… chair is not as comfortable as I would have liked it to be.
Mind you, that’s not the end of the World, not at all. Firstly, if I can’t try it out before I buy it, I have to accept whatever I can find. And secondly, it’s far more comfortable than the previous one.
Anyway, my faithful cleaner and I had loads of fun late this afternoon assembling it and I’m now sitting in it, making the most of a seat that actually goes up and down as it’s supposed to do and a backrest that reclines into a comfortable sleeping position if ever I need it.
As you can gather, I’m feeling rather better this morning. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, sleep has always been my go-to cure for all evils.
Not that I had a good sleep last night, though. I was determined to push on and write up the notes for yesterday and the missing ones from the day before yesterday, before I went to bed, and although I managed it, it was not far off midnight by the time that I hit the sack.
And although I was asleep quite quickly, it lasted until all of … err … 05:10 when I awoke, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t go back to sleep.
In the end, round about 06:10, I gave up trying and had an early start to the day. Not that I was in any rush, though. I took my time having a good scrub up and taking my medication, including making another honey, ginger and lemon drink, and I wasn’t back in here any earlier than I might usually have been.
And so I transcribed the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night. I was in the tower block at work and had gone out for a quick coffee. However, there had been a couple of folk musicians playing in the café so I stayed around to listen for much longer than I really ought to have done. On the way back to my office, I found myself on the roof. It was November and it was a beautiful sunny day. There was a sandy kind of beach on the roof and you could see for miles, and the sea in the distance looked beautiful. I thought that I could bring my sandwiches up here at lunchtime to have a nice little relax. I looked back into the building through the fire escape. It seemed that the top floor stairwell had been completely redesigned over some kind of period and repainted. One of the senior officials who knew me was there, so I asked him when it had been done. He said that it had been done during the Luxembourg Presidency and made the building much easier to maintain and clean. I set off to walk down the stairs to my office but after about three or four floors, found myself on the ground floor. It was inside a little delicatessen type of place in the busy shopping street just outside. I wondered what had happened to all the intervening floors. I was being hours late back to work so I rushed to the lift and opened the doors, but there was a girl in it. I asked her “do you mind if I join you?”. She replied “yes, if you are going to do it today”. I asked her which floor she required but she gave a very non-committal answer so I set the dial to go to my floor and the lift set off. But there was the sound of a girl panting very loudly. It wasn’t the girl who was with me so I asked her if she knew what was happening. She replied that it was obviously some girl in a hurry so I asked “where is she?”. She replied “ohh, she’s around somewhere” and that made things even more confusing.
The tower block relates to a building in which I once worked for a short while in Manchester, although it didn’t have a beach on the roof and you couldn’t see the sea from there. There was no delicatessen on the ground floor either.
However, being horribly late back from a tea break or a lunch brings back a few memories of a very troubled time and I’m surprised that it has risen its ugly head once more after all these years.
And later on, I was at someone else’s house and my niece was there with one of her daughters and her daughter’s friend. They were messing around with an AI app and had managed to make the television in this room talk to them. They were discussing things like going out. It was a Sunday afternoon and fairly late and I would have expected them to go out much earlier because it was such a nice day. But they were talking to this app about going out, and in the end, one of them asked about when they could have a taxi. The app replied that he could be there in about ten minutes. My niece said “well, I want to get washed and get ready and everything” so I said “well, just go out as you are”. So they arranged to have this car come to pick them up via this AI app and they dashed upstairs to get ready. I went to look out of the window and there were crowds of people walking up and down the street, kids running around, and there was a huge dog, an enormous thing. Then there was a slightly smaller dog, all white like a polar bear, and there was a strange kind of deer that was also white. It had the two hind legs much shorter than the front legs so it was walking on a lead with someone in a kind of strange fashion. As I looked, a brown Cortina MkIII pulled up in the street at the bottom of the hill and went to reverse into someone’s drive. However, he hit a trailer that was parked on the pavement. I thought that if he’s the taxi, he’s going to be in a lot of trouble. But he parked in the drive and walked off. So then I went up with the television and found my mobile ‘phone, which was an old type of Nokia. The back of it didn’t seem to fit on the front. I noticed that I’d written some notes on the back about where all the data was stored on which memory stick. I didn’t remember doing that in the past, so I sat down and began to play around with this television and this AI map. However, it was long after ten minutes, the taxi hadn’t arrived and the girls still hadn’t come downstairs from getting ready.
The view from this house corresponds with a view that I had from a house that I used to visit in Neston on the Wirral fifty-odd years ago, although my niece never ever visited it. Talking Ai apps are all the rage these days, although I’m doing my best to avoid them. I prefer text that I can cut, paste and save rather than rely on my fading memory.
The animals were quite curious too and I don’t know what to make of them.
Isabelle the Nurse turned up and sorted out my legs. And then, in accordance with the prescription that I received yesterday, she took my blood pressure.
"If the blood pressure is less than 8.5" said the prescription. "telephone the dialysis clinic immediately."
And so she telephoned immediately. "Mr Hall’s blood pressure is 7.9!"
"Oh" came the reply. "That’s normal for him!"
After she left, I made breakfast and for once, I managed to eat everything as well as drink my coffee. And how I have missed a good mug of coffee!
Back in here, there was the uploading of a pile of little miscellaneous programs, some of which I’ve been using for over twenty years and which are difficult to find these days. Luckily, I’ve been saving all the installation programs but even so, there are one or two of the full executable programs that are no longer on line and in one case, the link to the executable program has been hi-jacked so I had to end up cleaning out all of the mess that it had created.
After a disgusting drink break, I made myself ready for the Centre de Ré-education and the taxi came to pick me up.
Having told them that three is the maximum amount of sessions that I feel able to do in a day, they had changed my programme to give me four this afternoon. And while it’s back to three next week, the week after, they have given me four again. I may as well talk to myself, I suppose.
The first session was sitting at something like a rowing machine, using my leg muscles (such as they are) to move some weights. A whole thirty minutes of it too and I couldn’t stand up afterwards. They had to lift me from the machine.
Secondly, I was with my physiotherapist who had me lying on my side giving me breathing exercises. She also suggested some exercises that I can do in bed, although I have my own ideas about those. That was when I realised that I was feeling better.
Thirdly, they strapped me to a machine that had me standing up. They kept on asking me every five minutes if I was still OK. I’ve no idea why, because it didn’t seem like any effort for me and I was enjoying the view out of the window.
Finally, the occupational therapist wanted to see me about hints and tips for the shower. However, that was really a waste of half an hour because he had no suggestions to make. And when he was talking about non-slip rubber mats, he was showing me examples at €150:00 or thereabouts. We’re doing the same job with a worn-out bath towel that one of my cleaner’s other clients was throwing away.
Back here, my cleaner helped me in and then we attacked the new chair. It was a complex piece of machinery to assemble but it seems to work really well. As I said earlier, it’s not as comfortable as I would have liked, but it’s definitely an improvement.
Tea was air-fried chips with salad and those breaded quorn nuggets that I like. And, regardless of there being only very small portions, for once I managed to eat everything. And it’s been a long time since that has happened.
So now I’m off to bed. With a repaired (I hope) washing machine, I shall be clothes-washing in the morning and then off to dialysis to see what delights they have in store for me there.
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the girl in the lift … "well, one of us has" – ed … I did once meet a girl in a lift
"Do you mind if I join you?" I asked.
"I suppose so" she replied. "But honestly, I had no idea that I was coming apart."
