It’s a symbol of how popular learning Welsh became at Covid. When the courses were face-to-face (or wyneb-wyneb<\/em> for regular readers of this rubbish who recall a dream a week or so ago) they had about 100 applicants each year. When Covid hit and the courses went over to video-conferencing, they had 1031 applicants.<\/p>\n That’s not the kind of thing for which infrastructure exists and they had to be quite inventive to fit everyone in<\/p>\n With my class, I’m quite lucky because already being involved and registered, my place is assured. However, for this revision course, I’m dropping down two levels and so I have had to re-register<\/p>\n So with studying a course down in the south, I’ll be saying things like gyda-gylid<\/em> instead of efo-gylid<\/em> and caeth e<\/em> instead of cafodd o<\/em>. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago why it was that the Welsh language evolved differently in the south and in in the north.<\/p>\n If I had had any sense, not that that is likely of course, I should have enrolled last night while I was talking about it and maybe I would have found something more convenient. But instead I had a little relax to unwind before going to bed.<\/p>\n Once in bed though I felt nothing at all. Nothing whatever and it was as if I’d slept all the way through the night undisturbed.<\/p>\n When the alarm went off though I was already awake and it didn’t take much to have me out of bed.<\/p>\n First stop as usual was the blood pressure. 16.0\/10.0 this morning, compared to 17.4\/10.6 last night. It really MUST<\/strong> have been a calm, comfortable night.<\/p>\n Second stop was to go to take my medication for the moment, half a tonne of it as usual. And then some tidying up ready for the nurse to come round. I’d like her to think that people actually lived here.<\/p>\n We had a good chat about the things that the hospital wants the local nursing staff to do. Some of the things don’t come within their remit, so it’s tough luck on me but the rest is going to start tomorrow at 08:45 and how I’m not looking forward to that, especially on a Sunday<\/p>\n She took the blood sample and gave me my weekly injection of the Last Resort and then wandered off while I organised some breakfast.<\/p>\n The coffee is really nice around here, and my flapjack is definitely a success. I’ll make some more of that another time if I can remember the ingredients that I used. They biscuits that I made on Sunday are overcooked, but not so much as they are in-edible. I’ll make more of those too at some point.<\/p>\n Next step was to listen to the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night. And I must have been stark out last night as I remember nothing at all of these. Did I dictate the dream about the person that I’d killed in that motel room? … "no, you didn’t" – ed<\/em> … He was beaten quite badly and I was about to finish him off when someone began to come into his room. I quickly had to clean him up, tidy him up and remove as many visible marks a possible to make it look as if he was treating himself for his wounds before they came in, which was difficult. Somehow I managed it and he passed by quite normally without having any suspicions. Then I had to restart these videos, all three of them, to find out exactly where the secret place was where you had to puncture the skin in order to kill someone – someone had worked out that you could leave very minimal marks by just putting something long and pointed in through these three places. He’d prepared a video of it, that I’d been watching but of course with this other guy coming into the motel room to see what was happening I actually lost the place in the video and couldn’t find it again on all three tapes for all three points on the body<\/p>\n That’s the stuff that dreams are made of, isn’t it? If videos like that really did exist and I really did have access to them, there would be far fewer people on this planet than there are today. I can think of quite a few who would shuffle off this mortal coil with my assistance, if I had any say in the matter.<\/p>\n But I di have some gruesome dreams; don’t I? And many have been far more gruesome than this. It reminds me of Dr Cameron in Tannochbrae in the good old days of Dr Finlay’s Casebook – or Dr Kenley’s Feesbook Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed I was going on a flight somewhere so I had to walk through the airport and look for my train to London. I eventually arrived at the station part and the next train to London was 22:02. It was only 21:00 so I thought that it was going to be cutting it a little too fine. I’d better go to find something to eat. I found what looked like a bakery or hot food stand and asked if they had a p\u00e2t\u00e9 v\u00e9g\u00e9tale<\/em>. She replied “no, no” and pointed to half a dozen things that she had on the shelves, the usual mainstream type of normal kind of food. She did have some large fruit bread. I thought that I could buy one of those but that would be quite a waste because I wouldn’t be able to eat all of that.<\/p>\n Not that anything like that would normally bother me, especially if I’m going on a flight somewhere. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I always take food with me on a plane. I’ve learnt from bitter experience that you can’t rely on airlines to always respect special diets on their planes, and it’s a long way and a long time across the Atlantic with nothing to eat.<\/p>\n Yes, my spicy or fruit bread has saved me from a fate worse than death on many occasions, as have my Subway sandwiches from the airport at Montreal. Consequently a large fruit bread would have been a gift from Heaven on a flight from an airport<\/p>\n Back in here and surfing around on the internet looking for something, I made a fantastic discovery. Carol Reed’s famous and spectacular film THE THIRD MAN<\/a> starring Orson Cart and Joseph Cotton is now out of copyright and is available to download<\/p>\n What a film that is, too. It’s not so much the acting and the dialogue but the way that it’s directed that makes it a classic – with all these cuts of ordinary, old people filtered into the scenes that really give it the kind of panic-stricken atmosphere that must have existed in the immediate post-war Vienna.<\/p>\n My acquaintance with Vienna is somewhat more recent than that. And the last time I was there, actually in the city, was 1998 when I took a 15-tonne lorry there from Brussels.<\/p>\n
\n"And what’s the matter, Janet?"<\/em><\/strong> asked Dr Cameron
\n"Och Dr Cameron, it’s gruesome"<\/em><\/strong> she replied
\n"Well, look again Janet"<\/em><\/strong> he said. "It’s gruesome more"<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
