… that it’s THAT time of the year again.

All the way back from the shops this morning, stuck behind two perishing motorhomes crawling along at 10 miles per hour admiring the scenery and occasionally coming to a dead stop. “Ohh look Petunia! A seagull!” all the way to the motor home camp site which, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, is just 200 yards down the road from here on the way to the lighthouse.

So it won’t be long before Caliburn and I will be playing skittles with the hordes of tourists swarming across the road without even looking before they step off the edge of the pavement.

Anyway, that’s for later on in the season.

Right now I’m more interested in what happened today, and especially this morning when just as I was on the point of throwing the bedclothes off and raising myself from the dead, the alarm went off. So we’ll call than a honourable draw this morning.

There was some paperwork that needed doing first thing after my medication so I did that and then it was time for me to nip out to the shops. And I noticed the tenant in my new apartment cleaning the windows. Word has spread around quite quickly.

Noz came up with a few things, including a new non-stick pie tin to replace the old cheap metal ones that I had. It’s the same pattern design as the frying pan I bought the other week.

Matching frying pan and pie tin? Whatever next? I’ll be going for colour-co-ordinated curtains at this rate. They were having a “cat accessory” sale as well. After what I’ve been dreaming just recently, do you think that someone is trying to tell me something?

At Leclerc I hardly spend anything. There wasn’t much that I needed apart from the fruit and some soya desserts that were in the clearance bin. And then I had to go across the road to post a letter to the property management company of this building.

Back here I had coffee and breakfast – more cheese on toast (it’s lovely being able to buy vegan cheese) – and then checked the dictaphone. I was in Caliburn at one point. We were driving somewhere through the countryside and came to what looked like a steep hill. I got out to push Caliburn up the hill but it wasn’t actually an uphill but a downhill. Caliburn roared away all on his own and I had to run after him. I ran for a couple of miles and came eventually to a bad bend. There was a Bova-bodied coach that Caliburn had hit. Several people in it were badly injured. There was shattered wood and a couple of other cars badly damaged all around there. My first thought was that I was really really sorry about all of this. I said it about 3 or 4 times. One guy on the coach who seemed to be uninjured said “I’ve bandaged some of the people over here as best as I can but there’s all that side down there. I felt really dreadful

And then I was with, of all people, that strange Burmese girl whom I met in Brussels. We were in Egypt and I had to go to Cairo to pick up a hire car but I was the wrong side of the Nile. I met some friends of mine – it might have been my friends from the Wirral in fact – and we were chatting. Then I thought “God! I’m going to have to go”. I had a choice between saying goodbye to the Burmese girl or to a cat and strangely I chose the cat. I picked up the cat and stroked it. everyone else in the area came round and started to stroke it. In the meantime the Burmese girl was hiding in a little recess somewhere. She wouldn’t come out and her mother was scolding her for this and that. In the end she asked me when I was coming back. I said a date and she said “I’ll make sure that she’s here to see you”. I thought that that was strange but anyway that was what we arranged. I had to set off to walk to Cairo. They rang me up from the hire company and said that they’d dropped off the car somewhere. I thought “I now have to go to walk and pick up this car and come all the way back and load it. Why couldn’t they have dropped it off at the hotel where I could simply have loaded the car and gone?”. I set off and met the husband from the Wirral. The vehicle that they had for me was one of these big American semi-trailer rigs, just the cab unit. I thought “this is enormous”. Alvin got out and said that it’s a 5-speed and started to give me a whole run-down but I couldn’t hear a word that he said. He wandered off and the Burmese girl and I climbed in – what she was doing there with me – she said something like “wouldn’t it have been a better idea to have arranged this vehicle differently?”. I was beginning to think that driving something big like this through the streets of Cairo she was probably right. I wish that I’d done it differently now but it’s too late. She was nervous and asked “shouldn’t we have this vehicle towed?”. I said that if anyone is going to do any towing it’s going to be this. This is the correct vehicle to do that. We set off anyway and I suddenly realised that I didn’t know whether this was a petrol or diesel engine. What’s going to happen now when I come to fuel up?

I stepped back into this dream later on and she was wandering around a supermarket looking for some hamburger buns so she could make hamburgers for tea.

And then she was there again a third time. The two of us were actually at a rifle range at a fairground, in a booth, a sort-of shooting gallery. The guy in control of the place was behaving rather strangely so we were keeping some kind of eye on him at the same time that we were shooting to find out what was going on.

Finally, we were talking about history later and Pliny the Younger whose eye-witness accounts of things like the eruption at Pompeii in which his father was killed was the basis of a lot of modern history.

It’s strange though, thinking about that Burmese girl turning up in the middle of the night. What brought her into the proceedings?

In fact, it was pretty strange all round. About 20 or so years ago (I was still working and had the armoured Opel Omega) she sent me an e-mail. “I’m a Burmese illegal and I need help. I think you can help me”.

What help I would be to a young desperate girl is anyone’s guess, and how did she find my e-mail address?.

That’s the kind of thing that piques my interest and has brought me more than my fair share of trouble in the past, as events in the High Arctic will demonstrate, but anyway, I must know more about this.

We met and I took her for a drive and then a walk, taking all of the usual precautions. She regaled me about how she’d fled Myanmar through the jungle swamps and into Thailand and stowed away on an aeroplane – you know, the usual story.

But while she was telling me this I was looking her over. Perfectly manicured hands and skin, designer denim jacket and jeans – someone who’s fled through the jungle and stowed away on an aeroplane? If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck and that’s all there is to it.

So I was wondering where all of this was going to go, so seeing as we were close to Valentine’s Day I sent her a bunch or red roses a couple of days later to try to draw her out but I don’t think that she was born yesterday because she cottoned on to my game, I reckon. After she’d tried to up the ante with a story about how she “really did have a passport” and I still didn’t take the bait, it petered out.

There have been a few bizarre encounters in my life, and that was certainly one of them. And I wasn’t on a ship remixing a Colosseum live concert either. I must have been losing my touch.

For the rest of the day I haven’t done very much. Just a leisurely ramble around here and there, and I had the guitars out for a while a well.

For tea there were no chips because the potatoes aren’t big enough. So I cubed them and fried them and they were just as good with a salad and some of those small breaded quornburgers. There’s still a few left before I start on the big ones, but the freezer is now emptying quite quickly and I’ll have to start another marathon baking session soon.

Hence the new pie dish.

So before I go to bed I’ll dictate some radio notes. That will give me something to do tomorrow and at least make sure that i’ve actually achieved something this weekend. High time I did some work.

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