… football match tonight.

Hwlffordd, after their heroics last week, were away in the Faroe Islands playing B36 Torshavn.

With 6 Albanian, 1 Latvian and 1 Afghan international in their side and a fairly successful history in Europe it was always going to be a struggle for Hwlffordd and when they were 2-0 down with 30 minutes to go, that looked as if it was going to be that.

But late in the game, during what was probably their only serious attack during the entire 90 minutes, to everyone’s surprise they managed to score a goal – being in the right place at the right time with a lucky ricochet in the penalty area.

So all is not lost. They are still within touching distance for the second leg back in Wales next week. And who knows? It’ll be most unlikely if they manage to pull it off but stranger things have happened.

And stranger things have happened too. Like I seem to have had a reasonable night’s sleep. It took me a while to go to sleep, even though I was in bed early, and I don’t recall waking up until about 06:30.

After waking up I somehow managed to go back to sleep again and had to fall out of bed when the alarm went off.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages, it took me quite a while to go wind myself up and start work, and today I’ve spent much of the day in Canada back in 2017.

So far, I’m somewhere down the Trans-Labrador Highway on my way to Goose Bay.

Part of my trip involved having a read of the controversial AP Low’s book written at the end of the 19th Century. He explored the Interior of Labrador on behalf of the Government of Newfoundland and of Canada, missed much of what was important and drew a rather inaccurate map that led several explorers to their deaths.

On the subject of maps, I’ve been having a close look at a hand-drawn map by a Moravian missionary called Reichel who visited the area in 1872.

What’s interesting about his map is that he draws on it the location of all of the isolated cabins, who lived in them and whether they were European, Inuit, Innu or Métis. It’s the closest thing that there is to a Census of Labrador in the 19th Century.

There was also the dictaphone. I was in North America. We’d been to see someone in a Social Security department about some Unemployment Benefit or National Assistance etc because my partner was unable to work and neither was I. We were in this waiting room. Eventually my partner was seen and was told that she’d have to go to Mexico so we set out for there. We ended up in a waiting room in a Government office there that was 10 times worse and 10 times more crowded than anything in the USA. She had a ticket with a number on it. It was all extremely chaotic. We were talking to a couple of people, one girl in particular who kept on being called to the front then having to come back to chat to a couple of her friends who were there. I made a joke to my partner “it seems that the response to when you’re being served is that it’s always going to be next time, you’re the next one”. She didn’t understand what I was trying to say and asked me to explain. Of course it’s very difficult to explain a joke like that. We were sitting there in this crowded, uncomfortable waiting room, waiting to be called to the desk. It looked as if we were going to be there for ever.

Later on there was the dream where I was being tortured by that guy dropping rocks on my head somewhere or other. Every now and again there’s a dream that I don’t write out because of its gruesome nature but this one was so distressing that I couldn’t even bring myself to dictate it. And that’s not happened more than a couple of times in the whole of the 20-odd years that I’ve been doing this.

It makes me wonder if this was the reason why I had one of the worst night-sweats that I’ve ever had.

Some of the time was also spent crashed out on my chair again and I’ve really been doing far too much of that just recently, especially as this was one of the better nights of sleep that I’ve had.

Tea tonight was some of those Chinese whatsits with vegetable fried rice, delicious as usual, and then I had to rush to watch the football.

Now I’m off to bed hoping for a good night’s sleep again. I’m going into town tomorrow, on the bus as it happens, but I reckon that I’ll still be flat out on the chair in the afternoon. I’m rather fed up of all this.