… 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."
but where its interest lies is that if ever you want to know where all of the humourists of the 1960s and early 70s like Monty Python and Marty Feldman obtained their ideas, it’s all here, everything and much more besides, and it was done in 1941.
