{"id":20816,"date":"2026-01-25T21:24:04","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T21:24:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=20816"},"modified":"2026-01-25T21:24:52","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T21:24:52","slug":"sunday-25th-january-2026-in-contrast-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=20816","title":{"rendered":"
Sunday 25th January 2026 – IN CONTRAST TO … <\/div>"},"content":{"rendered":"

… the last few weeks, or even months, I didn’t go to sleep at all quickly last night. Actually, had it not been for the fact that there were several dreams recorded on the dictaphone, I would have said that I didn’t go to sleep at all last night<\/p>\n

Actually, going to bed last night wasn’t as early as I would have liked it to be. For a start, it took an age, as you might expect, to finish writing WAR AND PEACE<\/a>, which, with over three thousand words, is one of the longest entries ever.<\/p>\n

That kept me going quite late, and by the time that I finished everything else that needed doing, it was about 22:30 when I finally made it into bed.<\/p>\n

As I said just now, I didn’t go to sleep straight away, as has been the situation in the past. Doped up with “Vick” and “Fisherman’s Friends” I lay there for ages trying to go to sleep, but without success.<\/p>\n

When the immersion heater clicked out at 06:38, I definitely heard it, and then I lay there, trying once more to go to sleep, until Isabelle the Nurse blew in.<\/p>\n

She found me in bed, and she took my temperature. Thirty-eight point four degrees. So the fever is still raging. She gave me another lecture about taking the wrong antibiotic and then insisted that I take a “Doliprane”.<\/p>\n

However, I refused. This country is afloat on Doliprane.<\/p>\n

“I have a headache” – “take a doliprane”.<\/p>\n

“I have a fever” – “take a doliprane”.<\/p>\n

“I have a pain in my foot” – “take a doliprane”.<\/p>\n

“I’m going for chemotherapy” – “take a doliprane”.<\/p>\n

“It’s cold outside” – “take a doliprane”.<\/p>\n

“I have a Welsh exam tomorrow” – “take a doliprane”.<\/p>\n

“Y Bala were beaten on Friday night by y Fflint” – “take a doliprane”.<\/p>\n

Nothing will convince me that doliprane is anything other than a placebo.<\/p>\n

After she left, it took me an age to rise up and head to the bathroom. When I finally made it into the kitchen, it was 10:00. That was a nice way to start a day.<\/p>\n

What was even nicer was breakfast. Porridge, plenty of piping-hot coffee and my last two homemade croissants. I must make some more next weekend.<\/p>\n

While I was eating, I was also reading some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This book is totally fascinating, and I’m learning all kinds of interesting things that I didn’t know previously, and that’s surely the aim of reading it. <\/p>\n

James Curle is discussing glass today, and one thing that I didn’t know, but which I do know is that "the window glass which was found throughout the fort, and in the Baths, varied in colour from green to a pale blue. As usual, one side was invariably dulled"<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

So it’s not clear glass at all. But then, recycled glass today doesn’t come out clear either, due mainly to the impurities and the mix of colours that go into the smelter. Maybe it was the same in Ancient Rome.<\/p>\n

Back in here, I had a footfest, watching the highlights of Penybont v Caernarfon and TNS v Y Barri.<\/p>\n

Online later came THE HIGHLIGHTS OF LAST NIGHT’S GAME<\/a>, Colwyn Bay v Connah’s Quay Nomads. They are well-worth watching but unfortunately, they can’t reproduce the tension and the drama. The FULL MATCH IS HERE<\/a> and believe me, you won’t be disappointed.<\/p>\n

There was also Stranraer away at second-placed East Kilbride. And this incredible undefeated run goes on and on, with Stranraer running out 0-2 victors. They are really riding along on a crest of a wave right now. Their next game is at home against third-placed Clyde and if they win, only goal difference will be keeping them away from that coveted playoff spot.<\/p>\n

Eventually, I decided that maybe I ought to take a listen to the dictaphone. And sure enough, there were three entries – at 02:15, 03:06 and 04:15. So there we go. I must have had at least two hours sleep, even if I didn’t think so.<\/p>\n

\nThere was something about a new plan to link various hard drives together to make systems bigger and work better. It involves a certain form of attachment and something that was quite complicated to do, so there were rules and regulations about it. But there was something going round last night that you don’t need to do certain things in order to make it work. Secondly, that older hard drives could still be linked together, and thirdly, if you open up a piece of paper with the sterile equipment inside and you lose or drop something, it makes no difference – you can still go ahead and carry out the task. Furthermore, if you approach it in a happy frame of mind, you are likely to have much more success than if you approach it with a grimace on your face. Someone was round at my place trying to link my devices together and I was extremely interested to see how they did it because it didn’t seem all that complicated at all to me.\n<\/div>\n

There’s nothing new in this idea. Even back in the 1990s we were piggybacking SCSI drives, using patched cables. I had one on my desk for a while in the chauffeurs’ office in Brussels.<\/p>\n

The second part of it relates to the nurse at dialysis who, having opened a sterile kit and put on the gloves, had to take them off to attend to a patient and then open another complete sterile kit just for a pair of gloves.<\/p>\n

\nI met up with my friends and their family again. We were in Belgium again, chatting about my plans for the future. I explained that I’d recently bought a new apartment so they were very interested in it. They asked me if I was going to let it, or what was the plan? I said that I was going to move into it and sell the place where I was living now, because although the place where I was living now was small and convenient for the centre, this place is bigger, cleaner, more in the open air, it’s on the north side of the city that I like, it’s near the airport and it was offered to me at a really good price. I asked if they would like to go to see it, so my friend said that she would so we climbed into my car and set off to drive. But we drove for miles outside the city – it was a really long expedition. We ended up down some kind of country lane, but there was nothing going on there so we turned round. I headed back driving but at one point there was an extremely sharp left-hand bend. I wasn’t concentrating and missed the bend, going straight on through the hedge. I put the car into reverse and went to reverse back out the way that I’d gone in, but there were two vehicles heading my way so I thought that I’d wait until they’d gone. One was an old type of pickup with a tower on it like a carnival float. I noticed that there was a wing missing off this pickup and a few other pieces, but it went and parked on wasteland opposite this bend. The other was one of these mini-pickups that were popular thirty years ago, these Japanese ones. This one was a British registered “T” registered, and it had trees growing out of it. It had obviously not been used for years. That disappeared up a side lane. We ended up back in another town and we were talking about my new apartment. I explained that it was two-bedroomed but I didn’t have all my furniture from where I used to live up until Virlet. It was all at the farm in Virlet. I only had the stuff that I’d bought since I left Virlet. If she had another bed and a mattress that she wasn’t using, I’d install them in my place, and I’d have a bedroom ready for when she and other people came to visit. We were walking through this town and we came to some kind of barrier, like a huge canvas screen that was blocking the entrance to a gate of the city walls. We tried to find a way round it. I went to one side and she went round to the other. I couldn’t leave from my side but she managed to from her, so I went to her side but somehow in between, the gate had become open again so I could walk through there. Then she asked me about parking. Was there an attributed parking space? I replied “certainly. That was an essential”. She answered “well, make very sure about it because we have two parking spaces attributed at our place but even so, we had a \u00a325:00 fine for not parking in accordance with the rules”.\n<\/div>\n

This second apartment is one that has appeared in a dream on a previous occasion several months ago. It’s a three-roomed apartment en enfilade<\/em>, that is in a line from front to back, and it’s situated in a street (that doesn’t exist) across the Boulevard Reyers on the border between Schaerbeek and Evere. <\/p>\n

The gate here in this dream reminds me of the drawbridge here in the walls in the medieval city up here. And driving through a hedge reminds me of once when I actually did just that, having skidded on a patch of black ice on a bad bend. And then, I simply turned round and drove back out the way that I came in.<\/p>\n

As for the ancient vehicles, Isabelle the Nurse and her friends have a carnival float that they are entering in this year’s Carnaval<\/em> in a couple of weeks’ time. <\/p>\n

\nThere was an interview about the new Roman alarm system imposed for waking up in the morning. The presenter was asking some kind of Roman officer how it was working. He thought that he was happy in general but it does create its own problems because the finger-swipe with the time to stop the alarm has been personalised so that only the person who set the alarm can switch it off, which is not very convenient if he’s been posted to a different camp or a different site within the legion.\n<\/div>\n

This would be interesting indeed, Roman soldiers swiping their alarms. I wonder what James Curle would have said.<\/p>\n

After that, I crashed out for half an hour, and then spent a few hours on my Welsh homework and now, that’s all finished and ready to go once I’ve checked it again.<\/p>\n

This led me up to pizza time. I have plenty of bread in the freezer so I decided not to make any more until I’ve emptied the freezer somewhat, however I reckoned that I ought to make a pizza at least, and try to eat at least some of it tonight even if I don’t feel like eating any of it.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, I did manage to eat about half of it and it was actually quite nice. The other half will do for when I next feel hungry, whenever that might be. But it’s hard, really, to believe that six months ago, I’d make a Sunday night pizza with 167 grammes of flour, whereas now, I’m struggling to eat half a pizza, made with 50 grammes with 50 grammes left for another day.<\/p>\n

That’s a problem for another time, though, because, rather later than I would like, I’m going to bed to try for a decent sleep before dialysis. Isabelle the Nurse told me to stay in bed tomorrow and she’d some into the bedroom to sort me out. But I could easily see myself doing just that and working on nothing at all when I have so much to do.<\/p>\n

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Roman soldiers and swiping alarms … "well, one of us has" – ed<\/em> … it wouldn’t really be an anachronism to have finger-swipe alarms in Ancient Rome.
\nAfter all, they had cars in Biblical times. And if you don’t believe me, read Acts 2:1 where it says "and when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one Accord in one place."<\/em><\/strong>
\nThey also had motor vehicles in Tolkein’s Middle Earth too. And if you don’t believe that, Tolkein tells us quite clearly that "Legolas and Gimli were to ride again together in the company of Aragorn and Gandalf, who went in the van with the D\u00fanedain and the sons of Elrond"<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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… the last few weeks, or even months, I didn’t go to sleep at all quickly last night. Actually, had it not been for the fact that there were several dreams recorded on the dictaphone, I would have said that I didn’t go to sleep at all last night Actually, going to bed last night […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,4507,1616,8571,16250,12057],"tags":[16412,3501,4788,1302,212,16376,2560,5287,5565,8581,7596,16364,801,16021,261,15372,15849,5164,16202,8309,3505],"class_list":["post-20816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","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-crash-out","tag-dream","tag-east-kilbride","tag-eric-hall","tag-football","tag-france","tag-granville","tag-high-temperature","tag-home-made-croissants","tag-httpwww-amazon-co-uk","tag-james-curle","tag-liz-terry-messenger","tag-n6","tag-stranraer","tag-vegan-pizza","tag-war-and-peace","tag-welsh","tag-youtube-ripper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20816","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=20816"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20817,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20816\/revisions\/20817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}