Tag Archives: penybont

Sunday 22nd February 2026 – WHAT A NICE …

… way to start the day today. By the time that I came back in here to start work after breakfast, it was 11:15. That’s about two and a half hours later than usual, and if every Sunday could be like that, it would be wonderful.

Mind you, it wasn’t an early finish last night. By the time that I’d completed everything that needed completing, it was once more just coming up to 23:30, and I would have loved to have been in bed an hour or so earlier. But simply, I don’t know where the time goes these days.

Anyway, once in bed, I was asleep quite quickly. However, it was something of a mobile night. I definitely remember waking up briefly a couple of times, although it wasn’t for long and I can’t really remember all that much about it.

One thing that I do remember, though, is that when Isabelle the Nurse turned up, I was fast asleep with my head under the covers. And while I was submerged at that end, she unsubmerged me at the other end to deal with my feet and legs.

After she left, I curled up again and went back to sleep. However, round about 09:30 I was found sitting on the edge of my bed. Much as I would like to, I can’t spend all day lying in my stinking pit. I have to make a start sometime.

After a visit to the bathroom, I went into the kitchen. First task was to bake the croissants that I’d prepared yesterday. And this new technique seems to have worked. The presentation was so much better today, and they looked like real croissants.

So a couple of those along with my porridge and hot black coffee, and I was well away. It really was a nice breakfast.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of MAIDEN CASTLE EXCAVATIONS AND FIELD SURVEY 1985-6 by Niall Sharples.

Yesterday, I mentioned that this section about pottery was going to be a very long job. And I was right, too. Today, we’ve been discussing the lugs that appeared on different kinds of Neolithic pottery – just the lugs. This book is going to be a very long read.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I’d heard a report that in the near future they would be bringing out a new version of the Berlingo. It was going to be a long wheelbase type of thing with more room inside. That became immediately more interesting to me because I would have liked to have had something like that at some point. I thought that if it was long-wheelbase, it would still be suitable for sleeping in if necessary when I was out on the road. I tried to find out more about it but apparently it was not being distributed for quite a while yet and that was disappointing news because I had a feeling that I was going to be needing a new vehicle fairly rapidly and this would probably have been ideal for what I wanted.

Back in the late 1990s, I needed a car in a hurry after the Mercedes went the Way of the West. With nothing better on the horizon, a friend at work sold me an old Volkswagen Passat diesel estate. Only just a few weeks later, Citroën announced the end of the run of C15 diesel vans, and they were selling them off at just €4995 plus VAT. One of those would have been perfect for what I wanted at the time.

There was also something going on about the Epstein affair. People had suddenly realised that the one important person, the former wife of Epstein, had not yet been arrested despite her name appearing in the files on numerous occasions. The official reason given was that although her name appears in the files, there’s no allegation of any wrong-doing and no-one has made a complaint against her. In that case, as far as the police go, there’s nothing to investigate until something is discovered in the files that implicates her in a crime.

With all of the revelations of the Epstein files and the aftermath, I’m just wondering when my name is going to appear in them. Everyone else’s has, for one reason or another, and I’m feeling left out.

As for the subject matter of the dreams, there was something the other day about AFKAP – the Andrew Formerly Known As Prince – and I imagine that that particular dream was in some way related to the revelations in the files.

When I’d finished the dictaphone notes, we had a footfest, with all of the highlights of the matches from the JD Cymru League over the weekend. And the unbeaten run of Connah’s Quay Nomads came to a shuddering halt as they were beaten by Y Barri 1-0.

And things are going from bad to worse for Penybont. With yet another player dismissed from the field, they crashed 3-1 away at Colwyn Bay. For a team that a few months ago was a comfortable second in the league, they’ve only won once since 21st November, and that game was against struggling Llanelli, where they scraped a narrow 1-0 win.

The next game was Stranraer v Spartans in Scotland. And at last, after a run of I don’t know how many draws, they managed to win. Mind you, it took A WONDER GOAL DEEP IN INJURY TIME by Aaron Quigg to break the deadlock.

A little later, after a little relaxation, I spent a couple of hours revising my Welsh ready for Tuesday, and then it was baking time.

No bread today, though – I took half a loaf out of the freezer ready for next week because I was going to bake a cake and didn’t have the time for everything.

For reasons that shall become apparent in early course, I really fancied a strong ginger cake. As well as that, Rosemary had found an obscure recipe that suggested that desiccated coconut and ground almonds were a suitable substitute for sugar when baking.

That sounded absolutely excellent, so I ground a couple of handfuls of almonds and added a cup of desiccated coconut instead of one cup of sugar in my oil cake and used coconut oil instead of the vegetable oil. With enough ginger to sink a ship, I mixed up all of the ingredients and poured the mixture into the baking tray.

After I’d made my pizza base, I started to make the layering cream for the cake. I’d found a good recipe with butter, icing sugar, coconut yoghurt (I mixed soya yoghurt with coconut oil), maple syrup and spices. I whipped it all up and put it in the fridge to stiffen.

But this filling and the consistency of the sauce looked excellent to me, and I was thinking that I could adapt it to almost any kind of filling, especially chocolate. I shall have to make further plans.

While I was assembling the pizza, I had the cake baking and it was done to a turn – maybe a little too much on top and not enough on the bottom – and I wish that I knew how to deal with that because it’s not the first time that it’s happened.

When it was ready, I took it out of the oven and put the pizza in. That was done to a turn fifteen minutes later, and as usual, I ate half of it, with the other half for tomorrow after dialysis.

Once I’d finished and tidied up everything, I cut my cake in half and went to put the layering mix in the middle in order to make a sandwich cake with the two halves. However, it wasn’t cooled enough and it began to melt the layering mix.

Next time that I make a sandwich cake, I shall have to stick it in the fridge for several hours to make sure that it’s properly and thoroughly cold. One thing, though, and that is that I’m certainly learning a lot as I go on, and that’s the whole point of doing it.

But right now, I’m going to finish everything off and go to bed ready for dialysis tomorrow … "I don’t think" – ed …

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about baking a cake … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of Zero and her mother when Zero was at a young and impressionable age.
They had been baking a cake together and were relaxing in the living room when the timer sounded in the kitchen.
"Be a dear and go and see if the cake is ready" said Zero’s mother.
"How do I do that?" asked Zero.
"Take one of the meat skewers from the cutlery tray, poke it into the cake a few times and see if it comes out clean."
So off trotted Zero into the kitchen.
Ten minutes later, Zero came back in. "Yes, mum, it’s cooked."
"So what took you so long?"
"Well, the skewer came out so clean that I stuck the rest of the dirty cutlery from lunchtime in the cake too."

Saturday 14th February 2026 – I HOPE THAT …

… you all had a nice, romantic day with the one that you love, and that there were hugs, kisses, roses and chocolates galore. For me, I moved the bedroom mirror to where I could gaze into it with admiration. After all, when there’s only me in the apartment, what else could I do?

What I could have done was to have gone to bed early but unfortunately, it didn’t work out like that. As usual, I fell asleep writing my notes and what with one thing and another … "and until you make a start, you have no idea just how many other things there are" – ed … it was, once again, about 23:30 when I finally crawled into bed.

One thing’s for sure, though, and that was that I slept right the way through until the alarm went off at 06:29. And then we had what has become the usual struggle of trying to find the energy and enthusiasm to leave the bed.

Nevertheless, despite the struggle, I did in fact manage to stagger off into the bathroom to sort myself out, and then into the kitchen for my hot drink and medication.

Back here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There had been a whole new series of elections in the European Union and hundreds of MEPs and directors had changed. They were beginning to have meetings with all of the new ones. There were also plenty of staff changes too and it turned out that I was one of those people who had lost their jobs as a result, so I had to leave my job. In doing so, I happened to make my way outside, which meant having to squeeze past dozens of meetings with people sitting everywhere, and basically had to walk along halfway up a fence in order to clear one group of people and was still walking in between them. As I was making my way out, I encountered someone whom I knew who told me that he was starting a new job in some other kind of directorate so I told him that I wasn’t starting at all, that I was on my way out of the building. When I was outside and in the street, I began to wonder what I was going to do. I could retire because I was old enough, but then I thought that there were plenty of employment agencies, so why don’t I go along to see what some employment agencies have, and if they have casual work so I don’t have to stay for too long in the same place. But walking along the street just outside our office where there were all these shops etc, traffic lines, tram lines, I couldn’t see an employment agency so I thought that I’d wait until a couple of days later and then have a day walking around Stoke-on-Trent to see what the agencies have to offer me.

So here we are again, at work long after retirement age. This time though, I’m the one who is being made to leave, rather than thinking about leaving on my own accord.

But the bit about going from employment agency to employment agency reminds me of the author Richard Gordon, who, on going from one shipping office to another in Leadenhall Street to find a berth as a ship’s doctor, also ended up making enquiries in the Leadenhall Street branch of Barclays Bank.

And we were in Stoke-on-Trent, wandering around the other night.

I was out in Shavington last night, walking past some houses where various kinds of actors lived. The first house was occupied by an actor who was starring in many leading roles which had received a really good critique. As I walked past her house, I saw that it was all run down and in need of a good going-over, with dead plants everywhere and long grass. I thought to myself that one day, that woman is going to start to have really bad reviews for acting and how on earth is she going to cope? The next house was someone from a well-known soap opera who was rubbing down his metal fence and preparing it for painting. He was as black as the ace of spades with all of the dust that had come off it. I remember one critic writing something that even if this is Britain’s most popular soap opera, it ought to be shown much less than it is now because the stories are all becoming all the same and there’s nothing ever new in any of them. But back home, I asked the parents how the football went. They just mumbled a few incoherent answers but I didn’t really understand what they were saying so I decided that I’d go to look myself.

Another place where I seem to be spending a lot of time is Shavington, even though we only lived there from 1956 to 1970. And there certainly wouldn’t have been any actors or actresses living there. However, it’s true that my parents showed no interest whatsoever in football so it would have been a waste of time asking them anything.

When the alarm went off, I was singing LIKE A HURRICANE by Neil Young. I’d gone into some kind of building that was a hospital. I’d written a scathing review of a doctor’s intervention but I’d had to go back to the hospital so I’d gone in rather quietly. I’d wanted Floor 6 so I’d gone to the goods lift, but there was someone else there with a trolley so we went in together. I pressed “6” but the lift carried on and went all the way up to the twenty-fifth floor and I had my eyes tight shut from about the fifteenth. This guy left so I pressed any button to take the lift down so that I could open my eyes again. I thought that I’d pressed about “Floor 10” or “Floor 12” but the lift roared on past. It roared on past “6” too so I pressed “6” and it shuddered to a halt and then began to climb up again. I managed to jump out onto the sixth floor as it went past. From there, I was walking across the campus of the hospital. I started off by singing Jackson Browne’s LOOKING EAST and then followed that by “Like a Hurricane”. I noticed that amongst the people on this campus was Castor, but the alarm went off before I had a chance to speak to her.

Actually, I wouldn’t have had my eyes closed if I were going up in a lift. Heights have never bothered me. I remember when Laurence and I went to look at an apartment on the eighteenth floor of a tower block in Brussels. I was out on the balcony looking to see what I could see, but she was pinned against one of the interior walls, far too scared to move. However, there is nothing on earth, not even the combined forces of TOTGA, Zero and Castor, that would entice me into a submarine.

The hospital needs no explanation, and neither does criticising the doctors, but the campus and jumping out of the lift are a mystery.

But seeing as we have been talking about Castor … "well, one of us has" – ed … imagine her appearing in a dream after all this time and I couldn’t manage to talk to her. What kind of tragedy or disaster is that?

But with her being in this dream, the lyrics of “Like a Hurricane” are extremely apposite. After all, it’s one of those rock masterpieces, especially the live version on RUST NEVER SLEEPS.

Incidentally, throughout these pages, you’ll see links to Amazon products appearing every now and again. Being a Sales Associate of Amazon, I receive a small commission on goods sold via my links. It costs you nothing at all extra, but helps defray … "part of the" – ed … cost of my not-insubstantial web-hosting fees.

There are also links on the sidebar for AMAZON UK, AMAZON USA and, since the recent “troubles”, AMAZON CANADA for the use of my numerous Canadian visitors. As I said, I am extremely grateful when someone uses them to make a purchase

The nurse was early yet again, and with there now being the pressure on the streets with Carnaval, he didn’t stay long. I could then push on with breakfast and read some more of MAIDEN CASTLE EXCAVATIONS AND FIELD SURVEY 1985-6 by Niall Sharples

He’s busy picking holes in Mortimer Wheeler’s excavation report, disagreeing with many of Wheeler’s conclusions and accusing him of making reports based on speculation and stating that "it is really a testament to Wheeler’s imagination that any clear pattern could be claimed.". However, he’s not above making a few assumptions and speculations himself.

This book, like almost all of the others that I’ve read, is a digital scan of a hard copy in someone’s library. And interestingly, though, certain entries and references in it have been redacted. I wonder if another author in the field of archaeology has been mentioned in the Epstein diaries, because it’s certainly bizarre. I’ve no idea why the owner of the original book would not want these names and entries revealed.

Back in here, we had a footfest – the highlights of last night’s matches in the JD Cymru League. Nothing much exciting happened, except that Llanelli, hopelessly adrift at the foot of the table, picked up a surprising point away at Cardiff Metropolitan.

Having done that, there were a few other things to do until it was time for a disgusting drinks break.

This afternoon, we had football. Penybont, fresh from their 6-0 mauling by leaders TNS, were at home to second-placed Connah’s Quay Nomads.

Penybont played better today but they were still clueless in attack and for all the work that he had to do on the field, Nomads’ ‘keeper Kit Margetson may well have brought a book onto the field with him and spent the ninety minutes reading it. There were several lengthy periods when he was actually playing centre-half in a back four rather than a goalkeeper behind a back three.

But the Nomads weren’t much better. They made Penybont ‘keeper Luke Armstrong work hard, for sure, but they could be still playing now and they still wouldn’t have any idea about how to score. For a team second in the table, they should be doing much better than this.

The score was a 0-0 no score bore draw, and both sides were lucky to get nil.

Later on, I’ve been in an internet discussion with my faithful cleaner. I’m in the middle of writing out a work schedule for my joiner who will be coming back soon, and my cleaner wants a change to the rubbish arrangements.

No, she’s not talking about deleting the blog, but about a new set of rubbish bins that fit under the sink. So we’ve been discussing different alternatives and when she comes down here on Monday, she’ll be measuring up.

After that, I attacked a set of radio notes that I’d dictated a week or two ago and began to edit them. I’d almost finished too when I had to knock off for tea.

Tonight it was a burger on a bap with salad and baked potato, followed by jam roly-poly from several weeks ago and vegan sorbet. And it was all delicious. And now, I’m off to bed, ready for my lie-in tomorrow … "he hopes" – ed …

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about not having any particular work to do today "well, one of us has" – ed … the five day week has been around for longer than you might thing. Several centuries in fact.
Someone once asked me "who was the first person to work a five-day week?"
My answer was "Robinson Crusoe"
"Why was that?"
"Well, he had all of his work done by Friday."

Saturday 7th February 2026 – I HAVE SEEN …

… one of the worst games of football this afternoon that I have ever seen in my life.

When you have the leader of the league against the third-placed team, you expect some kind of tense, thrilling contest. But not today, unfortunately. It was one of those games that is best forgotten.

Just like last night, in fact. That is best forgotten too. Having been endlessly sidetracked when writing my notes, and having fallen asleep yet again in my chair, it was almost midnight by the time that I’d finished everything and crawled under the covers.

And there I lay, without moving, until all of … errr … 04:30 when I awoke. Mind you, I didn’t manage to go back to sleep again and I finally awoke at about 06:25, a couple of minutes before the alarm. There wasn’t even enough time to check whether it was worth making an early start.

It was quite difficult to haul myself out of bed, as you might expect, but eventually I staggered off into the bathroom for a wash, a change of clothes and a handwashing session so that my socks and undies will be ready for next time.

In the kitchen, I made my hot drink and took 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 back playing bass guitar last night in my apartment. I’d been cleaning a few things and was cleaning the case in which the bass guitar lives when something made me stop and take it out. There was a “Man” record playing on the playlist, 7171-551 so I began to play along with it. then the next one came along, and the next one came along and so on. I hadn’t realised at that point that I had an audience. My cleaner was at the door and she was watching. After a while, she came in and said a few words of encouragement but I wasn’t particularly happy, it having been so long since I’d played. I didn’t think that I was particularly good but I did carry on. And once more, I was up on the stage. There was a young country-and-western or folk singer or something like that playing acoustic guitar, and I ended up accompanying him. On one of the songs, I played this really melodic bass guitar solo in the middle of it and it sounded really, really good.

Anyone who has heard my mobile ‘phone ring will immediately recognise the opening bars of “7171-551”, played by the Welsh rock group “Man” when they had the legendary ex-Quicksilver Messenger Service guitarist John Cipollina amongst their numbers. It’s said to be (although this is disputed) the ‘phone number of Mike Nesmith of the Monkees, and it’s also my mobile ‘phone ringtone.

But it’s true – I haven’t played guitar for almost two years since I had the implant fitted in my arm. It’s really painful to bend my wrist as I should. As well as that, I can’t stand up to play, and the guitars are too heavy for me anyway.

Did I dictate that dream about the private investigator who had a lot of work on his hands and was finding it very difficult to keep up and organise? … "no you didn’t" – ed …. I was spending a lot of time with him for different reasons. He had an assistant, a young guy. Every now and again, he’d give this young guy tasks to do which had come in which were fairly simple, straightforward etc. This private investigator had to take a few days off and went to Norway in the middle of winter where he sat, sorted out all his paperwork and then came back again. One of the jobs that he had to do was to drive two different Lotus vehicles because someone was alleging that they were the same car and they needed a report to say so. His young assistant chose to do that job so I said that I’d go with him. We set out and met the woman concerned and began to walk with her. We were walking through Chester and came past this music shop where this young boy nipped off to have a play on a guitar. We carried on walking and she said that she thought that he wasn’t the brightest spark in the box. I replied “no, but he’s nice enough”. He caught up with us and we arrived at this place, and she sent him to build some kind of seating area out of metal framework and OSB. When he’d done it, I went back to have a look and I noticed that he had small pieces of wood left over so I told him to use some of the OSB to fill in the gaps so that people would sit down there comfortably to watch this particular trial, but it turned out that he didn’t have enough wood to do that.

The private detective reminded me of Robert Mitchum, who played Philip Marlowe in the film FAREWELL MY LOVELY, one of the best films that I have seen for quite a while.

The street in Chester where the music shop was – I can see it now. It’s Frodsham Street, the street that leads from Foregate Street up to the bypass and then Brook Street. Of course, the rest of it is quite meaningless.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up to sort out my feet and legs, and after she left, I could make my breakfast and read some more of Mortimer Wheeler’s MAIDEN CASTLE .

And he’s not above taking a few pot shots at his colleagues, although not in the same subtle manner as James Curle. Re-examining the work of one of his predecessors who had examined the site at the end of the nineteenth century, he says that "Cunnington … found his black and white mosaic (apparently in situ) and a ‘mass of masonry’, 9 ft. by 6 ft. If the latter existed otherwise than in his imagination, it may have supported the cult-statue or altar, but no trace of the mass survived in I934"

He also talks about the pagan temple dating from the last quarter of the fourth century AD at Maiden Castle and examples at other hillforts, and speculates that there was a revival of paganism amongst the native population towards the end of the Roman occupation. He seems not to have considered the possibility that during this period, the Romans had been recruiting auxiliaries from beyond the boundary of the Empire who still adhered to their old pagan cults and had not yet adopted Christianity. And despite what Bede told us back in the eighth century, there is clear evidence that Saxon invaders were settled in parts of England as early as 368 AD, so it may equally well have been that the “Romano-Celtic” temples were built by or for these “foreigners”.

Back in here, there were the highlights of last night’s football, and that took me up to a disgusting drink break. Then I made a start on the radio notes that I need to finish, although I didn’t go very far because there was football on the internet – a game between TNS in first place and Penybont in third place.

And as I said just now, it was an appalling game. Penybont have been out of sorts since before Christmas and have not been doing very well. But today, they were the worst that I have ever seen.

Their manager said before Christmas that they need to strengthen the squad in the winter transfer window, but instead, they sold their two best players and recruited poorly to replace them. The fire has definitely gone out in their team. No team in third position in the league should EVER lose 6-0, no matter what the circumstances. And had it not been for an inspired display by their goalkeeper Luke Armstrong, the result could have been much worse

The thing, though, is that after a few really excellent games that have been a credit to the league, I was bound to come unstuck at some point. Who would have thought that it would have been at this game, though?

The rest of the afternoon was spent finishing writing the notes for that radio programme, and then I edited the notes that I’d dictated previously for another one.

Tea tonight was a vegan burger on a bap with salad and baked potato, followed by fruitcake and soya dessert. And delicious it was too.

Right now, though, I’m off to bed, hoping for a really decent sleep and a lie-in, but we shall see how things unfold.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the imagination … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of my brother at one of his many jobs.
The boss asked him "what are you doing?"
"I’m working" he replied.
"You’re only pretending to work!" roared the boss
"Well, you’re only pretending to pay us" replied my brother
He didn’t last long in that job.

Friday 26th December 2025 – I SHALL BE GLAD …

… when today is over and I’m tucked up in my little cot. It’s not been a very good day today.

It all went wrong last night when it seemed to take an age to make and eat my tea. As a result, everything else was running horribly late. It took hours to finish my notes and it was long after 23:30 when I finally crawled into bed.

What hadn’t helped was the fact that I’d fallen asleep several times while at the computer. It wasn’t as if it had done me any good either because I still felt just as tired as I had been earlier

And as usual, we had the very disappointing situation of being awake at 04:35 and not being able to go back to sleep, no matter how hard I tried.

Every cloud has a silver lining, though. After about an hour or so, I hauled myself out of bed, moved over to the desk and dictated the radio notes that I’d typed earlier in the week. When it was time to go for a scrub up, I’d even begun to edit them.

In the bathroom I had a wash, a shave and a good scrub of some of the clothes, and then wandered into the kitchen for the medication and the hot drink. I wasn’t very impressed with the state of the kitchen, though. Although I’d done all of the washing-up, there was still other stuff lying around that I should have tidied up. I’m not doing very well at the moment.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And last night, TOTGA put in an appearance. So “welcome back, TOTGA”. We’d been talking about two of her children who were still at primary school at the moment. They were just finishing Year 5. I asked how they were doing and she said that they seemed to be doing fine. I mentioned something about them being twins, always being promoted, going up to the next year together etc. But if one had to double a year, what would the other one do? She said that the girl is already well in advance of all of her fellow pupils so she’s almost certainly going to have no problems, but the boy is a typical boy and we’ll have to see. “I don’t know what they’d do if that ever were to happen”.

In British schools, children don’t double a year as they do in France. They push on to the next year, regardless of their academic abilities. Or, at least, they used to. I’ve no idea what the situation is now. Just like everything else, times have evolved.

In the meantime, something else that was happening was that I was walking and I had no idea why I was doing it but I was walking miles along this path at the sid of this main road. As I came into a town, I saw a lorry ahead of me suddenly swerve onto the wrong side of the road and stop. It was foggy so I couldn’t see what had happened but I imagined that there had almost been an accident or something. When I was further on, I could see that some lorry, like the red one of my brother-in-law, had come out of a workshop doing body repair. When it was turning to join the route, it hit a parked car. I thought “that’s an expensive body job that he’s just had done, isn’t it?”. I walked on down this steep hill into the centre of the town. I remember seeing a shop, closed and boarded up that was a former “Boots” shop. And then up the steep hill and out of the town. There was someone else walking up that hill but I walked past them. The woman said “did you receive that image that I sent to you?”. I’d no idea what she was talking about so I just said “I can’t remember now for the moment”. She went on and on about this image as I was walking past her and walking further on. At the top of the hill, there was a beautiful view across the countryside. The sun was starting to go down and I suddenly realised that I had to go back to fetch the van. I’d walked miles, so how on earth was I going to go back and fetch the van in the couple of hours before it’s dark? So I crossed over the road and began to hitchhike back the way that I had come. When I came into town, there was a crowd of people gathered round some kind of office. I stopped and went to see what was happening. It was the local planning consent people so I produced a baguette and a loaf of bread that I had in my van. I interrupted the proceedings and said that I’d like to apply for planning permission to open a bakery. I explained that the reason why I hadn’t made an application in time was that I’d only just been made redundant. In the end, they turned down my application on the spot. I asked if it was because it was late. They replied “no” because I needed to check out all these other kinds of things. So I climbed back into my van but he stopped me. He asked for the keys to the van so I gave them to him. he opened the side door and he could see that it was full of total rubbish so he closed the door again and handed me the keys. He said “the inside of your van is disgusting”.

What was impressive about that was that in the dream, I could recognise the red lorry. But although I said “brother-in-law”, it actually belongs to my niece’s husband and it’s the one that I drove from New Brunswick in Canada down to New Hampshire one year to deliver for repair an engine that had thrown a con-rod out of the side of the block.

Walking aimlessly around like that is something that I probably would have done in my youth. I often wandered over the hills and moors from one youth hostel to the next. It was lovely and peaceful and gave me plenty of time to reflect. But the inside of my van being a total tip? Now there’s a surprise!

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in later, bringing with her the news that outside, it was minus two degrees and she’d had to scrape the ice off her windscreen. So winter is a-cumen in. Lhude sing Rudolph, hey? No wonder I was feeling cold.

As she left, I gave her a little present – a slice of my Christmas cake and a mince pie in a plastic box. I’m feeling generous this year.

The plan was to make my Boxing Day breakfast as yesterday, but for some reason, I couldn’t face it. I decided to postpone it until Sunday when I’d have more time and went with the more usual breakfast of porridge, toast and coffee.

However, I did allow myself the luxury of mushroom pâté on the toast. And that gave me an idea. I make my own hummus every now and again, so why not try to find a recipe to make mushroom pâté?

In A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE, our author James Curle is now beginning to describe the excavations.

This is the interesting part because although we’re only on page 68 (of 708!), I’ve already learnt a great deal about how it all works and how they were able to identify the different layers of building and demolition. He makes plenty of assumptions about what he’s seeing, but most importantly, he explains exactly why he’s made those assumptions, and I wish that more people would do that.

Not for nothing has this book been described as " … a standard reference work, ahead of its time and still the most decisive work published in Scotland covering this period of Roman occupation, expansion and retreat."

Back in here, the first thing that I did when I sat down at my chair was to crash out. I’ve no idea why because I hadn’t seen it coming. I know that I’d been feeling out-of-sorts this morning, but I had simply brushed it off as one of those things.

It wasn’t just for five minutes either. I worked out that it was about 09:45 when I came back in here, and it was 11:20 when I awoke.

That had rather snookered my plans for today. I had wanted to finish this radio programme before going to dialysis but I was now lagging way behind and I was nowhere near finished when my cleaner turned up to apply my anaesthetic.

The taxi driver had a struggle to find me today. He hadn’t been to pick me up for ages, this one, so having come into the building with someone else instead of ringing my doorbell, he went up to the old place and was hanging around there when my cleaner discovered him.

We had to go to pick up someone else on the way, and he kept us hanging around for hours, so we were late arriving at dialysis. And there, they were in the middle of a crisis so instead of about 14:00 as is supposed to be, it was 14:50 when I was plugged in.

There had been another crisis too. On the way in, I nipped to the bathroom. And there, I found that I couldn’t rise up after the performance was finished. I had no end of a struggle, and it exhausted me. I’ve mentioned just recently that I’ve noticed a further weakening of the muscles, and it looks like I’m not wrong. This really is the end.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’d ended up making two Christmas cakes, due to the fact that I’d made too much mix. I took the smaller one into dialysis and presented it to the staff and let them demolish it. It’s probably the last time that I’ll see Julie the Cook, who is moving on to pastures new in the New Year, and I wanted her and her colleagues to sample my delights. She came to tell me how impressed she was with the cake, and that pleased me enormously.

There was football on the internet this afternoon – Penybont v Llansawel. I’ve mentioned in the past that Penybont have gone right off the boil just recently and have fallen down the table from a commanding second position to an also-ran fourth place. Today was more of the same as they ground out a 1-1 draw at home to a team third from bottom.

What didn’t help them was having to play eighty-three minutes with ten men, having had a player sent off after seven minutes for “striking an opponent”. Ironically, it’s the same player who was also sent off after seven minutes for “serious foul play” in his previous match.

The comments that his manager made after the first sending-off have led to him being charged with “bringing the game into disrepute” and “insulting and offensive language”, or some such, so I’ll be interested to hear what he has to say this time. But having seen both incidents numerous times, I don’t think that there’s any real cause to complain about either.

Eventually, they came to unplug me, hours later than I would have liked, and I staggered out to the taxi. I clearly wasn’t well, and I don’t know why.

Back here, my faithful cleaner helped me into the apartment, and after she left, I made tea. I wasn’t really in the mood for it, and a fair proportion ended up in the bin. I did manage a small slice of Christmas pudding afterwards, and that was excellent. I’m well-impressed with my Christmas cooking and baking, that’s for sure.

One sad part about it though was the number of times that I fell asleep while I was trying to eat. I almost fell off my chair at least twice.

Back in here, I began to type out my notes, but I couldn’t. I’d done four lines and that was that. I really couldn’t keep going any longer. I simply typed out a somewhat … err … terse remark and went to bed where I don’t care if I sleep for a week.

But seeing as we have been talking about archaeology … "well, one of us has" – ed … Nerina once told me that instead of marrying me, she should have married an archaeologist.
"Why is that, dear?"
"As I grow older, the more interesting he’d find me."

Saturday 8th November 2025 – MY CANADIAN VISITORS …

… finally struggled into Granville at about 21:30 this evening, bringing tale after tale of woe about their disastrous journey from Toronto.

They are here until Monday afternoon when they will be returning to Paris ready to fly out again, hoping for much better luck this time.

So all of that journey just to spend less than forty-eight hours with me. If you want an example of a real “flying visit”, you need look no further than this.

And I was ready to see them too. I’d made a determined effort to go to bed early, however, once more, I failed miserably. It was 23:20 when I finally crawled into bed. And there I stayed, fast asleep, until all of … errr … 04:20.

By about 05:20, I’d given up all hope of going back to sleep and so I raised myself from the Dead and began work.

Well, not exactly work. There were the highlights of last night’s matches in the JD Cymru League. Llansawel, third from bottom, beat Y Bala 2-0.

However, I’m still laughing about the result at Park Hall. Adam Roscrow, unwanted at TNS for over two years, scored a goal with just seconds to go on the clock, a goal for his new club, mid-table Cardiff Metropolitan that beat runaway leader TNS 3-2, their first defeat in I don’t know how many games.

Enjoy THE HIGHLIGHTS

After the football, I began to edit the radio notes that I’d dictated a couple of days ago. However, I abandoned the project for the moment when the alarm went off, and went to organise myself in the bathroom.

To accompany the medication today, I made another one of those fiery ginger, lemon and honey drinks. I’m not sure whether it’s doing any good because I can’t feel my throat for a couple of hours.

After the meds, I began to put away the shopping from yesterday. I was certainly feeling so much better than I did yesterday. That’s just as well because I had to totally reorganise the fridge to make enough room for everything.

The nurse caught me unawares, in the middle of reorganising things, so I had to stop what I was doing and let him attend to me. It didn’t take him long, and then I could push on and make breakfast.

The croissants are a little overbaked but the apple turnover things are perfection. They have really turned out well and I’m so impressed with them. Almost as impressed as I was with my stainless steel dustbin, something that regular readers of this rubbish will recall from a previous version.

After breakfast, I carried on with sorting out the shopping, and putting a pile of stuff in the freezer for another time. The place looks a lot tidier now than it did before, that’s for sure. There was some broccoli to blanch for freezing, and I saved the water because tomorrow, I shall be making a broccoli stalk soup.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was with a girl last night, but I don’t know who it was. We were going to find some kind of hotel place where to stay for the night. Something went wrong with the coffee but I’m not sure what it was. They had one of these things where you made coffee by putting the grounds in and pushing down a plunger. Something went wrong with the organisation of this, and we had a coffee that was made with one of these, but it seems to have been made by accident. If anyone had pushed the plunger down, it must have been one of the members of staff, so we had no idea how come this coffee had been made and why it had been made, but it was probably the nicest coffee that I’ve had for ages.

This is something that seems to be happening quite often these days – being with a girl but I don’t know who she is. That’s something of a disaster. Can you imagine not being able to recall who she is? These days, I don’t have enough contact with the female sex so being able to recall who they are is quite important. I ought to be extracting as much amusement and pleasure from my dreams because it’s the best that I can do.

The two navies met each other on a couple of occasions during the American Civil War when they had some kind of naval battle. On one occasion, the Confederate Navy ship was sailing when it was accosted by a Union ship. They had a battle, which the Confederate ship won. The story goes that the German gun shelled the Colwyn Bay bench with ammunition and injured almost everyone on there, although Colwyn Bay deny this. They say that what they did was in turning their weapon and employing it against the Russians in poor South Africa as a way of equalising the staff and maker and shaking the tip and changing money … fell asleep here ….

It seems that there are two threads running through here. One concerning the American Civil War, about which I have been reading so much just recently, and the second being the football, which is a constant theme these days.

Did I tell you that in the last dream, the cannon that scored the fight that smashed the deck of the Federal ship was as straight as anything used in the battle? … "No you didn’t" – ed … They had to have one man organising the gun, two men organising it and shooting it and another team of rangefinders. They had to spot where the shell landed. But the situation diverted towards Mons where they were all used in the English campaign, although only one of them became famous and was in danger of being captured by the Turks so its own sailors blew it up

What the Turks would be doing at Mons is anyone’s guess, but here I am merging two threads again – the Civil War and World War I.

After a disgusting drink break, I began to make everything ready in the kitchen and living room ready for my visitors, and to make sure that we had everything that we needed. It’s becoming quite complicated, all of this entertaining, but I’ll keep on doing it. It’s nice to have company.

Later on, I carried on with the radio programme but I stopped before I finished because we had football on the internet, Connah’s Quay Nomads (fourth in the table) versus Penybont (second).

This was another match that is best forgotten. Two teams with undoubted quality and several internationals on the field should have produced a match of real skill and entertainment but unfortunately, it was nothing like.

Penybont, who had a man sent off close to half-time, were dreadful. They played with no intent or ambition and were swept aside, 4-0, by the Nomads.

In their last three games, they have conceded a total of thirteen goals. That includes conceding three against a side that’s third from bottom. That is just totally unacceptable from a team lying second in the table. There’s something dreadfully wrong here.

Knowing that my visitors were now on their way, I made tea – more couscous and Moroccan bean tajine, but they had nibbled at things on the train and weren’t all that hungry. The chocolate cake and mango sorbet went down well, though.

It’s lovely to see them, even if it’s only for a very short while, and we spent hours chatting about the past. It was long after midnight when they went and as soon as I’ve pressed “send”, I shall be going to bed, long after 01:00.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about my visitors being stranded in Paris … "well, one of us has" – ed … they told me that, in order to pass the time, they had been to an art exhibition featuring the works of a French painter who stayed for a while in French Polynesia.
"Gauguin? " I asked
"We don’t think so" they replied. "Once was enough."

Sunday 12th October 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone again this morning.

But then what do you expect? If you don’t go to bed until 23:30 and you are wide awake again at 01:30, you don’t really have time to go very far.

As you might expect, it was a horrible night last night – one of the worst that I have ever had. Having noted how much better I was feeling over the last couple of evenings, last night saw the collapse and I was back to where I had been earlier last week, struggling desperately (and sometimes unsuccessfully) to stay awake.

It was definitely one of those nights where I could have done with being in bed much earlier but as usual, I couldn’t concentrate on anything and the time simply drifted away to nothing.

Once in bed though, I don’t even remember being awake for a minute. I was out like a light, only to be awoken a couple of hours later by a dreadful attack of cramp in my thighs, an awful cough and a powerful urge to vomit. These sensations kept on coming and going, making things most uncomfortable for me and the pain and inconvenience was such that I abandoned all hope of going back to sleep.

For the last couple of nights, I’d been awake quite early but had gone back to sleep again without very much effort. But I tried – oh, how I tried – this morning and nothing would seem to work … "he was very trying" – ed … . So round about 05:30 I gave up the ghost and left the bed.

After a good wash, I went for the medication, and it was a very leisurely medication too. I wasn’t in any rush at all this morning, what with feeling as ill as I was. In fact, it was quite a struggle to keep the medication down.

Back in here, with nothing on the dictaphone to transcribe, I started my little footfest.

First match up was at the top of the JD Cymru League – TNS, who are leading, against Penybont who are second. It should have had all the air of being an exciting game, but quite frankly, Penybont were abysmal. The TNS attackers were going through the static Penybont defence like a knife through hot butter and the final score – 6-2 to TNS – didn’t do TNS any justice.

If Penybont are serious about mounting a challenge for the title, they are going to have to organise themselves much better and play much better than this.

In the middle of all of this, the nurse turned up. He sorted out my feet and then helped me fit these foot supports that the Centre de Ré-education gave me. But he didn’t really have much of an idea how to fit them, and neither did I, so after he left, I removed them.

After breakfast, which I really didn’t feel like eating, I came back in here to watch the highlights of the rest of the games, not that there was anything of interest to report.

All of this was followed by Stranraer v Queen of the South in the Scottish League Cup, and Stranraer ground out a very respectable draw against a team that is comfortably in mid-table in the league above.

What was interesting ABOUT THIS GAME was that we had another one of these exciting “let’s play it out from the back” moments that so entertain the crowd.

This afternoon, I’ve had a whole raft of exciting things to do, such as to sort out my tax affairs which are proving to be more complicated than I could ever imagine.

There was my Welsh homework to do too, and that’s almost finished. Half an hour on that tomorrow will see it ready to go off.

The printer needed a good overhaul too, as some of the stuff that I’ve been printing just recently isn’t as it is supposed to be. In the end, I changed a couple of ink cartridges and it seems to be working a little better, although the Magenta is still being troublesome.

And that reminds me – I need to order some more ink cartridges.

This afternoon was beautiful and sunny, so seeing as I didn’t have my shower last week and I shan’t be having one for a couple of weeks with all of these medical appointments, my faithful cleaner came down and helped me organise the shower. At least, now I smell nice and sweet for Emilie the Cute Consultant tomorrow, although how long it will last, I really have no idea.

There was bread to make, and pizza to make too. I really didn’t feel like doing anything, but it has to be done. I was in total agony while I was making it, but I forced myself to carry on, and in the end I managed to produce an excellent loaf and an excellent pizza.

In the middle of all of this, Rosemary rang me for a chat. She’s had her car serviced just recently and she didn’t understand a few things on the bill.

It wasn’t one of our usual chats though – my voice was giving out and in the end, I had to terminate the chat as I couldn’t keep on going.

Throughout the whole of the day, I could feel myself becoming worse and worse. By teatime, I was feeling totally dreadful. I don’t think that I’ve ever felt as bad as I was feeling just then. In fact, halfway through my pizza, I just couldn’t go on any longer.

The pizza was abandoned on the table. And even though I hate waking up to dirty dishes all over the kitchen, so was the washing-up. I came back into the bedroom and simply climbed into bed, probably the best decision I had ever made.

But seeing as we have been talking about the difficulties in going to sleep … "well, one of us has" – ed …, apparently one of the best ways to fall asleep is to try counting sheep.
I asked one of my friends if this were true.
He replied "I’m not sure. I tried it the other night, starting off with one sheep. By the time that I had to leave the bed to go to work, I had ten thousand sheep, a huge farm in Australia and I was busy constructing a meat-packing factory"

Sunday 21st September 2025 – ONE OF MY …

… WEB PAGES is going berserk right now with hits, and the hit counter is rolling off the page through sheer weight of numbers.

The tiny little village of St Paul’s River, or Rivière St Paul, on the Forgotten Coast of Québec close to the border with Labrador has become famous overnight. It seems that a consortium of fourteen residents of that tiny place have won the latest round of Canada’s national lottery, a prize of no less than $50,000,00 or, as the Canadian national newspapers have to explain to their intellectually-challenged audience, about $3.4 million each.

When I say “the Forgotten Coast”, I really do mean the “Forgotten Coast”. Totally isolated from the rest of Québec, pretty much ignored by the Province and with its only road connection being east into Labrador. There is so little known or written about the place, and as I seem to be the only person on the whole of the planet who has ever researched and written about it, everyone seems to be coming to me and my web page for newsworthy snippets.

Not that I mind, of course. Everyone should be entitled to his five minutes of fame, especially me. After all, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed.

But thinking about it – which I always do, of course – if I live for another year or so, I will have more than five minutes of fame. I was told right at the start of this illness that no-one had ever survived more than eleven years with it. I was diagnosed in November 2015 and in principle, based on the Law of Averages, I should have been pushing up the daisies, or “eating the dandelions by the roots” as they say around here, a long time ago.

In fact, when I was ejected from the hospital in Leuven after eighteen months and told to find somewhere civilised to live, I asked the professor if I should buy myself a nice little apartment somewhere.

"You won’t have your money’s worth from it" the professor told me brutally. But here we are.

Mind you, we won’t be here much longer if things carry on like last night.

Once more, I sprinted right the way through all of my chores and ended up nicely tucked up in bed by 22:30. And how I wish that I could do that every night.

The next bit isn’t so clever, though. And that is that at 02:30, I was wide-awake. Try as I might, I couldn’t go back to sleep so eventually, round about 04:15, I left the bed.

Yesterday evening, I’d missed the live Caernarfon v Penybont game so I found the link to the game and sat back to watch it.

It’s really difficult playing football in a tropical monsoon, especially when it’s accompanied by a hurricane, and I could tell after five minutes that most of the Caernarfon team was wishing that it was somewhere else than on a football field. They really did seem quite disinterested.

After about 75 minutes, they totally fell apart and Penybont were striding through the Cofis’ defence with monotonous regularity. They scored two quick goals and could easily have three or four more.

Caernarfon pulled one back late in the game when Adam Davies latched on to an underhit backpass, and even had the ball in the net a second time in stoppage time, only for it to be controversially ruled out for offside.

Seriously though, I was convinced that the referee was refereeing a totally different game to the one that we were all watching.

After the final whistle, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. At some point during the night, I had this desire to turn round in bed but try as I might, I just wasn’t able to move. I kept on trying to think how I could bring everything that I wanted down towards where I was, which was in bed with some trees that had been planted to celebrate some kind of victory growing all around me if I was unable to change my position. It wasn’t until I awoke at 02:11 that I was able to move into a different position.

Reading this back, I have no idea whether or not it was true because I have no recollection of any of this. I’ve certainly no idea why trees should be growing all round my bed, planted to celebrate a victory.

Isabelle the Nurse was next to interrupt my train of thought. She was grateful for the prescription that I had obtained for her, and so was I because, without it, she couldn’t give me my injections. We had a friendly chat as she dealt with my legs, and then she disappeared off on her rounds.

Once she’d left, I made breakfast and read some more of BATTLES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

We’re not discussing the American invasion of Québec which Colonel Carrington, our author, describes as strategically correct but with enough tactical and logistics shortcomings to short-circuit the entire procedure. And I do have to say that I agree with him in this respect.

It was a slow start to the day. I was a couple of hours in the living room doing not very much at all, and then I came back in here for a footfest of highlights, including Stranraer gaining only the second point of the season.

But what a flukey equaliser the Elgin City goal was. I reckon that Kane Hester will TRY THAT SHOT a thousand times over the next ten years and not put the ball anywhere near the goal, never mind in it.

After the usual disgusting drink break, I came in here and began to work on the next radio programme, being interrupted by my visitor for tomorrow asking me to confirm my address.

Round about 16:00, I knocked off and went to make a loaf of bread for next week and some pizza dough for this evening. I was however interrupted by Rosemary, who ‘phoned me to say that she was back home after her mega-adventures in Italy.

She told me quite a bit about her holiday, but it was only a short ‘phone call today, just one hour and five minutes. Not up to our usual standard at all.

While I was at it, seeing as I had some vegan pie filling in the freezer, I baked a vegan pie for my guests for tea tomorrow. They have to eat, after all. For Tuesday night, I might ask my faithful cleaner to find a small aubergine and then I can cook one of my aubergine and kidney bean whatsits.

Tonight’s pizza was totally delicious, another candidate for one of the best that I have ever made. And now, I’m off to bed ready to Fight The Good Fight tomorrow, I don’t think.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the football highlights … "well, one of us has" – ed … a footballer from one of the games was injured and carried off the field.
They took him to hospital and while he was sitting there in the Accident Department, the registrar came over to check him in.
"And why have you come to the Accident Department?" she asked.
"I’ve no idea" he replied
"What do you mean?" she asked
"One of the other team kicked me on the knee" he explained. "But it wasn’t an accident. He did it on purpose."

Tuesday 1st July 2025 – I HAVE EMULATED …

… my namesake the mathematician today, and done three-fifths of five-eighths of … errr … nothing.

And I can’t say that I’m sorry either. Not only am I not feeling very well, and haven’t been ever since the first drip of chemotherapy went in, I’ve done rather a lot over the last couple of weeks and I need a rest.

My rest actually started last night. I’d finished everything that I needed to do by about 22:30, and very shortly afterwards, I was in bed.

From what I remember … "which isn’t an awful lot" – ed … I must have been asleep quite quickly. I didn’t even start my nighttime mantra that helps me go to sleep when all else fails.

It was something of a turbulent night though. I remember being awake at 01:40 and again at about 04:20 but it was at about 06:15 when I finally decided that that was enough sleep. Not that I was out of bed quickly though – it took me a good ten minutes to summon up the energy.

The first thing to do was to watch a football match. Penybont had been playing a friendly against Airdrie in order to warm themselves up for their European Championship match. Whilst Airdrie had most of the play, Penybont’s desperate defending only allowed them to score one, whereas Mael Davies and Gabriel Kircough scored two of the sweetest goals that you are likely to see at this stage of the season.

The next thing was to transcribe the dictaphone notes from last night. I was in a hotel with someone. It was one of these plush places where everyone dressed for dinner. I couldn’t be bothered to dress for dinner so my friend and I came downstairs and found a table where we could just sit anywhere, expecting at any moment to be shunted off into a side gallery or somewhere like that out of everyone else’s way. I began to look through the menu to see what we could have when a young couple came down. They were very much like 1920s socialists with the cloth cap and all of this kind of thing. They chose to sit down at our table, not that we minded, of course. We began to chat, and I asked the girl what she would like for her meal. She said that she would like some really typical English sausages. I replied that there were some very, very English traditional sausages in the freezer but they were vegan ones. If she didn’t mind, she could have some of those. She asked if I could fetch two for her so I went off into the kitchens to find these sausages and to find one or two things that I needed too. I couldn’t find a plate so I opened the door to the cupboard and began to rummage through it. The noise that it made was absolutely awful so everyone looked around. I said “if you wanted to see what I was doing to make this noise, you are a little too late”. A few people made some kind of comment. I then had to go to fetch a ramp, and I really had no idea where a ramp would be. There were still one or two people making a few comments so I lay on my back and pushed myself along with my feet arched and my elbows dug in so that I could move quite quickly. Everyone was impressed by that. Then I came to a trailer that had exactly what I wanted as part of the floor bed on this trailer, so I lifted out the appropriate piece. It was really heavy. I then set out on my back propelling myself with my feel and my elbows to go back to my table.

When I was skiing in Bulgaria with my cute little Irish friend, we met another young couple (I wasn’t all that young actually) in our hotel and had a little chat with them. The guy was one of these clever types who knew everything … "like someone else we all know" – ed … and so it was hard to have a chat with them, but the girl, although she wasn’t my type and in any case, I was with my friend, was quite sweet. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have shared any of my vegan sausages with her. Coming from the kind of family that I had, “sharing” was a phenomenon that was quite unknown.

And then I was at school, and it was school lunch break. I met up with a friend of mine and we had a really long chat. It wasn’t until later in this chat that I realised that the time was now 15:35 and we were an hour and a half late to go back for our lessons. He thought that he’d better rush so I decided that I’d rush too. But I couldn’t go back to lessons at this time of the afternoon because it was nearly home-time. Besides, it would look silly just going in for the final thirty minutes, so I decided to loiter around. So when my friend disappeared around a corner, I hung back to wait until he’d gone but instead, he came back to look for me. I reluctantly followed him until we came into the school hall, where I took my leave of him and looked as if I was going to climb up the stairs to go upstairs. Instead, I went to hide in the bottom of the stone stairs that were in an artificial turret to wait there until the final bell went. However, a class came downstairs into the hallway, looking around. I recognised the teacher, who was one from whose class I had dropped out a while back. She was discussing certain things, but must have seen me somehow because she stuck her head in the door and asked “could you take these books back up to my room please?”. They were apparently books that she had been showing to this class but they decided that they weren’t of any use in this course. I began to collect the books but as I started to go, she called me back to take her handbag. I had to go upstairs and hope that the classroom was empty and that there was no-one in there; otherwise it would be extremely embarrassing, just walking in in the middle of a lesson with things to leave behind, and then to go again. They would all be wondering what I was actually doing.

Being in school was at one time a regular subject during my nocturnal rambles. Not that I enjoyed school – not at all – but when you spend seven years in a place during your formative years, it figures quite intensely in your make-up. Strangely though, I very very rarely see any pupils whom I knew. Quite a few “mystery girls” though, including the famous “girl from Worleston” whose appearance overwhelmed me for several months, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. I never did find out who she was.

There was something somewhere about another friend of mine who had moved back to live with his parents. They had a large house on the edge of a wood. With another friend, we were wandering around and I pointed out this house. I said “this is where so-and-so’s family used to live”. He replied “so that was the house that he was hoping to have as his inheritance. What a shame he isn’t going to have it now”. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to say that he was still living there, and I don’t know why I couldn’t say it.

This is a wood through which we’ve walked on several occasions in the past during our nocturnal rambles. But once again, here I am stuck in some kind of dilemma. Why take the easy route when there’s a way of complicating matters?

Finally, there were three of us on somewhere like a motorway services or airport concourse. We’d booked a room in a hotel on site. We found the hotel, which was enormous, by far the largest I had ever seen, but we couldn’t find the entrance. After walking all the way round, we found the entrance and found that we had room n°80. We set out to find the room, walking through crowds of people, several bars and so on, down several series of steps one after the other, until we came to a series of what looked like bathrooms. Even then, right at the end we still hadn’t found the bathroom for n°80,but there was another door with several more bathrooms beyond, and maybe n°80 was through there. But even so, we were still nowhere near finding our hotel room in this labyrinth.

This is a place that we have visited on several occasions during the night too. And dreams about hotels seem to be commonplace these days. I wonder why. Am I missing the fact that I’m not going away at all these days? And yet another dilemma?

Isabelle the nurse came round later to deal with my legs and to give me my injection. She tells me that it’s another one of the “injections of last resort” as I used to have all those years ago. It seems that we really have gone round full-circle.

She also seems to think that it’s a good idea to go to Rennes for chemotherapy rather than Paris. So does everyone, a sit happens, which is a change to find so many people agreeing with me.

After she left, I could make breakfast and then, now that I’m alone, go back to reading THE SURVEY OF LONDON.

There’s a beautiful example of the confusion caused by the calculation of the “old year” of the Julian calendar. Our author, John Stow, has been talking about the Rebellion of Thomas Wyatt.

He tells us that Wyatt and his men marched on London on 3rd February 1553. However, under the old calendar with the New Year beginning on 26th March in those days. In modern times the march on London has been dated as 3rd February 1554 because of the change of the date of the New Year to 1st January.

Back in here afterwards, I vegetated around for quite a while, chatting to my cleaner on the internet as she was doing a couple of laps around LeClerc.

When she returned, she came with a pile of shopping that she had found for me, including a shed-load of vegan cheese. Also two litres of olive oil on special offer at €13:20, a price that you won’t find bettered anywhere else.

This afternoon, I did something that I should have done a couple of months ago and filled in my tax return. This involves printing off a pile of supporting documents and luckily, my printer seems to be working properly for the moment. However, the ink is running low and we shall have to see if it continues to like these ersatz ink cartridges.

There were a few other letters to write. I’d been letting the correspondence run astray for a few weeks and it needed bringing up to date. No time like the present, before it goes completely out of hand.

For a change, there is some good news too. The plumber tells me that he’s coming to start work on Thursday, and won’t that be nice if he does? And not only that, the kitchen-fitter is starting on Wednesday next week and the way his programme is panning out, he thinks that he’ll be finished by the end of the month.

And so this move might be on much earlier than I thought. At least, I shall move my bedroom and office downstairs as soon as it’s possible. The rest can follow when there are people available to bring it.

As seems to be the case these days, I didn’t feel much like eating anything. However, I can’t go on not eating anything so I made a small about of stuffing and prepared a taco roll with some rice and veg. Even though there wasn’t much, it was still a struggle to push it all down.

And as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, if I’m off my food, then there’s really something wrong with me. I’ve been off my food ever since chemotherapy, and I wonder if my appetite will return before the next session. If not, I can see a huge load of complications arising.

So now that I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed. I’m restarting work tomorrow, and it’s also shower day, at long last. A good scrub will do me a lot of good.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about my namesake the mathematician … "well, one of us has" – ed … he is actually famous for other things. And another poem has been written about him.
"A mathematician named Hall
Went to a fancy-dress ball
He thought he would risk it
And went as a biscuit
But a dog ate him up, crumbs and all."

Friday 21st March 2025 – I’M HAVING ANOTHER …

… late night tonight. Mind you – this time it’s for a very good reason. Hwlffordd, third in the table, are playing Penybont, second, and need a win quite badly if they are to take second place. Normally, these days, I wouldn’t watch it until tomorrow afternoon at dialysis but this is a crucial match that I can’t really miss.

It’ll probably end up being later than last night’s, anyway. For a change, I was in bed not long after midnight once I’d finished everything that I had to do. And although I was asleep quite quickly, it wasn’t for long.

It was another freezing cold night and I was chilled to the marrow. In fact I grabbed hold of my dressing gown and put it on in bed and went back to sleep, feeling a little warmer.

And that’s surprising me. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in the very recent past I’ve been sweating buckets and feeling so hot in bed that it’s unbelievable. Right now though, for the last couple of days it’s been exactly the opposite. So what’s happening here then?

Once I was asleep, there I stayed until the alarm went off and then a very weary me staggered to his feet and wandered off into the bathroom.

After a good wash and tidy up I went for the medication, and then back in here to listen to the dictaphone to see what had happened during the night. Some woman was talking to someone from the northern part of the USA about things that had been going on in a chat group. The person replied that it wasn’t actually things in general but a few specific occasions where people had been adopting some kind of strange attitude and coming out with some unusual comments. He couldn’t explain anything about them but he did mention that he was very friendly on line with a girl from Oregon. She was possibly the latest person to take part in this strange way of talking and using strange words and so on. He gave a couple of examples of things that she had said but they weren’t particularly complimentary.

That reminds me of a group of people with whom I used to hang around back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when we all talked in clichés. You would never ever hear someone say "it’s over there" without someone else replying "what? Behind the rabbit?"

Or when someone needed to find out how heavy something is the answer would always be "we shall use my largest scales"

There were thousands of quotes like that that filtered all the way through everyday conversation back in those days, and many of them still hang around today but for the most part, it’s a form of communication that has become very exclusive because there are fewer and fewer people who remember it.

These days, in general, a sense of humour is non-existent. I remember a fellow student, in despair after an “exchange” with an American, created a spoof web site with the University logo on it for a course entitled, “Understanding Irony” and pushed it into the USA. Not only did he have several applicants, his point was proven rather more dramatically than he intended because the University, which also didn’t have a sense of humour and would have benefited from his course, threatened him with all kinds of sanctions if he didn’t take down the site.

Later on in the night I had Crewe Alexandra v Barrow. Barrow, who were bottom of the league, put up a really stubborn existence but Crewe ended up overwhelming them and scoring in a late goal. As a result, Crewe won the championship, probably the first actual championship that they have won, and Barrow were relegated to the National League. Even so, many of the commentators were in admiration of Barrow’s determined style of play and their determination to hold on to win a point at all costs

Earlier in the season Crewe Alexandra were pushing for the leadership of the table and Barrow were down in the depths. But a look in the table just now shows that the Alex have slid down somewhat and Barrow have found some form and climbed up. So this is one dream that won’t be coming true – just like all the rest, I suppose.

The nurse is off to a funeral this morning so I told him to pass on my condolences to the family of the deceased. It’s for one of the guys with whom I used to travel to dialysis. He passed away last Saturday.

After he left I made breakfast and read some more of MY NEW BOOK. We’re still in the introductory basic astronomy lesson, discussing the various calculations of different New Years and, would you believe, mistletoe

Nevertheless I sat rather bolt-upright when I read his remark "It was absolutely essential for early man, including the inhabitants of Britain as it was then—townless, uncivilised — that the people should know something about the proper time for performing their agricultural operations".

Surely, if man had stopped being a hunter-gatherer and had settled down to a sedentary life to pursue agriculture, that must mean that they have stopped competing with each other and are learning to co-operate. And is it not the embracing of co-operation between human beings a sign that humans have become civilised?

Back in here I made a start on the Woodstock programmes and by the time I’d finished I had all of the music for Friday and Saturday, all edited, remixed and ready to go. Mind you, I’m not quite sure how I’m going to manage to fit one hour and twenty-two minutes of music plus all of the accompanying speech into a one-hour time slot on the Saturday

Tomorrow, if I have a moment spare, I shall have to do the music for the Sunday and see how much I have for that.

Some of the notes have already been written and I can work my way through the rest as I go along.

My cleaner turned up today and between us we have still not managed to find my medical card. This is going to become a problem if I’m not careful. I can’t think where it might be. I’ve put it somewhere safe and so that will be that.

That reminds me of life down on the farm. I’d see something on special offer and think that i’ll need that for a renovation in six months time, but it’s such a good price that it’s well worth buying it now. So I’d buy it, put it somewhere to keep it safe and when I came round to need it, I could never ever find it again.

Tea tonight was a very quick salad, veggie nuggets and chips, and then back here for the football.

Hwlffordd took off at a very rapid rates of knots and scored an early goal, but then Penybont roared back upfield and scored an equaliser almost immediately.

Having played at 100 mph for the first 20 minutes or so, Hwlffordd seemed to run out of steam and they became less concerned with attacking and more concerned with retaining possession, to such an extent that it became embarrassing at times. It goes without saying that Penybont scored a second late in the game and even so, Hwlffordd still didn’t show any sign of urgency

You don’t score goals if you don’t attack and Hwlffordd are one of the lowest-scoring teams in the league. Their defence is (usually) excellent but their lack of effort to move the ball quickly upfield and to find a striker who can score goals is going to cost them in the long run.

So now I’ll do the washing up and then go to bed. Washing clothes, making orange juice, and dialysis are on the agenda tomorrow.

But yesterday, we were having a discussion about light bulbs … "well, one of us was" – ed …
This morning a friend of mine in Germany asked me "how many Germans does it take to change a light bulb?"
"I don’t know" I replied. "How many does it take?"
"None" she replied. "German light bulbs are engineered correctly and so never ever need changing. And anyway, Germans don’t have a sense of humour."

Saturday 8th February 2025 – I HAVE HAD …

… just about enough of this dialysis.

These four-hour sessions didn’t last long. Today, they gave me four and a half hours, and they still haven’t extracted all of the water from me that they ought to have extracted. So how long is it going to be when I go back on Monday?

One thing’s for certain though, and that is that if they keep on pumping the stuff out of me at this rate, I’ll be pushing up the daisies quicker than I think.

Ordinarily I would have complained, except that the doctor on duty was the miserable one who hates his job and loves his patients even less. I imagine that I would have been sent away with a flea in my ear had I gone to see him

In fact, it’s true to say that I am having as much luck with the senior hospital staff as I am about going to bed early because for no particular reason last night it was another late night by the time that I’d finished everything. It was a very weary me who staggered into bed at about 00:30 this morning.

And even though I was fast asleep straight away and didn’t move for the whole night, at 05:35 I sat dramatically upright, wide awake. I’ve no idea what awoke me either because I couldn’t hear any noise.

Try as I might, I could not go back to sleep and in the end gave it up as a bad job. When the alarm went off at 07:00 I was having a good scrub in the bathroom, followed by a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant.

Once I was ready, I filled the washing machine with all of the clothes that remained and se it off on its cycle (a very clever machine, mine) and then went into the kitchen for my medication, remembering not to take the anti-potassium stuff and not the sunlight pills either

Back in here I began to transcribe the dictaphone notes but there were so many that I hadn’t finished by the time that the nurse came.

There were the usual banal questions and then I wished him a very happy holiday. It’s his turn to go skiing now. Isabelle should be back tomorrow.

Breakfast was next, and then I read MY NEW BOOK.

We’re still moving on with our discussion of contour forts and he gives a few example of them. With regard to several of them he makes the pertinent observation that "the fortress seems to be too large to have been defended by any force which it could shelter."

That is of course perfectly true but it’s a moot point because if the defenders are not likely to be very numerous, neither are the attackers, so the defenders wouldn’t have to defend all of the perimeter. Instead, they would just concentrate on the point where the attackers are launching their particular offensive

No-one has any idea of the population of Britain in 500BC but it can’t have been more than half a million, so it’s not as if you could gather a large army at one place and at one time.

Back in here I finished off the dictaphone notes. I was in the living room of a semi-detached house. I’d been off with this girl and her parents weren’t very happy. We’d had a confrontation when I’d brought her home. We had managed to pass over the confrontation and we were saying goodbye to each other in the hall when the dream faded away

Apart from the fact that there I was, just about to Get The Girl and the dream dies, there’s a great deal more to this dream that anyone would imagine or realise, and I would care to admit. And parents being unhappy was just about par for the course back in those days.

There was also something about the ceremonial exchange of keys for a car that I ended up buying from a garage. The exchange was something that was reproduced in India at the same times. If you were buying something in India you would have to step back for thirty seconds so to convince everyone that it was OK. It was during that period that the recourse would take place, that the former wife of a friend of mine, would come along and do something instead of whatever her name was and me.

So who is “whatever her name was”? And why can’t I remember the first part of this dream? f there’s a girl involved, I ought not to go around forgetting or missing out..

I was out with a friend and we were wandering around a fairground. There were two of us, a guy and a girl. We walked around this fairground and ended up in a place where we could have a hot snack. One of my friends wanted a hot snack so we went round there but the hot snack place was closed. There was a tape across it. We ended up having a coffee. The coffees were tiny, a tiny expresso type of thing and they had to be drunk in the cafeteria on the first floor. ….battery flat .. So we bought a coffee and we had to go up the stairs to drink it to the café. There was a spiral staircase, very tight, very steep and I couldn’t walk up it so we were there with these coffees wondering what to do

So who were my friends? Do I have any?

Then I was with a group of gendarmes. We were going somewhere to pick up something and we had to go there very quietly but we suddenly discovered that something had gone wrong. When we looked at one of the objects that we had that we’d bought at this café we could see the maker’s name. That suddenly rang a bell with one of the gendarmes. He told the others, who suddenly realised what it was. We all piled into the car and we drove. It was driving through Crewe down a few of the side streets. We came in to the bottom end of Delamere Street. We drove down to the bottom. We were looking for a number something like 148 but there weren’t that many houses in that street, not at all, so we didn’t know or I didn’t know where this was going to be. They identified a house – at least, the guy in charge did – that was nowhere near that number and he said to the driver “park a little further down the street” so we did . Someone exited the car and there was some kind of commotion outside so I left the car to go to see. The guy who had exited the car was helping a pedestrian stand up who had been knocked down. I suddenly realised that our car was driving forward. I shouted to “put the brake on” but no-one paid any attention to it. It kept on rolling forward and forward and forward. Suddenly it stopped. I shouted “for God’s sake put the brake on!”. Someone in the car said “well, it was on, but we didn’t know what was going on”. I said “you were rolling forward and you knocked someone down!”. Anyway one of the gendarmes went up to the house. He had a key in his pocket and unlocked it. He walked in and we followed him. It was a filthy, disgusting, untidy house. I have never seen or smelled anything like this . It was full of cats. At first though there was nothing. There was no-one to be seen and he walked around shouting. In the end he walked through this curtain that was hanging over the doorway into what was the kitchen. It was filthy and disgusting, and smelly. There were these cats everywhere. Suddenly two girls appeared. One was about twelve and the other was about nine. The younger one was blonde, the elder one was dark. I suddenly realised where we were because I’d sent birthday presents to these kids. They were the family of one of these gendarmes. They were trying to make some coffee, he was asking them where such-and-such was but they didn’t know. He was looking around for papers and came across some papers about two matching pieces of furniture. He said “this might explain the mystery because they were bequeathed to the two of us and it looks as if the guy has just taken one which he thinks might be his share but we were so totally in the dark and totally bewildered about this.

The house is still clear to me even now. If anyone knows Crewe, it’s just before where the old white single-storey buildings and the belisha beacons and zebra crossing used to be. But the stench in that house was so strong I could actually smell it at the time. Apart from that, it was just like a sketch out of one of the GENDARME DE ST TROPEZ films.

And finally we had a nightmare. I’m not sure where this fitted in anywhere but at one point I dreamed that my cleaner went to take off my plasters and found that one of my puncture holes was still leaking after all this time. There was blood everywhere all over this plaster and all over my lower arm

That really is my worst nightmare of all of this and I shall hate the day when it happens

After typing out my notes, I crashed out, believe it or not. Never mind about being upset about crashing out, I can’t believe that I crashed out so early on in the day. I might at least have had the decency to have waited until I was on my bed in the dialysis centre.

Once I awoke though, I finished off the notes of the next radio programme and was busy involved in doing a few other things when the cleaner turned up. I told her about my nightmare and prepared her to be standing by just in case … .

The taxi was late again, but not as late as it might have been. Just me as a passenger with a friendly, peasant driver and we had a nice drive down to the centre.

For a change, I was first to be seen and that boded ill for the rest of the day. And it hurt just as much as it had on previous days.

There was football on the internet too – TNS v Penybont, 1st v second. At one time Penybont were pushing for the Championship but they have fallen away quite badly just recently, and were well-beaten by TNS, even with TNS playing the final 10 minutes with just 10 players.

One of the nurses came by with the bad news about the extension to the session (the doctor, I suppose, didn’t have the nerve) and so at the end I was the last out of the centre. I mentioned my nightmare to the nurse who unplugged me so she put extra plaster strips on my dressing.

And with the taxi having to drop off someone at Avranches, it was miserably late when I arrived home, tired, fed up and completely exhausted.

You have no idea how much a dialysis session takes out of me, never mind a four-and-half-hour session.

Tea was a burger on a bap with salad and baked potato followed by apple cake and soya dessert, and that’s it for tonight. I’ll dictate my notes and then I’m off to bed. Quite frankly, I don’t have the courage or the energy to do anything else.

The secret of these increased dialysis sessions was explained to me later. Apparently one of the doctors (I’ll leave you to guess) is fed up of me chatting her up all the time
She told the girls to increase the suction time to take more water out at each session
"Isn’t that dangerous?" asked one of the nurses
"Who cares?" answered the doctor."If we extract at a rate of 5 kilos per session, in 16 sessions he’ll be gone completely."

Saturday 1st February 2025 – I REALLY MUST SHUT …

… up and stop moaning about this dialysis. If I were to tell you that we had another four painful hours of life coupled up to the machine you would very soon become as fed up as I am about the whole affair. I really can’t believe that everyone else suffers as much as I do about all of this.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

After I’d finished my notes last night I had a few things to do and once more it was quite late by the time that I finally went off to bed. Not that I’m bothered too much. Times have changed these last few months.

Once in bed thought, it was totally painless. I didn’t feel a thing for the whole six hours or so until the alarm went off the following morning.

And that was an effort to leave the bed before the second alarm. I’m having to push myself along as best as I can at the moment and hope that I can keep on going. It’s now my shoulders and my back that are giving me major problems

In the bathroom I had a good wash and scrub up, with a shave and plenty of deodorant in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant. And then I attacked the washing.

“Attacked” is the correct word too. There were piles of it. So much so that even with the washing machine loaded to the brim, there was still plenty that wouldn’t fit in which will have to wait for another time. This is becoming ridiculous.

In the kitchen I had all of my medication, not forgetting the Vitamin D supplement, and then I had to tidy up the empty shopping bags that were lying around all over the place.

It’s not been a very happy morning so far, has it?

If the nurse had turned up two minutes earlier he would have caught me in flagrante delicto. I’d just finished tidying up when he came. Of course he had to do his “cocorico” after Friday’s rugby, but that doesn’t bother me. I have no interest whatever in the game, except to say that it’s a sport played by men with odd-shaped balls.

He was in and out in a few seconds today. he didn’t stay around at all. That suits me fine and I could make breakfast and read my book.

We’re reaching the conclusion and it is as I suspected – a great deal of construction done quite rapidly around 400-380BC, periods of calm, increase in wealth and a relax in tension, followed by spells of more rapid overhauling of the forts until, in the words of the writers, "this is now an architecture of intimidation …. alongside a ‘deliberate closing down’ of the wider agricultural landscape, including animal slaughter"

Not just animal slaughter either. There’s evidence of warfare, such as heaps of slingshot pellets in readiness by the gates, and also, regrettably, piles of skeletons of men, women and children, clearly victims of a battle, cast into a pit.

This all started with some iron relics that were found in a caravan. And they have now identified them as a convex bowl on a spike that would be thrust into a tree-trunk to act as the pivot for a gate, sitting in a corresponding concave bowl set in a sill-beam in the floor.

That’s not all either. to stop the tree-trunk from splitting, a couple of iron bands were heated and strapped around the end of the tree-trunk. They would shrink and contract the wood, and the spike would be rammed home, with the bands preventing the wood from splitting

And if that’s not clever for Iron-Age engineering 2500 years ago, I don’t know what is.

Controversy has at last reared its ugly head. But it’s expressed in a much more scholarly way than T Rice Holmes ever did. The authors tell us "It seems worth stating here that there are so many problems with Avery’s (1993, App. A, 146 ff.) understanding of Varley’s work that it is in some ways safer simply not to consult Avery "

Back in here, first task was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was with Steve Knightley at a concert. He was organising one of these entertainments. It was a shame because there was only about a dozen people attending them. I’d been on the stage during one of his songs to do something so during a pause he was doing an entertainment having half a dozen people up on the stage for something like a quiz. He looked at me and said “you’ve just been up, haven’t you?”. He couldn’t find enough people to make up the team that he wanted on the stage. They were about to ask him the prize to start to answer the questions. Someone asked him “what are the prizes?”. He ummed and ahhed and didn’t say anything. Then he took all the people off the stage before the quiz had started and then led them out into the car park. We walked through the car park. Someone worked out that “ohh the first prize is marriage” to which one of the women said ” it can’t be that. I’m already married”. And then she looked at Steve Knightley and said “unless there’s a nice, gallant man who is going to arrange it for me”. We walked down to the far side of the car park and there were four or five cars parked down there. I recognised mine, and there was a Black Tulip BMC 1100-type of car. His was an Austin A40, a dirty green metallic and the whole of the bottom was rusting away. The wheels were rusting. He told me that he was a concrete examiner during the day. I thought that he’d been driving the car through the concrete. He said “yes, it needs something doing to the paintwork to stop it rusting further” he said. Why do’t you come down on Friday and do it for me?”. I thought “he lives the other side of Bristol”. He said “oh by the way my wife likes to have her one flat tyre each week so she’s probably have that while you’re down there”. I thought “well, I don’t suppose that I’m doing anything on Friday but even so ..”

Even though I remember nothing whatsoever of this dream, I can see the car park and see my car. It was a black Ford Consul MkI, a car that I have never owned, but would have given my right arm to have had at the time. Steve Knightley is much more well-known for being one third of the group “A Show Of Hands” whom I have never seen live but I have several of their concerts sent to me by a friend who works at a folk festival. He would really be quite good as a game show host I reckon. Judging by the cars though, this was set in the early 1970s when life was so much different. I’m not saying “better” because TB, rickets and waking up to ice on the bedroom window in the morning wasn’t good at any moment in history.

Next stop was to finish off the radio notes from yesterday. They are all done and dusted now ready to be dictated. It didn’t take me too long. But there are quite a few that need dictating tonight so I have better hurry up and finish my notes.

When the cleaner poked her head into the apartment I was backing up the computer, so once more that fell by the wayside. I’ll do this full back-up onto the travelling laptop yet.

She put the patches on my arm and then I had to wait for my driver so I tidied up in the kitchen.

It was my favourite driver today, so we had the whole running commentary, complete with gesticulations, all the way down to Avranches. And at Avranches we had the usual painful procedure that’s enough to drive me wild.

Once installed though, I could settle down to watch the football. Penybont v Hwlfforth is a match of second v third, with both teams keen for points – Penybont to stay clutching on to the coat-tails of TNS and for Hwlfforth to fight off Caernarfon for the coveted third place.

But I’m not sure what game I was watching because, apart from the fact that its quality can best be described as “agricultural”, I don’t think that either goalkeeper had any serious work to do. The match finished 0-0, with both sides lucky to get nil and if they are still playing now I reckon the score would still be 0-0.

The rest of the time at the hospital I spent backing up the computer, with still a long way to go. But when the buzzer goes off and the girls come to disconnect me, I just want to go home.

They guy who brought me back was the one who, I reckon, has some part in running the affair. We had a little chat on the way home and he dropped me off in the capable hands of my cleaner.

Now that the stair handrails have been fixed I strode personfully up all twenty-five steps to my door, and then collapsed inside.

Tea was a burger on a bap with vegan salad and baked potato, followed by apple cake and caramel soya dessert. Life doesn’t get much better than that And now that I’ve written my notes I’ll dictate the notes for the radio programmes and then go to bed.

But seeing as we have been talking about Steve Knightly and his small crowd … "well, one of us has" – ed … it made me smile. I once told someone that I played in several one-man shows
"I thought that there were three people in your two most famous groups" she replied
"Indeed there were" I replied. "but when I talk about a “one man show” I’m usually referring to the size of the audience"

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."

Friday 4th October 2024 – IT’S GOING TO …

… be another late night tonight.

In fact it’s going to be a rather long day because not only is it going to be a late night, it was an early morning too. When the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already just about to begin to make the bread after having had a good wash.

Then again, it was an early night last night. Somehow I managed to have everything finished by 22:30 and it wasn’t many minutes later that I actually climbed into bed.

Once in there, it didn’t take me long to go off into the Land of Nod. All in all, it’s about time that I had a night like that

It was about 06:00 when I awoke again and couldn’t go back to sleep no matter how I tried so in the end I gave it up as a bad job, climbed out of bed and went off for a good scrub down.

Having finished that I went into the kitchen, scrubbed down the worktop and began to make the bread. I decided against trying to make some bread rolls, for the rather prosaic reason is that there’s no room in the freezer to stock them and it’s pretty pointless making just one.

But once again, the dough didn’t rise as much as I would like. That’s bizarre because the pizza dough goes up like a lift so there’s nothing wrong with my technique. All that I can think of is that it’s the flour. This stuff is the special bread flour, while the pizza dough is made of the cheapest plain flour, so that’s quite strange.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out what was going on during the night. It wasn’t as exciting as last night unfortunately. I was sure that I had just been spotted by the police as I was driving using my ‘phone at the same time so that’s one point on my licence and a fine that I could well do without. Even worse, I hadn’t been paying my mobile ‘phone bills for a while so the ‘phone company is now going to start to chase after me. And then the car didn’t have any tax or MoT so I had a feeling that the book was now going to be thrown at me and they would be intent upon making me suffer for this. I sat down and thought about how I could clear all of the bills and all of the backlog but it would be the end of April before I had any money available and that’s a long time to wait and I didn’t think that anyone in these kinds of organisations would wait that long. As I was walking through Belgium … "Brussels actually" – ed … around the Inner Ring near the old theatre that had been boarded up I was thinking about all of this and wondering whether the fines from the traffic police or the fines about the mobile ‘phone would come first and how they would all affect my driving licence. I reckoned that I would be in for a very bad six months before things would ever improve

Fortunately most of my transgressions occurred before the days of mobile ‘phones, ANPR and computerised police forces. I would have been totally out-of-place and totally unprepared for the modern World. When I think back to how we used to behave back in the late 60s and early 70s, I’m reminded of Daniel Gooch and his "whatever would be said of that mode of proceeding today?"

But it’s a shame that I didn’t meet that girl from last night again. That reminds me of Lee Jackson singing YOU WOULD GIVE A SMALL FORTUNE TO GET BACK IN YOUR DREAMS

The nurse was in a good humour again this morning and was in chat mode again, although he didn’t say anything important . Mind you, he gave me some instructions about more supplies that we need. We seem to be running low yet again

After he left I gave the bread its second kneading and then went to make breakfast and carry on reading the REPORT OF THE EXCAVATION of the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Holborough.

We’ve finished our examination of early Anglo-Saxon grave goods with specific reference to pot-hangers, and moved on to pathology lessons, having a master class on skulls with specific reference to dentistry. There’s no doubt that if I could absorb all of this book I’d be an expert on Anglo Saxon physical history. It’s one of the most fascinating books that I’ve ever read.

After putting the bread in the oven I came back in here and started work.

Today I’ve been a very busy boy. I’ve cracked on and completed all of the notes for the next radio programme. That burst of energy took me completely by surprise.

And there was a couple of pauses too. Firstly, I had to take the bread out of the oven when it was finished. It’s not perfect but it does look really good, that’s for sure.

Rosemary rang me up for a chat. Just a small one today – one hour and thirty-four minutes

Then there was a leisurely lunch – cheese, tomato and cucumber sandwiches on fresh, soft, delicious bread followed by a pile of fruit. The bread really was nice.

The cleaner came down too and had a good blitz through the apartment. Now it looks as if someone actually lives here, which is always nice

My afternoon hot chocolate was rather late today, and back in here I rather regrettably crashed out while I was doing something else. Only for about 20 minutes though, so I can’t complain too much. A few weeks ago it would have been for a couple of hours.

Tea was a rather rushed chips, salad and vegan nuggets. Rushed because we had football – Penybont v Barry Town

After their famous victory against TNS, Penybont somehow managed to lose against Llansawel, the bottom club in their following game, and when they went 1-0 down early in this game I thought “here we go again”

But whatever Rhys Griffiths put in their half-time cuppa, I wouldn’t mind a swig of it because they ran out 4-1 winners in the end. And we were treated to some of the finest goals that you would ever see

The standard of football was excellent – over the last couple of seasons we are really seeing an improvement in quality – and Penybont were the better team. But 4-1 is something of an exaggeration because Barry were much better than that.

And once more, this was another game where both I and the commentators thought that the referee must be refereeing a completely different game to the one that we were watching.

So right now I’m going to go to bed. I want a good sleep as tomorrow I have two lots of radio notes to dictate so it’ll be a late night.

But the match tonight made me feel rather sorry for Barry Town who deserved much better than to lose by three goals. It reminded me of Harry Carpenter trying his best to console Ken Norton after he had been badly beaten in a boxing match by Mohammad Ali
"Cheer up, Ken" he said. "Without you, it wouldn’t have been much of a fight".

Friday 20th September 2024 – MY SPOTTED DICK …

… rose up really well this morning.

But that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about my baking instead.

And so as I had a loaf of bread to bake and there would be half an oven going begging and the supplies of jam roly-poly are diminishing, I thought that I’d experiment.

The other day I mentioned a spotted dick when I was talking about vegan oil-cakes and so I decided that quite literally the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I’d bash one out

Thinking about it though, I could have bashed it out much earlier than I did because I was wide awake this morning at about 03:15.

Last night I was in bed early once again planning on making the most of having finished everything early, but it never worked out like that.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that a couple of nights following the dialysis have been difficult, and the night sweats that I used to have when my cancer was raging have also come back.

But last night I had everything in spades – wide awake early and the sweat pouring off me in buckets. They measured me with an echograph at the hospital and said that I had six litres of water in me. I bet that I don’t have that much now.

And so it was really difficult to go off to sleep and although I was drifting in and out of some kind of sleep, I saw 06:45 come round on the clock and then 07:00

When the alarm went off the first thing that I did was to go and make some dough for bread. I gave it a good working-over too because I wasn’t very happy with the last lot of bread that I made.

Then into the bathroom to organise myself and have a really good wash. And to wash a pair of the elasticated socks because the nurse wants to try those on me instead of the puttees.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And to my surprise I found that I’d travelled quite some distance too. A new junior manager started. He was quite a nice friendly young guy. We used to have some quite interesting chats. He was in charge of the motor pool so I’d made arrangements to borrow the modelling clay that we used for repairing dents for the cars so that someone could try a piece and I could order it because where they were living the prices were so extortionate that they were looking for ways of economising. This manager also had a list of clients whose files he was working. several of those people were quite interesting so I told him that I was going to photocopy it for taking home with me during the summer because there were a couple of names on there of people with whom I’d like to keep in contact. He was rather dubious about this but in the end agreed for me to do so. We were the last people out of the office on that Friday night. Getting everything together took much longer than I thought it would. By the time that I’d finished it was rather late. Then he told me that when he came back from holiday he didn’t have all that much longer to remain in our office and was going off to somewhere else. I thought that that was really sad because he was the first person in that place with whom I’d managed to create some kind of rapport

Once upon a time I did work with a really nice trainee junior manager. He was a keen snooker fanatic and there was a snooker club just down the road so at lunchtimes we’d go and bash off a couple of frames. He was writing a book in his spare time. I wonder if he ever finished it.

And then I had to go to Bangor University. There were some files that I wanted and someone had to sort them out for me. They were rather reluctant to do so but in the end they gave me the files. Then I heard a voice in the distance whisper “and keep an eye on him”. There was a mirror on the wall. I had a look in it and could see a man who looked like a policeman gesturing to two other men who were probably also policemen. I felt that they were on the point of following me to see what I would be doing with these files. Then we were at a railway station. There was a film being filmed although I didn’t realise that it was a film at first, about a Chinese girl and her boyfriend who were supposedly heading off from the interior to the city to spend a different life there. They were having the usual regrets about parting etc. Suddenly the girl announced that she had tickets not for the city but to actually go to the USA. They were off to the USA instead. The film then cut to the girl standing outside the window of the lottery office with some kind of wistful air on her face. I thought that if ever there was a moment to end a film it should have been there with that shot with that look on that girl’s face but for some reason the cameras kept turning and filming some further pointless action that totally spoiled the entire dramatic effect. I thought that they’d really missed an opportunity with letting the film roll on after that particular shot.

So it seems that I’m adding film-directing to my nocturnal curriculum vitae. I wish that I’d been able to do all of this when I was awake and could earn a living by doing it.

But the University story is familiar. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I once went to Cambridge University to raid their library to look at some papers that had been bequeathed to them. But no such luck. “We give priority to our own students” said the registrar “and it’s only when one of those has had the opportunity to look at them that they will be released into the public domain for other researchers to examine”. And they’ve had the letters and papers there under lock and key waiting for one of their students to examine them since they were bequeathed in … errr … 1869. It’s positively indecent, this incestuous academia. God alone knows what other papers there are lurking in their archives and what tales they could tell us?

And Bangor University? I had a girlfriend who went to Bangor University and if the group in which I was playing didn’t have any bookings I’d spend my weekends in Bangor. My old J4 van didn’t ‘arf clock up the miles.

So finally I’d been out with my girlfriend. We were on our way home and were looking in the newsagent’s window at different things, looking at some of these head-dummies that they use for displaying wigs etc. There were a few with very elongated necks for displaying polo-necked jumpers. We thought that they looked horrible and thought of a few people who resembled them. On the way back past a newsagent’s we saw a bust of a clown and of course made the usual politician remarks then carried on walking home. At one point I was sure that I’d taken two steps without using my crutches but I didn’t say anything. We arrived home, I undressed and went to bed. There was a cup of lukewarm tea so I began to drink it but my partner told me to wait. She was in the kitchen fetching me some medicine. Afterwards when I was drinking the tea she said “come over here. You have to be looking at this (…fell asleep here …) so she went over to check the computer before coming to bed. She said “God! Come here! You have to see this!” so I left the bed and walked over towards the computer but suddenly stopped and said “do you notice something?”. She replied “yes. You’ve just taken two steps without your crutches” so that was twice on that evening that I’ve managed to walk without my crutches.

That was only a dream though. I tried in real life to walk without my crutches but no such luck. I can’t even move, never mind walk. But who was the girlfriend? I can’t believe that I was in a situation like that and I didn’t pick up the girl’s name. How depressing is that?

When the nurse came round he sorted out my legs and fitted the clean socks that I’d found. We’ll see how that goes for the next few days. Last night I’d put the puttees in to soak and they’ll have a good clean over the next few days.

The nurse didn’t stay long. He’d soon cleared off and I went to check the bread. It had risen really well and I was quite pleased with that. I gave it a second kneading and put it in the mould, and while it was doing its stuff I made a basic oil cake with a couple of handfuls of raisins.

It’s not exactly a sponge cake, but it’s the nearest thing that I can make for a spotted dick with the facilities that I have

Our book this morning was talking about religion in Roman times and he makes a few very interesting points.

One of which was that Christians owed their loyalty to their faith above that of their Emperor and if they had to choose one if the two ever came into conflict, they would choose their faith.

There was an parallel with that, which I noticed immediately. Catholics were until comparatively modern times not allowed to hold a Government position or work in the Civil Service.

The reason was that they owed their authority to the Pope. And the Pope could excommunicate a King or even summon up an army to depose him. And in a case of confrontation, a Catholic would have been obliged to support the Pope rather than his monarch. They were not prepared to “abjure the temporal and spiritual authority of the pope” as required by Law.

When breakfast was over I put the bread and cake in the oven to bake and went to undertake part two of my tasks for the day.

The bedding has needed changing for a few days but I’ve been hoping somehow, somewhere, to be able to take a shower. That’s not going to happen but after last night the bedding needs to be changed and the quilt aired. After all, it was a glorious sunny day with a nice stiff breeze

That took longer than expected but at least I could clamber easier over the bed. Something is working somewhere. And while I was at it, I gave what little hair I have left a good wash.

When the oven stopped I checked the stuff in i. The bread was cooked nicely but the spotted dick, although it had risen nicely with the baking powder in it, was only half-done. I gave it another 20 minutes. I only have a table-top oven which is rather “hit and miss”. In view of its shortcomings I’d bought a fitted oven from a friend who was remodelling his kitchen and I wish that I’d brought it up here from the van while I still could.

After lunch, cheese and tomato sandwiches on nice, fresh bread, I did some work.

One of the concerts that I have “in stock” I identified and found that it fell on a day in which I’ll be broadcasting a programme in the near future. So why not have a concert “anniversary edition”?

The concert itself is almost an hour and a half long so I’d been listening to it all morning on repeat play to try to identify which tracks I could edit out. And that wasn’t easy because I liked them all.

Eventually though I’d edited it down to about 57 minutes, which means three minutes of speech which is 11 lines of text.

So now the concert runs together seamlessly and you can’t hear the joins where bits have been cut out, and I’m halfway through writing the text

The cleaner came round and we went through the medicine shelf, made a list of what is running low and she went off to the pharmacy. Another good job done. She also fitted the new quilt cover on the quilt – in a fashion that took seconds and I was so impressed.

Tea tonight was a rushed chips with nuggets and salad. Delicious as usual

And rushed because we had football, Penybont v TNS

And history was made tonight because for the first time EVER, in front of a four-figure crowd, Penybont managed to defeat TNS. And that’s TNS’s first league defeat for almost 18 months

Of course, one swallow doesn’t make a summer but Penybont were surprisingly good and well worth their win

Now I’m off to bed, late as usual because of the football.

And I won’t have much sleep tonight because that strange, stabbing pain that I used to have in my right foot? It’s now reappeared in my right ankle and this will keep me awake all night. You can be sure of that.

But that dream about walking home with a girl reminds me of one night in Nantwich late on a Friday evening (and anyone who has been around Nantwich late on a Friday evening will know what I mean) in the days of my youth I stumbled upon the young sister of a friend of mine hurrying home
"Would you like me to walk you home?" I asked. "Keep you safe from all the drunks and layabouts?"
She looked at me. "Frankly Eric" she said "I’d feel safer with the drunks and layabouts"

Sunday 11th August 2024 – SO MUCH FOR …

… my idea of going to bed at “a reasonable time” last night.

"The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men gang aft agley an’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain for promis’d joy" as the famous Robbie Burns once said.

However, it wasn’t grief and pain that came my way, but blood. And buckets of it too. In the distance and time that it had taken me to walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, I’d knocked my legs somehow and there was blood pumping just about everywhere

Even as I look, there’s a trail of drops of blood leading from my chair to where the big plasters are. And even one of those wasn’t enough to stop or even slow down the bleeding

However, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, this is what happens when you have all of these blood-thinning products. It’s becoming a rather regular feature, which is regrettable.

So instead of lying down on my nice comfortable bed, there I was, sitting on a chair with a collection of plasters and bandages on an impossible task waiting for the blood to congeal.

For an incident that took place at about 23:45, it was long after 01:00 when I finally went to bed.

Once in bed, I slept all the way through to the alarm going off at 08:00. I don’t think that I moved a single muscle all night.

When the alarm went off I staggered into the bathroom and that’s where the nurse caught me. He’d come early and I hadn’t had time to wash, never mind change my clothes (and I still haven’t)

He talked a little about his holiday but otherwise didn’t have too much to say for himself and was soon gone. I could sit down to breakfast and to read my book. We’re talking about the dismantling of the narrow-gauge railway that ran to Wallace in Montana, a event that took place in 1895. That railway didn’t last all that long.

Back in here afterwards I transcribed the dictaphone notes from the night. I’m not sure what I was doing last night but I was with a group of people. There was something going on about a medical issue. We were all being treated one-by-one for some kind of illness, taking it in turns to go to hospital. One of the girls went in quite carefree and happy and we all seemed to make a note “well she’s going to have a good time there in the hospital. They’ll love her”. There was a little old lady who went in. We had to go to her cottage to collect her things in order to send them to the hospital where she would be staying. I was actually at her house collecting her things together ready to go when the alarm went off.

It reminds me of my neighbour. Someone pretty soon will have to come to her apartment and collect her things if she really is going to live in a Home. I always think that for that to happen is a pretty sad state of affairs. From what I know about these Homes, it’s just a place where the elderly go and just wait to die. There’s no dignity or humanity in any of them.

There was football on the internet afterwards – Clyde v Stranraer in the Scottish Fourth Tier. And it was one of those games where Stranraer had 99% of the play, hit the woodwork and did absolutely everything except score, whereas Clyde just had one attack upfield and a lucky ricochet was enough for a sucker punch and send everyone in the crowd home shaking their heads.

Afterwards I made a start on editing the radio notes that I’d dictated before going to bed.

The first lot I had to do again. Somehow I’d managed to miss the first ten seconds of my dictating and I’ve no idea how on earth I did that.

And then I had to re-edit and remix the eleventh track because for some reason it had become mixed up with a pile of dictated notes. I’ve no idea how I managed to do that, but it really was a mess.

As a result, I’d only finished the two “additional tracks” prior to lunch. And it was a very late lunch at that.

Back in here after lunch I sat down – and the next thing that I remember, it was 16:30. I’d been stark out for over two hours and hadn’t felt a thing. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d gone to sleep. But while I was crashed out I was having a whole series of really exciting dreams but as I awoke the hole lot simply evaporated and I remembered nothing. How sad is that?

For half an hour I bashed away at some more radio notes and then went into the kitchen to make my bread for the week. And in a fit of mad enthusiasm, while the dough was proofing, I made a chocolate cake

While the cake was settling down and the dough was rising I rolled out the pizza dough for tea tonight. I’d taken the last lot out of the freezer just after lunch and it had been defrosting all afternoon.

There was football on the internet. Llansawel’s first game for over 25 years in the Premier League, and against Penybont too.

LLansawel had kept the core of their promotion-winning team and, as we know, there’s an enormous gulf between the Premier League and the second tier. It was quite evident and the score, 2-0 to Penybont, surprised no-one.

However, it was really good to watch a proper footballing duel between Llansawel’s veteran centre-forward Luke Bowen and Penybont’s centre-half, Dan Jefferies. A proper aerial combat of the type that reminded me of watching football back in the 1960s and early 70s

So having seen everyone of importance in the league already after just the first game, it’s going to be a long, hard season for Aberystwyth, Llansawel and FFlint. Those clubs are going to need to find some quality from somewhere, and quickly too.

The dough for tonight’s pizza was perfection itself. It had risen beautifully and was really light. And as usual, the toppings (mushroom, onion and olives with cheese, tomato sauce and cherry tomatoes, was second to none.

The batch of dough that I made where I forgot to add the oil has turned out to be the best that I have ever cooked.

The bread is fine too and my chocolate, orange and coconut cake looks delicious and I can’t wait to try that as of tomorrow afternoon when it’s cooled properly.

So right now I’m off to bed. I have three weeks of Welsh Summer School starting tomorrow at 10:30. Time that I was going to bed.

But before I go, Clayton Green has signed for Penybont from relegated Pontypridd United. He was playing today but his wife wasn’t there to watch the game. She was in church down the road where the vicar noticed her.
He turned to his verger and asked "is that Fanny Green on the front pew over there?"
"No Vicar" replied the verger. "It’s just the way the sunlight comes through the stained-glass window"

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Tag Archives: penybont

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