Yes, I’m not going to tell you how old I am but when we lit the candles on my gorgeous vegan chocolate birthday cake, there was an avalanche on the ski slopes at Super-Besse and when I went to blow them out later, I was driven back by the heat.

We had vegan meatballs and tomato sauce with spaghetti as well for a birthday tea and now I’m well-and-truly stuffed. And to make things even better, the nurse forgot to come this morning and give me my injection. What more can any man desire?

I haven’t bought myself a present because firstly, I wasn’t sure that I was still going to be here (either here at Liz and Terry’s, or anywhere else for that matter) and as you all know, I’m not all here anyway. Secondly, I do have my eye on something but whether I’ll now be able to have the use out of it is anyone’s guess.

But I know that I am going to be in for a good time tonight because the birthday present that I do have lined up is something well worth having. I’m a big fan of the 1930s actor Gordon Harker, as regular readers of this rubbish may have realised. Amongst his output were three films in which he starred as Inspector Hornleigh with Alastair Sim as his sidekick, Sergeant Bingham. One of them, Inspector Hornleigh Goes To It, has been discovered and was broadcast, with 20 minutes of it missing, on BBC television years agobut since then it’s been restored in its entirety and is available from archive.org. Of course, I’ve long-since downloaded it.

As for the other two films, “Inspector Hornleigh” and “Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday”, the latter was likewise rediscovered and broadcast on BBC Television but had not only a 20-minute missing section but a 1O-minute piece where the soundtrack was lost. Since then, it has disappeared. The former film has never been aired on TV as far as I can tell, and I’ve always considered it to be lost.

However, there’s a new film archive site that’s sprung up, and would you believe, it’s actually offering those two films. It goes without saying that I’ve downloaded them, and I’ll be watching them in bed tonight as my birthday treat.

I didn’t contact the Medical Insurance people today because other things cropped up. We had another visit so we needed to tidy up, and the visitors stayed until early evening. You can’t do much when you have company. I’ll have to do this on Friday now. But I have cracked on with my dictaphone notes and seem to be making quite good progress.

I wasn’t making much progress during the night however. Anything but, in fact. I started out in an office trying to work out the business affairs of a couple of stockbrokers but I couldn’t receive a reply from them to a simple enquiry. One of these stockbrokers was a magistrate and what I wanted to know was how many penalty points a person received for being convicted for shoplifting (yes, this makes sense, doesn’t it?). I couldn’t obtain a reply to my phone calls or my letters – then suddenly a big illuminated sign went up in our office to announce that the firm of stockbrokers concerned had undergone a heavy internal re-organisation and were far too busy training new stockbrokers than to spend their time helping businesses like us perform our tasks (and the message was delivered in rather a patronising, insulting tone). We were told to contact them after 15th January (it was September at this moment, I recall). This meant that I needed to find someone else who was a magistrate and so I asked around the office. In the end, some of my colleagues gave me a name which was a Mr Hyde-White (Wilfred?) so I had to search the building in order to find him. Everyone with whom I spoke replied that it was in fact Mrs Hyde-White who worked here but even then, no-one could direct me to her office and I seemed to be going around in circles. The simple answer, of looking on the internet or even trying to find the records of the relevant Court case, never ever occurred to me;
But clearly my medical situation is preying on my mind because one of my nocturnal rambles last night was to go off and seek a second opinion about my medical condition. This involved taking the train to a town called “Port” which was somewhere along the railway line between Lyon and Marseille. The train that we needed was one of these old-type of 1960s long-distance expresses (not the TGV) and so we set off for the station, which was a huge station, just like the one at Crewe but many times bigger. We arrived there hours early for our train which was at 11:30, so we settled down to sleep on the benches on the platform – me, my brother (whatever is he doing here again?) and a girl whom I don’t recognise. Suddenly, I sat bolt upright – and it was 11:25 and the train was just pulling into the station. But here I was, half-undressed, I couldn’t find my socks (there was a pair of blue ones but I was sure that they weren’t mine but I tried to put them on anyway) or my jumper, my possessions were strewn about just about everywhere. My two companions were in the same state but they were in no kind of hurry to prepare themselves to board the train – there was only me rushing to get ready – I was trying to encourage one of them to board the train so that we could simply throw our gear on board and leap on straight away afterwards. But bang on 11:30 the train pulled out (this is of course any other country in the world rather than the UK) and we were stranded, totally unprepared. I was now panicking that I’d missed my appointment for wherever I had to go. The woman with whom I was travelling just didn’t seem to have any sense of urgency whatever. My brother and I wandered off to try to find some left-luggage lockers to dump all our superfluous stuff. I had decided that there would be just me and the clothes that I stood up in. He then decided that he would like to have the keys as he was going to wander off and make some other kind of arrangements for something else. “Don’t worry!” he said, “I’ll be back in a day or two”. I replied that I wanted the keys to do this NOW and I want you back in five minutes. This of course led to yet another interminable argument. Afterwards, I ended up back with this woman who was still totally nonchalant about all of this. She said that she couldn’t understand all of the fuss. “We’re taking the train to Porto, aren’t we?”. I replied that we weren’t at all. It was to PORT that we should be going. She couldn’t believe it, but there it was, written on the tickets. She wandered off to find a ticket inspector to see if there would be another train within the next 5 minutes that would take us to our destination in time for my appointment. But we STILL weren’t ready, with our possessions strewn about the place, I still didn’t have any socks on and all of this kind of thing. It was totally absurd, it was.
I can’t remember where I was after that but it was nowhere that I recognised. We (whoever we were) were driving along a road through a town or city that may well have been mainland European (we were certainly driving on the right) alongside a railway line and then up a slip road into the main traffic. There was a song playing, one about “riding in a taxi” and we were changing the words to sing “riding in my A60” which is strange to say the least because much as I like A60s, the cars with which I will always be associated when it comes to talking about taxis will of course be Cortinas. But as we merged into the traffic up ahead, we noticed in front of us a Morris Marina which was clearly a taxi because it was black on the lower part and up to the high waistline on the sides, with white upper body and roof and boot lid.But this was a bizarre vehicle to be using as a taxi in mainland Europe.

But this is twice just recently that I’ve been having issues about trains. This is bizarre. I wonder what it’s all about.

But I can worry about this later because I’m now off to bed to watch my films. I reckon that I’ve earned it.

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