… what the hell is going on here.

Back in the old days, like 6 months ago, I could sit down with a clean computer screen and in 4 hours bash out a radio programme all the way from the very start – like choosing the music – to the very end, like having it up and running.

So having dictated the notes last night, all that I had to do today was to edit them, assemble the programme, choose the final track, write, dictate and edit the notes for that and add it in. So here am I, it’s quite late in the evening and I’m nowhere near finished.

It all went wrong last night. What I dictated was, as I expected, total rubbish and having tried unsuccessfully to edit some of it, I gave up and re-dictated it.

But it’s hopeless trying to dictate anything here during daylight hours at a weekend. I lost count of how many times a motorcycle went past the window causing me to stop and after it had gone past, going back and re-dictating from a point farther back

Having edited it and halfway through assembling the programme I noticed a couple of places where I hadn’t gone back far enough so I re-dictated the segments.

Then I couldn’t make the tones of the new part match up with the old parts despite trying for hours. So in the end I ended up having to re-dictate it yet again.

Where I’m at at the moment is in the editing stage.

But at least I know how long the gap is for the eleventh and final track so that’s all ready and the notes dictated and edited. LOVE AIN’T FOR KEEPING is one of the most beautiful love songs ever and you don’t need me to tell you when was the last time that I played it to an audience

And it was an audience of one too.

But anyway, I digress … "again" – ed … I’m fed up to the gills with this blasted stuff that’s making me sleep, making me see all kinds of strange things when I close my eyes and totally churning up my brain so I can’t concentrate on anything.

More by luck than judgement I’ve fought off waves of sleep today but everything is turning into a total mess. I try to keep the notes on my whiteboard tidy so that I can follow them backwards if necessary, but that’s a total shambles too.

It’s all a total morass at the moment, and in years to come, people are going to look at the notes from this last week or two, shake their heads and say to each other "I don’t know what he must have been smoking when he was writing all of that, but I wish that he’d passed it around to the rest of us"

It’s like the time that the Cambridge boat sank in the middle of the Boat Race and everyone going round, pointing at the crew and saying "they were totally out of their scull".

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed, I had something or a better sleep last night. Maybe that accounts for why I managed to go through the day without actually crashing out.

It was about 01:00 when I finally went to bed, and I awoke (but that’s not to say that I left the bed) at about 10:00.

It was a leisurely start to the day, as befits a Sunday, but eventually I managed to make a start on the dictaphone notes. We started off with the story of a small girl who was elected for some kind of competition because she could run so fast. She was taken to somewhere like the Centre de Re-education for a medical examination. There, she was confronted by a bear and then by a polar bear. When people asked about that, the answer given was that where she’s going she might actually encounter these animals so she’ll have to know what they are, what they look like etc and whether she could out-run them. While she was having her medical they were preparing the meals. The meals were very scanty, that’s for sure, but specially prepared to give the most energy from a small amount of food. They came to me and asked if it was true that I was a vegan. I replied “yes” so shortly afterwards they gave me a chicken salad type of thing which of course didn’t go down very well at all. Then the giri was made ready for this competition

That reminded me of the time that I was up in RED CANYON IN UTAH IN 2002.
A tourist there asked one of the tourist guides "is it true that a bear won’t attack you if you carry a clove of garlic in your pocket?"
The guide replied "it all depends on how quickly you can carry it."

Later on while I’d been asleep I’d received a mail from a friend about a group of people who had bought a field and were going to use it as a kind of forum for telling jokes. The jokes were going to be kind-of middle of the road jokes so that they could develop a kind of middle of the road humour that would satisfy most people about the political correctness of the modern world and those who are upset about the outrageous nature of some crude jokes. He went on to show some kind of complicated maths calculation that went down to something like the 3rd or 4th line of a multiplication problem. Much as I’m pretty good at simple maths I couldn’t get my head around this of something like 2/3 of 5/8 of 7/8 of 3/7 or whatever it was. Also in the field was an old school bus up on jacks that was going to be their office. All in all I thought that it was going to be a strange situation for anyone to be in to come to this place and maybe give it their support

This would be one of those occasions where I’d have to call on the services of my namesake the mathematician who told me once that three fifths of five eights was … errr … nothing

But actually this is quite apposite, especially as my teatime viewing at the moment is SPACEBALLS. It reminded me of the famous Mel Brooks quote that "good taste is the enemy of comedy".

There was more stuff on the dictaphone too but good taste notwithstanding, you really don’t want to read it, especially if you’re eating a meal right now.

So after lunch I attacked the radio programme, and that’s where I am right now, stuck in the middle of all of that nonsense wishing that I could get out of it

There was the usual series of breaks to deal with the pizza of course, and quite enjoyable it was tonight too, even if it was the wrong flour that I used. But that’s the problem – on line, I can’t order the flour that I really like so anything will have to do as I go by trial and error.

But now everything is finished I’ll go back to deal with the radio programme. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, once said "The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well"

However I feel more like the Duke of Marlborough on his way to do battle in Flanders. "God knows I go with a heavy heart, for I have no hope of doing anything considerable"