… out who it was who rang my doorbell this morning at 09:30, “harsh words” will be said. I was just on the point of tidying the kitchen and putting things away when someone rang the front door bell and awoke me. Who does a thing like that at 09:30 on a Sunday morning? I just stuck my head under the bedclothes and presumably they went away. However I couldn’t go to sleep again after that. It really annoyed me

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m happy (well, I’m not, actually, but that’s by the way) to raise myself from the dead at any time you like but Sunday is a Day Of Rest when there’s never an alarm and I’m quite content to lie in bed for as long as it takes until I’m ready to show a leg. And anyone who gets in my way and interrupts me will know all about it.

But that’s not the worst of it.

As it happens I did manage to go back to sleep at some point but at 10:15 the doorbell went again.

This time I staggered across the apartment as Nature intended ready to give someone a piece of my mind but there was no-one on the other end of the parlophone.

There was no point in going back to bed after that so I had my medication and, exceptionally, I made myself a mug of strong instant coffee

It took a while, as it usually does these days, to come round into the Land of the Living and then I sat down to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I’d been producing a play. Admittedly it wasn’t very good but it was part of street entertainment. The idea was that there would be 4 different versions of this play taking place simultaneously and the actors would begin to walk from the far end of each street until they arrived simultaneously in the centre of the Square in the town centre. Of course, doing something on that kind of scale in a small town there won’t be any kind of experienced actors so if you did find any experienced actors you’d ration them out between the different performances to make sure that one of the streets didn’t have more quality than the others. It was all quite hit-and-miss, the kind of thing that was destined to fail but you would give it a go. The actors set off and slowly advanced into the town centre down their respective streets to meet up in the middle. There was one woman who was really outraged because she considered that her street had a couple of second-rate actors playing important roles whereas the neighbouring street had a couple of professional, experienced actors playing the same roles. She was incensed. What annoyed me more than anything was that from where she was standing to watch it she could actually see two performances, the one with the average actors and that with the better actors in the leading role so she really had no grounds to complain. Nevertheless she was extremely angry and vituperative about it.

That reminds me of something that happened 10 years ago when I was in Munich. I was at some kind of party with some theatrical types and busy chatting to a young Italian girl who was with a travelling theatre company. She was telling me that she was going to produce her first ever play – either Hamlet or “The Scottish Play”, I can’t remember now.
She asked me "how would you produce the play?"
"Do you know the play well?"
"Yes I do" she responded.
"Have you read it?" I asked
"Yes I have" she answered
"When you read it, do you visualise in your mind and your imagination what is going on, or do you simply look at the words?"
"I can imagine and visualise it" she answered.
"Well, that’s how you produce it – so that it turns out exactly how you imagine it to be. It’s all your own work – no-one else’s so do it how YOU see it and not how anyone else wants you to see it, otherwise there’s no point in you being the producer"

And half an hour later "how would you produce the play?"

Later on during the night I was talking to the lorry driver with whom I was talking in a dream a couple of nights ago. He was telling me that every Sunday he had to go to the fuel depot at Y Fflint to load up his lorry ready for the week’s work. But because it was a Bank Holiday just about everywhere was filling up so there was an enormous queue. He wasn’t attended to until late at night which meant that he had no drivers’ hours left to go home. He slept at the side of the road in his cab then spent the next week delivering, running later and later because with the effects of Covid it took much more time to unload and prepare anything. Instead of being home for Friday he ended up coming off the road and going straight to the tanker depot to refuel for the next week’s work without even seeing his home and having to sleep in his cab for the night again. He went at the height of Covid for several weeks without even seeing his own home and family.

Finally I was staying with some people in Arizona, in a big house on the edge of town. There was just the boy of the house and me there – the family was away. No-one had said anything about food and by now I was starving. I’d brought some bread rolls with me in the car so I said that I’d make a sandwich. Did he want anything? He replied no so I went off and fetched whatever I had, which wasn’t very much. later on in the afternoon as it began to go dark I went for a walk. I could tell by plaques on various places around the town that it had been created in 1918 as a watering point along the railway. Someone had built a church but it was all ripped out and modernised in 1933. There were several stories. One of the strangest things was that at the side of the Town Hall was what might have been a memorial of a 1950s convertible that had been involved in a really heavy front-end smash. There were 3 children standing by the car so I wondered if they had been killed in the accident and the memorial was to them. The most interesting thing was when I went down a side street I ended up in some kind of gallery that was all ornate carved wood like something out of a Gothic cathedral. There were people milling around and one or two people were talking to me. I was standing by a waste paper bin blocking it. Some woman asked me to move so we had a little chat. I pointed out to her a ghastly luminous human head floating down the gallery. As I went round the corner I came across a cat show with about 20 or 30 cats in baskets. I went over to stroke them and some woman made a remark to someone else about “that’s the guy who’s staying with such-and-such a family at the moment”

After lunch I made the pizza for the next batch of pizza and I do have to say that the dough came out the best that I have made for some considerable time.

While it was busy proofing I began the bread and butter pudding.

The recipe included eggs so I had a go with Liz’s patent baking-soda-and-vinegar replacement. And the result was something like Lance Percival experienced in CARRY ON CRUISING

Nevertheless it went into the oven well enough and baked quite nicely. I decided in the end to bake it in a low, wide dish in the conventional oven so that it will cook more evenly

As yet I haven’t tasted it but if it’s anything as nice as the uncooked mixture tasted before I baked it, it’ll be phenomenal.

And having ordered some dry figs in the week from LeClerc, I found three unopened packets in my baking box. I really must make a proper and thorough inventory of exactly what I have in here.

In between everything I edited the radio notes that I’d dictated last night and I completed the programme. I’ll be ready to start the next one tomorrow.

There was a visitor too. One of my neighbours came round to talk to me about cars with hand controls.

The pizza was absolutely delicious again, and now that I’ve written my notes I’m off to bed once I’ve had a drink of honey, blackcurrant and lemon

So who will put in an appearance tonight? At some point during the night I had a vague recollection that Nerina was there or thereabouts. I’ve no objection to her coming to visit me during the night because, after all, I did invite her to share my life for better or for worse.

However I do wish that everyone else in my family would clear off and leave me alone. I put as much distance between them and me in the real world as I possibly can and so I take a great deal of objection to them pursuing me around in the ether during the night.