Tag Archives: liz terry messenger

Thursday 7th September 2023 – BY THE TIME …

… that you read this I probably won’t be here.

Well, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m not all here and I haven’t been all here for quite a while but tomorrow I shall be somewhere else.

What I have been doing today is preparing for my journey. And it’s taking some preparation too.

There is however some good news. You might think that the idea that my neighbour isn’t going to work tomorrow morning so can’t drop me off at the station on her way meant that I’d have to make other plans.

Before I phoned to book a taxi (yes, I really am that ill) I checked the bus times. The bus from outside here doesn’t for some reason that only the dispatcher will know, go into town or near the railway station. I have to change buses.

There are three places where it’s possible to do so and in the past, I’d miss a bus to the station by a couple of minutes. However I checked today and found that they seem to have adjusted the timetable, meaning that I have a 20-minute wait at the port for a connecting bus.

There’s only 15 minutes to leave the bus at the station and board the train before it departs, so I shall have to hurry as best as I can. But it seems to be the most logical way to go to the station.

If ever I had anything to say about it, I’d have a major re-route of the bus network. It defies all understanding that here in the walled city, where the population density is heaviest, the bus doesn’t go to the town centre, the railway station and the hospital, and stops a good few hundred metres away from the largest supermarket.

So be that as it may, I’ve been quite busy today.

last night was rather depressing because I went on several little voyages that completely evaporated out of my mind when I tried to dictate them. My brain is really turning to spaghetti right now.

When the alarm went off I was dead to the world and had something of a scramble to rise to my feet.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I had a chat with Alison and with Liz on the internet and we had a few things to say to each other. Rosemary also sent me an e-mail to say that the internet was down at her place. The Auvergne is definitely “The Land That Time Forgot”.

First thing that I needed to do is to book my train from Brussels to Leuven. I’m not going to have much time in Brussels to buy a ticket when I arrive and, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m not as mobile as I used to be.

Once I’d done that, I had to track down all of my paperwork and print it off, and then organise my medical folder. I don’t need the stuff that I took with me to Paris last week.

But it really is a sign of the times that even one unnecessary piece of paper in the backpack makes such a difference in my mobility.

There was the backpack to pack too. And we had a slight catastrophe because I can’t find my box of medical stuff that I take with me. I’ve no idea where that might be. I’ve put it somewhere but I can’t think where.

That’ll teach me a lesson. I’m the world’s worst at organising myself so I have to have a place for everything and everything has to be in its place. And if it isn’t, than I am totally lost.

So now that my bag is packed as much as possible, complete with food to sustain me on my journey, I backed up the computer onto the USB key that I take with me when I travel.

And not having backed up the portable computer since my last trip to Leuven, which was in May, there will be tons of stuff to amend and append when I’m on the train tomorrow morning. A mere 2,338 files, to be precise.

There was even time to finish off sorting out the music for another programme. But I’ve not written any notes for it as yet as I’m going to have several days when I won’t have anything to do so I can catch up with it then.

A little earlier I talked about my nocturnal voyages. We were doing a remake of EL DORADO last night. I was accompanying John Wayne on his travels on his horse. Our version was much better than John Huston’s … "actually Howard Hawks’s" – ed. We did so much more in the film and went into it in much greater depth. It was another one of these that went on for absolutely hours but I ran out of steam while I was in the apartment of the girl who was trying to give him false information. It was nothing like the cabin in which the girl was living – it was an office block in a huge complex and an apartment above the Bank that was there, all modern glass and chrome etc. The person who gave John Wayne his information at the sheriff’s office, which was a huge place with lots of small offices was actually one of his ex-wives. She struck me as being quite a nice woman. But I ran out of steam while we were confronting the woman about the disappearance of the gang that we were trying to hunt down.

There was another long rambling dream, however as I mentioned earlier, I’ve forgotten almost all of it. The interesting thing about it was that we encountered the wife of a friend of mine. Her birthday was 5th September. I had another friend who was also a nurse. Her birthday was also 5th September. I thought that that was the most amazing coincidence.

Later on, there was another dream that I’d forgotten, one in which we encountered the body of a friend of ours in the Stores in a castle. She’d obviously been very unhappy and she’d committed suicide but I can’t remember any more of this.

However a little later I had something of a recollection of a few things relating to that last dream. There was something to do with hire cars. Whole fleets of cars had been hired out by big reputable companies but some were so old – quite a few “G” registration cars there as in the mid-80s. They had been hired out for this event. I was interested to know whether they’d hire them out again but the person concerned with whom I was talking didn’t know. All my colleagues at work were making remarks about the vehicle that I’d hired and about me driving it which I thought was awful but never mind! There was also something involving a bowlful of the dirtiest water you could ever imagine but I don’t now where that fitted in.

Tea tonight was fried rice and vegetables with some of those Chinese whatsits that I bought a while ago. It was a really nice tea too and i’ll have some more of those when I can

Actually I ought to have a think about making them myself. They are basically tofu and vegetables wrapped in some of that brick pastry stuff. I suppose that I could make them like sausage rolls and slice them into smaller lengths.

And that reminds me – I need to think about making my sausage rolls at some point.

Before I finished, I diced the remaining carrots, blanched them and put them in the freezer. There weren’t many of them but it would be a shame to throw them out.

So I’m off to bed, ready for tomorrow. I shall be in a rush so I need to get a move on. And it will be a long, tiring day which won’t end for quite a while. At least I can sleep on the train, if I’m not too busy with those 2,338 files.

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Monday 4th September 2023 – I HAVE HAD …

… visitors today. And that’s not like me at all, is it?

And not only that, but I’ve actually been to the local bar this afternoon too. And that’s even less like me.

They say here in France that jamais deux sans trois – “never two without a third” – and so what else I’ve done that is unusual these days is that I was out of bed this morning before the alarm went off.

Not by much, it has to be said, but by enough to make a note of it.

After the medication etc I went and had a shower – I need to look my best because the nurse would be coming to inject me. I needn’t have been in a rush because he was late again today

Once he’d left I carried on with a few bits and pieces until my visitors arrived.

It’s been a good couple of years since I’ve last seen Liz and Terry. They immediately entered into my good books by bringing 20 tins of baked beans with them. That should put the wind up everyone in the vicinity.

Much as I’m a big fan of European food, no-one else can make proper baked beans like the British. Even the “British Recipe” baked beans on sale in Canada taste nothing like the baked beans from a British supermarket.

There was so much that we had to say to each other, much of which was said in my apartment and more of it was said in La Rafale, the bar down the road. With the temperature at 28°C at lunchtime it was really nice to be out and about for once.

Liz bought a baguette so we went back to my place and rustled up a huge salad of all kinds of different things that I had lying around or in tins and it all went down very well.

Once everyone left I made myself a drink and came in here where I crashed out for well over an hour. Totally dead to the world, but then I’m not used to going walkabout like that these days.

Having eventually recovered consciousness, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. My father and I were going up to Scotland on a motor bike. The only problem was that we had our sister’s mouse to take care of. We were trying to work out how we were going to do it. In the end I was rooting through all of my storage cupboards and came across a large, flat, wide sandwich box kind of thing. We thought that that would do and lined it with newspaper and put the mouse in. It was a struggle to close the lid with the lid being so large but eventually we closed it. Then we were thinking about how we were actually going to transport it. It wasn’t until we were almost ready to go that I had the thought that we were going to be on the road for 8 hours and had made no provision for drinking water or food etc for the mouse. I wasn’t convinced that it would survive the journey without it.

At another moment I awoke and I had headphones on listening to some music – Alice Cooper’s I’M 18 was playing. In the background I could hear some other music. I thought that the alarm must be going off so I’ll go to turn it off. I went to the bathroom and noticed that the time was 08:00. My father was late for work, my brothers and sisters would be late for school so I had to dash round awakening everyone. In real life I looked at my watch to see whether I ought to get up but it was actually 02:54 so that must have been some dream.

It rather reminded me of Tommy Cooper and “I knew a man who dreamt that he was awake, and when he woke up, he was!”

Someone had run a bath in an apartment on the ground floor of a big building. No-one was sure except me about what was happening. I don’t know what happened next but towards the end a young girl stripped off and stepped into the bath ad began to wash herself. The Police arrested a guy who lived in this apartment who had cancer. Apparently the bomb was a trick to fill the apartment with gas and he was going to light it to blow up the building and himself with it. He didn’t care because he had terminal cancer and only a short while to live. It would look extremely like an accident and of course he wouldn’t care about dying with such a short time left to live. He would be a hero to whatever cause it was that he was following.

Finally I was out last night with someone whom I used to know. We were driving around the outskirts of Stoke on Trent going to see a friend of his. We were in a Hillman Hunter. When we came to a road junction he seemed to have a lot of difficulty pulling out. It turned out that part of the fascia panel or something had fallen down and was blocking the accelerator pedal so we couldn’t advance in the car. In the end we had to stop, which nearly caused a big accident, while he investigated. He pulled off the panel and we could set off. A big tractor pulling a huge trailer had seen us stop and he decided that he’d pull out of the side street just as we set off so there wasn’t really enough time. He had to try to accelerate his tractor, the trailer swung round, went into a ditch, overturned and spewed all the contents out all over the side of the road, and then pulled the tractor into the ditch after it. We ended up back at his friend’s house. His friend was married to an actress. At first we had to wait my companion was searching around for some stuff fof his. Then the guy came in, an old guy, extremely simple, not the sort that you’d think would be associated with an actress. he showed me a set of brake shoes and aske me if I knew what they were off. They were like nothing I’d ever seen. He explained that they were used in some kind of mountain pathway as a shock absorber for tourists who slipped off the path and hit the barrier. It’s an extremely complicated system. At some point I’d left my red Cortina estate parked in a lay-by for a couple of days. When I returned the interior light was on. I thought that it would never start now after 2 days with that light on. I sat in and turned the key and it did actually struggle into life. I was extremely surprised by that.

Tea tonight with a delicious stuffed pepper with plain rice and the rest of the salad from lunchtime. Having marinaded in the dressing for several hours the salad was even more delicious than earlier in the day.

So now I’m off to bed. I really ought to restart work tomorrow. I’ve wasted far too much time just recently doing very little of anything important. High time that I got to grips with everything before I fade away.

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Friday 25th August 2023 – I MADE AN …

… executive decision today. And in case you don’t know what an executive decision is, it’s a decision that you make that, if it goes wrong, the person making it is executed.

So having a form to be picked up from the chemist’s in town and knowing that my neighbour would be heading that way, and not feeling in the right kind of mood to rush about this morning, I abandoned the idea of going into town this morning and asked my neighbour to go to the chemist’s on my behalf.

It was probably something to do with the fact that I didn’t end up going to bed until really late last night and although I had a slightly better, more quiet night than I’ve had recently, there wasn’t enough of it to make a difference.

When the alarm went off I was flat out in the arms of Morpheus. I was actually in a zoo or a circus, somewhere where there were animals, but the alarm went off just as I was starting under way.

Struggling to my feet I had my medication, checked my mails and messages, spoke to my neighbour and then tried to find someone to pick me up at the station on Wednesday.

You’ve no idea how difficult it is, and I’ve no real confidence that the people who in the end agreed to meet me are really as reliable as I would like them to be.

Today was the final Welsh lesson of the Summer and it went OK, although I wish that it would have been better. There’s a couple of weeks now before the next year’s course begins and I’ll probably have forgotten everything by then.

At lunchtime I had a really beautiful shower and then changed the bedding. I’m going to have a really nice sleep tonight, a nice clean me in a nice clean bed. And I can’t say that I’ll be sorry. Mind you, as usual, I’m sure that it won’t be as really nice as I would like it to be.

With a short while to spare before the lesson restarted, I listened to the dictaphone to see what was on it. I’ve talked about the animals at the zoo or circus. We were going off from school on our Christmas meal somewhere. I was struggling to walk somewhat of course but I did the best that I could. My friends weren’t particularly interested for some reason. We had to board a couple of buses. The one in which I was sitting was an old lightweight thing with no windows, an open-top type of bus. It set out through these icy roads. Something happened up ahead which meant that we had to stop. Our bus had no traction and began to slide. The bus in front then decided that it would reverse to go around the obstacle. At that moment with the force my head was flung outside the edge of the bus and the bus that was reversing hit me with the most almighty bang straight in the right eye. I had never ever felt so much pain in my head than at that particular moment. I really did feel the pain from somewhere. People came running. There was a girl whom I knew and couldn’t believe at first – telling me not to be stupid about all of this kind of thing. Suddenly she screamed and ran off. A couple more people came and began to give me some First Aid to my head. But there was a real pain that I felt at that moment in my head and right eye

That’s probably why I wasn’t feeling like very much this morning. I really did feel the injury that I suffered during the night. I’ve no idea what had happened while I was asleep that might have caused it.

After the lesson I made my hot chocolate and then came back in here where I crashed out for a couple of hours. And it was another really deep sleep that took me out of just about everything.

Tea tonight was a salad, but with no mushrooms (because I didn’t go to the shops today) I had cheese and olives with it. The chips and vegan nuggets were cooked to perfection in the air fryer – the best that I’ve ever made.

Later on, Rosemary phoned me and we had a really lengthy chat as we usually do. Then both Liz and Alison were chatting to me on the internet. It seems that I’m quite popular these days but I’ve no idea why.

Tomorrow I’m shopping and then I’m having a rest. I’ve been working to hard just now and I could do with putting my feet up.

Not that it’s likely to happen but you never know your luck. One of these days nothing will happen that will disturb me. But then I’ll probably be bored to tears.

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Monday 31st July 2023 – I’M GOING TO STOP …

… discussing my miserable nights because you’re probably just as fed up reading about them as I am having them.

So when the alarm went off I was fast asleep in the bed and it was something of a struggle to crawl out of bed before the second alarm went off.

After the medication I went and had a shower to try to awaken me but that didn’t work very well. After the nurse had been to give me my weekly injection I came back in here.

It took an age for me to come round into the Land of the Living and it was a very late mid-morning coffee. And then I had a listen to the dictaphone.

There were tons of stuff on the dictaphone from the night there too. Someone’s name turned up on my social network, a boy whom I knew from a foreign country when I was at school. We got in touch and agreed to meet. I could recognise him from his photo. He was with some kind of little dog. When they came close to me they suddenly disappeared. I had a walk around this park and couldn’t see them. I walked across the park to the other end and that was when I caught a glimpse of them. I waved and they waved back. Eventually after many attempts we managed to meet up. It turned out this he had stopped to buy a sandwich on his way to meet me and his dog had seen someone with a sandwich and gone haring after it so he’d gone haring after the dog. he wanted to know why I hadn’t written to ask him where he was. I thought “it’s only been like 15 minutes” but something inside told me that it was in fact a couple of years that i’d been wandering around that park. That was a lapse of time that I couldn’t explain

There was something about Zero too last night. My friend from Congleton had had some good luck. She’d had her house up for sale for a considerable amount of time and it had suddenly sold for a much better price than she had anticipated too. She already had another property lined up that she could buy so she didn’t need the money and her doctor was asking her what she planned to do. She could come up with thousands of things. One was to buy a house at Prestatyn where they could go at weekends but would in fact be Zero’s house when she’s a little older. The other doctor thought that a good idea. He also mentioned about her becoming a private patient and having to pay for her medical treatment saying that private patients had so much better treatment than NHS ones etc. He also asked her when she was going to marry again. She made some kind of vague nebulous reply about that.

I can’t remember who I was with in the next one. It wasn’t TOTGA because her name came up in the conversation but it was a girl with whom I used to work who had a good job that involved projects. The thing was that you came up with your own project and this firm would back you and provide you with the resources to do it. She was telling me all about it and how good the other situation was. In fact it might have been someone I used to know quite well, saying how much of a change it was from her previous employment. She said that any kind of project was considered, whether fitting tyres on a car, rock groups practising etc. It’s the sort of thing that had I been able I would have been interested in doing. I had an appointment somewhere else but she was talking away so much about this that I didn’t really want to leave. I wanted to stay to listen to the rest of it even though I was running late. We said that the only way to do a job like this is to go at it 100% give it everything you have and take what opportunities are offered. While this might not suit some people’s mentality it certainly suits others and those are the kind of people who would benefit from some situation like this

Later on we had an old small FIAT saloon, the type that you could load things in through the back window. I was putting some electrical equipment in but knocked the amplifier on the back seat forward into the footwell. As I was locking up the car I told Nerina what I’d done and told her not to let me drive away in the morning like that. She asked why I didn’t do it now. I said that it’s too complicated being in the dark and I can’t see what I’m doing. I might start pulling wires out. She still thought that it would be a good idea to do it now. To be quite honest I was absolutely exhausted. I just really wanted to stop doing it and go to bed but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to explain it as a good reason to Nerina. I was busy finding all kinds of other reasons not to do the job right now.

And finally I was doing some research so I joined an institute. I was in their offices looking through some paperwork. I came across someone’s file. It was a huge front and back piece with hooks on it where you could hang it from a rail with the spine upwards. I took one of these out to have a look at it. It was really just full of notes etc and various items of correspondence, one of which was someone asking around if anyone had an Opel Omega or Corsa that they could take a ride in to see what they were like ready to purchase. Someone scrawled underneath “God, are they asking for a taxi here?”. I had a look through it and went to put it back but I caught my right ankle on a stone on the wall and that caused me to drop to my knees. I don’t know why that happened but I couldn’t stand back up again. And I can’t stand up if I end on my knees either. That’s what’s really stopping me from going very far – the fear of falling over.

So we had Zero, TOTGA, Nerina and a few other regulars out there with us last night. It was nice to see so many of our friends. Still no Castor though, which is a shame. In a couple of weeks time it will be four years since our Brief Encounter in Peel Sound and the Coronation Gulf.

So when I’ve not been asleep I’ve been dealing with the next radio programme. The music is sorted out, paired off and much of the text has been written.

From now on I’m going to try to do things in a slightly different way. Usually I leave the very last track until last but in the programme that I’m preparing, the very last track has already been chosen, and for a very good reason too.

Inserting a track and its relevant text into the middle of a programme is quite complicated and takes much more time but I’ve been giving that a great deal of thought in order to find a work-around.

Tea was a stuffed pepper as usual and it was of course quite nice too. Made with fresh carrots too. There was not enough room in the freezer to buy a bulk lot of carrots to freeze so I just bought a couple to see me through until next weekend.

I’ll need to make some space in the freezer for more veg so I reckon that on Thursday I’ll be having mixed veg in cheese sauce. Now that I can buy vegan cheese in good quantities I can have much more of that, and quite right too.

But that’s for Thursday. There are a few more days in between. I’ll wander off to bed and prepare myself for battle tomorrow. Here’s Hoping that it’s a better day.

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Firday 21st July 2023 – I MADE IT …

… back from town this morning.

Actually, going down into town was the easy bit because I went on the bus.

Mind you, I nearly didn’t because just as I was stepping out of the front door I realised that I’d forgotten half of the paperwork that I needed so I had to come back.

These days I can’t move very quickly at all so I was afraid that I’d miss the bus. But luckily I managed to stagger aboard just before she pulled away.

Something else that might have made me miss it was another miserable night. What with the football and everything it was long after midnight when I went to bed and it took me an absolute age to go off to sleep.

Once again, I was up and on my feet before the alarm went off, and after I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages, I went and had a shower to make myself smell nice.

Before leaving for the bus I put the washing machine on the go so that at least I’d have some clean clothes for when I came back. I’m running out of clothes at the moment.

At the Carrefour I forgot the cherry tomatoes but I remembered everything else, and then wandered off to the Post Office to post a couple of letters, one of which was the demand for a disabled parking badge, and to pick up a registered letter.

At the chemist’s the staff were fighting over serving me and I ended up with the girl who lost the bout. She gave me the Aranesp, which cost an arm and a leg as usual, and then I set off for home.

The walk back was agony. It really was. It took me an age and I was exhausted by the time I returned. I had my cheese on toast but regrettably fell asleep almost immediately.

It’s no fun waking up to a cold mug of coffee. I’ve no idea how long I was asleep but it wasn’t five minutes – I’ll tell you that for nothing. It felt like an eternity and at one point I really was contemplating the idea of going to bed.

Anyway, instead I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I was during the night. I was with a friend of mine. We’d gone to some kind of sports hall place to do a job. As we left Crewe to join the motorway there was a policewoman at the top of the motorway exit watching the drivers join the motorway. She shouted “drive safely, watch your speed limits and don’t speed”, something like that. Of course my friend immediately shouted back some kind of comment as he would about “what do you mean? I’m not going fast. What are you saying? What are you implying?”. Of course I could see exactly where this is going so I said “come on mate, let’s get to work” but he still wanted to pick a fight with this policewoman. In the end I managed to organise him and I apologised to the policewoman. The last thing I wanted was for her to chase us down the motorway. So we did what we were doing and it worked quite well. There was a roulette table and a few one-armed bandit things there. He looked at his watch and said “we can spend an hour here and have a play on that”. I’d put all the money safe so I didn’t want to go bringing it out again. I should have put my possessions into some kind of safe but I didn’t fancy the idea of it because there was no lock. Everyone could go in and take the stuff so I kept them on me. I really wanted to go home but he was dead set on staying here wasting his money so I suppose we’ll have to. But I hope that he really is only going to be here for a short while and not spin it out for the rest of the night. I could see that happening quite easily.

Later on there was another group of us who had been out for a walk. I’d ended up with a man and a woman who might have been some friends of mine, I dunno. We met an American couple. The woman-friend of mine had gone off to do something so we were just wandering around when the American couple appeared. They asked if we knew where a certain café was. My friend thought that it was the one around the corner from where we were standing although I thought that it was the one where we had been earlier in the day. We went round the corner to this one and could see that it was a really expensive place. There was nothing special about it. The guy said “let’s walk up to some place or other at the end of the track”. I asked “what about your wife?”. There didn’t seem to be much of a reply. Off we set. It was slowly going dark. We reached the end which was by the water. There was a girl there. For some reason I was asked to take a photo of her so that she could be put on a poster. I had the little Nikon and went to take a photo but for some reason the camera wouldn’t take the photo. It might possibly have been too dark. I took the big Nikon which doesn’t need the light so much and I positioned this girl in the street light at a table in the café so that the light would fall on her to give the best possible view, went to take the camera but found that the battery was flat. This American couple had a bit of a moan to me about all my things etc.

Later on I spent some time back in Canada. I’ve left Cartwright and I’m heading down the Métis Trail back towards the Trans Labrador Highway.

The area around Cartwright and Sandwich Bay in particular is populated by the Métis.

When the early European traders came out here in the 18th and early 19th Century, those employees who opted to stay usually took a native wife, sometimes an Innu but mainly an Inuit. Their descendants are known as Métis

Almost everyone out on the coast is descended from probably about 20 distinct families and it’s interesting to read the Censuses of 100 or so years ago. Each cove or sheltered bay would have its own “family” who would work the salmon fishing, the cod fishing and then go off into the interior trapping during the winter.

Even more strangely, suddenly you’ll find that in a certain location there might be a different family than in the previous Census. Almost inevitably, one family might just have daughters. When she married, she would stay at home and bring her husband to her, and he would inherit his father-in-law’s cove and trap lines

Every now and again you’ll come across a French name – Michelin being one of the most common. For a while there was a trading firm from Montreal – Revillon Frères – out here on the Labrador coast trying to establish a foothold against the Hudson’s Bay Company.

There were also a few merchants from the Channel Islands who tried to establish themselves here but a big bank crash in Jersey in 1873 wiped them out.

The Métis did not have any rights at all until the 1980s. Being the children of native women they were never recognised as Europeans by Law according to the European settlers, and because they were the children of European men, they never acquired the rights of native indigenous people. It wasn’t until Section 35 of the Constitution Act was amended in 1982 that the Métis became recognized as one of Canada’s three Aboriginal peoples and began to receive their rights.

Tea tonight was falafel, chips and salad. Quite delicious but it’s given me stomach ache and I don’t know why.

But now I’m off to bed for a good night’s sleep ready to fight the good fight around the shops tomorrow. But before I go, I’ll leave you with the HIGHLIGHTS OF LAST NIGHT’S FOOTBALL. I hope that you enjoy them as much as everyone else seems to have done.

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Friday 14th July 2023 – MY SAUSAGE BEANS AND CHIPS …

… tonight were absolutely excellent, and cheered me up after another miserable night.

And something rather unusual happened last night. I was in the middle of dictating a dream when suddenly there was silence and I then heard myself snoring. But strangely I was only asleep for about 8 minutes according to the timestamp and in that time I went off on another little ramble

That’s something that has never happened before, as far as I’m aware. I’ve gone back to sleep in the middle of dictating something but usually that has been that for quite a while.

All it all it was rather a mobile night and I was flat out when the alarm went off.

After the medication and checking my mails and messages I had a chat with Liz – the first for a while – and then a listen to the dictaphone to unravel my voyages of the night. It was school holidays so we’d all gone down to Kent. We were in the sea just a little way offshore and there was a girl there but I can’t remember any more about it.

We were then discussing the football. In one of these second legs one team had changed its entire back line and gone with a completely different set of defenders and midfielders. While we were discussing it we learned that one of the football managers who’d been on the park a couple of days earlier had died during the night but we didn’t get round to working out which one it was

There was a group of us who had been to Shrewsbury for something, a concert or whatever. We’d met some Ukrainian refugees. At the end we said goodbye to everyone and set out to walk back to London. I was in charge, showing the way. At one point I took the wrong turning at a roundabout and found that we were going back towards the town centre. We had to turn round and walk back the way we’d just come, re-join our tracks and carry on out of the city into the countryside. As we were doing that a couple of people from our party disappeared. We found them in a restaurant on the side of the street where one of these refugee people was with his family. We had a lengthy chat with them. Just as we were leaving the woman took us aside to ask how many there were of us. She counted and there were 7. She said that it’s because her husband and her friend wanted to buy us all a present. We thought that was strange because we hardly knew them but she was completely adamant about it.

At some point in the proceedings my brother was involved. I had to take something to a town in Scotland in the car. The guy told me where to go but when I arrived there was no-one around. A couple of minutes later he rang me again to ask where I was. I told him that I’d been there but didn’t see anyone. I was sitting in the side of this street for quite a while. In the end he agreed to come to find me where I was. he said something about a red engine but what I had in the back of my van was certainly not a red engine. I wondered if I had the correct thing. There was something in this town that I had to take away. I said to my brother “if I end up not dropping off this engine I’ll need someone else to take away this other thing”. He said that he’d do it for the petrol money. I told him to mark down his mileage. Then I had to sit and wait for this person to turn up.

I’d kidnapped a girl and was going to take her back to my camp. We set out to walk back to my camp. She was complaining that her feet were hurting. With my conjuring trick I summoned up some shoes and socks … fell asleep here … we were walking up the side of this motorway but she said that her feet were hurting so I magicked up a pair of suitable shoes and socks that she put on and said that it was so much better

While I was asleep in the middle of that dream I was kitting out an ambulance. There was an attendant who was rather miserable like Goldstein in The Navy Lark who was always moaning. We were kitting out this second ambulance to replace Caliburn. The idea was to take it for an MoT without saying that it’s mine to see whether it makes any difference and then start to arrange all the stuff. We’d be able to put away the stuff but it was all in some kind of haphazard order. I wanted it tidying out but the orderly guy was rather upset. I told him just to get on with it, we’ll do some and he can do the rest. He didn’t like the order in which I was putting stuff in the van but that was a shame, too bad. He made a few comments but I didn’t really take all that much notice about them

There was more to it than that too but you really don’t want to know about it right now, especially if you are eating your meal.

It was just as well that I’d done that homework last night and some revision this morning because in our Welsh lesson we were thrown straight in. We were hard at it all day but even so we didn’t finish the course. We missed out quite a bit.

Still, I don’t suppose that you can have everything.

It’s over now so I have a couple of weeks to forget everything before my month of full-time education begins. That should be fun on Zoom too and I’ll probably be worn to a frazzle by the end of it.

When it was all over I had my hot chocolate and home-made biscuits and then I relaxed somewhat.

In an on-line library I found the diary of Dr Eliot Curwen so I borrowed it for a read.

There was no Government medical service on the Labrador coast until, would you believe, 1982. In 1892 Wilfred Grenfell had come out from the UK as part of the Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen and he was so appalled by the poverty that he saw that he left the Mission, set up the International Grenfell Association to provide medical care.

Rather than having a hospital to which the people could travel (although there were eventually a couple created) the hospital travelled to the people. It was actually a small steam-boat in which he and his “WOPs” – volunteers who came “with-out pay” – worked up and down the coast

Grenfell was really something of a showman and entertainer and so his published accounts should be interpreted carefully, but Curwen, who came out as a WOP on Grenfell’s second voyage was a naïve, innocent college graduate from a well-heeled background and the distaste and horror of what he saw oozed from every page.

He recounts one occasion where he tried to photograph a family but the father wouldn’t let the children come out of their sod hut. He eventually found the reason – and that was that the children didn’t have one single item of clothing between them.

There’s a story of a father who tramped the countryside for miles trying to find food for his starving family. Returning unsuccessfully, he chased his wife and eldest children away from the house as they could manage independently, killed his three youngest children with an axe and then shot himself.

At roughly the same time as this, Captain William Kennedy, captain of HMS Druid out on Fisheries patrol off the Labrador coast wrote in his autobiography “these poor trampled-down folk, who never see a coin of the realm, are told they are British subjects. It’s an idle mockery. Under the truck system they are ground down and half starved, having often nothing but corn-cake and molasses to eat in the winter, and not sufficient clothing to enable them to withstand the rigorous climate at that season … On our visits round the island, we met with sights enough to sicken us, and make us ashamed to think that these poor creatures were British subjects like ourselves.”

Labrador didn’t become part of Canada until 1949. Prior to that it was a British colony

As I said earlier, tea was delicious. I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I run out of British baked beans because those elsewhere taste totally different. In Canada for example the tins are packed full of corn syrup and taste awful. They aren’t all that much better over here.

Tomorrow I’m shopping, if the weather has improved. It was horrible today with storms, high winds, gusts of rain, just about everything that you don’t really want in mid-July. If necessary I can stay in because I have sufficient to keep me going but I’ll go stir-crazy if I don’t go out.

It reminds me of four years ago when we were on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR on our Arctic Expedition for 3 months and everyone was developing Cabin Fever by the end of it.

It has to be said that it would have been a much better voyage if a couple of people I could think of hadn’t been on it. But there again, they would probably say the same thing about me.

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Friday 30th June 2023 – THAT WAS THREE HOURS …

… of my life that I’ll never ever get back.

It beats me (well, it doesn’t actually – it’s called “egoism”) why people come to these meetings and spend hours talking about nothing of any use whatsoever. There was even a lengthy discussion that went on and on and on about a Motion AFTER it had been defeated.

In my opinion, such as it is, all these meeting and others of a similar type should be held standing up, outside in a rainstorm. That would succeed in concentrating the minds.

My mind was sufficiently concentrated last night to have been up and about once more long before the alarm went off. But I really did wonder why because my head was spinning around for a good few hours. It really was quite uncomfortable.

After the medication I came in here to carry on working but knocked off at 10:00 to stagger outside and catch the bus into town. There was no way that I was going to walk into town.

Having stocked up on a few of the basics I came back on the bus and made myself some coffee and cheese on toast for brunch, and then I started work.

Today I’ve finished my exploration around Cartwright (at long last) and even as we speak I’m heading out in an open boat to go for a walk on what I consider to be the Furdustrandir, the “Wunderstrands” of the Norse sagas and to walk in the footsteps of Vaino Tanner, the Finnish anthropologist

His claim to fame is that during his expedition to the Labrador coast between 1937 and 1939 he made the observation, that has since gone down in history as far as I’m concerned, that

  1. Inuit girls are very keen to marry settlers of European descent
  2. they are the hardest-working of all of the Inuit people (and then goes on to list all of the household tasks that they are expected to do in the home)
  3. they have an extremely sensual nature

I was intrigued to find out how he discovered all of this, particularly the third point, so as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I went to the High Arctic myself in 2018 and 2019 to conduct my own field research into the matter.

There was a pause, for much longer than I was hoping, for this perishing waste of time of a meeting that could have been accomplished in less than an hour had everyone been of a mind to do so, but some people really like to have their money’s worth.

Back here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was down on the farm at one point and decided that I was going to stay here this time. That meant moving a lot of stuff from outside the barn door and moving some stuff around inside the barn so that I could put Caliburn in, then I could sleep in Caliburn and cook outside. It was dark and raining bit I did what I could. Then I went to get into Caliburn. Then I remembered that just before I parked him up I’d changed something over but hadn’t tried to see whether he’d start or not. I got in and turned the key. He took an age to start and when he did he wouldn’t fire up or run normally. he was coughing and spluttering. By this time I actually had him into a field where I planned to turn round. I thought to myself that I’m going to have a devil of a job now trying to move him to the path seeing as he’s not running correctly and I had my things all over the place.

There was also some kind of public meeting taking place with crowds of people. I had to wire up the PA system to broadcast to the hall. We had a row of 4 speakers down each side and 4 speakers either side of a corridor down the middle. It meant running wires to them. A friend of mine was cutting the wires and I was installing them. We reached one point where we’d had to move a few things around and the two wires were about 2 metres short. I had to go back to my friend who was busy talking to some young child and sorting something out for it, and ask him for some cables 2 metres long. He cut them. I thought to myself “should I give him back the old wire or should I just keep it and take it home with me at the end when everyone has gone?”.

I was back in that hall again later, this time in rural Canada. There was a big crowd of people in there whom we’d been investigating. A WPC had disguised herself as a citizen in order to infiltrate the group to find out what the private organisation was all about. One day she didn’t turn up so we went for a closer listen to the people and found out that they were concerned about how interested we were and didn’t seem to have had a hand in removing her.

Finally, there had been some kind of issue in an Army camp where I was. The junior staff was rather insubordinate. One of them had stood up to the Colonel and said something quite offensive to him on the lines of “well, you aren’t in charge of me; I am” which outraged the Colonel. He was fuming about it. he was planning on having everything all toughened up in the camp to re-instill some more discipline. There was much more to it than this but I awoke again with a massive attack of cramp in my left leg. That playing up now is all I need.

Tea tonight was chips and salad with some of the frozen sausage rolls, cooked with the chips in the air fryer. Just one more serving of those and then I’ll have to start on something else. But if I go to Noz tomorrow, which is debatable, they might have some more frozen vegan stuff on offer.

But actually there are plenty of carrot burgers, breaded quorn fillets, sausages and falafel so it’s not as if I’m actually going to be short of anything.

And thinking on, I need to make more space in there because I haven’t had a vegan pie for an absolute age. That thick onion gravy was delicious yesterday and some more of that, with steamed veg, new potatoes and a slice of vegan pie really would be delicious. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

But that’s tomorrow. Right now I’m off to bed and hoping to have a really good sleep. Not that I will, I expect, but I have to keep on trying.

Actually, that’s something at which I’m quite good. A lot of people have said in the past that I’m very trying, which was quite nice of them.

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Tuesday 20th June 2023 – I’VE HAD A …

… horrible afternoon today. and I really mean that too, in case you think that I’m exaggerating. I’ve spent almost all of it fast asleep on my chair, well out of just about everything.

It’s not as f I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep last night. I was in bed at some kind of realistic time and I can’t remember being awake for all that long.

And when the alarm went off I was on board the THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR. It was the last day of our trip around the High Arctic so we came back on board handing in all of our possessions etc ready to go to our cabins to pack for the next morning before we leave. I was talking to a few people and a girl probably in her late 20s with curly hair began to talk to me. She asked me what my plans were. I said that we were going to fly to Houston from here. I was going to hire a car and drive around for a few days. She didn’t ask but began to plan my voyage with me “we’ll have to do this, we’ll have to do that but you’ll have to drive of course” etc. She was a nice enough girl, pleasant, but I couldn’t get over the fact that she was wanting to come along and hang around with me for a few days. I went back to my room thinking “I hope that I recognise her when we’re having our evening meal tonight”. Back in my cabin, it was an absolute tip. I remember leaving in a hurry but I didn’t remember it being in such a mess as this. I began to tidy up but there was so much stuff, all kinds of it and a huge pile of lace curtains that i’d somehow brought with me. I thought “there’s no way I can take this home” so I began to wrap it up and put it in a sack ready to take to the rubbish. It was at that point that the alarm went off.

After I’d had my medication I did some preparation for my Welsh class but at about 09:50 I headed out for the nerve specialist, having a little chat with a neighbour on my way out.

The news was, as I suspected, not so good. All of the obvious checks were made and came up with nothing. The only thing to think of is that the cancer is spreading into my nervous system.

There’s a hospital in Paris that specialises in nervous disorders and goes deeply into the matter. Would I like to go there? Well, do bears have picnics in the woods?

As well as that, there’s also what they call a Centre de Réeducation here in Granville. That’s a place where people who have had a severe accident or illness go in order to redevelop their life skills ready to go back to their normal life. He thinks that I might benefit from going there and would I like a referral?

One thing that he did tell me is that I mustn’t hold out too much hope. If the cancer is in the nervous system nothing is going to improve but it’s important that I keep my autonomy as long as possible and the treatment that I’ll be receiving will be towards that end.

On leaving, I went to Lidl to do some shopping and then I came back here. Grabbing something to eat and a coffee, I went to my Welsh lesson. But it wasn’t a success. My mind and my heart weren’t in it and I was really glad when it was over.

While I ate my lunchtime fruit afterwards I was chatting to Liz on the internet and then I completely, absolutely and definitively crashed out. and it was the deepest and most desperate that I’ve had.

When I finally awoke I had my hot chocolate and then transcribed the dictaphone notes. Some you have seen, but there were other. I was back at school last night. I couldn’t find any course work for any of my lessons. I’d left my satchel in our form room while I’d gone off somewhere. When I came back there was a class in there so I couldn’t go in. One thing led to another. The following morning I still didn’t have my class work so I decided that I’d go in to the class to enquire. No-one understand what I was talking about for a minute until it suddenly twigged that it was in fact my form classroom too but no-one had seen my satchel. The teacher couldn’t help and neither could any of the pupils in there. In the end I had to leave it and go to find my current class completely without papers. I walked in a few minutes late. The teacher scowled at me and asked where I’d been. I gave some kind of vague excuse and sat down. She had to give me a photocopied sheet for the current lesson that we were supposed to be doing. There was something strange, that the class that I’d interrupted to find my possessions, all the kids were in school uniform except for 2 who were in completely different school uniform of green pink and white that had nothing whatever to do with our school colours that were navy blue and white.

And then I was with a girl from school last night. We had a kind-of fast food stall in the town centre late at night. It was an upmarket thing. We had a stainless steel plate that we heated on electric elements and would fry peppers and stuff like that on it. It was a very complicated way to go about doing things but if you used the correct cooking oil it turned out to be really nice. It was the end of the night about 02:00. Everyone was going home and we were packing up. Lots of people would come over to chat and have something to eat. We ended up having an interesting chat with a couple of guys and girls. They gave my girl a beer to try, a special beer. She politely offered me one but I said no. She offered me some cake so I said no. We had a very interesting chat about nothing at all for a couple of minutes as we were cleaning everything up and putting it away.

Before I had tea I had to clean dice and blanch a kilo of carrots. I’d bought some at Lidl because I was running low. And it was a real fight to fit them in the freezer.

Then I made tea. A taco roll with rice and veg followed by the cinnamon roll and ice crea.

So having had an awful day, I’m going to bed. I’ve had enough of this and I’m going to start afresh tomorrow. There’s something going on right now in my body and I wish that I knew what it was.

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Wednesday 7th June 2023 – BRAIN OF BRITAIN …

… strikes again!

When I was going through the freezer yesterday I took some stuff out while I looked for something in there. This morning I found that I hadn’t put the pizza dough back and it had defrosted.

There are some things that you shouldn’t refreeze one they have defrosted so I checked with Liz, and apparently dough is one of them. So I had to bake the empty shell part-way through and then try to make some room in the freezer so that it would fit.

Whether it works or not I really don’t know, but we’ll find out on Sunday, I reckon.

And while we’re on the subject of working … “well, one of us is” – ed … I was working today. And in fact, just for a change, I had a good day too.

It started off quite well because once more I was up and about before the alarm went off.

And after the medication and checking the mails and messages, I made a start.

Much of the day has been spent on the Canada 2017 project. Today I’ve been in Heart’s Content in Newfoundland, the site of coming ashore of the first Transatlantic communications cable in 1858

Although that one only worked for a few weeks, several others were laid that came ashore there subsequently, the first in 1866 laid by the steamer Great Eastern, one of Brunel’s leviathans that although a resounding success from a sailing point of view, was an economic disaster as a passenger vessel.

Somewhere else I visited was the town of Dildo, a very popular holiday resort for single ladies from a certain Greek island but contrary to rumours, not twinned with Fücking in Austria nor Orgy in the Auvergne nor Condom in South West France.

It might have a close relationship with Grandes Piles in Québec though

A third place that I visited in Newfoundland today was a site called Come-by-Chance, the place of the first recorded meeting between the European settlers and the Beothuk natives. Something that the natives didn’t live to regret because by 1829 the whole tribe had been exterminated.

The cleaner came round this afternoon and gave me the news about my neighbour. Apparently there are some little signs of improvement and that’s good news She actually went for a little walk with my cleaner for a brief moment yesterday, the first time that she’s been out of doors since her fall.

As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … I might not be doing so well but there are people far worse off than me.

And I had to redo a radio programme today. The one that I was due to send off this week was suffering from this muffled bass issue that seems to have sprung up. Luckily I found the master files and so it didn’t take me as long as I might had I had to do it all from scratch again.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too from the night. I was checking the times of the buses because I had to go to hospital. There was a bus from here that arrived there in time but coming back was going to be something of a lottery. I was chatting to some people whom I knew about that. They asked me why I didn’t think about taking the bus at the hospital and carry on the route instead of coming back so that I’d go all the way round. I explained the the bus’s terminus was in Baschurch, absolutely miles away. If I had to go out all the way there where I could catch a bus back I’d be out there for ever. It won’t be a case of a simple one-day bus trip.

I was walking around a town somewhere. I bumped into a couple whom I know and a few other people. We all went for a coffee and chatted about these car boots that you fit to steering wheels to prevent people stealing them. There had been a new one on the market just recently and someone had written a report about how easy they were to take off. I suddenly realised that a while ago I’d had to take one off a car so that we could move it. It was quite easy too. They were on sale in this newspaper for £10:00 each. We had a lengthy discussion about these car boots. In the end I asked this couple what they were doing around town. They said that they’d come to buy a camera because I had theirs. “Oh dear” I said. “I can’t remember having it. I should have looked”. Just then a caravan came down the street, a big huge thing being towed by a car. It had outriggers on it to stop it overturning. It went round the corner and a little girl with us said “oh look it has a flagpole”. I said that if it were to go on a campsite it would have to pay extra for the pole. The girl was so surprised but the couple said “yes, you have to pay extra for that”.

As well as speaking to Liz and the cleaner today, I’ve also been speaking to my niece and I’ve had another marathon chat with Rosemary. Her Ukrainian refugee family had been with her a year at the end of May and so were obliged to move on. Somewhere more relevant has been found for them and they left on Tuesday

My niece was telling me that her husband has had to have surgery and will be away from work for quite a while. He’ll find that extremely difficult because I’ve known him for 30 years and I’ve never ever seen him idle

Tea was another leftover curry with half a helping from the freezer, accompanied by one of a batch of naan bread that I made this afternoon. And I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that I’m not going to be troubled by vampires thanks to how I made it. It’s pretty wild.

Tomorrow I’m going to carry on with my Canada 2017 stuff. I have a visit planned to the site of the deadliest aircraft disaster in Canada.

But right now, later than intended, I’m off to bed. I’ve done enough for today and I’m exhausted. And I’ll have to work on my fitness because there’s shopping to do at the weekend and I have to be on some kind of form for that.

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Sunday 4th June 2023 – THAT WAS A HORRIBLE …

… night last night. I don’t think that I went off to sleep for a moment.

My left leg was hurting all the way through the night and I just couldn’t make myself comfortable.

So much so that I was wide awake at 08:00 and out of bed by 08:30 and when was the last time that that ever happened on a Sunday?

After the medication and the mails and messages I spent much of the day working on my Canada 2017 journey. I’ve now spent a week at my niece’s house, done some work on Strider and now I’m on my way for the Bay of Fundy to pick up Strider’s insurance.

That’s something that I won’t have to worry about in the future because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, Strider is up for sale. There’s no point in having him sitting rusting away at the end of my niece’s drive when someone else can make use of him.

Liz came onto the internet too. Her grand-daughter is into ballet and is off shortly to Portugal to perform. She’s appeared in a couple of videos just recently so Liz sent me the links to watch.

Tonight’s pizza was another masterpiece. I seem to have this off to quite a fine art now and that’s really good. I’m not sure how I can improve on how they are turning out at the moment.

What helped today though was that the oven was stinking hot when the pizza went in. I’d run out of fruit buns at the end of the week so I made a batch this afternoon and they look quite good. I’ll tell you tomorrow about how they taste.

There’s a little room in the freezer now to put the spare ones. While I was ferreting about in there I found a plastic container with some soup in it. Carrot and ginger it was, and I remember making that and how good it was.

And notice the use of the past tense. The soup no longer exists and it was just as delicious as I remembered it. It made a nice change from cheese on toast at lunchtime.

Despite what I said just now, I must have gone to sleep at some point during the night because there was some stuff on the dictaphone. I started off in the Air Force in World War I. My aeroplane had been attacked and I’d been killed. I was still somehow going through the lines of a song trying to work out the lyrics and have the tune fitted into them because it wasn’t as straightforward as it might have seemed.

Then I was in the mountains of Central Europe last night with a couple of other people. We’d been climbing these rocks and were having to move this wood about, these very long tree trunks. At times it was extremely difficult and complicated on these rocks. More than once we almost dropped them into the valley down below. When we reached a place where we could relax I was talking about cars. Someone knew where there was a certain type of car for sale but it was in Bulgaria. he translated the advert for me. I mentioned that I’d be interested in paying so much for it. In Bulgaria he said that’s an “anhorse”. I had to be very careful not to confuse it with “anhorst” and a few others that meant different sums. he coached me through it and then wrote it down. I looked at samples of his writing. There was writing of other people there. Some of it was really close together but very tall. He talked about whose that was. We agreed to make an appointment to see the vehicle but now we had to retrace our steps back the way we’d come with these two enormous tree trunks which was really difficult. We almost dropped them again in the same place. One of the other people suggested that he go in front so that he could hold them from the front while I held them at the back and we slid them along. How he was going to go to the front past me and these tree trunks was another big complicated issue. There was also a young girl there too but I can’t remember what she was doing or why she was there.

And then very early on Sunday morning I was heading into Crewe Town Centre to do something about this leg. I’d gone over the bridge in Flag Lane ready to turn into Delamere Street and they both came round the corner, my father eating some chips. I grabbed a chip and said that I hadn’t had any this weekend. I asked how they were and they asked how I was. We had a little chat really about nothing very much in particular

Shortly I’m going to bed – nice and early too. I’m absolutely whacked and I’ve already fallen asleep once or twice today sitting on my chair. I’m hoping to have a really good sleep tonight. I’m certainly tired enough but things never work out quite like that, do they?

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Friday 26th May 2023 – MY LUNCH TODAY …

… was delicious.

Down at the supermarket in town this morning they had some fresh broccoli on special offer so I bought a chunk, trimmed off the florets, blanched them and then stuck them in the freezer for a later date, now that I have room.

There was a nice, thick, chunky stalk left over so I made a soup. I fried an onion and garlic in olive oil with some cumin and coriander, diced a couple of small potatoes and diced the stalk, added it to the mixture to fry and when it was all soft, added some of the water in which I’d blanched the broccoli.

After about 20 minutes’ worth of simmering, I whizzed it with the whizzer and ate it with some crusty bread.

And I’ll do that again!

But here I am, waxing lyrical about going to the shops and buying some broccoli as if it’s the highlight of my life. One of those memory things popped up on my social network, reminding me that 11 years ago today I was out on an icebreaker as we smashed our way through the pack-ice on our way back to Natashquan after taking relief supplies out to THAT ISOLATED ISLAND off the “forgotten coast” of Québec.

The moral of this story is “whenever an opportunity comes your way, grab it with both hands and go right to the end. You’ll never know if you’ll have another chance, and you never know what the future has in store for you”.

While we’re on the subject of the High Arctic … “well, one of us is” – ed … the first track to come round on the playlist this morning, after what I had said yesterday, was THE VANILLA QUEEN.

It’s been a long time since that “fascinating lady” has been to “haunt me in my dreams” after “the bright, nocturnal Vanilla Queen” and I stood together on the bow of THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR watching the midnight sun in the Davis Strait. I was never the same again.

And while we’re on the subject of the High Arctic … “well, one of us is” – ed … the lovely Dyan Birch, whose voice is up there with Kate Bush, Julianne Regan and Annie Haslam, put in an appearance shortly afterwards.

She was well-know of course for her stint in Kokomo but before that she sang in an obscure Liverpool group called Arrival and their first album was one of the very first albums that I ever bought all those years ago.

The song that featured on the playlist was HEY THAT’S NO WAY TO SAY GOODBYE and I picked that as one of the ones to be broadcast in one of my radio programmes in due course.

It’s the song that came into my head up in the High Arctic as I watched “someone” walk from out on this desolate windswept and icebound airstrip to her aeroplane without waving or looking back and I thought to myself “hey, that’s no way to say goodbye!” but a few years later when I was saying goodbye to someone else on another airport, I suddenly realised the reason why some goodbyes have to be said in that way.

Samuel Gurney Cresswell, the artist and Arctic explorer, was once asked to explain Robert McClure’s loss of nerve after their dreadful experience in the moving pack-ice not too far from the first airport that I first mentioned. He replied that a voyage to the High Arctic “ought to make anyone a wiser and better man”.

However it didn’t work for me. One day I’ll write up the story of those three missing days.

But that’s enough maudlin nostalgia for the moment. We all know that nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

Let’s turn our attention instead to this morning, and the fact that one more I was up and about (in principle because I was far from awake) before the alarm went off.

But a shower slowly brought me round and I put the washing on the go. Oh! The excitement! It’s almost as riveting as the day that I had when the highlight was taking out the rubbish.

There was plenty of time before I had to go anywhere so I transcribed the dictaphone notes from the night. This was another one of these work dreams again, and I’m having plenty of those. I was working in an office but I wasn’t very productive and I wasn’t doing very much at all. Mostly wasting time. The Germans invaded the country and occupied the town where our office was situated. They ordered most people to leave. Those people gathered their things together and started to set off. At that moment I came back into the building having missed everything that was going on, saw them going, and said something like “goodbye, my colleagues. I don’t know how many of us will meet again after this thing has happened. Wishing everyone the best”. I’d heard some stories that some farmers had been far too friendly with the invaders and denounced a couple of people already. So we sat and started on what was going to be a very long ordeal.

But invaders again? We had them the other night, didn’t we?

Then there was something else on these lines. Someone ended up sending something or other to the office where we were working, as a kind-of sign of discontent but I can’t remember anything about it.

I also spent much of the night in company with a young girl and I wish that I knew who she was. We were talking about the area up at the back of Barrow, places like that. I mentioned a fishing port that was formerly very busy. When the fishing died out they came and moved some of the railway lines that connect the port network to the main line but left a diesel shunter behind that was now stranded on the dock and can’t be moved. We were chatting about all kinds of interesting things. Right at the end there was some kind of problem about her having to pay her rent on her little apartment so I suggested that she comes to live in mine. This was another one of those really nice, warm comfortable dreams that I wished would go on for ever and I don’t have too many of those.

But seriously, who would want a relationship with me?

It was a slow stagger down to the doctor’s and I didn’t have long to wait to see him. But as I thought the other day, he confirmed that with this series of injections, there’s nowhere else to go. He wrote out everything that I needed, wrote out the prescriptions, and that was that.

And that got me thinking.

It’s not the first time that I’ve mentioned it but a few years ago I was standing ON THE CREST OF SOUTH PASS, the gap that the “trails west” emigrants used when crossing the Continental Divide where to the east the waters drain into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, and to the west they drain into the Pacific.

It’s the most peaceful place on earth and I want to go back. I’m getting itchy feet again.

At the Carrefour round the corner I bought the broccoli, some mushrooms, some potatoes and a couple more of the small peppers. Now I know that I can freeze them, i might as well put a stock in the freezer now that there’s room.

Have you any idea how much a month’s supply of Aranesp costs? You really don’t want to know. And because it’s not on the list of GP-prescribed medication I have to pay for it up front and claim it back from my health insurance. That will hurt for a while.

So loaded up with a ton of medication (I’m singlehandedly keeping the French pharmaceutical industry afloat and they won’t ‘arf miss me when nature takes its toll) and having to go back tomorrow for some more, I crawled back up the hill onto my rock where I made my soup, had lunch and then … errr … relaxed. This stagger back takes its toll of me.

This afternoon I finished off choosing the music for the next batch of radio programmes but I’ve run aground at the moment. There’s a French musician called Miquette Giraudy who collaborated with Steve Hillside-Village and she wrote and played on several tracks. But you try to find them. None of my usual sources came up with the goods. The best example of her work that I can find so far is the album on which she collaborated with Hillage after he left “Gong”.

Both Alison and Liz were on line later so I ended up chatting to both of them. Alison was telling me more detail relating to our chat yesterday and Liz was showing me photos of her little week away in the Marches.

Tea was chips (now that I have some potatoes) done in the air fryer, with salad and some of the veggie balls. So you might say that part of my meal was a load of balls this evening. But then again, you might not.

Shopping tomorrow, not that I need very much at all but I have to go through the motions. I’ll go to LeClerc of course to see what they have to say for themselves, and I’lll also go for a prowl around at Noz. There’s usually a few surprises there and it’s nice to buy something different. It helps to shake up the diet.

And then after lunch a walk into town to pick up the Aranesp, which means that in the afternoon I’ll be crashing out. Terrible, isn’t it?

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Friday 19th May 2023 – AT LONG LAST …

… the internet is back up and running, as you might have noticed.

What has apparently happened, as the technician who came round just after lunch told me, was that there was a short-circuit in one of the apartments that had fused the main installation in the building.

They had repaired the installation but the short circuit persisted so they had to disconnect the circuit and gradually reinstate it apartment by apartment until they could find out which one it was.

Of course, it was in one of the apartments that is a “second home” for someone from Paris who wasn’t here so it couldn’t be fixed until they’d contacted the apartment owner and found a keyholder so they could go in, and of course it was in the circuit before mine which meant that I was disconnected while all of this was going on.

Whether that’s the case or not, I don’t know. But it will explain why the connection flickered on a couple of times quite briefly during all of this.

But every cloud has a silver lining, and it’s a real ill wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good. It gave me an opportunity to catch up on a mountain of outstanding work, which isn’t all done but it’s still progress, and also, because the technicians were coming to check my installation, it meant that I had to tidy up the bedroom. I even had the vacuum cleaner going for a while.

And while I was tidying up, I found the missing spare battery for the NIKON D3000 that I lost a long time (as in several years) ago. It had fallen underneath one of my bookcase units.

So how did I celebrate everything? Well, while I was in town this afternoon I treated myself to an ice cream. I felt that I deserved it.

Especially after last night. I was so engrossed in a couple of tasks that it was long after midnight when I finally crawled into bed. And when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was stark out. It was an effort to haul myself up out of bed before the second alarm went off five minutes later.

Mind you, after the distance that I travelled durning the night, I was surprised that I made it back in time for the alarm. At one point I was living with a group of Mexicans from 100 or so years ago, the time of the Revolution. We were living on the margins. We weren’t actually revolutionaries or criminals. I can’t remember most of this but there was one part where we were in a cave and there was some kind of event taking place concerning someone who had made a promise that he’d pay to have his wine crop blessed and fruitful but hadn’t done so. And so they held him to submitting his youngest daughter, who was 10, to be sacrificed. He had to fill in all this form to state about her etc and that he was willing for her to go and that he recognised that he was in default for not having thanked whoever it was properly for promoting the fruitfulness of his crops

Did I mention the story … “no you didn’t” – ed … about the 2 girls who had tried to buy some wine from an off-licence to get a teacher at school into trouble? The server recognised them and wouldn’t sell it to them. He had his revenge quite accidentally. It was the school outing and he’d forgotten to tell the parents of one of these girls. She hadn’t gone to school that day – she was paying truant. She thought that everyone else would be at school and cover for her but of course not being there on a day when there were so few students her absence was noticed and someone complained to her parents. When this all came out, the shopkeeper had forgotten to tell the parents about the trip as well, he said “don’t forget that I remember you from the day when you were in my shop so be careful not to make a fuss. You can see why karma has caught up with you”.

And then I had to go to meet someone in the centre of London so Aunt Mary had given me a book, an ancient book about Civil Engineering that she wanted to sell and have some money. All of the booksellers were around Angel Bridge Railway Station. I arrived at the Metro and the guy in the ticket office saw me coming. He had a ticket all ready. I asked for a return too but he replied “no. This is a weekend ticket and you can use it any time like but you’ll have to hurry. The train is in”. I took the ticket, paid for it and dashed downstairs but missed the train, found that I was on the wrong platform, walk back up halfway and enquire of the guard or look at the sign to find myself on the correct platform ready to go. But there was something else in this dream about someone being pregnant. They were discussing the pregnancy and talking about gifts that they should buy. One of the girls was very upset that someone else had been chosen to buy the nappies etc because she said that she didn’t have all that much money. That would have been an ideal present for her bearing in mind her shortage of money.

And we’ve had quite a few dreams when I’ve been wandering around the Underground in London, haven’t we?

Finally I had to go to do some research on Emerson Lake and Palmer. I found someone who had some information on them who lived in London so I went down. She was a bus conductor on the buses. Rummaging around in her office I came across a book that was an assembly of photocopied press cuttings going back all the way to 1967, news articles and everything. It was an absolute goldmine and I was enthralled reading it. It mentioned a whole load of clubs and places in London that you could see from the window of this woman’s house. I was there making notes. When she came up onto the top deck of the bus to show someone some damage that needed to be repaired I told her about the book and told her that on no account was she to let it out of her sight. It’s something that she really ought to keep for posterity. When I finished I was going back downstairs to her house. They were talking about a car going for an MoT. I thought “I’m not doing anything this afternoon so I can take it”. I put the book in my rucksack hoping that no-one noticed and went round to see about this car. It turned out to be a pedal car for children. I thought “this is strange” but I’d already offered now so I’ll have to go. I asked her where I’d go. She replied “turn out of here, go up the hill to the roundabout and it’s the 5th street on the right down there”. I was trying to make a mental note of this but it sounded like more than 5 minutes away but I was already committed now so I’d have to go and do it. This book of press cuttings is a little gold mine. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, especially in a dream.

After the medication I came here and slowly unwound myself and then attacked another project. A while ago I’d found the soundtrack of an obscure German rock band that had performed at one of the Hawkfests some time ago.

Back in those days technology wasn’t what it is today and this was full of holes from a worn recording tape. Using the techniques that I’d been practising just recently about “cutting in” pieces of music from elsewhere in the track, I set about repairing the holes. It wasn’t easy, but I managed in the end to make something quite presentable and you’d never find the joins. Even I was impressed.

There was a break for coffee and a fruit bun and I do have to say that the fruit buns that I made in the week are excellent. And as for the biscuits, that I have yet to mention, they have really worked and are even better than the chocolate ones that I made a while back

By now it wasn’t far off lunchtime so seeing as I was expecting visitors I started to prepare for a shower but bang on the dot Rosemary rang me for one of our marathon chats.

Just as she finished, Christian from the radio came round for the radio programme that will be broadcast this weekend. We had a drink and chat, and he told me about a local musician who is looking for a bassist. That piqued my interest, as you can imagine. It’s quite lonely here sitting in my bedroom playing with myself.

As soon as he left, the technician came round and checked that everything was working properly, and once he’d gone I could finally have my shower.

It was a painful walk into town to find some mushrooms for my salad tonight, and whet there were were pretty grim. Mind you they had some of those small peppers so I bought a couple for future use.

Next stop was the estate agent to drop off this paperwork, and then the long painful walk back up the hill to home, punctuated by a call at the new ice cream parlour that’s just opened

Back here I cleaned the peppers and put them in the freezer, and finally the physiotherapist turned up. His “marathon session” turned out to be 20 minutes but he had me working quite hard. I was glad when he left and I could have my hot chocolate and delicious ginger oatmeal biscuits.

And then , regrettably, I crashed out for about an hour.

Liz awoke me and we had a chat on the internet (now that I have an internet on which to chat) for a while and then I ended up with a late tea. Chips and mini sausage rolls cooked in the air fryer with a salad.

The mini sausage rolls are starting to run out now so I’m going to have to search for a vegan savoury stuffing so that I can make my own. Puff pastry is quite time-consuming and difficult to make so I might have to by a roll of ready-made stuff and use that.

So shopping to morrow, so I’d better have an early night. I’ll pop into Noz and see what there is there on offer. I could do with a change of diet. I’m still wading my way through the asparagus tips that they had but there are bound to be other exciting things.

Mustn’t forget the vegan yoghurt either. I’ve run out of that and it makes a lovely addition to my leftover curries. Things are definitely looking up around here.

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Thursday 18th May 2023 – IF YOU CAN …

… read this posting, then the internet is finally back on.

Well, actually it was on this evening at about 17:00, for all of about 30 seconds. There was just a flicker from the modem, it began to initialise and then it packed up again.

And then checking the error ticket that I registered, it’s still an active ticket so even they don’t believe that they’ve repaired it yet.

But I have to go out tomorrow so while I’m there I’ll stagger up the hill to the Internet suppliers, and instead of crutches I’ll take a pickaxe handle with me. That will sort out the men from the boys right enough.

Last night actually was something along those lines too because I had another reasonable sleep – just waking up a couple of times here and there during the night. There have been one or two like that just recently, I’m pleased to say.

Even more pleasing is that when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was actually up and about. There have been one or two of those just recently too.

So after the medication, there was no internet to check the mails and messages. And no work that I could undertake either.

But I’ve not been idle. Far from it in fact. I’ve been making the most of having no internet.

First thing that I did was to go through the memory stick in the back of the computer. It’s 128GB and it lives in its little socket. Every night before I go to bed I back up the files that I’ve used during the day by copying them onto the memory stick.

Since I reconfigured this computer (in August 2021) it’s become pretty full up so I went through and reviewed all of the files on there. Many of them are superfluous, having been overtaken by events or saved elsewhere. And that freed a pile of empty space.

Having done that, I turned my attention to the main backup. There’s one of these server boxes in here with a couple of hard drives in it. I bought my first PC would you believe 30 years ago, in 1993, a 386SX (prior to that, Nerina and I had an Apple II).

Since then I’ve gone through about 20 or 30 hard drives of different descriptions and everything has been copied onto some kind of backup hard drive all of which has been copied onto bigger and better back-up hard drives over the years.

About 18 months ago, my backup storage became full and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I began to go through and merge everything in to try to free up some space.

That’s what I’ve been doing for most of the rest of the day and although the project is far from finished, I ended up with enough free space to perform a complete and thorough back-up of the big computer, and there’s plenty more free space left.

There will be even more too as this project keeps on going, as long as the internet doesn’t start up again. If it does, I’ll have to go back to work.

But what’s exciting about this is all of the stuff that I’ve been finding, including all of our texts and programmes from when Liz and I were running “Radio Anglais” in the Auvergne.

Something else that I also found was all of my old University stuff. Those were the good old days when I was studying in the back seat of my car while I was waiting for my boss to finish his meetings.

Unfortunately I wasn’t a particularly good student because I couldn’t stick to the curriculum. I’d pick up something during the course and then go to put it into practice instead of reaching the end of the block. ONE OF THE THREE theses that I did for my degree was really good, well researched and involved a great deal of effort. I enjoyed every minute of doing it and learnt a great deal. But it was rather a shame that it went miles off-topic.

That’s the story of my life unfortunately.

There was some time left to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I had actually been away during the night, but not to anywhere exciting and not with anyone of interest either. However a young girl came over to me at some point during the night. She asked me how the door-locks on Caliburn worked so I took her over there and gave her and her her friend a demonstration. They didn’t say why they wanted to know that and I didn’t ask but it certainly seemed to be a curious thing to me that they’d be interested in something like that.

And later on the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union and I was fighting in the Soviet Union Army. Our unit was at the rear and the General refused to order us to the front. We prepared ourselves anyway and were waiting and waiting. In the end the General came to see us and told us that we weren’t going. I marched up to him in a very formal voice “we are going to the front and you aren’t going to stop us”. It was a very tense situation but in the end he gave us instructions and we set off. We set up some kind of preliminary camp somewhere. The front line was several miles away and we were going to walk to it. I gave instructions to the chauffeur to follow us with the car and caravan which would be our office. People thought that it was best to leave it where it was but I wanted it closer to the front line. He and the other chauffeurs were chatting to a bunch of girls in a field. We set off to march. There were one or two people heading our way as if they’d come from the battle. We could see planes overhead. We made ourselves psychologically ready for confrontation

Finally, I was in Crewe. I was body-filling a car door, making a bit of a mess of it. Someone else was with me. An old L-reg Duple-bodied coach pulled up. Although it had a couple of other operators’ liveries on it I recognised it as one of Barratts. Someone with me asked whose it was so I replied that it was one of Barratts. They asked how I knew. After the driver parked it he walked round the corner, boarded another one that was there and drove away. I said “let’s go and check the legal writing on it”. We set off to walk around the corner to where he’d parked the coach. Just as we were coming up to it someone else boarded it and drove it away. I said “ahh well, never mind”.

The physiotherapist rang me up to say that he wasn’t going to come (once again!) and it’s just as well that he rang because at that moment I was stark out on my chair. The excitement of finding all of these files must have overwhelmed me.

Tea tonight was a burger with pasta and veg in a spicy tomato sauce. It’s been a while since I had pasta and there’s quite a bit lying around here, as I discovered when I was sorting through stuff the other day. I might actually try some pasta instead of rice with my stuffed pepper next week, if I remember to buy an peppers.

But after all of this thrilling day that I had, I’ll transcribe a couple of the backlog of dictaphone notes and then go to bed. I’ll need a shower in the morning because the radio guy is coming to pick up my work as I can’t e-transfer it right now, and I have to go out to the letting agent at some point.

The physiotherapist says that he will come too, but we shall see. I’ve heard all of that before.

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Monday 8th May 2023 – AND THE ANSWER …

… to yesterday’s question was indeed “not very much”.

It’s actually a Bank Holiday here today when the country celebrates VE Day and strictly speaking I ought to be having a lie-in as I try to do on as many Bank Holidays as I can, but with the threatened arrival of the nurse to give me my fortnightly injection, that’s out of the question.

What usually happens is that when I try to lie in on a day that he is due to come to visit, he usually has a blood test to carry out in the building so he’s here before breakfast. Consequently, we had an alarm set today for 07:00 as usual.

Mind you, I needn’t have bothered because when the alarm did go off, I was sitting on the edge of the bed dressing. we’ve had another one of those nights – and mornings.

It was about 08:50 when he came round to give me my injection. And here’s a thing that’s totally unexpected – the database paperwork that he has to keep to record the injections that he gives me is now full.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“I don’t know” he replied. “It’s never reached this stage before”

So clearly I’m continuing to defy all expectations. No-one with this illness has lived longer than 11 years and I was diagnosed in 2015, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall (and I expect that I had it a good while before then) but while it’s true to say that I know all about ill-health, I’m still fighting on. Not exactly fighting fit, just fighting for breath and fit to drop.

With it being a Bank Holiday I’ve had a very relaxing day doing too much of nothing at all. I did finish the radio programme today, as I said that I would, and listened to the one that is to be broadcast this coming weekend but that’s about it.

There’s just one more now that is half-done and I’ll do that this coming weekend. And then I’ll have to start off again. I’m months ahead, which is good news, but there’s always this feeling that some of it will have to be done again as some of these artists can’t go on for ever. I remember back a few years ago in the old “Radio Anglais” days when I spent quite some time waxing lyrical about Chris Squire, only for him to begin to manger les pissenlits par les racines the morning the programme was due to be broadcast.

There was also the stuff on the dictaphone that needed transcribing too. We’re back on the Sherlock Holmes murders again. A couple of people had been struck down in a park by someone dressed entirely in black. There was some woman who dressed herself in black ready to go out just as 2 people were starting to walk on a common in Balham. These 2 people were talking about their past, the girl saying “wasn’t it to this common that you brought such-and-such a girl with whom you used to go out, but she was rather strange?”. The name that they used was the name of this girl. There were police loitering in attendance. They arrested someone dressed all in black in the vicinity of this couple and dragged him away. It turned out that he was actually a mime artist dressed in black ready to perform his act to collect money. As the camera panned to see him dragged away it panned through a figure in black sitting in a café on the common overlooking the events that were taking place

Later on I was going on a coach trip with work for some kind of sports event. One of my colleagues asked me if I went on the previous one two weeks ago to Carlisle. I said no because I had something else to do that evening. While we were waiting for the coach back on this draughty bus station it just didn’t appear. We sat there waiting. There were several tomatoes rolling around, coming and going. One of them came back so I asked it if it had come to pick us up. Someone said “I’ve already asked him and it’s not him” so we sat there and waited. Suddenly I realised that I didn’t have my watch or my key to the office. I’d left them at home. I was wondering what I was going to do. I thought that I’d better take a gamble and go to fetch them. I ran, which was the first time in ages, all the way home to our house in Vine Tree Avenue. All the lights were on. I could hear people moving around. The front door was unlatched so I walked in and ran lightly up the stairs. The taps were all dripping in the bathroom but no-one was in there. My brother was asleep in bed with the light on so I walked quietly in, picked up the key card and my watch that was on the bed, came out and came downstairs again. I could hear my parents in the front room talking about me but I didn’t have the time to stay and listen. I managed to open the door again without making too much noise and set off to run back to the bus station.

It’s a total mystery to me why it is that my family keeps on intruding into my nocturnal voyages. During my waking hours I don’t even waste a minute thinking about them so what’s going on in my subconscious? I don’t mind Nerina putting in an appearance every now and again – after all I invited her into my life for better or for worse, but one of the reasons of leaving the UK was to escape the negativity of everything that was weighing me down and I thought that I’d left them all behind.

But it was interesting to read the bit about “running”, given how I’ve not been out running for a couple of years and I couldn’t do so these days anyway. When we started this programme at University we had all kinds of people recording their dreams, one of whom was a girl who was born without legs. She would tell us that although she’s never walked a single step in the whole of her life (for obvious reasons) she still dreamt about herself going for a walk. So clearly, dreaming isn’t completely tied up with your own personal experiences.

Finally I’d had some issues at work about sick leave, that kind of thing. In the end what I used to do was that at night I’d take a van from work without authority and do furniture removals etc. On one occasion I came back with my Luton Transit. We dropped it off at Zero’s father and began to strip it for spares so we could sell the bits and move on. It wasn’t until we had it pretty much dismantled that it suddenly occurred to me that in the back of it was an old Volkswagen estate, another estate car, a motorbike and lots of other bits and pieces. I’d been using it as a shed I went round to see his wife and said “you’ll never guess what I’ve just remembered” but she told me. She asked me what the plan was. One thing going through my mind was to hire a vehicle, put the Luton Transit on the back and drive al lthe way to France, unload it, drive back and carry on. I said that it would probably take us about a week. If you like, you, your husband and Zero could come along as well. She looked dubious at that point and asked “could it be done in a weekend?”. I replied “we could get there and back in a weekend but unloading it is something else”. She said “the difficulty is with Zero. She could go to her grandfather’s who could take a day off work to look after her but I don’t think that we could do anything else. Are you sure that it couldn’t be done in a weeked?”. I had to describe the journey to her etc. She said “the next question of course is whether we have any money”. I repled “you won’t need any money. Everything will be on me of course”. We had this huge discussion.

Interestingly, I do have a Luton Transit, as regular readers of this rubbish in one of its previous versions will recall. I bought it for scrap because I wanted the box off the back to use as a garden shed and it’s still down on the farm 20-odd years later. And there is a Volkswagen estate in the back of it too, albeit in pieces. A diesel estate that was crashed in Spain and which I recovered to use for spares for mine.

And even more interestingly, while I was waiting to take it down to the farm, I did use it around Brussels doing furniture removals at night and weekends. No tax, no MoT, no nothing in fact. But back then in those days no-one really cared. I remember reading the story of Sir Daniel Gooch, Chairman of the Great Western Railway, reminiscing about the experiences of the way that the GWR operated in its early days, and commenting “what would be said of such a mode of proceeding today?”.

And, interestingly, once more as Tom Petty would have it, “HOW COULD I GET SO CLOSE TO” ZERO “AND STILL BE SO FAR AWAY?”. I’m not sure how many times this is just recently that she’s just been tantalisingly dangled out of reach during one of my nocturnal rambles. It seems that I can summon up members of my family at the drop of a hat but Zero, TOTGA and Castor are totally eluding me. And the Vanilla Queen dropped off the radar a long time ago.

Looking back on things, each time that I’ve been up in the High Arctic, and each time I’ve been trying to edit that Colosseum live concert late at night on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR I’ve had a strange encounter with a mysterious young lady of the opposite sex. First there was The Vanilla Queen, and the next time there was Castor. Jamais deux sans trois as they say around here, but the way my health is going, there won’t be another trip out there. 700 miles from the North Pole we were in 2018 and it looks like that will be that. No Rensselaer Harbour, no Thank God Harbour (where my namesake is buried after they poisoned him 150 years ago) and no Fort Conger.

All of this reminiscing probably means that I have too much time on my hands. But nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

So having crashed out here and there, I went for tea. Steamed veg with falafel balls and a vegan cheese sauce. It’s amazing just how different things have become since mainstream French supermarkets are now selling vegan cheese. It’s expensive of course, but it saves me having to bring back a rucksack full every time that I return from Leuven.

Tomorrow is a Welsh lesson of course, so I’m off to bed early. I don’t want to go crashing out in the middle of my lesson. And then I’ll have to pack my stuff ready for Leuven. Three hospital appointments I have on Thursday so I’m going to be busy.

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Thursday 4th May 2023 – I HOPE THAT YOU HAD …

… a happy star wars day today. May the Fourth be with you.

It’s certainly been with someone, because it hasn’t been with me at all. I don’t know why but I seem to have gone several paces backwards today.

It was another one of these usual nights that started off with a disaster. Every night before I go to bed I back up my computer.

There’s a powerful memory stick in one of the back ports and I use the search option to identify all of the files that I’ve used during the day and copy them onto the memory stick “just in case”.

So there I was using the “search all files saved today” function and all of a sudden it came up with “no files found”. That’s of course nonsense because I’ve spent much of the day working on the computer.

Three or four attempts came up with the same result, but then all of a sudden the light went on in my brain. In the time it had taken (a mere few milliseconds) to actually start and then finish the search it had passed midnight. So “today” was now “yesterday” and I wasn’t searching that. In the couple of milliseconds that had been “today” I hadn’t used any files.

From all of the foregoing you’ll gather that I had a late night. But even so, coupled with all of the usual difficulties that I’ve been having about sleeping, I was still up and about before the alarm went off at 07:00.

When I say “up and about”, I mean in the figurative sense. The body was there but the mind certainly wasn’t and I can’t think of a single thing that I did during the morning. I just sat and vegetated.

At lunchtime though I went and had a shower in the hope that that would revive me (it didn’t) and then I walked into town. And I hadn’t gone 20 yards from my doorstep before my right leg collapsed again. Luckily I had my crutches to hand otherwise we might have had a nasty accident.

It gave out again a bit further on as I headed down the hill and this is extremely discouraging news. I’m off to Leuven next Wednesday and this is not the time for my leg to be breaking down.

At the letting agent’s I introduced myself and gave them the necessary paperwork and discussed my plans. They shall make further enquiries and get back to me. But it’s not going to be as quick as I was expecting or hoping. Not to worry though. The news that they were able to give me was encouraging from my own point of view.

It was a bright sunny day when I set out so of course I went without a coat. And so as you might expect, it was raining when I returned. Only for a while tough. It soon brightened up again.

Still warm though, so the sight of two elderly tourists wandering around in thermal bubble-jackets, woolly hats and scarves was rather bewildering.

Back here I had some hot chocolate and more of my coffee biscuits and then transcribed the dictaphone notes, of which there were more than just a few. And for a start I had awoken again right in the middle of a dream only for it all to completely evaporate away the moment that I awoke. This is all very depressing and disappointment because I want to know who it is on whom I’m missing out.

Later I’d gone out for a run in a wood in an old quarry. I was running around there when my brother appeared (yet again). For a while he was with me but I accelerated a little and left him behind. When it came to going back home I started to race and I was quite some distance in front. I pounded up a steep gravel bank to the top, only to find that he had caught up with me somehow. He said something like “oh I’m going to catch you up”. I replied “no you aren’t”. He asked why and I replied “I’m going to go ‘BOOOH” to you” which of course I did. he was so startled that he fell down in this quarry all the way to the bottom again. I could have carried on had I wanted but I stopped to see how he was. Then we carried on back towards home talking about football and things like that.

And then I was with a girl from University last night. We were talking a bit about old times, then I forget most of what happened after that. But later I stepped back into this dream and she was running a newspaper or some kind of similar office. I’d started to do some volunteer work for her. I turned up in the afternoon after lunch. She was doling out the work to different people. She gave me a couple of pieces, one of which was some information about someone who lived in a certain building in the City of London. At first I didn’t recognise the name of the building – then I did because it was the building where my aunt used to live but had changed names. I knew that there was a pretty disreputable guy who lived there. This was asking all kinds about him. She wanted someone to research it. That’s why she asked me to do it. There was more stuff too, a little more complicated. I was reading this memo that had come. It was a simple straightforward memo by the looks of things. I suddenly had a kind-of Writer’s Block. I couldn’t think of how I was going to reply to it. Then I began to worry thinking that I don’t have much time as it is. I can’t afford to spend this time sitting here staring at this and not actually doing anything about it.

I also had a phone call to make. It was really early in the morning. Another friend of mine from University (and I wish that I’d noted who he was) was in a Court case. He’d said something about something or other. I’d sent him a message asking him if he needed me to do anything for him – to find anything. But late last night as I was going to, I noticed that he’d replied and said “no” so this morning very early as soon as I awoke I phoned him and had a very quiet word with him to wish him luck and making sure that there had been no new developments overnight that needed me to do something on his behalf.

Finally, coming into Paris, I was with a couple of good friends. We were driving. The first thing that I noticed was that at the slip road at the side of the motorway there were a couple of motor bikes that looked as if they’d had an accident and were blocking the road. A little further back there was a car and someone was moving a pile of cones so that the car could join the main motorway rather than carry on along the small road. Then there was a whole pile of motorcycles that looked as if they’d been flattened by something and cars that were parked any old how. It all looked as if they’d been disturbed by a hurricane or tornado or something. As we dropped down the hill into the city we could see everything in the distance. There was what looked like a huge gorilla walking around in a park quite some distance away. We could make it out with the naked eye. We all stopped and had a look. Just then our car performed a 360° pirouette then carried on driving.

After all of that I … errr … reclined for a while.

Tea tonight was one of those curried vegan burgers with some curried fried rice. And for some reason it didn’t taste as nice as my food has been doing just recently. In fact, thinking about it, yesterday’s meal didn’t taste as good as it might have done either. I wonder if I’m sickening for something.

Like I said just now, this is really not the time for me to go breaking down.

But break down I did because when I came back in here after tea, I crashed out yet again. This really is too bad.

Things are going to have to improve at some point soon, I hope, because all of this is getting on my nerves as you can imagine. I’m not looking forward to my trip next week if I can’t do better than this.

But one thing is certain after what I learnt today, and that is that I’m not going anywhere without my crutches. Not on your Nellus Secundus

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