The book

Hahaha, well that wasn't a good start… and now?

And writing this on a Nexus 7 is proving a bit problematic. With short words I need to remember to press the word showing above the keyboard to get the space after the word. Sometimes I forget or type the wrong word. I think I'm getting a bit better now though…

Anyway the original opening of the book was going to be…

Last year I almost died. Now as I write 'last year' that is true for me but you dear reader have a different timeline. Of course if I finish this as yet very incomplete book and publish it in some form you could be reading this relatively soon but I might be famous and rich and well perhaps appearing on The Jonathan Ross show with, erm, Lily Allen (she was on last night). Jonathan Ross, I briefly met with him or rather he met with me… I was in Leicester Square in London looking at what films were showing and wondering what to see when he came up to me, handed me two cinema tickets and said “I can’t use them, maybe you can” and then hurried off leaving me with the tickets and a slightly dumbfounded look on my face. I don’t remember now if I even thanked him, I think I didn’t but I just stood and stared at the tickets.

And now I'm writing a book about writing a book. Well, perhaps not but as I write this sentence I am. Not good, but at least I wrote something tonight.

Anyway back to my near death experience. I'd been feeling weak for a while. I was having difficulty getting upstairs to my bedroom. I'd been falling asleep on the sofa instead. One day I tried to get up and collapsed onto the floor instead. That was a surprise and it was even more of a surprise that I couldn't get up. I was on the floor and staying there at least for a while, but at least the TV was on and I could reach the remote. I thought after a bit of time I'd be able to get up and would be a bit better, but I was wrong.

As I contemplated my fate I became aware that I couldn't reach the phone and I couldn't use or indeed get any food.  Now you can last a long time without food but you have to have some water. Without any water in about two days you die.

And now my Nexus 7 won’t charge via its micro USB connector so I have to type something today on my computer, whoa is me. I either get a new Android tablet or I’m typing via computer or perhaps I get a cheap wireless pad charger, but I’ve not got any money for anything, drat.

Yes, yes I forgot to write anything in my book today except that when I got up in the night to take a piss I wrote this, so nah, nah, nah!

The second time I forgot to write anything! It will not be a book, just something I forgot to write, but hopefully when the charge pad arrives it will charge my Nexus up and I’ll get back to writing in time, regularly and tell my interesting account of how, at the moment anyway, I’ve survived death…

So  “What’s It All About, Alfie?” a great film starring Michael Caine with the title song written by the great duo of Bert Bacharach and Hal David. Burt Bacharach who died on the 9th February 2023 just a few weeks ago as I write this, had a big tribute on BBC television tonight. Do you know that the song Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head was also written by Bacharach and David? I’m going to get my saxophone out now and see if I can play any of it.

Well, I did get my Alto saxophone out last night and I WAS able to play not just one but a few notes. My left hand being pretty useless makes this difficult but I’m going to persevere.

But back to my… I don't really know what to call it… illness? That will do for now.  I’m on the floor unable to get up but luckily I have a couple of 2 litre bottles of water on the floor and I should be able to crawl to them. They are by the fridge and I am by the sofa. I’ve tried to lever myself up onto the sofa but it’s no good, but I think I can crawl, just about crawl. It proves to be pretty tough even to crawl, but if I don’t have water I die, and I don’t want to die, at least not when I haven’t done anything notable. I may have worked for nine years on the early web helping to set up the first English national newspaper on the web. So it was The Daily Telegraph and the website I helped create was simple by today’s standards but we were the first. Maybe some people at The Guardian will help me sell the book. One of the people I worked with on the early Telegraph site left to help set up the Guardian website. I doubt that anyone I know works on the Guardian website now but maybe…

A small break from my illness while I tell you about one of the most wonderful days - a few minutes really - of my life. The day when I did a parachute jump.

It was when I was at university and we jumped from a small Cessna. It was so small that the individual about to jump had to climb onto the step over the wheel beforehand. I was the first one about to jump.

Thank God I was wearing a parachute... Hahahaha. Once I had climbed onto the step I was holding onto a wing strut facing forwards. The step was only big enough for one foot, the other was failing in the air and below me about 5,000 feet below was the ground.

I did a static line jump meaning that the parachute was opened via a cable attached to the plane. But for the first 4 seconds after I jumped I was falling through the air... Then the parachute opened, there was a massive deceleration and then I was floating down...

It was incredibly lovely.

So I’m on the floor, with water a desperate crawl away. It might be desperate but of course I made it.

And I should have written a lot tonight but I’m tired now and I’ve been doing other things on the computer so not much tonight and this paragraph will probably be deleted anyway before you,dear lonely reader, actually read it.

I will mention now that I have a pen pal, er, email pal I met on I think Twitter many years ago now. She’s in the USA therefore American and I think she lives in Louisiana though she may have moved. Anyway I have a lot of emails that either she or I sent. I said to her that someday we ought to make a book out of our emails since there are such a lot and I believe we talked about some very interesting things. For instance I told her about the parachute jump I did. I would recommend any person doing one. I could drift into another book, or movie script, that I started to write but stopped because… I’m not sure, I should complete it. Anyway the first scene of the movie is a parachute jump, and, as it is a musical, it’s set to Bohemian Rhapsody.

Bohemian Rhapsody and the late, great Freddie Mercury. Some people die too soon.

And I don’t know what to write now, but at least I’ve written over a thousand words, that’s something., or is it if it’s just nonsense like this. I was supposed to be writing about my illness but, but… I need a new laptop… or tablet or something. At the moment I have to come upstairs to write…

I need to fix my Nexus 7. It works but the charging port doesn’t and I thought I’d fix it by getting a wireless charging pad, but although the pad thinks it’s charging (the light blinks when the Nexus is placed on it) the Nexus doesn’t actually charge…

And now it's the next day and I'm typing this on my Nexus because it's now fully charged! It turns out I was placing my Nexus wrongly on the charging pad and the blinking light on the charging pad indicates that the pad WASN'T charging because when I moved the Nexus slightly and the light on the charging pad stopped blinking and remained steady and then the Nexus WAS charging…

So I've used up a little bit of the charge writing this but I've still got 93% charge left, so I'm happy and going to sleep now.

I much prefer writing this on my Nexus since it completes most words for me which saves a lot of typing and also ensures that the words are spelled correctly. Of course it doesn't help in any way with the content but it's a lot better typing on my Nexus. I suppose this will be another paragraph to cut when and if an editor ever gets to look at it. Perhaps I'd better get back to the point of this book now…

Er, what is the point of this book? Hahaha.

And so last night I fell asleep on the sofa and woke up at four am. I’m slightly confused today.

So It’s been a day or two now with nothing written. I expect this ‘book’ will end up like all my other work. Enthusiasm, duty then decay as the work gets forgotten and unfinished, or in truth barely started. Such is my life and probably my death. I meant to die but I couldn't be bothered to. Anyway for those of you who want to read my unfinished work it’s now on the web as I’m writing it, er if I remember to export it as an html file regularly. Nearly three pages now, see, I’m getting there. Oh and my cheap wireless charging pad is now bust so I’m back to writing things on the computer again, but at least now dear reader you can check on my progress, that’s if I give you the url and actually announce it… say on Twitter, hmm I could that right after I’ve typed this… should I? Do you know my Twitter username? Well anyway it’s now being broadcast on Apache (if my computer is actually on, and connected to the internet) and the url (uniform resource locator) is…

http://tgabber.mine.nu/TheBook.html

Yes it works and I’ve just exported it as html!

Dammit the things I have to do to put it on the web. It's pretty time consuming right now, I have to download it as a zipped html file and then extract it to the correct place. There are other ways to do it, but I’m sticking with this for now as it’s nearly 3am in the morning and I have to go to bed soon.

So another day closes and as seems to happen quite often, I don’t have anything to write tonight I just want to go to bed.

And while I remember, here’s the movie script I started writing then forgot about and lost…

http://tgabber.mine.nu/MovieStars.html

And now I have to download my book (from who knows where) and extract it (because to download it as html it’s in a zip file) then place the extracted copy in a certain place so that it’s on the web, and…

It’s done!

The How and the Why.

So as we left it last night - and what you perceived as irritation was just tiredness - you think that from the moment the sperm meets the egg and those little strands of chemicals entwine together, our fate, our destiny is fixed? The son of an axe murderer will themselves be an axe murderer...

Some important things are decided certainly, our base attributes have been rolled (fantasy gaming terminology here if you don't play) but I firmly believe far more important is our environment, upbringing and the events that happen to us in our early years. And these fall into three categories

The things we remember

The things we are told about

The things we've chosen not to remember

I'll now illustrate this with my own life.

Apparently I nearly died when I was born. I had the umbilical cord around my neck strangling me. Perhaps it was my own curiosity that did that. I know as a child that I loved to play with ropes. There was also a long cord pull switch for the light next to my bed, I used to tie my hands up in it from the age of about four.

When I was a toddler and learning to walk, I had a childhood stroke and a bit of my brain died. I don't remember this but have been told about it. All I do remember is walking down a corridor while a doctor watched me. "Notice the way he holds his arm? It's not just his foot, there's a slight paralysis down his whole left side." Slight enough to make me clumsy, awkward, but hidden enough that you couldn't call me disabled. Just now I have to find my own way of doing things, improvise.  By the way, we weren't given any proper diagnosis at the time. "Something" had just happened. It's only as an adult that I've had the proper explanation.

I'm a late child, an accident, born 13 years after my nearest brother. My father tells me I saved his life. He'd had a heart attack the year before I was born, if it hadn't been for me he says he'd have had nothing to live for. "Too much love will kill you every time" - another Queen song - hmm gotta put that on now - that's what I got from him. He spent four years in a Japanese PoW camp in WW2, so he taught me to survive too though. He made it to 89 before his heart finally gave out.

My mother and father sit at opposite ends of the living room. He drinks, she drinks. He watches television, she reads or does crochet. Her mind burns with an unchallenged intelligence. They don't talk.

I'm allowed to do pretty much what I want. Only occasionally do I get imperative commands and often in the wrong context.

At the age of around five we're in a restaurant as a family. Apparently I'm dawdling over my food and everyone else has finished. In frustration my mother says to me "if you don't hurry up and finish that, we'll leave you here and they'll lock you in." I burst into tears, but I forgot the incident.

I develop a phobia of being in places near closing time. Only in my late teens and my grandmother reminds me of the restaurant incident do I understand where that phobia comes from and begin to conquer it.

And now the big one, the thing that happened when I was nine and that nobody has ever reminded me about and I shut the memory away until my 30s. And you are the first person I am about to tell it to.

Every Sunday morning, I'd get in bed with mum and then dad would bring us breakfast in bed. Mum was ticklish on her feet and I used to love to dive under the covers and torment her (I'm now something of a foot fetishist...) This particular Sunday, my hands wandered up her legs, up her thighs, stroked places, felt hair... the scraps of memory that have come back to me are just scraps... In truth I'm not sure exactly what I did. The main section of the memory that has resurfaced is standing on the landing outside my parents bedroom, being given a stern lecture by my father. "You're too old to get in bed with your mother. You must, never, ever do that again, do you understand? Good then we'll forget about this and not speak of it again."

Can't confirm any of the above for sure as both mum and dad are long dead now.

An end to intimacy and warmth caused by my actions but it was not explained to my WHY it was wrong.

The change in my personality was so noticeable at junior school that my form teacher, a gorgeous woman in her twenties, a classical 1960s beauty (I'd begun to notice even at nine), came to visit my parents. I can still see her now sitting in the middle of our otherwise empty three-seater sofa, short skirt, bare legs and stiletto sandals (more foot-fetish feeding), knees clamped together, my father in a single chair on one side and my mother on the other with me perched on the arm of my mother's chair, close to her but not touching.

I've no idea what was said then, I was asked to leave the room for most of their talk. I doubt my parents told the truth.

I used to shrink from physical contact whenever a woman even got close to my body without knowing why.

There's quite a bit more, from the boy who used to wank off next to me in class when I was 13, to finding first one of my brother's (softcore) and then my father's (hard core) porn magazine stashes... I'll leave you to draw the obvious conclusion from that one. Although I will say I always preferred my brother's. I'm a sucker for beauty, but the best beauty radiates out from a beautiful mind. Yet again Leah Gotti (only her professional name), springs to mind.

So now I have shown you all these examples... have I triggered any inklings in your own mind?

Remember you didn't spot the obvious of your birth year on the end of your handle until you looked.

And yes, I like to play mind tricks... I once briefly had a stage hypnotism act... but I try to stay away from those techniques with friends.

So, now to the story I've attached that I hope you'll find time to read (if you've even managed to make it to the end of this email!). It's only four pages long and it was written last summer when I'd lost impetus on my "magnum opus". I realised that, apart from a (rejected) TV script that I'd done many years ago, I'd never ever completed a story in writing. Oh I've started many, many, many novels in my time but they have never been finished on the page. One or two I have finished in my head to my own satisfaction.

I do have a fascination with the BDSM world that I have never acted on and so I chose to use that as part of the theme, but also how men with power misuse women. I suppose the yacht owner could have been me if I'd followed the path of money and career instead of breaking away from it. Strangely it was only a few weeks later that the Weinstein scandal broke. Maybe my subconscious had already heard the whispers.

The woman, ah the woman who I have since named Nina has played on my mind and I have the idea for a novel about her life story. She will witness the accident she describes but not remember it properly for many years... and I also want to give her a chance to avoid the fate I have conjured for her here. It's her that features in the second of the two short stories that I've made public on my site 'Growing Up'. I might write her whole novel as short stories and then put them all together later.

It would be interesting to get feedback from someone who does take part as to how it comes across. There's nothing I hate more than coming across something in a story that deals with things I know about, only to find the author is completely clueless about the reality.

Well I've written enough for now, it's taken me around two and a half hours, but I've mostly covered stuff that's not yet in the book so I'll flagrantly re-use some of this (1700 words!) and consider my work done for the day! I'm THAT lazy!

Hhm… when I started this book it was going to be about my illness and, maybe, my recovery but it seems to have wandered off into something completely different now. A sort of autobiography but I leap all over the place in time. It will need a lot of editing if it ever gets published, perhaps after my death…

Hahaha, I like to make myself laugh, even if it’s only on the inside. Well, has anyone ever read this? I don’t know but at least it’s now sort of on Twitter (if my computer is on and I remember to export it…) nearly 3,500 words now (actually over 3,500 now as I edit and correct things and of course write more stuff but anyway who’s into computing apart from me). A lot of them are duff but at least no spelling errors (spelling checking as I type is marvellous, computers are pretty good now). You see I’m a qualified computer scientist, I’ve got a degree from Exeter University, only a 2.2 but that’s okay I spent most of my time getting drunk anyway rather than going to lectures. It turns out that ’getting drunk’ was actually good training for working in The City in the 1980s as, unlike today, everybody in the office would go out and get drunk at lunchtime and return to the office in the afternoon to sleep it off… I remember that the very first manager of a client I was taken out to see (no names, no pack drill but if was the London City office of a major German bank) pulled out a bottle of fine brandy as we entered his office (and is was only about 10 in the morning) and poured each of us a hefty glass of the brandy.

And of course I go back through the stuff I’ve written so far and correct or alter some things slightly. For instance I’d forgotten to finish the recollection about Jonathan Ross because my internet went down, oh and thank you to Leah Gotti for the ‘like’ on one of my tweets.

And the first stall has happened, I literally ‘forgot’ I was writing this latest ramble of a book. But at least I have the 168 page version of the old book I forgot now starring me in the face too. I should do better at remembering to finish things… I think I ought to make this a google doc too, in fact I’ll try now…

Well, my old book should be in Google documents format now but it doesn't seem to be here… Oh it IS here, now to read and edit the old book a bit and then put it online.

And since lunchtime yesterday, my time,  I now have a fibre internet connection, which is super speedy although it isn’t helping me much in writing this current book, although to be fair it has contributed this paragraph. Perhaps I just ought to nick a few (or perhaps many) pages from the book I’d forgotten I’d already written…

Another forgotten book goes unwritten, sigh, or perhaps…

It was the tail-end of my time at university, a few of us were in the pub closest to our hall of residence. We might have been celebrating the end of our exams, or we might just have been drinking, I don’t recall any more. I know I certainly didn’t need a reason, just an excuse. The pub was a dump – I see from research on the internet that it’s still there, The Victoria or Vic for short – but as the starting point of my story is some thirty-five years ago, I’d hope they have got around to improving the décor slightly by now. It probably still attracts a mix of townies and students though.

That night stands out as the only time in my life I’ve ever been involved in a bar fight. Although to be strictly accurate the fight happened just outside the pub. And to be completely fair, if a fight is defined as an altercation where two or more people hit each other then maybe it wasn’t even a fight as my opponent was the only one to land a blow – on my right eye. But in fairness to me it did sort of start inside the pub.

I’d just put 10p in the fruit machine (“amusement with prizes”!). I didn’t win. As the machine had not yet separated me from all my change I took another coin from my pocket. Then, and this next bit is very clearly etched in my brain, just as I had the coin poised over the slot to drop it in, a voice behind me said “If you put another coin in that machine you’re dead”.

Well obviously it was an empty if somewhat extreme threat, since I’m here writing this now. But it did make me pause, slightly – and then I carried on and dropped the coin in the slot. Because that is how I react when threatened. Clarity of memory now deserts me somewhat. I can tell you that I didn’t know the person but from his accent and clothes I think he was a townie. I had no idea why he was angry with me but I have speculated in later years as I got more acquainted with fruit machines and their insidious behaviour that really it was the machine he had an issue with and I just happened to be standing in front of it.

Then he didn’t hit me and I think I might even have had another drink or two or three and completely forgotten about him – until me and my drinking acquaintances left the pub.

Reviewing that last hazy memory I think I’m probably trying to make myself sound too relaxed by implying that I may have had more drinks. I can’t imagine that he was stewing away in some corner for hours while I continued to indulge. I think we might actually have left quite promptly. Not exactly running you understand, but certainly walking purposefully. And he followed us out.

And then he hit me. But not before I had taken up a martial-arts style pose that I’d read about in a self-defence book, that he completely bypassed as he gave me a shiner. And then Richard grabbed him from behind and threw him to the ground and that was that. And I pretended to be rather put out with Richard as it’s not a good image to have someone else do your fighting for you, although let’s be honest he probably saved me from at least one more black eye.

I was going to London the next day – for a job interview.

It wasn’t a great interview. I was applying to be a computer programmer and I’d taken along a printout of my final year project, a program I was unjustifiably too proud of. I don’t think I had a hangover, or at least not a bad one, but the elephant in the room was undoubtedly my swollen eye. I wasn’t asked about it and I didn’t volunteer any information, but my self-imposed interpretation was “who wants a thug working for them?”

On the plus side I did get to visit London on a nice summer’s afternoon and walk down the King’s Road in Chelsea. The company I was applying to had their data-centre incongruously placed in a side road just one along from Flood Street where then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and husband Dennis had their private London residence. I took a short detour to take in this non-tourist landmark.

I quite liked Mrs Thatcher in those days, she’d just beaten the Argentinians in her war. The war had made some very good early reality TV. There’d been a lot of impressive explosions and the British had proved they had the best armed forces to everyone watching. It was slightly unfortunate that some of the stuff that blew up had been British but that just gave our boys a chance to show how brave they were under fire. Death, life-changing injuries and post-traumatic stress were not part of the narrative, at least not in my head. If I regarded the whole thing as just some sort of real-life action movie I can feel shame about that now, but I didn’t then. Those Harriers, they were a cool bit of kit.

I left university without a job having scraped a 2.2, but with a promising start to a career as a heavy drinker, proudly following in my parents footsteps. I had been unsuccessful in romance, to be fair I hadn’t even entered the game. I returned to Bolton, to the house where I’d been born twenty-one years earlier, where my mother had died seventeen years after that and where my father now retreated into his whiskey bottle each evening.

The keyboard works with my new android tablet… yay!

Hi, well at last I have a new tablet too. I wonder how long this will last? Will I be able to finish this book before I break this tablet? I broke my Nexus 7 simply by putting it on the edge of a table and then knocking it off. Admittedly it was outside and the Nexus 7 hit stone but still…

And of course new tablets take a lot of time to set up, so I totally ignore writing anything in my book, until now when I was just looking at Translators from French to English for Thunderbird and somehow my as yet largely unwritten book came into the equation… That’s computer science!

We all live, we all die. Some of us might die before our time, others might live a very long life and do nothing that endures beyond their life. I don’t have any children so if there is anything meaningful that I leave behind it might be this book. What would our lives be without Shakespeare or Dickens?

Everything has its time and is then forgotten, lost or destroyed. Everything I have will at some point be destroyed. Even our home, the Earth will be destroyed, it might be several million, perhaps billion years away but at some point it will be no more. Will humanity survive the Earth’s destruction? Who knows, who really cares, it’s not in the foreseeable future. Is it?

I am very untidy. I look around and even the table in front of me is full of things. Much of it I don't need now or have forgotten. Then I come across something and remember "I did that". For instance if you are familiar with the best movie database on the internet imdb.com you will find my name on it somewhere. And of course I then had to look it up, it took me about five minutes but I found it:

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1061844/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cr14

Hahaha, well that's enough for this session.

And now, thanks to a very kind neighbour, I have a modern phone and it's nearly new. So I suppose that I'd better start working on the book again and reluctantly become famous. The late  Richard Harris when I met him, thought there was something a bit special in me and I wouldn't want to disappoint him. Not that he knows anything about this now, well unless there is something more, and we all find out eventually.

There is a lot more that we, as humans, don't know than we know. We are just a tiny spec living for a very short time in the vast expanse of the universe.

And I think I owe my life to a cat. A friendly wild cat that sat on my lap as a kitten, liked it, and has been my friend ever since. I call him Precious though I'm sure in cat language he has his own name that I don't know.

And Precious has just got off my lap to have a bit of food. It's actually quite difficult to write anything when Precious is around. He doesn't like me using the computer, he prefers it when I stroke him. He will frequently hop onto my computer desk and make it difficult for me to see the screen.

And just as I wrote the previous paragraph up came Precious purring but making it difficult to see my computer screen. But cats are cats…

Now several months have passed since I last wrote anything so this seems to be another abandoned book, unless that is I can get back to writing something every day… At the moment Precious is asleep on the sofa next to me, perhaps I can write a little bit before he wakes up and wants more food. But where am I in the book now? I’ve only read back the last two paragraphs that I wrote a long time ago now and they were both about Precious interfering with my writing. I need to read back more…

Well what a mishmash of topics I’ve skimmed through. When I first started this er, book, that at the moment is only 12 pages long and a good editor would probably cut most of it. On the first page it was supposed to be about my near death…

I suppose I should explain why I think Precious saved my life. Precious is a cat. Cats sleep a lot, about 15 hours a day, and when they are not sleeping they mostly want food. As a cat friend I feed Precious well but when I was on the floor of course I didn't feed Precious. After a while he got hungry and went to my neighbours wanting food. I think that's why my neighbours suspected something was wrong with me and as a group after four days came, looked in a window, saw me on the floor and saved me. But if Precious hadn't gone to a neighbour for food I probably wouldn't be here writing this now, I’d be dead. So that's why I think Precious saved my life. Accidentally of course, but he was happy to live with me again when I got out of hospital.

So, Precious saved me and changed my life.

Oh, and I got a mention from Sam Quek on BBC Radio 2 last night, so thank you very much Sam!

And a few weeks have passed since I wrote the previous sentence, another abandoned start of a book, but I’m not quite done yet! As I write this it's New Year's Day for the year 2024 so I’m going to have another go at this book, at least a paragraph a day on my new android tablet… What will I write tomorrow? Hmm…

Well at least my reminder is set up now and if I hadn't done the reminder I wouldn't have written this sentence today. So now tomorrow I need to write something interesting that someone will want to read. Watch this space! Although strictly speaking it is already tomorrow, so yesterday I wrote nothing although it all depends on the time zone, doesn't it?

Well I really, really didn't write anything yesterday as the daily reminder is most definitely at the wrong time… (that's my excuse anyway) So, I’m moving the time, and then after another 2 days when I don't write anything I'll have to come up with a different excuse. What was this book supposed to be about anyway?

Well at least the reminder worked today. Now maybe I could get work setting up other people's Android tablets. I seem to have done a lot with this new tablet which only cost 90 euros new and seems very good. I must remember to make some bread or I won't have any for lunch!

And even the reminder doesn't make me write anything good.

I want to write something about my early summer holidays now. From about five I spent the summer holidays in Ireland, right down in the south-west corner. For the first few years we went to a hotel in Skull and had only two weeks but then we bought a cottage about 9 miles from Skull near a village called Goleen. For all the next years until I was 17 and my mother died, I spent the whole summer in Ireland there. If you walked just a little bit from our cottage you could see Fastnet lighthouse about 9 miles offshore in the Atlantic.

At our cottage in Ireland we didn't have a television and it was long before the Internet so in the evening I mostly read books. We did have an old record player but only have few records. I remember we had two albums of Noel Coward performing in the USA and I listened to them a lot and ended up knowing the words of most of the songs so I could sing along with the record.

“Poor Uncle Harry, wanted to be a missionary, so he took a ship and sailed away.”

The first verse of one of the splendid songs that Noel Coward composed, wrote and then sang.

In another change of tack I’m going to go back to my illness today. After my neighbours broke in and saved me an ambulance came, the people loaded me into the ambulance and took me off to hospital in Limoges. But one of the people who rescued me stopped the ambulance as it left Lavalette to hand me my house keys. I remember that I was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt but did not have any shoes on. I was very annoyed that I didn't have shoes.

The ambulance took me to a big hospital in Limoges which I discovered later was known by the abbreviation CHU. I was on a hospital trolley and I waited, and I waited what seemed to me a very long time. I didn't have a watch or any of my personal electronics so I don't know the exact time but I waited and waited.

Something was very wrong with me but I didn't know what it was. Oh and I wasn't allowed to drink anything, not even water. Not being able to drink anything was to become a big thing for me in the next four months. I couldn't even have a glass of water, nothing oh and of course I wasn't allowed to eat anything either. But of course I would be nourished correctly, everything provided for me via drips. If ever you want to provide torture for someone that lasts months just provide them a cure like mine. The only positive side of being in hospital was that I met some very nice people.

Maria and Marie-Louise are nurses who nursed me every day that they were working and I like to think that we became great friends. I have to take a moment now to think, I very much hope that I remembered their names correctly. They were responsible for training me to walk correctly again. I didn't realise that if you're in bed for a long period like I was you can have difficulty even walking. On the last day I was at the hospital one of them even gave me a brief kiss on the cheek. Those two nurses looked a lot alike although they said they weren't related. However, I think that an investigation into their family history would have given them some common ancestors a few generations back. I hope one day to meet them somewhere again, perhaps I will run into one of them on my regular visits to the hospital.

Now what was this book supposed to be about? I don't know, but every one of us dies. Some young, some old, some middle-aged, but there is no escaping death. I would like to be famous for a few years before I die, perhaps some form of this as yet largely unwritten book might make me famous for a while. If you really want something I think you can get it. Just try and try again until you know how. But don't do anything very bad or you might become famous for the wrong reason.

I’m thinking about film scripts again today. All the coincidences that happen in a film are not really coincidences because they are already in the script. So if a character wins a several million to one lottery they didn't really because it was simply in the script.

Sigh, computers. I did what I thought was a simple change and everything goes tits up and apparently the recovery doesn't work so I have to set everything up again and of course everything has changed since I last did it, double sigh.

I’m feeling very depressed right now. I think I still have a lot of life in me but I don't know how or when to do anything. I think this paragraph probably should be deleted as it doesn't add anything much and it’s dreadful. I might even delete it tomorrow. But I have written something.

Haha, well the previous paragraph still stands for the moment and I am feeling a lot better today although at the moment Precious the cat has gone missing. He has gone missing for a couple of days before so at the moment I'm not very worried right now, just slightly concerned and hope that he's not lying injured somewhere.

And of course Precious was okay and returned to his house late last night using his personal door. He’s in bed asleep at the moment and graciously allows me to live in what I am sure he now regards as his house as I feed him frequently. Cats have a great life if they find the right person to live with.

Oh and I still haven't yet fixed the thing which I disconnected accidentally from Google Home a few days ago. Big tip, don't delete anything from any computer thingy unless you know exactly why it's there and what it's for.

I you ever feel down as I do quite frequently at the moment then just listen to Hero as sung by Mariah Carey available for free on YouTube here:

 Mariah Carey - Hero (Official HD Video)

and I think you'll feel a whole lot better.

And I almost didn't write anything today but here I am typing on my tablet and not sure what to write. Oh well I had a bit of a tidy up this morning and I'm quite satisfied with the result. Now maybe I can write a proper paragraph tomorrow, maybe, maybe.

It's never tomorrow is it, just always today and now I'm confused whether I tidied up this morning or yesterday. Oh well that's my life now, a bit baffling.

And if I don't go to bed but merely fall asleep on the sofa for a while is it still yesterday? Or maybe I don't know what day it is. But it's only just after 8am and I’ve written something in my book so that's not bad. Now I’m a bit worried that Google knows what I’m going to write before I actually write it. Perhaps Google could just write the whole book for me.

Perhaps writing the book in my head will do. I mean it's not as if anyone will really read it, it's just an exercise in frustration as I can't think what to write.

And just in time I write this paragraph because it's now just after 11pm but I did it, I wrote something today. Hmm, it should really be something that might go in the book rather than just writing something just so I have actually written something. Basically my life is pretty shit at the moment so if I don't write something that people might read what do I do?

Perhaps I should mention something on television right now. Do you know who Robin Beck is? Well she wrote and performed the song which was used (with slightly modified lyrics) in the original Coca-Cola TV advert “when you know you’re in love for the very first time”.

If I have to think of one moment that is the best time of my life so far it would be one night in London when I was drinking alone in a pub and a woman shouted across the room, “hi Tim!”. It was a woman who was at the same employer as I was many years earlier. She was out with a friend of hers who I hadn't met before. Of course it transpired that the woman, ,Julie, was now married and had two children.

Time moves on, until one day it doesn’t and you’re dead, then the world ends or it doesn’t and of course carries on until one day millions of years from now.

I’m going to do a few paragraphs on skiing now because I once spent a whole winter in a ski resort. But I first started skiing on a winter holiday for two weeks when I went on my own to a French resort in the Alps called Meribel. Most people ski together but I skied alone and got drunk a lot. I don't really want to be alone but friends are something I've never learnt to do. But I did become sort of friends with the two workers who were running the chalet I was staying in, if only because I think they felt a bit sorry for me oh and also because I was on a camp bed in the loft… I even got too drunk one night and threw up in the loft but when I came downstairs and said I needed something to clear up my vomit the girls said that was no problem they would do it.

And so I was very happy with my skiing holiday in Meribel even if I was on my own. A few years later, when I didn't know what to do I remembered the holiday in Meribel and thought I might like to work there for a season. Now a coincidence, I spotted an advert looking for people to work in the following season in Meribel and there was a person interviewing candidates in London soon.

I passed the interview perfectly although I almost left my scarf behind at the interview but ran back after a minute and retrieved it.

And so I worked a season in Meribel as a bartender, waiter and entertainer, comic and hypnotist. I think I was probably best as a bartender, I was certainly crap as a comic, I did get quite good at simple skiing though!

Everyone dies, maybe there is something after, maybe there isn’t, but try to make the best life you can now, this minute, perhaps by reading my book…

And now an up-to-the-minute report, do some washing, hang the washing on the outside line to dry while it's nice and sunny, have some lunch and then fall asleep on the sofa. Awaken when it's getting dark and now it's raining while your washing is still outside on the line. Yes, that happened to me today.

It's always today, never tomorrow, that's life. Your future is what you make it, so make it a good one. A quote from a film but which one? I think it was Back To The Future in fact I’m almost certain it was. I had a scan yesterday as many people want to keep me alive, I’m not sure why, maybe so I can finish this book? That would be a first since I rarely finish anything.., What will I write about tomorrow? Wait and see…

But I can't write anything tomorrow, it's always today unless I have a time machine.

I’ve just looked at my work so far, 18 pages and less than 50,000 characters. I need to do more, possibly a page a day from now on. Can I do that? Well I’ll see, I mean I don’t really have anything else to do, just watch a lot of television, do the housework and tend, as best I can, to my broken body.

Well, I just spent the last half hour or so doing tiny edits on the 18 pages of this barely functioning book when I should be doing some actual writing. But now some new stuff. A few nights ago I watched a documentary about the Transatlantic yacht race that went tragically wrong ín the 1980s. It was called the Fastnet race since the yachts rounded the small island on which stands the Fastnet lighthouse. As I’ve already written our family had a cottage in southern Ireland from which, if you walk a little bit down the road, you can see Fastnet rock about nine miles offshore. The ashes of my mother are buried in the garden there although I doubt anyone but me now remembers that.

I should include a few photographs in this thing as I took a lot of pictures of the cottage and surroundings and also it would be something interesting to do to actually learn how to scan slides in and incorporate them into this book. I have scanned a few slides previously but it was many years ago and I’ve forgotten how to do it. Of course these days nearly everyone has a phone that takes pictures which are stored electronically but once upon a time you needed a camera and could only take 24 or maybe 36 pictures on a film which needed to be developed before you could see the pictures. How things change.

Of course the cottage was gutted by fire but that was after I’d stopped staying in it. My father kept the cottage and rebuilt it after the fire but I never went back to it. My father sold the cottage without asking any of the family what they would like to do with it.

That he sold it without asking pains me a little. I suspect I ‘d now be living there instead of in France if I’d had a choice. But life is what you make it until you die. One day I would like to visit this cottage again but perhaps life will work out differently or perhaps if you want something passionately enough, you can make it happen. I think I should read the old book I wrote again and take some more from it. There should be some more good stuff somewhere.

My father was a wonderfully functioning alcoholic. He held down a well-paid and well-respected job as an accountant and within the scope of his lifestyle, he was kind and generous, only totally lacking in empathy or perceptiveness. He was never violent, hardly ever raised his voice and the worst the alcohol ever did to him was sometimes send him into deep self-pity.

“You can’t have a minute back, and a minute you spend in misery or self-pity is a minute wasted” he would remind the world without irony when one of these moods took him. He’d been in the Royal Navy and a prisoner of the Japanese for most of World War Two. He rarely spoke about it.

I sat around the house, I didn’t have any sort of plan for my life. I felt vaguely obligated to get a job, well just because that’s what you did. An interview offer came in from Plessey, based in Poole, Dorset to work on computerised traffic light systems and to my surprise I got another offer of an interview from the computer company I’d been to in London, but from a different division of the company after “my details had been kept on file”. Apparently some companies really do do that!

So off I went to both interviews – no black eye this time – and in due course received offers from both. So then I had to decide, Poole or London. It was no contest, I wanted the bright lights of the big city. So my London adventures were about to begin.

The first thing I had to sort out was somewhere to live. I had a couple of weeks before I was due to start my new job so my plan was simple. I took the early train down to London intending to spend a day flat-hunting, that should be plenty of time to sort something out. Writing that sentence now I’m still astonished at my naivety. Although to be fair to me, this was the 1980s and the everyday use of the phrase ‘housing crisis’ was still decades away.

I’d been to London a few times before, for the recent job interviews obviously and then prior to those, a school trip and finally a visit of a few days when the family had stayed with a cousin who lived in one of the outer suburbs. I knew London was a big place, but I don’t think I’d really grasped the scale.

My new job was based not in Chelsea but in the City office of the company on Upper Thames Street. My plan, such as it was, was to visit areas that were convenient for tube travel to work and see what the local estate agents had to offer. Travel took up way too much of the time I’d allocated and there was nothing that wasn’t a complete flea-pit, at least nothing for my paltry budget which I think was around £150 a month.

By early afternoon I was despondent. I bought a copy of the Evening Standard and trawled through the small-ads. One ad for a studio flat in Palmer’s Green stood out. Consulting my map, I noticed that, although it was a fair way out, there was a direct service from there into Moorgate, only a few minutes walk to the office. It wasn’t an Underground line so I hadn’t considered it before.

I rang the number in the ad and got told by the agent that they’d be showing the property from 6pm and if I was interested I should be at the address by then.

And now this is where this anecdote begins to get a little strange. I took the train to Palmer’s Green in plenty of time (I have a mild phobia of being late for anything) and having looked around the unremarkable but pleasant enough area, I went to Park Avenue where the flat was. I was very early and there was no one around but by the time it was nearly six o’clock there was a queue of maybe 30 people behind me! Something seemed not quite right?

The estate agent arrived and invited me, as first in the line, to have a look at the place. It didn’t take long, it was, as they say, ‘compact’. What had once been a single room had been partitioned up into three tiny spaces, bathroom, kitchen and living/sleeping area. However, for the money they were asking for, it was a palace compared to the places I’d seen earlier in the day.

He must have asked me a bit about myself, I don’t remember the conversation until he got to the bit where he said “I don’t normally do this but if you can give me the deposit and first month’s rent now it’s yours”.

After the day I’d had and when I thought about the queue outside, I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d come equipped with an envelope of money for just such use. He quickly got me to sign a piece of paper as I handed over the cash.

Then he said “Don’t say anything as you go out, I want to show it to a few more, I don’t want people to think being first is all that matters”.

I walked away in a bit of a daze, I could get the train back to Bolton tonight as I’d planned!

Of course, I’m sure you know what’s coming next, I’d been conned. I had a sinking feeling as it dawned on me while I sat on the train home.

Except…

Somehow, somehow I hadn’t been. The agent had been completely genuine and I had a legitimate lease agreement in my possession. The number worked when I called him to make arrangements and I was able to move in the following week with no problems, ready to start my working career.

I hadn’t kept regular hours since I’d left school, over four years ago now and I’d never had paid work of any kind. I wasn’t looking forward to it at all. My father had bought me a custom-tailored dark wool suit with chalk pinstripes since he thought that’s the sort of thing all the best people in The City wore. It made me feel old and strange.

The City office of Comshare Limited was in Queensbridge House, Upper Thames Street. It took me about 10 minutes to walk to Palmer’s Green station. From there, there was a comprehensive rush-hour service into Moorgate so hardly any waiting time for a train on a normal day, then about a 30 minute ride with stops at such exotic places as Alexandra Palace, Finsbury Park and Highbury & Islington along the way. From Moorgate another walk of 10 minutes or so took me down past the Bank of England and to the office.

Although I’d initially applied to the company for a position as a computer programmer, the post I was actually taking up was as a ‘customer support executive’ for their banking products. This was still a time when many businesses didn’t have their own computer systems, all the processing was done on our large mainframe machines (Rank Xerox Sigma Nines if anyone is interested).

In charge of the small team I was assigned to was Mark and working with him was Dorothy – Dot for short. These were also the two who had interviewed me. They were both smooth and smart and pretty obviously had a bit of a thing for each other. In charge of the more technical side of things was Andy, who was scruffy and smart if that makes sense, a talkative and very likeable Irishman. Also on the technical team was a young friendly guy Vinod, who was Indian I think and Pete a slightly older Englishman who was somewhat more cynical and who would get a little frustrated with my know-it-all approach at times.

There’s really only one thing I remember about that first day, we went out to lunch. The team took me to a private members bar nearby, the Mansion House Club. It was dimly lit, the drinks were overpriced and the waitresses were underdressed.

We had a cocktail or two and probably some food and then some more drinks. I didn’t have to pay for anything. After a couple of hours I remember asking if perhaps we shouldn’t be getting back to the office. Nobody but me seemed bothered about that. We had some more drinks.

And some more.

Shortly before it was time to go home we went back to the office. Once there Andy handed me a pile of manuals, said I should take them home, have a good read through them and he’d question me about them in the morning, with that he wished me good night and said he was off to the pub. I put them in my bag and somehow returned to my flat in Palmer’s Green.

I sat in the single easy chair in the bed-sitting room and found that it was quite difficult to focus on the text in the manuals. I threw up. It was then that I remembered that I’d been drinking Guinness after the cocktails, the smell was quite distinctive.

The last pocket of memory I have of that evening is being on my hands and knees attempting to scrub vomit out of the carpet, the rest is something of a blur.

It’s a credit to my university education that I was able to function through my hangover the next morning and arrive at the office on time, although I was genuinely concerned that although I’d made an effort to read the manuals, I couldn’t now recall a word of any of them.

I had no idea what to expect. In my head I think I thought that work would be something like school, with things to learn and remember and assignments to hand in and that maybe I’d failed before I’d even got started. I decided to come clean straight away.

My earnest apology for failing to take in any of the documentation was met with gales of laughter from the entire office, of course I’d been had. In fact, I’d been in such a state the previous evening that there were more than a few surprised faces that I’d made it into work at all. I had such a lot to learn, just not about computing.

The work was all much more casual and slow-paced than I’d anticipated. The second afternoon I was given a simple coding task to update a program that generated a report. It took me a couple of hours or so, but when I went back to Mark with the update he was somewhat nonplussed. “Oh, I thought that might take you a couple of weeks” he said with no hint of sarcasm or irony.

The company had a large computer centre and surprisingly it was in Chelsea just a road away from the house that Mrs Thatcher owned. That house was very visible because Mrs Thatcher was British PM at the time and there was always a police officer outside her front door. But to start with I was in the city office, an office built over a busy road. It was a strange building and there were no views from the windows. I should check one day if that building still exists because I don't think it has anything to recommend it.

Okay, I’m now going to try a picture insert… let’s just try dropping a picture onto the document…

Well that was very simple, our Irish cottage when we bought it (a house really, I think). But does it translate to html easily?

Well some refinement to the placing will be needed but it works pretty easily (sort of).

Another day passes and today I'm going to write about a famous person I was in a pub with. Well, when I say ‘with’ I wasn't, actually with him, he was just in the same pub as I was. But it was quite a small pub, there weren't that many people in the pub and I’d guess there was only about 20 feet between us. So who was it?

It was George Best.

Of course younger readers might not know who George Best was. Well perhaps consult the internet then because he was Northern Irish, and perhaps one of the greatest footballers who ever lived.

George Best - Wikipedia

I think when I saw him he was drinking alone and of course he died due to alcoholism only a few years later.

I think today I may work a bit on the formatting which is probably pointless at this stage as it is completely irrelevant since nobody but me reads any of this and if, at some stage, it gets produced professionally all of this work is worthless. But I want to have headers and page numbers and since I'm a computer scientist it should be simple…

Okay this is not good, the android version is ridiculously complicated as I can't find the things I want easily.

Haha well I have page numbers now in some views but it's ridiculous. Instead of making things simple, programmers have made everything overwhelming.

Of course page numbers only show up in my Google Docs version at the moment. When I export it to html then it’s just one long weary html line… for now.

Today as I write this I’m sitting outside. It's lunchtime and I've just finished mine. Typing on my tablet in the sunshine is quite difficult because I can only just see the screen. I might try wearing a different hat.

So I changed hats, this one has a wider brim but unfortunately a change of hats hasn’t made it any easier to see the screen. I might just listen to some music instead of trying to see the screen.

So that in my timeline was yesterday, or strictly speaking two days ago at it is now past midnight so if my timeline it’s now Saturday the 9th of March (and it’s 2024 if you’d like the full date).  But it’s very early in the morning and I'm about to go to bed, but before I do that. Here’s another picture at a wedding with my mother, some friends and me as a 14? year-old (age is just a guess, although I suppose I could probably work out the exact date with a bit of time and research).

And the export to html is broken with 2 pictures because instead of 2 pictures the broken html has the same picture twice so I have to manually correct the export, sigh. Or rather in fact the html numbers the pictures in reverse so the above is image 1 and the preceding picture is now image 2 which means I have to manually renumber the images when I add one or export them all again.

So after my picture adventure I feel it's time to get back to my near death experience but I can't remember where I was up to. Did I write about the four days on the floor, occasionally  vomiting, with no food and only a bit of water? I need to go and check. Only not today, I’ll just keep writing, maybe I'll get some inspiration and write something profound or maybe as usual I don't know what to write. I have a weird feeling today, maybe I know something profoundly important but I don't know what.

Perhaps I should do some programming, I haven’t really done any in ages, a bit of PHP perhaps on websites but that’s about it. Strangely, I like programming in a new language and learning all about it rather than using a language I’m supposed to already know and yet have forgotten things and have to look them up.

Well, moving to the bottom of a Google doc is simple if you’re on Linux using a full keyboard, but on an android tablet… Perhaps using a heading would be the simple thing?

A heading works although I had to use my computer to create the heading. There may be a way to do it on my android tablet but I haven't found it yet and anyway I don't need it unless I accidentally delete my bottom header. Anyway enough about problems with Google Docs for now. I went to the hospital in Limoges again yesterday and I’m pretty certain now that I will be making regular trips to the hospital until I die. It's curious my life now. It seems to me that becoming somewhat famous is my only option. I'm not at all sure how I do it but while I live there is an opportunity.

My mother died when I was just seventeen, just before Christmas. But the illness lasted about a year. Cancer of course, she smoked heavily and in the summer I was left alone in our Irish cottage when my father became concerned about her health and the two of them flew back to England leaving me alone. That was the first time I was alone, although the people in the village were extremely considerate and I was looked after very well.

Sigh, I was just about to copy over a few pages from what I now call ‘the old book’ into this document but as I skim read what is already in this work I realised the thing I was about to copy was already in this document. But it might be quite good if I wanted to copy it twice…

Humans will perish sometime and perhaps sooner than we think but not yesterday or today as long, that is, as some deranged human in an influencing position (and there are quite a few) doesn't get completely insane and launch nukes at everyone. So hopefully write something tomorrow too.

Damn, it's always today. When I’m dead do things get better or does my realisation of things just stop? Science says there is nothing but science may not be right on this. Talking or rather writing about death is not good. Writing about cooking would be much better. I find it interesting because at the moment I receive a Resto box of food each week and I never quite know what will be in there until I have it so my cooking has improved quite substantially.

What now? Who knows, while I live I write, even if it's meaningless. If I only write a sentence or two a day though, is that really writing? Oh well, I think I need to write about some more of my life now. Perhaps I should write about the time I enrolled in a drama school… Hmm, that was an interesting time.

As a computer scientist and as, at the time, personal computers were just beginning to be sold, I was very happy to provide the school with a personal computer and of course I programmed it for them.

And the reward? Well, when the school became a charity they made me a trustee. I'm not sure now whether that was a benefit or a curse. But I met a few famous people during that time.

Oh and I went to the same school as Ian McKellen although several years later. But I was at school when he was in Romeo and Juliet in Stratford and the school organised a trip to the theatre to see the play. What's more is that Ian came onto the coach afterwards and answered a few questions. A few years afterwards I was thinking about what to do and thought about starting a film company. I wrote to several actors suggesting that I might make them a director of the new company. No one replied apart from one, Ian McKellen. He said he wasn't interested in becoming a director of my company but at least he wrote back. I wish now that I'd kept his reply but I’ve lost it.

Of course I never formed the company but I’m sure now that if I had it would have been spectacularly useless. Our lives follow a path, how much of it is really in our control?

Unless you do something depending on a random outcome then whenever you take what you think is a decision you might think your way up all the possible paths but really you will always decide the same thing at this point in your life because of your experience.

Maybe randomness is the way. There was a book I read (can’t remember the title right now) . The central character decided to live his life randomly although in truth the choices he offered himself were really not random at all. It is very difficult to escape your destiny.

Depression, it hits me sometimes and I contempt suicide. I don't think I’d actually take my own life but sometimes I think about it. We all die anyway sometimes by accident. But doesn't everyone get depressed sometimes? If you're immune to depression aren't you a bit crazy?

I’m just going to include a brief memory of my father from my early teenage years. We spent all our summer holidays at a cottage we owned right down in the south-western tip of Ireland. An idyllic country spot. The cottage itself was about half a mile outside our local village and my father and I would often walk into the village to get something or other from one of the few shops there.

On this day, we were in the post office. The village was like its own little time warp. This was the 1970s but the post office still had a little manual telephone exchange and row upon row of wooden shelves where the merchandise was displayed but you didn’t get it yourself, you asked the shopgirls to get it for you, using a little ladder if necessary to reach the uppermost shelves.

Don’t ask me what we were in there for that particular day, or even the setup for the snapshot of memory I’m about to relate. I only remember a specific few seconds, almost on a loop like one of those gifs that there are so many of these days.

There’s a pretty blonde Irish shopgirl on a ladder with her back to us reaching up for something. She’s wearing a modest blue skirt. For some reason my father is next to her also reaching up. Waiting for her to hand something to him? The loop starts. My father moves his arm up and as he does so he deliberately presses his arm against her buttocks so that the movement makes her skirt ride up to show her underwear. Did he just wink at me? Or have I edited that wink in later as part of my reaction to what I saw? End of loop.

I was stunned, my father had a penchant for mildly dirty jokes and would regularly refer to buxom women he saw on the street in graphic terms. All of which at my age I found awkward, but I’d never seen him do something like that before and I found it deeply, deeply disturbing. Of course, we never talked about it, but then we never talked about much of anything.

Sometimes just copying something from some other document that I’ve abandoned is easier than writing something new. That's what I did yesterday, a very distasteful memory of my father. A not deliberately nasty person but someone who had some very bad habits. But who hasn't got any bad habits? I would think most people have a few.

Today it's the Grand National! Quite possibly the most famous horse race in the world. Although it's getting weaker, only 34 horses will race this year apparently in a bid to improve horse safety down from 40 entries last year.

Well that was not an interesting horse race, a horse that had unseated the rider was leading through most of the race although curiously the commentators didn't even mention the horse once it had unseated the rider, it was almost as though the horse didn't exist.

And it's now late on Thursday and this ‘book’ is in acute danger of becoming yet another abandoned project. But not yet. Even if I’ve missed a few days I’m not done just yet. Perhaps I should turn this into a cooking book. I made another great lasagne this week. One of the things I discovered (via the internet) is that you don't need to cook the lasagne sheets of pasta before you layer them into the sauce. The secret is just to make the sauce runny enough so that when the sauce and layers of dry lasagne are baked in the oven the lasagne sheets can sup up some of the sauce so that the lasagne sheets become cooked in the sauce. That is something that I never knew until this week. But the finished lasagne was lovely with the lasagne sheets becoming flexible and lovely cooked in the sauce.

Oh and I made it in a large dish so that, as a single person, I could put some lasagne in a bowl, heat it up, and I had enough for four days. It's very curious being a recipient of a Resto package. I never know exactly what I’ve got until it arrives. So I often have to adapt recipes to suit what I have.

I have an umbrella somewhere in the house but I can't find it. There is no way it's got thrown out but I don't, for the life of me, know where it is.

Duvets, the best way to put a cover on a duvet. A lot of people find this very difficult but it can be incredibly easy if you know the technique. I was one of the people who found putting on a duvet cover very difficult until one day, several years ago now, that I found out about this technique. First of all, turn your cover inside out. Now put the cover on your arms with your fivers at each of the bottom ends. Now grab the duvet so that one bottom cover is in each hand, remembering that you are already wearing the cover inside out. Now you simply raise your arms so that the cover falls over the duvet. If done correctly the cover is now almost completely on the duvet. So depending on the coverage the rest of the things should be quite simple.

I think we should now have another picture and for no better reason than it's the first thing that I thought of. I think I should have a picture of the house where I am now. Having said that, I now need to find one. Oh if only my photos were properly organised and catalogued.

Hahaha, well I thought about putting a picture in and then completely forgot about it. I think I know what sort of picture I’d like but it's difficult to find it…

Well that took a long time but here is a picture of the house when I bought it:

When there is some nice weather I should take a picture of the house as it is now. Not much has changed really I think.

I don't have a car in France. A long time ago I did pass my driving test at the first attempt when I was 17. But I think I’ve always been very good about using machines. Useless in maintenance though. I have a private pilots licence. I took a course at university spending most of the money I inherited from my mother to gain the licence. It was brilliant flying over Devon while learning. A lot of training to gain a licence is actually solo flying. But you are not allowed to take passengers until you have a licence. I suppose a few people may have perished in learning to fly but I have no numbers or proof.

One of the things you have to do to get a pilot’s licence is fly a solo qualifying cross-country route where you have to visit two other airports. For my route I had to fly to Cardiff and another little airport whose name I don’t recall at the moment. It was a very interesting flight. One of the first things you do whenever you're given charge of an aeroplane is to inspect it thoroughly. All the exterior checked out so I got in the pilot's seat and started the internal checks. The initial checks were perfect so I started the engine. Even with the engine started there are still more checks to do, even while taxiing to the runway. There was a problem with the brakes, once applied they wouldn't release properly. Of course I reported the problem to the tower over the radio but I now had a broken aeroplane at the end of the runway and I couldn't taxi because the brakes were now stuck on. Luckily an instructor was listening in to the radio when I radioed the tower to say I had a problem and drove out to my aircraft. The instructor said she'd fix the plane enough to taxi back to the hangar but said I’d have to drive her car back to the hangar. Of course I agreed especially as her car was the best car I’d been able to drive as of that time.

When we were back at the hangar a senior instructor said that I could still go on the qualifying cross-country but I’d have to take another aeroplane. That was nice as the only other aeroplane available was the newest one, so I got to fly that one solo instead.

I landed, got my logbook signed and took off again at the first airport, which, if my memory is correct, was somewhere in Dorset, and then I set course for Cardiff.

I think I flew the leg to Cardiff almost perfectly and as Cardiff airport appeared in the distance I was enjoying life.

I called Cardiff approach on the radio and the responder said that as there was so little air traffic at the moment he could give me a straight in landing on the 30 runway and I could line up and call finals when I was happy with my approach.

So, there I was flying into Cardiff and feeling very happy. I lined up on a runway and started a slow descent, then when I was certain of my approach I used the radio to call finals. The response was immediate and very unpleasant. The responder said something like “thank you for calling finals but that is not a runway”.  Instead of the runway I’d lined up on a taxiway.

Somehow I hadn't read the large white numbers which identifies the runway (which is the first two digits on the compass heading). In a panic I said I’d find the correct one, levelled off and scanned the airport. Of course the runway was on the same heading but just a few hundred metres to the left…

So I landed safely in Cardiff but was convinced I’d blown my qualifying cross-country flight. However when I went to the tower the flight manger smiled and signed my log with a big tick. There was nothing about calling finals when lined up on the taxiway mentioned or in the documents. Somehow I’d gotten away with it.

And so I passed my qualifying cross-country the first time and looking back now I think that day was the most interesting of my flying life.

Now, for no other reason than it just occurred to me, I’ll tell you about one night during my time at Exeter University. There was this one boy who seemed a bit posh and had a lot of money. One night he said to a few people including me that he had a lot of bottles of booze in his room and that there was no way he was going to get through them all so he’d decided he was going to have a party, a special party, where everyone had to make cocktails and that he was having it tonight, that we were all invited and that he expected every one of us to be there.

So about 6 of us went up to his room and it was stacked with full bottles of spirits of gin, whiskey, vodka and a lot of other things that I didn't know but it was all alcoholic. None of us asked where all of this had come from. Looking back it was almost like he’d raided an off licence.

And my bed broke last night so I slept fitfully on the sofa. I think I’ve fixed my bed now with a few new screws and I will see tonight…

My bed was comfy and didn't break, so I’ve fixed it until it breaks again. As I’ve said before, everything has a time and is then past it. My mini heater has gone bust now or at least one element of it has. And I’ve just had a look and Temu isn't selling those heaters anymore, oh well it must get a bit warmer soon, although it's been a terrible summer so far, rain almost every day and still quite cold even though it's nearly June.

Another day, another storm and the rain lashes down. At least Google delivered my new Chromecast promptly but now that I’ve got it I’m not sure what to do with it as my Freebox provides all the specified services already. So just another gadget I don't know what to do with. I’d better get a new television…

Well I tried to use the Chromecast but it wouldn't join my home network so another gadget in the bin until or, unless my incoming multi-hdmi makes it work.

What am I writing this book for? I’m not a salesman, probably no-one other than me will ever read this thing. And now my Chromecast is working as my latest package from Temu arrived today and the Chromecast was plugged into my hdmi socket adapter and after a lot of faffing about it started to work!. I’m not exactly sure what I will use it for as my Freebox provides most of the services that the Chromecast offers but hey it’s another remote to add to my collection.

I sometimes wonder if anyone in the western world writes anything on paper any more? Certainly I don't, all done on computers, phones and tablets. Even my keyboard isn't used much any more. I did try voice typing but at the moment it gets so much wrong that I have to spend so much time correcting it that it's simpler to use an on-screen keyboard.

Now my washing machine is broken. A man came around to inspect it today and it seems the pump that empties the water is bust. The repairman said he'd try to get a replacement pump but I might have to bin it and get another machine.

No new pump apparently so the repairman who didn’t actually remove the back of my current machine is selling us a new one at a vastly inflated price. Who said scammers don’t work in this part of France?

OK well I'm trying the voice typing again and this time it seems to be much better in fact I might use it from now on because at the moment it's getting all the words correct. I wonder how you do commas though. For instance if I have a list of things like paper, pen and ink you see it's not got a comma after the paper word and the should have. Okay well that works but it's not instinctive enough icing for instance if I have another is like ice cream paper pen ink there's no commas at all in the list.

Oh dear, the previous paragraph had icing in a sentence and I don't know what the word should be now but it certainly isn't icing. You see that's the problem with using my voice occasionally a word or two will be interpreted incorrectly but I don't spot it. However, when I read it back it doesn't make sense so well I am upset. However looking at things in the round using speech to write is certainly a lot quicker than typing. It's just the occasional inaccuracies that I don't spot that upset me.

And I've had a new washing machine installed and it flooded the whole of the kitchen floor because the installer didn't hook up the drainage hose correctly. It took me several hours to mop up the water. But I think I've now fixed it and I've taped the connection up so it shouldn't disconnect now unless I physically take it apart.

Using voice writing can be awkward because you've actually got to have thought about what you're going to say before you actually say it and if you get anything wrong then you have to manually type the correction. Sometimes I think I know what I'm going to say and then I change my mind halfway through. I think the thing is to watch the screen carefully when you are voice writing because then you can spot if you've made a mistake and correct it immediately because if you don't correct it then there will be an error that can change the paragraph completely.

What is an RCD alongside the fuses? Well RCD stands for residual current device and it's not exactly a fuse but it does trip if there is some leakage of electricity somewhere. I now have a problem with my oven which trips the RCD but only if it's hot so somewhere in the internals there is a little bit of wire that is causing the problem but only when it's hot.

So I stripped my oven down and looked at the internals but I haven't seen any wire that is displaced or causing the short so I don't know maybe I'll test it again but if I haven't as yet. Voice typing is very strange and especially when it Mrs words out and I said missing as but it interpreted my voice as Mrs.

I don't know what I've written down in this book less I read it all again but it's now such a long read that I don't want to but perhaps I will say something twice or even three times but it doesn't really matter because nobody's going to read this apart from me anyway are they? Well perhaps if I get a good editor then some time in the distant future somebody will read it.

Arrgh! Something went wrong with my phone last night and in the end I’ve done a complete wipe and am currently re-installing all the important apps. Sometimes I wish I was a cat, a cat like Precious who is sitting on my lap and purring as I write this.

So now my phone is back to normal well apart from a few apps that I haven't yet installed and everything is okay apart from the fact that I don't know what to do. Oh dear it's one of those days where I think I know things but perhaps I don't and that's the difficulty because I'm on my own even Precious the cat has gone on a bit of a wander.

Of course, Precious turned up, wanting food as usual and of course I fed him because I'm a human who is very fond of cats and Precious in particular. Precious, the cat who met me as a kitten, sat on my lap, liked it and shooed all the other cats away.

Precious, one of the few true friends I have and certainly my best one.

Yesterday, for the very first time, I made some soda bread. It doesn't have yeast like ordinary bread but uses baking soda and buttermilk (usually) to cause some rise in the bread. As I didn't have any buttermilk (which is apparently quite difficult to get in France) I used milk into which I’d squeezed some lemon (gleaned from the internet) which worked. The advantage of soda bread is that you don't have to leave the bread to rise, just mix all the ingredients up and cook it in a hot oven for 40 minutes. The cooked soda bread was delicious, I’ll certainly make it again.

Hahaha, the preceding paragraph had the word ‘sofa’ instead of the word ‘soda’ before the word bread so when I read it back I had made some sofa bread which was a bit strange, haha.

The Tour De France is on again and I always enjoy watching it on television. A few years ago one of the stages came pretty close to where I live in France so I thought I’d go and watch this stage live. To be honest, I think watching it on television is better. For the stage I watched live which was about 5 miles from where I live, I had to get there early, wait around for about 4 hours, get a glance of a load of cyclists whizzing past, none of whom I had time to recognise, and then trudge home again, If I can find it I’ll include a photo of that day.

Britain has had an election and Labour is now by far the largest party but the plonker Nigel Farage has got into parliament which is a disaster.

Will broken Britain ever be better again? Probably not in my lifetime. It's in times like these that I’m glad that I now live in France. But I often wonder what my life is. I have virtually no family now and I might die and no-one will notice, apart from Precious of course. If I don't feed him, he'll certainly notice.

Most people are a lot more complicated than their friends realise. This paragraph owes its origin to the fact that I just watched Myleene Klass as a guest on Countdown and only learnt that she was singing backing vocals in numerous hit songs before she became famous as one of the people in the group Hearsay.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myleene_Klass

At this moment, in my time, England are playing the Netherlands in the euro 24 football competition semi-final and it's 1-1. 32 minutes of the first half have gone and I’ve no idea who will win. But the initial thing that made me want to write this paragraph was that in the initial interviews on ITV no-one mentioned the late but undeniably great George Best.

And, perhaps my most famous footballing incident, I was once in the same pub as the great George Best. It was a small pub in Chelsea near where I worked and a few of us went for a drink after work. We were sat down at a table when in walked George. He was on his own and got served quickly then chatted to a few people on the far side of the pub.

Well, the English football team won the semi-final of the Euro 2024 competition but then lost the final. So as a country England hasn’t won any football competition since 1966.

As a teenager I was a member (supporter) of Lancashire county cricket club. Confusingly the Lancashire cricket ground is called Old Trafford but it's NOT the same ground as Manchester United’s ground which is also called Old Trafford. I suppose my best day was when I held open the pavilion door for the Lancashire cricketer and West Indian captain Clive Lloyd.

It's very hot right now, so much so that I didn't sleep last night.

Now global computers bring almost everything to a standstill because some prat at Microsoft released some software which most Windows computers use with a bug that crashed many computers around the world. As a side note the program which contained the bug was supposed to guard against suspicious software, Crowdstrike, doh.

I’ve apparently been banned from what used to be Twitter for posting that someone should slap the people who thought a time trial was a good way to end this year’s Tour de France race, sigh.

Today, Friday 26th of July as I write this, the 2024 Olympic games begin with a wonderful introduction along the Paris river Seine but already terrorists are trying to disrupt things with some rail troubles.

It's very hot at the moment, so hot that France has declared an emergency in this part of the country. In French it's a ‘canicule’ , a heat wave. So hot that I can't sit outside, I just suffer inside. It's not even sunny, just very hot, but the weather forecast is for things to get a little cooler soon but not before it gets even hotter tomorrow.

There is still something that I have to do, I simply don't know what. I feel there is a path to my life but I don't know what. But that's what makes it interesting and exciting because if I knew what to do and then did it, well that wouldn't be much fun.

My debit card has now stopped working because,  er, I don't know, is it unhappy?

There's a bizarre thing I’m meant to do now if I want to buy something over the internet but lots of sites don't seem to offer an opportunity for me to do the necessary things. I haven't forgotten or miskeyed any password but my debit card has stopped working and a cash machine now has a message to contact my bank.

So after a lot of effort finding out my bank’s email address I have now written an email that will hopefully get my debit card reactivated. I think the debit card security is ridiculous and I wonder why people put up with it. No person has made a decision, it's all done by bad computer programming.

My debit card has now been reactivated so I hope I don't run into any more bad computer programming in the near future. Although due to my debit card being inactive for a while I now have over 100 euros in my account. I’d better spend some of it quickly.

But with shopping over the internet the frustrating thing is waiting for products to arrive. As yet I haven't had anything not arrive but sometimes the product I’ve bought doesn't live up to the description. I always buy food fresh though, I’m not about to be poisoned by something I’ve bought over the internet.

As yet none of the hamlet's bins have been emptied today and it's now about half-past 3 in the afternoon. Normally they are emptied in the morning although in September the day changes but it's still August. What's going on?

No binmen yesterday and not today either so far, perhaps they have gone on holiday. It's a bit bad when there is a notice that everyone received that the bin collection will change but someone who wrote the notice has got the dates wrong. It's very bad,

Just watched a documentary about the late great pairing of Morecambe and Wise. Compared to them I have never watched any comedians who are even half as funny as those two. I tried doing stand-up a few times but I was rubbish, truly rubbish, I think I’d have walked out on myself.

Well my bin has been emptied but I don't know when, possibly sometime on Friday which is the day bins should be emptied but only from next month and apparently the bins will only be emptied every fortnight from then on.  I think they should just get a smaller truck…

But until then I now don't know when my bin will be emptied. I think I ‘ll need a bigger bin.

I read through a lot of what I’ve already written today. It's a mish-mash and if I ever think it might be done it will need a really good edit. I see I briefly mentioned the late Sir Richard Harris but then didn't write how I met him. So it's now time to tell that aspect of my life.

Someone I knew through work wanted to make a film and through various influences I became the casting director. It seems kind of silly now but living in London at the time, before there was the internet, it seemed kind of cóol. So anyway we thought about casting and we wanted a few stars so maybe Richard Harris could play a part? And he was acting in a play in one of the West End theatres of London at the moment so I could drop off a script at the stage door.

So wearing my best suit one evening I first of all saw the play that Richard Harris was starring in. Then after the play had finished I went to the stage door of the theatre and spoke to the stage doorman. I expected to drop off the script and then leave but the stage doorman took the script, said to me “please wait a moment” and then disappeared into the theatre. When he returned a few moments later the script was gone and The doorman said “Mr Harris will see you now” and then gave me directions to Richard Harris’s dressing room. Slightly bemused I stepped into the theatre and followed the directions.

And there I was in Richard Harris's dressing room, with Richard sitting down amongst maybe three or four other people. As I entered he looked up, smiled, and said to me “sit down and make yourself comfortable”. So I did just that. Richard Harris then regaled us for about an hour with stories. At the end he looked at me and said “I’ll read your script, what's the part you’d like me to play?” I answered and then he said “come back tomorrow and I'll give you my decision.”.

So I had a fairly sleepless night and I remembered that Richard had talked about one of his young relatives a lot, so I thought I’d leave him a present for her. I remember because I had an old signed copy of Alice in Wonderland so I thought that would be a good present. But rather than give it to Mr Harris directly I left it at the hotel that I’d found out he was staying at.

In the evening I was at the stage door again after the performance and this time the stage doorkeeper recognised me and said “I trust you remember the may to Mr. Harris's dressing room?” I nodded and the stage doorkeeper said “then go straight in”. So for the second time in two days I was in Richard Harris's dressing room.

Again I had to wait until the end before Richard got to me. But this time he let everyone else leave before he got to me. “I’ve now read your script” he said, “but I won't be taking the part.”

“I agree, it's not a good script” I responded.

He handed the script back to me then looked into my eyes and said “but I think you’ll go far”.

Then the meeting was over and I left.

Well, so far I haven't done much, only got drunk with bankers a lot and been very lonely most of the time. Although I do now have Precious the cat. A wild cat who sat on my lap as a kitten and has adopted me. We’ve been together over 2 years now.

It’s now 2am and I need to do something on my main computer.

Precious wasn't very happy about me trying to use my computer when I ought to be in bed asleep and we had a bit of a falling out but he was waiting for me to feed him in the morning so I think we have made up.

Have I said yet that I spent almost two years attending a part time drama school? Oh and I left before the end of the course but then became a trustee of the school. Talking about schools, back when I was a youngster I attended the same school as the great Ian McKellen although years after him.

Oh and I’ve just sent a tweet to Elon Musk to maybe resolve the disabled status on what used to be Twitter, although I doubt he’ll read it. Elon Musk is now the richest person on the planet. He may even become the world's first trillionaire in dollars shortly. Though what he’s going to do with his money I have no idea.

Perhaps Musk will buy a motorbike or maybe a company that builds motorbikes… Musk has wrecked Twitter and I would now recommend Bluesky

https://bsky.app

 which is shaping up to be like Twitter was before it was wrecked. I think it could do with a better name though.

But anyway, how am I? I’m okay but fed up with the stoma that takes about two hours of my day just looking after it. If I had the money I’d have an operation to remove it and use my anus again. But I don't have the money so I just live with it until I die.

Sigh, that previous sentence was very depressing, there is a lot of life in me yet so I think there will be interesting things that I don't know about that will happen to me.

And another fabulously wealthy person is found to be a sod but as usual only after they are dead. I won't name anyone as then there is no liability issue any anyway the richest massive sods in my time are probably different from yours.

Perhaps I should just take a daily walk but the weather at the moment is rotten, however when it's sunny it's usually too hot.

I’m not sure if this is possible until I’ve tried it but can I have videos in my book? (Suddenly expecting a long and tedious day),

Hmm, the quick answer is that you can’t currently have a video in a Google Doc. The slightly longer answer is that there are a number of ‘hacks’ or addons that you could use but I actually don’t need a video anyway I was just interested to know if it was possible. In fact I’m relieved that you can't have a video in a standard Google Doc. Books should be read and pictures looked at. If I had videos it would be one item that couldn't make it into a traditional book. And now I need to document some of my life except I don't know where I’m up to. Might have to read everything that I’ve already written (again).

I don't think I’ve written about my time working at Woolworths, not in a retail store but at their head office. A big building on the Euston road in London and the department I worked in was on the top floor.

As an off-topic side note I’m fed up with slight rain or even just heavy clouds preventing me from receiving BBC channels via satellite. All is however not lost as there is always the internet but it does take a bit of work to access.

I worked as a contractor at a lot of big companies. One of the companies I remember most is American Express whose head office is in Brighton. Working there for a month I spent the week in Brighton staying at a hotel and then went home to London at the weekend.

I’m going to the hospital in Limoges again tomorrow but only for a day visit to have my eyes looked at, not that they can do anything but I suppose it’s some sort of job for some people.

And when I haven't had any sleep as the taxi should pick me up at about 8am, well…

The taxi didn't come so I missed the appointment at CHU and nobody contacted me so perhaps I don't exist. But for the time being I’ll assume that I do exist and that I have messed up somehow. Oh and today I found out that you can't change Google's translation output to male. Well not without some hacks that is. I haven't tried out the hacks I’ll just have to learn how to do Goggles translate output in my own voice.

Of course the best way is not to make a French phone call at all but instead get a French person to do it, and voila!

Yesterday there was such a storm that there was a power cut in mid-afternoon. The power came on again shortly before it got dark but there were two small outages after it got dark. It made watching TV very difficult so I went to bed early.

The days when I was writing this on a Nexus 7 are long gone as I broke it permanently quite a while ago. However I still write most of this on an Android tablet, only one that I bought last Christmas and it's much better than my old Nexus.

Now today, if all goes to plan, I should receive a new television, bought from Amazon on Monday. But I have to give a secret code to the deliverer first and the code is… 461 940… I think… but I might have to say it in French or perhaps the deliverer will just plonk it down and drive off…

Well the deliverer asked for the code as he was coming up the path and I had it written in large digits on a bit of paper so I handed it to him, he keyed the code into some sort of small electronic device and everything was fine. So I’m now watching a new TV which is much better than the old one. Of course a new TV causes minor problems, there is a new remote for the TV and although I might eventually enable it on my universal remote at the moment a lot of things need different key presses on my new remote. Life is so complicated.

Oh and my new TV has a lot of extras, it's basically an android computer with 3 hdmi slots that I can connect my TV inputs to and it has an awful lot of extras that I haven't looked into yet. It has a modern TV browser but I accidentally and unintentionally turned off JavaScript for the TV browser and so pages would load but most wouldn't work properly. JavaScript now turned on again after about 2 hours of wondering what had happened. I'm now going to try loading a special program which means some programs think I'm in the UK… hmm will it work?

Well it does work but I only need it if the weather is so bad that I can't receive UK satellite signals as that only happens now and then. So now I can watch movies from the internet on my new TV, luxury!

Of course, I have to be a bit careful with my new TV, lots of programs want to extract a payment for stuff, but they are not getting any more money from me!

TV which does internet is a new thing for me, although the interface is rather clunky but maybe I can enable my keyboard somehow then that would be rather good. Well, I enabled my tablet keyboard talking to my new TV pretty quickly and it's much better for typing than trying to use the remote, sorted!

Oh dear, my new TV went on the blink today and for a while I didn't know what to do as even after several restarts it was still on the blink. Then I remembered that I’d enabled ‘developer options’ once I turned them off everything was okay.

So developer options makes the TV not work, that's not good, in fact it's terrible. But on the whole my new TV is great but it's a bit bizarre to have a TV which does internet.

A lot of things on the internet these days, iPlayer from the BBC is good but I only need it if the satellite signal is obscured by heavy clouds or rain. While I don't know for certain but I think my new TV might pick up a lower signal from my satellite box.

Anyway, nice weather on the 31st of October, Halloween (a ceremony imported from the USA) so I don't have to worry about clouds today.

And now it's November, another month and I find I’m able to spend a small bit of money online which I wasn't able to spend the day before or the day before that because (and I am assuming here but I’m pretty sure that I’m correct) I purchased a new TV online last month there was some limit I’d passed that my bank wouldn't let me spend any more online in the month of October.

Since I now have a Google TV and it shows up in my android home app might be able to make some voice commands to work… possibly… although it's probably easier just to use the remote, but where's the fun in that?

Another day and I’ve learnt how to turn my new TV off and on via voice but I think I can do much more. Can I choose what input of the TV to use? So no more progress on the use of voice on my new TV except there is a button on the new TV remote which. If I hold it down I can use a lot of voice commands on my TV but as I have to hold a button on the remote it's easier just to use the other buttons on the remote.oh and today in the voting on the USA presidential election. If Donald Trump somehow becomes President again the world is in big trouble.

And the world IS in big trouble… Everything has a time and is then lost and forgotten, what is important at some time is then irrelevant at another. Did Russia have any influence in the USA presidential election? No one in the media has mentioned it as yet but perhaps there may come a time…

It's at times like this that I think the world might have been very grateful if the person who attempted to shoot Donald Trump had just been a little more accurate when he fired. But what happened is in the past and can’t be changed, well unless everything is a dream and I’ll wake up one day.

But it isn't a dream, or at least, if it is, it's a very realistic and depressing one. Sometimes I think I’m the only living thing and all of this is just a way to try to keep myself entertained. Of course, that very probably isn't the reality but it's actually very difficult to prove that anything else actually exists in reality.

Precious the cat, who saved me mainly I suppose so I can feed him, although he keeps me warm frequently sitting on my lap like a mobile hot water bottle.

Oh and I’ve now got a shawl which can be slightly heated as long as there is some charge on the rechargeable battery thing. Although when I bought it there was no battery. I complained to the retailer and they sent me another one which also didn't have a battery! I gave up complaining and just bought a rechargeable battery then gave the other shawl away.

It's a warm (well slightly warm as it's the middle of November) day in this bit of France today and I might go for a bit of a walk while the weather is nice.

Or not, the walk never happened principally because I got into watching something on television. A TV series that is only on French TV but I can select an English soundtrack as it was made in the USA. ‘The Rookie’ a TV series about a man in his forties who joins the police force in Los Angeles.

Perhaps I might try riding my bicycle again. But not today as it's raining and cold. The wicked weather caused the electricity to go off this afternoon and it only came back on just before dark. The major trouble with having a power cut is that when it comes back on a lot of settings need to be redone, especially setting clocks correctly.

Another day another set of clouds but it's a trifle warmer and at the moment (lunchtime) it's not raining but rain may be on the way or not, it just depends.

I feel that the Earth is not happy with us humans and wants rid of us. Some time in the future it will happen, everything has an end, but not now.

Rain and then more rain, the weather is not good at the moment. But the weather changes and one day on there is a bit of sun. Only a bit but at least the heavy rain and wind has stopped.

I think it's kind of strange now that I once lived in London and the head office of the first company I worked for was in Chelsea just one road away from the place where Margaret Thatcher had her London private residence.

But everything changes and I now live in France and am very grateful that I don't live in England anymore. Not only is the weather better here but the economy is in reasonable shape unlike the UK.

And I'm a big fan of heated fleeces, that is a fleece and has warming elements worked via a battery. So now I can be warm even if my house is cold. But of course only if the battery for the fleece has some charge left. When the battery is flat… Perhaps it would be good to get an extra battery…

Now the BBC has had to change some of its shows this Christmas as another presenter has been named as a sexual predator. Reality is a bastard sometimes. But at least my new TV is very good and it was a bargain at less than €250.

I can now have 3 programmes on the go since the new TV has its own items downloaded or rather streamed via the internet, so much in fact that I get a bit nonplussed now forgetting which device the programme I want to watch is playing on. But it's better to have too many devices than not enough.

And Precious the cat is my best friend, keeping me warm with his body when it's cold. If you think cats are always warm when they sit on your lap they are because their body temperature is slightly higher than humans.

One of the worst nights I had was at University when for some reason a group of us hired a minibus to go on a drunken pub crawl but I was the driver. So I stayed sober whilst the other 15 people on the bus got very drunk. One person even got so drunk he tried to climb onto the roof through a window while I was driving. I had to stop and say to him firmly that if he didn't stay properly seated he would be walking back.

Changing topic again today is the Strictly Come Dancing final in the UK and even though I’m in France I can watch English TV via satellite so I’m looking forward to it. Of course the weather needs to be good for the satellite channels to work and there was a bit of rain last night, but I was able to watch most of the final and was very glad that the blind contestant won.

So now it's another week and there are only 9 days until Christmas, not that Christmas really means anything to me although I did get an extra €50 as a present. Of course Christ wasn't really born at Christmas, nobody knows really when he was born but as midwinter in the past in the most advanced countries was dark and potentially freezing a festival was very welcome.

Now I’m having trouble with my phone, the cable that charges the phone won't stay in and so unless I hold the charging cable in the phone doesn't charge. But that's sort of okay now.

I'm going to the supermarket today for the things I’ll have for Christmas, not sure what I’ll get but perhaps a box of chocolates and a bottle of brandy.

I returned from the supermarket with food, a box of Quality Street and a bottle of Armagnac (which is like cognac but from another area of France) for Christmas.

Oh and I took delivery of a heated tunic which is way too small but didn't include a battery. In fairness to the website the page I ordered from did say that they didn't include a battery but I missed that.

On Christmas day this year I think I might have burger chips and peas, it's good to break tradition.

Of course now it's actually Christmas Day I might just drink a lot and leave the cooking until another day.

Writing is talking to oneself, how very true.

A sunny if cold day today, my bin hasn’t been emptied so I might recover it although now I don't know when it will be emptied again, but maybe on Monday or Tuesday next week.

But it's the week between Christmas and New Year so a lot of people aren't quite sure what is going on or even what day it is. For instance today is actually Sunday but one television channel just broadcast a Saturday morning show which actually has Saturday as part of its title!

But now today is a foggy Monday with only two days of the year left. Cold but not raining, although there is a bit of a damp chill in the air.

New Year's Eve and I did nothing but watch the television, but I did have two New Years, one in France where I live and the another in the UK on the English television channels.

So today is 2025 in some countries although I think China still has a different calendar. But life gets back to dull and normal now with Christmas and New Year now almost another year away.

So today is the first Saturday of the new year and I don't know what I’m going to do except do some washing as my stoma gets things dirty rather quickly. But I have hope, not sure what I hope but it's much better than no hope. Hahaha, I think that last sentence was a go at comedy so you dear absent reader probably know why my comedy career stalled.

There is an awful lot of bad television broadcast these days. I turned off two programmes today. I think I’ll recall the day I rescued a young owl from my chimney. I’ve just spent at least an hour trying to find pictures that I took after I rescued the young owl but at the moment I can't find any of them, sigh. However I remember that the owl would fly around and sit on a nearby roof for several days afterwards and I like to think that the owl knew that I was kind to it. And I’m disgusted by my storage of photos. I have such a lot of folders in so many different hard disks, that I, as a supposed computer scientist, am flabbergasted.

Movie stars don't die early in a movie expect… when one of them occasionally does it's a big shock, until of course it's been on release for a day or two and it's all around the internet.

Well, I didn't know what to write today so I looked through some of my previous works (all unpublished and unfinished). But I might have been a good novelist had I put my mind to it but I didn't, anything for an easy life. Hahaha, well that last sentence was a bit depressing, but my life is what it is. Perhaps I can tell a joke? But what sort of joke works in a probably never to be published novel? And what makes you, dear anonymous reader, laugh? Anyway that doesn't matter, reading the last sentence is the joke.

I think I’ve missed at least one day now, possibly two, primarily because I don't know what this book is any more. Perhaps I should just turn it into a novel, unfinished of course. But I won't, all of this book is true as far as I know and my memory remembers, but I have no idea what I’ll write except that I will write something.

And to illustrate the point this is one day after the day I wrote the previous sentence and here's another one! Hahaha. My continuous problem these days is that I have a stoma. Surgery has given me a bit of my intestines on the outside just above my left waist and I don't use my anus anymore instead waste comes out through the stoma and there is no muscle to regulate the waste, it just comes out when it's ready so I have to wear a bag on the stoma to collect the waste. About 2 hours of my day is now about dealing with the stoma. I hate it.  

Anyway the mad Donald Trump is now President of America again so the world is in chaos once more. I don't understand how anyone in their right mind could vote for Trump as he lets mad people out of prison.

I think it's time for another picture but I’ve forgotten all the things I have to do to actually get a picture into my manuscript. If it works this will be a picture of my time at Exeter University in my final year when I was President of my hall of residence.

Well adding the picture is very simple apart from the fact that all the existing images get renamed which to my mind is the wrong way around.

Today I learnt how to reboot my new TV (which is actually a dedicated computer ) I simply have to hold down the power off button for at least 5 seconds then they said next time I turn it on (via the remote as there aren't any buttons on the TV itself) it does a reboot. And a reboot is needed every week or so the TV stops responding to the remote.

And I’ve broken my decent tablet so I’m writing this on an old and knackered one but at least it works. My newer tablet got dropped on the floor and it cracked the screen but more problematic is that the newer tablet wouldn't respond to any presses on the screen. Anyway Sarah has given me a bit of extra money so I am getting a new tablet.

And just checking that my keyboard (which I actually rarely use) still works and it does, but it's usually quicker to type on the screen as using the keyboard you have to type complete words, no auto completion using the keyboard!

Perhaps I should have a swim, only there is no swimming pool around here, unless it doesn't stop raining… I remember that when I first learnt to swim I swam underwater to begin with because I found it easier, that's until I needed to breathe!

I received my new tablet today and it's pathetic. I am looking to return it and get a refund oh but the refund page is blank, perfect if the company doesn't want to do a refund. I think that the company should be sued. Of course it won't be and I'm beginning to doubt if I'll even get my money back. I'm beginning to think that the company is deliberately crooked. And using an android app called Devcheck I've discovered that the android on the device is only version 7 so this device has been illegally updated to android 13 and it doesn't work correctly.

So I've missed a couple of days writing anything but today I should be getting a new android tablet which works correctly and efficiently although I won't actually know until the tablet arrives and I've had some time with it installing the programs I need and like.

Hmm, well my new tablet has arrived and is a lot better than the previous one but still not as good as my broken tablet. I so wish that I hadn't broken it, but I did so that's that.

But at least using Google apps keeps everything in the cloud so as long as I know my password everything is available because it's held somewhere in the cloud and I suspect multiple times in backups so that when something in the cloud fails everything is still safe.

Oh and I located the vendor of my broken tablet. It is Amazon and if I’d had a proper look around I could have brought a new tablet the same as my broken one, sigh, I might save up and buy that one in a few months… Although actually I’m not sure that it is the same. But whatever, I haven't got any money at the moment so I'll forget about it for now. Things change and I’m okay I think. Accept that my current tablet seems to not attach to my working WiFi sometimes. I’ve no idea why even though I’m a computer scientist. I may need to search the web.

I think I’ve solved the WiFi problem by defining a static IP address for the tablet along with the gateway. For diverse reasons I don't use the standard network addresses and my tablet was sometimes trying to use the wrong IP gateway. But now I’ve got all the relevant IP addresses on my tablet and, touch wood, it seems to be working.

Except yet again some programs are misbehaving. Perhaps I should just go back to pen and paper. Oh, but technology is fun! Er, isn’t it? Anyway I was never any good with pen and paper, always making mistakes so that the results were a sequence of crossing outs and corrections. Tying on a tablet has many advantages. For instance there are no corrections, if you don't like a paragraph you can simply replace it and the old paragraph is gone, er except if you go through the edits because in technology things are rarely forgotten, they just don't get displayed.

But ultimately everything is forgotten, it might be a few million years but nothing lasts forever, even Shakespeare.

For some reason I ‘m getting a load of spam calls over the past few days. I don't answer any of them but I’m annoyed that my phone keeps ringing.

Yet again Donald Trump is treated differently, as Starmer announced yesterday that Trump is going to get a second State visit to the UK. But after Trump’s appalling treatment of President Zelensky from Ukraine I and many other people think the state visit for Trump should be withdrawn.

Sometimes I don't know who to listen to on my Google speaker, but I think I’ve solved the difficulty. There is a directory of songs on my main computer. I can just open the directory and pick an artist from the list.

At the moment there is a programme on TV about people taking medicinal drugs incorrectly. I don't like drugs of any format. I remember when I was in hospital last year I was drip fed with medicine for a few weeks and wasn't allowed to eat or drink anything. I had to sneak sips of water just to moisturise my mouth a little. It was terrible.

I just ordered another set of glasses today since my current ones aren't photochromic and when I bought them I thought that they were.

It's another sunny day today and now a little bit hot but it's still only March. I suspect this year is going to be another record hot one. I don't particularly like hot weather, I prefer it mildly warm.

I don't want to turn this document into a record of the weather but today it's raining so I’m staying in.

I receive UK TV via satellite and it's usually very good expectations when it's rainy as the rain interferes with the satellite signal but I now receive French TV via the internet and there are a few English channels too. A lot of the programmes are made in English but have French dialogue by default however a lot of the programmes can have the original soundtrack instead it just takes a few clicks on the remote. I do wish that to set original dialogue as the default was an option in the settings but as yet it isn't. I hate somebody else doing the dialogue and I’d rather watch a foreign programme with subtitles rather than have a nobody try (and usually fail) to sort of lip sync the dialogue in English. But the French seem to like lip syncing either that or they don't know.

But today it's raining and when it rains the reception I can get on English television is affected. Oh well, it doesn't rain all the time. Besides, I ‘ve got such a lot of programmes recorded now that there is always something to watch. Anyway I have a 1Gb DSL internet line these days and my French TV is actually provided via the internet.

I have a new mouse now for my main computer and it works although I'm a bit miffed that it takes two AAA batteries rather than AA ones which my previous mouse did. I have 4 rechargeable AA batteries but have no rechargeable AAA ones, oh well another thing to add to my wishlist. I'm disappointed at the new glasses though as they don't have clear vision.

Anyway it appears that the intermarche sells rechargeable AAA batteries so I just have to make the batteries I have in the new mouse now have to last until the next shopping day in 10 days time. Maybe soon Ian will be able to take me again, but I don't know for now.

Although it's not yet Spring the days are now longer than the nights, even if only by a few seconds.

I seem to be getting a lot of spam calls and text messages these days. I thought at first that it was because I was given the phone as second hand but of course it's not that because the number changed when I put my SIM in. So there are just many spammers targeting the French mobile market, but the spammers won't get a penny out of me.

Now lots of TV people are doing silly things to try and raise some money for charities. I actually hate these days, most poverty and disruption is caused by a few very rich people not playing fair with the masses.

A fire at an electricity substation yesterday caused Heathrow airport to shut down for the day. Such is life.

I’m a bit miffed that when I opened the new package from Temu that I’ve received some dork had stuck instructions for my new shawl onto the outside and even though I’ve tried to remove it bits of it still remain and it makes my new shawl a bit shoddy. Someone needs to be fired. But perhaps they already have been, but I’ll never know one way or the other. Just to fly out to the factory would cost me more money than I have.

So, it's now Wednesday and the Prime Minister’s questions just ended for this week. Such a lot of talk but nothing much said.

Every other Thursday at the moment I go shopping and someone comes to help me. It's usually a different person that I haven't met before. Today I greatly enjoyed the person who came, I thought that we got on very well.

But I’m on my own again apart from another cat, who's a little bit undernourished and gratefully ate some of the food I put out. I seem to attract cats I always have. Dogs no, but cats, I’ve had many cat friends so far in my life but I haven't ever bought one, they just come to me and stay around for a time and then move on, except for Precious who has been with me since he was a kitten, has fathered five kittens himself and I would be very sad now if he left me.

Oh and my new glasses broke after less than a week but they weren't what I wanted anyway. Before the glasses actually broke I’d left a lacklustre review on the seller’s website. I now wish the glasses had broken before I’d left the review because then it would have been damning. The site would probably have given me a refund if I returned them but returning them would be more trouble than they are worth.

Oh well, it's another sunny day today, but it will rain tomorrow, I know for certain because it's already tomorrow although as I write this it's always today, erm, this paragraph deserves a cut.

As does this paragraph as I knew what I was going to write for this paragraph yesterday but now it's today I’ve forgotten, sigh. Just as well that nobody is ever likely to read this.

Since I can't think what to write I think it's time for another picture. Including pictures is simple but I keep forgetting how to do it…

Hmm, I think I have to add a picture on my other device where I actually have some pictures or I suppose I could take a picture now on this device, but then I’d have to think what to take a picture of…

Oh and I’m having problems with my local version of Apache now, but I got that sorted after nearly borking my main computer.

The UK apparently has a bit of a problem with ‘smart meters’. I’ve had one for years and never had any problem with it, although now I’ve written that I’d better keep a sharp lookout on it.

Oh but I’d bet French smart meters are a good deal better than English ones although I have no evidence. Some products that I’ve bought from China are now on their way here.

Anyway now I can get a picture… hmm which one…

A French road about 2 miles from my house.

I have a suspicion that Google has changed the numbering of images in Docs so that you don't have to include all the images again if you've just included a new one as I’m almost certain that I had to include all the existing images again as they had previously had all their numbers changed. Anyway it seems simpler now to include a new image, but I don't want this document to be a lot of images compared to the text, so no more pictures until I’ve written at least another 10 pages.

I think I’ll write about the famous people who I’ve met. I’ve already mentioned Richard Harris and Ian McKellen but as I went to drama school I’ve met a few other famous people as well. However the most interesting thing was when I was sitting in a pub in the East End of London on my own. Someone came up and said to me if it was okay if he sat in the chair next to me. Of course I said yes and he then sat down. He was a pretty famous actor from a TV series playing then. I recognised him straight away but then tried to continue reading my book. I didn't actually read anything more but slowly finished my pint then got up and left. I have no idea if the pub is still there, a lot of pubs have closed since then.

Of course as I went to a small drama school in East London on the Whitechapel road I met a number of people who are actors and I recognised most as being on television at some time or other. I installed a computer at the school and in return they made me a trustee of the charity that ran the school.

But maybe the most unusual actor that I saw was Jeff Goldblum who I saw sitting by himself on a stool leaning on the bar at one of the local pubs. I found out later that at the time he was going out with one of the barmaids working in the pub. Ah well, all in time gone bye.

So, today I wanted to remember which fuse switch was what room but I thought I’d remembered the fuse switches for the kitchen and bedroom because I didn't want to turn those off. Well I remembered the kitchen switch correctly but not the bedroom one and by turning that one off even if only for a few seconds I disrupted the internet, sigh. I think everything is back on correctly now but I wait for something to go wrong…

Well, I survived and nothing has gone wrong, yet…

I always remember a work lunçh in the canteen many, many years ago. A woman who I had a bit of a crush on came up to the table with some lunch and sat down. The table was now full. Julie, who had just joined, started a conversation, but her first sentence was “has anyone else ever tried anal sex?” Nobody answered and I think Julie said something like “I have, I think you should try everything at least once.” Then I think some other woman at the table changed the subject with some comments on the lunch today.

Sigh, I had a really good idea of what to write today but that was about two hours ago and of course I’ve forgotten the idea now. Then I thought of another topic, but looking back over what I’ve already written I’d already done it. Look back over how to put on a duvet cover easily….

I’m going to get a new LNB for my satellite because I think my existing one is broken in some form or another though I don't know what the problem is because I can receive most channels, only a few are unavailable.

Now I’ve never run a marathon and I never will. I’m not particularly lively, partly due I think to the slight paralysis that I have all down my left side. Very slight, for instance I can’t wiggle my left toes. My left side works but not particularly well. I think that's because of a slight injury to the right side of my brain as the right side of one's brain controls the left side of the body.

I want a moment to say that Donald Trump ought to be in prison, not President of the USA. I think something will happen to him soon as he's a loony and behaving like one. But as the new vice-president is deranged too things don't look too good.

Okay I’ve ordered the new LNB and it's been shipped and is on it's way but as it's coming from China it will take a will to get here and although (many, many years ago) I put the satellite dish up myself I’m not sure now how to replace an LNB, but with the internet I’m sure I can find some advice. I’ve had a look and plenty of advice but every article that I’ve looked at so far have had different ways of attaching an LNB from mine, oh well, I’ll see when I receive it.

It's a strange life for me at the moment, I wonder what will come next? Ah well, I’ve got Precious the cat to keep me company and even a timid new cat visits me sometimes now. If only I wrote things down whenever I think of a good thing to include but alas I don't and another good idea gets lost in my mind for now.

Last night there was a thunderstorm and a lightning strike hit very close to my home causing the electricity to go off. At my home, being in the countryside the electricity goes off quite often. It usually comes back within 5 minutes or so. But this time it didn't come back on. So I had no electricity for about two hours and decided to check my fuse box, but all the fuse switches were on. I sat down again. It began to get dark and then the street light switched on. Normally if there is a power cut the street light is affected too. I took another look at the meter and fuse box.This time I noticed that the main fuse switch was off. I turned it on and I had power again. Oh well a lesson in how to read the switches correctly I guess. Presumably the lightning strike hit the electricity cable in some form and the main switch turned itself off presumably to protect my equipment in some way.

Now I’ve fitted my new LNB and it's very good. I expect I’ll be dead before I have to fit another one. But that's life or rather death. Hahaha even my new thin wireless receiver is working so at the moment I don't have to plug in my phone to recharge it I just have to put it in a specific place.

A brilliant film gets remade until even the actors are bored. Oh well it's something to do I suppose. But there are so many films that really shouldn't get made. If even the actors are bored then you can be certain that the film is not very good.

The washing machine is a big part of my life now as I have some washing to do every two or three days now, principally because my stoma discharges whenever, especially during the night when I’m asleep and the bag regularly doesn't catch everything. But my life, whatever it is, is certainly a lot easier than a lot of people throughout the world.

When I was on summer holiday at the age between 7 and 17 I went with my family to the republic of Ireland where my father bought a house.

It's a bank holiday in the UK today and in Gloucestershire there is a bizarre competition where people follow a cheese down a steep hill. I don't think the cheese will taste very good at the finish.

Apart from Christmas and New Year almost all public holidays are on the nearest Monday to the actual date but in France public holidays are still on the actual day that the date recalls. I wish I spoke better French but I’ve always had a difficulty with speaking languages other than English, also I’m upset with Google's error checking when it gets things wrong.

There is a thing on TV at the moment about modern ‘smart keys’ for cars and how it is so easy for a person to steal them. The topic ended with the observation that a good quality but ancient steering lock was one solution to the problem. But as I don't have a car, new or old, it's not my problem.

It’s odd that Google docs on android doesn't have a button to go to the end of a document as it always opens a doc at the start but if, as I’m doing now, additional text almost always needs to go at the end. However, all is not lost! All you need to do is at the end of the document put something in a different style and then you can move to the end merely by clicking the document outline button and as long as the thing you've put at the end has a unique style it's easy. But someone at Google ought to change the program slightly and put in a ‘move to the end of the document’ button since it's very easy.

I had a horrible moment today when my main computer wouldn’t boot. At the moment I’m running Ubuntu 22.04 as the operating system and if you press ESC repeatedly when the computer is trying to boot you get a menu where one of the options is recovery mode. I chose that, the computer downloaded a few files then everything was fixed. Not something I want to go through again although I now know how to solve it.

So now it's supermarket shopping day and I have to think about all the things that I need.

With my monthly money this week I’ve bought a new outdoor chair and table. I hope the weather is good enough for me to use them although it will be a few weeks before I get them. It turns out that the new outdoor furniture I’ve bought will be shipped by land and sea rather than by air freight so they will take a lot longer to arrive than normal. Oh well as long as they actually arrive sometime that will be very good.

So it's summer and today it's fairly clear and warm, but I'm not looking forward to the next few months as I think it might get very hot. I wrote the previous sentence yesterday and today it is already very hot. A TV programme about the vastly decreased ice in the Antarctic has made me worried, but I expect that I’ll be dead long before the world actually burns. Although if Donald Trump has his way he might try to get USA citizens to start some fires…

Now Israel has bombed Iran and it feels as if WW3 is that little bit closer. It seems to me that the right-wing Israeli government has lost all perspective of what is right.

Yesterday there was no electricity for a while in the afternoon and it went off and on again several times before it finally stayed on. The on and off thing was so complex that it messed up my automatic lights that I control via voice and I had to spend about 2 hours setting them up again.

Oh and when you make a mistake in a Google doc the correction can be simple but it can be quite complex as I just discovered!

I might just have discovered how to write a best-selling book, the secret is…

Oh dear, my secret hasn't worked, so no point in telling it to you because I’m probably the only person who will ever read this. But if you really want to know…

Sigh, today I’ve had to deal with a splurge of fluid almost jetting out of my stoma. I literally don't understand how sometimes the fluid is quite thick and stodgy and other times it is very fluid. It's not directly caused by what I’ve eaten since I generally have the same breakfast but I’m never sure what consistency the fluid will be. And after that sorry mention of bodily fluids I’m going to brighten the mood with this thing on Twitter that I found today:

https://x.com/i/status/1935317498485747954

Yes, cats are very clever and adventurous although the cat I’m friends with doesn't appear to be. He just sits on my lap a lot and purrs.

It’s very, very hot today, so hot that I was unable to sleep last night and sleep tonight isn’t looking good.

Now President Trump bombs Iran and WW3 becomes ever closer. Oh well, I'm watching something on television at the moment about someone who lives on a canal boat and I remember briefly thinking about buying a canal boat but instead I bought a property in France.

I think now that buying a property in France was the right move. Now as I get a bit older I find it very nice to live in France and not the sorry UK.

Perhaps I should give this book a title now rather than ‘The Book’ but I don't know what to call it so that's a bit of a problem. Maybe I should just give it a nonsensical title such as ‘The Spicy Pineapple’...

But at the moment it's still called ‘The Book’ because I can't be bothered to change it and if I did I’d probably forget to change something vital and everything would go tits up.

It's very, very hot at the moment, so hot that I don't want to do anything. It's nearly July but the temperature should only be like this for a few days in late August. I think the Earth is trying to get rid of us. I want a cold shower. Oh and the very hot weather affecting my English TV reception, the very hot weather adds to the noise and so as the day warms up my reception gets worse. But at least I can watch lots of channels that have zero interest for me, sigh.

The very hot weather is still here and although it should only last a few more days I’m so tired and worn out as I haven't been sleeping well. Oh and my stoma decided to spurt out a lot of liquid that went all over a lot of stuff. I hate my stoma.

Now I’m watching some french television in the morning as one of the programmes has decided instead of being a studio format they would do everything from the seaside and they are currently on a beach. Very nice work for the presenters although I imagine it's very difficult for the technicians. I’ve discovered that it's the last episode of the current series so I’ll miss it for a while.

The Tour De France 2025 started yesterday in my time, and I’ll just echo that watching it on television is much better than watching it live, particularly when it's raining. One of the reasons I like to watch it is simply because of the helicopter shots of the usually very impressive countryside.

I used to ride my bicycle a lot but since I got out of hospital I’ve only ridden my bicycle a couple of times. Perhaps I should turn this book into a detective novel? But no that's not going to happen because I’d basically have to delete everything and start again. Now a new heatwave is building up as the Earth turns its back on humans. It's so hot today and at the moment it's only 10am.

So a fly decided to drown itself in my lunchtime soup today. That was very annoying but I wasn't going to abandon my soup although I had some trouble getting the drowned fly out.

But flies will soon have a new difficulty which should kill most of them. But it's now a public holiday in France so nothing will be delivered today.

Perhaps I should have been an airline pilot. Pilots are very well paid but it is after much training. However as I already have a civilian pilot's licence I think training might have been simpler. However I am much too old now.

Perhaps I should have been an accountant like my father and as a small boy I did once say I would be but accountants are a bit too dull, much better to be a computer programmer!

Anyway if things go as planned the pesky flies might have met their match today. But I suspect there will be some difficulty as there usually is. Even though the flies have died a lot there are still some more. But I will win in the end!

Well the tennis fly catcher works but. I’m a bit concerned about the heat generated while it's charging. I don't know what sort of battery the thing uses but if they are lithium then they might catch fire so I’ll only charge it when I’m in the same room.

I’ve had to order another tub for the sink because my current one has sprung a leak. The new tub hasn't arrived yet and it cost over 11 euros so I hope it arrives soon.

Yeah, my new tub has arrived and is now in use. It's a little bit smaller in terms of height than the old one but it will do and might actually be a benefit as it uses slightly less water.

Now Google has ‘updated’ it's nest software and a lot of my stuff doesn't work correctly anymore. An update that breaks things isn't really an update.

Yesterday, the Tour De France visited Courchevel which is in the French Alps very close to Meribel where I spent a season working many years ago. I went to Courchevel many times but there was nothing I recognised so many years later plus it's summer so there was no snow!

Oh and everything is working again on the Nest front as Google has updated or more likely backtracked the update which messed up my things.

So.the Tour De France 2025 ends today and also the England women's football team play the final to the Euro competition. As both things are on at the same time I might keep switching TV channels.

Well, the English women won the Euro competition but it went to penalties. Hannah Hampton as the English goalkeeper was magnificent and saved enough to assure victory. It seems to me that when women play football the play is a lot cleaner than when men play. It may just be my imagination but I think it isn't.

There has been a big earthquake near Japan and now that area is waiting for a big tsunami.

So today I might be buying a new, well second-hand, sofa. But I won't be getting a shower as it is too expensive. Perhaps I might fit one myself…

Well the new sofa was very cheap, only 70 euros and 10 euros for delivery, but it has yet to be delivered. Will it be the right one, the one that I choose? I’m a bit suspicious, until it's actually in my home.

I only found out today that there is a women's Tour De France but as it doesn't get on television much I was previously unaware of its existence. The women's version is only 8 stages so it only lasts a week and doesn't have any rest days. Since I discovered it on the last day this year I’ll have to wait until next year for most of it, that's if I live for another year. I fully intend to but who knows what fate may have in store for me.

Anyway I've ordered some more things from the internet today including a litter picker which I think might be useful for getting things if I’m sitting down without getting up. But my hope is often dashed by reality.

Meanwhile some other things I’ve ordered over the internet should be arriving soon.

It's very hot again, so hot that I don't want to do anything except sit in a cold room except none of my rooms are cold now.

Even hotter today, sunny and very hot. I think I prefer winter.

The current UK government is making a lot of mistakes at the moment and some of the ministers on breakfast television seem to not know what is going on.

Something about the extreme heat is getting me very down. Perhaps I should go for a walk.

When I start the washing machine I usually think of something I’ve forgotten just after I’ve pushed the start button, sigh.

Yesterday I was going to wash most of my shorts but that didn't come to pass. Oh and now I discover that the shorts I like the most are coming undone at the crotch because of broken stitches.

With all this heat I’m thinking about buying an air conditioner but I expect that if I get one the heat will be over for this year. Anyway I have ordered an air conditioner and in an attempt to get it swiftly I’ve ordered it from a French company. So all being well it should turn up sometime this week.

But I still haven't got my new (well second-hand) sofa and I’m beginning to get a bit irritated as it's now been over 2 weeks since I bought it. If it doesn't turn up sometime this week I may have to take some steps.

The thing with a mini air conditioner is where does the heat go? If it doesn't have any window thing then it's really just moving the heat around a bit.

Well it seems my mini air conditioner is really just a fan which sprays a fine mist and the mist rapidly evaporates thus cooling the air a little. I shall have to see if this works effectively. Oh and apparently the nozzles can get blocked. Of course that hasn't happened yet but I wonder how long that will take and if I will be able to deal with it effectively.

So I now have a different sofa. It's not the one that I chose and it's a 3 seater rather than a two seater which was my choice. But after the difficulty that the people installing it had I didn't want to upset them. But I find it a bit strange getting a different sofa. I assume someone somewhere is wondering what happened to it and a company that delivers the wrong thing is not a good company.

I now have a new fly killer but for some unknown reason this one has a timer and can switch itself off after 2, 4 or 6 hours. What idiot thought fitting a timer to this thing would be good? The only thing good about this purchase is that it looks sublime but as a useful thing it's junk.

Oh and I don't know how Nigel Farage got elected as an MP because he should be in prison not in parliament.

Anyway it's almost the end of a very hot summer and I'm thankful. If you're cold you can put some more clothes on but if you're too hot there's only a limited number of clothes you can take off.

Of course I have bought some new shorts just as the weather becomes colder, but there is always next year.

The shorts have arrived, 4 new ones all with cord around the waist. But the cords on all the new shorts are untied unlike the ones I bought before. So I have been researching knots. Of course the most efficient are also the easy ones to do.

There are a lot of people doing pointless things to, I don't know, get some achievement or set some pointless record, perhaps both. But maybe I’m just a curmudgeon if I could spell the word correctly. It only took me about 5 minutes to get the correct spelling.

Sigh, I don't know what to write again, but at least I’m writing something even if it is rubbish. I watched a film based on a Stephen King story last night but as usual the written word was much better.

There is something about this time of year that I like, it's not yet cold but you don't know exactly what the weather might be.

I am wondering, for no particular reason, whether to get a new mobile phone since my current phone doesn't support NFC. Not that I have any need for it, but shouldn't I have the latest version?

That last paragraph was ridiculous, of course I won't be changing my phone, which reminds me I left it upstairs, but nobody calls me anyway apart from spammers.

Apparently autumn is coming early this year. The lack of rain has made trees start to drop their leaves about three weeks before usual.

I may have said this before but Nigel Farage should be in prison not in parliament. But, sigh, he's on television this morning.

My dreams during sleep at night are often very vivid but as usual, when I wake up, they fade quickly away.

There are many things in life that I don't know about, I’ve never been to Australia for instance. In fact I’ve travelled very little. I get most of my information via television.

But I’m frequently bored by television. I should write a good book and become famous instead.

Another fatal shooting in the USA. Whatever you think about the human fatality, gun law in the USA is absurd.

Today has been a bit of a pain for me as the electricity went off at about 7pm yesterday and only came on again about two hours ago, about lunchtime. But a hundred and fifty years ago there wasn't generally available electricity so I suppose that I was only experiencing what life used to be like. One thing I’d definitely miss is my washing machine. If there was no electricity I’d have to wash everything by hand, not something I’d be happy with.

Oh well, I have power and a tablet and I’m writing this, or at least trying to. If it's not very good, well that's something for the editor.

I wish I spoke better French. Having lived in this country for about 15 years now you’d have probably thought that I’d be fluent, but with nobody to talk to apart from when I go to the supermarket it's been difficult. However when I was in hospital for four months I got to speak with many people so I think my French may have improved a bit.

Today I’m going to make a lasagne which will be quite large and should feed me for three or maybe four days. Well I nearly dropped the lasagna as I was taking it out of the oven and only saved it by getting lasagna all over my t-shirt. By the way, is it lasagna or lasagne? What's the difference? Well the answer is that in Italian, lasagna is the singular and lasagne the plural. So in the dish lasagne is probably the right word as there are several layers of lasagna. Is that all clear?

Well, three days on and I’m still eating my lasagne although this will be the last day. I won't make a loaf this time, so after the end of the lasagne it's ready meals until I go to the supermarket on Thursday. It's either chilli con carne or shepherd's pie, I’m not sure which to have first.

In the end it was the chilli, so it’s shepherd's pie today, plus a glass of wine of course!

Another day has gone, so it's supermarket today now, and I'm not sure if I've met the person who is going to take me before or not, but it might be clearer when I see her. It turns out that I hadn't met her before but she actually lives in Chateauponsac.

It seems that the British government wants to introduce an obligatory digital ID. It seems to me that this would be just another new government thing which costs a lot of money and doesn't do anything much.

The British Prime minister is being interviewed right now on the BBC and is doing the same thing that almost all MPs do, not answering the question that is asked but saying something else. It is very frustrating. Even if the person being interviewed wants to make a different point, a short sentence acknowledging the question is not difficult.

So, everybody dies. Some people have a fatal accident, some people live to be over a hundred, but everybody dies.

I wonder how manufacturing makes a zip? What are the various stages?

The big news item in Britain today is a BBC programme documenting the current unacceptable practices in the metropolitan police. Eleven police officers have been suspended.

I’ve come up with the potential for a new book which would be all about my Irish holidays in the summer and the purchase and renovation of a cottage (house really) in the south-western bit of the Irish republic. I’ve written a little bit of this earlier in this work but I think it probably needs a separate document to be honest.

So will this work continue? Yes, because I’m so entrenched in it now and I’ve got such a lot of things as yet untold that I will continue with this.

I am slightly annoyed that any criticism of Israel’s over-blown destruction of Gaza is regarded as anti-Semitism. Benjamin Netanyahu has to answer for his complete destruction of Gaza.

I spent a lot of summers in southern Ireland when I was young. I’ve been trying to remember where I went for my first holiday and I can't remember. I think it may have been somewhere in Waterford, maybe if I look at a detailed map I might remember. I’m uncertain whether any document on my Irish summer holidays will ever happen, I have problems even adding a little to this document every day.

So, there is now a ceasefire being implemented in the Middle East after two years of, I hesitate to use the word ‘war’ because after the tragic day on the 7th October when over a thousand Israelis were killed, there has just been a brutal destruction of Gaza by Israel. I don't believe in religion so I find it very hard to comprehend why a whole state can brutalize another state in this way.

But some humans are brutal. I sometimes think that the world would be a much better place if humans didn't exist. But we do, although sometimes I wonder why.

Now almost everyone is praising Donald Trump for his intervention in the Middle East. Although I have some doubt about whether the peace will last.

I don't understand people who are terrified of spiders. Spiders kill flies and weave intricate webs. They also have eight eyes. So I prefer spiders to flies. The only thing is the webs they leave behind.

It's now October and only just becoming light now although I’ve been up for over an hour. But at the end of the month the clocks go back an hour so for a while it will be light just after I get up.

I don't think a document on my holidays in Ireland is going to happen as I find it somewhat difficult to update this thing every day as it is. For instance, I nearly forgot to update this document today, even though I have a reminder which pops up on my tablet every day, but I'm usually doing something else when the reminder pops up so I acknowledge it and then continue with the thing I am doing. But I remembered to update this document today because the game I usually play on my tablet is unavailable whilst an upgrade is going on.

Updates, updates, there are too many and in my experience they often break things because they haven't been tested correctly.

When I was very young, just in my first job, I got a big raise when I solved a vital computer problem. I kept very quiet about the source of the problem though and I discovered that I’d caused it in the first place.

Oh well I might try taking a new passport photo today, as long as it doesn't rain, but rain is quite likely. Of course, I didn't take any new photographs. For one it did rain slightly and it usually takes about an hour with setting up the background and then remembering how to set up the phone camera correctly. I have about 2 months to do it…

Once upon a time I used to cycle to the supermarket but these days someone takes me to the supermarket in a car every two weeks. But the rest of the time I’m mainly alone. In fact I’ve been alone most of my life, apart from the cats of course. I’ve always had a bit of a thing for cats, they seem to like me too. And a cat is always warm when it sits in your lap since cats have a slightly higher body temperature than humans.

I’m not a dog person though, dogs take too much work whereas with a cat, as long as you feed it, it mainly looks after itself. And of course with a cat your house is free of mice, although Precious likes to show off his kills so there is more than one time that Precious has brought along a dead mouse for me to look at and perhaps congratulate him.

There is a programme on TV that is all about the source of the thing that brought down the News of the World. It is very good.

But with live news reports it is very frustrating when a news reporter continually gets a fact wrong. I guess the reporter will face a dressing-down off camera when the report is over. Or perhaps I have got the facts wrong, in which case I’m a plonker!

I had a dream last night about being a stand-up comedian but do you actually have to stand up? Whilst I’m talking about stand-ups I think you should be aware that I have actually tried being a stand-up on three occasions. I was awful in all three possibly because I didn't prepare anything. NowI’ve thought about preparing a two minute routine in French to try and make my French shopping assistant laugh. I’m not sure if I’ll try to do it though.

Hmm, no work yet on my two minute comedy routine, perhaps I should do something today… I haven't done anything, perhaps I’m not really any good at comedy, maybe I should write a joke, at least in this case I don't know if the reader will laugh. Sadly I can't think of a joke, any joke, except that I once thought I could do comedy. Oh well, that's life. I always remember the first thing I said in my first comedy routine, I said “I’m not actually any good at comedy, I just didn't want to pay to come in” That actually got a few laughs and was certainly the funniest thing that I said.

So I’ve just received a solar powered outdoor light, but at the moment I’m having difficulty installing it. Oh well, there isn't a lot of sunlight at the moment anyway. I might have another go today although I might not.

Well, I did have a go at installing the solar powered light and I did it successfully the first time which is a bit unusual. Now the solar powered light works and I have an outdoor light over the front door. But I’m a bit worried now that there won't be enough sunshine to power the device, still it works for now and I installed it successfully.

I wish people wouldn't talk about Christmas until December, it gets very, very weary with Christmas talk starting at the beginning of November. Perhaps I should talk about Easter, that's less than five months away now.

It's a rainy day today but I got all my washing in just before the rain started, however I now have a wet cat sitting on my lap. Oh well, it's only water. I think the cat is more concerned than I am since he's now thoroughly washing his fur.

I don't want to start celebrating Christmas until December but it's now getting very difficult as a lot of TV ads have Christmas themes and even the radio is now playing some Christmas songs. But it's only seven days until December now so I think I’ll hold out.

I tried leaving my washing out to dry overnight as the weather was dry, but that turned out not to be a good idea as this morning the washing was not dry and was stiff with frost. Clean but frozen. Oh well, now I know.

I wish I’d looked at the date I last updated this document before I opened it, because I think I missed a day but now I'm not sure.

I made and cooked a pizza yesterday, but instead of mozzarella cheese I mainly used Brie and it was delicious.

There was an article on breakfast this morning about a potentially dangerous chemical that is apparently in everything, particularly non-stick pans. I didn't understand any of it.

I regularly fall asleep in front of the television these days and then when I actually go to bed I have trouble sleeping, oh well, that's my life! But I slept well last night so that's good.

Sometimes I hate going to the supermarket, especially when I don't have enough money to get some drink, which was what happened yesterday. The cashier said I didn't have enough but luckily I had a bit of money still in the bank so I was able to use my debit card to make up the difference.

The World Cup is football used to be a great tournament but now it's getting ridiculous. Next year the World Cup finals will be spread across 3 countries, the USA, Mexico and Canada and 48 teams will be in it. I won't be watching. But hey, Donald Trump got an award from FIFA, a useless medal.

I don't understand how Donald Trump got elected. Why did he not get disqualified for being a bozo?

Today I have just applied for a new passport but I have to send the old one to the passport office and I haven't got a padded envelope or stamp. Oh well I’ll send it somehow even if it does take some time.

This morning I had a brief dream that I hadn't got any alcohol for Christmas, but luckily it was just a dream! I usually get a bottle of brandy for Christmas, on Thursday, when I go to the supermarket again, I might try and get one for this year…

But I have to post my passport as well and I'm slightly concerned that I won't remember it until it's too late. But the local post office is closed in the afternoons now it seems so I’m not sure when I can get there. Oh well I don't really need a passport except for some of the money I’m receiving but perhaps Ian might help.

Anyway, today I'm going to the supermarket for the last time before Christmas and , as is my tradition since I’ve moved to France, I hope to get a bottle of brandy.

As it turns out I got a bottle of Armagnac which is similar to cognac but slightly different. But I’m not going to open it until Christmas Day (or possibly Christmas eve). But now it's the 20th of December and Christmas television is now well underway.

Or perhaps the 21st of December because days seem to have a very short time these days.

I think I missed a day because it's now the 23rd and according to a leaflet I have there’s a bin collection tomorrow the 24th which is a public holiday in France. I will put my bin out and see if it gets emptied.

I haven't yet checked my bin because it's only 10am, I think I’ll leave it until about midday.

Well the bin was emptied yesterday which was a bit peculiar but very good for me and it's now Christmas Day 2025 and as usual I'm on my own, but at least there are a few good things on television.

Now my matter smart plug is playing up. I might try to reset it and set it up again, but I’m not sure yet. Well I managed to sort out the matter plug by not actually resetting it but connecting it to my network again.

I don't know why the matter plug disconnected, something odd but anyway it's working again now so all is well. I think I prefer winter as you can always put more clothes on if you're cold but there are only so many clothes you can take off if you're hot and walking around naked is a bit frowned upon especially in a supermarket!

At least somebody is taking me to the supermarket on Friday after the new year as things get back to normal whatever that is.

So it's now 2026, another year, another set of problems and solutions. What will this year bring? I don't know yet.

Sigh, another heated shawl not working so that makes two that have gone bust for me. I suppose I’ll get another one as they are quite cheap really but I'm now concerned about the quality. At least I now have three power banks even if I’ve got nothing to use them with. I suppose if I used my phone a lot I could recharge it with one but the only thing I usually use my phone for is browsing the internet and the phone usually has about 70% charge left at the end of the day. Anyway I’ve now ordered another heated shawl although as it's coming from China it will probably take about two weeks to get here.

Well my new shawl has been shipped and the delivery date at the moment is between the 13th and the 15th of January. I hope it gets here a bit quicker. We have a bit of snow now here in this part of France and that is very unusual. Now the snow has gone but there's light rain.

Today I went to the local post office and sent my old passport back via recorded delivery. I hope that everything is now okay and that I receive my new passport in due course. However things don't usually go so simply. Perhaps my photo won't be acceptable or perhaps I’m just not English enough any more. In my defence I could say that I don't actually know any other language than English properly. Even after about 15 years living in France my French is still terrible.

My new shawl didn't arrive today but I was expecting it. If it doesn't arrive tomorrow then I will have a concern. Well I was wrong, my new shawl did arrive yesterday after all. The van I thought may deliver it wasn't the right one, but the van that did deliver it only arrived at about 5pm. However the heat it puts out is minimal, almost as if it wasn't on.

Also, I now have some warm, as in heated, gloves although I'm not sure if I’ll ever really wear them as it's a bit complicated with all the wires. I tried out the gloves yesterday and it took about half an hour to get the cables connected. Twice one end of a cable disappeared up my sleeve. But I'm actually wearing my new left glove now but not powered up simply because I'm washing my regular gloves.

Many years ago I went to a concert at the old Wembley stadium. It was supposed to be a concert by Billy Joel and Elton John but Billy was ill and didn't appear. Instead Elton John was at his piano on his own. He apologized then gave a brilliant concert by himself for about two and a half hours without any breaks. I’m very glad that Billy Joel did not appear.

Donald Trump is not only stupid he is dangerously stupid. Now he says he wants to take over Greenland. I can't understand why anyone voted for him. Anyway things have calmed down now as Trump seems to be satisfied with a new deal which only a few people know about for now. But Trump would be in prison, a mental institution or dead, preferably dead. Now Trump has denigrated all the UK troops who fought in the Iran war.

No-one in Europe wants to go to the rabid USA for this year's World Cup so I think venues in the USA should be moved to Canada. Oh and now the USA’s ICE department is shooting US citizens dead, so lots of people are changing plans to now not go to the USA.

So Google has decided to change some things with tasks, notes and the calendar so that my calendar is now full of things that I don't want there. I’ve had to delete lots of things just to make my Google calendar useful.

I had a problem with the bag on my stoma yesterday. Twice the bag just dropped off, once when I was getting out of bed. Took me a while to clear everything up.

My relatively new shawl has stopped working after only about a month. This is ridiculous, I shall probably try taking it apart to see if I can fix it.

After a long time of not getting some things I recently purchased from China, the items eventually arrived yesterday. One item is a replacement remote control for my Humax and it works perfectly. I might now open the old one to see if I can fix it although with only one Humax the old one will be useless unless the new one breaks.

I'm having problems with this tablet. It was crashing and not booting correctly a lot yesterday but so far today it is working fine. I think something in the SSD drive of this tablet went bad and it's taken a while for the system to recognise this and flag it as a bad sector so that it won't be used. Well, that's my theory and I would like my tablet to operate correctly now.

My tablet is sort of working now but I have to reboot it frequently. Oh well, everything breaks eventually and someday I will die. I just hope it's a long time away.

Another day of rain, the rain is getting wearisome now, a lot of rain and not much, if any, sun. But anyway, life goes on and maybe I’ll someday write a magnificent book, perhaps this is it, but probably it's not. Oh well, I’m sure my next one will be better.

One of my problems is that I get bored with writing things down, especially as nobody ever reads it. My document as I write it is even online although I admit that I only update the online version about once a month. Now I can't remember if I updated this document today or not, anyway it's updated now.

Another day of rain and a wet cat. Precious the cat is very good about evacuating his bowels outside and burying it but then he comes back inside and is wet. Oh well that's life. Another storm today and I’m expecting another very wet cat…

Well so far I have a dry cat but now I have a broken monitor on my main computer, sigh. I could possibly use an old TV as my monitor while I wait for the money and time to get a new one, but I’m not sure it will be any good. For one thing the old TV is rather large. I’d decided not to try using my old TV as a temporary monitor as, for one thing, I can't find my old remote to actually make the old TV work. Once upon a time TVs used to have controls on the actual TV but nowadays everything works via the remote, sigh.

The reading glasses I use are very cheap but they do break easily. Today one of the arms on my current glasses broke. Luckily I had another pair of broken glasses with the other arm broken so I was able to take the good arm off them and screw it into my current ones.

Now I’ve got a new monitor so I can see my computer again. The new monitor is a lot lighter than my old, broken one too.

I’m having another attempt to get an air fryer as this seems to be the machine that everyone is cooking things with at the moment. Perhaps this time it will arrive but I’ve no idea where I’ll put it. Apparently my new air fryer arrives on Monday, so I might leave it in its box for a while.

My new air fryer did arrive and of course I opened it and set it up but as I actually have nothing to use it for I might just look at it for a while then stick it somewhere out of the way.

Oh and I thought I'd ordered a hair trimmer but when the package arrived yesterday I'd only ordered the accessories for the hair trimmer. So lots of accessories for something that I haven't actually got. I’d attempt to get a refund except the package was so cheap that the time to try to get a refund would cost me much more. Anyway I ‘ve now ordered a hair trimmer from a different company and hopefully this thing will be the right thing and get delivered within about two weeks. But perhaps WW3 will come before I get my trimmer because Trump has started more wars than any other USA president before. Oh and Trump’s new war in the middle east against Iran has apparently delayed my latest purchase in getting air shipment because Trump has grounded or at least delayed a lot of aircraft. But like goes on, until one day it doesn't, but hopefully not today.

But “president” Trump should be locked up, not in power. Perhaps God could make a move and terminate his life.

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