… twenty-four hours this has been.

Round about 02:30 this morning, the wind started to blow up. By about 04:00, we were having gusts of over 100 kph and it’s not let up since.

And seeing as I now live at the front of the building, I’m having the lot rattling against my windows, and I’d forgotten just how noisy a howling gale can be.

It was looking quite good though earlier in the evening. I’d finished my work a good while before 23:00 and I’d climbed into bed with an air of optimism … "makes a change from a hot water bottle" – ed … hoping to have a decent sleep for once.

Once in bed, I was asleep quite quickly, but it didn’t last. I awoke as the wind began to rise, and although I fell asleep again shortly afterwards, by about 04:00 I was awake and had given up all hope of going back to sleep.

Having said that, at one point I did actually go back to sleep but I was wide awake again at 06:00 and at that point, I arose from the Dead and headed off for a wash and shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon.

After the medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night and if I had been able to persuade one (or more) of my favourite young ladies to put in an appearance.

I was doing something with some kind of newspaper. There had been some issues with a couple of women over something, that were not connected to the newspaper at all. I’d actually witnessed something so I was ready to make a statement before the police, but this newspaper launched a big personal attack on me, basically to say that if I were to go before the police and make some kind of statement, then they had plenty of statements that they could make about me. I wasn’t sure what they meant, and in any case, that was a wicked thing to say. However, I decided that I’d publish in my newspaper these letters that I’d received, in the headlines, and that way, I could control them without any kind of problem. But the offence concerned related to offences against a certain man. They mentioned his name but I can’t remember it now.

The centre of France was rather lawless with people with objections making up the rules as they went along. I had four litres of milk on hand at Virlet but I was told by a troop, one of Barber’s troops, to empty it all away because somehow lying unattended on a battlefield could be extremely dangerous, so they extracted this promise from me. But it made life difficult because every time I was coming to the hoarder, and the hoarding was at the top of the list, I was stopped and thoroughly searched. But my ankle right at the time who was resigned was never searched, and neither was the bass guitarist woman who actually played together in the concert drive. It seemed to be that they were just targeting me and no-one else in this.

As I mentioned the other day, sometimes I have no recollection whatever of some of my dreams, and these two certainly fit in to that category. I can’t remember anything at all about them. But did you like the archaic use of the word “before” in the first dream?

We were in Crewe last night and we were planning on setting up some kind of radio post in a motel there. So we checked the equipment that we had. We had the radio, of course, and we had a suppressor to act as an aerial and a few other things like that. Someone else brought with him another receiver so that we could boost the power, and then we set off. We turned from Gresty Road into Davenport Avenue, and there were the two new houses on the corner. There was a third one in the far corner, a small detached house, with access into the garden of one of the houses next door. I explained that this was bought by the family to house one of their daughters who had grown up. She lived there but she had communication and shared facilities with her family. We walked past one of these signboards where the American President had several of his statements and his Truth Social account, and every time you wrote something in this book on this table, one of his Truth Social things sprung up. The one that I noticed was “only half the water on the earth is due to water”. We saw some of the comments and some of them were hilarious. We were thinking that we hope that this book will be available in a thousand years time to show the people just how stupid the current times were. Then we went to set up in our hotel but for some reason, every time the radio was plugged in, it kept on screeching. Changing the amplitude of the aerial didn’t seem to help. The person with us said that he couldn’t possibly couple up his radio to this network with this noise happening. We’d have to try to think of a way to overcome it but that was going to be complicated.

When our family moved from Shavington in 1970, we settled in Davenport Avenue in a house right on the corner with Gresty Road. I know the patch of land on which the new houses were built. Furthermore, I reckon that I know the girl referred to in the dream. She and her family lived in one of the houses in Gresty Road just before you turn in to Davenport Avenue.

As for the American President and the stupid current times, I try to keep politics off these pages but someone clinically insane in charge of the most powerful country in the World, another madman trying to turn the clock back to 1940, and another group of people committing a genocide of a magnitude that the World hasn’t seen for 1400 years, all of which while the rest of the World looks hopelessly and helplessly on, I’m glad that I shan’t be around to see how it all transpires.

Finally, I’d been doing some things around this stately home for some reason or another. I’d begun to chat to the daughter of the owners. She was in my opinion a very nice girl, not the kind of girl that you would normally meet when you are dealing with the aristocracy. We began to see each other on a very informal basis. One day, I was round at their house early one morning to take her to work but there was a commotion somewhere. I rushed to see what it was, and at first I thought that it was the Lord and his son who were being attacked. However, they were sitting there quite nonchalantly, not having heard anything. Then we heard some screams coming from across the lawn. In another wing of the house, the butler or whatever was trying to defend it from some burglars. The burglars came running out, we rushed over, and there was the mess. Once we’d tidied it up, I happened to notice that there was a film playing on the video recorder, one of the INSPECTOR HORNLEIGH FILMS so I stood and watched it for a few minutes; Then I thought that I had to take this girl to work, so I tried to stop the video recorder, but I couldn’t see the “stop” button or a “pause” button so after a few minutes, I ejected the cassette and then I went upstairs. The girl was waiting for me, and she was not very happy. She said that if we had gone as soon as I had turned up, which was what she wanted to do, she would have been at work for six minutes already. I could only apologise, but I felt that it wasn’t going to be enough. But one thing that I noticed was her perfume. She had on this lovely perfume and that’s something else that I can still smell it now, this perfume.

It beats me where this one has come from too. But the Inspector Hornleigh films, the vastly underrated Gordon Harker with his sidekick, a very young Alistair Sim, are amongst my all-time favourite black-and-white films.

And the perfume was gorgeous too.

Isabelle the Nurse blew in with the wind, sorted out my legs and then blew out again, so I could make breakfast and read some more of BATTLES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

The American Army is half-starved, unclothed, unpaid and near mutiny. But even so, the British still refuse to sally out of their camps to press home an advantage. It’s as if they have given up all hope and are waiting for a miracle. It makes very depressing reading.

Our author, Colonel Carrington, is however also hilarious. He has a complete and utter failure to recognise irony when he sees it. He tells us that General Greene detached General Morgan to, inter alia "collect provisions and forage, form magazines, prevent plundering, etc."

Maybe someone ought to explain to Colonel Carrington that the difference between "collect(ing) provisions and forage" and "plundering" is “who is doing it?”. When an army is plundering, it’s called "collecting provisions" but when a starving private soldier is collecting provisions, it’s called "plundering."

Back in here, I carried on with my notes for this radio programme and it’s now all finished, ready for dictating if I’m up early tomorrow. But I probably won’t be. I’m really exhausted after today and the bad night last night.

My faithful cleaner was late to come and apply the anaesthetic, and shortly after she left, there was a knock at the window. I thought that it was the taxi coming early but it was in fact the tenant of one of the holiday homes in the building who had locked himself out. I could have done without that.

The taxi was late again and in the howling gale, it took me ten minutes to walk to the car, hanging on grimly to my crutches and the driver. It was no fun at all.

There was someone else to pick up too, out in the back of beyond, so all in all we were horribly late arriving.

They put me in a different room today, but I had no peace. The low blood pressure alarm went off every half-hour and the nurses came a-running, poor things. Not that it did any good though.

For a change, I was reading about the battlefield clearances ofter World War I, the hunt for bodies and the consolidation of smaller cemeteries into larger ones. It made some quite gruesome reading and I’ll probably be having nightmares about it in the very near future.

Bodies are still being discovered in Flanders Field, on the Somme and elsewhere even today. As recently as eighteen years ago, a mass grave was discovered with about two hundred and fifty Australian soldiers in it.

As seems to be the case these days, I was left to be the last to be unplugged. Consequently, I was once more horribly late returning home.

My faithful cleaner and the driver had to help me to the apartment, in view of the wind, and I was glad to be back inside, even if it is cold right now.

Tea was a baked potato with a burger on a bun, and once more, even though I cooked a smaller portion, I left food on my plate. This is not very much fun at all. There’s definitely something wrong somewhere.

But that’s to worry about tomorrow. Right now, I’m off to bed. Sunday is a lie-in until 08:00 of course, but we’ll have to wait and see. If this wind keeps up, it will be most unlikely.

And seeing as we have been talking about the archaic use of the word "before" … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of once upon a time when I uttered an expletive in front of some rather posh lady.
A short while later, her husband came to see me. "how dare you swear before my wife?"
"I’m terribly sorry" I replied. "I had no idea that she wanted to go first."