the time, we went to the unfashionable ones, although when I was driving coaches and we had no work for a few months after Christmas, I’d go to ski resorts in Eastern Europe such as Romania and Bulgaria. I even took Percy Penguin with me once.

The nurse turned up as usual, and while he was dealing with my legs and feet, he gave me the same warning as my cleaner did yesterday about the festival down in the port and how it was total chaos.

After he left, I made my breakfast and read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Today, we had another little chat about geology, and then we returned to fungi, with a discussion about fairy rings. Maybe the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine would have been interested in joining in the discussion. It’s a shame that the subject wasn’t “fairy boots”, otherwise it would have given me a good opportunity to drag Lee “I’m a prostitute” Pottymouth into the discussion. He’s not put in an appearance in these pages in an age.

When breakfast was finished, I had a few things to do, after which I intended to work on reformating the music that I’d downloaded the other day. However, in the end, I ended up having an on line discussion with someone about music that went on for quite a while, discussing mainly folk-rock songs.

And when the chat finished, I was so fired up that for the first time in a couple of years, I picked up the acoustic guitar and played CAREY by Joni Mitchell and MOONAGE DAYDREAM (I don’t know why) by David Bowie. I was surprised how much I’d forgotten, and also how much it hurt afterwards.

At midday, I went into the kitchen for my disgusting drink and midday medication, and then I began to make myself ready for dialysis. My faithful cleaner turned up too to put the anaesthetic on my arm too.

After she left, I hunched up over the table and let myself relax, with my head resting on my forearms. I was once again just about to drift off into a really nice dream when the doorbell rang. I looked at the time and it was 12:58 – I’d been away with the fairies … "although not in any manner that would excite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine" – ed … for just over half an hour.

There was no one else to pick up en route so we arrived at dialysis a few minutes early, despite the chaos around the port today. However, it made no difference because there was a queue of people in front of me, and it took until 14:25 to be plugged in.

Once everything was up and running, I had to wait until 15:30 for the football to kick off so I found one or two other things to do while I was waiting. However, I must have crashed out somewhere along the line because I awoke with a start at 15:27, just three minutes before kick-off.

The match that I’d chosen today was the basement clash between Rhydaman and Trefynnon. This was a real six-pointer, as both sides had yet to record a victory, and they needed to start winning soon, as the rest of the table was cutting them adrift.

As you might expect, this was another game played at a hundred miles per hour with both teams going at it hammer and tongs. And its opening was certainly dramatic – Johnny Evans missed a sitter of a free header when surely it must have been easier to score, and then straight from the goal kick, Trefynnon roared up the field and scored to go in front.

Then we had goals disallowed for offside, balls hitting the post or being cleared off the line, until Johnny Evans, in the fortieth minute, scored with a delightful lob from outside the penalty area, right over the head of the Trefynnon goalkeeper.

It went from bad to worse for Trefynnon when in the fifty-sixth minute, Rhydaman scored a second goal to take the lead. From then on, Trefynnon threw everything they had at the Rhydaman defence, but to no avail and Rhydaman took all of the points.

That was a shame because I thought that Trefynnon had the better of the play, but they are deep in it now after that.

And spare a thought for Cambrian United. For the second away match in succession, they conceded nine goals. And they are one of the better promoted teams too.

This was when I noticed something rather bizarre. When I’d begun to watch the football, there were fourteen minutes after the final whistle before the end of the session. However, despite there being over fourteen minutes of stoppage time in this game, there was still half an hour to go, and I wasn’t finished until 17:55.

From 14:25 to 17:55 is three and a half hours, not the three hours that I’m supposed to have, and when I weighed myself later, I was still four hudred grams over my dry weight. Mind you, I did notice that the chief doctor, he who doesn’t like me chatting up the nurses, was on duty again today. He spoke to several people in the ward, but kept well clear of my bed.

When I was outside, I had to wait a few minutes for the taxi but I was once more the only passenger. Nevertheless, it was 19:15 when I finally arrived home.

My cleaner was waiting for me, sitting on her mushroom outside, and she helped me into the house and gave me another disgusting drink.

After she had left, I made myself a small plate of pasta and veg tossed in olive oil, garlic, black pepper and vegan cheese. And delicious it was too, especially as it was followed by a peach yoghurt.

Back in here, I had things to do, and then write up my notes. Now when I’ve checked the stats and backed up the computer, I’ll be off to bed. It’s horrendously late tonight … "or this morning" – ed … but I don’t care. I’m aiming for a lie in tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about people sitting on mushrooms and other bizarre things … "well, one of us has" – ed … a man walked into a doctor’s surgery and began to speak to another man sitting there.
"Why are you here?" he asked.
"I have the biggest piles the World has ever seen" he replied.
"Is that why you’re sitting on that giant bean cushion?" he asked.
The man replied "look more closely."

EPIC HALL

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

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