… dealing with issues involving the perfidy of friends, showing me just how fickle people can be.
Not in the real world, I hasten to add, but during my nocturnal ramblings about in another world.
Firstly, I can’t remember where I was, but it resembled the Loire valley down near St Etienne where it cuts through a spectacular kind of gorge and although the issues of this event are somewhat vague right now, I remember waking up in the middle of the night in a cold clammy sweat.
The second event was much more straightforward. I was running a pub (as if that’s ever likely to happen, of course) with my partner (who shall remain nameless to protect her dignity) and I hit upon the wonderful idea of inviting all of the lonely people, and have a kind of disco get-together where they could meet up and make friends. My pub was thus heaving with people and when the music started upstairs in the empty room, I packed them all off upstairs. I wandered off upstairs a short while later to see what was happening but there was no-one there. My partner explained to me that as soon as she had set out two tables for the people to pass between in order to pay their admission, they all cleared off. I explained to her that the idea was that it would be free and that we would benefit through the bar to which she responded that she needed the money. “It’s the pub’s money anyway” I replied. After all, I’d laid out the expense in the first place. So she tried to explain how her logic worked using some kind of weird logic about how if you paid a Deed of Covenant to someone, it was different than if they paid a similar Deed to you. “And anyway, where’s the music?” I asked, having laid on a disco kind of thing (using, incidentally, some speakers and an amp from my days as a rock star) which wasn’t in this room that I had set aside. “Ohh, I was listening to that in my room” she replied. That was quite enough for me, so I went off to start to pack my bags. I’d had enough.
But in between these two events it was all much more exciting. I was in an aeroplane that was part of a force that was to bomb London (of course). My plane was shot down and I survived the crash, and met up with a couple of people who had survived from another lost plane. We decided to carry out a plan to wreak havoc on the London Underground so we occupied a station and barricaded ourselves in with a train-load of passengers with the intention of causing havoc. Unfortunately, there was a lift of which we were unaware and people were still able to enter and leave the station, and we didn’t have the resources to seal this off and so we did the best job that we could. Then we left via a service exit where we had a Volkswagen minibus of the type common in the late 70s (in World War II this would have been astonishing) and we escaped. We ended up dumping the Volkswagen in a wood and hiding out on a housing estate in a council estate occupied by an old woman who was a relative of one of the people with whom we were travelling. I was able to obtain medication there and even my mail. But then an ice-cream van pulled up outside to sell his wares to the kids but we could tell that it was plain-clothes police team (shades of Peter SellErs and The Wrong Arm Of The Law [DVD]
Yes, it’s all happening in the middle of the night, isn’t it?
The daytime was, however, much more relaxed. So much so that I was probably horizontal for most of it. Nothing happened at all to break the monotony.
Well, that’s rather unfair. Of course I had my blood test and the results came by e-mail later. And in a fashion that is totally perverse, the blood count has gone UP not down. Just after my last transfusion it was 8.1 but today it was 8.2. Something isn’t right, and I remember thinking to myself that after the two packets of blood that I had had last time, the figure of 8.1 seemed rather low. That would seem to be borne out by today’s figures.
The second thing concerned the home-made Black Forest Gateau. Kate was carrying it rather awkwardly and Darren cried out for her to be carefully.
“Don’t worry” said Kate, with an evil gleam in her eye. “I’ll tidy it up if it falls off”.
So really, that was about it. So relaxed that I was horizontal, I said. And by 20:45 I was too – upstairs in my little attic flat out. And quite right too – I was exhausted, and it wasn’t as if I had done very much either as you can tell.
But that’s just how things are these days I’m afraid. And I can’t see things improving for a while. Let’s all hope that this operation that is scheduled for sometime soon can have me up and about and doing stuff. I’m rather fed up of all of this.
and the second is the legendary 
. Easily the best of the Pink Panther films and that by a long chalk too. So imagine my consternation, if not horror, at Christmas 2006 when I discovered to my chagrin that the film was for some unaccountable reason not included in 
. And here it is, at €2.99!