… slightly better night last night.
In fact, I tried the usual cure for insomnia – settling down in bed to watch one of the “Bulldog Drummond” films that I had downloaded from www.archive.org and, sure enough, 10 minutes later I was definitely gone with the wind. And apart from just one awakening during the night, I was right out until 06:50. It’s been a while since I’ve beaten the alarm to awakening, isn’t it?
And I was well away during the night too. I was out last night with a boyfriend of Anne-Marie on the way to her apartment. And it had been so long that I couldn’t remember which building it was. Twice now I had seen a building that I was convinced was the one in which she was living but it was not – instead we ended up at an old cottage in a residential area of the city. I vaguely remembered her living in a disreputable, semi-derelict house in just oen room but here were maybe half a dozen or more boys of the age of her boyfriend – they had gutted the derelict parts of the house and were in the process of installing some kind of kitchen there. Where we had parked was in the street right in front of the house, blocking the street to passing traffic and I was concerned that this might cause problems for Anne-Marie with her neighbours, but then I had to try to convince myself that it wasn’t my problem – I hadn’t been driving the vehicle and it was the driver’s problem and Anne-Marie’s problem anyway, nothing to do with me.
A little later I was out with Alison. We’d been into a neighbouring town to look for an electric kettle. We’d identified a place that might sell one and so we set out to pick one up. However our way into town took us in a different direction – and it was quite confusing to arrive in this direction for a start – and so we weren’t close to this shop with the kettle so we had to look again. We ended up in a market hall, a 1920s brick-build white-emulsioned place that was in a semi-derelict condition with planks of wood shoved through the windows and dead pigeons all over the place that had been killed by poisoned corn being used. Alison mentioned a place here that might have one to sell but I wasn’t convinced that this place would have one, and that we would have to find the place that we had already identified, but how we were going to do this we had no idea.
It might sound strange about Anne-Marie making an appearance, but yesterday, someone was searching her name on the internet and they fetched up on my blog, where she’s made a couple of appearances in my past. That particularly stuck in my mind, although it clearly stuck more firmly than I imagined.
I was having breakfast when the alarm went off this morning, and then back down here I had a couple of very long missives to write. That took me right up until lunchtime, when I nipped out to the supermarket on the corner for my baguette.
After lunch, I cracked on with my website. I’ve been reading a couple University theses on life in Labrador (the Metropolitan University of Newfoundland – note the “Newfoundland”, not “Newfoundland and Labrador” – has published many of their theses on line this last couple of years) and what I’ve read has enabled me not only to find tons more stuff on North West River (the farthest northern point of Labrador that it’s possible to reach by road) but to make additions to several other pages that I have written in the past.
The trouble with all of this, as I have said in the past, is that I’m spending more time researching than writing, and what started out as being a quiet little travelog is now becoming an epic of mammoth proportions.
Not only that, I crashed out for an hour too, which is hardly a surprise seeing my early start.
For tea I finished off the other half of the can of beans, some more croquettes and the last vegan curry-burger. I’ll have to think of something else for tea tomorrow.
And now I’ll try for another early night tonight. I have just one housemate and she seems to be quite a quiet personality – she was hunched over a book eating her tea when I went upstairs to make my meal tonight.
Let’s hope that it stays like that.
