Tag Archives: ill health

Friday 17th August 2026 – AFTER THE CATASTROPHE …

… that was last night, I decided to try a different approach to life. “Smile,” they said. “Things could be worse!”. And so I smiled this morning, and sure enough, things were worse.

Last night, after tea, I’d gone straight to bed, leaving undone those things that ought to have been done, thinking that I could deal with them in the morning. I went to sleep quite quickly for a change just recently, and there I lay until some time quite early the following morning when I had to leave the bed to go to stroll the parapet.

Back in bed, I went straight to sleep again until I needed to raise myself from the Dead once more, and for the same reason. And while I was summoning up the energy to do so, the alarm went off and that was that.

It was a very sloooooooooow start to the day and I was late going into the kitchen for the medication so instead of the hot drink, I had just another small mouthful of orange juice to wash it all down.

Back in here, I began to write the notes for yesterday but I kept on falling asleep. I could tell that because what was appearing on the screen was nothing like what I had written. While I was discussing this with myself, Isabelle the Nurse appeared.

She was quite concerned about me today and told me on leaving to take it easy and to have a rest. I didn’t need a second opinion – after she left, I came back in here and went to bed, fully-clothed.

For once, I can’t even remember falling asleep, but I must have done because I didn’t wake up until 12:28. So after the marathon session last night, you can add another four hours or so onto that.

Once I was up and about, the first thing that I did was to finish the notes for yesterday that I had begun, and they are all online now.

Next stop was the dictaphone to find out what had been going on during the night.

I was with a young guy with whom I used to work many years ago. He’d succeeded in most of his exams but the final exam, in order to secure promotion, was turning out to be rather too complicated for him. The boy who did manage to pass was in the rear by nature, and you could see how careful he was when he was putting a spanner into the river … fell asleep here …

This is another one of these dreams of which I remember absolutely nothing at all. But it’s a shame that I went back into a deep sleep in the middle of it because it was beginning to sound interesting.

I was driving down a road to Aberystwyth last night. It was a French road too, with all the kinds of road markings, but I was driving on the left. Then I had a feeling that I was going the wrong way so I had to perform a U-turn, but instead of turning to the right, I turned to the left and I’m not really sure why. I thought that I was going far too far away from Avranches.

As for where this road might have been, it certainly wasn’t one that I knew, but it was definitely a French road, judging by all of the carriageway markings and road signs.

Of course, in that dream about Aberystwyth, I could have been going window-shopping. That’s all that I can do because I have no money these days.

This is another bit that I can’t remember. As for money, with being house-bound, I hardly spend anything these days so I’m not as desperate as all that.

At some point in the afternoon, my cleaner came in and did her stuff. But I was in here, struggling to keep awake, so I didn’t go in to see her today. I’m sure that she can manage on her own without me.

Once all of my dreams were out of the way, I carried on with the radio notes. And although they are all finished now, it wasn’t as straightforward as all that, because I fell asleep again more times than I care to remember while I was writing them.

But with them all out of the way, we were then treated to the unusual sight of me going for breakfast at 18:30. After all, I have to eat something at some point and it saves me cooking a meal tonight.

But eating a meal is one thing. I eschewed the usual breakfast coffee because I have enough problems during the night without adding 300ml of coffee to them.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of THE CELT, THE ROMAN and THE SAXON by Thomas Wright.

He’s continuing to talk about Roman villas, and today he’s discussing several that show signs of violent destruction and burning, with human remains discovered within them. He concludes that there "can hardly be a doubt of their having belonged to persons who were slain when the building was attacked", something with which future archaeologists like Mortimer Wheeler might well have agreed.

So right now, I’m going to call it a day. It’s been a wretched day and one that I would much rather forget, much worse than Saturday last week. Despite it being early, I’m going to bed in the somewhat vain hope of sleeping off whatever is the problem, ready for better days ahead.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about sleeping … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of my little brother who once went into his parents’ room at about 03:00 and awoke them, saying "I’m scared. I’ve been dreaming of monsters chasing me around my bedroom. Can I get into bed with you?"
"Not likely" said my mother. "I’m not having those monsters getting into bed with us too!"

Friday 3rd April 2026 – I HAVE HAD …

… another miserable day today and I’ll be going to bed in a few minutes regardless of how early or late it might be. And if I have yet another evening without any tea, I really don’t care at all.

Last night, as I said earlier, I was in bed at 20:20 or thereabouts, and I was asleep almost straight away. But not for long, though. By about 00:30 I was awake, and try as I might, I couldn’t go back to sleep.

In the end, round about 03:00, I left the bed and went to sit at the computer. After doing the stats and backing everything up, I wrote yesterday’s entry and replaced the terse note that I had written earlier.

Back into bed at about 04:30, I set the alarm for 07:30 and went back to sleep – except for a brief moment round about 05:00 when I definitely heard someone shout “wake up, wake up”.

When the alarm went off, I staggered … "eventually" – ed … to my feet and went off to the bathroom for a kind-of wash. Not very much of a wash, it has to be said, because I was still fully dressed.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There was something about a girl who was writing some kind of biography about the Beatles, or one of the Beatles. She was choosing all kinds of music for the programme. She’d borrowed a pile of books to read but her teacher had borrowed half of those and she was having a great deal of difficulty getting them back. It turned out that this teacher wanted to be involved in the project too but the girl writing it wouldn’t have her in the project at any price. Eventually, she managed to come up with some kind of notes, but there was all the music and she didn’t really want to be involved in the music. She was going to leave this to the producer to sort out the songs and insert them into the programme where he thought fit, despite where otherwise she might have put them.

There doesn’t seem to be very much of any relevance in this dream, so I’ve no idea about anything that might have been going on. It seems that quite recently, we are having a lot of dreams that don’t relate to anything that’s been going on, so I’ve no idea what’s happening these days. It’s probably something to do with these extra pills that I have to take.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up as usual and we had an interesting chat about hot cross buns. Apparently, she’d seen something on TV about them and wanted to know more. I told her that I’d give her my recipe and let her find out for herself.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of THE ROMAN FORT AT BALMUILDY on the Antonine Wall, written by Stewart Napier Miller.

Today, we’re discussing pottery, would you believe? And it’s interesting to note that these experts can identify the individual potter, where and when he worked from just a small fragment.

And just like James Curle at Newsteads, they note that pottery from the earlier period is of much better quality than that of the later period, quite the reverse of what you would normally expect.

As an aside, I have to say that my home-made hot cross buns are absolutely excellent. They really have turned out very well indeed and I’ll have to make another batch like that, but not have the oven so hot. I should have realised that 200°C is too high and I should have stuck to my usual 180°C

Back in here, I had things to do, such as to check my e-mails, and I found that there was work to do. Someone had written to me to tell me that I had misidentified a building on ONE OF MY WEB PAGES, so I had to amend the entry.

While I was at it, I was able to identify a colour for which I had been searching for quite a while and I can now use it, as you might already have noticed.

When I’d finished everything, I began to edit one of the sets of radio notes that had been hanging round for quite a while. So right now, the two halves of the programme have been prepared, the joining track has been chosen and the notes for it written, ready for the next lot of dictating.

That was despite several interruptions. Firstly, at midday, I had to put the dirty clothes into the machine to wash them. And then take them out later and prepare them for my faithful cleaner to hand up when she comes this afternoon.

When she turned up, round about 14:00, I was feeling too ill to stand up and say “hello”. I just grunted a few things to her from in here and let her get on with it.

After she had left, there was football on the internet, Llanelli v Y Bala.

And I have to say that I have never ever seen a team play as badly as Llanelli. Bottom of the table and already relegated, for the first sixty minutes, they played so badly that they made Y Bala, next to bottom, look good. The game was already over at that point, with Y Bala 4-0 up and it was no exaggeration.

For the final thirty minutes, Llanelli were much improved and played with much more fire and spirit. They even hit the woodwork a couple of times, but couldn’t score a goal. And in fact, near the end, Y Bala scored a breakaway goal that made it 5-0.

The battle for the second relegation place is now hotting up. From being eight points clear a couple of weeks ago and looking quite safe, Y Fflint are now just two points ahead, with one game left to play.

After the game was over, I crashed out in my chair for an hour or so. I’d been fighting off wave after wave of sleep all day. When I awoke, I really was feeling dreadful.

As it was almost teatime, I cut myself a slice of chocolate cake and put a dollop of home-made ice cream on it, and then brought it in here. That’s my tea for tonight and, once more, it really is excellent. I’m quite pleased with how the cake has turned out.

So now that my notes are finished, I’m off to bed, hoping for a good night’s sleep, but I doubt it.

The heating is turned up full in here tonight as I’m freezing cold, I’m coughing like never before, a streaming cold and non-stop sneezing. At least, in bed I can keep warm, and I’ll stay in bed for as long as it takes. I really am feeling quite dreadful right now;

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about my cake … "well, one of us has" – ed … a man walking on a beach finds a magic lamp and gives it a rub. Suddenly, a genie appears.
"You have liberated me from my prison" said the genie. "I shall grant you three wishes."
"First, I’d like a motor yacht on a trailer"
"No problem" said the genie. He waves his wand and a motor yacht on a trailer appears.
"Now I would like a million Pounds" said the man.
"No problem" said the genie. He waves his wand and a million Pounds appears.
"Now I would like to be totally irresistible to women" said the man
"No problem" said the genie. He waves his wand and transforms the man into a chocolate cake.

Saturday 28th March 2026 – YET ANOTHER EVENING …

… when I’ll be going to bed without any food. I started to take the stuff out of the fridge but it went almost straight back, before I’d even taken all of it out. Somehow, I just couldn’t face it tonight.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … my taste buds are definitely changing again. I wonder what’s going to drop off the menu this time, apart from my sausage, beans with cheese, and chips that I was planning on having.

This latest thing seems to be something to do with one of the medicaments that Emilie the Cute Consultant has prescribed for me. Last night, after I’d finished my notes at some kind of reasonable time, I finished off everything that needed finishing and then went into the kitchen for the medication. And about five minutes later, I began to feel quite uncomfortable.

The next thing that happened was that I was hit by a huge wave of fatigue, and I was glad to crawl into bed before it overwhelmed me.

Once in bed, I fell asleep quite quickly and apart from one or two brief awakenings, caused mainly by fits of coughing, I remember nothing whatever until the alarm went off at 06:29. And can you imagine just how difficult it was for me to leave the bed at that moment?

What with having some hand-washing to do too, I ended up being terribly late in the kitchen for my hot drink and medication. Still, better late than never. But I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that I had an incredibly dry throat, I was feeling dizzy and also quite lethargic.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And it was a disappointment – I think that Emilie the Cute Consultant’s medication is affecting my sleeping patterns too.

Wales was being attacked by England, so Wales responded by pushing the English back into England. Eventually, the Welsh army overwhelmed the English army right up to the point where not only did they capture most of the English army bases in the UK, it managed to capture a couple of bases’ settlements that were north of Hadrian’s Wall which, in theory, were in Scotland. Wales ended up capturing things like the forts at Newsteads which upset the Scots, and the Scots decided that they really would … fell asleep here …

And when I found the dictaphone later, it had been running for two hours and fifty-five minutes, so if you want to hear me snoring and coughing, you will have plenty to go at.

And “snoring”, yes. I’m sorry for doubting you, Percy Penguin.

As for the dream, the first part relates to very little that is current, but the second part refers to James Curle and his A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE that we read over Christmas and New Year.

There was something about a building somewhere in Crewe that should have been right in the centre of town but was somewhere tucked up a side street, one of the ones behind Market Street. I was on my way to visit it but I couldn’t remember exactly how I was going to be able to go there and at that point I was awoken by an enormous fit of coughing.

Apparently, at the back of Market Street, they have demolished a load of old railway engineering buildings and are building on the site. Let’s hope that the money lasts so that they can finish the job. Having gambled on HS2 arriving in the town, the council’s finances are in a total mess.

The nurse turned up as usual and saw to my legs and feet. He didn’t have much to say, but he doesn’t think much of my lifestyle and my lack of eating. He thinks that my main meal should be at lunchtime. However, if I eat a lot then, I just fall asleep in the afternoon and I do that too often without inviting it.

After he left, I made breakfast and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

Today, we’re discussing the exiles living on the charity of the Pope in Rome. And as I said yesterday, there are piles of them – far too many to count. The Pope must have been a very wealthy man.

After breakfast, I had the fridge to tidy. I’d bought a lot of vegan milk because if it hadn’t been for running low on milk, I’d have waited for another week for supplies, with not eating much these days. So I’m going to see if I can last out four weeks this time.

It’s difficult to believe that a year ago, I was ordering shopping every two weeks

Back in here, we had the highlights of last night’s game between Caernarfon and TNS. These included yet another “let’s play it out from the back, boys”, with a predictable result.

There were a few other things that needed doing, but I’m not sure how I managed because I was feeling quite tired and lethargic, and shaking off wave after wave of sleep.

There was football on the internet at lunchtime – Hwlfordd v LLansawel. And after their dreadful display last week, Hwlffordd played much better and managed to grind out a 1-0 win to move ahead in the race for the European playoffs.

But I’d love to have a closer look at Hwlffordd’s challenge on Llansawel keeper Will Fuller as the cross came into the penalty area.

Eventually, I managed to begin to edit an outstanding set of radio notes. By the time that I’d knocked off, I’d assembled the two halves of the programme, chosen and dealt with the final track and written the notes for it, ready for dictation.

And seeing as we have been talking abut the radio programmes … "well, one of us has" – ed … I forgot to mention yesterday that that very long concert that I need to edit – it’s all done and the notes are all written. I managed to find a few hours yesterday afternoon when I sorted it out.

There were also a couple of chats with a few of my friends too. It’s nice to hear from them every now and again. We don’t see each other anything like enough these days since I’ve been ill.

Later in the afternoon, I began to make my hot cross buns. They are all made now, ready for Easter. Eight of them and then are huge. The trouble with my hot cross buns was that the oven was rather too hot and the buns are somewhat scorched. It won’t make much of a difference, though. They will still be nice.

So with no tea and having finished my notes, I’m off to bed and my lie-in tomorrow … "he hopes" – ed … because I definitely need it. I’ve crashed out a couple of times already today and I’m feeling as if I could crash out again at the drop of a hat.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Pope and the refugees in Rome … "well, one of us has" – ed … Queen Charlotte of Cyprus came to see the Pope in her horse and carriage.
As it was such a nice day, she invited the Pope to come for a ride with her. And after ten minutes, the horse … errr… broke wind extremely noisily.
"Oh dear" said Queen Charlotte, extremely flustered. "I really am so sorry."
"It’s no problem" said the Pope. "In fact, if you hadn’t said anything, I would have sworn that it was the horse."

Friday 27th March 2026 – AND SO, AFTER …

… last night’s theatrics, I managed to survive into today.

Not without problems, though. I am still having these severe coughing fits, my nose is running and I’m freezing, freezing cold. In fact, although for the past few days I’ve just been running the heating at night, it went back on on Thursday for twenty-four hours per day. And yet I’m still perishing.

So after I’d finished the notes for yesterday, I managed to find the time to dictate a few radio notes, making a horrible mess of them, and I reckoned that that was nature’s way of telling me to go to bed.

But not before I’d switched off the alarms and set one for 07:30. A lie-in will do me a little good, I hope.

However, there was just one problem. The alarm that I’d set didn’t have a sound. Consequently, it was the vibration and the buzzing that awoke me, rather later than it might have been. I was dead to the World at that moment.

As usual, it took a while to haul myself out of bed, and as I was already dressed (yes, I’d gone to bed again fully dressed) I sat at the desk and listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And again, it was somewhat disappointing.

I was in dialysis last night. There was some discussion amongst the staff about cases of food poisoning going around. I listened quite carefully because when someone began to mention a couple of the symptoms, I realised that that was actually how I was feeling and how I was suffering. However, the only thing that I have to eat or drink there is the orange juice and coffee so I don’t know where this thing about food poisoning might have come from at dialysis.

That was rather prescient, I suppose, because the idea of food poisoning had gone through my mind at some point during the afternoon on Thursday.

When the alarm went off, there was something going on about weddings. We’d been planning some kind of wedding for something or other and a couple of people had said that this is going to be the kind of wedding that we’ll never forget. But I didn’t manage to go very far down into this dream at all because the alarm went off and awoke me.

What a shame that the alarm awoke me just as this dream was starting up. I would have loved to have known how it would have developed.

The nurse turned up as usual to sort out my legs and feet. He didn’t have much to say today, especially after I’d told him that I’d gone to bed at 20:00. I suppose that he was pondering on how to deal with the situation in his capacity as a nurse, but he simply dealt with my legs and feet and left.

Once he’d gone, I could deal with breakfast — the first meal that I’d had in twenty-four hours — and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

We’ve finally finished the sorry tale of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where, like just everywhere else in the Balkans, the citizens handed their country over to the Ottomans on a plate. We’re now turning our attention to Rome, which seems to be where all of the exiled Kings and Princes ended up, living at the mercy of the Pope.

The list of royal personages who found refuge there is impressively long, that’s for sure, and it includes the names of some of the most powerful in the medieval Balkans.

Back in here, I had plenty of things to do now that my week’s work is finished. The most important was to pay my property taxes for my place in Canada, and now that’s done. There was also the food order for Leclerc to review and send off. And as you might expect, there were several items unavailable.

However, they did have a butternut squash, so my roasted butternut squash soup for Easter Saturday looks like it might be on.

Another thing that I’ve been doing is to back up the files. Now that I have an 8 TB disc drive in the new office computer, I’ve been merging all of the files that were on different hard drives, and they are all now on this large one. I’ve merged in the working files too, and the next plan is to format the two external drives, split the contents of the large back-up drive into two and copy them onto the two external drives, half each, as an extra insurance back-up.

My cleaner turned up as usual to do her stuff. I explained that I wasn’t well, so she sensibly left me to it and left at the end of her session.

Not that I had much rest because fifteen minutes after she had gone, Leclerc turned up with the shopping. So I had all of that to put away (and it’s still not all away) and one kg of carrots to dice, blanch and freeze. And to save the water for the base of the butternut squash soup.

Back in here, I drifted off on my travels for a short while and then had a look at some of the notes that I’d dictated just now. Two of them were the notes for joining tracks so I edited them both and assembled the programmes. That’s me now well ahead for self-sufficiency.

Tea tonight was the curry that I was going to eat last night, a korma from out of the freezer, with rice and veg followed by vegan trifle. And I noticed that the agar-agar jelly seems to be breaking up. It’s probably not meant to be kept as long as this, so I shall have to make a smaller one next time. I hope that this one survives a little longer and doesn’t end up completely in the waste bin. That would be a tragedy.

It will also be a tragedy if I don’t get a move on and go to bed while I still can. I need a good night’s sleep and this looks like the best chance of having one.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about weddings … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone once asked "why does the bride always wear white at her wedding?"
"It’s to symbolise purity and chastity" I replied
"Of course it isn’t" retorted someone else. "If you look around, you’ll find that all kitchen appliances come in white these days."

Thursday 26th March 2026 – HERE I ALL AM …

… not sitting in a rainbow but sitting at my desk in my office. And the time is 02:15

If you’re wondering why it’s so late, the answer is that it isn’t. Anyone who came here yesterday evening or in the early part of the morning will have noticed from the rather terse entry that I made at the time that I’d come home from dialysis and gone almost straight away to bed.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … when I’m feeling as bad as I was feeling at that moment, bed is by far the best place for me to be.

In fact, I’ve been feeling rather strange all day. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that it all began on Wednesday afternoon when a bizarre wave of fatigue swept over me. In the evening, I couldn’t finish my meal and I was really glad to finally make it into bed, late as it might have been, for all the usual reasons.

Once in bed, I went to sleep fairly quickly and apart from one or two little twitches during the night, I slept right through to the alarm at 06:29.

As usual, we had another struggle to rise to our feet and then I staggered off into the bathroom for a wash and a shave – not that it will do me much good because, having prescribed some tablets for me that have a high suicide rate, I imagine Emilie the Cute Consultant sitting all afternoon in her little office with her fingers crossed.

After the hot drink and the medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And it was rather disappointing.

TNS won the Welsh championship and by rights should have qualified to play in Europe, but something happened which meant that they lost that place to a Scottish football club. Many people were upset by this. One of the Welsh reporters said that regardless of the outcome, TNS should have had the chance to play in a play-off against that team, regardless of how many people were interested in coming along to watch it.

This is another one of those dreams that has little basis in fact. The Welsh clubs sometimes have three, sometimes four teams playing in European competition during the summer but that number depends on how well the clubs performed in the previous summer. And TNS, perennial championship winners, would always qualify for first place.

The nurse turned up early today. And he had a moan about the gloves that he used yesterday and had set aside for today not being where he’d left them. I replied that if he were to leave them in the medication drawer, they would still be there but if he were to leave them on the kitchen worktop, they would automatically go into the bin with the rest of the rubbish.

After he left, I made breakfast and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

We’re still discussing Bosnia and Herzegovina, and we’ve reached the same old, old Balkan story of disputed successions, greedy nobles, all that kind of thing, who spend so much time squabbling amongst themselves that they fail to see the danger of the Ottoman forces gathering on their borders.

In fact, there have been several instances of nobles actually calling the Ottomans to help them with their struggles, preferring the yoke of the Sultan to that of their own brother, uncle etc. It really was a shameful period in European history.

Back in here, I finished the radio programme from yesterday, choosing the final track and writing the notes for it.

With that out of the way, I began to look at the next two for next week. The first one is easy – it’s difficult to believe that I’ve been doing this radio work for seven years and I can now actually recycle one of my earlier programmes, with some slight updating of the notes. That was done in no time flat.

The second one might be a little (just a little) more complicated. It relates to a sad day in San Francisco’s music history and as it happens, I have a recording of the concert that took place there on that day.

The big question though is “how do you condense a concert of four hours and fifteen minutes of one of the greatest jam bands ever into a programme of fifty-eight or so minutes?”. I can see that I shall have to be very imaginative.

But by now, there were strange goings-on. My throat had become all dry and sticky, I was losing my voice and I was feeling a little light-headed. I’ve no idea why. Anyway, I treated it as just one of those things and carried on.

My cleaner was rather late arriving for my anaesthetic so it was something of a panic. And then the taxi driver, who had never been here before, couldn’t find the entrance to the building and my cleaner, who had collared him in the street, came back here to escort me out.

We had two other people to pick up, one of whom was worse than me so I had to leave the front seat and sit in the back. And that was quite a gymnastic effort without my crutches, desperately clinging onto the door of the car.

At dialysis, I was seen quite quickly, but it was the nervous new girl who attended to me so it took longer than it otherwise ought to have done. However, she took one look at my lips and went to fetch a colleague. So I ended up sitting there for have an hour with a damp compress wedged between my lips.

Once I was plugged in, I was left pretty much alone and I could press on and fill out my shopping list for tomorrow. The doctors kept their distance today, obviously all sitting in their little office with their wax effigies and with their fingers crossed.

By the end of the session, I was feeling light-headed and nauseous as well as everything else. Luckily, the taxi driver was waiting for me when I was unplugged, and even luckier, it was one of my favourite drivers so we had our usual rocket-ride home.

My faithful cleaner helped me into the apartment, where I was hit with an overwhelming wave of fatigue on top of everything else from which I was suffering. After my cleaner had left, I simply made a brief blog entry and then crawled, fully clothed, into bed and that was that.

And that is where I’m going right now – to catch up on my beauty sleep.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about fighting between brothers … "well, one of us has" – ed … I remember once when my brother and I, very young, were having a kiddy fight
My mother turned up and asked "what’s happening here?"
"He started it" said my brother, pointing to me. "He hit me first."
"And why did he hit you?"
"He didn’t like it that I’d hit him just before."

Tuesday 27th January 2026 – AFTER THIS EVENING’S …

… little crisis that some of you may have caught and others of you may have missed, I’m trying my best to resume normal service right now.

In all honesty, this afternoon and this evening have not been very good at all.

The downhill spiral probably started last night. Early in the evening I was feeling reasonably OK but things rapidly fell apart, and I was in bed immediately after I’d finished my notes, leaving plenty of things undone that I ought to have done.

There was no problem going to sleep either, even if it was only 21:40, and … "for a change" – ed … I’m not going to come out with any nonsense about “as I have said before …” because you are probably as bored reading it as I am of writing it. But anyway, at 02:43 …..

So there I lay, tossing and turning, thinking that even in my ambition to make an early start, this is still far too early, so I turned over and tried to go back to sleep.

When the alarm went off, I was talking to my aunt in London. I’d been staying at my youngest sister’s, and I’d had one of those fits that I used to have years ago when I’d just switch off, lose all energy, lose all motivation, and have to go to bed. I remember my bedroom at my sister’s being in a really disgusting state, but in the morning, I set out and ended up back home. I remembered nothing whatever after that except that I vaguely heard someone coming into my bedroom, trying to shake me awake but not being able to do so, then going back downstairs again. When I awoke, my room was in an even worse state. I couldn’t find my clothes, I couldn’t find anything, there was that much rubbish and dirty, sweaty stuff all over everywhere. I dressed and went downstairs, and my aunt was there. I apologised. I said “I must have given you a dreadful fright”. She replied “I wondered what on earth was happening”. The first thing that I did was to go to see my youngest sister who was here, and apologise to her for how things were. Then I went back to talk to my aunt again. She told me that she was now living in an old people’s home in Brent and asked me to smell her arm. I smelt this perfumed hand cream and said “owww, we don’t get that for less than twenty guineas per ounce, do we?” in a very affected posh London accent. She then laughed. She was telling me about other people whom she’d met when she lived in the Barbican who had now died, and I must have misheard something because when I said “yes”, she looked at me and said “so you don’t speak English then?”. She also made some kind of remark about my clothes. But I noticed something, that the whole living room had totally changed round. Nothing was in its correct position, everything was completely different. She said that she’d seen a poster on the wall saying to ring someone. She’d ‘phoned that person when she saw the poster and that person had asked if she knew where my niece’s husband’s skis were, which, of course, she didn’t. But neither did I. It was more-or-less at that moment that the alarm went off.

The significance of this will become apparent in due course, but anyway, I’m not likely to be staying at the houses of any of my sisters. My aunt, though, was a different matter. For some reason, which I shan’t explain here, she was very fond of my eldest sister and me. When each of us was a teenager, she invited us down (at different times) to London for a six-week summer holiday. For me, it meant being armed with a bus rover ticket, an A-Z map and a pile of sandwiches, and I roamed aimlessly and endlessly all over the metropolis visiting all of the places about which I’d read, for I was a voracious reader when I was a kid.

Long after that, I’d still go down to see her, but it all stopped dramatically after a certain incident at a certain funeral, an incident that I thought was of the worst possible taste and which still leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth.

As for the devastatingly untidy rooms, that needs no further explanation.

Although I was feeling better, I had to struggle to leave the bed and even more of a struggle to stand up. I didn’t have the force to raise myself to my feet. But eventually I managed to head for the bathroom, stopping on the way to take some more bread out of the freezer, as I had forgotten last night.

After a rather cursory wash and scrub up, I headed into the kitchen for the hot drink and medication and then back in here to see if there was anything on the dictaphone.

I’d been staying the night at my eldest sister’s. When it came to morning, I came to pick up my things ready to leave. I had a few other clothes with me and one or two other things, a pillow, a quilt cover, bits and pieces of food. But I couldn’t find the coffee that I’d brought. Eventually, I found the coffee container in the washing-up, so we must have used it. That was all still wet and dirty and hadn’t been washed so I didn’t want to take it as it was. I’d have to come back for that. My sister gave me some biscuits and a few other things and I was loaded up like a packhorse. I really had trouble trying to carry these so I went outside and stood on the corner on the steps of the bank to put everything down to think of what I would do. In the meantime, a bank employee came up behind me, closed the door and locked it because it was lunchtime. Then an American friend and his wife came past. They were talking about an incident that had taken place where they had found this beautiful lake, but it turned out that they were right on a mortar range and all these explosions began to go off around them. I asked them if it was at Garrison in Colorado but they replied “no, it was somewhere in Florida”. I tried to continue to talk to them but they just disappeared. So with all of these things that I had, and there was some shopping to do on the way home for some coffee and I needed some ink for my computer printer, I thought that I’d never carry all of this so I left half of my things on the steps of the bank and walked off. I noticed that at the top of the Rue Couraye, one whole side of it had been demolished and they had begun to build something else with it all fenced off. I’d gone a couple of minutes when I thought “if I go on like this, I’m not going to be able to find my things when I go back. Someone is bound to have moved them”. I had to turn round and head back towards the bank. Somehow, I had to work out a way of how I was going to carry all of this at the same time and also go to do this shopping on the way home.

Seeing as we have just been talking about my eldest sister … "well, one of us has" – ed … why have my sisters suddenly started appearing during the night? What’s happening here?

But this is a strange dream in the sense that if I were heading home from the town, I wouldn’t be going up the Rue Couraye at all but in completely the opposite direction. Any demolition there wouldn’t surprise me, though. Our mayor has his delusions of grandeur about turning this town into a paradise for tourists, at the ratepayers’ expense, of course.

An anxiety attack at the end of a dream is nothing new either. We have dozens of these.

There was another dream too, but it is far too overly-political and I am doing my best, in these horrendous times, to keep politics off these pages.

The nurse came in to see me and to sort me out. His cheerful mood is keeping on going, although there were one or two things that shocked me and I was glad that he left. I hope that he will learn some good manners and behave himself tomorrow.

After he left, I made breakfast. Porridge, coffee and toast made with lovely fresh bread. And I could read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE.

James Curle is talking about horse harnesses now, which is not really my cup of tea. However, I … "as usual" – ed … was led up a side-alley where I ended up for quite a while, totally intrigued by the story of the Ring of Silvianus, said by some … "and hotly disputed by others" – ed … to have been the inspiration of the One Ring of TOLKEIN.

Incidentally, throughout these pages, you’ll see links to Amazon products appearing every now and again. Being a Sales Associate of Amazon, I receive a small commission on goods sold via my links. It costs you nothing at all extra, but helps defray … "part of the" – ed … cost of my not-insubstantial web-hosting fees.

There are also links on the sidebar for AMAZON UK, AMAZON USA and, since the recent “troubles”, AMAZON CANADA for the use of my numerous Canadian visitors. As I said, I am extremely grateful when someone uses these links to make a purchase

Back in here, I revised some more of my Welsh and then went to the lesson. And I do have to say that this was one of the best lessons that I have had. I did really well and I enjoyed it. If only they were all as good as this…

After the lesson, I tidied up a little in the kitchen and then in here after the mess that the technician had made the other day.

When my cleaner turned up to do her stuff, she shooed me into the bathroom for a shower while she changed the bedding so that I have nice, clean bedding today, and then she carried on with her stuff. We had a nice little chat afterwards for fifteen minutes and then she went on her way.

There were a few things left over from last night that needed finishing, and it was round about this point that my batteries began seriously to run down. I remember seeing 17:10 on the clock and thinking that I’d better stand up and go for my disgusting drink, but the next thing that I remember was it being 18:45 and I was slumped over the desk, head in the crook of my elbows.

What was I saying earlier about “those fits that I used to have years ago when I’d just switch off, lose all energy and lose all motivation, and have to go to bed”?

So indeed I climbed into my nice, clean bed, trembling as if there was an electric current running through me. And that was that.

At about 21:05, I awoke and by 21:45 I was sitting at my desk again. Surprisingly … "or maybe not" – ed … I was feeling hungry. It was far too late to think about making a meal, so I had a couple of slices of my emergency flapjacks.

Equally surprisingly … "or maybe not" – ed …there was something on the dictaphone from that couple of hours.

There was a European Union meeting taking place, with loads on international bodies present. I was in charge of part of the organisation so I was sitting right near the front with a couple of other people of my grade. Every now and again, I had to stand up and sort out some kind of problem, then come back to sit with my grade again. At one point, there was a huge disruption over on the far side so I went over to see what it was. It was someone from another multinational body having a huge row with a group of people. I made some enquiries about what the matter was but this guy then turned on me. He said that he was extremely disappointed because it seemed that he had been denied access to some part of the building or some part of the meeting. I explained something along the lines of “well, if he had been denied access, it’s not really my problem. I’m just here for the general organisation”. He flew into an absolute rage. In the end, I just turned my back on him and in the best Roger Daltrey fashion, I said “why don’t you just f-f-f-fly away?” and walked off. I went to sit back down again, but this time I sat in a different place which was right in the front on the corner of one of the aisles. There was then some kind of musical concert. I’d noticed that there were several groups of children from all over Eastern Europe present, and they all had musical instruments. One of the groups came forward – they were all in these East European peasant clothes, boys and girls, and the girls had a kind of fringe of gold tinsel or something which, just before they began to play, they pulled over their heads. I turned to the girl sitting next to me and said “I could think of plenty of people around here who ought to wear a mask like that”. After they played, I expected the next group to be called forward to play but instead, there was some kind of prize-giving. It was for the best instrument in this orchestra. The first one was awarded to a girl and the second instrument, it was a boy’s turn. The boy’s name was called, but another boy was extremely angry about this. He thought that he should have it and complained that there was some kind of feud against him. This was extremely embarrassing for this meeting to hear this high-pitched discussion/argument going on. As the presenter was finishing this particular presentation, he then began to introduce a couple of very small children to the crowd. Then he introduced another young girl who was walking past. I began to think that this is going out of hand now. If he’s supposed to be presenting prizes for these instruments, he should get on with it. If there are other groups waiting, he should let them get onto the stage and do their bit rather than him trying to monopolise the whole evening. I wondered if I should be intervening at this point.

This reminds me of when I worked for this bizarre American company in Brussels and we had a big international meeting to organise. And I distinctly remember at least one attendee being most offended by something, to the extent that he stormed out. Roger Daltrey said, of course, “why don’t you all f-f-f-fade way?” but nevertheless, I’m pleased that I came that close in a dream.

As for the kids, I’ve no idea where they fit in, although I do recall a certain incident at Primary School … And when I was on my peregrinations around Eastern Europe in the past, I saw plenty of kids in local peasants’ dress and I always thought that, no matter who they were, they all wore it very well.

So having written my notes and finished off what needs doing, I’m off to bed where, if I’m lucky, I may even be able to sleep.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about my family … "well, one of us has" – ed … it’s totally untrue to say that I’m estranged from them.
In fact, I told my friend that I’d sent them a lovely parcel for Christmas.
"Did they enjoy it?" she asked.
"Unfortunately not" I replied. "The Bomb Squad managed to defuse it before they could open it."

Saturday 24th January 2026 – AND ONCE MORE …

… I’m off to bed without any food.

It’s not only that I don’t feel like any, or even that my stomach is churning around so much that I’ll be ill if I eat something, I also have to shake off this miserable feeling of tiredness, wretchedness and ill health.

As you can probably guess, I had another bad night last night, followed by another really bad day today, probably one of the worst days that I’ve had since I fell ill over ten years ago.

Last night, I finished off by saying that I was going to bed early. It was round about 21:30 when I finally finished everything that needed doing, and it wasn’t much longer after then that I managed to climb into bed.

It didn’t take long to go to sleep either but I awoke with the stabbing pain in my foot and a really bad fit of coughing. I’m not sure what time it might have been, but I tried for what seemed like an age to go back to sleep. When I finally looked at the time, it was 03:43, so it must have been about 02:30 at the latest when I awoke.

At some point I must have gone back to sleep because I awoke later and lay there wondering what time it was. I had my answer about five minutes later when the alarm went off, so it must have been about 06:20 when I awoke, something like that.

Once more, it was a real effort to leave the bed. I had a spinning head, nausea and heaven alone knows what but I made an effort to crawl into the bathroom for a good wash and to sort myself out.

The hot drink and medication were next, and even though I didn’t feel like taking them, I forced myself.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night and I really was surprised at how far I’d been.

There was some kind of rock festival going on in France and it was raided by the police. I was in my bed when they came. They began to ask me questions, to which I replied quite well so they asked me if I would mind being the interpreter for many of the interviewees. I didn’t really see that I had much of a choice, but one thing was certain was that I wasn’t going to leave my bed because I was quite comfortable there and everything that I wanted, including the alarm, was at arm’s length so I didn’t really have to move at all.

Could you imagine this? Me in bed at a rock festival? But it wouldn’t be by any means the first time that I’ve been asked to act as an interpreter by the local administration

I was driving my taxi last night. I was in Sandbach. It was a hot day, no-one was moving and it had been very quiet so I thought that I’d have a wander back towards Crewe. In the end, after much deliberation, I was parked up in Edleston Road, or one of the streets near Edleston Road. I hadn’t noticed that the rear end of my vehicle was blocking the street but there was no traffic about at all. Suddenly, a young boy came up and asked “are you the office manager?”. I asked why, and he replied “the director of Cumberland School wants to speak to you”. I’d heard this once before, but I hadn’t taken it seriously, seeing as it was a Sunday, so I decided that seeing as I was doing nothing better, I’d go. For some reason, I parked the car and walked up Edleston Road towards Nantwich Road and was planning to walk along Nantwich Road to Cumberland School. But then I thought “I couldn’t remember where Cumberland School was, and how I wished that schools would just have the name of the street, like ‘Bedford Street Primary’ or something like that rather than these fancy names”. I thought that by the time I found it, I’d probably want to buy an ice cream or something to cool me down, and it would have been cheaper to have gone in the car in the first place. But I bumped into a couple of people whom I knew. One of them was my Greek friend, so we decided to walk together. And these three or four people of us set out to walk. We were having this argument about shopping in Preston, about how the shops were better in Preston than they were around here, and should we look in this new shop that was being opened to see if it’s any good? I replied that seeing as it’s just opening here now, it’s probably been open for twenty years in Preston. I described one of my visits to Preston, where I’d gone into town, parked in a multi-storey car park on the edge, walked out, gone to one of these catalogue shops, bought everything that I needed for everyone at Christmas and come straight home again. This discussion carried on for quite some time. Then, suddenly, I looked around and thought “we’re in Stoke-on-Trent here. We’ve walked from Crewe to Stoke-on-Trent. Where on earth did we go wrong on this route?”. In the end, my Greek friend and I said goodbye to everyone and went over to the bus stop. On the corner of one of the streets where we were standing was a huge collection of bus stops. Then I couldn’t remember the number of the bus that went from Stoke back to Crewe. In the old days, it used to be the 20 and then it changed to the 320, but I couldn’t think at all. I left my Greek friend standing against the wall and went over to a couple of the buses. There was a group of drivers standing around the buses, and someone from the bus company looking very official with a crash helmet, so I imagined that he was collecting the money, so he must be someone important. I asked him if he could tell me which bus went to Crewe but he said “no” and walked off. The other bus drivers weren’t particularly helpful either so I went over and had a look myself at the stops. I saw the 320 on there so I imagined that this was probably it, but there probably wasn’t going to be another bus for nearly an hour. There was also a bus 550, and that number rang a bell with me for some reason but I couldn’t think why. By then, my Greek friend was sitting on a wall so I helped her down and gave her a kiss. That surprised her, but she responded. So we were standing there and she said “I hope that this isn’t a trick to lure me out of my home and keep me out for ages”. I had to reassure her that I was as disappointed as everyone else, as I was supposed to have had this meeting and it should have taken place a long time ago but I’d ended up in Stoke-on-Trent too and I was only supposed to walk half a mile. I couldn’t explain any of this but it was certainly no plan.

First of all, there’s no Cumberland School in Crewe that I know of. And if there were, it would be at the other end of town near the Cumberland Bridge or the Cumberland Sports Arena rather than off Nantwich Road somewhere.

Secondly, my Greek friend was a strange girl. She started at the European Union at the same time that I did. There was quite a group of us who began at the same time, and we used to organise social events and that kind of thing between us. It was only natural that after a while, we began to pair off and I spent a lot of time with this girl. However, although she encouraged me to spend the time with her, there would always be a moment where she would have a mini-panic attack and withdraw into her shell, and I could never penetrate her barrier. Strangely, a few years later when I met Laurence, she made much more of an effort to be friendly, but when Laurence and I separated three years later, she immediately withdrew back into her shell

Funnily enough, she asked me once to drive her to the airport when she was flying back to Greece. I helped her carry her suitcase inside and said goodbye to her at the barrier.
"Make sure that you eat properly and look after yourself" she said.
A woman in the queue behind her said "that’s right, we’ve got to give our husbands their orders"
And I don’t think that I’ve ever seen such a big, beaming smile on anyone’s face, either before or since.

And thirdly, although catalogue-shop shopping was a thing that I did at Christmas in the past, I have never ever been shopping in Preston in my life.

We’d gone to Chester for the day, a big group of us, and it began to rain. It continued to rain in one of the most incredible torrential downpours that I have ever seen. After a while, the rain stopped and we could start to walk. I went for a walk around and met several people from our trip, and we talked about the weather. At that moment, the level of the water in the town began to rise. It looked as if the river had overflowed from outside in the country and was beginning to flood everywhere. I made a few comments that were pretty much ridiculed by everyone else, and then I decided that I’d go for a walk to see exactly how badly the place was flooded. I went and found the little shortcut alley that I used to take from work up to the town centre. That seemed to be OK, but I walked on a little further and there was a steep road down on the right. Where the railway bridge was, it was deep in water and there was a torrent of water circulating up against the support of the railway bridge, making a huge splashing noise each time. I decided that I’d walk down that way to see how bad it was. Luckily, the pavement was quite high there, so even though the road was flooded, it wasn’t actually too deep if I kept to the pavement. I carried on walking through it. Then I began to think that I hope that this current doesn’t knock me over because I can’t stand up again and there’s no-one else about. Perhaps I ought to have come down here on my crutches.

Even now, I can still see where I was during this dream. I was at first in the city centre, and later, I was along the ring road on the southwest side of the city centre. And if the River Dee had flooded all of that, then the World really did have a problem.

And once more, going for a walk without my crutches, knowing full well that I should have them with me. It’s wishful thinking, this walking.

Isabelle the Nurse came in, face mask and all, and gave me a serious lecture about these antibiotics. With still no prescription from Emilie the Cute Consultant arriving at the chemist’s, I’ve been taking the ones from last time. She warned me against it because I don’t know if it’s the same type that has been prescribed, and I don’t know if it’s the same dose.

She checked my temperature too. Thirty-seven point four degrees. Yes, she thinks that I’m ill.

After she left, I could make breakfast. I didn’t feel like anything, but I’m going to be really ill if I don’t eat something. So I ate it, albeit with a churning stomach, and read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE

James Curle is still giving us his Roman pottery lecture, and once again, as I mentioned the other day, he tells us that "when we pass from the early vessels to those of later date the most striking characteristic appears to be that the ware employed is generally rather poorer in quality."

That’s not what you would expect at all.

After I’d finished, I came back in here. It was 09:55 and by 10:00 I was back in bed, not only fully-clothed but with my slippers on too, as I discovered later. I just couldn’t keep going.

It was, would you believe, 13:00 when I awoke. And a good forty-five minutes before I was back at my desk. It took me that long to leave the bed.

And would you believe? There was yet more stuff on the dictaphone from that three hours.

I found myself in a prison. I was sharing a room with another person, and there was also the Egyptian doctor whom I knew in there. He was there more as a doctor than an inmate and the room and the situation was more like a hospital than a prison. I’d bought my computer in with me. It was a new computer and I was coming to terms with it, but I was busy trying to do some work while he was busy trying to pack up and prepare everything for his holidays, the doctor. I went to change, and ended up with my fleece under one of my big fleeces. It made me feel extremely warm and it was constraining me around the chest, and I couldn’t think why at first. Then I began to settle down. I noticed that all over the room, someone had put these little hand-made stickers of an orange background with a face and two eyes wide open. So I wondered what was happening here. Then I noticed that while I’d been away, someone had closed my laptop. I wasn’t sure if that had shut it down, whether it would reopen if I were to open it. I moved it around on the bed to give myself a little space. The doctor then said something like “it’s strange really that there are only the two of us here who have some kind of information technology tool. I replied that when I had my taxi in the 80s, we had an Apple II computer and I had my first PC in 1993, so I always had some kind of information technology with me when I’m travelling around somewhere.

This is another one of those dreams that totally beats me. It seems to relate to nothing at all, except that I’m surprised that I could actually remember, during a dream, all about my computer-owning history

Did I dictate the dream about some friends of mine and me and me down in the Auvergne? We had a house together. We’d been somewhere and come back, but there was someone parked in our drive so we had to move these people out so we could put our cars in. I had a Ford Cortina in there that I was repairing. It was up on a jack, an electric jack with a hand-held button with one of these long curly cables to operate it. I could set it en route, either up or down, but I hadn’t worked out how to stop it. It was either all the way up or all the way down. This was not what I wanted it to do and it was becoming extremely frustrating. One of my friends was then talking about putting a lock up and I wondered what he meant. I imagined two subterranean tubes that you could buy that you could pull out and lock to stop people parking in your parking space, but I didn’t think that that was what he meant. At that moment from down the road, a car was coming. It was coming really fast on this dirt track and there was dust everywhere. It roared past and we both said that if it keeps on going like that, there will be an accident. But the car in our driveway, it was a dark red MPV with a trailer and had Ukrainian plates. It came out of our drive in reverse at such a rapid rate of knots that it had disappeared around the bend before we’d even managed to do that without coming to grief.

Having a Ford Cortina up on a jack would be nothing new, but an electric jack? Certainly. Those two red vehicles would be interesting, especially the Ukrainian one and trailer disappearing at a rapid rate of knots in reverse gear.

When I was feeling like it, I did some work on the next radio programme, but it was a slow, painful work that took about ten times longer than it ought.

Eventually, I knocked off to watch the football. Colwyn Bay v Connah’s Quay Nomads. In front of the biggest crowd for a league game for many, many a year, we had a game that everyone would have enjoyed. It was another candidate for the best game that I have ever seen.

It pulsed along from end to end and the dramatic ending couldn’t ever be bettered in fiction. No-one would believe it if you were to write a story like that.

There were quite a few kids in the crowd too and despite it being January, freezing cold, wet and windy, you wouldn’t believe the queue at the ice-cream van. Nothing ever changes with kids, I suppose.

So that’s it. I’ve had enough, and I’m off to bed, cold, hungry and fed up but I don’t care.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Greeks and Greece … "well, one of us has" – ed … back in Ancient Greece, a distinguished old gentleman took his hlamis to the akestës for repair.
"Who are you?" asked the akestës, preparing to chisel out the tablet.
"Who am I?" asked the customer. "I’m one of Athens’s foremost playwrights"
"Euripides?"
"No. The wife caught them on a nail as she was taking them out to dry."

Friday 23rd January 2026 – EVEN AS I TYPE …

… these notes, I really ought to be making tea. But the truth is that I have a churning stomach right now and running through a list of possible menus that I might eat, there isn’t one that appeals to me. All it seems to do is to make my stomach churn over even more.

As well as that, although I’m feeling somewhat better than I did this time last night, I’m still feeling a lot worse than I ought to be, so the aim is to do what I have to do as soon as I am able to do it and then head off to bed again, in the hope that yet another good sleep will do me some good.

Not like yesterday, which, despite my early, really early night, didn’t go according to plan.

As I mentioned yesterday, despite going to bed at 19:25 or thereabouts, I was awake again four hours later. And although I said that “I settled down again and waited to go back to sleep”, I was still wide-awake at 02:30 and showing no sign of dropping off.

At some point though, I must have gone back off to sleep because I was awoken by the alarm, and it took me completely by surprise. And I must admit that I have never felt less like leaving the bed as I did this morning. It took me an age to rise up to my feet and head off to the bathroom. As a result, I was running really late for everything else.

In the bathroom, I changed my clothes, having been in the same clothes without a change for forty-eight hours and I washed my undies. I like to keep on top of my clothes like that, having spent years living out of a suitcase. And then, I went into the kitchen for my hot drink and medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was in the Soviet Union last night in my van. There had been some kind of concert supposed to take place, so I was in this village or small town down in the south of the Soviet Union on my way to Asia and I bumped into these two American girls who were also going to this concert. We went into this room and there were probably thirty or forty people standing around. So we sat down and waited for something to happen. We were expecting this music concert and then perhaps a discussion about what came out in the songs, that kind of thing. But I fell asleep, and when I awoke about ten minutes later, everyone else was asleep too except these two American girls. They were looking at their watch and one of them said “well, we may as well go. There’s a bus back to the USA in an hour. In the end, the three of us left, with all these other people asleep. Outside, there was plenty of snow, and we walked, and where the bus was due to be picked up was at this car park and there were two white MkIII Ford Zephyrs there with the word LEI written on the badge instead of “Ford Zephyr”. The girls went to stand there, and in the end, I invited them to come with me to Asia, but they were reluctant. They asked me if I’d ever been there before. I replied “no, but I have travelling in the blood”. I said that I’d been a taxi driver, coach driver, chauffeur and I’ve travelled the Northern Hemisphere all on my own in the past, and my father was a lorry driver so it’s all in the blood. But they were very reluctant, so in the end I left them and climbed over the roof of one of these Ford Zephyrs to head back to the van. I heard one of them say to the other one “it’s a shame that he’s such an untidy person” so I was thinking that maybe if I’d been more tidy, they might have come. I walked over to where I’d parked the van but couldn’t see it. This looked nothing like where I remembered having parked it. I thought that I must be in the wrong place so I tried to retrace my steps and ended up miles out of town trying to find the van. Where I was, all the snow had melted and it was an urban scene with trees in the distance. I wandered through all of these buildings, trying to find my way out to see if the van was behind them, but I couldn’t find my way out of these buildings. I was wandering around for ages. In the end, I found myself on a train. I was standing by a window, looking out to see if I could see the van somewhere, but I heard a commotion behind me. It was a teacher with a bunch of maybe ten girls. She’d gone to find the ticket controller. It seemed that some English-speaking people were sitting in these girls’ seats and she had to make them move. She spoke to them in English, so I spoke to her about the van. She said that she couldn’t help me. I need to see the police. I replied that the van hasn’t been stolen – I just can’t find it and in any case, I can’t speak Russian. I tried to speak some Russian from what I remembered but made a mess of it and she really wasn’t able to help me at all.

What a strange dream that was! For a start, I did learn to speak Russian, although I’ve forgotten most of it now. That started off when I was working for Shearings and I’d heard that they were trying to win a contract with an American travel agency to transport American tourists behind the Iron Curtain to “visit their roots”. It sounded probably the most fascinating coach-driving work ever, so I found a local Russian exile who taught me over a period of six months. When the company announced that they were looking for drivers to go behind the Iron Curtain, I naturally volunteered.
"Why should we select you ahead of everyone else?"
"Well, actually, I can speak some Russian"
It was the most fantastic work that I have ever done, and I enjoyed every moment of it, even if it did mean a relentless diet of wiener schnitzel.

But meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … dream, I could easily imagine myself at one time driving through the Soviet Union to Asia, somewhere like pre-revolutionary Iran, but the political climate east of Poland and Romania these days would put anyone off. And wandering around aimlessly looking for my van because I’d forgotten where it was parked is just like me, especially these days.

As for the white Ford Zephyrs, I couldn’t ever imagine them being in the Soviet Union, whether under a different maker’s name or not. They are much more likely to have been ZIL 111G vehicles, although if you were to see one of those, you would know that you are in trouble, because they were only ever given to members of the Politburo.

Isabelle the Nurse took me by surprise this morning. Fitted with a mask, she stormed into the apartment and attended to my legs. She had a go at measuring my temperature with my thermometer and it’s still quite high. However, she doesn’t think much of my thermometer and she’ll bring her own tomorrow.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE

James Curle is still discussing pottery, and now, we’ve moved on to how we are able to identify the different potters. There’s a fascinating list of potters’ marks and some equally fascinationg comments such as "this little fragment is an example of pottery classified by Dragendorff as ‘Dragendorff 37’, and there is a sample of this ware in a museum in (some obscure town in) Bulgaria."

Back in here, I had a variety of things to do, not having attended to my affairs as I should for the last forty-eight hours, and then I had last night’s notes to write.

They are now online, and then I finished off the notes for the radio programme on which I’ve been working.

In the meantime, I was having a good chat with Liz, who was giving me loads of motherly advice about how to find natural remedies to deal with my current health issues, and later on a brief exchange of messages with Rosemary.

There was football too. On Tuesday night Stranraer had played Queen’s Park of the second tier in the Scottish Cup on a swamp in a monsoon and had beaten the Spiders 6-5 on penalties after a 1-1 draw during one hundred and twenty minutes.

In theory, they now have a match at Ibrox against Glasgow Rangers, but the behind-the-scenes and off-the-field controversy after the game will need to be resolved first before it’s confirmed.

But that’s about everything, really. I suppose that there’s much more about which to write, such as my faithful cleaner coming down to do her stuff, but instead, I’m going to bed. And good riddance to me. I really don’t know how to cope with this latest illness. It’s getting on my wick and it’s high time that something happens before I go berserk.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Soviet Union … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once saw a man in the Red Square holding up a pice of paper.
I asked a local – a very vocal local yokel – what he was doing, and he replied "protesting, of course."
"But what about?" I asked.
"Ignorant foreigner!" he replied. "Why would he need to put that on his sign? Everyone knows what’s wrong! ".
Two minutes later, a police van pulls up and they drag him inside.
"So what’s he done now?"
"Ignorant foreigner!" he replied. "Everyone knows what he did!".

Thursday 22nd January 2026 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day it’s been today.

And for a change, I’m not going to start with “As I have said before …” because you are probably just as fed up of reading it as I am of typing it and as I am of it happening.

But I really was quite ill yesterday. As I mentioned, it was some time shortly after 20:00 (and had I not fallen asleep in the chair after I’d finished my notes, it might well have been not so long after 20:00 too) when I climbed into bed, fully clothed, threw the bedding over me and went straight to sleep.

And there I stayed until all of … errr … 02:30.

After that, I lay there, trying to make myself as comfortable as possible and, if possible, go back to sleep but, I thought, without much success. However, it certainly wasn’t four hours later when the alarm went off at 06:29, so at some point, I must have dozed off to sleep for a couple of hours without realising it.

It took quite a while, much longer than it ought, to extricate myself from underneath the covers, and then I staggered into the bathroom. At least, I was feeling a little better than I was last night.

In the kitchen, I made my hot drink and took my medication, and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was in the USA last night and had ended up in a motel where I was waiting for my friends to arrive. The receptionist was a rather simple boy who couldn’t speak very well and I had a great deal of difficulty understanding him. There was an old black-and-white film on the television about a group of people, men and women, who were escaping from somewhere. One or two of them were caught and were rescued. The film was probably from the early 1930s and it was an interesting one so I was trying to watch it but this boy kept on interrupting me. He mentioned something and I said “well, that’s pretty small beer really” to which he said “yes, we have nine of those”. Then he had to open the door for the stairs up to the rooms to let a dog out but the dog came down, looked around, and went back upstairs again so he closed it. At some point, I’d left the motel and ended up in Montreal. I went to look at this huge basilica that was built of brick and was going to photograph it but I couldn’t find a place to park the car. Everywhere was “no parking” and there were one or two police patrols so I thought that I would have to come back and do this on foot again, but I couldn’t think when I’d be able to. I drove a little out of town to try to find a place to see if I could have a good view with a telephoto lens but I noticed that time was running on so I had to abandon that idea too. Then I was walking back to the railway station. The streets were crowded and I was trying to watch this film as I was walking but the film kept on freezing and when it began to move again, it had actually finished. It was really disappointing for me that I’d missed the end. But outside one of the big stores in Montreal was a guy with a barrow with all kinds of things on it from the store such as pencils, paper, writing pads, sweets and everything. As I walked past, I thought that maybe I’d buy a bag of sweets or something to take with me on the train. I thought that I had five minutes so I nipped into the store. It was something like Woolworth’s or British Home Stores. Despite a good search, I couldn’t find where all of the sweets were and I began to feel rather disappointed that I’d have nothing to take with me on the train.

There’s a story about a motel in Flagstaff, Arizona, where I stayed in 2002, that relates to this, but the World isn’t ready to hear it and I doubt if it ever will be. As for the basilica, the big brick-built basilica is actually the Basilique Nationale du Sacré-Cœur at Koekelberg on the northern edge of Brussels and although the view of it and its situation that I had in this dream is nothing like its actual situation, it’s very similar to its situation in a dream that I had a few months ago.

I’d been to Manchester with my niece’s eldest daughter. We’d been roaming around the different TV studios. We’d seen several performances being recorded and we’d even seen a football match taking place in one of the studios there between Llanelli and Y Barri. On the way back, we bumped into one of my father’s friends from Winsford who asked us if we’d had a good time, what we’d done and where we’d been. I noticed that gradually he was separating my niece’s daughter from me and having a very intimate chat with her at the other end of the street. I wondered what was happening between the two of them and what was going on.

This is a kind of situation that I could easily imagine, had it been a different girl (not a daughter of my niece) and a different friend of my father. But the indoor football match is “interesting”, to say the least. There are very few full-size indoor stadia in the World, and certainly none in the JD Cymru League.

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in as usual to sort out my legs. She was her usual chatty self but didn’t stay long. I could then go on to make breakfast and read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE

James Curle is still telling us about pottery – it seems that there’s a long way to go in this. And I’ve learned two interesting facts about Roman pottery –
Firstly, pottery from the earlier period of the occupation at Trimontium (up to, say, 120 AD) is of better quality than the later period (from, say, 140 AD until 180 AD). That’s unusual. You’d expect it to be the reverse.
Secondly, even in 1909, the examination and cataloguing of Roman pottery had reached such an intense degree that even without the potter’s stamp on his wares, they were able in many cases to identify the potter, his workshop and even the period during which he was working.

Back in here, I had a few things to do and then I made a start on writing the notes for the next radio programme. But I had noticed that my health was starting to slip back again and my cough, which had calmed down for a moment, had now returned with a vengeance.

My cleaner turned up as usual to apply my anaesthetic, and after she left, I waited for the taxi to take me to dialysis, all the time feeling weaker and weaker.

It was actually quite a struggle to walk to the car and even more of a struggle at the other end to walk to my bed. By now, I was freezing cold and eventually, they were obliged to bring me a blanket.

That made very little difference, so they took my temperature – thirty-seven point seven degrees. The nurse telephoned the doctor, who told her to check it again in an hour.

After an hour, during which I became even worse, she checked the temperature again. This time, it was thirty-eight point four degrees. She telephoned the doctor again and Emilie the Cute Consultant came a-running.

She performed various examinations (including a Covid test, which was negative) and took several samples and said that she’d let me have the results tomorrow and that she’d send any prescription necessary directly to my chemist.

When the taxi came for me, I could barely walk out to it. It was a most undignified stagger. However, I made sure that the driver wore a face mask because I don’t want to infect her with whatever I’ve caught. When I sent my message to my cleaner giving her an idea of when I’d be back, I told her to wear a face mask too.

While I was at it, I sent a message to Isabelle the Nurse to tell her to wear a mask when she calls tomorrow. I don’t want her to spread my viruses around her patients.

When I arrived back here, it was 19:20, and by 19:25, I was in bed, fully-clothed yet again. There was just time to take off my shoes, but no time (or desire) to make any food. Once in bed, my cleaner threw the quilt over me and went on her way, and I went straight to sleep.

Round about 23:30, I awoke, and thought that it might be a good idea if I were to post an entry to say that at least, I’m still alive. Alison must have read it quite quickly because we ended up having a little chat about our health problems. She has a few of her own right now. We’re all growing old and it’s sad.

After that, I settled down again and waited to go back to sleep.

But before I doze off again, seeing as we have been talking about face masks … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once asked someone why it was that doctors and nurses always wear face masks around the hospital.
"Is it to prevent the spread of infection?" they asked.
"Oh no" I replied. "It’s that if ever they make a mistake or do something wrong, you can’t identify them and bring them into Court."

Thursday 15th January 2026 – I’M FED UP …

… of all of this, that’s for sure.

This afternoon, I arrived at the dialysis centre at 13:50. I was finally plugged in at … errr … 15:10. That’s one hour and twenty minutes that I had to hang around like Piffy on a Rock. As if I don’t have anything better to do than to wait on their convenience.

That’s how it has been today, one thing after another after another. It started off last night when I ended up going late for tea and not actually finishing until 23:30 or thereabouts everything that I needed to do.

With this racking cough that is still not improving and a nose that’s flowing like a stream in full flood, I didn’t really have all that much of a good sleep either. I did in fact go to sleep rather quickly, but I kept on waking throughout the night with a desperate desire to cough.

When the alarm went off, it was a desperate struggle to leave the bed and it took me quite a while to summon up the energy and make an effort to go to the bathroom, where I had a good wash and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant.

After the hot drink and the medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out what had gone on during the night.

I was in the hospital again. I’d been staying there for a while and they had changed my mattress around so that it would have sides of even wear rather than all going to be bogged down on one side. However, as soon as I changed my position to the other side of the bed, it was like being in a different bed and I ended up with a second lot of flowers, which was not what I expected. I didn’t really know what to do and how to react to this kind of thing, and especially the two deliveries of flowers, one for each side of the bed, that I’d had. That was becoming complicated.

That’s the problem with my mattress here. I turned it once, but now both sides are worn and it really does need replacing. As for the hospital and the flowers, I wonder what they are doing here.

Later on, I was driving my taxi around Shavington in the Basford neighbourhood, I suppose. There was something about a couple of red roses in the middle of the road. I’ve no idea why, and that’s all that I remember of this particular dream, unfortunately.

So I’m back to driving taxis again. I’ve not done that for a week or so. But flowers yet again. There’s definitely something happening today with those.

And then there was a third dream. It was about a university meeting, and there were hundreds, if not a couple of thousand, people there milling around. They were talking about plans for the forthcoming year etc., and then we had to go along and choose a place to stay on a student exchange for two weeks. They had all kinds of guides to help you choose, notebooks and music etc. I went straight over there and began to liberate all of the RUNRIG cassettes because where I was hoping to go was that I’d heard that there was an exchange to the Outer Hebrides or to an island almost out as far as the High Arctic. I was determined to be on that regardless. Once I’d collected all of these cassettes, I wandered round but couldn’t find any tutors. I asked a couple of people but no-one else could find them. They had all disappeared, so I wondered what was going to happen next – we needed to be allocated rooms, we needed to be fed etc. Then I suddenly realised that I’d been walking around without my crutches so I went back to where I’d been sitting. The girl who had been sitting next to me was there so I gave her a wave and said to her “you’re in trouble”. She asked why, and I explained that it was for letting me walk around here like this without my crutches. We had a little comment about it. Then I saw that the food was arriving so I went, but it was only the dessert. I couldn’t really see any vegan desserts so I had to hope that what I’d chosen was a dessert. Then the main course arrived, but it didn’t look very healthy. It was mashed potatoes and a kind of meat stew, something like that. It was strange that they had put the dessert first and the main course second. I couldn’t help it – I was nibbling away at my dessert rather than helping myself to a main course. I noticed that there was a vegetarian option but no vegan option. Everyone seemed to be taking lumps out of the vegetarian one rather than the vegan. There was also a starter there that was placed in the third position but that had nothing but cheese on it. There was no vegan cheese either. I couldn’t help but nibble on my dessert instead of trying to organise a main course. I was beginning to feel extremely frustrated by this time – not being able to find a tutor, not being able to register my choice of student exchange, not having any real meal to eat, and finding myself automatically nibbling on a dessert first. This wasn’t the kind of situation that I was hoping for.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have visited this island in the past during a nocturnal ramble. It doesn’t have a name but it’s right out of place, where it was during that previous dream.

But how many times is this that I’ve dreamed of walking without my crutches? It’s probably a good dozen or so. And then having one of these attacks of uncertainty that I have sometimes during the night. But dreaming about food is an unusual twist to this.

The nurse turned up early again and sorted out my legs. He didn’t stay long and I could push on and make breakfast. And to read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE.

James Curle has now started his excavations but is still setting the scene. He has, however, now worked out that the reason that the Roman fort wasn’t put in the most logical place, as I mentioned yesterday, was that there are the remains of a huge Roman camp there. and he’ll be excavating that in due course.

After breakfast, I gave in an inch to fear and went one better than David Crosby. Probably because, having had the ‘flu for Christmas, I’m not feeling up to par and it just increases my paranoia, like looking at my mirror and seeing a police car.

Back in here, there was post to deal with, a package that needed returning and a few other bits and pieces. Once I’d done that, I began to do some more work on the radio programme that I’d started the other day.

There wasn’t much time to do very much but nevertheless, I made a certain amount of progress before my cleaner came in to apply the anaesthetic on my arm. While she was here, she busied herself with a few small tasks about the place, seeing as she hadn’t been here on Tuesday, and then she wandered off, leaving me to wait for the taxi. I came back in here to carry on with the radio programme.

The taxi was a couple of minutes late coming for me, and then we had to drive out to the back of beyond to “rescue the perishing” – pick up someone else and take him to dialysis too. Consequently, we were several minutes late arriving.

Once I’d weighed myself, I installed myself in my bed and waited. And waited.

There was another new girl there today being given instruction by one of the experienced nurses. Consequently everything was done by the book with procedures rigorously obeyed. On top of that, another one of the patients, already plugged in, had a crisis so everyone downed tools and rushed to her aid.

The delay was such that the afternoon coffee was served long before I was even plugged in, so I had to sit and look at it while I waited.

Eventually it was my turn to be plugged in and, once more, it was all done by the book. As a result, it was 15:10 when my machine was finally switched on and running. I’d been waiting one hour and twenty minutes. To add insult to injury, the internet there was down so there wasn’t a great deal I could do, except to drink my now-cold coffee and read a few papers about ancient roads.

Actually, that was quite interesting because the author contends that roads such as “Dere Street”, once north of the Roman outpost camps north of Hadrian’s Wall, are not Roman at all but ancient prehistoric trackways used by the Romans. He contends that they do not show the typical characteristics of Roman roads, and they aren’t mentioned in the Iter Britanniarum.

He seems however not to have considered that if the Iter Britanniarum had not been written during the reign of Antoninus Pius but later, as several people suspect, it’s likely that the Antonine Wall between the Clyde and the Forth had been abandoned by the time the Iter Britanniarum was written, and so there wouldn’t be any Romans likely to be going beyond the outpost forts so there would be no need for a route guide for those roads.

During the session, the new nurse kept on asking me if I was OK, not that it made any difference, and although Emilie the Cute Consultant was the doctor on duty today, she sent a messenger to ask me how it went in Paris. I replied that it was as expected – there had been a deterioration in my condition – and I expected that once the news reached her, she would come dashing to my side to soothe my fevered brow. But she clearly doesn’t love me any more.

Eventually, they unplugged me, totally by the book of course, and by then it was 18:50. I’d been there for five hours for a session of three-and-a-half. As if I don’t have anything better to do with my time. Luckily, my chauffeur was waiting and she drove me home quite rapidly.

It beats me what’s going on there at times, because it always seems to be that no matter what time I arrive and in what order, I’m almost always the last to be connected and it really is getting on my wick.

There was a howling gale again and a driving rainstorm outside when we arrived so I was dropped off at the back outside the fire escape where there are only three or four paces to walk into the building. And being helped by my faithful cleaner, it was quite a comfortable walk.

After my cleaner left, I made tea, horribly late again after all of this. Rice and veg with a taco roll full of spicy Mexican beans and mushrooms. However, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have done because I fell asleep three times while I was trying to eat.

Back in here, I made a start on the notes for the day but having fallen asleep twice while trying to type and seeing that what I was writing was a load of gibberish … "nothing new there" – ed … I threw in the towel and went to bed.

But seeing as we have been talking about cutting our hair … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of once being at work when I absented myself for half an hour and the boss wondered where I had been.
"Having my hair cut" I replied
"What? In the company’s time?"
"Well, it grew in the company’s time, didn’t it?"
"It didn’t all grow in the company’s time"
"Well, I’ve not had all of it cut off!"

Monday 29th December 2025 – I AM FEELING …

… a little better today.

But there again, that’s not too difficult because I’m convinced that I couldn’t possibly have felt as bad as I did for two days running.

You’ve really no idea of how I was feeling yesterday evening. Not eating any tea is a testament in itself because that’s something that very rarely happens. Instead, I just wrote out my notes and by 21:30, I was in bed.

Being awake at 02:45 was definitely not part of the plan though. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed …. it’s pretty pointless going to bed early because all that it means is that I awaken correspondingly early the following morning.

This time, however, I was lucky. I managed to go back to sleep quite quickly, and there I lay until about … errr … 05:45. Having checked the time, I decided that I’d give it ten minutes and then make an early start. However, what I remember after that was the alarm going off at 06:29.

And after that, the next thing that I remember was the repeater a few minutes later. That’s the first time that I’ve actually been asleep for the repeater alarm, as far as I can remember.

It took a good few minutes to haul myself to my feet and head off into the bathroom. As well as having a wash and scrub up, I also had a shave just in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant at dialysis today.

After the medication and hot drink, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone. I was walking home from the bus stop – I’d just alighted from the bus – and a dark green MG Midget went past and pulled up at the side of the road just ahead of me. As I approached it, the driver hopped out. He was one of the people from work. He said “come on, Eric, hop in. I’ll take you home”. I thought that that was nice of him but I didn’t have far to go. But I hopped in anyway, and I asked him about the car, if it was a 1967 model. He replied that it was a 1969 one. I thought that it was in very good condition for its age. We drove a little way further along Rope Lane and turned into Vine Tree Avenue. Eventually, I managed to tell him where to stop and he had to reverse a little way. I pointed to our house and said that that had been our family home as children since 1956. My brother came out then and helped me take my shopping out of the car. The driver then asked if he could have a drink of water. That was all that I needed because the house was probably in a total tip and I didn’t want anyone from work coming in because I didn’t want details of my private life like that being the subject of discussion, but there was nothing that I could do about it except to let him in. He came in and went up to the bathroom. I went into the living room and all over the floor were bottles and jars and things so we started to have a quick tidy-up. There was a huge pile of plastic bottle tops, so I asked my brother where he kept them. he opened the door so I put them all in there. Then the guy came down and said “quick, find me a chair!”. I asked “what on earth has happened?”. He replied that he was putting his contact lenses in but he’s put them in the wrong eyes. He needs to change them. I had to find a chair then and let him sit in the kitchen. I thought “this situation here is going from bad to worse”.

Why on earth would I suddenly start to dream about a former colleague, about whom I haven’t given a moment’s thought in over twenty years? But this idea of living in total chaos is nothing new, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. It seems to be how I spend most of my life.

There was a situation where I was in the clutches of some evil guy. He’d imprisoned my sidekick, a young girl. He was trying to find out a few things from me that I wasn’t all that keen on telling him. Then his sidekick came in and suggested that the two of us, my sidekick and me, be put in the same room together. If we were locked in there for a while, things might change. Eventually, the boss agreed and the sidekick took me off. When we reached the room where he’d locked up my sidekick, he opened the door and let her out. He said to the two of us “right clear off while I go and sort him out”. We didn’t need telling twice. We dashed off down the stairs to the half-landing and caught the lift. The lift was quite full but we squeezed in, reached the ground floor and cleared off. It was pouring down with rain outside, and I thought that I had well over an hour to drive now so I’m going to leave the top down on the car. We climbed aboard a bus and it set off, but we had to stand, and we were standing near the back. When it arrived at the bus stop near the car park, we pressed the bell and went to alight but there were too many people in the way. The bus was just about to start off again so my sidekick shouted and he stopped again. We managed to climb out. I could see my car on the car park. It was the yellow Mustang, covered in dust from its long drive across the desert abd currently being soaked in rain. When we climbed out of the bus, there was an old lorry there, a four-wheeled lorry with a tipper body on the back, an old Dodge, and it was carrying licence discs from the past. The earliest one was 1966. There was even one from 1935 that said “two times”, which made me think that there must be an identical lorry to this one somewhere in the vicinity used by the same person. It was nice to see an old lorry like this, and even at that age, it wasn’t all that unusual in the USA to see lorries of that age driving around – these old Dodges

And where has this all come from? It reminds me of nothing whatsoever that is relevant to anything recent. However, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall I did once DRIVE THROUGH AN AMERICAN DESERT IN A YELLOW FORD MUSTANG

Isabelle the Nurse came around as usual to sort out my legs. It’s her last day for a week so when she left, I wished her a really nice break. It’s her oppo tomorrow for a week. I wonder how cheerful he’s going to be.

Then it was time for breakfast and some reading. I’m still on this Roman military engineering right now. But as usual, I was sidetracked off into reading about the Roman Emperor Caligula. And what I read drew some very disturbing parallels with a certain person in a position of power across on the other side of the North Atlantic Ocean. It’s really uncanny. HERE’S ONE TYPICAL EXAMPLE

After breakfast, I came back in here where there were things to do and then a radio programme to review before sending it off for broadcast. With what time was left, I began to edit the next radio programme notes and they are now almost all completed.

My faithful cleaner turned up to apply my anaesthetic and then I had to wait for the taxi. It was late arriving but as I was the only passenger, we still arrived on time. Even so, I had to wait forty-one minutes before they could come and sort me out.

They asked me how I was feeling so I explained my woes. They insisted on a full blood sample and a few other tests too. They asked me if I would have a full COVID test. My usual response is in the negative but seeing as it was Emilie the Cute Consultant on duty today and remembering what had happened in the past with her requests for COVID tests that I didn’t want to take, I didn’t dare refuse.

She came to see me later, telling me that what they had examined so far had been negative. However, she gave me an appointment for an X-ray on my chest and lungs to see what’s going on with this cough. For that, I’ll have to travel back in time because the appointment is dated 5th January 2025. Still, that’s not going to be a problem for someone as intelligent and resourceful … "and modest" – ed … as me.

Unfortunately, she didn’t hang around chatting very long. The days when, eighteen months ago, she was perched on the edge of my bed chatting away about nothing are long gone.

There was some bad news at the dialysis centre today too. This was the last time that I shall see Julie the Cook. She lives forty-five minutes away from there and the travelling is getting her down, so she applied for a job at a local hospital within walking distance of where she lives. She’s been accepted and she starts in the New Year. I wished her luck, of course, but it’s sad to see one of this very cheerful, pleasant group of nurses fly the nest. In fact, the only reason that I go to dialysis is to be cheered up by them, and they do a wonderful job.

Eventually, late as usual, they unplugged me and I headed for home. The taxi was waiting and it was an interesting drive back because the driver was one of those interesting people who has a lot to say for himself. We always have some very good discussions.

Back here, my cleaner helped me into the apartment and after she left, I made tea – baked potato with a taco roll filled with salad and vegan cheese. Only a small portion, but I managed to clear the plate. I had some steamed Christmas pudding for afterwards and that was nice too.

But thinking about steamed puddings, I wonder how a steamed fruit pudding or treacle pudding, or even chocolate pudding, would turn out. I shall have to experiment. And that reminds me – I still have some fruitcake and the rest of the jam roly-poly in the fridge too.

Back in here, I began to write out the notes, feeling better than I had for a while, but found myself crashed out in the chair after a while. I couldn’t keep on going, so once more, I abandoned the notes, to be finished in the morning. This is becoming ridiculous.

That “feeling better” feeling didn’t last for long, did it?

But seeing as we have been talking about Caligula … "well, one of us has" – ed … he was infamous for his … err … excesses.
One day at the Circus Maximus in the middle of a chariot race, he notices a small boy amongst the crowd who looks exactly like him. He sends for a Praetorian Guard to bring the boy to him
"Tell me" he says. "Did your mother ever visit Rome?"
"Oh no" replies the boy."But my father did, years ago."

Sunday 28th December 2025 – YOU CAN TELL …

… that I’m not very well at all right now.

In a few minutes, I’ll be going to bed, without any tea. If I’m off my food, then things are really bad, but I’m just not hungry.

As well as that, I’ve suddenly gone freezing cold all over, which is a surprise because the heater in my room is belting the heat out.

In fact, whatever I seem to have caught, I’ve had it for a few days now and it was even worse last night. I’d managed to write out about half of my notes before an uncontrollable wave of fatigue swept over me. I was away with the fairies for about twenty minutes and when I awoke, I just couldn’t go on.

In the end, I gave up and crawled into bed, and that was that.

When I awoke, it was 03:35. I wasn’t expecting that. I’d been so tired that I was expecting to sleep for a hundred years. What was worse was that I couldn’t go back to sleep. I ended up tossing and turning about in bed for hours. When I next looked at the clock, it was 05:25 so I thought that I’d heave myself out of bed in ten minutes and start work.

Whatever happened after that, I’m not at all sure but when I had a quick glance at the clock, it was 08:25. Apparently I’d gone back to sleep again after all of that.

The next thing was Isabelle the Nurse shaking me awake. I’d gone back to sleep yet again, but not for very long that time.

After she had left, it took a good while to heave myself out of bed. And after the bathroom, I went into the kitchen, where I looked at the clock on the microwave. It was 09:30. That’s rather a late time to start my day.

For breakfast, I made my full meal that I should have had on Boxing Day, with porridge, coffee, baked beans on toast, sausage, hash browns and more toast with mushroom pate. It was all totally delicious, although I could do with finding some better beans than these haricots lingots to make my baked beans.

While I was eating, I was doing some more reading. Not of my book right now, but of Roman military architecture. And here’s something fascinating – with their trebuchets, as well as hurling stones and rocks, they would also hurl hollowed-out logs filled with charcoal. These made really good incendiary devices for setting fire to the wooden houses in fortified villages.

Back in here, I finished off yesterday’s notes and now they are online. And it was really depressing having to read through them to see how ill I was becoming, as I suspect that reading through these will be.

But having done that, I went to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was on the taxis last night, and I had two cars, a yellow MkIII and a green MkIII.I was sitting in the office and another girl was sitting on the sofa in there. The girl who was working the radio was a nice, quiet girl, and I really liked her. We’d established some kind of unofficial relationship which I hoped would actually lead to something. For some reason, this other girl was extremely jealous and how she showed it was by, while we were sitting there, putting her hands on me, putting her arm around me, etc. In the end, I went to sit on the floor because I didn’t really want to upset the other girl. It was all extremely uncomfortable. There was much more to it than that too but I seem to have forgotten what it was.

It’s a shame that I’d forgotten some of this dream. However, it’s perfectly true to say that at one stage I did have a yellow MkIII – VBH742N and a green MkIII – PGJ362P. Cortinas, of course. There was also a blue one – LND9P before I moved onto MkIVs, of which there were more than I care to remember.

I was up in the Austrian Alps last night. I was running some kind of business at the side of the road by a great big lake. I was discussing the general situation with one or two people, one of whom was a musician with Crosby, Stills and Nash. We’d lived by this lake for years and we decided to drag it to see what was in it. There were hundreds and hundreds of glass bottles so we set about raking them out. We had quite a pile that we could send off for recycling. While we were in there, we struck something like a large motor vehicle. I had a look down, and it was a coach, or was it a bus? But it was something like that, a large passenger-carrying vehicle. We set about trying to drag that out. I was surprised because we were talking about vehicles that were in the bottoms of lakes in the Alps. I was saying that coaches generally have a body type number so-and-so and buses generally have a type designation so-and-so, one of which was EA but I can’t remember the others. So we hauled this bus or coach out as well and that went off for recycling. I was saying that I was astonished because usually, with coaches, they would all be recovered immediately. It was only the odd bus or two that you’d find still in there in the lake, although I knew personally of where there was at least one coach still in a lake somewhere up here. I carried on fishing out the bottles and could see my tabby cat walking around the edge of the lake, actually in the water but around the edge of the lake, heading towards an island or a lump of mud. When I’d finished, I had three or four bottles left and I didn’t know what to do with them so quite simply, I filled them with water and threw them back.

This reminds me of the stories of all of those missing German gold bars that disappeared at the end of World War II. They were believed to have been sunk in Lake Toplitz along with a huge amount of counterfeit British banknotes that the Germans intended to use to undermine the British economy.

The money was actually found in the lake, but the gold was not, although conspiracy theorists will say otherwise. Mind you, there’s also a conspiracy theory that says that there’s a flying saucer in the lake.

Of all the cats that I’ve ever owned, I’ve never had a tabby cat so I don’t know why I’d dream about having one.

There was football on the internet afterwards, Stranraer away at Annan Athletic. The unbeaten run goes on, but they could and should have done much better than to draw 2-2.

After that, I unfortunately fell asleep, and for a good while too. What is happening to me?

It took me a good while to recover after that, but once I was back in the Land of the Living, I finished off the radio notes and then dictated them, along with the notes for the joining track for the previous programme.

Earlier on, I’d taken some of the frozen pizza dough from a good while ago out of the freezer and it had been defrosting. When I went to look at it, it was certainly past its best and so it went into the bin. The rest of the frozen dough in the freezer then followed it because I don’t think that it will be any better.

The rest of the day was spent editing the notes that I’d dictated just now. The joining track was added in to the two halves of the earlier programme, along with the edited text, and that’s now complete.

There was time to do some editing on the notes for the following programme and I’m about a quarter of the way through. I’ll do the rest whenever.

Right now though, this quite ill, quite depressed me is going to go to bed, even if it is only 21:00. I’ve had quite enough of today and I really want to pull through into a better state of health. Sleep has always been my favourite medicine for that and a lot more won’t go amiss.

But seeing as we have been talking about Stranraer FC … "well, one of us has" – ed … they are one of the few football clubs in Scotland that doesn’t have a women’s football team.
When I asked manager Chris Aitken why, he replied "we had eleven women sign up, but they all flatly refused to wear the same outfit as each other. "

Saturday 27th December 2025 – AFTER LAST NIGHT’S …

… excitement, things are slightly back to normal here and I’m feeling slightly better. Still, I couldn’t have felt much worse than I did then.

Last night, I crawled into bed at 22:00 or thereabouts, dead to the World, and went straight to sleep. I was so tired that the last thing that I expected was to be awake at 03:39.

Not to worry, though, because I went back to sleep shortly afterwards. And there I lay, until … errr … 04:46. And after that, there was no chance of going back to sleep, no matter how hard I tried.

In the end, round about 05:50, I left the bed and began to write up yesterday’s notes. But for some reason or other, I was feeling quite nauseous this morning. It was extremely uncomfortable for quite a while.

At 06:29 I headed for the bathroom and had a good scrub up and then went into the kitchen for the morning’s hot drink and medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone, and I was really surprised at how far I’d travelled last night. There was something about a couple of Roman towns and a complicated street layout that I was examining. But when I came to take hold of the dictaphone, the dream evaporated and I can’t remember anything more about it other than that

Dreaming about Roman towns is no surprise these days, seeing how much reading I’ve been doing on the subject.

There was another dream too about a friend of mine in the USA. I’d sent him a really long letter setting out all kinds of different reasons for this, reasons for that, and something. He wrote back, saying “well OK then, what is it that you want me to do? I’m working under a lot of difficulty and problems too. I wrote back to say that what I wanted was a Ryobi angle grinder with another battery and to ask whether he could find one for me from Home Depot or something like that. But there was somewhere in this dream that I was wandering down a labyrinth of hospital corridors but I don’t know where this fitted in

There is plenty of Ryobi battery-powered stuff around here and down on the farm. It was my favourite brand of tool for all the work that I was doing and it rarely let me down. It was, however, the circular saw that I burnt out, not the angle grinder.

I was either in the Middle East last night or in a Middle Eastern shop in Brussels. It was run by someone from the Levant, something like that. There was a young boy serving behind the counter. I watched him with a customer and he was doing everything that he should have done correctly. He was doing a really nice job of serving these people. When the people left, his boss came out and gave him congratulations about how well he’d been doing and how impressed he was with the sale. But he did have something to say, so I chipped in and said “there’s always a ‘but’, isn’t there?”. He asked him “what time were you out until last night?”. The boy said something like “in the very small hours”. The owner of the shop gave him quite a rebuke – he’s never going to make a good commercant or shopkeeper if he isn’t going to concentrate all of his efforts on his job and make sure that he has a proper night’s sleep before coming into work.

There are plenty of these Middle Eastern shops in Brussels and Leuven and when I lived there, I was a frequent visitor and bought tonnes of spices from there. I’ve run out of cumin just recently and I’ve no idea how or when I’m going to replenish my supplies now that I no longer go there.

From there, I moved on to Gainsborough Road. I was living back in Gainsborough Road and it was all overgrown with weeds and grass growing through the cracks in the concrete, etc. It was a real mess and really untidy. I was finding it really depressing. It was pouring down with rain outside and I was trying to organise a few things so I went down to the shed to fetch something. When I went into the shed, I couldn’t remember what it was that I wanted to fetch so I went back into the house again. I looked at the time and it was 10:35 and I wondered what was happening down at the taxi office. Whether they had come in to work, whether they were working or something like that because the ‘phone in the house hadn’t rung at all at that point. I hoped that there was someone down there. Then I suddenly realised that I wasn’t at work. I thought that I’d better ring my boss and tell him that I was ill, or something like that, and that I’d be in that afternoon. However, I couldn’t remember the ‘phone number. I was sitting there, drumming my fingers on the table trying to recall the ‘phone number, and then I thought “I’m seventy-one years old. What am I doing going in to work? Why am I supposed to be going into work? Why haven’t I retired already? At seventy-one, this is absolutely ridiculous!”.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I did actually retire from work in my dreams the other week. So how come I’m still thinking of going? I’m quite impressed, though, that I can remember my age, even in a dream.

Something else that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is that going somewhere to fetch something but forgetting what it was is also a regular habit.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up as usual and brought back my empty box. She enjoyed the Christmas cake but found the mince pies rather too sweet for her taste. She’s probably quite right there, because so do I.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE. However, as usual, I was sidetracked down another alley.

This time, it was all about Roman artillery and siege weapons, so I had a browse around in cyberspace to see what I could find. After some searching, I came across DE RE MILITARI by Vegetius Renatus Flavius.

It’s a book about recruiting, training and equipping the Roman Army. The copy is horrible, having been printed in 1767 on transparent paper, but it’s the only English translation available.

Back in here, we had a footfest, with all of the highlights of the games in the JD Cymru League.

And there were some impressive crowds at the matches. The Caernarfon v Colwyn Bay game in the Premier League attracted 1333 spectators, which for a town of just under 10,000 inhabitants, is some good going.

At Ruthun, a town of about 5,700 people, the Vale of Clwyd derby in the Second Division against Denbigh attracted a crowd of 1047, and at Porthmadog, a town of 4,100 or so people, a crowd of 827 saw the Third Division match against neighbours Pwllheli, a town of about 4,000 inhabitants.

After all of that, there was the Stranraer FC Christmas Special, during which, regrettably, I fell asleep. It’s becoming ridiculous, all of this, isn’t it?

This afternoon, I began one or two outstanding jobs, such as tidying up a couple of the drawers in one of the pieces of office furniture. They have been mixed up and in a mess since the removal and it’s high time that I began to sort things out.

The truth is that I can’t seem to find the power pack for the little Roland bass amp. I’ve no idea where it’s gone. It must be somewhere, I suppose, but I can’t see it. Mind you, with the removal that we did in something of a hurry, it’s hardly surprising that some stuff has been misplaced.

When I’d finished the drawers, I began to write the notes for the next radio programme, and I’d completed about sixty percent when it was time to knock off for tea.

Whilst I managed to stay awake while preparing and eating my tea, it didn’t last long. Back in here, while I was typing out these notes, I fell asleep three times and the final time, I couldn’t even see the keyboard when I pulled myself through. So in the end, I crawled off to bed and tomorrow will be another day.

But seeing as we have been talking about pulling ourselves through … "well, one of us has" – ed … I remember when I was driving the taxis and I’d heard that one of my regulars was extremely ill.
Consequently, I asked his wife how he was. She replied "I’m afraid he’s at death’s door"
A couole of weeks later, I saw her again and asked how he was
"The doctors have managed to pull him through" she replied.

Saturday 29th November 2025 – I HAVE DECIDED …

… that tomorrow and all subsequent Sundays until further notice, there will be no alarm call. If Isabelle the Nurse comes along and finds me still in bed, then she will have to sort out my legs while I’m lying there, and after she’s gone, I’ll go back to sleep. I can’t go on like I am at the moment.

What didn’t help was that, after the football, it was a terribly late night. By the time that I’d finished everything that I needed to do, it was long after midnight when I finally crawled into bed.

There was no difficulty falling asleep either, and there I lay, dead to the World until BILLY COTTON shattered my peace.

Ohhh! How I wish that I could have stayed in bed. I was feeling absolutely shattered. It took a good ten minutes for me to summon up the courage to leave the bed and stagger off to the bathroom.

As well as washing myself, I filled the washing machine with dirty clothes and let it loose while I wandered off for my medication.

In the kitchen, there was yesterday’s washing-up to do before I could do anything else. How I hate waking up to that in the morning, but it gives you some idea of how tired I was last night that I left it. However, once I’d done it, I could make my hot ginger, honey and lemon drink with which to take my medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone but there was nothing on it from last night. Not that that’s a surprise, seeing how tired I was. What I did instead was to … errr … crash out on my chair.

Isabelle the Nurse took me by surprise when she arrived. Pressing the doorbell as she does when she arrives awoke me with quite a shock.

After she had given me the final injection of this series, she sorted out my legs and then wandered off. It took me another good ten minutes to be able to stand up and go to make my breakfast.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of ROMAN ROADS IN BRITAIN and although there was plenty of interest, there was nothing that was worthy of a note in here.

However, our author did put me on the trail of a book written by John Horsley called BRITANNIA ROMANA, written in 1734. It contains information about what was known about the Romans at that time, and also visual descriptions of the remains. Judging by what Codrington has been telling us, a great deal of infrastructure was still standing in Horsley’s day but had disappeared by the time of Codrington.

When I’d finished breakfast, I went to rescue the washing from the washing machine and hang it on the clothes airer. And that almost killed me too, so back in here, I crashed out yet again.

When I came round, at about 11:30, I began to assemble the radio programme that I had been preparing. It took a while, but it’s now finished and ready to go. And so I watched the highlights of Barry v Hwlffordd from last night.

After I’d stopped for my disgusting drink break, I began to make my Christmas cake. And I’ve ended up with two because I made far too much batter. Does anyone want a spare Christmas cake?

It took over three hours to prepare them today, and of course, the week during which the dried fruit had been soaking, and they went into the oven on a low temperature for three and a half hours.

While the cakes were cooking, I made a start on another radio programme. This is another complicated one and is going to take some assembling. Sorting out the music is quite a task and I’ve still not finished that part yet

Back in the kitchen, I switched off the oven and checked the cakes. They are cooked to perfection, and now they need to cool down for a week or so before I can marzipan them, and then another week before I can ice them

But I’m definitely ill and I’m at a loss as to why. I’m totally exhausted, I ache in every conceivable place and I’ve lost all of my energy and enthusiasm. In fact, I’m really surprised that I’ve managed to do so much today, despite how ill I’m feeling.

So ill that, in fact, I made a very small portion of mushroom curry and yet most of it ended up in the waste bin. No dessert either. I just want to go to bed.

But seeing as we have been talking about baking a Christmas cake … "well, one of us has" – ed … you have to bake it in a fan oven turned to 120° for three and a half hours
When I lived in Crewe, I mentioned it to a local girl who wanted to know the details.
A few days later, I asked her how she had got on with it.
"It was a waste of time" she replied. "I tried what you said but after ten seconds, the cake just slid down to the side."

Friday 28th November 2025 – THERE’S NO DOUBT …

… about it – I really am ill.

Today has been a pretty miserable day as far as I am concerned. And it should have started so well too.

Having raced through everything last night, my notes were online quite early and I was looking forward to a nice, early night and a really good sleep. However, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed …. it’s really pointless going to bed early, because all it means is that I awaken correspondingly early the following morning.

Like 04:05 this morning, for example.

At about 05:20, I’d given up all hope of going back to sleep and had risen from the Dead. I took full advantage of the early start by dictating the radio notes that I had rewritten the other day, so they were ready for editing.

Next stop was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I’d been out with some friends last night, and we’d been to rescue a car that belonged to one of them. When I went to pick it up, they asked me if I would drive it back. It was a Morris marina, and I couldn’t get the hang of the gearbox. It felt ever so tight to me. However, I managed to move it in some fashion and came into the city centre. I put the indicator on to turn left, but people stopped for me as if I wanted to go up into the church precinct. In the end, I had no choice but to go up into the church. We stopped there and waited for the traffic to die down, then we climbed into the car again, with me struggling with the gearbox to leave. I ended up being stuck behind an old, dirty bus and I suddenly realised that I was in an old, dirty bus too. I had to pull out from behind this bus without hitting it and somehow make my way forward. I pulled out and had to wait for a gap in the traffic. Just as I was about to pull out, a car suddenly appeared. I saw it over my shoulder and the guy with me said to his wife “did you see that? He actually used his shoulder”. He was quite impressed by that. So we set off, but then we had to go to a DIY shop for some DIY stuff for my house. They all set off running but I knew that it was miles away so I ran a lot slower to conserve my strength. But there was an incredibly steep descent and I could have jumped into the bus and let it roll down to the bottom of the hill but I thought that it would be most unsafe so I carried on running. Eventually, I arrived at this DIY place and found that they had all purchased everything and it was all stacked. However, they looked exhausted so and they asked about when we were going to load it. I replied “you need to take a break first because you aren’t going to load anything like that in that condition”. The guy in the shop said that as it was all on a pallet already, he could take it with a fork-lift truck and drop it down at the side of our vehicle.

The part about looking over my shoulder relates to the time when I was chauffeuring in Brussels. I had a General from the Finnish Army in my car and he asked me if I had been a motor-cyclist. I asked him why, and he replied "you’re always looking over your shoulder when you drive, just like a motorcyclist does. "

The friend was, by the way, related to one of the young ladies who come to see me during the night and it’s a disaster that she never put in an appearance. And we had a Marina estate once when I had my taxis. We were going to use it for parcels but, as always, I was overtaken by events.

One thing though was that I never drove “dirty old buses”. I was quite selective about whom I drove for and restricted my activities to Shearings and to a local firm with an excellent reputation.

By now though, I was wishing that I had stayed in bed because I was beginning to feel awful, nauseous and totally exhausted. Nevertheless, I went for a good wash and to make my hot ginger, honey and lemon drink for my medication.

Back in here, I could no longer concentrate on anything, and it was a very weary, depressive me that crawled into the kitchen when Isabelle the Nurse came round. She gave me my injection and sorted out my feet, and when I told her how ill I was feeling, she suggested that I go back to bed.

Strangely enough, that was my opinion too, but first I made breakfast and read some more of ROMAN ROADS IN BRITAIN.

As usual, I was sidetracked by the Iter Britanniarum as I followed the routes of some of these roads. Interestingly, he talks about a Roman agger or embankment that carried a road that crossed over the River Hodder in Lancashire. I had a quick look on an online aerial map and noticed a LOVELY CURVED EMBANKMENT NOW OVERGROWN WITH TREES, THAT COULD EASILY BE AN AGGER leading to the river, and if you zoom in to the river really closely, you can see what looks like a paved ford under the water.

There’s also talk about a Roman fort at Caersws in mid-Wales “in a bend of the River Severn with three concentric defensive rings” and, allowing for modern erosion by the river, I FOUND THIS.

A little earlier, I’d mentioned going back to bed but I couldn’t even go that far. I staggered onto my office chair in the bedroom and promptly fell asleep again.

When I awoke, over an hour later, I was still feeling ill but I pushed on and edited the radio notes that I’d dictated earlier. So that programme is ready to be assembled now.

The taxi came early to take me to the Centre de Ré-education so I had to wait around for a while when I arrived.

My first session was with the relief physiotherapist as mine was on a training day. She exercised my arms and legs for a half-hour period that passed surprisingly quickly.

The second session was with the occupational therapist but he didn’t really offer a great deal of help and we were finished after fifteen minutes.

After waiting around for a while, I saw Elise the Dishy Doctor. I poured out my tale of woe, and we decided, after a lengthy discussion, to suspend all of the activities at the Centre de Ré-education until the doctors at dialysis decide that I’m fit enough to restart, whenever that may be.

In the meantime, she gave me a prescription for twenty-five sessions of physiotherapy at my own pace in some local cabinet. However, as my faithful cleaner said later, finding one that has a vacancy is going to be a real challenge.

The final session was this standing upright in this frame thing but I abandoned that after twenty minutes and went to look for my taxi home.

My cleaner helped me into the apartment and then I collapsed into a chair in the kitchen. After she left, I came back in here and, once installed in my comfortable chair, I crashed out again – until, would you believe, 19:45.

For tea tonight, I made a batch of hummus and ate it with some crackers while I watched the football – TNS v Caernarfon. TNS had the lion’s share of the game, of course but the Cofis kept them out for eighty-two minutes.

Two late goals, one of them with the very last kick of the game, gave TNS another win, and once again, the Cofis played the match without any great sense of urgency going forward. They really are going to have to play better than this if they want to make their mark.

So right now, I’m off to bed. Totally exhausted, but relieved to some extent that I’m only out for two afternoons next week. This is some kind of progress.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Finnish General … "well, one of us has" – ed … when I went round to his apartment once, he had a large stuffed black bear in his hallway.
He told me a story about it that I could easily believe to be true and underlines the misunderstanding when two foreigners are conversing in a third, foreign language.
He was holding a cocktail party and one of his guests, an Italian lady, asked him about the bear, and the conversation continued in English.
"I shot it myself" he replied.
"So is it the complete bear there? "
"Oh no. It’s just the fur "
"So what did you do with the bear itself? "
"We ate it"
And so she went round this cocktail party with stories of the General dragging the dead bear into a clearing in the forest and then sitting around a campfire eating it raw while it was still warm and fresh.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: ill health

Friday 17th August 2026 – AFTER THE CATASTROPHE …

Friday 3rd April 2026 – I HAVE HAD …

Saturday 28th March 2026 – YET ANOTHER EVENING …

Friday 27th March 2026 – AND SO, AFTER …

Thursday 26th March 2026 – HERE I ALL AM …

Tuesday 27th January 2026 – AFTER THIS EVENING’S …

Saturday 24th January 2026 – AND ONCE MORE …

Friday 23rd January 2026 – EVEN AS I TYPE …

Thursday 22nd January 2026 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

Thursday 15th January 2026 – I’M FED UP …

Monday 29th December 2025 – I AM FEELING …

Sunday 28th December 2025 – YOU CAN TELL …

Saturday 27th December 2025 – AFTER LAST NIGHT’S …

Saturday 29th November 2025 – I HAVE DECIDED …

Friday 28th November 2025 – THERE’S NO DOUBT …

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