… it goes around here – at least, regular readers of this rubbish will recall exactly how it goes.
You make a start on a simple job that should take 10 minutes, and one thing leads to another. And once you make a start you’ll be surprised at how many other things there are.
That’s how it went today – I wanted to choose a piece of music by Jim Croce for the next radio programme only I can’t find any.
So did I digitalise it during my mammoth digitalisation project of a couple of years ago? And if I didn’t, where the hell is the analogue tape from years ago? And why isn’t the tape deck working?
How many times have we been here before?
And that’s a shame because the day seemed to start so well. Despite having crashed out while writing my notes last night, I finished them quite early and in the absence of anything else I went and had an early night.
What’s more, I slept right through until the alarm went off in the morning and can’t remember a thing of what happened in bed.
When the alarm went off I checked my blood pressure again. 17.5/9.8 this morning compared to 19.8/12.4 last night.
What intrigues me is these “target figures” of 14.0/9.0. How am I supposed to reduce my blood pressure? What steps should I be taking?
It all seems pretty pointless to me to be told to control my blood pressure and not tell me how.
After the medication I came back in here to check the dictaphone notes to see if I’d been anywhere. And to my surprise there was quite a bit of stuff. I ended up living in Dungeness on the southeast point of England facing France. I just wanted to opt out of society. After a while I was persuaded to play a couple of folk gigs which they had to do with 2 people on the stage behind me ready to grab me if I fell over and pick up anything that fell down. They went well so we talked about a folk festival at Dungeness. We erected a stage and invited groups and audiences. It all seemed to go very well. One of the performers was a young girl. It seemed that every newspaper that interviewed her was only interested in if she was having “a physical affair” with another member of the band. She walked out of so many interviews as soon as they asked her that. There was another musician on stage, a young guy, who was really good and as well as singing, had the audience moving as well and had some really good exchanges with them. apart from the odd hiccup it all seemed to go really well
But that bit about the girl and the newspaper interviews – that’s another story that I could tell you but for the fact that the Statute of Limitations doesn’t cover the issues that would be raised.
However Dungeness was one of my favourite places to camp out, not the least of reasons being that I could pick up French wi-fi there and that was important in the days before roaming.
But while we’re on the subject of roaming … "well, one of us is" – ed … A few years ago I was in North America and because of the high cost of roaming over there I’d switched my ‘phone over from “any operator” to just the network of my supplier, which meant in effect that I wouldn’t pick up anything at all
Anyway, I took the ferry from Sydney in Nova Scotia across the Gulf of St Lawrence to Newfoundland to see my friend there and I went on the “long crossing” to Argentia, all 23 or so hours of it.
When we were about three-quarters of the way across, my ‘phone started to go berserk with all kinds of messages, missed phone calls and the like – alarms and bells going off everywhere.
Of course there are a couple of islands – St Pierre et Miquelon – in the Gulf of St Lawrence that are still French possessions, part of the DOMTOM (Dominions et Territoires Outre-Mer), relics of the old fishing station disputes of the 19th Century.
They are treated by the French as the UK treats, say, the Isle of Man, so all of the French companies are there, even my French network supplier, and as we sailed past, it was simply beaming to me my missed calls and messages as if we were anywhere in le Héxagone – mainland France.
After that I checked on the immigration rules for the islands and to my surprise, seeing as I hold a French residency card, there aren’t any. I began to think of a cunning plan but as we know, ill-health overwhelmed me.
Mind you, I’d have loved to have seen what the Sécu – the Social Security – would have said about paying for a taxi for me from there to Paris.
Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed, we were playing that strange and weird game again that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. It was the end of the season and we’d avoided relegation despite having no money and no crowd particularly. It was the end-of-season meal where everyone was supposed to be eating and making speeches. I came downstairs and followed the trail. I was swept up in the crowd and had to fight my way through. At the bottom of the stairs you either turned left into the concert or right into the refectory. I went right and chose my meal from a buffet type of thing. Someone, the President of our league I suppose spoke about our teams – ever-present in the league we were but we never did very well as we had no money etc. Other teams did much better but they had much better investment. I had to tell a poem about a departed friend so I had to write one more-or-less on the spot and read it out. That was rather a challenge because with his death I was in no mood to write or challenge them
Somewhere in that dream I was walking down the Avenue de L’Exposition. I had a job as a taxi driver for a company but I thought that my car was rather old and was embarrassed about it. On my way down the hill, coming up the hill was a Ford Zephyr 6 C-registration with a taxi sign on it so maybe my car wasn’t all that old after all. On thing that I learnt was that trips to the hospital were taking place by tour de rôle – each driver went on a rota and they did hospital trips in turn. At the road junction further down I found a pile of peas. I thought that they obviously belonged to the hospital because that’s the nearest big building so would they send a fleet of cars, one to take one of these peas individually to the hospital or not
Now that’s what I call a logical dream.
After the coffee and bread pudding I made a start on the next radio programme.
This one was going to be complicated. I needed to find some music by a couple of artists, one a guy called Tim Davis. He was the long-time drummer for Steve Miller but retired due to diabetes, of which after having his legs amputated, he died.
He wrote a couple of songs for the Steve Miller Band and sang on one or two of them, but my “usual sources” wasn’t able to distinguish which and there was considerable dispute about one of them. In the end, I had to delve deep down into the bowels of the internet to find some evidence upon which I can rely, only to find that I didn’t have the song, so I had to hunt down a copy of that.
Then there was Jim Croce. He spent years dithering as to whether he wanted to be a rock star and finally, after years of deliberation, he launched himself off into a search for stardom, only to be immediately killed in a ‘plane crash.
As I said earlier, I had some of his stuff somewhere and that ended up into turfing out almost every drawer, box and cupboard. And then I had to digitalise it once I could make the tape player work.
The track for which I was particularly looking was WALKING TO GEORGIA.
Where he’s going to in Georgia is Macon (“Mahh-com”, Jim, not “May-con”) and of course regular readers of this rubbish will recall having been with me on several occasions to Macon in Burgundy to see my friend Jean-Marc, with whose family I stayed on a student exchange when I was 16.
Best thing that I ever did, was to go on a student exchange and I’m glad that my great nieces in Canada have been on a few.
My trip opened up my eyes to the big wide world and a totally different culture, and I was never the same afterwards. Having been once, I was determined to go again – and again, and again etc.
But going back to Jim Croce and his song, “Walking to Georgia” to see his girl reminds me of the times that I walked back from Chester through the night to where I was living near Audlem after seeing my girl – all 30 or so miles of it.
Eventually I managed to sort out everything and by the time that I knocked off for tea, I’d chosen all of the music, paired it off and written the first couple of notes.
Tea was a stuffed pepper with stuffing based on couscous and it was quite nice. And although I’m running short of peppers, my faithful cleaner will buy me some more tomorrow. She came waltzing into the apartment and caught me in flagrante delicto riding the porcelain horse.
When I’m in here on my own I ought to develop some good habits, like closing the toilet door.
Anyway, she has her shopping list, and I’ve finished everything now, so I’ll check my blood pressure, take my medication and then go to bed. I have a Welsh lesson tomorrow and I need to be in good shape for it.
With this Welsh course I’ve no idea where I’m going with it. I’m miles behind everyone else and there’s another two years to go. I’m not sure whether I’ll finish the course or whether the course will finish me.
But I do have a cunning plan. It all went wrong two years ago so I might sign up with a different provider for an evening class for a course from two years ago and try to build up my bases again.
Coleg Gwent was usually pretty good so I might have a look and see what they can offer me.
Double-Welsh sounds almost as good as Double-Dutch and I can speak that fluently, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.
But it sounds like a good idea to me. As Kenneth Williams once said, "I’m often taken aback by my own brilliance".
