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Tuesday 8th March 2016 – FIRST EXCITING THING …

… to happen today was that my web-host’s server went down. And was down for about three hours in total and so you were all denied the pleasure of reading about my ramblings in the early part of the afternoon.

But that wasn’t what upset me the most about it. What did annoy me was that I had been actually using part of the blog from October, and when it all went down, my work came to a shuddering halt. As I mentioned the other day, the next part of the magnum opus which is the collating of the photos that I took in Canada last year with the relevant notes that I made on the dictaphone – that’s also coupled with the entries that I made on my blog so I needed to cut and paste the relevant sections out of there to correspond with whatever I dictated on the dictaphone. And of course, with the blog being down, that I could not do, and so that was that.

Second exciting thing was that the nurse remembered to come this morning. And as a result, I had my blood test. I’ve had the results too, which show that my blood count has now gone back up to 9.0. “Good news” you might be thinking, but it should be tempered with the fact that I’ve had a blood transfusion with two pochettes of blood in between this one and the last one. It’s going to be much more interesting to see what happens at the blood test next week and see where we have got to.

Third exciting thing was that Nerina came along to visit me again during the night, which certainly makes a change from members of my family. Regardless of anything that might (or might not) have happened in the early 90s, I would prefer her company any day to three or four of the others whom I’ve met recently while I’ve been out and about in the middle of the night.

But it was not she who made her appearance during the early part of the evening, but some others with whom I can well live without. I can’t remember what was happening here now with this first bit but I had nine somethings – was it nine stitches? Nine rows of stitches? But they had to be taken out and while this was going on I was surrounded by a load of people whom I knew – some of whom worked in the OUSA offices. But I do remember in my dream passing out long before we reached the end of what was going on there.
But after the trip down the corridor, the next part was a lot more coherent even if I couldn’t remember the beginning of it. I’d been out for a drive with Nerina, each of us in our own car. Both of them were markIII Cortinas – mine being a lovely pale-green late-model one but Nerina’s was an old 2.0 bronze-coloured one. But I was ill and having difficulty driving mine, having been told not to go too far in it, but that wasn’t likely to stop me. After a while, we came to a petrol station and I was feeling really uncomfortable by this time. Nerina suggested that we swap cars as hers was fitted with power-steering and so it would be easier for me to drive. And so we swapped. The fuel gauge in Nerina’s car wasn’t working so I reckoned that I had better fill it up to make sure that I had enough fuel to make it back home again. I told the girl in charge of the petrol pumps to “fill ‘er up”. But after a few seconds, the counter on the petrol pumps stopped working so she tried with the next one, and the same thing happened. And so on, and on. But anyway, it seemed that Nerina’s car was almost empty so I was filling it right to the top – as much as would go in it. Not that that annoyed me – what was annoying me was that the fuel read-outs on the pumps weren’t working. As you probably know, ever since I started with my taxis in 1979 I’ve always kept fuel records for the vehicles that I’ve used, and I still do so even today with Caliburn. I was telling the girl at the fuel pumps about this and she replied “don’t worry, sir, it’ll all be okay. We’ll work it out somehow”. I was wondering just how she was going to do this with all of this confusion about changing from pump to pump, how much fuel had gone into Nerina’s car and how much it was going to cost me. And then how was she going to prepare a receipt for me with all of the details that I needed to keep up with my records as I usually do. The delay was now starting to get on Nerina’s nerves, and she mentioned that I had only invited her out for half an hour and now I had her doing all of this (and it wouldn’t have been the first time that I had heard this complaint either). And I hadn’t even checked the water in the car yet.

But then downstairs, wait for the nurse, work on the web pages as much as I could, coffee and vegan banana muffins for break, baked beans on toast for lunch and home-made vegan lasagne for tea. I’ve told you before, … "and you’ll tell us again" – ed … if I ever recover from this illness that I have and am fit enough to go back home, I shall immediately find something else that might be wrong with me.

Much as I love my little house and miss it very much, I shall miss Liz’s home cooking even more.

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Sunday 6th March 2016 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since I posted a photo on here?

It must be ages and ages – I know for a fact that I didn’t take any photos at all during February and that has to be the first time for about 15 years since I had a photo-free month.

heavy snow fall march le fournial sauret besserve puy de dome franceBut so that you don’t feel deprived, here’s a photo taken with the camera in my mobile phone and it shows the snow that came a-falling down today.

And you’ve no idea how nice it is to be sitting inside here, by the stove, with a mug of hot coffee and a home-made banana muffin, and watching it fall. Unfortunately it didn’t stick around because we had a weird sort of weather day. heavy snowfall and then sunlight which melted the snow, and then snowfall again, and then sunlight, und so weiter.

When I went out for a walk just now, 99% of the snow had gone, but there was a crystak-clear sky with tons of stars and a rapidly-plummeting temperature. It’ll be cold tonight, that’s for sure.

As for my walk, this was the best so far. I’ve progressed to a fair distance now – about 150 yards away, I reckon. And I’m moving easier and quicker without quite so much pain and with less of a breathing difficulty although I still have this egg in my lungs that I can feel when I’m getting out of breath. So apart from that, there might be hope for me yet if only I could overcome this blood-loss thing.

So what else did I do today?

Apart from laughing at Manure, I spent all of the day going through my medical receipts. Now that the Insurance Company has agreed my maladie grave and given me a case number, I can send them all in. That meant putting them in date order, finding the prescriptions that went with them, printing out a dozen or so claim forms and filling them in, and then scanning the documents in order to keep copies. That lot took me from about 09:30 to about 16:00, with a couple of pauses for coffee and home-made banana muffins and a pause for lunch.

And how much do they owe me then? Well, to date, bearing in mind that there are quite a few bills that have yet to arrive, it’s about three months’ pension money. And that’s what I’ve spent out in about two and a half months of illness. So you can see why I’ve been struggling and in all kinds of difficulty.

So why haven’t I made a claim beforehand?

The answer to that is that without having had my claim for a maladie grave approved, I would have had to submit my claim under the normal procedures and only had part of the expenses approved. And then, the relevant claim file for that period would have been closed and you know just as well as I do what it would have been like trying to persuade an Insurance Company to reopen a closed claim.

I also had a haircut today. Liz was busy scalping Terry and so I took my turn in the queue. It needed doing but it wasn’t ‘arf cold outside afterwards.

As for last night, though, I was on my travels yet again.

I was up on the moor somewhere round by Northumberland and the Scottish border with a party of soldiers, maybe 100 of us, but we weren’t troops and in British Army soldiers but more like a throwback to Roman times, that kind of thing. We were in search of a powerful band of orc-like creatures who had been devastating this area. We had travelled so far into the wilderness and it was late in the day so the leaders of the party called for a halt for the night. He sent out two parties for observation. One of these parties had some kind of flying machine – a primitive light aeroplane made with a tubular aluminium frame but with no covering and they would fly over they area to see what was happening and see if any trace could be found of these orc-like people, while the second party, of which I was a member, would go to a watch-tower, something like a Martello tower not too far away, to liaise with whoever was in the aeroplane and receive their signals. So there we were, inside this watchtower but there was no sign of this plane – we waited and waited. Just when we considered that it was time to go back to the main party, we heard the plane flying over so the leader of our party took the lamp, a big black affair with a solar panel for recharging the battery (you have to admit that the Romans were very advanced technologically) and went outside. He didn’t return, so someone else went out, and found the first guy with an orc spear right through his body, thrown with tremendous force to the extent that it had gone halfway through him. At that moment he too was speared by the orcs, and this is how it went on. There were just 5 of us left and then the other party that had been with the aeroplane, they came back (minus the aeroplane). Not being quite aware of what was going on, I went down to meet these four people, who had a girl of about 4 with them. But there were also four other people there, two men and two women, and they were in business attire and the people from our party were looking at them. Suddenly, the penny dropped and I shouted out “run, you fools! Can’t you see that they are orcs!”. This led to something of a struggle and two of our group of four were cut down and the other two made it inside. But the little girl was left cowering by the door. I fought off these orcs and in a short time they had gone. I picked up the girl and went inside but the place was deserted. All that I could see were muddy orc footprints all over the walls and the ceiling. They had somehow managed to enter the building and removed the rest of our two parties while I was outside fighting. This left just me and the little girl, and we had to rejoin our main party a mile or two away, and God knows where these orcs were. Had they gone off with their captives, or had they killed them and were lying in wait for us, or were they attacking our main party. So we just had to grit our teeth and make a run for it, hoping that we would get through.
That was another unpleasant situation to be in and I was glad that a call of nature had aroused me from certain death. And after the usual trip down the corridor I was back with a group of children and there was gambling, people injecting themselves with needles and all of that kind of thing, which (strangely enough – or maybe not, as it happens) relates to a discussion that we were all having here on Saturday afternoon.

So now, having had my walk, I’m off for another early (but not quite so early) night. I have a blood test in the morning so I need to study.

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Saturday 5th March 2016 – THAT BLASTED NURSE …

… forgot me yet again this morning!

And there I was, deep in the arms of Morpheus, miles from anywhere on this planet when the alarm went off. And I struggled downstairs pretty quickly, remembering the other day how I had been pris au dépourvu in my nightie by the nurse and vowing not to repeat that ever again.

And then after breakfast, I waited … and waited … and waited. And then that was that. I gave it up and went and sat down in the living room feeling rather annoyed. I could have had a wonderful lie-in for a change had I known that he wasn’t going to come.

So where was I then when I was away with the fairies?

I was actually off again playing cricket last night – something that I’ve done on one or two occasions just recently. And if you remember, I did say that if ever I were to be invited to play cricket for a team, it would be as a wicket-keeper before anything else. Certainly not my bowling, which is what I was doing last night. And my bowling was, as you might expect, pretty wayward but somehow it kept confusing the opposition and I ended up taking more than my fair share of wickets. One ball went hopelessly wide but the batsman waved an unnecessary wand at it and top-edged it down to a rather short long-on. Another ball that I sent down was a rather inviting dolly and received exactly what it deserved. It flashed past me and I just instinctively stuck out my right hand and much to the batsman’s dismay and everyone else’s (including my) astonishment, I caught it. and this meant that the batting team was all out for 66, which was quite a cause for celebration.

And then I missed the celebrations because the alarm clock went off.

What I’ve done today is to update my Open Office to the latest version. When I bought this laptop last year, I downloaded the current version but when I came to use the spell-checker today I found that I had forgotten to download it. And that led to the upgrade – together with the new spell-checker.

And once the spell-checker had been installed, then do you remember all of the dictaphone notes that I was transcribing over the last month or so? Then I spell-checked all of the Canada notes and now they are ready for the next stage of the process – viz. the tying in of the notes to the relevant photos that I took while I was over there on my travels.

We had a lovely surprise as well this afternoon. The beautiful smells coming from the kitchen turned out to be Liz’s first attempt at making home-made banana muffins (made, of course, with home-made bananas), vegan of course. And they were beautiful, especially with a nice hot coffee. Sitting inside with warm oven-fresh banana muffins and hot coffee watching the snow-storm that was raging outside was really pleasant.

So I don’t know what is going to happen now. The nurse is yet to arrive and it’s starting to be late – at least for me these days anyway. I’ll be going for my post-prandial perambulation in a minute and then I’ll be off to bed, whether he comes or not.

And even as we speak, the nurse turns up. 30 minutes late but there we are.

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