… who drew the short straw tonight, coming with me to take a coach party down to the south coast, Worthing or somewhere similar. We stopped the night at a town not too far away, somewhere near Lewes. While we were there, I rang up the hotel on the coast to make all of the arrangements for our arrival, and to find out the directions to the hotel. When I came out of the telephone booth into the bar, there were several giant-sized people in the bar, all professional wrestlers who were handing out promotional gifts. I was given a cigarette lighter (of course, I don’t smoke) but it leaked and I was getting all of the fluid all over me and smelling like a tart’s boudoir. In the end, Nerina sent me to wash my hands so I went into the toilet but all of the sinks were full of baby clothes – someone had filled up all of the sinks and left the clothes in there to soak. This had annoyed everyone in the hotel. I went to someone else’s coach because I knew that he had a kind of tap and hand-washing arrangement on an extendible pipe right by the driver’s seat (it was a left-hand drive coach but the entrance was on the left). I used this to wash off my hands. While I was doing this, other coach drivers came up to ask what I was doing, so I explained. I had difficulty closing off this tap no matter what I did, so the other drivers had a try and they couldn’t do it either, so they started to fill their bottles of drink with it. Coming off the coach I heard some woman talking to one of the coach hostesses talking about exit doors on coaches. She was going on about a particular kind of coach and describing a particular kind of door, to which I interjected that that was a B10M (which, incidentally, is a model of chassis, not a body) but no-one was listening and the hostess was saying that it’s not an E62 like we have. So I said “B10M” again, to just the same amount of notice. And back in the hotel still filthy, still covered in cigarette lighter fluid, and I eventually found a map of how to reach this hotel. It wasn’t where I thought at all but to the west of the town on a headland and fairly easy to reach. There was a big coach park right opposite just by the headland and also a small restaurant close by which was useful because I knew what hotel food was like and I could see me eating out every night if the hotel food was rubbish.
And Maria, having made her rather dramatic entrance onto our stage yesterday, is back for a follow-up appearance. This time however, she was quite seriously ill and had been discharged from her employment at the EU. I was running a business from my home with about three or four people sitting at desks doing things (I can’t remember what now) and so to help out Maria and make sure that her Social Security obligations were met, I offered her a small job at my place. And so she came to work, not doing very much. On one day needed to go to a medical appointment so I offered to take her. “You can’t go like that” she said, indicating my present attire, and nipped off upstairs (I’ve had exactly the same conversation with a friend of mine a couple of months ago, by the way). She came back down again with a pair of denim jeans. “Put these on”. “What size are they?” I enquired, to which she replied that they were 32-inch. Now up until I stopped running in the late 1990s I could fit into 32″ jeans, but even on a nocturnal ramble I knew full well that they would be too small, but I tried them on and found that I actually needed a belt to hold them up, which amazed me. But anyway, off we went to the hospital and on the way, I found that the two of us were holding hands, something that Maria would never ever do in real life (and which parallels, incidentally, something that was going through my mind with another person just before I dropped off to sleep).
Later on, the two of us found ourselves out on the ski slopes. We were fighting our way out through hordes of children up the steps to the three ski-lifts that were there and then I came to a sudden stop. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on three or four occasions in the past my nocturnal rambles have taken me to a certain ski-run which involves a passage down a narrow valley, a difficult passage through and over some kind of watershed and then a glorious run down another valley which made all of the hard work quite worthwhile (and we even visited it in our red Cortina estate on one occasion during one night) – anyway, this was where I was heading. But I couldn’t remember how to get there now. Looking at the map board, I could see a black run indicated (ski runs are colour coded to give their degree of difficulty and black runs are the most difficult) which I reckoned would be the one that I wanted, but I couldn’t work out how to get there. Maria said that she knew the way but was surprisingly evasive when it came to actually telling me. I was looking for a map to take with me but there wasn’t one available and so I was feeling really disappointed about this as I had really been looking forward to revisiting this ski run.
On that note of disappointment the alarm went off and I came downstairs. And then had a long loooooooooong wait for the nurse to come. He’d forgotten that it was blood test day and was busy doing his rounds elsewhere while I was sitting here starving.
And talking of blood tests, here’s a shock. I have an id and password so I can go to the laboratory’s website any time after 16:30 and pick up my results. And this evening I found that my blood count has NOT gone down. Now there’s a surprise. I wondered why I had not been “summoned to appear at nine o’clock in the forenoon to answer to the aforesaid” at the hospital.
But this brings with it it’s own problem. I mean – this is good news, make no mistake – that if the blood count is down on Monday, I may well be called in on Tuesday, but I’m being admitted to hospital on Wednesday for my operation on Thursday. On Wednesday I’m definitely having a transfusion (I’ve been told that for definite) and it’s likely that on Thursday and Friday they will be carrying on (assuming that I’m still here on Friday). Too much strange blood all at once can provoke a strange reaction and I don’t want one of those while I’m under the knife. I would have been much happier to go in tomorrow regardless.
But apart from that, I’ve had a quiet day in the house doing not very much at all. I’ve not even set foot outside (although Terry took his van for the controle technique – it passed, by the way). There was a huge mega-sale of items on the 3D site that I use so I spent a little money today (and I would have spent a great deal more had I had it to hand) and I pressed on with my 3D Animation course.
The course set us an interesting challenge. We are doing computer-generated 3D animation now (the part of the course that is of most interest to me) and the aim was to produce a bedroom and fit it with items so that the occupant of the room could be clearly identified. I have therefore been scouring www.sharecg.com – the leading free resource community for the 3D program that I use -for items and happily building a bedroom for my K4 character. She now has a bed with teddy bear, a desk with homework scattered about, a chest of drawers with a boom box on it, a wardrobe with clothes hanging in it (it took me hours to do that), a skateboard with helmet and also a pile of clothes scattered about the floor. No prizes for guessing who is the occupant of THAT room.
Apart from that, I’ve had a shower (so that’s me sorted until September) and a change of clothes (ditto) and done badger all else. And ask me if I care.
But I suppose that really, I do care. I can’t go on like this. I’m not looking forward to the operation and I’m looking forward even less to the week or so that will follow. But I need to do something positive and put my life back on the rails. Much as I enjoy being here, I really want to go home and get on with everything.
