… woken up after having fallen asleep once more on the porcelain horse.
Well, not exactly “just” – it was a couple of hours ago, actually, but never mind. You see what I mean, though.
Not that it’s any surprise, though. Last night was another one of these crazy nights. Bedtime was nothing like as early as it might have been and as I would have liked, but I was soon asleep regardless.
Not for long, however. I had another one of these phantom alarm calls last night that almost had me sitting on the edge of the bed. But as the second alarm didn’t sound as it usually does, I checked the time, and it was 01:42.
As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I’m really puzzled by these phantom alarms. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that for an alarm call, I have BILLY COTTON and his raucous rattle waking me up, and the chances of anyone else in the vicinity using that as their alarm call will be about nil, I reckon.
So what’s going on?
Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, once the false alarm had sounded, I couldn’t really go back to sleep. It was another night where I was drifting in and out of sleep, not being sure which period was awake and which period was asleep.
At one stage, I looked at the time, and it was 06:06 – just twenty-odd minutes before the alarm. I was actually contemplating leaving the bed at that time to claim an early start, but then I told myself not to be silly.
The alarm did go off soon enough (and it was a real alarm call too), and surprisingly, I was soon sitting on the side of the bed, and it didn’t take me as long as usual to raise myself from the Dead.
The first stop was to unlock the front door ready for when Isabelle the Nurse arrives, and then I went into the bathroom to sort myself out for the day.
Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.
In the dream, I did actually mention the girl’s name. She was a certain girl who played a short but dramatic role in my life a few years later, long after I had finished school. However, I’ll keep her name to myself. Lots of people from my past have figured in my dreams ever since I’ve been recording them … "in 1997" – ed … and it’s bad enough that they know me, without being named and shamed because of it.
However, I do have to say that in a dream, it’s impressive that I can work out the difference between the girl I know and a girl I don’t know.
The story of the school dance is another story which the World is not yet ready to hear. We need to turn the clock back to 1971 and Nerina wouldn’t have been around then – she was still in primary school in Crewe. But there was certainly someone else with me and there was certainly something about leaving the school in mid-dance, but that was in connection with two bags of chips from Ted’s fish and chip shop in Welsh Row.
And we’ve talked about these white huts before, designed and assembled at schools that became overcrowded when the school-leaving age was raised from fourteen to fifteen in 1947. We had several at our grammar school in Nantwich too. They were called HORSA huts – HORSA being an acronym for the “Hutting Operation for the Raising of the School-leaving Age”.
Isabelle the Nurse turned up shorty after I’d finished, and as she was dealing with my legs and feet, we discussed injections. She’ll give me my anti-‘flu injection on Friday, but it’s unlikely that she’ll be able to give me my COVID injection. The packs of injections are only sold in multiples of five, and it’s doubtful that she’ll have another four patients who require the injection.
She tells me to ask at the dialysis centre, or else at the hospital when I go there on 23rd November. What I will do, though, is to talk to Emilie the Cute Consultant about it. She’s the one who’s insisting on me having it, so it’s up to her to find a solution.
My faithful cleaner said that they could do it at the chemists in the town centre, but while in principle, I could just about go there on the bus, I can’t come back.
You would think that it wouldn’t take many brains to work out that the bus stop by the big medical centre, where hundreds after hundreds of people suffering with ill-health would visit and where I would catch the bus home, would have been the first place to have had its pavement raised to bus floor height so that people could board the bus, but not only has it not yet been raised despite numerous petitions, but the pavement is horrendously low there and the bus doesn’t even stop at the pavement but out in the roadway where there are even more difficulties.
Never mind running a bus company, there are some people on the council who couldn’t even run a bath.
After Isabelle the Nurse left, I went and made breakfast and started to read THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.
Before I’ve even gone very far into the book, I’m appalled at the lack of sensitivity of the “upper classes” of Herefordshire. In 1866, a few weeks before the period that this book covers, there was a devastating accident at the Oaks Colliery near Barnsley in which three hundred and sixty-one miners and rescuers were killed. That was the highest ever total of lives lost in a colliery in the UK until 1913, when the Senghenydd disaster cost four hundred and forty lives.
And while the recovery of the bodies was still taking place and rescuers were still dying from the effects of the methane in the “afterdamp”, our author tells us that "if this gas can be so bitted and bridled to its proper use, instead of venting itself in wild mischief, its value would be enormous." and "it appears that since the closing of the pit after the explosion, the whole mine has become one huge gasometer, giving off at times 50,000 cubic feet of gas per hour, a quantity sufficient to light up every thoroughfare in the neighbourhood."
After I’d finished eating, I came back in here to do a few more things that needed doing, and then I started work.
However, I was interrupted by my cleaner, who had been down to the chemist to bring back the rest of my medication for the month. She also told me the same as Isabelle the Nurse had told me about the chemist and the COVID injection. She reckons that if they won’t do it at the dialysis centre or at the hospital, we can work out a cunning plan.
The work that I’ve been doing today is hunting down the remaining music that I need … "he didn’t have it all yesterday after all" – ed … and then reformatting it and re-editing it, and then selecting the tracks that I need – and that wasn’t easy either because I’d never heard one or two of these albums before.
It might have been somewhat easier nevertheless if I hadn’t crashed out for forty-five minutes or so this morning.
Once I’d chosen my tracks, I had to remix them, pair them and then segue them, and that took a while to do too.
When all of that was done, I began to write out the notes, but I’d hardly started when I needed to go to ride the porcelain horse. I’ve no idea what time it was when I went, but the last time that I’d glanced at the clock on the computer, it was 18:03, and it can’t have been much later than that.
And to give you some kind of idea of how long I must have been asleep, when I went into the kitchen after washing my hands, it was 19:45.
As you might expect, I remember nothing whatever about going to sleep. I didn’t even remember going in there. When I awoke, I really thought that it was morning, but I couldn’t remember the alarm clock going off. And then I noticed that I was still in my day clothes, so I wondered if I’d gone to bed fully clothed, or was it the previous evening and I was on the point of going to bed?
This just shows you how confused I am when I awaken from these sudden, spontaneous crashings out.
Slowly, it dawned on me that it was still the early part of the evening and that I’d been working. And I was disappointed that I hadn’t continued to work and made more inroads into these radio notes that I’m writing.
When I stood up, the room was still spinning round and round, and I fell over into the shelving unit in the bathroom. I ended up falling back into a sitting position, covered in stuff that had fallen off the shelves that I had crashed into. Eventually, the room stopped spinning and I could stand up and put everything back where it belonged.
From the freezer I took half a loaf for my toast for the next few days and a slice of frozen lasagne for tonight’s tea. While the lasagne was in the microwave defrosting and warming up, I cooked some vegetables and made some cheese sauce, and when the lasagne was ready, I had that with the veg and cheese sauce.
For pudding, I had some more tinned apricots with home made chocolate and coconut ice cream, and it was just as delicious as yesterday. I’ll have to make some more vegan ice cream. I wonder if these drinking syrups would go with, say, almond milk and freeze properly to give the ice cream some flavour. There’s one way to find out, I suppose.
So having finished my notes, there are just a couple more things to do and then I’m going to bed, ready for dialysis tomorrow … "I don’t think" – ed …
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about chemists … "well, one of us has" – ed … my cleaner told me that while she was there at the end of the morning, a woman from Crewe came in.
She asked "could I have a packet of nothing, please?"
The chemist stopped in her tracks. "What do you mean? A packet of nothing?"
"Yes" replied the woman from Crewe; "A packet of nothing. You see, I have this headache."
"And what does a ‘packet of nothing’ have to do with your headache?" asked the chemist.
"I’ve seen the advertisement outside the shop" she explained. "The one that says ‘Headache? Nothing acts faster than Anadin’"
