Tag Archives: medication issues

LIVE: Monday 7th September 2026 – AND SO WE’RE …

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… back in the good old night-time routine of waking up early and not going back to sleep again.

Over the last three or four weeks, I genuinely believed that I’d left all of that behind and moved onwards and upwards into a much more normal sleeping pattern, but ohhh! Cruel and Wicked Fate has confounded me yet again.

Last night I was in bed by 22:30, thoroughly tired and exhausted, and I was pretty soon asleep. Apart from the odd bit of tossing and turning, I stayed asleep until some unearthly time in the morning where I was wide awake again, and despite how tired I might have been feeling, I didn’t go back to sleep again.

At one point, I was so fed up with it all that I went to look at the time. And just as I was about to switch on the ‘phone, the 06:29 alarm rang.

That was the cue to leave the bed, but in all honesty, it took much more than that to rise to my feet.

Once I was up and about, I slid over onto the chair and began to listen to where I was last night.

We were in the territorial army last night. And as time went on, the territorial army began to produce proper sailors and so on so they became more integrated into the organisation of the terriers, and it was quite common for them to fulfil some kind of role in the organisation. This meant a big shuffle round of the personnel. We suddenly found that people had been removed from their post and that some Territorial who had qualified in that subject was there instead. As captain, I was responsible for making sure that it was usual and acceptable for a girl of 11 like Seren. I had to start by working my way around the different classrooms to see what changes had been made, and then two of our … fell asleep here … so it was all starting to become pretty complicated here.

While this might be an interesting dream, relating to a discussion I’d had with my friend recently, I actually remember nothing whatever of this dream, regardless of any significance. Usually, whenever I begin to transcribe them, there’s usually always a distant memory that comes drifting back, but not with this one.


I was back training that football side again last night, and we were working on receiving free kicks – working on defending against free kicks and winning the ball. We had a practice fence that we brought on whenever we were doing something involved with an arret against the grieving things and then just curling the ball in and spinning into the net over the wall. When my cleaner came past, she said something along the line that we weren’t all that particularly good like back when we began to practise this week. But give them a week and they’ll be brilliant. Then on her way home from working her midday shift, she gave me a packet of biscuits, so I gathered that what she meant was that it was lunchtime, but every time that we defended a kick, we had this big defensive wall made of this fence. We were raising it higher and higher to make it more complicated for the attacker.

This seems to be a recurring dream right at the moment, with me training various football clubs. However, nothing seems to be so bad with some clubs that my training won’t make it worse.

Then I went to continue the notes from yesterday, but the first thing that I noticed was that I was locked out of my own blog site. This captcha will be the death of me at this rate. I simply went into my site’s file manager and disabled everything that I’ve done these last few days. I’ll look at it again later, but in the meantime, I’ll carry on with the blog.

When I was nearly finished, my friend turned up imitating the role that I’ll have to use on my little WordPress flying machine, but I carried on chatting with him, even if it did mean postponing the Hound of the Baskervilles’ breakfast.

So having fallen asleep four times and with my posting degenerating into a load of rubbish… "what’s new?" – ed … as you can see from the above, I’m going to bed and I’ll continue tomorrow. It always seems to be the case that I can fall asleep sitting on my chair at the desk but never at all when I’m lying in bed.

Anyway, tomorrow, we’ll go back to yesterday and carry on. from last night.

So trying to make sense of everything, my friend turned up with a mug of coffee, which was extremely nice of him, but I asked him to put it on the kitchen table, and I’d be in in a sec.

After a quick visit to ride the porcelain horse, I went to join my friend in the kitchen, where we drank coffee and chatted about nothing very much in particular until the arrival of Isabelle the Nurse.

And then an interesting thing happened. The Hound of the Baskervilles, who hadn’t barked at all when she came in, rolled over onto his back and exposed his stomach so that Isabelle the Nurse could give him a good tummy-tickle. It’s amazing that he still remembers her after all these months.

She came over to me afterwards to deal with my legs and feet, and I asked her where my tummy-tickle was, but she told me basically to clear off.

After she left, the Hound of the Baskervilles had his breakfast and I made mine, and while I was eating, I was reading my new book, THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

And for the benefit of some of my readers – it’s “Naturalists”, not “Naturists”. There’s a big difference.

This book will probably have one or two controversies of its own, but at least they will be between members. It’s not a book written from one person’s viewpoint.

There’s a crisis with the medication right now. It seems that one set of pills was missed off the order a couple of weeks ago, and now I’m down to my last handful. I shall have to have a word with my faithful cleaner later.

Back in here, there were the notes to finish, and then there were a few other things to do, such as to review and send off the radio programme for this week. And just when I was standing up to go to prepare myself for dialysis, the alarm went off to remind me that it was time to prepare myself for dialysis.

In the kitchen, I sorted out a disgusting drink and the midday medication and then made myself ready. My cleaner turned up to sort out the anaesthetic, but her first priority was to stroke the belly of the Hound of the Baskervilles. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … he has far more luck with the women than I do.

After she left, I waited here with His Nibs for my taxi while my friend nipped out for a short while. Now that Mrs Dinosaur has left the area, we’re back at the usual situation of the taxi being a few minutes late. But at least it was a Mercedes B-series from the taxi company that the company that I use had recently bought.

We had to go via Sartilly for the old lady there, but nevertheless, we were still five minutes early at Avranches. I had one of the new nurses and she was quite efficient, and I was up and running by 14:15. I noticed that there were two people in my room whom I didn’t recognise. “Holidaymakers”, I was informed.

There wasn’t as much fluid to extract today so, once more, I persuaded her successfully to up the total by 300 grams to give me a head start for Thursday

Once I was organised, I had some football to watch. We started off with the rest of the match between LLansawel and Airbus UK Broughton.

Say what you like, it’s clear that three of the newly promoted clubs, Llandudlo, Cambrian United and the Wingmakers, can compete to some degree at this level, whereas the other three – Rhydaman, Trefelin and Trefynnon – are here as cannon fodder and that’s not a very pleasant place in which to be. Throw Y Fflint in there too, and you have what look like your relegation candidates for the end of the season.

So, retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, the match finished 0-2 to the Wingmakers, and quite right too. From what I saw, they certainly had the better of the play.

After that, there was Cardiff Metro v Cambrian United. The Met pulled away into a 2-0 lead, but Cambian plugged away and came back into the game. The final score was 2-2, and Cambrian hit the woodwork on two occasions towards the end of the game.

Just as the final whistle blew, the nurse came round to unplug me. The time had fitted together nicely. And even better, just as I was about to leave, Emilie the Cute Consultant came to see me. The bad news is that I start a new course of the disgusting potassium powder. Ahh well!

By now, my chauffeur was waiting – a chatty guy whom I hadn’t seen for a while, so I didn’t have to hang around and I would have an interesting ride home.

We were back at a reasonable time and found my cleaner perched on her mushroom waiting for me. She helped me into the apartment and then went off to cuddle the Hound of the Baskervilles. I was clearly a distant second in her priorities.

She sorted out my disgusting drink, sorted out the medication, found my friend’s missing jacket and then wandered off. My friend stuck another bowl of chilli, this time with baked potato, in my mitt and we tucked in. This is real luxury, having a meal plonked into my hands upon my return.

The next plan was to write my notes, but I failed miserably. I fell asleep four times before I’d even written a dozen lines, so I said “sod it” and went to be.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Hound of the Baskervilles … "well, one of us has" – ed … yesterday, he went into La Rafale and ordered a pint of beer for himself.
"Wow! Magnificent" said the barman. "With skills like that, you ought to be in a circus!"
"Why?" asked the Hound of the Baskervilles. "Do they need an electrician?"

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Tuesday 2nd January 2024 – I DON’T KNOW …

… which one it is, but one of these new medicaments is having a strange effect on me.

It’s as if I’m drunk. My head is all light and airy and my co-ordination is gone. It’s quite a strange feeling really

There’s one of the ones that I take in the evening that is giving me these wonderful nocturnal voyages and whatever it is I’m not going to stop that one and miss out on a night of fun with Castor, Zero and TOTGA but the one that’s giving me this strange feeling, I’ll have to see about that.

When I was at the Centre de Re-education I mentioned it there to a couple of people and presumably it will pass to whichever doctor takes over my case now that Dr Sigaud has left.

There’s also the question of the Christmas pudding, as I mentioned the other day. Following my post the other day I had several suggestions as to what to do with it, some of which were physically impossible and that tells me more about my friends than it does about my pudding.

But I liked Sean’s suggestion best. “Why don’t you just eat it?” but he and a couple of other people suggested that I wrap it well and freeze it so, having had an extra helping this evening so it’s now down to half its size, I’ll probably try that. But the pudding was a perfect success and I was so pleased with it.

So this morning I was up as soon as the alarm went off, and I took my blood pressure. And something extremely embarrassing happened this morning. And I’m not going to say what happened so don’t bother to ask.

After the medication I came back in here to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I was in North America last night. I’d talked to my father that I was needing a new van. He said that he knew someone so I left it at that. I was upstairs with a friend of mine who was rather shy and timid and wouldn’t do anything unless he was pushed into it. He and I had a little chat. I understood that there was a girlfriend in the building in one of the floors below. We had to wait until these dancers either stopped or created a gap in their formation so that we could nip through. He went off to look at the girl. I went to the window to look at what was going on because my Canadian relative was running a garage and had all kinds of things in, like snowmobiles etc. He was expecting to buy a vehicle on a trailer – it might have been a small tractor or something similar, I can’t remember, so he was busy making room in his drive. But there were all vehicles parked outside. Suddenly someone nudged me and pointed to a queue of cars that were now being parked outside our house and next door’s house. At the end of the queue was a yellow transit series 1 so wondered if that was what my father meant. The driver exited and began to check the wheels and tyres, hitting them with a hammer etc. I was wondering about that. Then he must have come into the building because someone shouted that he was there. I quickly grabbed a few friends and made some chips. We had some cod in batter so we had cod and chips arranged and helping with this guy. We went down and met my friend and he joined us. I told him to go to telephone someone because we had a meeting arranged for this afternoon and it looked as if I was going to be unable to do it. He said “right-ho” and shot off. I thought “that’s not like him at all”. Anyway he reached the ground floor and we went over to the dance hall and began to talk to this guy. We were surrounded by a couple of young girls who were doing some dancing there. I was talking to the guy about the van. He gave me a price, which sounded quite realistic but I didn’t realise that this was his private vehicle which he only used in the winter for shovelling snow, and with a backplate on it, for towing other vehicles so I could understand the low mileage but I was worried about the treatment it had had as a towing vehicle and I wasn’t so sure about it now.

There was some dispute about the FA Cup. In the end the FA decided that they’d replay the previous round with all the clubs concerned still in it but they would give some kind of points adjustment from now on. Teams that were supposed to be really good would be given no points deduction and the lesser teams could be given as many as 12 on some kind of sliding scale. They decided that they’d play the previous round’s matches on this basis. The team for whom I played had a “minus 2” by the side of it. We went out to a game nut although we won it, it wasn’t enough to overcome the points deficit that they had. So I went back to work. People saw me come in and immediately asked about the result. I told them, and 1 or 2 people thought that it was funny as you might expect and 1 or 2 people were really seriously concerned

While I was transcribing I noticed that yesterday I was in Flagstaff, Arizona, and people were telling everyone else to be very careful about the town.

They aren’t joking either. John Bourke, the aide-de-camp of General Crook, was stationed there for a while as Crook and his army campaigned against the native Americans.

In his wonderful book ON THE BORDER WITH CROOK he describes several events and notes that "Man’s inhumanity to man is an awful thing".

It’s in Flagstaff that I had ONE OF THE STRANGEST MOMENTS OF MY LIFE, so strange and bizarre that I didn’t realise what was going on at the time. But I worked out what was going on quite quickly later on.

Anyway, this morning I came across a recording that I’d missed – a live football match featuring Caernarfon v Colwyn Bay. Of course, with no longer using social networks I don’t receive the updates and announcements that I used to.

But anyway, after years in the wilderness Colwyn Bay were unstoppable in the Cymru North division and were promoted to the Welsh Premier League this season.

However, as clubs like y FFlint, Airbus UK Broughton, Afan Lido and several others have found recently, the gulf between the second tier and the first tier is enormous, and Colwyn Bay, despite having made a few intelligent signings, are finding it tough going.

Caernarfon are renowned for having the best midfield in Wales and despite losing Noah Edwards and Rob Hughes in the summer, their replacements are even better

The defence has been rather fragile but the signing of Ben Maher and putting him alongside Dion Donohoe in the centre of defence has made them a much more formidable proposition.

Thy had no attack whatsoever last season but Jack Clarke from Chester and Adam Davies from Airbus UK Broughton, the power up front is impressive.

However there’s an injury and suspension crisis at the club right now and neither Donohoe and Maher were on the field.

The crisis has hit the goalkeepers too and between the posts was youth team keeper 16 year-old Hari Thomas. And when they have a “save on the Month” programme I’ll let you see the save that he made from Colwyn Bay midfielder Tom McCready. And if you can’t wait until the end of the month, go to 00:01:23:00 of THIS LINK.

Despite the injury and suspension problems there was really only one team in it but they made hard work of a 2-1 victory. I can’t understand why, with the signings that Caernarfon have made in the close season, why they are only 6th in the table. They should be doing much better than that.

After that, for the rest of the day while I’ve been here I’ve been dealing with the concerts that I’ve been sent from Shrewsbury, including one by Judy “I’ve Looked At Clouds” Collins – 82 years old and still able to rock a large crowd. Would you believe it?

Yes,
"So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way"
Except that it wasn’t clouds that got in my way

And
"Oh, but now old friends they’re acting strange
They shake their heads and say I’ve changed
Well something’s lost, but something’s gained
In living every day"
they are sentiments with which I can relate too.

However
"But now it’s just another show
And you leave ’em laughing when you go
And if you care, don’t let them know
Don’t give yourself away"
Doesn’t that bring back a few memories and regrets?

At midday I had a good wash and at 13:00 the taxi came for me to go to the Centre de Re-education. Two sessions today, one with the ergotherapist and the other with Severine on the couch.

While I was at it, I mentioned this problem with one of the medicaments and hopefully they’ll report it

There was some stuffing left over as well as the Christmas pudding, so I had a stuffed pepper today using the stuffing instead of the bulghour or quinoa that I usually use.

And do you know what? It actually worked and was delicious. Plenty left over for a taco roll tomorrow and a leftover curry on Thursday. I’m really doing well with my meals.

So now that I’ve finished my notes I’m going to bed. Tomorrow I’m at the Centre de Re-education almost all afternoon and there’s plenty of paperwork to do in the morning. I’ll be a busy bee for the next few days.

At least if keeps me out of mischief, so the story goes, But I can get into mischief regardless of any constraints. There has been years of experience.

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Sunday 30th June 2019 – SO HERE WE ALL ARE …

… not exactly sitting in a rainbow but sitting in the bedroom of a relatively comfortable hotel in, would you believe, Aberdeen.

And how unhappy am I?

Having made a special enquiry, and had it specially confirmed, that there was a hotel shuttle bus, necessary in view of the amount of luggage that I have and the state of my knee, I telephoned the hotel when I arrived at the airport only to be told “we don’t have a driver on tonight”.

So I had to hobble, dragging my load behind me, for about a mile up the steep hill to the hotel.

On arrival, in quite some distress with my breathing problems and the like, I was given a room on the second floor (despite having asked for a low floor) – and there’s no lift. So I had to drag my load up two flights of stairs.

As you can see, despite the fact that this nice modern hotel could be such good value for money (very rare in the UK)if it were to have staff and management wh actually cared about the customers, here’s one very unhappy bunny.

And the UK? I have said (on many occasions) that I would never ever set foot in this accursed country again, but needs must when the devil drives.

With it being Sunday morning I was hoping to have my usual Sunday lie-in but after last night’s quite dramatic crashing-out, I shouldn’t have been surprised at all by sitting bolt-upright at 06:44. Not what I intended at all.

Plenty of time to go off on a nocturnal ramble.

I was doing a coach tour again last night, down in the South of France and I was picking up passengers all over the place. I couldn’t find the paperwork for the moment telling me who and where I was picking folk up. So I was doing as fast as I can, and ending up at the final stop I was one person short. So I wondered where on earth I’d got this one person short. While I was waiting I was chatting to people and some woman came up to me to ask me what I thought of the passengers – what I thought of this woman, what I thought of that man. Despite my being very non-committal which I always tried my best to be I was shaking my head and pulling a face at some of them. I certainly hadn’t intended to do that. Eventually I found the piece of paper and found that I had left three people behind at Dijon and that was over an hour back. I thought “how am I going to explain this?” because I’d have to ring up the company to say that I didn’t get them and if I had the paperwork I could have done that. But Dijon is this thing and I might have to go all the way back and upset all of the passengers before I’d even started. One woman pulled the voyage list that I had to read it and of course i had to pull it back before she could as passengers aren’t supposed to read the voyage list with everyone’s name and address on it.
Later on I’d been in Crewe last night with Margaret Armstrong’s old Ford Cortina and parked it up in Bedford Street. I’d walked through the alleyway round all the backs of the houses round the back of Chambers Street and Catherine Street and all of those places, walking for a while around there. There were all kinds of exciting things round there, round Gresty Road where My sister used to live it had all been transformed with some kind of building built onto the backs of the houses over the back yards, and a derelict house that I had once looked at, that was all derelict too and the roof and attic too of this “new build” extension. And some weird semi-detached houses, quite modern design all covered in ivy, and some older semi-detached houses derelict and bricked up. Unkempt gardens and all kinds of things like that. There was a girl there, walking in my direction back to the car, on the phone so I passed her once, she passed me and I passed her again. As I got to the car she came over to me “you’ve got the zodiacs, haven’t you?” I said that they are actually on board the ship and that’s off the coast of Scotland at the moment”. “Well I want to make the white cloth to throw over them” So I said that I would get the measurements the next time that I’m up there, which will be in a couple of weeks’ time..

Firstly though, I had to find my medication. But I’ve packed it so well that it remains well and truly packed and I probably shan’t find it until I return home, whenever that might be, because now that I have my French Carte de Sejour I’m not in any hurry to go home.

After breakfast I attacked yesterday’s blog and then went out to the station. Now 09:30 so Subway should be open to buy something for lunch, and to buy my rail ticket. But much to my surprise, Subway was closed. And none of my raisin buns in Carrefour either so instead I had to go back down into the bowels of the station to the Delhaize and that came up trumps with a vegan falafel salad, demi-baguette and a fruit mixture thing. The guy at the till even found me a plastic cutlery set to eat it with.

So on the way back out, Subway was just opening up. That’ll teach them!

Back at the hotel I collected up everything, organised myself, grabbed my stuff and went off to pay for my two breakfasts. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve paid the booking agency in advance for a couple of breakfasts in a couple of places, only for the hotel to have “no trace” of the breakfast payment. So now I pay on-site if I’m breakfasting.

Down to Brussels-Midi station in time to leap aboard a Nederlandse Spoorwegen train to Amsterdam via the airport. It threw me out here. And here I am, in the departure lounge of Brussels Zaventam Airport, waiting for an aeroplane. And I hope that the Big Old Jet Airliner will carry me far away.

I eventually found the flight desk, which was not yet open and so I had a lengthy wait, spent talking to a couple from Australia and a young guy who looked like a Pacific islander from Baltimore.

Check-in was quite straightforward and Security even more straightforward. If only it would be as simple as this in other airports. Now I’m sitting quietly waiting to find out which terminal my flight will dock at, and I’m clearly in Travelling Mode because I’m listening to Colosseum Liveand I’ll probably follow it up by listening to On The Road by Traffic. My two favourite travelling albums.

We we were eventually called to our aeroplane. It was now moored at gate A60 at the far end of the terminal from where I was so I had something of a hike, which will probably do me good anyway.

I didn’t have long to wait and much to my surprise we were very quick in boarding the ‘plane. There were only a handful of empty seats but it was only a small ‘plane. I asked the stewardess if it was a Fokker and she replied “no, it’s quite well-behaved”. But I made a note of its registration – PH-EXT. That tells me that It’s an Embraer 190.

The name of the stewardess was Suske so I asked her what she had done with Schanulleke. But as Kenneth Williams and Alfred Hitchcock once said, and as I have repeated on many occasions, “it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners”.

Once the ‘plane took off I switched on the laptop, put it onto flight mode, and started to listen to “Lost Angeles” once more. But it was quite pointless because no sooner had it all fired up than I had to switch off because we had gone into the arrivals path. In fact, I think that we spent more time manoeuvring on the ground than we spent in the air.

It’s not all that far to Schiphol from Zaventem and I could have gone by TGV from Bruxelles-Midi but believe it or not, it would have worked out more expensive. And that’s something that I don’t understand.

And I’m pretty annoyed because I have to wait 5 hours or so for a connection. There was a flight that went my way that took off 5 minutes before we landed but, would you believe, it was delayed and I could in theory have gone on that had I realised and run for it.

So now I have to wait. I sat and ate my delicious falafel salad and bread.

To reach my flight I had to pass through passport control and for some reason I was grabbed for a security check. I always have bad experiences at Schiphol, as I remember from last time.

I was given the “works” and was preparing myself for the cavity search when they suddenly found what had drawn their attention to me. “No, those aren’t bullets in a magazine. They are AAA batteries in a battery holder”.

It was weird at the terminal. People were actually locked into their departure lounge and if you weren’t on that particular flight you were locked outside. I had to wait for ages until the departure lounge cleared and they tidied it up before I was allowed in.

In the meantime they had changed departure lounges without saying anything and I almost found myself going to Glasgow. I had to hurry along down the corridor.

The place to Aberdeen was packed, and it was a big plane too. PH-BGK, a Boeing 737 called Noordse Stormvogel . They asked for volunteers to send their hand luggage into the hold and I volunteered. Less to have to carry around.

And it seemed that everyone knew each other. Probably Shell oil workers flying back to the platforms after a weekend off.

We had to wait for 20 minutes too. There was a connection that arrived late and some of our passengers were on it. And then when they arrived, we had to wait again for a free slot. However, we arrived in Aberdeen only a few minutes late.

Immigration was relatively painless and our bags were already out when we arrived in the hall.

And then I had my issues with the hotel.

Once installed in my room I had a nice, welcome shower and washed my rather sweaty undies, and now I’m off to bed. I’ve had enough of today. And this might be the last you’ll hear from me for a while, so don’t be disappointed. Check back regularly until normal service will be resumed.

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