Tag Archives: dream

A Day of Doing Nothing

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Got up late, did nothing, dreamed in front of daytime TV. I was in Dublin, I lost my trousers in an argument about disabled toilet facilities and after several setbacks I set off to walk home, realising that I had lost my sticks but could walk fine without them. Before you ask, I had my wallet in my jacket pocket and was able to use my driving license to get on the ferry.

I am aware that dreams of lacking trousers may be associated with all sorts of things, but in the dream I had excellent legs and was positively flaunting the catheter. Under-confidence does not seem to have been an issue.

Found three new ways of messing up the process of strapping the bag on. One had uncomfortable consequences, but this is a blog not a medical text book so I won’t add more detail.

Iris at Mencap Gardens

Anticoagulant clinic rang to check on me because the hospital had failed to liaise with them.

Julia has just arrived home. We are now going to have a cup of tea. This is the most interesting thing to happen today if you disregard the uncomfortable consequences mentioned a couple of paragraphs above.

With a day of low activity it is difficult to reach my 250 word target and, even with padding, I am struggling to reach the limit. I have 25 words to go. twenty two now. It can be very difficult writing that sort of sentence because, of course, as you write it, you become wrong as the word count changes.

Yellow Flags

I may be back later because the urge to write could return.

On the other hand, I have poetry to submit and nothing actually finished, with just one day to go before the end of the submission window and nothing finished. This could be my most unproductive patch in the last three or four years.

Iris. One of my favourite flowers.

The Great Parsnip Plot

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The shopping arrived just before 9.00 tonight. Still no parsnips. I suspect that sinister forces are at work. One week can be an accident, but two weeks is starting to look like a plot. There is also, according to the delivery driver, a national shortage of tinned tomatoes, which is why we ended up having tomatoes with Italian herbs. This is not a problem, I can cope with herby tomatoes. The parsnips, on the other hand are beginning to take up too much of my thinking.

No eggs again this week. We could have free range eggs but no economy eggs. This, I feel, is part of the plot to get rid of poor people. First they add to our tax burden, then they cut off our fuel supplies. Now they ensure that only middle-class foods are available (you never hear of a shortage of quinoa, do you?). In time, like cash and Izal, the famously useless glazed toilet paper, we will cease to exist.

I don’t usually talk about my dreams. This is partly because I forget them easily, and partly because other people’s dreams are usually boring. It’s also because I don’t want to give anyone an opportunity for Freudian imaginings. I assure you that if I, was in the habit of dreaming about parsnips it would be because of the supply situation, and they would definitely be parsnips.

However, I recently had a very strange dream. It featured a doctor telling me that my latest blood test indicated that my left hand lung, liver and kidney were all being starved of nutrients. For the moment let’s ignore the fact I don’t have two livers, I’m not sure how that sneaked in. It seems that the reason for this nutrient deficiency is because I do up my trouser belt too tightly.

I will leave you with that thought, and find some pictures. The header is a reminder of the time we could still obtain root vegetables.

 

Simon Wilson, Nottingham Poet

Another Senior Moment

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Today I got up, pottered and made my way down to the surgery for my 8.30 appointment. It turns out I should have been there at 7.30. I apologised and then asked for the blood testing letter they were preparing for me. I had checked with them in person, then on the phone, and had agreed to pick it up this morning. It was the third time I have done this and both the previous arrangements have gone wrong.

Surely nothing could go wrong today.

Ha!

There was no letter and nothing about a letter on the computer. Sometimes I get the feeling that, to the NHS, I simply don’t exist.

After ten minutes of phone calls it appears that the test is not necessary as they used the blood they took last week to do the test, even though it hadn’t been requested at that time. Yes, at the time of the test I had not yet had the letter telling me it was due. When I got the letter I spoke to the nurse (who had taken the blood on my previous visit) and we agreed that I should request a letter from reception to allow me to have the test when I had a regular Warfarin check. She seems not to have known that the blood she took, and the tests she requested, included one I didn’t even know I needed at the time.

Are you following this?

It is almost as if the NHS does things that none of its employees or clients knows about, but as a lot of the budget goes on administration and management this surely cannot be . . .

Of course, in a month’s time,  when I can’t get my arthritis medication because I haven’t had the blood test I will find that I have just been told a load of old rubbish, as usual.

Next, armed with the details of my latest prescription request (the one I have tried to collect twice already) I went to the pharmacy and gave them the details the surgery had given me. It took several attempts but they did eventually manage to find the details on their system, but only after I complained when they told me, again, that they had no details of it. Makes me wonder if I should have complained more the first time, and if they would have found it then.

If Alice and the Mad Hatter ran the NHS I wonder if it could be any more dreamlike.

The opening picture is of a confused old man, wondering where it all went wrong.

Improvement at last!

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The cold finally started to improve yesterday. I started to write a post on that subject, found inspiration came slowly and, eventually, fell asleep in my chair. Waking at just after midnight I humphed at missing a day on the blog and went to bed.

The clock went off this morning, waking me from a dream where Julia and I were about to embark, as newly-weds, on an academic career at an American University in the 1940s. I think I was vaguely remembering something I’d read in the biography section of a poetry book recently, probably about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, but as I’m not from Yorkshire and we don’t have a gas oven it’s not a 100% fit.

Julia is now at work, I’m feeling optimistic about my prospects for the day and I now have approximately eight hours ahead of me in which to achieve either greatness or inner peace, or possibly both.

A cup of tea seems like a good starting point for either of those results, so I think I’ll go and put the kettle on.

The photograph is from the Suffolk trip, but it has tea in it so it will do as a library shot.

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Selfie in a teapot