… was a somewhat different night from the last God-knows how many. Although I wasn’t feeling particularly tired, I’ve been a lot less tired than that just recently too and somehow managed to fall asleep quite quickly.

However, not last night. I don’t know what was happening but I had some kind of skin irritation that kept me awake for hours and round about 03:00 I left the bed in search of some kind of cold cream because I reckoned that that was the only way that I was going to have any kind of sleep at all.

And it worked too. Not as quickly as I would have liked, but I did manage to go off to sleep eventually.

Nothing of the foregoing, however, prevented me from awakening round about 06:15, and that was a surprise. I must have had less than three hours sleep. Strangely enough, I wasn’t all that tired either … "relatively speaking, that is" – ed …

So when the alarm went off this morning I was on my way out of the bathroom, having had a good wash, a shave and a wash of my clothes in the sink.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night. And no-one was more surprised than me to find that even though the night was so short, there was something on there too. I was still working in an office and nothing at all was going right there. I was hardly accomplishing anything but then again it was only a week or two before I was due to retire so I was just going through the motions anyway. I could tell that the bosses and everyone like that were unhappy about my efforts but I couldn’t really care less. I thought that I’d had a very raw deal at that place and I didn’t think that I owed it anything. I was just waiting to leave and if anyone said anything to me that would have provoked any kind of argument I would have quite simply walked out. Things reached some kind of head on Monday and I was due to go back in on Tuesday but I ended up going to see a friend on Monday night who had a collection of strange vehicles. He told me that he was planning on cutting one of them down to salvage the cab to put on another one. I thought that that was rather a shame and something of a waste but he was quite adamant about doing it and he invited me to go round to have a look because he felt that it wasn’t going to fit without any kind of severe modification so I agreed that I would go to have a look with him and see what I thought but I really wasn’t very happy with this idea of his of cutting up one of his strange vehicles.

That sounds like a couple of jobs that I’ve had in the past, after which I decided that office work is not really for me. But regular readers of this rubbish will recall that not pulling my weight at work, being close to retirement and planning to walk away was a regular theme during the night at one time.

The story about the guy with the vehicles also rings a bell – to such an extent that a couple of his bizarre vehicles have come his way via me. He features fairly regularly (or did for quite a while) in these pages too, but merely as a supporting actor to a main character. This world is far too small for my liking, or Byd Bach! as they say on the other side of the Severn-Dee valley.

Isabelle the Nurse came round to do her stuff, and she brought some good news with her. It seems that she had been round to the old High School that is being converted into offices (and which is where our radio studio is) and she had a quick peek into the building that is going to be the Granville Dialysis Centre.

She reckons that the transformation work in there is well advanced and wouldn’t be surprised to find it open ahead of schedule. That will save me at least one hour every day, not having to trudge my weary way three times per week down to Avranches.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK. We’ve breezed through Pickering Castle in North Yorkshire and have now arrived at Pontefract.

Pontefract is a major castle with a very long history, so I wonder how much of the book has been devoted to a discussion about it. After all, we’re about half-way through the book and if we aren’t careful, we’ll be running out castles before we reach the end.

After breakfast, I came back in here and had a few things to organise, a few letters and forms to scan, a few e-mails to send and when I’d done all of that, I made a start on my Woodstock magnum opus.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I don’t pay much attention to what happens to my body when I’m in hospital or at dialysis. I was hospitalised as a small baby and I reckon that it must have traumatised me because I can’t bear to talk about, think about, listen to or watch anything medical.

So I don’t know what is going on at all, but when my faithful cleaner rolled up my sleeve to fit my anaesthetic patches, she gasped. My upper arm is swollen like a balloon and it’s just one huge dark-blue bruise where one of the punctures from the dialysis had bled under the skin. No wonder it was so painful.

She fitted my patches nevertheless and for a change, the taxi was early for me. We were three passengers in total plus the driver, and we had a lovely drive in the sunshine down to the dialysis centre in Avranches.

Today, being early, I was third in and third to be coupled up. And the nurses gasped too when they saw the mess that was my upper arm. You cannot imagine how painful the coupling-up was either. I had to wear an ice blanket to numb the arm and deaden the pain. Even so, I had to endure it for three and a half hours, during which I made out my LeClerc shopping list, but it was far too painful to concentrate on anything else.

One of the first in, one of the first to be coupled up meant that I was one of the first to be uncoupled. But it took much longer than it ought – firstly because of the pain and secondly, because they had a young student stagière there and I offered to be the guinea pig on which she could try out her skills. After all, how else am I going to have some nice young female holding my hand for ten minutes?

Even so, I was back here by 18:25 which makes a really nice change. And there was more good news. That electrician who came the other day has sent me a quote which is not unadjacent to what I was expecting. Even better, the work qualifies at the lover rate of TVA by virtue of the age of the building and the age of the installation.

It’s nice to have some good news for a change. After all, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any.

Tea tonight was a helping of lasagna out of the freezer. I need to start to think about making some space in there. I’m hoping that fairly soon, Rosemary will come back with her recommendation for a fridge-freezer and then I can organise myself (if ever that’s possible) and move some of the frozen food downstairs whenever the apartment is free. It’s strangely quiet down there.

But seeing as we’ve been talking about people holding hands … "well, one of us has" – ed … many years ago, I saw one of my friends wandering around Hanley hand-in-hand with his wife.
When I met him a few days later, I told him "you two looked so sweet wandering around Hanley like that, holding hands as if you were still teenagers"
"Ohh, it wasn’t like that at all" he said
"Why was that?" I asked.
"Didn’t you notice the sales?" he replied. "I was trying to stop her hand going after my wallet."