And wasn’t that nice too? Ingrid came round to visit me for a couple of hours to see how I was doing and that cheered me up greatly. It’s nice to have good friends and it’s nice for them to take an interest in what is going on and in what you are doing. She came round ar 15:00 and we were chatting away until after 17:00, with lots of news about people whom we used to know. After all, since the demise of all of the community self-help groups that we used to have, we’ve all been out of touch with everyone else and what’s been going on.
After Ingrid left, we had tea. Liz had made some vegan pies in the morning before going to work and I had mine with a baked potato, broccoli and sweet corn. Absolutely gorgeous, it was too.
And I needed it too because I was exhausted after a most astonishing series of lengthy rambles during the night. It started off with a group of six women, blasted off in a rocket to go to a distant planet. When they arrive, they divide themselves up into three groups of two. One of these pairs, an older woman and a younger one, leave the rocket to go in search of intelligent life, I suppose. However they become separated and the younger one, who is very insecure, wanders around very carefully trying to avoid being contacted and meeting anyone. She then finds a little shower block kind of place where she can take a shower. Its a white stuccoed stone-built small circular building but on multi-levels descending deep underground with just one shower on each level and a continual supply of warm water. It’s just like a scene from one of the Our Man Flint
And what was my role in all of this? I’ve no idea but after a trip down the corridor it was my turn to be new in an office. I was wandering around there, getting my bearings, and I met up with Laurence’s step-father Paulo. We had a long chat and he invited me to lunch, taking me to a café. And it was the worst café that I have ever visited. The queues were absolutely enormous with one queue for meals and another queue for snacks and no-one came to serve at the queue for snacks, except on the very very odd occasion. Someone would, very occasionally, be moved on from there but we waited and waited. The place was filthy and horrible and the servers were quite disgusting, picking up and serving the sticky cakes with their fingers and then licking their fingers clean. Eventually we did make it to the head of the queue, Paulo, his friend, and me, and we found the food to be very very basic, something with chips. I just asked for a giant plate of chips but they were freezing, freezing cold. It was horrible, the worst café in the world and I can’t think of any reason at all why anyone would ever want to come and eat here, in this filthy café with this disgraceful service and shocking food.
From here, we wound ourselves backwards to Hillbilly days and we had received a carriage from the Flying Scotsman. It was to be converted into a convertible for some kind of exhibition or other, which we were very unhappy about, but we had won this prize and that was that. We had to go to stay in this place in the Wilderness which was two converted railway carriages used as holiday homes. It was the weirdest place that I’ve ever visited or ever been. The people who were running it were strange people to say the least and there were two guys there more content on stealing everything that they could lay their hands on rather than anything else. And that includes one of the carriages, for which they had rigged up one kind of cable and winch to help them tow it away. But we were easily able to outwit these men because they were not too bright, to say the least. The people who ran it were as poor as church mice and doing everything in their power to try to get more money. One thing that they were trying to do was to defraud the baker, and we had to continually speak to the baker to ensure that we received our order and that it was correct. We noticed that the food that these people were eating was disgusting – cheap, offal kind of meat slices and cheese slices. They were even eating kittens and one of our party, a young girl (wherever did she spring from) was so dismayed about this. We tried to convince her that this is what rural people have to do – kittens are useless mouths and out there you have to eat anything that presents itself and which would otherwise consume foodstuffs itself.
By now we were at an airport and waiting for a couple of people to arrive (and this had strains of déjà vu about it too). Four people in fact, and they turned out to be a girl who has featured occasionally in these nocturnal rambles, her mother, her friend and her friend’s mother. We had to take them somewhere and so they all piled into the car, which was my father’s old grey Cortina. But then the girl suddenly remembered that she had forgotten something and dashed out of the car to fetch it. We were all there urging her to get a move on. But eventually I parked the car up and decided that I would abandon it, as I have done with a variety of other Cortinas during my nocturnal ramblings . It needed to be emptied but as it was still dark I connected up a light to the car’s battery but it wasn’t good enough to see very much so I decided on coming back a little later to do it when it was light. But “a little later” meant that it was even darker because it had been the evening just a couple of hours ago. I’d also left the light connected and so I was wondering if the battery of the car would be flat by now. There was one of these “know it all” teenagers hanging around offering me all kinds of gratuitous advice and that was getting on my nerves too.
No wonder that I was exhausted. I even managed a sort-of lie in until 08:15 too. But it wasn’t quite as good as it sounds because according to the dictaphone, which I use during the night to record these adventures, I’d woken up every two hours or so anyway, just like being back at hospital, I suppose. I can see me having to work hard to snap myself out of this. But it’s perfectly understandable that I didn’t do very much this morning either after all of this during the night.
