… painful session at the Dialysis Clinic today. This time though it wasn’t all the fault of the people who worked there. The taxi company had something to contribute towards the debacle that was today.
And there I was, all proud and happy that last night I’d managed to go to bed before 23:00. Not many minutes before, it has to be said, but it was enough to be noteworthy and cheer me up a little after yesterday. "Oh folly! Folly! And deep joy!" as Stanley Unwin once famously said.
It wasn’t such a bad night as one or two have been just recently. I only awoke once or twice, I didn’t check the times, and I was soon asleep again.
However when the alarm went off I had a struggle to haul myself up out of bed. I would gladly have stayed there for another couple of hours but no such possibility today.
In the bathroom I had a good scrub up, applied the deodorant and even had a shave. Not that it would do me much good of course but we have to go through the motions.
Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night and I was surprised by how much distance I’d covered. Some kids in a primary school were doing a course on awareness of the slavery trade. They had to choose a character and stand up to talk to me about them. The first girl talked to me about the difference between good and evil and the others who were small told a story about what they wanted everyone to hear. One said that the slavery business was dominated by her grandfather who imported tobacco from North America. Each of these children had a little story to tell.
And I bet that they did too. Many famous people of the 17th, 18th and 19th Century were slave-owners and it has to be said that there were many other people whose treatment was not all that much better until the rise of the Trades Union Movement. When I finish my magnum opus about the treatment of the “liveyers” on the Labrador and Québec coasts in the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th Century (a project that has been on hold since the chaos began last October), you’ll see what I mean. Slavery has many different faces.
Later on I was looking through the file of a German person. At the front of the file was pinned a piece of paper, a typewritten note of some kind of thesis which began “my parents were buried somewhere on the border in the early days of the conflict in 1939” and then went into e lengthy philosophical discussion. It referred me to his thesis which was hidden somewhere in the depths of the file so rather than do the work that I was supposed to do, I sat down and began to read his history, or, at least, looked like the history of his father of the person concerned, because the given name of the person whose file it was and the given name of the person who wrote this document were different so I sat down and had a read of it
Quite often I was side-tracked by what I found hidden away in the archives. There was once a reference to a huge blackmarketeering ring being uncovered in Crewe just after the war with some famous names being implicated. But that aside, Crewe was and probably still is famous for all the Italians, Germans and Poles in the town. Of course, as you might expect, many people blame the European Union but the fact is that there was a prisoner-of-war camp in the vicinity and after the war, many of the prisoners opted to stay. After the war, the camp became a resettlement camp for the Polish Army that had fought alongside the British in North Africa and Italy and when the Russians annexed the eastern part of Poland in 1946, some of the Poles found themselves with no home to which to return so they settled in the town.
Finally I was putting on my brown shoes but the shoelaces were too short and it was annoying me so I asked the mother of the boy where I was staying where I could buy some brown shoelaces. They gave me a list of suggestions so I replied “yes, but I mean ‘now'”. They looked at me and laughed, saying “nowhere is going to be open yet. It’s not 09:00”. I’d forgotten all about restrictions in Belgium on opening hours. It was so frustrating. But the woman came along and had some kind of “Système D” method in mind where she glued a broken piece of shoelace to my shoelaces to help me work because she thought that I was using it to surf the web. But I was using the mouse of course to surf the web. Someone came up to me and asked “why are you on the internet now? Everywhere is going to be closed, all the shops”. I replied “yes but it’s the World-Wide Web. The USA is 16 hours behind so the USA shops are going to be open now”. They had a very hard time getting their head around this idea of different time zones, which I found to be completely strange. So there I was, hoping to find a pair of shoelaces from somewhere.
“Système D” is a lovely French phrase, the “D” being short for something rather vulgar, and it’s a phrase that means making do, adapting what you have and managing to perform tasks with whatever kinds of unorthodox tools and equipment you happen to have to hand. I’ve been doing that for years and so have many of my friends. It’s probably what binds us together.
Belgium, and Brussels in particular is a strange place as far as shop opening hours go. They are regulated quite tightly. There was one guy who ran a normal grocer’s shop and obtained a licence to run a “Night Shop” so he simply stayed open past the regulation hours for a conventional shop. He was found to be in contravention of the law about day-shop hours so he fitted his shelving with wheels and at the appointed closing time of a conventional shop, simply pushed his shelving with all his stock on it across the road into a shop premises that he rented and ran his “Night Shop” from there. And then pushed everything back across the road the following morning.
It was the other nurse today who came to see me. He asked how everything went so I told him that it was awful so that shut him up and he did what he had to do and then left in rather a hurry which suited me fine.
Then it was breakfast followed by more of my book. Alfred Watkins is still drawing his ley lines across the Herefordshire area and makes some very interesting assumptions about some surnames and place-names, some of which more modern research seems to have undermined.
It seems to me that if he had toned down much of his unwarranted speculation his work would have been much better received. The problem with modern vernacular researchers is that if they encounter someone like Watkins who presents 100 assumptions and research shows one of them to be misplaced, the other 99 are also dismissed automatically and that’s certainly not the case.
Back in here I carried on tracking down music for the next radio programme, and that’s proving to be difficult. There’s a list of artists whose work I need to find and for some of them their work is tending to be much more elusive than for which I had bargained
My cleaner turned up bang on midday to fit my anaesthetic patches and after she fitted them she stayed for a few minutes for a chat and then cleared off to attend to her afternoon clients.
The taxi turned up a little later than planned. It was a driver from St Hilaire du Harcoët who had taken a passenger to St Lô, than then travelled light to Villedieu to pick up passengers for Granville and then for me to take to Avranches.
He told me a story that I had heard “elsewhere”, that the Sécurité Sociale is taking more of a keen interest in expenditure and is insisting that much more effort is made to combine trips and cut down on the light mileage
That explained why we had to go to St Planchers to pick up a passenger for the other hospital in Avranches.
We were late picking him up and as his appointment was before mine, it was only right that we went right across town to drop him off and then come back to drop me at the Dialysis Clinic. I mean – they can hardly start without me, can they?
Consequently I was late at the Clinic and the anaesthetic had worn off, as I found out when they stuck the needles in.
There I was, in agony for the whole session of three hours and thirty minutes. No-one came to see me or to interrupt me. I just read my Welsh notes and then started Richard Hakluyt’s PRINCIPALL NAVIGATIONS
Hakluyt was a writer and being acquainted with “the chiefest captaines at sea, the greatest merchants, and the best mariners of our nation” of the late 16th Century he wrote his book to record and report all of the discoveries that British and some other seamen had made during that period, with the aim, so it’s believed, of encouraging colonialisation.
My interest of course lies more in the northern end of the spectrum, around “ye New Founde Lande” and in particular those of Humphrey Gilbert, who was sailing his spectacularly unsuccessful voyages during the period about which Hakluyt writes.
Disconnecting me from the machine was probably as painful as plugging me in, and I was glad to leave.
The driver who took me home was my favourite driver who has taken me to Paris a few times. We had to go across town to pick up yet another passenger, and then we had a running commentary all the way home – so much so and so engrossed was she in what she was saying that she drove right past the turning to drop off the lady we had just picked up, and had to turn round and go back.
Back here my faithful cleaner was at her post awaiting my arrival and I managed the 13 steps of the first flight of stairs, but it was touch and go for the final two or three. I’m not ready for further exertions yet.
And how glad was I to be back in my apartment? I sat down for a while to recover and then made tea – vegan pie and steamed veg followed by rice pudding
Bed-time now and tomorrow I have to Fight the Good Fight and sort out this music ready to write out the notes.
But talking of my favourite taxi driver … "well, one of us is" – ed … reminds me of the story about the difference between a Parisian bus driver and a bus driver from Marseilles that I told a friend of mine
So I asked her if she knew
"No" she replied. "What’s the difference?"
"In Paris" I said "you shouldn’t speak to the bus driver."
"And Marseilles?" she asked
"In Marseilles" I replied "you shouldn’t reply to the bus driver."
