{"id":20812,"date":"2026-01-23T20:16:26","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T20:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=20812"},"modified":"2026-01-23T20:16:27","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T20:16:27","slug":"friday-23rd-january-2026-even-as-i-type","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=20812","title":{"rendered":"
Friday 23rd January 2026 – EVEN AS I TYPE … <\/div>"},"content":{"rendered":"

… these notes, I really ought to be making tea. But the truth is that I have a churning stomach right now and running through a list of possible menus that I might eat, there isn’t one that appeals to me. All it seems to do is to make my stomach churn over even more.<\/p>\n

As well as that, although I’m feeling somewhat better than I did this time last night, I’m still feeling a lot worse than I ought to be, so the aim is to do what I have to do as soon as I am able to do it and then head off to bed again, in the hope that yet another good sleep will do me some good.<\/p>\n

Not like yesterday, which, despite my early, really early night, didn’t go according to plan.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned yesterday, despite going to bed at 19:25 or thereabouts, I was awake again four hours later. And although I said that “I settled down again and waited to go back to sleep”, I was still wide-awake at 02:30 and showing no sign of dropping off.<\/p>\n

At some point though, I must have gone back off to sleep because I was awoken by the alarm, and it took me completely by surprise. And I must admit that I have never felt less like leaving the bed as I did this morning. It took me an age to rise up to my feet and head off to the bathroom. As a result, I was running really late for everything else.<\/p>\n

In the bathroom, I changed my clothes, having been in the same clothes without a change for forty-eight hours and I washed my undies. I like to keep on top of my clothes like that, having spent years living out of a suitcase. And then, I went into the kitchen for my hot drink and medication.<\/p>\n

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. <\/p>\n

\nI was in the Soviet Union last night in my van. There had been some kind of concert supposed to take place, so I was in this village or small town down in the south of the Soviet Union on my way to Asia and I bumped into these two American girls who were also going to this concert. We went into this room and there were probably thirty or forty people standing around. So we sat down and waited for something to happen. We were expecting this music concert and then perhaps a discussion about what came out in the songs, that kind of thing. But I fell asleep, and when I awoke about ten minutes later, everyone else was asleep too except these two American girls. They were looking at their watch and one of them said “well, we may as well go. There’s a bus back to the USA in an hour. In the end, the three of us left, with all these other people asleep. Outside, there was plenty of snow, and we walked, and where the bus was due to be picked up was at this car park and there were two white MkIII Ford Zephyrs there with the word LEI<\/em> written on the badge instead of “Ford Zephyr”. The girls went to stand there, and in the end, I invited them to come with me to Asia, but they were reluctant. They asked me if I’d ever been there before. I replied “no, but I have travelling in the blood”. I said that I’d been a taxi driver, coach driver, chauffeur and I’ve travelled the Northern Hemisphere all on my own in the past, and my father was a lorry driver so it’s all in the blood. But they were very reluctant, so in the end I left them and climbed over the roof of one of these Ford Zephyrs to head back to the van. I heard one of them say to the other one “it’s a shame that he’s such an untidy person” so I was thinking that maybe if I’d been more tidy, they might have come. I walked over to where I’d parked the van but couldn’t see it. This looked nothing like where I remembered having parked it. I thought that I must be in the wrong place so I tried to retrace my steps and ended up miles out of town trying to find the van. Where I was, all the snow had melted and it was an urban scene with trees in the distance. I wandered through all of these buildings, trying to find my way out to see if the van was behind them, but I couldn’t find my way out of these buildings. I was wandering around for ages. In the end, I found myself on a train. I was standing by a window, looking out to see if I could see the van somewhere, but I heard a commotion behind me. It was a teacher with a bunch of maybe ten girls. She’d gone to find the ticket controller. It seemed that some English-speaking people were sitting in these girls’ seats and she had to make them move. She spoke to them in English, so I spoke to her about the van. She said that she couldn’t help me. I need to see the police. I replied that the van hasn’t been stolen \u2013 I just can’t find it and in any case, I can’t speak Russian. I tried to speak some Russian from what I remembered but made a mess of it and she really wasn’t able to help me at all.\n<\/div>\n

What a strange dream that was! For a start, I did learn to speak Russian, although I’ve forgotten most of it now. That started off when I was working for Shearings and I’d heard that they were trying to win a contract with an American travel agency to transport American tourists behind the Iron Curtain to “visit their roots”. It sounded probably the most fascinating coach-driving work ever, so I found a local Russian exile who taught me over a period of six months. When the company announced that they were looking for drivers to go behind the Iron Curtain, I naturally volunteered.
\n"Why should we select you ahead of everyone else?"<\/em><\/strong>
\n"Well, actually, I can speak some Russian"<\/em><\/strong>
\nIt was the most fantastic work that I have ever done, and I enjoyed every moment of it, even if it did mean a relentless diet of wiener schnitzel<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … dream, I could easily imagine myself at one time driving through the Soviet Union to Asia, somewhere like pre-revolutionary Iran, but the political climate east of Poland and Romania these days would put anyone off. And wandering around aimlessly looking for my van because I’d forgotten where it was parked is just like me, especially these days.<\/p>\n

As for the white Ford Zephyrs, I couldn’t ever imagine them being in the Soviet Union, whether under a different maker’s name or not. They are much more likely to have been ZIL 111G vehicles, although if you were to see one of those, you would know that you are in trouble, because they were only ever given to members of the Politburo.<\/p>\n

Isabelle the Nurse took me by surprise this morning. Fitted with a mask, she stormed into the apartment and attended to my legs. She had a go at measuring my temperature with my thermometer and it’s still quite high. However, she doesn’t think much of my thermometer and she’ll bring her own tomorrow.<\/p>\n

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE<\/a><\/p>\n

James Curle is still discussing pottery, and now, we’ve moved on to how we are able to identify the different potters. There’s a fascinating list of potters’ marks and some equally fascinationg comments such as "this little fragment is an example of pottery classified by Dragendorff as ‘Dragendorff 37’, and there is a sample of this ware in a museum in<\/strong> (some obscure town in) Bulgaria."<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Back in here, I had a variety of things to do, not having attended to my affairs as I should for the last forty-eight hours, and then I had last night’s notes to write.<\/p>\n

They are now online, and then I finished off the notes for the radio programme on which I’ve been working.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, I was having a good chat with Liz, who was giving me loads of motherly advice about how to find natural remedies to deal with my current health issues, and later on a brief exchange of messages with Rosemary.<\/p>\n

There was football too. On Tuesday night Stranraer had played Queen’s Park of the second tier in the Scottish Cup on a swamp in a monsoon and had beaten the Spiders 6-5 on penalties after a 1-1 draw during one hundred and twenty minutes.<\/p>\n

In theory, they now have a match at Ibrox against Glasgow Rangers, but the behind-the-scenes and off-the-field controversy after the game will need to be resolved first before it’s confirmed.<\/p>\n

But that’s about everything, really. I suppose that there’s much more about which to write, such as my faithful cleaner coming down to do her stuff, but instead, I’m going to bed. And good riddance to me. I really don’t know how to cope with this latest illness. It’s getting on my wick and it’s high time that something happens before I go berserk.<\/p>\n

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Soviet Union … "well, one of us has" – ed<\/em> … I once saw a man in the Red Square holding up a pice of paper.
\nI asked a local \u2013 a very vocal local yokel \u2013 what he was doing, and he replied "protesting, of course."<\/em><\/strong>
\n"But what about?"<\/em><\/strong> I asked.
\n"Ignorant foreigner!"<\/em><\/strong> he replied. "Why would he need to put that on his sign? Everyone knows what’s wrong! "<\/em><\/strong>.
\nTwo minutes later, a police van pulls up and they drag him inside.
\n"So what’s he done now?"<\/em><\/strong>
\n"Ignorant foreigner!"<\/em><\/strong> he replied. "Everyone knows what he did!"<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

0<\/span><\/a><\/div> <\/div>
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… these notes, I really ought to be making tea. But the truth is that I have a churning stomach right now and running through a list of possible menus that I might eat, there isn’t one that appeals to me. All it seems to do is to make my stomach churn over even more. […]<\/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":[16412,3501,4788,13133,5577,212,1712,2560,5287,5565,8581,1137,16021,261,7383,12058,15945,288,15849],"class_list":["post-20812","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-a-roman-frontier-post-and-its-people","tag-archive-org","tag-bad-night","tag-bouquet-granvillais","tag-cleaner","tag-dream","tag-early-night","tag-eric-hall","tag-football","tag-france","tag-granville","tag-ill-health","tag-james-curle","tag-liz-terry-messenger","tag-no-food","tag-nurse","tag-queens-park","tag-rosemary","tag-stranraer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20812","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=20812"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20813,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20812\/revisions\/20813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}