{"id":19558,"date":"2025-02-07T22:14:10","date_gmt":"2025-02-07T22:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=19558"},"modified":"2025-02-07T22:18:03","modified_gmt":"2025-02-07T22:18:03","slug":"friday-7th-february-2025-its-been-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=19558","title":{"rendered":"Friday 7th February 2025 – IT’S BEEN A …"},"content":{"rendered":"

… slightly better day today (only slightly). I haven’t managed to crash out and not only have I actually done some work, I’ve actually felt like doing it too, rather than having to grit my teeth and force myself.<\/p>\n

But then this is bewildering, because when I’m here I don’t feel as if I’m about to crash out (and that’s a change since last Summer) and yet when I’m in the dialysis centre, as soon as the machine starts off, I’m away with the fairies (and hopefully not in a manner that invite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine).<\/p>\n

What I’ll have to do when I’m there on Saturday is to make enquiries to see if it’s a normal situation. I’m sure that it isn’t though. There are nine beds in our ward and I’m the only one who seems to crash out.<\/p>\n

So after I’d finished my notes last night I had to do the backing-up, and then do it again because I’d forgotten to back up onto the USB key on the keyring, the one that I use to transfer data between the big office computer and the travelling laptop.<\/p>\n

So rather later than usual I headed off to bed, where I fell asleep almost immediately<\/p>\n

Once more, I awoke bolt-upright at 06:15 and by the time that the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already sorting myself out in the bathroom.<\/p>\n

Into the kitchen next for the medication and then back in here to find out where I’d been during the night. I was at the Power River last night, by the motel in which I stayed IN 2019<\/a> where we saw (or where you will see when I upload the photos) the remains of those Conestoga (or were they Studebaker?) covered wagons – real “prairie schooners”. I’ve no idea what I was doing there though because, as usual, as soon as I reached for the dictaphone the whole dream evaporated and that was, unfortunately, that.<\/p>\n

The Powder River really was lovely though – typical Wyoming and Montana “dust bowl” country full of historical battlefields from where the Native Americans were desperately trying to cling on to their traditional way of life. History around every bend. I drove down the valley on my way from Wounded Knee – the site of (almost) the final confrontation between the Native Americans and the European American military – and Fort Phil Kearny, where the Native Americans wiped out a patrol of 81 soldiers let by Captain William Fetterman. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we walked all over the site where Fetterman and his troops met their end, and even blagged our way onto a coach trip going around the various sites of confrontation in the area.<\/p>\n

But this isn’t doing me much good, is it? I’m becoming all nostalgic and broody about travelling, going back to North America, finishing off my tour of the old wagon route across the USA in the 1840s, all the things that I didn’t do when I was there before and said that I would do some other time. <\/p>\n

Some hope.<\/p>\n

The nurse came around early again today. The first question he asked me was "have you ever been to Montr\u00e9al?"<\/em><\/strong>. Not much I have, and he knows it well enough.<\/p>\n

So he asked me all kinds of questions about the city<\/p>\n

"Are you planning on going there?"<\/em><\/strong> I asked
\n"Yes, maybe in three or four years"<\/em><\/strong> he replied
\n"Well, you shouldn’t have any trouble"<\/em><\/strong> I replied. "The nursing profession is one of the professions that receives maximum points on the immigration scale"<\/em><\/strong>
\n"I won’t be going as a nurse"<\/em><\/strong> he answered. "I’ll be finding something else to do"<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I always said that his heart wasn’t in his job<\/p>\n

After he left, I made my breakfast and then carried on reading MY NEW BOOK<\/a>. <\/p>\n

We’re having a really good discussion about contour forts with several examples used as illustrations. And when you see that people in recent times consider that Iron Age forts with four rings of concentric walls, ditches in between of fifteen feet deep, covering twenty and thirty acres, perimeters of 2 miles, all that kind of thing were but “status symbols” of authority when they were living hand-to-mouth and barely had the time to cultivate their crops and herd their beasts, it defies all logic.<\/p>\n

It’s also just how amazing the date of “between 400-450BC” crops up in the conversation when we talk about building these forts or refurbishing old Neolithic ones. That date corresponds with what is believed to be the arrival of the Celtic race who came to suppress and overwhelm the Belgae. The similarity of dates can’t be a coincidence. Building status symbols when they were in the process of being invaded (the Belgae) or trying (the Celts) to overwhelm an existing race of inhabitants. I need a lot more convincing that the modern reviewers have offered so far.<\/p>\n

In a modern report on Maiden Castle, a hillfort in Dorset, we are told that "Hoards of carefully selected sling stones have been found at"<\/em><\/strong> each entrance, "One area of the cemetery featured burials of 14 people who had died in violent circumstances including one body with a Roman catapult bolt in its back"<\/em><\/strong>, and then goes on to say "there is little archaeological evidence to support … that the hill fort was attacked by the Romans"<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The author of this modern report that I read makes the point that "although 14 bodies in the cemetery exhibited signs of a violent death, there is no evidence that they died at Maiden Castle"<\/em><\/strong>, a comment which, if T Rice Holmes had read it, would have provoked an explosion. The idea that someone would find a dead body killed by a Roman bolt and then carry it however many miles and then right up a steep hill into the fort in order to bury it surely can’t be a serious proposition. And in any case “absence of evidence” is a completely different affair than “evidence of absence”<\/p>\n

So abandoning yet another good rant for the moment, I came back in here and for much of the day I’ve been working. I’ve chosen 10 tracks for the next radio programme, edited them, remixed them, paired them and the segued them, and then I’ve been writing the notes. I’ve almost finished too. Another hour or so will see it all done tomorrow morning, I reckon.<\/p>\n

There were the usual interruptions – lunch, the cleaner, my mid-afternoon break etc. but those are only to be expected. Apart from that, it’s been another quiet day where although I worked hard, I could have worked even harder.<\/p>\n

But I’ll worry about that tomorrow because I’m off to bed.<\/p>\n

But seeing as we have been talking about Broadus … "well, one of us has" – ed<\/em> … the town was founded in 1900 after the massacre at Wounded Knee had removed the last of the native Americans from the area
\nBut in the dying days of the old West an American cowboy turned up at the saloon, totally stark naked, on a native American palomino horse.
\n"What on earth happened to you?"<\/em><\/strong> asked the innkeeper
\n"My horse died about 30 miles away so I set out to walk here"<\/em><\/strong> began the cowboy.
\n"Then this native American girl rode up on her horse. She said ‘cowboy take off your shirt’ so I took off my shirt
\nThen she said ‘now cowboy take off your pants’ so I took off my pants
\nThen she said ‘now cowboy, take off my shift’ so I took off her shift
\nThen she climbed down off her horse, lay on the ground and said ‘OK cowboy, now go to town’ so here I am!"<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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… slightly better day today (only slightly). I haven’t managed to crash out and not only have I actually done some work, I’ve actually felt like doing it too, rather than having to grit my teeth and force myself. But then this is bewildering, because when I’m here I don’t feel as if I’m about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1710,44,4507,1616,8571,12057,7876],"tags":[3501,16179,13133,5577,212,2482,16178,2560,5565,8581,389,16030,12058,7891,12563],"class_list":["post-19558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cleaner","category-dream","category-eric-hall-2","category-france","category-granville","category-nurse","category-place-darmes","tag-archive-org","tag-arthur-hadrian-allcroft","tag-bouquet-granvillais","tag-cleaner","tag-dream","tag-early-start","tag-earthwork-of-england","tag-eric-hall","tag-france","tag-granville","tag-httpwww-lesguis-com","tag-maiden-castle","tag-nurse","tag-place-darmes","tag-powder-river"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19558","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=19558"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19560,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19558\/revisions\/19560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}