{"id":20833,"date":"2026-01-30T21:23:48","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T21:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=20833"},"modified":"2026-01-30T21:23:50","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T21:23:50","slug":"friday-30th-january-2026-just-because-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=20833","title":{"rendered":"
Friday 30th January 2026 – JUST BECAUSE I … <\/div>"},"content":{"rendered":"

… awoke this morning at 02:10 doesn’t mean that I was in bed early last night. I would have liked to have been, and I might even have been too, had I not fallen asleep on my chair during the evening. However, it was nearer 23:00 than anything else when I finally crawled underneath the covers.<\/p>\n

However, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed<\/em> … it looks as if dialysis is the catalyst for these early awakenings. It always seems to be following a dialysis session that I only have a very short sleep.<\/p>\n

So last night, after lying awake for well over an hour (I was watching the clock), I must have gone back to sleep at some point because the alarm awoke me at 06:29.<\/p>\n

As seems to be the case these days, it took an age to sort myself out and crawl out from underneath the covers. In fact, I was giving serious thought to abandoning these 06:29 starts and setting the alarm for 07:15, today and for the future, but I still harbour faint hopes of being able to pick up my old lifestyle at some point.<\/p>\n

In the bathroom, I had a good wash and scrub up and then went for my hot drink and medication. And I do like my hot lemon, honey and ginger drink.<\/p>\n

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out what went on during the night.<\/p>\n

\nI’d received some kind of offensive e-mail from some kind of organisation so I was determined to sit down and reply. I’d been thinking for quite a while how to do it but eventually, I had some kind of idea formulated in my head. There was a young child, who was a cousin, who was in the house with us at the time so I sent her on a little errand to fetch a book, to fetch some paper and to fetch something else, and I said that she could help me write a reply. We sat down at the table, but for some reason, she was at the far end and I was at the other. There was a huge tablecloth on the table and as I tried to write, the pattern on the tablecloth was preventing me from writing on the paper so in the end, I had to roll it back. I began to write, and made three or four attempts but I couldn’t find the correct kind of words. All the time, this girl was sitting at the far end of the table. In the end, she asked if she could come and sit up near me. I said that she could, so she came up and climbed up onto the lorry that was parked next to me, opened the door and sat on the back of one of the front seats so that she was level with me at the table. Then I sat down to write out this reply. Even then, I couldn’t seem to express exactly what I wanted to say. I could see myself sitting there for hours trying to formulate some kind of response with what I had going around in my head previously for ages.\n<\/div>\n

In fact, I have actually had such an e-mail, and I’ve been planning for some of yesterday evening and much of the day in order to make a suitable response. Why my cousins should appear, though, I don’t know. That’s twice in a week or so, and I haven’t really paid them much attention in the thirty or forty years before that.<\/p>\n

As for the lorry, that was an extremely surreal situation. And I can see it now. It was either a Thames Trader or a Bedford S-series and was painted olive green.<\/p>\n

\nBut there was also something else about another one of my cousins who had left school. I enquired whether she had found a job yet. The response was “well, she doesn’t come from a very well-motivated family, does she?”. But I reminded whoever it was speaking that a couple of her elder brothers had actually gone on in life and started their own business so they were certainly well-motivated, and so were one or two others, so I didn’t really think that it was fair to pick on the younger ones like that.\n<\/div>\n

And that’s perfectly true too. Two of my cousins, having left school with no job and no prospects, joined the Army and served under fire in Northern Ireland. On demobilisation, they went to work for a roofing contractor in Nantwich, and within a couple of years, they had their own roofing business. My niece came across a third who had been in a similar situation after leaving school. However, when she met her twenty-odd years later, she was running her own contract cleaning company. So even if their family environment had been non-motivational, they certainly weren’t. <\/p>\n

But as I said, where do my cousins (my father’s sister’s children) come into all of this?<\/p>\n

The nurse blew in quite early today to see to my feet, and he didn’t hang around at all, which suited me. I could crack on and make breakfast and read some more of A ROMAN FRONTIER POST AND ITS PEOPLE<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We’re now quite close to the end, going through the appendices. We’ve finished plants, animals and humans, and we’re now on coins. And once more, I must confess to having had a laugh at James Curle’s tale of cataclysm at the end of the occupation, as I mentioned yesterday.<\/p>\n

He talks about the abandonment of the fort and in particular, "the bodies of unburied men"<\/em><\/strong>. According to the anthropologist to whom he sent all of the human bones that he found, they related to just ten individuals, most of whom were in pits or ditches. Of those that were identified, two were children, three were women and four were men, and only one showed any signs of battle damage. That’s not, of course, to say that the others did not die a violent death \u2013 just that the parts of the skeletons recovered show no evidence of it.<\/p>\n

The passage on sheep is interesting too. The bones recovered seem to relate quite closely, if not exactly, to the Soay sheep, the feral sheep on the island of Soay in the Outer Hebrides. As long as there have been written records \u2013 over a thousand years \u2013 there is no evidence of anyone having introduced a different breed of sheep to cross with the feral sheep there, so they would seem to be truly Neolithic sheep.<\/p>\n

We’ve now started coins, which is interesting. And this is how a lot of dating of sites can be done. For example, if you find a coin dated 120 AD underneath a Roman road, you know that the road can’t be any earlier than that date. And successive coins (and pottery, of course) in successive layers can further help in dating.<\/p>\n

After breakfast I came back here, and the first thing that I did was regrettably to doze off until about 11:00. I really was tired.<\/p>\n

And then I had to chase up the comptes rendu<\/em> of the aborted fibre-optic installation so that I can go and sit on the building’s management committee and make them pay attention to what’s going on.<\/p>\n

Next task was to track down some music for the next radio programme, and if this lot isn’t going to be an obscure collection of songs, I don’t know what is. It took hours to track down everything that I needed, reformat, remix and edit it, pair it and segue it.<\/p>\n

There were the usual interruptions too. My cleaner came in to do her stuff and she brought me a new pair of slippers, seeing as my old ones had died a death. We went for a stroll down the corridor to see what was going on in the technical zone too.<\/p>\n

Then Rosemary rang. "Do you have a minute or two?"<\/em><\/strong> And so, one hour and twenty-two minutes later … <\/p>\n

There was even time to write some of the notes for this programme, and with a bit of luck, God’s help and a bobby, I shall finish it tomorrow.<\/p>\n

Tea tonight was vegan sausage, baked beans and chips. Proper beans too, not ones that I made. The sauce on those that I made was quite good but it was the beans that were wrong. I’ll buy a tin of French baked beans with my next order to see what they are like, and if they aren’t up to much, I shall have to bite the bullet and buy a tray of real beans online, unless any of my British friends are passing a supermarket on their way here sometime.<\/p>\n

There’s one thing about this meal, and that is that it seems to be the only food that I enjoy these days. And as it’s packed with protein and fibre, especially when I drop a handful of vegan cheese into it, it’s quite a healthy food. <\/p>\n

So on that point, I shall clear off to bed ready for a good start tomorrow (I hope).<\/p>\n

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about sheep on the island of Soay … "well, one of us has" – ed<\/em> … they are in fact a protected species, classed as “endangered” by UNESCO.
\nAnd as with most endangered species, they have to be counted every year. However, quite rarely for an endangered species, there has NEVER been a recorded tally of their numbers in the UNESCO yearbook.
\nOne day, at a European Union meeting, I met a representative from UNESCO, and I asked him about it.
\n"Well, we do send people there"<\/em><\/strong> he said "but they don’t come back and we have to go to look for them"<\/em><\/strong>
\n"And do you find them?"<\/em><\/strong>
\n"Ohh yes, they are always there, but the task is never completed"<\/em><\/strong>
\n"Why’s that?"<\/em><\/strong> I ask
\n"Well, they only ever get as far as ‘sixteen’ or so, and then they always fall asleep."<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

0<\/span><\/a><\/div> <\/div>
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… awoke this morning at 02:10 doesn’t mean that I was in bed early last night. I would have liked to have been, and I might even have been too, had I not fallen asleep on my chair during the evening. However, it was nearer 23:00 than anything else when I finally crawled underneath the […]<\/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":[16412,15089,3501,4788,3260,13133,5577,1302,212,2560,5565,8581,13341,16021,15372,12058,288,16445,16446,2487],"class_list":["post-20833","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-air-fryer","tag-archive-org","tag-bad-night","tag-baked-beans","tag-bouquet-granvillais","tag-cleaner","tag-crash-out","tag-dream","tag-eric-hall","tag-france","tag-granville","tag-home-made-lemon-ginger-drink","tag-james-curle","tag-n6","tag-nurse","tag-rosemary","tag-soay","tag-soay-sheep","tag-vegan-sausages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20833","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=20833"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20834,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20833\/revisions\/20834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}