Tag Archives: tidying up

Friday 24th July 2026 – THERE HAS BEEN …

… some astonishing news released today in respect of the Welsh football pyramid. One of the all-time greats is back – and he’s fifty-three!

The news is bound to upset former million-pound striker Lee Trundle, who’s still turning out for Cwmbran Town at fifty and who has been the oldest player in the pyramid for quite some considerable time.

Marc LLoyd Williams was a legendary player in the Welsh Premier League for over two decades, as well as several spells in the English football league with clubs like Stockport County, Halifax Town and York City. He played 467 games in the Welsh Premier League and scored a record 319 goals in that time. In the 2001/2002 season he scored 47 goals, a total that would have won him the European Golden Boot had it not been for Wales’s low coefficient.

He retired at the end of season 2013/2014 and since then has been a TV pundit and coach for some of Wales’s youth teams but the news today is that he has signed for Locomotive Llanberis as a player. All I can say to him is “good luck. Nice to see you back”

That’s a nicer thing that I said to myself when I awoke this morning at … errr … 02:30. It may well be that I’d gone to bed last night at 21:45 or something like that that had caused me to be awake so early, but that’s not what I was thinking at all.

So at 02:30, there I was, trying hard to go back to sleep but with no success whatsoever. I lay here and slowly watched the day begin to dawn. However, at one point I must have gone back to sleep because I suddenly awoke, bolt-upright, at 06:18.

When the alarm went off, I was already sitting on the edge of the bed claiming my early start. But, as usual, summoning up the strength and enthusiasm to go to the bathroom was something else completely.

First off, though, was that I had a thirst that you could photograph, and so I went into the kitchen for a drink of water with a good squeeze of lemon in it.

Once in the bathroom, I sorted myself out and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

Our little travel club had gone to London because one of the girls was living there. We went to see her and have a good chat to make up old times, but she was saying that she had to go to pick up her new car today, and everyone whom she’d asked to drive her there had let her down. I said that there wasn’t very much that we could do because we didn’t have a car, but she went on for quite a while about this. In the end, she said “come on, let’s go” and walked out. There was her car, a white four-door Fiesta. I noticed that one of the doors wasn’t fitting properly so I asked her about it. She said that it’s not been bolted in. It’s just wedged in. She explained that she’d had a problem with one of the doors, and some English guy who ran a car repair place in Belgium had sorted out a door for her for five pounds. So we went into London and ended up where this event was taking place but it was not really good at all. There was nothing much happening, so we decided to leave. For some reason or other, I’d been eating a whole pile of paper, and all of a sudden, I had to spit it out. I just opened the door and spat out all this paper that I’d eaten and another huge load besides. I was sure that everyone thought that I was being ill. Eventually we found a private members’ club and we were able to order drinks there. Then we had to catch a bus right across London to Victoria Station to find our way home. I felt terribly disappointed because I thought that we all might have been asked to stay but we had to leave … fell asleep here … We were lucky because we found four seats on the tram and the tram was packed to the gunwales with everyone on it, people trying to leave through the “in” door by the driver. It was a total mass of confusion. There were two girls for some reason standing in the pathway of a tram on an adjacent line to ours. It was raining and pouring down, so our tram and theirs had their windscreen wipers working. Eventually, we arrived at where we were going, and one of the girls took us all up these side streets, which I probably thought was a short cut to the station but we’d have to see about that. There was a car pulling out of the kerb so I had to walk round it. The one that was behind it pulled out of the kerb and hit me, so we made a really impressive impact on the driver of that vehicle. The guy who had sold one of us that door, he asked if I’d had my van fixed. I replied “no” so he said that he’d be available after August if I wanted him.

There are a lot of things in this dream that mean something. My three friends, for a start. We’ve travelled miles together, one way or another, all over Europe.

The car, too, currently means something, complete with the missing door. And so does moving between Brussels and London

Many other items fit into events in real life, too numerous to explain, so I reckon that this dream is all about me sorting myself out one way or another.

The nurse turned up as usual, and we had a good chat about bikes and responsibilities while he was dealing with my feet. And then he cleared off, and I could push on and make my breakfast.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.

We’ve reached the end of the summary, having to wade through page after page of nonsense such as "Much of Europe was still pagan ; during a long portion of this period the Church among many Teutonic nations retained a missionary aspect; and even in Christian countries the Church had not arrived at her full influence. Finally, towards the end of the period the civil and spiritual powers came into open collision, the dispute on investitures roused Europe to its very centre."

There was also "its glorious successor speaks of days when the Church had leavened the world, and, instead of missionaries labouring and dying among Pagan Danes and Saxons, sent forth from those very lands the warriors of the Cross to fight for the holiest spots of their religion.".

It seems that even the church and its ministers, such as Freeman have totally forgotten what is the message of Jesus, Exodus chap. 20 verse 13 and Deuteronomy chap. 5 verse 17.

Right now, we’ve passed on to Arabian architecture. I was expecting all kinds of offensive comments about Arabian architecture from him, and I wasn’t disappointed. We started with "But considered as a real work of architecture, any second-rate production of Grecian, Romanesque, or Gothic art, must rank far above their most splendid monuments. Their splendour is mere barbaric magnificence superadded to fantastic and inconsistent forms, lifeless germs which existed for ages without developing into the features which would seem to be their natural results" and it all went south from there.

Back in here, I had things to do, such as check the Leclerc order that I was about to send off, and then I could finish off the notes from yesterday. Although not without a struggle. You’ve no idea how many times I went to sleep and almost fell off my chair while I was working

Just before midday, I suddenly had this flash of memory – “the washing!” I’d promised my cleaner that I would do the washing today, ready for her to hang out when she comes this afternoon to do her stuff. I usually start it at 10:00 because it takes an age to do, so I hope that it has time to do its cycle.

Round about 13:00 I stopped for a disgusting drink break and the midday medication, and I was caught in flagrante delicto by my faithful cleaner. She set about doing her stuff, and we chatted for a while before I wandered back into here and set about doing some work.

But not for long, though. At 15:25 Leclerc turned up with my load of shopping. And although there wasn’t much, it still took a load of manoeuvre to fit all the frozen food into the freezer and the cool stuff into the fridge. And there was plenty other stuff to put in the cupboards and shelves. It’s becoming quite an art to pack it all away.

Round about 19:30, there was a calamity somewhere. All of the police cars turned up in the car park near us. There were sirens blowing, people shouting, policemen shouting and using the little new loudspeakers and microphones. I’ve still no idea what they are up to, but my cleaner thinks that it’s some kind of demonstration or rehearsal for something

Tea tonight was delicious sausage and chips with baked beans cooked with cheese and black pepper. It’s absolutely wonderful, especially when followed by two slices of my fruit bread.

So now that I’ve finished my notes and checked over everything that I need to do, I’m off to bed before I fall asleep again.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Ten Commandments … "well, one of us has" – ed … Moses came down from Mount Sinai, and all the people gathered round him. “It looked like the Crewe Carnival procession” he said later.
"Come on, Moses" they urged him. "Tell us the news."
"There’s good news and there’s bad news" he replied.
"Tell us the good news, Moses"
"The good news is that I’ve got him down to ten"
"What’s the bad news, Moses?"
"The bad news? Well, he wouldn’t budge on adultery."

Friday 17th July 2026 – AFTER THE DISASTER …

… of yesterday, today has been a much more satisfying, and a much more productive day, and for once in a long, long time, I am happy with what I have accomplished.

Not that you might have thought so during the night. What with one thing and another … "and until you make a start, you have no idea just how many other things there are" – ed … it was 23:45 when I finally crawled into bed last night, looking forward to my long, uninterrupted sleep.

And there I stayed, too, until all of 02:03 (I checked). At that point, an enormous coughing fit awoke me (yes, the antibiotics stopped a week ago) and I couldn’t go back to sleep again.

At some point, though, I must have done, but it wasn’t for long and I was awake again, watching the darkness gradually turn into daylight as the sunlight slowly began to creep round the edges of the shutters.

The alarm shattered my reverie, and to my surprise, it didn’t take long for me to have my feet on the floor. Mind you, having my feet on the floor is one thing. Standing upright on them is something else completely.

Once I’d summoned up the enthusiasm and the energy, I went to sort myself out in the bathroom and then came back in here.

I had my CX500 out, so I thought that I’d go to see my friend on the Wirral. I went all the way there, but he wasn’t in. It turned out that he was in the local bar, so I went to look for it and there, I joined him. We were chatting about things and he mentioned that there was some kind of motorcycle rally taking place over the weekend in his area. We carried on chatting for a while and then I asked him if he wanted me to come up on the weekend to go to this rally, but he said “no”. I thought “there’s not much point carrying on this conversation” so I went to begin to go home. But I had no headlight on the motorbike. There was a sidelight but no headlight. First of all, I went down to another pub and had half of bitter. That was absolutely packed and I had trouble trying to find a seat. There was someone in there saying “God, this place is just packed with people drinking” so I shouted out “so what did you expect to find in a pub?” that brought a whole roar of laughter from most of the people in there. When I went to go, I climbed onto the motorbike and made sure that the sidelight at least was working, started up the bike and headed for home. But I was halfway down Electricity Street and Alton Street before I realised that I was going the wrong way, so I turned the motorbike round and headed for home. I stopped off on the way at a friend’s house in Winsford. He found a headlight bulb so I went to try it in the motorbike and it actually worked. I thanked my friend and my father. This other guy was here, he from the Wirral. He said to my dad and his friend “do you want to see two motor scooters?”. They had no interest in that so they said “no”, but it turned out that they were two types from Eastern Europe. One was a Korno but I don’t know what the other one was. Eventually, they went to see them but they were distracted by four kittens that came out of the garage. One of the kittens I knew, but I didn’t know the three others. When he went away to do something, my father, his friend and I just stayed there looking at these kittens.

There’s lots of mileage in this dream.

My father and his friend are here again, after making an appearance a couple of days ago. My father, I can understand, but not his friend, about whom I haven’t thought for something like thirty-five years.
As for my friend, there is a pub just around the corner from where he used to live. And there is actually a funny story about it, but the World is not yet ready to hear it.
He was also extremely moody and his rather abrupt “no” wouldn’t have been any surprise in real life.
Why I would be in Alton Street and Electricity Street (in Crewe) when I’m supposed to be on the Wirral, and coming home via Winsford is totally mystifying me.
The friend with the lock-up garages (and the kittens) is a different friend completely than the one on the Wirral.
In that particular friend’s garages, you might well be likely to find a couple of rare motor scooters from Eastern Europe, but as far as I have been able to find, there was nothing called a “Korno”. However, there is a village of that name in the Czech Republic.

And probably much more besides.

There was also a dream about me having a very tight timetable for the place where I worked. There was talk that I’d be having a few days off from the Wednesday to the following Tuesday to go to see a concert by a German composer, somewhere on the north coast of Scotland on the Saturday night. Nerina would be going with me and so would my brother and his wife. We met in a pub to discuss what I thought was the trip but it turned out that they had no intention whatever of going. They couldn’t recall mentioning it in the past, but I was certain that they did. But I’d warned everyone at work, but obviously we aren’t going now so it doesn’t matter.

Not that I’m likely to be going anywhere with my brother and his wife, a classical music concert wouldn’t be of all that much interest to me.

But the idea of organising everything and having it all fall apart at the last moment is nothing new whatsoever, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. It’s something that happened frequently in the old days. As for working to a tight schedule, I’m sure that you have seen plenty of evidence of this.

But there was one boy who was fed up with having porridge and things like that for breakfast and was agitating his parents to have sandwiches. I hoped that that didn’t happen because I enjoyed my porridge in the morning.

This is something that I dread happening. Breakfast, with my porridge and toast, is just about the only meal I really enjoy these days and it would be an absolute catastrophe if I were to lose my appetite for it.

And that reminds me – regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve been talking a lot about the loss of my appetite following the chemotherapy sessions that I had. While I was browsing through these pages looking for something in particular, I came across this quote –
"At lunchtime, I had some vegan cheese on my butty and I’m a little disturbed because the taste seems to have changed. It hasn’t – it’s that my taste buds have changed since I’ve had chemotherapy and that’s disturbing me. It’s one of the reasons that I’m off my food right now. I don’t really fancy anything to eat and the idea of eating anything greasy makes me queasy."

That’s a quote from the first time that I had chemotherapy, and in particular the ENTRY FROM 10th APRIL 2016 – over ten years ago. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.

The nurse was a little later than usual today, and he wittered away about nothing in particular while he dealt with my legs and feet. After he left, I could make breakfast and read some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.

At the moment, he’s having an interesting discussion on the difficulties that people had back in his day almost two hundred years ago, telling the difference between Anglo-Sacon and Norman stonework.

If you ever see them close together these days now that we know so much more, there’s no difficulty in recognising the differences

You can see the difference here in this photograph that I took of St Mary Magdalen Church in Geddington. The Anglo-Saxon stonework is on the left and straight ahead over the arch. Then round to the right, where it all becomes so much neater, that’s the Norman stonework. The Normans had much more experience of stonework than did the Anglo-Saxons, what with everything that they built in Normandy prior to the Battle of Hastings.

Back in here, I had the usual few things to do, and then I attacked the notes for this concert on which I’d been working. They are now all written and ready for typing.

After that, there was one that I started a week or two back, and that’s now all done too and ready for broadcasting, although that won’t be for a while just yet.

There were the odd interruptions while I was doing that. First of all, there was a disgusting drink break with the lunchtime medication, and then my faithful cleaner turned up to do her stuff.

While she was here, I had her take two of the drawers out of the freezer, and I sat on the chair and went through them, sorting them out. Some stuff was binned but the rest is now organised and I know what I’ve got and where it is. And doesn’t that make a change?

Back in here and after the radio stuff was finished, I began to tidy up the mass of papers that was hanging around in here. That’s mostly now done too. As I said, it’s been a very productive day.

However, I didn’t ‘arf have a fright. While I was looking at something out of the window, a big bird, probably a seagull, flew slap-bang head-first right into it. The noise was astonishing and I thought that the window had broken, but it remained intact.

I told my cleaner about it, and she went outside to look but there was no evidence of anything.

Not like the owl that flew into the window of a place where I was staying in Leuven.

The poor bird – an owl by the looks of things – quite clearly left his mark on the glass there, and I don’t think that he could have survived a collision like that. But on my window, there’s not a trace.

Later on, it was time for tea. Chips, sausage and baked beans – the beans cooked with freshly ground black pepper and vegan cheese. Delicious as always.

And for pudding, I had some of the fruit bread that I made a few days ago. It’s a little dry, but the taste is magnificent and I’m really happy with that.

So now it’s bedtime, ready for dialysis tomorrow … "I don’t think" – ed …

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about appetites … "well, one of us has" – ed … a young guy takes a young girl out for a meal. To his surprise, she orders almost everything on the menu. And then she gulps it down.
"Blimey!" said the boy. "Do you eat like this at home?"
"No" she replies. "No-one wants to sleep with me there."

Wednesday 15th July 2026 – IT HAS BEEN …

… a slightly better day today (I think) following the exertions of the last few days and I’ve been feeling a little more like it, which makes a change. Even though it’s only a little more, every sign of improvement is welcomed.

Not that you would have thought so last night. It was another late night when it should have been an early one, but as usual, I can’t seem to concentrate enough these days to push on without being side-tracked.

And as you might expect, with it being the quatorze juillet last night, there was an impressive, mammoth firework display down at the port. And it started up the minute that I climbed into bed.

That was guaranteed to cheer me up as I was desperately trying to go to sleep, as you can imagine.

These days, I’m in no fit state to walk to the edge of the cliffs on the other side of the headland to take photographs of the events, so I’ve posted a photo that I took in 2022 when I was still able to walk around.

Once the racket was over, I tried to go to sleep, but it seemed to take longer, longer than ever last night. And when I finally did, waking up at about 01:30 and again at 02:20 was certainly not part of the olan.

That second time, I had a great deal of difficulty going back to sleep, but somehow I managed it, only to wake up again at 06:15. At that point, I could have gone for an early start and slid my feet out of the bed onto the floor, but I decided against it and curled up in bed to make the most of what I could of these remaining fifteen minutes.

When the alarm went off, it was the usual struggle for me to rise to my feet – maybe fifteen minutes or so – and then I staggered off into the bathroom to sort myself out for the day.

Back in here, the first job was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was dictating my notes on Canada during the night. It was one of Darren’s friends who turned up in a big Cadillac and wanted to have a chat with me. We went off for a chat and we were in some kind of schoolroom, and there was this old man there who was worrying everyone about his problems, and no-one else was allowed to have any problems unless they accepted his, all that kind of thing. People tried to sit him down and talk to him but he just refused, so I’d written out an invitation for him to come along and have a chat, but seeing as I thought that I wasn’t going to waste my time, I screwed it up and threw it in the bin. I put something on the notice board but I folded it over so that no-one else could see it, but if he wanted to, he could undo it and read the message. Then, the boss came down and said that he had committed suicide and wanted to know what we knew about it. We all repeated this story about what had happened, but he found my letter that I’d screwed up and thrown away in the waste bin, so he immediately began to connect me with all of this. He was interrogating me quite closely, but I was saying that I was just telling him what I saw and what happened, and not forming any opinions of my own at all. Then I had to write out my notes about my visit to Canada. I started off with a piece of A4 and a pen, but I thought that I may as well write it out first or last onto the computer. So I started the computer, but somehow I was back with these pieces of paper and a pen and I must have had five attempts with these papers and pen before I was able to sit down and start on the computer.

Darren in Canada actually does know someone very well who has a Cadillac, but it was certainly not him last night. Anyway, here’s a photo of the car in all its glory, just to liven up events.

The story of the old man relates to nothing that I can recall, but the piece of paper in the bin has some kind of relation to an event probably fifty years ago, and it’s strange that it should suddenly occur right now.

The idea of writing out by hand my dictaphone notes is strange too. Today, my first instinct when transcribing them would be to reach for a computer keyboard. Having five attempts with a paper and pen beforehand would be a very strange way for me to go about things these days.

But something else on here was that my elder sister and her husband put in some kind of appearance. They had come into a little bit of money so they were talking about buying a couple of cars to clean up and sell them. My sister asked her husband about prices for cars and he replied “what do I know? Where can I find out?”. I pointed them in the direction of the Auto Trader magazine and told them to take out a monthly subscription, but if they are going to do this on a regular basis, they may as well try to get hold of Glass’s Guide, which is something that values vehicles much more precisely than the Auto Trader stuff.

This is probably the most unlikely dream that I have ever had, I reckon. My elder sister and her husband would certainly not be interested in messing around with cars, not under any circumstances at all. So why I dreamt it, I have no idea.

I’d put some secondary double glazing in the windows of my apartment. I’d rescued them from an old solicitor’s office so they had something and “solicitor” written on them that people could see from outside, so I ended up having one or two enquiries about this kind of thing. Someone came along and asked me to try to find a girl who had gone missing, so I said that I’d see what I could do. I went round to see her family – it was an Italian father-type figure with a young blonde-haired wife. It turned out that this daughter was the daughter of his first wife who had died, and the girl was still in existence and still living, although she’s not lived at home for a few years. All in all, he quite satisfied me that what he was saying was correct. Then, he asked me to stay around because he might need my services at some point, so I stayed around and he chatted to me for a while. In the end, he wanted to begin to upset a couple of nurses’ homes in the area, finding ways to annoy them. I tried to find out what they had done to annoy him, but he wouldn’t say, but he went about it in his own way with no help from me. I noticed that he was becoming increasingly more bitter as the time went on. It was then that I found him standing in a doorway looking into the room, so I went to look into the room too. There was some kind of monster there … "the bit that goes here has been edited out" – ed … Eventually, he explained to me that that was his son by his first wife and was born terribly handicapped and deformed. That was the reason why he had killed his first wife, and this is the reason why he’s wanting to attack these nurses’ homes. His wife said in the end that all he seems to think about is his son. He doesn’t think anything at all about anything else.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s not usually my habit to edit out parts of my dreams. If they are the disagreeable or violent ones, I usually don’t publish anything about them, but this one was so interesting, apart from the bit that you really don’t want to read and you’ll thank me for not publishing it, that it needs to be published as far as it’s appropriate to do so.

The apartment that I had was a modern one, not this one here, on the second floor of a building and the plot seemed to be something of a cross between FAREWELL MY LOVELY starring Robert Mitchum, and Michael Caine’s PULP, ironically two of my favourite films and how anyone can give “Pulp” a one-star rating is totally beyond my comprehension.

But I’m not quite sure of what to make of this dream. It was certainly disturbing, but on the other hand, it was certainly interesting and compelling. I just wish that I knew what its significance was because, apart from those two films, it relates to absolutely nothing that I can recall. Certainly nothing recently.

Incidentally, throughout these pages, you’ll see links to Amazon products appearing every now and again. Being a Sales Associate of Amazon, I receive a small commission on goods sold via my links. It costs you nothing at all extra, but helps defray … "part of the" – ed … cost of my not-insubstantial web-hosting fees.

There are also links for AMAZON UK, AMAZON USA and, since the recent “troubles”, AMAZON CANADA for the use of my numerous Canadian visitors. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I am extremely grateful when someone uses them to make a purchase

The nurse was early today. 08:09 when he put his sooty foot through my front door. We just chatted a little about the impending storm later on this afternoon and after he’d finished my legs and feet, he cleared off.

Once he was out of the door, I could make my breakfast. And while I was eating, I was reading some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman

Today, he’s introduced the subject of bell towers (spire, steeples and all of that) into the discussion, and goes on to say that "the introduction of so striking and characteristic a feature in any form was a very great step. It is one which owes its origin to Christianity ; a campanile was never attached to an idol-temple, and is equally forbidden at this day to the proudest mosques of the false prophet. It is to Christian worship alone that the joyful sound of bells gathers the multitude of the faithful ; it is therefore to Christian temples only that the lofty towers are attached which rear them on high to convey their clear voice more distinctly and uninterruptedly."

This is on page 182, so there are another 375 pages of this kind of nonsense through which I have to wade.

There was some tidying up to do in the kitchen after breakfast, and then back in here afterwards, there were several things that needed doing on the computer. After that, I could start work.

Today’s task, as I mentioned yesterday, was to write out the remaining notes for the radio programme that I had been preparing. And that took longer than expected, due in part to me crashing out in the chair for forty-five minutes. I would probably still be crashed out in the chair right now too had it not been for a couple of spam calls and someone using a strimmer right outside my open window.

But I’m really fed up of these spam telephone calls, as you can imagine. It’s non-stop, one after the other after the other and it’s all the ‘phone calls that I seem to have these days.

Although it took longer than I was anticipating, I’d finished writing the notes by 15:00, and that’s not bad going considering how tired I was, my little doze in the armchair, my pause for a disgusting drink and probably a few other things too.

There was even time to make a good start on preparing a concert that will hopefully be broadcast the week after the one that I have just finished. And that reminds me that I must push on and finish dating this huge pile of concerts that I’ve inherited from several different sources. Once I do that, I’ll have a much better idea of who did what when and where and co-ordinate them into my “anniversaries” database. Over the past three or four years, it’s accumulated births and deaths, album release dates, rock concert and festival dates, United Nations international days and significant other dates too, and it’s ever-expanding.

Tea tonight was delicious. It was vegan pie with vegetables, mashed potato and gravy. Cooked to perfection, of course. There’s not much vegan pie left now, so I’ll have to start planning to make some more.

The promised storm didn’t turn up this afternoon. However, round about 18:00, there were a few rumbles of thunder in the distance. Right now, though, the sky has really gone black over Bill’s mother and I don’t reckon that it will be too long before it arrives. … "ten minutes later, it was pouring down with rain" – ed … After the fireworks last night, I could do with a quiet night in bed.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the nurses home … "well, one of us has" – ed … I remember maybe about forty-five years ago when the nurses were lodged in what had been the old Memorial Hospital in Victoria Avenue in Crewe.
The building was due to be demolished but it had somehow kept going, but it was in a pretty dreadful state. The local Health Authority launched an appeal to raise some money to carry out the repairs.
The appeal had the slogan "PLEASE HELP OUR NURSES HOME".

Monday 6th July 2026 – WHEN THE ALARM …

… went off this morning, I was sitting in my chair, working. I’d actually been up and about for 45 or so minutes, and when was the last time that that happened?

But anyway, last night was another one of those nights where I couldn’t seem to push on and finish everything. While I was writing my notes, I had a plate of crackers and the vegan cream cheese in front of me, and I managed to finish all of that, right enough, but it still ended up being a horribly late night again.

Once I was in bed, I was asleep quickly enough, as usual, but once more, not for long. Round about 01:20 (I checked the time) I awoke, and that was that. It was another one of those nights where I tossed and turned, trying to make myself comfortable as dawn very slowly began to break.

Round about 05:30, I was wide-awake and with no apparent possibility of going back to sleep, I decided to raise myself from the Dead – although it took a good while to find the energy and the courage to do so.

However, I’m glad that I did because I managed to dictate the notes that I’d written ages ago for three radio programmes. It’s only one small chip off a very large block, but at least I’m making a start.

What was interesting about this, though, was that when I awoke, it looked as if it might be a bright, sunny day but within a period of fifteen minutes or so, a thick mist had appeared and I couldn’t even see the car park from here. “This bodes well for the rest of the day,” I thought.

When the alarm sounded, I was just finishing off the third so when I was ready, I went and organised myself in the bathroom, having a really good wash and even a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon at dialysis.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. However, I needn’t have bothered because there wasn’t anything there. After all, if you don’t sleep, you can’t really dream, can you? Either that or my subconscious is totally exhausted after last night. Instead, I found plenty of other things to do. There’s no shortage of work around here.

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in as usual and chatted away for a while as she sorted out my legs and feet. And after she left, I had another lengthy struggle to raise myself up from the chair in the dining area to go to make my breakfast.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.

He’s managing to steer clear of controversy again today – but only in general terms. We’ve finished with Egyptian architecture, had a whistle-stop tour of Persia (which he liked) and India (which he also rubbished) and have now arrived in Greece.

We’ve not been in Greece even a couple of lines before he begins to wax lyrical, with eulogy after eulogy of praise for what started out as simple “post and beam” architecture of the type that he rubbished at Stonehenge. Consequently, we end up with paragraphs such as "Indian, Egyptian, even Persian art, is grand, striking, awful, but it is not, in the highest sense, beautiful : it exhibits power, and even genius, but genius coarse and unrefined, unfettered by the laws of taste and the perception of elegance ; its ornaments are grotesque and fanciful, its magnificence cumbrous and excessive. For grace, simplicity, and loveliness, we have still to look to that wonderful people, who, after the revolutions of so many ages, yet remain the centre of all intellectual greatness, whose history still furnishes the best lessons in the science of man’s political and social being ; whose literature must remain to every age as the ground-work of every intellectual study ; from whose poets we derive our first ideas alike of all that is lovely, and all that is sublime ; from whose philosophers we learn the first principles of the first of sciences, the laws of thought, and of the passions which stir the human breast. Such was the glorious land of Greece,"

So here we go again. Art isn’t architecture, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … And the Persian kings such as Cyrus, Cambyses Darius and Xerxes were busy trying to build empires, so their buildings were supposed to be impressive in order to awe the leaders of subjugated nations by their power and magnificence, as I have also said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed …

After breakfast, I went into the bathroom, where I went one better than Dave Crosby, probably because I’d had the ‘flu for Christmas and wasn’t feeling up to par. So anyway, I’m not giving in an inch to fear so I set to work.

Back in here later, I had a few more things to do and then checked over the radio programme that will be broadcast this weekend and sent it off for inclusion in the stream. After that, I spent some time planning my next radio programme.

That took me up until my faithful cleaner arrived to apply my anaesthetic. And while I was preparing my bag ready for dialysis, she was going through all of the various prescriptions that I had. One or two of them were expired so she gave me a big bundle and asked me if I could ask the doctors for a new prescription, but with everything on it instead of having half a dozen pieces of paper.

While I was waiting for the taxi, I had a bit of a tidying-up session. There were some clothes hanging about, so some went into the laundry basket and my thick winter jacket, I hung up on the hook over the front door. And there, I made a huge discovery.

When I left the Auvergne, I was convinced that I’d brought three fleeces with me, but after all this searching for all this time, I could only ever find two. But when I went to hang up my jacket, there was the third fleece, on a hanger on the hook. How long has that been there?

The taxi was late arriving and we had to pick up someone else on the way. Consequently, I was late arriving at dialysis. However, to my surprise, they came to deal with me straight away and I was up and running by 14:20. Once again, though, it was a pretty intense session and I wasn’t at all looking forward to it.

Mind you, the connection wasn’t ‘arf painful. The guy who was doing it is here temporarily from St. Malo and rather than feeling gently for the correct spot, he just thrusts the needle straight in. However, although it’s quite painful, the pain doesn’t last very long.

As usual, they set the machine to take my blood pressure every half-hour, and so every half-hour a nurse came running over as the alarm sounded. My blood pressure is habitually very low, quite often below the “alarm” setting, and it’s no cause for concern but they still keep running over “just in case”.

Unfortunately, Emilie the Cute Consultant wasn’t on duty today, but the duty doctor took my prescriptions and wrote out two new ones, one from her for the medication and the second from the dietician for the disgusting drinks. And I see that now I’m expected to have four of them each day. I’m not sure how I’m going to find the time to drink them, never mind do anything else.

When the session was over, I was unplugged quite quickly too. Once again, my weight was just as Saturday – one of the lowest measures that it has been for years. Now I was ready for a nice, early start to go back home, but the taxi wasn’t and I had to wait about ten minutes for it to put in an appearance.

It was the young, chatty guy who came to pick me up, and as I was the only passenger, we had a good chat about not very much all the way home, and I was here by 18:40, which makes a nice change.

My cleaner was there, waiting to help me into the apartment (and I needed it too), and after I collapsed into a chair, she passed me a disgusting drink. I suppose that she thought it a good way to revive me, and after the miserable failure of the other day with an energy drink, she was probably right.

After she left, I made myself a quick meal. A mixture of kidney beans, mushrooms, tomato, onion and garlic into a taco roll which I ate with rice and vegetables. And I enjoyed it too, which is just as well because Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, there’s football on the internet as the Welsh clubs sally forth to do battle in European competition, so I won’t have time to prepare a meal.

Back in here afterwards, I had a few things to do and then I began to write my notes. However, I’d hardly written the first line when a huge wave of fatigue overwhelmed me. I didn’t recover either afterwards and, as usual, I thought that there’s only one place to be at a time like this.

Interestingly, I’m noticing that it always seems to be right after dialysis when this happens and I have to go straight to bed. I wonder what’s going on with whatever it is that they are doing to me while I’m there.

Anyway, before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the thick mist … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminded me of a true story told to me by a woman with whom I once worked.
She told me that she was coming home from Liverpool to Stockport and there was such a thick mist that she couldn’t see where she was going. She was sure that she’d missed a turning and was now hopelessly lost.
As she drove up to a traffic light, she saw that in front of her was a lorry that belonged to a company in Levenshulme. "What luck!" she exclaimed. "I’ll follow it home and I’ll work my way out from there!"
After about an hour or so, the lorry came to a halt in a yard, so she went over to the driver and asked "whereabouts in Levenshulme are we exactly?"
"Madam," he replied "this is our depot in Preston."

Friday 3rd July 2026 – WHEN I AWOKE …

… it was 21:15 and I have never felt so ill in all my life. I just sat here in the chair and couldn’t even move a single muscle. It took me an age before I even began to think … "so what’s new?" – ed …

Eventually, I pushed my chair … "it’s a good job that it’s on wheels" – ed … over to the bed, slid across and went back to sleep almost straight away. No notes, no back-up, no stats, no medication, still fully dressed and with the shutters wide open. It’s not that I didn’t care but I just didn’t have the energy to do any more than roll over into bed.

That was how it remained until about 03:00 when I awoke. I thought that this was going to be another one of those nights where I lie awake for hours, but in fact, I was soon back to sleep. However, when the alarm went off at 06:29, I simply switched it off, switched off the second alarm, reset the alarm for 08:00 and went back to sleep.

The next thing that I remember was the nurse turning up at 08:05. And I was still in bed too. I must have somehow slept through the 08:00 alarm, although that’s really surprising, given the racket that BILLY COTTON makes.

It took me about forty-five minutes to come round to my senses … "what senses?" – ed … and then I headed off to the kitchen to make breakfast.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.

He’s describing the standard design of a portico to many an Egyptian building, and finishes by saying "The outline is, of course, most barbarous and uncouth, as nothing can well be more unpleasing than the sloping walls in such a position,".

However, he then goes on, in the same sentence, no less, to add "the general effect of such a prodigious bulk of masonry living with images must be awfully magnificent."

And here, although he doesn’t realise it, he’s hit the nail fairly and squarely on the head. The design isn’t at all meant to be pretty. It’s meant to be “awfully magnificent” – to overwhelm the visitor, to impress and to menace visiting royalty from other places and to frighten the unwary. It’s what I’ve been saying all along – that architecture comes before, and a long way before, art.

A little further on, still talking about the portico, he says "One of the magnificent engravings in the great French work on Egypt gives a vivid idea of what an Egyptian temple must have been in the days of its glory ; representing the whole architecture and enrichments accurately restored."

So come on, Mr Freeman, you can’t have it both ways.

Back in here, I sent off my shopping order to Leclerc, wrote up the notes for yesterday, which are now on line, and then turned my attention to the dictaphone to find out what had been going on during the night.

I was in London last night, and one of my father’s friends was there. He was driving around on the North Circular Road and ended up somehow on the pedestrian footway and became jammed in an arch underneath the railway bridge and couldn’t move his car. We couldn’t move it either. I was staying with some friends from the university and it wasn’t a very happy evening for some reason and I wasn’t enjoying myself so I decided to go to bed early. Next morning, I had a good lie-in and went into the kitchen. They were all sitting around there and it looked as if they had had a breakfast. They asked me what I’d been doing, and I told them that I’d been writing my university thesis, which was true. It was what I had been doing. No-one offered me a coffee, no-one offered me anything. I asked if I could make myself a coffee, but I couldn’t find the coffee. I had to hunt through the kitchen and eventually found a jar of coffee that was open. No-one offered me any food so in the end, I left. I was walking through the area around King’s Cross and the crowded shopping streets when I thought that someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned round, and in the distance was someone holding up a big, blue envelope with the word “Darren” written on it. I walked on down the street, looking in the butchers, the fishmongers and all this kind of thing until I came towards the end of the road, where I met some people whom I knew. They were watching two people on one of these motor-trike things, the type with two wheels at the back. One of the wheels was smoking and I thought immediately that a wheel bearing had seized on it but they were still continuing to ride it, and we were saying that it’s going to catch fire before they’ve gone too long. However, they carried on and carried on and, in the end, the half-shaft parted from inside the axle. I thought that they had some really big problems now, but they still carried on. I walked on down to the end of the road, turned left and walked on down there a bit. I saw my father’s friend’s car still wedged under the bridge, then I turned left again to head towards the city centre and the railway station home. For some reason, it wasn’t Euston to where I was going but one of the stations that went out to the south of London. I walked down the road a small way and there was a baker’s there. He was busy arguing with a little boy but in the end gave him a stale bun, with which the boy ran off. I looked in the window and they had some of these raisin bread-and-butter puddings so I went in and bought a slice. A little further on down the road was a little British fish and chip shop. I’d seen someone with some chips earlier on, which had made me hungry so I went into this fish and chip shop and ordered a bag of chips. That was where I was waiting when the dream ended.

Regular readers of this rubbish in a previous version will recall that I did stay with some people from the university a couple of times, and the treatment that I had there was pretty much the same as the treatment that I had during the dream.

The walk through the crowded shopping street reminded me much more of the East End of London rather than King’s Cross, although not that I’d likely to be looking in any butcher’s or fishmonger’s window.

The silver Mk III Ford Cortina (because it was a silver Mk III) is interesting and I’ve no idea what was happening there with that, and neither with the trike losing a half-shaft. Mind you, with the Reliant van that I had, I was regularly stripping the splines off halfshafts because of the extra power in the all-alloy OHV engine that I fitted in place of the cast-iron side-valve engine.

And bread puddings? It’s been ages since I made a good old bread pudding, but with home-made bread, I don’t have the stale bread like I used to.

Two of my friends turned up last night. I was living in some strange house but I don’t know exactly where. First of all, one of my friends from the Wirral turned up and we were having a really long chat about the past. He was wearing some kind of strange black suit with white pinstripes but they weren’t lines, they were dots. We were chatting about all kinds of different things when another friend from the Midlands turned up too. The three of us were chatting for a while but for some reason, they didn’t want a drink when I offered them one. The third person, he said that he was on his way to IKEA so the second guy said that it would be a good idea. As it happened, I was planning to go there with my father that afternoon – it was a Sunday. So I rang my father and he sounded as if he had a cold. I asked him what time we were planning to go to IKEA but for some reason, he switched me over to a recorded message, so I hung up and called him back. He started a very long explanation about all kinds of different things, and in the end, I lost patience and asked “is that ‘yes’ or is that ‘no’?”. In the end, he replied “no” so I hung up and said that the three of us would all go together and I’d go to fetch my van. I walked down the street to where I’d parked it, but it wasn’t the van, it was a Mk IV or a Mk V Cortina, I don’t know. It was old and shabby and leaked a bit and misfired on one of the cylinders. However, I started it up and it seemed to run OK so I drove up the street to where the other two were waiting, put my foot on the brakes but the brakes took a while to work. I thought “I’d better sort out these brakes sometime when I can find five minutes to do it”.

Those two guys and their respective wives and offspring are welcome to turn up here any time they like, of course, just as are any of my other friends, but with what remains of my family judiciously avoiding contact with me (except for that lot in Canada), they can please themselves.

The Cortina sounds just like many that have passed through my hands at one time or another, Mk III, Mk IV and Mk V. Shabby, rotten floor, questionable brakes, and misfiring. But nevertheless, in some of the shabbiest of them all, I travelled thousands of miles with nothing going wrong that I couldn’t ever fix by the roadside.

Although I didn’t record this, it was ringing around my head when I finally awoke, so I suppose that I’d better write it down before I forget. I was in Main Road in Shavington last night – twice, in fact. Once with a girl whom I knew and I wish that I could remember who she was, and the second time with a friend of mine from school who now lives out in the wilds on an island off the coast of Scotland. We were walking down there “today” and I was pointing out the sites that I remembered from when I lived in Shavington. There was a site with three modern bungalows built thereupon and I said that I remembered that in the past, it was an old yard where something had been demolished a long time previously. Someone kept a couple of lorries on it but what interested me the most in those days was that there was always the odd derelict car on there being slowly dismantled. Every few weeks there would be a different one and I used to go down there regularly to see what there was. But then, I pointed across the road to a little lane that degenerated into a farm track, with a couple of cottages on the right-hand side. I explained that it was called “Pusey Dale” and I pointed out a green light right at the end. I explained that they were making a natural cemetery there and if all else failed, that was where I wanted to end up. But whoever put me in there must plant a yew tree on top of me so that I’d live on through the roots and branches of the tree.

Strangely enough, there is plenty of truth in that dream. There was a site just like that exactly as I described with a lorry or two and a couple of old cars on it. There really is a place called “Pusey Dale”, just as I described, and someone has indeed applied for planning permission to have a natural cemetery down there. And for me to be buried there under a yew tree would be quite an acceptable way to end, if the dustbin men won’t take me.

While I’d been writing notes and transcribing dreams, I’d had the washing machine going, and now it was finished, so I emptied the machine, ready to hang up the wet clothes, and went for a disgusting drink and the midday medication.

My faithful cleaner turned up next to do her stuff and to hang up the washing. While she was here, we chatted about nothing much, but I need to be more sociable here and there every now and again.

Leclerc eventually turned up, later than anticipated. While I’d been waiting, I’d been tidying out the fridge, making sure that there was a place for everything, so when I had all of the stuff, I spent a happy hour or so putting everything away where it ought to go. The place looks quite tidy now, and that’s not like me at all.

Later on, I went for tea. Vegan sausage, beans and chips. I made the chips as my friend advised – boil in water for five or so minutes and then fry in the air fryer to cook, with olive oil and a bit of thyme. And he’s right – they really do taste much better – much more like proper fish shop chips like in one of the dreams just now.

So now, having finished my notes, I’ll do what else needs to be done and then go to bed ready for dialysis … "I don’t think" – ed … tomorrow afternoon.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about cemeteries … "well, one of us has" – ed … there was the old hoary story about the American who visited a cemetery in the UK and was totally astonished by the size of it.
He buttonholed a passing yokel – a very vocal local yokel, in fact – and asked him "do people die here often then?"
"Oh no" replied the yokel. "Just the once, I think."

Tuesday 9th June 2026 – WHAT A DIFFERENCE …

… we have made to this apartment today. My faithful cleaner and I have been through the apartment like a dose of salts. Tonnes of stuff has gone down to the rubbish bins and there is actually a lot of unused space on the shelves now.

This is what I’ve been hoping to do for quite a while, and I’m glad that we managed to do it today.

Yesterday was an exciting evening too. I finished everything that I needed to do by 23:00 but organising myself for bed took much longer and I bet that it can’t have been much earlier than midnight before I climbed into bed.

For a change, I was asleep quite quickly, but I awoke at 04:00. Try as I might, I could not go back to sleep, and just when I was thinking of getting out of bed, the alarm rang. It was 06:29.

First thing that I did was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. However, to my dismay, there was nothing on it. Instead, I found plenty of things to do in order to pass the time, including an interesting chat with a chatbot, would you believe, about the Oregon and California Trail and the fate of the Donner Party

Isabelle the Nurse turned up this morning. She was quite late, which is no surprise for her first day back. Of the two nurses in this practice, she’s the one with the “touch” for blood tests and injections, so anyone who needs one of those and it’s “the other one” on duty will usually wait until she starts her week.

After she left, I made breakfast and then carried on with Vera Evison’s book AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY AT HOLBOROUGH, KENT while I was eating.

The book didn’t last long – only 87 or so pages – and so when I’d finished, I turned to the next one. EBURACUM OR YORK UNDER THE ROMANS by C Wellbeloved.

It was written in 1842 so the introduction goes on for ever, it’s full of flowery prose and phrases along the lines of “would the gentle reader please excuse any faults that he has found …?”

Up to now I’ve not found any worth mentioning, so I came back in here to revise my Welsh.

At 11:00 I went for my lesson and it all passed quite well, even if the tutor didn’t send us the coursework until five minutes before the start of the lesson so we couldn’t review it.

At the end of the lesson, I sorted out the bathroom and some clean clothes, and when my faithful cleaner arrived, she shooed me under the shower.

The shower was really hot today and I enjoyed every minute of it. In fact, I wanted to stay in it for much longer. And this was also the second time that I managed to go into and come out of the shower without the help of my crutches.

Once I’d organised myself, I went to join my cleaner in the living room. We attacked the shelving and I sorted out one of the bags and the shopping trolley that we brought in last week. Quite a lot of the stuff went the Way of the West, but everything else was sorted and boxed quite quickly.

We then turned our attention to the bedroom and the cupboards in here have been emptied of much of the stuff they contained and the photography equipment moved to the top shelf over my desk. There are shelves galore free now.

By the time that we finished, I needed an energy drink. I was completely dazed and confused.

After my cleaner finally left – after an hour of overtime, I suppose – I found a few other things to do, including restarting the radio programmes and hunting down some music.

All of that took me up to teatime, which was a taco roll filled with one of the frozen leftovers that my friend cooked, lengthened with mushrooms, tomatoes and tomato sauce with peppers, all on a bed of rice and vegetables. And how nice was that?

Right now, though, later than ever, I’m off to bed. I’ve had a tough day.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Welsh … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once met a boy from Wales who had been an “unexpected birth”.
"But didn’t your dad use precautions?" I asked.
"Yes" he replied. "He used a Welsh letter"
"What’s a Welsh letter?"
"A French letter with a leek in it."

Wednesday 13th May 2026 – AND THERE I …

… was again, thinking that last night was going to be the same as the previous two or three that I have had.

However, it wasn’t quite to be, but as the Duke of Wellington said after the battle of Waterloo, it was "the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life".

Actually, things started off that way. I began to write up the blog notes at about 19:30 but as usual, I was sidetracked much more than I would have liked to be, and by the time that I’d finished the notes and done everything else that I needed to do before going to bed, it was more like 21:30 when I finally slid under the covers.

As usual, it took a while to go off to sleep, and there I lay until all of 01:00.

It wasn’t a coughing fit that awoke me but a howling gale that had sprung up outside. It wasn’t ‘arf making a racket and anyone pushing up the daisies from underneath the surface of the churchyard up the road would not only have been awake but probably walking around.

Being wide awake, I took the opportunity to go for a ride on the porcelain horse and then came back here to climb into bed.

At the rate that things were going, I thought that the wind would keep me awake for the rest of the night. However, after about an hour or so, I must have gone back to sleep, which certainly makes a change just recently.

When the alarm went off, I struggled into an upright position and then had to wait for the room to stop spinning so that I could think about standing up. And once I’d summoned up the energy and the courage, I headed off into the bathroom to sort myself out.

In the kitchen, I had my energy drink and medication and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out what had gone on during the night. But to my dismay, there was nothing on it. What a disappointment! Still, never mind. It gave me an opportunity to catch up on a few other things.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up as usual and we had a chat about the weather while she sorted out my legs. It’s sunny outside but cold, and the gale is still raging. I hope that it will be gone by Thursday when I have to go to dialysis.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of Charles Roach Smith’s THE ANTIQUITIES OF RICHBOROUGH, RECULVER, AND LYMNE, IN KENT.

And I might have known! Back in the introduction he mentioned “my friend Thomas Wright” so I ought to have guessed what would come soon afterwards. Mind you, we have to wait until page sixteen for the first mention of “Richard of Cirencester”.

By the time we reach page eighteen, we have "it may be mantioned that the authority of Richard of Cirencester’s ‘De Situ Britannia’ has been questioned’ … Hatcher, in his preface to his translation, has ably combatted the objections brought against the original of the itinerary… But what no cavilling can set aside is his itinerary."

So there we go again.

Back in here, I had a few things to finish off and then I began to write the rest of the radio notes. There was however, a brief pause while I sent off my food order to LeClerc.

Once I’d finished, I went for a disgusting drink break and then came back in here, where I began to research the next programme.

Later on, I went into the kitchen to do some more tidying and throw away some more stuff that was lingering in the fridge. How I hate throwing away food, but as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … if I’m not eating it and it begins to grow legs, there’s really no other alternative.

The Leclerc order then turned up, and I managed to put everything away and to sort out and put away the delivery bags. But I’ve found, to my dismay, that I’ve forgotten to order the taco wraps and that is going to be a real inconvenience.

By now, I was totally exhausted and so I came in here to collapse into my chair for a while to recover. But I managed to find some energy from somewhere and all of the music for the next programme has now been selected, remixed and re-edited, paired and segued, and all that remains is to write the notes. I’ve no idea where that energy came from.

So right now, I’ll take my evening medication, finish off a few things and then climb into bed. I’ve had a better day today and I seem to be a little more energetic and enthusiastic. I hope that this improvement will continue.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the high winds … "well, one of us has" – ed …regular readers of this rubbish will recall that about eighteen months ago, we had gusts of wind touching two hundred kph.
Shortly afterwards, i met a guy whom I knew who told me that he had had enough and was moving.
"Where are you going?" I asked him.
"About ten miles inland to La Haye-Pesnel" he replied.
"Why there?" I asked.
"Because that’s where my house has gone."

Tuesday 12th May 2026 – OH NO! NOT ANOTHER …

… night like Sunday and Monday! It’s becoming far too much of a habit, this is.

So on Monday night, after I came back from dialysis, I came straight in here to write up my notes. Considering how much I didn’t write about yesterday, it took a lot longer than I expected to finish them.

And then, I had the stats and the backing-up to do, my evening medication to take (with a square of chocolate cake and a mouthful of orange juice), and then finally the bathroom to sort myself out for the night. It was about 21:30 when I slid under the covers and how grateful was I to be there?

Once I was asleep, I stayed asleep, but only for a while. At some point, I awoke, and try as I might, I could not go back to sleep. And so there I lay, watching everything tick over and over towards 06:29 and the alarm. I’ve no idea what time it was when I awoke because I didn’t look. And I didn’t care either.

When the alarm went off, it was another struggle to leave the bed and head for the bathroom, but eventually, I found myself in the kitchen with a high-energy drink and my medication. If the drink won’t kick-start my day, then nothing will.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone, and I was surprised that I’d actually had the time to go anywhere.

I was dreaming about reading a book. I can’t remember which book it was but it was one that the taxi driver from yesterday evening had lent me. I distinctly heard a voice ask “what page are you on?”. I distinctly remember replying “I can’t remember”, and I said it out loud too.

So here we are – one of the very rare dreams where I actually talk out loud in my sleep. These are very few and far between and I can’t even remember when the last time was.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up after her week’s break and told me all about her weekend hiking around Normandy with her little group. It actually made me quite jealous that I can no longer do things like this. When I think of all the miles that I’ve walked in the past …

After she left, I made breakfast and started a new book – THE ANTIQUITIES OF RICHBOROUGH, RECULVER, AND LYMNE, IN KENT, also by Charles Roach Smith. I’m hoping that this book will be more interesting and more useful than the last one, but so far, he is just setting the scene.

Back in here, I had a few things to do and then I had to revise for my Welsh lesson. The lesson itself passed OK, but we’ve now finished the course several weeks early. So what we have started to do is to revise the salient points of previous lessons and that’s going to be a challenge, especially for people like me with a Teflon brain.

Unfortunately, it looks as if our little group will be breaking up at the end of the year. We were shown a copy of the book for the final two years of our course and that has put the wind up several of our members. It is indeed complicated, there’s no doubt about that, but I’m going to push on and try it. However, I doubt that many of the others will join me.

That will be a shame because some of the people have been with me since the course started in 2020 and we’ve built up a really good rapport.

After the lesson ended, I prepared the bathroom and then went to tidy up in the kitchen. You have no idea just how much food I threw away just now. It’s shameful and embarrassing, but if it’s fresh food like potatoes and onions and I’m not able to eat it, there really isn’t any alternative once their shoots begin to sprout.

My cleaner turned up to do her stuff and she shooed me under the shower. So now, there’s a nice, clean boy … "well, clean anyway" – ed … in clean clothes, ready for a comfortable night in clean pyjamas.

We also sorted out a few things and tidied up a few more places, as rumour has it that we might be having a guest here at the weekend, so the place needs to be tidy.

After she left, I made myself a taco roll with salad and some of that vegan cream cheese. It makes a really, really nice mid-afternoon snack, but things might be improving a little because LeClerc has on offer some new vegan products this week, and I’ve also found a recipe for vegan mushroom pâté which I am determined to try.

Back in here, I relaxed for a short while, catching up on a couple of football matches that I missed, and then, eventually, I began work on the notes for the radio programme. I haven’t done half as much as I would have liked, so I shall have to get a move on and finish tomorrow morning and then make a start on the second one.

So now, having finished my notes, and having vomited violently on three occasions (and I’ve no idea why because I haven’t been coughing), I’m going to finish everything off and go to bed, hoping this time to actually sleep … "some hope" – ed …

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about vomiting … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of being on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR up in the High Arctic in 2019 when we were hit by a raging storm in the Lancaster Sound.
One guy was leaning over the rails, being extremely ill.
"The trouble with you," I said "is that you have a weak stomach."
"Rubbish!" he retorted. "I’m throwing up farther than anyone else on this boat."

Saturday 9th May 2026 – I HAVE TO ADMIT …

… that I was feeling much better this morning. Not exactly sprightly, unfortunately, but much better than I was a few days ago.

What I put it down to is the course of antibiotics that I’ve been given. I know that one swallow doesn’t make a summer and two tablets out of the ten that I’ve been given don’t count for a lot, but I awoke several times during the night, and to my surprise, I wasn’t coughing.

Last night, I started to write out my notes quite early in an effort to have yet another early night, and it was just before 21:00 when they finally went online. There were a few other things that needed doing afterwards, including taking my evening medication, but it can’t have been much after 21:30 when I finally crawled into bed.

As I mentioned just now, it was a turbulent night when I awoke on three or four occasions. I’ve no idea what time because I didn’t look, but it was dark and the electric water heater was working.

The final time that I awoke, there was bright daylight streaming in around the edges of the shutters so I wondered if I’d overslept through the alarms. But when I checked, it was 06:25 – four minutes before the alarm was due to go off. The nights are getting shorter.

In theory, I could have put my feet on the floor and claimed an early start, but I couldn’t be bothered. Instead, I lay in the warmth under the covers and waited for it to go off.

It didn’t take quite so long to summon up the enthusiasm to go into the bathroom this morning, and then I went into the kitchen for my energy drink and medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And I was surprised at the distance that I seem to have covered.

I was somewhere in some kind of school or college. We were doing a kind of science fiction film and everything like that. There was a group of us, or we were divided into small groups or something, and we were wandering around in our group. One of the other groups came along and began to attack us with these weird science-fiction type machines. It became something of an aerial display or bombardment or something from these really rapid, powerful and fast machines flying overhead all the time, going mainly in one direction and then presumably turning around somewhere and coming back in the same direction and so on. It had us, well, not pinned down because it wasn’t aggressive, but it was a flying display of all kinds of these strange machines. We were trying to work out whether they were remote-controlled or whether there were people flying them or something, because there were far too many to be flown by this one small group. This went on for ages and ages with these plane-type things flying over our heads. Eventually, they all disappeared. We were somewhere along the track of an old disused railway. Once they had all gone, one of the people with us decided that he was feeling hungry and was going to eat something. He asked about the rest of us, so I replied that I’d just nip back to school for a moment and fetch some biscuits from my bag. I went back to school and there were kids everywhere. There were all kinds of equipment and so on relating to these science-fiction things. I went to my bag for some biscuits but there weren’t all that many. Someone gave me some kind of cable but I already had four or five different ones in my hand so I had to go back to my room to sort them out, to make sure that I had what I wanted, and the one that that other person had given me, I’d leave behind on the bed for later.

This must have been a fascinating dream. I can still see the flying machines even now, and they would have been too small to carry a person. They reminded me of the very primitive attempts at gliders or kites such as those built by the Frenchman Clément Ader, with bat-like wings, and they were yellow, red or green. But there were thousands of them.

I spent a lot of time last night roaming through the junior levels of the Welsh pyramid. There were two cases that came to mind – the first was a girl who had been administered a vitamin supplement twice – first by her former team and then by the team that she rejoined later. This was put down to a confusion of paperwork between the two clubs so no action was taken against anyone. The second was a similar kind of case between three small boys. This was ruled to be due to a change of personnel or something like that, and someone who had left hadn’t noted something in a file. There were no charges brought against any of the clubs for misbehaviour or anything like that. It was all due to negligence or carelessness or something.

Interested as I am in football in Cymru, I’ve no idea of anything at all about this dream. And the idea of three small boys is nothing special. Drug testing in football over there is routine these days, and the Football Association of Wales controls all football from under-11 upwards, and I’ve seen 9-year-olds playing in under-11 games in the past.

There was a girl at work with whom I’d been at school. Somehow, we found ourselves in the same supermarket after work. She bought one or two things and so did I, and I gave her a lift home in my van afterwards. Next day at work, we were working away quite happily but then, in the afternoon, I had to go somewhere to do something. I went down to my van and found half a baguette in there that I’d bought, another half-baguette and a loaf of bread that this girl had bought. I picked up the loaf of bread and thought that when I go back to the office, I’ll take it to her and give it to her. I set off on foot on this errand and began to walk down Welsh Row in Nantwich. I ended up walking miles, and it was all through streets and lanes around Nantwich. Then I was in Brussels, walking through Brussels. It seemed to take ages to do what I was trying to do, with walking all around these places. It was sunny, it was sweaty and I was walking up a pedestrian alley, but someone had tied a rope across it as if to close it so I just opened the rope and walked through. Some Dutch guy began to have an argument with me about moving the rope so I told him to clear off, but he didn’t and this argument carried on. In the end, I used a couple of really vulgar Flemish terms and it looked as if he was going to come over and fight with me, but instead, he just wandered away. I found myself in a park, and after walking through this park for five minutes, I realised that there was a huge drop over the wall and I wasn’t sure how I was going to find my way out. Suddenly, I came to an entry that I didn’t know was there so I went through an entry onto the road and began to walk towards Nantwich. There was a house with a ginger cat so I went to stroke the cat but it wouldn’t come to me. It ran away. Eventually, I found myself back in Brussels again, walking up from Woluwe St Lambert into the centre of the city and into work again. There was one lift that you could only take, that went all the way to the top so I went in there, came out and went into another lift and went back down to my floor and found that I was in the wrong building. I had to go across to the next lift, which was exactly the same – straight to the top – and back down again into the office. I still had this loaf of bread with me but when I came into my office to sit down, I couldn’t see the girl at that moment.

The girl concerned in this dream unfortunately died shortly after leaving school. When a group of us heard that she had become seriously ill, we went round to her house but her parents wouldn’t let us come in. At first, we were quite annoyed by that, but as time has gone on and I’ve seen people die, I can understand how she and her parents must have been feeling.

And a lift again, just like the previous night. I wonder why these are suddenly appearing during my dreams. It’s not as if I’m ever likely to encounter any these days. However, wandering around Brussels in my dreams is nothing new.

The nurse turned up as usual and asked how I was. I told him that I was feeling better than yesterday, but he didn’t have much to say for himself. He was soon gone and then I could make breakfast and read some more of REPORT ON EXCAVATIONS MADE UPON THE SITE OF THE ROMAN CASTRUM AT PEVENSEY by Charles Roach Smith.

And here we go again. He tells us that "the mortar, that important ingredient which Saxon, Norman and English architects only imperfectly understood, was made by Roman masons on a principle so sound and unvarying that its tenacity is unimpaired by age and its solidity is nothing inferior to the stones and tiles it cements together"

He then goes on to mention that "it is nothing unusual to find Roman mortar used as facing stone in the walls of our medieval churches".

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I wonder what happened to the people who built the stone walls so well and made the mortar that has lasted for all these years. If they had been pushed into Wales or over to Brittany, as has often been suggested, why aren’t there any of these types of stone buildings there dating from the early mediaeval period? And if they had been absorbed into the Anglo-Saxon population, why didn’t the use of stone and mortar continue?

It really beats me why ethnic cleansing has been ruled out by most authorities.

Back in here, there was football to watch. Arbroath v Dunfermline, with Arbroath failing to overturn the 1-0 deficit from midweek. So Dunfermline march on, one step further towards the Scottish Premier Division.

Afterwards, it was the National League playoff semi-finals – Carlisle v Boreham Wood and Rochdale v Scunthorpe. With both games ending 2-1, we’ll have a final between Rochdale and Boreham Wood to see who plays next season in League Two.

With all of that out of the way, I had another look at the radio programme that I mentioned yesterday. This is going to be a complicated affair but I cracked on all the same. In the end, after much binding in the marsh, I was able to identify, from a list that I had to make, which ended up containing 451 albums of all genres and of all different kinds of obscurity, about twenty that I actually owned, by fourteen different artists.

At that point, I went into the kitchen for my afternoon medication and ended up spending an hour tidying out the fridge. I really must be feeling better!

Having done that, I made a taco roll with some of that vegan cream cheese and salad. And it was really nice too. I shall have to order some more of that next time I’m online shopping.

Back in here again, the sunlight was streaming in through the windows, the temperature was 24°C and it was lovely. I thought that I’d just close my eyes for a few minutes and soak up the heat, so there I was, thoroughly enjoying myself until I fell off the chair seventy-five minutes later. What a waste of time, but it really was nice.

Pushing on, I finished sorting out the music for the radio programme and I had even chosen more than half of the tracks and remixed and re-edited them by the time that I knocked off.

So right now, I’m off to bed, looking forward to a good sleep and a lie-in tomorrow until the nurse wakes me up … "he hopes" – ed …

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about these flying machines … "well, one of us has" – ed … it remind me of a scene from UP THE CHASTITY BELT as Frankie Howerd prepares to leap from the top of the castle tower, wearing his bat-like wings.
"Oh look!" exclaimed Lady Lobelia. "It’s Lurkalot. He flies again!"
"Ahh, Lurkalot!" exclaimed the boxer Billy Walker, playing the part of Chopper the Woodsman. "His flies be his undoing."

Saturday 28th March 2026 – YET ANOTHER EVENING …

… when I’ll be going to bed without any food. I started to take the stuff out of the fridge but it went almost straight back, before I’d even taken all of it out. Somehow, I just couldn’t face it tonight.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … my taste buds are definitely changing again. I wonder what’s going to drop off the menu this time, apart from my sausage, beans with cheese, and chips that I was planning on having.

This latest thing seems to be something to do with one of the medicaments that Emilie the Cute Consultant has prescribed for me. Last night, after I’d finished my notes at some kind of reasonable time, I finished off everything that needed finishing and then went into the kitchen for the medication. And about five minutes later, I began to feel quite uncomfortable.

The next thing that happened was that I was hit by a huge wave of fatigue, and I was glad to crawl into bed before it overwhelmed me.

Once in bed, I fell asleep quite quickly and apart from one or two brief awakenings, caused mainly by fits of coughing, I remember nothing whatever until the alarm went off at 06:29. And can you imagine just how difficult it was for me to leave the bed at that moment?

What with having some hand-washing to do too, I ended up being terribly late in the kitchen for my hot drink and medication. Still, better late than never. But I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that I had an incredibly dry throat, I was feeling dizzy and also quite lethargic.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And it was a disappointment – I think that Emilie the Cute Consultant’s medication is affecting my sleeping patterns too.

Wales was being attacked by England, so Wales responded by pushing the English back into England. Eventually, the Welsh army overwhelmed the English army right up to the point where not only did they capture most of the English army bases in the UK, it managed to capture a couple of bases’ settlements that were north of Hadrian’s Wall which, in theory, were in Scotland. Wales ended up capturing things like the forts at Newsteads which upset the Scots, and the Scots decided that they really would … fell asleep here …

And when I found the dictaphone later, it had been running for two hours and fifty-five minutes, so if you want to hear me snoring and coughing, you will have plenty to go at.

And “snoring”, yes. I’m sorry for doubting you, Percy Penguin.

As for the dream, the first part relates to very little that is current, but the second part refers to James Curle and his A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE that we read over Christmas and New Year.

There was something about a building somewhere in Crewe that should have been right in the centre of town but was somewhere tucked up a side street, one of the ones behind Market Street. I was on my way to visit it but I couldn’t remember exactly how I was going to be able to go there and at that point I was awoken by an enormous fit of coughing.

Apparently, at the back of Market Street, they have demolished a load of old railway engineering buildings and are building on the site. Let’s hope that the money lasts so that they can finish the job. Having gambled on HS2 arriving in the town, the council’s finances are in a total mess.

The nurse turned up as usual and saw to my legs and feet. He didn’t have much to say, but he doesn’t think much of my lifestyle and my lack of eating. He thinks that my main meal should be at lunchtime. However, if I eat a lot then, I just fall asleep in the afternoon and I do that too often without inviting it.

After he left, I made breakfast and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

Today, we’re discussing the exiles living on the charity of the Pope in Rome. And as I said yesterday, there are piles of them – far too many to count. The Pope must have been a very wealthy man.

After breakfast, I had the fridge to tidy. I’d bought a lot of vegan milk because if it hadn’t been for running low on milk, I’d have waited for another week for supplies, with not eating much these days. So I’m going to see if I can last out four weeks this time.

It’s difficult to believe that a year ago, I was ordering shopping every two weeks

Back in here, we had the highlights of last night’s game between Caernarfon and TNS. These included yet another “let’s play it out from the back, boys”, with a predictable result.

There were a few other things that needed doing, but I’m not sure how I managed because I was feeling quite tired and lethargic, and shaking off wave after wave of sleep.

There was football on the internet at lunchtime – Hwlfordd v LLansawel. And after their dreadful display last week, Hwlffordd played much better and managed to grind out a 1-0 win to move ahead in the race for the European playoffs.

But I’d love to have a closer look at Hwlffordd’s challenge on Llansawel keeper Will Fuller as the cross came into the penalty area.

Eventually, I managed to begin to edit an outstanding set of radio notes. By the time that I’d knocked off, I’d assembled the two halves of the programme, chosen and dealt with the final track and written the notes for it, ready for dictation.

And seeing as we have been talking abut the radio programmes … "well, one of us has" – ed … I forgot to mention yesterday that that very long concert that I need to edit – it’s all done and the notes are all written. I managed to find a few hours yesterday afternoon when I sorted it out.

There were also a couple of chats with a few of my friends too. It’s nice to hear from them every now and again. We don’t see each other anything like enough these days since I’ve been ill.

Later in the afternoon, I began to make my hot cross buns. They are all made now, ready for Easter. Eight of them and then are huge. The trouble with my hot cross buns was that the oven was rather too hot and the buns are somewhat scorched. It won’t make much of a difference, though. They will still be nice.

So with no tea and having finished my notes, I’m off to bed and my lie-in tomorrow … "he hopes" – ed … because I definitely need it. I’ve crashed out a couple of times already today and I’m feeling as if I could crash out again at the drop of a hat.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Pope and the refugees in Rome … "well, one of us has" – ed … Queen Charlotte of Cyprus came to see the Pope in her horse and carriage.
As it was such a nice day, she invited the Pope to come for a ride with her. And after ten minutes, the horse … errr… broke wind extremely noisily.
"Oh dear" said Queen Charlotte, extremely flustered. "I really am so sorry."
"It’s no problem" said the Pope. "In fact, if you hadn’t said anything, I would have sworn that it was the horse."

Saturday 21st March 2026 — I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone from last night. And, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that’s something that fills me full of dismay. So boring is my life these days, compared to how it used to be, that the only excitement that I seem to have is whatever goes on during the night. And so a night with nowhere to go is really depressing.

Not that it was particularly early. As usual, things seemed to drag on and on, and it was about 23:15 when I was ready to crawl into my stinking pit, having moved all of the rubbish off the bed.

Once in bed, I fell asleep quite quickly and there I stayed until a mega-coughing fit awoke me. I’ve no idea what time it was because I was too depressed to check. But there I lay, in that kind of no-man’s land between sleeping, being awake, and dozing off, all the way through until the alarm went off at 06:29.

And once again, I had a real battle with myself to leave the bed at that moment. It’s becoming harder and harder to force myself right out of bed these days.

In the bathroom, I had a wash, and then I washed my undies ready for next time. In the kitchen, I made my hot lemon, ginger and honey drink and took my medication, and then I came back in here.

With no dictaphone notes to transcribe, I had a look at the highlights from last night’s football. Llanelli went down to Cardiff Metro, as expected, but the TNS v Colwyn Bay game had a very unexpected result.

Colwyn Bay have NEVER beaten TNS, and as the match was bing played at TNS’s ground, no-one expected any difference. Colwyn Bay did, however, take the lead, but we all expected it to be just delaying the inevitable.

However, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day, I mentioned TNS’s rather … errr … pedestrian defence and how a quick ball over the top and a couple of rapid wingers rushing on could create havoc. Sure enough, a long clearance out of Colwyn Bay’s defence, right over the top of the TNS defence, saw the ex-Greenock Morton striker Jordan Davies rush on after it.

A panic-stricken TNS ‘keeper rushed right off his line to try to clear, but missed the ball and scythed down Davies. Result — a red card and a free kick.

Later on, Colwyn Bay scored a second, and although TNS hit the woodwork twice, the score finished 0-2 in favour of Colwyn Bay. You can SEE THE HIGHLIGHTS HERE

Isabelle the Nurse turned up, full of good humour as usual. This time, she managed to avoid hurting my foot, which was good news, and she soon left. I reminded her before she went that she might probably find me in bed tomorrow when she calls;

After she had gone, I could make breakfast and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

Having told us yesterday about how well the Greeks were being treated by the Ottomans, he goes on today to tell us about some of the atrocities that they committed. It should be said, however, that most of them were committed after a rebellion or something like that.

There was however the terrible tax on children. Every year, the Ottomans would come to each Greek town or island to select a number of children, and carry them back to their cities. The boys, they would train them as Janissaries, the elite formations of the Ottoman army. The fate of the girls needs no description.

On another subject, he tells us that a convent was opened in Athens by a nun called Philothee Benizelou. Our author informs us that "she has left a most uncomplimentary description of the Athenians of her day, with whom she had some pecuniary difficulties and upon whom she showers a string of abusive epithets in the best classical style"

A woman after my own heart. My next task will be to find a copy of her writings.

Back in here, I had thing to do, and then I made a start on trying to make the new computer work.

First thing was to further dismantle the old computer. I removed the graphics card (complete with HDMI port) and then went to install it in the new one. That was not as easy as it might have been either — it needed some adjustment to the case to make it fit because the face of the graphics card covers two whole bays.

Having done that, I was still no further on, so I carried on my unplugging one by one everything that I’d plugged in yesterday. And it was after I’d removed one bar of additional RAM that the machine suddenly sprung into life. So there’s a short-circuit in one of the bars of RAM then.

So once, the computer was up and running, it now became necessary to install my suite of preferred programs, and as usual, that takes a very long time.

While it was doing its stuff, I was busy tidying up all of the bits and pieces and putting them away. Then, I had endless hours of fun trying to put the box and packaging up onto the top shelf of the unit by the door. And that wasn’t as easy as it might have been either, at least, for me.

Round about 16:00, I knocked off … "for the moment" – ed … and went into the kitchen.

A few weeks ago, I’d talked about making a trifle for a pudding. I’d found a recipe for making vegan jelly, involving agar-agar and fruit juice, so armed with a carton of grape juice, some agar-agar, some sugar, and a pear, I set to work.

And do you know what? It’s set to perfection!

Tomorrow, I’m going to make some really thick custard to pour all over it, and when it’s all cooled, I’ll whip up some vegan topping to pour all over it. It should be wonderful.

We had football on the internet later – Y Bala v Hwlffordd. Y Bala are next-to-bottom and ripe for relegation whilst Hwlffordd are seventh and pushing for the European play-offs. But Hwlffordd were absolutely awful today, the worst that I have ever seen them play. And while Y Bala were very … errr … agricultural, they played with a fire and an enthusiasm that I haven’t seen for ages, and their 1-0 victory, their first home win in 142 days, was well-earned.

Tea tonight was a burger on a bap with a baked potato and veg in butter, followed by vegan cheesecake. And it was a lovely tea. I enjoyed every mouthful of it. It will set me up nicely for my lie-in tomorrow, I hope.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about writing in the best classical style … "well, one of us has" – ed … I’m reminded of a family who sent their son to one of the best European schools in Brussels so that he could have a good multicultural and classical education.
One of the family’s neighbours asked them "and how is his education going?"
"It’s wonderful" said the boy’s mother. "In no time at all, he could write home asking for money in seventeen different languages."

Friday 20th March 2026 – WHAT A MESS …

… my bedroom/office is in this evening.

You can’t move in here for computer bits, boxes, packaging, cables and all of that. It’s going to take hours to sort out all of it and make the place tidy enough that I can even crawl into bed.

Consequently, it won’t be anything like as early a night as last night was.

And “early” is certainly the word. Having abandoned tea at some ridiculously early time last night, I came back in here and dashed all the way through what needed to be done, with hardly a pause. That’s why I was in bed at 21:48, and I wish that it was as early as that every night.

However, regular readers of this rubbish will recall exactly what happens when I try to have an early night, without me having to explain it in anything like any detail.

Searing pains in the foot, intense fits of coughing – they would be guaranteed to awaken me at any moment without the extra assurance of an early night. And so, from about 04:00 onwards, I was going through phases of sleeping, dozing and awakening all the way through to the alarm going off at 06:29.

And as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … there have been very, very few times when I have felt less like leaving my stinking pit than this morning.

Eventually, though, I was in the bathroom for a good wash and then into the kitchen for the hot drink and medication, all the time wondering how long it will be before I’m back in bed. Totally ridiculous, seeing how early I was in bed last night.

Back in here, I managed to avoid the bed and instead, had a listen to the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night.

There were Royals under attack again last night. This time, it was the turn of Prince Michael to face the music when he asked someone in the crowd what they knew about a certain organisation. They replied that they were the people who sponsored the prize given by the Prince for some kind of good social activity. That took the Prince quite by surprise, as it was as well-known as it seemed to be. But with a lot of attention on the Royal Family in these recent times, it’s hardly surprising that a lot of these little facts are creeping out into the open when they were hidden before.

The Royal Family is still making the headlines these days, even if the Press has moved on from AFKAP – The Andrew Formerly Known As Prince. They now seem to be concentrating on others, and I really do wonder when someone else is suckered into the Epstein web. Not that it’s likely to be Prince Michael, of course. He keeps himself well out of the limelight and out of controversial situations.

I’d joined some kind of club on the internet about something or other, and although there was a list of about seven or eight people who were supposed to be officiating this site, I had my suspicions that it was being done by artificial intelligence, so what I proposed to do was to sit down and draw some 3D models of people that would represent this mysterious committee. I began to draw one, and I was giving some people a few lessons on the anatomical arrangements, the clothing, etc., but it was coming close to midday. I had some cheese with me, but I wanted some bread or something like that to go on it. Seeing as we were at the seaside, I went to a few of the stalls to see if they would sell me a bap or something, but they would only sell me a bap if it had something on it. In the end, I had to settle for a really basic kind of salad bap with just lettuce and tomato on it. It cost me thirty shillings, which I thought was enormously expensive, but I thought then that at least I’d have something to eat with my cheese at the moment.

Yesterday, I had a posting removed from a British newspaper comments section. My comment contained a word that is completely innocuous in British English but means something completely different in American English. It seems that their comments “moderator” is an artificial intelligence program from the USA because it was zapped almost immediately.

And it’s been an age since I’ve done anything with my 3D program, but the story that no-one would sell me an “empty” bread roll is one that occurred on several occasions in the distant past.

I was back in the Auvergne at Cécile’s place. I’d put an advert in the local paper about wanting to form a group. I had a couple of replies, and the first person to turn up was a female keyboard player. The second was a guy with a guitar. We began to talk about what we wanted to do and what we intended to do, and it seemed to gel a little. We didn’t have a drummer, but that can come later, I suppose. The guy explained that he was something of a novice, but that didn’t matter because we’d improve as we went on. When it came to late at night, these other two people decided that they would have to go, but they said that they would be back in the morning. They actually left together, so I thought that at least, those two were going to get on really well. Then, it must have been Cécile who mentioned something about tea. We hadn’t eaten, so she was going to make a great big bean salad, and she wondered if I’d help too. The way that she was giving out the instructions, it looked as if I would be going to be making all of it. Then I remembered that I’d bought some bean salad dressing from Canada and I couldn’t remember where I’d left it, so I thought that I’d run down to the shop on the seafront and see if they had any. But I’d forgotten how late it was, and, of course, all the shops along the seafront were closed, so I had to come back empty-handed. As I was passing the police station, I noticed that there was a woman standing outside with a baby in a pushchair. The woman was smoking a Turkish cigarette right in front of the baby. There were a couple of people remonstrating with her about this, but she didn’t seem to care at all.

Cécile used to play the guitar, and so when we were together, I did actually put an advert in one of these ecological papers to see if there were any drummers about. We did actually have a response too, but Cécile had to go off to the Ile d’Yeu to look after her mother, and so that put an end to that project before it had even started.

All of the shops being closed is another recurring story from the past, but I’m not sure where the cigarette episode fits in all of this.

And back at the seaside again? Hmmmm.

I was trying to organise a football team, so I’d sent out an open invitation for players to come to trials. One guy, who played in the centre of defence, had brought along his wife, who also played in central defence, and asked if she could have a trial too. I put her on the field alongside her husband at the start of the game. Although, like most trial games, it was very bitty and disjointed, she had a really good game and, in fact, performed better than her husband. Anyway, I kept them both on for the next round of trials.

When FC Pionsat St Hilaire was due to play against another team one Saturday night, the opposition turned up with only ten players. There was a girl with their supporters, and she offered to play for them. We couldn’t see why she shouldn’t, so she ended up on the field with them. And she was quite a useful player too.

But the third and fourth dreams recurred all the way through the night, coming back on several occasions. It’s been a good while since I’ve had a dream like that.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up as usual and was disappointed that I hadn’t found a doctor whom I could berate. And she made a bad move with her hand, right on the base of my foot exactly where the worst pain can be found. I was in agony after that.

After she left, I went to make breakfast and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

Today, we’ve finished the Latin occupation of Greece, and we’re now dealing with the Ottomans. Surprisingly, life for the Greeks under the Ottomans is in some respects easier than under the Latins, so our author tells us. They are allowed freedom of religion, the power to appoint their own governors and all kinds of things like that, things that they were never allowed to do under the Latins.

And surprisingly, there is very little repression of the population.

Back in here, I revised for my Welsh and then went for the lesson. And for a change, it was one of the best lessons that I’ve had, and I wish that they would all go like this one.

After the lesson, my faithful cleaner turned up to do her stuff. She sat me down at the kitchen table, took all of the boxes off the shelf unit by the door and told me to sort them out.

It took an age, as you might expect because tidying up is not my forte, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. However, it’s almost all done now. There’s just one box of stuff that I wouldn’t know how to sort, and there’s a box that I brought in here, full of stuff that should, by rights, belong in the bedroom.

Surprisingly, even though I used more boxes than were there before, not only is the unit much tidier, there seems to be much less stuff on it. I’m not sure how that happened.

After she left, I came back in here and unwrapped my late birthday present.

As you might have guessed, it’s a new computer – or, at least, a reconditioned one.

The first thing that I did was to take the case off and installed the hard drives from the old one and uprated the RAM, but to my surprise, there’s no HDMI socket for the screen.

On the graphics card, there are four ports that look as if they might be USB ports but they are about twice the size. Some kind of HDMI adapter came with the computer and it plugs into the ports on the graphics card, but when I plug in the HDMI cable, there’s no screen display.

The screen is working fine because when I plug it back into the laptop, it works fine. So I’ll have to find a solution, and if not, I shall hope that the graphics card from the old computer will fit into this motherboard.

However, as you might expect, I have boxes, cables and computers all over the place and I can’t go to bed until I tidy them away somehow.

Tea tonight was chips, sausage and beans with cheese, followed by vegan cheesecake. Only a small tea tonight as I’m still off my food. It looks as if it’s going to be another period of semi-starvation right now.

Anyway, that’s enough of that. I’m going to tidy up and at some point, if I’m lucky, I might even be able to find some room on the bed for me.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the pain in my foot … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once told one of the doctors at dialysis about it.
"It hurts so much in several places, doctor" I said."What do you advise?"
"Well" he replied. "My advice is to stop going to those places."

Tuesday 10th March 2026 – WHAT A NICE …

…tea that was tonight. And seeing as I didn’t have anything in mind but instead made it up at the last minute, it was even nicer. I ought to do this more often.

In fact, today has been a reasonably good day, for the most part. Not like last night, where I was once more running hours late … "as you are tonight too" – ed …

By the time that I’d finished everything and was ready for bed, it was once more coming up to 23:30, and I really don’t know where the time goes. But anyway, I finally slid into bed, curled up underneath the bedclothes and went almost straight to sleep.

However, it was a rather restless night and I awoke a few times, usually for no good reason. However, there was one dream that related to all of this.

This was another morning when I was convinced that the alarm had gone off and awoken me. I was lying there, waiting for the second alarm, but nothing actually happened so I didn’t leave the bed.

It was hardly surprising because when I checked the clock later, it was 02:21. So that probably explains it from that point of view – why the alarm hadn’t gone off – but it was so real and so convincing, as a few other similar dreams have been.

When the alarm finally did go off, I was totally flat-out in bed, fast asleep. And it was such a struggle this morning to leave the bed that I didn’t have my feet on the floor when the second alarm went off. So we’ll have to call that a failure.

Nevertheless, I was eventually able to stagger into the bathroom, and then afterwards, I went into the kitchen for the hot drink and medication.

Back here, I had a listen to te dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There was an article in the staff magazine about someone moving house from the UK over into Belgium. I thought to myself that it would be a really good idea to write some kind of weekly column about the challenges and differences that people face that they don’t realise at first. I thought that I’d go for a walk around the area where this new person was living. While I was walking around there, almost right outside his house was an old pale blue J4 van. I wondered of maybe this might be his. I wanted to take the back door off and look inside it, because there were plenty of things inside, but that was going to be complicated because there was a piece of the bodywork in the way. I could manipulate the piece of bodywork and pull it out, but the whole van would fall to pieces if I were to do that, so I tried gently to do it, but it was obviously not going to work, so I went to fit it back. However, I’d disturbed the door lock while I was doing that, soinstead of the key being completely vertical, it was now at something like forty-five degrees, so I thought to myself that he’s going to have something of a surprise when he comes to unlock the door.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall me saying that back in the mid-70s, I had an Austin J4 van before I had the big Transit. Mine was about thirteen different colours, many of which were shades of green, and it was so rotten that you didn’t need to do anything to take the back door off. It would fall off on its own.

The whole front had rotted away from the chassis, so when you slammed the door (they were sliding doors), the front end would move forward a couple of inches. How it passed its MoT I really don’t know, but I didn’t bother taking it to its next one. It ended up in Barlow Brothers scrapyard in Crewe and I recovered the £25:00 that I’d paid for it.

But we did have a staff magazine when I worked at the EU and I actually appeared in it, but not as an official contributor but as a letter-writer, and my photograph was taken, with me on the Honda scooter that I had at the time. That was the scooter that I taught Roxanne to ride when she was … errr … eight years old.

We were supposed to be moving house that afternoon, so I’d had something of a lie-in that morning because emptying my room wouldn’t really take me all that long. So when I awoke, I began to sort everything out, and my mother came in to see how I was doing. I was making quite a lot of progress but there weren’t enough boxes for everything, so I had a feeling that much of my stuff was just going to be thrown into the van. When I’d finished my room, I went to see how everyone else was doing, but no-one seemed to be doing anything. They were just sitting there, lounging around. I was doing my best to chivvy everyone up, but to absolutely no success whatsoever. It seemed that everyone else in the house was just not interested in packing away their things. I made a start, working on the lounge and the living room, but the people who were sitting around were just in my way and I had numerous kinds of discussions and arguments with them about lending a hand. But at one stage, I stopped and listened, and I couldn’t hear anything coming from upstairs where my mother and some of the other children were. I thought to myself that it’s when kids and people are being silent, that’s when they are getting into the most mischief but I didn’t really have time to go to have a look at it if we had to be out of this house in a very short space of time. I just tried my best to sort things out and make the best of the one or two people, particularly the very young kids, who were interested in giving me some help.

This seems to be another one of those dreams that’s par for the course. Here I am; I’ve done what I have to do, and I’m becoming stressed out about something that has nothing whatever to do with me. Emptying the house was the problem of my parents, so why am I so concerned about it?

It’s simply that, I suppose, I’m totally unable to delegate anything to anyone else. I become far too interested in it myself to trust anyone else to do things.

The Nurse turned up, happy as Larry, after his week’s break. I told him about the planned removal of the medication to one of the empty drawers, so I hope that he cottons on to it tomorrow instead of having a mad ten minutes panicking.

After he left, I made breakfast and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

Things are coming to a head in Greece as the Frankish control has passed to the Navarese, then to the Florentines, then to Naples and a few other people in between. No-one can seem to keep control of Greece for very long in the fourteenth century.

But what’s worse is that some of the disaffected powers are asking for help from … The Turks, of all people, and the Turks aren’t going to miss an opportunity to install themselves in Greece. The disputes between the various Latin factions are laying the foundations of their own destruction.

Back in here, I revised my Welsh and then went to the lesson. The lesson passed really well again, thanks to all of the preparation that I’ve been doing. I should have done it years ago. . But what’s important is not necessarily how much I prepare, but how much I can remember for the next lesson.

And our classmate from Dubai is still there. She still can’t understand the panic in the western press.

After the lesson, I had some tidying up to do, and then, when my cleaner came to do her stuff, she shooed me under the shower. When I came out, she had started organising the medication drawer, and I can’t believe how full it is, with everything that was lying around.

But it’s going to be much better like this, and I reckon that even then, there will be further scope for improvement.

After she left, I made a start on the next radio programme. And now, all of the music has been selected, reformatted, remixed, re-edited, segued and paired, and I’ve even written some of the notes for it. I can finish it off tomorrow, and then I have plenty of other things to do before I start the next one on Thursday morning.

And to tell a little secret, I could have done much more than I did, except that I had a little “relax” in my chair for half an hour in the early evening.

As I said earlier, I had no idea what to have for tea. But in the end, I ended up with a slice of vegan pie with veg, including cauliflower, mashed potatoes and gravy. It was followed by birthday cake and home-made ice cream. Delicious!

But right now, I’m off to bed ready for a good sleep before a hectic day of work tomorrow. I need my beauty sleep – and lots of it, of course.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about my letter to the EU’s staff magazine … "well, one of us has" – ed … the discussion was about the comparatively low death rate on Belgium’s roads compared to other countries.
My response was "seeing the amount of smoking that people do in Belgium, most people here die of cancer. It’s only the survivors who die on the roads."

Saturday 7th March 2026 – THIS REALLY BUSY …

… spell that I had yesterday and the day before seems to have continued today too. Mind you, I let a really golden opportunity slip through my fingers, but more of that anon.

Last night, it was another late night … "as it will be tonight" – ed … and it was again about 23:15 when I finally struggled into bed after I’d finished listening to Colosseum.

Once again, I managed to go to sleep quite quickly, and there I stayed until all of … errr … 04:01 precisely when I awoke. It was too early to raise myself from the Dead so I lay there vegetating, being totally unable to go back to sleep.

At what I thought would be about 05:30, I thought that I may as well leave the bed and dictate the radio notes that I’ve been writing, but on checking the time, I found that it was actually 06:05 and the alarm would be going off very shortly.

That was certainly a missed opportunity – I could have dictated all of the radio notes and been totally up-to-date again in that respect, but at 06:05, it’s far too late to make a start.

Nevertheless, I managed to raise myself into a sitting position, and by 06:20 I was up and about and heading to the bathroom. An early start, sure enough, but not the early start that I wanted or needed.

After a really good wash, I went into the kitchen and now that I have some fresh lemons thanks to Leclerc, I could make my drink correctly and take my medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out what I’d been up to during the night.

I was on my way to see some friends. I arrived in a city and I was on a bus, and because my mobility is restricted, I ended up in a hotel in the city centre in the early afternoon. The first thing that I did was to ask a few questions to a kind of robot writer. I wrote down some questions and it wrote out the answers, then it asked me if there was anything else that I needed. I said that I had to speak to some friends so the first thing that I did was to write “hello” to one of my friends, but I didn’t receive a reply, so I sent another brief message to one of my friends. She wrote back to say that she was pleased to see me and that the papers that I wanted were outside her lock-up garage in some kind of 17th- or 18th-century box, and this is the time when most neighbours won’t really complain about people hanging around there, so maybe I would like to go along and move them. I explained that I was not able to travel and couldn’t make it up there on my own, so she came back with a message “would you like me to prepare a meal for you?”. I was hoping to see my other friend who wasn’t in, but nevertheless I replied “yes, that would be really nice”. Then she told me about how she could make some kind of container. I sent back “what? Do you mean out of a lump of bread?” but she replied “no, out of a lump of butter”. I thought that that was not going to be a very good idea at all, to try to make a container out of a lump of butter.

It’d been a long time since I’ve thought about a robot writer – the 1960s and 1970s precursor to Artificial Intelligence and the display screen.

But of course, there’s the phenomenon of “automatic writing”, where some people can go into a trance while holding a pen, and it’s as if another being takes over and begins to write with your arm, hand and pen, with you having no control over it.

That’s something that has happened to me, and I’d love to know in what language you’d find the words ” XDFVV CHXWD BBBQC”.

Making a container out of a lump of butter would be interesting too. I hope that it wouldn’t be for holding hot food.

Isabelle the Nurse turned up as usual and sorted out my legs and feet, being really delicate around the sole of my right foot as the pain was back this morning. She was running late for a blood test so she couldn’t hang around.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

Today, we’re dealing with the winding down of the Frankish empire in modern Greece, the attacks by the Catalans, the Navarese and the Genoese, and the capture and sack of Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottomans.

The Ottomans are now preparing to move into Greece, and this is probably the saddest part of the whole procedure

During the morning (and some of the afternoon) I’ve been rearranging the things in the kitchen drawers, making it all more user-friendly. I’ve now ended up with a large drawer completely empty, and my cunning plan is to move all of the medication into it instead of having it lying scattered around all over various shelves and drawers. It will be much nicer, much more user-friendly and a lot less dispiriting when I don’t have to look at it every time I’m in the living room.

There was football at lunchtime, Y Fflint v Dinas Bangor, in the semi-final of the Welsh Cup. Bangor, from the third tier, were hoping to be the first club from their level to reach the final but Y Fflint, struggling in the Premier League, are hoping to win the cup for the first time since 1954.

Unfortunately, despite having done so well to reach the semi-finals, it was one step too far for Bangor. What stood out for me was the difference in quality between the Fflint and the Bangor players, which is only to be expected. Y Fflint were much quicker to the ball and seemed to be able to find a colleague with a pass, even when under a lot of pressure.

But congrats to Y Fflint and commiserations to Bangor.

And also congratulations to former JD Cymru League striker Will Evans, who played for Cardiff Metropolitan and Y Bala. Now playing in the English First Division with Mansfield Town, today he scored a goal against Arsenal to go with the one that he scored against Manchester United a couple of years ago.

Tomorrow, we had a first-v-second division encounter between Caernarfon and Y Rhyl, which you CAN WATCH HERE at 13:15 UK time, 14:15 CET or 08:15 Toronto time.

The rest of the day, I’ve been editing some of the radio notes that I’d dictated in that mad session the other morning. I managed to deal with no fewer than five programmes – admittedly only the notes for joining tracks – and now that’s five more radio programmes totally completed, all the way up to 2nd October. As I said, I want my radio shows to live on after I’ve gone.

There was even time to begin the research on yet another radio programme, in addition to the one that I began yesterday. This one today will take me all the way up to 27th November.

Tea tonight was the last of these breadcrumbed nuggets that have been hanging around in the freezer since Adam was a lad, with vegan salad and a baked potato – with vegan cheese in the slits instead of vegan butter. It was followed by some of my birthday cake and home-made ice cream.

But as for the nuggets, there are a few that I’ve bought recently, and the aim is to take them out of their shop packaging and tip them into an old ice cream container so that they are better-protected in the freezer than in a plastic bag.

But anyway, that’s for tomorrow, maybe. Right now, I’m off to bed.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Sack of Constantinople "well, one of us has" – ed … I asked one of my friends "did you know that the Ottomans sacked Constantinople in 1453?"
"Really?" he asked. "Who did they appoint instead?"

Friday 6th March 2026 – GUESS WHO …

… has been a busy boy today?

It’s difficult to understand where all of this energy has come from, but it was certainly there today and I hope that it will still be there for the weekend too and I can keep it up.

Last night, though, it didn’t look as if it would be a good day today. Once more ♬ I dillied and dallied and dallied and dillied, lost my way and don’t know where to roam ♬ and ended up being quite a bit later than intended going to bed. If I’d rushed, I could have been in bed by 22:30, I suppose, but it was in fact 23:30 when I crawled under the covers.

At least, I went to sleep straight away, which was one thing, but it was rather sad to awaken at 05:00. I could have done with much more than that. A good few minutes were spent deciding whether I should leave the bed at that point but instead, I curled up in the warmth of my quilt and went, surprisingly, back to sleep.

But not for long. I don’t know what time I awoke after that, but the alarm went off a short time afterwards and I tried my best to raise myself from the Dead.

Eventually, I was able to stagger into the bathroom for a good scrub-up and then I went into the kitchen for my medication and hot drink. And DISASTER – no fresh lemons. I had to make do with processed lemon juice, and it’s not the same.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There was a huge meeting of some kind of Gamblers Anonymous thing where people were invited to comment on how they stopped gambling. There was one guy who gave a lengthy speech about how he’d managed to stop gambling etc. and everyone applauded him. He was taken as being one of the shining examples of this meeting. Later on, while he was with his friends, they all went off somewhere and left him on his own. It was then that someone else came round to bring him a prize that he’d won when he’d been gambling. It was a huge prize too, and there was no possibility of hiding it. The people who had brought him this cheque decided that they’d take him out for a meal, and they ended up presenting formally this cheque to him in a restaurant where his friends were actually dining at the time. That proved, of course, to be something that was most embarrassing to everyone. Of course, his friends were really angry at having supported him at this Gamblers Anonymous thing. They went over to the table later where he was sitting, or he went over to theirs and they had a most acrimonious argument or discussion about this whole affair.

This was a strange dream. It’s another one that seems to have come out of nowhere, with nothing that has happened in recent times provoking anything like this.

I’d met a girl walking around Granville and I began to chat to her. She was part of a large family whose father had died and they had been evicted from their house where they were living and were basically on the road looking for somewhere to stay. They were heading in the Rennes direction. It turned out that the previous night they’d spent in a hotel just down the road from where I was living, one of these cheap village hotel-type of things. I felt really disappointed that I hadn’t seen her then. After we’d had a really good chat and she had wandered off, I went down to look at the street. I thought that what was this big hotel had been all boarded up and padlocked. There was no possible way in to it, so I didn’t say or do very much. I realised then that she was actually at the house next door because I could see the tables being laid out for breakfast the following morning, so I loitered around there but she didn’t turn up, and neither did any of her family, so I wondered if they had moved on. At some point a little later on, I met her again. She said that they were leaving and were going towards Rennes. I was spending some time chatting to her. She had this very large family and one of the children was underneath my bed, stuffing stuffed toys up underneath the mattress, so I had to chase her away. I was chatting to this girl when this old, strange minibus turned up. She basically said “goodbye” to me, and I felt terribly disappointed that she was leaving. They all crowded into this ancient minibus, one of those that had the luggage underneath the floor, and they set off. I decided that what I would do would be to try to hitchhike down towards Rennes to see if I could catch up with her at some point. So I set off and arrived at Rennes. I was on an airfield when this strange aeroplane came in to land. It nearly knocked down an officer, who made some kind of gesticulation at it, but I thought that he shouldn’t have been walking across the landing strip anyway. I wondered if this was the family arriving, so I ran towards the aeroplane, but it had crash-landed, sticking up with the tail in the air, landing on its nose. There was some kind of riot going on around this ‘plane and the police were called to quell it, which upset the commander of the base because he didn’t think that it was appropriate for the police to intervene in some kind of military affair. But there was a description of the airfield somewhere, and somewhere, people were talking about the different places where the aeroplanes were parked etc, but I didn’t take much notice because I was hoping that this was the ‘plane in which the family had arrived and everyone in it, especially her, were all OK.

And I was going to say that this was another one too, but meeting a girl in the street and staying in one of these shabby village-type of hotels of the kind that you would have found in every French village fifty years ago but are now long-gone reminds me of my hitchhiking trip around Finisterre in the mid-seventies when, in Morlaix, I was staying in such a place, I did meet a girl while I was walking around the town, and we did have quite a chat.

Furthermore, the streets in which this dream took place resembled very much some of the streets in the Quartier St Paul of Granville around which we drove yesterday looking for one of our passengers.

The rest of the dream would seem to be pretty meaningless, especially the part about the airfield and the part about the little girl shoving stuffed toys up underneath my mattress.

Isabelle the Nurse wandered in as usual and organised my feet and legs. She had a little more time today so we had a little chat. She seems to think that I ought to buy some garden furniture so that I can sit outside. And I would, believe me, if only I could lift myself out of it afterwards.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

The period of the Frankish occupation of Greece is coming to an end, due to the marauding Turks, and we’ve been discussing the Battle of Nicopolis when a reinforcing army coming from the West to relieve the besieged Franks in Greece was annihilated by a Turkish army, ending all hopes of salvation for the besieged. The End Is Nigh, right enough.

Back in here, I had things to do as usual, one of which was to send off an order to Leclerc because I’m now about to run out of soya milk. One thing that I really did fancy was a butternut squash because I wanted to make some butternut squash soup for next week, but it had gone out of stock since yesterday, which was a disappointment.

When I’d finished what I needed to do, I attacked the next radio programme and now, all of the notes are written, ready for dictation.

There were several interruptions too. I went to set the washing machine off with a load of clothes. I’m no longer able to hang the clothes up on the airer so I’ve arranged with my cleaner that I’ll do the washing on Friday lunchtime and she’ll hang it up when she comes in on Friday afternoon.

After she’d hung up the washing and done some cleaning, we emptied the top shelf in the wardrobe in here. There were plenty of bags, backpacks and so on, but we also found a large plastic box full of tools, screws and all kinds of similar stuff. I’d been looking for some of this stuff since the day that I first moved in here when I needed to erect the shipping radar aerial but couldn’t find it anywhere. So that’s another box to sort out this weekend.

Rosemary called me for a chat today too. Only a brief one – a mere fifty or so minutes – and, as usual, we didn’t discuss anything of any importance.

With what time was left, I began to prepare the following radio programme. This one will fall on the anniversary of the Day of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and you’ve no idea how many songs I have in my library that include the word “child” or “children” in the title. I could make a really good radio programme with all of those.

Tea tonight was baked beans with cheese, chips and vegan sausage, followed by the last of the apricot halves and some more of my delicious home-made ice cream. Tomorrow, I can start back on my birthday cake and finish it off during the coming week.

But right now, ordinarily I would be going to bed but onto the playlist has come a COLOSSEUM CONCERT FROM 1971. This is a really strange concert, because every time it comes round on the playlist, something dramatic happens. It appeared on the playlist on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR in 2018 when I met The Vanilla Queen, and also in 2019 when Castor suddenly appeared on the scene, and we know how dramatic those encounters were. I was never the same again.

There are also links on the sidebar for AMAZON UK, AMAZON USA and, since the recent “troubles”, AMAZON CANADA for the use of my numerous Canadian visitors. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I am extremely grateful when someone uses them to make a purchase

But before I go and listen to the rest of Colosseum, seeing as we have been talking about Gamblers Anonymous … "well, one of us has" – ed … there’s a similar society for people who suffer from alcoholic issues.
"Is that called ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’?" asked one of my friends.
"Knowing the people whom I’ve met and known" I told her "it’s more like ‘Alcoholics Unanimous’."

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: tidying up

Friday 24th July 2026 – THERE HAS BEEN …

Friday 17th July 2026 – AFTER THE DISASTER …

Wednesday 15th July 2026 – IT HAS BEEN …

Monday 6th July 2026 – WHEN THE ALARM …

Friday 3rd July 2026 – WHEN I AWOKE …

Tuesday 9th June 2026 – WHAT A DIFFERENCE …

Wednesday 13th May 2026 – AND THERE I …

Tuesday 12th May 2026 – OH NO! NOT ANOTHER …

Saturday 9th May 2026 – I HAVE TO ADMIT …

Saturday 28th March 2026 – YET ANOTHER EVENING …

Saturday 21st March 2026 — I HAD NOTHING ON …

Friday 20th March 2026 – WHAT A MESS …

Tuesday 10th March 2026 – WHAT A NICE …

Saturday 7th March 2026 – THIS REALLY BUSY …

Friday 6th March 2026 – GUESS WHO …

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