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LIVE: Sunday 18th October 2026 – I HAVE JUST …

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… seen a most extraordinary incident in a football match – the kind that will be played back on these “blooper” videos on social networking channels for years and years to come. And it won’t be any surprise because I had to look at it twice and still find it hard to believe, and so did the commentator and everyone in the crowd too.

But more of that anon. Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

Last night, by the time that I’d finished everything that needed doing and was about to crawl into bed, it was long after midnight, and I’d been letting it all hang out until 00:30, I suppose. And that kind of time for going to bed is doing me no favours at all.

However, with no alarm clock and being awoken in bed by the nurse, at whatever time he comes on a Sunday, that’s much more positive.

Always assuming that I sleep right the way through, which in these days is highly unlikely, of course. And so it proved last night. It was about 04:30 or so when I awoke, and after that, it was one of those early mornings when I’m drifting in and out of sleep without anything being definitive. I was awake at 06:20, which I know because I looked at the time, and the next thing I remember was the nurse coming into the apartment round about 08:30.

He sorted out my legs and feet while I was still in bed, and then he cleared off until tomorrow. But I couldn’t go back to sleep, so a short time later, I threw off the covers, and when I eventually summoned up the courage and energy to stand up, I headed into the bathroom to sort myself out for the morning.

When I’d finished dressing, I went into the kitchen to make breakfast. It was only 09:15 too, so it wasn’t actually all that late compared to a weekday.

Breakfast was quite good today. There was the usual porridge, juice and cafe, and two more of my home-made croissants filled with apricot jam. Yes, they were really delicious. There was no book today, though. The travelling laptop is still in my bag, as it will be going with me tomorrow to the day hospital before dialysis. The time has come round for the second instalment of this product that stimulates my white blood cells. And if it gives me the same kind of boost as the first one did four weeks ago, it will be pretty good.

And when it’s all over, across the road I go, off to the dialysis centre without a break and, more importantly, without breakfast. And that will hurt the most. That is, unless, once more, the nurse who looks after me goes for lunch, forgetting that she has to put the anaesthetic on my arm. That will hurt much more when I go to dialysis and they come to plug me in.

After breakfast, I came back in here to carry on with yesterday’s notes, and you may well have noticed that they are now on line, almost two thousand four hundred words of them. That meant that I could now transcribe the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was round at my niece’s house last night, and it was the usual chaotic place with all of their families and friends there. I was having to leave that evening as I was somewhere near Stranraer. My niece’s husband was talking to me about an oak that he’d been growing since it was an acorn, and now it was ready to be cut down, and he told me that I could have it. He explained that he’d been curing it with mushrooms and everything like that. I kept on asking for him to tell me where it was, but for some reason, he was very reticent. Then they all decided to go to someone’s party up in town, but I was planning to leave that night and I had a lot of things to do. One of the things that I’d promised to do was to take all the scaffolding and piping that was by the front door and put it somewhere, so I’d already put it in my van. My elder sister, she should have been helping me as she promised, but she went to this party too. Now that the van was all ready, apart from the piping that I’d put in it – this tubing that I’d put into it – and I didn’t have the address of this tree and had stuck all these tubes in my van, so in the end, I went down to where this party was and took hold of my sister. I said “are you still going to help me move these things?” She replied “oh yes, I’ll help you tomorrow”. I answered “you know I’m leaving tonight” so she reluctantly came out of the party. I asked my niece’s husband if he had the keys to these two garages that he had across the yard at the bottom under the trees, and he gave them to me. They were two half-keys that you had to fit together in order to open the door. So I picked those up and then went outside. I saw my sister walking around the street, so I drove over to pick her up. She came over extremely reluctantly as if she had no interest whatsoever in giving me a hand to move these tubes and piping in the van, even though they were for her daughter’s husband.

There have been quite a few dreams in the comparatively recent past about being at my niece’s house, all of which have put the house in an unreal situation, somewhere a long way from its actual position in real life, and all of them recounting stories that have absolutely no basis in fact.

But the significance of Stranraer is easy to explain, seeing as I watch Stranraer FC’s matches almost every weekend and sometimes when they are playing in midweek too. We’ve also been going to parties on a regular basis through the night just recently too.

The oak tree is significant too, seeing as I’m reading a chapter on special trees in Herefordshire in my morning book right now, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. However, I bet that the oak in this dream wasn’t ready to be cut down quite yet either. They need a few hundred years to mature first. And the mushrooms relate to that chapter on parasitic mushrooms that we read too.

The scaffolding and tubing is interesting as well. Regular readers of this rubbish in a previous version will recall, I own quite a bit of scaffolding that I bought from that huge painting project in Liverpool City Centre when I was in the UK once, and I also bought some heavy duty tubing from Stoke on Trent to use as wind turbine masts and so on. My van was full of the stuff when I came back from the UK that time.

And, of course, there’s the usual visit of someone from the rest of my family. They always seem to pop up when they aren’t required

This took me up to today’s football – Afan Lido, tenth in the second tier v Penybont, third in the first tier.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Afan Lido’s ground. They haven’t been in the first tier and televised matches since they were relegated at the end of season 2013/2014, and although it’s a fairly new ground, it was looking rather tired and neglected back in those days. However, it looks as if it’s had a refurbishment and a few good coats of paint and looks much nicer.

As for the match, I don’t think that there was ever a doubt about who was going to win it. Penybont was by far the better team and had, I reckon, about two thirds of the play. At times, Afan Lido were struggling to get out of their own penalty area. However, they held on for a good forty-odd minutes before Penybont scored their first goal, a header by a Penybont defender from a corner.

And then we had a calamity!

The very same defender who had scored the goal, about thirty seconds later intercepted a loose ball down by his own goal line. His keeper was up near the penalty spot, so we all expected a pass to the keeper. Instead, the defender, calmly and nonchalantly, kicked the ball into his own net to give Afan Lido an equaliser, and no-one watching the game could believe what they had just seen.

Whatever Penybont’s manager, Rhys Griffiths, had put in his team’s half-time cuppa, I’d like a drink of that myself because within three minutes into the second half, Penybont had scored two more goals to go 3-1 up. However, Afan Lido woke up quite quickly and managed to keep the Penybont attackers out for the rest of the game, albeit with some desperate defending at times.

Afan Lido had some good moments of their own too, and with a few minutes to go, they won a corner. The ball pinged around inside Penybont’s six yard area for a few seconds, then hit a Lido player and went into the net. I don’t think that he knew anything about it – he was just in the way – but it was a goal for his team and they were now just one goal behind.

As the game came up to the final whistle, the Lido won yet another corner. This led to a game of head tennis, and the same player as just now put the ball in the net. But while he and his team were dancing around to celebrate, the linesman had his flag up for offside.

So Penybont won the game 3-2, meaning that Afan Lido were just so close, but on the balance of play, the result did rather flatter Afan Lido.

There was yet more football after that. The first match was Stranraer away at Spartans. And the Stranraer juggernaut rolls on with yet another win, this time 2-0. Still top of the table, on goal difference from Clyde, and those two have opened up a five-point gap to third place. The next few months will be interesting.

There was another 2-0 scoreline too, this time in the game between Greenock Morton and Queen’s Park. And since having sacked their manager a couple of weeks ago, Morton have become a different team. The players have finally gained some confidence and are looking as if they are enjoying themselves, and they had more shots on target in this match than they had in all of the matches under Ian Murray. They fully deserved their victory this afternoon. Here’s hoping that they can keep it up.

Two other important tasks remained to be done. The first one was to freeze the remains of my shepherd’s pie. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that several days ago I had invited comments from my readers. Most of the suggestions that I received had nothing to do with the shepherd’s pie, and they were physically impossible anyway, but Seàn sent me a couple of ideas, for which I was grateful.

However, in the end, I found some small ice cream containers that Marianne had had. They were 900 mg instead of 1 litre, and the portions of shepherd’s pie were just about the right size to fit in. They are now in the freezer, freezing away.

The final job was my Welsh homework, seeing as I’m not here tomorrow morning. That’s all done now, and I’ll review it on Tuesday morning before I send it off to be marked.

So now my notes are also finished, so I’ll just finish off everything else before I go to bed. Hospital tomorrow morning, and I don’t really want to go. Here’s hoping that the effects of the perfusion make it worthwhile.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about pies … "well, one of us has" – ed … a well-known cook from one of these celebrity TV programmes went to Australia, and while he was there, in front of an invited audience, he made a lemon meringue pie, and all of the audience cheered.
He stood there, scratching his head in bewilderment.
"What’s the matter?" asked the producer.
"Everyone cheered" he replied. "I don’t understand it."
"Why’s that?"
"Because back in the UK, I was told that Australians like to boo meringue."

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Live: Sunday 6th September 2026 – CAFE AU LAIT …

… is nothing like as good as Café Au Lit, Ay? … "and I bet that that went clean over the heads of most of your readers" – ed …

So when I was awoken by my friend bringing in a mug of coffee to my bedside table, I made no complaint at all, even if I had been fast asleep up to that point.

And “fast asleep” was quite right too. I’d collapsed into bed at about 20:30 and was probably asleep before my head touched the pillow. I was only going for a crash-out of about an hour then I’d wake up and carry on with the notes. That was the plan, anyway.

However, when I awoke and checked the time, it was 03:48 – much later than I had intended. Nevertheless, by 04:00 I was attacking my notes.

They were finished and on line round about 05:10, and I went back to bed. This time, though, I changed from my day clothes into my night clothes for the sake of decorum. And once more, I was asleep before my head touched the pillow.

When my friend brought in the coffee, it was about 08:15, and I hadn’t had three mouthfuls out of the mug before my nurse came to deal with me. And the Hound of the Baskervilles too, as well as his German lessons.

After he left, I finished my coffee and eventually made it into the kitchen, having dressed myself first. My friend was just about to be dragged out on walkies duty by the Hound of the Baskervilles, so I made another supply of croissants.

Once the croissants were in the oven, I set about making my porridge and also the juice for my morning medication. And everything was ready at the same time so I grabbed two warm croissants and put them on a plate to have after my porridge.

When the Hound of the Baskervilles dragged my friend back, we chatted for a while … "with the friend, not the Hound of the Baskervilles" – ed … and then I came in here to check the dictaphone to see if there was anything on it.

There was something about my middle sister last night. She was going to go to school in Paris. She was not really the sharpest knife in the box so we were wondering how she was going to cope. My mother seemed to think that she would cope OK with very few problems at all, but I said that I could imagine her getting herself lost on the Paris underground without any problems whatsoever. I didn’t think that anything augured particularly well in this plan to send her there.

This is one of those dreams that’s so unexpected. I’ve no idea why a dream like this would be going around my head. It’s extremely unlikely that she would have gone to Paris because she was not very good on her own in strange places. Not to mention the fact that our family would never ever have had the money to send her there.

But it’s interesting nevertheless that she appears in my dreams because she is the least likely member of my family to do so.

After that, there were two football matches to see.

They were both in Scotland – the first was Forfar Athletic v Stranraer. The Loons have always been Stranraer’s Nemesis but today, the tables were well-and-truly turned as Stranraer deservedly shellacked the Loons 0-3.

The next game wasn’t so interesting. Greenock Morton and Queen’s Park are struggling at the foot of the table so these three points were vital to both clubs.

Morton have recently signed about six loan stars, so I was looking for a vast improvement, but it wasn’t to be. From what I saw, it was a team that hadn’t knitted together yet, and a 2-1 defeat was about right.

There were several other things to do too, and then I made a start on fine-tuning the captcha. And I won’t tell you the saga about that because you’ll be pulling out your hair just as I would be if I had any hair left to pull.

Round about 13:30 we decided to take advantage of the lovely weather by going for a drive and buying a bag of chips at our favourite chippy in Avranches. So all three of us, my friend, the Hound of the Baskervilles and me, piled into the car like three superheroes and set off.

We went via a couple of garages in the area that were selling motorhomes to see what was on offer, but there was nothing that would fit in my friend’s garage so we didn’t pursue our enquiries. From there we went into the centre of Avranches but to our dismay, the chippy was closed.

Instead, we went to the car park by the cathedral. There’s a big public park there that is another one of the favourite places to visit of the Hound of the Baskervilles so he dragged his master off for another walkies. However, he spent most of his time being fascinated by the fish in the fishpond.

We came back a different way today – via La Haye Pesnel and Folligny, where we went to look at the old railway station and marshalling yard there. The yard was important because it was there that loads coming from the docks at Cherbourg would be trans-shipped to a train going to Granville and was heavily bombed by Stukas on 17th June 1940.

When the Germans arrived, they put it back into commission, and it was bombed by the allies in 1944 during the D-Day landings.

Back at home, rather much later than intended and not having had our chips in Avranches, I made a pizza. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve made one of those so, do you know, I’d forgotten how long the cooking time was? Consequently, we had a “rather crisp” base that, rather than a knife, you needed an axe to cut your way through it, and it spoiled somewhat the lovely taste of the topping.

The pudding afterwards was another one of these new soya yoghurts, and they tasted just as good as the previous ones.

There were still plenty of things to do so I came in here to do them, but as usual, there was an enormous wave of fatigue that swept over me when I was only halfway through my notes, so I posted online what I’d already written, took my nighttime medication and crawled into bed. I can always finish my notes off tomorrow morning.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about pizza disasters … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once met a friend who told me that he had burned his pizza while it was in the oven.
"What type of pizza was it?" I asked.
"It was a Hawaiian pizza" he replied
"So next time, put it on aloha temperature."

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Sunday 19th April 2026 – WHAT A NICE …

… way to start the day. When I opened the shutters in here and sat down at my desk to start work, it was already … errr … 12:20. Who could ask for a Sunday morning any better than that? As was said once a long time ago in a “Gunsmoke” episode, "Sunday is the one day of the week a man can get up at noon and sit around with his boots off without anybody hollering at him about it."

Mind you, for reasons that I still don’t understand, Saturday was a rather late night and I didn’t finish everything and slide under the bedclothes until 22:30. The football can’t have taken all that long, surely?

But Sunday is a lie-in so I was planning to sleep until Isabelle the Nurse came to sort out my legs at about 08:30 as usual.

At least, that was the plan, and, as we all know, "The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men gang aft agley an’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain for promis’d joy." At some point during the night, I awoke for what seemed to be the usual reason and went off to stroll the parapet. I’ve no idea what time it was, and neither did I care.

Back in bed, I went to sleep again fairly quickly and although I awoke at some point when it was light outside, I shoved my head back down under the quilt and went back to bed.

Isabelle the Nurse awoke me, ringing the doorbell to announce her presence. She sorted out my legs and feet, chatting away about the brocante in the town while I was cowering under the quilt. After she left, I went back to sleep almost straight away.

When I checked the time, sitting on the edge of the bed ready to stand up, it was 10:33, so all in all, it was a very good sleep and a very relaxing morning.

In the kitchen, I just had some of my medication and then made breakfast – porridge, coffee and two of my home-made croissants – and the croissants were, as usual, delicious after ninety seconds at 180°C in the microwave.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of THE CELT, THE ROMAN and THE SAXON by Thomas Wright.

We’re discussing agriculture today, and he tells us that "Mr. Bruce observed … traces of cultivation on the waste lands in Northumberland, and he is probably right in attributing them to the Romans. ‘A little to the south of Borcovicus,’ he says, ‘and stretching westward, the ground has been thrown up in long terraced lines, a mode of cultivation much practised in Italy and the East. Similar terraces, more feebly developed, appear at Bradley. I have seen them very distinctly marked on the banks of the Rede-water, at old Carlisle, and in other places."

These terraces are called “lynchets” and date all the way from the Iron Age and maybe before, to the early medieval period

By now, it was 12:15 after my lazy start to the day, so I headed back in here and switched on the computer after first, of course, opening the shutters.

The first thing that I did was to transcribe the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night.

I’d come across a brochure about coach tours so I was looking through it. There were lots of coach tours going all around the UK, but it was a shame that every one just picked up in London rather than anywhere else. There were adverts in there for British Rail which said “we aren’t only this and we aren’t only this and we aren’t only this” and someone suggested that they aren’t only anything, in fact. There was someone who had to return to the USA and someone was giving her some kind of instructions about where to go to catch the bus to take her back to her home town. There was a guy there with an elderly woman who was probably his mother, and they were in the queue for having a burger so he asked his mother if she wanted rye. The mother didn’t understand at all what he was walking about and tried to have him explain, but he wasn’t being very patient with her. Then it was my turn to order so I asked for a veggie burger. They asked me what else I wanted on it but the dream faded out there.

As if I’m ever likely to go on a coach trip anywhere as a passenger – except those few times to football matches. Mind you, I did go on a few with Nerina in the past.

The rye bread relates to some bread that Jackie left with me when she left. It’s been ages since I’ve had some good German bread, so I really enjoyed it, thanks, and I’ve been thinking of ordering some more at some point.

One thing though, and that is that I have no idea why British Rail would be allowed to advertise in a coach company’s brochure.

There was also something about being in Virlet. I was down there and I was looking at the barn. There were all kinds of things growing out of the slates on the barn but right at the peak of the roof where the wind turbine is, there was a tree growing out of it so I tried to find a ladder. I eventually found a ladder and I was trying to stand it up but it fell over. I picked it up but it was the wrong way round, upside-down. I needed to clean some electrical contacts so I was looking for something to clean the contacts but I couldn’t find anything. There was probably something in the barn, but I wanted to put this ladder up so that I could climb up onto the roof and pull this tree out. However, I was in my work clothes, so I was really tidy, with tidy shoes, and I was afraid of dirtying them, but I couldn’t think of how I could change into anything or whether I had anything with me.

It’s not like me to bother about making good clothes dirty – I’ve ruined enough of those in the past. And I never really was much good at manoeuvring ladders around, particularly the old, heavy wooden ones. But anyway, there won’t be plants growing in between the slates on the roof because there aren’t any. It’s a sheet roof pressed to resemble slates.

After that, we had a footfest. Firstly, we had the highlights of the rest of the matches in the JD Cymru League. There was nothing of any excitement there today, except a few heart-stopping moments as a couple of clubs tried the “let’s play it out from the back, guys” routine, but unfortunately, it came to nothing as the teams recovered and cleared their lines.

Secondly, we had Greenock Morton at home to Queens Park. And what a match that was. Morton could have had a dozen goals before half-time and another dozen in the second half, but a well-known phrase involving the hindquarters of a ruminant animal and a stringed musical instrument comes to mind. They were so dominant, especially after a Queens Park player had been sent off, that I was expecting an extremely tragic ending for Morton in the last couple of minutes, but both teams left the field with a 0-0 draw, accompanied by the boos and jeers of both sets of supporters.

Finally, we had Stranraer at home to their bogey team, Forfar Athletic, and as you might expect, the Loons went back to Angus with the three points and a 0-1 victory.

After all of that, I vegetated for a while and then did some more of the long project that I mentioned several weeks ago. And now, it’s slowly beginning to take shape, but there’s a long way to go.

There was a pause as well during the afternoon when I went to make a loaf of bread. That’s now cooked and cooling down in the kitchen, and I’m going to be off to bed in a minute or two, without any tea again.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about lying in bed … "well, one of us has" – ed … Nerina and I went camping once, and I awoke in the middle of the night. The view was so magnificent that I awoke and pointed upwards.
"Look at all of that!" I exclaimed. "I don’t think that I’ve ever seen so many stars before in my life! And there’s a shooting star over there if you look that way!"
"Do you know what that means?" she asked.
"Not at all" I replied.
"It means that some swine has stolen our tent, you berk!"

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Friday 23rd January 2026 – EVEN AS I TYPE …

… these notes, I really ought to be making tea. But the truth is that I have a churning stomach right now and running through a list of possible menus that I might eat, there isn’t one that appeals to me. All it seems to do is to make my stomach churn over even more.

As well as that, although I’m feeling somewhat better than I did this time last night, I’m still feeling a lot worse than I ought to be, so the aim is to do what I have to do as soon as I am able to do it and then head off to bed again, in the hope that yet another good sleep will do me some good.

Not like yesterday, which, despite my early, really early night, didn’t go according to plan.

As I mentioned yesterday, despite going to bed at 19:25 or thereabouts, I was awake again four hours later. And although I said that “I settled down again and waited to go back to sleep”, I was still wide-awake at 02:30 and showing no sign of dropping off.

At some point though, I must have gone back off to sleep because I was awoken by the alarm, and it took me completely by surprise. And I must admit that I have never felt less like leaving the bed as I did this morning. It took me an age to rise up to my feet and head off to the bathroom. As a result, I was running really late for everything else.

In the bathroom, I changed my clothes, having been in the same clothes without a change for forty-eight hours and I washed my undies. I like to keep on top of my clothes like that, having spent years living out of a suitcase. And then, I went into the kitchen for my hot drink and medication.

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

I was in the Soviet Union last night in my van. There had been some kind of concert supposed to take place, so I was in this village or small town down in the south of the Soviet Union on my way to Asia and I bumped into these two American girls who were also going to this concert. We went into this room and there were probably thirty or forty people standing around. So we sat down and waited for something to happen. We were expecting this music concert and then perhaps a discussion about what came out in the songs, that kind of thing. But I fell asleep, and when I awoke about ten minutes later, everyone else was asleep too except these two American girls. They were looking at their watch and one of them said “well, we may as well go. There’s a bus back to the USA in an hour. In the end, the three of us left, with all these other people asleep. Outside, there was plenty of snow, and we walked, and where the bus was due to be picked up was at this car park and there were two white MkIII Ford Zephyrs there with the word LEI written on the badge instead of “Ford Zephyr”. The girls went to stand there, and in the end, I invited them to come with me to Asia, but they were reluctant. They asked me if I’d ever been there before. I replied “no, but I have travelling in the blood”. I said that I’d been a taxi driver, coach driver, chauffeur and I’ve travelled the Northern Hemisphere all on my own in the past, and my father was a lorry driver so it’s all in the blood. But they were very reluctant, so in the end I left them and climbed over the roof of one of these Ford Zephyrs to head back to the van. I heard one of them say to the other one “it’s a shame that he’s such an untidy person” so I was thinking that maybe if I’d been more tidy, they might have come. I walked over to where I’d parked the van but couldn’t see it. This looked nothing like where I remembered having parked it. I thought that I must be in the wrong place so I tried to retrace my steps and ended up miles out of town trying to find the van. Where I was, all the snow had melted and it was an urban scene with trees in the distance. I wandered through all of these buildings, trying to find my way out to see if the van was behind them, but I couldn’t find my way out of these buildings. I was wandering around for ages. In the end, I found myself on a train. I was standing by a window, looking out to see if I could see the van somewhere, but I heard a commotion behind me. It was a teacher with a bunch of maybe ten girls. She’d gone to find the ticket controller. It seemed that some English-speaking people were sitting in these girls’ seats and she had to make them move. She spoke to them in English, so I spoke to her about the van. She said that she couldn’t help me. I need to see the police. I replied that the van hasn’t been stolen – I just can’t find it and in any case, I can’t speak Russian. I tried to speak some Russian from what I remembered but made a mess of it and she really wasn’t able to help me at all.

What a strange dream that was! For a start, I did learn to speak Russian, although I’ve forgotten most of it now. That started off when I was working for Shearings and I’d heard that they were trying to win a contract with an American travel agency to transport American tourists behind the Iron Curtain to “visit their roots”. It sounded probably the most fascinating coach-driving work ever, so I found a local Russian exile who taught me over a period of six months. When the company announced that they were looking for drivers to go behind the Iron Curtain, I naturally volunteered.
"Why should we select you ahead of everyone else?"
"Well, actually, I can speak some Russian"
It was the most fantastic work that I have ever done, and I enjoyed every moment of it, even if it did mean a relentless diet of wiener schnitzel.

But meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … dream, I could easily imagine myself at one time driving through the Soviet Union to Asia, somewhere like pre-revolutionary Iran, but the political climate east of Poland and Romania these days would put anyone off. And wandering around aimlessly looking for my van because I’d forgotten where it was parked is just like me, especially these days.

As for the white Ford Zephyrs, I couldn’t ever imagine them being in the Soviet Union, whether under a different maker’s name or not. They are much more likely to have been ZIL 111G vehicles, although if you were to see one of those, you would know that you are in trouble, because they were only ever given to members of the Politburo.

Isabelle the Nurse took me by surprise this morning. Fitted with a mask, she stormed into the apartment and attended to my legs. She had a go at measuring my temperature with my thermometer and it’s still quite high. However, she doesn’t think much of my thermometer and she’ll bring her own tomorrow.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE

James Curle is still discussing pottery, and now, we’ve moved on to how we are able to identify the different potters. There’s a fascinating list of potters’ marks and some equally fascinationg comments such as "this little fragment is an example of pottery classified by Dragendorff as ‘Dragendorff 37’, and there is a sample of this ware in a museum in (some obscure town in) Bulgaria."

Back in here, I had a variety of things to do, not having attended to my affairs as I should for the last forty-eight hours, and then I had last night’s notes to write.

They are now online, and then I finished off the notes for the radio programme on which I’ve been working.

In the meantime, I was having a good chat with Liz, who was giving me loads of motherly advice about how to find natural remedies to deal with my current health issues, and later on a brief exchange of messages with Rosemary.

There was football too. On Tuesday night Stranraer had played Queen’s Park of the second tier in the Scottish Cup on a swamp in a monsoon and had beaten the Spiders 6-5 on penalties after a 1-1 draw during one hundred and twenty minutes.

In theory, they now have a match at Ibrox against Glasgow Rangers, but the behind-the-scenes and off-the-field controversy after the game will need to be resolved first before it’s confirmed.

But that’s about everything, really. I suppose that there’s much more about which to write, such as my faithful cleaner coming down to do her stuff, but instead, I’m going to bed. And good riddance to me. I really don’t know how to cope with this latest illness. It’s getting on my wick and it’s high time that something happens before I go berserk.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Soviet Union … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once saw a man in the Red Square holding up a pice of paper.
I asked a local – a very vocal local yokel – what he was doing, and he replied "protesting, of course."
"But what about?" I asked.
"Ignorant foreigner!" he replied. "Why would he need to put that on his sign? Everyone knows what’s wrong! ".
Two minutes later, a police van pulls up and they drag him inside.
"So what’s he done now?"
"Ignorant foreigner!" he replied. "Everyone knows what he did!".

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Saturday 10th August 2024 – IT’S NOT BEEN …

… all that much better today than it was yesterday. There has been a slight improvement to be sure but almost anything would be an improvement over what surely must have been one of the worst days of my life.

It was another late night last night. and I’m not talking about midnight or anything respectably late but I’m talking about times like 02:00, that sort of thing.

Something awoke me at 05:45 and I’ve no idea what it was. At te time I was in the middle of some kind of panic attack thing about how I must catch a bus to somewhere, a long-distance coach. I have to be somewhere else by 08:00 to board this bus and I’ve no idea what time it is and when the alarm goes off will I have time to go – another one of these panic attacks. But whatever awoke me sounded so real that I actually left the bed to answer my phone, which hadn’t rung or even received a message, so I’ve absolutely no idea why I would have done that.

Having made sure that there was nothing going on that might have been of an importance I went back to bed.

These days I’ve had a few of these panic attacks while I’m asleep.. I wonder if some part of my body is telling me something and that I need to take heed. But I really can’t think where I have to be that involves any kind of travel that I would undertake in a long-distance bus. The only place where I would ever be likely to want to take one would be between Montréal and Florenceville in New Brunswick, but not even that bus runs any more.

Once I was back in bed there I stayed until the alarm went off.

When Billy Cotton ROARED HIS RAUCOUS RATTLE I staggered off into the bathroom to have a good scrub, wash my night-time shorts and change my clothes. I have to look my best for Isabelle’s last day before she goes off on a well-deserved break.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was in a scrapyard somewhere and we had an old Class 20 or similar shunter. For some reason we had to go to a quarry. At the quarry was another one of the same type of machine. There was some issue involving the driver of that particular machine so as we were there one of our people drove it. There was a huge argument and he ended up escaping in this machine, not before he’s destroyed half of their infrastructure, driven over the top of a crane cutting the bodywork etc. The bailiffs or someone turned up at our place and wanted to take away our machine thinking that it was theirs but when they compared the registration numbers of our train with the registration numbers of the locomotive from the quarry they found out that it wasn’t the same so they couldn’t take it, so they left Then the guy turned up with this machine from a quarry so we ended up with two identical machines due to people losing their temper

Actually, I know someone who has a Class 20 diesel locomotive. He might even have more. He’s the neighbour of a former friend of mine and runs a company in Staffordshire hiring out locomotives to various railway companies and has a useful side-line ingoing round various locomotive breakers yards rescuing the more valuable spare parts. He started off with just one locomotive that he had bought to preserve but made a fortune hiring it out to the builders of the Channel Tunnel and, like Topsy, his business “just growed”.

Isabelle was in “chat” mode again today and she spent some time here. Having covered for her boss’s absence on holiday she’s now going off for ten days. He starts back tomorrow and their cycle of “one week on, one week off” begins again.

While I was having breakfast I was reading about the Maginnis Gulch Stampede, or Montana’s Phantom Gold Rush, an incident that was played to perfection in CARRY ON COWBOY

But for those of you who have expressed an interest, the book is called FOLLOWING OLD TRAILS, written by a newspaperman called Arthur L Stone.

Later on in the morning there were the highlights of last night’s game between Queen’s Park and Livingston, and then I joined that guy I mentioned the other day, Blair McNally, for a trip to the East end of Glasgow for Vale of Clyde v Port Glasgow Athletic, a proper amateur football match in about the eighth level of the Scottish Pyramid.

This afternoon I’ve been tracking down concert dates. And much to my surprise, because of all the ones that I’ve done this is the first, I came across one that took place on a date on which I will have a radio broadcast within the current cycle of programmes that I’m preparing.

So on 21st March next year we’ll be having a live concert from the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago in 1974. This afternoon I’ve mixed the music for the concert and I’ve written half of the notes. I could have written more but unfortunately I was away with the fairies for a while at some point.

While I was at it, I came across a few other interesting bits and pieces, and finally turned my hand to downloading a concert that had been sent to me by one of the musicians who took part, featuring the almost-last concert on which my hero Deke Leonard played.

It’s a real pity though because of how the dates fall, this one won’t be broadcast for several years yet.

Tea tonight was one of my favourite quorn steaks in breadcrumbs, with baked potato and vegan salad. And it was delicious as always. Something that I eat every week but why not if I enjoy it.

So now I’m going to dictate the next batch of radio notes and then I’m going to try to go to bed at something like a reasonable time.

But talking of “Carry On Cowboy” reminds me of the two bandits (one of whom was Sid James) talking to the Indian chief Big Heap (Charles Hawtrey)

Big Heap – "And this is my son, Little Heap"
One Bandit – "How"
Other bandit (Sid James) – "How"
Big Heap – "And this is my squaw. I bought her for two buffalo skins"
One Bandit – "How"
Other bandit (Sid James) – "Never mind how. Where?"

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Saturday 3rd August 2024 – SO WHERE DID …

… Saturday go?

As for me, I didn’t go anywhere. I spent most of the day on my chair here in the office and much of the time I was fast asleep. It was pretty much a repeat of last Saturday, and the Saturday before that.

It seems that this Saturday thing is becoming a habit, and I don’t understand why

It’s not as if I had a particularly late night last night. To my surprise, and probably yours too, I was in bed by 23:00. Not by much, it has to be said, but enough to make it worth celebrating.

And I was asleep quite quickly too. In fact I had hardly begun my little night-time mantra before I was off with the fairies

But a strange thing happened this morning. I heard the alarm go off so I switched it off and after a stretch and a yawn, I pitched myself up onto the side of the bed.

Usually, I wait for the second alarm to go off, by which time the room and bed have stopped spinning so I can get off. But today – no second alarm.

So after several very long minutes I went to check the phone to make sure that I’ve not switched it off by accident – and there it was, still switched on, and the time was 06:55, five minutes before the first alarm is due to go off.

And it did do off on time too. So what was it that had awoken me earlier? Now there’s a mystery if ever I saw one.

In the bathroom the first thing that I had to do was to wash my watch. I’m bleeding from the wrist right underneath where the watch sits and there’s blood all over the watch. I can see this being an endless process, waking up in the morning and wiping the blood from somewhere.

We can’t go on for much longer with all of these blood-thinning products. I can see serious problems ahead if ever I have a real injury.

Having had a good wash and remembering to wash my shorts this weekend, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I’d been for a walk around a seaside town with a friend of mine. We were appalled by the state of the beach. It was nothing but a huge rubbish dump and the smell of urine was overpowering from the water. We walked around for ten minutes and wondered how on earth the people living in the area could possibly put up with the stench that was driving me berserk. Then I set out for home. As I started for home I was overtaken by one of these Crosville Ford Transits that was heading into town. I was walking but found that I could keep pace with it. We walked all the way to Shavington with his bus just in front of me. It pulled into Shavington and went in round behind the Pony Express place at Sugarloaf Corner but I took the short cut across the front of the chip shop where I bought some chips for supper … fell asleep here … so there I was back home again with this Ford Transit bus again about 20 yards away. I wondered “what on earth was this doing? It’s travelled all the way from the top end of Crewe with no passengers on it at all to come into Shavington and then just sit here and do nothing

And I could really and honestly smell the stench of urine during this dream. It was overwhelming

Later on, I dictated One confusion was the number. It was 3230-whatever but I kept on saying the number wrong, getting the order like the numbers in the wrong place but eventually I managed to sort it out with a bit of confusion.

This obviously relates to something, but I really have no idea what. But as we know from past experience, I seem to be missing out on a lot of dreams that happen but I seem not to record. One of them was that famous dream a couple of months ago involving Castor, and we can’t not record dreams where she, Zero or TOTGA are involved. That would really be the end

The nurse didn’t take long to sort me out today. She was in and out in 10 minutes, her usual cheerful, bubbly self. She wants me to wash my puttees tonight and use the clean ones starting tomorrow, and showed me a few unhygienic marks on these. I wanted to tell her that that was her fault, not putting the plasters on the right places, but I reckon that it’s probably not a good idea to antagonise unnecessarily the person who puts the antiseptic and plasters on my wounds.

After she left I had breakfast and carried on reading my book about someone’s walks around Montana in 1910 and 1911.

While I’m reading, I have the internet running in the background and looking up all of the places that he visited and seeing just how many changes there have been in the 100-odd years since he wrote. It’s a fascinating study and, as I’ve said, so many of his observations and notes that he made from talking to the elderly settlers who had come there when the territory were first settled have failed to make it into modern historical reminiscence.

So much of this early pioneer history has been lost, and will be forgotten for ever as long as research today is just being conducted with the aid of Wikipedia and nothing else. I have a feeling that people are going to forget how to research.

It’s all very well people asking you “what did you learn at University?”. I leaned far, far more than just whatever there was on my course and, surprisingly, the place where I learned the most was in “OUSA Debate” and the other big Current Affairs chatroom whose name I have forgotten but will remember the moment I press “publish”.

In here I sat down to plan out my day, and the next thing that I remember, it was 12:43 and I had a splitting headache. I’d slept for about two hours, just like that. No recollection whatever of anything.

Falkirk’s match against Queen’s Park was on the internet so I watched the Bairns beat the Spiders and then made myself a sandwich.

Back in here after lunch I started to edit the notes that I’d dictated about John Mayall.

By the time that I’d finished this afternoon I’d assembled the programme and choosing the 11 tracks and the text from scratch I ended up 81 seconds over my hour.

However, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I always include in my notes a lot of filler so removing 81 seconds of it was time-consuming but not defeating.

Now I have a programme assembled that features many artists who played with him before he left to live in the USA and if all goes according to plan it will be broadcast next weekend.

Remember, you can hear me and my programmes at LE BOUQUET GRANVILLAIS on Friday and Saturday at 21:00 CET, 20:00 UK time and 15:00 Toronto time and there are podcasts recorded to hear later if you miss them.

The excitement was obviously far too much for me because I crashed out yet again and that was depressing. I need to be doing much better than this. I can’t keep on falling asleep.

But anyway I recovered just in time for tea – another one of my favourite breaded quorn fillets with baked potato and salad. The lettuce was looking rather sad but nevertheless I used what I had to. I just can’t seem to keep lettuce for any length of time.

So now that I’ve finished my notes I’m going to dictate the next batch of arrears, put my puttees in to soak and hope that I can make it back in here without knocking my legs and bleeding to death

But before I go, I have to say that I have been taken to task about some of the humour that exudes from these pages. Someone seems to think that they are becoming far too full of smut.
"Don’t you know what good clean fun is?" wailed one contributor.
Well of course I don’t so I e-mailed her back. "You tell me. What good is it?"

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Monday 29th July 2024 – I’VE HAD A …

… lovely chat this morning.

Round about 10:30 I noticed that Ingrid had come on line. It’s been a while since we’ve had a chat so I ‘phoned her up to find out her latest news.

Like most of us these days, it’s a mixture of good and bad but it’s still nice to keep in touch with each other and exchange our news regardless of what type of news it is

Something else that was nice was to be in bed before 23:00 last night and it’s been a long time since that’s happened. I’d all-but given that idea up as an unrealised ambition, but there we are.

With having prepared the pizza dough and the pizza early, I’d soon eaten it and cleaned up the kitchen (I try to do that every night – I don’t like to wake up to the washing-up), then I came in here to write up my notes.

Everything was all done and dusted by about 22:30 so I just had to undress and roll up my puttees before hitting the hay.

And once again, I didn’t need much rocking. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall I have a little … well, mantra, I suppose, that I follow when I’m in bed to give me an idea of how long it takes to fall asleep. And I haven’t reached the end of it yet, certainly not last night.

Despite everything though, I was awake again at 04:15 for some reason. But there’s no danger whatever of my leaving the bed at that time. I curled up and went back to sleep, and that’s where STRAWBERRY MOOSE found me when the alarm went off.

On my way to the bathroom I took my puttees into the living room. And in that distance, a mere handful of yards, I managed to lose yet another clip for my puttees. I’ve absolutely no idea what’s going on with those. There is no rhyme or reason why they should disappear, and nowhere for them to go.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and change of clothes, washed the clothes that I’d taken off and then put into the bowl the crêpe bandages from the last few days and left them to soak ready to clean tonight.

Back in here again, nursing a thirst that you could photograph, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And I’d gone far too by the looks of things. I was miles away on some kind of visit to the hospital. They checked me over and gave me a couple of injections. They gave me a tablet and I began to hallucinate. I had a kind-of hallucinatory dream at that point where I was just seeing all kinds of shapes like speech bubbles that kept appearing and disappearing etc. That went on for several minutes. Someone from the hospital said “doesn’t that feel better than a ponction lombaire or whatever it was, which of course it does but I couldn’t understand what they were doing and what was the significance of it. It just seemed to me to be a series of random tests but there was this kind-of geodesic dome thing in there that was containing all the balls, stopping them all flying everywhere I suppose but it was so big that you couldn’t actually see it. To all intents and purposes there was nothing there doing that. It was all just so surreal.

And that reminds me of the hallucinations that I had when they started me on that anti-potassium powder. Until I’d become used to the stuff I was all over the place. I could honestly have sold that down the back streets of a Paris suburb and made a fortune. And, of course, anything, absolutely anything, is better than a ponction lombaire – except for a ponction thoracic

I was working in the same place as my father. I wanted a couple of days off so I told my boss that I had to take my motorbike in to have some work done on it. I asked for a couple of days off which were granted. When I was off on the first day he sent a mail around saying that he’d recalculated everyone’s holidays and I only had two days left. I couldn’t understand where all my holidays had gone to so the first thing that I did was to go back into the office and cancel the day’s leave for tomorrow. He looked at me and asked “is your motorcycle done?”. I suddenly couldn’t think what he meant but it suddenly hit me and I said “yes, that’s OK”. He wanted to speak to my father but my father was having this intense private conversation about his leave and how many more days he wanted off etc but it was difficult for him to talk with the boss there and difficult for the boss to interrupt and difficult for the boss to comprehend what was happening so I interrupted him again to ask how come I’d only had two days leave left. He began to go through my list of entitlement of my days that I’d taken off already. I could see that there was some kind of mistake but I could see that he wasn’t particularly sure about anything and carried on going through it. I thought that the only thing to do was to wait until he’d finished and if he hadn’t picked up the mistake then I’d pick it up but it was all extremely confusing. I certainly felt that I had a lot more than just two days annual leave left. It was only July and most of my annual leave wasn’t taken off until the last week in August and the first week in September.

We always used to take our holidays the first two weeks of September. The brats would be back at school and out of the way but the weather would still be nice and all of the venues would be open. My last holiday was at the end of September though, in 2022 when I went to Canada. But that was due to force of circumstances

My team was called out to do some work on a road maintenance thing. When we turned up there was equipment everywhere, material everywhere and this road maintenance thing was a right mess of total confusion. We eventually tracked down a couple of guys. They were supposed to be edging off people’s gardens where they were overgrown, their hedges, on the public highway. We asked them how far they’d gone with that they were doing. They replied “nothing” – that was why they had called us out. One of my friends said something and this led to something of a brawl between the two teams. Of course the boss stepped in and stopped it. He said that it was totally ridiculous. He said that we’d come here to do a job and all we needed was some information – how much of the job they had done and how much they hadn’t done. If they tell us, we can start. It seems ridiculous that they’ve contracted for this and called us in as subcontractors because we’re cheap, and just because we’re cheap all we’ll end up doing is brawling amongst ourselves. It’s totally futile. We’ll never have anything done unless someone gets a grip and tells us now “how far have they gone with this job or are we expected to do it all? If so, let’s get on with it”.

Not quite a regular theme, but people making even the most simple task into something that is complicated way beyond belief seems to be the way of the modern World and its inhabitants. But my griping reminds me of Great Western Railway chairman Sir Daniel Gooch at a Railway Inspectorate hearing saying that "it’s high time we threw all these modern safety contraptions into the fire and returned to he business of running railways"

I’d stepped back into that period of dream about the road-mending. We were there doing the job that we were supposed to do when suddenly a bull appeared around the corner and began to charge at all of our equipment and personnel. I’ve no idea where it came from and why it was here but it was an extremely aggressive bull all the same

It beats me why I can step back into a banal nondescript dream like that but whenever I’m with Zero or TOTGA or Castor I can never manage to do so. You would think that after all of these years I’d be able to summon up my female companions at will

There was some time left before the nurse arrived so I began to watch a football match from the weekend – Queens Park v Kelty Hearts. It was interesting to me because after all of these years and complications involving Hampden Park, the stadium known as “Lesser Hampden” at the side of Hampden Park is finally complete and the Spiders, who own Hampden Park and used to play their home games there, now finally have a home that they can truly call their own. And while I won’t ever be able to watch a game there, I was there in spirit virtually this morning.

It’s the nurse’s last day today for a while. He’s off on his holidays. It’s Isabelle for the foreseeable future starting tomorrow so I hope that she’s in a good mood.

The nurse this morning was reasonably happy with everything which was good. Things are so much better when the nurses are cheerful and happy.

After he’d gone I had breakfast. And then I came back in here to watch the football.

This is THE LINK to the game. It’s interesting because firstly, you get to see Little Hampden, and secondly, you’ll see the most one-sided football match that I’ve seen for many a year.

Kelty Hearts were not just bad, they were appalling. They lost the game 6-0 and they were lucky to get nil. Had it not been for the heroics of their ‘keeper and some inept finishing by the Spiders’ forwards, we could have had a cricket score here. Dominic Thomas even blazed a penalty miles over the bar after it had been awarded shortly after the kick-off.

And then Ingrid was there so we had a chat. She told me inter alia that after a spell just now in hospital, there’s nothing more that can be done for her left leg. She’s had to give up all kinds of things, including her beloved walking and cycling

But it’s an ill-wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good. Wondering how she was now going to move around, do her shopping etc, a woman in her village mentioned in the middle of a conversation that she was planning on exchanging her car, an elderly but perfectly serviceable Toyota diesel automatic, for a new one.

Of course, if it’s your left leg that will no longer work you can still drive an automatic. And when you find an insurance company that will recognise all of your no-claims discount from your previous car insurance years ago, the rest is, as they say, history.

And so in the near future I might be having another visit. I hope so because I like Ingrid. In fact, I like all my friends and wish that they’d all visit me more often.

Most of the rest of the day has been spent working on radio stuff. The second long radio notes has now been edited, the programme has been assembled, the final track has been chosen and the notes written ready for dictation.

Something else I’ve been doing too is to make a start, or a re-start, should I say, on the notes about my trip to Jersey in 2022. There’s about 100 photos that need editing and the notes writing. The longer I leave them, the harder it will become to do it.

But apart from the two bad falls that I had, that was a really good trip and I wish that I’d gone over there on other occasions instead of leaving it until the last moment when I was at the limit of being able to do it.

To my surprise, I only crashed out for about 20 minutes today. And if that’s not progress I don’t know what is. I hope that I can keep it up.

The cleaner stuck her head in the door to give me some post. I’m summoned again to that hospital in Avranches where I had that dispute. So that’s another phone call to organise.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg. Plenty of stuffing left but I have a cunning plan for that tomorrow. I’m planning a baking afternoon seeing as it looks as if I’ll be running out of bread.

But that’s tomorrow. Tonight I’m off to bed. Late again, but not all that late. Let’s see how many puttee clips I can lose tonight.

But dreaming about that bull reminds me of a sign that I saw in a field near Ironbridge when we were looking for a place to camp once.
"I let people use this field for free, but the bull may make a charge."

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