Tag Archives: laurence gomme

Tuesday 12th August 2025 – I HAVE HAD …

… some visitors around here this morning, which is always very nice.

However, can you imagine how embarrassing it is when you make coffee for three and suddenly realise that, due to the slow moving-house process that has already seen a pile of stuff move downstairs over the last ten days or so, you only have two coffee mugs up here?

Yes, Bane of Britain strikes again, doesn’t he?

It was something of a “Bane of Britain” night last night too. I’ve no idea what exactly happened but I was still eating my evening meal at about 21:45, and there is no particular reason for it being so late.

Consequently, it was after midnight and I was still letting it all hang out yet again, with a good few minutes before I actually crawled into bed.

Not that I stayed there too long either. At 02:10 exactly I awoke with a streaming head-cold of most embarrassing proportions and I had to leave the bed to find a roll of kitchen paper. Ordinary paper tissues did not suffice.

Nothing seemed to calm it down either. In the end, I smothered my chest and the lower part of my face with some eucalyptus vapour rub, wishing that I had some Olbas Oil handy.

Eventually, I managed to go back to sleep, where I remained until … errr … 05:20. And this time, I didn’t manage to go back to sleep. After about half an hour of trying, I gave it up as a bad job and, clutching my roll of kitchen paper tightly to my chest … "this is becoming ridiculous" – ed … I staggered off into the bathroom.

The medication was next, and then I staggered back into here to listen to the dictaphone, thinking to my self that I’d be lucky if there was anything on it after such a short night.

However, you never know your luck. Not that it was an awful lot but there was something last night about being in bed and looking at one of the walls in my hospital ward. It was tiled, with tiles that were 30cms by 60cms laid horizontally. They were laid one directly above the other directly above the other rather than staggered with half a tile over the top of one and half a tile over the top of that. You can hardly see the join above the tiles but you could see where the door into the room was – that was right on the edge of some of the tiles.

No prizes for guessing to which subjects of recent discussion this relates. And the tiles are indeed 30cms by 60cms. Whether they will be laid horizontally or vertically, or in straight vertical lines or as overlapping tiles depends very much on the plumber. I have given no instructions. Incidentally, where the builders of 1998 have built, the joints are an absolutely disgraceful mess but when we found some of the original wall, all 1,200mm thick of solid Grès de Chausey granite, you could indeed barely see the very neat and precise joints made by the builders of 1668.

Having done that, I started to think about the radio programmes that I want to finish today. There’s one where I need to rewrite the notes because the ones that I wrote and dictated at the end of last week aren’t long enough, and then there are the notes to finish for the one that comes afterwards.

However, Isabelle the Nurse arrived just in time to interrupt the proceedings. We had a little chat while she sorted out my legs, and then she cleared off, leaving me to make my breakfast.

This morning, I finished THE OLD ROAD. Belloc has now arrived at Canterbury and was in the cathedral in time to celebrate the anniversary of the assassination of Thomas A Beckett.

The book was extremely interesting, that’s for sure, but Belloc didn’t really go into his subject very deeply. He barely scratched the surface of many of the places of interest that he passed along the way, and his description of the route itself was somewhat brief. I would have liked to have seen much more, but then again, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I am famous for never writing just one word when a hundred would do the job just as well … "quite!" – ed …

The value of the book lay in its anecdotes, just as did John Stow’s, but I’m sure that Belloc had many more up his sleeve that he could have imparted to us.

Before he finished though, there were a couple more points of interest that caught my eye.

He wrote "I came to wish that all history should be based upon legend. For the history of learned men is like a number of separate points set down very rare upon a great empty space, but the historic memories of the people are like a picture. They are one body whose distortion one can correct, but the mass of which is usually sound in stuff, and always in spirit."

This is, of course, the theory of Laurence Gomme whose book FOLKLORE AS A HISTORICAL SCIENCE we read back in March. It’s also something that, while I don’t necessarily agree completely with Belloc and Gomme, I would consider to be an excellent starting point, and would use scientific means of unravelling history as a tool to investigate the folk theories, rather than as a means unto themselves.

The second point is his remark that "I thought I should be like the men who lifted the last veil in the ritual of the hidden goddess, and having lifted it found there was nothing beyond, and that all the scheme was a cheat ; or like what those must feel at the approach of death who say there is nothing in death but an end and no transition."

We all know that feeling of extreme disappointment when we end up after many years of toil with exactly what we wanted, only to find out that it wasn’t what we needed, or that it didn’t live up to expectations, and we wonder why we went to all that trouble.

The next book on the list is THE DIARIES OF SIR DANIEL GOOCH.

He was the Chairman for many years of the Great Western Railway during their period of immense prosperity, and I’ve been looking forward to this book for quite a while.

But here we go again. Gooch talks about the loyalty that one should have towards one’s employer, that "you can be relied upon steadily to persevere in the pursuit of their interest, and so identify yourself with them that they can rest assured you are not ever seeking for a change, because you thus might earn a few pounds a year extra.", and "It ought to be every man’s greatest happiness and pride to say, ‘I have been associated with the same men through life.’ And to my mind, nothing speaks stronger against a man than for him, in describing his past life, to go through a long list of changes in his business associations,"

He then proceeds, several pages further on, to recount the enormous list of employers and employments that he had had during his adolescence.

The editor of his diaries tells us that during the “battle of the gauges”, with “God’s Wonderful Railway” trying unsuccessfully to persuade the other companies to adopt their Broad Gauge, Gooch "alludes with justice to the gain which the country reaped from this conflict of the gauges, putting on their mettle, as it did, the engineering giants by whom the conflict was carried on, and leading through their rivalry to improvements in speed, economy, and comfort which might otherwise have been long postponed."

It’s a well-known saying that “necessity is the mother of invention” … "not Frank Zappa" – ed … Technology and science make massive strides during wartime, for example, when the pressure is on everyone to push farther and farther ahead of the enemy as quickly as possible, and when we were discussing the dominance of TNS in Welsh domestic football the other day, I mentioned the dramatic improvement in standards in the JD Cymru League as clubs struggle to catch up.

After breakfast, I sat down at the desk to do some radio stuff but my visitors turned up. The lady who does the curtains brought her husband round. He’s a musician and wanted to see my guitars. As expected, he drooled over my Gibson EB3, which most people do. I sold my soul to buy it back in 1975 and I won’t ever part with it, even though I have been told on more than one occasion to name my own price. I hope that whoever inherits it after me will look after it carefully.

It was interesting to welcome my guests though. The electric door opener doesn’t work – YET AGAIN – so I had to go down the stairs on my own to open the front door, and then somehow work my way back up here without assistance. I could well do without this. I’m trying to cut down the number of times that I go downstairs and back up again.

There was a huge parcel delivery too, but I had warned the plumber and he had managed to intercept it at the door.

Once everyone had gone, I could press on with the radio programmes. The notes are now finished and ready for dictation, which I shall do the next time I have to leave the bed at 02:10.

However, listening to one of the soundtracks, I’ve noticed several imperfections. It looks as if someone has had a go at editing it before it came into my hands. At the end of every track, in the middle of the applause, there are small blank moments of a couple of hundredths of a second and the volume of the succeeding piece of applause is slightly different from the preceding one.

It seems that someone has done a “cut and paste” job on this, even though the running order matches the official set list, and the applause sounds similar and consistent so it’s not several concerts merged together to make up one complete one.

Anyway, I was there for quite some time cutting out the blanks and playing with the volume adjusters to make everything match.

There were several interruptions too. My friend from the UK who is managing my project over there wanted a good chat, and then my cleaner came in unexpectedly.

While she was going through my cupboards the other day sorting out some things to take downstairs, she came across some things of Roxanne’s that were left behind when she and her mother moved away and I can’t bring myself to throw away. After all, she was the only daughter that I ever had, even though it was for only three years.

Time, the damp of the farm and so on have not been kind to them so my cleaner had taken them away so that she could work her magic. She brought them down this evening and she had made a magnificent job of them. I really must take steps from now on to keep them in a better condition than I have been doing.

Thinking about Roxanne later, as I sometimes do, I began to think that I should have had another daughter. I would have been a wonderful father and she would have been spoiled rotten.

Tea tonight was a delicious taco roll with rice and veg and home-made garlic mayonnaise. And now, later than usual … "again" – ed … I’m off to bed, hoping for a better night than last night.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the end of the journey not being what we would want it to be … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of the story about the team that was sent in search of the very last Giant Prawn of the Galápagos, teetering on the edge of extinction.
When the team returned to the Natural History Club in London, the members crowded round and asked the leader "how did you find it?"
"Mmmmm. Delicious" he replied.

Friday 25th April 2025 – I WAS WIDE-…

… awake this morning at, would you believe, 03:05. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s a total waste of time really, going to bed early, because all it seems to mean is that I wake up correspondingly early.

And early it was that I went to bed last night – 22:20 in fact.

The dialysis on Thursday afternoon had left me thoroughly exhausted. So much so that I couldn’t keep on going at all. I skimmed through everything that needed to be done, despite going off into a trance at least twice, and then threw in the towel.

Once in bed, I fell asleep rather dramatically and there I stayed, dead to the World, until, as I said, 03:05. I lay around in bed, wondering whether or not I ought to raise myself from the Dead, until at least 03:20 when I happened to glance at the time, and quite a while after that too, but I must have gone back to sleep at some point.

There I stayed until all of 06:20 when I awoke again. That time, I couldn’t go back to sleep at all and when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was … errr … riding the porcelain horse.

After a good wash and my medication I came back in here to check on where I’d been during the night. I was talking to Julie the Cook during my dream. The discussion came round to checking over my apartment to have a look around and see what was going on for my ill-health. But as she said that she would come so I found the calendar and wrote in there that she was expected for the 29th of the month. Then I went back into the main room just to remind her and confirm that that was what it was going to be.

Julie the Cook has said before now that she will come to inspect my kitchen one of these days – in fact, she said it again on Thursday – but I will believe it when I see it. I don’t think that it’s ever likely to happen. However, the fact that I’m dreaming about dialysis and the people there tells me that I seem to have let it become embedded in my thoughts and that’s a depressing idea.

Later on I was round at my niece’s and her husband last night. They were sorting out transport and cars etc. I noticed that my niece was driving around in the old mini that she never usually drove. He husband asked her what had happened to the Riley. We went into the garage and there was a Riley 1.5 sitting there without the front radiator grille. She said that she’s hit a squirrel with the grill and had taken the grille off to try to remove the squirrel. The grille was currently in the back room. I had a look at the engine – it was an overhead cam engine with a chain pulley on the camshaft. I wondered “what on earth engine was this out of?”. Later on we went shopping and we were wandering around a big department store where there were loads of people. I suddenly saw a range of tissue … "he means ‘cloth’ " – ed … so I shouted to her “ahh … tissue” and she laughed. We went over and started to look through the tissue for my apartment. There was a really nice heavyweight deep red velvet type of embossed tissue there that looked really nice and was really heavy. She wandered off to the curtain range and came back with one of these Victorian-style curtains with frills and built-in lace nets and began to compare the two to see whether they matched

Whenever I think of overhead cam engines, the Ford Pinto immediately springs to my mind. I’ve dismantled and reassembled so many of them that I could at one time do it in my sleep – and I did too. However the camshafts in those are belt-driven and the pulley on the camshaft in the engine in this dream was definitely a chain-driven pulley, so I really don’t know.

Leaving aside the question of dreaming in French again, one of the things that I will be doing soon is to see the seamstress who has the little shop down the road whom I interviewed once for the radio. In her little shop she makes all of the dresses for the carnival queens and what I want her to do is to make the curtains for my new apartment, seeing as I don’t know who else to ask. I want to have everything just like I want it to be, right from the very beginning, because I’m never going to move again … "and we’ve heard that before, haven’t we?" – ed … and I don’t want to go through the bother of having to redo anything later.

Isabelle the Nurse came round and we talked about her trip to Avallon in Burgundy. Everyone knows about the story of King Arthur, allegedly mortally wounded at the Battle of Camlann in 537 and taken to the Isle of Avalon in Somerset to die. Just outside Avallon in Burgundy in the dim and distant past there was a battle in which the King of the local troops, Riothamus, was deposed and killed by the invaders. There have been several suggestions that this is the origin of the tale of King Arthur and that the Battle of Camlann is fictional. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall our reading of the book FOLKLORE AS A HISTORICAL SCIENCE in which the transplantation of folk tales by migrating peoples would facilitate such a confusion of memory.

After she left I made breakfast and carried on reading MY BOOK. And here we go again.

In all of the books and papers that I have ever read, I don’t think that I have ever seen a sentence with so many sub-clauses in it as "The general area, which at Windsor, Arundel, and Berkhampstead is oblong, to suit the contour of the ground, is here, as at Tonbridge, Tickhill, and Clare, where the ground is not strongly marked, nearer to a more solid figure, of which, in this case, two sides and the contained angle are governed by the line of the old Roman wall."

It took me several attempts to absorb this sentence and put it in a straight line. There is surely a more straightforward and direct route that the author could have used to express his thoughts and make them much clearer.

He’s also tying himself up in knots again. He tells us on the top of page 193 that "Two mounds, though not unknown, are uncommon.". Half a dozen lines later, he tells us that "Such subordinate mounds are not uncommon in earthworks of all ages,". I wish that he’d make up his mind.

Back in here, I began to work on my Woodstock programmes and pushed on with the Saturday events. There are just four more groups and the outro to write for that, and I’ll also have to think of a way of including Louis de Funès in my programme too. I can’t have a programme without a special guest.

There were plenty of interruptions. There were a couple of disgusting drink breaks, my cleaner put her sooty foot in here to do her business, and one of my neighbours, the President of the residents’ committee, popped in for a chat to find out about how things were and to tell me about her recent trip to New York.

Tea was a delicious leftover curry but the naan was not so good. It kept on falling apart as I was trying to flatten it for frying. The chocolate cake and chocolate soya dessert more than made up for that.

So it’s bedtime now, ready for dialysis tomorrow, I don’t think. And there’s a footfest too, Caernarfon v Barry Town to see who will push on for European competition, and later, the Second Division Cup Final between Airbus UK Broughton and Trefelin. That will be an interesting match because Lee Trundle, at 48, still turns out every week for Trefelin. In the pre-match summary he’s raring to go. He also says that he has no plans to retire and will carry on next season. How I wish that other International footballers would turn out for their local football clubs to give something back to the community, rather than retiring to their island paradise to count their fortunes.

But that’s tomorrow of course. Tonight, it’s bedtime

And seeing as we have been talking about the Battle of Camlann … "well, one of us has" – ed … I am reminded of the American tourist who turned up in Castlesteads early one morning and buttonholed a local.
"Can you tell me when was the Battle of Camlann?"
"537" replied the local
"Damn" said the American, looking at his watch. "I’ve just missed it"

Friday 28th March 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone this morning when I awoke.

And that’s not surprising either seeing as I didn’t go back to bed until 04:15 and I was awake again at 06:50 (you will note that I said “awoke” – I didn’t say that I left the bed).

Last night’s fiasco was enough to put the shakes on just about everything. After my rather dramatic exit from the dialysis centre, coming home and going straight to bed where I was probably asleep before I hit the horizontal position, there I stayed in a state of what I can only imagine was unconsciousness until after midnight.

When I awoke, I was fully-clothed still, with a thirst that you could photograph. Luckily I still have some of that banana-flavoured soya drink that I like that I bought in Belgium (is it really eighteen months ago since my last trip to Belgium?), so I helped myself to a litre of it, wrote my notes and backed up all the files.

After I’d finished what I had to do I still wasn’t tired so I found a few things to do to keep me occupied and then eventually crawled into bed, fully clothed again.

It was difficult to go back to sleep, so I don’t suppose that I slept all that much, and when I looked at the time and saw that it was 06:50 I gave up all hope.

The alarm clock made up my mind for me so I crawled out of bed and went to the bathroom to sort myself out. Then into the kitchen to take my medication and to do yesterday’s washing-up which I had forgotten. I hate going into the kitchen in the morning and finding the washing-up still there.

With nothing on the dictaphone I found some things to do and then Isabelle the Nurse arrived. I told her about yesterday and she thinks that the machine was too powerful for my heart to cope and that caused the dramatic loss of blood pressure that triggered everything off.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

We’re still discussing these stone circles and avenues in the West Country. At Stanton Drew he makes the point that while there are circles and avenues that suggest that Arcturus was the target when they were constructed, at 1690BC and 1410BC, he finds that "With regard to this N.E. circle … " – the third one in this series of circles – its strange alignment "… would suggest that the N.E. circle was really erected to provide the alignment, from the centre of the great circle, or from the Cove, to the summer solstitial sun, about the year 870 B.C.,".

Furthermore, "There is other evidence, to which I attach importance, as it deals with a method and policy found in many temple fields in Egypt, that of blocking the alignment of an older star- or sun-cult, which the astronomer priests replaced by their own. The stones of the avenue, of the solstitial N.E. circle I expect once blocked the May sunrise line from the great circle ; judging from the Ordnance map, and remembering the number of stones that have disappeared,"

According to my “wave of invasions” cheat-sheet, a huge wave of Celtic invaders began to arrive in England round about 800BC. They brought with them the Iron-Age “Halstatt” culture and their superior tools and weapons would have overwhelmed the previous settlers. If those previous settlers were pushed west, they would push before them the people who had previously occupied those lands, so maybe they replaced the previous culture of the worship of Arcturus with their own culture of worship of the sun.

What is also interesting is the reference he made to the situation in Egypt where the worshippers of one star arrived and overwhelmed a previous culture. Archaeological evidence lends a great deal of support to this idea, so I’m now interested in plotting, as I said yesterday, a timeline of the worship of Arcturus and seeing if I can follow it through Europe and maybe arrive in England at the same time that the worship of Arcturus seemed to have begun there.

But this is all sounding like my University studies. I’d start by researching something and be so engrossed in what I’ve found that bore no relation to what I’d be studying that I’d go miles off course on a tangent into some other realm that had nothing whatever to do with the subject. I enjoyed what I was doing, enjoyed it very much, but the lecturers didn’t.

His next chapter is actually on “folklore”, but not the folklore what we know. He’s more interested in finding relics of customs that relate to the old forms of worship and how they became tied into Christianity, rather than using them as I would and as LAURENCE GOMME was doing – plotting the migration of groups of people by the relics of the customs that remain in modern society.

After the book, I came back in here and prepared my LeClerc order. And I was really struggling to complete it too. Despite the fact that I haven’t sent in an order for three weeks, I’m not eating as much (or as often) as I did and I was really struggling today to reach the €50:00 minimum order

Times are really bizarre around here. I look at my “usual products” and my “reminder list” and think “I have some of that” or “I don’t need that” or “I don’t feel like eating any of that”. I don’t think that I can ever recall a period such as this that has lasted for so long. I look in the kitchen and the shelf unit is full of stuff.

Once I’d sorted that out, I spent the rest of the day (or much of it) on my Woodstock programme. I now have every song that I need, and they are all re-edited and remixed. Some of the tracks took some hunting down, others had to be extracted from the soundtracks of concerts that I have.

Every song (except one) was actually played at Woodstock by the band or musician concerned, although I can’t use any sound that came from the loudspeakers at Woodstock. I’ve had to use versions from other places.

My cleaner put in an appearance to do her stuff as usual, and while she was here the LeClerc delivery turned up. I usually order it for “after 16:00” but he often rings me up to ask if he can come earlier if I’m the only client in the afternoon. I’d rather have it after my cleaner has left but I’m not going to stop him having an early finish on a Friday if he can.

After my cleaner left I had 2kg of carrots to wash, dice and blanch ready to freeze and then back in here Rosemary, back from her break in Italy, rang me up for a chat. I’m convinced that she has a camera hidden in here somewhere to find out when I’m free.

Tea tonight was a rushed salad and chips with some of these vegan nuggets and it was delicious. The chips were cooked to perfection in my air fryer.

Tea was rushed because we had football, Drenewydd v Y Barri. Y Barri needed the win to keep alive their push for the European playoffs and Y Drenewydd needed a win to keep alive their hopes of avoiding relegation.

Y Barri came out of the traps so much quicker and played some nice football and were looking comfortable at 2-0 up. But Y Drenewydd came alive in the last ten minutes and when they scored with three minutes to go, they threw everything that they had into the attack.

Y Barri won the ball and roared upfield with a one-on-one on the Y Drenewydd goalkeeper – only for the Y Barri forward to miss the easiest goal that he could have scored in his life. That spurred Y Drenewydd on and we witness some desperate defending in the final minute and Y Drenewydd couldn’t find the goal that they needed.

Why they hadn’t played like that with the same desperation throughout the game I really don’t know, but now, while they are not mathematically sure of being relegated, they are going to have to find something special from somewhere.

At half-time I did the washing up and then I grabbed a slice of my new orange, ginger and coconut cake to eat for the second half. And it really is as delicious as I thought that it might be. I’m proud of that.

So now that I’ve finished my notes and backed up the computer, I’m off to bed ready for an exciting (I don’t think) day at the dialysis centre.

But seeing as we have been talking about shopping … "well, one of us has" – ed … I’m glad that I don’t go shopping any more. It saves unpleasant surprises.

Once I was in a supermarket in Belgium and a woman came up to me and asked me "aren’t you the father of one of my kids?"
That stopped me dead in my tracks. I had to rack my brains and think hard. There was the girl in Morlaix and the other one at that strange house when I was hitch-hiking around Brittany but that was in France in the mid-seventies.
For a whole minute I had to rack my brains about trips that I’d made into Europe subsequently. In the end I gave up.
"I can’t really recall anything" I said, shaking your head.
"Oh, I’m sorry" she replied. "I’m sure that I’ve seen you bringing Roxanne to school. She’s in my class this year"

Sunday 16th March 2025 – I HAVE BEEN …

… a very busy boy today and have hardly stopped at all. I could do with a few more days like that, except that almost none of it was to do with any of the work that has been building up in here.

It actually started last night when, after finishing off my notes and doing the back-ups, I recorded the notes that I wrote for the radio programme that I began last week, and also for the final track for the previous week.

That took me up to just after midnight and it wasn’t many minutes after that that I was in bed, underneath the bedclothes.

When the alarm went off at 08:00 (it’s lie-in day today) I was already sitting on the edge of the bed. I had beaten the alarm, not by many seconds, it’s true, but nevertheless I’m going to claim it as an early start all the same. They all count.

After a good wash I came back in here and began to transcribe the dictaphone notes while I waited for Isabelle the Nurse to turn up.

She was late again – even later than usual, but she brought with her the photos and videos of her Carnaval float and costumes. They did a really good job again and it was quite impressive. The way some of the owners of the floats let themselves go with their designs and lampooning of politicians, local and national, should be an inspiration for other countries to let themselves loose.

After she left I made a late breakfast and read MY BOOK. And it’s now finished, ready for the next one to start tomorrow.

Our author, having explored the effects on Christianity is summing up and tells us that he considers that the folklore that existed in many rural communities until fairly modern times is not Celtic but belongs to the Brythonic people whole the Celts found when they arrived here.

He quotes the mystery and mysticism that surrounded it that the Celts, whom Caesar encountered, told him all of the rumours and fairy-tales that litter Caesar’s writings. That may well be the case because Pytheas, who voyaged around the British Isles in the 4th Century BC, presumably met some of the Brythonic peoples in their coastal outposts before the Celts arrived, and he told similar (but not identical) stories.

Gomme states further that he considers that the Celts and the Brythonic people lived side-by-side, with the Celts in their tribal settlements and the Brythonic people in their rural villages, and there they stayed. But we’ve seen anthropological evidence that there was very little, if any, mixing of the people, and all of the later Brythonic human remains were found in caves, hinting that they may probably have been in hiding out of the way of the marauding Celts.

Furthermore, many of these magnificent hill-forts that we saw earlier date from round about 500-400BC – the time that the Celts were beginning to arrive in Britain. That doesn’t look to me like anything like people living side by side at all, It looks like defenders living in total fear and panic.

And so,even though it was a very interesting and thought-provoking book that made quite a number of good points and taught me quite a lot, as far as the contact between the Brythonic and Celtic people, and indeed the Celtic people and the subsequent Saxon people, I’m still going for defeat and extermination.

There was bread to make after breakfast – a bread roll for lunch. With the air fryer, it’s much easier to dash off a roll like this rather than go for a batch in the big oven. So I ran up 100 grams of flour and made a dough, leaving it to fester.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been. And I’d travelled far during the night. I was in a strange town and fancied going to the swimming baths. I turned up, paid for my entry and went in, changed and went through the double doors. It was the smallest room that you could imagine. There was some clear tiled flooring and there was a shower tray that was probably big enough to fit ten people. That was the bath, just one shower head. I thought “how disappointing this is for having spent this money to come for a swim. Nevertheless, people began to arrive. I thought “they probably enjoy it” and made ready to leave. Just as I was about to step out of the door, the room made a really funny noise and began to move. I looked out and the room was turning round through 90°. At the end of its cycle it coupled up to something. I had a look through another door. There was a huge Olympic-quality swimming pool there with cafés, shops, a swimming costume shop, everything like that. I was obviously in the ante-room where you showered before going into the water. At opening time the room simply spun round and connected up with the main pool. I was ever so impressed. I had a listen to the conversations of some of these people talking about what they had been doing, where they had been, what swimming clothes they had bought. It was really interesting.

When I was driving coaches I’d often go to the swimming baths to relax when I was away on a tour. When I lived in the Auvergne I looked forward to my Saturday afternoon swim at Neris-les-Bains and later at the new pool at Commentry. But my worst-ever encounter with a swimming baths was in Loretteville, a short distance from the city of Québec where I froze to death in water that was, if I remember correctly, 11°C. I must have been out of my mind, but there again I’d been living in a car for two weeks so it was not before time that I washed.

Later on I’d just been uploading a file to my computer, watching it, and it was going up, 20,000 items, 30,000 items and still going on. I was wondering how long it was going to take before it loaded. It was only supposed to be one item that I was adding.

And how many times have I, instead of deleting a single file, deleted a whole directory instead and had to go scurrying off to the recycle bin.

Later on, I’d been in a pub in Audlem. I asked if they had something to eat, but apparently not. I explained that i’d been on the road all day and was desperate to try to find something. In the end she suggested that I could make a sandwich if I had some bread, but I didn’t have any. She took me over to a corner where an old man was asleep. She said “see what he has”. I opened his bag thinking that there were some fish and chips in there but there was a loaf of bread which of course I couldn’t touch – the loaf of bread of someone else. A guy came over and gave me a set of keys. he said “take my tractor, there’s a blue Massey Ferguson, and go down this road. It’s called Cegidfa Road but it goes nowhere near Cegidfa and that should take you to the shop if you do a zig-zag as you go down”. I climbed into the tractor and set off but ended up in a completely different town so I climbed out and walked down a street of old, decaying, crumbling terraced houses with water cascading off the roofs etc. I suddenly found myself standing next to this really big, heavy stone wall. I wondered what it was so I looked round behind it and it was like a forest but with bits of building and bits of equipment and an old, decayed toilet in there. I saw a poster that said that this was the old RASC Stafford military base. Regretting that I didn’t have a camera I set off to go back to the tractor. But there was some discussion going on about how in view of the increased tension in the World and talking about National Service there is just not the infrastructure in the UK for supporting the National Service any more with all of the military depots that have been closed and wound down, some sold off, the rest abandoned. If they were to have a general call-out for one day it would be absolute chaos and totally impossible

This deserted and abandoned camp reminded me very much like Camp B70, the civilian internment camp at Ripples in New Brunswick that WE VISITED IN 2011. And it’s true that, having lived for so long under the shade of the American umbrella, Europe is totally uprepared for war. Regular readers of this rubbish in an earlier guise will remember the endless disputes that I had with the Finnish General in charge of the EU’s military force, trying to steel the force into filling the power vacuum that was developing in the World at the end of the 20th Century.

Later on, down the coast towards St Pair I’d met some British people who had a house right on the seafront. I’d come down from London. I wasn’t quite sure exactly whattheir game was but they were rather shady characters, I suspected. I was out with them one day. We’d been to some kind of do and there had been a buffet there. They told me where I could find something to eat. I went to the table to ask what they had but they didn’t really have anything. I had a coffee in a plastic mug so they poured it into a glass mug and they charged me £0:40, or €0:40. All I had was a £5:00 note so I paid with it and they gave it all back in change. I went and sat down and began to talk.
Shortly later we found ourselves in their house. It’s a big rambling house but so untidy, the garden was full of rubbish and the room in which we were sitting was full of paint tins, people and objects, all DiY stuff etc, paper everywhere. They were talking about all kinds of things, saying that they had a job available for someone who wanted it. I suggested “why don’t we write down on a piece of paper all the skills that we are all good at doing and we can see what we can do”. They thought that that was a funny idea but I thought it an excellent one. In the end they all dispersed and I was sitting there having a think when a girl came in. She asked me if that job had been taken. I replied “as far as I’m aware it’s still going”. She wondered what she could do about it so I told her “why don’t you ask?”. The woman of this house then came in to say that they were all planning to go off to London for a concert or something or other. I said “I’d like to go too”. She replied “you can go in a car with someone and the rest of us will have to go in the buses”. We began to think about preparing to go. I began to have this really uncomfortable feeling about this situation. It’s nice to meet people and it’s nice to be friends and to be involved in things but this was simply far too shady a situation in which I should be involved.

And this reminds me of the “Pink Palace” – that place where I stayed while I was waiting for the previous occupier to move out of “Reyers” when I’d bought it, so that I could move in, back in 1994. That house was a huge house with many single rooms, each one occupied as a kind-of pied-à-terre by single British businessmen when they came to do business in Brussels. That was a very happy three months and I learned a great deal from those people.

Having dealt with the dictaphone I sat back and watched Stranraer totally demolish league-leaders East Fife up in Methil. 3-0 was the final scoreline and it was not undeserved. What I wish though, having seen the dismal displays against Clyde and Forfar, is that they could do this every week.

Next task was to edit the radio notes that I had dictated. But I was nowhere anything like even halfway through when I had to break off for lunch

My bread roll was perfect, my cheese on toasted bread roll exquisite, and I ate it in here, something that I vowed never to do, but today it was because of the other Welsh Cup semi-final.

Cambrian United are seventh in the second tier and have had better seasons than this, and today they have the unenviable task of facing runaway Premier League leaders TNS, fresh from their triumphs in European competition

For the first five or so minutes the team from Tonypandy took the game to TNS but when TNS scored their inevitable first goal, the heads went down and the floodgates opened. At half-time the score was 5-0 and it looked as if we were going to be heading for an embarrassing scoreline.

However, I don’t know what the Cambrian manager put in their half-time cup of tea but I wouldn’t mind a swig of that myself, because it was a different game in the second half. Cambrian were much more relaxed and played some neat football. They kept TNS out for the rest of the game (although I suspect that TNS could have changed up a gear had it been necessary) and had a few chances of their own. Had the referee seen the foul by McGahey on Tim Parker as he was one-on-one with Connor Roberts in the TNS goal, TNS would have finished the game with ten men.

After the final whistle there was bread to make as I have run out (well, I haven’t – there’s some in the freezer but it can stay there for now). It was another sunflower seed loaf, and I set the dough off and left it to rise.

While it was doing its stuff, I had some over-ripe fruit here, apples and kiwis. I’m right of my fruit at the moment so I made a batch of apple and kiwi purée to have at breakfast with half of the stuff. I’ll make some more later on with the rest.

There’s also some oranges that I can’t seem to eat (my taste buds changed dramatically a few weeks ago when I was ill) so when the current breakfast orange juice is finished, I’ll experiment with the liquidiser attachment on my food processor and make some fresh orange juice.

The bread was excellent and my pizza (I’d taken some dough out of the freezer earlier) was perfect too. In fact, all of today’s baking etc seemed to have gone very well. It killed my legs though, standing up, and when I move downstairs I’ll have one of these screwable stools that I can raise the height of the seat.

But now I’m going to bed. I’ll finish the radio notes tomorrow and do half of my Welsh homework too ready for Tuesday’s lesson. We’re cracking on with our Welsh course but we won’t be anywhere near finishing it by the end of the year and it’s going to over-run.

But while we are on the subject of swimming pools … "well, one of us is" – ed … a boy at that swimming pool in Loretteville ws thrown out while I was there, for … errr … relieving himself into the water.
"But everyone does that in a swimming pool" pleaded the boy
"Maybe they do" said the lifeguard "but not from the top of the high diving board"

Saturday 15th March 2025 – THERE WAS NOTHING …

… whatever of any interest happening today. I can’t think when it last was that I had such an uneventful day.

There was even a decent sleep for once. It may well have been late by the time that I went to bed, quite a while after midnight in fact, but I was soon asleep, which is no surprise after the difficult night the previous day … "??" – ed ….

Once in bed and asleep, I stayed asleep right the way through the night with no recollection whatever of awakening and it’s been a while since that’s happened too.

When the alarm did go off, I was away with the fairies – but not in any manner that would incite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine. I was doing something with a pair of lady’s shoes but I’ve no idea what because immediately that the alarm sounded I awoke and the whole lot evaporated completely.

Into the bathroom for a good wash and scrub up, some deodorant and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant later on at Avranches.

There was also some washing to do, and amazing as it might seem, having taken care to wash my clothes before another large pile builds up, there was still too much for the washing machine. This is becoming ridiculous – either my clothes are growing or the washing machine is shrinking . There certainly aren’t more clothes than before.

With nothing on the dictaphone this morning, I could crack on and do some more unzipping. There’s not all that many left to do now but I keep on finding more and more that I hadn’t found earlier.

Isabelle the Nurse was late as usual, no thanks to the roadworks in the town centre where they are rebuilding the square outside the Mairie. As well as that, they’ve suddenly and spontaneously decided to carry out more roadworks elsewhere in the town centre that’s blocking part of the one-way system and it’s a nightmare.

After she left I made breakfast and carried on reading MY NEW BOOK.

We’ve begun to discuss the influence of Christianity on folklore. He is of the opinion that "Christianity was both antagonistic to and tolerant of pagan custom and belief. In principle and purpose it was antagonistic. In practice it was tolerant where it could tolerate safely. At the centre it aimed at purity of Christian doctrine, locally it permitted pagan practices to be continued under Christian auspices. In the earliest days it set itself against all forms of idolatry and non-Christian practices"

He goes on to quote from Gibbon’s DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE saying that "in later days, after the fifth century it accepted both pagan practice and pagan ritual."

It’s interesting that he picks the fifth century. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410AD and by the Vandals in 455AD and in 476AD the “barbarian” Odoacer seized the throne of Rome. This influx of foreigners into the city of Rome doubtless weakened the grip of the Church .

Pope Gregory wrote in 601AD to Abbott Mellitus who was on the point of going as a missionary to England "because they have been used to slaughter many oxen in the sacrifices to devils some solemnity must be exchanged for them on this account, so that on the day of the dedication, or the nativities of. the holy martyrs whose relics are there deposited, they may build themselves huts of the boughs of trees, about those churches which have been turned to that use from temples and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting and no more offer beasts to the devil [diabolo], but kill praise of God in their eating, and return thanks to all things for their sustenance"

Our author adds "This toleration took the shape either of allowing the continuation of pagan custom and belief as a matter not affecting Christian doctrine or of actual absorption into Church practice and ritual."

In fact, judging by the deterioration of the pure Christian faith in the way that it is practised these days by many so-called Christians, there’s a very strong argument that suggests that rather than the Christian faith having absorbed some facets of paganism, it’s more as if paganism has absorbed some (and only some) facets of Christianity. The more uncomfortable aspects of pure Christian belief have been abandoned a long time ago, if ever they were there at all.

Back in here I attacked the Woodstock radio project and I now have all of the music that I need – at least one track from every artist (even the ones that I didn’t believe that I could find) except one. And that’s because Sly and the Family Stone don’t really fit into my programmes and I’ll have to omit one or two groups anyway.

My cleaner turned up later to fit my patches and then the taxi, driven by the boss, turned up to run me to Avranches.

Once more, I was one of the first there and had to wait until they had cleaned up from the morning. Once I made it to my bed I was the fourth to receive attention (I don’t move as quickly as the others) and then I could settle down to watch the football.

Welsh Cup semi-final today between Connah’s Quay Nomads of the Premier League and Llanelli of the second tier. The Nomads are having a wretched season by their standards and Llanelli are leading their division so it was always going to be a tight affair.

The gulf in class and quality was evident however but even though the Nomads had most of the possession they went in at the break 1-0 down because of a penalty. Both sides had hit the bar however.

Two inspired substitutions at half-time turned the game around for the Nomads. They were 2-1 up in a couple of minutes before Llanelli had had time to re-adjust but once they had adapted to the new situation they held on to the end, having had a couple of chances of their own.

It was another one of those really exciting games however, with plenty of entertainment for the neutral fans.

After that I began to sort through the music for the Woodstock project until it was time to be unplugged.

The same driver brought me home – early once again. I could relax and unwind for an hour or so with my disgusting drink.

Tea tonight was a chiliburger on a bap with salad and baked potato followed by date bread and soya dessert. The same as last week’s, and the week before etc, but still just as delicious.

So right now I’ll dictate my radio notes and then go to bed. I have a busy day tomorrow, bread making and so on

While we’re on the subject of pagan ritual and belief … "well, one of us iss" – ed … to tell a little secret, I had my suspicions that Nerina might have been in touch with things that we know not what. Not long after we had come together, we were out driving when she touched my leg. I immediately turned into a lay-by
It made me suspicious, especially when we were in the local supermarket once and she wanted to buy a new broom to sweep the yard.
At the check-out I told the cashier "don’t bother to wrap it – she’ll fly it home"

Friday 14th March 2025 – A TAXI CAME …

… to pick me up at 15:30 for a medical appointment at the hospital in Granville at 16:00.

That was the first that I had heard of it. No-one had ever said anything to me. The taxi driver therefore telephoned the hospital, who confirmed that they had nothing down for me today and so the taxi driver left.

The burning question of the hour now is not O’Rafferty’s motorcar but who is turning round and round in circles waiting for a taxi that is not going to arrive to take him to a hospital appointment that he is likely to miss.

Something else that was confirmed today was the snow at Caen last night. Isabelle the Nurse’s husband had to go to Caen yesterday morning and he encountered it. It wasn’t just half a dozen flakes either but a proper snowfall. Several photos of the coverage have circulated around the internet as a result.

If it had snowed early this morning I would have seen it, because when the alarm went off at 07:00 I’d actually been up and about for an hour and a half, and awake for a lot longer than that.

That was after another late night too. Not feeling in the least tired after dialysis I wandered around through cyberspace and came across a match between Wales under-21s and Iceland under-21s that I’d missed. Even though Wales played for a good proportion of the match with just 10 men, they were never seriously under pressure and while a 1-0 score doesn’t look very convincing, Iceland never looked like scoring. The one chance they had, they needed a hand (observed by the linesman) to push the ball over the line.

So in bed at 00:30 and I took an age to go to sleep. But by 04:30 I was awake again, wide awake too, something that seems to be quite common after a dialysis session. By about 05:30 I’d given up any hope of going back to sleep and with plenty of things to do, I arose from the Dead and went about my business.

Plenty of business too. First of course there was the bathroom, and then the medication. And back here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And despite the short amount of sleep, I had actually been out and about. I was back in work last night. Before that, I’d been to Shavington and was taking a load of rubbish to the tip. Someone whom I met on the way who worked there asked me if I could take hers and her grandmother’s. I fitted everything into the car and went off. For the next day at work I didn’t see this particular girl for a while so in the end before I went home I thought that I would go into her room and mention it to her. I knocked on the door, opened it and went in. The room was in total darkness. You couldn’t see anything. I asked “is anyone there?”. A voice from behind the desk said “yes” but it wasn’t the voice of the person whom I was expecting to hear. Anyway she put on a light so that I could see her. I said “I think that I have the wrong room. I was looking for …” and then I couldn’t think of the name of the person. I had to try to think of someone else’s name. I came out with a name and she replied “there’s no-one of that name working here”. Then I realised that the name that I’d mentioned was that of someone who used to work there but had left. I thought that this meeting isn’t going very well at all. Then she began to put on a white dressing gown type of robe or something. It looked to me like one of these Japanese martial arts suits. I asked her if she was going to be doing some martial arts, and she smiled but didn’t say anything

It beats me why I spend so much of my sleeping hours in Shavington. We moved there in 1956 and my earliest memory is sitting on my mother’s knee in the cab of the lorry that took us there, going past the entrance to Mount Drive in Nantwich, and we left there in 1970 to go to live in The Land That Time Forg … errr … Crewe. But seeing as we are talking about Mount Drive … "well, one of us is" – ed … I didn’t know where it was of course when I was only two but I do remember my surprise and shock a few years later when we went past it on my way to see my grandparents in Wardle. I was astonished that I had remembered it so clearly and recognised it.

As for dreaming about work, why would I still be doing that?

Isabelle the Nurse was late again but it didn’t worry me because I’d been unzipping files out of storage. There are still plenty to go at but if I do a batch every day I’ll catch up with it.

One thing though, and that is that regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I first had this mega-computer in the office I went through all of the old disks that were lying around, copied all of the contents onto the back-up drive and slowly cleaned them out and linked everything up. There must have been one that I missed because I found a huge batch of files that had never been merged. I ran a batch-processing duplicate file detector through it and disposed immediately of 1.2GB of duplicated files.

Isabelle the Nurse didn’t have much to say for herself apart from the bit about the snow, and she was soon on her way, leaving me to make breakfast and read MY NEW BOOK.

A lot of ground was covered today. We started off talking about “cohabiting customs” and I admired his quaint way of expressing himself when it came to delicate subjects. When talking about the Arunta people, he tells us that "The father, de facto, is not father according to the ideas of the Arunta people. He is at best only one of a group of possible fathers according to the practices of the Arunta people."

Of the Semang people, he quotes a book that says that "Semang women are common to all men" but also quotes a Victorian-era observer of the tribe who rather delicately says that "I have not had an opportunity of personally judging"

While we’re on the subject of the Semang people … "well, one of us is" – ed … he tells us that "it often happens that a little [clan] or even a single family uses a form of speech which is differentiated from other dialects to be practically unintelligible to all except the members of the little community itself".

That’s not just true of the most primitive tribes in the Borneo and Malaysian jungle. A conversation between someone from Cornwall and a Geordie, or a Jock and a Scouser will have the same characteristics – but maybe it simply underlines his point and is not a very flattering tribute to the inhabitants of those UK regions.

After this, we moved on to discuss the migration of tribes, something that we mentioned yesterday. He is at a loss, as I am, to explain how it is that a society such as the Romano-British and all of their technical achievements, that we discussed several months ago, was wiped off the face of the country to an extent that, for example, it took 1,000 years for metal-smelting to even approach Romano-British standards, if it wasn’t wiped out by extermination, and how it is that the Nordic settlers of Greenland could be wiped so completely from the island that there has never been one single trace of Nordic DNA found in contemporary Inuit skeletons if the Inuit had not summarily dispatched the Nordic Greenlanders wherever and whenever they encountered them.

In explanation he quotes Max Duncker who, in his book,”History of Antiquity”, asks "How could the conquerors mix with the conquered ? How could their pride stoop to any union with the despised servants?". The answer to that question may be found on the plantations in the Southern United States in the 18th and 19th Century. According to an Artificial Intelligence search engine to which I have access, "By 1860, approximately 10% of the enslaved population in the United States was of mixed race. This significant percentage reflects the scale of sexual exploitation and resulting mixed-race births."

Back in here I attacked the notes that I’d recorded last Saturday night for the radio programme and that took a lot longer than intended because the new edition of sound-editing program that I use that I had downloaded was doing all kinds of weird things. I wasn’t the only one complaining about it either and a new improved version was distributed in a hurry and that seems to be so much better.

But I tried an experiment. In my best “radio voice”, cutting out the slips, errors and breaths, I’m speaking at something like 17 seconds per 300 characters. I quickly ran up a character-counting utility and a spreadsheet function and worked out that what I had dictated should have run, in its cleaned-up form, to eight minutes and thirty-four seconds. When I looked at the end of the edited sound-file, it was exactly eight minutes and thirty-five seconds.

The next time or two I’ll do this again and see if it remains constant. If so, this will speed up the process by being able to do the whole lot at one go rather than having to do an extra track to fill the gap later.

So by lunchtime the programme (apart from the extra track) was finished. I didn’t stop for lunch but carried on and made a start on my Woodstock programmes. By the time that I knocked off, I’d not only chosen all of the music, I’d even found, downloaded, converted and remixed most of it, even one or two tracks that I thought that I’d never ever find

That included a stop for my cleaner, the disgusting drink break and to talk to the taxi driver. I do have a lively, busy life (I don’t think).

Tea tonight was air-fried chips, salad and veggie nuggets followed by date bread and soya dessert, delicious as usual.

Very shortly I’ll be off to bed and hope for a good sleep. It’s hard to believe that after so little sleep I’m not really all that tired. But with dialysis in the afternoon and Connah’s Quay v Llanelli in the Welsh Cup, anything can happen.

But while we’re on the subject of paternity … "well, one of us is" – ed … little Johnny goes to his father and says "daddy, last night I had a dream and it was that you are going to die today".
Obviously, the father is really upset all throughout the day and is a very relieved man when he finally goes to bed.
Next morning on his way to work, he meets his neighbour. "I had a really bad day yesterday" he said. "My son had a dream and luckily it didn’t come true, but I was worried all day."
"You should worry" said his neighbour. "The guy who lives in the house next door to yours had a heart attack and died yesterday morning."

Thursday 13th March 2025 – THERE HAS BEEN SNOW …

… up the road in Caen earlier today, so someone said. I don’t imagine that there was very much at all, but even so, it’s a sign that winter is still with us, despite the glorious week that we had at Carnaval.

It was certainly freezing last night. My cleaner mentioned that there was ice everywhere quite early on and when Isabelle the Nurse came round, it was a mere 2°c, despite the sunshine.

Not that I felt any of it, because I was tucked up in bed and fast asleep. I finally managed to drop off into the Land of Nod, even though it was another late night last night. I managed to catch Colwyn Bay come from behind to beat Caersws and to watch Gresford Athletics really good run of form over the last few weeks come to a shuddering halt against Cegidfa.

But at least it wasn’t as late as the previous one though. I was in bed by 00:30 which was about an hour earlier. And I remember almost nothing of what happened during the night – just a vague memory of changing the batteries in the dictaphone, so there must be something on there from the night.

Despite actually managing to sleep, it was a very weary Yours Truly who struggled out from underneath the sheets and into the light, beating the second alarm by not very much at all.

And after a good scrub up it’s Dialysis Day) and a stop in the kitchen for the medication I came back here to listen to the dictaphone. I was doing something with a 3D character when the bed collapsed underneath me. I had a panic attack at that point because I couldn’t pick myself up off the floor and couldn’t stand up again. When I was dictating that the batteries in the dictaphone went flat so it’s not been my night at all

And apart from that moment about changing the batteries in the dictaphone I remember nothing at all.

Isabelle the Nurse was late yet again, flying in and flying out again. She apologised for being late today because one of her clients had mislaid his medication. And for that reason,when I finally move downstairs, all of my medication will be in one box on one shelf and nowhere else.

While we’re on the subject of moving downstairs … "well, one of us is" – ed … I forgot, to my shame, to mention yesterday that I’d had a chat with Alison. How could I forget to mention that? Anyway, it looks as if our intrepid band of travellers will be descending on me some time in August. That will be lovely.

Breakfast was next, and then MY NEW BOOK. Today, our talk on “cohabiting customs” has taken us into the realm of migration.

He makes some very interesting points too. He reckons that as in most mammal groups, there may well have been a dominant male who kept the females to himself and when teen boys reached sexual maturity they were expelled from the group.

If one man had five women, then it means of course that four men had none. And the only way that they would obtain a mate was either by overpowering the senior male and seizing some of his, or else roaming afield to raid a neighbouring group. If a strong group of wandering males encountered a weaker group, they would seize the females and the men of that group would either be killed or would flee.

That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds either. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that Samuel Hearne’s first-nation Canadians, on their way back from their trip, came across a weaker band, seized all of the women and girls and … well … Samuel Hearne didn’t leave much to the imagination.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … book, the fleeing men would start off the next cycle, roaming afield until they in turn found a weaker band und so weiter

He draws a parallel between this scenario and the fact that it seems to be always the weaker, more impoverished and less-technologically-advanced groups who seem to exist in the worst and poorest environments.

There are pages and pages of this – in my opinion far more than there needs to be, and I can’t help thinking that our author must have been a bundle of fun to have around at parties.

After breakfast I began to edit the radio notes that I’d dictated on Saturday night but I didn’t manage to go very far because I was distracted. And in any case my cleaner appeared, earlier than usual.

It’s a good job that she did too because my 12:30 taxi to dialysis turned out to be a 12:05 ambulance on its way back to Avranches, and so we had the pantomime of me trying to climb into the back. With no power in my legs, I have to sit on the floor and heave myself up with my arms. God alone only knows what will happen when this paralysis spreads into my arms.

First in again though at dialysis, so early that I had to wait around. But when they did let me in I was first in and first to be coupled up. With the anaesthetic not having had long enough to act, I spent five minutes with an icepack wrapped around my arm but it didn’t seem to do very much good and I certainly felt it.

Apart from the coffee coming round, no-one at all interrupted me and I managed to accomplish a pile of work today. I wish that it would be like that all the time.

The guy who seems to run the show came to pick me up tonight and with another passenger on board, we came to Granville. My cleaner was there waiting for me and it really was nice to be back here by 18:30. I wish that it would be like that every trip. And who knows? When they set up the centre at Granville, whenever that may be, I may well be home before then.

Tea tonight was one of my pies with steamed veg and gravy. Potatoes, broccoli, sprouts, cabbage and cauliflower, a little of each. And my pie was delicious. But I really have gone too far overboard with all this cabbage. It’ll still be here long after I’ve gone.

But I’ll be gone in a moment- off to bed ready to Fight The Good Fight tomorrow.

But seeing as we have been talking about dialysis … "well, one of us has" – ed … we had some fun in the centre this afternoon.
One of the nurses was going to couple up a female patient, and she was saying "now just relax, Julie. It’s only a little job this with the two needles. It’s not difficult and it won’t hurt, Julie, and it’ll be all over in a matter of seconds and you’ll breathe a sigh of relief"
"But my name’s not Julie" said the patient
"I know" said the nurse "but mine is"

Wednesday 12th March 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone this morning when I checked it.

Not that is any surprise because you don’t dream if you don’t go to sleep, and last night I didn’t go to sleep at all. In fact I didn’t go to bed until 01:25, mainly because I wasn’t feeling tired and I have plenty to do right now so I thought that I may as well take advantage and i might tire me out, but for all the good that it did, I may as well have stayed up and worked throughout the night

So in bed I tossed and turned all the way through to when the alarm went off at 07:00 and then I arose from the Dead with, surprisingly, not much difficulty.

Today is shower day so I just had a cursory wash and then went into the kitchen for the medication, then back in here to begin to watch the highlights of last night’s football matches in the JD Cymru League. I felt really sorry for Y Fflint who were beaten 4-0 by Connah’s Quay Nomads despite playing the best football that I have seen them play for quite some considerable time.

Isabelle the Nurse was late yet again and once more she was in too much of a rush to stop for long. One day I might be able to see the photos of Carnaval but I doubt whether she will ever have the time to show them to me.

Breakfast was next, and then some more of MY NEW BOOK. Today, we are discussing religion and, in an unlikely combination, marriage customs.

Well, not exactly marriage customs because back in the past there was no such thing as marriage. Perhaps I should say “cohabiting customs” but even so, that would be inaccurate because he’s found some tribes where the two partners don’t actually live together but simply meet up on occasion, and "he seems merely entertained to continue the family to which his wife belongs".

We talked a few days ago about Caesar’s report of Britons holding wives in common and as I suspected, he has found tribes of natives contemporary to when he was writing his book who did just that

And that got me thinking. It would be interesting to delve deeper into his theory of simultaneous legends and fables in different parts of the World, and with today’s facilities and science, run a series of DNA tests to see whether there might be any truth in his theory

After breakfast I made a start on the next radio programme and by the time I knocked off this evening I’d finished everything that needs to be done for the ten tracks that I chose, ready for dictation on Saturday night.

That’s despite the usual interruptions, such as midday medication, my cleaner arriving and the disgusting drink break. Not to forget my shower either. That was really nice again, although it takes quite an effort to force myself to climb over the side of the bath. Roll on when I can have a shower in my new apartment downstairs.

Last week I’d used the last of the naan bread dough and so later on I made another batch. And I remembered to put the garlic in it too, which was good news. Chopping the garlic on these new tempered glass chopping boards is so much better than on the old plastic ones too, and they also make nice flat boards for kneading dough too. Ask me how I know.

Tea tonight was of course a leftover curry and naan bread and I do have to say that it was the best garlic naan that I have ever made. My bread-making seems to have improved just recently, and I’ve no idea why. I suspect that it’s that my small water measurer is inaccurate. Things have improved since I’ve been adding more water (according to my measurer) than the recipes recommend.

So now I’m going to go to bed and try to sleep. “Try” being the appropriate word because despite the lack of sleep last night I’m not tired at all. I can’t understand this. Tomorrow is Dialysis Day so i’ll probably sleep during the afternoon, but I have better things to do.

But while we’re on the subject of concubinage customs … "well, one of us is" – ed … this system where the two partners do not live together was recorded among "the Syntengs and the people of Maoshai,"
The author of that particular report asked our author, Laurence Gomme, if he knew the difference between a giant panda and a male member of that tribe
"A comma, I suppose" said Laurence Gomme
"What do you mean?" asked the author of the report
"Well" replied Gomme "A giant panda eats shoots and leaves. A member of that tribe who only visits his partner simply eats, shoots and leaves"

Tuesday 11th March 2025 – I’M HAVING ANOTHER …

… late night tonight but ask me if I care. I have just seen one of the most exciting football matches that has been broadcast on S4C and believe it or not, it was between the teams who are next-to-bottom and third from bottom in the table, Llansawel and Y Drenewydd.

Never mind though about the late night – it will go with the late night that I had last night. It wasn’t until about 01:25 that I finally crawled into bed.

Thinking about it though, when I remember how things were nine months ago when I was crashing out for a couple of hours in the afternoon,staggering into bed like a zombie and struggling to rise up next morning, it does point to something of an improvement the way things are now, and I suppose that it’s the dialysis that is responsible for that. I can’t think of any other reason

So there I was, crawling into bed at 01:25 and there I stayed, flat out without moving until the alarm went off at 07:00. It wasn’t a particularly perspiration-laden night – not as much as some have been just recently – so I suppose that dialysis may not be to blame for the perspiration either.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and clean-up and then into the kitchen for the medication.

Back here there was the dictaphone that needed my attention. I was running a wedding car business last night with an old Rolls Royce. At one wedding that I went to, I actually missed it myself because there was some kind of problem going on with the car or with something. While the party was in there marrying I actually had my head under the bonnet of this Rolls Royce so I didn’t make the ceremony. There was a second wedding too and I also missed that but I can’t remember why now but I didn’t go to it. The next one I had all the people on board the Rolls Royce and they wanted to stop at the corner shop so I pulled up, went out and came back with some cans of drink. They climbed back in and we had a chat. The man said “right, let’s go to the wedding. You don’ want to miss this one, do you?”. I made some remark and he replied “yes, but let’s go to the wedding and find a reason for hating him”. We set off and the Rolls Royce turned to the right inside this great big building. I was going straight on for some reason. Whatever it was that I was pushing became bogged down in the carpet and I couldn’t move it and I was still there trying to free it off and free it off.

Sticking my head under the bonnet of a car was something that I spent a lot of time doing, and I would have enjoyed it very much had I had the time, but things always seemed to go wrong at the wrong moment. It was a never-ending story of swimming against the current back in those days, probably very much akin to being stuck on the carpet while everything is going by past me.

Isabelle the nurse was horribly late today. It’s her first day back on duty so I suppose that she has all of the blood tests and injections that have been building up while her oppo was doing the rounds. She breezed in and back out again and hardly had time to draw breath while she was here.

Breakfast was next and then there was MY NEW BOOK. Today we have been examining early English folk-tales. He’s been looking at them in depth and identifying customs and practice in those folk tales that bear no resemblance whatever to real customs and practice, either in the British Isles, traditional Middle Europe or Scandinavia,

His argument is that the English population as we know it, starting with the Celts, came from those areas mentioned. If the customs and practice in the folk tales does not come from those areas, it must therefore come from someone else, which of course is logical. However he suggests that it comes from the race of humans in the British Isles that the Celts found when they arrived in the middle of the first millennium B.C.

This is how he reckons that he will be able to construct something that will give us some idea of the social and interpersonal life of those who were here before the Celts arrived.

Later on I began to revise for my Welsh. I had a good hour at it and made more progress that I thought that I might but it was to no avail because the lesson was not as good as it might have been. However I was relieved (to a certain degree) to find that I was not the only person in the class who is struggling to keep up, and we talked about going on a Summer School together later in the year

After the lesson I was computing again and I now seem to have almost everything that I need. There’s one program that I mentioned that I can’t find, and for some reason, Waterfox wouldn’t connect me to my Welsh lesson and I had to use another steam-driven web browser. I shall have to look into this and find out why.

Tea tonight was a taco roll as usual, a hurried tea in fact because of the football.

Aberystwyth look well-and-truly down, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … but of the other three clubs at the bottom, Y Drenewydd, Llansawel and Y Fflint, they seem to have cycles – one will win two or three game and pull clear, and then another one will do the same and catch up, and then it’s the turn of the third.

Consequently, tonight’s game between Llansawel and Y Drenewydd is of crucial importance to both clubs who are level on points in the table.

Y Drenewydd came out of the blocks at a tremendous rate and it must have been almost 10 minutes before Llansawel entered their opponents’ half. I forget now how many times Y Drenewydd hit the post, hit the bar, had shots cleared off the line, and had Will Fuller in the LLansawel goal not played the game of his life it could have been a catastrophe.

Llansawel had only really one good chance in the Drenewydd penalty area and you surely don’t need me to tell you what happened.

Nevertheless Llansawel have made something of a habit of dropping points by conceding goals in the final minutes of a game and today was no exception. A 1-1 draw was probably a good reflection of Y Drenewydd’s failure to capitalise on the chances that they had and a tribute to Llansawel’s dogged defence. From a neutral spectator’s point of view, it was a thrilling, exciting match.

Tomorrow is shower day of course, and radio day too so I’ll be busy. It will all keep me out of mischief anyway, I suppose.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Rolls Royces … "well, one of us has" – ed … when Tiger Woods came to play at the Scottish Open a few years ago he hired a Rolls Royce from Edinburgh Airport and set out to drive to St Andrews.
On the way he picked up a young girl hitchhiker, and he delighted in showing off all of the luxury fittings in his car. She kept on pointing to things asking "what’s this? What does it do?" and he told her.
She pointed to some plastic things in the tray by the gear lever and asked "what are those?"
"They are tees" he said
"What are they for?" she asked
"You put your balls on them before you drive off" he replied
"Blimey!" she exclaimed. "Rolls-Royce think of everything!"

Monday 10th March 2025 – I HAVE RECEIVED …

… a rather disturbing communication today from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

At first I thought that it might have been Castor who had finally caught up with me but it’s much more disturbing than concerning anything that might (or might not) have occurred on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my place in Canada is actually on the frontier with the USA – quite literally, because my southern boundary is actually the international border between Canada and the USA. This letter tells me that if I "see or hear any suspicious activity at or near the border, to telephone …" and gives me a freephone number to use.

Obviously the Canadian authorities are taking Trump’s sabre-rattling quite seriously and who can blame them? It’s bad enough having a bunch of paranoiacs living next door to you but when the head of the family is someone who is in my opinion clearly insane, it must be extremely worrying.

Seeing Trump’s rants about Canadians, Mexicans and all kinds of other people, I am reminded of the outpourings from Nazi Germany reviling the Jews and the Poles in the 1930s and I have begun to wonder, a long time before this, whether Putin and Trump have done a deal to divide the World between them – Putin in Europe and Trump in America. If so, the Americans are going to learn the hard way that if you lie down with dogs, you’ll inevitably end up with fleas. Putin is much more clever than Trump.

But anyway, at a certain moment I decided that I would leave the politics out of my writings, but sometimes it really is unavoidable.

Going to bed late seems to be unavoidable too these days. After 01:00 when I finally crawled into bed after a long day’s work. I was asleep quite quickly too and only awoke once or twice during the night.

When the alarm went off it took me a minute or two to gather my wits, which is surprising seeing how few I have these days, and then I staggered of into the bathroom. I had a wash and shave, in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant, and then I had some washing to do. I must make myself and my clothes look pretty.

After the medication I came back in here and listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was back at the family home in Vine Tree Avenue having a wrestling match with another kid. all of a sudden I felt another person join in. Of course, both my hands were occupied with the first kid so I couldn’t do anything about the second one starting. After a minute or two I felt “this other person means this!”. The first person disengaged and cleared off but the second person continued to grab me around the neck etc. After a while it spoke and I recognised it as someone from OUSA. I thought “what have I done to you to merit this?”. She came up with some kind of nebulous response that didn’t mean a thing and pressed home her attack. In the end I refused to retaliate and tried to wriggle myself free. After a couple of minutes she said “well I suppose you have other things to do, have you?”. I thought to myself “not really but I can find something”. She disengaged and in a minute or two she left. I thought “what on earth was that all about?”. I went into the living room or other room. My grandfather was there but I didn’t see him but it was his dog and our collie was there. I began to stroke them both. Our collie was old and blind so I talked to her to let her know that it was me but the two dogs were there in our living room and I just continued to stroke them for a while before I went to look for my shoes to go outside.

It’s not difficult to understand why anyone from OUSA would want to strangle me. I was definitely not “flavour of the month” back in those days but then again far too many people took far too many things far too seriously. But what on earth is my grandfather (or, at least, his dog) doing in my dreams? He (the grandfather, and probably the dog too) has been dead for almost 50 years.

The nurse actually had something interesting to discuss today. We were talking about one of the local football clubs that I used to go to see in the days when I could get out and about. Apparently he used to play for them years ago and will even turn out today when they are short of players.

Then it was breakfast and MY NEW BOOK time. Today we are starting to come to the meat of the matter.

He tells us that "analysis of each custom, rite, or belief will show it to consist of three distinct parts, which I would distinguish by the following names :-
1. The formula.
2. The purpose.
3. The penalty or result."
And that there are usually several ancillary elements too.

What he intends to do is to make a table, say, from 1 to 10 and then from, say, A-Z. Then to select folk tales from all over the World and fit each one horizontally into the table, with common principal parts in the same numbered column and common ancillary elements in the lettered column.

He’ll then to read down the columns to identify common themes in various different folk tales and see if he can identify common folk tales that have changed over the centuries.

It’s going to be an absolutely fascinating thing to try to do and I’m looking forward to seeing him do it and what might be his results.

As a matter of fact, it has a special appeal to me. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when this project about dreams started, it was the aim of the student undertaking this project to see whether or not dreams had common threads running through them and whether or not several over a long period could actually be tied together like episodes of a soap opera. We’ve seen enough over the years to identify many common threads but I’m wondering if I ought to go back and set up a table like Laurence Gomme has.

Back in here I was unzipping files until my cleaner arrived, and I witnessed her have meltdown when she realised that they had given her the wrong medication at the pharmacy.

The taxi was late arriving and then we still had to go to pick up someone along the way. Consequently I was last in the queue and had to wait for ages for them to deal with me.

They checked my heart today and I still have it, which is good news. It means that I’ve not turned into a Tory yet. They also gave my feet an examination and I noticed that the nurse put on rubber gloves before she touched my socks.

Last in means last out and we had to bring someone else home too. And then we had an accident. The car in front overshot his turning, stopped and then reversed backwards without looking, straight into the front of our car. Luckily, the damage was minimal and after what can be best described as “a frank exchange of views” the drivers exchanged details and we drove on.

All the time, I was thinking that it was a shame that it wasn’t my favourite taxi driver taking me home. I would have loved to have seen the fireworks.

It was 19:35 when I staggered in here. I didn’t feel much like making tea but I had a stuffed pepper all the same. And now I’ll be off to bed in a moment.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I was talking the other week about studying while I am in dialysis. While I was uploading stuff to the computer I came across a programming language called “Python”.

It’s a useful little program for writing little scripts for batch processing so I uploaded it back at the farm when I was doing some work in 3D. Today at dialysis I downloaded the most recent version as well as the clip libraries and I reckon that I might see what I can do with it. It’ll keep me out of mischief.

But while we’re on the subject of snakes … "well, one of us is" – ed … someone once caught a snake and asked me what type it was
"How long is it?" I asked
"It’s just about 3.14159 feet long" he replied
"Oh yes" I replied. "What you have there is a pi-thon"

Sunday 9th March 2025 – THAT WAS MORE …

… like what I call a decent night after the last couple that I have had. I was in bed just after midnight and slept right through until about 07:45 without any interruption at all, taking almost full advantage of my extra hour’s Sunday lie-in. I could certainly have done with it too.

After I finished my notes and everything last night I dictated the radio notes ready for editing and refraining from doing more work on the computer, I crawled off to bed for a good night’s sleep.

At 07:45 I had another one of these dramatic awakenings and although I didn’t look at the time I had a good idea of what time it might have been by the fact that it was light outside. I simply curled up under the quilt until the alarm went off.

Last weekend the nurse caught me in flagrante delicto in the bathroom. Today either I was quicker than that or he was later arriving because I was actually back in here when he turned up.

After he left I made breakfast and carried on reading MY NEW BOOK. His take on religion (which we are discussing today) is that "I venture to think that civilised man shares with the savage of today, and with the primitive ancestors of all mankind, the charge of applying perfectly good logic to an insufficiency of facts."

Interestingly he notes a great similarity in religious beliefs between various bands of Native Americans, natives in Guyana and in Brazil, as well as other beliefs shared by other widely-dispersed groups of natives.

Back in here there were the dictaphone notes that needed transcribing. I was with one of the boys from school last night. We were walking along Alton Street in Crewe. He was telling me that what he was looking for was some kind of place where he could give singing lessons and have a kind of pied-à-terre there too. I asked him “what kind of place? But what? First-floor balcony? Open-air roof garden?”. In the end he came down to the idea of a singing workshop with apartment. I said “what you are actually looking for is what you would used to find on every street corner in Crewe in the pre-1920s Crewe which is the old local shop that would have been a grocer’s or a hairdresser’s or something with a two-roomed apartment above it”. Just at that moment we walked past what was a florist’s so I said “just like this in fact”. He wasn’t very enthusiastic but I couldn’t see exactly what he was hoping to do if that wasn’t the solution. While we were pondering on this I stepped out off the kerb into the side-street and was nearly run down by a car coming the other way. I looked around and we were in Nantwich Road near the Earl of Crewe. I wondered what on earth I’d been doing to have walked this kind of distance from Alton Street up to Nantwich Road without thinking about what I was doing and where I was going.

Whoever this boy was and if I recognised him in the dream, I have no idea. But it was certainly a quick transition up the hill from Alton Street to Nantwich Road.

Later on, we were round at my house in Virlet last night, me and a couple of my siblings. The house was in a total mess with dust and rubbish and papers everywhere and hadn’t been lived in for fifty years. They were having a good look around it. We were wandering into the next room looking at the damage and the decay and the waste, all the rubbish and dust. They came to a door in the side wall and managed to force it open. Next door was the Council Chamber which was all richly furnished with seats and huge tables and chairs with silks and everything. The contrast between that room and the rooms in my house was astonishing. They all noticed it and made some remarks. They they picked up a couple of brushes and began to sweep everything up. I’d left everything as it was because I was intending to go through the rubbish and sort out everything that I needed but they just began to brush things up and stick them in bin bags. They went into the bedroom and found that the bedroom was in total disorder and mess that someone must have left the door open, the Christmas tree had fallen down so I’d better go to have a look at that. Then they came to the door at the end of the house and couldn’t open it so they all pushed against it. Suddenly it opened and they cascaded out, falling down one storey into the yard at the back. They asked “how do we come out of here?”. I told them to go down to the end of the alleyway and turn left. I thought “this is the moment when I suppose that I ought to go too”. I locked up the house and left. When I reached the place where they should have been, there was one of these cryptic signs so in the end I interpreted it as “Eric, forget this and go home” so I thought that I’d better set off for home. It was a sunny day with lots of cloud though. All the rain that we’d had over the last few months was slowly beginning to dry out. I thought that this is going to be a really nice day.

The house I actually recognised. It was one in Gresty Road opposite the football ground, one that I knew quite well at one time. But the idea that the Council Offices were next door is a long way short of the mark. The story about the house and dust everywhere sounds just like the farm in Virlet when I was plastering it and dropped a huge bag of screws all over the floor into the dust. I loved my place down in Virlet but it was no place to be when ill-health strikes. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the old man with whom I was quite friendly who had a fall in his house in the middle of a minus eighteen degree winter and lay on the floor undiscovered for four days and never recovered.

There was a bread roll to make for lunch. Last week the fresh bread roll was an excellent idea so I was keen to give it another try.

After that we had the football, Stranraer v Peterhead. It was a tough gritty match that finished 0-0 and quite rightly too because no-one had any much more play than the other. But the disgraceful scenes at the end when the Peterhead coach came onto the field and attacked a Stranraer player have no place whatever in football. And even worse, the referee took no notice whatever of the incident. Whether he mentions it in his match report remains to be seen.

There were the highlights of the matches in the Cymru Premier League to watch too. And Penybont finally won a match in the second phase as they beat Y Bala. Aberystwyth went down 3-0 though and now look certainties for the drop down to Tier Two. Y Drenewydd live to fight another day after a draw with Y Fflint but Llansawel went down at home against Y Barri by a last-minute goal.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent finishing off the uploading of data onto the new system disk. It’s all there now but it needs unpacking and sorting and that is going to be a mammoth task and will take an age until it’s finished

The cheese on toast on fresh bread roll, all cooked nicely in the air fryer, was excellent again. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I am really impressed with my air fryer, almost as much as I was with my stainless steel dustbin.

Later on I had bread to make and following the success of the loaf last week I put sunflower seeds in this one too. And it rose up just as well as the one last week did

There was pizza dough to make too. This was another really good batch that rose up really well. Two lumps are in the freezer and the third made a lovely tea tonight – a tea that would have been even nicer had I remembered to put the cheese on before the cherry tomatoes. I really don’t know what’s happening to me and my memory these days.

So now that I’ve finished my notes I’ll carry on unzipping *.RAR archives for a while and then go to bed ready for Welsh homework and dialysis tomorrow

A few days ago though, we were talking about the dams in Germany that the Dambusters breached. So while we’re on the subject of religion today … "well, one of us is" – ed … when the Mohne Dam broke, the warden telephoned the church in the valley to tell the vicar to flee
"I’ll be okay" he said. "The Good Lord will provide"
When the water reached the church the vicar climbed into the tower. A few minutes later a boat rowed past. "Quick, vicar, leap aboard"
"I’ll be okay" he said. "The Good Lord will provide"
When the church was flooded the vicar climbed up to the steeple
Another boat came past. "Quick vicar, leap aboard!"
"I’ll be okay" he said. "The Good Lord will provide"
But the Good Lord didn’t and the vicar drowned
At the Pearly Gates he met St Peter and he remonstrated with him. "I always believed in the Lord and he betrayed me. Why did the Good Lord let me down and let me drown?"
"Well" said St Peter. "He did send two boats for you."

Saturday 8th March 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone this morning.

But then that’s hardly a surprise when you don’t go to bed until 02:20 and you are up and about by 05:35. And that’s something of a tragedy because if I’m going to have a bad night’s sleep at least I want to be going out and about enjoying it, even if it is only a notional travel.

As you might expect I was hunting down files and data last night and then ended up being carried away by something or other, and once you make a start you’ll be surprised at just how many other things there are. It was still a very weary me who crawled into bed at about 02:20.

Not that it did me all that much good because although I did go to sleep at one point it wasn’t for very long and in the end I became fed up of doing nothing whatever and arose from the Dead.

In the bathroom I scrubbed up and washed my clothes, and then went into the kitchen to take my medication. Next task was to finish off the unpacking of the food from yesterday and organise the collection of glass jars so that there was room to add some more

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m trying to do away with plastic in here. Over the last few months I’ve been buying my olives in these big glass jars and I now have quite a collection. My range of glass-bottled loose product is expanding quite rapidly because of the extra stuff that I have bought over the last few months as my recipe ideas have expanded and as I try to move everything out of plastic and paper bags into glass jars.

Before I came back in here I tidied away all of the shopping bags so that they weren’t all over the floor. But in any case it doesn’t work. My place is now just as untidy as it was yesterday before my cleaner came.

Once back in here, with nothing on the dictaphone to transcribe I made a start on unzipping data but was halted in my tracks by the nurse who came to sort me out. He asked me the same questions as usual and so he had the same responses as usual, not that I’m too bothered.

After he left I made breakfast and carried on reading MY NEW BOOK. We reached page 123 today and that marks the end of the introductory preamble as he sets the scene for what is to come.

He’s convinced that these strange stories that Julius Caesar reported about the British people being cannibals, holding wives in common and other "odious practices" as he puts it were not actually the practices of the Celts who Caesar met but those of the people who were here and were displaced by the Celts when they arrived.

Furthermore he thinks that he can prove it too and I shall be interested to see how he manages to do it, bearing in mind that if there are no written records of the Celts there are likely to be even less for the people who were here before.

In here I carried on with the extraction of files until my cleaner arrived to fit my anaesthetic patches. She had only just finished too when the taxi arrived. 12:15, 15 minutes early. Not that i’m bothered though because the sooner we start the sooner we finish (in principle).

It was the young chatty driver who came for me today but he didn’t have much to say for himself which is a shame because the time passes more quickly when you are having an interesting discussion.

First in at the dialysis centre I was, and first to be coupled up. Julie the Cook had left a message for her colleagues and they applied the ice pack too before they plugged me in and although it did hurt, it didn’t hurt as much as it has done in the past.

There was football this afternoon, TNS v Hwlffordd. Hwlffordd are pushing Penybont for second place following Penybont’s dramatic collapse of form but TNS demolished them with some ease and the 5-1 scoreline was not flattering TNS at all.

Hwlffordd played some pretty football at times but it was all to no real purpose and they didn’t look threatening at all. For all the distance between Aberystwyth and Hwlffordd in the table and in the style of play, Aberystwyth’s showed much more dogged resistance last week that Hwlffordd did today.

Emilie the Cute Consultant was there today and she said “hello” to me, but that was about the extent of her interaction today. No-one else spoke to me until it was time to be unplugged.

The driver who brought me home was the young girl who brought me home several weeks ago. We were talking about food and I found, to my surprise and to hers too, that we are both vegan. She immediately asked if she could come round for a meal and who am I to refuse such a request?

Mind you, I’ll believe it when I actually see it.

My cleaner watched as I ascended the stairs and once I’d sat down and recovered my strength I had my disgusting protein drink.

Tea tonight was one of those weird chili burgers on a bap with salad and baked potato followed by date bread and soya dessert. It was the first time for a fortnight that I’ve actually felt like eating a proper meal.

So there’s some dictating to do and then I’m off to bed ready for tomorrow. I have a busy day of baking and there’s some fruit that needs transforming into juice and purée.

But while we’re on the subject of glass bottles … "well, one of us is" – ed … I used to collect them if they were any good and reuse them for other things. One day I found a really nice one.
It was rather dirty so I went to rub it clean and suddenly a genie appeared out of the neck.
"You have released me from the bottle and now I am yours to command" he said. "Give me 100 gold pieces and I will answer any two questions"
"Blimey!" I said. "That’s a lot of money for two questions, don’t you think?"
"Yes" replied the genie. "Now what’s your second question?"

Friday 7th March 2025 – DOES ANYONE WANT …

… some cabbage?

This week LeClerc has had its vegetables on special offer and as I have plenty of broccoli already, I thought that I’d go with the cabbage and cauliflower at €0:99 per head.

The difficulty with not going to the shops yourself is that you can’t see what it is that you are buying, and I had I seen beforehand, I might have changed my mind somewhat. Freezing is not possible because already I’m rather short of room in there, so it looks as if I shall be eating cabbage for the rest of my life. I have never in my life seen a cabbage as big as the one that rolled in through my front door this afternoon.

That was really the highlight of the day. Today should have been a Woodstock day today but as I said yesterday, I had other fish to fry, like dealing with the recalcitrant computer.

It was well after 02:00 when I finally crawled into bed this morning, feeling very much the worse for wear, but at least I had a working computer with all of the internal drives connected and the basic suite of programs installed so that I can carry on working in the morning. And, as expected, I didn’t need much rocking at all.

In fact, I slept right the way through until the alarm went off and don’t recall awakening at all, but then again I suppose that five hours sleep isn’t all that much to write home about. And it was certainly another perspiration-laden night as I discovered when the alarm went off.

Into the bathroom for a good wash and scrub up and then into the kitchen for the medication.

Back in here, now that the computer is up and running with the new system disk installed, I began the on-line hunt for all of the little files and utilities on which I rely. I have most of them stored in one of the back-up disks but an opportunity like this to see whether there have been any upgrades in the meantime is too good to resist

To my regret one of the most important ones seems to have been withdrawn. All that I have in the back-up are the extractor files, not the program itself so I’m rather stuck. Searching on the internet with the writer’s name just comes up with links to some other people’s efforts which are nothing like as good.

The nurse’s arrival interrupted my flow somewhat. he didn’t have too much to say for himself but he did ask me in view of my computer problems "I have a friend who is an informatician who can help you. Would you like me to contact him for you?"
"Thank you" I replied "but I can manage quite fine, thank you" and I can too. And in any case, if his friend is anything like his taxi driver friend, I’m keeping well clear.

He asked me how come I can sort myself out and so I told him.
"You should have opened your own business!" he said. "You could have been rich!"
However, he has in the past berated me for doing my washing in the morning instead of awakening in the middle of the night and doing it then to save 50 centimes on the electricity bill (and awakening all the neighbours). I know that I’m careful with my money but even I can recognise the difference between “being careful” and “having an unhealthy obsession”.

After he left, it was breakfast and MY NEW BOOK time.

Today we have been identifying the violence in the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm that "we are entitled to call savage, because they are so far removed from the European culture amidst which the folk-tales have lived, and because these elements belong not to the accidentals of the stories but to the essentials.".

He goes on to say "An occasional savage incident might have been considered a freak of the original narrator, or a borrowing by one of the countless late narrators of these stories brought home from savage countries ; but statistics disprove both of these suppositions. It is not accidental but persistent savagery we meet with in the folk-tale. It is also the savagery to be found amongst modern peoples still in the savage stage of culture"

And then "The modern savage is better off in this respect. He has an outside historian in the traveller and the anthropologist of modern days. The savage who was ancestor to our own people had no such means of becoming known to history, or had but very limited means, and it is only in the deathless tradition that we can trace him out ….. History is indebted to tradition for preserving some of the most remote facts of racial or national life, which but for tradition would have been lost"

What I have to admit is that when I saw a reference to this work when I was reading something else, I hesitated to download the book because I wasn’t sure that it would be interesting. But rather like the Ancient Egyptian Astronomy book that we read, this is turning out to be absolutely fascinating and I’m keen to find out where we’ll go next.

Back in here afterwards I began to write the notes for yesterday and they are on-line now if you missed them

The LeClerc order was next. That needed to be reviewed and sent off For a change they had almost everything. Only the garlic that I like was missing but they had a substitute and that will keep me going until the next time that I order.

Having done all of that, all that I had to do was to upload the data that I need. Some of it is of course available because I’m still using the old data disk but some of it isn’t and I had to trawl through the back-up drives to find what I need. But there is still some stuff that I can’t find and I’ve no idea where it might be.

My hunt for data ended up with me having a closer look at the failed hard drive and after a lot of manipulation I’ve managed to make it fire up which is a surprise. So all is not lost quite yet. I’ve left it running all day and it seems to be fairly stable to date But the hunt for data and sorting it out instead of leaving it in a mess will go on for several days, I should imagine.

There were the usual breaks of course. No lunch because I still haven’t recovered my appetite as yet and I’m not going to force it. Then we had the cleaner coming round to do her stuff. After that we had the disgusting drink break and finally, the LeClerc order arrived. I’d asked or it “any time after 17:00” and at 17:01 it was coming up the stairs.

There wasn’t very much in the order today but there’s nevertheless not much place to put things. I’m not going through the food as quickly as I used to now that the appetite has diminished.

The cabbage and cauliflower took an age to cut up and now they are blanched and draining on the draining board. I’ll have to find a way to fit it all in the freezer before I go to bed.

Believe it or not, I’d forgotten to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I’d been out with a group of friends from school. We’d been through the city centre of Antwerp. There ended up being a bunch of about seven or eight of us. They asked me if I could take their photograph. I didn’t have a camera so they gave me someone’s telephone. They set out to walk around a corner and I had to capture them coming round it. They had to do it seven or eight times before I finally took the photo. First of all I couldn’t make the camera work, then I had someone in the way, and then there was something else that happened. I had to do it ever so many times before I’d even taken one.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that camera issues used to be another theme that ran regularly around my nocturnal perambulations. It’s a surprise that it’s suddenly reared its ugly head yet again after all this time.

Later on I was talking to a girl. We were discussing some ballerinas. One ballerina was an older girl who was talking about her biography and talking about the University that she went to in the Netherlands at Leiden. This carried on and I could see one of my friends being more and more disgusted with this conversation. I asked “what’s the matter with this?”. She replied “my father works as a lecturer at Leiden and he could tell you that she’s never set one foot there in her life. They were then talking about a much younger girl who had been very very talented but had given it up to go to work in the coffee bar of the local police force in London and what a waste of talent it was. Then they announced that she had actually given up the coffee bar and had gone back to be a ballerina.

Several friends of mine have daughters who are ballerinas, and not just the average Saturday afternoon ballerina either. One of them is currently at sixth form in the National Ballet or somewhere and the other one, a few years younger, danced for the UK at the European Championships in Prague a few months ago.

Tea tonight was more vegan nuggets (seeing as they were on special offer) with chips and salad. I have to do my best to keep the food going.

But I’l worry about that tomorrow. Tonight I’m off to bed.

But as we have been talking about computer problems … "well, one of us has" – ed … I am reminded of an old Andy Capp cartoon from many years ago. Andy Capp and Chalky White were watching some guys struggle to try to fit a 1950s computer through the door of a building.
They stood there watching for about fifteen minutes as the men tried first one way and then another and then another.
In the end Andy Capp went over to them and said "why not plug it in and let it work it out for itself?"

Thursday 6th March 2025 (cont) – NOW THAT THINGS … .

… are back to normal (well, as normal as things ever could be around here) I can carry on and do what I ought to have been doing, and update everything.

And had I known how things were going to have worked out, still being on my feet (well, OK, on my chair) at 02:00 I would have had an early night instead of being up to all hours watching Stranraer, after several weeks of impressive football, go back to their old, miserable ways and be easily beaten by the bottom club in the league who spent most of the night playing with just ten men.

That was as embarrassing as the defeat aginst Clyde a couple of weeks ago and was really depressing after the last three or four performances.

So anyway I went to bed eventually and had another perspiration-laden night where I was only really half-asleep for most of it.

When the alarm did go off I hauled myself to my feet and headed off to the bathroom for a scrub and even a shave. After all, you never know if Emilie the Cute Consultant is going to be there today.

No medication right now because you also never know if the nurse might actually want to come along and do this blood test this morning and it has to be done à jeun so I listened to the dictaphone instead to find out what had gone on during the night. There I was, lying here asleep and a girl was trying to load some ink or something into my mobile ‘phone so that it could print a document. I tried to pur some fat into it but the fat was in a chip basket thing. Of course, every time you tilted it to pour it the liquid would seep out through the holes so I wasn’t having any success with my cooking last night.

Can you imagine trying to lift molten fat out of a chip pan with the chip basket? I’ve no idea what goes on inside my head at night, but there again, I don’t have all that much more idea about what goes on inside my head when I’m awake.

Later on I was out in North Wales looking for an address. I ended up somewhere beyond Conwy in an area that I didn’t know very well but I couldn’t find it. I ended up on an extremely steep hairpin bend. Trying to walk or cycle up there was extremely complicated. When I reached the top there was a waterfall. The waterfall was where some kind of primitive dam had been that had been broken and the water was cascading over it down into the valley where it joined the main river. There was a main road off there to the right and there was a lot of traffic coming that way so it was complicated to cross the road. I did cross the road but still couldn’t find this address. In the end I saw a map with the shape of where it was and I identified that I should have been four miles beyond Abergele so I had to retrace my steps and try to return across the road on a pushbike was even more complicated with all of the traffic that was coming straight on down the main road. Once or twice someone paused and that was the signal for someone to nip over but I had to wait for a while and found myself in the end with about a dozen vehicles on the central reservation waiting for a gap in the downhill traffic again. Once we set off there were all these vehicles passing so closely and I was then freewheeling down the hill listening to the news about a bicycle race. There were two people in the middle of the road, a man and a woman with bikes and they didn’t seem to be paying any attention to me as I came hurtling down and I missed the woman by a matter of millimetres.

As it happens, I recognise this road too. It’s out of Llangollen heading down into mid-Wales and I was there 20-odd years ago with Nicole when we came to pick up the old LDV. The dam is very much how I would have imagined one of the “Dambusters” dams to have been after it had been blown up. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we WENT FOR A LOOK AROUND the dams few years ago on our way to Colditz and STRAWBERRY MOOSE‘s famous escape attempt.

Incidentally, four miles beyong Abergele up a steep mountainside is one of the Iron Age hillforts to which Arthur Allcroft took us a couple of weeks ago, but there was nothing about any hillforts anywhere last night.

When the nurse did finally turn up he did actually take the blood sample and I knew all about it because, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … he just doesn’t have “the touch”.

After he left I made breakfast and carried on reading MY NEW BOOK. We’re discussing exciting subjects today, such as men marrying their daughters and the young killing off the old folks once they stop being productive and become useless mouths to feed.

He’s actually done some research into this and has found plenty of examples back in history and in more remote parts of the World where those customs were still current when he was researching his book. All I can say is that for someone whose day job was a clerk in London County Council, he had some strange pastimes and hobbies.

However, he has proved a point over which I have been puzzling. If people back in ancient history were so concerned about having useless mouths hanging around eating the produce, the produce must have been so scarce that not even family ties could hold the people together and stop them killing each other. So I remain totally unconvinced by the modern way of thinking that these hillforts were nothing but symbolic. The huge amount of effort that went into the construction of these immense defensive works and the amount of time they had to spend away from the fields or from the hunt, they really must have been scared almost to death by what might have happened had they not spent all that time and effort in their construction.

Back in here later I had a few things to organise and sort out but was interrupted by the telephone. "Is it OK if I come a little earlier, like 12:00?". It was my taxi driver.

What has happened was that last week these new Social Security regulations came into legally-binding force and so this is how it’s going to be from now on – taxis turning up at any time they like if they are obliged to combine trips. Not that I’m complaining because, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed …, it’s a free service and in any case the sooner we arrive, the sooner I can leave and so I sent a message to my cleaner to inform her.

Poor thing, she had to scramble here to fit my anaesthetic patches and was still here when the taxi arrived – at 11:47. The Sécu has instructed that a timespan of 45-minute either side of the booked time is acceptable under these new regulations and by my reckoning the car was actually 43 minutes early. That’s cutting it fine.

We had to pick up someone else on the way of course, someone who had a hospital appointment for an operation. "As we’re so early we may as well drop madame off at the hospital first."
"She’s going to hospital in Rennes"

When I arrived at the dialysis centre I was so early that they hadn’t even finished dealing with the morning’s patients but Julie the Cook saw me and she quickly finished off setting up my machine (patients have their own individual settings) and I was installed and up and running by 13:15.

She tried a new trick this afternoon. While she was setting up the machine she slapped an ice bag on my arm. And that actually might have helped a little – at least until the effect wore off.

Apart from the coffee, no-one bothered me at all until it was time to unplug me. Julie the Cook had gone home a long time before and one of the others came to sort me out. For some reason I was rather unsteady on my feet at first. It can’t have been low blood pressure because that was OK.

So it was 17:30 when I staggered out of the centre and the taxi was already waiting for me. We had someone else with us to drop off along the way but even so I was back at home by 18:15, much to the surprise of my cleaner

That was when I discovered the catastrophe in here, with the big desktop computer spinning around in BIOS mode complaining “I can’t find any disk with an operating system on it”.

Luckily I had a spare 1TB SSD that I’d dismantled from another machine so I formatted that in a disk caddy with the help of the travelling laptop and set about dismantling the big computer. It’s always good to perform a clean installation every couple of years because you’ll be surprised (or maybe you con’t) at the amount of rubbish that accumulates over the passage of time.

While I was doing that, I actually found what I suspect is the fault. There’s an internal power lead with three connectors for disk drives. The one that was connected to the SSD system drive has a crack in it and what seems to have happened is that the crack has allowed the internals to flex and they have shorted out.

No problem. I just disconnected the internal back-up drive and plugged the new SSD System drive into that connector. I’ll have to order a new power lead from somewhere in due course to connect everything back up on a more permanent basis.

While it was sorting itself out I made a quick tea – just like THE CARMICHAELS and "supper waits on the table inside a tin".

Back in here afterwards, I settled down and steeled myself ready for what is going to be a very long night

But while we’re on the subject of Colditz Castle … "well, one of us is" – ed … I’m reminded of that legendary “Two Ronnies” sketch from years ago.
"We’re making a film about prisoners escaping from a camp in Germany"
"What’s it called?"
"The Colditz Story"
"What are you making next?"
"A film about life in a South Wales mining village"
"What’s it called?"
"The Coal Tips Story"
"And after that?"
"We’re doing a film starring Raquel Welch who will be playing the role of an Inuit"
"What’s that called?"
"We haven’t decided yet"

Wednesday 5th March 2025 – MY CLEANER IS …

… a heroine – an absolute marvel, and I’m really pleased and grateful that she’s here.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that now that I’m properly settled here on the coast with no prospect of returning home to the farm, I’ve been changing a few things around.

One of the things that I’ve been doing is slowly disposing of all of the plastic that I have and replacing it with glass as much as possible. My plastic chopping boards are looking very much the worse for wear and I have been planning to let them go the Way of the West whenever the next opportunity presents itself.

A couple of weeks ago, LeClerc sent me a preview of the next instore sale that started on Tuesday. They had some lovely tempered glass chopping boards – huge ones too – at just €2:85 each and had I been able to do so, I would have been queueing at the door on Tuesday morning.

When she was here last week I mentioned it to her in passing and talking about how I would have liked to replace my two plastic boards (I have one for smelly foods and one for other stuff).

So today when she came in to sort me out, she produced two tempered glass chopping boards, one black and one white.

It’s quite strange really that it’s the slightest thing that makes such an impression and makes such a difference. I couldn’t believe that I’ve been so impressed by this – even more impressed than I was with my stainless steel dustbin.

Not so impressed though with last night. A late night again and then pretty much more of the same old same old …, difficult to sleep, waking up drenched in perspiration again. The difficulty in sleeping I can cope with, but it’s everything else. However, at least, despite what I said yesterday, if I had another perspiration-laden night when it wasn’t a Dialysis Day, it can hardly be the dialysis that’s causing it.

Nevertheless I was asleep this morning when the alarm went off, doing something with someone else, talking about food, saying that the food, which should be a natural substance and not a processed kind of meal or processed kind of product. Then we were watching something on the television, a quiz game where people produced some kind of extraordinary object and the second team had to try to decide exactly what the purpose of that object was. They had invented some kind of quiz game out of this.

Something else that I can do in my sleep that I can’t, or never had the opportunity to do during my waking hours. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … if only I had found someone capable of making some use of all of these marvellous ideas that I only ever seem to have when I’m asleep. I’d be typing this from the deck of my yacht in the Bahamas with floozies peeling grapes and tossing them into my mouth.

It was another struggle to extricate myself from my bed before the second alarm and to struggle into the bathroom. Back in here straight away afterwards because I can’t ingest anything until after the blood test.

Instead, I transcribed the dictaphone notes from the night. Apparently at one point I’d just been for a walk through part of Crewe. I went down Mill Street and up Brook Street and up and over the railway bridge in Edleston Road. In fact was walking over the bridge in Edleston Road when I awoke. I don’t know what I was doing and there was no-one else with me. I was just strolling around.

That’s a disappointing evening, walking around Crewe like that during my sleep. I’m old enough to remember when the east side of Mill Street was a maze of cheap, crumbling terraced houses until in the early 60s the whole lot was swept away practically overnight. And as is typical for Crewe, it remained a derelict bombsite for thirty years afterwards until some kind of new development began. I can see the demolished town centre being like that for the next ever so many years.

Later on I was talking to some American woman about some people who had left the USA to go to live over the border in Mexico. I was explaining to her that to actually come to live in the USA and work was quite a straightforward matter but complicated as long as you had the right kind of education, background and qualifications but once you were in the USA changing jobs is extremely complicated and difficult. For many people it’s no longer an option to do so and they begin to look around for other ways of earning their income. At first she didn’t believe what I was saying and pooh-poohed it but gradually she began to understand the point that I was trying to make. She ended up by agreeing with everything that I was saying.

That’s a rare achievement, isn’t it? Having people agree with me like that. But conditions for employment in the USA are quite strict. Even though my niece’s second daughter is married to an American and lives in Michigan, she couldn’t even think about changing her job and leaving her Canadian employer until she’d applied for and been granted a work permit to do so. It took her fifteen months to obtain it.

The nurse came round and told me that he’ll take the blood sample tomorrow. So I’d gone without my morning drink for nothing. There’s no point remonstrating with him about it because it will only give me ulcers. I know what I would like to give him.

Breakfast and medication was next while I read MY NEW BOOK. Today, we’ve been talking about the myths of buried treasure, the myths of open-air meetings and also the ancient Graeco-Egyptian LEGEND OF RHODOPIA. Have a read of that legend and see if you recognise anything in it from your own childhood.

There is going to be a considerable amount of mileage in this book, I can see that. It’s going to destroy a great many of my childhood illusions.

Buried treasure, usually guarded by a mythical monster, is another story with a lot of mileage in it. It was usually buried in time of war and disturbance and his answer to the mythical monster is the threat that the person who buried it made to whoever was watching him bury it. People believed in mythical monsters in those days.

That’s not so far-fetched either. Nerina and I were driving around Brittany once many years ago and came across a garage proprietor who had discovered several ancient French cars from someone’s collection walled up behind a false wall to hide them from the Germans. The person who had walled them didn’t live to reclaim them and there they stayed until the garage proprietor found them.

“Buried treasure” is regularly turning up, buried in haste in the path of invading armies centuries ago, and presumably the owner didn’t live to dig it back up again.

After breakfast I made a start on the next radio programme. I’ve decided after much thought that I’m still going to keep on well in advance with one programme per week to keep up the rhythm, and use the spare time in the week to work on the Woodstock set. That way, I shan’t become bogged down.

Anyway, by the time I knocked off tonight, I’d done everything for the programme except dictating it and choosing the final track. That’s going to be another Saturday night/Sunday effort.

There were the usual interruptions – not a lunchtime one though because my appetite is still very much diminished. There was the visit of my cleaner, the shower and the disgusting drink break, as well as probably one or two other things that I can’t remember right now.

Tea was a leftover curry, except that there aren’t any leftovers. Instead I found a helping of pie filling in the freezer and used that instead. Not one of my more memorable meals, but you can’t win a coconut every time. The naan was delicious though. This batch of dough (of which this naan was the final helping) was an exceptionally good batch.

Tomorrow is Dialysis Day but I’m past caring about it and how it’s going to turn out. I’ll just wander off to bed (late as usual these days) and tomorrow will be another day.

But while we’re on the subject of treasure … "well, one of us is" – ed … one of my friends once told me "my wife is a little treasure"
"Is that so?" I asked
"It certainly is" he replied "and furthermore, I’m not going to tell anyone where I’ve buried her"

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Tag Archives: laurence gomme

Tuesday 12th August 2025 – I HAVE HAD …

Friday 25th April 2025 – I WAS WIDE-…

Friday 28th March 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

Sunday 16th March 2025 – I HAVE BEEN …

Saturday 15th March 2025 – THERE WAS NOTHING …

Friday 14th March 2025 – A TAXI CAME …

Thursday 13th March 2025 – THERE HAS BEEN SNOW …

Wednesday 12th March 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

Tuesday 11th March 2025 – I’M HAVING ANOTHER …

Monday 10th March 2025 – I HAVE RECEIVED …

Sunday 9th March 2025 – THAT WAS MORE …

Saturday 8th March 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

Friday 7th March 2025 – DOES ANYONE WANT …

Thursday 6th March 2025 (cont) – NOW THAT THINGS … .

Wednesday 5th March 2025 – MY CLEANER IS …

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