… that is, the 14th August, I’m being assessed for “assisted living”.
This is the long-awaited follow-up to my visit at the start of the year to the Centre de Re-education and the discussions I had with the various ergotherapists.
This is when then decide whether I need to go into a Home or whether I can continue to live here. And if the latter, what level of support will I need to assure my autonomy.
As it happens, although I have a tendency to moan a lot about my situation … "perish the thought" – ed … and things are slowly becoming more and more difficult, I’m confident that I’ll still be here for the foreseeable future.
Of course, a nice young aide menagère, or “domestic help” wouldn’t go amiss and I wouldn’t say “no” if one were offered to sooth my fevered brow, but knowing my luck, it wouldn’t be a nice nubile nymphet but a retired Bulgarian weightlifter
So we shall see how the future unfolds. But it’s nice to see that things are beginning to move rapidly. At this rate, there won’t be any time left at all in the month of August with all of these appointments and visits.
Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, despite everything that I said last night, I ended up going to bed quite late yet again. I was waylaid by, would you believe, the West Asian Football Federation’s final in the women’s tournament between those two powerhouses of the female football world, errr … Jordan v Nepal
It actually went down to penalties, which was why it finished so late. And it was Jordan that took the honours.
Surprisingly, the game was much better than it ought to have been. Nepal had the better of the play, as it happened, but they struggled to match the speed of the Jordanians on a counter-attack.
So late to bed once more, I slept right through until the alarm went off, and then had a very shaky start to the morning as I struggled to come to terms with the speed at which the room and bed were spinning round.
Once in the bathroom I scrubbed myself up but left the spare set of puttees soaking until tonight. That will do them a world of good.
Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. This was one of these chaotic dreams about being in laboratory but there were bits and pieces everywhere that were either attached to me or falling to the ground or getting in my way. I couldn’t clear them out from in front of me at all. Everything that I touched seemed to be connected to me in some way or other, either physically or spiritually or something like that. I couldn’t have some kind of clear way walking around this laboratory. It was just like being in one of these fairgrounds where everything is attached to everything else and you have to somehow find your way to the end but there was no possibility of doing that last night, it was just so chaotic, all this stuff.
These chaotic dreams occur every now and again and I suppose that it’s really all a symptom of my chaotic life. And it’s nothing like as chaotic as it used to be either. I used to live in total chaos.
In fact, someone once asked me my day (a Wednesday) and time (03:00) of birth, and they produced from somewhere for my birthday one of these in-depth horoscopes.
It’s absolutely frightening as to how accurate it is. It talks about how I live in my own little world totally oblivious of the rest of the World and concludes with "your life and living arrangements seem to be total chaos but that bothers people around you far more than it ever bothers you"
And never were truer words ever spoken. Poor Nerina. She had a really difficult job on her hands and she deserves a medal for having stuck to it for almost nine years.
When the nurse came, we had an interesting chat about seagulls. There are several types of course but here in France we have two common species, mouettes and goëlands. She was using the words interchangeably so I asked her the difference.
She replied that she didn’t know, and set me a task, to prove that I am worthy. Namely, to find out the difference for tomorrow.
After she left I had a nice leisurely breakfast reading about the forced removal of the Flathead tribe of native Americans from their reservation to another reservation that they will share with the existing occupants so that their land could be sold – to the benefit of the American Government.
That kind of thing was pretty much commonplace in the USA in the 1880s and 1890s. If the native Americans refused to move, they were simply massacred, and I’ve walked across the site of the most outrageous massacre of native American civilians, at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1894, when I was there in 2019
Much of the day has been spent today working on the final lot of notes that I dictated on Saturday night. They are all done now, the two halves of the programme are assembled and the joining track has been chosen with its notes written ready for dictation.
And considering that the other day we were discussing Dave Arbus, it seems appropriate that the track that I chose was one by East of Eden.
First though, I had a listen to my programme about John Mayall. It’s actually quite good and I’m quite pleased with it. So I sent it off to Headquarters for inclusion in the stream for this weekend.
The rest of the day was spent tidying up the paperwork. I’m sure that it all grows when my back is turned. It doesn’t matter how many pieces I file away, I always find one piece somewhere that I’ve overlooked.
My cleaner stuck her head in the door to bring the post – including the letter about my visit. We had a chat about my neighbour too. We’re all wondering what is going on with her as we’ve had no news
Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg. And delicious it was too. Plenty of stuffing left, so its taco roll tomorrow and a leftover curry on Wednesday. I’ll leave off the pie foe a while
So having washed my puttees now and hung them up to dry I’ve written my notes and I’m off to bed. Late again but it can’t be helped. It seems to be the current state of affairs.
But going back to the story of my apartment, Friedrich Nietzsche once famously wrote "You must carry a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star. Out of chaos comes order."
However, he died in 1900 – a long time before I was born. Had he been alivr during my lifetime he would have written something completely different.
