{"id":1420,"date":"2013-07-21T21:47:20","date_gmt":"2013-07-21T21:47:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=1420"},"modified":"2017-07-16T09:20:46","modified_gmt":"2017-07-16T09:20:46","slug":"sunday-21-july-2013-and-am-i-all-packed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=1420","title":{"rendered":"Sunday 21 July 2013 &#8211; AND AM I ALL PACKED?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Am I &#8216;eck as like. <\/p>\n<p>No surprise there, is there?<\/p>\n<p>I had a lie-in until about 09:20 and by that time it was far too hot to do anything much. Records have tumbled today and I can&#8217;t think how often it is that I have had to put cold water into the solar shower to cool it down to an acceptable temperature of about 37\u00b0C.<\/p>\n<p>For yes, I did have my first (and probably only) solar shower of the year this evening, and gorgeous it was too &#8211; well-worth waiting for. <\/p>\n<p>Mind you I almost didn&#8217;t manage to take it &#8211; there sunning itself on the concrete pad right almost where I was planning to stand was a whacking great snake &#8211; the first real snake that I&#8217;ve seen at my house, although I&#8217;ve seen plenty elsewhere.<\/p>\n<p>He p155ed off pretty sharp-ish when he saw me and disappeared into the woodpile, right next to where the ladder is. I got to thinking of myself that it was a shame that I didn&#8217;t have a couple of friends, some counters and a pair of dice.<\/p>\n<p>And if you want to know what kind of snake he was, at the speed at which he disappeared, he was definitely a calculator. That&#8217;s right &#8211; a calculator is a very fast adder.<\/p>\n<p>Still, Caliburn is emptied and there&#8217;s a pile of stuff in it.<\/p>\n<p>Not all I need to take all of it but there&#8217;s a slight change of plan. I&#8217;m not leaving right after the radio shows. It&#8217;s going to be even hotter tomorrow so it&#8217;ll be wicked on the road. I&#8217;m coming back here and I&#8217;ll leave at about 19:00 when it cools down.<\/p>\n<p>Trying to print off the radio stuff, and nothing worked. It&#8217;s not gathering in the paper and so I&#8217;ll need to strip it down and find out why. But I never have any luck with printers. There&#8217;s dozens round here that don&#8217;t function as they are supposed to do.<\/p>\n<p>Luckily Liz came to the rescue with some stuff (and a nice tea and some ginger cake for which I am always grateful) when I was down there rehearsing the radio shows and I&#8217;ll have to get Radio Tartasse to do the rest tomorrow.<\/p>\n<p>Now as you know, every now and again I write down my dreams on here.<\/p>\n<p> Many years ago when I was at Uni I helped out as one of a few guinea-pigs for someone who was doing research into dreams. We had to record our dreams and submit them to this guy who was using them as material for his thesis. <\/p>\n<p>Even though the project ended years ago I still keep it up to a certain degree because it was so interesting and now it&#8217;s become something of a habit.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t record all of my dreams because without the equipment that we had, it&#8217;s difficult to do so, and so I only record the ones that I remember really well. And last night&#8217;s was a corker, it really was.<\/p>\n<p>Back in the 1980s when I had my taxi business in Crewe I had a young girl working for me on Saturdays. She stayed for a couple of years and then left to go to college. <\/p>\n<p>She kept in touch with Nerina and me and there was talk at one point that she might come to lodge with us for a while as home conditions were difficult.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, to cut a long story short &#8230; <em>&#8220;Hooray&#8221; &#8211; ed<\/em> &#8230; Nerina and I separated a few years later and I was preparing to emigrate, and I bumped into Nerina. She asked me how I was and we had a little chat about this and that.<\/p>\n<p>One thing that she said quite surprised me. &#8220;I&#8217;m surprised that you didn&#8217;t get &#8230;. to move in with you&#8221;.<br \/>\n&#8220;How do you mean?&#8221;<br \/>\n&#8220;Well, you must have known that she had a big crush on you&#8221;.<br \/>\nRather like Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Williams in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/gp\/product\/B00009PAJO\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1634&amp;creative=19450&amp;creativeASIN=B00009PAJO&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=erichall-21\" target=\"_blank\">Carry On Loving<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=erichall-21&amp;l=as2&amp;o=2&amp;a=B00009PAJO\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" \/>&#8220;Surely you must have felt it?&#8221;<br \/>\n&#8220;Felt it? I never got anywhere near it&#8221;.<br \/>\nI didn&#8217;t, as it happened, and it was rather late in the day to tell me, I thought.<\/p>\n<p>A good few years or so years later I did encounter &#8230; again &#8211; now separated from her husband and with a young baby in tow. <\/p>\n<p>I was just about to go off\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.erichall.eu\/1999u010.html\" target=\"_self\">New York for a holiday<\/a> and, on a whim, I invited her along.\u00a0 But it was far too short notice and it didn&#8217;t happen, and I always regard her as &#8220;the one that got away&#8221; &#8211; the lucky girl.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, last night, here she was. We were in Sydney, Australia, together as a couple, talking to someone about their cats, and a taxi driver stuck his head around the door and said that it was time to go. So we went outside to get into his taxi, a big modern silver Opel with a huge scrape all the way down the side and with a floor made of wooden pallets. He took us back to our home and when he dropped us off, I noticed that the letter box outside had been knocked off its pedestal and bent. So there I was fixing it and putting it back into position so I could post this huge pile of brown envelopes, but &#8230; told me that the postman had passed while I was fixing the letter box and it was now too late.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve never had a dream as realistic as this &#8211; so realistic that in the middle of it and I had to get up to go for a Gypsy&#8217;s downstairs in the bathroom, when I returned to bed and went back to sleep, the dream carried on from where it left off.<\/p>\n<p>It was totally astonishing and I would love to know what has been going on in the back of my mind somewhere that has made it come up with all of this. It&#8217;s quite unnerving for some reason and has put me right off my stroke. I shan&#8217;t be feeling myself for a good week or so &#8230;<em>&#8220;and quite right too&#8221; &#8211; ed<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Surreal was not the word.<\/p>\n<p>..<\/p>\n<div class='watch-action'><div class='watch-position align-left'><div class='action-like'><a class='lbg-style1 like-1420 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='like' data-post_id='1420' data-nonce='4f76f79927' rel='nofollow'><img class='wti-pixel' src='https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/wp-content\/plugins\/wti-like-post\/images\/pixel.gif' title='Like' \/><span class='lc-1420 lc'>+5<\/span><\/a><\/div><div class='action-unlike'><a class='unlbg-style1 unlike-1420 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='unlike' data-post_id='1420' data-nonce='4f76f79927' rel='nofollow'><img class='wti-pixel' src='https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/wp-content\/plugins\/wti-like-post\/images\/pixel.gif' title='Unlike' \/><span class='unlc-1420 unlc'>-8<\/span><\/a><\/div> <\/div> <div class='status-1420 status align-left'><\/div><\/div><div class='wti-clear'><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Am I &#8216;eck as like. No surprise there, is there? I had a lie-in until about 09:20 and by that time it was far too hot to do anything much. Records have tumbled today and I can&#8217;t think how often it is that I have had to put cold water into the solar shower to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,4507,1616,258,330,307,161],"tags":[5384,5381,337,3567,212,1735,2560,5565,801,206,5366,261,3293,5385,8963,5307,5377,462,336,335,320,6852,738],"class_list":["post-1420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream","category-eric-hall-2","category-france","category-les-guis","category-liz_terry-messenger","category-sauret-besserve","category-solar-shower","tag-a1-taxis","tag-caliburn","tag-carry-on-loving","tag-cooled-shower","tag-dream","tag-emptying-caliburn","tag-eric-hall","tag-france","tag-httpwww-amazon-co-uk","tag-httpwww-erichall-eu","tag-les-guis","tag-liz-terry-messenger","tag-mandy_m","tag-nerina-hall","tag-printer-issues","tag-radio-anglais","tag-sauret-besserve","tag-shower","tag-snake","tag-sydney-australia-2","tag-tidying-up","tag-vegan-ginger-cake","tag-wood-store"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1420"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9247,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1420\/revisions\/9247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}