Tag Archives: vegan pasta

Tuesday 18th June 2024 – ON OUR WAY …

… home, going home where lovers roam.

Yes, unfortunately I can’t welcome you to the Pleasuredome yet – that’s another year away once the tenant downstairs clears off, but I can certainly welcome you to an apartment that I have never ever seen in all my life before.

Not only is the apartment spotlessly clean, and by that I mean my office and bedroom too, everything in sight has been washed to death including all the bedding and I have a lovely clean bed in which to climb later this evening.

My cleaner has worked miracles to have this place ready for me and I’m beyond speechless at the efforts that she’s made for me.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the solidarity that I have encountered in this building has made coming to live here all worthwhile.

A shame that the hospital couldn’t have joined in the fun. Like most French public functions it’s “duty before everything else” and most of the staff had a tendency to be rather brusque but nevertheless, in unguarded moments they could all (well, mostly) be good fun and apart from the dreadful stuff that passed for food, I enjoyed my stay.

Well, most of it, anyway.

And for a change, I actually enjoyed last night. I had a good sleep for once. Although I wasn’t in bed until long after midnight, I slept right the way through until 06:00 without awakening when I had to go for a ride on the porcelain horse.

And would you believe, well, I’m sure you would because you’ve been following these pages long enough, someone chose that moment to come in to tell me that they wanted to take a blood sample.

"Come back in five minutes" I grunted.

Ten minutes later we had the 06:15 whirlwind through the ward. I gave blood and just about everything else. Surprisingly they didn’t ask for a diabetes sample – I suppose that they’ll “get that from the blood test” – but they gave me a totally unsolicited glass of orange juice all the same.

Having gulped that down, I settled down under the covers again and was totally dead to the World until the next round of awakening at 08:15. That two hours or however long it was was the deepest sleep that I have ever had, I’m sure of that.

With that procedure out of the way, breakfast came round. And once I’d polished that off I nipped into the bathroom where, sitting astride the you-know-what, I had my last hospital shower.

And remembering what happened the other week in Paris, I didn’t wash my clothes. I don’t want to be lugging soaking wet clothes halfway around Normandy.

After the shower I had a visit from the medical staff. All of my medication has changed and I noticed with a wry smile that in some cases we’re back to where we were a couple of years ago.

And a real surprise was that the chief of the dieticians came to see me today to excuse herself and her team. Nothing I can say or do will change the Byzantine nature of things in the French Public Service so I listened politely and thanked them for coming, but I must admit that it was through gritted teeth.

As well as all of that, there are several appointments in the immediate future and a couple of tasks for the nursing staff who come to the apartment every morning. I’m definitely going to be having my money’s worth.

What was sad that it wasn’t Emilie the cute consultant who came to say “goodbye”. She sent a sidekick to blast me off into Eternity today and I was really disappointed at that.

And so it went on for several hours, people preparing me and then unpreparing me for departure so in the end I gave up and went to sleep in my chair.

Eventually an ambulance arrived and the ambulanciers strapped me to a stretcher and loaded me into the back of their vehicle. And there I was, hoping for a rather discreet and unobtrusive return.

My cleaner bless her was waiting downstairs to help me up here but the guys put me in a chair and carried me up. It’s a good job that I’d lost all that weight.

Once inside the place, while I was being overwhelmed by the kindness, my cleaner was going through my prescription, restoring to the shelves medicaments that had been discarded in the past, withdrawing medicaments that had only just been prescribed and then she sallied forth into town to have the new prescription made up, and presumably to arrange a lorry to bring it all back.

While she was away I had some hummus and biscottes along with a mug of hot chocolate. New stuff fresh from the bottle – you should have seen how bloated the stuff was in the fridge that I’d left when I went in.

When my cleaner came back, she had half the stuff. The rest will be here over the next few days. But we both came to the conclusion that the amount of stuff here now is overwhelming and I am going to need help to sort myself out with this medication otherwise we’ll be having a tragedy.

What I shall probably have to do is to involve the visiting nurse in all of this.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from the night. That was when we just realised that there would be quite a lot more than just rape back at our base so we decided to hurry back from the end of this mission and take up some kind of armed guard although we expected that if our armies were defeated we’d all be disarmed anyway in which case if would be very pot luck as to what happened and what people had to suffer before the end of the war was announced.

Quite a gruesome subject, I know, and ordinarily I wouldn’t post something like this but it actually has some kind of basis in fact. A prison camp containing prisoners of all nations was overrun by the Russians in Eastern Europe and the prisoners were released. Many of the prisoners remained in some kind of orderly cohesion but the Russian prisoners went berserk and began to commit all kinds of atrocities. A delegation from a local village came to the camp and pleaded with the British officer in charge to send a platoon of British prisoners to protect the inhabitants of the village from the depredations of the Russians. The irony of the situation was not lost on the British prisoners – defending their enemies from their allies – and it was definitely a premonition of the times five years hence.

Tea tonight was my long-anticipated pasta with vegetables and melted cheese, along with a burger from the European Burger Mountain in my fridge. And you’ve no idea just how delicious it was. It made the waiting all worthwhile.

Well, perhaps not.

So now I’m going to curl up in my luxurious clean bed and if it wasn’t for the nurse in the morning, I wouldn’t be leaving it for a week.

At least there will be no bed-baths. There was a strange, foreign nurse on the ward this morning giving bed-baths. With one guy she folded down his nightgown to his waist and said "first I wash as far as possible"
Then she rolled up his nightgown, began to wash his legs and said "next I wash as far as possible"
And finally, with a flourish, she ripped off his gown and said "and now I wash possible"

Monday 11th September 2023 – EVEN THOUGH I …

… had the alarm set for 06:30 this morning I was still up and about before it went off.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … this settee is one of the most comfortable places where I’ve ever slept.

Even more interestingly, I’ve not had one of these night-sweats that I’ve been having just recently back at home. I’ve no idea what’s happening. I think that Alison might be afraid that I’d be wanting to move in here permanently.

Something else that was quite surprising too is that I remembered to take my medicine too – the first time since Thursday last week. It’ll be interesting to see what will happen to my sleeping pattern now that I’m back on the medication.

Loads of stuff on the dictaphone from the night. I started off in Nantwich, walking up Welsh Row towards the Grammar School where I used to attend. There were people there and it was late at night. I was intending to walk up one of the side streets that were there. Suddenly we came under attack. We were in a big spacecraft thing so we all had to fit into our flying suits, like a large sack of something. We had to unzip it and it was like 3 flying suits all joined together. It took ages to sort them out because we’d never done this before. We were panicking quite badly because the attack was quite severe. In the end the first person in front climbed into his. I managed to unzip the parts behind him so I could climb into the middle piece. Someone else unzipped the part behind to climb into the back. We were then ejected n some kind of capsule into Space. We could see the fog, mist and ice forming on the outside of our helmets etc. It was freezing cold in this capsule but the 3 of us inside more or less the same flying suit meant that it was extremely warm in there too as far as we were concerned. We were quite comfortable even though ice was forming everywhere. But what this had to do with Nantwich I’ve really no idea

Back into this dream again. The woman recognised her daughter first then the father recognised her later. There they were in the middle of the Square in Sandbach dressed informally and were giving her a hug. They tried to question her about where she’d been and what she’d done but I explained that this wasn’t the best time to do it here in public because you never know who’s listening and what kind of capabilities they had, where the surroundings actually either don’t help anyone or just work in their favour.

I was with a girl last night talking about a couple whom we knew. They were a very strange couple. She was a straight-laced young girl and he was an older guy, rather wild. She asked if they had any profession or anything. It turned out that she was a former probation officer and she was someone whom she’d encountered during her work and they’d started a relationship together, which was extremely strange. This conversation went on for quite some time. She suggested that we go to meet some people whom she knew. She took me on a walk around the town in the rain. We ended up in these blocks of buildings which were actually 4 flats. She just came to the door of one of them and walked in. There were all kinds of people around here in this living room, I suppose, where she’d entered without even knocking. There was a girl having her eyebrows plucked by someone. She was in her underclothes. There was a cat being fed with a bottle, a pile of kids and an old woman. She went off into another room to fetch someone. I had to make some small talk with these strange people, introduce myself etc. It was certainly not the meeting that I’d been expecting with people. It was one of the strangest groups of people or families that I’d ever encountered

I don’t know where this fitted in with anything but on my travels during the night I saw a National Express coach reverse into a parking bay at the same time that a pile of kids were trying to alight. It was a woman driver reversing it. I thought that it was probably the most dangerous thing that I’d ever seen, all these people alighting from the coach as she was backing it up into this bay.

All of the day has been spent choosing music for the radio programmes for next year. I’m doing things slightly differently for next year so choosing the music is much more complicated in certain circumstances. It’s the more complicated ones that I’ve been doing today.

There was an interruption though – the Jehovah’s Witnesses came a-calling. They didn’t stay long though – I soon to saw to that.

Washing myself is a complicated affair so I can’t go upstairs. I ended up washing in the kitchen and I was half-way through when I thought that it might be a good idea to close the blinds in the window.

While I was at it I washed my clothes to date. I managed to hang them over a couple of chairs in the garden, only for them to receive an extra rinse. We had a torrential downpour this evening.

Tea tonight was pasta in my home-made cheese sauce with a vegan burger in a baguette. It was surprisingly delicious.

Alison was late coming home from work so we had a good chat for a while and now it’s bedtime. Tomorrow I’m going to have an attempt to go to the supermarket. It’s 400 metres up the road so it will be a brave try but we are running low on supplies.

So I’d better clear off an have a good sleep so I’m ready to fight the good fight.

Sunday 10th September 2023 – SO FAR THE SCORE ..

… is “Eric 2, Alison’s cups and saucers 0”. And that was just trying to make one meal here this evening. By the time that I leave here after my hospital appointment Alison won’t have any crockery left

However, look on the bright side This sofa on which I’m sleeping is one of the most comfortable on which I’ve ever slept. Once I’d finally gone to sleep last night I had the best night’s sleep that I’d had for some considerable time.

So much so that at 06:15 I was awake and by 08:00 I was up and about, feeling quite refreshed. How about that for a Sunday?

Hans came down a short while later and brought me a coffee, and when everyone had finally assembled down here we went for breakfast in Tervuren where we were yesterday.

Alison knew a scenic route through the park and the forest and quite luckily there was a parking space nearby.

Everyone else had patisserie but I had my bread rolls with jam, coffee and orange juice. We sat in the sun for hours and put the world to rights.

Later on we came home and an elderly lady passer-by actually helped me into the car which was very nice.

Back here we sat in the sun, nibbled on bits and carried on with our chat, and then Alison took Hans to the airport and Jackie to the station. There wasn’t much point my going, although after seeing the kind of damage that I can do while tidying up, I bet that Alison wished that I’d accompanied her.

Instead, I had a listen to the dictaphone. There was something going on last night about finding medals stuffed down sofas. When we uncovered this one we had a feeling that it was fake. later on there was an issue at a petrol station. I was with Paul. In the end I can’t remember very much but ha had to speak to a cashier. At the end of each line of petrol pumps at these Motorway services there was a kind-of hatch where there should have been a bank employee sitting. We had a drive around this fuel station but could only see one that was occupied, right at the top of the hill. We had to go to the bottom, swing the car round and drive back up again to pull up alongside the kiosk.

I then had to go to pickup someone at the airport at 12:45 – pick them up to take them to the airport. I was in one of these Japanese-style midi vehicles from the 1980s. I found the address and pulled up outside but no-one came out. I was waiting for about 15 minutes. Then I saw that the door was open and the keys were in the door. I imagined that they must have wanted me to go along and knock. I went and knocked, and a guy and a few boys dressed in some kind of sports uniform and track suit came out, said their goodbyes to whoever was in the house and went into my vehicle ready to leave.

Later on Alison had bought some kind of dancing sheep, cut-out trains and earth-moving equipment that were being used as a promotion for a cartoon film about sheep. She asked me to look at it. It was cheap and not very good, one or two of the things didn’t work properly so for just £1:00 or whatever I thought that it was quite interesting and amusing. It turned out that she’d paid £60:00 for one pack and £50-odd for the second. I thought that that was absurd. She realised that it was expensive, particularly as one or two of the things didn’t work but she happened to fall in love with them when she saw them being stored at the side of the road. Later on when we were around at her house which was actually Rosemary’s, thinking of something else I asked her if all the vehicles had been removed from that plot of land, thinking of the place where Terry found that old van that we drove away. She said “no, there’s just the old red one left”. I couldn’t remember any red one there. She said “the one that my son was going to use when he started his business before he died. I had someone come and take away all the others but that one hasn’t gone yet”. I realised then that we weren’t talking about the same plot of land at all. I was talking about one next to her cottage in France which was all overgrown etc.

There was something else with cars too. We were preparing a fleet of vehicles ready to go to a war zone, big red American-type tipper vehicles towing trailers. We prepared them. Before that there was a building site nearby. I’d been there to ask if they needed any volunteers to do any work. They asked about what I did, and to come back the next morning. I was there preparing these cars. In the end there was just one like an American Cobra sports car left. We couldn’t find the key to it. We spent hours sorting out the seat belt for it. When it was ready the guy looked under the table and found the key. he asked “what’s this key doing here?”. I replied “I don’t know – I’ve never seen it before”. he looked at it, looked at the registration number of the car and said “it’s one off the buses off on the holiday tomorrow”. I asked everyone what I was supposed to be doing tomorrow. One of his children – he had four, 2 boys, a girl and another who, although it was the oldest, was the smallest and rather fragile. This smallest one said to me “it’s lime-washing tomorrow again, I’m afraid”.

We had something about a cup of tea. Tea in Italy was something of a delight and they’d bought me a tea and a biscuit. The tea had milk in it but it tasted really nice. I couldn’t understand that because normally I wouldn’t drink tea with milk. It tastes bitter anyway

For tea I had pasta in a cheese sauce with olive oil, black pepper and oregano along with a couple of the vegan sausages that I’d bought yesterday.

Alison has an early start in the morning so I’m going to bed early. It would be nice to drink a coffee with her before she goes to work.

And then I can find a few things to do; to keep me out of mischief.

Monday 23rd September 2019 – THE ANSWER TO …

… last night’s question about where I might end up during the night is “I don’t know”. Or, more to the point, “I can’t remember”. Yet I was certainly somewhere. And on at least two occasions too (and maybe more) judging by the files that are on the dictaphone.

As of yet I haven’t listened to the tracks so I can’t even say with whom (if anyone) I was travelling last night. And that’s always the exciting part of course. I can’t wait to get to grips with the dictaphone notes and type them all out. That will mean editing the blog back as far as … gulp … 26th June. So that’s really going to be a labour of love, isn’t it?

The alarms went off as usual at 06:00 but it was a good hour later before I showed a leg. What with the medicine and all of that and a general tidy-up I was upstairs in the living room at 08:00. Sandra came to join me a little later and we had breakfast and a really good chat for ages.

A little later on, once the tremendous rainstorm had subsided, we went for a walk to buy groceries for tea tonight. She lives on a new housing estate tucked on down a side road right at the end of a commercial zoning area and this area is alive with ethnic shops and restaurants from the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent.

We stocked up with tons of stuff of all kinds of varieties, had a look at the big cinema across the road (nothing there that tempted me at all) and then went for lunch. There’s a place that covers pitta bread with various toppings (I had vegetables), toasts them in a gas-powered pizza oven and then folds them over to eat.

Absolutely delicious they were too.

But while I was out, I did a very foolish thing that maybe I shall come to regret – but ask me if I care.

There’s a pawn shop along the highway nearby and we went in more out of curiosity. And my eye was inexorably drawn towards a Genz Benz 200-watt combo amp and 15-inch speaker with tweeter.

Way overpriced at $CAN 350 but nevertheless this is a serious piece of kit and the guy in the shop lent me a bass guitar to sit down and have a play, which I did for over half an hour. It needed a good clean (which it had at the tender mercy of my fair hands) and then quite some use before the dust on the potentiometers disappeared, and then it had the most wonderful sound that I have ever heard.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, it’s now joined the Fender practice combo in the back of Strider and I didn’t pay anything like the asking price for the outfit. One very happy bunny here.

All I need now is an opportunity to go out and put it to work while I’m over here in North America. I have everything that I need, including a guitar strap that I managed to negotiate into the deal. High time I started bringing in some money isn’t it?

This afternoon we went for a walk. There’s an abandoned railway that runs past the end of Sandra’s street right along the riverside and it’s been converted into a cycle path and pedestrian walkway. The weather was quite nice so we made the most of it, walking all the way down past the Belltown Dome towards the city as far as the public beach at Britannia Park.

The beach cafe was closed (this ridiculously short tourist season in Canada gets on my wick, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall) so we walked back again. Sandra went off to practise her Spanish and I did a few chores on the laptop.

For a change, I made tea tonight. One of my pasta-and-bean-in-tomato-sauce surprises (the big surprise being that it was edible) and it went down really well which is always good news.

And then we tried to fire up her ancient Sony Handycam 8mm camera to watch some of her old family videos, but to no avail. Dead batteries (as you might expect) and no battery charger. Anyone have an old Handycam going spare for a few days?

After another really good chat (we seem to find tons of things to talk about ) I’ve come to bed. An early night and hopefully a voyage that I might actually remember. It’s no fun going anywhere if you can’t remember where you’ve been.

Thursday 4th April 2019 – REMEMBER YESTERDAY …

… when I told you that winter had returned to Normandy?

Well, it’s here and with a vengeance too. The storm is blowing up right across the bay and churning up the sea something wicked.

This little trawler, with its lifeboat in tow, is making heavy weather of leaving port this morning and struggling out into the wind.

By the time the evening came round, the wind had dropped slightly.

Ever so slightly, and as it was high tide when I went out for my evening walk, the waves were crashing down over the top of the Plat Gousset in an impressive fury.

All in all, it’s been quite a spectacle today with the weather the way that it has been.

Despite a night that was rather later than I wanted, I had a decent sleep up until about 05:30 when I awoke. There was a little bit of awakening during the night but nothing much to worry about.

There had been plenty of time to go on a little voyage or two though. I was at a meal last night and sitting at the table were a couple of people whom I know – Zero being one of them. She at one time was a regular feature in my nocturnal rambles and who seems to be making something of a comeback just now). She was saying to the man who was with her – probably her father – that if only she had said something different to … (a former school-friend of mine) … he might be alive today. My ears pricked up at this news. “Is … (so-and-so) dead then?” “Ohh yes” said the reply. “Died last night”. There was another friend of ours working in the same place so I dashed down to tell him the news. He wasn’t there so I left a note on his desk. But on reflection I reckoned that the note wasn’t very clear and should have been written in a different way to clarify it.)

A little later I was caught in something of a no-man’s-land between here and the Auvergne. I had a piece of land down there and there was a wooden chalet-type thing there but it was just a shell, no inner lining and no inner dividing walls. I’d had it up for sale and people had been looking at it. A princess had liked one version of it and someone else liked another version of it, and all in all I was becoming confused about what I was going to do. The land down there was full of stuff including a Honda 500cc twin motorbike – a really nice parallel twin from the 1980s, a few cars and a couple of those were nice too, and an alsatian dog that stayed down there and guarded the place when I was away for months on end. I went back there with a former friend from Stoke on Trent. He was saying how he liked one particular style in which the chalet could be arranged. He started to pick up the wardrobes, even those full of clothes, and carry them about to put them in other places. I was wondering about all of the work that needed doing to organise everything so that I could sell it on but it’s not even worth thinking about. He had a drive around the field on this Honda and said how he thought that it was beautiful. He asked what I was going to do with it, and I replied that I was going to take it to Brussels. Getting it into the van won’t be a problem but getting it out at the other end might be because I’m on my own there. He’d let this dog loose. It was sniffing around everything. There was a Ford Anglia estate and the tailgate was open. We were having a look inside it and this dog came and jumped inside. I was saying “get the dog out. It has no business being in there”. I was worried that it was going to disgrace itself and ruin the interior.

And for a change, I was up quite early too and I’d quickly dealt with the morning procedures. I’d even managed a shower too.

It’s shopping day today but before I went out I transcribed a few notes from the dictaphone.

Terry turned up to say hello too. One of my neighbours wanted some DiY work doing and he’d been signed up to do it.

Once I had Terry settled in, I headed out to the shops, braving the howling wind. But again, I didn’t get very far at all.

I’ve mentioned before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … that large, heavy vehicles are not allowed into the interior of the city walls. They have to park up outside and the goods trans-shipped to a smaller vehicle.

We’ve seen that happen a few times already, and there was another occurrence this morning.

The fish dock by the Fish Processing plant was busy too.

They must have just opened the harbour gates because there are three trawlers down there unloading their catch, and a whole fleet of vans and lorries waiting to take away the produce.

It must have been a really impressive sight down there 40 or 50 years ago when the cod-fishing on the Grand Banks was at its height.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that every so often we are treated to the presence of a rather large crane on the quayside.

The last one was in April last year, and here sure enough almost exactly a year later, there’s another one here today.

From up here, I couldn’t see what it was doing down there, and in view of the weather I didn’t fancy the idea of going down there to make further enquiries. I’ll save that for a better day.

That’s not all of the excitement down in the harbour either.

We now have a huge load of gravel accumulating on the quayside, and a digger moving it around so that it’s by the conveyors.

That can only mean one thing, and that is that Neptune or one of her sisters will be here in early course. She’s actually in London right now, but Shetland Trader is at large in the English Channel a mere cockstride from here.

From here I strolled up through the town on the way to the railway station. There, I collected my tickets for my next trip to Leuven. I like to have them in my possession well in advance because the ticket machines aren’t always reliable and the ticket office is closed when I arrive for my train.

Next stop was at LIDL for the midweek shopping. Apart from the usual stuff and a packet of brazil nuts, I bought one of these shower hanger trays. I’m fed up of my soap and shampoo floating around all over the place and I’ve been looking for one of these.

Today, LIDL was having a bathroom equipment sale and these shower hanger trays were one of the articles on offer.

On my way back home I went down via the rue Saint Paul into the rue Sainte Genevieve to check up on the new house-building.

As I suspected the other day, they are now rendering it with crépi.

And it’s quite interesting to see how they do it. They have a mixing machine that makes it come out like a rather wet clay and the spray it onto the breeze blocks and then smooth it over with some large floats.

Back here, I made myself a nice hot chocolate and then set down to work.

All of the blog entries as far back as 12th July 2018 are now up-to-date. But I’ve run aground temporarily because I’m back to when I was prowling around the Somme front line.

The searchable text database is done back to there too and, as it happens, so are the dictaphone notes for that period.

So one of the projects on hand is to tie them all together and make up a couple of web pages about the whole voyage. But when I’ll do that I really don’t know right now.

Terry came round for lunch and a chat, and after he had left I had another session indexing the photos from my trip to the High Arctic. I’ve probably done another 100 or so and I shall be glad when they are all done and dusted, because then I can add them to the blog entries for those dates.

That’s a task that is long-overdue.

While all that was going on, there was a terrific rainstorm going on outside, but by the time that I was due to go for my walk it had stopped.

Once outside, I didn’t bother to loiter in the wind.

A brisk walk around the headland and a quick look at the chantier navale. They weren’t spraying today, which is hardly a surprise given the wind.

But I did notice that there seems to be a layer of colour in a stripe low down on the hull, so it looks as if they are getting close to putting on the final coat.

Back here, I whacked another pile of notes off the dictaphone list, in the middle of which I was roused by Terry telephoning me to say that he’d been banging on my door for 10 minutes. I must have … errr … had a litle relax.

We had a chat and after he had gone home (and I had forgotten to give him some stuff for Liz) I carried on with the dictaphone.

So engrossed was I with what I was doing that I was late for tea. So i did a quick plate of mixed veg and pasta tossed in powdered garlic and olice oil followed by pineapple and coconut soya cream.

After the washing-up, I headed out for my evening walk.

The wind had dropped slightly so I could actually walk, but there’s an incredible amount of force in the sea, as I have said before.

It’s all stored up in some incredible reserve of force and with a 3,000-odd mile uninterrupted journey across the Atlantic, the force can remain in the mass of the sea for quite a considerable time.

By the time that I made it round to the view overlooking the Plat Gousset, it was not far off high tide.

I could see that the waves were crashing over the sea wall with an incredible amount of violence. I stood there and watched it for quite a while.

It’s really quite a spectacle when it’s going full steam ahead, as you can ses.

After a while, I headed back home, giving a little kitten a stroke on the way

With being a little late this evening, it’s rather last now so i won’t be having my early night tonight. But I’ll do the best that I can.

But I’ve had two lots of news today. And both concern little projects that I’ve had on the go for a while. Things have no accelerated and one of them is now complete and the other one, I’m now locked into.

And so there’s no turning back now, and I have an awful lot of work to do before I’m very much older. I wish I had been more selective and brought more books back from the Auvergne.

I need a good sleep tonight.

crane port de granville harbour manche normandy france

“night high winds storm waves over plat gousset granville manche normandy france

Sunday 27th August 2017 – NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL …

… a good night’s sleep!

Despite all of the time that it took me to drop off to sleep last night, it was … errr … 08:50 when I awoke this morning – the joys of it being Sunday and no alarm clocks!

And I had been on my travels during the night too – but just don’t ask me where I went because as soon as I awoke this morning it all went clean out of my head.

With it being a Sunday, it’s the legendary Taylor Breakfast Brunch day and so we had to loiter around until 11:00 until everyone gathered their wits and we started cooking. And by 12:00 we all had our snouts in the trough.

I was starving too for some reason (I’ve probably got worms) so I ended up making some more toast.

After lunch, Rachel proposed some washing so I nipped and had a shower while my dirty clothes walked off on their own into the washing machine. And then it was time to load up Strider.

I’m not sure what’s happening here but either I’ve lost a pile of stuff or else I’m getting better at packing him, because there seems to be much more room inside.

That will come in handy because I’m leaving here tomorrow and getting on the Trans-Canada Highway at Woodstock. And despite there being just Strawberry Moose and me inside when we set off, by the time we get to Woodstock we’ll be half a mill … "ohhh no!" – ed.

Much to my surprise, one of the LED light sticks and the portable battery pack still had charge in them. But everything is being charged up and there are some water bottles freezing in the freezer ready for the 12-volt fridge.

I had a rest after that (I’m not as young as I was) and when Darren came home from cutting tyres we did some work downstairs.

Cue another rest.

The wi-fi here is a little flaky so Darren had bought a new modem and router so this was my task for the evening. And you can see that it all works.

As well as that, I made some garlic bread for our pasta supper.

So now I’m off for an early night – my last night here for a while. Tomorrow I’m hitting the road to Saint John for Strider’s insurance and licence tags, and to go and see Ellen who is in hospital there.

That should keep me out of mischief for a while;

Wednesday 20th April 2016 – I SAW THE END …

… of my film last night when I went to bed. The very first of the three Inspector Hornleigh films and although the character wasn’t as developed as in the later films, it’s still quite an enjoyable film.

I managed to stay awake too until the end, which is something of a surprise these days. I’m not as young as I used to be and it looks as if my days of being wide awake at 03:00 are long since gone.

I had a good night too. Apart from on trip down the corridor at about 04:00, I remember nothing at all until I awoke at 07:30. Not even if I had been anywhere during the night.

But we have a new cleaner today, and he’s already got on my wrong side. At about 08:10 he knocked on my room door to clean the room. I Staggered off for an early breakfast but when I came back, I discovered that he hadn’t been in. He finally turned up at 10:00, almost two hours after he had disturbed me.

That’s not all either. I went to make my butties at 13:00 and there he was – cleaning the kitchen. Who on this planet decides to clean a kitchen at lunchtime when everyone would be wanting to prepare their meals?

But when I was turfed out of my room, I went off and paid for the last week of my stay here. My situation will shortly start to become precarious as my 15 days will be up, but at least if I pay up promptly even before they send me a bill, then I have a good chance of being overlooked as long as there is room here for anyone else who wants to stay.

After that, I went out to shop for lunch and stocked up up hummus and salad, and there was also 1.5 litres of iced tea on offer at €0:69 so I added that to the supply.

This afternoon, I made a start on a project that I had abandoned for a couple of years. When I brought my blog in-house, the photos from the older incarnation needed updating and the meta tags needed to be added because they had somehow gone astray. I’d done some of it but then I was interrupted by other things. Anyway, this afternoon, I restarted the project and I’ll see how I get on. But one thing that it shows is that some of my motivation seems to have come back.

For tea, I went out for my pasta and tomato sauce and on the way, I found another Asian supermarket. That has an exciting stock too and I can see myself stocking up with supplies here too before I go back to France, if I ever do.

But tea was nice – I’ve been lucky with what I’ve found in the way of food up to now. And now I’ll be off for another early night. And who knows – I might even watch another film if I’m feeling up to it.

But tomorrow I’m back at the hospital. I’m not looking forward to that at all.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: vegan pasta

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