Tag Archives: steve winwood

Saturday 18th January 2025 – ANOTHER THREE HOURS ..

… and thirty minutes of sheer, unadulterated agony this afternoon as once more, one of the nurses managed to find the “sensitive spot” in whatever it was that they did in that hospital in the summer.

Whatever else happens in this hospital, I can’t go on like this. I’m sure that dialysis isn’t supposed to be this painful.

At least I can console myself that I’m not suffering as much as the guy who usually comes with me on a Thursday and Saturday. I asked why we hadn’t seen him for a few days and was told "he comes in an ambulance now. He’s had a bad fall"

The only fall in which I’m interested right now is to fall from my chair into bed as I’m exhausted.

It was another late night last night. Just as I was going to bed, a “Traffic” concert came round on the playlist and that’s another “must” to stay up and listen to, especially when there’s an 11-minute version of SOMETIMES I FEEL SO UNINSPIRED and almost 10 minutes of DEAR MR FANTASY.

Anyway, once we returned to normality I crawled off to bed, with the words of Steve Winwood echoing around my head –
"sometimes I feel like my head is spinning
Hunger and pain is all I see
I don’t know who’s losing
And I don’t care who’s winning
Hardships and trouble are following me".
My head is definitely spinning, I can certainly feel pain and while I’m not suffering any hardship – those days are long gone – I’m definitely being followed by a heap of trouble right now. What is worse is that it’s all of my own making too.

Those troubles kept me awake once more and it seemed like an age before I finally drifted off to sleep.

When the alarm went off this morning. I was away on my travels, with a shower that I had to repair so the first thing was to drain the tank. I profited from that by having myself a nice hot shower. I disconnected the shower hose so the pump was on the wall in the bathroom so I took off the pump from the wall and lowered it down a little. This forced the water out of the pump which then drained into the bath. I put the shower pump down, about halfway down the wall so that it was about halfway down to the level – so the water in the tank was halfway down, and put the pump there so that it was drained off the top half. I was sitting there contemplating what to do next when the alarm went off. I was really disappointed because I was enjoying that.

So don’t tell me that all of my nocturnal skills, about which I have so boasted in the past, have deserted me during this crisis through which I’m going right now. It’s the one thing on which I could rely in the past and with the right kind of support, I could have made millions from the skills that I never knew that I had

It was a desperate struggle to rise to my feet and go into the bathroom before the next alarm went off but I just about made it. And then a desperate discovery – that I’ve run out of clean sweaters. Nothing else for it but to put last week’s back on. I have just about enough of other clothes to have a good change but I really am going to have to overhaul my wardrobe. What am I going to do with all my Arctic clothing for a start?

Having washed and shaved, I put the bedding from last week into the washing machine with a selection of other dirty clothing and let the machine do its stuff. Then I wandered off for my medication, remembering to take my “sunlight” Vitamin D.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out what else has been going on during the night. There was something about an extremely valuable – well, not valuable but a historic plate that was of great significance between me and some young lady and I don’t know who she was. I had to keep it safe so I hid it under my coat but as I moved, I broke it. A V-shaped piece fell out of it. I was thinking “how am I now going to repair this so that it will be the correct type of plate and that no-one will notice that it’s damaged.

In fact, I really didn’t know who she was. She didn’t resemble anyone whom I might know at all

There was also something about people who were working in Crewe Works. They had to cycle a certain way around the Queen’s Park and would reach a point where someone was waiting. When they reached that point they would have to turn round and cycle back towards the Works. They couldn’t take a short cut by turning around earlier but they all had to go to where this particular guy was standing in the middle of the road.

“Queen’s Park”, or, at least, the road around the back of it by the Golf Club, and “Crewe Works” – that is, the Railway Works – are playing something of a role in what’s going on right now in my mind so it’s inevitable, I suppose, that they should put in an appearance at some point. No sign of Moonchild though. She didn’t come dancing through the shallows of the river into my dreams last night

But what’s sad about this is that I can remember when half of the town was covered in the various branches of the Railway Works and when every boy in the town was destined to become an apprentice in either “The Works” or “Royce’s”. The town was flooded out with bicycles at chucking-out time, and how much like a ghost town it was during “Works Week” – all that was missing were the tumbleweeds. Nowadays Crewe is a ghost town all the time, but for different reasons. There is nothing whatever left of its railway heritage and even the big multi-storey “Rail House” is empty and threatened with demolition

Isabelle was in and out in a new world-record time today. She doesn’t seem to be so keen on stopping and chatting as she used to. Perhaps word about me is filtering around the town

After she went, I made my breakfast and carried on reading MY BOOK.

For a change, I’m not going to post any selected comments because firstly, I don’t know enough about the subjects that he’s discussing – it’s all conjecture unsupported by any evidence anyway, and secondly, because his invective and abuse has become tiresome to read and even more tiresome to repeat. I shan’t be sorry to finish this book and start the next one.

Back in here I carried on with the radio notes and they still aren’t finished. Once more I was caught in flagrante delicto by my cleaner who surprised me by her arrival when I wasn’t expecting her. She fitted my anaesthetic patches and we didn’t have long to wait for the taxi to come for me.

Just me in the car today with the driver. Apparently the other passenger who usually accompanies my on a Saturday has had a bad fall and goes to dialysis in an ambulance now.

Everything was running horribly late at the Centre today and it took hours to plug everyone in. That can’t be why it hurt so much because the first pin went in much less painlessly. Anyway, I didn’t enjoy it at all.

As usual, once the pump started up I crashed out and I was away for quite a while. So much so that my coffee that had been brought to me while I was asleep was stone-cold.

Before crashing out though, I was hallucinating again as I did the other day. This time there was something about me being on board a Spanish Galleon but I didn’t stroke it this time to see if it was real..

That miserable doctor was on duty today and he managed a brief “hello” as he passed by my bed. And that was my lot. I must be thankful for that, I suppose

Unplugging me was just as painful as plugging me in and how I wish that it wasn’t. The same driver who brought me was waiting to take me back and we had a guided tour of his Head Office at Marcey les Grèves on the way home. I’m convinced that he is in some way charged with the running of the place in some capacity.

Anyway, he’s confirmed that I’ll be picked up in principle at 07:45 on Wednesday for my trip to dialysis followed by my taxi to Paris at lunchtime afterwards.

It’s freezing outside tonight, literally freezing, at 0°C so I was glad to be in the warmth indoors even if climbing up these stairs doesn’t seem to have become any easier just recently.

Tea tonight was a breaded quorn fillet with baked potatoes and salad, which was nice as usual, especially when followed by chocolate cake and soya yoghurt.

So now i have to dictate what I wrote earlier in the week and then finish off the lot that’s half-way done sometime. I need to go back too and review the couple of weeks that are missing and have another think about what I’m going to do. I can’t leave it until the last moment to come up with a plan.

So I’ll do that and then go to bed – to make the most of my little lie-in

But in the radio programme notes that I was writing, I was writing something about Caravan’s album A BLIND DOG AT ST DUNSTAN’S
St Dunstan’s was a Charity in London created to care for Blind People and is famously known for its hotel in Brighton which was praised for its "magnificent views over the Downs and out to Sea" – the sense of irony being totally lost on the writers.
But the title of the album relates to a story that one day a little boy saw a male dog mount a female dog.
"What’s that big dog doing, daddy?" asked the little boy
"Well," stuttered daddy nervously, "the dog at the bottom is blind, and the one on top is helping him, pushing him along to St Dunstan’s."

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Monday 24th April 2023 – THAT WAS DIFFICULT!

With nothing much better to do today, I decided that I’d do this radio programme about the 14th July.

It wasn’t easy because I had all of the music, including the very, very last track already in my mind so I had to make sure that the speech fitted all of the gaps in between the music. I know that with the way that I speak, 300 characters of text is the equivalent of 17 seconds of speech so I can make sure that I’m always somewhere in the right kind of area, but that doesn’t take into account the fact that song lengths are often not as published and there’s quite often a silence at the beginning or end. And so it can quite often be rather hit-and-miss, especially if my maths aren’t up to much.

So no-one was more surprised than me to find myself almost a minute short of where I needed to be.

Luckily, when I’d been preparing the programme I’d made a reserve selection of appropriate songs of various lengths and so with a little judicious editing I managed to fit in Lindisfarne’s “Bring Down The Government” with some explanatory text.

It still wasn’t right though and I ended up having to re-dictate a couple of speeches and then do yet more editing. What with one thing and another (and once you get started you’d be surprised at how many other things there are) it was 21:00 when I finally finished.

It was some real good fortune that I actually felt like doing it too because I had another wretched night. I was in bed reasonably early but once again it took me an age to go off to sleep. I awoke again at 04:15 and couldn’t go back to sleep. I watched the dawn slowly rise but I must have gone back to sleep at some point because when the alarm went off at 07:00 it was a real shock to the system.

With the nurse coming today to give me my injection I had to have a shower otherwise he wouldn’t have come in through the door. So of course he has to come quite early today while I’m still soaking myself. That was rather embarrassing.

And he has to come back on Thursday to take a blood sample, so later on this week I’ll be doing another dartboard impression. At this rate I’ll be more comfortable sleeping on a bed of nails but I bet that someone would tell me to fakir off.

Next task that interrupted me was the dictaphone, to see where I’d been last night. Nothing like what I’d been up to on previous nights but then again it wasn’t as if I’d had much sleep. I was out with Steve Winwood last night for some strange reason. There was talk of forming a group but nothing ever came of it. We went to an Indian restaurant somewhere, one that I’d been told was good. As I didn’t know how to go to it, it was in a completely different town, we had to go all around the houses. We arrived and they began to serve us. It was a very strict place. Everything was very formal. We ordered our starters and he went to go to the bathroom. Someone on another table obviously recognised him and asked him what numbers he was going to perform with his new band. He mentioned a few songs and then walked off. I could hear him talking to someone in the distance but I couldn’t see him, going on about the restaurant and how he didn’t expect such a posh, formal place etc. One of the things that I asked him was that I read somewhere that the very first chord he ever played on a guitar was Dflat. I asked him why. He said that it sounded good. I asked if it was the opening chord maybe to a song. he made a very non-commital reply to that which I thought was bizarre.

Later on a group of us was walking up a mountain pass. At the side of the road there were 4 or 5 cars that were parked. Then there was a very sharp bend. Round this bend coming towards us was a cattle wagon, a big heavy thing that was fully-loaded. he took the bend really wide because of his length and almost knocked the wall down into the valley then drove straight into the back of one of these vehicles. he didn’t stop. He kept on trying to push this vehicle forward into all the others to push them to give him more room to turn. Someone shouted “camera” so I took out my camera and began to take a couple of photos. It was only then that he stopped and got out to inspect the damage. By now he’s transformed into a yellow school bus. 3 people came with a huge bag and had to clamber onto the roof at the back of the coach in order to put the bag on the roof rack. Another girl appeared. She went round to the front and said to the driver something like “I was on this bus yesterday and I think that I might have left something on board”. This was probably the most surreal thing that I’d ever witnessed

And then, in between everything else, I dealt with the radio programme.

Tea was a delicious stuffed pepper. And what I did was to turn down the air fryer 20° and to cook it twice as long as I did last week. That cooked it to perfection.

Plenty of stuffing left over for a taco roll tomorrow and for a leftover curry on Wednesday. That’s what i’m looking forward to more than anything because, of course, I have a naan bread awaiting me. I’m really impressed with the naan breads that I made and I’ll make another batch of them.

What I’ll have to do though is to remember that the dough expands considerably so instead of making the batch into three lumps, I’ll have to make it into four or even five.

But never mind – it’s still delicious.

Tomorrow I have my Welsh lesson so I need to be on form, and then on Wednesday I go to sign the purchase agreement for my new apartment.

And then the fun will begin.

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Thursday 13th October 2022 – I WAS NOT …

… alone in bed last night. I’d just curled up and settled down quietly to go to sleep when suddenly there was a thud on the bed and some thing pushed a black and furry head into my chin.

Sure enough, Cujo the Killer Cat had decided to come to join me. She curled up next to me and went to sleep. All in all, she was there for an hour or so, changing position every 15 minutes or so to make herself more comfortable while I of course was becoming even more uncomfortable, but in the end she jumped off, ate a couple of cat biscuits and went off for a prowl around the house.

Anyone who knows anything at all about cats will know that this is simply normal, usual behaviour. When we were married Nerina and I had four cats so you can imagine how that worked out. Here, there are three cats but so far only Culo the Killer Cat has found me on a permanent basis. Oscar, the ginger and white cat, found his way onto the bed at one point but Gilligan, the young long-haired cat not at all.

With Cujo waking me up during the night, I forgot about a dream that I was having. I was having a lovely dream, but with Cujo the Killer Cat coming to join me I awoke and most of it went immediately out of my head. But there was some woman telling me that she’d let me know if something happened again and so on. Unfortunately I can’t remember what that was or anything but it was really nice wonderful comfortable dream.

And later, we were talking about defence in World War I and how the new German heavy machine gun was supposed to be the best. They fortified all of their railway stations and places like that with examples of their heavy machine gun

I stepped back into that dream some time later .Our unit had been badly shot up in World War I and we were being evacuated from the Front with a pile of wounded. One of the wounded was a French private and I spent a lot of time chatting to him. He was in complete agony. Eventually we found some road transport that brought us into the city centre of Verdun. Luckily he was one of the first off the transport into the hospital. I asked the nurse if he’d been shot with a machine gun. She replied “yes”. I asked what were his chances of recovery because he had a seizure. A few of these nurses came rushing round to him but he pulled his way through this seizure. They turned to me and said “he’ll be OK now that he’s gone through that. There will be no worry with him”.

Finally, I’d gone to a mobile phone shop because I wanted to download from my mobile phone an album that had been supplied free with the ‘phone. I couldn’t find which directory it was in despite knowing the name of the musician … "it was Steve Winwood" – ed. The first thing that I noticed was that he typed my phone n° into his computer and immediately had access to the contents of my phone via some kind of remote connection. He could see everything that I had on my phone, what my desktop was, etc. He hadn’t asked me for permission to do that and in any case I didn’t think that he could use his computer to view the contents of my phone from his desk. I was absolutely appalled. I was going to write to as many people as I possibly could to make this kind of thing known to them. I thought that it was awful that they could just type my number into their computer and see on their screen the contents of my phone and what I had visible on my screen at that moment.

When the alarm went off there were still people moving around the house and so I waited until everyone left before I arose from the dead.

The first thing that I did was to transcribe the dictaphone notes, that you have already seen.

Next plan was to book some accommodation for the next couple of stages of my journey. I’m leaving here in 10 days so I have to make sure that I have somewhere to stay.

It’s not easy because I have no Canadian ‘phone these days for the bank to send me some verification instructions for payment, so I have to book into these “pay on arrival” places and there aren’t too many of those

Next step was to try to find some freight companies to ship this sunroof back to Europe. After much research I found a couple of freight forwarding companies in Saint John and I’ve been in touch with them. Whether or not they reply is something else completely.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that receiving replies to e-mails that I send off to try to organise something or other is something that very rarely happens. Everyone complains that there’s a recession and that business is difficult but my own experience is that no-one really wants to do any work.

After lunch I had to go and measure my parcels. Having turned out the cab of Strider I couldn’t find my tape measure. Luckiiy though when I was in IKEA in the summer I’d picked up a measuring tape and it was still in my little bag so I managed to do it after a fashion.

They need to be weighed but I can’t lift them on my own. I shall have to wait for assistance.

One thing that I’d noticed was that it looked as if someone had been growing potatoes in Strider’s cab. I found an old yard brush and swept out as much as I could. He really needs a good vacuuming too as he’s full of dust. I’ll bet that he’ll go 5mph faster when I’ve done all that.

While I was out there, I noticed something quite amusing. Cujo the Killer Cat lived up to her name and brought back a live mouse to the front of the house. She dropped it off in front of Gilligan, the young long-haired cat, and was teaching him how to hunt it.

He performed a few practice pounces on it but after a while he lost interest. Cujo couldn’t incite him to continue so in the end she picked up the mouse and wandered off into a quiet corner to deal with it herself.

However I’m not sure what had happened because back in here I crashed out – and for all of three hours too. I must have been completely exhausted after all of my efforts for the last couple of days.

Tea tonight was more of my Chinese meal from yesterday and then I spent a good while chatting to Rachel. Consequently I’m late going to bed.

There’s plenty to do tomorrow so I need a good night’s sleep. That is, unless Cujo the Killer Cat comes to join me tonight.

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Saturday 5th December 2009 – I’m all nice and clean for a change.

90 minutes in the swimming baths at Neris today followed by a nice warm shower – did me the world of good and when I change the bedding in a few minutes it will be wonderful. I’m going to have a nice lie-in as well tomorrow morning and make the most of it.

Montlucon shopping this morning, and I spent a fortune. Mind you, much of that was stuff for Christmas so it’s not unexpected. But I didn’t get myself a present though. Strange as it may seem, I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted and there definitely isn’t really anything that I need. I did however find some interesting DVDs in NOZ, the cheapo rubbishy shop that sells all kinds of end-of-range stuff. Their music selection is at times pretty good. Most French people haven’t heard of many obscure British or American musicians – that’s how I managed to buy that Nice triple-album a couple of months ago. But today, in the music DVD selection they had a huge collection of DVDs of live concerts. Most were rubbish but there were concerts by Tom Petty, Steve Winwood and by Steppenwolf. So at €3:50 a time I’ll be having a megamusic session on Christmas Day.

I’ve got some better prices for my new tyres too – a saving of about €40 and that includes Michelin “Alpine” winter tyres as well. Even at … errrr …. €360 for three tyres I reckon I might go for this.

fcpsh football club de foot pionsat st hilaire montfermyThis evening I saw Pionsat’s 3rd XI draw 1-1 with Montfermy. And they will be kicking themselves for the 2 points dropped rather that the one point gained, for Montfermy were by far and away the worst side I have ever seen and Pionsat’s 3rd XI had some good players out this evening too. And for once the defence played an immaculate game with the central defenders being in position and not wandering away for the whole of the match. They should have demolished this side.

Anyway, an early night beckons. And so does my clean bedding.

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