Half of the day I’ve spent running around doing stuff, and the second half of the day I’ve spent the day recovering, lying in bed underneath the quilt for a good four hours.
Definitely what you might call a bad day.
With having to leave my bed early this morning, I had a really bad night’s sleep. I couldn’t get off at all and spent most of the night tossing and turning. I did manage to go a-voyaging and when I organise the dictaphone I can tell you all about it.
But up and about quite early and by 07:30 I was back on the road in the driving rainstorm that was going on.
Round by the docks, where Thora was moored at the quayside. She had obviously crept in on the morning tide because I didn’t see her there yesterday.
There was plenty of free parking at the cinema opposite the railway station.
By 08:45 I was in St-Lô. And Then a 10-minute walk up the hill (past plenty of empty free parking spaces which wouldn’t have been there had I been relying on them).
And also past the medieval city walls and fortifications, or what’s left of them. The city was pretty much devastated during the battles of early July 1944.
The walls are fairly complete though to the eastern side of the city and my route to the Prefecture took me through one of the remaining gates.
I arrived at the Prefecture at 09:00 expecting to have to fight my way past the hordes of disgruntled British immigrants laying siege to the building, but there was no-one about at all, except for a security guard leaning on a wall smoking a cigarette.
The receptionist showed me the way upstairs to the waiting room where there was a water fountain for the thirsty (I couldn’t see a coffee machine but there’s a café on the corner across the road).
One other couple in front of me and they were dealt with and gone by 09:45, and I was called straight away, 15 minutes early for my appointment.
Constance, the girl who saw me, was very nice and friendly and chatted away throughout the meeting. Very nice indeed – she can put her stamp on my dossier any day of the week.
Ohhh yes, I can still chase after the women at my age. I just can’t remember why!
I had two folders, one with original documents that I’d been collecting over the last 9 months recording all the details of my life over the last 6 years and one with the copies, arranged in the order in which they were listed on the application form.
She only seemed to be interested in the copies that I gave her – not so much the originals – except for the passport of course.
ONLY THING MISSING – because I’ve moved house since I came to France, I need a Certificat de Domicile from my current Mairie. But that’s no problem. Constance gave me her e-mail address and I can send it to her by mail.
She took my fingerprints and a specimen signature, and that was that. She promised me a Permanent Resident Card valuable for 10 years, and said that it would be ready in three to four weeks. All I can say is that I admire her optimism.
So there you are, people, totally painless. A journey that started at the beginning of October has finally reached its destination and I hope to be fully registered in France in due course.
All of this Brexit nonsense has been putting me through an enormous amount of stress as you can imagine, but once I have my card in my sweaty little mitt, the silly, stupid xenophobic Brits can go to hell in a handcart.
After my meeting I was intending to go sight-seeing around the town. But the rain put paid to much of that though.
However, I didn’t have to go far to encounter the Eglise Notre Dame de St Lo. It’s just around the corner.
You will probably notice the plain block wall between the two towers and think that it’s completely out of place. In fact, the church was badly-damaged by the American bombers and the medieval wall that had been there completely disappeared in the blast.
That was a temporary wall, and we all know that there’s nothing at all quite as permanent as a temporary solution.
But at least there is something still there.
These ruins were part of the entrance gates to the fortified prison that was here. This housed a great many prisoners of the Germans and many were killed when the building suffered a direct hit during the American bombing.
Today it’s a memorial to the civilians who lost their lives during the German occupation and the American attacks.
At this point the rain got the better of me so I headed back to Caliburn.
I did however notice a really good view of the tower that I had noticed earlier, and I managed to take a photo of it from a better angle.
On the way back home, I called into the “Action” shop in Coutances and picked up another cheap dashcam. I have a little project in mind for that. And then to LeClerc for a couple of bits and pieces.
Back here, I noticed that Thora had gone from her mooring. That was a very quick turnround, which might explain why I went for so long without seeing her.
And so I had lunch and then crashed out in bed for four hours. I felt awful.
An energy drink perked me up a little and then I made tea – an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit from 9th April 2018. That’s the last one of those now so next week I’ll have to make some more.
My new camera bag arrived today. The cheap ones were on offer at Amazon so I treated myself to one – the first part of my mega-spending session to arrive.
And then I went out for my evening walk outside.
Having had the heavy rainstorms of today, there were still plenty of heavy clouds around. But they were blowing away quite rapidly and we were treated to this glorious spectacle of a beautiful sunset over the Ile de Chausey
The couple of trawlers silhouetted against the sea gave the photo some kind of ethereal quality.
While I was out there, I was lucky enough to see a rainbow.
Round by the car park in the boulevard Vaufleury, I noticed it away in the sky round by Villedieu-les-Poeles, somewhere like that.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in the past I’ve taken several photos of rainbows, but the colours have never come out quite as well as they have done tonight. The red, orange, yellow and green are particularly startling.
Now I’m off to bed. I’m still not feeling so good so an early night will do me good. I might even sleep too.
recounts a delightful story where John Ruskin once criticised James McNeil Whistler’s painting “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket” by saying that he “never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”.
so I could see what was going on.
– probably the best album Tom Petty ever made), I downloaded a few more tracks to work on.
On the way back, I encountered something of a medical emergency in the rue des Juifs.
