… last night with a blog entry of a near-record three thousand one hundred and seventy-seven words, I shall try to be a little more concise tonight. After all, I don’t want you lot wasting as much precious time reading my rubbish as I seem to do writing it. But as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … my downfall when writing essays always was the word count. I’d reach the word limit before I’d even warmed up.
Anyway, I digress … "again" – ed …
Last night, I was in bed later than I would like to be, but not as late as some nights have been just recently. And for a change, it took longer than usual to go to sleep. That’s because I’d had something of a shock before going to bed.
When I’m around the house at this time of year, I wear a sweater, but when I go out, I change the sweater for a fleece jacket and change back when I come home again. When I changed back yesterday evening, I noticed nothing amiss.
However, when I was undressing last night, I noticed that the tubing on my arm that holds the compresses onto the pinholes in my forearm was drenched with blood. I had a feel of it and the blood seemed to be slowly drying out. It wasn’t bleeding any more, I reckoned, and as I had some old tubing that had lost its elasticity, I put a piece over the tubing on the arm to stop the blood staining the sheets and quilt cover when I’m in bed.
Nevertheless, it took me by surprise because I had felt nothing at all. And we’d been told at dialysis that at the rate the body will lose its blood through these pinholes, we will only have five minutes to react before it will be too late. And that’s no use at all if I’ve no idea that the clock has already begun to wind down.
That was the thought that was going through my mind as I tried to go to sleep.
At some point, I must have gone to sleep because round about 01:40 or thereabouts, we had another phantom alarm call that woke me. I recognised straight away that it was a phantom call so I didn’t react, but I didn’t go back to sleep either – well, not for a while.
After tossing and turning in my bed for ages, I went through another phase of this “sometimes I’m awake, sometimes I’m asleep, but I don’t know which is which”, and I was definitely awake when the alarm rang.
As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … being awake is one thing – being up and about is something else completely.
But once I was up and about – well, if ever you want to have an idea about what makes a “day of two halves”, you only have to read on and all the rest will become clear.
First task this morning was to unlock the front door ready for the nurse when he comes round, and the second was to go to sort myself out in the bathroom. The bleeding on the arm had stopped a long time ago, but some of the blood that was on the tubing had soaked through to the tubing that I had put on later. Luckily, it hadn’t soaked through onto the sheets and the bedding.
Back in here, first task was the dictaphone to see what had gone on during the night.
Being in “another chaotic household with my mother” is nothing new at all for me. It’s how we lived back in “those days”, and regrettably, I seem to have inherited it.
My “friend from Germany” was here with her daughter about eighteen months or so ago, and what we all had in common was that we went to the same university. Her daughter even became a lecturer there. The mother and I sat on some of the same committees, so having plans and so on was something that we always had up our sleeves.
The ramshackle stairs up to my room in the attic remind me of something, but I can’t think what, and the young girl with the boyfriend – I know who she is, but she’s in the wrong generation for this dream.
The nurse turned up, earlier than usual, and we had a chat about his week off as he was sorting out my legs and feet. And after he left, I made my breakfast.
As I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.
Today, we are discussing erratic boulders. These are huge, isolated rocks that differ totally from the rocks around them, and our friends are debating how they might have arrived in their particular place today, hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from the rest of the rocks of their type.
Several people were taking wild guesses, but eventually someone came up with the answer that corresponds with modern-day thinking, and that is that they were brought down by glaciers and “dumped” when the glacier ran out of steam to carry them.
He tells us that these erratic boulders "were slowly carried along by the motion of the glacier, year after year, however great their dimensions, till, on arriving at the edge of the ice, which was always melting during the heat of summer, they were precipitated into the valley below, there forming masses of debris commonly called moraines."
Today, there are several types of moraine recognised by geologists – two of which are, firstly, lateral moraines that form at the side of the glacier, and secondly, terminal moraines at the end of a glacier. And you can tell how far a glacier has retreated by checking the succession of terminal moraines. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we had hours of fun exploring and scrambling over a terminal moraine of the Brother John Glacier in northern Greenland several years ago.
When I’d finished breakfast, there was some tidying up in the kitchen to do and then I came back in here to carry on work.
There were several things that needed my attention, and then I could continue with the task of reformatting the rest of the music that my friendly neighbourhood chatbot found for me yesterday. When it had all been done, I had to remix and re-edit it all and then choose the individual tracks to include in the programme.
That’s where my chatbot came in useful again. I told him to review as many reviews as he could find of each album that he had selected and to tell me which song had received the most positive reviews, why, and what the reviews said. In no time at all, he had identified most of the tracks and had a little cameo of a post about them that I can translate into French in due course.
That has also saved me a couple of days’ work.
There was enough time to deal with a few of them and prepare them for broadcasting, but then it was time, long after time, in fact, for my midday medication and disgusting drink. My faithful cleaner came in at that point and caught me once more in flagrante delicto having a break, but she also showed me what a heroine she is.
Talking to my chatbot the other day, we were discussing my bread and how I could improve on what I was doing and how I was making it. I told him about the sunflower seeds, occasionally brazil nuts and sometimes almonds that I included in the flour, and asked him whether or not there was anything else that was healthier that I could include.
The chatbot gave me a list that included chia seeds and several other grains, so I had given a list to my cleaner for her to keep a lookout.
She’d wandered around the “weigh it yourself” section at Leclerc this morning and managed to find chia seeds and a mixture that contained most of the other seeds that the chatbot had mentioned, and she’d bought a supply of them both for me.
As well as that, they had my favourite arrabbiata sauce on special offer – buy two and the second one is sixty-eight percent off – so I told her to buy four if she saw them. And sure enough, there were four of them on the kitchen counter next to the seeds.
Once she’d sorted everything out, I told her about the problem with my arm. She had a look and decided that it was suitably horrible, so she removed all of the blood-soaked dressings and cleaned my arm. She found some things to make a temporary dressing and then wrapped my arm in cling film.
The reason for the cling film is because it’s Tuesday today, and Tuesday means that it’s shower time. She then sorted out the bathroom for me so that I can shower in comparative safety.
When the bathroom was converted, I had hope to have had a flat floor, like a walk-in wet room, but when you have a floor made of solid grès de Chausey granite, installed in 1667, it’s simply not possible to do so. No-one can chisel their way into that so the base is fifteen centimetres off the ground. I need to have a couple of steps up. And as yet, there are no handrails in the shower, so my cleaner needs to take the portable handrails that fence in the porcelain horse.
The shower today was wonderful. I washed my undies and my night attire in the sink first, and while I was showering, I threw them in too so that the shower would rinse them. But the water was lovely and hot, and I took full advantage of it.
The bathroom was hot too. Although I turned the heating off after the first night, I switched the heating on in the bathroom before the shower with the temperature set to twenty-four degrees. The heated lightbulb was on, of course, and so it was even nicer stepping out of the shower too.
After I’d dressed, I went into the dining area, where my cleaner attended to my arm. It had bled a little more under the shower but it had stopped again. Nevertheless, she made a thorough job of patching the arm so that it wouldn’t bleed again, and if it were to do so, the number of compresses under the plasters would absorb the blood quite quickly.
At about 15:00, as usual, she cleared off to her next client, but she said that she would be back when she returns this evening to make sure that everything will be OK.
Back in here, I tried to restart work, but for some unknown reason, all my motivation and energy had gone. All my “get up and go” had got up and gone. That was a real disappointment, as I had so much to do. I just sat here and vegetated for a while instead of working.
None of this was getting the baby bathed, but it really was turning into a day of two halves.
At about 17:00 I decided to start tea. There was the broccoli stalk from Saturday’s Leclerc delivery, so I was going to make another broccoli stalk soup.
First, though, there was the bread. And seeing that I intended to make enough soup for two meals, I decided to make four bread buns. With chia, you need to use more water than normal, so instead of a hundred and thirty millilitres of water with my two hundred grammes of flour, I used a hundred and forty.
While the dough was proving, I chopped up the broccoli stalk and a potato into tiny cubes and put the mix on one side. Then a pile of mushrooms were chopped, and I put them on one side too, mixed with a handful of frozen garlic. Finally, I chopped up a couple of small onions.
My favourite saucepan has a really heavy base, so I fried the onions in it, and when they were well done, I added the mushrooms and garlic and gave them a few minutes too before adding the broccoli and potatoes, stirring everything around. Once everything had been frying for five minutes, I added enough vegetable stock to cover the food and left it to come to the boil and then simmer.
By now, the bread bun mix had risen considerably, so I added a spoonful or two of chai seeds and three or four spoonfuls of the seed mix and gave it all a second kneading before dividing the dough mix into four and making flat pancake-like lumps of dough, which I put on some baking paper.
While I was waiting for things to happen, I washed up everything and tidied up. And that’s not like me at all. Usually, I end up in a total mess with stuff all over the place and there’s no room to do anything.
While I’d been talking to my chatbot about bread, he’d given me some useful tips. Firstly, never mind the one hundred and eighty degrees – wind the oven up to two hundred and twenty. Then, put a big container of water … "like his metal pie dish" – ed … at the base of the oven. Finally, put the baking tray in.
When the oven “pinged” that it was ready, it was full of steam and the baking tray was scorching hot. But I put the buns and their sheet of baking paper onto the hot baking tray and put it back in the oven.
The chatbot had recommended parsley, chives and thyme as herbs for my soup, so I’d added those a little earlier, but now I poured the soup mix into my whizzing jug, and with the whizzer, I whizzed it all up into a rather thick liquid. Half of it went into the fridge in a sterilised jar, and the other half went back into the saucepan with several handfuls of these coquillettes, the small elbow-shaped pasta.
After fifteen minutes in the oven, I followed the chatbot’s advice, turned it down to one hundred and eighty degrees and removed the water. Then I left it all for another ten minutes.
As I took the soup off the heat, I added a pot of vegan soya and stirred it well in. And the bread buns were total perfection. I have never ever had a success like this. Two buns went into the freezer for the other half of the soup some time, and two, I dipped into my soup and cleaned my bowl when I’d finished.
Pudding was a pot of coffee-flavoured soya yoghurt followed by a prune. All in all, that was a really nice meal, but it had taken ages to prepare.
Back in here after tea, I began to write up my notes, and I’d reached the halfway stage before I was totally overwhelmed with sleep. It was late too – not too far short of midnight, so I posted on line what I’d done, added a “to be continued” stamp and then went to bed.
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about making soup … "well, one of us has" – ed … afried of mine told me about the antics of a famous chef in a Mayfair restaurant in London.
"First, he diced some vegetables really finely, cooked them in water and added a couple of oxo cubes. Then he threw a hyena into the pot, and finally, he jumped in himself"
"Really?" I asked.
"Oh yes" she replied. "He made quite a laughing stock of himself, he did."
