Category Archives: la mie caline

Thursday 12th March 2020 – I WAS ALMOST …

… right about the pontoons. So almost right in fact that I’m going to give myself 9 out of 10.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I counted the pillars on the quayside and decided that they were going to install two rows of four, and then they went yesterday and put a fifth one in the row on the north side of the harbour that confounded all of my expectations?

Anyway, to cut a long story short … “thank goodness” – ed … they might have installed five n one row, but today they are indeed starting on a second row, just as I reckoned that they would.

But that’s going to be bad news as far as I can see for the shipping in here, where they are installing that second row.

Here’s Tiberiade, a sister ship to Coelacanthe, and I watched her for a good five minutes struggling to negotiate her way around the pillars in order to find a berth to which to tie up.

And that’s just a fishing boat. We have both of the Joly France boats, Chausiais, and then the two Channel Island ferries, Granville and Victor Hugo, that tie up more-or-less where they will be fitting that pontoon. I’m not sure how that’s going to work for them

And while you admire the photos of the storm that we had tonight, let me tell you about my totally miserable day. A day when everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

And we started off my oversleeping. Not by five minutes or ten minutes but a good hour and a half. Staying up and listening to decent music might be a good plan from that point of view, but 01:30 is being rather optimistic when I want to be up by 06:15

That got me off on the wrong foot and things disintegrated from there on.

The medication was no problem, and then I came back and looked at the dictaphone.

And no wonder that I was exhausted this morning. I’d been miles during the night.

There was a whole group of us discussing some guy’s application for something or other. It was an unusual application – it turned out that he had an eagle on a ring not too far away and he wanted something to control this eagle but no-one would take him seriously about this. Everyone was saying that if he had an eagle living there it would be fantastic. But no-one could quite get to grips with the seriousness of the thing because eagles can even carry off people. This all came about I think when someone was getting married, I’m not quite sure, and there was a fear of this eagle but this sighting was dismissed and they never saw it again. People were saying “ohh well, there you are, it must have been a false report, this kind of thing, but this whole thing was based on the fact that an eagle had reappeared and been seen at a different place entirely so maybe it hadn’t actually gone away but had just basically moved nest into somewhere else.

Later on, three kids were staying at our old house in Vine Tree Avenue. We were there and there was a hell of a lot going on in this dream. One of my things to do was to go round and check on the flies. For some unknown reason, the flies were of interest. I’d read a book on flies and the life-cycle of the flies, the family of the fly, all this kind of thing and it was interesting to see how much the families of the flies around our house actually bore to it. So I used to do my rounds and check on things while everyone else was out and I still kept on doing my rounds. And on one of my rounds I walked into my parents bedroom and there was one of my sisters. “So what are you doing here?” I asked her “I’m looking for a quiet place to study and write some letters and people wouldn’t leave me alone so I came in here”. I said “the easiest thing to do to be left alone is to not make any noise and people won’t remember about you. You should really be in here and shut the door and that would be better still” and I gave her some more advice like that as well. But it was something about the life cycle of the fly and the family of the fly that interested me.

I was in the area of Shavington last night, (…Rope Hall Lane…). I was on a motorcycle and I was following someone in a car. This motorcycle thing went past us, grey but with an orange-painted tank on it. As I went round a bend the guy in the car was busy turning the car round to come back the other way towards me. I asked him what was up. Apparently the motor cycle had hit him and driven off. A crowd of people came round, someone on a police motor bike but it wasn’t a policeman. The guy with me was telling a story about how he had hit him and said a few impolite things and driven away. I suddenly realised that I knew this guy, and I bet that I knew his name as well as he sounded like the kind of person whom I’d met. I mentioned it to him, that he’s a regular on this road and we can find him again at some other time.
But then I was in Shavington (… Rope Lane by the Vine …) with someone else, someone from Canada but not Josée I think. We were talking about my childhood as we drove through Shavington so I took her down Vine Tree Avenue and showed her the house where we lived as kids. Of course it’s much different now than it was in those days. We were having a chat about it when some woman came up and asked me if I knew the area. I said that I had lived here. She replied that she had lived here since the 50s and she knew this street – pointing to Edwards Avenue – by some other name. I said that if she had been here in the 50s she must have known me then so we had a chat. I don’t think that we actually got to mentioning my name, who I was, but we were talking on about Edwards Avenue and Vine Tree Avenue and I was pointing out some garages (… which don’t exist …) that still bore some kind of resemblance to how our houses looked at the time

As I said, no wonder that I was exhausted.

After breakfast, there wasn’t much time before I had to go to the shops, so I looked at the digital soundfile that I’d downloaded yesterday. And one brief listen to that, and that one followed the previous version into the bin as well. The first couple of minutes of the opening track are missing, and that’s no good to anyone.

What I’ll have to do is to download yet another version if I can find one.

Before I went out I grabbed a quick shower and then headed uptown, stopping to watch Tiberiade perform her nautical danse macabre around the harbour.

At LIDL there was nothing of any particular interest, although I did watch in mild amusement as someone came into the shop in plastic gloves and a face mask to do his shopping. I think that some people need to get a sense of proportion. More people died in the 2003 heatwave, and more people will die of influenza in a normal winter. The trouble is that because those things are so normal, the Press never mentions them so people don’t realise.

Talking of journalists, I have a journalist friend in the USA who is currently having a hysterical panic about this virus. So I asked her how the tally of deaths and illness from the virus compares with the amount of firearm-related deaths and injuries in the USA.

She didn’t reply, but kept on having her hysterics.

Yes, never mind this virus. There are people walking the streets in the USA with enough firepower to wipe out a small-sized district at the drop of a hat, yet that causes these silly Americans no concern whatsoever. But then again, I suppose that the USA is such a violent bloodthirsty country that they are accustomed to the idea of violence.

And that’s a dreadful state of mind to be in.

Several weeks ago, I posted a photo of what I considered to be the first buds of the year. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that at the time I expressed my scepticism.

But there’s no doubting whatsoever about these. here in the rue de la Houle there are definitely buds here on this creeping plant that’s growing up the wall.

Yes, we can definitely now say that Spring is on its way quite definitively. That put a little spring into my step, although I wish that I knew what happened to winter.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that we’ve been keeping an eye on the new building that’s going on on the corner of the rue Charles Guillebot and the impasse de la Corderie.

Being in an energetic mood today, I went to have a closer look at it today. It is indeed a new house. But the people who are building it don’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to finish it.

It’s one thing that I’ve noticed here with the local builders. They don’t seem to be in any rush whatever to actually complete anything and we’ve seen projects like this go on for ever.

Just by way of a change, seeing as I’d never come this way, I went down into town via the rue Charles Guillebot.

That takes me down the north side of the eglise St Paul, a side of the church that we haven’t seen before. I’ve probably mentioned this church in the past. It was one of the earliest concrete structures built in modern times (the Romans were well-advanced with the use of concrete) but like most things, was never maintained.

As a result, there are bits dropping off it and there are notices all over the place telling the public to keep well clear.

At La Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette and headed back home.

But once more, I stopped half-wau up the rue des Juifs to admire the view. We saw them earlier knocking the support pillar into the floor, but that was a photo that I had taken later this afternoon.

What we are seeing in this photo is the floating pontoon setting out from its mooring with that support pillar in its evil clutches and being shunted into position by the little boat.

It’s actually quite an exciting procedure watching then manoeuvring about the harbour with all of their equipment. All of this free entertainment that we are having.

Back at the apartment, I had a little surprise. I bumped into one of the more energetic owners here, and he invited me to come with him on a little guided tour.

Underneath this building are several big man-made caverns which had been bricked off and a year or so ago they had found the entrance and smashed their way through the wall to the inside.

There were apparently the water tanks for the old city in the days before there was the mains water supply. All of the rainfall from the roofs of the houses and from the street was channelled into here.

And it’s certainly an impressive sight to see. Apparently, it was full of all kinds of things before they started to clean it out. The plan was to divide it up into private cellars for the owners of the apartments, but it’s hit a major snag.

And he showed me what was the snag.

One of the underground caverns was well-blocked off and took some smashing down. And when they finally broke their way in, they could see exactly why it was so well sealed.

If the story that I was told is correct, and I would gladly learn otherwise, the building was divided into rooms by all kids of ad-hoc partitions that had accumulated over the centuries. When it was converted into apartments, the old partition walls had to be smashed down and taken away.

Included in the contract for the work was a large sum for “hire of containers and transport away of the waste” and this was duly paid. However it seems that the waste was never transported away at all but thrown down the lift shafts into one of the caverns and the cavern was then sealed off so that no-one would see it.

Of course, this is just one person’s view of the matter and there is very likely another, but one inescapable fact is that m’learned friends have been called in by the building’s management committee.

We shall see how all of this develops over the next few months. But nevertheless, it was exciting being down here and seeing all of this that I had never seen before.

After lunch I boiled up some ginger and then started to make my orange and ginger syrup.

I peeled 5 large juice oranges, gave then a quick whizz in the whizzer and poured off the juice, which I put into a bottle that I had sterilised. That went into the fridge.

The left-over pulp was whizzed down finely and then, after the ginger had simmered for an hour or so, I added the left-over pulp, brought it to the boil again and then left it to simmer.

While that was happening, I made a start on the sound files that we had recorded at the Grande Marée yesterday.

There were a few people out there this afternoon but I didn’t loiter very much.

My route took me round to the chantier navale where I could see that La Granvillaise and one of the fishing boats have gone back into the water. But Charles-Marie is still in there, minus a good few of her planks. This is going to be a long job

There was another classe decouverte out there today too, but no-one whom I recognised so I headed for home. I’m still shaking my head about that unexpected encounter yesterday.

Back here, I had a look to see how my orange and ginger was doing.

Nicely simmering away so I took it off the heat, added a couple of tablespoons of manuka honey (that’s how I make it into syrup), poured it all into the whizzer and gave it all a really good and lengthy whizz around.

The syrupy mass was then poured into the orange juice that I had put in the fridge earlier and it was all shaken up to mix it in. It all went into the fridge where over the course of the next week or so I’ll be using it up as my morning drink.

Back at my desk, I carried on with the sound file but I didn’t get very far as I drifted away with the fairies. And I also had my half-hour on the bass.

Tea was a burger on a bun with potatoes and veg. And I forgot the veg until the very last minute and had to rush them. The apple pie and ice cream for pudding was delicious too. I really am living well these days.

There was quite a wind blowing outside this evening.

Not one of the strongest winds that we have had and not really enough to knock me out of my stride either. And so i was astonished to see how the waves were roaring in to the Plat Gousset.

It is the period of the fullest moon and the highest tides, but even so, I hadn’t expected to see waves like this coming into the Plat Gousset with such incredible force. I stood there for quite a while to watch the show.

Windy it might have been, but not enough to frustrate my two evening runs. I managed to fit them in without too many problems and managed to push the distances on again. For my second run, I even made it up to the top of the ramp and I haven’t done that for a while.

But there was a lot of activity in the port and at the fish-processing plant. With it being nearly high tide, the gates are open so the big fishing boats can come in and unload.

For my part, I went and had a little play with the NIKON 1 J5 and the f1.8 18.5mm lens

The photo above was taken with the shutter speed at 1/20 at f1.74 with ISO 900

This photo here was taken completely manual with speed of 1/125 at f1.74 and ISO 2800.

They have both come out rather well and I’m quite pleased with them. Still plenty of room for improvement but I’ll just keep on working away at it until I improve.

So back here I’ve written up all of my notes and now, a lot later than I hoped, I’m going to bed. I hope that I have better luck trying to drag myself out of bed tomorrow morning, but who knows? It’s really driving me to despair

Wednesday 11th March 2020 – IT’S THE GRAND MAREE TODAY!

The day when we have one of the greatest tidal differences of the year.

There’s what they call the “tidal coefficient” – the difference between high tide and low tide. It varies quite considerably but once it starts getting into the 80s and 90s you know that it’s going to be a good one.

And today, the tidal coefficient was .. errr … 117. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Why this is important is because at very low tide, the public areas of the shellfish beds are accessible. Shellfish of all descriptions is something very important here and there’s a great deal of commercial exploitation with clearly defined areas that the commercial operators lease.

But beyond those areas, it’s a free-for-all and just about anyone has the right to hunt for shellfish there, with certain restrictions. Of course, these areas are usually under water so they aren’t accessible. But on the days when there is a great tidal coefficient, the public can reach there quite easily.

And so they do – in droves as you can see.

They were not alone, because a couple of intrepid reporters from the local internet radio station were out there as well, interviewing the people and finding out what was going on.

And we (because, dear reader, I was one of them) picked up loads of hints, learned a few good recipes, and met a couple of guys who were having a picnic on the rocks, with fresh oysters.

And it’s not true, what they say about oysters. They aren’t aphrodisiacs at all. I had a dozen on my wedding night and only nine of them worked.

Talking of working, I haven’t really done much in the way of working today. I had a really busy night, as I discovered when I looked at the dictaphone after my medication.

There was something happening about school last night with a lot of people. I was there with a former classmate and one or two other people. We were in trenches, bogged down and were being fired at. A voice from the other side saying “everyone who is still alive, stand up and let’s see you”. Of course I had no intention whatever of standing up and being seen for I knew exactly what would happen, so we didn’t. They were still shouting, all this kind of thing, from over there. I had some peaches or pineapple chunks or something and was eating them. I spilled some syrup all over the place while I was doing this so I had to scout around for something. I came across a towel from one of the girls – it might have been another one of my former classmates so I said to my friend something like “she will have to come and share yours tonight” meaning to share his bed. But yes, well … as a kind of joke. He said “but most of the girls are going home tonight because there’s something going on at home and there will be very few people left here tonight”. Of course I was staying and I thought that that would give me an opportunity to get my hands on Percy Penguin and get her to spend the night with me
A little later it was back to a dream that I’d had earlier, something to do with the Germans again. I was being shadowed into this underground station. I could see that there were two of them, a man and a woman rather like Colonel Gruber and his female associate in ‘Allo ‘Allo. They were surveying me so I ended up tearing down to the platform, making sure that they were on there and step onto the train as it pulled in, then stepping off the train just as the doors were about to close so that they were stuck on it and it disappeared off into the tunnel. I had to think whether there was anyone else that I had noticed who might have been with them. But there wasn’t so I thought that I would head back outside again. At that moment another German came down with a squad of soldiers and started to say something, which inevitably was about the people on the train. “Get the people off the train”. He was told that the train had departed, which was quite evident but he was not having any of this. I was thinking to myself “well, I’d got rid of those two people but I really need to get away before they come back and find me”. But anyway … So I was somewhere and there was a girl in here with me as well but I didn’t really know exactly where, anyway. There was something to do with bass guitar in this part – Graham Simpson of Roxy Music with his EB3 like mine. He was one of the musicians who was involved with this somewhere. but I’m not quite sure where
And later still I finally got my hands on TOTGA. There were special offers on the ferries to Europe so I rang her up to tell her about it but she’d booked a ferry to Ireland and she was telling me all about Ireland. I asked if she was going from Stranraer to Larne and she said “yes” that very evening, so I thought that she would have to get a move on because it’s a 5-hour drive to Stranraer. I was walking on an island somewhere. I can’t remember who was with me but we were following the two ships – a passenger ferry was leaving and there was a freighter that was leaving behind it. I was telling TOTGA this but I was getting all the names of ships mixed up all the time and she was having to correct me, even though she didn’t know the place and didn’t know the ships, anything like that. It was really quite funny. But anyway she was going to ireland and not coming to France

It’s hardly surprising that i was too worn out to do too much today, after all that.

After breakfast I sat down to deal with some of the splitting of the soundfiles that I’d downloaded. And that wasn’t straightforward because not one of them was correct.

Two of them had extra tracks that weren’t marked on the track lists so I had to hunt down which ones they were. For a third one, the timing just didn’t correspond at all with what I knew, and it turned out that I’d somehow managed to acquire a special studio original master before it had been edited down. That might be an exciting curio but it was a pain to work with.

As for the fourth, in the end I gave up trying to deal with it and managed to track down a different copy that, I hope, might be more accurate.

Once I’d done that, I spent an hour or so doing some tidying up. I know that Neitzsche famously said “out of chaos comes order” but Neitzsche never visited my apartment. But anyway, it now looks as if someone lives here.

That was the cue to nip into town and La Mie Caline for my dejeunette for lunch, stopping to chat to a neighbour on the way – the same neighbour whom I had met yesterday.

And it looks as if my assumption of two rows of four pillars isn’t correct. There they were this morning installing a fifth pillar in the same row as the preceding four.

So this is going to have to be another thing for me to observe over the next few days or so to see what they are actually going to be doing.

But whatever they were doing with the scaffolding down on Marité’s berth, they must have done it.

They seem to have folded up their tents and disappeared quietly into the night, or some such, because the scaffolding has now disappeared and Marité is now back where she ought to be.

As for me, I pushed on down to La Mie Caline, picked up my bread and came home to my apartment.

After lunch, I still had half an hour so I cracked on with my radio project and almost managed to finish it.

But my oppo came bang on time and, gathering up my material, we set off for the rocks. And I made an important discovery too. I have a headphone-splitter, which means that I can plug two headphones into one headphone socket.

And it also works with microphones too so we could use two microphones with the Zoom H1 and that’s really what I call progress.

We spent about an hour and a half down there talking to people and I ended up with about 30 minutes of speech, which will need to be edited down. Laurent is going to interview the Police to have a statement about what is and what isn’t permitted during the peche à pied and once we have that, I’ll prepare another radio programme.

On the way back, we stuck our noses into the chantier navale because we had heard some sounds coming from there that didn’t seem to be very healthy to us.

It turns out that in the chantier navale they are down to just three boats, and if they carry on much longer like this on Charles-Marie they’ll be down to two because there’s a guy there going berserk with a crowbar and ripping off huge chunks of wood.

There’s this feeling going through my mind that this is going to be very interesting.

After all of this excitement we went for a coffee and watched the pile-driver pounding away at the fifth column in the harbour.

Laurent then went home and I came back here to finish off my radio project. That’s now done, 1 hour exactly and even though I say it myself, it’s going to be a pretty good one. At least I hope so.

For tea tonight, I fancied something a little different so I found a slice of pie in the freezer. That went into the oven with some potatoes and I cooked some veg (I forgot the leek) and gravy.

The gravy is new stuff that I found in NOZ. It’s ok when you add herbs to it, but it doesn’t thicken. I had to make a quick cornflour paste for that. And the result was quite acceptable.

Pudding was yet more pie – of the apple variety, with the last of the coconut dessert stuff and some of that vegan ice cream – and I forgot the chocolate sauce.

But as I have said before … “many times” – ed … I really am eating well these days.

That was the cue to go for my evening walk. No-one around so I managed both my runs, although I have been managing them better just recently.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the past year or so we’ve been watching them do some work on an old house in the Place Cambernon. For the last while it’s been without a front.

But today, I notice that it has acquired one. And this is good news. Things are progressing around here on the accommodation front. And not before time too, as I found out when I moved here and so did my neighbour, so she said.

So hours later than intended, i’m off to bed. I must stop listening to all this music. It’s doing me no good whatsoever and just keeping me awake at night.

Tuesday 10th March 2020 – I WAS RIGHT!

It WAS a good idea to go out early this morning to have a look at the gravel boat that had arrived during the night to make sure that it was indeed Neptune that had honoured us with her presence.

As you can see, here she is all fully loaded and deep in the wtaer and all of the hatches are battened down. It’s round about 16:00 and she’s not even been in the harbour 24 hours.

This could well be one of the quickest turn-rounds that we have seen.

At something like 10:40 this morning when I was out and about to see what was going on, she was nothing at all like in the previous photo.

Loading hadn’t been on the go for long, as you can see. They’ve started loading from the stern and working down towards the bow, she’s well-down at the stern and the bow is quite high out of the water.

That’s a clear indication that they haven’t been going long and they have about 2200 tonnes of gravel to put in her.

This morning, to my surprise, i was awake at about 05:20. But not for long, though. I was soon back to sleep.

Even more surprisingly, I managed to beat the third alarm yet again. That shows a kind of courage and determination that I thought that I’d lost.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone. And there was plenty to go at on there. I’d been a busy boy during the night.

At some point during the night I’d awoken to find myself telling a story about some kind of radio programme that I’d been doing that involved travelling on a ship. I was recounting this story and when I reached the end I suddenly found that the day was wrong. It wasn’t in fact going out on the day that I thought it was. The ship was going out some other day so I ended up having to retrace my steps and come back again. It was all extremely weird because it was all so lifelike while I was recounting this story.
Later on I was in some town in between Cologne and Frankfurt and had to go to meet either Jackie or Alison – I can’t remember who. The idea was that I would catch the TGV – there would be one quite regularly between the two, or was it Vienna? Might have been Vienna even I dunno. There would be some kind of TGV regularly between them. I had to start making enquiries but I found that the town where I was staying, there was no TGV. It didn’t stop. I had to go all the way back to Cologne or Stuttgart or somewhere to get onto the train. I thought “this can’t be right”. There must be some kind of local train between here and wherever the other person was. So I started to make enquiries. I found a little station where I could conceivably get a train back to Stuttgart and then get the TGV down there. So I started t think about doing this. Then I suddenly looked at my watch and it was 13:54 and I had to be down there for 17:00. I’d let all this time lapse so I thought that the only way that I was going to get down there is to drive down there. But then I had the problem of leaving my car ad that’s going to be extremely awkward. I was in a library while all this was going on and of course there were some books on display that I wanted to sit and read. In the meantime all kinds of things were going through my head about what would happen if I left my vehicle unattended wherever I was supposed to be and would it be painless about the parking, all that kind of thing. In the end I was totally overwhelmed by all this kind of thing
And at another stage of the proceedings I’d been with another friend of mine again, one who featured a short while ago. We’d been wandering around all the clubs. There was a snooker club place that we went to, a sports club and we went in there again and there was a TV. We thought about watching the football so he was flicking through the channels on the TV trying to find the football but we couldn’t seem to find it. There was some guy, a young guy, sitting there trying to watch something as well but he wasn’t finding anything so we ended up talking to him. He was a down-and-out kind of person. Again it was a case of time running out and we needed to be somewhere else.

There was more to it than that, but as you are probably eating your tea or something right now, I’ll spare you the gruesome details.

After breakfast I attacked the digital sound-file splitting. Two of them were straightforward – quite easy in fact. The third was more complicated as it contained more than it should have done. That involved tracking down through about 20 studio reference files until I found the reference to the version that I had.

But as for the fourth, it was a very obscure album to start with, from 1966 from a record company that has long-since disappeared featuring a couple of artists who have disowned their work from this period.

Reference to the album itself helped me unravel some of it but the rest was … well … not easy. I’ve managed to find a discography of the work of the artists and looking in the tracks for the phrases that represent the titles (it’s a good job that it wasn’t an instrumental) I reckon that I’ve managed to do it justice.

There’s still no clue as to what this master tape relates to, but I’ve now ended up with a very rare, and very special version of Julie Driscoll singing “This Wheel’s On Fire” long before Bob Dylan actually recorded it himself. That must be something.

This was the cue for me to go out and see what was going on down in the harbour.

The weather was, once again, completely miserable outside. It wasn’t actually raining but it wasn’t far off and there was haze out everywhere. The harbour gates can’t have long closed because the fleets of fishing boats were out ther eheading to their stations.

At least, I think they were fishing boats. I couldn’t see a thing in this claggy mist.

A little closer towards the shore the view was slightly better. Not much, but at least I could see what I was supposed to be looking at.

That’s actually a yacht, heading out in the wind towards the Ile de Chausey in the wind, and good luck to him too. I must admit that it did make me feel rather envious seeing him out there.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m on a fitness thing right now. I’ve upped my daily walks from two to three, I’m doing two lengths of running, and my morning stroll into town for my dejeunette for lunch is the longest way possible

That means walking right down to the lighthouse and instead of cutting across the lawn, going down the steps and right round the headland where I came to grief last summer.

And as I tuened the corner right at the bottom, I was treated to the sight of three more yachts coming round in squadron formation.

It’s not very often that you see yachts out there in the middle of the week when it isn’t a school holiday, so I’ve no idea what is happening. There must be something special going on to attract them like this.

and there’s more excitement round by the chantier navale

We saw the number of boats under repair dwindle down to none at the end of last week, and then yesterday we had a couple in there. But today, joining La Granvillaise and a fishing boat is another fishing boat and the yacht Charles-Marie.

So it’s All Systems Go down there right now, and that’s good news for the port. A thriving and successful chantier navale will encourage boat owners to keep their boats here and assure the success of the port.

With the tide being now on its way out, the harbour gates were closed so I could walk across the top to the other side of the harbour to see what was happening with Neptune.

But first, that row of pontoons that I mentioned yesterday that looked as if it might be new. Unfortunately it isn’t. They must have been cleaning them, that’s all because it’s still the same old pontoons – just looking nicer.

So I went to see what was happening down at the other end of the harbour.

For some unknown reason, they aren’t actually using the conveyors to load up the ship.

There’s a digger bringing the stuff out of the gravel bins and dumping it in a heap at the foot of one of the big cranes, and the crane is picking it up with a grab and dropping it into the hold of Neptune.

I”m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before but there’s a quarry near Avranches that produces a very high-grade fine stone that is eminently suitable for mixing with asphalt.

There are two asphalt plants in the south of the UK, one near Shoreham and the other near Whitstable and they buy their stone from the quarry here at Avranches, and the gravel boats ferry it across.

And that, of course is a country that thinks that it’s all-powerful and can rule the world, yet it can’t even produce any gravel of its own from the rocks that exist on its own shores. It’s when you think about things like this that you realise just how much of a joke this Brexit really is.

As for Neptune herself, she was built in 1992 in Rosslau on the Elbe in Germany and, rarely these days, flies the British flag. And, surprisingly, she has ice-breaking capabilities.

While I was down here I went to see if there was anythign going on with that scaffolding that they had installed at Marité’s berth.

There were two men working on it and from what I could see, which wasn’t very much I have to admit, it looked as if they might just be repointing the wall.

So on that note, I went to La Mie Caline to pick up my dejeunette and then wandered back slowly to my apartment.

First thing that I did back here was a little bit of tidying up to try to make the place a little more respectable, and then to sort out another pile of albums that need digitalising.

That was the cue then to finish off finding the rest of the music for Project 031 and organise all of that. That took me nicely up to lunchtime.

After lunch I started to write out the notes for the radio project, but had an interruption to go for my usual afternoon walk.

No pathetic parking to report – just one of the lowest tides of the year (the real lowest one is tomorrow).

We’ve seen plenty of photos of the marker light for the harbour entrance being submerged up beyond the top of the highest red band, but we very rarely get to see it completely out of the water and surrounded by sand and rocks as it is today.

It’s the time for the peche à pied too. Low water is below the level that is reserved for the commercial exploiters so the general public can go out to the unallocated parts below the traditional low water mark and help themselves.

And there are plenty of people out there too having a go, and there will be even more tomorrow with it being school half-day.

One of my neighbours was out there too so we had a little chat.

On the way back, I had something of a shock.

A gaggle of schoolkids and a couple of teachers went past me on a classe découverte and one of them was the absolute spitting image – and I really do mean that – of someone who has figured in our adventures, in one form or another, on numerous occasions.

It made me look twice to make sure that I wasn’t hallucinating about this. It really was quite unsettling.

Back here I finished off my notes and then dictated them. But I didn’t finish editing them because I … errrr … closed my eyes for a little while. That’s the kind of thing that’s depressing me considerably.

Tea tonight was the leftover stuffing from yesterday mixed with a can of kidney beans and rolled into a couple of taco rolls, with rice and vegetables. Plenty of stuffing left over, so that’s a job for Friday night I recon and my “leftover curry”.

Pudding was apple pie and that coconut soya dessert stuff. And even though I say it myself, my apple pie is delicious and I’ll make some more like that. But I’ll remember to put the nutmeg and cinnamon in it too.

And then I went out for my evening walk, with my little NIKON 1 J5 and the f1.8 18.5mm lens for company.

There was sole wid and low cloud, but apart from that, there was an impressive view and I could see for miles. That encouraged me to have a play around with the camera and the lens to see what it could do.

It was set on shutter priority at varying shutter speeds and I took several photos of the view across to Brehal-Plage from different points with diferent settings.

What with one thing and another, I wasn’t expecting it to do very much and a couple of examples were filed under CS as you might expect.

But given the limitations of what I’m doing and the equipment that I’m using, the results of those that survived the cull are not unacceptable. A blind man would be pleased to see them.

In between all of this, I managed to fit in a couple of runs down my normal track. The first along the north side of the walls and the second across the place Maurice Marland

And to my surprise, I managed to run on for a fair distance too, well past my usual finishing post. even part-way up the ramp on run number two.

But at the top of the ramp I had a look across to the port to see if I could see neptune. But no. In probably one of the quickest turn-round times ever, the harbour gates are open and she’s been and gone already. She’s not there now, the ground’s all flat. And she’s on her way to Whitstable.

It really WAS a good job that I went to see her this morning and didn’t leave it until later.

While you admire the best photo of the bunch, taken at 1/20 second at f1.74 on ISO3200, I was feeling so enthusiastic (which is not like me at all) that I continued my walk a little and actually managed a third run down another one of my running tracks.

Yes, I’m keeping the pressure on and I’m determined to improve my basic health even if I can’t do much about my illness. Running 800-900 metres might be no big deal for some, but for someone my age who is slowly dying of a debilitating illness, it’s pretty good.

Back here, I’ve been writing up my notes and listening to music. But now I’m off to bed. I have important things to do tomorrow so I need to be on form.

Monday 9th March 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about those piles of gravel that had been appearing over the last couple of days on the quayside down in the harbour.

This blurred and illisible photo (I still have a lot to learn about the NIKON 1 J5) shows a ship that I have every reason to believe is Neptune moored at the loading bay by the conveyors where they ship the gravel on board.

At long last we’ve had a gravel boat in the harbour and I shall go out tomorrow (and try to be early) just to confirm that it is indeed she. It would be just my luck for her to have a rapid turn-round and for me to miss her.

But here’s something else quite interesting.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that bad parking is a regular topic in these pages, particularly in the boulevard Vaufleury which is on a service bus route, is just 50 metres from the High School and is an access road for the fleet of school buses that come in the opposite direction to the service buses.

Where Madame (it is indeed a Madame) is parked is
1) the wrong way round
2) half on the pavement
3) blocking the buses
4) at school chucking-out time
5) just about 20 FEET from a huge free car park
so finally, at long, long last, the local police are doing something about it and they are making her move her vehicle.

That is pretty much encouraging news.

What else is encouraging news is that I was awake before the first alarm went off, and I was out of bed before the final alarm. Crashing out half-way through last night’s entry and so giving up and going to bed was good news in that case.

After the medication, I had a look at the dictaphone. Apparently I was in this labyrinth of a theatre complex last night all the way through this underground reception hall place with doors going off leading into theatre auditoriums and all kinds of things. There were all kinds of announcements about the place, many of them were out of date, 2011 I noticed. There were all kinds of things happening here. But I was just wandering through listening to the radio. They were talking about “hypocrites of the year” I suppose – some guy who was telling us all about how keen he was for this and how good he was going to be for that but while he was doing that he had increased all your library charges. Someone else was going on about how brilliant a cricketer he might have been, all this kind of thing, but he made one fatal mistake and that was heroin. I was drifting through this auditorium that had a couple of very faded leather chairs and the leather was worn out in certain places. Something to do with catching a London Underground train somewhere. There was a thing too about caring for your vans if you were on a limited income, like a hippy, and a warning that the supply of LDV vans even in scrapyards was drying up now – the van that was chosen for an example was a silver LDV M-reg.
A little later I was outside with someone who was supposed to be Liz’s husband but he was more like the father of a couple of friends of mine. He had Liz’s daughter with him. She’d been on a student exchange and she had a student back with them. He was saying “you’ll have to come round for a game of pinocle or something one of these days. We’ll have an evening of five people”. He indicated roughly a place in eastern Manchester, Hyde or that area Stalybridge where he was living but he didn’t go into any further details about that. I was wondering who this “five” was because I knew that he was on his own, the daughter had her friend and there was me, so who was the 5th? I couldn’t think.

After breakfast I had a look at the digital sound files. I managed to unsort three of them too. One of them however needs much more attention because for some unknown reason there’s a load of “additional music” which seems to be a mixture of selections of various tracks, so I’d like to know what was going on there.

It isn’t the first one like that that I had found either.

By now it was time to go for my shower and to clean myself up somewhat, and then head up into town.

Not that I actually got very far before I was interrupted.

Remember yesterday when I photographed all of the pontoon-supporting pillars on the quayside and I mused that they might be assembling them in two rows of four?

Here’s the big floating pontoon travelling across the harbour with one of the pillars within its clutches almost at the place where one would expect to see it if we were going to have a fourth pillar in that row.

And the scaffolding too. We talked about that as well.

My attention was drawn from a distance that the masts of Marité were not where they would usually be. And that was strange because she doesn’t usually roam around the harbour but stays put in her habitual little corner.

But she’s definitely moved, and the reason for that is that they’ve put the scaffolding, complete with OSB wallboards, in her usual berth and there are a couple of guys down there doing something.

So at least I know that the scaffolding is actually a working platform for some kind of task.

From here I headed down into the town centre and up the rue Couraye towards LIDL.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that several weeks ago we watched them fit some kind of protective shuttering around the front of the boulangerie here and start to smash out the old window.

The protective shuttering has now gone and, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, the new shop front is in glorious display. That’s quite a nice job that they’ve done there. It looks quite good.

Now for the first time ever in my whole life, I’ve seen every till open at the same time in a LIDL. And that will give you some kind of indication of just how busy it was in there today.

No cucumbers, which is a problem, and nothing else of any real interest as far as I was concerned. All in all, a little disappointing. 3-kilo bags of apples was about the closest that I was to a bargain. And they won’t last long now that I’m making my purées myself.

On the way back I headed to La Mie Caline for my dejeunette but i was held up outside the shop as Birnam Wood went past on its way to Dunsinane.

There was actually a tractor and trailer parked around the corner with several large plants stacked thereupon, and presumably this machine was busy distributing them around the town.

It’s certainly a different approach to beautifying the town. I’ve said often enough … “indeed” – ed … that there isn’t enough greenery in this town and we ought to have some more.

Having picked up my dejeunette I headed back home again.

Only half-way up the rue des Juifs before I was distracted yet again. Not that I would know much about these things but they look pretty much like new pontoon supports and new pontoons over there on the west wall of the harbour.

What with one thing and another, I can see that I’m going to be quite busy tomorrow having a look at all of these things. But at least the harbour gates will be closed again by 09:30 or thereabouts so it doesn’t have to be an “early” early.

And in other news, there’s activity in the chantier navale today too.

It’s been quite busy in there up until very recently, but regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the boats have been going back into the water one by one until just now we had none whatever left.

But that’s all changed now. There are two boats in there now, one of which is a large yacht that might actually be La Granvillaise. I’ll go for a stroll over there this afternoon to check on that.

Back at my apartment I made myself a coffee and then split up a fourth music file. Pretty straightforward except that there were three extra tracks on it that aren’t on the LP that I have, so I had to track down which version of the master tape I had obtained so that I could identify the tracks.

There was still time before lunch to send off my project for this weekend and to start a new one to add to the stock.

After lunch, I carried on with the radio project but didn’t get too far before I was overwhelmed with a wave of fatigue. I didn’t quite crash out but for about 15-20 minutes I was teetering on the edge and didn’t actually do any work or anything while I was sitting there

By now it was raining outside when I went for my afternoon walk.

Neptune was due to come into port, that I knew, so when I saw an object the same colour as Neptune far out to sea in the English Channel I took a photo with the intention of enlarging it back in the apartment.

Which I did, and it wasn’t Neptue at all but one of the fishing boats heading back to the port. Neptune must still ne well out of range, which wouldn’t be a surprise because there’s a while yet before the harbour gates will open and she won’t want to sit around outside waiting.

She might not want to, but everyone else is.

The tide is well out and the little creek that leads up to the side of the fish-processing plant is only just starting to fill with water. It’ll be another half an hour or so before she’ll be deep enough to accept the fishing boats but they are all starting to congregate just outside.

There were at least 10 of them out there – maybe more but I had run out of fingers by this point and I wasn’t going to start taking off my shoes and socks. Mind you, had I had my hands in my pockets, I might have been able to count up to 11.

While I was walking round across the lawn by the War memorial, I noticed this.

We haven’t had an earthquake or a landslide or anything. That house is actually built like that. It’s what they call a trompe l’oeil – “something that cheats the eye” and it’s the window thats aligned strangely to follow the contours of the roofs rather than being in the hotizontal/vertical plane.

What’s bewildering me right now though is why I never noticed that before. It’s not like me to miss out on something this.

Anyway, enough of this. I continued on my way around the headland to go to see what was going on in the chantier navale.

And I was right here too. It’s my lucky day, isn’t it? The “G90” painted on the side of the yacht tells us that it is indeed La Granvillaise down there on blocks.

Crowds of people milling round her too so there’s clearly something important going on with her. At least, I imagine that the people are there for her. It’s unlikely that a fishing boat would receive that much attention unless she had caught the Loch Ness Monster.

Yesterday, you’ll recall that we saw a couple of kayaks out there in the baie de Mont St Michel.

And so when I saw something else quite small out there in that general direction, I reckoned that it might be another one so I took another photograph of it to examine back in the comfort and safety of my apartment.

But it wasn’t a kayak at all but one of the small flat-bottomed boats that they use for transporting the boxes of seafood to the quayside from boats that have for one reason or another not been able to moor at the fish-processing plant.

And earlier this morning we saw the large flaoting pontoon carrying one of the pillars across the harbour.

A short while later the noise of the pile-driver started up and it’s been going on for most of the day. And so I had expected them to have made substantial progress, and I was quite right about that.

It’s been pounded quite well and quite deeply into the bed of the harbour and I imagine that they’ll be connecting up some pontoons to it in early course.

It’s certainly interesting.

And while I was musing on this, I witnessed the “police interaction” that I mentioned earlier.

Back here I did a little more to the radio project but ended up having an hour or so playing with the bass guitar and the 6-string electric/acoustic. It’s been a good while since I had a decent play about and I must work harder on this and make more of an effort.

Tea was a delicious stuffed pepper with rice, followed by some apple pie and coconut soya stuff. And despite the absence of spices, it was really nice. I’ll have to make a few more like that one of these days.

But I’m really going to have to buy a bigger fridge and a bigger freezer.

For my evening walk I went to see what was going on with the winds.

The tide is well out now but the wind is still causing the waves to smash against the wall down on the Plat Gousset. I bet that they didn’t do much repair work on that wall today.

My two runs weren’t a problem, except that my first run had to be on a different course due to waterlogging. And then I went to have a look at Neptune.

Now i’m back here and ready for bed. I’ll finish (I hope) the radio project tomorrow and then I can deal with another outstanding matter.

However did I find the time to go to work?

Friday 6th March 2020 – SPEND! SPEND! SPEND!

Yes, I’ve had some good fortune today, and as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any. But that’s another story of course, the sea approaches to Kugluktuk not excepted.

In fact, I should really have started this entry yesterday because that was when it all kicked off. Only in my confused state – something that is a regular occurrence these days – I forgot to mention it.

So yesterday I had a letter from the Belgian Old-Age Pension Authorities. After only about a year or so since I made my application, they have finally agreed to grant me an old-age pension in respect of my time spent working for General Electric and for that other strange American company where I met Alison.

So, as of 1st March 2019, I am richer by the princely sum of … errr … €29:47 per month. Yes, I can really go wild with that, can’t I?

But it’s not actually the sum of money that is important. It’s what goes with it that matters. I haven’t yet looked closely into it but there are things like free eye care, free dental treatment and the like. I’m not quite sure what, but believe me, I shall be looking closely into it over the course of the next few days.

And that’s not all. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had to go to the Bank today to pick up this blasted form. Three weeks since I handed it in, just for a simple stamp to be stamped upon it, and it took until today for it to be completed.

The guy to whom I spoke – he was as bewildered as I was as to why no-one there could have done it on the spot. he suggested that, the next time, I speak to him directly when I need something like this.

But then the subject turned round to the question of my money there. Not that there’s a great deal, but even so, he reckons that I could be doing so much better with it. And he worked out a little plan.

“You have your contents insurance with us” he said “but if you had other insurances, you’d get an even better deal”.
“But I do!” I insisted. “I have my motor insurance, my legal protection insurance (yes, I had a very mis-spent youth and who knows what’s bubbling away somewhere?) and the insurance on Virlet with you”
“No you don’t” he retorted.
“Yes I do” I insisted. “Have a look at my July outgoings”
And so he did. And there were my three annual payments
“But these are with the Credit Agricole Centre-France” he said. “That’s a different organisation”
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the fun and games we had when I moved here and tried to have my bank accounts set up and transferred over. I thought, that after much ado about nothing and all of the time that it took, the situation had been resolved. But apparently not.

Anyway, he picked up the ‘phone and did it all on the spot so that at long last, all of my banking details are under the same roof in France.

“And I have some good news for you” he said. “This is a cheaper area for insurance than the Puy-De-Dome. You’ll be saving on your insurances with us.”

So he’s going to look at them more closely and get back to me with some revised propositions. And, hopefully, some money back too.

This morning I was ever so close to beating the alarms. I failed by a matter of seconds and that was very sad news.

But still, an early start (just about) and after the medication, I looked at the dictaphone. Strawberry Moose starred in last night’s entertainment. he was out somewhere and there was a football match going on with all different people, women and girls just kicking around playing. He was on the sidelines cheering and they were talking about him. Someone was saying, some woman saying that she’d been out for 30 years but had had to go back to work and was working as a typist and was taking Strawberry Moose with her to do some kind of reporting. I said “he’s going to be extremely busy then because tomorrow he’s going to the swimming baths and he has another football match to go to tomorrow afternoon”. I was busy trying to fit a dressing-up costume on him but his paws were too big to go through the sleeve holes and so on. This was another one with a lot lore to it than this but I can’t remember it now.

So that was the best that I could do during the night, and I went for breakfast instead.

Once breakfast was out of the way I had a look at a few digital tracks. No problems with any of them this morning although a couple of them ended up being far longer than I was expecting, and one of them many more tracks than there ought to be. I wonder if this is a “lost studio master” with the discarded tracks left on it. Who knows?

All of that took me up to about 11:30, believe it or not, and then it was time to go out for my dejeunette.

And one part of me wished that I hadn’t because I’ve never seen a rainstorm like it. I was drenched before I’d gone 100 yards. But another part of me was pleased that I went because I caught a gravel lorry just finishing tipping its load on the quayside and then reversing into a gravel bay to turn round.

And you can tell about the rain from just looking at the photo.

My walk took me down past the car park that they are fitting out on the quayside on the rue du Port.

And I believe that I made some kind of sarcastic comment about the roller-coaster concrete track that they had laid in the middle of it.

But it’s quite clear now why they have done it like that, and I’m off to eat some humble pie instead. They’ve fitted some concrete guttering on the concrete strip that they laid, and the dips now have drainage grids installed in them.

So they are obviously like a roller-coaster in order to channel away the water. So I’ll shut up.

Having picked up my bread at La Mie Caline I came back here and as there was still plenty of time before lunch I finished off the editing of the sound file for Project 030.

For lunch I had more of the mushroom, leek and potato soup and it’s even more delicious. Tomorrow will be the last load and then I’ll be back on the hummus butties. Must take some hummus out of the freezer.

after lunch I went down into town for my appointment with the Credit Agricole, as I mentioned earlier.

On the way back, I decided to go for a little walk around to see what was happening.

The fete foraine – the funfair – has cleared off as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. But not all of it has gone. The candu floss and toffee apple stall is still here.

Does that mean that it’s going to stay here for the summer? That will be quite interesting if it does. It will all add to life’s great pageant down here on the coast for the season.

But here’s exciting, isn’t it?

There’s certainly something going on here because the pile of gravel by the conveyor is getting bigger and bigger so there’s clearly something about to happen.

And I’m afraid that curiosity got the better of me when I returned home. I had a look at the shipping AIS map and, sure enough, the bulk carrier Neptune that comes in here sometimes for the gravel in in the English Channel and it’s heading in this direction.

Of course, it’s too early to say what it’s doing and where it’s going, but it’s optimistic.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is the installation of these three large grey pillars in the harbour and my theory about that they are for.

And it looks as if I’m right on that score too, because down there they are installing some pontoons heading our perpendicularly to the quayside and anchored to the posts.

Incidentally, I had a look to see how the pontoons are fastened to the mounting brackets. They are on rollers in grooves so that they will float up and down as the water level changes.

Unless they have a puncture, which is always possible I suppose.

My walk took me back around the long way in order to clock up the percentages on the fitbit.

And look who’s coming into harbour right now! It’s our old friend Thora coming in from Jersey on the afternoon tide. So hello to Thora.

As for me, I made it back and cracked on with the Project 030. I joined it all up and found a final track to finish it off, and then dictated the notes for it.

Just for a change, I ended up being four seconds short so I had to dictate a little extra to let into the proceedings. But that’s now all done and dusted and it doesn’t sound too bad.

What makes a difference is that there’s less talking from me.

Tea tonight was a burger and pasta in tomato sauce followed by apple crumble and the last of the Alpro Soya Dessert (note to buy some more).

And while I was eating, I was musing over my breakfast. Home-made muesli (well, home-mixed, should I say because the individual items were brought in), home-made apple and pear purée and home-made apple and pear cordial.

That’s all pretty impressive stuff, I have to say.

For my evening walk I took the little NIKON 1 J5 with me, fitted with the f1.8 50mm lens.

You can see the image that I took with it tonight. That’s darkened four stops on the Exposure Compensation function. Still far too bright. And far too blurred.

What I’ll have to do is to set the camera to shutter priority and use a faster speed to eliminate the blurring, and then give it all some further thought.

Despite the howling gale I managed my two runs, although the first was not where I usually go. The wind blew me out of there.

The football was weird. TNS sprinted into a 2-goal lead in minutes and never ever looked like they were in trouble. Barry Town were pretty poor and the possession – 62%-38% and the corners 8-2 tell their own story.

And if it could speak, the Barry Town woodwork would have a few things to say. It’s no exaggeration that TNS could have had half a dozen against a very poor Barry Town side by half-time.

But football is a funny game, as we all know. After about 55 minutes the Barry Town right-back floated in a speculative cross to the TNS penalty area from the right wing. Everyone, including the TNS goalkeeper Paul Harrison, stood and watched as it floated aimless into the area and be picked up by the slightest breeze that drifted it onto the far post and rebounded into the net.

Deep into injury time Barry Town won their second corner of the game. The high cross was headed by a Barry Town attacker towards the outstretched arms of Paul Harrison,, only for it to hit one of his own players and take a wicked deflection into the net.

So probably the most astonishing 2-2 draw that i’ve ever seen. And I bet that the crowd is still shaking its head over this result because I know that I am.

Shopping tomorrow, and if I’m early, I’m going on a little expedition. “Spend, spend, spend!” as I said earlier.

Wednesday 4th March 2020 – SPRING IS SPRUNG!

The grass is riz, and all of that kind of thing.

Although I’ve no idea where “da boidies iz”, at least I can tell you all where the daffodils are. Here in the Square Maurice Marland they have sprung up over the last couple of days on the lawn here.

It’s usually a sure sign that the worst of winter has passed us by. But we haven’t had a winter this year to speak of, so I’m not taking anything for granted as far as this bizarre weather goes

Another thing that I’m not taking for granted these days is my ability to raise myself from my bed with the alarm. It was another disappointing start to the day. Not as disappointing as the previous day, but 06:25 is still unacceptable in my eyes.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone and I could see straight away why I was so tired. I had travelled miles during the night.

We had been on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour again last night and there were loads of competitions and all of this kind of thing. There was talk that some of us were going to go for a walk. What this meant was having to make a written demand and our vote would be counted depending on what we’d written. We’d have to write out a reason why, something along those lines. It turned out that it should have been called at 14:00 this vote thing but instead it was well into the evening, about 20:00 and we stall hadn’t finished writing out our thing. It was going to be called very soon so we had to crack on and get done with it. I was telling all these stories about how in the past a group of people had gone ashore but didn’t have their equipment with them so they had to go back to the boat to get it and come back again. There was all this talk about how “a huge crowd of people had disappeared abruptly as if they had been eaten by a polar bear” because they hadn’t told anyone where they were going. They were on shore, all this kind of thing. I had Castor with me during this evening. We were talking about all kinds of things.
At one stage we were talking about putting down some kind of red carpet or something for a group to walk down but the point was that no-one had ever done that in the recent past except for Abba for some reason or other. It was quite common to do this 30, 40, 50 years ago in the days of Led Zeppelin to highlight someone in this way but it’s something that’s not done at all now
This procession thing was being recorded on *.mp3 and everyone had to have their *.mp3 things ready. Again, some people hadn’t done theirs yet but some had. In some cases the volume was far too loud and distorted everything. In another case it was too soon and there was too much of it. In other cases the ship that they were on would diverge out of the carnival for some reason or other. I wasn’t even given an opportunity to make a start on the one that needed doing for us and so we were at n°19 in the queue out of 20 and it looked as if we were going to be stuck there for ages while they sorted themselves out and did a proper thing. But then of course that’s not what the carnival is all about. It’s very ad-hoc and improvist and people ought to be learning from that.
I was with another friend later on, someone else who has featured quite recently in my travels and we were walking up the Boulevard Leopold III towards NATO and that way towards the airport. We were discussing projects that I had on the go. One of them was about cartoons – I had to write some kind of article about cartoons. It came out that we were talking about Belgium and how you got to like the place or didn’t. It wasn’t a case of liking, it was a case of “different” and you either appreciated the differences or you didn’t. The subject of cartoons came up in the discussion. he said something about reading cartoons to other people so I added that I was looking for a pile of cartoon books to write for my project. He didn’t actually have any. All his stuff was old stuff so I said that was just what I want. he said “I know. Come with me”. he climbed up off the motorway exit ramp that we were on onto a road above it. Of course I had to climb up there with him. Funnily enough I remember climbing up and I wasn’t out of breath for a moment. he said on this road was a shop. I knew that there was a cartoon BD shop on here where I could get things from but I didn’t really want to pay for them. I was only going to use them for this project and hand them back. He wanted to take me there to have a look so I thought that I might as well go.

Like I said, no wonder I was thoroughly exhausted after all of that.

After breakfast (a late breakfast, for obvious reasons) I sat down with the sound files and split several more. Once more I came across one that was all over the place with stuff on there that was arranged any old how and it was quite an effort to tie it all up properly.

Another one had once been cut into tracks and rejoined, but whoever had cut the tracks had clearly had some kind of visual impairment for it had been cut in the wrong places and when it had been rejoined, there were milliseconds of silence. So I had to edit out the silences and then re-cut it.

One of those two – and I can’t remember which one – was also damaged and I had to repair the damage to several tracks too. All in all, for something that should have been straightforward, it took absolutely ages.

Still time to finish off Radio project 028. And that took less time than expected because while the last track is usually always a killer to find, the first one that came to my mind not only was almost exactly the right length (I had to add in 2 extra seconds of commentary) but fitted the context perfectly.

That was the cue to start to think about lunch.

For the past couple of days I’ve had a thing about leek and potato soup (I’m not sure why but I’m certainly not pregnant) and o Monday at LIDL they had leeks on special offer.

So I heated up the wok and sliced a couple of onions. Just as I was about to add them, the telephone rang, like it always does at that moment. Rosemary was on the line, wanting a chat, so I told her that I’d call back in 15 minutes.

And then I returned to the soup.

In went the onions, followed by a pile of garlic and all of the leeks, sliced up into rings, and then the mushrooms that were left over from the weekend, along with some rosemary, sage and thyme.

While they were all frying, I peeled my potatoes and diced them. They went into a saucepan with some water and I emptied the stuff out of the wok, and left it so simmer.

Rosemary and I then had a good natter for a while which meant that I was horribly late for just about everything yet again.

With the soup mix now simmering away on the stove I headed off towards town going the long way round, right around the headland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have been encountering a fishing boat or two on something of a regular basis. And today was no exception.

Something was moving in and out of the waves out there in the English Channel so I took a photo with the intention of blowing it up (the photo, not the object) back in the apartment. And sure enough, we have another fishing boat.

But that wasn’t all of the excitement either.

There was something else out there moving about and so I took a speculative photo of that too. This time we have Joly France and a pile of passengers out there doing a run out to the Ile de Chausey.

And I was thinking to myself that I hoped that they knew where it was, because we were having a sea fog again and you couldn’t see all that much out there.

Round the headland and down the hill on the old road into town.

The harbour gates were open so i couldn’t go that way, so I walked down the rue du Port instead. I’d heard the pile-driver going off during the morning so I was wondering what was happening. But it seems that they have installed a third pillar out there now

This new pontoon is going to be something very special and as I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … it’s not looking good for the commercial traffic in the port.

Walking this way (and if anyone mentions “talcum powder” they will be disqualified) brought me past where they are working on the modernisation of the car parking facilities.

And they are definitely making progress here, because today we have some parking arrestors installed along the edge. They’ll come in handy to stop grockles reversing their cars into the harbour and on top of trawlers.

Mind you, a good fork-lift truck can help overcome obstacles like these, as we saw the other weekend over by the fish-processing plant.

At la Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette and headed for home.

However my attention was diverted by activity going on over at the third pillar. The workmen are now back at work after lunch and they are carrying on with the installation.

What they seem to be doing is using water pressure as a means of penetrating the bottom of the harbour and every now and again a pile of silt would be forced out under pressure.

But it made me think – how much time and money would have been saved by doing this when the harbour was drained a couple of years ago. A total lack of joined-up thinking.

We had the same issue when time and money was spent installing a path to a noticeboard at the Pointe du Roc a couple of years ago, only for it to be dug up again a couple of months later for the path to the new war memorial.

Back here the soup was rzady, well-cooked, so it went into the whizzer and was whizzed right up.

It’s rather thick and the mushrooms have given it a distinctive colour, but that doesn’t distract whatsoever from the taste, because with my dejeunette it was delicious.

And, even better, there’s enough for a couple more days too. I shall be quite looking for that.

And there’s no need to worry about this coronavirus thing. My soup will kill off anything. In fact, it’s already been named “the cure for which there is no known disease”.

After lunch I had a couple of phone calls to make and then I attacked Radio project 030. No 029 – that’s a live concert and I have to think about that one

My afternoon’s work was interrupted almost immediately by it being time for me to go for my afternoon walk.

And there seems to be dirty work afoot in the rue Notre Dame somewhere, because the road up the hill is closed to traffic.

That means that the vehicle have to go down the rue St Jean in both directions, and that will be exciting because it’s quite narrow in places and even coming one way can sometimes be difficult.

It’s bound to lead to some confusion.

As for me, I walked around the walls and even managed a couple of runs. One of them was only half a run, due to the fact that there were too many people around, but the other one was a complete run.

Remember me saying just now that I was worried about the impact of the harbour reorganisations on the commercial freight traffic here, such sas it is?

Those piles of gravel over there caught my eye this afternoon. I’m pretty certain that they weren’t there the last time that I was down on the harbour and if so, that can mean only one thing as far as I am aware.

And that is that at long last, we might – just might – be having one of the gravel boats coming into port fairly soon. And about time too. The last one that i saw was before I went off on my Arctic jaunt.

And here’s a very blurred photo (unfortunately) showing someone digging up the road in the rue St Jean.

When I reached him, I asked him what was the issue and he replied “nothing”. He clearly had no interest in discussing the matter so I didn’t waste my time trying to obtain further information.

Instead, I came on back home.

My intention was to press on with Project 030 but shame as it is to say it, I crashed out good and proper. And I do mean “good and proper” because it was deep enough to go off on a voyage and I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow when I’ve transcribed the notes.

Nevertheless, I did manage to pull myself together long enough to choose the music for project 030 and even make some kind of start on the text.

That took me to tea-time and having enjoyed Liz’s apple crumble so much, I decided that I would make one too.

120 grammes of flour and 60 grammes of vegan margarine all rubbed in together really well so that it was something like a very stiff paste. And then 120 grammes of oats were rubbed well into that so that it was all nicely smeared together.

Three cooking apples were then peeled, cored and cut into small chunks and put into an oven dish. They were covered in brown sugar with desiccated coconut, cinnamon and nutmeg, soaked lightly in lemon juice and all stirred up together and then pressed down.

The oven had been warming up during this time so I covered the apple stuff with the flour and oat mixture and put it in the oven

In the meantime I made myself a pizza and that went into the oven too.

And here’s my apple crumble. Doesn’t it look wonderful? And it tastes as good as it looks too, especially with some of that Alpro coconut dessert stuff.

The good news about this is that there’s plenty left for the next few days too.

And there’s no doubt about it – I don’t think that I’ve ever eaten so well as I have been doing for the last few months since I’ve been on this healthy food and drink thing after coming back from Canada

And with my exercise and running, I’m doing as well as I can and that’s important. God food and plenty of exercise will keep me going for a while yet, I reckon.

Later this evening I went out for my walk as usual.

As an experiment, I took both working cameras with me – the Nikon 1 J5 and the old Nikon D3000. The aim was to take two photos of the same object with the same settings on each camera to see which one produced the best results in low-light conditions when fitted with the low-light lenses that I have.

The top one is taken with the Nikon 1

And this one is taken with the Nikon D3000.

As you can see, there’s a marginal improvement with the J5 over the D3000 but that’s probably due to the fact that despite being a smaller camera, the resolution is so much better.

But there’s not all that much in it between the two.

However, it was a different story around the headland by the chantier navale.

Even with stopping down the J5 4 stops to darken the image it’s still managed to produce an overexposed and blurred image.I should have stopped down much further than this to speed up the image.

But as for the Nikon D3000, that wasn’t able to stop down anywhere near enough to even attempt a photo. Only one entrant in this competition, never mind one winner.

It was pretty much the same story here too.

The D3000 struggled and couldn’t produce a worthwhile image whereas the Nikon I J5 produced an acceptable image in the dark, with Chausiais and Joly France being quite prominent over by the ferry terminal. With a tripod or my monopod even, this would have made a really good image.

But one thing is certain, and that is that when the big NIKON D500 is repaired, I’ll be making much more and much better use of the low-light lens than I have been doing so far.

There was time for a run too, which made me feel better and then I came back to write up my notes.

It’s late now, later than I was hoping, but I’ll do the best that I can. I have a lot to do and I need to organise myself better.

Early nights ae much more important so I need to think about how I intend to manage it.

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 – THERE ARE MANY THINGS …

… in this life that I don’t understand.

And one of the most bizarre things that I don’t understand is why the SNCF (the French national railway network) has suddenly decided that it can no longer book me through to Brussels using a (French) TGV train, but an independent ticketing agency can do so, at a price that is cheaper than that which I normally pay – and even more so when you consider that I don’t receive my Senior Citizens’ discount or my Fidelity Bonus.

Yes, I tried again this morning to book my trip with the SNCF for the 18th but it didn’t work out at all, just as yesterday. I had intended, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, to go up to the railway station and book it there, but I reckoned that I’d try the booking agency that I sometimes use.

And sure enough, here we are.

This morning was something of a disaster – quite in keeping with modern times. I missed the alarms and ended up in bed until 07:30. This is starting to become extremely depressing as far as I am concerned.

What is even worse is that round about 17:00 I crashed out again. Yes, right good and proper too. Dead to the world in a deep sleep for about 20 minutes and I remember thinking just how bad that is. I’m not doing at all as well as I would like in this respect.

But anyway, back to this morning.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. Anyway, last night we were out recording the Carnival procession and there were lots of things happening there. We were having to make some edited highlights. One bit that sticks in my mind out of many many others was where something came along to join the procession out of a car park so we filmed the approach to the car park which was clear, then filmed this object adjoining to car park and superimposed the two to make it look as if the object was emerging from the car park. That was what we filmed and people weren’t very happy about how we did that but we really couldn’t see any other way of doing what we were trying to do.
Later on during the night I was back with the football, just as I was a couple of nights ago. This was pretty much relegation form for Crewe Alexandra who hadn’t won a game for weeks and were struggling. They had been gripped by this lack of confidence and loss of points and gone downhill. They weren’t playing too well and weren’t keeping possession and other teams were rapidly getting good results against them. Someone left Crewe Alexandra and became the manager of Rochdale, someone called Hogg, Graeme Hogg, I dunno. We were all musing – what of Crewe for a forward because while Crewe were bad, now they had even less idea and out of the transfer window you couldn’t bring anyone in at the moment. It was just generally bad news for lower-league football with all of this going on and blocked this and blocked that and players wanting to be somewhere else and didn’t want to have to work and so on.

And I’ve absolutely no idea where all of this football stuff just recently has come from. Something’s going on somewhere and I wish I knew what it was.

After breakfast I had a crack at splitting up a few more digital sound files and that seemed to go pretty smoothly although there were several distractions of one sort or another – such as a few mails to write, rail tickets to book, that kind of thing.

That took me up to about midday – time to go and fetch my dejeunette from La Mie Caline.

Armed with the NIKON D3000 for a change, I set off to see what I can see. And straight away I realised that I had forgotten how to work it. Still, I managed to pick out an image of a fishing boat out in the English Channel

And straight away, I noticed a difference in the quality of the image compared with that of the big NIKON D500. I hope that it gets well soon.

For my walk, I went the long way around, all the way round the headland and down into town along the rue du Port.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall me mentioning yesterday the piling that was going on in the harbour with the piledriver ramming another pillar into the sea bed inside the harbour.

That was one of the things that I wanted to see and sure enough, here they are, having had a really good go at it over the last day or so.

What’s worrying me is that now that I know what they are, I recall having seen four or five of this objects over on the far side of the port. If they are going to install all of those, it’s going to restrict the movement around the port quite considerably for the larger boats.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also have seen with me a pile of scaffolding being erected on the quayside by a crane.

This was then lowered into the harbour itself and anchored to the quayside.

So today, we can see a couple of workmen on there having a good play around with something or other. I’ve no idea what but I suspect that they are drilling the quayside just there in order to mount another one of these pontoon supports.

This is another thing that I’ll need to check in the future.

But not today though, because the harbour gates were open and so I couldn’t cross over the top.

Instead, I wandered around to the other side of the fish processing plant to watch the new fishing boat, Rocavi II come into port.

What interested me the most was the catch. The plastic boxes in the stern were full of shellfish of some kind or other and it looked to be a very impressive catch.

Mind you, they wouldn’t have spent the money on a new boat had they not been confident about the profits that they would bring in.

Having been frustrated in my attempts to cross to the other side of the port, I walked instead along the rue du Port and into town that way.

That took me past where they are refurbishing the old car park here, and they seem to be making some kind of rapid progress.

What they are doing is laying some kind of concrete channel which can’t be for drainage looking at how irregular it is. It must be for some other purpose and I suppose that the secret will unfold as time goes on.

Having picked up my bread I set off back for home but on the way back fell in with one of my colleagues from the radio who had also been a victim of that debâcle the other Sunday.

She told me her story, which paralleled mine pretty much but which ended up in a completely different and much more unpleasant way and I can understand why she was so upset about the whole affair.

Still, our chat went on for ages and was very interesting. I’d already had a few plans of my own for the future and she was quite keen on leaping aboard.

After a rather late lunch I made a start on the notes of the radio project on which I’m working.

There was the usual interruption while I went for my afternoon walk around the headland.

Although the wind has died down considerably from how it has been just recently over the last couple of days, there is still plenty of force remaining in the sea.

Even though the tide was now well out, the waves were crashing into the sea wall and sending a pile of spray everywhere. Just imagine what this must be like at high tide.

I had the NIKON D3000 with me again, and as you can see, the quality is nothing like as good as the quality of the big NIKON D500.

That is of course hardly surprising, seeing as it only cost me a quarter of the price but it’s the best that I have right now. And it’s still able to pull in a pic of the waves, even though I can’t manage to produce the same speed without compromising the ISO settings.

Still, I managed with this camera for about 5 years so a couple of weeks won’t make very much difference one way or another.

While I was out there walking along the clifftop, I was distracted by a load of noise coming from across the harbour.

Right away on the far side was a skip lorry with a pile of skips. And the digger that seems to spend a lot of time over there was messing about with something or other but I couldn’t quite see what it was.

And so accordingly I resolved to loiter in the vicinity for a while in the hope that something might develop, while I admired the lifting cab on the digger. I’d not noticed that before.

Sure enough, it didn’t take long for something to happen over there.

Now, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we went over there a couple of weeks ago when we saw a pile of cast iron pillars that they had ripped out of the harbour.

The digger seems to be fitted with a grabber and what it’s doing is picking up the pillars and dropping them into a skip on the back of the lorry, presumably to take away for melting down and recasting.

So now we know.

From up here on the clifftop there’s a good view down into the old car park that they are refurbishing.

With the zoom lens I can take a good pic of it from up here and have a better idea of what they are doing, although I do have to admit that i’m still none-the-wiser.

On that note I came home, where I had a phone call. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on 14th February (one of the many reasons why I keep this blog is so that I can keep a note of what I do and when i do it) I went into the Credit Agricole to have a form signed, and the issues that arose out of that simple request.

The form still hasn’t been returned so I sent them a mail this morning to express my displeasure. They rang me back later this afternoon to tell me that they had no trace of my form

As I suspected, signing a form and putting a stamp on it is far too difficult for them. Remember that I went there on 14th June last year and it took three employees to deal with that simple request.

Anyway, they’ve gone off to have a think about the issue and, one hopes, contact me sometime in the not-too-distant future to tell me that they have somehow managed to lose the form completely.

It’s hardly surprising that after all of that, I had a good old crash-out as deeply as I did. So deeply in fact that I was well away with the fairies for quite some time. I had a dream about a Mark X Jag like the green one that I used to have, which was in some lock-up garages at the back of Catherine Street although it wasn’t really Catherine Street. I’d bought the vehicle from a guy who had had it in a garage there. I was trying to get in touch with him to find if I could take over the garage but no-one knew. In the end I spoke to a woman whose house backed onto the garage who knew him. I was asking her the questions and she said “oh he brought it here in a caravan-type of thing, this was where he kept it” and so on. When I said about keeping on the garage she ummed and ahhed and didn’t really know the answer

Tea tonight was a burger on a bap with potatoes and veg, followed by the last of the apple crumble. I know that I should have been baking but the freezer is full to the brim and there’s no room for anything at all in there until I empty some stuff out.

And even so, that’s going to be problematic because I’m running low on peas and I’ll have to buy a packet of those. So where i’m going to put them is anyone’s guess.

Out on my walk this evening I took the NIKON D3000 with men but fitted with the low-light 50mm f1.8 lens.

As a test pic, I took a photo of the Place d’Armes right outside here to see how it would turn out. And having been used to working with ISO as low down as ISO6400 without the slightest hiccup, ISO 3200 on the old Nikon is a real battle.

The lens works well enough in the poor street lighting put the image is far too grainy for my liking. One of these days I’ll try a decent graphics editor and see whether or not I can digitally improve these images.

And the camera doesn’t have anything like the control that the big NIKON D500 has.

Try as I might, I couldn’t achieve a decent well-balanced image of the lights out at Donville-les-Bains and that was rather disappointing.

Instead, I went for my two runs and managed them comparatively comfortably. On the second one, I even made it right to the top of the ramp and it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to do that.

But in between the two runs I had a pause at the top of the cliff overlooking the Place Marechal Foch.

With a reasonable amount of light I could wind back the ISO to a more reasonable level and the photo didn’t come out too badly at all.

To such an extent that I’m wondering why I haven’t made much more use of the 50mm lens on the big Nikon during the nights when I’ve been out on a stroll. I shall have to look into that.

On that note, I’m off to bed. I’m disappointed in my performance over the last couple of days and I have to do better. I can start by trying to catch up with my beauty sleep. I need as much of that as I can get.

Monday 2nd March 2020 – CATASTROPHE AFTER CATASTROPHE!

I am having a desperately bad day today.

Nothing is working, nothing is going to plan and everything that I touch seems to be breaking. I’m now at the stage where I’m too scared to go to the bathroom!

And it all started off so well too! I’d had a good sleep for what it was worth and even managed to beat the alarms out of bed.

A nice breakfast, nothing on the dictaphone to copy out, and a good crack on at the splitting of the digital files.

But that was as good as it got. The rest of the day descended into chaos.

First task was to book my accommodation in Leuven for the period 18th – 23rd March. And, surprisingly, all of the cheap accommodation had been sold out already. I’m having to go up-market into a higher class of accommodation – at an additional price of course.

The rail trip was next. And, surprisingly, there were no trains available at all on that day, or the day before. I used the SNCF chatline and whoever was on there confirmed that the trains were running, and that I should call the helpline.

At that point I went for a shower and then headed off into town.

First stop was the railway station. But I didn’t get as far as i would have liked because I was bewildered by the lack of funfair.

It’s not there now – the ground’s all flat. They’ve folded up their tents like Bedouins and crept off silently into the night by the looks of things. I’m sure that they were here for longer than this in previous years.

At the station, the person at the counter told me that the trains were indeed running and there’s no reason whatever to think otherwise. She told me to book on the ‘phone if the internet still isn’t working.

And if I’m stil unsuccessful, to come back and see her.

Outside in the avenue Marechal Leclerc they were tidying up now that the fete foraine has gone.

The guys with the pressure-washers were out again washing the confetti into the drains for it to be discharged into the sea, which is a pretty thankless task, i suppose. It’s a good job that it’s made of paper.

At LIDL I bought a few things – some button batteries which always come in useful of course, and some new vinegar and olive oil dispensers.

The reason why I bought those was because they looked as if they were spray-on containers but when I unwrapped them at home, I found that they weren’t. And that disappointed me greatly.

But they did have leeks in – a bundle at €0:99 and I was thinking only the other day that I really fancied some leek and potato soup. So I bought a bundle and I’ll make some of that too.

On the way back, I had a look at the building work going on at the impasse de la Corderie.

They don’t seem to be making much progress so it’s difficult to see what it is that they are going. What I’ll have to do next time that I’m over there is to go to have a closer look and see what’s going on.

Had I not been running quite late and had a lot to do, I would have gone over then and there. But I had to press on regardless

Instead, today I went on down into town and La Mie Caline to pick up my dejeunette.

On the way though, I stopped to see what was going on with the big funfair because if the small one had gone, it was quite likely that the big one would follow it quite quickly.

And I was right about that too because they have broken camp and are in the process of clearing off too. But at least it gives me an opportunity to admire the balcony and French windows of that showman’s caravan just there.

As I’d been walking through the town I’d heard a pile of banging coming from down in the port so I was wondering what was going on there.

By the looks of things, they are installing a second one of those big grey pillars that we’ve been seeing. There’s a piledriver attached to the big crane and it’s that which has been making the noise as it drops down and drives the pillar into the silt.

And this is starting to cause me more than a little concern. Are they going to ba having some of these pontoons going out perpendicularly into the harbour basin?

And if so, how are the big gravel boats going to be able to turn round if the width of the harbour is thus restricted? I don’t like the way that this is shaping up one little bit.

Back here, I telephoned the rail booking point. They confirmed that the trains were running normally, They could book me tickets on the phone, no problem, so I gave them all of the details.

And then we had the “ohh dear!”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve no idea. The system will let me take you as far as Lille but no further. And on teh way back, it won’t let me book you from Brussels to Paris”.
“Why not”?
“I’ve no idea. It looks as if the TGV isn’t accepting our bookinss”

Well, that’s a badger and no mistake. But at least it’s solved the problem of my morning walk tomorrow. It looks as if it will be a walk up tp the railway station and see if I can book it from there.

Next stop was to order a new glass for the mirror on Caliburn. And having specified a “right-hand” one, when I had the “confirmation of order” in my mailbox, it quite clearly states “left-hand”.

So what the heck happened there? I had to send them an e-mail and hope that they read it before they post the glass.

Next was a phone call from the people at the radio trying to make me reconsider my decision to withdraw from Group activities. Despite their pleading, I stood firm. Not necessarily because I want to withdraw, but simply that if I change my mind, then that won’t change theirs and things need to change – and change drastically – at their end of we are to progress as a team and do things correctly.

With all of this going on, it was lunchtime by now so I made my butties. And then I started work on the radio project that I have to do.

There was an interruption for my walk, and this was where the calamity of calamities hit me. For some reason or other, the BIG NIKON has stopped working!

It’s refusing to read the memory card that’s in it.

So back here, I tried almost every single memory card in the apartment (and there are more than enough of them around here!) and no luck whatsoever. This really IS a calamity!

With something of a bitter taste in my mouth, I carried on with the radio project and, clearly being unable to think straight, I’ve made something of a dog’s breakfast of it and some of it has to be done again.

Tea was some of the leftovers from yesterday – the lentil curry with rice and veg, followed by apple crumble and some of that Alpro soya dessert stuff.

For my evening walk I fired up the old Nikon D3000 but didn’t get very far with that. As for my runs though, I managed to go quite far with them and imrpved my distances more than somewhat.

It just goes to show what having a good diet can do for you.

And not crashing out today either. That’s good news too.

But in view of my dreadful day today i’m going to have an early night and a good sleep – write off today as a total loss and start again afresh tomorrow.

It’s the least that I can do.

Friday 28th February 2020 – I MISSED …

… the alarms this morning.

Yes, round about 07:30 when I finally heaved myself out of my stinking pit this morning. I’ve no idea why because last night wasn’t exactly a late night.. after the medication I had a look at the dictaphone as usual. I’d been on a few travels too during the night, but not enough to wear me out.

I’d been in Audlem and it had been some kind of New Years Eve or something like that. There were hordes of people out in the street all dressed in fancy clothes. I’d been wandering around looking at them and admiring their outfits, all that kind of thing. Then I headed down to where the Buttermarket was. There were even more people coming out from down Shropshire Street, all in a sort of nightwear type of thing as if they had been to some kind of pyjama party. They were all streaming up to a pub that of course doesn’t exist somewhere on Stafford Street. This pub was a black and white Tudor building with all kinds of statues on the edges of the roof like in Austria. There were all these bunk beds outside and this was the middle of winter and all these bunk beds for kids outside. These kids were all dressed in nightwear and I couldn’t understand what it was that they were doing. This was really late for kids to be out and so on.
Before that we had been in a procession, a procession of all kinds. We were dressed as seafaring pirates, a Marsupilami thing. We were quite happily parading and making up the story as we went along. We saw some being questioned about who was in a huge queue and who wasn’t and we realised that this was going to be the fate of death for us because we wouldn’t be allowed to continue. We chatted amongst ourselves who it was and ended up talking to this very young girl about 6 or 7 and ask her all these questions but by now we weren’t having the microphone passed down to us and being put on the air.

And there was more to all of this lot too.

After breakfast I had a look at some more sound files and, sure enough, just as expected, a couple of them were all over the place and took an age to sort out; Somewhere in the middle of all of this I took my Carnaval costume back to its owner. We had quite a chat and she had a lot to say for herself about her work so I made a note for the future.

After having finished the sound files I went down into town for my bread. The long way round too seeing as I wasn’t going anywhere special tody.

But down on the harbour, the hydraulic concrete-breaker that’s been breaking up the rocks over at the ferry port is back so that it looks as if they will be restarting there some time very soon.

Not today though. Chausiais and Joly France were over there moored in a NAABSA position on the bottom. It looks as if they have things to do this weekend.

While I was here I went to look at the new pontoons that they’ve been installing.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day I mentioned the cranes on the quayside and that I didn’t think that they will reach over the pontoons.

Today, there were a couple of fishermen there so I asked the question. And the answer is “no, they don’t reach”.
“So what are you going to do then?” asked Our Hero
“Bof” replied one of the fishermen with a beautiful Gallic shrug.

A beautiful word, “Bof” – a must-have word in anyone’s vocabulary. It means basically “I don’t know” but with a much greater air of abandonment.

The tide was out so I could walk across the harbour gates to the other side.

Thora had gone, as I had expected, so I could admire the new pontoons here too. They are cracking on with all of this and I don’t think that it will be long before they have finished.

But as I have said before, I hope that they will leave some space for the commercial boats like the gravel boats that come in here, even if they haven’t been in for a while.

At La Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette and headed for home.

Still plenty of time before lunch so I made a start on scanning in all of the receipts that needed scanning. And I was surprised that there were so many. I seem to have run aground somewhere in my plan for rolling scanning. even worse, I can’t find the receipts for medication that i bought at the end of June prior to going off on my sea voyage. It was an expensive do too so I hope that I didn’t discard the receipts along with all of the rest of the paperwork that I threw away on my travels.

After lunch, I had something very important to do. I’d used up the last of the hummus so I had to make some more. And although it took a while, it was thoroughly wicked when it was finished.

Basically, for any given weight you need 50% of chick peas and 25% sesame seed paste. These are the important figures to remember.
The remaining 25% of the given weight is made up of all kinds of things – olive oil and chick pea juice for a start. Then I use sea salt, ground black pepper, garlic (tons of that) and then your “flavouring ingredient”.

Everything except your flavouring ingredient goes into the whizzer and it’s whizzed round until it’s a nice creamy paste. Then, add your “flavouring ingredient”. I made two batches, one with the roasted peppers that I had prepared last night and the second with some sliced olives. You add that to the mix in the whizzer and whizz it just enough to disperse it rhrough the mix but not enough to break it up completely.

After that, I could crack on then and fill in these forms. And that wasn’t the work of five minutes either, with so many to do. I hadn’t really realised just how many receipts had piled up over that period when I broke my hand.

There was the usual pause for my afternoon walk. Around the walls this afternoon, but no run because there were far too many people around.

Despite the wind, there were quite a few people down on the beach at the Plat Gousset too. I’ve no idea what they were doing but they were clearly having a good time doing it.

So I came back to carry on work, but it wasn’t quite the success for which I was hoping. There was a little … errr … repose during the afternoon that slowed me down too.

By the time that I had finished the medical expenses it was 18:30 and so I did something that I haven’t done for quite some time, namely I had a play on the bass. It shows you just how much work I’ve had to do that the guitars have been on the back burner all this time. The track “Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic came round on my playlist so I spent half an hour working out the bass line.

There has been some excitement too. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my disenchantment with certain events over the weekend. The controller has called a meeting for Monday to discuss them but EVERY ONE of the volunteers is refusing to go and there has been a frantic exchange of e-mails.

There are stories of one or two others who are as disenchanted as I am, but I had no idea that the feeling was so general. Not, of course, that I am surprised.

Tea was an “anything curry” of leftover food in the fridge, including a couple of falafel balls that had been in there maybe longer than they ought to have been.

The evening walk around the headland was disappointing. I only managed one run and that was a struggle too as I had a headwind against me. Reaching my mark, never mind extending it, was something of a battle.

Later, I had the football to watch so I started to write my notes on the little old Acer laptop that I have recently raised from the dead just to prove that it still works.

It was Welsh Cup quarter-final and we should have had two second-division teams, Prestatyn Town and Flint Town United. But their match was called off so the cameras made a dash across North Wales to show us Caernarfon Town v Cefn Druids instead.

Caernarfon scored after just a minute – a wicked deflection from a corner that shouldn’t have been awarded in the first place. And then they had Alex Ramsey to thank for a series of excellent saves to keep them in the game for the next hour.

The match hinged on a moment of madness on the hour-mark.

Arsan, one of the Druids defenders, was fouled and the referee blew his whistle to award the free kick. Arsan, in his folly, kicked out at the Caernarfon player for which he was rightly booked. Probably not 30 seconds later, he had the ball and as he ran past a Caernarfon player, fell to his knees. No clearer case of simulation you will ever see, and he picked up another yellow card and was thus expelled from the game.

In my time I’ve seen some stupid players do some stupid things, but nothing quite as stupid as this.

Within the next 5 minutes Caernarfon had scored two more goals, and went on to score a bizarre fourth right at the end when an outstretched Caernarfon boot touched the ball awkwardly causing it to loop up over everyone and drop down behind a defender into the net.

So I’m off to bed now. For the first time in a while I’m off shopping and I hope that they have more of that Alpro soya ice cream. I started on that for tea tonight and it was delicious.

Thursday 27th February 2020 – AFTER CARNAVAL …

… this last few days the big clean-up begins.

Here in the rue Couraye this morning was one of the several pressure-washers washing the confetti off the walls and the windows down into the grids where it will be eventually discharged into the sea.

Somewhere in the press I read that there had been a total of about 7 tonnes of confetti thrown during the carnaval, and looking at the state of the town on Sunday evening I could well believe it. It was as if we had had snow.

Talking of the Press, I have an apology to make to one of the local newspapers, Ouest-France. When we had our press conference the other week, only two of the three journalists invited actually turned up. I was told, and so I wrote, that it was Ouest-France that was refusing to cover our radio station.

That however is not the case. It’s La Manche-Libre that is boycotting the radio station.

This morning, I had my own clean-up.

The day started a little later than I hoped, due to the difficulty that I had leaving my stinking pit. Only 10 minutes or so but nevertheless …

After the medication, I attacked the dictaphone. I was in with some kind of circus last night. There were all these people dancing around in this kind of blue-ish costume. They were all ages, from quite young to twenty-something. One of them, a young girl, was covered in henna tattoos from head to foot. I can’t remember who I was with – my brother or someone – but we were remarking on all these people and I was reading a circus magazine, a Dutch circus magazine but it was actually written in English and was going on about all of the activities at various circuses and fairgrounds. It was all extremely interesting as I read one, put it down, picked up another, all these dances. Then it turned into a marriage. My brother poked me in the elbow and said “look over there! That is going to be really something”. There was a young girl standing on some kind of table or other surrounded by all these other young girls. This girl was the one being married. There was an older woman there, probably her mother or something, ginger-haired. The look on this mother’s face was priceless because I think she just realised that with the weight of people on this table it was going to collapse any minute and this was what my brother picked up to (assuming that it was him) and all these people would be decanted all over the place.
Later I was back to doing something around the port as well with different people, a kind-of broadcast with what was going on there. What I remember mostly was the guy who claims to be tax-exempt in the Uk but all of the hoops that he had to go through to get that tax-exempt status. Apparently it’s not granted automatically any more. You have to apply for it even though you don’t know how to apply or what to do. And there was something about me being the only one to wear a hat.

Breakfast was next and then I attacked the digital files. One soundfile was scratched but I managed to edit it out but several others were, as expected, hopelessly out of order and it took me an age to sort them out as they should be.

And I’ve no idea who noted the running times in the library files but they bear no resemblance whatever with the actual times that I recorded.

On that note (seeing as we are talking about music) I went and had a shower and a general clean-up. And a hair-cut too because it was actually becoming rather longer than I liked. It’s now nice and short.

In fact, I wasn’t sure that I like my new haircut at first, but I think that it will grow on me.

That was the cue to hit the shops – rather later than I anticipated.

There was a howling gale blowing outside again. Not as bad as some days that we have had recently but bad enough. Poor Thora was making heavy weather of her way into port, and that was no surprise.

At LIDL I didn’t buy anything whatever that was extraordinary. It was still a reasonably-expensive shop though because I’m going to have to make some muesli tomorrow I reckon so I may as well buy in the stuff that I need seeing as I’m there. I do like my home-made muesli.

At La Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette and, dodging the rain showers, made it back home just in time to answer a call from Rosemary. She’d “hit the wall” and was looking for inspiration.

We had a lengthy chat, like we always do, and that took me up to lunchtime.

After my butties I wrote and then dictated the text for my “live concert” for the month of April. I like to be ahead. That’s now all edited and merged, and when I played it back it sounded really good. One hour exactly, and that’s just what is required.

There were a couple of interruptions to the proceedings too.

Firstly of course, there was my afternoon walk around the headland. Quite a few people out there again seeing as it’s still the school holidays. And down in the chantier navale we seem to have come down to just one boat.

There were two in there last night, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. I wonder where the second one went.

Earlier on today, we’d seen Thora fight her way into port on her trip over from the Channel islands.

She had made it safely in, evidently, for here she is tied up at the usual mooring dock by the unloading crane next to Marité

It’s going to be tomorrow before I can get down there to have a chat to them, and I bet that she will have sailed by then. That’s usually the case. I never seem to be able to catch up with the skippers of the two Channel Island freighters.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is that just before Carnaval they had a compactor flattening the surface of the car park that they are refurbishing in the rue du Port.

We’ve not been able to give it a close look since then so I took the opportunity to give it a good looking-over today. There’s more machinery on there today and they also seem to have been digging a trench that they are lining with concrete.

So it looks as if they are pressing on with their plans. I hope that they’ll do a good job, and that they’ll plant a good pile of greenery down there. The twon centre is a little desolate with an absence of growing stuff.

But talking of them growing stuff, the new pontoons down in the harbour seem to be springing up like mushrooms.

Yesterday, we saw a lorry delivering some of the pontoon mounting brackets to the far side of the harbour, and today it looks as if they have not only managed to install them in the correct position, but fitted some of the new pontoons in place.

It’s all looking quite impressive, but I’m wondering if they are going to be leaving any room for the commercial traffic. I know that we haven’t had any gravel boats in for months but even so, there still needs to be the facilities for one to arrive if necessary.

Meanwhile, back on the north side of the harbour, work is likewise continuing apace.

The large floating pontoon with the cranes is over here now and they seem to be fitting a couple more of the floating pontoon walkways.

You can see that the fishing boats are already moored up against it, and so I wonder what they are going to do about the little cranes that they use to load and unload all of the fishing gear that they use.

It doesn’t look to me as if the reach is long enough.

Back here I … errr … closed my eyes for a few minutes and then quickly finished off the April live concert. With the time that was left I had a good listen to it while I edited a few more photos from July 2019.

There was some good news, in that I managed to track down a couple of things that had been puzzling me – like the names of islands out in the Atlantic Ocean and the name of a ship (a mis-spelling that I managed to track down) to name but two.

Tea was frozen pie out of the freezer, with potatoes veg and gravy followed by pineapple chunks with raspberry sorbet and chocolate sauce. Totally delicious

It should have been a burger on a bap but what happened there was that I’m very low on hummus and I have to make some more tomorrow. As I have plenty of peppers lying around I decided that I will make two batches – one with olives as usual but the other with roasted peppers. Hence the oven, for roasting purposes

It was a beautiful evening out tonight, even though it was rather windy.

That light out there – I’m not sure where it was but it was a good way out. And you could even see the lights of Jersey yet again.

As for me, I managed my two runs, overrunning both of them with still a little bit left in the tank I’ve put on 200 grammes since I last weighed myself so I need to run it off again.

There are no plans whatever for tomorrow so I’m going to spend the morning after the digital music exercise dealing with my health insurance repayments.

o just watch someone come along and spoil my day.

Wednesday 26th February 2020 – I’VE HAD VISITORS …

… today.

Or, rather, one visitor. The person who is responsible for this radio shambles came to see me this afternoon about the e-mail that I had sent him on Monday evening.

And basically, I told him about my take on the events of this weekend and, for good measure, all of the things that I’ve been telling the regular readers of this rubbish ever since last November.

Anyway, he’s gone away to mull over the things that I mentioned.

The irony is that of everything that went wrong, it could all without exception have been prevented and would never have happened had they been willing to listen to advice right from the very start.

Simple things, like “we had no contact” because one particular mobile phone network doesn’t reach to where the control was. The idea of swapping phones over so that the person at the control had the phone that worked in there and those in the street had the others went totally over their heads.

All stupid little things like that which destroyed the broadcast.

Anyway, I promised that I wouldn’t mention anything, so I won’t. But it remains to be seen whether things change and whether he has the courage to confront the major issue.

But to my surprise, I’m not alone either. By pure coincidence the other two people who were implicated in this affair as “victims” (as opposed to “perpetrators” of the actions) had been in touch with him and told him pretty much the same thing that I told him too.

As for me, I had a late morning this morning. It was 07:00 when I finally crawled out of bed and had my medication. That’s already 45 minutes of my day lost before I begin.

After the medication I looked at the dictaphone but for once it had been a quiet night and I hadn’t gone anywhere. Ahh well!

Instead I spent much of the morning splitting up some digital sound files into their individual tracks. It was another one of those “all mixed up” days with tracks in any kind of order.

Furthermore, two of the albums weren’t from digital masters and were so deformed that no effects function that I had could restore them. In the end I had to search even further to track down a better copy of each.

Round about 11:00 I called it a day and headed off towards town and La Mie Caline for my dejeunette.

Once more, now that the wind had subsided from last night, I went the long way, all the way around the headland. And out in the distance I could see something moving on the water.

It was too far away for me to identify properly so I took a hopeful photo with the aim of blowing it up (the photo, not the object) when I returned home to see what it was.

And actually it’s nothing really exciting. Merely Joly France on one of her ferry trips out to the Ile de Chausey.

A little earlier, I mentioned that the high winds had subsided from how they were yesterday evening.

But even so, it must have been powerful out in the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean because the seas were roaring in. The harbour gates are still open, which means that high tide is at least two hours away but even so the waves are crashing up to and in some cases right over the harbour walls.

The energy that there must be in those waves, just waiting to be harvested instead of using coal, gas, oil and nuclear.

The tide was out, as I mentioned, so the harbour gates were closed and I could take the path over the top to the other side.

As I crossed over the top of the gates, I could see that one of our regular visitors is back again. Normandy Trader is sitting at the quayside over there underneath the unloading crane.

She must have sneaked in on the early morning tide while I was asleep, I reckon. Whatever blockade there might have been of the Channel Islands ships, it’s clearly over.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday I mentioned the large grey post that had appeared at the quayside across by the rue du Port.

The big floating pontoon was back over on this side of the harbour so there was a very good view of what they had been fitting.

And so even though I’m better-informed, I’m still none-the-wiser. I shall have to make further enquiries. But at least you can see the new pontoons that they’ve been fixing.

There are things that I need to discuss with the skipper of Normandy Trader and also with the skipper of Thora, the other Jersey freighter.

And so I took myself off over there for a chat. I stopped on the way round though to look at all of the shelfish that they had been unloading. Normandy Trader works for, amongst other customers, the Jersey Fishermen’s Co-Operative and brings in the catch for the buyers here.

It’s one thing that the silly Brits have forgotten. There’s very little market for shellfish and the like in the Uk but that’s the predominant catch in inshore fisheries there.

However, there’s a huge market for it on the Mainland and that’s where most of it ends up. The British fishermen need the European market to sell their catch and the imposition of tariffs will kill the trade stone-dead.

We saw earlier this month how the Channel Islands were brought to their knees after just 4 days of boycott.

The skipper of Normandy Trader wasn’t about. In fact the whole ship had the air of the Marie Celeste about it.

Disappointed yet again, I pushed on … “pushed off, more like” – ed … to La Mie Caline where my path was interrupted by this rather large lorry trying to squeeze its way in between the fairground vehicles and the parked cars.

One thing that i’ve noticed is that the pontoon mounting brackets are now starting to be affixed on this side of the harbour wall too, and here are a couple more making their way onto the construction site.

While you admire a couple more photos of the storms at sea I bought my bread and headed slowly back up the hill to home.

Plenty of time before lunch so I dictated the notes for Project 027, uploaded them to the computer and began to edit them.

Not that I managed to go very far because I stopped for lunch – and then there was my visitor for the afternoon.

Basically, I vented my spleen – or, rather, I would have done had I still had my spleen – for a good 95 minutes (I timed it) but unfortunately it didn’t make me feel any better.

Not that I was expecting it to either. But I made my point and that was the important thing.

After he had left I carried on with the editing and managed to turn 10:24 minutes into just 7:10, which is always good.

But when I played it back, there was a horrible noise. Somehow I’d made an unconscious manoeuvre of some control or other and it had distorted the sound.

Had I known what I had done I might have been able to reverse it and restore the sound but in the end I had to redo it.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this I went for my afternoon walk.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that buoys pop up every now and again in the sea around here, and there was another one out there today. I still haven’t worked out what their purpose is though.

There were plenty of people around today so I wasn’t able to fit in very much in the way of a run. The way that I run these days is quite embarrassing and I’d rather not be observed.

The radio project is now complete and ready to go (in about 3 months time) but I didn’t have time to finish a “live concert”. Mind you, I’ve had plenty of tile to think about things and I known now what i’m going to do if none of the irons that I have in the fire come up trumps this time round.

No harm in preparing something and being well ahead.

Because tea was late, I had an aubergine and kidney-bean whatsit with pasta and vegetables followed by the last of the rice pudding. It won’t be long before I have to start cooking mega-curries again. The pile in the freezer is diminishing.

Outside tonight, it really was beautiful.

There was a really cold wind out there but the skies were clear and you could see for miles. This trawler here right out in the English Channel stood out really well and the photo hasn’t come out too badly considering the distance at which it was taken.

But at least, after the wicked storms that we have had just recently, they’ve been able to go back to work.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day I took a photo of the lighthouse and the coastguard station her eon the Pointe Du Roc.

It subsequently occurred to me that I don’t remember taking one of the same view in the dark. So seeing as I was going that way this evening, I duly obliged.

As you can (or can’t) see, it’s nothing whatever to write home about. But I suppose that it’s something for posterity.

“The fishermen are back at work after the storms” I said earlier.

And as I rounded the headland I saw this bright light heading my way. The fishing boats aren’t merely just coming into harbour, there are others heading out to sea too at the same time.

This is another photo that could have been much worse that it actually is, but I’m clearly in need of much more practice at shooting in the dark if I want to do anything special.

There have been changes in the Chantier navale too just now.

Yesterday we managed to make it up to three fishing boats, but this evening we’re back down to two again. So it’s all go in the shipyard.

It wasn’t all go though on my little running route. Far too many people about, as well as two cats squaring up to each other.

And so I continued my walk to another one of my reserve courses and had a good run along there instead. Must keep going as much as I can.

So bed-time now once the good music stops. Shops tomorrow, do the text for this live broadcast and then spend the rest of the week attacking the arrears of work.

It’s all go here after having fallen considerably behind. I must pull myself together.

Tuesday 25th February 2020 – THE WIND OUTSIDE …

… tonight is probably one of the most wicked that I have ever experienced in all the time that I’ve been here.

You might be wondering how come it is that the fete foraine – the funfair – is still managing to operate in this kind of weather.

In fact, firstly only part of it is. Several of the rides have closed down, presumably due to the high winds. But then again, the Parking Hérel, where the funfair is situated, is pretty well sheltered.

Where I’m situated is on a headland right on the English CHannel with nothing between me and North America and I’m certainly taking the brunt of it. There’s another headland to the south of the Parking Hérel and there’s a high cliff right behind it.

But returning to our story, a rather strange thing happened to me during the night. I had the same dream no fewer than four times, one after the other. I couldn’t believe it when I listened to the dictaphone.

We were at school. I was with a friend of mine and we were taking photos of all of the school children. They were all sitting at the big long tables eating their meals. At the end of the session we went over to the headmistress and asked “what about our meal?” She asked “haven’t you had yours?” “No, we’ve been busy taking the photographs”. It developed into a long, lengthy discussion about how we should have had a meal which of course we knew. She couldn’t understand anything because of this issue about the photos. She knew that we’d applied for the contract and that we should have had the contract as our quote was the best, all this kind of thing and we were entitled to a meal. She went on and on for a while. In the end she went off and my friend went off. She came back with a pile of paperwork and asked “who’s filled in these forms?” They were forms to show the directors and officers of the company. I could remember filling one in when i was appointed but my name wasn’t there. It was still directors of the company from school years ago who were still there. She said “I remember (… someone else from the past …) filling in this form only yesterday about taking kids for a walk. It’s clearly something that wasn’t right and it had to be put right so that the situation could be regularised. When my friend came back in I asked him what he would be doing on Wednesday night. He came out with some kind of comment about getting ready for school on Thursday. I told him that we had a pile of paperwork to fill in. I started to explain to him about the paperwork
I had this dream four times this evening as I mentioned earlier. But in the third one the headmistress was going on about cupboards in front of the radiators which were small with close-fronted cupboards and doors. She was saying that in the old days they were porous so that the heat could pass through and warm the room more but the ones they have now are solid and so the heat doesn’t pass at all.

So explain that if you can!

After breakfast I set about cutting up a pile of digital sound files into the component tracks. And once more I had the misfortune to find a pile that were out of order and it took a considerable amount of time to unravel them.

What with having something of a late start this morning, it was about 11:00 by the time I finished my morning tasks.

That was the cue for me to go for my bread before I actually settled down to do some work.

For a change I had no intention of going out to see the parade this afternoon so I went for a long morning walk all around the headland, which would give me an opportunity for a close-up view of the chantier navale to see what was going on.

And we seem to have acquired another new resident. We now have three fishing boats in there receiving attention

The tide wasn’t quite in so the harbour gates were closed and I could pass over the path on the top to the other side of the harbour.

The big pontoon with the cranes was hard at work again over by the rue du Port. They are cracking on with the installation of the new pontoons for the landing stages and they might well be finished sometime soon.

But I was more interested in that very large grey post that now seems to have appeared over there behind the floating pontoon. That’s something else that I shall have to check.

But there was one thing yesterday that I mentioned and that I said that I would check up on today.

That was the crane and the mysterious scaffolding construction that it seemed to be erecting. So down at the quayside today I had a look to see what was going on, and there is the scaffolding bolted to some poles that are screwed firmly to the quayside and clamped down.

So it looks as if there’s some kind of serious and semi-permanent arrangement of things happening here right now.

Having picked up my dejeunette at La Mie Caline I headed back home. The crowds were already starting to assemble and I didn’t really want to be caught up in it.

Instead, in the run-up to lunchtime I began the notes for the next radio project.

After my butties I spent an hour or so in the kitchen. The orange and ginger syrup is running out and having bought a pile of lemons yesterday, I decided to make a lemon and ginger syrup.

First step was to slice up the rest of my ginger root (I must buy some more) into tiny pieces and put them in a little water in a saucepan, bring it to the boil and let it simmer.

Meanwhile, peel the lemons and remove as much pith as possible, put them in the whizzer and give them a whizz around to extract as much juice as possible. That was strained off, poured into a bottle that I had sterilised and put in the fridge.

The rest of the lemons went into the whizzer again and properly broken down, and then added to the water and the ginger and left to simmer.

In the meantime I cracked on for a while with the notes for the radio project and then went out for my usual walk.

If you are wondering why there are no photos of the afternoon walk, it’s because the heavens had by now opened and we were having rain like I haven’t seen for a long time. I did have my camera with me but it was tucked up inside my wet weather gear and I had no intention of taking it out.

However, I did find a dry bit of my walk, one of the places where I usually go for a run, and so I took the opportunity to clock up another couple of minutes.

Back in the apartment I took the ginger and lemon off the heat and added a couple of tablespoons of honey to sweeten it. And then the whole lot went into the whizzer for a really good whizz around until it became a syrupy mass.

Final step was to take out the bottle of lemon juice that I had earlier put in the fridge, add the syrup to it and give it a really good shake up so that it was all mixed well in. And that will be the drink for the next week or so, diluted with my filtered water.

However, I am tempted to see what it might be like with some sparkling water.

Having finished writing the notes, I turned my attention to tea. Stuffed pepper with rice and veg, followed by rice pudding.

And I bet that you are all wondering how I make my stuffing too.

So, a handful of either bulghour or quinoa – whichever is first to hand – goes into a saucepan with a very small amount of water and some spicy chili power. It’s brought to the boil and left to simmer.

In the meantime, I chop up some onion, garlic, mushrooms, olives and anything else that looks as if it might be suitable and chuck it all into a bowl. And then I add a fistful of salted peanuts.

By now, the quinoa or bulghour should be ready (it doesn’t need to be competely cooked) and you add that to your mix with herbs and black pepper.

Finally, add some tomato sauce (I have some nice arrabiata sauce that they had in Noz and I bought a few jars) and olive oil and mix it all up together.

Cut round the stalk of your pepper and pull out the core, the seeds and the pith. Then stuff it with your stuffing and pack it well in with a fork.

Finally, 6.5 minutes on medium-high wattage in the microwave (in a microwave-proof bowl of course), followed by whatever time it needs on full power to finish cooking until the pepper itself is nice and soft. And there’s your stuffed pepper.

Outside, I was absolutely whacked by this thoroughly wicked wind that seems to have sprung up out of nowhere.

My original pla was to go around the walls for a second time today rather than around the headland which would be … errr … somewhat exposed. But it didn’t quite work out like that.

The wind was so violent that it was impossible to walk at all in the rue du Nord and that’s the way that I go when I’m off on my travels out around the walls.

Instead, what I did was to go for a walk through the narrow streets of the old medieval town where there was at least some kind of shelter.

One of the streets was actually quite well-sheltered from the wind and as there was no-one about I broke into a run.

It wasn’t as long as I would have liked but it wasn’t the kind of weather to be out there discussing things like that. It was one of those occasions where I was obliged to go with what I had and make the best of it.

The route that I took brought me back into the Place Cambernon and there, a little surprise was awaiting me.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on Thursday evenings we have a pizza van parked up in the square. But tonight we seem to have acquired a burger van.

Whether it’s going to be a permanent arrangement every Tuesday or whether it’s just a temporary arrangement for the period of Carnaval remains to be seen. But whatever it is or will be, it’s nice to see some life coming back into the medieval town.

By the time I made it to th city gates there was still 6% of my daily target to have a go at so I went for another little extension to my walk.

From the top of the walls there was a good view down into the funfair so I experimented with different speeds, exposures and ISO settings to see what I could produce.

And then I came back to write up my notes.

Now it’s bed time, later than I was hoping, but still …

The wind is sill howling away outside but in a minute I’ll be tucked up under the covers. I wonder where I’ll be going tonight. And how many times I’ll be going there.

Monday 24th February 2020 – THERE’S SOMETHING MISSING …

… from this photograph, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Where’s the big red Iveco van that has been parked on the parking area at the fish processing plant since before I came back from North America at the end of October?

The answer to that conundrum is pretty simple. On Sunday morning the police, the fire brigade, the ambulance crew and a heavy breakdown truck lifted it out of the water where it had ended up sometime over Saturday night – early Sunday morning.

If someone were to tell me that someone had been up to mischief with one of the forklift trucks I wouldn’t be at all surprised, or else a group of revellers had decided to have a little bit of drunken “fun”.

But anyway, it’s not there now – the ground’s all flat.

As for me, with no alarm I slept through until round about 09:00. And it took me a while to force myself out of bed afterwards too. I was in no hurry.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone. Apparently I was in Toronto last night which was strange because I’ve never really been there and I was walking around the streets. I ended up in a street that was 250 yards away from the main centre according to the adverts because there was a shop that was closed “who would like to rent this place 250 yards away from Toronto’s main shopping street?”. As I walked on, there was this building advertising musical instruments and motor bikes so I went in. On the ground floor by where the door was was all drum kits. So I walked in and this place was absolutely amazing like a labyrinth of things and they had all this equipment down on the ground floor except the guitars. I walked upstairs and it was like vaults only upstairs. All these rooms, all these kinds of things in it except eh motor bikes and guitars. A lovely guitar workshop with all tools of all kinds on the walls and a couple of guys in wheelchairs who were working there. I couldn’t see the guitars or the motorbikes. As I walked around I discovered that there was a third floor as I heard one of the guys say “we aren’t going to expand onto a fourth floor yet – we’re all right as we are”. So I said “oh the third floor sounds good”. So I walked through this dark dingy recess place and out into the main stair well which was a huge stone stair well but the third floor was comics and magazines so I thought “where the heck are the guitars and motor bikes? I’d better go back in and ask”. But just then a girl came around ringing a handbell saying “closing for lunch, closing for lunch! Everyone outside” just like something out of a Dickens novel.

After breakfast I had a shower and a general clean-up. I weighed myself too and I’m now within just 400 grams of my first target weight. I’ve actually touched it once but couldn’t keep it there. I’m hoping for better luck this time.

Then off I headed to the shops.

As is my custom these days, I had a look down to see what was going on in the harbour. And we have another crane down there, round where Joly France and La Grande Ancre are moored.

From up here, it’s not easy to see exactly what it’s doing, but it seems to be involved with a pile of scaffolding. When I go for my bread tomorrow I shall go for a closer look and see

At LIDL there was nothing special that I bought – unless you count a tube of superglue. However I did buy some lemons because I’m getting low on my home-made orange and ginger syrup so I shall be having a go at making some lemon and ginger syrup and see if I’ve really got the hang of it.

In the summer there will be many more fruits (I hope) to have a go at if it all works out.

On the way back I stuck my head over the wall of the rue St Gaud to see what was happening down on the car park in the rue St Sauveur.

The fete foraine – the funfair – is now in full swing so I imagine that everything that is going to be here is here already, erected, up and running.

We seem now to have a fully-fledged kiddies’ corner with quite a few attractions, which is a good sign. But I must admit to having spent a good few minutes admiring the French windows and verandah in that showman’s living accommodation.

Back here it was already lunchtime and having picked up my dejeunette from La Mie Caline, I had my butties.

After the break I made a start on project 27 for the radio. In the time available I chose all of the music (except for the last track of course) but then came across a problem that I did not have a suitable break for my invited guest.

What I did then was to grab one of the lengthy sound-bite files that I have and cut it down into the individual sound-bites and save them all. From there I was able to pick out a suitable one.

Tomorrow I’ll crack on and do the text, and then do a “live concert” for the end of April.

There was the usual break for my walk outside around the headland this afternoon.

There were a few people out there this afternoon wandering around, and some action on the water too. The tide must be on the turn because the fishing boats were heading home.

At first I wasn’t sure exactly what that was, seeing as it was so far out to sea in the English Channel. But a little “crop and enlarge” brought out the fishing boat

In past years I couldn’t remember if the fete foraine – the funfair – worked at all during the daytime in the week.

But anyway, there it is, all illuminated and the attractions seem to be going round and round.

having stood there and admired it all for a while, I came back here for a coffee and a slice of cake that I happen to have around here right now.

After all, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it yet, but It’s my birthday today. Another day older and deeper in debt.

There was a disagreeable task to be performed this evening too.

I’ve spent the last 24 hours, including much of the night when I ought to have been sleeping, mulling over the events of yesterday. And something else has happened in this connection in the early part of the afternoon that has merely underlined my thoughts.

As a result I’ve sent a mail to the co-ordinator to say that –
1) I’ll continue to do my rock music programmes
2) I’ll undertake spontaneously any other project that attracts my interest, and do it alone.
3) If he wishes me to undertake any other solo project, then I’ll be happy to do it, as long as it really is alone.
4) If one or two of the others (and I mentioned a few names) wish me to help them with any project that they have in mind, then they can contact me.
5) But I’m not going to involve myself in any group project
6) I’m not going to involve myself in any live broadcasts
7) I’m never going to work with him and one or two others (withdrawing from two projects to which I had previously committed).
8) I refuse to be in the same room as one other person whose name I mentioned.

If you think that I’m being rather petulant, the fact is quite simply this –
I’m slowly dying of a wasting, debilitating illness and I’m reaching the critical point. There’s not enough blood in my body to carry around the oxygen that I need and so my heart needs to beat almost twice as fast to pump sufficient blood -and oxygen – around.
The doctors have told me on several occasions that the only reason I’m keeping going so well is that I have a very strong heart and the moment that my heart gives out, I’ll have had it. And so I must do absolutely everything in my power to avoid anything that puts any unnecessary strain on my heart and stress is to be avoided at all costs.
And the stresses of the events of yesterday are no good at all. Stressing myself for a good purpose is fine because I think that the means are better than the end as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. But stressing myself for no good purpose is not what I have in mind at all.

Tea tonight was one of the new burgers that I had bought a while ago from Leclerc. It wasn’t disagreeable but it wasn’t anything special either. Apsta and vegetables tossed in a spicy tomato sauce too and followed by some delicious rice pudding.

When I went outside for my evening walk it was raining quite heavily. But it wasn’t going to put me off.

And it had occurred to me that I hadn’t taken any photos of the grockles in their caravanettes parked all over the Place d’Armes and they have already started to break camp and several have left.

But up here on the walls of the medieval town there was a good view right across to part of the car park. Despite the weather the photo isn’t too bad and at least it’s picked up the vehicles on the car park.

The first part of my run was waterlogged but I managed to fit in the stand-by run which wasn’t too bad. and once more I overran by a good 25 metres and that’s always good news.

For the second part of my run I managed half-way up the ramp which was quite impressive seeing as how I hadn’t properly recovered from the first part. But, impressively, I’m running for about 4.5 minutes per day according to my fitbit, which at my age and state of health is pretty impressive.

The tide was well in now so the big trawler-type of fishing boats were in the inner harbour unloading their catch at the fish processing plant.

As for me, with no cat to stroke tonight, I came home and wrote up my notes.

The alarm goes back on tomorrow so I’ll be back hard at it again. So an early night is called for. But I’d much rather listen to the decent music that’s just come onto the playlist.

Wouldn’t you?

Saturday 22nd February 2020 – NOT A SINGLE …

… photo of the Carnaval today.

And that’s because I’ve been far too busy. In fact I still haven’t finished Friday’s notes yet, I missed out on the shops, I missed out a football match at the Stade Louis Dior (which US Granville won) and I’ll miss out on my lie-in tomorrow.

However, start as we mean to go on. And I was once more up and about before the third alarm. And after the medication I attacked the dictaphone and sure enough, there was an entry

There was a big group of us living in these like ships cabins things, 4 or 5 ships cabins. I was in a room with Andy Morrison of all people and what was happening was that I wanted to go to bed early. But it was the night of the budget and he wanted to record the budget so this was going on and on and on this discussion, and he went off somewhere. I went to the bathroom and ended up peeing into the chimney – the pot-bellied stove, I’ve no idea why. Just then he came in and we were talking about this. I said “do you want to record it or don’t you?”. He said “well, yes”. So I found a video tape we could use to record it and he said something about a cowboy film that was on afterwards. I was really tired by this time – I couldn’t really think straight and I didn’t want to have to programme the machine in case I programmed it wrong. I asked “when’s it starting? Is it starting now because I can get 6 hours out of this tape so I can switch it on and record it. Would that be enough time for the budget and this film?”. He was going on about “it’s not very fair on these boys” meaning he boys in another group because they want to do something and want to know about the budget. I said “they’ll have to look out for themselves. Do you want me to record it or don’t you?”. While he was vacillating like this I awoke. He was going on about things being unfair for the others which was of more importance than what he wanted to do in his dormitory where he was sleeping for your own personal affairs.

After breakfast it was the calm before the storm so I dealt with a pile of file-splitting for this digital sound file project. I’ve now split enough to fill a DVD so I burnt one and put it in the store for future reference.

Another thing was that I haven’t done a USB memory stick for albums that I’ve purchased recently and there was enough to fill a 2GB USB stick. The hi-fi here can only read up to 999 files so 2GB is about the correct size for that.

While that was doing, I attacked a pile of photos. Of the several thousands that need doing, I’m now up to 83 but there could have been more, but some of the morning wa spent doing some research. There was a photo that I took of a distinctive object on shore so I tried to track it down. And after a great deal of searching I found it, and that set me right for another pile of objects.

Time to go down into town for my dejeunette at la Mie Caline.

In view of the short time available I went the direct way. I looked over the wall and saw the reason why they had the compactor on the dug-up car park the other day. It’s been pressed into service as a relief car park for the period of tCarnaval and I imagine that the chars will be parking down ther eon Tuesday.

At least I hope so and that they aren’t going to leave it like that. It will be a shame if they were to.

Having picked up my bread, I had a quick look across the road at the stage that they erected the other day.

It seems to have sprouted a few figures all ready for Carnaval. Satire plays an important rôle in the proceedings and we can be assured that someone somewhere will be up to no good somewhere.

So I came back home and made myself a sandwich but was caught unawares by Thierry who turned up early so I had to bolt my lunch and then we headed out.

Up in town it was the defilé des enfants and my task was to interview the kids. Kids have a tough time because they usually have a great deal to say but no-one ever listens to them.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that at one of our live broadcasts a while back there was a family of two adults and three kids standing there. The interviewer wanted to know what the kids thought of the affair so he asked … the parents.

That was something that I didn’t appreciate at all. I have a great deal of time for kids so I made it my mission to be spokesman on their behalf.

And when I came back here at 16:30 I had 29 soundfiles that I had recorded with the kids. I had to sit down and edit every single one of them and then send them off to be processed and that wasn’t the work of five minutes either. I ended up having a very late tea out of a tin.

Still had to fit in my walk though, although I didn’t need to go far seeing as I’d done all that walking today.

The fete foraine is in full swing as you can see. I walked – or rather, ran – all the way down the rue do Roc to the roundabout and then came back through the car park.

That gave me a good view across the bay down into the town where I could see what was going on.

The car park right now is full of grockles in their mobile homes making a mess of everywhere and I must have disturbed half the camp site.

But taking photos is much more interesting than dealing with them so I couldn’t really care.

Back on the road again and I ran back along my usual course and found that I could fit in an extra 25 metres or so of running. and the only reason that I came to a stop was that I hit an incline.

It seems to be the inclines that kill me off but that’s unavoidable round here.

So I’ll listen to a little music and then go to bed. I have to be up at 08:00 tomorrow as they are coming for me at 09:00 and there are things to do.

Friday 21st February 2020 – EVEN AS I …

… write I’m watching the football.

And in case you are wondering how I’m managing to do this, I have the football on the big computer and I’m typing on one of the laptops.

Not the little Acer that served me for all those years but the one that I bought in the USA to replace it. However I did magae to fire up the little Acer and download a couple from my suite of programs. I’ll give it a good run out next week and see how it does.

It’s not easy doing these two things at once but I’m having more luck than the footballers are. There’s a howling gale blowing on Deeside and it’s making a total mockery of this match. It’s nothing but a complete lottery out there. One goal kick “straight down the field” ended up in the commentary box.

This morning I was, for once, up and about before the third alarm. And apart from my adventures yesterday, that makes a nice change. Once the medication was out of the way I had a go at the dictaphone.

After breakfast I had another go at cutting up some digital sound files. A couple were quite straightforward but one was, as expected, out of order and that took a while to untangle.

Afterwardsm being in an enthusiastic mood, I tracked down a couple more on the internet and, as bad luck would have it, they were all over the place and took an age to sort out

That left me a short while to do some tidying up in the bedroom and put away stuff that had been hanging around for a while. One of these days I’m going to strip out the bedroom and tidy it up completely.

That took me up to lunchtime and so I went for my bread at La Mie Caline. As I’m having a quiet day today I went for my very long circuit right around the headland, down into town and across the harbour gates.

After lunch I had a look at the Acer. It’s as slow and creaky as ever so I just downloaded Irfanview, Notetab and VLC Player. Part of the problem with that machine was that there was too much stuff on it. It was only ever meant to be a portable machine for travelling

After my afternoon walk I had a good session on the photos. There are thousands to go at and I made it as far as 36. Mind you, much of the time was spent trying to decipher the names of the ships that I was photographing. At least that was a success.

One thing that I was planning to do was to dive out to the shops round about 17:00 but on reflection I reckoned that I have everything that I need and can buy some stuff on Monday if I need it.

Instead I went for a shower. I need to make myself look pretty because I have been invited out this evening to one of the neighbours. I went, anyway, just to show the flag for an hour and then came back here.

After a quick tea I went for a quick walk including a couple of runs and then came back for the football.

Connah’s Quay Nomads v TNS at the top of the Welsh Premier League, or JD Cymru League as I ought to be calling it from now on I suppose. Played in a hurricane, it was an impossible match and the ball was impossible to predict.

Connah’s Quay took the lead deep into stoppage time in the first half, and deservedly so because for once, TNS looked jaded and tired and the Nomads had the lion’s share of the play.

After half time TNS had the wind with them but it didn’t make a lot of difference and after 75 minutes, when the Nomads finally got the message and played the ball on the floor instead of the air, the Nomads actually looked much more dangerous.

1-0 it finished though, and the Nomads could have had another 2 or three quite easily. Lewis Brass in the Nomads goal was practically a spectator. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen TNS play quite like this.

Nomads now 4 points clear at the top. Let’s hops that they can hang in there.

Now, I’m off to bed. I’ll finish this properly sometime soon but I have a lot on this weekend. We’re broadcasting the Carnaval procession live on Sunday from 13:30 CET and tomorrow I’m out interviewing the kids.

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Category Archives: la mie caline

Thursday 12th March 2020 – I WAS ALMOST …

Wednesday 11th March 2020 – IT’S THE GRAND MAREE TODAY!

Tuesday 10th March 2020 – I WAS RIGHT!

Monday 9th March 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

Friday 6th March 2020 – SPEND! SPEND! SPEND!

Wednesday 4th March 2020 – SPRING IS SPRUNG!

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 – THERE ARE MANY THINGS …

Monday 2nd March 2020 – CATASTROPHE AFTER CATASTROPHE!

Friday 28th February 2020 – I MISSED …

Thursday 27th February 2020 – AFTER CARNAVAL …

Wednesday 26th February 2020 – I’VE HAD VISITORS …

Tuesday 25th February 2020 – THE WIND OUTSIDE …

Monday 24th February 2020 – THERE’S SOMETHING MISSING …

Saturday 22nd February 2020 – NOT A SINGLE …

Friday 21st February 2020 – EVEN AS I …

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