Mad Darby Diaries

 I am under pressure.  I have 3 days until the removers come, I am still doing my daily trips to the hospital, the paperwork is piling up and I am being frustrated by not being able  to complete things.  Orange just doesn't answer the phone, or at least they do with a recorded message saying they can't answer the phone.  I have tried dealing with them online but the scenarios offered don't include my situation.  The don't operate on Saturdays and during the week they work 9 to 5.  Pathetic.  Meanwhile I need a covid test.  One test centre leaves you hanging then cuts you off, another wanted to charge an extortionate amount of money so finally I managed to get an appointment miles away.  I am planning a trip to the UK (fingers crossed Johnson doesn't put France on the red list) but you can't complete the locater form until 48 hours before travel when I will be living temporarily in a caravan with no internet access.   I am still...

 You would think that with all the stuff I have given away, sold or taken  to the tip, there would be nothing left to chuck out but you would be wrong.  Every day I get up at 4.00am and drive to the hospital in Angers to get nuked.  I leave the car in the park  and ride and take the tram, and nearly every day the inspectors get on to check the tickets.  Not one inspector, 7 or 8 of them, entering by every door so that no-one can escape. I sit smugly watching while people are fined or ejected from the tram as the only time I didn't have a ticket was because the machine was out of order.  Yesterday I reached into my bag, pulled out my ticket and handed it to the inspector.  Her machine beeped and lit  up red.  Out of date.  I scrabbled around in my bag and found another, and another.  Eight in all, and everyone out of date.  The other inspectors had finished their inspecting and were now gathered round me watching my antics....

 Putting books  into cartons is easy.  Clearing out drawers that are full of bits is an irritating, time consuming nightmare.  I don't usually stay this long in one house so I don't normally accumulate much, but 10 years is a long time.  You know what it's like.  Where do spare batteries belong?  Open a drawer and shove them in, until you find that in one drawer are spare shoelaces, band-aids, aspirin, so out of date they would probably give you a headache rather than curing one.  Add to that, a book-mark - no make that 3 bookmarks - a memory stick, a whisky flask, a camera, assorted pens, paper clips, an old telephone and a penknife I confiscated from one of my sons when they were teenagers.  They are now in their fifties.  And it's not just one drawer.  There is one in the kitchen, one in the dining room, bedside table and oh yes I have just found a plastic box full of odd electrical items, computer cables and the like, things who...

 Whether I like it or not I am a morning person.  In the middle of my radiotherapy treatment I get up at 4.45am, leave at 6am, drive an hour,  take a tram, for an early appointment at the hospital, which lasts about 20 minutes, and then do it in reverse - every day.  Once home I pack boxes - I have just finished packing box number 36.  I have the weekends off so what did I do this morning?  I got up at 5am, went for an early morning walk at 6am, came home and started packing boxes. I love the subject of the universe, rockets going to the moon and mars and beyond but I can't seem to get excited, or even interested in Branson and Bezos going up in their own private rockets.  Crossing the Atlantic in Concorde was far more interesting.

 I have moved so many times there are few things to which I  am attached.  What with burglaries, 'lost at sea', and downsizing, upsizing and downsizing again, most of my original belongings have long disappeared.  Despite all this I have clung on to photographs, some in albums so heavy I can hardly lift them, but in this age of digital everything it is important to me to keep hold of them.  How many billions of digital pictures lay forgotten on old laptops and phones?  Does anyone look at them once they have been posted on social media?  Probably never so I shall keep lugging them round the world with me and when I die the children can get rid of them if they so wish -if they dare!  I am definitely up for a bit of haunting from my afterlife. So that, a few family mementoes and my published works are what are important for me to keep.  However, when it comes to my children and grandchildren their priorities take a different course. I am moving...