… I’m off to bed without any food.
It’s not only that I don’t feel like any, or even that my stomach is churning around so much that I’ll be ill if I eat something, I also have to shake off this miserable feeling of tiredness, wretchedness and ill health.
As you can probably guess, I had another bad night last night, followed by another really bad day today, probably one of the worst days that I’ve had since I fell ill over ten years ago.
Last night, I finished off by saying that I was going to bed early. It was round about 21:30 when I finally finished everything that needed doing, and it wasn’t much longer after then that I managed to climb into bed.
It didn’t take long to go to sleep either but I awoke with the stabbing pain in my foot and a really bad fit of coughing. I’m not sure what time it might have been, but I tried for what seemed like an age to go back to sleep. When I finally looked at the time, it was 03:43, so it must have been about 02:30 at the latest when I awoke.
At some point I must have gone back to sleep because I awoke later and lay there wondering what time it was. I had my answer about five minutes later when the alarm went off, so it must have been about 06:20 when I awoke, something like that.
Once more, it was a real effort to leave the bed. I had a spinning head, nausea and heaven alone knows what but I made an effort to crawl into the bathroom for a good wash and to sort myself out.
The hot drink and medication were next, and even though I didn’t feel like taking them, I forced myself.
Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night and I really was surprised at how far I’d been.
There was some kind of rock festival going on in France and it was raided by the police. I was in my bed when they came. They began to ask me questions, to which I replied quite well so they asked me if I would mind being the interpreter for many of the interviewees. I didn’t really see that I had much of a choice, but one thing was certain was that I wasn’t going to leave my bed because I was quite comfortable there and everything that I wanted, including the alarm, was at arm’s length so I didn’t really have to move at all.
Could you imagine this? Me in bed at a rock festival? But it wouldn’t be by any means the first time that I’ve been asked to act as an interpreter by the local administration
I was driving my taxi last night. I was in Sandbach. It was a hot day, no-one was moving and it had been very quiet so I thought that I’d have a wander back towards Crewe. In the end, after much deliberation, I was parked up in Edleston Road, or one of the streets near Edleston Road. I hadn’t noticed that the rear end of my vehicle was blocking the street but there was no traffic about at all. Suddenly, a young boy came up and asked “are you the office manager?”. I asked why, and he replied “the director of Cumberland School wants to speak to you”. I’d heard this once before, but I hadn’t taken it seriously, seeing as it was a Sunday, so I decided that seeing as I was doing nothing better, I’d go. For some reason, I parked the car and walked up Edleston Road towards Nantwich Road and was planning to walk along Nantwich Road to Cumberland School. But then I thought “I couldn’t remember where Cumberland School was, and how I wished that schools would just have the name of the street, like ‘Bedford Street Primary’ or something like that rather than these fancy names”. I thought that by the time I found it, I’d probably want to buy an ice cream or something to cool me down, and it would have been cheaper to have gone in the car in the first place. But I bumped into a couple of people whom I knew. One of them was my Greek friend, so we decided to walk together. And these three or four people of us set out to walk. We were having this argument about shopping in Preston, about how the shops were better in Preston than they were around here, and should we look in this new shop that was being opened to see if it’s any good? I replied that seeing as it’s just opening here now, it’s probably been open for twenty years in Preston. I described one of my visits to Preston, where I’d gone into town, parked in a multi-storey car park on the edge, walked out, gone to one of these catalogue shops, bought everything that I needed for everyone at Christmas and come straight home again. This discussion carried on for quite some time. Then, suddenly, I looked around and thought “we’re in Stoke-on-Trent here. We’ve walked from Crewe to Stoke-on-Trent. Where on earth did we go wrong on this route?”. In the end, my Greek friend and I said goodbye to everyone and went over to the bus stop. On the corner of one of the streets where we were standing was a huge collection of bus stops. Then I couldn’t remember the number of the bus that went from Stoke back to Crewe. In the old days, it used to be the 20 and then it changed to the 320, but I couldn’t think at all. I left my Greek friend standing against the wall and went over to a couple of the buses. There was a group of drivers standing around the buses, and someone from the bus company looking very official with a crash helmet, so I imagined that he was collecting the money, so he must be someone important. I asked him if he could tell me which bus went to Crewe but he said “no” and walked off. The other bus drivers weren’t particularly helpful either so I went over and had a look myself at the stops. I saw the 320 on there so I imagined that this was probably it, but there probably wasn’t going to be another bus for nearly an hour. There was also a bus 550, and that number rang a bell with me for some reason but I couldn’t think why. By then, my Greek friend was sitting on a wall so I helped her down and gave her a kiss. That surprised her, but she responded. So we were standing there and she said “I hope that this isn’t a trick to lure me out of my home and keep me out for ages”. I had to reassure her that I was as disappointed as everyone else, as I was supposed to have had this meeting and it should have taken place a long time ago but I’d ended up in Stoke-on-Trent too and I was only supposed to walk half a mile. I couldn’t explain any of this but it was certainly no plan.
First of all, there’s no Cumberland School in Crewe that I know of. And if there were, it would be at the other end of town near the Cumberland Bridge or the Cumberland Sports Arena rather than off Nantwich Road somewhere.
Secondly, my Greek friend was a strange girl. She started at the European Union at the same time that I did. There was quite a group of us who began at the same time, and we used to organise social events and that kind of thing between us. It was only natural that after a while, we began to pair off and I spent a lot of time with this girl. However, although she encouraged me to spend the time with her, there would always be a moment where she would have a mini-panic attack and withdraw into her shell, and I could never penetrate her barrier. Strangely, a few years later when I met Laurence, she made much more of an effort to be friendly, but when Laurence and I separated three years later, she immediately withdrew back into her shell
Funnily enough, she asked me once to drive her to the airport when she was flying back to Greece. I helped her carry her suitcase inside and said goodbye to her at the barrier.
"Make sure that you eat properly and look after yourself" she said.
A woman in the queue behind her said "that’s right, we’ve got to give our husbands their orders"
And I don’t think that I’ve ever seen such a big, beaming smile on anyone’s face, either before or since.
And thirdly, although catalogue-shop shopping was a thing that I did at Christmas in the past, I have never ever been shopping in Preston in my life.
We’d gone to Chester for the day, a big group of us, and it began to rain. It continued to rain in one of the most incredible torrential downpours that I have ever seen. After a while, the rain stopped and we could start to walk. I went for a walk around and met several people from our trip, and we talked about the weather. At that moment, the level of the water in the town began to rise. It looked as if the river had overflowed from outside in the country and was beginning to flood everywhere. I made a few comments that were pretty much ridiculed by everyone else, and then I decided that I’d go for a walk to see exactly how badly the place was flooded. I went and found the little shortcut alley that I used to take from work up to the town centre. That seemed to be OK, but I walked on a little further and there was a steep road down on the right. Where the railway bridge was, it was deep in water and there was a torrent of water circulating up against the support of the railway bridge, making a huge splashing noise each time. I decided that I’d walk down that way to see how bad it was. Luckily, the pavement was quite high there, so even though the road was flooded, it wasn’t actually too deep if I kept to the pavement. I carried on walking through it. Then I began to think that I hope that this current doesn’t knock me over because I can’t stand up again and there’s no-one else about. Perhaps I ought to have come down here on my crutches.
Even now, I can still see where I was during this dream. I was at first in the city centre, and later, I was along the ring road on the southwest side of the city centre. And if the River Dee had flooded all of that, then the World really did have a problem.
And once more, going for a walk without my crutches, knowing full well that I should have them with me. It’s wishful thinking, this walking.
Isabelle the Nurse came in, face mask and all, and gave me a serious lecture about these antibiotics. With still no prescription from Emilie the Cute Consultant arriving at the chemist’s, I’ve been taking the ones from last time. She warned me against it because I don’t know if it’s the same type that has been prescribed, and I don’t know if it’s the same dose.
She checked my temperature too. Thirty-seven point four degrees. Yes, she thinks that I’m ill.
After she left, I could make breakfast. I didn’t feel like anything, but I’m going to be really ill if I don’t eat something. So I ate it, albeit with a churning stomach, and read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE
James Curle is still giving us his Roman pottery lecture, and once again, as I mentioned the other day, he tells us that "when we pass from the early vessels to those of later date the most striking characteristic appears to be that the ware employed is generally rather poorer in quality."
That’s not what you would expect at all.
After I’d finished, I came back in here. It was 09:55 and by 10:00 I was back in bed, not only fully-clothed but with my slippers on too, as I discovered later. I just couldn’t keep going.
It was, would you believe, 13:00 when I awoke. And a good forty-five minutes before I was back at my desk. It took me that long to leave the bed.
And would you believe? There was yet more stuff on the dictaphone from that three hours.
I found myself in a prison. I was sharing a room with another person, and there was also the Egyptian doctor whom I knew in there. He was there more as a doctor than an inmate and the room and the situation was more like a hospital than a prison. I’d bought my computer in with me. It was a new computer and I was coming to terms with it, but I was busy trying to do some work while he was busy trying to pack up and prepare everything for his holidays, the doctor. I went to change, and ended up with my fleece under one of my big fleeces. It made me feel extremely warm and it was constraining me around the chest, and I couldn’t think why at first. Then I began to settle down. I noticed that all over the room, someone had put these little hand-made stickers of an orange background with a face and two eyes wide open. So I wondered what was happening here. Then I noticed that while I’d been away, someone had closed my laptop. I wasn’t sure if that had shut it down, whether it would reopen if I were to open it. I moved it around on the bed to give myself a little space. The doctor then said something like “it’s strange really that there are only the two of us here who have some kind of information technology tool. I replied that when I had my taxi in the 80s, we had an Apple II computer and I had my first PC in 1993, so I always had some kind of information technology with me when I’m travelling around somewhere.
This is another one of those dreams that totally beats me. It seems to relate to nothing at all, except that I’m surprised that I could actually remember, during a dream, all about my computer-owning history
Did I dictate the dream about some friends of mine and me and me down in the Auvergne? We had a house together. We’d been somewhere and come back, but there was someone parked in our drive so we had to move these people out so we could put our cars in. I had a Ford Cortina in there that I was repairing. It was up on a jack, an electric jack with a hand-held button with one of these long curly cables to operate it. I could set it en route, either up or down, but I hadn’t worked out how to stop it. It was either all the way up or all the way down. This was not what I wanted it to do and it was becoming extremely frustrating. One of my friends was then talking about putting a lock up and I wondered what he meant. I imagined two subterranean tubes that you could buy that you could pull out and lock to stop people parking in your parking space, but I didn’t think that that was what he meant. At that moment from down the road, a car was coming. It was coming really fast on this dirt track and there was dust everywhere. It roared past and we both said that if it keeps on going like that, there will be an accident. But the car in our driveway, it was a dark red MPV with a trailer and had Ukrainian plates. It came out of our drive in reverse at such a rapid rate of knots that it had disappeared around the bend before we’d even managed to do that without coming to grief.
Having a Ford Cortina up on a jack would be nothing new, but an electric jack? Certainly. Those two red vehicles would be interesting, especially the Ukrainian one and trailer disappearing at a rapid rate of knots in reverse gear.
When I was feeling like it, I did some work on the next radio programme, but it was a slow, painful work that took about ten times longer than it ought.
Eventually, I knocked off to watch the football. Colwyn Bay v Connah’s Quay Nomads. In front of the biggest crowd for a league game for many, many a year, we had a game that everyone would have enjoyed. It was another candidate for the best game that I have ever seen.
It pulsed along from end to end and the dramatic ending couldn’t ever be bettered in fiction. No-one would believe it if you were to write a story like that.
There were quite a few kids in the crowd too and despite it being January, freezing cold, wet and windy, you wouldn’t believe the queue at the ice-cream van. Nothing ever changes with kids, I suppose.
So that’s it. I’ve had enough, and I’m off to bed, cold, hungry and fed up but I don’t care.
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Greeks and Greece … "well, one of us has" – ed … back in Ancient Greece, a distinguished old gentleman took his hlamis to the akestës for repair.
"Who are you?" asked the akestës, preparing to chisel out the tablet.
"Who am I?" asked the customer. "I’m one of Athens’s foremost playwrights"
"Euripides?"
"No. The wife caught them on a nail as she was taking them out to dry."
