Tag Archives: samuel hearne

Thursday 21st November 2024 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve featured any photos on these pages?

And how long is it since we’ve featured a photo with snow in it?

And what I mean is “real snow”? And while these photos may not be so impressive, I wasn’t the one who was driving so I couldn’t photograph just anywhere, otherwise you would have had photos much more exciting than these to look at.

Anyway, for the coast of Western Normandy, even this amount of snow is impressive and enough to bring the whole region to a shuddering halt. For November, it’s totally unprecedented. But our taxis ploughed valiantly onwards so that I could see what was going on.

So while you admire a few photos of yet more snow that we encountered, I’ll say some more about my day today.

Starting of course with last night. Although not in bed early, it was before midnight when I finally crawled into my stinking pit after finishing off everything that needed doing.

And once in bed, there I stayed for the rest of the night, thinking that I can’t have moved a single muscle during the whole of the night, optimism that turned out to be misplaced as it happened, but I certainly can’t remember anything about it

When the alarm went off I arose from the Dead, just about, and had a very slow walk into the bathroom. But not before switching on the rest of the heating in here, because I noticed that the outside temperature was 0°C – freezing point.

While I was washing I noticed that not only had I lost the protective netting over my arm, one of the two plasters had disappeared too. I wonder where that had gone. It’s a good job that my arm hadn’t bled any during the night.

Back in here I found the missing objects. They were in the bed . I must have moved about quite a lot in order for them to to have come off my arm. I would have expected to have known about it, anyway. But I wonder what I must have been doing for that to happen.

First thing that I did afterwards was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There was something in a dream about going to to war and colonising some particular area, how it was very important to wear your uniform exactly as it had been supplied and wear it exactly where it fitted properly and where it was supposed to be rather than where if felt more comfortable on your body because if you had it somewhere where it wasn’t supposed to be it would sweat and make life really uncomfortable for you but that’s all really that I can remember of that.

I stepped back into that dream too and when the alarm went off I was having a lengthy discussion with someone about something or other but the alarm going off totally disrupted my whole train of thought which is a shame. I would have loved to have found out where this dream would have led me.

So with nothing of any real significance, except, maybe that I managed to step back into a dream that was 76 minutes previously, which is a good memory for the subconscious, I waited for Isabelle the Nurse.

When she arrived she told me about the freezing conditions, the fact that it had begun to snow, the excitement on the streets and the general chaos in the town as everyone struggled to come to terms with the snow. If the temperature drops a few more degrees the département will be paralysed.

After she left I made breakfast and read my book. I’ve finally some to the end of Samuel Hearne’s adventures which is a shame because not only did I gain much from reading them, his glossary of fauna and flora at the back in even more interesting.

If only John Hornby had read them.

John Hornby, or “Jack Hornby” to the few friends that he had, was the son of the famous rugby player and cricketer who lived in Nantwich and is buried in Acton Churchyard near my aunt. He went out to Canada on several occasions to explore the Wilderness and the Barren Grounds. However in 1927 he and two companions starved to death on the Thelon River in the Barren Grounds.

They had gone to follow the trails of the migrating animals and to live off the animals that they captured.

Hearne makes the point that even some of the First-Nations people who have lived amongst the migrating animals for generations have starved to death. He says in his book "in some years, hundreds of deer may easily be killed within a mile of York Fort; and in others, there is not one to be seen within twenty or thirty miles. One day thousands and tens of thousands of geese are seen, but the next they all raise flight, and go to the North to breed.".

He concludes his notes with "I am persuaded that whoever relies much on the produce of the different seasons, will frequently be deceived, and occasionally expose himself and men to great want." – advice that Hornby would have done well to heed.

However, had Hornby taken a copy of Hearne’s book with him, he would also have had a great many hints on how to obtain an enormous amount of food out on the Barren Grounds. Some of it would have been unpalatable to European tastes but it’s better than starving to death.

After breakfast I came back in here where I paired off the music that I’d chosen yesterday for another radio programme, and then segued the pairs together. However I was taken by surprise by the taxi driver.

The new rules and regulations come into force today apparently and now if there are journeys to and from the same area within a 10 km radius of pick-up and drop off, the taxi proprietor is obliged to combine them as long as they do not result in a delay of more than 45 minutes. The taxi company had three trips – two others and me – that fell in this category so we all had to pile in together

Half an hour early, and not being anything like ready, I told the driver to go to pick up someone else and come back. I sent a frantic message to my cleaner who dashed here to fit my anaesthetic patches and help me dress and pack, and then we made it downstairs into the wind and snow to await the driver.

When she returned I piled in and we went off to the hospital to pick up our third passenger and then we had a drive through the tempest and blizzard to Avranches.

In case anyone is wondering, I’m not complaining about these new arrangements. I’m having for free something that is available in no other country in the World, as far as I am aware. Free and for nothing. I’m grateful that it exists and I would do anything to keep it and prevent any abuse.

However I might have thought differently when they came to plug me in. The anaesthetic hadn’t had time to work and I knew all about them plugging me in, as I suspect does everyone else in the neighbourhood now.

And then I had another one of these cataleptic fits that I have every now and again

Once I recovered I read my Welsh again and then read some of the reports of the crew of the Sieur de Roberval who was chasing after Cartier on his third voyage. However I was interrupted by a nurse who brought me an appointment with an ophthalmologist and a doctor who brought me a prescription for a pedicure.

But an eye test? Which nurse did I call “beautiful”?

And I’m admiring the precision of Roberval’s pilot who is giving his measurements clearly, even if they are in leagues. A league could be anything back in those days – there was no fixed measurement – but as I can now identify some of the points between which he works out his distances I’ll be able to work out what was Roberval’s idea of a league

When they unplugged me I headed out for the taxi and it was the same driver who brought me down. We had a little chat on the way back in the snow, and slid the car a couple of times on the ice, once into the kerb.

My faithful cleaner was waiting for me and watched once more as I climbed up all of the steps unaided. I really must keep this up.

Tea tonight was something out of a tin. I wasn’t feeling too adventurous. I’ve had a hard day and I’m going to bed for a good rest (I hope).

But all of this snow in Western Normandy? What do you make of that? It’s not like the Auvergne (which has had a shed-load over this last 24 hours and is currently without power) or Canada but it’s still impressive.
But still not as impressive as what went on with radio station KHAR in Alaska in the early 1970s with the newsreader reading out details of the daily snowfall in various cities – "and Helena got six inches during the night" and then hastily explaining himself " . . . Helena, Montana, that is"

Wednesday 20th November 2024 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone from the night just now.

But that’s not surprising because I didn’t go to sleep at all. It was what the French call a nuit blanche.

And if you think that going to bed at midnight or thereabouts is bad, then how about at 02:00 and I was still awake and not in bed?

This kind of thing happens occasionally, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. It’s a pretty miserable affair when I’m awake like this and can’t sleep but it’s just another one of those little things sent to try me, I suppose, and I have to make the best of it, such as it is.

So after finishing off my notes I was somewhat tired, but more physically tired than a sleep kind of tired. I couldn’t find the strength or the will to haul myself out of my chair and move the few inches or so into the bed. I just sat here and vegetated for all that time.

Eventually I managed to pull myself together and headed off to the bathroom to prepare myself for bed, thinking to myself that it wouldn’t have been so bad had I been able somehow to do some work in the time that I was still awake.

Once in bed I tossed and turned and couldn’t sleep at all, and that was probably the most depressing part of the night. I began to reminisce about things that I should have done, or ought to have done, and that’s bound to bring me out in a depression.

And that’s how it went on for most of the night. I was too far wrapped up in the past to think about the present, and that’s definitely the wrong way to be doing things.

When the alarm went off I crawled reluctantly out of bed (and you’ve no idea just how reluctantly) and headed for the bathroom and a good wash and scrub up.

Back in here I listened to the dictaphone and, as I expected, found nothing. So instead I had a look at my shopping list ready to order things from LeClerc on Friday.

However it’s difficult to make up an order this week. I have a lot of things in stock so I don’t need much. In fact, I can live without everything for the next week or two (except the soft vegetables of course) so I made an executive decision and decided that I won’t sent off an order this week. What I do need, like the mushrooms, tomato and cucumber, I’ll ask my cleaner to fetch them.

And for the benefit of new readers, of which there are more than just a few these days, an executive decision is one where if it’s the wrong decision, the person making it is executed.

Isabelle the Nurse had news for me today. Firstly, they are moving the War Memorial while they renovate the town centre and secondly, snow is forecast for tomorrow. And I’m going to Avranches and the clinic in a taxi too.

After she left I made breakfast and carried on with my book.

Hearne is now writing his summary. He writes about the people whom he meets, their lifestyles out in the peri-Arctic tundra and their habits, and it’s all extremely interesting. About his guide he says "I have met with few Christians who possessed more good moral qualities, or fewer bad ones" and "his scrupulous adherence to truth and honesty would have done honour to the most enlightened and devout Christian, while his benevolence and universal humanity to all the human race, according to his abilities and manner of life, could not exceeded by the most illustrious personage now on record"

If that’s the case, then having read about some of the antics of his guide and party on the way back from massacring the Inuit, it tells me so much about the behaviour and morals of England and the English at the end of the Eighteenth Century.

We’re also being treated to an account of the wildlife and vegetation that he encounters on his trip. And his discussion of the food that they ate on their journey has revolted my stomach. It makes my meals sound positively appetising. Hearne however claims that he quite enjoyed some of them and in that case he’s welcome to them.

And when he describes the contemporary meals that are on offer back in England in the 1770s, that’s enough to get me going too. They make my mother’s meals sound delicious.

After breakfast I came in here and assembled the radio programme. Despite the speech being longer this time for some reason or other, it all went together quite nicely and I ended up being thirteen seconds over the one hour allowed for the programme.

But that’s not a problem. I can just cut out some of the applause and move some of the sound-bytes up a little and then it will all fit. And in fact, it all fits quite nicely

After lunch I had things to do. A friend of mine was on-line so we had a chat. We have a project going on together that is becoming quite involved and so it was good to have a chat about it.

There were a few on-line orders to make too. I need to overhaul the freezer here because it’s iced up and the drawers have collapsed. I’ve found a supplier of the drawers in Rouen so I had to organise an on-line order. They’ll be here by the weekend, I hope, and with the hair dryer that I liberated with the help of my cleaner, it will be “all systems go” with the freezer.

While we’re on the subject of the cleaner … "well, one of us is" – ed … she turned up to do her stuff this afternoon, part of which was helping me into the shower.

Well, watching, actually, because I managed to climb into the bathtub and sort myself out totally unaided, and isn’t that a change? It’s not all that long ago that I couldn’t even lift my leg up, never mind climb into the bathtub.

The shower was delicious too. I stayed in there for much longer than I should, giving myself a good hosing-down in nice hot water. And I enjoyed every minute of it too

So a nice clean me climbed out of the shower and tidied the bathroom to match the rest of the apartment, and then came back in here to choose the music for the next radio programme.

After the cleaner left I took some naan dough from the freezer and left it to defrost and then made some dough for the next supply of bread.

Tea tonight was a delicious leftover curry with naan bread followed by chocolate cake and the last of the strawberry-flavoured soya dessert which is a shame because it was so nice

While I was having tea the bread was baking in the oven. And at 160°C for 15 minutes and then turn over for another 15 minutes at 160°G, we have the most perfect loaf that I have ever made.

So now I’m off to bed, to catch up on my beauty sleep. I need it too after last night. Dialysis tomorrow but I don’t know how I’m going to go there. All public transport tomorrow is cancelled due to the wave of bad weather that is expected to hit us tonight so I imagine that the taxis won’t be going either, but we shall see.

But before I go let me say something else about Hearne’s trip to the Coppermine River.
One night he and his guide, Matonabbee, were lying there looking at the stars in the sky
"Look at that shooting star, Matonabbee" said Hearne. "What does it signify?"
"It represents the spirit of one of our tribe on his way to join his ancestors in the sky"
"And the stars?" asked Hearne. "Do they represent our ancestors?"
"They do indeed" said Matonabbee. "They are happy with us so they have come out to dance with joy"
"And look at the Aurora Borealis" said Hearne. "And the moon. It’s all so wonderful. And here we are, staring up at it through the night. What does it all mean?"
"It means" said Matonabbee "that earlier this evening some thieving b@$t@rd stole our wigwam."

Tuesday 18th November 2024 – IT LOOKS AS IF …

… I’m off back to Paris.

The Neurology department of the hospital where I go has summoned me to attend, some time in late January (I can’t remember the date right now), so I wonder if it has anything to do with the scan that I had a few days ago.

If it is, then that’s good. But if it isn’t, that’s good too because there can’t be too many people looking at my nervous system. The more the merrier as far as I’m concerned, provided that they all agree on a course of treatment.

After all, it is a treatment that I’m hoping to have. If there’s any kind of possibility of improving my mobility then I’ll take it, and with both hands too.

It might even enable me to go to bed earlier too. Midnight these days is the new 23:00 and I reckon that I’ll be struggling to meet that kind of deadline too on certain days.

Last night though I was in bed just before midnight and was asleep quite quickly and there I stayed until about two minutes before the alarm went off when I had one of these dramatic awakenings that I sometimes have.

Despite being awake early (ish) it was still a struggle to find my way out of bed before the second alarm and into the bathroom before the third one. I had to rely on all kinds of determination to drag me out of bed.

But having washed, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Once again we had an alarm going off at 04:20. I was with some Native Americans at the time discussing health arrangements and medical examinations with them. We were considering how that kind of thing was going to work. My brother was there. He saw the vehicle that I was using, which was an old A60 van. He asked from where I’d had it. I told him that it was a hire vehicle. He thought that it was a great machine and he’d have to look out for another one. He’d try round all the Native American corporations to see who had one etc

And I remember nothing at all about the alarm going off. But I did own an AUSTIN A60 VAN in the past. He was called Bill Badger and we had a great many adventures together over the couple of years that I owned him

This dream continued afterwards and we were giving various Native Americans some kind of medical check. We had guides and tables to help us so we were puzzled when one girl turned up who seemed to be taller than the others but whose weight seemed to be far less than any that we had recorded to date. We had a look in our notes but there was nothing so we resolved to weigh her again only this time totally naked and without her dictaphone and music player around her neck (…fell asleep here …)

The second part of this dream – when I say that it “continued”, then according to the timestamps there’s just over an hour between the two parts. And this is another dream of which I have absolutely no recollection at all. But I clearly have Native Americans on my mind, what with reading Samuel Hearne and Jacques Cartier. And weighing is a procedure that we have to follow at the Dialysis Clinic, both before and after the procedure.

Then there was a football match taking place. I was watching from a balcony of a sports centre or something like that. The first thing that I noticed was that all the players of one team rushed towards the linesman to berate him for something. As they wouldn’t calm down the referee began to hand out yellow cards. As they continued, he sent them all off. I asked the other team, which was the Midland Bank, what had happened. They said that apparently every time their goalkeeper had been involved in a collision with one of their players the referee had given a foul against the goalkeeper. And then this ball, no-one was convinced that it had gone out of play except the linesman so there shouldn’t have been a throw-in but the linesman insisted and that’s why the other team was so upset. But while I was talking about this to someone i was reading through my e-mails. I’d had one from one of my friends on the Wirral. It was from the wife of the partner saying “now that the husband has a job on the new Radio Monte Carlo …” and that rang a bell with me because someone else whom I know as a DJ had begun to work for RMC so I wondered what was happening there, whether they were recruiting or something.

Sometimes I wonder what referees and linesmen see that I have missed, and what I have seen that they have missed. I’m sure that at times, the referee is refereeing a different match to the one in which he’s standing in the middle and which I’m watching. But working for another radio station where things are more challenging and more is expected would be exciting. Local radio is great but it does have its limitations. I’m ready to take on the World!

Did I dream that dream about our neighbours in Shavington? … "no you didn’t" – ed … I was on my way back home in Shavington, going down Vine Tree Avenue and they were standing outside their house? The first thing that I had to do when I went in was to move a settee outside. I could manage that fine on my own but when I was halfway through it the neighbours came round and began to chat but I carried on moving this sofa. I had it outside and I was going to stick it in the garage. Mrs Neighbour then came out for a chat. She watched as I opened the door of the garage – it was an “up and over” door and I stood this settee up on its end so that I could manoeuvre it in. She was astonished to see everything that was in there including the two cars parked one on top of the other – one was the green Princess. My brother was there too. He had this old rickety bike but there were one or two good things on it. I took that from him and threw it into the garage and pulled out another bike that was much more modern and generally in better condition but needed a good overhaul and service and two new mudguards. He could take the mudguards off the other bike. I told him that he could have this other bike but if he hadn’t done anything to it in a couple of weeks they were both going down to the tip. Mrs Neighbour was astonished by all of this. Later on I was an an autojumble. I was walking around and I saw stalls selling badges, all kinds of things that were of interest. Then I came across a stall selling rear light fittings. He had all the little strips of colour that I needed for the Mark III Cortinas so I enquired about them and he told me the price. They really were reasonable so I said to whoever I was with that I’ll be back here some other time and bring some money with me because there’s loads of stuff here that would be of interest to me. This other person shook their head and said “well, Eric, I just think that you are simply accumulating more kinds of old junk for all the good that you are going to do”.

“You are simply accumulating more kinds of old junk for all the good that you are going to do” – And there’s a lot of truth in that. My life is full of all kinds of half-finished projects that will never ever see the light of day. There’s a fortune stashed away in my barn and in my warehouse if only people will realise the value instead of hurling it into a skip. But anyway my brother made it into a dream yet again, and so did some neighbours whom I last saw in 1970 and haven’t ever thought about for a moment either before or since that date.

It’s Isabelle the nurse on duty for the next seven days so things will improve here I hope. She has many more interpersonal skills and is a much better conversationalist. But she didn’t hang about this morning because she had plenty of blood samples to extract, which is no surprise.

Once she’d gone, I made breakfast and carried on reading my book. And Samuel Hearne has now arrived safely back at the Fort, but not before experiencing yet more horror and depravity.

His group, now numbering almost 200 people, all heading for the Fort to trade their skins and furs, when they stumble across a small party of strange First-Nation people. Being only a small party, his larger party "robbed them of almost every useful article in their possession"

And worse was to come. His party"joined themselves in parties of six, eight, or ten in a gang, and dragged several of their young women to a little distance from their tents" and what Samuel Hearne goes on to describe cannot be imagined.

Hearne remonstrated with his party, only to be told "in the plainest terms, that if any female relation of mine had been there, she should have been served in the same manner".

In the past, I’ve read several third-party accounts of Hearne’s voyages and read several summaries, and not one of them has ever mentioned the cruelty and depravity about which Hearne writes, other than the massacre of the Inuit at Bloody Falls.

Back in here I revised my Welsh and then went to the lesson. And once again it passed quite satisfactorily. Although it doesn’t seem like it, I must be able to concentrate a lot better than I have done in the past. I just wish that I didn’t have this teflon brain where nothing sticks to it.

As usual, it’s a late lunch when I’m having my Welsh class, so there wasn’t a great deal of time afterwards. Nevertheless I attacked the radio programme notes that I had dictated on Saturday night that hadn’t been edited, and now they are all ready for use.

Strangely though, when I dictated this batch a few weeks ago, the running time was 7:05. Today though, for some reason, they are 7:36 – exactly the same notes. Now there’s a mystery if ever there was one.

There was a break for hot chocolate of course, and the finishing off the editing took me up to teatime.

Taco roll again, with more refried beans. I’ve run out of tomatoes so I had just mushrooms with onion and vegan cheese with the refried beans, and that worked too. There’s enough refried beans left over for one further meal and then that will be that, which is a shame. Refried beans was top of my list of things to find when I went to Santa Fe in 2002 and I’ve enjoyed every mouthful of the very limited stock that I’ve been able to find elsewhere.

Pudding was more home-made chocolate cake with strawberry soya dessert. There are two more tubs of soya dessert in the fridge and I can’t remember what’s in them, but I bet that it’s just as nice.

So later than ever, it’s bed-time ready for tomorrow which is shower day.

But that dream about the football referee reminds me of the boy at work who asked for the afternoon off to go to his uncle’s funeral – on the day of the Cup Final.
Later on, that afternoon, the boss was at the Cup Final and who should he see but his young employee watching the game from the terraces
"I thought that you said that you were going to your uncle’s funeral" roared the boss, angrily
"But I am, Sir" cried the boy. "I am"
"What do you mean" asked the boss
"Well my uncle is the referee" said the boy "and he’s just awarded a penalty against Manchester United"

Monday 18th November 2024 – YET MORE FUN …

… at the Dialysis Clinic this afternoon.

But at least we managed a full session of three and a half hour. And even more interestingly, of the weight that I lost during Saturday’s session, I’d only put a little back on. And that’s the best news that I’ve had for quite some time too.

Not such good news was my late night last night. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I’ve now given up the idea of trying to be in bed early. Rushing around like a madman and still failing dismally is just stressing me out for no good purpose.

They have told me before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that it’s only because of my heart being so good that I’ve kept going for so long. It’s pumping the blood around at twice the normal rate and has been doing so since 2015 and many hearts would have given out long before this.

They’ve also told me that because of the general state of my health a transplant is out of the question – I would never survive it – so I have to keep going with the one that I have. And so I have to do all in my power to avoid stress. And that includes worrying about problems that I can’t resolve.

So with not worrying about going to bed early, it was late when I finally crawled into bed. And there I stayed until 07:00 when the alarm went off.

There was a moment at 04:20 when something awoke me. However, after checking the time on the watch I simply turned over and went back to sleep

It took a few minutes for me to come round into the Land of the Living this morning and I almost ended up falling asleep again. However I dragged myself out of bed quickly enough and went for clean clothes and a trip to the bathroom

This morning I had a good wash and even a shave, washed my clothes and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone. And to my surprise, and also to my disappointment, there was nothing there.

That IS a big disappointment. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the only excitement that I ever have is when I’m in bed asleep – although if the shenanigans at the Dialysis Clinic keep on going, all of that might change.

The nurse had his usual discussion of asking me how my pizza went and what did I do yesterday – the same conversation we have every Monday when he’s on duty. I’m glad that he came early and left quickly.

That meant that I could continue with other things, like making breakfast and reading my book

And poor Samuel Hearne is in the wars again.

His group comes across a lone First Nation woman from another tribe who had been abducted by others but she managed to escape after they beat her baby to death

However things go from bad to worse as she’s now prisoner of Hearne’s guides and they have a wrestling tournament to decide who will claim her as his own. The leader of his band decides that he will participate, one of his wives tells him that he already has more than enough wives to look after so that there isn’t room for another one, and so he beats the wife to death right in front of Hearne

Hearne writes the story in such a matter-of-fact way but I’m sure that he was deeply affected by it.

Or maybe, because he has seen such horror and hardship so far on his voyage, what’s one more? He must be totally resigned to the events that unfold, there’s nothing that he can do, and he just wants to return to the fort at any price.

Back in here I had my Welsh homework to do and to my surprise and regret, instead of taking just half an hour to do it, I was still working on finishing it when my cleaner turned up to fit my anaesthetic patches.

The taxi was late coming for me – the driver had brought someone back from Rennes – but it’s a driver whom I like and we had a good chat on our way down to Avranches.

Consequently I was the last in at the Clinic today, and the last to be seen by the nurses. We were already running way late and my anaesthetic was running out but first before they coupled me up they had some tests to perform on my legs.

Therefore when they came to couple me up the anaesthetic had worn off and everyone in the building and a few people outside too knew that I was being plugged in.

One of the plugs failed to work too and after several tries, they disconnected it and ran everything through the one plug, so I had a throbbing pain in my arm all through the session.

They carried on with several examinations of my legs and feet, and I was also seen by the doctor in charge. I asked him about the scan and he confirmed the disc issue. I asked him what was the plan for the future and he told me "we’ll wait to see how it develops."

Well, I can tell him that without waiting any longer for any more evidence.

While I was being seen to I was fighting off wave after wave of sleep thanks to being force-fed with orange juice to keep my blood sugar up. I was also revising my Welsh and then seeing how Jacques Cartier was getting on.

He and some (but not all) of his men have survived the winter, although with great difficulty. But disappointingly he doesn’t go into a great deal of detail about it. But as he’s about to return home the following Spring, he kidnaps the King, Donnacona, and some of his elite companions.

Cartier promises to bring them back but of course they all have the temerity to die in France so on his third voyage he is met with an icy reception.

His narrative comes to an abrupt end once he’s built the fort in which he and his group intend to stay – I suspect that he handed to his superior, the Sieur de Roberval, the subsequent part relating to the settlement when he arrived later – and it’s not been seen since. But returning sailors have painted a gloomy picture of confrontation with the First-Nations peoples until the French finally admitted defeat and abandoned the St Lawrence River for the moment.

But not without having sown the seeds of a brutal war that lasted until almost the dawn of the 19th Century, during which thousands of colonists and First-Nation people were killed.

When my machine finished they had further tests to perform on my legs before they unplugged me and compressed my arm to close the holes. Consequently I was very late leaving.

It was another young taxi driver who brought me home, another one of the chatty ones. He’s thinking of emigrating to Québec so he was asking me loads of questions about life out there. Québec was one of the places that I had in my mind to go to settle and I’d made enquiries once during one of my visits there. But ill-health wiped out every ambition in that respect.

Despite the driving rain and gale-force winds my faithful cleaner was at her post, and she noted how well I managed to climb the twenty-five steps up to here. She thinks that every day I’m showing an improvement. And how I wish that it were so. I’m not so optimistic.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg followed by chocolate cake and strawberry soya dessert. Very delicious.

It’s bedtime now so I’ll be clearing off in a minute. It’s Welsh lesson tomorrow so I have homework to send off and the radio programme to send off too

But there was an interesting story about Cartier and one of his native guides off walking to Hochelaga when suddenly a party of angry Iroquois rise up in front of them
They turn to go back but there’s a party of Iroquois there too.
So they turn to the left – and there’s a party of Iroquois there
So they turn to the right – and there’s a party of Iroquois there too
"Well, Taignoagny" said Cartier to his guide "it looks as if we are surrounded"
His guide turned to him and replied "what do you mean ‘we’, paleface?"

Sunday 17th November 2024 – THIS RADIO PROGRAMME …

… was flaming complicated

What I did last night before going to bed was to re-dictate the notes from two radio programmes that I’d recorded previously. I don’t know what was up with my microphone when I first dictated them but they had turned out as if I had my head stuck in a metal bucket while I was dictating.

Nevertheless, I’d done everything and assembled the programmes but I was never happy with them and so yesterday I decided that I’d have another go

Dictating them was no problem and interestingly, the unedited notes of the first programme were only one second shorter than the unedited noted of the first attempt.

Having done all that, and it being later by far than I would have liked, I crawled off to bed.

Once again, I slept the Sleep of the Dead and knew nothing at all about anything whatsoever until the alarm went off at 08:00. Once I’d switched it off i crawled into the bathroom to have a wash and brush up before coming back in here to listen to the dictaphone.

Not that I reached very far because the nurse came early again and I had to go into the living room for the attention to my legs.

The nurse and I had the same discussion about baking a pizza that we have had I don’t know how many other times and I was glad when he finally slung his hook

Once he’d left I could make breakfast and read my book. And I do have to feel sorry for Samuel Hearne. There’s no doubt, reading his story, that he’s at the mercy of his First Nation guides on the return to the fort. He has absolutely no control, no power and no influence over the events that are unfolding.

They are covering incredible distances – 45, 45, 46 miles per day at times – over some of the roughest terrains in the world, distances that are confirmed by modern mapping methods, without stopping for rest. Women are giving birth, people are dropping out, sick people are being abandoned to die and Hearne is footsore and bleeding but he has no choice but to keep up or to be abandoned too.

He describes his diet in some detail and it’s not for the faint-hearted. But he also describes the life, cultures and habits of the First-Nation people and also the animals that he encounters. It’s a fascinating glimpse through a window into a country and a lifestyle that has gone forever.

Back in here I carried on with transcribing the dictaphone notes. I was in my little office at work. I’d been having a meeting with a couple of people. The subject of ages came up because a famous British tennis player roughly my age has married a girl of 26, a Swedish football player who is playing for a club in London. We all expressed our congratulations and had a general discussion about affairs like this. I happened to thumb through a few life assurance files and found that a few of the French sex-symbol women were now well into their mid-90s, something that many people find hard to believe. We all shook our collective heads at the idea of age. As we prepared to leave – or as the two people prepared to leave, some woman walking past my room ended up engaging herself in conversation with another woman. In the end there were three of them. For some reason my office door was open but they were right outside my door. In fact one of them was inside my office leaning on my wall. They were discussing the crisis in the French National Health Service, about how things weren’t the same as they used to be, how operations are being rushed, how people are being left with scars due to imperfect surgery. They were going on like this for about half an hour. When they paused for breath I asked them “what are the three of us – that is, these other two people in my meeting and I – going to do and how are we going to react now that you have told us all of this gruesome story about operations, hospitals etc?”. For some reason they seemed to be rather embarrassed about being overheard (…fell asleep here …) then made arrangements to watch a film, something like that. I can’t remember the name of the film now.

It goes without saying that there’s no crisis in the French health system. Whatever problems there are (and there are problems, to be sure) are as nothing compared to the issues that plague other countries and other health services. Having experienced several of them, I can say without fear of contradiction that i’ve never been so well looked-after as I have been in France.

Football was next on the agenda. There were various highlights from other matches in the Welsh Cup, including a giant-killing act where Y Wyddgrug from the second tier beat Llansawel from the Premier Division 2-1

Following that, we had Stranraer against Bonnyrigg Rose Athletic. Bonnyrigg are in deep trouble right now because their pitch, known with good reason as the “New Dundas Swamp” is probably the worst in professional football and a sad throwback to the bad days of the 1960s and 70s.

The club promised to replace it with a synthetic surface but failed to do so and so have been deducted six points. They have two months to come up with a plan otherwise they will be in even deeper trouble.

But right now Stranraer were entertaining them at home in a match where the weather was all four seasons, terminating in a torrential downpour.

Despite Stranraer having the lion’s share of the game the score was 1-1 going into injury time when Bonnyrigg scored a goal out of nothing to win the game that Stranraer should have won at a canter.

After lunch I made a start on the first radio programme. And, even more strangely, the edited notes ended up exactly the same length as the edited notes the first time round. So how come the assembled programme ended up 17 seconds short of the one hour?

So confused was I that I must have spent well over an hour trying different arrangements but nothing would work so in the end I called up the project files of the first attempt.

To my surprise, I found that I had included a different song from the one for which I had dictated the notes, and that accounted for it. I’m not sure why I did that.

Anyway, there was an interesting introduction on that replacement song so I extracted it and tagged it onto the front of the correct song that I’d used in the revised programme. Now I was 27 seconds over but filtering out some of the applause soon took care of that.

However, I’d spent so much time on that programme that there was no time to start the second one.

There had been a break though for my hot chocolate and crackers, followed by making the pizza for tonight. Just after lunch I’d taken out some frozen dough from the freezer and it had been slowly defrosting during the afternoon. So after my hot chocolate I kneaded it again and rolled it out onto the pizza tray

Later on I assembled my pizza and then baked it in the oven. The base wasn’t as baked as I would like it, which seems to be the fault of my oven which is pretty much hit and miss but it’s the best that I have.

So now that everything is finished for the night I’m off to bed, ready for a fresh start tomorrow.

But talking of Hearne and the animals that he encounters reminds me of the two explorers wandering across the plains of southern Africa in the 18th Century admiring all of the strange and wonderful animals
"Look at that strange male animal" said one of them "sneaking up on that herd of females"
"Wildebeest?" asked the other one
"Any moment now, I reckon" said their guide

Saturday 16th November 2024 – AS I HAVE …

… said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … if it’s not one thing, it’s another with this dialysis.

Today the machine wasn’t working correctly and the poor nurses were so fed up of running to it every five minutes when the alarm went off that in the end they went to see the doctor who told them that I may as well be thrown out. They can’t change the machine because each machine has to be configured specially for each patient and to reconfigure a machine that’s not in use takes far too long.

So at least I had an early return home today after all of this.

It’s about the only thing that was early today (apart from the taxi, about which we’ll talk in due course) and last night. It ended up being another late night but I’m now past caring about what time I go to bed. I’ll just go to bed when I feel like it and if necessary, sleep during the dialysis.

But when I finally did go to bed, I was asleep quickly enough and had another Sleep of the Dead all the way through. When the alarm went off, I was at a rock festival, part of the organisation. I’d just introduced Steve Marriott to the crowd. England had just played Germany in a football match in a European Cup competition and had won so there was a whole host of repartee from Marriott and from the audience like “well it’s only fair that we keep on playing them until they finally manage to win”, lots of things like that which were extremely interesting. But the microphone cord for Steve Marriot had become stuck somewhere and I had quite a job to free it off and pull enough cable through so that he could finally put it on its stand and begin to perform. There was also something else about a song – had a song ever been played, or something like that. It turned out that each time they’d go to play it on a concert, the concert would over-run so they would have to cut short their set in order to fit into the time scale and that one always seemed to be the song that would go. So there was some dispute or discussion about whether it had ever been played, and what would be the situation if some other group decided that they would like to play it. Would Steve Marriott still be obliged to consider it in his set or would he be obliged to drop it and pick another one?

What a bizarre dream. There’s a little something of just about everything in there and none of it makes any sense or has any significance.

Rising from the bed I staggered off into the kitchen to make some dough for some bread as I’m going to be running out today. It went together quite nicely too for a change just recently. I’ve not been too happy with my bread-making technique this last couple of weeks.

And then into the bathroom where I washed not only me but also some of my clothes. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I have to keep on top of the laundry here as best as I can.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I was during the night. There was something going on in a small field. There were groups of us sitting around there watching it. For some particular reason we stood up and then we all settled down again. My youngest sister was there too, and that’s twice in the last few nights that she’s made an appearance so what’s happening here?

As well as that, there was more too, but you don’t want to know about that, especially if you are eating your tea right now.

The nurse came at a time more like his usual arrival, and for a change he refrained from making any comment that would irritate me. In fact he was quite pleasant and the closest that he has been to normal for quite some considerable time. He asked if I was going to watch the rugby later.

Me? Rugby? I come from North Wales.

After he left, I gave the dough its second kneading, made breakfast and carried on reading my book.

And poor Samuel Hearne. After the massacre of the Inuit at Bloody Falls that so affected and upset him, his account of his journey to the coastline of the Arctic Ocean bears no resemblance to that reported by Franklin in 1821 and Richardson in 1848.

In fact Richardson, in his own memoirs writes "it is not very probable that he could have induced the Indians, over whom he had little influence, to accompany him on his survey, after they had completed the massacre which was the object of their long and laborious journey ; nor, had he gone actually to the mouth of the river"

It would seem that Hearne, obviously totally dismayed at his own inability to convince his guides to press on to the coast and ashamed to admit it to his superiors of the Hudson’s Bay Company, wrote a description of how he imagined it to be in the belief that no other European would ever be able to follow in his footsteps.

But there is something in the book that I’m reading that has rung a very large bell with me, and quite surprisingly and unexpectedly too.

The copy of Hearne’s book that I’m reading is a version dated 1910 and contains editorial comments made by someone who at the time was associated with the Hudson’s Bay Company.

The editor tell us "Since this Journal was written, the Northern Indians, by annually visiting their Southern friends, the Athapuscow Indians, have contracted the small-pox, which has carried off nine-tenths of them … but having been totally neglected for several years, they have now sunk into their original barbarism and extreme indigence ; and a war has ensued between the two tribes, for the sake of a few remnants of iron-work which was left among them ; and the Dog-ribbed Indians were so numerous, and so successful, as to destroy almost the whole race of the Copper Indians."

An Arctic explorer by the name of Vilhjalmar Stefansson is described by the Canadian historian Pierre Berton as"the most controversial of that singular breed of venturers who set out to unlock the secrets of the frozen World" – although how anyone can say that of Stefansson when there are people such as Cook and Peary in that group I really don’t know.

And Stefansson’s place is not due to any fraud or intrigue like the two more famous candidates for that title. He is notorious for the famous story of the “blond Eskimoes”.

In 1910 Stefansson was wandering about on the shores of the Arctic Ocean and came across a group of Inuit who had paler faces and some of whom had brownish hair. On his return to civilisation he foolishly told a newspaper reporter of what he had found, embellished with a few bells and whistles, and a few days later, blasted across the front page of the Seattle Times was "Explorer discovers lost tribe of whites"

The newspaper reporter admitted later that he had used his “ingenuity and imagination” to flesh out the story, but by then, the damage had been done.

Worse still, when Stefansson returned to the Arctic a few years later with a party of Scientists sponsored by the Canadian Government, no trace of those Inuit was ever found and he was denounced as a charlatan hungry for attention from the media.

But I reckon that the comment by the editor of Hearne’s book explains exactly why no trace of his Inuit would have been found.

The bread baked itself quite well in the air fryer while all of this was going on. And I’ve found the secret – which is to bake it for fifteen minutes, take the bread out and turn it over and the put it back in for another seven and a half. Then I have a lovely loaf that isn’t burnt.

Back in here, I had things to do and was so engrossed that I didn’t realise that my faithful cleaner had arrived to put my anaesthetic patches onto my arm.

The taxi came early too, and it was the new girl who doesn’t know her way around. I had to show her the way to the other passenger who sometimes comes with me and then we had a nice, pleasant drive down to Avranches.

We were early arriving so we had to wait, but if I’m going to be plugged into a machine for three and a half hours there’s always something that I can be doing to pass the time while I’m awaiting.

When I emerged everyone else had already gone in so I followed them into the ward where I was quickly plugged in.

No orange juice for me so, for the first time in I don’t know how many weeks, I had another one of those cataleptic fits that I used to have. I heard everything that went on but for an hour I was totally unable to do anything at all.

Once the coffee and orange juice came round to restore me to the Land of the Living, I revised my Welsh and then carried on reading Cartier’s account of his voyage as edited by Richard Hakluyt.

Cartier is intent upon visiting the First-Nation settlement of Hochelaga but the King, Donnacona, is intent on preventing him at all costs. Donnacona’s attitude and opinions have hardened quite considerably since Cartier kidnapped his sons the previous year.

Pretty soon the St Lawrence will ice up and Cartier will be obliged to stay there over the winter. It will be interesting to see the interaction between the First-Nation people and the Europeans when the latter find themselves at the mercy of the former in an inhospitable and unfamiliar land in some very unwelcome temperatures.

Remember that as yet, no European has any conception at all as to what a Montréal (because that’s where Hochelaga is) winter is really like. Montréal is situated at 45°N, roughly the same as Bordeaux and Turin and winters like in those two cities will be what Cartier and his men expect.

Meanwhile, all is not well with the dialysis machine. Every five minutes the alarm goes off and poor Julie the Cook has to run to see what’s the matter. She resets it and five minutes later it whistles again.

Eventually, she’s had enough, and who can blame her? She goes to see Emilie the Cute Consultant (who has been keeping her distance from me) who tells her to switch off the machine and send me home. We’ll try again on Monday.

The taxi arrives just as I leave the building and we have a very interesting and conversational drive home

My faithful cleaner is at her post as I arrive, and she’s astonished by my early return. And once more she watches as I stride out up the twenty-five steps to my apartment.

There’s football tonight. Rhydaman of the Second Tier, having already knocked out a Premier League club, Aberystwyth Town, in the previous round, are taking on Hwlffordd in the Welsh Cup. And they are at home too

There’s a huge gulf in class between the Second Tier and the Premier League, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … but what Rhydaman managed to do was to drag their opponents down to their level.

Hwlffordd are third in the table but on this showing, they are a long way short of any kind of serious quality that will enable them to challenge for honours. They took the lead halfway through the first half more by luck than any skill, but Rhydaman managed to equalise near the end.

Try as they might, Hwlffordd couldn’t find the killer touch

The game went down to penalties and it was a very dismal 10-9 win to Hwlffordd. And I for one am hoping that we’ll see much more quality from someone in the next round.

Tea was the last burger on a bap for now, with baked potato and salad followed by chocolate cake and strawberry soya dessert. Next week I’ll be back on the breaded quorn fillets as I’ve now run out of baps.

But my chocolate cake is really nice, especially with the bits of real chocolate whisked into it.

So I’ll dictate my radio notes and go to bed ready for the morning.

But I’m still having a smile at a story that one of the nurses told me this afternoon.
Normandy is of course a centre for apple-growing and cider production and many of the local farms combine the two. And the nurse told me the story of a local farmer who had fallen into his cider fermentation vat
"He was in there struggling for several hours before the fire brigade managed to pull him out"
"That’s terrible news" I exclaimed. "What took them so long to pull him out?"
"Apparently he wouldn’t let go of the side of the vat" she said.

Friday 15th November 2024 – I HAVE BEEN …

… a very busy boy … "for once" – ed … and worked hard today … "for once" – ed …

And that might have been because I had one of the best sleeps that I’ve had for a long time … "for once" – ed … I didn’t awaken, turn over or do anything while I was asleep, to the best of my knowledge. I awoke for the first time at 06:55, 5 minutes before the alarm was due to go off and that was that.

As seems to be the case these days, I was late again going to bed. But I have this little project of sorting through, would you believe, 22,000 photos and I’m doing a few each night, in the hope that one day I’ll finish. I won’t finish it if I don’t make a start, that’s for sure.

After a while I crawled off to bed and there I slept the Sleep of the Dead until the morning, and I could do with a few more sleeps like that every now and again. I don’t know why nothing awoke me

When the alarm went off I managed slowly to bring myself back into the Land of the Living and crawled off into the bathroom for a good wash and scrub up.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And I didn’t go far at all. Someone shouted me again in the middle of the night. This time it was attached to a dream about having a new kitchen installed and they were the installers come to deliver the material ready to fit it

Strangely enough, I remember nothing at all about that. But I am going to have a new kitchen installed when (if) I finally manage to move downstairs. There is already a row of kitchen furniture up against the wall and I’ll be installing units in a kind-of island something along the same lines that I have here.

Naturally, I have proper units for that. There are those that I bought in Munich that are still inside the back of the van, and the four base units still in their boxes outside the door here. There’s also a worktop in the van along with the oven that I bought and is still in the van.

Looking at all of this, it’s just about four months in 2022 between me going on a mega-drive around Central Europe for several weeks and me being unable to walk any more. It’s difficult to believe how quickly I became so ill

This cancer that I’ve had since 2015 is bad enough and that’s been slowly dragging me down and further down, but what went on in that four months was totally inexplicable. However, I made it to Jersey and I made it (just) to Canada to tie up my affairs, but at what cost?

The nurse was quite early again today and that suits me fine because the sooner he comes, the sooner he goes and I can continue with some more exciting stuff.

When he arrived he asked me the same kind of silly question that he asks me every day, as if he hasn’t heard the answers all these times, and that irritates me considerably. Today I left him in no doubt that he was irritating me so he changed the subject to something else just as patronising, and got on my wick even more.

After he left I made my breakfast and carried on with my book. Hearne does indeed discuss some of the “family arrangements” of his First-Nation companions and is hardly complimentary. And of the arrangements of the families who live around the fort he has even less of a good opinion, if that were ever possible, He describes them as "being the most debauched wretches under the Sun"

Considering that we are talking of a book written at the end of the Eighteenth Century when feelings were much more delicate than they were twenty years ago (although not today in this current society that seems to be becoming more Puritan by the minute), his book and his accounts must have caused uproar

He concludes his narrative in this chapter with "In fact, notwithstanding the severity of the climate, the licentiousness of the inhabitants cannot be exceeded by any of the Eastern nations"

But we moved quickly on from there and have just read the account of the massacre by his First-Nation guides and porters of a hunting party of Inuit camped on the shores of the Coppermine River by what became known as the Bloody Falls. And the gratuitous savagery and brutality that he describes is dreadful

We flew over the Bloody Falls on our way back to Calgary from Kugluktuk at the mouth of the Coppermine River, and it’s hard to believe that such a peaceful place was the site of such horror.

Back in here I’ve finished off all of the notes for the next radio programme, which I’ll be dictating on Saturday night. For a change just recently, this was quite straightforward and will probably be quite boring after what I’ve been up to with the radio just recently.

There were several interruptions during the course of the day.

The first was, of course, for lunch and a slice of flapjack followed by some fruit.

Secondly, my faithful cleaner came to do her stuff and we tidied up the medication and then sorted out a new water filter for the jug that I keep here. There’s a pack of water filters on the top shelf and I can’t reach it but today my cleaner came with her step-ladder so she climbed up and passed one down to me.

As well as that, I’ve been talking to a friend on the internet about business, looking for a maker of stained glass and trying to find someone who will supply me with a couple of new drawers for my freezer, seeing as two of the old ones have gone the Way of the West. I want to defrost the freezer but there’s no point with the drawers in the state that they are.

That’s really all that I’ve done today. I don’t know where the time goes but it doesn’t seem as if I’ve wasted any time doing nothing or being distracted, which makes a change.

Tea was some vegan nuggets with chips and a vegan salad, followed by chocolate cake with strawberry (in honour of HIS NIBS) flavoured soya dessert.

So now that I’ve finished my notes there are a few small things that I have to do and then I’m off to bed. I have bread to bake tomorrow so I hope that it turns out well. The last couple have not been as I would have liked.

Samuel Hearne will be continuing his travels tomorrow too, to find the mouth of the Coppermine River (he should have asked me, because not only do I know where it is, I’ve been there) persuade the natives to come to trade furs with the fort, and to find the copper mine where they make their artefacts and report on its value

But he also told a very interesting story about how, when one group of his party diverted to carry out another task and was hurrying to meet back up with the main party, the members of each group announced their whereabouts each day by sending up a column of smoke

That reminded me of a discussion that I was having at the Little Big Horn when LITTLE BIG ANTLERS and I were talking to one of the Sioux guides there.
He was explaining the system of Native American smoke signals and there were several in the distance that he was interpreting.
He explained to me that the system worked by lighting a very smoky fire of damp grass and holding a blanket over it, then releasing the blanket to allow the column to rise in a kind-of Morse Code arrangement that he could read
But there was one of the columns in the distance that looked bizarre even to a tenderfoot like me
"Can you read THAT signal?" I asked him
"Oh yes I can" he replied. "Most definitely"
"What does it say?" I asked
"It says" he said "Help! My blanket has caught fire!"

Thursday 14th November 2024 – SO HERE I AM …

… back from the Dialysis Clinic, still in one piece. But not without them trying their best though. I’m really not too sure how long I can keep it up (as the Bishop once famously said to the actress).

And while we’re on the subject of things being up … "well, one of us is" – ed … I was up quite late again last night. However that was a personal choice of mine and nothing to do with any work or other obligation so I’m not complaining.

But once in bed, when I finally made it, I slept the sleep of the Dead and remember absolutely nothing at all.

When the alarm went off I was off on my travels somewhere but it evaporated immediately which was a shame. It must have been exciting, and there’s not enough excitement in my life these days. It’s a pity that every last memory of whatever it was simply disappeared.

The bathroom was first, and I managed to stagger in there before the final alarm of the morning. I had a good wash and scrub up, and even a shave. I know that Emilie the Cute Consultant doesn’t love me any more, but that’s no reason not to make an effort.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out if I’d been anywhere during the night. I was with my youngest sister. We’d gone to a walled city, something like Chester or something like that but in actual fact it was a port on the south coast. We were going to see a ferry – the one that goes from Sheerness to Vilssingen but it had been doing something else on the high seas somewhere and had changed its name. We were discussing the ship. When we arrived at the outskirts of this town I made the remark that I’d only ever been here once before but didn’t have a camera with me. You could see across the bay in the cliffs all these houses that had been carved out of the cliffs. Once I’d passed underneath the entrance gate to the city and began to climb the hilltop towards the city centre, I stopped to take a photograph of it but the camera on my ‘phone wasn’t working properly. It was having difficulty taking the photo. A couple of guys came over and began to chat. They were really getting on my nerves – one of them saying “I know a good place where you can photograph”. Anyway, right in the end I told him to clear off while I tried to take this photograph. I had to go back down towards the gate again but still this photograph wouldn’t turn out. Then I joined my youngest sister again who had been for a run. She told me that you could run in this city as long as you obeyed various rules like in which order you can run, the distance that you are running, which lane you should be in etc. It sounded really complicated to me but when she set off I joined her and we were only losing 2-1 for quite some time before we were overtaken again by events but I thought that we put up a really magnificent performance …fell asleep here … so we had a good run in this city. My sister set off and ran down the hill so I ran after her. Instead of keeping to the footpath she ran right back through the road in the city gates and underneath the walls into the town. I was surprised that that was allowed but she insisted that it was perfectly safe to run through on the road instead of on the pavement and so underneath the city gates rather than through the pedestrian exit. She began to explain all the lanes, their order and what they meant, where you should be, who you may overtake and in which lane

Not that I’m ever likely to be going anywhere with my youngest sister, and she is even less likely to want to go running. But I’ve had a couple of dreams about being in Chester or somewhere like it just recently so am I becoming all nostalgic? I lived there between 1972 and 1974 in my late teens and I do have to say that it was amongst the happiest times of my life. What wouldn’t I give to return to that joyous, carefree period surrounded by good friends and a healthy ambience? And a camera not working? That was a recurring dream at one point, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Later on I found myself another girlfriend. She’s someone whom I know and I wish that I knew who it was. We hadn’t been officially boyfriend/girlfriend but we spent a lot of time in each other’s company and I really looked forward to seeing her. She became ill, and had to have a lot of people looking after her which cut down quite considerably the time that we spent together. She slowly began to go out again. I met her once at some kind of concert where she was with some friends. I went over to say “hello” to her, and the first thing that she did was to give me £15:00 because she owed me £15:00 and I’d completely forgotten about it. I made a remark about her being a little better so would she like to come and have a chat with me. She said “no” which really disappointed me. She replied that things had changed. “I’ve been ill” she replied “and you’re no longer going to like me”. I told her that I’d always like her regardless of anything. She replied “you can’t trust me really, can you?” which was a reference to my own insecurity more than anything else. I was going to reply but at that point the dream faded away. Either that or I did.

That’s another thing, isn’t it? Me finding myself a girlfriend. In fact there’s something connecting this to real life too. I had a girlfriend at school and we drifted apart. A a couple of years later I was at the Teacher Training College in Crewe watching a rock group when I noticed, among the people in the crowd, the aforementioned. I went over for a chat and one thing led to another, and once you start you’d be surprised at how many other things there are. So our couple reignited but when she left school and went to University at Bangor it fizzled out again after a while.

The nurse was, for a change, late today. He asked about my plans for moving apartment and then proceeded to try to teach me to suck eggs, as if I’m senile or something. I wish that he would stop patronising me like this. It’s really getting on my wick.

After he left I made breakfast and carried on reading my book. Samuel Hearne is now well on his way to the Coppermine River. He’s making some very pertinent observations about the life and habits of the First-Nation people out in the Barren Grounds of Canada – that area of peri-Arctic tundra situated above the tree line. He describes the philosophy of the First-Nation people as “every man for himself” and “the survival of the fittest” and describes how a stronger man taking away even a weaker man’s wife seems to be an everyday occurrence. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the Barren Grounds is one of the most remote, isolated and cruellest places on earth. If Jacques Cartier had called Labrador "the Land God Gave To Cain", whatever would he have said if he had made it to here? I was in Yellowknife in 2018, AS REGULAR READERS OF THIS RUBBISH WILL RECALL and while that’s not exactly in the Barren Grounds, it was still dismal enough from a natural history point of view.

Back in here I had a few things to do and hadn’t even started work when my faithful cleaner came to fit my patches. After she’d done it she took away with her all of the medication that I no longer use. She’s going to sort it and make a list to see whether any of her other clients can make use of it, to save throwing it away.

The taxi came early and it was one of my regular drivers but she was quite quiet. But didn’t she drive us down to Avranches at a hell of a rate? I’ve no idea what might be the matter with her.

There were quite a few patients here today and as a result, even though I was early, I was the last to be seen, as you might expect. I’m convinced that they do it deliberately, wait until the anaesthetic effect of the patches has worn off.

The first needle though was painless. Totally painless. However, the second needle made up for that. I knew all about that one and so, I suspect, do those people walking past outside.

My glucose limit was right down in the basement but no-one brought me an orange juice. Consequently I slipped into a diabetic coma until one of the Auxiliaries brought me a juice with my coffee. And then I revised my Welsh, listened to some music and read more of Hakluyt’s translation of Jacques Cartier’s voyages.

Here, Cartier sets the scene for all further problems between the French and the First-Nation people by kidnapping the sons of the chief of the local tribe in order to take them back to Europe. And then on his return, on his second voyage, he befriends the wrong tribe, hence leading to 250 years of conflict between the French, the Dutch, the English, the Iroquois and the Huron, along with various other Europeans and First-Nation groups.

Last to be connected, I was last, and by a long way too, to be disconnected. My cleaner had sent me a frantic message wondering where I was.

In the meantime though a doctor came to see me. We had the usual banal questions but said nothing about my scan last week so I asked him. He went away to have a look and came back to say that I had a slipped disc. And then wandered away before I had chance to ask him what their plans were about it.

That rang a bell with me. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall me saying in the past that there’s one of the doctors here at this hospital who has all the air of wishing that he was driving a taxi or serving in a restaurant, anywhere but working in a hospital. It looks as if he’s been pencilled in to deal with me

It was another speedy drive back home with a driver who was listening to the news all the way back. And then my helpful cleaner watched as I managed once more to climb the twenty-five steps up to here totally unaided.

Tea was steamed veg with falafel in a vegan cheese sauce followed by chocolate cake in a soya pistachio cream. And it tasted wonderful too. I really must stop eating so well.

But now I have some more things to do before going to bed. And tomorrow, I’m not (planning on) going anywhere so I can take my time.

What I shall do is to read some more of Samuel Hearne’s adventures in search of the Coppermine River.
The next chapter, written by Samuel Hearne is "Some Observations On The Sex Life and Practices Of The Athabasca and Chipewyan First-Nation People"
And the following chapter, written by the Athabasca and Chipewyan First-Nation People is entitled "Some Observations on the Sex Life and Practices of Mr Samuel Hearne"

Wednesday 13th November 2024 – I HAVE FINISHED …

… the second radio programme, the notes of which I also dictated on Saturday night.

This one was much more complicated than the last one but because of my little program it was all done, finished and dusted off much quicker.

It helps having used an array for the numbers rather than entering them manually whenever they needed to be changed, so let’s all give it a big hand … "hip, hip, array" – ed …

Last night I had a lot of things to do and as a result I didn’t go to bed until late, long after my ideal time of 23:00 but one thing that I can say is that I had the best sleep that I have had for ages. I awoke once during the night as far as I can remember, but I was asleep very quickly afterwards so I didn’t pay much attention

When the alarm went off, three girls had just come round to my apartment. I was still in bed but I was wide-awake. I was making plans for the immediate future, what I was going to do. Then one of the girls came up to me, ripped the bedclothes off and shouted “wakey wakey”. At that moment the alarm went off and Billy Cotton REPEATED THE CALL.

But can you imagine that? I suppose you can because it’s pretty much par for the course. 3 girls come into my apartment and just as it’s about to become interesting, Billy Cotton spikes my guns. It’s a change for him to do it though. Usually it’s one of my family who would put the spanner in the works, just like they did in real life.

So there I was, sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for the World to stop spinning around and then when it stopped I got off and headed off to the bathroom to clean myself up.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. My girlfriend had come round with her mother, and we’d left her mother in my apartment while the two of us went to a kind-of party in the afternoon. When we came back, the taxi dropped us off by the club on Nantwich Road and we walked down the side street there to the side door of my building. The first thing was that we couldn’t open the padlock. It was as if something had been stuffed down the keyhole but eventually I managed to open the padlock and could unlock the place and walk in. At the first glance I thought that her mother had died, the way that she was lying on the sofa, but she was lying there chewing, and it suddenly occurred to me that she was chewing a chocolate. My girlfriend went over to talk to her to make sure that she was OK while I prepared the papers and so on from this party/reception type of thing to which we’d just been.

Who this girl was, I have no idea at all which is a shame. Some kind of company would be a nice thing to have in a dream. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have met some really nice girls on occasion during the night. It would be nice if I could do that today but first of all I don’t go anywhere these days and secondly I’m far too old for any of that kind of nonsense.

The nurse came early again today and after making the usual remarks, saw to my legs and then cleared off. He can’t have been here ten minutes. Not that I’m complaining though. It suits me fine.

After he left I made breakfast and read my book.

Samuel Hearne is on the move again, out on his third trip to find the Coppermine River. He makes some very prescient and penetrating remarks about the First-Nation women whom he encounters which, if read in the wrong spirit, would not be appreciated. He likens them to nothing more than beasts of burden

However, it should be remembered that if the men are out hunting for food, chasing deer around and hoping to catch them, they need to be able to move quickly so someone else has to do the heavy lifting and carrying. Life on the Barren Grounds is really tough and in fact a guy from Nantwich, John Hornby, starved to death with two companions out there almost 100 years ago. It’s a fight and only the toughest survive. Co-operation and partnership is essential.

Back in here, I had some editing to do. Listening to the radio programme that I’d prepared yesterday, I found that I’d left in there a reference to a track that I’d cut out. So the reference had to go too, which meant that I was now 2.23 seconds short.

Not a problem though – just add in some applause at an appropriate moment and we’ll be fine.

Then I began to prepare the next programme by editing the notes that I’d dictated.

Having done that I broke the finished sound file up into segments for each track and then entered the times of the sound-bytes and tracks into my little program and the machine did the rest.

It found me a selection that ran out to one hour and twenty-eight seconds – not a problem – except that one track wasn’t what it was supposed to be and by the time I’d edited it to represent what I wanted, the batch was short by several minutes. And there was, regrettably, an error in my programming that caused one track to be counted twice.

In the end, I was nine minutes short so I had to go again. This time I was one minute and twenty seconds over, but editing that much out is no problem at all.

There were several interruptions.

Firstly, there was lunch. I can’t go without food and I had a slice of the flapjack that I’d made a while ago.

Secondly, my cleaner came round to do her stuff and that meant a shower for me this afternoon. And although she stood and watched, I did absolutely everything on my own today and you’ve no idea how proud I felt.

She cautioned me about attempting a shower when I’m on my own. There might be an improvement in my mobility and I’m right to push myself onwards, but I mustn’t take any risks. I’m not out of the woods yet. I have simply moved into different woods.

We then spent a pleasant half-hour going through the medication and you wouldn’t believe (or maybe you will) the amount of medication gathering dust around here that is long out-of-date. There’s some stuff dated 2017 and I bet that I can find stuff older than that if I look around. It’s high time someone got to grips with this over-prescribing of medication.

After my hot chocolate I had naan dough to make because I’ve run out. This lot is extremely garlicky which is just as well. I’m not going to be bothered by werewolves and vampires, especially when the garlic naan is smeared in my garlic butter

Tea tonight was a leftover curry with naan bread, as usual. It really was delicious and I reckon that it was the best that I have ever made. My chocolate cake, with lumps of real chocolate, is also excellent, especially with a pistachio soya cream

So that’s enough for today. Tomorrow I’m off to dialysis so Heaven help me. I can’t take much more of this.

But I’m still having a laugh at some of the comments made by Hearne in his book.
Apart from his beautiful quote "they never give themselves the trouble to acquire what they can do well enough without" to describe the philosophy of the First-Nation people in the Barren Grounds, something from which many people in Western society would do well to note, he records a conversation between several of his First-Nation guides
Sitting around the fire late at night after a heavy meal of venison they jokingly ask each other whether they would ever consider having "an intrigue with a strange woman"
It reminds me of a party in Munich to which I went several years ago and an Italian girl asked me "tell me – would you ever consider making love to a perfect stranger?"
"Madam," I replied "the way that things have been just recently, I would even consider making love to a bloody awful stranger"

Tuesday 12th November 2024 – I HAVE FINISHED …

… this radio programme that has been hanging around my neck like a perishing albatross for over a week.

In the end, I made a selection of tracks that were something like, and some judicious editing of the applause and the speech from the stage finally brought it all down to one minute and twenty seconds over. And the rest, I had to hack about a bit and I eventually managed to shoehorn it into a programme of one hour.

It’s currently turning around on the playlist and I do have to say that it works quite well

Something else that worked quite well was my sleep last night. After I’d finished everything that I needed to do, it was long after bedtime but nevertheless it was the best that I could do. And the good thing about it is that I can’t remember awakening at all.

Having said that, I awoke with a start at about 06:30 and couldn’t go back to sleep. When the alarm went off I was sitting on the edge of the bed already, so this will class as an early start

In the bathroom I had a good wash and scrub up, and then came in here to deal with the dictaphone notes. For a short moment I was with Percy Penguin last night. When she climbed into the van she told me that she had something to tell me. She wanted to finish our relationship. One of the reasons that she gave me was that she didn’t like my choice of music which was fair enough, I suppose. For a change she seemed to be quite confident and quite sure of what she wanted to do. That’s not like her at all. In some ways I admired what she said. It goes without saying that I was disappointed but life is full of disappointments, isn’t it? You just have to become used to them

It’s been a while since Percy Penguin has put in an appearance, so welcome back to you. She was a very simple, uncomplicated girl and when I was going through a very bad patch she was the only one who ever gave me any support. In fact she was the only one who ever listened to me when I wanted to talk. She herself had been dealt a terrible hand by the fates but she just drifted through life, tossed about on the currents and never seemed to care at all. She just carried on as best as she could with whatever came her way.

Later on I was in London. I’d been listening to someone talking, a very kind-of unkempt fellow, saying that he’d been living on the streets and had no home but had been appointed leader of a playgroup in Central London. He’d been on some kind of trip to see some kind of concert. He’d been so many days without sleep but he’d come back into work – gone straight to work thinking that when things quietened down he’d take a sleeping pill but by that time he was far too irritable and touchy to have thought about the sleeping pill and went the whole day without it. This playgroup bewildered me. I was actually in Central London at the time and had a rough idea of where it might be. I walked out of my hotel down the road. There was a pub on the corner called “The Brewery”. I turned round and was in the Cathedral precincts. I walked up past the Cathedral but I couldn’t see this other church anywhere. After I’d had a good look around, I decided that I’d walk back. First thing that I noticed was some old guy. He was picking things up off the streets so I thought “homeless person, I suppose”. I thought “there really are some people who are down on their luck if they are having to pick discarded clothing etc up off the streets”

This dream doesn’t seem to have any significance at all as far as I can tell. I can still see the pub and the cathedral precincts but I can’t recognise them from anywhere that I’ve been, either in my sleep or when I’ve been awake.

The nurse came early today, and we had the usual inane, patronising comments that get on my nerves so much. I suppose that I’ll have to stop moaning and deal with it. It doesn’t look as if it’s going to go away any time soon.

After he left I made breakfast and carried on reading the story of Samuel Hearne. Today, he’s on his second attempt to reach the Coppermine River and has just had an encounter with a group of Northern First Nation people who promptly relieved him of everything that he carried that was of any use to them, so now he’s on his way back to the fort on the shores of Hudson’s Bay

Third time lucky, heh?

We had a meeting here today at 10:00 – one that we should have had on Friday had it not been for the complications surrounding that hospital appointment.

It was concerning the radio, and a couple of people from the Admin and the Local Council came for a chat to see how everything was with me, which was quite nice of them

As a result, I was late going for my Welsh class. But what I did there and for how much I missed, I did quite well yet again. It’s becoming a habit and I hope that it keeps up.

After lunch I waded into the radio programme.

Once I’d remembered how to deal with arrays, things went so much better with the little program that I was trying although there were several shortcomings with it and I shall have to tweak it some more whenever I have time, whenever that might be.

The radio programme is now up and running satisfactorily so tomorrow I’m going to make a start on the second one of this series. So God help me!

Tea tonight was a taco roll with some more of the refried beans, tomato and mushrooms. Had it been more spicy it would have reminded me of my stay in Santa Fe in Arizona twenty-odd years ago when I had the Mustang convertible.

THAT WAS A TRIP AND A HALF – through the deserts of the Southern USA and then back through the Rockies – even driving up to the top of Pike’s Peak, all 14,000_odd feet of it.

All the time that I had the Mustang, the top never came down. Even when it was snowing up in the Rockies. After all, if you’re going to have a convertible with the top up, you may as well have had a saloon car.

So having finished my notes, I have a few things to do and then I’m off to bed for another good sleep (I hope).

But one thing that Samuel Hearne might have said in is book about the First Nation peoples was that they made a great deal of use of the plant that is known by people in Eastern Canada as “Labrador Tea”. They dry it and drink buckets of it.
Hearne was telling his boss in the fort about the time that he and his band were camped by the side of a lake and his guide, having drunk so much tea that he could hardly stand, crawled off to his bed instead of leading the expedition
"Did you find him next morning" asked his boss "and give him a good talking-to?"
"We found him" said Hearne "but it was far too late by then"
"What do you mean?" asked his boss
"We found him all right" said Hearne "but during the night he had drowned in his teepee"

Monday 11th November 2024 – THIS BLASTED DIALYSIS …

… thing isn’t becoming any easier. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

Four of us arrived at the clinic together today. I was the first to be coupled up and, as you might expect, the last to be uncoupled. There I was, hoping for a quick getaway today but it didn’t quite work out like that.

Going to bed at a reasonable time is something else that isn’t working out either. Once again, it was well after 23:00 when I finally crawled into bed . At least I had a decent sleep though because I slept right through to when the alarm went off, with no pain at all.

When the alarm went off I was busy in an adventure. There was a bank robbery or something like that planned, a huge, elaborate way of doing it too and a lot of people had a lot of little parts in this. Where I joined in was where the local bus driver who had been asked to do something suddenly realised what he was being asked to do and declined to do it, right on the very day. One of the girls went onto his bus and with a fluttering of eyelids and so on asked “you will do just this one little task for us, won’t you?” which was to throw a mine through the open window of an apartment. In the end he agreed to do it, so she gave him this little mine. It was a false mine, but the purpose was for the people inside to flee their apartment and leave the door open. She gave him the mine and I went with him. He asked a lot of questions about the mine, how far is the tailback etc. My issue was how were they going to throw this through the window of an apartment on the thirteenth floor. I imagined that they’d already worked this out. There must be a balcony or something. We talked about the mine and set off in the bus. I thought to myself that when someone writes the story of this bank heist it’s going to make one of the most exciting adventure novels I could ever imagine

That was something that I wished would have carried on because it was certainly exciting enough. And as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the only excitement that I seem to have is what happens during the night.

Mind you, that’s not true at all. I’ve received an e-mail to day saying that someone has taken control of my computer, has videos of me watching filthy movies and what I was doing while watching them, and will send them to all of my contacts unless I buy Bitcoins to a value of $1410 and send them to a Bitcoin wallet. So in about 45 hours we’ll see whether he can walk the walk as well as he can talk the talk. This should be very interesting. I hope that you will be waiting with bated breath.

Meantime, back at the ran … errr … apartment I staggered off into the bathroom for a good wash and shave, and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone. Did I dictate the dream where a bunch of four kids was responsible for destroying a house? … "no you didn’t" – ed … They had a water leak in the washroom of where they were staying so they began to explore to try to find it and fix it. Of course, everything that they did led on to further problems then on to further problems and further problems. They ended up destroying a house. The girl and her two younger sisters took to the road and found another boarding house in which to stay by pretending that their parents would be joining them later. The same thing happened with this one – they totally destroyed it. When I arrived on the scene the girls had left but had somehow managed to go into Space where they had landed on the Space Station and were busy pulling that to pieces looking for a leak too. There was another false alarm at 07:00. It didn’t awaken me but I heard the alarm go. I knew that it was a false one so I took no notice but I was in London, part of the street crew who had been defeated by London University. I was in Fulham and I can’t really remember what was happening but I was a guest there and helped them with a few events, the Fulham University, but we didn’t make any progress at all.

Funnily enough, I can’t remember this false alarm going off this morning. As for kids destroying a house, that’s not a problem at all for modern kids. They seem to be much more destructive than we ever were.

Later on I’d been to see the doctor. I’d given him all the details of my illness and a few other problems. When I’d finished, he looked at me and said “yes I’ll have to write a prescription for you”. Then he took from the inside pocket of his jacket, not his prescription pad but a rough notebook and proceeded to write in there. I had to tell him three times about his prescription. It was only after the third time that he happened to look at what he was doing and realised that he had the wrong pad and had to start again.

That’s something that I seem to have on my mind right now – this story about prescriptions. It seems to be a big issue right now. But if people want to pay less tax, then there’s going to be less money available for Social Services. Here in France we still have something that’s far, far better than any other country in Europe.

Isabelle the nurse blitzed in and out today. She didn’t want to hang around too long. I don’t seem to be popular with too many other people right now. I wonder what I’ve done? Maybe this cyber-blackmailer has already been in contact with them, I dunno.

After she left I made breakfast and carried on with my book. Samuel Hearne has set out on his first trip into the Barren Grounds in his search for the Coppermine River, and recounts how his native guides robbed him and his companions of everything that they possessed and how they had to retreat to the fort on Hudson’s Bay. Times were tough in 1769

Back in here I had things to do, like my Welsh homework for a start, and then afterwards I still made no headway with this blasted timing for this radio programme.

In the end I’ve bit the bullet and begun to write a computer program. It’s been years since I’ve written a program and I’m surprised that I could still remember. I wrote my first program in 1975 using loads of If:Else and GoTo constraints but this needs to be more sophisticated than that.

It’ll probably take me longer to write the program than to do it by hand, but the program will be useful for another time

My cleaner surprised me in mid-calculation and I had to go to have my patches fitted. And the taxi was early – I was busy cutting up last night’s chocolate cake when the driver turned up.

For once just recently I was on my own and it was probably the quickest journey that I’d ever had. As a result I was early arriving and although I had to wait ten minutes while they cleaned up after the morning shift I was soon in the ward, with three other people coming in with me.

They coupled me up quickly enough and while it wasn’t actually painless, it was better than some times just recently.

However they noticed that my arm was starting to swell up as if they had missed their aim with the needles. They carried out a quick echograph to check and found that everything was perfect, and indeed the dialysis pump was showing a good circulation.

Consequently I spent most of the session with an alcohol compress on my arm to reduce the swelling. I still have one on now so I’ll be going to sleep with alcohol fumes all around me and I’ll have a huge bruise there in the morning

There was a couple of new people there today too so the doctor came to see them. He didn’t come to see me though to find out how things were and to tell me what was in my scan from Friday. I was rather disappointed by that.

At some point I had a little doze and while I was away with the fairies (but not doing anything about which the Editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine would comment or which would be of interest to my cyber-extortionist) I saw three bodies. One was a girl and one was a man and I don’t know the third, all wrapped in cloth, in the water. two were chained down under the water to some kind of attachment and had been there for a couple of years. The third, either the woman or man, was with them under water but a new arrival, not yet chained down

In this dream I was actually underneath them in the water and was looking up at them. It was weird.

Apart from that I read my Welsh, drunk loads of orange juice and then carried on with PRINCIPALL NAVIGATIONS

Hakluyt is now attacking the works of Jacques Cartier and his voyage of 1534. This is interesting because it refers to two comments that Cartier wrote in his journal. Firstly he says "in all my travels along this (Labrador and Newfoundland) coast, I have not seen even a bucketful of good soil"

That’s my impression too and much as I would have loved to move to Labrador, gardening would be ruled out for a start.

The second quote of Cartier is much more famous. Sailing up and down the Straight of Belle Isle between Labrador and Newfoundland, he describes it as "the Land that God must truly have given to Cain"

Despite finishing early, uncoupling me was something else completely. I had to wait until there were two nurses free because if one is compressing a patient, there must be another one ready in case of emergencies elsewhere in the Unit.

It took an age until they sorted me out, and they seemed to be more interested in my arm than anything else. The poor taxi driver had been waiting for a while and I bet that she was fed up. But once in the car we sped off to Granville.

My cleaner was waiting for me and watched along with another neighbour as I climbed all of the stairs unaided up to my little apartment

After I’d had a rest I put away the rest of the chocolate cake and then made tea – a stuffed pepper, which was really nice. There’s still some ginger cake left so I had some of that with pistachio-flavoured soya dessert.

Bedtime now, and I need to be ready for my Welsh lesson in the morning. I may well be late joining because there’s a meeting here in the morning

But seeing as we were talking about absent-minded doctors just now … "well, one of us was" – ed … it reminds me of that hospital in Belgium a while back
"Doctor" said a nurse "why are you writing your notes with an anal thermometer?"
So the doctor hands it to the nurse
"Will you go back into that patient’s room" said the doctor "and bring me back my biro?"

Sunday 10th November 2024 – THIS PERISHING RADIO …

… programme is driving me crazy.

What I have to do is to edit the text that I dictated last night, chop it into segments and attach it to the relevant track, and then make a selection of tracks with their attached speech in order to make a runtime of an hour or maybe some seconds over that I can edit out.

Sound simple doesn’t it? But I’ll tell you something, and that is that it isn’t anything like.

Even a decent night’s sleep didn’t help matters much. Although it was after 23:00 when I went to bed, it’s a lie-in in the morning so I still had over eight hours sleep (in principle).

“In principle” of course because, as usual, I was awoken several times during the night by someone or something and I can see that being a problem when I’m living on the ground floor, if I ever do actually make it there.

Despite all of that, I was still fast asleep and dead to the World when the alarm went off at 08:00. At that moment we were discussing someone’s face – how they’d only had it for ten years and it’s always been the same. Something like that but I’d only just begun when the alarm went off.

And the significance of that, I have no idea whatever.

In the bathroom I had a good scrub-up and came back in here to listen to the dictaphone, but I hadn’t gone far before the nurse came to see me.

She’s obviously someone else who doesn’t love me because she was here and gone in a twinkling of an eye, not really wishing to chat. She says that she’s really busy tomorrow, which is no surprise because on Tuesday her oppo takes over.

Once she’d left I made breakfast and read my book. Having finished the editor’s preamble, we’re now reading the author’s preamble.

Interestingly, despite Samuel Hearne being alleged by many to have been the person who discovered on Marble Island the traces of the long-lost James Knight expedition, he makes it clear in his notes that a party of fishermen from his ship, in their "boats, when on the look-out for fish, had frequent occasion to row close to the island, by which means they discovered a new harbour near the East end of it, at the head of which they found guns, anchors, cables, bricks, a smith’s anvil, and many other articles"

Furthermore, despite the many theories that circulate about the mysterious disappearance of the crew, "while we were prosecuting the fishery, we saw several Esquimaux at this new harbour; and perceiving that one or two of them were greatly advanced in years, our curiosity was excited to ask them some questions concerning the above ship and sloop," and they were given an explanation that should remove any doubt about the likely end of the survivors of the shipwrecks.

Back in here I had some football to watch. There were the highlights of the other matches in the Welsh Premier League and then Stranraer away at league leaders East Fife.

Stranraer have only won once since August last year and have been looking well off the pace but to everyone’s surprise, including theirs, I bet, they actually ran out 2-1 winners and are now off the bottom. If they keep this up they might actually avoid the relegation playoffs this season.

Then there were the dictaphone notes to deal with. I had an old, white Ford Cortina MkII. I was in London somewhere. I had someone with me and we were trying to leave the city. We’d been all the way round the north and in the Midlands. There had been some talk about it being a Bank Holiday and how if someone was going to visit the local supermarket he’d better do it on the Friday because otherwise everything would be sold by the Saturday. I’d made it down to London and was trying to exit the city. I told the person with me to look out for Croydon and if we could follow the signs for Croydon we’ll be half-way there. So we kept tacking across the south hoping to pick up a road. We ended up in some residential area where I nearly knocked down some woman crossing the road after alighting from a bus. Suddenly this guy said “just stop for a minute”. He left the car. I thought “this isn’t the moment to be stopping. We’re in a rush and we have to leave”. I heard some water running, and then I was distracted by something. I suddenly realised that he was standing behind me. We both climbed back into the car and I set off again. I asked him what he had been doing. He replied that he had seen some washing-up. I answered that we had much more important things to be doing than washing-up. The washing-up could have waited for another moment if we want to leave this city without being caught.

Just recently during the night I’ve been spending a lot of time in a white Ford Cortina MkII. That’s quite strange, because the one that I owned was black. But I’ve no idea why anyone would want to leave a car in order to do the washing up.

The reference to shops being closed is possibly a reference of when I first came to live in Brussels. The 11th of November is a Bank Holiday in Belgium but an “optional” one where I was working so I was coming in to work anyway. I’d forgotten about the Bank Holiday and ended up in a panic because I had all my shopping to do and nowhere to do it. For tea that night I walked quite a long way looking for a fritkot

And never ever is Trevor going to bother anyone with that feeble attempt at the styrofoam that just trickled by as he tried to have his ticket read by the machine at the entrance to the Undergound.

That’s what I dictated, and I can’t think of any meaning at all that applies to it. I like the rhyme at the beginning though.

That was everything on the dictaphone but there’s also an impression going through my mind about discussing football managers – someone saying that they thought someone to be too old for the job, but someone else reminding them that some famous football manager is actually 106.

Anyway, I then started work on the first of the two radio notes that I dictated last night. And they weren’t straightforward to edit either. They took quite a while. And now I’ve ended up with thirteen segments that, with their music, total about one hour and thirty minutes.

So thirty minutes has to go, which is in principle no problem, but as yet there’s no combination of tracks and speech that makes about one hour, no matter how I try.

It goes without saying that I haven’t yet started the second one. Perhaps I should have done that one first.

After the hot chocolate I started the baking. First of all was a load of dough for a few pizze, one tonight and a couple more for the future.

Then, there was some dough for a small loaf, followed by what should have been a ginger cake but the ginger has gone the Way of the West so it was a rich chocolate cake instead. That’s the next pudding.

All of that took several hours and once more I was out on my feet again. I can’t do all of this standing up and I really ought to buy a stool for the kitchen. But when do I find five minutes to do any on-line shopping?

So the pizza is done and baked and eaten, and it really was lovely too. The bread looks nice and so does the chocolate cake. Mixing the cake mixture in the food processor is really a good idea.

So now it’s bedtime, ready for tomorrow and another painful session at the Dialysis Clinic.

But baking that chocolate cake reminds me of my friend near Macclesfield who was baking a cake. When the oven “pinged” she was speaking to someone on the ‘phone so she told her daughter, who was aged 11, to go to check to see if it was done
"How do I do that?" she asked
"You stick a knife into the centre" said her mother "and if it comes out clean, you know that it’s done"
So off she went – and didn’t come back until tem minutes later
"Well? Is it done?" asked her mother
"Ohh yes" she replied. "The knife came out clean"
"So what took you so long then?"
"Well, the knife came out so clean" said the daughter "that I put the rest of the dirty cutlery in there too".

Saturday 9th November 2024 – IF ANYTHING CAN …

… go wrong, then it surely will. Especially if I’m involved in it

And these dialysis sessions are certainly testing this theory to the limit. I am not having much luck at all.

That’s hardly to be unexpected, because right now I don’t seem to be having much luck with anything. And it’s not as if there are any ladders under which to walk or black cats to kick

Even going to bed at a reasonable time seems to have deserted me for the moment. Finishing my notes at a reasonable time last night, but the time that I’d finished everything else that I had to do, I still ended up running late, as usual.

At least, the compensation here is that it didn’t take me long to go to sleep in my nice, comfortable bed. And once I’d gone to sleep, there I stayed until the alarm went off. There had been a little tossing and turning, but nothing about which I needed to worry

When the alarm went off I was working in a chemist’s shop prescribing medication to people. I was told that there was a control on the amount of medication being given out and when I prescribed some to a woman she told me that I was giving her too much. I told her that at the end of the treatment, when she’s finished she can stick the remainder back through our letter-box so that we could have it back

This is an ongoing issue in real life, with all of the over-prescription of medication. I look at all of the stuff that I have in here and multiply that by so many million people and it’s a fortune. Many of these doctors in hospitals seem to live in a bubble and don’t seem to understand how their prescriptions affect those living in the real world. But we’ve talked about that quite a lot just recently.

Despite what might have been a good sleep it took an age to haul myself out of bed and I only just about beat the second alarm. Burning the candle at both ends doesn’t seem to be working so well

In the bathroom I had a good scrub up and then piled all of the washing into the washing machine, bedding included. It all goes in on a “mixed materials 40°C wash” and if anything wants any different than that then I don’t buy it. It goes without saying that I have nothing that needs ironing.

Back in here I had a computer issue. For some reason it wouldn’t boot up this morning. I had to go to tweak around with the BIOS to make it work and that took some time to do. Consequently I was only half-way through the dictaphone notes when Isabelle the nurse came

She had a good moan about all of the shopping scattered everywhere. That was going to be this morning’s job after I’d finished the dictaphone notes but the best-laid plans etc. Anyway I told her that it was my mess in my apartment and she can give me some of her hours to tidy up if she’s unhappy

After she left I made breakfast and read some more of Samuel Hearne’s travels. Except that I didn’t. Two days in and we’re still reading the editor’s preamble. That’s probably going to end up longer than the author’s book if it keeps on like this.

Then there was the washing to hang up, seeing as the machine had finished. And that’s quite a battle, given my state of health and my lack of balance

Back in here I finished off transcribing the dictaphone notes. I had been doing some work on the city walls. I’d cleared away a platform in front that we were going to use to put on music acts etc so that the public sitting in what was the old moat could see whoever was on the platform. I don’t know at all about the history of this platform but it just happened to be there. While I was cleaning it out I heard a noise like a sports car. I stopped and looked up, and there was a guy there. I asked him if that was his car. He replied “yes, it’s a ‘Facer'”. I said “that’s a marque of which I’d never heard before”. He replied “it’s the only one”. He looked down and asked “what are the chances of putting this car down there?”. I replied “if you have a look on top of the walls a little further down we have cranes that run up and down on top of the walls. We use them for raising and lowering things. Bring one of the cranes up here. They’ll soon lower your car down”. The fact is that the crane didn’t quite reach to where the platform is, but if I stood on the platform and threw a rope that would be tied to the car, then as he lowered the car down I could pull it to the platform. He set off and we set off to go round and come round onto the correct side of the platform. He suddenly began to think “what about the insurance? What about the MoT and the Public Liability?”. We told him to clear off, shut up and lower the car down. He didn’t like our brusqueness but we thought that it was the best way to proceed, to bring this car down onto the platform. As it happened, we had a quick look in the encyclopaedia. He played keyboards so with me on the bass and my friend who worked with me, he was a drummer, we had the makings of a pretty sound group, the three of us

One of my friends lived in a house right on the city walls in Chester and I worked in a building on the walls too. We’d often said that it would be an ideal place for a rock group, or any other musical act for that matter, to have a concert. A few power chords just at the start of the 14:30 Novices’ Handicap down below on the Roodee should upset quite a few punters.

I was in Court last night – a hearing trying to persuade a tenant to leave a property but he was being difficult. He was finding humour in all kinds of strange places but I reckoned that this humour was a front. He was trying to embarrass me in front of the judges so I kept a very clear silence and only answered the questions that they were asked to me and ask him until he pulled up out of steam which he did rather by the nineteenth of the second. He was unable to persuade the French children’s governess that she was the kind of person to be given a more senior role in the Government of France where she could make a name for herself in history.

Does this dream ring any bells right now? I bet that it does. Although where the children’s governess fits in, I’ve not quite worked out.

Did I dictate the dream about the two of us being on a coach tour with two drivers? … "no you didn’t" – ed … We had to stop for coffee but there was nowhere convenient and we ended up at some kind of dire roadside burger bar but it was the absolute best that we could be. The other driver took over to drive and on leaving was almost pranged by a silver 4×4 as he pulled out. In the meantime I’d gone off somewhere – I had Nerina with me – and all of a sudden there was an urgent contact “can you check and look out for a silver 4×4?”. By this time I was back driving this coach again. I looked in my mirror and could see this 4×4 right behind me so I replied “it’s behind me now”. The voice asked “can you follow it to find out where it goes”. I thought “follow it in a coach? I can try”. However I lost it, but I had a rough idea where so I circled around this housing estate again and sure enough, I found it. So I built a swimming pool and filled it with water, then the voice asked me to check on the number. When I checked on the number I saw the old guy driving it, he was standing on a set of ladders up some kind of pole in his garden where there was a light bulb that he was busy taking out. I took the number and reported it. Someone then gave me a briefcase and said “this is his” so I went and knocked on the door. His wife was there so I handed her the briefcase and we began to chat. She said something about his computer so I had a look. It was old and full of viruses so I cleaned it for him, removed the viruses and tweaked a few other things, and it worked so much better. When he ‘phoned up we told him what we’d come for. The wife told him the news so he asked “can you switch it off yet?”. He told me that it needed switching off so I arranged it. She said “yes, it switches off now”. he replied “that’s the first time in 100 years that it’s switched off”. Then Nerina and this woman engaged in quite a lot of small talk about nothing else in particular really

Wouldn’t it be great if I could build a swimming pool and fill it with water at the drop of a hat like that? And I have in the past done strange things like door-stepping someone for purposes other than which are obvious, but we don’t talk about these.

There wasn’t all that long to do stuff of my own before the cleaner came round to stick my anaesthetic patches onto me. It’s freezing outside, she reckons, so I put away my warm-season fleeces and brought out one of the Arctic ones. I kept my jumper on though if I’m going to be in Ice-Station Zebra.

While I was waiting for the taxi to arrive I put away all of the food and did a little rearranging on the shelves. It goes without saying that with my cleaner being early, the taxi was late. And we had someone to pick up along the way.

At the Dialysis Centre there was a crisis. Two patients had been sent over from the hospital for emergency dialysis and one was having a panic attack. Consequently every available nurse was helping out around the bed.

It was 35 minutes before I was seen and by that time the anaesthetic on my arm had worn off. They also missed their aim with the second needle and had to re-do it. Consequently I was in agony throughout the whole three hours and thirty minutes.

"Shall I bring some ice to ease the pain in your arm?" asked a nurse helpfully

"What?" I exclaimed "In this blasted igloo? You must be joking!"

So I listened to a couple of concerts, revised my Welsh, suffered being force-fed with orange juice, had a little doze and read more of Hakluyt’s PRINCIPALL NAVIGATIONS

He’s busy right now talking about a couple of trips in the 1580s and 90s to the Gulf of St Lawrence and the constant changing of sovereignty of the islands there is playing havoc with me being able to identify them in the names by which I know them today

Not only that, we’re talking in the period when the Basque country was still independent and its own language predominated so that makes matters even more complicated, especially when the ports on the Biscay coast are mentioned in passing, under their former names.

Being so late starting meant that I was so late finishing and the guy who came down with me, who has a four-hour session in the other ward, was ready before I was, so we both came home together.

My faithful cleaner was waiting for me and once more watched in awe as I climbed the twenty-five stairs up to my door. Not as quick as Thursday or Friday but it was still an achievement. We have a new tenant in one of the apartments upstairs, so I met her cat on the way up.

After my cleaner left, we had football. Cardiff Metro v Y Bala. The Met scored after two minutes – a lucky rebound but Y Bala equalised just on the stroke of half-time.

The game came to light when Y Bala scored two goals right immediately after half-time and then we had an exciting second half as the Met clawed their way back into the game with two goals. The final ten minutes was certainly exciting.

It was a good game once it opened up. Cardiff Met play some pretty football but in their desire to retain possession, they can go from all-out attack to a long back-pass to the keeper in the twinkle of an eye and it’s so frustrating to see them do it – eight men up in attack that they pass it backwards.

Y Bala’s style is rather more agricultural but they play forward much more often and with better results.

Tea was a vegan burger on a bun with salad and baked potato followed by ginger cake and soya dessert. It’s all good stuff this.

There’s some dictating to do and then I’m off to bed.

But talking of my bad luck … "well, one of us is" – ed … reminds me of the time in Sheffield when I was walking past the soup canning plant, the boiler exploded and the streets were flooded in vegan tomato soup
"That must have been lucky for you" said a friend
"Not really" I replied. "I could only find a fork"

Friday 8th November 2024 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day I’ve had today. I’ve done nothing, accomplished nothing, have loads of things that I need to do and I’m going to be here until eternity just doing the most urgent things that I have to do..

And it all started off so well too. Even though I wasn’t in bed at 23:00, it was something quite like it – not a horribly late night like some have been.

Furthermore, although I wasn’t asleep quite quickly, once I’d dropped off, there I stayed for quite some considerable while. There was the odd awakening here and there but nothing that particularly kept me awake.

However, once I was awake at about 06:00, then awake I stayed and nothing at all would induce me to go back to sleep. So when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up and about.

In a departure from usual tradition, I went and took my medicine straight after washing. Usually, the medication is taken at breakfast but I have a feeling that I’ll be struggling for time a little later.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. We were discussing radio programmes again. There was something to do with a famous star who owned a Triumph Herald. An interviewer had been talking to me about interviewing him. Then there was a change and we found ourselves on the Orient Express heading deep into what was formerly the USSR. I was on there in an ordinary carriage with someone else. The train was packed. We were coming into a village where we were going to change locomotive, which meant that we would be not moving for a good few minutes. I knew this village, and knew that there was a really first-rate ethnic Indian restaurant right by the station. I told the guy with me about it. We agreed that we’d take a risk and go there while the train was stopped. As the train was pulling into the station we left our seats and ran the whole length of the train. When we came to the sleeping cars we were told that there was no room in there. The train was crowded, which we knew but we took no notice and pressed on right to the front. When the train stopped we nipped out of the station and found this little café but it was now a big restaurant. There were loads of people there and it was really busy. It was quite upmarket, and it wasn’t what I was expecting at all and neither was my friend, but here we were. The first thing that I did was to grab a plate of something or other to take with me to the table because I could see how busy it was. There was a decent possibility here that we would never be served and have our meal by the time that the train is ready to leave. At least I wanted to eat something while I was here. I was really disappointed by this famous little Indian café place being no longer here and all the delicious hot food had gone – “hot” in both senses of the word of course.

This dream reminds me of that little Indian café that I found out in the Côte Vertu in Montréal. It really was nice and I went back there time after time. Going back in 2022 for the first time since 2019 I found that it had been enlarged and wasn’t quite the same, and neither did it have the same level of intimacy, as the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine might have said. The food was still excellent though.

There was something really bitty next. First of all I was round at a friend’s girlfriend’s house, somewhere where a group of us went quite often. I actually bought a jar of coffee to give to the mother to thank her for all the time that she’d made coffee for us. But somewhere along the line I had a new house, a brand-new solid front door and I was busy measuring it up to fit security bolts in it. But it was winter and I didn’t really feel like opening the door and working just there then with how cold it was outside.

There was actually a girl who lived near me in my adolescence who was the girlfriend of a friend, and it was pretty much open house. Any one could come round and visit, and several people made new acquaintances there. In fact, I made a little friend there who was my companion for a couple of months. However everything fell apart when my friend discovered that his girlfriend had become much too friendly with another one of the visitors.

Isabelle the nurse was late coming around this morning – swamped with blood tests as the laboratory is closed on Monday and no-one wants them done on Tuesday, for reasons that I have either mentioned or implied.

She didn’t hang around and was soon gone, leaving me to make breakfast in peace.

That thesis on the Border Marches has gone the Way of the West now. I think that we reached rock-bottom when our author described “Rhuddlan Castle, in Cheshire, right on the border with Wales”. Although it was in part of the lands that was administered by the Earl of Chester and so can be called “in Cheshire” at a pinch, it’s well over be border, almost half-way to Anglesey and the only way of supplying it was up the River Clwyd from the sea because the overland route was in the hands of the Welsh.

Having finished that I made a start on the history of Samuel Hearne’s famous trek to Coppermine on the northern coast of Canada where had he done the trek in 2019 Castor and I would have been there to him.

However I didn’t read much because the taxi came early for me. I hadn’t even finished my breakfast which was a shame.

At the hospital, with all of the renovations going on, we had the devil’s own job to find the radiography area, and then I was abandoned.

It didn’t take too long for them to come to see me and I was in and out of the machine in five minutes. I didn’t even have to undress or take off my shoes, which was strange if they wanted to look at my foot.

They pushed me outside where I had to wait for the taxi. And wait. And wait. One hour and twenty minutes in total, and there were two other passengers in the car so I went on a sightseeing tour all round Southern Normandy. 12:35 when I made it finally back home.

Mind you, once more I excelled myself. My faithful cleaner stood and watched in awe as I climbed all 25 steps up to here yet again.

After she left I warmed up the remains of my breakfast and finally managed to eat it.

The next task was to complete my order for LeClerc and send it off. It’s a cheap order this week as I have much of the stuff in stock, but olive oil is on special offer again so that helped bulk it up

My cleaner came round to do her stuff and we sorted out the medication, disposing of a load of stuff that’s no longer in use. It’s gone into a bag in the corner, not thrown away, because what’s the betting that sooner or later another prescription will bring it out?

Then I came in here to deal with the radio programme. I’ve paired off the music and segued it, and even made a good start on the notes but Rosemary rang me for a chat. But I had to abort that because the delivery came from LeClerc and I had to put away the frozen stuff

Having done that, I called Rosemary back and we had another one of our marathon sessions that went on for quite a while, and I forgot to check the time.

It wasn’t far short of tea time though, and only just enough time to put away the chilled stuff. The rest will have to wait until tomorrow, although with a session at the Dialysis Clinic, a football match to watch and some radio notes to finish, I’m not sure exactly when tomorrow it will be.

Tea was a handful of those mini-nuggets with chips and a vegan salad, followed by spicy ginger cake and soya dessert. Really nice too.

That was followed by starting to make more bread. You can see that my day is a long way from finishing. Blimey! What a day! And it’s not going to improve any either. And I’ve not had even one sip of coffee today either.

But a strange thing happened at the hospital just now. A nun came rushing out of the doctor’s room in tears.
A few minutes later the doctor came out so I asked him "what’s the matter with her?"
"I’ve just told her that she’s pregnant" said the doctor
"Blimey!" I exclaimed. "Is she?"
"Ohh no" replied the doctor "but I think that I’ve cured her hiccoughs"

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: samuel hearne

Thursday 21st November 2024 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Wednesday 20th November 2024 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

Tuesday 18th November 2024 – IT LOOKS AS IF …

Monday 18th November 2024 – YET MORE FUN …

Sunday 17th November 2024 – THIS RADIO PROGRAMME …

Saturday 16th November 2024 – AS I HAVE …

Friday 15th November 2024 – I HAVE BEEN …

Thursday 14th November 2024 – SO HERE I AM …

Wednesday 13th November 2024 – I HAVE FINISHED …

Tuesday 12th November 2024 – I HAVE FINISHED …

Monday 11th November 2024 – THIS BLASTED DIALYSIS …

Sunday 10th November 2024 – THIS PERISHING RADIO …

Saturday 9th November 2024 – IF ANYTHING CAN …

Friday 8th November 2024 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

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