Tag Archives: peter hammill

Thursday 21st September 2023 – DESPITE HAVING …

… spent most of the day dashing around doing things, it doesn’t seem as if I’ve accomplished all that much.

It’s quite true that for a while round about the early afternoon I was … errr … resting, but it wasn’t as if it was for hours on end.

This morning when the alarm went off I was flat out deep in the arms of Morpheus and it was a desperate stagger into the bathroom before the second alarm went off.

The letter from the hospital about my admission told me that I have to abstain from several medicaments. I couldn’t work out which ones they are so I’ve basically cut down to the bare minimum and hope that that’s the correct thing to do

Tomorrow I’m planning to go into town on the bus. There are some letters that need posting so I’ve had to collect up everything. It also involves a trip to the bank so that’s going to be interesting for sure.

There’s also a trip to the chemist’s as I’ve run out of Aranesp. That’s only available by special order so I had to telephone them to make sure that they have it in stock for tomorrow.

Something else that I’ll need to do is to have something of a more important shopping session in town. I’ve made an executive decision – which, for the benefit of new readers is a decision that you make that if it goes wrong you are executed – that I’m not going to the supermarket on Saturday. If I’m off to Paris on Monday I won’t need any shopping for the week.

So having written a pile of letters and made some plans I had a listen to the diictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was round at some girl’s house. She was extremely unhappy to see me, as if it was obvious that I shouldn’t be there. But with her having no parents there at that time I came in and stayed. Because she was so unhappy I kept to a small room upstairs. First of all there was a delivery of food with which someone in the house dealt. About 20 minutes later there was a knock at the door. I heard a voice from outside asking “is your dad in?”. Someone came up to shout for me. I went downstairs and saw that it was a man delivering two packets of soya milk and two packets of banana-flavoured soya milk in a couple of fancy little containers. I thanked him and said to the girl “don’t let such and such a girl see this. If she sees the banana-flavoured milk it’ll be gone within seconds”. It didn’t bring a smile out of her. All of this going on was extremely uncomfortable.

And a little later downstairs I went because someone else had come to the door. They’d brought some kind of special vegan food for me, followed a few minutes later by someone who had brought some vegan fruit but they’d disguised this as potatoes or something like that so I was making some kind of strange comments about these potato-looking vegetables. This girl who was there who seemed to be something to do with the owners of the house was extremely uneasy while I was there. I could certainly feel that atmosphere a great deal

There was another lengthy, really involved dream as well but I had a bad attack of cramp in the middle of it and it completely evaporated. I can’t remember a thing.

Later on I was going on an expedition to the Amazon. There was a group of us living in some kind of temporary accommodation near Edinburgh sorting out everything we would need and everything we were going to take. Once again, the thing that was worrying me was that there was no provision for any vegan food as far as I could see. That can’t have been right. We were all sitting around. Outside someone had put some tree trunks that they’d set alight that were a really bright light as they burnt. I asked for my shoes and socks back that someone else was wearing. he took his feet from his sleeping bag and gave them to me, and put on his own barefoot-type of shoe. We set off and I thought that we were going to the railway station across the road. Instead we walked for a while and boarded a train going somewhere else. I couldn’t understand why. They gave me a long complicated explanation about this. We alighted at a station and had to climb these stairs in this wrought-iron place like a Paris Metro. On the platform above we had to look for our tram to take us to wherever we needed to go. We couldn’t go to the platform until our tram was called. We waited there, then a TGV suddenly pulled in there. I asked if this was a tram but no-one seemed to be interested in replying. We wanted something like Tram 73 but this was Tram 9 so we had to wait for it to load up and clear off. It was really most extraordinary thing to see, a kind-of tram stop in a railway station.

Finally, we were in the foyer of a cinema or something waiting for something to happen. They were playing a piece of music that I recognised, a piece by Van Der Graaf Generator (as I thought in the dream) … “actually Alquin” – ed … I was humming a bass line along to it because there was no bass line. The girl with me looked at me and asked me what I was doing. I explained and she replied “yes, I was wondering what this would be like with a bass line added to it”. She said that the guy with us who wasn’t there at that particular moment knew Peter Hammill. She’d have him talk to Peter Hammill about playing it with a bassist. I replied that Peter Hammill wasn’t a big fan of bass guitar and quite often played without one. I didn’t think that he’d take very much notice. We were having this really intense discussion when the alarm went off.

Interestingly, I met Peter Hammill a few times when I lived in Manchester in the mid-70s and we had a good chat one night in Brussels when he was appearing in a café there one night not long after I moved there. And he didn’t like bassists all that much either. When Nic Potter, one of my heroes, left Van der Graaf, Hammill didn’t bother replacing him and had Hugh Banton play the bass parts on the foot-pedals of his organ.

While I was at it I waded through another pile of arrears on the dictaphone. Only 2 days to go and then I’ll have finished the stuff from Leuven last week. And then I have the stuff from the hospital last year to deal with. Despite all the time that I spent lying in bed during that couple of months, I couldn’t summon up the energy or enthusiasm to deal with them.

As for the rest of the day I’ve been going through the music again and I’ve sorted out another pile of stuff. Having had to load up this machine’s new hard drive from scratch I seem to have incorporated a great many duplicates into the mix and some of the stuff is in the wrong section of the hard drive.

That left some time to write out some more notes for the radio programme. They should be finished by tomorrow and then I can think about dictating them. Things are dropping slightly behind but when I come back from Paris and have finished with all of this health stuff I can concentrate better.

Tea tonight was fried rice and veg with some of those Chinese vegetable things. Fried in vegan margarine with piles of soy sauce it really was delicious.

So tomorrow I’ll be out and about, which means that I’ll be crashed out at some point somewhere. But once I come back from the shops I can pack my bags ready for Monday morning. That 04:30 start is going to kill me.

Sunday 23rd April 2023 – THAT WAS A …

… horrible day today.

With it being Sunday it’s supposed to be a day of rest during which I can lie in bed for as long as I want.

Certainly much longer than 09:30, but by that time this morning I had given up trying to go back to sleep. I’d awoken about an hour earlier and was just lying there tossing and turning to no good purpose.

So after the medication and checking my mails and messages I didn’t do very much at all for a while. Being up and about is one thing but actually being active is something else completely.

Once I’d finally joined the Land of the Living I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I had a cat, a ginger cat last night. As I was going somewhere I took the cat with me in its carrier. We boarded the ship, I parked the car and took the carrier with me ready to go into the lounge. That meant climbing up a row of steps to the top deck so I threw the carrier up to the top so that I could pull myself up with both hands but the wind caught it and blew it over the side. That was the last that I saw of it, carrier and all. The cat was gone. A couple of minutes later there was a similar situation but this time with the laptop. I was doing almost exactly the same thing and that went over the side too

There were also 2 old women living together. I don’t know why but it was night-time and I was sleeping there. We heard a strange kind of noise so we listened. We couldn’t work out what it was so we ignored it. About half an hour later we heard the noise again. We came to the conclusion that it was one of these old women. We awoke the other one and had her go into her sister’s room to find out what was happening. From there the dream jumped to me at the doctor’s, arguing with him to try to have him come out. He was being extremely unco-operative. In the end we persuaded him to come to this girl’s house. We jumped again and it was in a court. It could have been a coroner’s court. Whoever was presiding asked the doctor the question “if he had reacted 10 minutes earlier would the deceased had still been alive?”. He had to admit “yes, she would have been”.

We were also out on the taxis last night. I was at my little workshop. I had someone with me and we had to leave so I went to get into a MkIII Cortina estate that was there. I put the key in and turned it but there were no lights on the dashboard. I said “God! Don’t tell me that the battery is flat. We’ll be stuck here for ever with everyone being busy”. Just then the ‘phone rang. It was Margaret. She asked “is there no dashboard light on the MkIV a problem?”. Whoever was with me explained to her that if there’s no battery or alternator connected you won’t have a light anyway but there’s no reason why the car won’t start. She tried it and it started so she went off to do her jobs. We hung up the ‘phone, I turned the key and the MkIII estate fired up and we set off.

And then I was with my friends from the Wirral. We were going to look at some houses that were damaged by fire or something and just left. We decided to go to have a look at them. There was another old woman living there who had a rather depressing kitchen and people had offered to help her improve it. She kept on turning them down and wasn’t very nice about it either. We came to these houses. The husband was in his Land Rover. Just then as we were on our way to go around the block to look at the back someone in a taxi that had been dressed up as a Carnival float reversed it out of a side street into the road and he just drove straight into the rear of it. This was his 4th accident in 2 weeks that I knew that he had been involved in but he wasn’t bothered in the slightest. I would have despaired if there had been so many for me. What he needed to have done was to have stopped and he could have avoided it. We managed to see one of the houses that had been fire-damaged. He was going on about how £12,000 to repair it was probably an exaggeration. He thought that it could be done for half. I couldn’t understand why the thought that because it may not have needed £12,000 but it wasn’t going to be far off to put this place right. It was simply not going to be saving thousands.

Later I was working in an office with John Cale, but which John Cale I don’t know. John Cale of Velvet Underground or John Cale the mate of Eric Clapton? We were working for an insurance company. Every now and again when the pressure of work became too much, we’d stop. He’d bring in some coffee and I’d bring in some biscuits and we’d have a little 10-minute coffee break. Anyone passing by at that moment could come in for a coffee and chat. management didn’t like it. They felt that we were wasting time. We explained that a morale-building exercise like this was doing us good. The funny thing about it was that this particular dream I dreamt in Welsh, so seeing as Velvet Underground’s John Cale was born in Garnant, it may well have been him.

I had exactly the same dream about an hour later. This time it was still John Cale but which one again? It was again in Welsh. I remember the ugly call and walked out when my grandfather became ill. I said that we’re invited for coffee and biscuits. They replied some kind of sarcastic comment that I didn’t have the time to mess around while they were paying me

I ended up on a holiday. We were coming back and had to unpack. That was the awkward bit because Caliburn was so full of stuff that in the end I had to reverse him out of the garage into the street and start to unload that way. I was talking to Jimmy Page. The subject of “Stairway To Heaven” came up. We ended up having a jam – me on bass and him on guitar. We had a lead guitar solo right at the very end of “Stairway” that went on for probably 20 minutes. It was the most incredible thing that I’ve ever heard. Strangely enough Jimmy Page said that he didn’t like it all that much but I thought that it was magnificent. When I awoke I wished that I could remember how it went because I really enjoyed playing that. However, it wasn’t “Stairway to Heaven” because when I awoke I was playing another Led Zeppelin song going round in my head but I forgot which one it was straight away.

Some of the rest of the day has been spent completing another radio programme. I’m now well ahead of where I want to be. I try to be about 6 months, or 25 programmes, ahead of where I am at the moment but tomorrow I’ll be sending off programme 176 and today I was completing programme 208.

That’s a good plan because if I end up stuck in hospital again like I did last autumn or if I go off on another long voyage, or if the worst ever comes to the worst then I’ll be covered for quite a while.

It’s all quite surprising really because I didn’t expect to be still going after all this time. I remember the hospital telling me back in 2017 when I talked about leaving Leuven and finding another place to live that I’d be wasting my time and money buying an apartment. That didn’t age well, did it?

The rest of the afternoon was spent flat-out on a chair. There can’t have been too much sleep during the night with all of that travelling around that I did and my early start in the morning so it’s not any surprise. It’s still quite dismal though. I wish that I could have a decent sleep at some point, with a few of my favourite visitors coming to see me.

And that reminds me. The final track that I chose for the radio programme that I prepared today was AIRPORT by my old partner in crime from my days stamping around Manchester in the mid-70s.
“Already it’s too late, you’re through the boarding-gate
And walking on the tarmac.
Already you are free, already you’ve left me
And cannot bear to look back, can you?”

And she didn’t look back either. How long is it now since Castor has put in an appearance during one of my nocturnal voyages?

Tea tonight was another pizza of course, and once again it really was an excellent pizza with putting the tomatoes on last and using that expensive grated vegan Cheshire Cheese.

So now I’m off to bed. With having prepared a couple of radio programmes this last week I don’t need to do any work for the radio tomorrow so I’m leaving the alarm set for 07:00 instead of 06:00 and I’ll have a little extra sleep, if I can.

The nurse is coming tomorrow morning to give me my injection so I’d better have a shower at some point early in the morning before he arrives. And I’ll have to tell him about the blood test that I need to have later in the week so he can come round and do the necessary.

So, see you in the morning.

Monday 7th October 2019 – JUST LIKE OLD TIMES!

Just pulling into the yard this evening with Amber after picking her up after cheerleading practice when Rachel stuck her head out of the door
“Could you go down to the tyre depot and pick up Darren?”

So I dropped off my passenger and headed off to my next job, musing that I ought to fit a meter under Strider’s dashboard and a taxi sign on the roof. When I sold my taxi business in 1989 I thought that I had put this kind of thing well-and-truly to bed.

But no. It was just like old times.

However, if anyone thinks that I’m complaining or that I’m unhappy about it, then that’s far from the truth. I was actually enjoying myself being out and about, especially with some decent music churning away on Strider’s hi-fi.

Actually, one of my old Mancunian acquaintances had made an appearance on my playlist. And as I listened to the words, I realised that they are really quite appropriate to the situation in which I have found myself these days as I struggle with my illness and events associated with it all.

The killer lives inside me: yes, I can feel him move
Sometimes he’s lightly sleeping in the quiet of his room
But then his eyes will rise and stare through mine;
He’ll speak my words and slice my mind inside
Yes the killer lives

Angels live inside me: I can feel them smile…
Their presence strokes and soothes the tempest in my mind
And their love can heal the wounds that I have wrought
They watch me as I go to fall – well, I know I shall be caught
While the angels live

And I too, live inside me and very often don’t know who I am
I know I’m not a hero, but I hope that I’m not damned:
I’m just a man, and killers, angels, all are me:
Dictators, saviours, refugees in war and peace
As long as Man lives…

Because, make no mistake, I am starting to struggle now. I had a really miserable afternoon yesterday and even though I was in bed early and had (for once) a really decent night’s sleep, I wasn’t feeling much better.

Luckily the girls had a lift into school so that I could take things easy this morning. I was in no hurry to surface. I had some food for breakfast, and a coffee, and then a play around on the laptop doing some stuff.

Zoe had told me when she left that she hadn’t been able to find Cujo the Killer Cat, so before I left I tried to hunt her down so that I could put her in one of the rooms where there’s no alarm sensor.

45 minutes I spent trying to find that blasted cat and when I went to the front door to accept a huge parcel delivery, there she was sitting on the bonnet of Strider. Outside all the time!

For most of the day I’ve been running around western New Brunswick fetching parts. It’s been really busy at work today. What added to the confusion was that just as everyone had something important to do, we had a delivery of 72 winter tyres and they all needed sorting and stacking.

Not only that, I’ve been doing my salemanship efforts today. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m something of an expert in Ford Cortina Mk III, Mk IV and Mk V, having made my fortune with them when I ran my taxi company. There are one or two in North America and someone posted on a forum that he couldn’t find any tyres anywhere to fit them

This place where I’m working right now is like an Aladdin’s Cave of treasures dating back years so I had a good look around. And sure enough, there are a handful just the correct size stuck down the back of the depot. And so I put an advert on the appropriate forum.

Back here, still in the driving rainstorm, i went to the Post Office on the way home to post the letters and then came back for tea. Plenty of pasta left over from the weekend, and rice pudding left over from last week. A meal fit for a king.

And then out taxiing until late. Just like old times.

But that’s enough for tonight, I reckon. I’m going to bed and I’m hoping to sleep. I need to pull myself round if I can but then again it’s been almost four months since my last blood transfusion, which I’m supposed to have every four weeks.

But do I care? Of course not. I’ve had a good time. And who wants to lie in bed at home to sit and stare at the bedroom ceiling anyway?