{"id":21372,"date":"2026-07-30T20:07:59","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T20:07:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=21372"},"modified":"2026-07-31T11:05:29","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T11:05:29","slug":"thursday-30th-july-2026-what-total-absolute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=21372","title":{"rendered":"
Thursday 30th July 2026 – WHAT TOTAL, ABSOLUTE … <\/div>"},"content":{"rendered":"

… and utter chaos it was at dialysis. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed<\/em> … what is it that goes through the mind of some of these “organisers” and “managers” that when they have about eight nurses on duty, they put two of the newest and … errr … less-confident nurses on the same ward on their own, with eight people who need attention?<\/p>\n

It’s about as logical as me expecting that I’d have a good night’s sleep last night. Yes, I was in bed early enough (about 22:30) and I did fall asleep rapidly, but that was as good as it got. I don’t know what time it was when I awoke but the street light was still on in the car park, which meant that it was before 02:30.<\/p>\n

From then on, there I lay, watching the World go round and watching it slowly go lighter and lighter. At some point, I did go back to sleep because I had another one of those awakenings when I sat bolt upright. This time, I did check the time and it was 05:50. <\/p>\n

Ordinarily, I might have thought about getting up at that time and claiming an early start, or even doing more dictating of radio notes, but instead, I turned over onto my stomach and went back to sleep. And no one was more surprised than me to be awoken by the alarm at 06:29.<\/p>\n

It was a very weary me who staggered into the bathroom to organise myself today. a good wash and even a good shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon.<\/p>\n

There were a few urgent things to do back in here, and then I checked the alarm to find out where I’d been during the night.<\/p>\n

And there was something on there too, but it was about five minutes long. There wasn’t time to transcribe it before Isabelle the Nurse turned up. She took my medical card to swipe into her machine so that the Social Security would pay her, and we talked about the fire at La Havaudi\u00e8re on Monday afternoon. The story that she told me is quite plausible, but I’m not going to repeat it, as it might be considered libellous.<\/p>\n

After she left, I made my breakfast and read some more of A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE<\/a> by Charles Freeman. <\/p>\n

He’s still rampaging on about the “heathen Mohammedans” and their “false prophet” and how their architecture was nothing new but an “anticipation” of “our wonderful Gothic architecture”.<\/p>\n

Back in here, I managed at some point to find five minutes to transcribe last night’s dream.<\/p>\n

\nI was doing a coach trip down to central France round by Auxerre, and the purpose of that was to look at my new apartment. When I looked, it was really nice, but the kitchen had overflowed its alcove, which I was planning on using, and that was going to make things rather complicated in the apartment. I wondered how I was going to manage to do this. Later, anyway, I went back to the bus depot and I was in my red Cortina estate. I began to load people into it, putting their luggage in and then we set off. We stopped somewhere near an abbey for coffee and somewhere else for an evening meal, and we were in this town the next morning. We were talking about the cars and my brother was saying that when he bought it, there hadn’t been an MOT on it. I replied that actually, there’s no MOT on mine at the moment, even though I’m taking all these passengers. Anyway, we talked about all kinds of things for the moment. Then we heard that someone in the area wanted to go back to Shearings and I had to go to pick them up, so I did that. They had some food and things with them so we were being even more overloaded. We set out, and then we heard that a girl from the Auvergne wanted bringing back en route<\/em> so we stopped at someone’s house and telephoned her. We agreed to meet her and wake her up. So we set off again, and my brother began to talk about this car with no MOT again, and I wished that he wouldn’t, with all of these passengers in it. We pulled onto a main road and then we pulled into a house to organise a few things and do a few things. But it was a house where someone lived, whom I knew from years ago in Crewe. He made a meal for us and these passengers, and I went outside to sort out a couple of things for packing. Then everyone climbed in, and then we heard that there was another person to pick up along the road, so my brother and I began to saw my car in two, with my passengers sitting in it. This was going to work out to be extremely complicated for them because although we were well on our way with cutting it up, they hadn’t noticed yet.<\/div>\n

Auxerre is quite a familiar town to me. Situated astride the River Yonne, I passed through it every time I travelled between Brussels and the Auvergne when I lived down on the farm. It’s a beautiful town, and the lest time that I travelled that road was in 2014 back from my LITTLE HOLIDAY IN OOSTENDE<\/a>, I went to visit all of the places that I used to drive through on that road and had a GOOD EXPLORATION OF AUXERRE<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The reason why it’s figuring in this dream is, I imagine, that yesterday, Isabelle the Nurse was talking about her family who live there.<\/p>\n

The red Cortina estate XCL465X has featured on these pages quite often. I had it for a long while in the UK and brought it with me when I came to Belgium. For the first few years I drove it regularly, but then when I had the Opel, it was relegated to secondary use. Its last trip was in 1998 down to the Auvergne towing the 2000E saloon and it lives now in the warehouse in Montaigut. There can’t be many cars forty-five years old that have never ever been welded at least once in their lives.<\/p>\n

The stop at the abbey was an interesting piece of this dream. I did in fact once stop at an abbey with my coach and passengers for a coffee break when we were out on a coach tour with Shearings.<\/p>\n

The rest of the dream is a confused bundle of not very much relevance. It’s certainly an interesting dream, though, and must mean something to someone<\/p>\n

Transcribing the dream wasn’t as easy as it might have been either. After a few minutes, I was experiencing wave after wave of fatigue that was trying to force me into going to sleep, and I was fighting as hard as I could to stay awake. However, that wasn’t easy either and at one point, I fell asleep from a sitting position at my desk and crashed out, falling headfirst onto the desk and keyboard with an enormous CRASH<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It’s difficult to understand how I managed to go to sleep, though. The elephants had come to the apartment directly over mine and brought something heavy with them that they dragged along the ground and then upstairs, making a hell of a noise as they did it.<\/p>\n

Once whatever it was was installed upstairs, the elephants began to work with something and that was making quite a racket too. In the end, I despaired and went for a few moments of … errr … quiet contemplation in the gentleman’s restroom.<\/p>\n

By the time that I’d finished everything, it was 11:50. So much for my plan today of dealing with the music for this radio programme. This will have to wait until tomorrow.<\/p>\n

At 12:00 the alarm awoke me from a little slumber and I went into the kitchen for a disgusting drink, the midday medication and to sort myself out for dialysis. My faithful cleaner turned up as usual to apply my anaesthetic and I repeated what Isabelle the Nurse had told me. She was, however, firmly committed to the cause of the farmer. <\/p>\n

After she left, I didn’t have long to wait for the taxi. It was early again today. There was already another passenger in the car, who yielded up the passenger seat to me, which was kind of her, and we had to go to pick up Madame Dinosaur from her exhibition. Once she was in, the three of us headed down to Avranches.<\/p>\n

On the way, we saw the field that had been the centre of the fire on Monday. All of the stubble had been burnt, the hedge was a charred mess and the verge by the roadside had been swallowed up. Closing the road on Monday was clearly the correct decision.<\/p>\n

We arrived at Avranches at about 13:35, and I installed myself in my little room. And this is where the troubles began. As I said before, with eight nurses on duty, six of them experienced and two novices who are rather … errr … “hesitant”, which manager in his or her right mind would have put those two nurses together and on their own in a ward of eight people?<\/p>\n

Consequently, the connection process was very slow, and it wasn’t until 14:35 that I was connected.<\/p>\n

All of the excitement had, however, happened before that. Once more, I was way over the maximum limit for the water, so I asked if I could stay for longer. My hesitant nurse said that she would “have to go and ask somebody”.<\/p>\n

She was away for quite a while and when she came back, she said that I could stop for an extra half-hour and changed the timer accordingly – but not the weight!
\n"Aren’t you going to change the weight?"<\/em><\/strong> I asked
\n"Ohh"<\/em><\/strong> she replied. "I didn’t ask about that."<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

After a few minutes she came back. "I phoned the doctor’s number but he wasn’t there"<\/em><\/strong> she said "so I left a message."<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

And that was how it stayed for the entire session. I’d ended up staying an extra half-hour for no good purpose.<\/p>\n

The nurse did come to see me with about half an hour to go. "Has the doctor been to see you yet?"<\/em><\/strong> she asked<\/p>\n

Well, I’d vaguely seen the doctor (not Emilie the Cute Consultant) in the distance so he was certainly on duty, but he hadn’t passed by me, so I answered in the negative.<\/p>\n

"Oh"<\/em><\/strong> she replied, and that was that.<\/p>\n

The blood pressure alarm was doing its thing throughout the day. Every half hour it began to wail, which brought a nurse running, but for no good purpose because, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed<\/em> … low blood pressure is a habitual situation with me and isn’t a problem.<\/p>\n

It was 18:40 when I finally staggered out of there. My driver was already there waiting, which was some good news, I suppose. However, it was the driver who doesn’t talk at all so we had a very quiet drive home.<\/p>\n

Back here, far later than I had hoped, my faithful cleaner was waiting. She helped me into the apartment and refuelled me with a disgusting drink. <\/p>\n

After a little bit of reorganisation, she went off back to her place and I could think about tea. But at 19:40, when I have plenty of things to do, a cooked tea is out of the question. I grabbed a handful of these little toastie things and a box of that delicious vegan boursin cheese and came in here to carry on with work.<\/p>\n

Not that I managed to go too far, because as usual with a really heavy spell of dialysis, the fatigue and tiredness began to attack me. I posted on line what I had written so far and crawled into bed. That wasn’t as early as it might have been either because Yours Truly fell asleep while riding the porcelain horse.<\/p>\n

But one thing about tomorrow \u2013 the football season has restarted, as I told you last weekend. The league matches commence tomorrow evening and Barry Town are at home in a televised game against Cambrian United. The team from the Rhondda Valley won the Second Division South championship and were promoted to the Premier League for this season, their first time in this division. But kick-off is late, so don’t be surprised to find only half an entry \u2013 or even none at all when you come for a butcher’s during the night.<\/p>\n

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the doctor and his unavailability just now … "well, one of us has" – ed<\/em> … later on, I discovered the reason why. He had gone to witness an autopsy performed by one of the great pathologists.
\nThe pathologist was busy wielding his scalpel in all the appropriate places, chatting away as he was doing so.
\n"This man used to be a very well-known actor"<\/em><\/strong> he said.
\n"Blimey!"<\/em><\/strong> said our doctor. "If he’s acting now, he must be really good!"<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

0<\/span><\/a><\/div> <\/div>
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… and utter chaos it was at dialysis. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … what is it that goes through the mind of some of these “organisers” and “managers” that when they have about eight nurses on duty, they put two of the newest and … errr […]<\/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":[16585,3501,2462,4788,1104,16586,5577,1302,16165,16612,3357,212,2560,5565,8581,389,15372,7383,12058,1029],"class_list":["post-21372","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-history-of-architecture","tag-archive-org","tag-auxerre-2","tag-bad-night","tag-blog","tag-charles-freeman","tag-cleaner","tag-crash-out","tag-dialysis-issues","tag-dinosaur-exhibition","tag-donald","tag-dream","tag-eric-hall","tag-france","tag-granville","tag-httpwww-lesguis-com","tag-n6","tag-no-food","tag-nurse","tag-taxi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21372","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=21372"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21375,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21372\/revisions\/21375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}