Tag Archives: vegan curry

Wednesday 22nd March 2023 – AFTER ALL OF YESTERDAY’S …

… exertions, today was a much quieter affair and no-one phoned me at all.

There were a couple of e-mails though. Someone had sent me the address of some handyman who might be interested in fitting a shower in my new place so I e-mailed him. And shock! Horror! He actually replied to me.

That’s a first, isn’t it?

It’ll give me something to think about in bed tonight. And that will make a change from lying there thinking about why I can’t go to sleep. Yes – we had another night like that, didn’t we?

No car alarms this morning but I was still awake quite early. I was on the point of thinking about gettign up when I must have gone back to sleep because the next think I remember was the alarm going off at 07:30

It was a real struggle to crawl out of bed this morning and I didn’t beat the second alarm by all that much.

Once I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages it was a very slow start to the day and I didn’t do all that much at first. But once I’d organised myself I made a start on the next radio programme. I’ve paired off all of the music and by teatime I’d written all of the notes.

Not one of my quickest efforts today.

After my lunchtime fruit I had a shower. And I needed it too because I forgot yesterday what with there being no physiotherapist. And getting into and out of the bath was no problem at all. Things have improved considerably and I’m much more comfortable doing my exercises. I still can’t walk properly but anything is an improvement to how I was 3 months ago.

Another thing that I was planning to do was to take the rubbish out and bring the shopping in but not only was there a howling gale, it was pouring down with rain too so I’ll leave that for another time.

While the cleaner was here I carried on with the notes for my radio programme and after she left I made a mug of hot chocolate. And then, regrettably, I crashed out for a good hour or so and I felt awful.

But that’s not a surprise because when I listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night, I was astonished. We were in the latter stages of World War II. There was a huge battle taking place on the border between Germany and France. What had happened was that the Front had been shattered and there were hundreds of these German pockets of resistance everywhere. The logical thing for the Germans to do was to abandon many of these pockets of resistance and try to create a front line somwhere but the American general who was being interviewed was adamant that he thought that the Germans would try to defend everything. Their forces would be so thinly spread that they would be overwhelmed. Something had happened to his legs. He’d been blistered with something and the blisters had died so all the skin on his legs was peeling off. It looked a complete mess. Then we had the German Army HQ in this city that was surrounded by all kinds of bomb damage. These high-explosive shells were falling on this concrete bunker. It was very clear that they couldn’t stay there because of the pounding that the bunker was receiving from these shells.

I’m not sure when I reached when I dictated that other dream (and I’ve no idea which other dream that would be) but I finally made it to the hospital for my appointment. There were no notices about which floor you were on in the lift. You had to press a button with some kind of shadow outline drawing on it and hope that the lift stopped at the correct floor for you to go for your appointment.

That previous dream – I forgot a lot of it that I hadn’t remembered but basically I had to go to the hospital at Avranches but there was much more to it that I’ve forgotten and I wish that I could remember it now

Later on I had to sit down and make a map or proper agenda of where I was supposed to go for all these appointments but I couldn’t remember where half of these examinations took place in the first place so I could work out where I had to go again for the repeats. There were all these strange things that happened to me and I didn’t have a clue how I ended up there or even where it was where I had undergone some tests. I really didn’t know how I was going to find these places again in order to go there this time round

I’d hired a Volkswagen to go and do something. When I went to pick it up next morning one of the tyres was down. I strapped an air compressor to the wheel, coupled it up to the tyre and set off. When I arrived at this dirt track that I had to take I turned onto the track and stopped to disconnect the compressor. There were loads of people standing around there examining this Beetle, pointing out the defects. Someone kicked the door. I started to be really annoyed. I went up to one guy and gave him a sharp kick. I asked “how do you like it if my car came along and gave you a kick?” and I kicked him again. “Stop kicking my car and go away”. These people just stood and looked at me as I went to go back into my car. One guy was standing by the door so I said “excuse me”. he asked “do you want to get in your car?” I replied “no, I want to open my door and hit you in the face with it” so he moved off as well.

And then I was with my girlfriend (I wish that I could remember who she was) and 2 other people, another guy and a girl. We’d gone skiing somewhere in this expensive ski resort. I’d been playing bass in this rock band and the guy had been playing drums in it. On our way back to our room afterwards we noticed that the orchestra had set up in the ballroom. He got behind the drums and I picked up the bass. One of the employees came running over and shooed us away telling us not to touch the instruments, going on about the mess that we were bound to make trying to play these things, the noise and how we would disturb everyone in the building withour realising that they almost had for free a concert that they would have paid hundreds of Euros to see.

Finally I was with a friend of mine. We’d constructed a big lean-to shed at the side of Virlet for the rainwater butts to keep them out of the way. I thought that if I were living here I probably would put the batteries in here too. That sounded like a good idea to me. We were busy trying to take some stuff to the tip so we began to tidy up. We began to drag stuff into this shed to see exactly what we had. The first thing that went in was a huge box of coal and wood. That was tucked in the corner. We moved a few things in and then went out for some others. His wife was busy wrestling with a board with some electrical equipment on it so he went to take that from her and put it away. She said that she would put some more stuff in that box of coal and would but we said that she’d have a real problem trying to reach it now that we are arranging everything and getting things ready to go to the dechetterie.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry. Not as good as it usually is (but that’s not saying that it was bad) because I had to rush. There was football on the internet at 20:00 – Cymeu under 17s against Scotland under 17s. I missed the first 5 minutes and by that time Wales were already 1-0 up, and they scored a second goal quite quickly too.

And for the first 70 minutes they were scything their way at will through a very static Scotland defence and how the score was only 3-0 by then I really don’t know.

And then we had a raft of substitutions by each team. It completely disrupted Cymru’s rhythm but it seemed to galvanise the Scots and to everyone’s surprise they scored 2 goals in a matter of 5 minutes and looked by far the better side from then on. We actually had a really exciting final period.

But then Scotland were caught short at the back pushing forward for an equaliser and Cymru scored a fourth.

The next couple of Cymru under-17 games against Montenegro and Iceland should be very interesting.

But now I’m off to bed because I’m exhausted. I can’t keep on going with these bad nights and something will have to happen at some point. I have to be prepared for a nice deep sleep sometime, and my money will be on when I’m at the wheel of Caliburn if I’m not careful.

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Wednesday 15th March 2023 – I’VE HAD ONE …

… of those days when I haven’t seemed to have done very much today.

Hardly a surpruise because it was another dismal night when I seemed to have taken hours to drop off to sleep. And when the alarm went off I had another fight to raise myself from the dead before the second alarm went off because I really didn’t feel like it.

It took an age to bring myself round into the Land of the Living after I’d had the medication and checked the mails and messages. And once I’d organised myself I set about writing a pile of notes for the music that I chose a week or so ago for one of my radio programmes in the future.

That wasn’t easy either because there was a period when I was drifting in and out of sleep, and even dropped off for half an hour or so. It’s not very easy to concentrate in moments like that.

Later on I spent some time hacking up a few soundfiles into individual tracks. After my efforts the other day there are quite a few in the pipeline. That kept me out of the way while the cleaner did her stuff in the rest of the house. I don’t want to get in her way.

There was plenty of stuff on the dictaphone too from the night, even though it hardly felt as if I’d slept at all. We were all on a bus going through a town. We happened to turn into a street the name of which was a well-known rock guitarist like Richie Blackmore. We drove past an industrial estate where this guy actually had a unit. Of course everyone was at the window clamouring for a really good look round to see if they could see anything as the bus drove past. Later on there was a bassist who put in an appearance. He said that he’d been for 4 auditions with 4 different rock bands and failed them all.

And then I was playing bass in a rock band at some point. I was singing as well. I had the computer out. It was on my desk. I had it in various stages of dismantling while I was repairing something but I had to go away. When I returned a little later my brother had some stuff out all over the desk. Of course I couldn’t find half the stuff of my computer. I asked him what he was playing at. He gave me a nebulous answer so I quite literally attacked him. It was all extremely violent

Later on The Ukrainians had just risen up and driven out the Russians from their city (although it was the Nazis during this dream). They’d raided all the stores and were busy distributing the hoarded food out amongst each other when another Russian Army appeared on the horizon (of course it was a German Army). There were frantic talks about whether we ought to stand and fight or simply surrender. The idea was that if we surrendered they would wreak their revenge on the entire city and probably kill almost everyone. It didn’t look very much as if surrender was going to be much of a viable alternative.

That’s a similar situation to what happened IN TULLE in 1944 when the locals rose up and overwhelmed the German garrison about an hour before an SS Panzer Division arrived on the scene

There was something else that happened last night about some girl being given a slice of a fraudulent cup of coffee. As she went to move away she had this incredible pain in her leg. At that point I awoke with this really stabbing pain in my right knee from somewhere so it’s obviously communicating with me somehow.

Tea tonight was another delicious leftover curry although some of the leftovers in the fridge failed the nostril test and were filed under CS. Consequently there wasn’t as much as there might have been but an added potato resolved that issue.

So having checked everything that I need to take with me tomorrow on my early-morning trip to Avranches, I’m now off to bed.

For the last hour or so I’ve been editing and cropping the soundtrack that has come my way of a concert that took place in 1974, only t find that the reason why it would fit into one of my radio programmes is because there’s a big hole full of silence in the middle, and when I edit it out and edit out the damaged tracks I don’t have enough.

It’s not my day, is it?

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Wednesday 22nd February 2023 – MY LEFTOVER CURRY …

… was delicious tonight. And plenty of it too. There was quite a backlog of food building up in the fridge that needed to be eaten and if I were honest, I needn’t really have added in a small potato to lengthen it

In fact, I’ve had plenty to eat today. The other home-made bun from the weekend, just as delicious as the first one on Monday. And then at lunchtime some soup from the container that I’d opened yesterday.

This afternoon I was invited out for a drink by the President of the Residents’ Committee of the building, at which there were a few nibbles, and then my curry tonight.

Being invited out by the President was interesting because even though the final act of purchase of the apartment downstairs hasn’t been signed, it seems that I’ve already been accepted into the inner circle.

Several of the apartments are rented out, several more are second residences so there aren’t too many that are full-time owner occupiers. What cheers up the people here is that the apartment that I’m buying will revert from a tenanted apartment to an owner-occupied apartment and that’s a rare reversal of fortunes for a modern seaside resort.

There are far too many apartments being sold out of private stock and into holiday accommodation and that’s killing so many coastal towns, and that’s mainly due to these casual letting websites that are now being swamped by exploitive casual racketeers.

But that’s a subject for another time. I’m much more interested in what happened last night. And there was quite a lot too because it was yet another night where I didn’t have a great deal of sleep, lying there tossing and turning and hoping that I would drop off at some time.

And I must have done too because there were plenty of travels that must have kept me busy. There was an aeroplane that had a pilot and a small crew on board. For some unknown reason the aeroplane started to dive forward towards the ground. Someone went into the cockpit and found that the pilot was asleep. They awoke him and he carried on flying. The exact same thing happened again. He’d fallen asleep again. The third time when they were trying to shake him awake they found that there was some kind of insect in the cabin. For some reason or other this insect had a power to put people to sleep. They managed to trap this insect and remove it from the cabin. From then on the flight proceeded quite normally just as it should without any problem.

And then there was someone in Jersey who had an agricultural business but had lost it for one reason or another. He had problems with the new purchaser or operator of the business and the business reverted back to him. He was obliged to carry on. I can’t remember any more about this now.

Someone wanted a change of room last night in a hotel or something and insisted on seeing the manager. What had happened was that there were some roadworks on the main road and the traffic had been diverted down a diversion which just happened to go past the front of the hotel which of course would keep everyone awake at night. There was nothing that the proprietor of the hotel could do about it obviously but he received all the blame for what was happening.

Later on I’d been to Shavington, Vine Tree Avenue, to visit my old house where I lived. When I left I was being watched all the way up the street while something was happening. I thought that the easiest way to do this was to nip in via a neighbour’s house and over the fence into the back and disappear that way. In the end I ended up knocking at the door of this neighbour. She was absolutely delighted and invited me in. Of course it was someone whom I didn’t really like and with whom I didn’t really get on but she was there making me welcome. We talked about bees and honey etc. She fetched her husband and phoned her children to say that I’d come round. I could see that rather than having just gone this way for a short cut I’d be here for a week if I wasn’t careful. I just couldn’t find a way of breaking off this meeting and leaving. Interestingly the names of the children weren’t the names of the children in real life. They were different.

Interestingly, when I lived in Shavington there were two families that were rather infamous for their lack of personal hygene and social niceties. And during the night I managed to find the address of one of them that was being occupied by the other.

At another point during the night a girl was presumed hanged herself or being untied by this snake during the song “Delilah”. The snake was slowly reaching its grasp. It looked as if there was going to be miles of arm of this snake left over by the time the snake had finished doing what it was intended to do with her. And if you can make any sense of what that was all about then please let me know because I don’t have a clue.

But when the alarm went off this morning I was having a cup of coffee. Not a real cup of coffee but a virtual one. I was actually back home. My mother had had to go to the shops for something or other. We kids had to get up. I was there with 2 of my siblings. We were looking at some notices that were plastered everywhere about words that we no longer used in everyday conversation. There was something about if Belgium and Italy elect Socialist governments this weekend it will be a first. Things like that. I didn’t have a chance to find out what was going on about it because the alarm went off.

Hardly a surprise that I was totally exhausted after all of that.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I rounded up the music for another radio programme that I’ll be preparing at some point. I don’t want to get too far ahead with the text of the programme because, as I’m finding out these days, more and more of the artists featured in my programmes are shuffling off this mortal coil and playing in that great gig in the sky which means that I have to keep on amending my programmes.

On the other hand, I need to keep some programmes all written up and ready. They came in handy when I was in hospital last autumn and there’s always the possibility that I’ll be in there again.

There was a pause for my lovely toasted bun, and another pause for the soup at lunchtime. In between, I tidied up a little here and there around the apartment ready for when the cleaner came. I also cut my hair and had a shower. I can climb so much easier into the bath these days so the physiotherapy is obviously working.

This afternoon while the cleaner was here I wrote up a few notes for the programme that I’ll be preparing on Monday and I’ll be doing the rest at some time in the near future. If I’m lucky I might even have the programme done before Monday too and then I can have a day off.

So having been entertained and having eaten my curry I’m off to bed for an early night. I need it too after the events of the last few days. Every now and again I go through these phases of having some really bad nights and by the looks of things I’m in the middle of another one.

Perhaps I ought to go out and about for a walk more often and get some exercise. Then I might be tired enough to go to sleep.

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Wednesday 15th February 2023 – WHAT A WONDERFUL …

… left-over curry that was for tea tonight. There was some stuffing left over from the stuffed peppers, a few mushrooms and sweetcorn from the weekend salad, a few fresh mushrooms and a small potato all fried together with an onion and garlic and some soya cream. A handful of rice and frozen veg made it into something special.

The next couple of curries should be OK but I’m running low on some of the spices that I use. I can see that I’m going to have to go shopping if ever I make it back to Leuven, whenever that might be. I can’t find a decent source of spices around here unfortunately.

Anyway, it’ll give me something to think about when I go to bed tonight. I spent far too much time thinking rather than sleeping last night and I expected to regret it, especially when I fell out of bed before the alarm went off, simply because I couldn’t go back to sleep having awoken earlier.

And there was plenty of time during the night to spend thinking too because it was what I would call a “difficult” night. I was in bed much earlier than usual, having finished all that I intended to do quite a bit earlier than I expected, so I decided to make the most of it.

It took a while to go off to sleep though, not that it bothered me too much, and once I was properly asleep I went off on a little travel. There was a group of us who knew each other from our school days. We’d come together, 6 of us, and we reckoned that we’d form a group and go off to perform some kind of series of concerts somewhere. 5 of us assembled but the 5th one was missing so we had to go into Crewe to find him. We suspected that he would be at a railway workers’ social club because he worked on the railway. We went there and I left everyone in the car park while I went in. I asked after him but he wasn’t there. Another one of my friends from school was. He came over. He was extremely upset because he’d read something that I’d written where there was a quote attributed to my father. He was furious that I was putting his words into the mouths of others. I told him in no uncertain terms that if I’d attributed a quote to someone, it’s because that person had said it. It’s extremely possible that in similar circumstances on similar subjects 2 people whom I know are likely to have the same kind of comment in reply.

It was a most unpleasant encounter, so much so that it awoke me. And it was from then on that it all went downhill. I’ve really no idea why such a dream, about nothing very much in particular, should be so disturbing.

But lying awake made me think about other things too and there ended up being all kinds of things churning around in my mind, more of which anon.

However, I must have gone back to sleep on a couple of occasions because I was off on my travels again. And who should come to join me on my perambulations but Zero? What a lovely surprise that was. I was round at her parent’s last night. I’m not quite sure what I was doing. She was there and she had 2 friends her own age round. They were outside in the dark playing housewives, all sitting around a plastic table pretending to drink tea. I was watching them through the window. 1 of the girls took hold of Zero and asked her if she could have a blueberry ice cream with some kind of syrup on it. For some unknown reason Zero was reluctant to make it. The girl was rather unhappy about that idea. She thought that Zero should go and make this ice cream for her.

Then later on I’m not sure whether I stepped back into this dream or whether I had some kind of flashback, but we were back on the subject of Zero’s unhappy family again. I was at home and her brother asked if I would go round to see their father. I told him that I couldn’t because I had plenty of things to do myself. I was busy. In the end I nipped out really early at about 06:00 in the gold Cortina estate. When I arrived there was no-one about so I just sat outside and waited. Then they all got up and started to have a party. I waited until the father came out so I could see him but his son walked past. He said “I thought you said that you couldn’t come”. I explained that I’d managed to find a little time. We wandered off. I thought that he would go to fetch his father but instead his father came out and wandered off doing something else. I could see him in the mirror.

And finally there was something else about something going on in a shopping arcade where there was a post office and post box and films. I wanted to go along to photograph this post office but it was pitch-black. There were all these people walking around there running around. I took the camera but it had to be on a time exposure. I had to hold the camera at a strange angle and press the button then wait for about 20 seconds without moving. Of course trying to push the button with this camera at this awkward angle removed the perspective that I wanted because the camera moved. I had then to quickly try to re-find the perspective that I wanted and wait for the film to take. of course it was a very long exposure being so dark and everyone was moving around. I couldn’t get them out of the way of the lens. I tried 3 or 4 times and had this really difficult struggle to actually make the button work and hold the camera straight, stop the camera moving, keep the people out of the way. None of the photos that I was taking were coming out properly.

So with all of that going on, I must have had some kind of sleep at some point. Especially if I managed to conjure up Zero after all this time. What with TOTGA the other night, all I need now is for Castor to put in an appearance.

After the medication and checking my mails and messages I had a few things to do. Like chosing the music for the next round of radio programmes. That involved going through the playlists and tidying them up because over the last few weeks I’ve decided to do things in a different direction.

That means doing some kind of major adjustment to the … errr … 6 playlists that I maintain. With over 1200 albums and 300 artists I’ve split the playlist into 6 with different artists in each one so that I don’t play the same groups too often.

But going back to what I was saying earlier about things going round in my head, one of the things that I was pondering was this question of paying for the apartment. I had a feeling that all of this was about to go pear-shaped so I spent several hours thinking of a cunning plan.

Sure enough, the company charged with dealing with the transfer rang me again today and came up with yet more demands for information. And in the end after much debate and discussion and having thought of a Plan B, I ended up telling them to clear off.

In the past, I’ve said that my bank in the UK is a regular favourite for the title of “worst bank in the world”. But right now, I’m firmly in their hands with their wicked exchange rate, their stupid daily limit and all of that, and it’ll take me forever to transfer the money over at an absurd cost. But the quicker I start, the quicker I’ll finish and the first daily amount has gone off today.

But as we have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … there’s no such thing as a recession. What there is instead is a whole load of money floating around waiting to be spent and no-one can be bothered to put the work in to go out and collect it.

And that reminds me – still no replies about that work I want doing. It’s unbelievable.

The cleaner came here for an hour as usual and made the place look a lot nicer. It’s a good plan having her here. And she took out all of the rubbish which was nice of her. That was a good decision.

So having sorted out allthe music, paired off the music for one lot (and I’ll pair off the other lot tomorrow morning) and had my nice tea, And having written my notes, I’m going to bed.

So who’ll come to see me tonight? It must be Castor’s turn of course, but “I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams”. I reckon that it’s going to be more like some member or other of my family.

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Wednesday 8th February 2023 – CALIBURN IS BACK

But not for long. When I went to pick him up this morning I discovered that they had forgotten to take him for his Controle Technique – the French equivalent of the MoT safety examination. The earliest the testing station can fit him in is tomorrow at 11:45 but I wasn’t going to struggle back home on the bus and come back out tomorrow to pick him up again, so I brought him home and I’ll drive him back tomorrow.

Hopefully I’ll have a better night’s sleep than I did last night. I was in bed at some kind of realistic time and was asleep quite quickly but I didn’t stay asleep for long. I was drifting in and out of semi-consciousness until the alarm went off and it would be wrong to say that I was sleeping.

There must have been times that I was asleep though because there were several little voyages during the night when I went off on my travels. There was me, a couple of girls and a young family with a small daughter. I’d cooked tea for everyone and made a big, sickly ice cream for afterwards. I doled out the ice cream between all of us. As I was handing it out I suddenly found out to my horror that I’d forgotten to make ice-cream for the little girl. I had to dash back into the kitchen and took my ice cream from the fridge and speedily divided it into half. I put her half into a smaller dish so it looked as if it was overflowing the bowl the same as everyone else’s and took it to her. Her eyes lit up and she was absolutely delighted by this. That made me feel much better but then I was going around afraid that I might have forgotten someone else’s ice cream. What would I do if that were the case?

And then I was back at work in another one of these recurring dreams where I was on the point of retiring. I had tons of work stored in my cupboard. Someone made some kind of strange remark about “we don’t know what you do all day”. I thought that they’d be surprised if they found out that I did nothing. I was going through some files and found some information about people whom we knew and one or two people who’d actually worked for us, and prison sentences that they’d received, for one person, defrauding an insurance company and another person for something else. We wondered why they had all gone quiet after leaving. There was some old guy in there who’d been sent to prison. Everyone blamed a friend of mine at work because he’d told a fellow to confess everything rather than keeping silent and making them have to prove it. Again it was a case that I could leave this job tomorrow and leave all this work undone and not have to worry about anything. If they were to talk about me behind my back I wouldn’t care.

Later on I was taking my passengers to the station in the yellow Cortina estate. We were driving through Shavington. There was a vehicle parked on the opposite side on the road. Suddenly 2 vehicles pulled out from behind it and I hit them head-on in the car. When I came to I was wandering around the area of Shavington trying to regain consciousness. I went into a big Department Store to buy some clean clothes. The staff was busy trying on a new uniform. They had T-shirts on etc while they were experimenting with these new clothes and weren’t interested in serving customers. Eventually I managed to track down a server who came to see me. I told her that I needed some clothes and needed to report this accident but she started to take me off in her direction where these clothes were

And finally I was in my new house last night, a house very similar to Gainsborough Road. There was a survey being arranged for it to decide whether or not I could buy it. I was already in there so I hoped that the survey was satisfactory. The house was a lot nicer than I remembered anyway. I was busy organising some things that I’d brought with me. I had my mother and father with me. My mother went into a cupboard and asked me to pass her some cheese and pork etc. She asked what I wanted to eat. I replied that I hadn’t yet decided so she told me to hurry up. Then my father came in. He’d been working outside and his hands were dirty. he had some hand cleaner with him that he’d brought. he went to put it down on the windowsill by the sink while he washed his hands.

After the medication I checked my mails and messages and then did a little tidying up ready for the cleaner. I phoned up the garage to check that Caliburn was ready and then caught the bus out to the garage to pick him up.

he actually started, despite about three feet of frost all over him, so something works, and I headed back to LIDL where I spent a King’s ransom on stuff that I needed for the next few weeks – and forgot the blackcurrant syrup.

Back here I made some coffee and while it was brewing I made a couple of trips down to Caliburn to bring up what I’d bought. And then I … errr … had a relax. I’m clearly not as fit or as well as I think I should be.

The cleaner awoke me when she came, and while she was doing her stuff about the place I paired off the music for the next couple of radio programmes and began to write the notes. And after she left, I fetched the final stuff up here from out of Caliburn, thinking all the time to myself about how much easier it will be when I move to the ground floor.

And that’s taken one step closer to the end today, because I gathered up all of the stuff that I needed to complete these forms about transferring my money for the purchase of the apartment. Hopefully they can now go ahead and create the transfer paperwork so that I can credit the money whenever I receive the final date of completion.

And then the fun will begin.

Tea tonight was another one of my leftover curries. And it was just as delicious as all of the others, although I’m still not sure why the rice and veg is going more soggy that it used to in the past even though I’m not cooking it any differently than I always have.

Tomorrow I have to take Caliburn back and if he passes, I’ll have a little trip to fuel up and go to LeClerc to do some shopping there. Make sure that I have a good supply of stuff on board.

And then probably have a little … errr … relax again when I come home because all of this effort is wearing me out much more than it ought to do. I’m clearly not as well as I should be and I shudder to think how I’m going to manage if they want me to go back to Leuven.

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Wednesday 1st February 2023 – I’VE JUST BEEN …

… crashed out on the chair in the bedroom. Not actually asleep but in some kind of cataleptic trance. I could hear the radio playing in the background but for a good 20 minutes or so I was totally unable to move.

It’s probably something to do with tiredness and that’s no surprise at all. I ended up last night – or rather, this morning – not going to bed until about 02:30. I started something before I went to bed and was somehow swept up in the excitement, such as it was.

And no-one was more surprised than me – not even you, I bet – that I was able to haul myself out of bed when the alarm went off at 07:30. And I kept on going al day as well.

After the medication and so on, I had a few things to do. Like bake my fruit buns. And I do have to say that they are the best that I have made – I had one with my coffee. I think that I’ve got the hang of them right now, although I wish that the dough would rise more than it does.

Most of the rest of the day has been spent sorting out the music for the next batch of radio programmes. It’s not like me to go around getting ahead of myself but one lot of music is done and paired off, and I’m halfway through pairing off the music for the second one.

However, I had to grind to a halt as I had other fish to fry. In fact, while I was listening to the one that I’d intended to send off, I heard myself going on about a musician who had died since I recorded it. Consequently I had to rewrite that bit, record and edit it, and then filter it in. And as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … it takes longer to edit a programme like that than it does to record it in the first place.

The cleaner came round too and had a good go at the place. She cleaned all of the air vents today which probably means that it’ll be a little cooler but smell nicer.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from last night too. I was with someone. We were living with someone on the edge of Paris. She’d been arrested in some kind of demonstration in Lyon so she was going to demonstrate against her arrest. She asked me if I’d drive her so we got into the car, a C15 van, and set out. We hadn’t been driving very long before I asked “are we actually going to Lyon?”. She replied “yes”. I then asked had she thought about what would happen if she were arrested again. She said “yes” and was quite prepared for everything. She intended to be true to herself and would feel pretty bad if she weren’t. We carried on driving. We stopped at a place for lunch, a pub. She decided that she wanted turkey, and they served me with turkey as well. There was someone else there whom we knew so the 3 of us were there eating turkey. She was talking about spells – how she’d like to go inside one of these spells and disappear off into the realms of darkness. She went up to the counter for something. When she came back she told us that she’d told the people at the counter what they had said and she told them what she wanted to do with this magic spell and this turkey. They had said that some Tory would probably come along and make sure that you stay there. We were eating this turkey and I suddenly realised that I was vegan and it was making me really ill. I had to stop and she was disappointed. I said that I wasn’t going to eat any more otherwise I’d be really ill. At that point a family came in, mother, father and a young girl. They looked around for a table and found one but there were no chairs. There were 3 of us and 4 chairs so the guy with us took our other chair and took it over to them to sit down so that they would at least have one seat.

Tonight’s leftover curry was delicious. It seems that my cooking is improving these days. I’ve no idea what I’m doing that is different or whether it’s my taste buds but the stuff looks much better and is much more tasty. But I’m hoping that when I eventually move into this new apartment with its nice kitchen and new appliances, it’ll be even better. A good oven will be a huge step up and I can’t wait for that.

But right now that’s for worrying about tomorrow because even though I’m not tired and it’s later than usual, I’m going off to bed. The physiotherapist will be here tomorrow afternoon so I suppose that I ought to make a start on trying some of these exercises otherwise I won’t ever improve.

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Wednesday 18th January 2023 – I HAVE BEEN …

… really busy today.

So much so that I’ve not had time yet to transcribe the (pile of) dictaphone notes from last night.

Being … errr … somewhat later than the alarm didn’t really help matters too much. But as soon as I was finally sitting at the computer, the telephone rang. Someone was obviously checking up on me.

It was the guy from the radio on the telephone. On the 5th February there’s something going on at the local theatre and the radio needed some music doing. And I’m at the stage where if I don’t do something as soon as I have the instructions, I’ll either forget it or run out of time or something.

And so there is no time like the present to get on with the task.

At midday I took myself off outside as the rain had stopped for a short while. Caliburn struggled into life so we went for a good drive for about 25 kilometres. It’s still not enough to put a decent charge in the battery so when I returned home I started trying to track down an auto electrician who can put his equipment onto Caliburn’s starting and charging circuit.

It doesn’t seem to me to be the charging circuit or the battery that’s at fault because the battery doesn’t seem to be getting any worse. It’s either the starter that’s on its last legs or else there’s a bad earth somewhere. In the old days I’d be underneath Caliburn checking everything over but I’m really not up to that right now. For a start, if I were to lie down, I wouldn’t be able to stand up again.

Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be an auto-electrician anywhere in the vicinity. I shall have to ring up the guy in the garage and see if he knows of anyone or whether he has the equipment to do it.

The cleaner came round this afternoon and did some work on the place. She’s not impressed with the microwave and, to tell the truth, neither am I. Once I get myself organised, the microwave here will be going to the great kitchen in the sky and I’ll be having something decent.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, when I moved here in 2017 I bought everything new at the cheapest possible price on the grounds that I would have everything all at once, and then little by little I’d replace it with decent stuff as it wore out.

And then I had a ‘phone call from the UK. I mentioned the other day that I was having to sort out my finances and somewhere along the line I need to sort out the Royal Bank of Scotland. Their bank charges are somewhat exorbitant but there’s a way around this and it’s not the kind of thing that you can do on your own.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry. There were plenty of leftovers and so it was quite a decent curry. I’m getting the hang of these curries now and they really are delicious. Tomorrow night’s tea though will be a vegan pie, I recon. I found a slice in the freezer while I was looking for something else and by the looks of things it’s been in there for a while.

At some point in the future I managed to deal with the dictaphone notes. This was something to do with a football match where I was. The winger of one side and the full-back of the other side put in a really crunching tackle on each other and the ball ricochets out and goes into the back of the net of the attacking side. The commentator seemed to think that that was violent conduct, should be disallowed and a free kick given to the defence. Nevertheless the referee gave a goal. I could understand why he did it although I thought that there were many clubs who wouldn’t have been so lucky as to have the benefit of a decision like this go in their favour.

Watson and Holmes were in bed when a carriage pulled up outside, a big black open carriage the kind in which you would imagine Dracula riding. Someone alighted and awoke them both. He invited them to come with him for a consultation at some silly hour of the morning. They piled into this carriage. It turned out that they were going to somewhere near Chesterfield. They set out but Holmes was not impressed. They were dodging the traffic – these old 1950s Ford Anglias etc. Suddenly the guy with them started to panic pointing out “the red spot! The fourth red spot!”. It was only after they were able to focus, Holmes and Watson, that they could see floating in the air above them 4 tiny red spots like pieces of confetti as they headed out of north London. These were keeping just ahead of them, probably about 30 feet above the ground.

Then about half an hour or so later we had this Holmes and Watson story almost word-for-word again coming along.

Crewe Alex were playing in the Cheshire Senior Cup final against a team from Audlem called something to do with Geoff Barnes, the Geoff Barnes Thrash or something. Barnes was a former Crewe Alex player who could probably have been Eric Barnes who played centre-half for the Alex for years and then retired and owned a gents’ outfitters in the town. But in the dream he had this formidable amateur side that went on to win just about every competition that they ever entered for a year or two. I can’t remember any more about this dream than this

Finally I was at the BBC last night preparing a meal for the radio. We were making some kind of chili con carne with everything in it. There was a rat and we cut it into squares and started to add it but at the very last minute I decided that maybe this wasn’t a very good idea. I started to fish out all of the bits. It was a shame that I’d added it because it was looking so nice up to that point and fitted nicely into the saucepan but once I added these chunks of rat it overflowed so I had to grab a bigger saucepan. That was what made me ralise that there was too much and the rat ought to go.

So bedtime now. Tomorrow I have a radio programme to prepare and a few phone calls to make. Things are hotting up around here right now, and in more ways than one.

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Wednesday 11th January 2023 – I’M NOT GOING …

… to tell you what time I left my bed this morning.

One thing that I will tell you is that it wasn’t 07:30, that’s for sure. And another thing that I’ll say is that at least it was still morning.

And it was a better night’s sleep too, without an awful lot of disturbances. One or two nevertheless. I was on the Millfields estate in Nantwich walking around and there was one of the tiny Ford Transit vans parked there. When I went past again the back was open and it was fitted out as a guy probably my age was sleeping in it. We started to have a chat. Someone else came along and joined us. We were talking mainly about politics . The conversation drifted around to John Henry and the Liverpool poets and the “Conservative Government Unemployment Figures” joke which I told incorrectly. They agreed with me that society was in a right mess these days as far as everyone like us was concerned.

And later on I was in Canada in my father’s garage, which was actually the garage of my niece’s husband as well. I was there with this ancient Bedford QL … “actually he means an RL” – ed … They were doing something or other and asked if I had my tools with me. They were in the back of BILL BADGER, my old A60 van. They wandered off and when I went outside to look they had all my tools out everywhere looking for something. I went over, and it turned out that a socket had gone missing. They couldn’t find it. I said that it was a complete tool kit when I assembled it. We started looking over everywhere. I was climbing over this Bedford trying to find it. Someone mentioned something about it. I replied “yes, this was £80, or $120 when I bought it in 1978. It’s still running”. Someone said “I thought you were in that yellow car” meaning the Cortina estate. I replied “yes, that was a bit more expensive, $350 but I thought that I’d give the Bedford a run out in Canada this time”

Once I’d had my medication I had a few things to do in here, such as scanning all of the prescriptions that i’ve received just recently from the doctor and then spent an hour or so tidying up the worst of the apartment so that the cleaner wouldn’t die of fright when she arrived.

While she was here I worked on the radio, trying to choose the music for the next few radio programmes. Not that I organised too many because you’ve no idea just how quickly an hour passes when you are busy.

She was heading into town this afternoon after she’d been here so I gave her one of my prescriptions – the one for the pair of crutches that the doctor wants me to have – and she fetched them back for me. They need adjusting before I can use them so I’ll organise the physiotherapist when he comes tomorrow.

But there is an improvement in the way that I’m moving about which isn’t actually difficult because it surely couldn’t have been much worse. I think that come Friday, if it’s not raining, I’ll try for the shop in the town centre again for my mushrooms and peppers. I’ll have to work out how to use the crutches and pull my shopping trolley along at the same time.

Tea tonight was a curry made of all of the leftovers in the fridge, lengthened by a potato. And it was actually quite nice. Tomorrow I might have a slice of pie with potatoes and veg. I have plenty of potatoes following the delivery of my food order last weekend and they will go off if I don’t use them.

And that reminds me – I have the lettuce to use as well. I mustn’t forget that. But it’s a Batavia and they do keep longer than an Iceberg. And how I wish that I had bought a bigger fridge. We’ll have to see what we can do about that in the future.

Anyway, now I’m off to bed. Tomorrow I’m going to be doing another radio programme in order to keep up with this two per week for the next while until I end up about 6 months ahead. That way, there will be plenty of room for manoeuvre if something happens that I’m not able to prepare any, such as happened when I was in hospital.

There won’t be an 06:00 start though. And there won’t be an 07:30 start either, if recent events are anything to go by.

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Tuesday 16th August 2022 – SUMMER IS BACK!

After the couple of days that we had of grey overcast weather conditions, Summer came back with a bang today.

Not quite the record-breaking temperatures that we had, but blue skies all the same.

dry footpath pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022And while we’re on the subject of the hot weather … “well, one of us is” – ed … I thought that you might like to see how things are doing around here.

This is the footpath on top of the cliffs at the back of the Sports Ground. It’s the route that I take down to the end of the headland and you can see how it is (or isn’t) holding up.

The path itself is a layer about an inch thick of dust. On the edges of the path the grass has dried out completely and has died off in places. The rest of it, what’s left, is a burnt shrivelled mass and it’ll take a while to regenerate.

Those little showers of rain that we have had just recently haven’t done anything towards improving the situation.

What else took a while to regenerate this morning was me, unfortunately.

It wasn’t until 09:00 that the alarm went off for me to awaken but there was a good reason for that. Late last night a Paul Temple adventure came up on the old-time radio feed just as I was thinking of going to bed. A programme that is timed at 3:25:00

These old radio programmes are really excellent and so I was planning on listening for an hour or so before going to bed. But instead I ended up listening to the whole programme and it was long after 01:00 when I fell into the stinking pit.

Not that I’m bothered about that because life is for enjoying too as well as working and let’s face it – I’m not getting much pleasure in anything else right now

So after I’d finally staggered into the kitchen for my medication I came back in here to find out where I’d been during the night.

And it’s no surprise that I wasn’t feeling like much today when you look at where I went during the night. Having stayed awake until all hours listening to a Paul Temple episode, when I was asleep I had a Paul Temple episode going on in my head. It went on for hours and hours and hours. It involved some saucepans and saucepan lids but everything was just so confusing that I can’t remember any of it. It rambled on and on and on about these guys who I think might have been sportsmen on small boats or something. That’s all that I can really say about this that went on for hours.

And then we were still in Istanbul (had we been there before? I dunno). We’d been talking to some people about meeting up with someone and performing an interview. They to whom we were talking was a taxi driver had something to do and he produced a girl. She exited his cab and walked away. The person with me said that that would have been a good interview. He explained that she was rather too far in in this organisation and would likely cause a lot of problems. She spent most of her time being institutionalised and the rest of the time going round with this gang. So we agreed and he said that he’d see who else he could find for us. He drove away. The person with me said “God, I have to go” and dashed through the door in this stone terraced house and disappeared. I went through this door. There was a set of really steep steps that went down to the river. I went down there as best as I could. I had no idea where he went. There were 2 or 3 cafés at the bottom. He didn’t appear to be in either so I wondered whether he’d gone to the toilet so I’d wait around. There was a girl painter there with a boy whom she was painting. He was carrying this brown and black cat. She was drawing the cat so I went over to talk to her and to stroke the cat. It wasn’t all that friendly but it didn’t fight or anything. We chatted about the cat for quite some time.

Later on we were on a train heading north towards Doncaster somewhere like that. We were on board and it was an express. There were a few seats taken, not all that many. We walked along the train trying to find our places to sit. I can’t remember any more than that

At some point or other a girl with me announced that she was pregnant but it was sort-of announced by accident. It wasn’t a planned announcement, it came out in the conversation. I asked her what she was going to do but she didn’t give a reply so we went back home and went in. The house was totally filthy and really awful. Everyone was just sitting around in a complete state of untidiness. Someone said “you’ll never guess what the baby (for there was another baby in there) had been playing with. He went on to say that it was a half-dead mouse. “I just threw it i ntothe middle of the room” he said which made everyone shudder. I had to start to look for this thing. I thought that if any girlfriend of mine was going to be pregnant this place is going to have to be cleaned up because she shouldn’t bring up a child in this no matter how someone else was bringing up another one. It clearly wasn’t any good at all and we needed to do something about it.

And finally I was walking along the shore on the edge of a beach. There was some people and a dog down there playing about in somewhere where there had been a great big fire. I could hear them discussing it. They seemed to think that it was some form of spontaneous combustion of whatever was underneath the sand. They were busy digging away at it and walking in for a closer look. I carried on walking past and ended up in the mountains in the snow looking at the maps about the ski resort and the various tracks to descend into the valley again. I was looking for either a blue or a red run. Eventually I found what I thought might be a good place to go down but there was a lot of fog around. It came swirling around cutting off the view of the valley and then the view of the sign with the routes on it. I thought to myself that this is going to be extremely difficult for me to go

That skiing excursion actually reminded me of a skiing adventure in which I took part in Cervinia in Italy in the days of my youth. I was with my Italo-Russian friend and we were up in the mountains of Italy near the Matterhorn. We were with a few other people but we were actually in front and when we returned to the village we found that we were on our own.

There had been hanging clouds in the mountains and they had missed the left-turning in the mist and carried straight on downhill into a different valley and ended up in Switzerland. In the days of border controls with no passports or anything, and the 38-mile taxi ride to return to the hotel was the least of their problems.

But something else that was interesting was the dream about the untidy house. We all know only too much about that these days and so for the rest of the day (because there wasn’t much of the rest of it after typing out all of that) I’ve been tidying up in here.

A huge pile of rubbish, papers and the like, bit the dust today. It’s all in the bin and a lot more would have followed it except that each time that I went out I bumped into a neighbour and we had a lengthy chat. Not that I’m one for chatting to the neighbours but I do have to try to be sociable occasionally.

And I now know why the barrier to the car park isn’t working. I wondered where the car of one of my neighbours had gone

As well as taking out the papers I’ve actually put some stuff away too, I have cunning plans for more stuff and later on tonight I’m going to go outside with my old non-working printer and … errr … forget where I left it. This is going to be quite a long job.

In fact I was so carried away that I forgot to go for breakfast. That’s not like me, is it? Although I am eating less these days than I have done in the past.

people on beach rue du nord Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022It was a surprise that I actually managed to make it out for my afternoon walk.

As usual I went across to the wall at the end of the car park to see what was happening down on the beach. With the weather being a lot warmer and sunnier than it has been this last couple of days I was expecting to see the crowds.

And as usual, I’m not disappointed. This was just a few of them, with many people having taken to the water to cool off. There were crowds of people elsewhere disporting themselves on beach towels catching the sun all the way down the coast.

yachts baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022While I was at it, I had a look out to sea to see what was happening there.

When I’d been walking down to the end of the car park I’d seen something white out at sea. It’s actually a yacht with a white sail with green stripe that’s cavorting around out there and it has a friend way over there towards the northern Normandy shore.

Over to the right of the yacht in the foreground is a marker buoy, presumably indicating another lobster pot, and then we have one of the many bouchot farms of the area in the background with its stakes rearing up like a medieval cheval de frise

st helier jersey Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022As you can tell from the previous photo, the view was so much better today with the air being much cleaner.

That meant that I had high hopes for a photo of Jersey and St Helier so I went and found a piece of high ground where there might be a really good view.

And once again I wasn’t disappointed. It’s not the clearest view that we have had of St Helier but it’s still pretty good all the same.

One of these days I’ll really have to get myself out there somehow so that I can identify all of the buildings that I can see from here. The way that things are right now, I’ll have to hitch a ride on a freighter.

kayak cabin cruiser baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022Or else flag down a friendly cabin cruiser.

As I walked through the sandy wastes towards the end of the headland I noticed this cabin cruiser pull up. At first I thought that it might be a group of fishermen but as I watched they lowered something down at the stern.

A couple of minutes later someone climbed in and kayaked away. And it’s a good job that it’s summer because you don’t need to keep warm. After all, we all know that you can’t have your kayak and heat it.

And on that not, I wandered off further down the path.

cabanon vauban people on bench pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022The car park was crowded again with cars so I was expecting to see a lot of people here too.

Plenty of folk down on the lower path and there was a couple of people sitting on the bench by the cabanon vauban.

Not that they had very much to see because there were no boats out there this afternoon and no-one fishing on the rocks.

However, the buoy that we saw yesterday marking what I assume to be a lobster pot was still there so they can keep their eye on that.

ch638749 pescadore ch918297 trafalgar ch764626 chant des sirenes ch449345 peccavi ch 730708 la soupape I ch898472 cap lihou chantier naval port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022So I wandered off down the path on the other side of the headland to see what’s happening in the port.

And there are yet more changes in the chantier naval as another trawler has come in to join the fray today. The black and blue trawler in the middle of all of that is Pescadore.

She always confuses me because when I first came here she was actually blue and white but had a repaint a while back.

Meanwhile over at the ferry terminal out of shot is Chausiaise, the little freighter. She’s not going anywhere at the moment.

marie fernand port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022While I was here I went to check to see if anyone was playing “Musical Ships” at the Fish Processing Plant this afternoon but I was side-tracked.

Over there in the inner harbour is a yacht. At first I thought that it might be Charles Marie because it seems to be the same style, but the colours are different. This one here is dark brown rather than dark blue.

So I shall have to go for a closer look to see if I can pick up a name.

But there’s another lorry in the port this afternoon, presumably dropping off some more freight for the Channel Islands. Things are certainly hotting up here as far as freight goes. We’re starting to be over-run and that’s good news.

victor hugo port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022Heading off towards the inner harbour (forgetting all about the Fish Processing Plant) I noticed that Victor Hugo is back in port.

The last that I heard of her she was running a shuttle around the outlying islands of the Channel Islands but now she’s back in the inner harbour and moored up at the quayside. It looks as if her mad dashes out and about over the last couple of days have come to a halt.

However I hope that it’s only a temporary pause. I mentioned earlier that I want to get out to the Channel Islands at some point in the near future and I had some high hopes that the ferry might become a regular thing. It’s no part of my plan for her to be laid up for long.

marie fernand port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022So back at the inner harbour and the yacht that’s in here.

It was not easy to read her name but a check of the fleet radar later revealed that she’s called Marie Fernand. She was built in 1894 as one of the harbour pilots for Le Havre and the northern Frenc coast, duties that she carried out until motorisation of the pilot service after World War I.

She was sold to someone in the UK in 1922 and for a long time disappeared from view.

Someone told me a delightful anecdote about her though. They planned to build a reconstruction of her in time for her centenary so they cast around for the plans. However someone had the rather brilliant idea “why don’t we just copy the original?”.

That was the first that the organisers knew that she still existed so they convinced the British owners to sell her back to the port and since then she’s been restored and was present at her own centenary.

There’s the Festival of Working Sailboats taking place soon so I imagine that she’s come here to be part of it.

Back here I had my iced coconut drink and did a little more tidying up. It’s going to take me an age to do what I want to do.

Tea was the second half of that rather wicked curry. and it was wicked as well. I’ll have to put the toilet paper in the fridge later.

But I didn’t go out to put the printer out. Even as I write we’re having a thunderstorm and a rainstorm. The printer doesn’t really work but I want to give someone a sporting chance and soaking it in water won’t help.

No radio tonight – I’m listening to music so I doubt if I’ll have a late night. I must remember to reset the alarm and then tomorrow carry on with my cleaning plan, otherwise known as “throwing out surplus items”.

A good night’s sleep would be nice too. We can live in hope.

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Monday 15th August 2022 – ONE THING THAT I …

… forgot to do (well, two things in fact) was to contact the various people like the nurse and the physiotherapist and tell them that I’m back home again.

But I needn’t bother about contacting the nurse. There I was working away at the radio programme this morning when round about 09:30 there was a ring on the bell. The Nurse was in the building and he thought that he’d check up on me to see how I was.

Anyway I’ve had my injection this morning, the first one that I have had since the beginning of June. I wonder if that would perk me up and give me a burst of energy. I must admit that I need one.

Especially having had to crawl (extremely unwillingly) out of bed at 06:00. I staggered into the kitchen for my medication and then staggered back in here to check my mails and messages before starting to deal with my radio programmes.

It was another long, slow morning doing the radio programme. There was the usual coffee break and then I was interrupted for about 15 minutes by the nurse coming round to give me my injection.

Even so, I would have expected to have finished it a long time before 11:35. It was definitely one of the slowest radio programmes that I’ve done, and for no obvious reason either.

While I was listening to the finished product and also to the programme that I’d send off later in the day I had a shuffle round with the music. I’ve let a few things go out of sync and I needed to tidy up everything.

As a result I ended up going for my lunchtime fruit rather later than usual.

After lunch I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. We were on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR. We were British and Norwegian Resistance fighters and the ship was crewed by Germans. We were undercover pretending to be Germans but we were going ashore later that night to sabotage some instruments and equipment. Our plans were interruped by having to go to shore immediately so we had to hide our equipment and hope that no-one would see it until we came back later and could nip out. While I was hiding the equipment and keeping the Germans talking they were trying to make our escape route out of the side of the ship by drilling 2 holes in the side. They were caught by a German so they beat him to death. They managed to smuggle him ashore where they could bury him. Then it was time for all of us to go ashore so we assembled at the side of the deck. The motor boat was below us and there was quite a strong current and high waves. The first 2 people who were 2 of my people lowered themselves down the steps into the motor boat. The first one went in OK but the 2nd one had her timing wrong. The wave hit this motor boat and threw her about 6 feet into the air. She landed in a heap at the bottom of the boat. As I was going down the steps I happened to look up. I could see 2 small holes in the side of the ship thinking that if anyone else sees that our goose is going to be cooked. If anyone sees that while they are boarding the boat our goose will be booked. I boarded this boat and said “the last time I was in this motorboat …” and they all looked at me strangely. I said “the last time I was in this motorboat was 3 years ago” and they all suddenly realised that this was the same boat that we were on in this wartime exploit that I’d been around the Arctic on a couple of years earlier.

Later on I was at University. There was a group of us and we gradually paired ourselves off into twos. I ended up with a Brazilian girl and we started to see each other. One day I had to pick her up after University. We were going to do something. I went home and it was all locked etc but the plates and crockery were out for the evening meal. I did what I had to do then went to pick her up. We went to the swimming baths. We had a good time around there. Afterwards I asked if she would like to come home. She replied “yes, fine” so I drove home. Trying to enter the house I couldn’t remember which key was which. There were so many of them on my key ring. Eventually I found the correct one. We were the only ones in and it was just like it was beforehand. She made a remark about it. She asked what time it was. I told her and she made an exclamation and said that she had to telephone her mother to let her know that she was OK. She asked if it was OK that she rang from here but it was to Brazil. I said yes if it’s a very short one. That was when I began to have a feeling that someone was going to be taking advantage of me in this situation. I didn’t quite like the idea of that.

It’s not something that I have never actually encountered in real life. My Road to Hell really is littered with previous good intentions

Finally we were going to an auction of possessions somewhere in aid of some Charity. There was a huge crowd building up outside and in the ante-room but they weren’t letting anyone in. It was becoming later and later. Then they announced that it might be that a lot of goods had been sold by tender prior to the auction which annoyed everyone. There was a surge of people forward into the auction hall and they were all surged back out again. While we were waiting we were looking out of the window. We were quite high up. We saw a vehicle towing a water tank on a trailer come out of a building and turn right. As he did, the trailer locked up and hit a parked vehicle. It spun the car round which hit a lorry. The trailer disengaged and broke away so the car drove off. This lorry did a U-turn and chased after it. When the driver saw the lorry coming he tried to escape but realising that he was never going to escape from this lorry he pulled over. By this time we’d caught up with the action for we were keen to see what would happen. The lorry driver took a big sledge hammer and started to hit this car which was an old London taxi by this time putting huge dents in the bodywork, breaking the windows etc while the young guy with his guitar who was driving stood around watching. Just then the police appeared so the lorry driver entered a building, picked up one or two things and came out carrying some stuff as if he was an innocent bystander. He’d probably gone 100 yards when the police suddenly started to run after him. He dropped his stuff and ran and dashed into a pub. In the meantime a group of girls in prom dresses was going past. he came out of the pub wrapped in a scarf or curtain. he looked like one of these girls in these Prom dresses but we could see that it was him. He tagged onto these girls while the police were busy scouring the streets. Suddenly they started running again after him. They stopped right by my car, one policeman did. He had his keys in his hand and they were pointing at me. I wound the window down on my car and said “you point that gun again at me and there’s going to be a problem”. He hastily stuffed his keys in his pocket and asked “what gun?”. I replied ” the gun that you just had in your hand and stuffed in your pocket”. He looked as if he was about to argue with me but he turned round ad ran off again. Whoever I was with asked “why did you say that?”. I replied “to disrupt the flow of his thought and action and slow him down a lot while the lorry driver makes his getaway”

And that must have been really exciting watching that during the night.

Unfortunately, during the middle of all of this transcribing, I crashed out. And for about an hour too. But I suppose having started at 06:00 this morning it was only to be expected. I even had a little wobble while I was doing the radio programme but I managed to fight it off.

people on beach rue du nord Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022As usual the first thing that I did was to go over to the wall at the end of the car park to look down onto the beach to see what was happening there.

The weather is now much more like a clammy October day today so I wasn’t expecting to see anyone sunbathing down on the beach today, and I wasn’t all that far out

Just one or two people sitting on the sand but there were plenty of people down on the waterline but I wasn’t counting all the numbers.

Those who weren’t actually swimming about in the water (and I’ve no idea why they would be doing that this afternoon) were presumably scratching around looking for shellfish, with the tide being well out right now.

It’s pretty pointless looking out to sea because there was quite a sea mist this afternoon and I could hardly see anything in the bay.

F-GCUM Robin DR400-180 baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022Instead, I concentrated my efforts on what was happening up in the air this afternoon. There were several aircraft up there, such as this one.

She’s F-GCUM, a Robin DR400-180 that belongs to the local aero club that fly out of the airfield a little further along the coast.

She took off at 16:11 and flew out around the Ile de Chausey and then down the bay to Mont S Michel, a quick lap around down there and back home again where she came in to land at 16:45.

My photo was taken at 16:39 (adjusted) so that all fits in.

F-GBAI Robin DR 400-140B baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022Right behind him, another aeroplane came flying over the headland.

Her registration number is F-GBAI and she’s another Robin aeroplane, a DR100-140B that also belongs to the aero club.

She’s been out this afternoon for quite a long flight this afternoon. She took off at 15:26 and carried out the same flight as the previous one, but did several laps around between the Ile de Chausey and the Point de Carolles on her way up and down the coast.

She came back in to land at 16:47 and seeing that my photo was timed at 16:41 (adjusted) all of that fits in too.

There were a couple more aeroplanes out there too but far too far away for me to identify.

pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022There were plenty of people out and about on the path and this photo doesn’t really do justice to the crowds.

But what I was much more interested in was the grassland. Despite the rain that we had yesterday, it’s not done anything to revitalise the grass and it still looks as brown as it always did over this last month or so wih the heatwave that we had.

Interestingly, the native plants, otherwise known as “weeds” seem to have perked up somewhat though. It just goes to show that the weeds will always triumph in any circumstances. We are going to need much more than what we had yesterday to bring this lot back to life again.

lobster pot buoy pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022There were plenty of cars parked in the car park and on the lawn at the side again this afternoon.

And there were plenty of people milling around at the end of the headland. But what caught my eye was the buoy out there just offshore (and only just offshore too) that is presumably marking the site of where someone has dropped a lobster pot in the hope of making a catch.

Plenty of people down on the lower path below where we are standing, but no-one at all on the bench at the end of the headland by the cabanon vauban. But then again, that’s not really any surprise because it wasn’t as if you could actually see anything out in the bay this afternoon.

peche à pied pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022However there were plenty of people down on the rocks just offshore

As I mentioned earlier, the tide was well out so there were people out there at the pèche à pied making the most of low tide and having a good ferret around amongst the rocks.

Anyway, I left them to it and wandered off down the path on the other side of the headland towards the port.

There was no change in occupancy in the chantier naval today, although there was quite a racket coming from there. And no-one playing “Musical Ships” this afternoon at the Fish Processing Plant either.

freight port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022Considering the amount of freight traffic that there has been just recently between Granville and St Helier, I was surprised to see so much freight still on the quayside.

We had Thora and Normandy Trader at least once running back and forth and even Chausiaise pressed into service as well. No wonder Normandy Warrior has come to join the party and the big Southern Liner has been carrying out trials in the harbour here.

But we all know where Marité is today. We can just about see her bow poking into the photograph.

Back here I had a glass of cold chocolate drink and then I had some work to do. Ages ago I broke a door shelf and the veg basket in the fridge and my temporary repairs have reached the stage where I’m spending more time repairing them than anything else.

Consequently I spent a while trawling through the internet and eventually came across somewhere from where I can order them. and it’s a good job that nothing else in the fridge is broken otherwise it would have cost me more to order them than the fridge cost new. I was astonished at the price.

After a good session on the guitars I went to make tea. The pepper that I had left over from last week had bitten the dust so I made a big curry with everything in the fridge, enough to last a couple of days. I rather overdid the chili powder so tomorrow after 24 hours of marinading it’s going to be totally wicked and I’m looking forward to it.

But that’s tomorrow. Tonight I’m off to bed. A good night’s sleep will do me good but I doubt if I will have it.

But if I go off on a couple of good voyages with some of my regular travellers, who seem to be rather conspicuous by their absence these days, I shan’t complain at all.

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Wednesday 10th August 2022 – YOU CAN’T MAKE …

bad parking place d'armes Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022… it up, can you?

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I did promise not to keep on moaning about the examples of pathetic parking that I’m seeing on a daily basis, but there are some times when you can’t really avoid making some kind of comment about what you see.

This is in our own car park – a private car park for this building where there are barely enough parking spaces for all of the inhabitants.

Two inhabitants don’t own cars which means that there are a couple of empty spaces but if ever they were to have guests there would be some kind of punch-up on the pavement, a grapple in the garden or a laying-out on the lawn.

It really is shameful.

Meanwhile, in other news, to my complete surprise, I haven’t crashed out at all today.

What I put it down to is that I’ve been quite busy today (although not with anything of any relevance) and as a result, time has simply flown by.

It was rather exciting when the alarm went off at 07:30 though. I was in the middle of a dream,in the High Arctic last night of all places in a small town. There was like a granite railway station there, like a port with an arcade and café and one or two shops. There was a Boots chemist that had closed down with a note saying “I’m not like some people around here with a grandfather who owns a chemist on a hill”. There was indeed a chemist on a hill that the people in town used, not the one down in this centre. There were a couple of other shops there closed as well. I’d gone to meet my youngest sister and we’d had a coffee and chat. Eventually I’d managed to find a plug so I could plug in my telephone and laptop as well so that they would charge up. The telephone went OK but I found that the laptop was still working, not switched off so I had to switch it off before it would charge up. There was a photo of some old Inuit guys on there. The funny thing about this was that when the alarm went off at that point while I was doing this. I thought to myself immediately that I’d better lie in bed for 10 minutes or so to give my phone and computer a chance to charge up before I got out of bed.

It’s amazing what goes through my head at times when I’m in that place somewhere in between asleep and awake.

Anyway I had the medication and so on, and forgot to check the mails and messages, and then organised the music playlist for the next series of programmes. I have 6 different playlists, numbered AA to FF with about 50 artistes in each and I rotate through them in a kind of order. I use about 11 tracks every week so it means that a complete cycle of artistes will take me between 4 and 5 programmes multiplied by the 6 playlists (that I work through in order) or about 28 weeks.

Of course, it’s not so simple because there are piles of “various artistes” too from samplers and so on from a previous existence in the 70s and they are dropped here and there into the mix every now and again.

Anyway, this week’s playlist consists of 14 artistes from list CC. Such exciting people and groups as Rory Gallagher, Eloy, Mountain and Atomic Rooster are amongst this week’s artistes.

That took longer than I thought as I hadn’t done it for several months, but once it was up and running I had a listen to the dictaphone to hear where else I’d been during the night. Percy Penguin (again! She’s becoming a regular!) was round at my house last night. We were going to have tea so I suggested that we have a stuffed chicken. So between the two of us we worked out the basic rudimentary properties of a good stuffing that was vegan and Percy Penguin would be bound to be about when we’re talking about a good stuffing. We went into the main kitchen of the house, not my little lean-to type of place but the main kitchen where everyone else was in order to cook this half-chicken that I had. Once we’d gone in there I had to go and fetch everything that I needed like saucepans, herbs, spices, quinoa, stuff like that. I began to collect everything but it became obvious pretty soon that I couldn’t remember half the stuff I need. I was going to be overloaded with stuff anyway. I wouldn’t be able to carry it and what would happen then? In the meantime there were people coming in and out of my place like the chemist and his wife in the middle of this rainstorm. They were doing something in my living room. There was a cat there that was soaking wet and the whole of the area by the door was wet through with this rainstorm as well. I had to go back out with what I’d managed to find to go across to the main house with what I had. Again I was sure that it was nothing like enough. I didn’t have the correct saucepans or anything. I could see that this was going to turn out to be a total tragedy because already if you are talking about 20 minutes per pound to cook a chicken it’s already going to take a couple of hours to do and it’s already about 20:00. I can’t see this chicken being ready for hours before we can eat it. Of course she’d have to go home as well. It was just going to be total confusion.

But I liked the idea of the vegan stuffing to eat with the chicken.

The story of half a chicken is not as far-fetched as it might seem. One Christmas (it might have been 1977) I wanted a small turkey but I couldn’t find one anywhere. I must have been in a dozen butchers. At the last one, in Willaston, there was a woman in front of me who was also searching for a small turkey, to no avail.

So I looked at her, she looked at me, and we both bought the last one remaining, quite a large one, and told the butcher to cut it in half. And each of us clutching our respective half, rather like the KINIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE we went our separate ways.

Meanwhile Retournons à nos moutons there was something else to do with baking where a girl, a young teenager, and there was some kind of cake that needed making. The girl didn’t want to become involved but the father did it all on his own on the quiet and it turned out to be quite a reasonable job. It looked really nice. When his family found out they were quite pleased about him having done it. That’s all that I can remember.

And then of course there was the trip by boat to the High Arctic. Yes, I’m becoming broody again.

Something else that I’ve done today was to transcribe a few more notes from the dictaphone, and then I’ve been doing a few rather unproductive things of my own.

people on beach rue du nord Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022One of the more productive things that I’ve done today was to go for a walk around the headland as usual, and that always starts with a look at the beach.

And so dodging the poorly-parked cars I wandered off to the wall at the end of the car park to have a look down there to see what was happening.

It was another beautiful summer day so I was expecting the crowds again and while there wasn’t much beach to be on, given the state of the tide, there were plenty of people down there upon it.

Quite a few of them had taken to the water as well which was no surprise given the weather that we were having, and I was feeling quite envious.

zodiac baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022And as you can imagine, I was feeling quite envious of these guys.

While I was looking around I noticed this zodiac out to sea in the bay. I couldn’t see what the guys were doing on board but at the speed at which they were travelling it wouldn’t have been fishing.

Even though there was a seagull giving them a fly-past, they didn’t seem to have any fishing equipment on board.

Anyway, I fought my way through the crowds towards the end of the headland to see what was happening there.

boats heading for port Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022You can tell that it won’t be long before they close the gates at the entrance to the port de plaisance.

As I was standing on the roof of the bunker looking out to see, I could see stream after stream of pleasure boat heading back from the Ile de Chausey, being led home by a yacht, although I had a feeling that that wouldn’t last long.

At the end of the headland I went across the car park to the end of the headland. But today there were no fisherman and no-one sitting on the bench by the cabanon vauban either.

And so I didn’t hang around. I headed off down the path towards the port.

l'omerta la grande ancre port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022Over at the fish processing plant we’ve had a change of occupancy.

L’Omerta is still there as you might expect, but Gerlean and Le Styx are no longer there. Their places have been taken by La Grande Ancre and one of the little port lighters.

There was no change in the chantier naval today either. There were the same boats there that were there yesterday, and Chausiaise was still moored up at the ferry terminal. But not with Victor Hugo who was still sitting forlornly in the inner harbour.

thora port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022While we’re on the subject of ferries … “well, one of us is” – ed … Thora is in port again.

She used to be a car ferry in the past and worked between a couple of the islands in the Shetlands but was retired when new, larger ships were bought.

In her retirement she first went off to be a diving support vessel, presumably out at the oil rigs, but later she was bought and came down here where she’s used as a little freighter that runs a shuttle between Granville and St Helier.

And that’s a route that’s becoming busier and busier. We had two little freighters on the route but a third, Normandy Warrior, came to join them.

And we’ve seen the big freighter Southern Liner that came in to try out the port.

joly france baie de mont st michel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022We haven’t finished with ferries yet either.

While I was having a good look around out to sea I noticed something moving deep down at the head of the Baie de Mont St Michel.

That prompted me to take a photo of it and back in the apartment I could enhance and enlarge it to see if I could recognise who was down there

By the looks of things it’s one of the Joly France ferries taking a ship-load of tourists out for a lap around the bay this afternoon while they have the tide in their favour.

joly france entering port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022After much deliberation I reckoned that it was the newer one of the two with its windows in portrait format.

And I can confirm that because just at that moment, around the headland from the Ile de Chausey and into port came another one of the Joly France boats.

We can tell by her windows in landscape format that she’s the older one of the two, hence my guess for the other one. She doesn’t seem to be Belle France anyway.

But that was the cue for me to wander off home. I haven’t had my fruit yet. I must have been busy.

yachts baie de mont st michel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022Before I do go home though, I’ll just take a photo of one of the yacht schools.

There were three or four of them out there this afternoon but this one caught my eye with the zodiacs of the monitors being used as tenders behind the yachts.

Back here I had my fruit and then came in here to carry on with what I was doing. And so engrossed was I that I had a late tea. Curry of bits and pieces out of the fridge and it certainly was delicious. And rather light the yacht school, a tender behind will be appropriate for me too.

So bedtime now, and then a day tomorrow where I hae an important letter to write and a few ‘phone calls to make. Everything will be back to normal next week. Except me of course. That’s too much to ask.

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Tuesday 2nd August 2022 – I REALLY THOUGHT …

… that I was going to have a good day today, but it all went pear-shaped round about 18:00 when after valiantly fighting off sleep for most of the day up to that point I finally succumbed.

And it might only have been for about 45 minutes too but it was still 45 minutes more than I wanted.

Mind you, last night I did end up going to bed rather later than intended, having been stuck at the computer longer than I wanted because a “Paul Temple” episode came up on the playlist just as I was going to bed.

However, at least the night was better than the previous one and I didn’t go as far on my travels.

But more about that in due course.

Much of the day has been spent going through the kitchen sorting out the herbs and spices, seeing what I have in stock and working out what I need to buy. And that took me longer than you might think as well because I had stuff everywhere.

It’s all sorted out and counted now, and arranged so that I know where it is.

When I’d done that, the next thing to organise was the medication. That’s something else that I have spread about all over the apartment and I don’t really know what I have. In fact there is probably more of medication that I no longer use than medication that I currently take

Something else that I needed to do was to back up the computer. I haven’t backed up the big computer onto the portable computer since I was on my travels back in June and so I’ve had to copy everything over onto the memory stick that I take with me so that I can do it on the train.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on my key ring I have a tiny 64GB memory stick that’s about half the size of a postage stamp. That lives on the key ring and I use it for transferring files between the desktop machine and the travelling laptop

Strange as it may seem, all of the foregoing took me until quite late in the afternoon. I do have to admit that I wasn’t in much of a hurry but all the same there was still plenty to do.

people on beach rue du nord Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022As usual I went out for my afternoon walk around the headland today.

And first stop was the wall at the end of the car park where I could look down onto the car park to see what was going on down on the beach.

There was plenty of beach to be on too because the tide was quite far out this afternoon. And the nice weather had enticed quite a few people out there to take advantage of it as well.

Some of them had even gone into the water too which was a surprise. It wasn’t that nice

boat zodiac baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022And as usual, while I was there, I had a good look around out at sea to see what was happening out there too.

There was a stationary cabin cruiser down there just offshore with a couple of men on board who looked as if they might be fishing. And so I’m sure that they weren’t all that happy when that zodiac roared over so that the crew thereof could exchange a few pleasantries with them.

And that really was that in Granville Bay. There weren’t any fishing boats or any other pleasure craft or any other water craft of any nature out there. I had no idea where they had all gone. This was the kind of weather where I’d expected to see quite a few people out and about.

Right out in the English Channel beyond the Ile de Chausey there were a couple of sails away on the horizon.

la cancalaise english channel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022With the 70-300mm LENS I took a photo of one of the sets of sails to see if I could enlarge and enhance it when I returned home so that I might be able to identify it.

And so having done the necessary, I couldn’t identify the ship but I could certainly identify the arrangement of her sails, and that told me that she was either La Granvillaise or her sister La Cancalaise who sails out of Cancale.

Sure enough, when I checked the fleet radar, I could see that La Cancalaise was out and about on her travels in that general area this afternoon so that seems to answer that question

F-GCUM - Robin DR400/180 baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022That wasn’t all of it either.

While I was walking down the path in company of all of the crowds of people, I was overflown by a light aeroplane out there in the bay.

She’s another one of our regulars – F-GCUM – a Robin DR400-180 that belongs to the aero club and which flies around the bay quite often.

This afternoon she took off from the airfield at 16:05 and flew down the bay where she did a lap around Mont St Michel and then flew straight back up the coast, when she landed back home at 16:33

There were crowds of people down at the car park, so much so that they were queueing to find a place to park.

yacht school baie de mont st michel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022Nevertheless there wasn’t anyone down at the bench at the cabanon vauban this afternoon, and that means that they missed quite a free show.

One of the sailing schools from Granville had gone out this afternoon and they had ended up right across the bay on the Brittany side.

And it’s not every day that you see the sailing schools go so far on their travels. We’ve only seen them over there once or twice in all of the time that we’ve been here.

You can see how far the tide is out in the bay this afternoon too. The water on the Brittany side of the bay is quite shallow.

aeroplane pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022and right now, as I was looking down the bay, I was overflown yet again.

Unfortunately the aeroplane didn’t manoeuvre itself into a position where I would read its registration number, and there wasn’t anyone out and about on the radar there at that particular moment so I couldn’t identify it like that.

So instead I set off to walk down the path on the other side of the headland towards the port to see what was going on there this afternoon.

There was no change at the chantier naval today. There were the same five boats there that were there yesterday.

l'omerta fish processing plant port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022There’s a little change going on at the Fish Processing Plant though.

L’Omerta is still there playing “Musical Ships” today, but she’s there on her own. Gerlean isn’t there though though. She’s cleared off and right now she was moored at one of the pontoons in the inner harbour.

It beats me why L’Omerta can’t do the same.

But they are assembling quite a collection of fishing equipment on the quayside up above her. Is that all going into L’Omerta at some point, or is someone else coming in to take it away?

victor hugo port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo August 2022Meanwhile, in the inner harbour, Victor Hugo is back again.

She’s spent the last 12 days in Cherbourg apparently, without going anywhere at all. And so as far as this plan to reopen the ferry service between Granville and St Helier goes, the plot sickens.

Back here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. We were with a group of people last night discussing these films on TV last night about how some of this surrealist comedy was done so well that you’d think that it was real even though you knew that it wasn’t. Then there was the kind of tragedy that you’d have that was done really well but you knew immediately also that it wasn’t real so you had a hard time equating to the other film because you always had in the back of your mind that this isn’t real at all, quite a difference from the comedy type of film. We were having an extremely in-depth conversation in our sleep. Of course I had my foot firmly in the comedy camp. A couple of people arguing against me mentioned films but I had never seen them so I didn’t really know.

Later on I’d been out around the town with a friend of mine from Manchester of all people. We’d been wandering round a couple of bars and places. It was quite busy because it was I dunno Roses Day or something, a day of a Battle of the Roses. In the end I had the idea to go down to the computer halls at the University even though it was late, take STRAWBERRY MOOSE with us, climb into the laboratories and send a few messages to Yorkist supporters about their failure at one of the battles that was being celebrated today. i’d done it before on previous occasions and thought that this might be another moment to do it. My friend was rather reluctant but anyway we went out. We found that the streets were totally deserted. There wasn’t a soul around. We couldn’t understand why. We expected to see crowds of people around there. I’d been trying to get some kind of picture on my laptop before going out but that hadn’t worked at all. That was one of the reasons why I suggested going out for it I had my laptop working we could have done it with that. Everywhere was totally quiet, the driveways were closed and locked. They had these metal fences up to keep people out but there wasn’t a soul about at all. It was just so eerie considering what was going on in the bar and what kind of important historical day it was.

They were still carrying out experiments on people’s knee joints with this machine. They kneel down onto the floor and are clamped into this machine and it puts vibrations through it. I was clamped into one after much complaining by authorities but it was designed for me anyway. A few other people were clamped in. One guy had osteo-arthritis but they turned him down. I was the one who had to tell him that he couldn’t be included in the study and had to send him back to wherever it was that he came from. The question of my knee is even infiltrating into my dreams these days.

Tea tonight was the rest of the curry from yesterday and it’s even more delicious when it’s been marinading for 24 hours in its own juices.

Now here’s a surprise. After I finished the washing-up I steam-cleaned the microwave. It hasn’t been cleaned for a while and needed a good going-over.

But that is one of the things that needs to be replaced in due course. It was a small, cheap microwave with a plastic cover over the metal interior and the plastic is now lifting off and the metal is rusting. It’s not very hygienic but there’s no point in replacing it until I have my new kitchen units up here.

So an early-ish start tomorrow because I’m off on the train to Leuven. Not that I’m looking forward to it but we’ll see how it goes. It’ll do me good to get out and about, even if it’s only going just that far.

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Monday 1st August 2022 – HERE WE GO AGAIN

bad parking boulevard vaufleury Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo 1st August 2022This is one reason why tourists have such a bad name and reputation in holiday resorts.

As Guns ‘n’ Roses once famously sang, “They come to our country and think they’ll do as they please”

Where that woman is parked and where her passengers are alighting is on the disabled ramp that leads down to the pedestrian crossing.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I promised that I would lay off the “pathetic parking” that I see on my travels around and about but sometimes some examples are really too awful not to document. I really do wonder what goes through the minds of some people some times.

Anyway, enough of that. Retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, my night last night was as bad as that piece of what is laughably called “parking”. I don’t recall going to sleep at all despite my early night and I spent all of it tossing and turning around in bed.

That’s not quite right because there were two things on the dictaphone, one of which I was actually dictating when the alarm went off at 06:00. And, rather like the gay ghost, that put the willies up me and no mistake.

There wasn’t much difficulty in falling out of bed at the sound of the alarm and finishng off the dictation once the alarm had finished, and then after the medication and checking the mails and messages I sat down and started work on the radio programme.

It turned out to be rather more complicated than most that I’ve done because I seemed to have somewhat overrun the speech. There was really only space for a final song of 1:59 and I had nothing even approaching that in the batch of music from which I had extracted this week’s stuff.

This led to some rather hefty editing of the speech. It’s just as well that I always add in facts that can easily be cut out but even so I was scratching around for stuff to erase at the end. That’s why even though I’d cracked on quite well this morning it was still as late as 11:20 when I finally finished.

While I was listening to it afterwards I was busy writing. I’d received a few e-mails and messages from various people that for one reason or another I hadn’t answered so I took care of that. I think that I’m up-to-date now so if you are waiting for a reply from me and haven’t had it, send me a reminder.

Another thing that I did was to organise my tickets for my journey to and from Leuven later this week, something to which I am not looking forward at all. But I’m going to be using the time sensibly while I’m away (I hope) and making plans for the rest of the year.

Before I went for lunch I had a good long session with the acoustic guitar, just to keep my hand in.

After the fruit I came in here to do some work but rather unfortunately the bad night caught up with me and I crashed out well and truly and completely. Gone for good, in fact, and I didn’t feel a thing for a couple of hours.

people on beach rue du nord Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo 1st August 2022Consequently I was rather late for my afternoon walk today.

There weren’t too many people down there on the beach this afternoon. The weather forecast had told us that today the summer weather would be back and while it was certainly nicer than yesterday, it wasn’t that nice.

So that would explain why the beach was rather quiet and why no-one had plucked up the courage to go for a dip in the sea. And I can’t blame them either. I wouldn’t have gone in there today either but I’m rather notorious for the kind of water in which I would immerse myself.

picking blackberries pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo 1st August 2022There were quite a few people out walking around on the path this afternoon though.

This couple had caught my eye, and it took e a minute or two to work out what was going on. But by the looks of things they were blackberrying.

It made me think that if they were that keen on blackberrying I should have sent them round to my house in Virlet where there would be enough blackberries to keep them going for as long as they like.

One of these days I’ll have to think about doing something with that jungle outside my place there. There’s some stuff in the house that I need but I can’t access it.

f-gcum Robin DR400 180 baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo 1st August 2022While I was brooding on the infinite, an aeroplane roared by out in the bay.

She’s one of our old friends, F-GCUM, a Robin DR400-180 owned by the aero club. We’ve seen her and her sisters on numerous occasions.

She took off from the airfield at 15:58 and flew south down the bay, did a lap around Mont St Michel, then came back up the coast, went out and around the Ile de Chausey and then came back in to land at 16:33.

My photo was timed at 16:09 (adjusted) so that seems to fit in with her voyage.

And “adjusted”? As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … all of my digital equipment is always set to standard time and not adjusted for Summer Time

sailing ship cap frehel brittany english channel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo 1st August 2022As I walked down the path towards the end of the headland I noticed a set of sails out there in the bay off Saint Malo.

She was so far away that I couldn’t recognise her so I took a photo with the aim of enlarging and enhancing it when I returned home to see if I could identify her. But from what I could see, she’s the one that we saw the other day with the strange sails that we were unable to identify.

We could identify the lighthouse at Cap Fréhel though quite clearly. That’s over on the right-hand edge of the image. It was quite clear this afternoon and we could see for miles.

anvil cloud ile de chausey baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo 1st August 2022This cloud out in Granville Bay caught my eye this afternoon. It was extremely interesting.

It’s what they call an “anvil cloud” and it’s a sure sign that wherever it is, there’s quite a storm raging.

If you look closely at the surface of the sea just in front of the Ile de Chausey, you can see the different, darker colour that would seem to indicate that that particular spot is taking a right beating right now.

There aren’t any boats out there in the bay right now and that’s not a surprise given the weather. They would be shipping a lot of water right now.

cabanon vauban people on bench pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo 1st August 2022And although there wasn’t an awful lot going on right now just offshore there was quite a crowd watching it.

Plenty of people on the car park, as I found as I threaded my way across the car park, and loads wandering around on the lower path, and that family of four has stopped for a breather on the bench by the cabanon vauban.

“No shipwrecks, and nobody drownding, in fact nothing to laugh at at all” and no-one fishing off the rocks either and so I left them to it and wandered off down the path on the other side of the headland towards the port to see what was going on.

la confiance 2 chant des sirenes cap lihou chantier naval port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo 1st August 2022When I reached the viewpoint overlooking the chantier naval I noticed that we have yet another change in occupancy.

There’s La Confiance II and Chant des Sirenes in there along with the two fishing boats that I have yet to identify, but we now have a fifth one that has just been pulled out of the water.

She’s Cap Lihou, one that we have seen quite often, and there was someone around there somewhere with a Kärcher pressure washer giving her a good going-over, as you can tell from the scaffolding and all of the water that’s around her.

There ought to be a squadron or two of seagulls loitering around as well because liberated barnacles would make a tasty snack

gerlean l'omerta fish processing plant port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo 1st August 2022Meanwhile, over at the Fish Processing Plant we have our usual suspects moored up

In front we have Gerlean and at the rear is L’Omerta in her usual place. In between the two is a little boat that we have seen around and about quite often but I’ve not yet been able to identify her.

One of these days I shall have to go for a walk around for a closer look but I’m really not up to it – at least, not up to the walk back up the hill again afterwards. Things have gone downhill quite considerably since I’ve been living here.

marité freight on quayside port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo 1st August 2022Before I went home I had a good look at what was happening in the inner harbour.

Marité is back in town after her perambulations over the weekend. and at the side of her there’s a lorry that’s unloading a pile of freight presumably for one of the Jersey freighters to take away.

There’s a speedboat too, shrink-wrapped in plastic so I imagine that she’ll be going on a freighter too.

Back here I had a coffee and then had a listen to what had been happening on the dictaphone during the night. While I had been in my sleep I tripped over a rough bit in the path and fell, and couldn’t pick myself back up again. That was about the only time that I went to sleep during the night, that was, as I noted at the time.

There was a group of refugees who wanted to be taken clandestinely across Europe. I worked out a few things to do basically and came to the conclusion that it would be easier if I put a few of them on the train led by jackie and Alison. Then with one other person I brought the luggage and everything across Europe by vehicle. I could get in front of them and be there when they arrived. When they returned from work I had the apartment all ready. They had to fight their way in over this sofa that I was using to block the door. They had a meal of boiled eggs and bread but there wasn’t much bread then we discussed everything. I could see that they weren’t too happy about this which I could understand I suppose. They asked me what the railway company thought about me moving these refugees by rail. I came up with some story because they hadn’t really asked because I was quite confident that it would work anyway and I didn’t want to involve too many people in what we were doing. It was all going to be something of a mish-mash with the idea that it would be all right on the night. I had a few things to prepare like some dummy school books so I was sitting down trying to prepare those in a quiet moment before it was time to go. I had a feeling that we still hadn’t resolved this issue about who was going how and where. I felt that we were heading for some kind of difficulty amongst ourselves in this respect.

Tea tonight was a curry made of all kinds of bits an pieces loitering around in the fridge. And there is enough for tomorrow too which is just as well because it really was quite nice and I’ll make more like this, except that I’ve run out of fennel now.

And that reminds me – I need to check the supplies to see what I need because many of the herbs and spices tht=at I use can only be bought at the Asian supermarkets in Leuven and not anywhere local to me in Granville. It’ll mess up my cooking completely if I run right out of some things.

Now that I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed. I’m looking forward to a good sleep although I’m not sure if I’ll have one. I can’t understand why last night was such a bad night because I didn’t actually crash out at all on Sunday and with the early start and the open-air exercise I ought to have been completely wasted.

So it all totally beats me.

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Wednesday 27th July 2022 – THERE WASN’T ANYONE …

l'omerta yachts baie de mont st michel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022… playing “Musical Ships” this afternoon at the Fish Processing Plant.

In case you are wondering where L’Omerta was this afternoon while I was out on my afternoon walk, she was out in the bay doing a spot of fishing, surrounded by a flotilla of yachts from one of the sailing schools being ushered along by a zodiac.

There were a couple of the smaller port lighters moored up at the quayside there but it’s not usually possible to identify them and in any case they are only there for a matter of minutes.

le renard english channel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022Something else that was oout there this afternoon was a large sailing ship out in the English Channel way beyond the Ile de Chausey.

At this kind of distance it’s impossible to identify her but having a crafty peek at the radar screen when I returned home I could see that Le Renard, the 30-metre sailing ship from St Malo, was out there in that position at that time.

So retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, once more I ended up going to bed rather later than I intended, once again because something interesting came up on the on-line radio playlist.

Not as late by any means as the other night of course. We have to have some kind of limits somewhere.

During the night I travelled some considerable distance, but I actually started off at home. We were all there, all doing various things with electrics and electronics. Someone came to the door and asked for a quote so thinking that it might be for something like that I went to the door to ask them. It turned out that they wanted a quote for moving a load of carrots to Germany. For that I needed further information so I had to invite them in and clear a little space by my desk. Instead they went to sit on my sofa. That was difficult for me so I went to sit on a sofa over there. There were a couple of them and a very young girl and were talking about all kinds of strange and different things. One of our little girls was taking to them about something like that as well but not really about these carrots. I was trying to get them to come to the point so that I could deal with them but they were still busy talking about a pile of irrelevances. They asked if our milk was pasteurised. I replied that it was heat-treated. We talked about rockets to the moon. One of my sisters said that she was born on a rocket going to the moon so I corrected her and said that it was on a rocket coming back from the moon etc but no-one actually reached the point of talking about this lorry-load of carrots that needed moving.

And then this was where I’d had a bird bath or something delivered to me unexpectedly. Someone came to the door to me about it. They wanted to talk straight away but when I tried to talk there was some kind of major eruption from them about everything. It turned out that they were learning the language and wanted to practise it or something like that but they realised that this had been dropped in the wrong place and wanted it moved and wanted to do it themselves or organise it themselves. I didn’t have very much to say while this thing was swinging about. They finally managed to put it somewhere else.

Checking if my laptop didn’t work as well as I’d like. What I’d done was to switch it on and let it update itself. Then I’d been called away so I’d left it but it had been picked up by the Security people who had transported it to the central unit. I was watching it and the central unit was only programmed to show roads and a lot of the route that my laptop had taken was on internal pathways. It wasn’t shown on those. Basically the tracking thing for internal purposes was no use at all. Eventually I had the call through that my laptop had been found and I had to go to pick it up. That was at the centre so we went up there. Their building wasn’t a building at all but in the open air sheathed in tin while they were rebuilding the medieval city walls around them rather like they are doing in Leuven. It was pretty much a building site, I fell into a trench and people thought that it was funny there. In the end I managed to rescue my laptop that was still uploading and carry on with what i’d been doing.

So we were all back in this big hotel. I had my laptop. We were chatting. It was Christmas Eve. There was a huge group of us in the lobby and people were talking about what they were going to do. Someone said that he was goig to wait a few years, carry on working and then do all the things that he wanted to do with his £2 million. I said that his £2 million isn’t going to be worth that much in a few years time, which caused everyone to laugh. Then I decided that I’d go to bed so I took my laptop with me and went to my car. I went to plug the laptop in. One of the plugs I could plug in fine but the two RCA plugs I just couldn’t plug in at all. There was like a subsidiary plug on the RCA plugs that plugged into another part and I couldn’t make them line up no matter how I tried. They wouldn’t go in at all into the charging box

Somewhere in a dream with some girl or other we’d had to go along and file some important papers. To do that we had to access a room where there was no access. In theory I could always jump up there, catch it with my fingernails and haul myself up. The two of us went. The idea was that I’d take the torch and paperwork and jump up there, she would pass everything to me then I’d haul her up. There were some other people there too. They had something made out of a weird collection of plastic bottles full of water that they were trying to use as steps to get themselves up like a circus artist’s trapeze thing. I went round to my usual spot but didn’t even bother to try to jump because I knew that I couldn’t reach it. I thought “what kind of state am I in these days that I can’t even do something like this that I could have done so easily a couple of months earlier?” I really am in a bad state right now and I wish that I wasn’t. Usually my dreams are my only form of escapism but it seems that it’s even catching up with me there and that’s a horrible state of affairs.

It’s hardly a surprise that I had a real struggle to leave the bed this morning. I did manage to beat the second alarm but there wasn’t that much in it.

After the medication I had a really exciting time taking the metal, glass and plastic rubbish out to the bin. Such are the highlights of my life these days when I have that to look forward to.

As well as having a really good session on all of the guitars that went on for hours I’ve been downloading stuff again. I’ve found another OLD-TIME RADIO SITE that I hadn’t know about before. That had tons of Francis Durbridge’s “Paul Temple” radio programmes on it so I’ve been downloading them.

Some tidying up too, packing for my trip next week to Leuven and doing a little DiY around here too – stuff that I should have been doing a long time ago. I was so busy that I was surprised that I managed to find the time to crash out for half an hour after my lunchtime fruit.

people on beach rue du nord Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022And there was time to go out for my afternoon walk as well.

And as usual my first port of call was down at the end of the car park to have a look over the wall to see what was happening down on the beach.

A few more people down there this afternoon although no-one was brave enough to take the waters. “I was misinformed” as Rick Blaine might have said.

It was quite warm this afternoon, although not that warm. Not like it was the other day.

hang glider place d'armes Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022It was quite windy this afternoon too.

That ws evident by the number of Nazguls that were out and about. There were several of them hovering around having just taken off from the field by the cemetery and a few minutes later one of them went by overhead, casting a cold shadow on those of us below.

This one is another two seater and it looks as if the passenger is a rather young person. I wonder what the age limit is for going as a passenger on board a Nazgul … “it’s 6 years old” – ed.

yacht baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022The Nazguls weren’t the only things out there enjoying the wind either.

There was this rather beautiful yacht out there in the bay this afternoon having a sail around. And as I watched, her sail bellied out in the wind and she performed a rather dramatic U-turn and headed back the way that she had come.

At a rather slower pace, I followed her down towards the headland. I can’t travel as quickly as a yacht in full sail in a gale, unfortunately. Especially when I have other pedestrians to contend with.

f-gsbv Robin DR400 180 baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022Round about here, I noticed an aeroplane out there in the bay on its way back towards the airfield.

Too far out for me to read its registration number I took a photo of it in the hope that I could enlarge and enhance it when I returned home but when I did so, that didn’t reveal much either.

However, the records of the airfield show that F-GSBV, a Robin DR400 180 that we have seen on several occasions in the past, took off at 15:19 and flew down the coast to Avranches. It then flew out into the bay, did a lap around the Ile de Chausey and came bak to the airfield where it came in to land at 15:56.

My photo was taken at 15:48 (adjusted) so that seems to correspond.

cap frehel brittany Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022The views out to sea today were really quite good.

You probably noticed that when you saw the earlier photo of the sailing ship out in the English Channel. It’s even more apparent with the view of the lighthouse at Cap Fréhel 70 kilometres away down the Brittany coast.

What is interesting about this photo is firstly that it wasn’t even taken from the usual spot on top of the bunker but from a place much more banal, and secondly I could see it with the naked eye without the aid of the camera lens.

fisherman pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022From there I walked across the desert that at one time used to be a lawn and was almost squidged on the car park by two cars reversing out of parking spaces.

Nevertheless I adroitly avoided them and wandered down to the end of the headland where I noticed that we had a fisherman down there on the rocks.

According to the local newspaper this morning the ban on fishing at certain spots has been lifted and our fisherman here does have something in which he might drop his catch.

Always assuming that he does manage to catch something. That would be exciting if we were to see someone else pull something out of the water.

cabanon vauban people pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022But whatever was happening, there was quite a crowd down there watching it.

These two people were sitting on the bench but they must have seen me coming because as soon as they saw me they stood up and made ready to leave. And who could blame them?

Not me anyway. I headed off down the path on the other side of the headland towards the port to see what was happening there, passing L’Omerta and her entourage as I did so.

La Confiance II is still in the chantier naval and still on her own. I’m hoping that she will have some more company soon.

thora port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022In the inner harbour yesterday we saw Normandy Trader loading up with freight and setting sail for Jersey.

Today we have Thora in port too loading up with freight. The harbour gates are closed right now but once they are opened I imagine that she will be disappearing into the sunset.

My coffee was waiting so I disappeared into my apartment and then transcribed the dictaphone notes which you read a little earlier.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry that was just as delicious as last week’s. I’m not quite sure what it is that I’m doing differently that is responsible for the improvement but I wish that I knew so that I could keep on doing it.

While I was writing up my notes Rosemary rang me up and we had another long chat, and as a result I’m going to be quite late going to bed yet again. Isn’t it always the case? But then again talking to friends is an extremely permissible reason for being late and I don’t do it often enough.

Tomorrow is another day without a lot to do so I need to organise myself even better and catch up with some arrears. There are plenty of those.

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Wednesday 20th July 2022 – SUNDAY NIGHT’S PIZZA …

… may not have been as good as others might have been in the past but tonight’s curry was a belter. One of the best that i’ve ever made.

Basically it was the left-overs out of the fridge with a potato added thereto and cooked to perfection with lots of lovely spices and some soya cream.

And if I can make curry like that again on a regular basis, I’ll be in business.

boats baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022Quite a lot more pleasure boats out there at sea today so while you admire them all in the next few photos (becase these are all that there were), I’li start at the very beginning.

And at least last night was somewhat better than the previous one. Even with the bedroom window closed and the fan switched off it was a lot cooler in the bedroom and I actually managed to go to sleep.

So much so that when the alarm went off at 07:30 it was a struggle to leave the bed.

Nevertheless I beat the second alarm to my feet (which is always good news) and staggered off into the kitchen to take my medicine.

fishermen speedboat baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

We started off with a neighbour just like that guy in Virlet who was bad-tempered and miserable, always finding fault, always being picky. We’d all been somewhere on board a bus, a pile of us. He had 2 young girls with him. When the bus stopped and everyone alighted he disappeared for a moment. I was going through my things and found some small bottles of water so I gave one each to these 2 girls and also a sweet. When he came back I gave him one as well, a bottle of water and a sweet. He was going on about how I was trying to buy friends, this kind of thing. I said “no, not at all. It was just something that I wanted to do because I’m that kind of person” or something like that. While they were all sitting there talking I took out my laptop and my headphones and was going to sit down to transcribe some notes.

yachts baie de mont st michel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022And then someone had heard of a photographer so he went to see him about doing some photographs. When the photos were done they were so good that he was wondering who it was who recommended him, whether he was a relation or simply just a friend of that person

Finally I was with a group of friends and we had gone to a meeting or something. There was a lunch laid on so we started to help ourselves to lunch. This meeting had cost us £8:00 each to go. We went but the meeting wasn’t particularly inspiring but the lunch was quite nice. This carried on for a short while afterwards and then they started to lay out the table with all these curries etc so I asked if we were going to stay for this as well. They replied “well we’d better start moving around or else we’ll be stuck in one place”. We started to wander around and they started to bring all of the things that they were going to serve. In the meantime where was this nice curry. I thought “never mind anything else. I’m going to have some of the curry”. We started to help ourselves to the meals. One of the things that was happening was a display of firearms with the children. The firearms discipline was hopeless. All the kids were turning their backs on each other while they were carrying loaded firearms. I said to one of the girls with us that that was terrible. If they had done that anywhere else they would have been thrown out immediately. Some fellow turned round and made some kind of remark to me. I replied “don’t worry. I’m a foreigner”. He asked “why is it that you are telling her then?”. I said that’s OK because she’s a foreigner too” so he turned round and walked away at that point.

The Welsh class continued with its usual chaotic structure but I’m not complaining. After all, it is free and it’s the best offer that I’ve had for a Summer School. And once again we didn’t stop for lunch but crashed on right through.

One of the tasks that we had to do was to read a couple of chapters of a book. The book was able to be downloaded as an *.epub but no program that I have on any of my computers would read it.

Eventually I tracked down a program – CALIBRE – that would read it but the field of view is so small that I can’t read the text and after spending about an hour at it I’ve still not found a way to zoom the page up to a realistic size.

It really beats me why people can’t stick to a good old-fashioned *.pdf format for on-line books.

When the course finished I had my lunchtime fruit and then a play about on the guitar for a while. That took me up to the walkies time.

people on beach rue do nord Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022And as usual I went out across the car park over to the wall at the end so that I can look down onto the beach.

Less and less beach down there today, and fewer and fewer people too. It was really warm out there this afternoon but I think tht what must have put people off was the fact that it was nothing like as warm as Monday. That really was exceptional.

And while we’re on the subject of the beach … “well, one of us is” – ed … someone trying to negotiate the steps that lead to the beach missed their footing and fell from the cliffs onto the beach yesterday evening.

That was the reason why the Air-Sea rescue helicopter was hovering around here while I was on the ‘phone.

hang gliders Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022You’ve seen all of the photos of what was going on out at sea this afternoon, so I had a look elsewhere to see if there was anything else going on.

And as I watched, a couple of Nazgul reared up from the field at the side of the cemetery and began to head my way.

“Your Only Protection is Flight” as Hawkwind sang in SONIC ATTACK, especially as I’m over 10 years old and don’t have a cocoon, but whereas a couple of years ago I could quite happily run all the way around the headland, these days I can’t even run for a bus.

There were quite a few people out and about on the path today and so we had the dust-clouds to deal with. I shudder to think what it will be like if the wind gets up with all of this dust about. It won’t be pleasant.

fisherman pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022Down at the end of the headland there was no-one sitting on the bench by the cabanon vauban.

However we did have a fisherman out there on the rocks. What with the ones that you might have seen earlier in one of the boat it seemed to be quite busy from that point of view.

There were even a few people having a go at the pèche à pied although I’m not quite sure, for the tide is nowhere near far enough out.

But that’s their problem, not mine. I left them to it, in the hope that a Nazgul would get them, and headed off down the path towards the port.

les bouchots de chausey la confiance 2 chantier naval port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022And yet another change in occupancy in the chantier naval.

We still have Les Bouchots de Chausey if it is indeed she, and La Confiance II but Monaco du Nord II has disappeared. back into the water, I suppose.

And while L’Omerta is still tied up – on her own – at the Fish Processing Plant, there wasn’t anyone this afternoon over at the ferry terminal. All of the ferries to the Ile of Chausey are presumably out.

But a friend of a friend tells me that Granville, the newer of the two Channel Islands ferries, has turned up this evening in St Helier and is planning on staying the night over there. So some kind of skeleton service is being run at the moment.

marité chausiaise port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo July 2022And if you are wondering where Chausiaise is, the little freighter is over there at the quayside underneath the crane, presumably being loaded with supplies for the island.

Marité is over there too. She’s not going anywhere right now by the looks of things. It doesn’t seem to be much of a summer so far for the town’s water craft.

Back at the apartment I had a good clean-up and a shower to make myself look pretty and then, bang on cure, Rosemary rang me. She MUST have installed a camera here somewhere.

It ended up being another one of our long chats, mainly about her Ukrainian guests. By the sound of things they have settled in the Auvergne and seem to be at home.

Their issue is first of all to learn to speak French, and secondly, to sort out some kind of employment. This involves contacting all kinds of Government agencies and finding out what facilities are available for Ukrainian refugees to integrate into French society, and so we spent the time of our ‘phone call making lists

Hopefully, progress can be made. But I can see myself being recruited into going for another trip into Central France some time in the near future for a hands-on task.

Tea was my delicious curry and then I came in here to write up my notes.

And now I’m off to bed. Another day at Summer School tomorrow and I’ll see how I get on. I’m not expecting too much but it’s all that’s on offer right now.

And considering that all of these supplementary courses are free, I’m just grateful that the Welsh Government is taking the trouble to educate us.

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