… where to begin today’s account. Bo I begin it when I awoke at 01:01 this morning? Or do I begin it when I awoke for definite at … errr … 07:59?

Well, anyway, after last night’s disaster when I fell asleep, fully clothed, into bed and didn’t move a muscle, I awoke at 01:01 exactly, according to the time on my ‘phone.

Despite trying everything that I could, by about 01:40 I gave up the struggle and heaved myself out of my stinking pit, never having felt less like doing anything in my whole life.

Once I was (sort-of) on my feet, I staggered over to the chair and when the World finally stopped spinning round, I began to plan my day.

The first thing to do was the statistics and then the backing-up. I can’t ever forget them. Next thing was to write up the notes for Thursday, and they are now on-line, with apologies to anyone who was disappointed when they came here looking for them.

There was nothing on the dictaphone from the night at that particular point, so I spent a while trying to concentrate on doing some stuff but in the end, round about 04:30, I gave it up as a bad job and went back to sleep.

When the alarm went off at 06:30, I’m afraid that I simply switched it off, set the alarm to 07:59 and then went straight back to sleep.

Once again, it was a very weary me that fell out of bed a couple of minutes after the alarm had sounded. I couldn’t hang about, because Isabelle the Nurse was on her way so I had to struggle into the bathroom as best as I could.

When Hurricane Isabelle blew in, she found me trying to take my medication. She couldn’t hang about long, for various reasons, but she took away “War and Peace” – the summary of my visit to Paris last week that had arrived in the post yesterday – for a read when she’s at home tonight.

And that reminds me – when it comes back, I need to scan it and send it to my health insurers because it’s quite comprehensive.

Incidentally, I note from the report that they confirm that I was given Retuximab and “some other product” twice back in early 2016 but they withdrew “some other product” because of the dreadful and insupportable side effects. However, here I am nine years on, much older, much more ill, much more unfit, and they are giving me the same “some other product” again.

So what’s happening here? Haven’t they realised what happened, or is this some desperate last throw of the dice? I think we should be told.

After Isabelle left, clutching my papers in her little mitt, I made breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

Today we are talking about medieval money, and there’s a beautiful paragraph or two about the history of the various coins of the realm of that period. It all ends with the delightfully modest statement "This much for mint and coinage, by occasion of this Tower (under correction of others more skilful)".

Why can’t modern authors be so modest? … "Why indeed?" – ed …

Back in here, it took a while to come round to my senses, and then I finished off paring and seguing the music for the radio programme that I’d been preparing.

My cleaner stuck her sooty foot in the door at some point to do her stuff for the day and after she left, I read through my Woodstock notes for the Friday, performed a few corrections, added this in, took that out, and that will be dictated at the next opportunity. Then I’ll do Saturday’s, and then Sunday’s.

At some point Rosemary rang me up for a chat. Just a short one today – one hour and twenty-three minutes. She’s offered to come all the way up from the Auvergne to help me if ever I need it and can’t find any more help else where. It’s a lovely offer, but it’s totally impractical for her.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I don’t have many friends … "and fewer and fewer these days" – ed … but those whom I have are the best in the World and no-one could wish for better.

At another point, I transcribed the dictaphone notes, and I was surprised that there were so many. I was down at Virlet. I noticed that there was smoke and a small electrical fire coming from one of the electrical anchoring points on the roof of one of the lean-to sheds. I was looking at it for a couple of minutes wondering “how on earth could this have happened?”. I filed up a bucket with some really dirty water and threw it onto the roof. It seemed to dampen it down somewhat so I threw another one or two on top too. I noticed that there was still a light burning in the upstairs part of the lean-to so I had to climb up an ad-hoc kind of ladder in the pitch black with a couple of the local kids wandering around, to stick my head in to see whether that had caught fire too. When I looked inside, I found that I’d left a light burning from all those years ago, so that was probably the reason for that. I climbed down and was back inside my garage where these two kids and their father wee wandering around. I was chatting to these two kids. Just to make sure, I took another big bucket of filthy water, told them to keep out of the way and went to throw it up onto the roof a final time but then I couldn’t see where the fire had been and from where the smoke was coming. There were a few bits and pieces of smoke but these were fumes from different kinds of things. They weren’t a fire-type of smoke. I looked on the roof but couldn’t see any sign of anything so I was sitting there pondering what to do with this bucket of water.

Whatever happens now at Virlet is long out of my hands and I need to forget all about it because I can’t ever go back there in my state of health and I’m not expecting any miracle from this treatment that will enable me to be mobile again. In fact, I’ve been wondering if this treatment isn’t simply a case of postponing the inevitable. Then it will be u to my heritees … "God help them!" – ed … to sort it all out.

Later on, I was on a train going somewhere – a German or French type of railway carriage. I noticed that it was measured. There were the little marks every so often, every 50 cms or something so we could see immediately where we were sitting because of the length numbers written on the ticket rather than the seat number. I can’t remember what happened after that.

So we’re back on the train again, are we? This seems to be something of a regular occurrence. Fans of these German psychoanalysts will doubtless say that it’s a subconscious wish to be away from my present mode of life, and who can argue with that?

And finally I was back on the taxis again. We had a fare to pick up at some medical centre at about 08:30. Nerina was with me and so was my step-brother. We went round to pick up these two people and dropped Nerina off at some place on the way – it might have been her mother’s – and then dropped off these two people in Sandbach but they just ran off. There was no point going chasing after them so we set out to come home. There were by now three of us – my brother-in-law was there. We were walking around a seaside town looking for a police station, looking at the yachts and everything. We’d had the freezer opened to sort everything out. We wandered around this seaside town but couldn’t find anything, and ended up throwing a ball at each other until someone broke his glasses when the ball hit him in the face. We climbed into the car and came home. The stuff from the freezer was still out on the shelf. I thought that I’d better put that away before everything melts. While I was doing it, there were loads of stuff in the fridge, sandwiches from several weeks ago etc. I was busy trying to sort out all of these. It seemed that the tidier I tried to make the fridge, the worse it became. Then I suddenly realised that there was a football match that I wanted to go to see, the final match of the season where TNS were playing at somewhere like Pontypridd. I was really hoping that I would have a chance to see it. Instead, I don’t know what happened. I was far too busy trying to sort out this fridge, I was driving a taxi too, I had the stuff to put back in the freezer. I reckoned that it was going to be one of those days when I’m going to end up doing nothing even though I had far too much of other things to do.

The motto of the long-departed and long-lamented “News of the Screws” was “all human life is here”, and this dream is certainly a microcosm of all of my life. I don’t think that it needs too much explanation or examination because you can see the parallels for yourself.

Tea tonight was a dish of left-overs. There had been some mushrooms festering in the fridge for a week and I’d been eyeing them keenly for a few days. There was also half an onion and half a tomato, so, with a little garlic … "he means ‘a lot’" – ed …, I chopped them all up and fried them in vegan butter.

And when they were nicely cooked, I tipped them out of the pan all over a couple of slices of thick toast. However they tasted nicer in my imagination than in my mouth. That’s not a criticism of the food by the way. Everything that I have tasted since chemotherapy has tasted as if it’s been laced with a shed-load of salt. I’m not enjoying my food at all right now, and that’s a sign that I am really ill.

But before I go off to bed, that medical report sounds like the old Kenneth Williams-Sid James exchange in one of the medical “Carry-ons”.
Dr Williams "give him a colostomy, an x-ray, a thoracotomy, a bioscope a … "
Patient James "what was all that?"
Dr Williams "and while you’re at it, wash his ears out."