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LIVE: Sunday 18th October 2026 – I HAVE JUST …

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… seen a most extraordinary incident in a football match – the kind that will be played back on these “blooper” videos on social networking channels for years and years to come. And it won’t be any surprise because I had to look at it twice and still find it hard to believe, and so did the commentator and everyone in the crowd too.

But more of that anon. Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

Last night, by the time that I’d finished everything that needed doing and was about to crawl into bed, it was long after midnight, and I’d been letting it all hang out until 00:30, I suppose. And that kind of time for going to bed is doing me no favours at all.

However, with no alarm clock and being awoken in bed by the nurse, at whatever time he comes on a Sunday, that’s much more positive.

Always assuming that I sleep right the way through, which in these days is highly unlikely, of course. And so it proved last night. It was about 04:30 or so when I awoke, and after that, it was one of those early mornings when I’m drifting in and out of sleep without anything being definitive. I was awake at 06:20, which I know because I looked at the time, and the next thing I remember was the nurse coming into the apartment round about 08:30.

He sorted out my legs and feet while I was still in bed, and then he cleared off until tomorrow. But I couldn’t go back to sleep, so a short time later, I threw off the covers, and when I eventually summoned up the courage and energy to stand up, I headed into the bathroom to sort myself out for the morning.

When I’d finished dressing, I went into the kitchen to make breakfast. It was only 09:15 too, so it wasn’t actually all that late compared to a weekday.

Breakfast was quite good today. There was the usual porridge, juice and cafe, and two more of my home-made croissants filled with apricot jam. Yes, they were really delicious. There was no book today, though. The travelling laptop is still in my bag, as it will be going with me tomorrow to the day hospital before dialysis. The time has come round for the second instalment of this product that stimulates my white blood cells. And if it gives me the same kind of boost as the first one did four weeks ago, it will be pretty good.

And when it’s all over, across the road I go, off to the dialysis centre without a break and, more importantly, without breakfast. And that will hurt the most. That is, unless, once more, the nurse who looks after me goes for lunch, forgetting that she has to put the anaesthetic on my arm. That will hurt much more when I go to dialysis and they come to plug me in.

After breakfast, I came back in here to carry on with yesterday’s notes, and you may well have noticed that they are now on line, almost two thousand four hundred words of them. That meant that I could now transcribe the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was round at my niece’s house last night, and it was the usual chaotic place with all of their families and friends there. I was having to leave that evening as I was somewhere near Stranraer. My niece’s husband was talking to me about an oak that he’d been growing since it was an acorn, and now it was ready to be cut down, and he told me that I could have it. He explained that he’d been curing it with mushrooms and everything like that. I kept on asking for him to tell me where it was, but for some reason, he was very reticent. Then they all decided to go to someone’s party up in town, but I was planning to leave that night and I had a lot of things to do. One of the things that I’d promised to do was to take all the scaffolding and piping that was by the front door and put it somewhere, so I’d already put it in my van. My elder sister, she should have been helping me as she promised, but she went to this party too. Now that the van was all ready, apart from the piping that I’d put in it – this tubing that I’d put into it – and I didn’t have the address of this tree and had stuck all these tubes in my van, so in the end, I went down to where this party was and took hold of my sister. I said “are you still going to help me move these things?” She replied “oh yes, I’ll help you tomorrow”. I answered “you know I’m leaving tonight” so she reluctantly came out of the party. I asked my niece’s husband if he had the keys to these two garages that he had across the yard at the bottom under the trees, and he gave them to me. They were two half-keys that you had to fit together in order to open the door. So I picked those up and then went outside. I saw my sister walking around the street, so I drove over to pick her up. She came over extremely reluctantly as if she had no interest whatsoever in giving me a hand to move these tubes and piping in the van, even though they were for her daughter’s husband.

There have been quite a few dreams in the comparatively recent past about being at my niece’s house, all of which have put the house in an unreal situation, somewhere a long way from its actual position in real life, and all of them recounting stories that have absolutely no basis in fact.

But the significance of Stranraer is easy to explain, seeing as I watch Stranraer FC’s matches almost every weekend and sometimes when they are playing in midweek too. We’ve also been going to parties on a regular basis through the night just recently too.

The oak tree is significant too, seeing as I’m reading a chapter on special trees in Herefordshire in my morning book right now, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. However, I bet that the oak in this dream wasn’t ready to be cut down quite yet either. They need a few hundred years to mature first. And the mushrooms relate to that chapter on parasitic mushrooms that we read too.

The scaffolding and tubing is interesting as well. Regular readers of this rubbish in a previous version will recall, I own quite a bit of scaffolding that I bought from that huge painting project in Liverpool City Centre when I was in the UK once, and I also bought some heavy duty tubing from Stoke on Trent to use as wind turbine masts and so on. My van was full of the stuff when I came back from the UK that time.

And, of course, there’s the usual visit of someone from the rest of my family. They always seem to pop up when they aren’t required

This took me up to today’s football – Afan Lido, tenth in the second tier v Penybont, third in the first tier.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Afan Lido’s ground. They haven’t been in the first tier and televised matches since they were relegated at the end of season 2013/2014, and although it’s a fairly new ground, it was looking rather tired and neglected back in those days. However, it looks as if it’s had a refurbishment and a few good coats of paint and looks much nicer.

As for the match, I don’t think that there was ever a doubt about who was going to win it. Penybont was by far the better team and had, I reckon, about two thirds of the play. At times, Afan Lido were struggling to get out of their own penalty area. However, they held on for a good forty-odd minutes before Penybont scored their first goal, a header by a Penybont defender from a corner.

And then we had a calamity!

The very same defender who had scored the goal, about thirty seconds later intercepted a loose ball down by his own goal line. His keeper was up near the penalty spot, so we all expected a pass to the keeper. Instead, the defender, calmly and nonchalantly, kicked the ball into his own net to give Afan Lido an equaliser, and no-one watching the game could believe what they had just seen.

Whatever Penybont’s manager, Rhys Griffiths, had put in his team’s half-time cuppa, I’d like a drink of that myself because within three minutes into the second half, Penybont had scored two more goals to go 3-1 up. However, Afan Lido woke up quite quickly and managed to keep the Penybont attackers out for the rest of the game, albeit with some desperate defending at times.

Afan Lido had some good moments of their own too, and with a few minutes to go, they won a corner. The ball pinged around inside Penybont’s six yard area for a few seconds, then hit a Lido player and went into the net. I don’t think that he knew anything about it – he was just in the way – but it was a goal for his team and they were now just one goal behind.

As the game came up to the final whistle, the Lido won yet another corner. This led to a game of head tennis, and the same player as just now put the ball in the net. But while he and his team were dancing around to celebrate, the linesman had his flag up for offside.

So Penybont won the game 3-2, meaning that Afan Lido were just so close, but on the balance of play, the result did rather flatter Afan Lido.

There was yet more football after that. The first match was Stranraer away at Spartans. And the Stranraer juggernaut rolls on with yet another win, this time 2-0. Still top of the table, on goal difference from Clyde, and those two have opened up a five-point gap to third place. The next few months will be interesting.

There was another 2-0 scoreline too, this time in the game between Greenock Morton and Queen’s Park. And since having sacked their manager a couple of weeks ago, Morton have become a different team. The players have finally gained some confidence and are looking as if they are enjoying themselves, and they had more shots on target in this match than they had in all of the matches under Ian Murray. They fully deserved their victory this afternoon. Here’s hoping that they can keep it up.

Two other important tasks remained to be done. The first one was to freeze the remains of my shepherd’s pie. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that several days ago I had invited comments from my readers. Most of the suggestions that I received had nothing to do with the shepherd’s pie, and they were physically impossible anyway, but Seàn sent me a couple of ideas, for which I was grateful.

However, in the end, I found some small ice cream containers that Marianne had had. They were 900 mg instead of 1 litre, and the portions of shepherd’s pie were just about the right size to fit in. They are now in the freezer, freezing away.

The final job was my Welsh homework, seeing as I’m not here tomorrow morning. That’s all done now, and I’ll review it on Tuesday morning before I send it off to be marked.

So now my notes are also finished, so I’ll just finish off everything else before I go to bed. Hospital tomorrow morning, and I don’t really want to go. Here’s hoping that the effects of the perfusion make it worthwhile.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about pies … "well, one of us has" – ed … a well-known cook from one of these celebrity TV programmes went to Australia, and while he was there, in front of an invited audience, he made a lemon meringue pie, and all of the audience cheered.
He stood there, scratching his head in bewilderment.
"What’s the matter?" asked the producer.
"Everyone cheered" he replied. "I don’t understand it."
"Why’s that?"
"Because back in the UK, I was told that Australians like to boo meringue."

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LIVE: Saturday 17th October 2026 – AND ONCE AGAIN …

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… we had yet more problems at dialysis. And just to prove how polyvalent everyone is at dialysis, they were a completely different set of problems than the usual ones. It seems that my whole life is going to be spent encountering these dialysis issues, and when one is solved, we can simply pass on to the next one.

But I don’t understand at all why I seem to have so many problems at places like that. It’s almost as if someone thinks that I don’t have enough of my own at home, like sleeping, for example. It seems that I can sleep perfectly well when I don’t want to, like in the middle of the day, but when I want to, like at night, I don’t seem to be able to manage it.

Last night was a perfect example of that. I was writing my notes up after the football, admittedly at some kind of very late hour, and suddenly, I could feel myself starting to drop off. That was the cue to abandon the notes, post online what I’d done, and go to bed. And then, not be able to go to sleep for ages.

Eventually, I managed to drop off and go to sleep, but it wasn’t for long. I’ve no idea what time it was when I awoke, but it was definitely in the small hours. I know that I was still awake at 04:59 because I checked the time and debated with myself whether I should get up at that point, but the next thing that I remember was the ‘phone going off at 06:29.

Once more, it took a real effort to haul myself out of bed and off into the living room to unlock the front door ready for when the nurse comes, and then go into the bathroom to sort myself out for the morning. I even had a good scrub up and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant at dialysis this afternoon.

Back in here, I attacked the notes from last night, and I’d almost finished when the early arrival of the nurse confounded me.

While he was sorting out my legs and feet, we chatted about the weather. Apparently the temperature is going to drop dramatically over the next few days, and a proper autumn will be upon us quite rapidly.

After he left, I made my breakfast, and while I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Our author is still waxing lyrical about some of these trees, and I don’t suppose that he’ll ever stop. But interestingly, he talks about some fine young chestnut trees in the grounds of one of these stately homes in Herefordshire, and when I went to look it up on the internet to see how things are today, the hall is now in possession of the National Trust, who make some very favourable comments about the chestnut trees that are now one hundred and seventy years old.

Back in here after breakfast, I finished off the notes from yesterday and they are now on line, as you have probably noticed. And then I went to transcribe the dictaphone notes.

I was at a football match last night when the two teams playing, each one having a substitute who played in a reserve league who had never come into the first team. So the first team had their new player in defence and the other team had their player in attack, and the attack players and the defence players of the different teams had to be involved in finding space and waiting to be passed the ball and so on, and then be taught how to control it once they had already received it, because far too many balls were bouncing off them and going out of play and that sort of thing.

This dream about players finding space relates to a certain training session for a certain hockey team somewhere, but that’s yet another story that the World is not yet ready to hear.

In fact, the part about the reserve players coming into the team also relates to the same story. But as that story is something reasonably current, it’s no surprise that it’s coming up now in a dream.

There was some Eastern European guy whom I knew – he might have been Polish or something like that – and he worked as a bacon slicer in a meat factory somewhere or other in the area. He was telling me about his aim to become a motor mechanic. He had this yellow Mk IV Cortina which looked fairly nice but there were a few things that needed doing to it, and he told me that he’d done them. He took the car for its MOT. There was also someone who was going to fetch my injections for me. I was supposed to have two injections, one on a Monday and one on a Friday. I’d had the first two, but for some reason I’d forgotten to collect the next two, so some woman or other, an elderly woman, she had a bottle of the stuff that the first injection used, and she filled the syringe with it and injected me with that. Then I had to take the prescription down to the doctor to explain what had happened and get him to write a new one for the product on the Friday and for subsequent ones. I put them in a brown envelope and gave them to this Polish guy. I went down to the MoT station afterwards, and his yellow Cortina was there, and it had failed on four or five things, nothing very complicated, but I heard that this guy had handed in his notice at work and was going to start being a motor mechanic, working underneath cars in the street, that kind of thing. But seeing the work that he’d done on this Mk IV Cortina and it hadn’t worked, I could see his next adventure ending in tears at some point.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I used to have a fleet of yellow MkIII and MkIV Cortinas in the past, although I didn’t know anyone Polish like that at the time. And the garage certainly didn’t resemble the garage at the salt mine where my father used to work, so where it was, I don’t know.

The story about the injections is interesting too because regular readers of this rubbish will recall that quite a few years ago, I had to have a series of injections a couple of times each week and had to fetch them from the chemists regularly. That’s how I first encountered these nurses who come to visit me every morning.

I forgot to mention the confusion when I went down to that garage. I’d given all the paperwork for these injections to this Polish guy and put them in a brown envelope. I walked into the garage where his car was being MoTd – at the back of Bedford Street near the old police station. I pulled out and told someone “here’s the envelope”. They picked it up, and it was the wrong one. The second one was the wrong one. The third one was hanging up by a magnetic attachment thing on the workplace by where this Polish guy was working. He brought it over to me and this other guy. We had a look at the paperwork together.

If this is confusing you, don’t worry. It’s confusing me too.

That was all that I had time to do this morning, although I might have had more time had I not crashed out between 10:20 and 11:00.

When the alarm went off, I headed into the kitchen to have my midday medication and my disgusting drink, and then to start to pack the travelling laptop ready for dialysis. My faithful cleaner came down to apply the anaesthetic on my arm too.

After she left, I adopted the usual position of slumping across the table with my head resting on my arms so that I could have a little doze, but that wasn’t for long either as the taxi turned up at, would you believe, 12:40. Not that I’m complaining, of course, because, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the earlier I arrive at dialysis, the earlier I’ll be home, and that suits me just fine.

However, the best-laid plans of mice and men and all that, we first had to go to Champeaux to pick up someone there to take to dialysis, and then at the autoroute interchange at Marcey-les-Grèves, we ran into a barrage of gilets jaunes. And what annoyed me about that was that there was a warning sign in the centre of the village, just by where there’s a turning that goes through a village called Saint-Jean-de-la-Haize, and from there via a couple of narrow lanes, you end up just four hundred yards from the hospital.

Now if I know that, why didn’t our driver, who has been working for the taxi company for thirty years?

So after using all our powers of persuasion, we eventually arrived at dialysis ten minutes early. And this is where the fun began.

If you want to know whether I had a new nurse or an experienced one today, you only need to look at the plasters that she put on my arm when she took out the needles at the end of the session, and that will tell you all that you need to know. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen such a dog’s dinner in all my life.

But the fun began when she was trying to plug me in. The first needle, in the lower part of my forearm, went in fine. The second needle, in the upper part of my arm, well, not so fine. She ended up having two tries at it and they both failed. In the end, she had to call for the senior nurse and it was a case of “third time lucky” when she did it. But I now know exactly how a dartboard feels.

Further bad news is that my internet subscription at the dialysis centre has expired. It’s only good for a year and then I have to renew it. And of course, with it being Saturday, there’s no-one on duty at the tech department of the hospital. So, without the internet, I read a paper on Lack of Moral Fibre in the Royal Air Force in World War II.

Apart from that, there were no other interruptions. Not even from Emilie the Cute Consultant, who came into the ward and went to chat to almost every other patient in here, except me, of course. She clearly doesn’t love me any more.

But seeing as we have been talking about the other patients … "well, one of us has" – ed … my favourite patient who is usually in the bed beside mine was brought in this afternoon on a stretcher. Apparently she had developed a breathing problem and, even with a cylinder of oxygen, was having difficulty breathing. I do hope that she’s going to be OK.

Today, the nurse let the session run to the full time, which makes a change, but when the session finally finished, she spent ten minutes cleaning the machine first before she dealt with me, and that was disappointing too. I wanted to be away.

When I was finally free and the wounds compressed and sealed (with the plasters stuck on any old how), I went to weigh myself. And I was actually bang on my dry weight, which is where I should have been those three times before. And the driver was waiting for me – the same one who had brought me – and I was the only person in the taxi too, so I was home at about 18:30.

My faithful cleaner was waiting for me, and she helped me into the apartment where she stuck a disgusting drink into my sweaty little mitt. And after she left, I made some food – a baked potato, peas and carrots and a burger on a bap. It’s been quite a while since I’d had that for a Saturday tea, and it shows that, bit by bit, my appetite is returning.

Football was next, another match in the Welsh Cup, this time between Y Fflint and Caernarfon, a repeat of the cup final a couple of months ago.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … Y Fflint play some nice, tidy football and don’t deserve to be as low down the table as they are, so it was no surprise to anyone when they scored the opening goal after just five minutes.

However, Caernarfon scored an equaliser almost straight from the restart and gradually went on to impose themselves on the game. By the final whistle, it was all on-way traffic towards the Y Fflint goal, with Caernarfon winning 3-1.

So tomorrow early afternoon, we have the final match of our Welsh Cup trilogy when Penybont, third in the Cymru Premier League, leave Bridgend to travel down to the beach at Port Talbot to take on Afan Lido, tenth in the second tier.

When the football was over, I attacked the dictaphone notes, but I really didn’t realise just how late it was. When the waves of fatigue began to sweep over me, it was almost midnight and I didn’t want to be letting it all hang out much later, so I posted on line what I’d written so far, added a “to be continued” sticker and went to bed. I’ll finish off the rest of my magnum opus tomorrow morning.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about bacon slicers … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of my friends told me about the woman from Crewe who went into her local butcher’s and sat on the bacon slicer.
"What happened?" I asked.
"The butcher was most annoyed" she said. "he ended up getting behind in his orders."

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LIVE: Friday 16th October 2026 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

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… the dictaphone this morning, which is something of a disappointment. Not that it’s any surprise, of course, because if you don’t go to sleep, you can’t dream, can you? Well, I can, as events in the recent past have proved, but not many other people can manage it.

And it’s also looking very much like I’ll have nothing on tonight either, because Bane of Britain … "fool that he is" – ed … dropped both sets of his night attire into the washing machine this morning without thinking.

It’s also gone very cold in here now. I’ve put on a sweater today for the first time this end of the year. The temperature is definitely dropping, even as we speak. It looks like I’ll be wearing goose pimples through the night tonight rather than anything else.

So let’s go back to last night, when all of this seemed to start.

Last night, I fell asleep in my chair again while I was writing out my notes. I was out for a good hour, if not more, and when I awoke, I had to edit out all of the nonsense that I’d typed while I was asleep. However, I missed a line, and I bet it gave you all quite a laugh when you read it.

But when I did wake up, I was doing no good at all, so I posted on line what I had written, added a “To be Continued” sticker and went to bed.

Incidentally, you may find a “To be Continued” on this posting too, but that’s for another reason entirely. I’ve been watching a Welsh Cup match on the internet until quite late this evening.

However, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s a waste of time going to bed early, because all that it means is that you wake up correspondingly early the following morning. And that was definitely the case this morning.

Whatever time it was that I awoke, I have no idea. It was still dark, that’s for sure, and it stayed dark for ages. And when I was totally and utterly fed up with just lying there trying to go to sleep and failing, I checked the clock. It was 06:00, so I thought that I may as well claim an early start for once.

So, by the time that the alarm should have gone off, I’d organised myself … "as best as he could" – ed … in the bathroom, unlocked the front door for the nurse when he arrives, and was back in here having started work.

The first task was, of course, to finish off the notes from yesterday. There were piles to do, as you probably noticed, and I hadn’t quite finished when the nurse arrived, quite early again.

While he was sorting out my legs and feet, we had a chat about the weather and how it was going to cool down now over the next few days as we move closer to winter. And I have a feeling that it’s going to be a bad one this year.

After he left, I could make my breakfast and read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Our author is still talking about the famous trees of Herefordshire and, as far as I can tell, steering well clear of controversy for the moment. But not to worry, I’ll catch him out again one of these days.

When breakfast had finished, I went one better than David Crosby, probably because I’d had the ‘flu for Christmas and wasn’t feeling up to par. Consequently, I didn’t give in an inch to fear and went on the attack.

And “attack” it was, too. You have to go back to 6th July since the last time I was similarly engaged.

With that being out of the way, I turned my attention to the washing. Would you believe that I’m on my last pair of trousers – well, decent trousers anyway? So I collected up all of the dirty washing and put it in the machine to wash. These days, I can’t hang up the washing myself to dry, so if I do it on a Friday morning, my faithful cleaner hangs it up for me when she comes in the afternoon, and that helps me a lot.

Back in here afterwards, I had yesterday’s notes to finish, and now they are on line, all two thousand-odd words of them.

It’s a good job in a way that there was nothing on the dictaphone, otherwise I’d probably still be there now transcribing them. However, there were a few other things to do too, and by the time that they were all out of the way, it was time for my midday medication and disgusting drink.

There were the radio notes to start when I came back in here. I’d made a start the other day but I’d barely scratched the surface. And with several new groups and artists featuring in the programme. It would usually take much longer to research them than it does for artists who have featured before. That’s why I was rather apprehensive about whether I’d ever finish it or not.

So, if I don’t ever start, I won’t ever finish, so I made myself comfortable and then I began. And with some kind of superhuman effort, I’d actually finished a good while before the end of the afternoon, despite the interruption from the cleaner when she came in. Yes, I keep on forgetting about the power of artificial intelligence and my friendly neighbourhood chatbot who these days does most of my research for me.

There was even time for the two of us to come up with a list of albums released, musicians who were born and musicians who have died on the day that the following programme will be first broadcast. My “births, deaths and releases” file is pretty comprehensive, but my chatbot can dig deeper than I can.

However, that programme is going to be complicated because I usually play eleven records, but I have thirteen candidates for inclusion on that day.

Tea tonight was my usual Friday night tea – sausage, beans with cheese and black pepper, and air-fried chips. That’s a meal that I could eat even when I was right off my food. I seem to remember that I was living for a couple of months on porridge, toast and the aforementioned.

One thing that I still can’t manage, and I don’t know why, is my Sunday pizza. But who knows? That might make its reintroduction to the menu one of these weekends.

After the washing-up, I managed to make it back in here just in time for the kick-off off tonight’s football.

It’s the Welsh Cup Round Two this weekend, and tonight, the televised match is Llansawel v Afan United, a very lopsided first-tier v fourth tier game.

It beats me why this game was chosen to be televised when most people could already predict the result and when there are several much more competitive games being played elsewhere throughout the country. The least that can be said for it, I suppose, was that Afan United didn’t lie down and die.

In fact, they had a game plan and they stuck pretty much to it, even if the Llansawel goalkeeper didn’t have much to do. And I was also impressed by the speed of Afan United’s two forwards, even if they were far too lightweight for this level of competition.

And a word must be said for Afan United’s goalkeeper, Liam Sheehy. He might have been a bit shaky at the start, and his team did concede five goals, but as the game went on and his nerves settled, he had an outstanding game, made several crucial saves and even saved a penalty.

So he and the rest of his teammates can walk off the field with their heads held high, especially as this is probably the first time they’ve ever played in front of a large four-figure crowd.

Tonight’s match should be much more competitive, and played on a better pitch too. It’s a repeat of last season’s cup final between Y Fflint and Caernarfon. Caernarfon’s form has been somewhat erratic of late, and Y Fflint, who always play nice football, have a new manager who has already ushered them to two victories.

Although the match didn’t finish until 22:45, I attacked today’s notes. However, I only made it so far before fatigue caught up with me. I didn’t crash out, despite the very short night’s sleep last night, but it was on its way, so I posted up as far as I had gone and went to bed. I could finish off the rest of it tomorrow morning.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about having nothing on … "well, one of us has" – ed … the local nudists in South Cheshire used to (I don’t know if they still do) hire one of the local night clubs in Nantwich one evening to walk around, dance, socialise and generally display their wares.
One night, I was driving my taxi around Nantwich when a girl, as naked as the day she was born, stepped out of the shadows and flagged me down. "Take me to Crewe" she said.
So there I was, sitting there, and not being able to take my eyes off her, even for a moment.
"What’s the matter with you?" she asked. "Surely you’ve seen a naked woman before!"
"It’s not that" I replied. "I’m just wondering where you’re keeping the money to pay me."

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LIVE: Saturday 26th September 2026 – SOMEONE ELSE HAS …

… now said how much better I’m looking these days. Admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve seen her, the taxi driver who used to live down the road from me in Brussels when she was young, but she actually made a point of coming over to see me after she and her oppo had put their patient out of a stretcher onto the bed.

There have been quite a few people who have said that just recently, and it is nice of them, and you have to admit that so many different people can’t all be wrong, but I just wish that I actually felt like it.

Having said that, I suppose that I ought to feel like it because I had another one of those rare nights when I was actually in bed before my curfew time of 22:30, a time that I go beyond with monotonous regularity.

As for what happened after that, I really have no definite memory. I might have awoken once or twice during the middle of the night, but I wouldn’t like to say so for definite, and I was certainly asleep when the alarm went off.

As usual, it took me a good while after that to find the enthusiasm to stagger to my feet and head off to the bathroom to sort myself out. And while I was in there, I had a good scrub up and 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 what had been going on during the night.

I was somewhere in the Balkans last night and we were fighting a revolutionary war against whoever had taken over the state. One of the things that we had was this huge St Bernard dog. Whenever there was any firing or shooting in the neighbourhood, the dog would rush off to try to join in, so we had to restrain him quite heavily. Then we saw the peace treaty that had been drawn up between the country’s militia and our regional militia. There were many, many people with us who didn’t agree with it, so it might be of some use or it might be not, and it might only apply to that immediate area rather than to a wider area, so we decided that we’d test it. We went down in one of the vans and that told us that this peace treaty was to be enforced in our area too, so we trained the dog, and we had it so that it could intercept coded messages and decode them. But it would only be for half an hour or so and then we’d lose this doggy shredder tool for ever.

Although I’ve been in the Balkans on a couple of nights in the recent past, there doesn’t seem to be anything in here that relates to anything that has been going on just recently. A couple of weeks ago I was reading something about the Greek resistance in World War II and the civil war afterwards, but there was certainly no mention of a St Bernard dog anywhere, and no-one had a van.

But the idea of a doggy shredder is a very interesting one. We shall have to try that out on the Hound of the Baskervilles.

There was a lot of us on holiday in Austria. We were staying at someone’s property where they ran an agricultural repair business. The guy who ran the business had just had an operation on his arm, so he wasn’t able to do any heavy maintenance tasks on other people’s vehicles, so his wife, when someone came, she was turning them away and telling them to come back. He had a great deal of difficulty doing this, so he was accepting jobs for two or three weeks hence. The boss of the organisation actually had a camera to film people working in his office to make sure that they were doing the right kind of work. Of course, everyone protested but he still kept them. There was a girl who was the loudest complainant, but the boss said that she spent a lot of time talking to her boyfriend. She said that she does it on a streaming service that runs in parallel with her work so that it doesn’t interrupt her work at all. The boss began to become really heavy on this subject, so I had to intervene. I said that surely the acid test is how much post she has left over at the end of the month. He just threw down his tea towel and marched off. In the meantime, a dumper had pulled up outside. It was one that needed repair and he had seen it a week ago and had put it off until today. And when it came in, it was in no state at all … fell asleep here … As well as this, we’d been skiing. The guy in the dumper asked us if we’d been skiing around here, so we said yes. He was surprised because he didn’t know that there was any snow, but we’d been having a really good time. I’d met this young girl, and she was one of these young girls to whom you could give a tickle and she’d laugh, that sort of thing. I happened to quite like her, so I was lucky enough that one day I managed to take her out. We ended up having a kiss and a cuddle before I took her home. After that, I noticed that she’d cooled off a little and wasn’t so tactile as she had been. When I gave her a tickle, she didn’t do anything, but when the boy sitting next to her did, she laughed. I thought that he’d obviously managed to put himself between the two of us. I thought that that was really a shame because I’d like to get to know this girl better.

There were loads of bits missing from this dream. I remember having a big, full A4 binder, as full as my Welsh one, and having to take certain papers out of it because I imagined that the garage guy would be asking me to fix the machine, the young girl was dressed in a black skirt and black jacket, and there was another, older girl there dressed in a green top and blue skirt.

But there’s plenty of mileage in this dream. Yesterday, I’d been listening to A CHRIS ISAAK CD which includes the song WRONG TO LOVE YOU and that presumably has triggered something off, and it does remind me of one particular skiing trip when we used to go to Aviemore in the early-mid seventies.

As I said, the folder relates to the Welsh folder from last year and the year before that I’ve just put away. As for fixing the dumper on behalf of that garage guy, it wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve had to do that in the garage of someone else.

The area of Austria where we were is that near the Czech border, which we have visited on several occasions in the recent past, and the operation on the arm causing him not to be able to work – an operation on the arm (having an implant inserted for dialysis) is one of the reasons why I haven’t played the guitars for a couple of years.

Turning work away is another thing that I could never do, no matter how inconvenient it was. And there’s plenty more too in that dream, but if I were to start to write it out, I’d still be here in the morning before I finished.

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, and now in response to a request that I received, AMAZON GERMANY. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I am extremely grateful when someone uses the links to make a purchase.

Hurricane Isabelle the Nurse blew in rather later than usual and treated me here in the bedroom where I was working. Apparently, a previous client had held her up for fifteen minutes and she had two patients programmed to meet her down at her office almost imminently, so she was interested in shaving as many minutes off her appointments as she could.

After she left, I went into the kitchen to make breakfast, and while I was eating it, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Today, we are reading about the Rhipiphorus Paradoxus or “wasp nest beetle”, whose larvae are parasites of the wasp larvae. This is really not my sort of thing at all, but if I keep on reading, I might actually learn something, and isn’t that why I’m reading all these books anyway?

Back in here, there were a few things that needed doing, and then I had to search around for all the music that I need for the radio programme that I’ll be preparing next week. I needed to track down some music for five of the artists who will be making their appearance, but I managed that before I had to go to make myself ready for dialysis.

My faithful cleaner came too to apply the anaesthetic on my arm, and after she left, I had to wait for the taxi. Not that I had long to wait because the driver was here ten minutes early. And as I was the only passenger today, she had me there by 13:30.

And there, I didn’t have to wait long before I was connected up either. I was up and running by 14:05.

No-one bothered me at all today except the nurses who came running every half an hour when the blood pressure alarm sounded. No doctors or anything. So I could watch the football in peace.

We started with a match from several weeks ago, a qualifying match in the Welsh Cup between Evans and Williams v Port Talbot Town. I managed to see just over half of it before today’s matches kicked off.

My choice this afternoon was the basement clash between Y Fflint and Rhydaman. This was a match that both clubs needed to win if they were to have any chance of hauling themselves out of the mire at the bottom, so I expected them both to be going at it hammer and tongs.

And I was right too. Y Fflint played the nicer football – much nicer, in fact, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … but Rhydaman had the best of the early chances, hitting the woodwork when it was easier to score and also having a goal disallowed for offside.

Y Fflint really do play some nice football, though, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … and it really is a mystery why they have had such poor results. What they haven’t had in any of their matches is a fair share of the luck.

However, all of that changed this afternoon. An over-hit kick upfield from the Fflint midfield found Rhydaman’s goalkeeper and central defender in a helpless tangle as they both went for the same ball, leaving Y Fflint’s centre-forward with the easiest of tap-ins to open the scoring, and a few minutes later, the Rhydaman goalkeeper dropped what should have been a simple catch right at the feet of the Fflint centre-forward, who thanked him very much for the opportunity to score again.

And later in the game, while Rhydaman were throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, at the Fflint defence, a quick clearance out saw a Fflint midfielder run the whole length of the pitch and slide the ball past the stranded keeper for a third.

Y Fflint have been threatening to give some club a right doing-over, but while 3-0 is not actually the score that I had in mind, it’s good enough to be going on with. And it really was an enjoyable game to watch too.

And just a mention about the crowd who saw Penybont come from behind to beat Airbus UK Broughton. It was the fourth-highest crowd in the history of the Cymru Premier League, and if that’s not an achievement, I don’t know what is.

The taxi was waiting for me when I went outside afterwards. It was the same driver who brought me, and once more, I was the only passenger, so I was home by 18:15. My faithful cleaner was waiting for me and she helped me into the apartment. When I was sitting comfortably, she shoved a disgusting drink into my sweaty mitt.

After she left, I made the baked beans, chips and sausage that I should have had yesterday, and then had a soya yoghurt and a prune for pudding.

Back in here, I saw the start of the match between Trefynnon and Llansawel, and then I began to write up my notes from today. And now that they are done, there are just a few more things to do, and then my Sunday lie-in. Isabelle the Nurse can deal with my feet and legs while I’m in bed.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about crowds … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of the time a man squeezed into a crowded lift.
"Ballroom, please" he said.
"I’m sorry" said the woman in front of him. "Am I crowding you?"

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LIVE: Saturday 19th September 2026 – I HAD TWO …

… phantom alarms during the night And I know that the first one of them was a phantom alarm because I was awake (at least, I think that I was) when it sounded. But it wasn’t the usual RAUCOUS RATTLE OF BILLY COTTON but more like a series of these wind bells ringing down in the bottom corner of the bedroom where the chest of drawers is.

The second one went off when I was asleep, and that WAS Billy Cotton. It went off at about 04:00 or so because, after I’d been tossing and turning around for quite a while, I saw that the time was 04:38.

So an 04:00 awakening this morning, which, considering that I didn’t go to bed until after 00:30 this morning, hasn’t let me have much sleep at all. It’s a good job that I’m in dialysis this afternoon so, if necessary, I can have a good sleep.

At some point much later on, I tucked myself up in the only position that seems to be able to make me go to sleep. It’s quite uncomfortable, and I usually wake up to find that I’m flat on my back again, but during the latter part of the night last night I didn’t move and was still there when the alarm went off.

This morning, it was more of a struggle than most mornings to rise to my feet, but the lure of Emilie the Cute Consultant was sufficient to attract me into the bathroom for a good wash and scrub up, and even a shave.

Back in here, I found that there was nothing on the dictaphone from last night, but when I had woken up earlier, there were a couple of things going on in my head as if I’d been awoken in the middle of a dream before I’d had time to record it. So, for what they are worth, I’ve written down what little I remember of them.

The first part seemed to relate to someone in this apartment looking for a teatowel. However, I awoke and noticed that they were all in here and I was covered in them, so there was definitely something strange going on.

And the second part took place round about now – towards the end of September (in my head I had the feeling that it was the 22nd of September) – here in France, and I was dressed in my winter jacket, gloves and woolly hat as if it were mid-winter, and other people were dressed for winter too.

There doesn’t seem to be anything at all to connect these two little bits with anything that has gone on in real life just recently. The closest connection that I can make is being up in the High Arctic in mid- to late September when I was certainly in winter clothing – as much of it as I could wear.

There were a few other things to do, and then the nurse arrived to interrupt me. He asked about the Hound of the Baskervilles, so I told him what I knew, and then he began to speak to me in German. My German isn’t as good as it ought to be, but I managed to answer him to a certain degree.

After he left, I made my breakfast, and while I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

We’re still on meteorology, and while I was reading it, I came across this report – "1816 was a very wet, cold season. Wheat out at Christmas, and the head so bad “that it would stick if thrown against a wall.” The season said to be as bad as in 1698."

Strangely enough, that was the only entry for severe weather in 1816, and that surprised me, for in 1815, there was the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, these days part of Indonesia. It is said to be the largest eruption in recorded history and the fallout from the volcanic ash was such that 1816 was said to be “the year without a summer” and “an agricultural disaster” with food shortages, famine and starvation.

Why there aren’t any more entries relating to this period is a total mystery.

Back in here with just two hours to go before I need to make myself ready for dialysis, but I couldn’t think of what to do in that period. It’s not very often that I have a block like that. So on the basis of “if you don’t know what to do, just do something, or anything,” so I wrote chapter ten of my book.

This was going to be the last chapter, but I seem to have let my fingers run away with themselves on the keyboard just recently, so there are at least two chapters still to do, plus the preface and the conclusion. But this has always been a challenge for me – sticking within a word count. You give me a word limit and I’ll go beyond it, sometimes by a country mile too.

When the alarm went off, I took myself off into the kitchen to sort out my midday medication and my disgusting drink. My cleaner duly turned up to sort out my anaesthetic and a couple of other little tasks too, and once she’d left, I had to wait for the taxi.

Not that I was waiting long because it was here at 12:40. We had to go to Champeaux to pick up someone else, and we were at the dialysis centre at 13:30. By 14:10 I was up and running too.

There were no interruptions, apart from the nurses running to deal with the blood pressure alarm every half-hour. Not even a doctor came to see me, so I could watch the football in mostly peace and quiet in my little room.

Yesterday, I mentioned the game between Caernarfon and Cambrian United, so that was my choice. And it was as chaotic as the newsfeed report said it was.

There was Caernarfon’s goalkeeper running the ball out of play, which led to fisticuffs between him and a Cambrian forward that saw both of them sent off. Later on, another Cambrian player was sent off for “denying a goalscoring opportunity”.

Caernarfon’s ten men were far too good for Cambrian’s nine, and it became an embarrassment as the Caernarfon players cut through the Cambrian defence like a hot knife through butter. There were actually nine different goal scorers making up Caernarfon’s total, and if that’s not a record, I don’t know what is.

After it finished, I watched the first half of Hwlffordd v Trefynnon, but once more I ran out of time. I’ll tell you about it when I’ve finished watching it.

When the session was finished, I had to wait a few minutes to be unplugged, and after that, another fifteen minutes for my taxi. But at least, I was the only passenger so I was home by 18:30.

My cleaner was sitting on her mushroom waiting for me, and she helped me into the apartment, sticking a disgusting drink into my sweaty little mitt. After she left, I made some food, just a handful of pasta and vegetables with melted butter.

Back in here, there was yet more football – a Welsh Cup match between Denbigh of the second tier and Trearddur Bay of the third tier. And when you are 1-0 down in the seventy-ninth minute with two players already sent off, as Denbigh were, what would be the betting on a Denbigh win?

It was only then that Denbigh began to play. And how is it possible for Trearddur Bay, with a two-man advantage, to leave a Denbigh player unmarked at the far post? That was one goal back to equalise, and then with two minutes to go, they scored a second.

The game itself was quite agricultural, and even though it’s second tier v third tier, I was expecting far better football than this. But I’ve seen worse on my travels, I suppose.

But I won’t be seeing any more tonight, unless they appear in my dreams, because I’m off to bed. It’s way past my bedtime. But at least (in principle) I can have a lie-in tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about agricultural disasters … "well, one of us has" – ed … an aeroplane crashed in a field and the local search and rescue brigade dashed to the scene.
They noticed two things – firstly that there was a farmer nearby wiping his hands, and the second was that the aeroplane was Air Force One.
"Oh my God! What a disaster!" exclaimed the brigade leader. Then he turns to the farmer and asks "where are the survivors?"
"There weren’t any" replies the farmer. "I just finished burying them"
"Even Donald Trump? Surely he must be alive at least!"
"Well, he told me that he was, but you know what a big liar he is."

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Saturday 25th July 2026 – THE WORST HAS …

… happened at dialysis today. And that is that I was obliged to stay for four hours instead of for the usual three. And it was my own choice too. There were a couple of good reasons for doing so, as you will find out as you read on.

As for me, I was in bed late yet again last night. Probably round about 23:30 or so when I crawled under the covers, and I was soon asleep. Once again though, I didn’t have much sleep, although I’ve no idea what time I awoke – I couldn’t be bothered to check – but it was still pitch-black and the light on the car park had been switched off so it was after 02:30.

Try as I might, I couldn’t go back to sleep. I stayed awake, tossing and turning for ages as the day slowly dawned. at one point, I must have dozed off because I remember waking up with a sudden start. It was 06:25, just a couple of minutes before the alarm. There was no real point in even trying to leave the bed for an early start in that short space of time.

However, it was the second alarm that rang at 06:33. It seems that Brain of Britain had forgotten to switch on the first alarm after switching them both off the other day.

In the bathroom, when I eventually arrived, I had a good scrub-up in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon. Unfortunately, I forgot to have a shave, as I found out later. That’s one way of blotting my copybook. Emilie the Cute Consultant won’t be very pleased with me.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I needn’t have bothered, though, because there was nothing on there. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that’s really quite a disappointment. It’s my only form of enjoyment these days.

The nurse turned up as usual to sort out my legs and feet. We talked about the Tour de France and then about his holidays, because he’s away for three weeks as of tomorrow and I’ll be in the tender hands of Isabelle the Nurse.

After he left, I went to make breakfast and read some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE by Charles Freeman.

Today, as we probe deeper into the architecture of the Arab world, we come across the statement "Saracenic fancy, moreover, contrary to all just principles of aesthetics, delighted in astonishing the eye with a vast superstructure raised on a support apparently quite inadequate to sustain it. The style is rich, wonderful, calculated to enchant at first sight ; but it is one that will not bear critical investigation ; the chaste gracefulness of the Grecian, the soaring majesty of the Gothic, are absent, and are ill supplied by the exuberance of a fancy, vivid and fertile to the last degree, but uncontrolled by any law of taste or consistency."

Any normal architect, having come across a technique “contrary to all just principles of aesthetics” that is “astonishing the eye with a vast superstructure raised on a support apparently quite inadequate to sustain it” would immediately be interested in giving it a “critical investigation” to find out exactly how they did it and to see if he can reproduce it.

Yes, I’ve long since come to the conclusion that this book is not about architecture at all.

Back in here, I have things to do, and then I made a start on the radio notes. But again, I didn’t do as much as I was hoping. All in all, it wasn’t a very good morning.

When my cleaner came down to sort out my anaesthetic, I was already in the dining area sorting out my things for dialysis. She didn’t take long to sort me out and then I had to wait for the taxi.

It was early today – a good fifteen minutes early, which suited me fine. Apparently there was someone else in Granville going to dialysis, and her appointment was for 13:30, not 14:00 like mine.

It turned out that it was a girl from the dinosaur exhibition that has set up camp in a field on the edge of town. They are here for the month of August, apparently, and then they’ll be off somewhere else.

While my driver was hunting her down, I looked at the number plates of the vehicles. Half of them had “59” number plates, indicating that they came from the département of the Nord. The others had “02A” number plates, meaning that they are registered in Ajaccio, in Corsica.

We arrived at dialysis a minute or two before 13:30, and when I weighed myself, I was horrified at what I saw. This is 800 millilitres or grammes over the maximum of what the machine can do in three hours. This process of sending my home without taking everything out, which they have done for the last three or four sessions, is now reaping some horrible rewards.

The nurse, one of the experienced ones, came to see me quite quickly and by 13:55 I was up and running. However, I did discuss the situation with the nurse and, seeing as I was so early, I suggested having a three-and-a-half-hour session instead of a three-hour one.

She told me that if I did that, I’d have to wait around for half an hour, as they would be very busy at that time. “how about three and a quarter?”

After a good think, I came up with “how about four hours?”, going the whole hog. Do it all in one swell foop and then it’s all over.

So four hours it was.

There was only a relief doctor here today so I didn’t bother her with any of my problems, and after that I was left mainly alone, except for when the low blood pressure alarm rang, but that didn’t bother me. Blood pressure at 8.0 is quite usual for me.

When I was finished, I was seen to with very little delay and at 18:15 I was organising my driver. We had to wait fifteen minutes for Mrs Dinosaur nevertheless, and after dropping her off at her caravan, I was back here at 19:04.

My faithful cleaner helped me inside and gave me a disgusting drink – the second of the day – and after she left, I checked the time. It was 19:30, far too late to think about tea now. I had plenty to do still, so I grabbed a bag of taco chips and came in here to do them.

The football season has started this weekend and, to my surprise, the FAW was broadcasting live one of the evening matches in the qualifying rounds – third-tier Cardiff Airport FC at home to fifth-tier Felinfach – and I wanted to see it to see what this new broadcasting system of theirs is like.

Firstly, there was no commentary, which was disappointing, but apart from that, it was quite an entertaining game. The gulf of class between the teams was evident and Cardiff Airport strolled to a leisurely 4-0 lead at half-time, having had the bulk of possession.

Whatever the Felinfach manager had put in his team’s half-time cuppa, I could do with a drink of it myself. They put up a much better fight in the second half and although Cardiff Airport ended up winning 6-0, they didn’t have the second half all their own way, that’s for sure.

As for the broadcast itself, there was no commentary, no teamsheets, no slow-motion replays and nothing to identify the scorers. I reckon that I’ll only be using this service if SGORIO has nothing to offer at that particular time.

By now, it was 22:40, far too late to start writing my notes, so I decided to do what I had to do and then go to bed. I can write my notes tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about dinosaurs … "well, one of us has" – ed … Mrs Dinosaur was telling us about the exhibits that they have there in their exhibition.
"We have Pteradactyls, Tyrannosauruses, Stegosauruses and Brontosauruses, and we even have a rare example of a sightless dinosaur. "
"What’s he called?"
"D’yerthinkhesaurus."

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Sunday 12th April 2026 – SO FAR, I HAVE …

… managed to avoid falling asleep today.

However, that’s not such a big deal today, because when you don’t wake up until about 09:00 and you don’t leave the bed until about 09:40, there isn’t much time to fall asleep afterwards.

In fact, you might say that I spent twelve hours in bed last night and, believe me, I enjoyed every minute of it. I didn’t actually, to my shame, rush through everything last night – it was something more like a leisurely stroll – and by the time that I’d finished the notes, the stats and the back-up, and then gone to sort myself out in the bathroom, it was just coming up to 21:30.

How long I spent in the bathroom, I didn’t record, but it wasn’t all that long and I was soon in bed, tucked up under the quilt.

And there I stayed until … errr … 03:55, when I had to go walking the parapet, and then back in bed, I slept until 07:05. However, I managed to go back to sleep quite quickly, and there I lay until the nurse awoke me. And that first sleep was not far short of six and a half hours, and it’s the best sleep that I’ve had for ages.

The nurse was having another good moan at me this morning. He was complaining that I hadn’t pulled the curtains. Well, much as I love the dark, seriously, I love the light too so I’m happy in the morning with the sunlight creeping around the edges of the shutters in here. He thinks that I ought to be in a perfect state of darkness in here while I’m asleep.

Once he left, I tried to go back to sleep but without success. And Alison made up my mind for me when she sent me a text message. Trying to reply when you have your head and your ‘phone down under the quilt is not easy, believe me, and when you drop the ‘phone on the floor and the message turns into a load of gibberish that sends itself, it’s even less easy than that.

With all of that going on, I decided to leave the bed, although it took me a good twenty minutes to find the enthusiasm and the energy to stand up. But once I was up, I headed off into the bathroom to sort myself out.

Back in the kitchen afterwards, where I forgot to take my medication, I baked my croissants, and they turned out really well. I was so impressed, especially as I was using some of the cheap pastry rolls.

So, with two of my croissants, some porridge and some hot black coffee, I sat down to read some more of THE CELT, THE ROMAN and THE SAXON by Thomas Wright.

And here we go again. In a footnote on page 115, he launches another attack on one of his predecessors, Thomas Stukeley, saying "The antiquary Stukeley published a “Medallic History of Carausius”, which, although it displays too much of that writer’s hasty speculations and conclusions, shows us with how much advantage the coins might be made to illustrate the history."

Whilst he’s not wrong about the coins illustrating the history, as we have seen before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the phrase “the writer’s hasty speculations and conclusions” reminds me of a well-known phrase involving a pot and a kettle.

After breakfast, I came back in here to transcribe the dictaphone notes.

There was some kind of civic centre opened in a local town. It had a huge ballroom-type of place, meeting room or whatever and there was a small annexe that had a licence for fifty people. Someone had applied to hire the smaller room for a birthday party and had sent in a list of fifty people who would be attending. However, the local council was dithering about this because they were thinking that whilst a couple of people on this list might not turn up, a couple of other people might turn up unannounced and take the attendance to over fifty, in which case there would be all kinds of legal issues, so they were still dithering about this for ages.

We were actually talking yesterday about people turning up uninvited to funerals and weddings. It’s strange how these things come round so quickly. And, of course, fire regulations, particularly in the UK, are such that there is a genuine fear of being found over the limit for the room. And when you see the size of the fines, no wonder people are rather nervous

I was staying with Bob Dylan last night. We were at his house, which was overlooking one of the lakes in either Vermont or New Hampshire. It was a very steep climb up to the front door and the garden was filled with flowers. We were sitting on a kind of terrace, and the way to go back to the front door was to go down, across and back up again, but he went inching his way along the edge of one of the flower beds, which looked extremely dangerous to me. He came back with a plate of cold baked beans. I asked him about why he preferred them cold instead of hot, but he didn’t really answer. Then, he said a little later that we had to go into town for something so I went into the house to put on my shoes. However, every couple of minutes, there was some kind of interruption, and there were lots of things that I had to do. Each time that I tried to put on my shoes, there was something else, but in the end, I managed to put on my shoes. Then, the story skipped and it was about a musician in a group who also played for Y Bala. He had mysteriously disappeared and no-one knew where he was. The police report said something that he had been living in a two-bedroomed terrace but he had seen something that had dragged him out, and no-one knew what that something was. He’d gone to follow it but hadn’t returned. Later on, back at Bob Dylan’s house, he was having an evening with his friends. There were three of his friends there and the father of this missing musician, footballer or whatever. They were all eating mashed potato and baked beans that were cold.

Actually, this looked much more like one of the lakes in northeast Maine to me, a region that we have visited ON NUMEROUS OCCASIONS.

But the cold baked beans are interesting, especially if they are American ones, packed full of sugar and additives. They must be disgusting. Even the “British recipe” baked beans don’t taste the same as they do back in the UK. I can’t recall whether a musician ever played for Y Bala, but Ywain Gwynedd had a long and successful career in the old Cymru Alliance League, mainly for Porthmadog FC.

With all of these interruptions while I was trying to put on my shoes, I’m surprised that a member of my family didn’t turn up. The odds would have been nailed on that they would have been involved somehow with all of that.

After that, I had a few things to do and then I recommenced the editing of the radio notes from where I had fallen asleep yesterday.

Not that I advanced very far because the girls arrived to say goodbye. We had a little chat and then an exchange of presents before they pushed off to catch their train for a girly evening in Paris. It was really nice of them to come to see me, and I appreciated it very much. I hope that they come again soon, and stay for longer.

Once they had left, I carried on with the editing, and the programme is now finished. It’s not very good at all, but given the circumstances that surrounded this concert, it’s lucky that there is a tape recording at all. Its value is in its rarity – it’s probably never been broadcast on the radio previously.

By now, it was time for the football. I’d already seen Stranraer beat Spartans 2-1 away from home and Greenock Morton lose away at Kirkaldy against Raith Rovers earlier this afternoon, but now it was the Welsh Cup Final between Caernarfon and Y Fflint. And for seventy minutes, we had one of the most exciting games that I have seen recently.

It’s a pity, though, that Y Fflint didn’t wake up until the twentieth minute, because the match was all over by then. Caernarfon had roared into a 3-0 lead while Y Fflint were still sleeping.

But as I implied just now, after that Y Fflint made a game of it and had several chances to score, but it was all too late and the score remained the same until the final whistle.

There were a few things to do after that, and then it was time for tea. Just chocolate cake and home-made ice cream again. That will do me for this evening, and now, when I’ve finished everything, I’m going for an early night.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about walking the parapet … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone once asked me "you know how we say ‘spend a penny’ to say that we are going to the bathroom"
"Yes?" I replied.
"So what do you say in Europe?"
"Simple" I replied. "We say that we are going to euronate."

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Saturday 11th April 2026 – THIS IS RIDICULOUS!

Most of the day has been spent fighting off wave after wave of sleep, quite often unsuccessfully.

Anyone would think that I wasn’t in bed by 21:30 last night with all of this, but it’s true that I was. Once again, tea last night was just chocolate cake and home-made ice cream, and then I came back in here to write up my notes.

Once my notes were finished, there were the other usual things to do, and then I went into the bathroom to sort myself out ready for bed. As I slid under the quilt later, it was just 21:28, and that made me feel so much better.

It didn’t take long to go to sleep either, and there I stayed, flat out until all of … errr … 03:20. Mind you, that’s almost six hours of continuous sleep and I was happy with that. I even managed to go back to sleep a little later too.

When I awoke again, it was 05:23 exactly. I hung around in bed for a while and then raised myself from the Dead to go to walk the parapet.

Back in here afterwards, in a fit of keenness, I dictated a pile of outstanding radio notes. However, I had this very dry throat, which seems to be a symptom of one of these new pills that Emilie the Cute Consultant prescribed for me, so I binned what I had dictated, went into the kitchen to gargle with some water, and then came back in here to start the dictation again.

By the time that the alarm went off at 06:29, I’d dictated the notes for four “additional tracks” and also the notes for a concert to replace those that I had discarded yesterday.

The next stop was the bathroom, where I had a good scrub-up and then went into the kitchen for my hot drink and medication.

Back in here, fighting off the first of many waves of sleep, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out what had happened during the night. But first, I had to find the dictaphone. Eventually, I came across it underneath the little bedside table at the head of the bed. It looks as if I’d missed my aim after I’d finished dictating something and had been presumably trying to put it on the table where it lives during the night.

There was some kind of new society or something like that which was created. It had all kinds of different social rules with the aim of people living together more happily than they seem to do at the moment under the current system. One of the surprising things about this was that they had “sock hand grenades”, you stuck a brick down the end of a sock and you would wield it around as a weapon and challenge other people in your society to a duel with these sock hand grenades. When these socks weren’t in use, they were hung over what looked like a horse hitching rail that you see outside saloons in Westerns, something like that.

It beats me how people can live together more happily together when they are clouting the living daylights out of each other with bricks stuffed down socks. But bricks or stones stuffed down socks made an effective blackjack during the war when you wanted to remove a sentry from his post without alerting his colleagues. You could have a nice swing from short range if you were to hold the open end of the sock, that’s for sure.

There had been a new artificial intelligence encyclopedia opened on the computer. But this time, instead of people making contributions to the meaning, people would suggest a word and the computer would work out the meaning and insert it. The plan was that people would only request words when they were actually working on a topic that included it. But some of these definitions were not very accurate at all and of course, people were not happy. However, it became quite quickly some kind of established way of job hunting, and people would look for new jobs on this system. Apparently, the keywords were something like “I want to push myself further on”. But this program actually was liked from that point of view.

We’d been talking about artificial intelligence yesterday evening and the rather variable quality of some translators, so that will explain this dream. But it’s true that many of these translators do leave something to be desired. They haven’t been perfected yet.

The nurse turned up, rather later than usual this morning, which is not like him. He didn’t have much to say for himself and was soon back out on his rounds. I could then go to make breakfast and read some more of THE CELT, THE ROMAN and THE SAXON by Thomas Wright.

Today’s highlights include "the barrows and other monuments of this island, which we are accustomed to attribute to the Druids, belong, not to the earlier Celtic population, but to the later settlers". Seeing as the arrival of the Celtic people is generally dated to the period 100 BC – 0 BC, he’s putting all of these Neolithic (4000 BC to 2200 BC, give or take a bit) barrows and monuments such as Stonehenge and Avebury towards being at least contemporary with the Roman occupation of Britain, if not closer to our own time.

That was bad enough, but I really and honestly did groan with dismay when discussing cave-dwellers, whom these days we associate with the Old Stone Age of 10,000 years ago, and I read his "these caves … were probably inhabited in the times of the Roman rule,"

Back here eventually, after fighting off a few waves of sleep at the breakfast table, I had a few things to do, and then I began to edit the radio programmes. However, it wasn’t long before a wave of sleep caught up with me yet again. Wave after wave, in fact, and at one point I fell asleep at about 12:00 and didn’t awaken until the girls came and rang the doorbell at 13:30. If they hadn’t, I’d probably still be asleep even now.

We had a good chat, catching up on old times, until they went out at about 15:30 to take some photographs. I came back in here to carry on … "and to sleep" – ed … until they came back again a little later, and our discussion continued.

After they left, I made the next batch of homemade croissants, and they are now ready for baking tomorrow morning, and then I came back in here to carry on. However, once more, I fell asleep. And there I stayed until teatime, which is ridiculous.

Tea tonight was, as usual, just chocolate cake and vegan ice cream. But I am starting to feel hungry again. I’m going to try to hold out until at least Monday night after dialysis, to see what happens there, and then I might slowly begin to reintroduce more food into my routine.

But not right now, though. I’m going to have another early night and then … "he hopes" – ed … a nice long lie-in. The girls say that they will be round at about 11:30 so I shall have to set an alarm for tomorrow, but I’ll tell you one thing for nothing, and that is that it won’t be at 06:29, that’s for sure. It’ll be enough time to have a good wash and have breakfast before they arrive, and that’s the lot. The nurse can sort out my legs and feet while I’m still in bed.

And before long, I really am going to have to snap out of this chronic fatigue. It’s one of these new tablets that’s causing it, I’m pretty sure, so I’d better hurry up and become accustomed to it.

But at least, today, despite everything, I’ve managed to totally complete four radio programmes, which is better than a slap in the face with a wet kipper. I would have loved to have finished the fifth too, but you can’t have everything, I suppose.

Tomorrow afternoon, by the way, it’s Welsh Cup Final day between Caernarfon and Y Fflint. If you want to watch the game live, THE LINK IS HERE and the programme begins at 15:00 UK time (16:00 CET, 10:00 Toronto time) and the kick-off is fifteen minutes later.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Welsh Cup … "well, one of us has" – ed … a strange fly saw a large group of flies running round the edge of a saucer, stopping to stretch and to limber up every so often.
"What are you doing?" the strange fly asked.
"We’re warming up" replied one of them
"Warming up?" asked the strange fly. "What for?"
"Well, we’re playing in the Cup in half an hour."

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Sunday 8th March 2026 – THAT WAS …

… much more like a game of football today. And I hope that those of you who watched it via the link that I posted yesterday (the link is still active if you want to watch it later) enjoyed it just as much as I did.

So last night, I went to bed, looking forward to today’s game of football. And as usual, I was later going to bed than intended. It was actually 23:40 when I finally crawled into bed after finishing everything that needed finishing.

As usual, I seemed to go to sleep quite quickly, and when I awoke (without the benefit of an alarm) it was just becoming light outside. I made no effort whatever to find out what time it was, because whatever time it was, I had no intention of leaving the bed. Sunday is a Day of Rest and these days, it begins with a lie-in.

When Isabelle the Nurse put in her appearance, I was fast asleep in bed, and quite rightly so. She massaged my legs and feet with the oil etc while I was lying there immobile, and then she wandered off on her rounds. I went straight back to sleep.

When I finally awoke, it was 10:10 – what a wonderful way to start the day, and I wish that I could do it more often. I went into the kitchen, made my breakfast, forgot my medication and read some more of ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT by William A Miller.

He’s now winding up the affairs of the Frankish nobles, recounting how, even in danger of annihilation by the Ottomans, they refuse to form a united front to defend their territory. They seem to be content with plotting, counter-plotting, invoking the aid of different factions such as the Genoese, the Neapolitans, the Venetians and even the Ottomans themselves to aid them in their selfish ambitions, not realising that the only winners in this scenario will be those who are giving the aid and, ultimately, the Ottomans.

But breakfast was nice, though. Porridge, hot black coffee and the last of the home-made croissants. I’ll have to make some more on Saturday. And while I’m at it, there’s only enough birthday cake to last until Friday evening. I’ll have to make some more dessert on Saturday too. Anyone have any ideas? Some kind of trifle sounds nice, but I don’t have any vegan jelly. Would agar-agar do the job, do you think? And I could top it with the vegan cream mix that I used for my birthday cake.

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

There were some photographs of some certain people going around that were dated back to the Roman period. Then, they came across a few more. One of them was interesting because it showed some Roman or other with an apple or something on his head as if it were a precursor to a story about William Tell. This became quite a well-known photo. Then they came across a few more which showed a couple of small girls, maybe eight years old or something, and they had that particular guy, who was asleep, and they were busy balancing these apples on top of his head. So they began to realise that the photo with the apple was not exactly a fake but was an involuntary one while this guy was actually asleep.

That would be quite something – photographs dating back to Roman times. Although the technique of using light to create images has been known since at least the fourth century BC, no one succeeded in capturing an image until 1777, and then they didn’t take the idea any further.

The allusion to William Tell is bizarre, though.

There had been some kind of archaeology carried out on a site. They had come across a woman, or a skeleton of a woman, who had been subjected to all kinds of atrocities and so on. A couple of years later, working in a similar place, they came across the same skeleton but much more modern, one that had also been subjected to a lot of atrocities. So we were busy trying to investigate it, so we had a small team. But there wasn’t much to do for entertainment there in the evening so one of the guys and I were talking about boxing. We agreed to have a three-round boxing match between us. This took place in the roadway up near the roundabout near the sports centre in Granville. We put the gloves on etc. and went to compete. It was obvious that this guy was in quite a different class to me and I was floundering around somewhat but he never actually laid a glove on me because my defence was quite good, but I couldn’t attack. At the end of a few rounds, he was rather dismissive about the affair and made one or two rather offensive comments, but I told him that I wasn’t in the least offended because we had to do something to pass the time, but I don’t think that he was all that entusiastic. He didn’t really appreciate anything, but I suppose that he could quite easily have had me on the floor in the first ten seconds if he had really tried. I forgot to mention in this boxing dream that the discussion about it came because we were discussing what to do to pass the time and the question of boxing came up. I said that I had brought it up before, but they hadn’t seemed to be very interested, much as I would have liked to have been involved in it.

If we go back to Mortimer Wheeler and MAIDEN CASTLE, there’s a report in there about a skeleton that they found which seemed to have been hacked about and cruelly treated round about the time of death.

As for boxing, I would have enjoyed maybe having a go once or twice, but I wouldn’t have been any good at it.

I’d had to go somewhere for some reason and I’d borrowed someone’s old pedal moped. I’d travelled all the way to wherever it was that I’d had to go and went to do what I had to do. Coming out of it, I bumped into the owner of the moped, a huge, big guy, so we went to go back home. He said that he hoped that the moped had been OK. I hoped that it was and went to look for it. But I’d left the keys in it and the ignition turned on, but it started up. He climbed on the front to ride and I sat on the pillion and we set off. Later on, I was driving, and he was talking about changing into his shorts, so I said that it’s probably not a good idea and tried to discourage him. We carried on riding and came to a town centre where there were roadworks. There was a diversion posted, but we reached a point where there was no diversion so I went straight on, but realised that this wasn’t the road. It was an old residential area full of terraced houses, some of which had been demolished. He was talking about a row of terraced houses somewhere that hadn’t been demolished because the Beatles had bought it after they had gone the wrong way down what had been supposed to have been a diversion and seen these houses standing on their own. Eventually, I tried to return to where the main road would be. This involved driving across a piece of wasteland. But there was a big fence at the end of it and a workers’ canteen. When the workers in the canteen saw me coming, they dismantled the canteen so that I could drive this car through and back onto the road. They asked if I would be OK from here. I said that I would have been OK had I seen the diversion sign. They replied that they had taken the diversion sign away thirty seconds ago because the diversion had finished. The guy on the back of this moped was now talking again about changing into his shorts even though he said that I had stopped him. But I hadn’t stopped him – I’d just tried to discourage him

This is a strange dream, right enough, hopping about from moped to car and to moped again. And, incidentally, there wasn’t a pillion seat on such things as an old NSU Quickly, a Phillips Panda or a Raleigh Runabout.

However, the demolition site seems to be a flashback to that dream about a disappeared sports stadium a couple of months ago, and while the Beatles never owned a stock of houses (as far as I know), I do know of one group that did, a most surprising group as well, given their ethos. However, professional secrecy impels me to keep that news to myself.

Having brought everything up-to-date, I watched the highlights of Stranraer’s game against Edinburgh City, bottom of the table. And I wished that I hadn’t because Stranraer were awful and suffered their worst defeat of the season, which is pretty hard to bear after some of their recent positive results.

Next on the list was the Welsh homework, which I almost finished before the football came on.

And while the result was predictable, given the gulf in class between a team in the Premier League and another one in the second tier, Y Rhyl gave Caernarfon a good run for their money and pushed them all the way. The game finished 2-1 to Caernarfon, and it could have been ohh! so different if the referee had awarded the penalty that I would have awarded to Y Rhyl in about the fortieth minute when the Cofis’ ‘keeper, Connor Roberts, hauled Y Rhyl’s Somali international Mohamud Ali to the ground.

But what has annoyed me about all of this is that I didn’t notice a single representative of the FAW at any of the games this weekend. It’s a well-known fact that the FAW is a very Cardiff-centric organisation and rarely wanders outside its home territory, but not being present at a Welsh Cup semi-final is appalling.

In a fit of pique, I wrote to the FAW to ask "Where was Noel Mooney" the CEO of the FAW "this weekend? I didn’t notice him at either of the semi-finals this weekend. Did he slip by unnoticed and unannounced, or did he simply not turn up? What was the matter with him? Was he ill? Or could he simply not find enough native bearers to carry the FAW drinks cabinet north of the Heads of the Valleys and fight off the sheep and druids who are all that occupy that forbidden and unknown (to the FAW) territory?"

As well as that, I added a few bells and whistles, but I don’t expect that I shall receive a reply.

Once the game was over, I went to make my bread and pizza. And I have never had a loaf of bread rise up as much as this one did today. It looks wonderful. The pizza was good too, and there is, as usual, half left over for tomorrow.

But right now, I’m off to bed ready for dialysis … "I don’t think" – ed … tomorrow

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about photography … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of my friends is a professional photographer.
One day, he was walking along a beach when two girls from Crewe came walking by the other way.
As he reached for his camera to take a picture of them, one girl said to the other "keep still! He’s going to focus!"
And the other girl replied "What? Both of us?"

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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?"

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Sunday 1st February 2026 – SUNDAY IS OFFICIALLY …

… a Day Of Rest, but you would never have thought so after today. I’ve been a busy boy.

Not so much last night, though. Running late as usual and falling asleep for half an hour in the chair while thinking about going to bed, it turned out to be a night much later than I would have liked, and certainly later than some have been just recently.

Eventually, though, I managed to make it into bed and asleep, where I stayed, flat out, until about 07:30. I don’t think that I moved at all during the night.

One glance at the clock made me wonder whether I ought to think about leaving the bed, but I soon dismissed this silly idea from my head, turned over, and went back to sleep.

The nurse woke me round about 08:30 to sort out my legs and, regrettably, I couldn’t go back to sleep after that. Round about 09:00, I hauled myself out of bed and cleared off into the bathroom.

Breakfast today was porridge, hot coffee and two of my homemade croissants, which were cooked to perfection. But I was thinking about the process that I use to make them, and I’m going to try something a little different next time to see if it makes a difference.

While I was eating, I was reading Mortimer Wheeler’s MAIDEN CASTLE.

He includes in his notes probably the longest preamble that I have ever read, and it contains little or no information about what he’s trying to do – it talks merely about the background and the naming of the site. And after the twenty-five pages or so, he reaches the conclusion that the information in his preamble is “not conclusive”.

We haven’t gone very far into the book either before we reach a discussion of climate change, with differing opinions as to whether climate change really exists or not.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall our discussions in the past about William Munn. He was one of the very first people to suggest, in his book “Location of Helluland, Markland & Vinland from the Icelandic Sagas” (long since out of print, but I have a few copies if anyone wants to buy one) that he wrote in 1914, that global warming was a real phenomenon.

He was roundly ridiculed by his peers at the time, most of whom have gone on since to have had omelette sur le visage as they say around here.

But one thing about Mortimer Wheeler is that he agrees with me on the question of civilisation. I’ve long contended that civilisation began as far back as Neolithic times when people were obliged to abandon their isolated hunter-gatherer lifestyle due to pressure of population growth and, instead, settle down, adopt sedentary agriculture and, most importantly, learn to cooperate in order to improve everyone’s quality of life.

Wheeler tells us that a "fortified city was not built in a day; its building involved a disciplined concentration of effort, and its existence was a perpetual symbol of coordinating authority. It implied a specialized and stratified society in which, presumably, the aristocratic traditions of the Celtic tribal structure found expression and at the same time acquired a stability not altogether native to them. It marked the true beginning of citizenship as a substantive element in the development of civilization in Britain."

Back in here, there were the dictaphone notes to transcribe.

I’d had to go from Morecambe to Shavington village centre for something, but while I was at work, it was another one of these things where I can retire at any moment I want because I’m well over retirement age and if people don’t like what I’m doing, I’ll just leave. I was trying to write a report about a Government investment in an organisation that had control of all of the Hackney carriages in one certain town. They’d had an investment of £1,000,000 or something and then another investment of £300,000, but that was nothing like the amount of debt that they had and they’d carried on trading all the same. It was my duty to make a report to decide whether we should carry on making further investments in this or whether we should pull the plug on it. I was sitting there writing my report and my brother was watching me. One thing though was that my handwriting was dreadful. As I was dictating it, I was writing by hand. It looked nothing like what I was saying and nothing like what was going down on paper. In the end, I wrote down everything that we’d done, I wrote down what had happened, and I was on the point of writing down all of the consequences if we were to pull the plug on it, saying things such as “one whole town would be without Hackney carriages for a while until the council sorted itself out. This was the reason why the councils prefer to issue Hackney plates to individual drivers rather than large companies”. Then we had to go somewhere, but first of all, I had to leave the building for something. I went down in the lift and when I was coming back, it was 10:20 and there was a man banging on the doors trying to enter the building for some reason but I’ve no idea why. I went into the staff entrance and to the lift, and it was something like ninety floors up, my office. I was there with another girl and we were discussing this guy all the way up. Then my brother and I had to leave to go to do something in Shavington so we set out to walk, but we ended up in Nantwich. In Nantwich, I had a fall and I couldn’t pick myself up again at first. It took a great deal of effort to climb back to my feet. I suggested buying something to take back to the office but my brother thought that it was a silly idea. No-one else did that so in the end, I didn’t. Then he said “we have what we need. Let’s go”. It was a bag of spark plugs. I asked “you did buy the correct ones for the Ford, did you?”. He said “yes” so we were discussing the Luton-bodied Ford Transit that I have, and the plugs were probably for that. I came to the decision when I was walking back that I was going to collect all of my cars, all that kind of thing and put them all in one yard and all of the Cortinas except the 2000E saloon and estate, I’d dismantle. I thought of all the lock-up garages that I had with all different Ford Cortinas, spares and body panels etc. I thought that that was going to be some real hard work to move everything over into just one place.

Not that I’d ever be doing anything with my brother of course, but here we go again, working when long past retirement age. That used to be a recurring theme in my dreams at one time and it looks like it’s coming back again. The ninety floors or so of lift reminds me of a building in Manchester in 1974-75. It wasn’t ninety floors up, but it was pretty close.

My handwriting is quite awful too, due mainly to a severed tendon from when I put my right hand through a plate-glass window in 1974.

As for the 2000Es, there are indeed a saloon and an estate. The estate is in the barn on the farm and is worth a fortune, being one of the very few 2000E estates still in existence. The saloon is in the warehouse in Montaigut and while it has a 1600cc engine and manual gearbox that I fitted in 1991, the matching engine (with failed big ends) and auto gearbox is there too. With the matching numbers on the engine and gearbox to go with the car, that’s worth a fortune too but I bet that someone with no idea of the value will come along and heap the lot into a skip. That’s my biggest worry.

And just for emphasis, I did once have several lock-up garages scattered around Crewe with all different Cortinas and bits thereof stored within. And spark plugs for overhead cam Fords are different from the more regular spark plugs. They are “F” series rather than the more common “N” series

There was also something about building a pushbike from a whole pile of bits while we were listening to the news about something but I can’t remember anything more about this. It evaporated as soon as I touched the dictaphone.

My second push-bike was actually one that I built up from bits that I’d accumulated here and there. I had it for years too.

After that, I had a footfest – the highlights of last night’s matches in the Welsh Cup. And believe it or not, this is A GAME BETWEEN A THIRD DIVISION SIDE (BANGOR CITY IN BLUE) AND A SECOND DIVISION SIDE (CAERAU TRELAI IN RED AND BLACK) in front of a crowd of almost two thousand, nine hundred people.

As promised, here are THE HIGHLIGHTS of last night’s game between Colwyn Bay and Caernarfon, but HERE IS THE WHOLE GAME if you’d rather watch that, and you won’t be disappointed.

There was also Stranraer away at Stirling Albion, and although the unbeaten run goes on, it was yet another draw. I’m not sure how many that is now.

After a disgusting drink break, I finished the notes for the radio programme that I should have finished yeserday and then began to research the next one. That involved tracking down loads of obscure music but to my surprise, after much binding in the marsh, I managed to find everything that I wanted. It’s not very often that I can say that.

When I’d sorted out the radio, I went to make my bread and pizza while I was having an online chat with my friend in Munich. However, I was interrupted when the President of the residents’ committee for the building came to see me to discuss this fibre issue.

She didn’t really understand the issue at first, so I had to take her into the technical cupboard to show her what was going on, and then explain to her the issues. After some considerable time, I reckon that she finally understood the issues.

However, what annoyed me more than anything was that it seems that this problem about the telephone cable trunking being obstructed is something that has been known for ages, and I’ve had to go through all of this just to prove it.

But on a happier note, the bread was easily the best that I have ever made. The pizza not so much, because while the bread rose up like a lift, the pizza base didn’t, and it was too crunchy for my liking. But you can’t win a coconut every time, can you?

On that note, I’m off to bed ready … "I don’t think" – ed … for dialysis tomorrow, and to see what nonsense we come up with there. With a bit of luck, I might have a good night’s sleep, although I doubt it.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about my bad handwriting … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once wanted to enter an international competition for bad handwriting, so I sent off my entry form.
A few days later, I had a reply. "I’m so sorry, but you are illegible."

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Saturday 31st January 2026 – I HAVE HAD …

… a really nice, leisurely day today, where I have done hardly anything at all, not even all of the things that I was supposed to do. And it feels quite good for a change to be able to say that.

Things began to quieten down last night, in fact. I could (and should) have finished everything quite early and had an early night but, as seems to be the case these days, I fell asleep on my chair while trying to sort out everything.

Altogether, I was away with the fairies … "although not in any fashion that would incite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine" – ed … for a good half an hour all told, and that had me running considerably behind.

Once in bed though, there I stayed until 06:29 when the alarm went off. It was a very quiet night, although I remember turning over in bed once or twice. However, it was nothing of any importance.

As usual, it took a while to sort myself out and head for the bathroom. But once I’d finished in there and had a good scrub up, I put the previous bedding and a few of the clothes in the washing machine and set it off while I went and had my hot drink and medication.

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

I was in the army last night, or joining the army, being interviewed or something. We had to go out on a huge patrol later that afternoon, so we all had to make sure that we were fit. We were all told to wear skin camouflage, so I put a couple of black lines underneath my eyes and thought that that would do for now. I sorted out my camera because this sounded as if it was going to be interesting, and one or two other things. I was in the room preparing everything when the captain came in. He told us again about this parade. I asked “are we supposed to wear uniform”? He looked at me with a big, hard look. “Of course you are” he said. If you don’t have a shirt, you can take one from the neighbouring regiment. I hadn’t yet been issued with a shirt, so I’d have to go to borrow one. One of the interesting things about this was that one of the soldiers in our platoon was fitted with a recording device. The idea was that we’d be marching with some allied nations, and the captain had an interest in knowing how they performed, how they marched and what they were up to during this particular patrol.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … there would be no chance whatever of me serving in the army. If ever I were called up to the Services, I would be in the Merchant Navy or some other similar occupation.

But this thing about “are we supposed to wear uniform” – it does have a parallel somewhere going back six or so years ago, and the idea of fitting a recording device to a soldier is certainly new.

The nurse didn’t stay long this morning. he was in and out quite quickly, leaving me on my own to make breakfast and finish off reading A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE.

The final part was the coin examinations, and it’s thanks to this that we are able to date at least part of the timeline of the fort. He puts the initial evacuation of the fort at some time round about 90 AD or maybe a few years after, due to the fact that in the first layer of debris, there are two coins dated 85 AD and 86 AD and their condition is “as mint”, implying that they haven’t been in circulation for long.

The next book is Mortimer Wheeler’s report on the excavations of MAIDEN CASTLE in Dorset in the 1930s.

Wheeler was the leader of the next generation of archaeologists who came after James Curle, and although he’s highly thought of, many of his conclusions are said to not withstand the passage of time. However, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we’ve already, not so long ago, questioned some of these revisionist opinions that seem to be doing the rounds right now.

The washing machine had finished by now so I sorted everything out and hung it up. And you’ve no idea how much energy it took out of me just to do that, even when I was sitting down.

After that, I came back in here and carried on writing the notes for the next radio programme. I should have finished them too, but I took my time and had a good wander around cyberspace, with the result that there’s still a little left to do tomorrow.

While I was at it, I had a little chat with Alison on the internet. It’s a nice day in Tervuren, so she’d gone for a walk in the park.

Later on, there was football. The Welsh Cup quarter finals and we were treated to Caernarfon v Colwyn Bay. This was another excellent match, a credit to the league, and roared from end to end with no side seeming to have the advantage of play.

However, the final scoreline was flattering and certainly didn’t reflect the balance of play by any means. I shan’t spoil the party and tell you the score because tomorrow, I’ll post the link to the highlights and you can see for yourself.

The crowd was another huge crowd of almost thirteen hundred people, but if you think that that’s a lot, the game between third-division Bangor City and second-division Caerau Ely attracted almost TWO THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED people, and that’s up there with the biggest crowds that I can remember. It’s bigger than several crowds in League One and League Two in England and is higher than the average gates of several clubs in League Two.

When the game was over, I went into the kitchen and had a few crackers with vegan cheese, and then I prepared the croissants ready for tomorrow.

Right now though, I’m going to bed in the hope of having a good lie-in tomorrow. But we shall see whether it happens or not. There’s usually something that comes along to confound me.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the crowds at Bangor City … "well, one of us has" – ed … it’s true to say that firstly, there’s not much else to do in Bangor, and secondly, the fans there are so partisan that they turn up in their hundreds at Bangor City Stadium just to watch the grass grow, and they’ll have a thousand watching a training session.
That’s not like the training sessions at Crewe Alexandra, where the team was once so down on its luck that the manager at the time, Jimmy Melia, announced that they would have a training session on the car park where the players would practise dribbling the ball around some traffic cones.
Later that evening, the editor of the “Crewe Chronicle” rang up the club to ask how the new training session went.
"Terrible" said the spokesman. "The traffic cones beat us 2-0."

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Sunday 14th December 2025 – ISABELLE THE NURSE …

… found me in bed, fast asleep, this morning when she arrived to sort out my legs. For once, I’d actually managed to have a decent … "kind-of" – ed … lie-in.

And I needed it too. Yesterday evening was another difficult night when I kept on falling asleep while I was trying to type out my notes. It took an age to finish everything.

There was another difficulty too. When I went to stand up, I couldn’t manage to keep myself upright and it was the most uncomfortable feeling that I have ever had. Even worse, I couldn’t walk either. It seemed that my right leg had now totally ceased to function, and if that were ever to happen, it would be the end of the world.

Eventually though, I managed to make it to the bathroom to sort myself out, and then I crawled into bed. And I can’t say that I’m sorry.

The next thing that I remember was Isabelle the Nurse’s cheery greeting as she breezed into the bedroom at about 08:40. I’d been flat out, fast asleep for a little more than nine hours, and it’s been a very long time indeed since anything like that happened.

She sorted out my legs and feet while I was in bed, half asleep, and then she disappeared again. But not before admiring my Christmas cakes and the icing thereupon. But how disappointed was I that she didn’t bring me a nice, hot mug of coffee?

After she left, it took me a good twenty minutes to decide that I wanted to leave the bed. I could quite easily have stayed in bed all morning, but anyway …

The first thing that I did was to make the croissants because I have run out. And what a mess I made of those. I rolled up the pastry with the points inside rather than on the outside so they went berserk when they began to bake.

While they were baking, I made the rest of my breakfast, and the porridge boiled over in the microwave. It really wasn’t my morning. At least the croissants tasted nice, no matter how they looked.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of Thomas Codrington’s ROMAN ROADS IN BRITAIN.

He’s now down in Southern England and, as this is a region that has been thoroughly explored and catalogued, there’s really nothing new about any of it. He makes one or two educated guesses about a couple of places, but subsequent research has shown that he was somewhat wide of the mark.

Not that it’s a problem. Modern archaeology has many more tools in its inventory than he had in 1909 and in many cases, he really was groping around in the dark.

After breakfast, there was tidying up to do. I found a couple of empty biscuit tins and, having cleaned them out, put the cakes in them. They are now on the cake shelf with all of the other baking products.

There were the leftover croissants to put in the fridge for another time, and then the kitchen needed another clean because yesterday, I hadn’t done a very good job.

Back in here, it was 11:04 when I finally sat down to begin work. And that’s a luxury and no mistake. I’d enjoyed my really slow start to the day.

First thing was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. We had been invaded by the Nazis so we were going through our house, destroying any incriminating paperwork, hiding our guns etc., so that we had a purely clean house when they finally arrived. When they did arrive, it was two women. The first thing that they did was to compare the marking of the deer with the deer that we’d had previously. It matched, so it was obviously our deer that we had killed. There was no problem there. Then she began to discuss the famine. I told her that that was two hundred years ago and had nothing to do with me. Eventually, I managed to convince her that it was an epoch in history and nothing particularly recent. She began to ask questions about my private life etc. We told her that we’d prepared a list ready for baking with all the details of our homes and our cookery on it so she told us to bake it, so we did. She had a good look around … fell asleep here …. Anyway, it was going back into that girl’s room for quite some time, and then one day we heard that he had taken her in his car to the beach and that was considered to be excessive and inappropriate, so he was summoned before the bishop.

The opening part of the dream reminds me of a story that I had heard once in North-Eastern France in 1914. When the Germans invaded and the British and French troops were in full retreat to the Marne, an undefended village found itself right in the path of the advancing German Army. Having heard of the atrocities committed upon the civilians in Belgium by the Germans, the mayor of the village ordered that all firearms be surrendered to him. And then, in consultation with the priest and the local undertaker, they put them all in a coffin and then had a formal “burial ceremony” in the cemetery.

The end of the dream refers to the case of the notorious headmaster Neil Foden, who is currently serving seventeen years in prison, but if you want to know more about that, you can look it up yourselves. The rest of the dream means very little.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I am actually asleep when I’m dictating these dreams. But what I mean when I say that I fell asleep is that my voice tapers off into silence, and you can then hear the heavy breathing.

Next on the agenda was the footfest of matches from yesterday. And HERE are the highlights of last night’s game. They don’t actually do anything like justice to the game, which is a shame.

And while we’re at it, THIS GAME is between a Third Division club (Bangor City) and a Second Division club (Trefelin), and I reckon that it would do justice to any fixture played in the Premier League.

When all of the Welsh football was over, we had Stranraer away at Elgin. And this run of Stranraer’s keeps on going. They ran out 2-1 winnsers, making five victories in a row. For a team that, at the end of September, were hopelessly anchored, well adrift, at the foot of the table, they are now up to fourth.

The bubble will have to burst sometime, but we are all enjoying it while it lasts.

A few months ago, my friend from Munich gave me an old 2012 2TB hard drive that had become corrupted. One task that I’ve been meaning to do is to have a look and see if I can fix it. Anyway, I stuck it into a spare bay in the array and had a play about.

In the end, after a little bit of messing around in the BIOS, I managed to make it fire up and then I could format it. It seems to be working fine now.

Interestingly, it seems to have corrupted itself into two partitions, one of 500GB and another one of 1.31TB. I’ve only ever seen one hard drive do that before, and even as we speak, that one is sitting on my desk, where it has been for a couple of years.

While I had the array switched on, I began to do a little housekeeping. I found an empty 4TB drive and fitted that in, so now, every bay is full. Then I began to shuffle things around somewhat to make my backing-up much more efficient

At 16:30 I knocked off in order to go bread-making and pizza-making. They both turned out to be excellent, mainly due to me having added a little more liquid than usual and letting them bake for a few minutes longer.

So now, having finished my notes, I’ll check the stats, do the backing-up and then go to bed. There won’t be a lie-in tomorrow morning, which is a shame, but we have dialysis instead. But as a footnote, I’ve not felt at all tired today and have kept on going remarkably well, considering. It seems that a really good sleep is what I’ve been missing.

But seeing as we have been talking about baking and tidying up etc … "well, one of us has" – ed … I once asked someone what was the secret of a happy life.
He replied "finding a woman who can bake, who can keep a tidy house, knit and sew, look after the kids and run the finances"
"And did you?" I asked
"Ohh yes" he replied. "But it was a nightmare."
"Why was that?" I asked
"Arranging things so that those five women never met each other."

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Saturday 13th December 2025 – I HAVE JUST …

… seen probably the most exciting game of football that I have seen for a long time.

It’s Welsh Cup today, the last sixteen, and with many of the big guns already eliminated, there’s a frantic race to the final when some unsuspecting and unprepared club will win and find themselves playing in European competition next season.

Consequently, it’s been “no holds barred” with a ream of sendings off, and in the game that I was watching, we had three yellow cards in the first fifteen minutes.

But meanwhile, back at the ran … err … apartment, last night was another late night. Not as late as some have been just recently, because I did actually put my foot down and dash along with the stuff as quickly as I could, but it was later than I would have liked.

And there I lay until all of … errr … 04:40, when I had another dramatic awakening. After that, I couldn’t go back to sleep and at about 05:37, I called it a night and left the bed.

Thinking that I may as well take advantage of an early start, I finished off the notes for the radio programme on which I’d been working, and then I dictated them so that they are ready for editing.

Once I’d finished, I went into the bathroom to sort myself out and then into the kitchen to make my hot ginger, honey and lemon drink to take with my medication. While I was there, and seeing as I wasn’t in a rush, I decided to fix a couple of the drawers that had fallen apart. These cheap and nasty IKEA drawers really are getting on my wick.

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in to sort out my feet and to give me my ‘flu injection. She had to sit with me for fifteen minutes afterwards to make sure that I had no after-effects, so we talked about nothing much in particular.

Then there was breakfast and some more of Thomas Codrington’s ROMAN ROADS IN BRITAIN. We’re now in Silchester, or Calleva Atrebatum as it used to be. It’s a well-known ruin, well-mapped by different archaeologists, so it holds no surprises for us

The shopping from LeClerc turned up, so I put most of it away, and then I had 2 kg of carrots to wash, dice and blanch. That took longer than it ought to have done.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. We were quite busy at home – well, at the place where I was living. It was like a big collective place with lots of different people living there. I was busy with a friend of mine. Early in the morning, we’d had a delivery of food from the supermarket. My friend brought it in and she put it down by the side of my desk. However, I wasn’t at the side of my desk for ages so it sat there for a while. As time drew on, I began to think about making tea so I went into the fridge, where I noticed that the carrots were all soft and inedible. I wished that I had some fresh ones. Then, I suddenly realised that I had because the order had come from the supermarket earlier. I dashed over to my desk but the bags had been moved again. Eventually, I found them, but of course there was the frozen food which was now all defrosted. I thought “never mind. It can’t be helped” and went to put it in the freezer. The freezer was, as usual, crowded out with stuff and there wasn’t really any room for it so I had to do my best to invent some room. Then, there were all of the other things too so I went to put them on the shelves. I was surprised at the number of sweets that I already had in boxes on the shelves, and I’d ordered some more, and I thought that this was never going to do because I was going to be here forever trying to sort out all of this. And the frozen food, having melted, just about put the tin hat on everything.

The part about the shopping presumably relates to this morning’s delivery. However, that passed OK, except that both the freezers are now full to overflowing and there’s no room to swing a cat in there

Later on, I decided that I’d go off on another trip to the Arctic so I contacted the people with whom I went last time and booked some kind of voyage with them that they were making up to some of the old Arctic exploration camps. I packed my suitcase and packed a smaller one and set off on my crutches to the bus station. When I arrived at the bus station, I had to look around for the buses that would take me to the airport and climbed on board a bus. The bus set off, and when I alighted at Manchester, I only had my small suitcase with me. I suddenly remembered that while I was looking at the bus timetables, I’d let go of my larger one and I must have forgotten it. I thought that there was no time now whatsoever to go back and pick it up and I was on a ‘plane to Montreal right now. At Montreal, I alighted, still with my small suitcase and walked round to my hotel. We were told that we were leaving in half an hour so that gave me half an hour to go around the shops to see if I could find some clothes, because I’d freeze to death in the Arctic like this. Of course, it was 08:30 and I found the big Army and Navy Stores where they would have most of what I’d need but it was still closed. It wouldn’t open until 09:00 and by then we’d be leaving. So with reluctance, I set off back to the hotel where we were meeting and came across an open-air market. I had a quick look around there but still couldn’t find anything so I set off back to the hotel. On the way back, I realised that I’d left my small suitcase at the market so I had to go back. Luckily, it was still there and I carried on back to the hotel. People were already congregating outside. A few people knew me and asked me how I was doing, so I made a grimace. One of them said “never mind, Eric. You’ll be great once you are on board the ship with us”. I thought to myself “if only they knew what kind of disaster this is going to turn out to be”.

It seems that I’m definitely yearning for Montréal and the High Arctic again, but of course there is a good reason why I’m not going. My health won’t stand it. However, being absent-minded and distracted away from my luggage is nothing new. As for the clothes in the Army and Navy store, back in the distant past, had I gone to the one in Crewe, I would have equipped myself with Arctic gear with no problems. What I should have done in this dream was to simply ask the organisers of the trip to postpone the departure until I’d kitted myself out. It would only have taken half an hour.

As for the open-air market, the one in Crewe closed down in 2016. That’s a really sad state of affairs. The whole town seems to be dying. It was bad enough when I lived there. It must be a hundred times worse these days.

The next task was to edit the radio notes that I’d dictated. And by the time that I’d knocked off in mid-afternoon, the notes had been edited and the two halves of the programme assembled. The final track has been chosen and the notes written, and they are awaiting dictation.

Back in the kitchen, I iced my Christmas cakes. And what a mess I made of that, especially when I was whisking the aquafaba and let go my hold on the bowl. We had aquafaba all over the kitchen, walls and worktop, the clean crockery and cutlery and also all over me. It’s a good job that I had some more in the freezer.

The icing sugar ended up being too runny and it ran down the side of the cakes, so I had to leave it to set a while before I could give it a second coat.

Not to worry, because we had Cardiff Metropolitan v Caernarfon in the Welsh Cup.

With only five Premier League teams left in the competition, and with two matches featuring games between four of them, there will be only three, or maybe even two in the next round if Greford Athletic of the Second Division knocks out Barry Town. So it’s anyone’s cup, and a cheap passport into European competition.

So the Met and the Cofis were going at it hammer and tongs, with the game swinging like a pendulum from one end to the other throughout the match. The Cofis scored first, but the Met equalised. The Met scored a second but the Cofis equalised almost straight from the restart.

With the game heading towards a penalty shootout, a moment of magic from the Cofis’ Portuguese midfielder led to a third goal, and with the Met throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, at the Cofis’ defence in the final seconds, they left themselves wide open to a rapid counter-attack, with the inevitable results. Hats off to Cofis manager Richard Davies for introducing a new, rapid pair of legs up front in the final minutes.

So what with Bangor City of the Third Division despatching Trefelin, second in Division Two, and Trearddur Bay of the Third Division hitting five past Newport, fourth in Division Two, we are going to have some interesting cup matches in the next round. And who knows? maybe a completely unexpected winner, especially as another one of the early favourites, Penybont, was bundled out by lowly Y Fflint this afternoon.

Tea tonight was baked potato, vegan burger and the rest of the baked beans. And then I had an enormous amount of cleaning to do in the kitchen to make the place look vaguely presentable. Hence I’m running incredibly late tonight. I hope that my lie-in works tomorrow morning.

But seeing as we have been talking about playing in European Competition … "well, one of us has" – ed … these European competitions have been around for millennia.
In fact, in 33 AD, a very important match was played just outside Jerusalem at a stadium called Golgotha. Someone called Jesus was actually playing in the defence, and when Billy Graham wrote his match report, he mentioned that at one stage, Jesus had joined in the attack.
He wrote "and Jesus went up for the cross".

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Saturday 22nd November 2025 – AS I HAVE …

… said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed …. it’s pointless going to bed early, as all it means is that I awaken correspondingly early the following morning.

And that, dear reader, explains why I was sitting at my desk working at 03:30 this morning.

Last night, I’d hit the hay at about 19:30 or thereabouts after my totally exhausting day at the Centre de Ré-education. Having a day like that after two days of chemotherapy is not doing me any good at all, and as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed …. it’s pointless giving me all of these exercises to make me better if the effort is going to kill me.

Surprisingly, considering how dead I was feeling earlier, it took an age for me to go off to sleep. But once I’d gone, I stayed gone and an earthquake wouldn’t have awoken me. But at 02:27 we had another one of these “sitting bolt upright” awakenings that I sometimes have.

Despite all that I tried, I couldn’t go back to sleep so after an hour or so, I raised myself from the Dead.

We started off with a foot-fest. There had been some matches in the Welsh Cup last night and the highlights were now online.

And how I laughed as TNS – perennial winners of just about everything – were leading 1-0 against Cardiff Metropolitan with just five minutes to go, only to concede two quickfire goals and go out of the competition.

It was even funnier later when Connah’s Quay – perennial runners-up – playing away at second-tier Llandudno, went down and out 2-1.

What with other results today, we have to go back to 2002-03 to find a Welsh Cup winner who is still in the competition.

After the football, I made a start on last night’s blog entry. I was so exhausted last night that there was no possibility of me doing anything. Eventually, the entry went online and then I had to do the stats and the statistics that I also hadn’t done yesterday.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from the night too. I was in the north of Scotland somewhere. There was a kind of canal that had been dug artificially from the sea. There was a ferry boat, one of these small, flat ferry things moored at the ferry terminal along this canal that sailed out across to an island just across a short length of sea. I was there in BILL BADGER, my old A60 van waiting to be loaded on, and a tractor appeared. He had something in the bucket at the front and something in the tri-point hitch at the back. The ferry guy told him that if he wanted to cross over to the island, he’d have to hire a trailer in order to take his things onto the ferry. They couldn’t go like that. He said that he would have to go back to pick up a trailer as he only lives at the top of the hill. The ferry guy said something like “it will be in the next price band” when he comes back so “to tell whoever was here that it’s agreed to pay twenty-five bob to go across”, which was presumably the fare for the current price band where we were. Then I was beckoned onto the ferry. There was a weird chiming noise in the distance, and the ferry guy said that that was the local church bells ringing the time. Then, there was an even weirder one almost straight away. He pointed to some tower on the horizon and said “that’s the town clock, that one is that’s striking now”.

Several ferries of that nature have had the pleasure of my presence. Mainly up in Scotland (and mainly in Bill Badger) but more than just a few around the coast of Nova Scotia.

Later on, I was with my niece’s youngest daughter and someone else. We were in my apartment in Granville. We decided that we’d go out for a meal so I collected my crutches and we set out towards the town. We hadn’t gone too far when I realised that I’d left my sac banane behind with my wallet in it so my niece’s daughter volunteered to run back. But then she pointed out the fact that I was in fact wearing it so we carried on downtown and came across a canal again where there was a boat heading up the canal from the sea. We came into the centre and came into a restaurant. It was 22:00 now and we weren’t sure whether it was still serving, but they ushered us to a table. It was an extremely posh affair and we were surrounded by waiters. I said to my niece’s daughter “we’re actually outnumbered here” to which she laughed. They kept on insisting that we had wines and that kind of thing whereas sparkling water was fine for me. Eventually, they poured a sparkling water for me and left the menus. I had the vegan menu, so there was a kind of stuffed tomato that looked nice. For the main course, I was hoping to have a salad. There were pages and pages and pages of different types of lettuce and different types of dressing. I asked the others what they were having, and they made some kind of suggestion but it didn’t ring any bells with me. The third person with us stood up and went over to a different table. She looked at it and came back, saying “that’s a lovely table over there”. My niece’s daughter said “well, we’re here now”. But the other person replied “but I want to go to sit at that table” but my niece’s daughter ignored her and so did I. We carried on looking through the menu and there were still these pages and pages and pages of different lettuces and different dressings, and I couldn’t really find anything else.

There’s no chance of me being in another restaurant. The last time that I was in one was an absolute disaster and I shan’t be doing that again. Besides, my appetite is all to pot these days. However, who was the third person? That’s a big mystery.

After a visit to the bathroom, I went into the kitchen to make my hot lemon, ginger and honey drink and to take my medication.

Back in here later, I sat down in my chair and that was the last thing that I remember until the nurse came at 08:30. Not that that is any surprise. It was an early start.

The nurse gave me a lecture this morning. I mentioned my ongoing dispute about the hours that they expect me to be available for treatment and he was most unhappy. He thinks that I should be grateful for all of the effort that everyone is making towards my eventual recovery and accept everything with a smile.

But that’s the difference between me and the medical profession. They want me to spend all of my life having treatment and I want some quality of life.

Once he’d gone, I could make breakfast. That included the two croissants left over from the last batch that I made and, warmed in the microwave, they were just as delicious.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of MY ARMY LIFE by Frances Carrington, or Mrs Grummond as she was at the time.

Some of the things that she writes are appalling, and I shudder to think what today’s World would make of them. The female Afro-Caribbean servant of one of the officers’ wives had been scared almost to death by an attack on the fort by the Native Americans and was refusing to go outside. The solution proposed by the officer’s wife was "to flail Laura into subordination by the help of a trunk strap.".

She asked the author to go to help her, and she did! And judging by the style of her writing and her description, she quite enjoyed it too.

Mrs Grummond told us at one stage that her "father was a slave-owner, but one of the better kind.". If the treatment of Laura is an example of the treatment meted out by one of the “better kind”, what on earth must the treatment have been that was meted out by one of the bad kind?

After the breakfast; I had a job to do. I sorted out all of the dry fruit that I need for my Christmas Cake, weighed it, chopped it into smaller amounts and mixed it in a large glass bowl. Having done that, I made a marinade of rum essence, brandy essence, lemon juice, orange essence and vanilla essence in water, added it all over the mix and stirred it well in.

It’s now in the fridge, all soaking in, and it’ll stay there like that for at least a week.

This afternoon I made a start on writing the notes for the radio programme that I’ve been preparing. It was a slow, laborious effort and I’ll have to finish it tomorrow.

We broke off for the football – Caerfyrddin v Colwyn Bay in the Welsh Cup.

Caerfyrddin are in the second tier and Colwyn Bay are in the Premier League, but with all of the cup upsets this weekend, a shock result might have been on the cards. However, Colwyn Bay ran out 3–1 winners without too much difficulty. They were always one pace ahead of the home side.

Tea tonight was two taco rolls with cheese, tomato and mushrooms followed by ginger cake and chocolate soya sauce. And now I’m off to bed, cough and all, because my cough has suddenly come back.

But seeing as we have been talking about the football on Friday night … "well, one of us has" – ed … the grandstand at Maesddu for the Llandudno v Connah’s Quay game was full to capacity, except for one empty seat.
"What’s with the empty seat?" asked one of the stewards
"I bought it for the wife" said the man sitting next to it "but unfortunately, she died."
"Well, couldn’t you offer it to one of your friends?" asked the steward.
"I did, but they couldn’t come" he replied. "They are all at the funeral."

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