{"id":20651,"date":"2025-12-05T22:52:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T22:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=20651"},"modified":"2025-12-05T22:52:01","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T22:52:01","slug":"friday-5th-december-2025-ive-done-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=20651","title":{"rendered":"Friday 5th December 2025 &#8211; I&#8217;VE DONE IT &#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; again!<\/p>\n<p>Crashed out on the chair in the office late this afternoon, and not just for five minutes either. I was for a whopping well over an hour. It looks as if I&#8217;m back in the bad old days of eighteen months ago when I was crashing out for hours every day with no sign of it ever improving.<\/p>\n<p>This is a really huge disappointment to me, and I&#8217;m totally fed up with it. I wish that I could snap out of it and push on with work, now that I have (at long last) the opportunity.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s just how it was last night too. I fell asleep a couple of times again while I was typing out my notes, and by the time that I finished, I was so wiped out that I went straight to bed without even starting, never mind finishing, what else I had to do.<\/p>\n<p>Once in bed, I fell asleep straight away, and there I stayed, without moving, until the alarm went off.<\/p>\n<p>A couple of times just recently, I&#8217;ve said that I didn&#8217;t really feel like leaving the bed when the alarm went off. This morning was probably the worst that I have felt and I really was on the point of switching off the alarm and going back to bed.<\/p>\n<p>Nevertheless, I struggled on and staggered into the bathroom for a good wash.<\/p>\n<p>In the kitchen, I made my hot ginger, lemon and honey drink, took my medication and then came back here to listen to the dictaphone to see where I&#8217;d been during the night. And it was no surprise to learn that there was nothing on there. It must have been a really deep sleep.<\/p>\n<p>The nurse came quite early again and sorted out my legs. After he left, I made breakfast and read some more of Thomas Codrington&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/romanroadsinbrit00codr\" target=\"_blank\">ROMAN ROADS IN BRITAIN<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve crossed Hadrian&#8217;s Wall and we are now looking at some of the forward camps where troops were stationed as an advance guard to watch over the territory north of the wall.<\/p>\n<p>He tells us that at Durisdeer, there are <strong><em>&#34;the remains of a small, but well-preserved Roman fortlet are located about a mile up the Well or Wald Path to the north-east&#34;<\/em><\/strong> and that a Roman road passed up the valley by the camp to connect the Nith Valley with the Clyde Valley.<\/p>\n<p>Consequently, I had a play around with an online aerial map and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/maps\/place\/55%C2%B019'32.1%22N+3%C2%B043'51.5%22W\/@55.3256877,-3.7314651,174m\/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d55.325575!4d-3.73098?entry=ttu&#038;g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTIwMi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D\" target=\"_blank\">CAME ACROSS THIS<\/a>. If you look closely, you&#8217;ll see the modern track, which is where the wheel ruts are, but slightly above it, you can make out the ridge of the Roman road.<\/p>\n<p>It was the defences that impressed me, though. I&#8217;ve not seen a Roman fort with a ditch and bank as pronounced as this one. They must have been really troubled times up on the frontier.<\/p>\n<p>Back in here, I finished off what I should have done last night and then carried on with writing the radio notes. They are all finished now, ready to dictate.<\/p>\n<p>There were several interruptions. Two disgusting drinks breaks, for a start. And my cleaner put in an appearance to do her stuff.<\/p>\n<p>The first thing that she had to do was to rescue two saucepans that had fallen out of the back of one of the drawers and landed on the floor underneath the unit. The second task was to shuffle the contents of the drawers around so that if a saucepan falls out again, it will drop into the drawer underneath and not onto the floor.<\/p>\n<p>While she was at it, she also sorted out my Christmas tree. So now it has all of its decorations and lights. It&#8217;s only about 30 centimetres tall, but it puts a little ambience into the living room and makes it look a little more like Christmas. As I have said before &#8230; <em>&#34;and on many occasions too&#34; &#8211; ed<\/em> &#8230;. I wish that other people around here would make some kind of effort.<\/p>\n<p>Back in here, I crashed out on the chair for well over an hour, as I said just now. To my surprise, when I awoke, there was something on the dictaphone.  I was at some kind of Russian spy school, looking through documents. I wasn&#8217;t very popular there and no-one liked me very much, not that that bothered me, but I was keen enough to learn. One of the documents was a report on a case that we had to study. It showed that someone had stolen some documents, had extracted information and passed them through to his superior. However, his superior was extremely unreliable and drunken. He was on the verge of giving away everything when he passed the information in some kind of strange, diagonal way across a whole range of people to someone totally unexpected on the far side of the operation. It fascinated me, so I was trying to write an extract of this. In the end, I ended up having to lie on the floor to do it, but the dog decided to jump all over me and I had to fight the dog off. In the end, I managed to drag the dog off outside and go back to the paper, but by then, the boss had come down from his booth. He told me not to bother and to move on to the next exercise. I told him that I was enjoying this particular one and I was determined to finish it. He said that the part that he enjoyed the most about it was the part when I was fighting off the dog. In the end, I put my foot down rather and made something of a fuss about it. In the end, he agreed to let me have a further five minutes to finish this particular case.<\/p>\n<p>Actually, I&#8217;d been reading quite recently about a Russian spy school that sent agents to try to prise out the British and American nuclear secrets just after World War II, so it&#8217;s probably something to do with that. <\/p>\n<p>But working on and enjoying a subject that my boss wants to ignore in order to concentrate on something else reminds me very much of my university course. I enjoyed the research that I was doing far more than the research that my tutor wanted me to do. It was for that reason that I was rejected for my Ph.D. The tutor didn&#8217;t think that I would stick to the task in hand.<\/p>\n<p>With the little time that was left, I began to hunt down some missing photos from 2019. This is a project that I was hoping to attack with all of this free time that I now seem to have &#8230; <em>&#34;in theory&#34; &#8211; ed<\/em> &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>For tea, I made a very quick stir fry and then came back in here to watch the football. Y Bala v Hwlffordd.<\/p>\n<p>Both clubs are in difficulty right now at the wrong end of the table, and having seen this game, I&#8217;m not surprised. Hwlffordd didn&#8217;t impress me at all, but Y Bala were awful. They were clueless and offered absolutely nothing at all.<\/p>\n<p>The score was 0-2 in favour of Hwlffordd, thanks to a silly, pointless penalty and another one of these marvellous wonder-goals that you see maybe once in ten years &#8230; <em>&#34;of which we have now seen two already this season&#34; &#8211; ed<\/em> &#8230; When the highlights come online, I&#8217;ll post the link and you can see for yourself. If someone had scored that goal in the Premier League, people would be talking about it for the next fifty years.<\/p>\n<p>Right now though, I&#8217;m off to bed, and I can&#8217;t say that I&#8217;m sorry because I&#8217;m exhausted. But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Hadrian&#8217;s Wall &#8230; <em>&#34;well, one of us has&#34; &#8211; ed<\/em> &#8230; here is a question that was asked in a Roman school in about 200AD<br \/>\nMagister &#8211; <strong><em>&#34;if it took five hundred men ten years to build the eighty Roman miles of Hadrian&#8217;s Wall, how long would it take three hundred men to build half of it if they took four weeks <em>feriatum<\/em> each complete year?&#34;<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nClaudius &#8211; <strong><em>&#34;no time at all, Magister.&#34;<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nMagister &#8211; <strong><em>&#34;why not, Claudius?&#34;<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nClaudius &#8211; <strong><em>&#34;because those five hundred men have already built it.&#34;<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<div class='watch-action'><div class='watch-position align-left'><div class='action-like'><a class='lbg-style1 like-20651 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='like' data-post_id='20651' data-nonce='c297ca7ac0' 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-20651 lc'>0<\/span><\/a><\/div><div class='action-unlike'><a class='unlbg-style1 unlike-20651 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='unlike' data-post_id='20651' data-nonce='c297ca7ac0' 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-20651 unlc'>0<\/span><\/a><\/div> <\/div> <div class='status-20651 status align-left'><\/div><\/div><div class='wti-clear'><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; again! Crashed out on the chair in the office late this afternoon, and not just for five minutes either. I was for a whopping well over an hour. It looks as if I&#8217;m back in the bad old days of eighteen months ago when I was crashing out for hours every day with no [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1710,44,4507,1616,8571,16250,12057],"tags":[3501,3350,13133,5237,1302,212,16395,2560,5287,5565,16396,8581,13915,13341,1217,15372,327,16383,16384,320,6263],"class_list":["post-20651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cleaner","category-dream","category-eric-hall-2","category-france","category-granville","category-n6","category-nurse","tag-archive-org","tag-bala-town","tag-bouquet-granvillais","tag-christmas-tree","tag-crash-out","tag-dream","tag-durisdeer","tag-eric-hall","tag-football","tag-france","tag-google-maps","tag-granville","tag-haverfordwest-county","tag-home-made-lemon-ginger-drink","tag-jd-cymru-premier-league","tag-n6","tag-photo","tag-roman-roads-in-britain","tag-thomas-codrington","tag-tidying-up","tag-vegan-stir-fry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20651","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=20651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20652,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20651\/revisions\/20652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}