Tag Archives: odile

Thursday 23rd April 2026 – HERE I AM …

… running hours late yet again, but tell me – if you had the choice between coming inside to your miserable, depressing life in here or standing outside in the absolutely glorious evening sun, chatting to friends and neighbours, what would you do?

That’s right, it’s been the most beautiful day of the year today, with not even a single cloud in the sky to put a damper on the proceedings, so naturally, I had to spend the afternoon in dialysis, didn’t I?

Still, at least last night wasn’t as bad as some have been.

By the time that I’d finished my notes etc. and was ready for bed, it was just about 22:00, later than I would like but never mind. I was soon under the covers, all nice and comfortable, and although it took, as usual, quite a while to go off to sleep, I was so comfortable that it didn’t really matter.

However, a few hours later, also as usual, I was awake again. No sign of going off to sleep so I ended up counting sheep. I had quite a flock but eventually I must have fallen asleep because when the alarm went off at 06:29 as usual, it awoke me.

And, also as usual, it took an age for me to struggle to my feet and go into the bathroom, where I had a good scrub-up and even a shave, in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon.

Not hot drink this morning – just a small mouthful of orange juice to wash down my medication – and then back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during what little night I’d had.

At some point, I dreamed that I was helping a girl who used to live in the Auvergne move her crockery and things like that. We had to be very careful with some of it because the handles could easily break. She sent a mail to me to tell me that someone else was coming along to help, and I should give him the same warning too. Then, in the dream, my alarm went off and I leapt out of bed and put on some football gear that was lying around in my room, as if I were going to be playing in a football match. Then, I found myself back in the bed and I wondered what happened to the alarm and me dressed in – that I was still in bed in my night clothes.

That’s something that I’ve done a few times, helping people move house, and I’ve done more than just a few of those in the Auvergne. But I’m sure that some people will recall who this girl might be if I were to mention that it’s par for the course for her to disappear as soon as the work starts.

The nurse turned up as usual, and I mentioned that I had a taxi coming for me at 08:00 so he’ll need to be here beforehand to sort out my legs and feet. His response, quite typically, was “go to bed tonight in your socks. I won’t be able to make it”. No surprise there.

After he left, I made breakfast and read some more of THE CELT, THE ROMAN and THE SAXON by Thomas Wright.

Today, we’re talking about religion, and here’s a surprising thing. Our author tells us "Over the left shoulder of Saturn is a sickle in form of our modern bill-hook, Sol wears a radiated crown, Luna, a crescent, Mars is helmeted and carries a shield, the head of Mercury is winged, the bust of Jupiter has been injured, and his emblems are not clearly to be recognised, Venus carries a mirror. Other museums in Germany, I am informed, contain sculptures of the planets similarly arranged."

In France, and in many other places too, I would imagine, it’s the custom, and has been for hundreds of years at least, to draw and sculpt images of the saints, each with his or her own particular emblem. One saint is always seen with a child, another with a loaf of bread, another with a dog and so on. I wonder if this dates back to the very early years of Christianity and is a reflection of adopting the practice from the Roman gods.

While I was sitting at the table, I crashed out yet again, and while I was away, I was off on my travels.

While I was having another little doze at the breakfast table, I dreamed that I was playing with the Spencer Davis Group at a festival in Greece. After we’d played, we took a boat and went across the strait to an island to look at the lighthouse there. However, we weren’t impressed so we came back. However, we didn’t land near our hotel but at a secluded beach about a mile down the coast. We came ashore on some kind of jetty and one of our party threw a plastic bottle into the sea. We found a place to spread out and lie down, but I went for an explore. I came across another hotel that was being used for concert performers and crew, so I went in. For some reason, I came out of the lift at the second floor and walked along the corridor, looking at the names of the occupants, and down at the far end, I saw the name of a former girlfriend from school. I knocked and went in to say hello, and she was delighted to see me. Her room had a window that tilted horizontally in the middle, so I tilted it wide open and flew outside for a good look. Back in the room, we were discussing her career. I told her that honestly, only one person in a thousand at this level makes it to the top. She replied that she was determined to work as hard as it takes so that the one person in a thousand would be her.

Dreams about me flying are very rare indeed. I’ll have to go back probably twenty years for the last one.

But as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we went to GREECE in 2013 and spent a happy week on Anxios, one of the Sporadic Islands, but not with the Spencer Davis Group. And I didn’t meet a girlfriend from school there either.

Back in here, I spent a little while sorting out a few things and then attacking the radio programme. It’s still been a struggle tracking down the music that I want, and one day, I hope that I will have what I need.

My cleaner turned up as usual to help me with the anaesthetic, and then I had to wait for the taxi to arrive. Bang on time he turned up, but with all of the roadworks and having to go to pick up someone else, we were late arriving at Avranches.

Late arriving means late being plugged in and with the machine playing up, I was resigned to it being a long session. One of the doctors (not Emilie the Cute Consultant, unfortunately) came to see me, and she told me that they were going to reduce my dry weight. “At long, long last!” I said to myself. “Now we can go about doing this properly”.

When I’d finished everything, I was next-to-last leaving but my taxi driver, one of my favourites, was waiting for me and we had a good chat as she drove me home. But once again, we were caught up in the roadworks so we ended up being late back. And after my neighbourhood chat, it was even much later when I came back in here. But it was worth it, being out in the sun.

After my cleaner left, I had half a piece of chocolate cake and home-made ice cream and then came back in here to finish off everything. And in a short while, I’ll be off to bed. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow, as you can imagine.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about counting sheep … "well, one of us has" – ed … out on a ranch in the Australian outback, the ranch owner asked a farmhand "how many sheep do we have?".
"No idea" said the farmhand.
"But I’ve sent you out three times now to count them."
"I know, but every time I reach ‘six’, I fall asleep!"

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Friday 27th February 2026 – WHAT A DAY …

… I’ve had today. And if I did crash out for fifteen minutes towards the end of the afternoon, I can only put it down to the after-effects of some very hard work.

Last night was quite hard work too. Once again, despite my best efforts, I didn’t seem to make much progress, and by the time that I’d finished everything and was ready for bed, it was 23:30 and how I wished that it was an hour earlier.

Once in bed, though, I was asleep quite quickly, and there I stayed until the alarm went off at 06:29. Surprisingly, when I awoke, I found myself in exactly the same position as I had been when I went to sleep, so it’s not a surprise at all that I remember nothing at all. I can’t have moved a muscle all the way through the night.

When the second alarm went off at 06:33, I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet on the floor – which is what counts for “beating the second alarm” – but that’s a long way short of saying that I was actually up and about.

The first thing that I have to do is to wait for the room to stop spinning around before I can even think about standing up. That can sometimes take a good few minutes.

Eventually, though, I found my way into the bathroom, and after a good scrub up, I went into the kitchen for my hot drink and medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone, but to my dismay, there was nothing at all on there. It really must have been a deep, sound sleep. I had to find a few other things to do to fill in the time before the nurse arrived.

But as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … not having any dreams to which to listen is extremely disappointing. It’s just about the only excitement that I have these days.

The nurse didn’t stay long today. He was being harassed by one of his boys about some clothes to wear at a paintball rally in the firing range and so needed to return to sort them out. That meant that I could start my new book, THE DEBATABLE TERRITORY WHERE GEOLOGY AND ARCHAEOLOGY MEET by A Lodwick.

This is a book that re-examines the excavation reports of Calleva Atrebates of 1909 and the collection of new evidence for the flora of the site in the prehistoric age.

Although I’m not much of a botanist (regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the only reason I passed my Biology ‘O’ levels was thanks to the helpful drawings on the walls of the Gentleman’s Rest Rooms at Crewe Bus Station) this is a fascinating book, as it talks about the expansion of the British crop pool during the Iron Age and early Roman period and suggests that many seeds common in the modern era were actually introduced into England by the Romans.

After breakfast, I started a new project. I went to make vegan ice cream.

In the fridge, I’d found some banana-flavoured milk and some coconut cream. So with some maple syrup, a pinch of salt, vanilla essence and a pile of chopped chocolate from the slab of cooking chocolate that I found, I went to work, whisking all of the ingredients together.

While that was doing, and in between going into the kitchen every hour to give the ice cream a stir to stop it freezing in one solid mass, I was editing the next lot of dictaphone notes.

There was an interruption when my cleaner came round to do her stuff. And a discussion. Apparently, Mme la Presidente of the Residents’ Association had had the engineers round to install her fibre optic system, but the engineers had declined, for the same reason that they had declined at my place.

Perhaps they’ll all believe me now.

Anyway, it led to a flurry of e-mails, and I couldn’t resist throwing my weight in.

However, I’m appalled by all of this. The conduit for the telephone, through which they’ll be passing the fibre cables to the apartments, has been blocked for over twenty years, and everyone knew this.

Nevertheless, the estate agency that manages the site gave everyone the go-ahead to apply for the installation. I was the first to apply. I had the engineers round who couldn’t install the cable because the telephone conduit is blocked, so on the 21st January I wrote to the Estate Agency to tell them.

Since then, nothing has happened. The estate agency hasn’t sent out a letter to people telling them of the problems, and as a result, there have been countless hours of technicians’ time lost, countless frustrating hours of residents’ time lost and the fabric of the building, a listed building of the “Patrimoine de France”, has been irreparably damaged by the two impatient residents who had technicians drill through the listed walls of the building.

Later on, a couple more technicians turned up to see me, to make a written report as I had asked. However, there was no need. I grabbed hold of another resident and Mme la Presidente and sent them off to speak to the technicians.

And surprise! Surprise! The technicians said exactly the same thing as those this morning and those who came to see me twice before.

Perhaps they’ll all believe me now.

After everyone left, Mme la Presidente came in for a chat and a piece of ginger cake, and once she’d left, I finished off editing the notes, assembling the radio programme, choosing the joining track and writing the notes for it.

This week, I’ve only actually written one programme instead of the two that I’ve been trying to do, but I’ve prepared two others, and tomorrow, I’ll try to prepare a third from the notes that I’ve dictated in the past. Then next week, I’ll go back to writing two more.

The stress and effort today were such that I crashed out in my chair as soon as I’d finished, and so tea was late. Beans with vegan cheese, chips and sausage followed by ginger cake and homemade ice cream. It’s not much of a success, texture-wise, but the taste is terrific, and I’ll make some more like that if my faithful cleaner can find some more of that banana-flavoured soya milk. The ground chocolate really added something special to it.

And that made me start thinking … "which is dangerous" – ed … I have some of these fruit cordials here of the type that you use to make fizzy drinks. How about a coconut milk-based one with chocolate and a stream of mint cordial running through it? There must be plenty of mileage with stuff like that, if the cordial won’t curdle the milk.

But that’s tomorrow. Right now I’m off to bed, to sleep, perchance, to dream. Or, as Lee Jackson put it, YOU WOULD GIVE A SMALL FORTUNE TO GET BACK IN YOUR DREAMS

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about ice cream … "well, one of us has" – ed … at the ice cream van at the park where I used to take Roxanne on Sundays, an old man hobbled over, obviously in great difficulty walking.
"An ice cream cone please," he asked
"Certainly, sir" replied the vendor. "Crushed nuts?"
"No" replied the old man. "I always walk like this."

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Friday 13th February 2026 – DID YOU KICK …

… any black cats today? Or break any mirrors? Or walk underneath any ladders? Today was, of course, one of those days when you don’t need to do any of that to bring bad luck upon yourself.

Take my faithful cleaner, for example. She walked out of the building this afternoon at 14:30 only to be drenched in a torrential downpour that began ten seconds later.

My bad luck today … "so far – the night is still young" – ed … has been with this perishing fibre optic cable installation, but more of this anon. Let’s start with last night.

And last night was bad enough. I forget how many times I fell asleep trying to write my notes and doing everything else that I needed to do before going to bed. As a result, what should have been a reasonable time for going to bed turned into a rather late one, much to my regret.

Once in bed, though, I was asleep quite quickly and that’s all that I remember until the alarm went off at 06:29. And what a time I had trying to haul myself out of bed. It’s definitely becoming more difficult as each day goes on.

Anyway, I was eventually in the bathroom having a good scrub and a change of clothes too because I’m going to run the washing machine later.

In the kitchen, I made my hot drink and had my medication and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was round at a woman’s house. She had a son in his twenties who was one of these manic depressive types. This woman and I were talking, and she pulled out from underneath her pillow a box which had a collection of gold coins. She called her son up and he came, and she showed him this box. She asked “what do you think of these?”. He looked at them and he was completely disinterested, and in the end, he went away. His mother said “I told him this morning that I was going to have someone round to knock a few nails into the foot of your bed but he’s obviously not made the connection and he doesn’t know what these are” so we carried on talking. A while later on, the son came back in. He told us a story that he’d met a famous actress. It was while he was canoeing on a lake with a friend. The wind rose up, and these two girls in this canoe were feeling very uneasy and wanted to be helped, so he and his friend helped them. He’d been on a date with this woman once or twice but this affair was in the throes of petering out because he wasn’t willing to take things any further. His mother tried to encourage him but it didn’t really work and he couldn’t seem to generate a spark of enthusiasm. Later still, we were in her room again and her son was there. He was a guitarist, quite well-known with a recording contract who’d opened one of these fundraising events for charity along with a few other big names. Again, he wasn’t particularly enthusiastic but he suddenly realised what this box contained and he’d come back up to talk about it again and to talk about the money that he has that he hardly ever spends. His mother gave him a huge box of chocolates but instead of eating it, he just took a few and said that he didn’t want the rest so the woman ate a few and gave me one or two too. We were then going to tidy up around her bedroom so I pulled a pile of paperwork down from a shelf on the top. It was all her university coursework with exams, assignments and everything. I noticed that a few were in different names so I asked her about them. She replied that her mother was a typist and her mother had intended to type all of them out so that they were neat and proper but unfortunately, her mother hadn’t survived.

In the past, I actually knew a guy like that, but there would have been no chance of him dating a famous actress, and neither would he have been a guitarist. And any romance of his would have petered out sooner rather than later.

The pile of university paperwork is extremely familiar from the past, and the gold coins are presumably something from the various excavations described in the books that I’ve been reading.

A few of us had in the past been talking about buying an island. While I was chatting to someone on the internet, it turned out that he owned an island off the coast of Newfoundland and was interested in selling it. I found out some more about the island and said that I wanted to talk to my solicitors, to which he agreed. However, I realised that I was in no health whatsoever to do that kind of project, but I would still have a share in it, simply as a foothold if I were able to recover, which would be nice. So I started to tidy up everything away and found some things that I’d bought from the shops, a loaf of bread, some carrots, things like that, and began to reorganise everything. I’d realised that I’d paid over the odds for carrots because there was a flood on the market and the price was coming down, but everyone is keeping the price high for the moment. I also sent a letter to my friend in Newport telling him about this island and expecting a few comments coming back. I’d finally sorted out everything that I needed, and then I had to change. I had some scruffy clothes lying around and also some much more tidy, casual wear that I could wear while I was getting dirty rather than my best clothes. I put that on and then had a look at the map to see where I would have to go to drop off some of these things, but the map wasn’t very clear and there was a printer’s error down the centre of the page that confused everything so I had to look very closely to find out where all of this was going to go. Then I could go out to the van ready to load it up, put some petrol in and do these deliveries.

Buying an island is actually something that several of us have been considering. It would have been a good plan fifteen or twenty years ago, but not today, unfortunately.

The story about the carrots seems to relate to a news item that I read the other day about potatoes. It’s been such a bumper year for potatoes that Europe is awash in them and prices have tumbled dramatically.

There’s also an ongoing project involving my friend from Newport too.

Did I mention that a group of us had decided to go to Edinburgh for a wander around? … "no, you didn’t" – ed … I’d been doing something with my Welsh, like cutting and pasting a few exercises which in part talked about Edinburgh. Then someone decided that we’d go. We all met up, and I had a big picture under my arm. It was something that I’d seen in a shop that I thought would be really nice in my apartment so I was carrying that around. Everyone was interested in the fact that it was quite heavy and we’d probably planned a whole day out, and this was going to be something of an obstacle but we carried on and we were walking around a couple of shops, looking at different things when the alarm went off. There was something in the middle of this dream about meeting up with cars and because there were so many of us, we’d have to use two cars but we could park them up at the top end of the city somewhere

Edinburgh was a city that I used to visit often with Shearings. Shearings had an arrangement with National Express Coaches in the past and occasionally ran a duplicate service overnight from Manchester to Edinburgh via Motherwell, Glasgow, Airdrie and Falkirk, with the return the following afternoon. If I didn’t have anything better to do, I would volunteer for it and I went up there quite a lot. It was a lovely run through the night.

It beats me, though, where the cars and the picture fit in with this, but the shop reminds me of the dream a couple of weeks ago … "22nd January" – ed … about being in Montreal.

The nurse was early today. He had a lot of work to do, so he said, so he couldn’t hang around. That suited me fine, because I had things to do too. For a start, I went and made breakfast and began to read my new book.

It’s called MAIDEN CASTLE EXCAVATIONS AND FIELD SURVEY 1985-6 by Niall Sharples. It related to further archaeological excavations that were carried out at Maiden Castle, to re-examine and develop the work by Mortimer Wheeler.

They aren’t just excavating the hill fort but are also casting their net much wider into the surrounding farmland and chalk downs.

And after reading the first few pages, I regretted having criticised Wheeler’s rambling preamble because it has nothing on the preamble in this book.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve commented in the past … "and on many occasions too" – ed … about the criticism that Wheeler received about his claims of battles and war cemeteries taking place at Maiden Castle, with people denying that there are traces of battle up there.

However, one of the comments in Sharp’s book is that, examining the sites of arrowheads discovered up on the chalk downs, "the distribution of arrowheads in the present survey can be seen to cluster around Maiden Castle", which you might expect if the place had come under heavy attack.

One interesting fact about this distribution that, surprisingly, he seems to have missed is that there’s another concentration of arrowheads around a ford over a river down in the valley. He seems to think that this was the site of a settlement and they may have been lost by the inhabitants over a period of several centuries.

However, it also seems to be possible that any attacking army coming from the north would try to cross the river wherever there was a ford and any group of defenders would do their best to stop them crossing. Hence the concentration or arrowheads.

That was something that I would have loved to pursue but I was interrupted, and before I’d finished my breakfast too. The man from the fibre optic turned up to have a go at installing the cable. And just like the first one, he was confounded, and at exactly the same point too.

The person at the estate agency who manages the building had given me her ‘phone number to ring if there is a problem, so we rang it. And as you might expect, there was no reply. Consequently, I telephoned the President of the residents’ committee and let her speak to the technician.

This question of fibre optics isn’t my problem. It’s a problem relating to the infrastructure of the building and that’s a problem for the residents’ committee and the estate agency to resolve. And it’s a problem that has been known for years, apparently, and no-one has lifted a finger to resolve it in all this time.

Over this past couple of weeks, I’ve wasted enough of my time, enough of the technicians’ time and enough of my internet supplier’s time. It’s long past the time that the people who have stood for election and the people who are being paid to manage it should have taken it in charge so they had better make a start before I become completely fed up.

This is the kind of thing that I’ve seen happen so many times before, and I know exactly how it’s going to end up because it all follows the same pattern. This time, however, I’m too ill to take on the running of the show myself, as I have done in similar circumstances in the past, but I’m not too ill to deliver a few hefty kicks into the nether regions of a few people and propel them into action one way or another.

So still seething after yet another good rant, I came back in here once everyone had gone, and begun to work on the next radio programme. And by the time I was ready to knock off, I’d finished it – at least, to the point where I’d written all of the notes. The next time that I have an early start, I’ll dictate them.

There were a couple of interruptions to my day, though. Firstly, I filled the washing machine with all of the clothes that were lying about, and set the machine off to wash them. Secondly, my cleaner came along to do her stuff and she brought with me another neighbour who wanted to know how things went. And had I still had a spleen, I would have vented it at that moment, but I managed to restrain myself.

Once the neighbour had gone, my cleaner hang out the washing. That’s another job that I can no longer do unfortunately.

Tea tonight was chips, sausage and baked beans with cheese and black pepper. It was the tin of French baked beans that I’d bought last week, and I do have to say that they aren’t a patch on British baked beans. They use these large beans that I tried but didn’t like.

The only answer then is that if no-one is going to come over from the UK in the near future to visit me, I shall have to bite the bullet and buy some online.

But that’s something about which to worry another time because I’m going to bed ready for tomorrow; And for once, I’ve already finished all of the work that I needed to do so I can have a weekend catching up on the arrears.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Friday the 13th and good and bad luck … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of a club that I visited once, many years ago, and there was a bingo game going on.
The caller was on the stage calling out the numbers
"clickety-click, sixty-six"
"two fat ladies, eighty-eight"
"the Brighton line, fifty-nine"
"unlucky for some …"
"HOUSE!" shouted a voice from the assembled multitudes.
"House called on ‘unlucky for some, number twelve’" said the caller
"What do you mean?" roared the voice. "’Unlucky for some’ is number thirteen! Twelve’s not unlucky!"
"It is for you, madam."

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Sunday 1st February 2026 – SUNDAY IS OFFICIALLY …

… a Day Of Rest, but you would never have thought so after today. I’ve been a busy boy.

Not so much last night, though. Running late as usual and falling asleep for half an hour in the chair while thinking about going to bed, it turned out to be a night much later than I would have liked, and certainly later than some have been just recently.

Eventually, though, I managed to make it into bed and asleep, where I stayed, flat out, until about 07:30. I don’t think that I moved at all during the night.

One glance at the clock made me wonder whether I ought to think about leaving the bed, but I soon dismissed this silly idea from my head, turned over, and went back to sleep.

The nurse woke me round about 08:30 to sort out my legs and, regrettably, I couldn’t go back to sleep after that. Round about 09:00, I hauled myself out of bed and cleared off into the bathroom.

Breakfast today was porridge, hot coffee and two of my homemade croissants, which were cooked to perfection. But I was thinking about the process that I use to make them, and I’m going to try something a little different next time to see if it makes a difference.

While I was eating, I was reading Mortimer Wheeler’s MAIDEN CASTLE.

He includes in his notes probably the longest preamble that I have ever read, and it contains little or no information about what he’s trying to do – it talks merely about the background and the naming of the site. And after the twenty-five pages or so, he reaches the conclusion that the information in his preamble is “not conclusive”.

We haven’t gone very far into the book either before we reach a discussion of climate change, with differing opinions as to whether climate change really exists or not.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall our discussions in the past about William Munn. He was one of the very first people to suggest, in his book “Location of Helluland, Markland & Vinland from the Icelandic Sagas” (long since out of print, but I have a few copies if anyone wants to buy one) that he wrote in 1914, that global warming was a real phenomenon.

He was roundly ridiculed by his peers at the time, most of whom have gone on since to have had omelette sur le visage as they say around here.

But one thing about Mortimer Wheeler is that he agrees with me on the question of civilisation. I’ve long contended that civilisation began as far back as Neolithic times when people were obliged to abandon their isolated hunter-gatherer lifestyle due to pressure of population growth and, instead, settle down, adopt sedentary agriculture and, most importantly, learn to cooperate in order to improve everyone’s quality of life.

Wheeler tells us that a "fortified city was not built in a day; its building involved a disciplined concentration of effort, and its existence was a perpetual symbol of coordinating authority. It implied a specialized and stratified society in which, presumably, the aristocratic traditions of the Celtic tribal structure found expression and at the same time acquired a stability not altogether native to them. It marked the true beginning of citizenship as a substantive element in the development of civilization in Britain."

Back in here, there were the dictaphone notes to transcribe.

I’d had to go from Morecambe to Shavington village centre for something, but while I was at work, it was another one of these things where I can retire at any moment I want because I’m well over retirement age and if people don’t like what I’m doing, I’ll just leave. I was trying to write a report about a Government investment in an organisation that had control of all of the Hackney carriages in one certain town. They’d had an investment of £1,000,000 or something and then another investment of £300,000, but that was nothing like the amount of debt that they had and they’d carried on trading all the same. It was my duty to make a report to decide whether we should carry on making further investments in this or whether we should pull the plug on it. I was sitting there writing my report and my brother was watching me. One thing though was that my handwriting was dreadful. As I was dictating it, I was writing by hand. It looked nothing like what I was saying and nothing like what was going down on paper. In the end, I wrote down everything that we’d done, I wrote down what had happened, and I was on the point of writing down all of the consequences if we were to pull the plug on it, saying things such as “one whole town would be without Hackney carriages for a while until the council sorted itself out. This was the reason why the councils prefer to issue Hackney plates to individual drivers rather than large companies”. Then we had to go somewhere, but first of all, I had to leave the building for something. I went down in the lift and when I was coming back, it was 10:20 and there was a man banging on the doors trying to enter the building for some reason but I’ve no idea why. I went into the staff entrance and to the lift, and it was something like ninety floors up, my office. I was there with another girl and we were discussing this guy all the way up. Then my brother and I had to leave to go to do something in Shavington so we set out to walk, but we ended up in Nantwich. In Nantwich, I had a fall and I couldn’t pick myself up again at first. It took a great deal of effort to climb back to my feet. I suggested buying something to take back to the office but my brother thought that it was a silly idea. No-one else did that so in the end, I didn’t. Then he said “we have what we need. Let’s go”. It was a bag of spark plugs. I asked “you did buy the correct ones for the Ford, did you?”. He said “yes” so we were discussing the Luton-bodied Ford Transit that I have, and the plugs were probably for that. I came to the decision when I was walking back that I was going to collect all of my cars, all that kind of thing and put them all in one yard and all of the Cortinas except the 2000E saloon and estate, I’d dismantle. I thought of all the lock-up garages that I had with all different Ford Cortinas, spares and body panels etc. I thought that that was going to be some real hard work to move everything over into just one place.

Not that I’d ever be doing anything with my brother of course, but here we go again, working when long past retirement age. That used to be a recurring theme in my dreams at one time and it looks like it’s coming back again. The ninety floors or so of lift reminds me of a building in Manchester in 1974-75. It wasn’t ninety floors up, but it was pretty close.

My handwriting is quite awful too, due mainly to a severed tendon from when I put my right hand through a plate-glass window in 1974.

As for the 2000Es, there are indeed a saloon and an estate. The estate is in the barn on the farm and is worth a fortune, being one of the very few 2000E estates still in existence. The saloon is in the warehouse in Montaigut and while it has a 1600cc engine and manual gearbox that I fitted in 1991, the matching engine (with failed big ends) and auto gearbox is there too. With the matching numbers on the engine and gearbox to go with the car, that’s worth a fortune too but I bet that someone with no idea of the value will come along and heap the lot into a skip. That’s my biggest worry.

And just for emphasis, I did once have several lock-up garages scattered around Crewe with all different Cortinas and bits thereof stored within. And spark plugs for overhead cam Fords are different from the more regular spark plugs. They are “F” series rather than the more common “N” series

There was also something about building a pushbike from a whole pile of bits while we were listening to the news about something but I can’t remember anything more about this. It evaporated as soon as I touched the dictaphone.

My second push-bike was actually one that I built up from bits that I’d accumulated here and there. I had it for years too.

After that, I had a footfest – the highlights of last night’s matches in the Welsh Cup. And believe it or not, this is A GAME BETWEEN A THIRD DIVISION SIDE (BANGOR CITY IN BLUE) AND A SECOND DIVISION SIDE (CAERAU TRELAI IN RED AND BLACK) in front of a crowd of almost two thousand, nine hundred people.

As promised, here are THE HIGHLIGHTS of last night’s game between Colwyn Bay and Caernarfon, but HERE IS THE WHOLE GAME if you’d rather watch that, and you won’t be disappointed.

There was also Stranraer away at Stirling Albion, and although the unbeaten run goes on, it was yet another draw. I’m not sure how many that is now.

After a disgusting drink break, I finished the notes for the radio programme that I should have finished yeserday and then began to research the next one. That involved tracking down loads of obscure music but to my surprise, after much binding in the marsh, I managed to find everything that I wanted. It’s not very often that I can say that.

When I’d sorted out the radio, I went to make my bread and pizza while I was having an online chat with my friend in Munich. However, I was interrupted when the President of the residents’ committee for the building came to see me to discuss this fibre issue.

She didn’t really understand the issue at first, so I had to take her into the technical cupboard to show her what was going on, and then explain to her the issues. After some considerable time, I reckon that she finally understood the issues.

However, what annoyed me more than anything was that it seems that this problem about the telephone cable trunking being obstructed is something that has been known for ages, and I’ve had to go through all of this just to prove it.

But on a happier note, the bread was easily the best that I have ever made. The pizza not so much, because while the bread rose up like a lift, the pizza base didn’t, and it was too crunchy for my liking. But you can’t win a coconut every time, can you?

On that note, I’m off to bed ready … "I don’t think" – ed … for dialysis tomorrow, and to see what nonsense we come up with there. With a bit of luck, I might have a good night’s sleep, although I doubt it.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about my bad handwriting … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once wanted to enter an international competition for bad handwriting, so I sent off my entry form.
A few days later, I had a reply. "I’m so sorry, but you are illegible."

0

Friday 29th August 2025 – I HAD FORGOTTEN …

… all about the wind outside here.

When I lived on the first floor, I was at the back of the building and so my only encounters with the wind were on the rare occasions when I went outside the door – or couldn’t, because the wind was so strong that we couldn’t open the front door so I would have to go out of the back.

However, last night, I remembered all about it.

The wind had begun to rise as I was on my way home last night but I hadn’t really taken much notice. However, by the time I’d finished my notes and was preparing for bed, it was blowing quite hard, and then I realised that being in the front, overlooking the cliffs and the sea to the right, is not necessarily always a great advantage and that there are after all, some drawbacks.

But last night, I was so tired. I fell asleep a couple of times while I was writing my notes and no fewer than three times when I was … errr … contemplating the state of the nation. I was glad to make it into bed, when I fell asleep almost immediately.

And there I lay until all off … errr … 05:29. For once just recently, I awoke earlier than the alarm, and I was seriously contemplating raising myself from the Dead, but the next thing that I remember was the alarm going off at 06:29, so I must have gone back to sleep.

It was a real struggle yet again to find the energy and enthusiasm to leave the bed and sort myself out. Yet again, it was over an hour, all told, before I ended up back in here after the medication.

First thing was of course to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Last night, I was doing something with some kind of radio equipment, I can’t remember what, when a couple of my friends turned up. They weren’t going to stay for long so it was necessary to clear the sofa of everything so that they could sit down. One of them volunteered to put all of the clothes away even though there wasn’t room for them anywhere. In the end, they both managed to sit down. Later, after they had left, I had to look for the clothes again. They had been rolled up in bundles and put on the stairs, each bundle, and several had been put into other places. One had been hung inside a CD cupboard, with the CDs from the shelves in that particular column being merged into other shelves in columns elsewhere. I was thinking that that probably means that I have to sort all of these out into alphabetical order again.

That’s a task that I still have to do, because the records, CDs and DVDs seem to be in any old kind of disorder, and sticking the clothes back into places where they don’t belong is also something quite relevant at the moment.

Later on, I was on a Plaxton Elite coach, driving it, taking a load of English kids back to boarding school. When I went to join it, it was crammed full of children and I couldn’t understand at first what was happening. It turned out that these kids were all French refugees who had fled France during the invasion by the Germans in 1940 and were being taken to some kind of hostel. I was charged with distributing all the food around. That became extremely complicated as people were moving around, and I didn’t know who had had some food and who hadn’t. There were all these giant biscuit things that I was distributing. Every now and again someone would raise their hand and ask for some more food. If I had some, I would take them half of one of these biscuits. Earlier, I’d been talking to a couple of boys about how comfortable it is to be going back to school. When I met them on the bus at that moment, I asked them what they thought of it now but they didn’t say very much. There was a mass of clothing on one of the seats right by where these two boys were sitting. I asked them what it was and they replied that it was a little French girl who was asleep. In the end, this began to become more and more confusing as I was awaiting the signal to leave and handing out these biscuits. I thought that at one moment that these biscuits will run out and what am I going to do then?

It would be a good dream to be driving a Plaxton Elite in wartime, seeing as they weren’t introduced until about 1968. And once again, in a dream, I’m worrying about something that might never happen, and that seems to be a recurring theme these days.

The nurse came as usual, armed with his blood pressure tester, and once he had taken one of the measures of the three that he was supposed to take, his batteries went flat … "in the machine, not in him" – ed …

After he left, I could make breakfast and read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.

Once more, it’s hard to understand the thought patterns of our author, Montagu Sharpe. He’s spent several pages bewailing the loss of artefacts from the period, salvaged by all and sundry without any record being kept, yet on page 37 he tells us that when he spoke to the person who had discovered and uprooted the Ancient British stakes that guarded the ford across the Thames at Brentford, "He kindly gave me several specimens which I have since passed on to Museums and to interested persons.".

He goes on to add that "from the inner portions various articles as mementoes have been made".

A little earlier though, on page 32, he has a crisis of T Rice Holmesque proportions when examining some notes by JS Maitland on Caesar’s crossing of the Thames. He tells us that "Maitland, in his “History of London,” places Caesar’s passage of the Thames at Chelsea" and continues by saying "All that Maitland seems to have done in 1732 in support of his theory was to take a boat to sound the river for shallow places, and thirty yards west of Chelsea College found the “channel N.E. to S.W. was not more than 4 feet 7 inches deep.” ! ! He made no quest for the remains of the stakes which Caesar says lined both the bed and bank of the Thames, which have in great numbers been so found, guarding the great ford of the river at Brentford,"

That’s not what I would call a respectable academic criticism of Maitland’s theories.

After breakfast, I had a couple of ‘phone calls to make. The nurse is writing up his accounts for the end of the month and needs the prescription for the injection that he gave me on Monday. And so I telephoned the hospital at Paris. I tried on several occasions, but they didn’t answer the ‘phone, which is no good at all for an emergency helpline.

In the end, I e-mailed them, only to have it returned as my professor is on holiday. I had to resend it to his assistant.

But that gave me an idea. It was Monday when I had this new injection, and it was about Monday that my problems of nausea and dizziness began.

Accordingly, I rang the dialysis clinic, but once more, it took several attempts before I was able to speak to the doctor who saw me on Thursday. I explained to her that I’d had a new injection, and she confirmed that side effects of dizziness and nausea are quite common with this new injection.

My cleaner turned up early in the afternoon to do her stuff, and we had the nurse back at 16:00 to take the afternoon’s blood pressure, with new batteries this time.

After he left, the President of the Residents’ Committee came down to inspect the apartment. She loves it so I thanked her for giving me the tip about it going up for sale. Without her, I would never have managed to purchase it. She brought me a yellow tea towel, to match the walls, as a housewarming present. That was really nice of her to do so.

The rest of the day has been spent playing around with some Artificial Intelligence. So far, I’ve managed to run two Artificial Intelligence chatbots into endless loops, which goes to show, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that Artificial Intelligence is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

Something else that I’ve found is an Artificial Intelligence server that downloads to your own computer. Even as we speak, I’m having a play around with that and downloading it, to see whether I can program it to be more random than it actually seems to be. It takes about 50GB of space, so I’ll be here for ever doing that.

Tea tonight was vegan nuggets with salad and chips, and now I’m off to bed, long after midnight but I’ve been dealing with all kinds of things this evening that have run me up a variety of blind alleys. And I’ll have the howling gale outside to blow me to sleep.

But seeing as we have been talking about Artificial Intelligence … "well, one of us has" – ed … I remember an old Andy Capp cartoon that featured two men struggling unsuccessfully to move a large computer through a small door.
"No problem" said Andy Capp. "Just plug it in and let it work it out for itself."

0

Friday 25th July 2025 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… night that was last night.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in the past, me still being up and wandering about the apartment (and anywhere else) at 02:15 would be a fairly common sight, so seeing me wandering around at 02:15 this morning would have been nothing unusual – except that I went to bed at about 22:30, had been asleep, and was now wide awake, out of bed and working.

That’s something that has happened only extremely rarely in the past.

For a change, I actually made a really great effort and dashed through my notes for the day, took the stats, backed up the computer, sorted myself out in the bathroom and then climbed into bed, all by 22:30 or thereabouts.

Once more, I was asleep quite quickly too, but not for long. Round about 01:00, I sat bolt upright again, wide awake, drenched in sweat. It was unbelievable.

Nothing that I could do would make me go back to sleep. I was hot and uncomfortable and really couldn’t settle. After just over an hour of trying, I left the bed and had a wash.

The first thing that I did when I came back in here was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I didn’t expect to find anything on the dictaphone in view of the somewhat diminished time span involved, but I was surprised. There was something going on in some American magazine about people and hospitals and ill-health etc. For some reason, I’d been asked to download some kind of article and upload something else etc. They were talking about me on a radio show doing this. I had the book in front of me but I couldn’t find the article and I couldn’t see any of the addresses or anything but they were urging me on to do this and I was hunting through this book trying to find the correct page but I was getting nowhere. I know that one of the people involved in this whom I had to download or upload had zebra-striped white and black hair and I was wondering more about that. I was trying to find this book but every time I turned a page there was either nothing on it or it was one of these intercalcary sheets etc. I just wondered how on earth I was going to find this.

So we’re back thinking about hospitals again, are we? It seems to be a major preoccupation of mine right now. Having some kind of panic attack in a dream is also becoming something of a regular occurrence, and that’s quite possibly also something of some significance.

The second thing that I did was to dictate the radio notes that I had written just before going off to Paris. That took much longer than it should have done too, because my computer screen decided to go to sleep in mid-type and it took me a few minutes to restart it.

In the meantime, I had to stop and restart the ZOOM H8 because I didn’t know how long it would take to restart the screen and I didn’t want the recording running away with itself.

Once I’d finished that, the next task was quite surprising. I actually went rather further than Dave Crosby, because, although I didn’t have the ‘flu for Christmas, I’m definitely not feeling up to par and it was increasing my paranoia, like looking in the mirror and seeing a police car.

However, I wasn’t giving in an inch to fear and I promised myself this year that I’d do something about it, so I went on the attack.

A nice, trim and tidy me came back in here and I watched a football match, with the Skunks putting eight past Annan Athletic in Tuesday’s Scottish League Cup match.

When the alarm went off, I went to have a good wash and sort myself out, and then a leisurely stroll into the kitchen to take my medication.

After that, I didn’t have long to wait. The nurse was very early this morning and, like a fool, he asked how I was so I gave him both barrels and I bet that he regretted asking. He saw to my knee and to my legs and then cleared off rather sharpish-like so that I could make breakfast.

Not that I made it very far as my faithful cleaner came to interrupt me. I’d heard her moving around in her apartment upstairs so I knew that she was awake, so I sent her a message asking about some medication that I needed. She knew where it was and pointed me in the right direction.

Once sh’d left I could carry on making breakfast, not that I wanted much but I have to eat after all, and then read some more of MY BOOK while I ate what little there was.

Our author, John Stow, is still wandering around the pre-Great Fire churches of London, and between the two of us, we have made a rather interesting discovery.

At the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the Duke of Bourbon was captured and held for ransom. Although the ransom was paid, and on a couple of occasions too, he was never released and never returned to his home.

Our author has been wandering around the old Greyfriars Church and in there is a tombstone, so he says, of "John, Duke of Bourbon and Anjou, Earl of Claremond, Montpensier and Baron Beaujeu, who was taken prisoner at Agincourt, kept prisoner eighteen years and deceased 1433."

That explains why he never returned home, but being held prisoner for eighteen years despite the payment of a couple of ransoms, that seems to be rather extreme.

Another interruption was the President of the Residents’ Committee who came to see how I was, which was very nice of her. She spent half an hour chatting, and I gave her the key to downstairs so she could go for a little inspection. She was well-impressed.

After breakfast, I sorted out some more things to go downstairs and then eventually came back in here to edit the radio notes that I’d dictated earlier.

Not that I kept going for long. I soon drifted off into sleep, sitting on my chair, and for once I wasn’t surprised or disappointed.

In fact, I fell asleep in the chair on a couple of occasions for about twenty minutes here and there. And I was having some gorgeous psychedelic dreams that faded in and out, just as I had one a long time ago when they were giving me some perfusion at one of the hospitals where I’ve been. There’s only one that I remember, and that was telling a friend of mine that I’d be down to see him at about 14:00 when I leave to go to see a girl with whom I’d been invited to stay for a while in the run-up to Christmas. He asked me her name and honestly, I couldn’t remember it, so I’ sure that he thought that I was bluffing. But after he left, I remembered that I couldn’t drive and that there was no contrôle technique on the van, so what was I going to do about this visit? And then another friend of mine came in to give me some presents that had arrived. We shook one and it rattled so we opened it, and it turned out to be a plastic box full of waffles. I can’t eat them of course so I offered them to her, and she snatched the plastic box out of my hands and made off with her booty.

But there were several like this, in such a short space of time, and they all slipped out through my fingers. It was simply impossible to try to record them.

My cleaner came round at about 14:00 to do her stuff and found me engaged in an on-line chat, with a robot from my telephone company. I need to sort out the line to the apartment downstairs for when I move. It took well over an hour to do what should have been a relatively simple task, but at least it’s going to go ahead with no complications.

And that reminds me. I have made an executive decision, and for the benefit of new readers, of whom there are more than just a few these days, an executive decision is a decision that, if it turns out to be wrong, the person who made the decision is executed.

The decision is that I am slowly moving the moveable stuff downstairs and just before my next chemotherapy, which seems to be about the 19th of August, my bed and office will be going down there too, so that when I return, I won’t have to climb the stairs. The rest of the stuff can come down to join me at a later date when there are people to help.

That’s regardless of the state of the apartment, whether the work is finished or not. I’ve been speaking to the kitchen fitter and told him that as of now, the bedroom is the priority followed by the part of the bathroom that is not the shower. The shower is going to be extremely complicated.

Eventually, I finished the radio programme and now have to look for one more track to finish it off. I can do that on Saturday and Sunday, but that’s going to be complicated too.

Tea was a baked potato, small salad and falafel. All of it very small, in fact, because I’m not hungry.

Actually, I’m fed up, I’m in pain, I’m ill and I’m not looking forward to dialysis tomorrow where I expect once more to be detained for at least four hours. I really can’t take much more of this.

But before I go to bed, seeing as we have been talking about Jean, Duke of Bourbon and the Battle of Agincourt … "well, one of us has" – ed … as he was leaving his château, he gave the keys of his wife’s chastity belt to his oldest and most faithful servant.
"Here, take these keys" he said to the servant. "While I’m away at battle, you are the only person who I can trust with them". And he set off on his shining white charger.
He hadn’t gone half a mile before the oldest and most faithful servant caught up with him, panting and out of breath.
"My Lord, my Lord" he gasped. "You’ve given me the wrong key."

0

Friday 25th April 2025 – I WAS WIDE-…

… awake this morning at, would you believe, 03:05. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s a total waste of time really, going to bed early, because all it seems to mean is that I wake up correspondingly early.

And early it was that I went to bed last night – 22:20 in fact.

The dialysis on Thursday afternoon had left me thoroughly exhausted. So much so that I couldn’t keep on going at all. I skimmed through everything that needed to be done, despite going off into a trance at least twice, and then threw in the towel.

Once in bed, I fell asleep rather dramatically and there I stayed, dead to the World, until, as I said, 03:05. I lay around in bed, wondering whether or not I ought to raise myself from the Dead, until at least 03:20 when I happened to glance at the time, and quite a while after that too, but I must have gone back to sleep at some point.

There I stayed until all of 06:20 when I awoke again. That time, I couldn’t go back to sleep at all and when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was … errr … riding the porcelain horse.

After a good wash and my medication I came back in here to check on where I’d been during the night. I was talking to Julie the Cook during my dream. The discussion came round to checking over my apartment to have a look around and see what was going on for my ill-health. But as she said that she would come so I found the calendar and wrote in there that she was expected for the 29th of the month. Then I went back into the main room just to remind her and confirm that that was what it was going to be.

Julie the Cook has said before now that she will come to inspect my kitchen one of these days – in fact, she said it again on Thursday – but I will believe it when I see it. I don’t think that it’s ever likely to happen. However, the fact that I’m dreaming about dialysis and the people there tells me that I seem to have let it become embedded in my thoughts and that’s a depressing idea.

Later on I was round at my niece’s and her husband last night. They were sorting out transport and cars etc. I noticed that my niece was driving around in the old mini that she never usually drove. He husband asked her what had happened to the Riley. We went into the garage and there was a Riley 1.5 sitting there without the front radiator grille. She said that she’s hit a squirrel with the grill and had taken the grille off to try to remove the squirrel. The grille was currently in the back room. I had a look at the engine – it was an overhead cam engine with a chain pulley on the camshaft. I wondered “what on earth engine was this out of?”. Later on we went shopping and we were wandering around a big department store where there were loads of people. I suddenly saw a range of tissue … "he means ‘cloth’ " – ed … so I shouted to her “ahh … tissue” and she laughed. We went over and started to look through the tissue for my apartment. There was a really nice heavyweight deep red velvet type of embossed tissue there that looked really nice and was really heavy. She wandered off to the curtain range and came back with one of these Victorian-style curtains with frills and built-in lace nets and began to compare the two to see whether they matched

Whenever I think of overhead cam engines, the Ford Pinto immediately springs to my mind. I’ve dismantled and reassembled so many of them that I could at one time do it in my sleep – and I did too. However the camshafts in those are belt-driven and the pulley on the camshaft in the engine in this dream was definitely a chain-driven pulley, so I really don’t know.

Leaving aside the question of dreaming in French again, one of the things that I will be doing soon is to see the seamstress who has the little shop down the road whom I interviewed once for the radio. In her little shop she makes all of the dresses for the carnival queens and what I want her to do is to make the curtains for my new apartment, seeing as I don’t know who else to ask. I want to have everything just like I want it to be, right from the very beginning, because I’m never going to move again … "and we’ve heard that before, haven’t we?" – ed … and I don’t want to go through the bother of having to redo anything later.

Isabelle the Nurse came round and we talked about her trip to Avallon in Burgundy. Everyone knows about the story of King Arthur, allegedly mortally wounded at the Battle of Camlann in 537 and taken to the Isle of Avalon in Somerset to die. Just outside Avallon in Burgundy in the dim and distant past there was a battle in which the King of the local troops, Riothamus, was deposed and killed by the invaders. There have been several suggestions that this is the origin of the tale of King Arthur and that the Battle of Camlann is fictional. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall our reading of the book FOLKLORE AS A HISTORICAL SCIENCE in which the transplantation of folk tales by migrating peoples would facilitate such a confusion of memory.

After she left I made breakfast and carried on reading MY BOOK. And here we go again.

In all of the books and papers that I have ever read, I don’t think that I have ever seen a sentence with so many sub-clauses in it as "The general area, which at Windsor, Arundel, and Berkhampstead is oblong, to suit the contour of the ground, is here, as at Tonbridge, Tickhill, and Clare, where the ground is not strongly marked, nearer to a more solid figure, of which, in this case, two sides and the contained angle are governed by the line of the old Roman wall."

It took me several attempts to absorb this sentence and put it in a straight line. There is surely a more straightforward and direct route that the author could have used to express his thoughts and make them much clearer.

He’s also tying himself up in knots again. He tells us on the top of page 193 that "Two mounds, though not unknown, are uncommon.". Half a dozen lines later, he tells us that "Such subordinate mounds are not uncommon in earthworks of all ages,". I wish that he’d make up his mind.

Back in here, I began to work on my Woodstock programmes and pushed on with the Saturday events. There are just four more groups and the outro to write for that, and I’ll also have to think of a way of including Louis de Funès in my programme too. I can’t have a programme without a special guest.

There were plenty of interruptions. There were a couple of disgusting drink breaks, my cleaner put her sooty foot in here to do her business, and one of my neighbours, the President of the residents’ committee, popped in for a chat to find out about how things were and to tell me about her recent trip to New York.

Tea was a delicious leftover curry but the naan was not so good. It kept on falling apart as I was trying to flatten it for frying. The chocolate cake and chocolate soya dessert more than made up for that.

So it’s bedtime now, ready for dialysis tomorrow, I don’t think. And there’s a footfest too, Caernarfon v Barry Town to see who will push on for European competition, and later, the Second Division Cup Final between Airbus UK Broughton and Trefelin. That will be an interesting match because Lee Trundle, at 48, still turns out every week for Trefelin. In the pre-match summary he’s raring to go. He also says that he has no plans to retire and will carry on next season. How I wish that other International footballers would turn out for their local football clubs to give something back to the community, rather than retiring to their island paradise to count their fortunes.

But that’s tomorrow of course. Tonight, it’s bedtime

And seeing as we have been talking about the Battle of Camlann … "well, one of us has" – ed … I am reminded of the American tourist who turned up in Castlesteads early one morning and buttonholed a local.
"Can you tell me when was the Battle of Camlann?"
"537" replied the local
"Damn" said the American, looking at his watch. "I’ve just missed it"

0

Tuesday 25th February 2025 – NOW THAT’S WHAT I …

… call a wasted day today. I have emulated my namesake the mathematician and done exactly three-fifths of five-eights of … errr … nothing.

Some of it has been my own fault, as you might indeed expect, but some of it hasn’t. I really need to motivate myself better if I am ever going to accomplish anything.

The most obvious excuse to use is that I was thoroughly, completely and utterly exhausted. The other day, returning from dialysis, I was in bed at 21:30 and last night it was 22:20. and I was lucky that I made it that far because I really wasn’t in the mood.

Once in bed though, going to sleep was another matter. “At least, being in a horizontal position is resting and relaxing” I kidded myself.

Eventually though I dozed off into oblivion and had yet another turbulent night. For a change though, following a dialysis session, I was actually asleep when the alarm went off at 07:00

At that moment I was with a friend of mine and we were trying to go into her office. There was a security reception desk and the girl on there was known to be rather strict so it was necessary to fill in an application form, and when you went for an eye test, the optical test, it would come up with several people similar and you had to guess which one you were. The aim was that I would find someone similar to me and say that I’d lost my card. She would give me a new card and I would go in. This however wasn’t working and there was nothing very similar to me at all so my friend had to think of another excuse. The girl at the reception desk took an absolute age to deal with all of this before she finally handed me a duplicate card. My friend said “this is just typical of this girl. She knows that this is a fraudulent application because we have thousands, and she’s just taking her time about it as she always does”. We went in a walked down a corridor, then we had to climb down into a courtyard and up the other side. Climbing down was fine but climbing up was almost impossible for me so I had to think of another way of doing it. At that moment a man came down and sat in the corner to begin to smoke a cigarette. I thought that the easiest way was to strike up a conversation. This place looked rather Asian so I talked about having a Japanese garden in here. My friend came back to look for me. He asked her “how long have you worked here?”. She replied “oh, years. I came here in August” and said which year it was. He asked “how do you find it?”. She replied “I made a mistake because I came here in a jumper and I regretted it”. She wandered off and he said to me “she’s a tough girl, isn’t she?”. I said “someone who had had the problems that she had had and survived, anyone would be tough”. He was looking at me and could see that I was disabled and said “oh please sit down”. I replied “I can’t because if I sit down I can’t stand up”. Then he began to panic saying “oh please sit down, sit down, sit down”. I wondered what was going on. This place where we were was like a volcanic crater although it was a garden with pavilion-type Japanese buildings in it, all ringed by a really jagged range of mountains in a huge circular form that looked just as if it was inside a volcano but with a garden inside instead of a crater.

That’s an interesting idea for Security, isn’t it? Being able to choose who you were. After all, NAMES ARE FOR TOMBSTONES, BABY. And I had a friend for a while in Brussels who had been a diplomat in Japan, but it wasn’t she. But if I’m going to be disabled and handicapped in my dream, then it rather defeats the point of them, doesn’t it? Not much point in escapism if you can’t escape.

Into the bathroom for a good wash and then into the kitchen for medication; Finally back in here to listen to the dictaphone because there was much more than just the above. I’d been working on a radio programme and I couldn’t ever make it right. It never seemed to go anywhere as how it was supposed to do. It was continually failing the quality control check. After several weeks of editing I finally had it something like and was ready to send it off. The recording engineer and some of the producers were however rather fed up of having this come up on their desks every week so they were determined to stop it but I sent it off anyway but they still came back and refused it. What should have been a deadline for the 28th of April was now running into May. They basically said that they wouldn’t edit it again and it was finished. I replied “well for failing it this last two or three times on tiny issues, it shows a serious lack of goodwill particularly when I have worked as hard as I have done over the past day or two to put the issue right. If there was nothing substantially wrong with the last one you should have accepted it” but they were still very unwilling to move on this particular issue and I could see this programme running on and on and on.

There have been radio programmes that have taken an age to do because the editing has been so complicated. There was the one a few weeks ago that took several weeks, and the worst part of it was that it overran so I had to edit it, and one of the bits that went was the bit where I’d had all of the difficulty

There was a girl from school directing a film last night. She was running through the scenes. I had a look at the scenes and towards the end of the film there were thousands of scenes every second, so many scenes to go through and they lasted a blinking of an eye. I was appearing as an extra in it and so was a friend of mine. We’d been to makeup and we’d been dressed up and put our costumes on. As the film was being filmed it was passed through some kind of computer animation so people became like cartoon characters as they were going through the motions for real. When I looked at my image and the vision of the girl who was with me, the images were horrible, the faces were all distorted and nothing seemed to be correct at all. We were standing on the set waiting to be directed. The girl from school came along, took one look at us, took one look at the screen effects and told us to leave the stage. We thought “that was a waste of an entire day. What a shame. Our chance for fame and fortune”.

This is another girl about whom I haven’t spent a day thinking since I left school. So why she would put in an appearance right now I really don’t know.

Later on I was with another girl. We’d stopped somewhere to look at something that we’d seen earlier. All of a sudden I had a horrible realisation that I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t have a clue as to how I’d arrived at this place, or the name of the place or what I was doing here anyway. I left the girl with the car and walked a little way up the road to see if I could see anything. On the left-hand side of the road was a funeral director’s place with gravestones in it but it was all closed, dusty, and hadn’t been open for years by the looks of it. I decided to turn round and walk back to the car and drive until we find a village and see the name. What I could also do later was to look through the dashcam videos and see if I could identify the route. As I was walking back a lorry that was coming up behind me stopped at the side of the road behind me. The driver alighted and stood by the side of his cab. A lorry that was coming towards me, he stopped too and he alighted from his cab. He was carrying a small puppy and he stood by the cab. I was effectively blocked in between these two lorries, and my car and my friend were beyond them. As these two guys stood there I had this horrible menacing feeling that something pretty awful was about to happen.

So who are all these girls who keep on appearing? I wish I knew. Some nice, charming, pleasant company would be just what the doctor ordered and to actually have them present and allow them to slip away so easily like this is something of a shame. And I know that regular readers of this rubbish will recall saying on many occasions that I never “know where I was” but in this dream it was for real. As for those two guys in the lorries, I know THE BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH THEM .

isabelle the nurse breezed in this morning, late as usual due to having to do all of the blood tests that her oppo doesn’t want to do. She had a few cheery words of greeting and then rushed back out. She’s been working on her float for Carnaval and making the costumes and she’s promised me plenty of photos after the parades this forthcoming weekend.

Then it was breakfast time and MY BOOK time.

Today we are discussing miscellaneous earthworks again and despite his dismissal of much that has been assumed or inferred on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, he seems to conclude that everything uncertain is “probably” something astronomical or astrological, or both. However, he is yet to post one single piece of evidence to suggest what it is that is supposed to be indicated or observed, and the position of the stars and planets in the sky hasn’t changed that much in the last 5,000 years. The earth rotates through something like 1° every 7000 years.

His “pottery works” on the shores of the Thames estuary in Essex was excavated in the 1930s and identified as an Iron Age or Roman salt evaporation site, and not only did I manage to find the report of the excavation, I found a treatise on the operation thereof and now I would be quite confident in running my own sea salt production facility if the need ever arises. It would have been the kind of thing that, had I found it 20 years ago, I would have gone to try it to see if it would work.

Back in here I had all of the replies to deal with, and you’ve no idea just how many there were. Do I owe you all money or something? Once again, a great big thank-you for your continued support.

No Welsh today, so I decided to deal with the “Taste of Woodstock” radio programme. First task is to see what “songs played at Woodstock” I have in my live music collection As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I can’t use material actually performed at Woodstock unfortunately.

The answer to that is “not as much as I need” so I edited what I had and then set out to hunt down more music but I was waylaid. One of my neighbours, the President of the Residents’ Committee, wanted to come to pay me a visit. She’d left me a birthday present yesterday, which was nice of her.

She came along and we had a very nice chat for a while and discussed several issues, one of which was, surprisingly, one of the topics that I’d discussed with Rosemary the other day. It seems to be something that’s on the minds of a lot of people right now.

Next was my little great niece (or is she my great little niece) who arrived back home in Canada last night from Ecuador. She showed me all of her photos and videos of her trip and I told her how impressed I was with her. And I am too. These opportunities for travel only come along once in a lifetime and you should seize the moment. Sitting there with her feet straddling the equator beats the one that I took of Alison straddling the driehoek – the three-cornered border between Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, and also beats the one of Rosemary, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and me straddling the Arctic Circle.

Had His Nibs and I been able to reach the North Pole in 2018 I might have trumped it but, regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we stopped 700 miles short. My niece has 50 years ahead of her to do that, and good luck to her.

And while we’re on the subject of Rosemary … "well, one of us is" – ed … she rang me again today for a short chat. And it was short too – only fifty-three minutes. She needs the birth certificates of her parents and didn’t know how to go about finding them. Consequently I had a very happy time delving deep into the bowels of the Public Records Office in Kew and to my delight, I came up trumps too. When I was in Wandsworth working in that Italian restaurant I spent a lot of time in the PRO

The radio programme for this coming weekend needed chaeking too. That’s now done and sent off, but there was no time left to carry on with any more work. I was late as it was. But making a taco roll with rice and veg followed by date bread and soya dessert doesn’t take long.

So now I’m off to bed ready for shower day tomorrow. And I hope that I have a more productive day than today was. I can do without too many days like that. However, I’ll never turn down an opportunity to talk to a friend when the opportunity arises. There are more things in life than working.

But while we’re on the subject of working … "well, one of us is" – ed … One of my friends had sent me a message for my birthday, saying "I hope you managed to lay your hands on something tasty for your birthday"
And so I replied saying "unfortunately not. The nurses at dialysis kept well out of my reach."

0

Tuesday 31st December 2024 – BY THE TIME …

… that you lot read this, the old year will have gone out and it’ll be a new year. For many people it will be a new beginning too, but for many others it will be more of the same old routine.

25 years ago today we were eagerly awaiting the Millennium. I’d given an interview on Belgian TV (in Flemish, of course) a few days earlier and on New Year’s Eve I was sitting in a bar in a motel in a small town on an island off the coast of New Jersey.

We were partying, of course. I was wearing a hat to which I had tied a helium balloon. I’d tied the hat to me all the same with just enough string so that the hat, by virtue of the balloon, was floating an inch or so above my head and it looked really cool.

The Continental USA has five time zones and so we celebrated New Year for New York, then for Chicago, then for Denver, then for San Francisco, and finally for Anchorage.

Once we had celebrated New Year in Anchorage, we all trundled off to the all-night petrol station and convenience store down the road where we bought a big tub of ice cream and with a spoon each, we tucked in. Then a couple of us walked down to the beach and waited for the dawn to break and for all of the hope that we wanted it to bring.

But look at me now, 25 years later. Never mind crossing the Atlantic, I’m struggling to cross my bedroom and my best hope for the New Year is that they can somehow resolve the issue of this painful dialysis.

How the Mighty have fallen.

So if I have any advice for anyone in this coming year it is "if you feel like doing something, do it now, right now, before it’s too late. Because you become much more ill and infirm much quicker than you think."

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, I stayed up last night, loitering around for my own pleasure reading a few web pages about this and that, although not about “the other” of course. That boat sailed a long time ago.

It was 01:00 when I finally crawled into bed and then I slept the Sleep of the Dead until the alarm awoke me. I hadn’t moved at all during the night.

When I awoke though I was in the middle of an exciting dream but the moment I went to reach for the dictaphone it all evaporated, every last drop of thought and that is really a tragedy. I only hope that it didn’t involve Castor, TOTGA or Zero.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and sorted myself out, and then came back in here to wait for Isabelle the Nurse.

While I was waiting, I had a listen to the dictaphone to see if there was anything on it from the night. I was in work again. It was one of the very last days of work before Christmas so we weren’t doing very much. We were sitting around, talking and playing some kind of game that went on round and round the building. after lunch, I was late back. There were already six or seven people in this group. Our boss was there, the big boss of the building. He told us that we may as well continue this game and he’d actually like to play it with us too, so he joined in. Just then, his ‘phone rang so he answered it. It was a woman, asking for permission to be in late tomorrow because her husband worked at Knorr and they were doing something at 09:00. He replied that that wasn’t a problem. Then what he said was that he had a whole host of adverts that he’d cut out of the papers and he was going to ring round and speak to everyone to find out who they were, what they were doing and whether we knew all about them. I had something of a thought myself because my ‘phone number was also in that lot. He made a start and I could see that he was coming closer to my number in this pile. I’d worked out what I was going to say, and that was that this was just simply a way that I could use as an aide-memoire to make sure that I’d filled in all my forms on time and sent them in, and that would be really all.

Whatever was going on in that dream, I can’t think of how it relates to anything that I might know, especially why Knorr should feature in it so prominently. But then nothing in my dreams ever makes sense – just like in real life, I suppose.

Later on, we’d been playing football in a 5-a side football tournament. We were waiting for our final matches to start. My brother told me that his match was in a couple of minutes. I said something like “so is my final match”. We went to our various respective areas of this field. I played my game and when I came back I couldn’t find my brother. I searched and searched but with no luck so in the end I went home. Being back home, first of all I was shouted at for being late and then shouted at for losing my brother but I told the story of the final games and I still don’t think that they believed me but they were becoming completely agitated. Just then we heard the front door downstairs open. We thought “is this him?” I looked out of the door and down the stairs. It was my old black cat. She sat at the bottom of the stairs miaowing for a couple of minutes. I kept on talking to her. In the end she ran up the wall and across into our room. I picked her up, stroked her and took her back into the room where my parents were. They seemed more relieved to see the cat than any news about my brother

This is what I call “unlikely”. There would be no chance whatever of my brother ever playing football. And being shouted at was nothing compared to what would have happened had I lost my brother somewhere.

It was interesting watching my old black cat climb up the wall but she is the only member of my family whom I would be pleased to see. Why the others keep on appearing so often is something that completely defeats me and I wish that they’d move out of my head and make room for some others to appear.

Isabelle was late today. First day back so I imagine that she had all of the blood tests and injections to do. But she was her usual chatty self and she complimented me on being the only person up here to have some kind of Christmas decoration visible to the public.

After she left I made breakfast, and that was when I discovered that I’d run out of bread and had forgotten to make any more yesterday evening. And so I had to have a quick breadmaking session first.

While I was waiting for the dough to rise I had breakfast and read MY BOOK.

Today we are discussing housing, coinage and religion but it is the “religion” bit that is the most interesting, and not for the more obvious reasons either.

It’s long-been a mystery to me why so many Welsh words seem to come from the Latin, even though the words describe some vital item that surely must have existed and had a name prior to the coming of the Romans. Anyway our author tells us, in an aside, that "Celtic religion, in so far as it was descended from the religion of the undivided Aryan stock, was fundamentally one with the religions of Italy and Greece ; and we might expect that it would resemble most closely the religion of the Italians, to whose tongue Celtic was most nearly akin."

There is a variety of early Italian languages, like Etruscan and Umbrian to name but two, that preceded the Latin language. And if the root of these words in common usage was derived from words in one of these early Italian languages that later influenced the Latin language, that would explain everything.

It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. The word for a snake in Welsh is neidr which sounds uncannily like “adder” and a river in Welsh is afon, pronounced “Avon”, so you can see that Modern English has been influenced by words from an ancient Celtic language. Why wouldn’t this work with any other languages?

After breakfast I carried on making the bread and by the time that I finished, I had the best loaf that I have ever made and I was really impressed with that. While it was baking I tidied up around the kitchen and regrettably, dropped and broke one of my best glass storage jars

Then I had to check the radio programme that I’ll be sending off later. And this is that mega-complicated one that took me weeks of thought and work to make. But listening to it, it really does work and there’s a pile of good stuff in it.

It features someone who was born in 1892 and probably never ever met a rock musician in his life but he’s an important personage in the story of rock music, and it’s well-worth a listen. So tune in to LE BOUQUET GRANVILLAIS on Friday or Saturday at 21:00 CET, 20:00 UK time, 15:00 Toronto time.

There was an unexpected visit today. The woman who is President of the Residents’ Committee and who helped me so much with the purchase of the apartment downstairs came to see how I was. She stayed for an hour or so too chatting away. And she was another one who admired my Christmas lights, so I had a moan to her about the lack of festive spirit shown by everyone else.

For lunch I tried one of my new flapjack slices and this batch is the best that I have ever made too. Pushing the mixture down tightly into the baking tray with a potato masher is definitely the way to go here.

My cleaner turned up today instead of tomorrow and helped me into the shower. And once more, it really was lovely. Only five months to go until I can move downstairs and have a real shower.

While I was showering she was cleaning so there’s a nice clean apartment and a nice clean me in nice clean clothes. How long all of that will last, I really don’t know.

Football was on next – Penybont v Cardiff Metropolitan, and once again at the vital moment Penybont threw away a two-goal lead. They went from 2-0 to 2-3 against TNS a few weeks ago and tonight, they went from 2-0 to 2-2. They have now been knocked off the top of the table.

A match played in a howling gale was always going to be a lottery but the Met, playing with the wind and a 6’4″ centre-forward in the second half managed the conditions much better and had Penybont under the cosh for most of the last 45 minutes.

If Penybont have any aspirations in challenging TNS at the top, they are going to have to look at the question of concentration much more closely. They can’t let matches slip out of their grasp like this.

Tea tonight was the last of the frozen wellingtons with a big pile of veg and gravy, followed by Christmas pudding and custard. But as for the veg, the roast potatoes and roast Butternut squash went down really well.

There are some leeks left so at the weekend, it may well be leek soup for lunch. There’s some butternut squash soup in the fridge for tomorrow.

So now I’m going to loiter around for a while before going to bed. Isabelle isn’t coming so I can lie in.
"I’ll give you a ring to see how you are tomorrow morning" she said instead
"No you won’t" I replied. "I’ll be in bed"
"I’ll leave it late then" she said. "About 11:30"
"No you won’t. I’ll still be in bed then!"

Anyway, just before I go, latest news from Bridgend in that Penybont FC’s dog walking service has collapsed.
"Why is that?" I asked my informant
"They have lost all of their contracts"
"What happened?"
"Apparently no-one is letting them take their dogs for a walk, seeing as how they are totally incapable of hanging on to a lead."

0

Friday 23rd August 2024 – WELL, IT’S ANOTHER …

… really late night tonight.

For some reason that I don’t understand I completely forgot about the football tonight. Y Bala v Y Fflint and this was a game that I really wanted to see.

But it slipped my mind and when I came back from tea tonight the first half was almost over. Luckily it’s on a recorded stream so I could wind it back to the start and watch it from the kick-off, but it means that now the final whistle has gone, it’s not really late

There’s definitely something going on here because I seem to be forgetting just about everything these days and I can see this bringing me into some serious trouble at some point because there’s a load of stuff piling up and some of it is really important.

At least I remembered to wash my puttees. After I finished my notes last night I went into the bathroom to sort myself out and then washed the puttees. They had been soaking for 36 hours in warm soapy water so it didn’t take long and they were quite clean afterwards.

Furthermore, I managed to do it without knocking myself or making myself bleed and that’s an achievement in itself these days.

It was quite early too when I went to bed. In fact I beat my 23:00 target. Only by a couple of minutes but even so, that’s still important. And it didn’t take long to go to sleep either.

A couple of times during the night I awoke but I remained stuck to my mattress until the alarm at 07:00 when I crawled out of bed and into the bathroom. I had a good wash and shave of the parts that I missed yesterday, and then I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone. Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson had been recruited to hunt down an old friend of Watson’s who had disappeared, someone who lived in salubrious surroundings. It was no surprise that he’d disappeared but a lot of people were worried soo they were set on the trail. Eventually, following a series of clues, they managed to track him down to a doss-house in Limehouse where he was staying under an assumed name. Apparently he’d had money difficulties so he’d sold a lot of his possessions to a pawn shop and with the money was living the life of an escapee in crude digs or something. When Holmes and Watson caught up with him he was extremely remorseful. He said that he’d spent £2900 but that was everything that he had and there was not a penny left so Holmes and Watson had to sell whatever possessions he still had in order to recruit him back into society. They had the cunning plan of advertising an Electricity Service where they could band together all the residents in one particular area and agree to arrange their electricity for them, including new houses that hadn’t had electricity up until now so they were going through these houses and photographs, selecting the best photographs. There was one there with a ghost walking out of the front door between two people and they were trying their best to capture this image but for some reason the image didn’t seem to want to be captured

There were several stories similar to this one in the Sherlock Holmes repertoire and of course his author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was very interested in the paranormal, being a huge supporter of spiritualism, séances and the supernatural arts to an extent that was almost fanatical. Seeing a ghost in between two real live humans would have been no problem for Conan Doyle.

When the nurse came I told her the good news about her supplies, my new puttees and the switch for the door. She gave me my injection and then dealt with my legs while chatting away. She reminded me that it’s a blood test tomorrow and she also need another … errr … sample … of a different type. I hope that I remember.

After breakfast I tidied up a little and then went to my Welsh class. It’s the last day today for a week or so so we can relax but she still had us working hard. I feel much more confident about my skills right now, but there was an awful lot to take in.

The big issue is that Welsh is not a Romance language like French or Spanish or Italian. It’s a Celtic language similar to Breton, Gaelic and Scots Gaelic so the rules of grammar are nothing like those to which I’m accustomed.

The vocabulary too bears little resemblance to any Latin-based language so sometimes it’s impossible to have a guess at the words.

There was a pause at midday when my cleaner came in to bring the medication – or, at least, the first load. The rest will come over the next day or two.

When the lesson finished I was surprised once more by the cleaner. We have a friend in the building who has now gone into a Home, and my cleaner, who had been tidying up her apartment, brought down some apple purée and tinned food that might be of use to me, which was very kind of them.

A neighbour popped in to, and left me some lovely strawberries. I seem to be flavour of the month right now.

Then Rosemary wanted me on the phone so we had a quick chat. Only a short chat today – just 58 minutes. We seem to be losing our touch

Tea tonight was falafel and chips with a vegan salad – delicious as usual but I’m running low on salad stuff. It might be sausage, beans and chips for tea tomorrow night yet. But regardless of that, the strawberries were delicious and there are some left for the next few days.

Then we had the football. Newly-promoted Y Fflint v Y Bala down at maes Tegid – Bala’s “Cae Tatws” football ground.

As has been said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … there’s a massive gulf between the second tier and the first tier and that was evident today.

But while Llansawel, the other promoted side, were being well and truly turned over by Cardiff Metropolitan, Y Fflint put up a gritty battle and while the result (Y Bala won 2-0) was never in any doubt, Y Fflint were in the mix all the way to the final whistle.

A loss though is a loss and already we’re starting to see a little gap open up between the two new sides, stuck at the foot of the table, and the other 10 clubs in the division and it’s rather early for this kind of thing. Three games without a point is still no points, no matter how well you play and how close the game are.

So right now I’m going to bed, hours later than I intended. I’m not doing myself any favours at all.

But talking of mediums and spiritualism and the like I once had someone ‘phone me up
"I’m phoning to tell you about Madame (whatever)". said the voice. "She’s a world famous Medium …"
"Well, she can’t be much good, can she?" I said
"Why?" asked the voice
"Because if she’d been any good, she’d have foretold exactly how this conversation would end …" and I hung up the ‘phone.

0

Wednesday 21st August 2024 – "ONCE YOU START …"

"… the dialysis procedure, all your problems will be over."

Yes, and we’ve all heard things like that before, haven’t we? If something like that could really solve all my problems I’d have done it a long, long time ago. Long before this.

In actual fact, it might solve one or two but I’m not expecting a Damascene conversion where I pick up my bed and walk. That’s being rather optimistic. But what we have learned from all of this is that it appears that dialysis is very much on the agenda.

Well know more after the 28th of August. That’s when everything is being inspected. They’ll make a decision very shortly afterwards. So if you see me leaping around like a two-year old, you’ll know that it’s done the business.

But for the moment let us return from our flights of fantasy back into the Real World.

After I’d finished my notes I wandered into the bathroom and there I put my puttees in the bowl to soak. The other pair I rolled up and put them ready for use in the morning.

Eventually I managed to make my way into bed, hours later than intended, and fell asleep almost immediately.

Something else awoke me at some point but I’m not sure what and I’m not sure when. This “not wearing a watch” is embarrassing but I’m scratching myself to death when I do.

The alarm summoned me to my feet at the usual time of 07:00 and I headed to the bathroom for a good wash and scrub down followed by a change of clothing. You never know – I might get to see Emilie The Cute Consultant this evening.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. This is another dream that involves some kind of panic attack. It was at one of these fairground places and there was a lot going on that didn’t seem to work correctly. There was a human cannonball who was fired from a cannon but the cannonball wouldn’t fire. It just rolled out of the bottom of the gun. It rolled over to by I think my youngest sister’s husband so what they had was this guy and this girl who had to climb inside the cylindrical thing where my brother in law was sitting. He was going to do something with the cannonball and they were going to intercept it but it was a terribly confined small space and I was there expecting some kind of panic or riot as the people concerned were unable to effectively escape from this claustrophobic environment. Luckily it passed off without any major incident. I certainly didn’t want to have to do it again with anyone and go through what was potentially a panic-stricken routine to extract them from this cylindrical tube thing while someone does something silly with a cannonball which seemed to be totally superfluous and ridiculous to me but that’s how it was

It goes without saying that I’ve no idea what’s going on there with that. The last thing that you’d expect to dream about is a human cannonball

A bunch of white track suits with a slogan on them were found to be mistyped. The slogan was wrong when I examined them as such and were counterfeit. They were able to test that by using a blob of chewing gum on the dragon’s head that was part of the label. There was a special technique for testing whether they were correct or not, in using chewing gum. This test failed so all the track suits were seized and were donated to refugees who were held in one of these detention centres

That sounds much more plausible. Forged sports equipment is quite a racket and I’m sure that we’ve all heard stories of famous mistypes in counterfeit sports goods. Without them there wouldn’t be famous sporting quotes like
"She was only the football supporter’s daughter
But she liked her ‘Uddersfield and her Arsenal"

When the nurse came, she moaned about my puttees losing their elasticity and asked me to arrange for a new pair. And on top of that there’s another issue. She has an electronic key to enter the building. She had it from my neighbour who has now moved into a Home and so wants her electronic key back

This will upset the nurses as the will then have to ring to be let into the building. And it would upset me because a couple of times now the nurses have intervened in my health issues when I’ve been unable to respond.

Consequently giving them unfettered access to the building is essential from my point of view and from theirs. Could I oblige?

So after she left and I’d had breakfast I put wheels in motion and made a phone call or two

Once more the Welsh lesson passed off well but I was still glad that it was over. In the pauses I’d chosen the missing track and written the notes ready for dictation so that’s that all done now.

The taxi came early for me so I was in a hurry to prepare but I ended up having everything to hand, for the first time ever, and we were there in plenty of time.

It wasn’t Emilie the Cute Consultant which was a shame, but her sidekick. And he tells me that he’s become a faithful listener of my radio shows. That means I have an audience of at least one.

We ran through everything and he told me that his Social Services department is on the trail of this Clinic in Avranches. He’ll let me know how it pans out.

Apparently my doctor had written a new prescription for me on 13th August. Where it’s gone, I don’t know but he printed it off, all … gulp … 19 items of it. And he added on an additional prescription for some new puttees, which will please the nurse.

He thinks that this dialysis will solve all of my problems, but he doesn’t even know what problems I have so he’s a very brave man

Back here my cleaner, who had been tidying the apartment, was waiting for me and she helped me upstairs where we sorted out the paperwork. We’ll check the medication on Friday and order some more.

Tea tonight was a delicious leftover curry with naan bread, cooked to perfection. But that’s the last of that batch of naan dough. I’ll have to make some more.

Now I’m off to bed. I have the heart specialist tomorrow morning so will he find a heart? Or am I turning into a politician? Watch this space.

But talking of human cannonballs, we had Gandey’s Circus who used to winter at Arclid near Sandbach. I had a friend who worked in the Crewe Employment Exchange who told me "Gandey’s are looking for a human cannonball. Do you fancy the job?"
"I thought that they already had one" I replied. "What happened to him?"
"Apparently he was fired last week" she replied.

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Friday 2nd August 2024 – I’VE HAD A COUPLE …

… of lovely chats on the internet this afternoon.

The first was with one of my neighbours, the President of the Residents’ Committee who was so helpful when it came to buying the apartment downstairs

And the second was with a close fried who lives in Newport. He was actually best man at my wedding and we still keep in touch.

However last night, I wasn’t anywhere like in touch with my ideal night-time curfew of 23:00. It was actually after midnight before I finally hit the sack, running as late as I was. The list of things that I have to do before going to bed seems to have grown longer and longer.

But once I was in bed, I didn’t reach all that far into my little mantra before I fell asleep. That’s one good thing – that I’m asleep quite quickly whereas in the olden days I’d be tossing and turning for hours.

There were no stone cutter, no diggers, no nothing going on outside this morning so I slept all the way through until about … errr …. 06:15 when something must have awoken me. And I lay there semi-comatose until the alarm went off at 07:00.

In the bathroom I had a good scrub up and sorted out some clean clothes. Who knows? I might get to see Emilie the Cute Consultant at the Clinic so I have to look my best.

With clean clothes, it meant that I could give my undies and trousers a scrub in the sink. These days I wear these shell-suit trousers all the time because they wash and dry in no time, which is good news seeing how filthy I can be.

Next step was to listen to the dictaphone to find out what I was doing during the night. I was in Shavington going to catch the bus to Nantwich and for some reason or other decided to walk up to the bus stop at the Elephant and Castle. I set out to walk and on my way I noticed in the distance the Farmer’s Daughter who has figured on these pages once or twice but she had short hair and that suited her head really well. She walked off somewhere and I was debating whether to go to follow her to see where she was going and to see whether I could summon up some kind of excuse to have a good chat. I walked up to where the Elephant and Castle is and put my hand out to turn right even though I was walking on foot. A couple of kids on the pavement, tiny kids who were presumably going to catch the bus to school saw me and waited on the edge of the pavement until I went past. There on the right hand side was an Austin Cambridge but it was “A” registration as in 1983 or 1984 but they stopped making Cambridges in 1967 and any vehicle that was subsequently registered would have had an age-related plate fitted to it, so why was this one carrying the plate of such a recent date. That was a complete mystery that needed to be resolved.

Yes, well I’ll tell you something for nothing and that I would not have been convinced if she wanted to cut her hair. I’m afraid that I’m quite the male chauvinist when it comes to girls’ hair. I think that long hair on girls is absolutely beautiful and it’s a cardinal sin for a girl to set out to disfigure that which nature has blessed her. But I’m impressed that I can remember banal details about car registration numbers and years of manufacture while I’m asleep.

As for The Farmer’s Daughter, there hangs a long tale that might be one of the many recounted at my funeral.

The taxi came bang on time which was nice and another passenger already in there graciously yielded up the front seat – it’s much easier for me to pop in and out of the front.

We set off for Avranches and first had to drop off the other passenger at the hospital, and then take me to the clinic across the road and up the hill.

This is a brand-new building and it does look impressive, although it beats me why they couldn’t have built it onto the existing hospital.

The nurse is there is one who has seen me before and she remembered me, which is rather sad going, I suppose. Once seen …

She asked me a load of questions about my current symptoms, and either she’s excellent at prognostication, the symptoms from which I’m suffering are well-known, she’s a regular reader of this rubbish or else she’s in league with the Devil.

It was interesting when she asked me things like "when you go to sleep in the afternoon, is it a sudden, dramatic sleep with no warning and no realisation that you’ve been asleep?"

You can say that again.

She weighed me again. And having been down past Target Weight 01 and close to Target Weight 02, my current weight is depressing to say the least.

She took off all of my bandages and dressings and commented about how well the surgery was looking. "Would I like to see?"

And so I told her to clear off and put a dressing on it, and it took her a while to do it. I think that she was hoping that I’d catch sight of it.

She’s formally forbidden me to wrap a dressing around the arm – just leave the plaster on it. And she’s going to ‘phone up the nurse and give her instructions. And so I’m suspicious.

But some good has come out of this meeting. I told her of my woes at the private clinic. She was horrified. Being a terminally ill patient, I’m entitled to 100% of my healthcare covered by the State. She showed me the paper that she has which confirms it.

The Private Clinic had no right to make me pay even a penny. So she’s asked to see a copy of the receipt and she’ll take it up with the Hospital’s Welfare Department

After she’d taken a blood sample she threw me out and the taxi brought me home where my faithful cleaner was waiting. She helped me up the stairs and into my apartment.

She seems to think that I’m moving better than I did previously, and how I wish that it were true

Not having had anything to eat or drink as yet, I sat down to breakfast. And couldn’t move for a while afterwards, so when the nurse came round to deal with me later, the place was a tip with breakfast dishes everywhere.

After she left, I had some ‘phone calls to make.

The President of the Residents’ Committee is returning on Sunday so we had a good that about this and that.

It included the latest news about our neighbour, currently residing in the hospital. Things are not looking to bright for her future and we may have seen the last of her in this building

Once we had hung up I made a drink and then ‘phoned a friend.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago I mentioned a project that I might be starting at some point.

It’s had a couple of false starts and deciding that it can’t go on for ever and can’t be delayed much longer, I have decided to go in a different direction.

This actually means calling for help. After all, the key to success has been knowing where to stop and when to seek the advice of experts, and if you have friends who can be depended up to help you in this respect, then so much the better.

And I’ll tell you something else for nothing, and that is at the end of a chat that lasted a Rosemaryesque one hour and 15 minutes, I was a long way further down the road than I was after several months of prevaricating

Tea tonight was pie and veg, the last slice which was a shame because it was so nice. And it was followed by apple turnover and soya cream

Yes, my air fryer is great for warming up slices of pie and apple turnovers.

So now I’m off to bed, hoping for a really good sleep, and I mustn’t forget to wash my shorts in the morning. I forgot last week. Why I wash them on Saturdays is because with not going to bed until later, they have longer to dry.

But before I go to bed, let me tell you about the Clinic at Avranches and the guy in the next cubicle to me.
He works in the quarry down the road and wasn’t quick enough to get out of the way when they detonated some explosive.
"And it’s badly damaged my … errr … ummm …" he said, groping for the polite word.
"Rectum?" asked the nurse, helpfully
"Well" said the man "in all honesty it’s not done ’em much good"

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Sunday 19th May 2024 – WHAT AN EMBARRASSMENT

this evening I’ve been out and about – and how I wish that I hadn’t. It did not go well.

Actually it all began to go wrong the previous evening. Despite the promise of an extra hour in bed until 08:00, it was actually long after midnight before I finally hit the hay, what with one thing and another. And once you start, you’ll be surprised at how many other things there are.

It was another turbulent night when I don’t think that I may have had much sleep, and I was certainly in no mood to deal with the alarm that rang.

Anyway I staggered off into the bathroom having switched off the alarm, done what I’d needed to do and washed the floor (which was much more complicated than it ought to have been) I was interrupted mid-deshabillé by the early arrival of the nurse. So he had to wait for me to finish.

Once I was ready he did the necessary and departed, leaving me to prepare breakfast.

There was a ‘phone call shortly afterwards. It’s a neighbour’s birthday, the neighbour who was so helpful in putting me on the trail of the apartment downstairs. It’s a “special” birthday and she was having a big party in one of the public rooms here.

She wanted me to be there, which was nice, and se she’d asked another couple of neighbours to help me. They rang me up to confirm the arrangements.

At some point in between one or two of the constant waves of sleep that were overwhelming me I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I was a teacher at school last night talking to a couple of guys. As a result I was late to go to my class one morning. On another morning a similar situation occurred but on a third moment I was just late. I ran into a young teacher who was trying to make an impression who was also late coming into school. I told him to simply say that he had been to see these two other guys who had kept him longer than they should but he couldn’t understand it. He kept on being confused about how he should say and what he should say. When I mentioned a sum of money which was why I was late – I had to go to pay a bill somewhere he asked “yes, do I have to pay these guys a sum of money?” and he started to really confuse himself. In the end I wished that I hadn’t said anything and that he’s just gone in and treated his absence as though without any problem whatever. This was going to end up far too complicated for him to understand which is a total surprise. It was all pretty straightforward to me what he needed to do. The other two guys involved – they were quite happy to play ball with any suggestion whatsoever

That makes a change, doesn’t it? People playing ball and willing to fall in with my ideas.

And then I vaguely heard the alarm go off at 08:00 and then vaguely heard the doorbell – when he came I was still flat-out asleep in the bedroom. He had to come and hunt me down and do all the things that … fell asleep here …

Of course, that was the phantom alarm sounding and it wasn’t the nurse to come in to awaken me either. There are some strange things going on in this building.

When the alarm went off I was busy teaching someone some French. We were at a strange kind of house party last night with lots of excitement going on. Down in the garage outside was a builder mixing cement who had developed a way of doing it automatically. He showed me round and showed me how it worked. It looked quite an interesting way of doing things – you could certainly mix a lot of cement quite quickly in this way. He was the one asking me the French for all kinds of different phrases as we were going along

There are so many things like this in my dreams that if I could remember them correctly and patent them, I’d make a fortune

While I was asleep at lunchtime there was something about two girls being here. It might even have been Percy Penguin and someone else. I’d made a big plate of salad and given them a side plate each so that they could help themselves to some, but one of the girls complained that the side plates just weren’t big enough and they wanted dinner plates.

At the rate that I’m breaking crockery here, they should think themselves lucky that they were offered side plates. It was probably all that I had.

So continuing on with my struggle after a rather late lunch I chose all of the remaining music for the next radio programme and paired it off. For some reason that took a lot longer than it ought to have done.

And so did putting on my shoes. I had to take off my puttees of course but the subsequent battle with my shoes took almost 45 minutes and was the most depressing moment of my life – so far

When my two neighbours called and helped me downstairs, you’ve no idea how depressed I was. It was clear that my health has deteriorated badly since the last time that I went out because it was such a struggle. I was beginning to think that it was the wrong decision to come out because I’ll never get back up the stairs again.

As I hadn’t been out for ages they took me on a guided tour of the town to see the sights, which was very nice of them. It’s ages since I’ve had a good look around.

At the party I fell in with a very nice group of guys and gals and eventually a chair with arms was produced so that I could sit down outside, enjoy the sun, talk music and eat a big plate of crudités

Eventually we had to go inside for a main meal, and this is where the fun began – I couldn’t get out of the chair, no matter how many people tried to help me.

Four guys had to carry the chair – and me, like some Roman emperor, I suppose – inside the hall and drop me at a table. Surprisingly there was nothing arranged for me to eat. someone eventually produced a plate of green beans followed by a plate of cherries.

We were there until about midnight and then we had the same trouble. It was impossible for me to leave the chair.

In the end they carried my and the chair to the car and bundled me inside, and that was not without mishap. I fell over a couple of times trying to go from the chair to the car.

At the other end, outside here, they helped me from the car, put me in the chair as I still couldn’t stand up, and they carried the chair and me up the stairs and tipped me out on the bed.

What an ignominious, humiliating way to spend an evening. I should really never have gone out but it’s as well to find out my shortcomings while there were plenty of people to help. Heaven alone knows what it will be like when I have to go to Paris.

But at least my experience wasn’t as humiliating as for someone else there. A rather large lady, who took up a lot of space, appeared at the party and wanted to sit down
"Three chairs for this lady, please?" asked our host
"Hip! Hip! Hooray!" roared the crowd.

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Sunday 12th May 2024 – I’LL BE GLAD …

… when today ends and I can crawl off into the warmth and comfort of my nice little bed.

It’s been a horrible day so far. Just now I couldn’t even find the strength to rise up from my comfy chair to go to take my pizza from the oven. Just how bad is that?

And to think that I was so looking forward to it too. Being for once early in bed I was looking forward to a nice long uninterrupted sleep last night.

But that didn’t happen either. We had two false or phantom alarms during the night and as I said the other day, I’ve no idea what’s happening there.

The second time, after having almost persuaded myself that it was time to leave the bed, was at 06:20. And then I couldn’t go back to sleep. I lay there vegetating until 08:00.

When I did finally stir my stumps as the alarm rang out, I headed for the bathroom where I had a really good wash and a change of clothes. The previous set of clothing walked into the wash basket on its own

The nurse came round later than usual. She sorted out my dressing and puttees but she couldn’t hang around and was soon gone. I had some corn flakes and coffee and then came back in here.

It’s not as if I did much either. I was flat out on my chair for a couple of hours completely involuntarily, and the hallucinations that I had were just like that time in hospital a few months ago.

Once I came back into the Land of the Living I watched Stranraer grub out a 2-2 draw against East Kilbride in the promotion – relegation play-off. It’s a good job that the second leg is in Stranraer because I think that they’ll need rather more than home advantage.

After lunch I transcribed the dictaphone notes, of which there were more than just a few. I was at a football match but a match where every player had to lie on a bed and perform some kind of ritual movement and then would be joining the team but the team was not so good in the goals and there were certain rhythms and routines that the players had to follow based on different lines in a series of books. every now and again someone would reposition these things so you’d change direction and go off again. I was busy trying to kill someone off the game. This was an extremely complicated manoeuvre too because I had to follow certain rules and they were complicated too in doing different things. In the meantime of course the person was trying to kill me. Then we were going to have a small game and I was going to take part in the main game so I was being briefed ready to take my position at the next interchange of players. It was all about playing up and down these steps as they changed function . It looked extremely complicated and on many times I had to confirm it with my notes that I’d taken a while ago which were still with the person with whom I was originally paired. Eventually they told me to stop that and just follow these instructions which completely confused me because I can’t remember all kinds of things like that that they wanted me to do. Then there were all kinds of different rules, regulations and other things. Then there was this guy trying to kill me from this subsidiary game. It was just so complicated.

And isn’t “I can’t remember all kinds of things” the story of my life? I can remember the lyrics of all kinds of obscure rock songs of the 196s but ask me why I’ve just come into the kitchen.

Then I was back in that game again. One of the guys who had started off the game was very seriously hurt, I suppose, and lost all the power in his spear or javelin or something so we were going to have to find someone else who would take over the position and maybe play from there. There was lots more to it too but I’ve forgotten all of that now.

Didn’t I say so? And it’s not my spear or javelin in which I’ve lost power these days

Then yet again I was back in this dream fighting a war. I went to sit down but missed my aim and fell onto the floor but I wasn’t on the floor so I thought that maybe I’d managed to sit up and extricate myself without a great deal of difficulty. Then I suddenly realised that I was actually lying on the bed. That’s not complicated at all to stand up from so I might be able to be lucky and get back into the game quite quickly.

Another phantom alarm tonight at 03:05

The voting formula has changed. It’s where people who were franchised members of a particular party all still voted and their vote was taken into account somehow but now they’ve decided that this can rise up to a million as more and more people stay at home with OCVID rampant. In 2017 the chief of the college came in with a car equipped with its winter tyres. There were already three cars there having their summer tyres fitted but as usual he fought his way to the front of the queue and tried to break in there to be dealt with earlier. The woman at that position was not having any of it despite how much of a period of voting she’s going to learn to lose because of the confrontation

And if you are wondering why my dreams don’t make sense, they are dreams. They don’t have to. In fact you’ll be lucky if anything that I write does.

Did I mention another false alarm at about 06:20 this morning?… "yes you did" – ed …

In between all of this I’d taken some pizza dough from the freezer and it had been defrosting. I rolled it out ready to assemble but I was interrupted. One of my neighbours came to see me for a chat which was nice of her

And so, running late yet again, I assembled my pizza and baked it. It was delicious as usual.

So now, at long last, I’m ready for bed, if I can get out of my chair.

But it’s not all doom and gloom, despite how it might seem. The good news is that the new Crewe Bus Station has opened – something that I should have reported a couple of days ago except that my “moles on various committees” have not been getting about as aften as they should and they’ll receive a kick in the nether regions in due course.

The even better news is that the new bus station has public toilets. That means that in due course all the residents of The Land That Time Forgot will have the same opportunity that I did of passing Biology ‘O’ level thanks to the helpful drawings that will doubtless appear on the walls before long.

They had guided tours of the public conveniences on the open day. It cost 2/6d for a visit – or 2/7d if you wanted to see all of it.

But going back to this story about not remembering anything. Two things happen to you when you reach my age. One is that you forget absolutely everything.
… "And what’s the second thing?" – ed …
I don’t know. I can’t remember.

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Thursday 18th April 2024 – APPARENTLY I MIGHT …

… be able to go home tomorrow, so they say.

But simply to pack my bags ready to go to my next hospital.

Apparently I’m being passed from hospital to hospital quicker than in a game of “pass the parcel” in a bar in West Belfast

Mind you, I can’t say that I’m sorry, for I might be able to have a little peace.

Not that I’m complaining about the service. Not at all. In fact, quite the reverse. There’s far too much of it. So much so that it’s overwhelming the other services that follow on.

This morning I was awoken at, would you believe, 05:00 because they wanted to check my blood sugar. At 05:00!!
So "help! Your blood sugar is too low. Drink this orange juice! Eat this jam!"
"Eat this jam? Eat it neat? What do I eat it with?"
A couple of minutes later "Here’s a ‘madeleine’ to eat with your jam"
"You’re quick enough to spot that I’m at risk of diabetes. And at 05:00 too! But not quick enough to spot that on the same page just 2 lines down it says that I’m a vegan."
Eventually we agree on some biscottes

And then at breakfast "Where’s the jam for my bread?"
"It says here on your notes that you’re diabetic. You aren’t allowed it"

While I’m actually eating (with my jam that I have now negotiated) –
Person n°1 comes with my medication
Person n°2 comes to change the plaster on my foot
Person n°3 comes to inject me in the hip
Person n°4 comes to remind me to tell her when I’ve been to the bathroom
Person n°5 comes to take my blood pressure and temperature

Eventually everyone clears off for a couple of hours and leaves me at peace with just the usual interruptions

And then round about 11:00 the doctor comes to see me. And while she’s soothing my fevered brow (and believe me, she can soothe my fevered brow any time she likes) –
Person n°1 comes to make the bed
Person n°2 comes to give me a clean nightshirt
Person n°3 comes to talk to the doctor
Person n°4 comes to tell me to tell her when I’ve been to the bathroom
Person n°5 comes to take my blood pressure and temperature

"Blood pressure’s rather high today" said the doctor, looking at the figures
"Surely not" I said. "Perish the thought!"

Eventually everyone drift away and leaves me in relative peace

But then I do need the bathroom and so I set off. And it’s odds-on, and you would have bet your money on it, that as soon as I’m in the bathroom the blasted phone rings

So I make it back to the phone just in time (which surely must be a ‘first’) and while I’m listening to radio business with the phone at one ear there’s the nurse in the other ear reminding me to tell her when I’ve been to the bathroom.

And so it’s gone on (and on, and on) all day. But at least I saw two friendly faces today. A couple of my neighbours, my devoted cleaner and the President of the Residents’ Committee, came to say “hello” and to bring me my emergency backpack, including the travelling laptop, and so I’m saved. The solidarity in my building is impressive.

After they leave, Doctor n°2 comes to see me. She’s from the Nephrology Department. Apparently she’s spoken to Paris and they’ve decided that as Nephrology is where my current problems lie and as there is no-one special at Paris handling my case from that point of view they can do it here so she’ll be taking over.

What I reckon is that she just wants to get her teeth into my kidneys – preferably wrapped up with mushrooms in a puff pastry.

Then Doctor n°1 came to tell me what Doctor n°2 had said so I told her that I was sorry.

She asked why so I told her that it was because I wouldn’t see her again – and she blushed!

And so it’ s gone on. It’s now 21:00 and I’m still being injected and I really ought to be running a sweep about how many more times tonight a nurse going to come round to tell me to tell her when I’ve been to the bathroom.

But as I said, I’m not in the least complaining. Had I been in the UK I’d have had to wait 18 months for an appointment to go to the bathroom. I’d have been pushing up the daisies a long time before this

As for my part, I’m like Mona Lott on ITMA and "it’s being so cheerful as keeps me going"

There’s some stuff on the dictaphone that needs transcribing too. I was doing something with a group of people, one of whom was a young girl whom I quite happened to like. It involved changing my clothes and I had to carry them across the room to the sink. I just about dropped them but managed to catch them just at the point where I awoke. It was, I think, the shock of dropping the clothes that made me awaken. I thought that I had a really good reflex action of catching them while I was half-asleep and there weren’t any real clothes there anyway.

It’s not bad, is it? Being able to catch non-existent clothing with a lightning reflex action when I’m asleep. Not for nothing did I keep wicket for one of the local cricket teams when I was younger.

And then I had to think of some good adverts for a bus company so we took it in turns to sing a rhyme of doggerel. One girl who was very much like Whats’ername who used to appear quite a lot on “Just A Minute” … "Sheila Hancock" – ed … sang a rhyme basically to say that she knew nothing at all. The boss who drifted onto the scene in the middle of a snowstorm in an old double-decker bus came along and told me as I was watching “that’s the way, Eric. Baffle them with nonsense”. Of course he couldn’t see where he was going because of the snow and ended up driving over the pavement and falling over the pavement head-first with his bus and ended up on the grass sticking upright. He was delighted because there was a part that had been damaged previously and they’d fitted a replacement panel. You could see a perfect reproduction of the panel in the snow even down to the makers’ name and date. He thought that if we could cast on that we could make some brilliant replacement panels ourselves of the one that he’d damaged ages ago and just had replaced. I thought that it was a strange idea but most good ideas like this always start off being strange.

It seems that I have several hidden talents, so well-hidden that I can’t find them anywhere during the day. Planning battles and military campaigns, catching non-existent clothing and running advertising campaigns during my sleep.

This isn’t the first advertising campaign that I’ve run in my sleep either. It’s a shame that no-one is actually paying me for the services that I’m providing during the night. I could afford to retire on the proceeds if this kind of thing carries on.

While I was asleep in the afternoon a new girl had started work in the office. There wasn’t really very much that we could do except to send out the new instructions for the new year. As nothing had been printed yet etc it was a case of having to do everything manually so I was running around looking for a 500-roll of stickers. She told me that they were in someone’s second drawer down. The girl herself was saying that “well no-one has recalculated anything so we’re going to have to do all that by hand too” which I thought was amazing considering that she’d only just started. We were trying very quickly to collect everything together so that at least we could have something that needed to be done and could set things under way so that at least she would feel that she was doing something on her start at the office.

That’s not everything that there was but you don’t really want to know the rest.

So this is all that I’m going to do for now. There are tons of arrears still to do but I need to be in the mood for it

But talking of blushing just now … "well, one of us is" – ed … this morning the little student nurse came to help me change my nightshirt and as she lifted the old one over my head she said, jokingly "ohh la la! Striptease!"
So I whispered in her ear "to tell a little secret, you aren’t the first female to undress me" – and she blushed too!

All of the foregoing is probably why I’m leaving tomorrow. I think that I’m actually being expelled, not discharged.

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