… staff Christmas lunch at the Centre de Re-education at midday today. And so as a result there really wasn’t all that much point in any of the clients going there this afternoon.
Anyone who has ever been to a French office party or Christmas lunch will understand only too well exactly what I mean.
It looked as if it was all going to go the Way of the West when Severine told me how difficult it was to make my feet respond to her massage.
She would probably have had more luck had she remembered to take of my shoes first, especially after all of the effort through which I’d gone to change my socks and put on clean ones earlier that afternoon.
Mind you, at least she went through the motions. Ophélie the Ergotherapist was definitely on another planet in some other universe somewhere and our session, which took ages to start, finished quite rapidly.
But I knew that today was going to be one of those days. During the night Zero had come to visit me. It was really nice to see her, but in the middle of a long interesting discussion that I was having with her, I suddenly awoke bolt upright and she immediately vanished into the ether.
Start as you mean to go on, I suppose.
Having finished my notes early last night I had an hour or so on the guitar and ended up going late to bed. One thing that I love about living in a building where the walls are 1m20 thick of solid granite is that I can make as much noise as I like and no-one can hear me.
Apart from all of the usual songs that I run through, I had a play around with THIS ONE.
It sounds really well on a decent acoustic guitar and the last time that I played the song to an audience was on the observation deck of THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR at about 04:00 one night when Castor and I were huddled up watching the midnight sun over Coronation Gulf on the last night of our little adventure
Playing Trevor Bolder’s bass line is really enjoyable and I used to do that a lot, but for some reason that I could never understand, I could never sing the chorus when playing the chorus’s bass line no matter how much I rehearsed and practised, and I found it deeply frustrating.
Being determined never to admit defeat and to master it one day, I still keep on trying, even if it has been 20 years.
"Keep your electric eye on me babe
Put your ray-gun to my head
Press your space-face close to mine, love
Freak out in a moonage daydream"
At least, we had the midnight sun, I suppose.
Being late going to bed, I didn’t go very far. But it’s quality that counts, not quantity of course, and just like Kris Kristofferson, "I’d give all my tomorrows for a single yesterday".
I dreamt last night that I was at the Centre Normandy again. They were teaching up all kinds of things like different series of recipes which for example was the one where we learnt about Christmas cakes and Christmas puddings. There was another one where we learnt about stuffing etc. It began quite normally but as the menus progressed it became more and more chaotic until in the end I was chasing a tin of Christmas pudding mix around my bed trying to find it (and I was too!).
And later, I was dictating the next dream without the dictaphone again, something that I do far too often. But I’m glad that my subconscious realised it and made a wild grab because this was when Zero appeared and I didn’t want to miss her. I’d been out around the North Shropshire area in my red Cortina estate and coming back through Whitchurch I wanted a pint of milk. I couldn’t find one so in the end I ended up at Northern Dairies where I bought a bottle. At some point or other I’d picked up Zero but I can’t remember how – at one minute I was on my own and next minute she was in the car. Then I had something else to do that meant that I had to double back through Whitchurch and drive around the town for a while. Instead of Zero I then had someone else with me but I can’t remember who it was. In the end I was just driving around. It was the afternoon. The previous evening I’d been to a football match, a ladies match between 2 teams. I came across a sports ground somewhere on the edge of Birmingham. There was a fair-sized crowd for what looked like an amateur game so I decided to stop to look as kick-off hadn’t happened yet. I was wandering around and ended up in one of the rooms of the building. It was full of schoolgirls and a couple of teachers. One of the teachers was wearing a bright blue flannel suit and waistcoat with his name on it and a lime green shirt and was talking in a high-pitched voice to these girls about their English exams. There was probably 20 or 30 schoolgirls packed in here. I was just sitting quietly in a corner trying to work out where I was. I noticed that the postcode of this place began with PR1. I thought “it can’t be Preston so where was I?” In the end I came to the conclusion that I was in Perry Barr on the edge of Birmingham. I ended up talking to 2 of the girls, asking what time kick-off was. They told me that we had 20 minutes to wait. Then in walked Zero. I said “hello” to her and called her by name which surprised everyone in this room – they didn’t know that I knew one of their schoolgirls. She came over to chat. I asked about her birthday, what presents she had, and asked her about her holidays. We were having a really lengthy involved chat when I awoke quite dramatically.
After that, there was no point in going back to sleep, even though I tried. I knew that this would be one dream into which I would never be able to step back. Can you imagine the disappointment? There I was with Zero on my plate, just about get my fork stuck in, and “paff”.
"Gone! And never called me ‘mother’!"
For about half an hour I carried out my exercises with the elastic strap around my ankles and then Arose from the Dead. It was 05:40.
Being up and about is one thing. Actually being in any state to do anything is something else completely and it took me an age to wind myself up ready to go.
Eventually though I managed to make a start on things and by lunchtime I’d edited the radio notes that I’d dictated before going to bed and assembled another complete programme.
Had I put my shoulder to the wheel I could have finished it off a lot earlier than that but what with a late night and a really early start, I went off again with the fairies for quite some time in the middle of it all.
Having had a good wash and scrub up I made myself ready for the Centre de Re-education and while I was waiting for my lift I hunted down some music.
Unfortunately I ended up stuck in yet another nostalgia groove (and in case you haven’t already noticed, I’m still in it, regrettably) and came across a recording of a live Hawkwind concert from a festival in Canterbury 20-odd years ago. And that was that, I’m afraid
That actually gave me yet another idea for my radio programme.
Back in the 1970s with my various vans I used to run a sound engineer around to work at various gigs and then a friend’s son was sound engineer with the Pink Fairies who supported dozens of headline groups. Consequently I seem to have inherited quite a collection of live concert recordings
Occasionally I feature a live concert recording in my radio shows when it’s convenient so I’m wondering if maybe I should go through my collection of recordings, try to identify the dates for those that aren’t labelled (there’s A HANDY WEBSITE ON THE INTERNET where people post setlists of concerts that they’ve seen and that should help identify some of them) and then broadcast “anniversary concerts” when the appropriate date coincides with one of my programmes.
After the Centre de Re-education I came back here, made my hot chocolate and sat down to sort out the music for the next radio programme. That’s all paired off now and I’ve even written some of the notes. Once more, I could have done much more but I … errr … relaxed for a while.
Tea was steamed veg with falafel and vegan cheese sauce but the veg wasn’t really steamed enough. It seems that my microwave is being rather hit-and-miss these days too.
So having finished off everything? I’m going to sort out some paperwork for the hospital, make my shopping list for the supermarket at St Nicolas tomorrow and then have a play on the guitar.
And hope that Zero comes back to see me again during the night, either on her own or with Castor and TOTGA
Yes, I’m still on this nostalgia thing again, so what better track to leave you all with than THIS ONE? Definitely the poet Robert Calvert’s finest hour.
He describes the perigee of despair in terms that no-one else could possibly imitate. Imagine being stuck in a interplanetary spacecraft on an inter-galactic voyage that will take centuries, just you and a clone of your lover, and when you make love to it "she calls another’s name"
There will never be another song quite like this.
Calvert is buried just a few hundred yards from where my mother lived as a child and one of the things that I intended to do was to go to visit his grave. But that’s just one more thing that won’t ever be done.
This “unfinished list” seems to be growing longer and longer, and there’s nothing that I can do about it.
and