… since we’ve featured an old car on these pages?
This afternoon when I went out for my walk there was this rather nice Lancia Fulvia Sport 1600cc parked outside by the new bicycle rack.
If I’ve identified this correctly this is one of the “Zagato” models designed by Ercole Spada and built in the early 1970s.
Beautiful cars but if I were spending the kind of money that I’d need to spend to buy one of these, I would have gone for the “Spider” with the roll-down soft top.
But anyway, be that as it may, while you admire a few photos of the local kids throwing themselves off the diving platform at the Plat Gousset, I’ll tell you about my miserable day.
And it’s hardly surprising that it went so bady considering how badly it started. It all went wrong last night when after having crashed out for hours last night, I couldn’t sleep.
At one point I thought that there wasn’t much point in going to bed because it was so late. But round about 03:30 I finally bit the bullet and fell into bed.
And surprisingly I didn’t stay awake all that long once I was in bed.
No alarm in the morning of course, with it being a Sunday.
And I was awake a few times here and there during the morning with it was about 11:15 when I finally took the plunge and left the bed.
After the medication I came back in here to have a play about with the music for the radio programme that I’ll be preparing tomorrow and combining the tracks into pairs.
The choice of the music for this week isn’t as exciting as it has been over the last few months and combining them in pairs wasn’t easy as they didn’t gel together at all.
But anyway, I did what I could and it doesn’t sound too bad.
That was the cue to go for lunch. Porridge, toast and strong coffee to try to make me feel better. But unfortunately it didn’t work out because after lunch while I was in the bedroom I drifted off to sleep again. How disappointing is that?
When I awoke I had a play about on the guitar for a while, playing through a few of the songs on my playlist. I have to keep uo on the music otherwise I’ll just slide back into oblivion as I did last winter when I was in a very bad place and stopped practising.
Mind you, I don’t think that I’m in a much better place at all these days seeing how the last couple of days have panned out.
At some point or other during the day I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.
I’d been in digs with some woman in some small town in Scotland. I’d been telling this woman that I was planning on settling in the area so she was trying to give me loads of stuff. I said that that was far too early yet because I don’t know what I had and where I was going etc. I was trying to find the bus timetable. In the end I did and there was one bus in the day and one bus in the evening to Inverness. I was interested in the evening bus to Inverness on Sunday evening so a local bus driver took me to find out about it. We spoke to some kind of strange Mennonite or Amish family who told me the correct answer. As I was leaving some other woman and her child told me the answer as well. The bus was at 22:55 which meant that it didn’t arrive in Inverness until the small hours of the morning which meant that I was going to have to keep my room here in this town. I couldn’t give it up and take a room in Inverness because everything would be closed when I arrived. I was sitting down there working out the differences, if I stayed for a week for example where I was it would cost me more than £1:00 in difference compared to staying as an ordinary bugler boy with the Salvation Army or something. I was performing all these calculations in my head as well to have it all organised here but it wasn’t organised the way that I wanted.
As it happens, I’ve actually been in a similar place to this in the Highlands of Scotland in the past during one of my nocturnal rambles.
And as usual I went out for my afternoon walk.
Today I chose to go around the medieval city walls so the view that I had of the people on the beach is quite different from how it usually is.
Not much beach right now but that didn’t seem to matter because most people who were down there this afternoon had made it into the water.
That’s no surprise because today was another candidate for one of the hottest days of the year.
And there were tons of stuff happening out zt sea today.
The first thing that I noticed as I walked around the corner was that Marité had finally made it out into the bay to take the locals for a ride – in more senses than one.
She was originally a fishing boat that went out to the Grand Banks of Labrador with a load of dories that were used for fishing for cod. She is apparently the last of the wooden-built Newfoundlanders that set sail from the ports of Western France.
There were plenty of of other boats out there too.
It took me a minute to work out who this one might be because I’ve never before seen her with all of her sail unfurled and set. But she is in fact La Granvillaise.
Once she turned to run with the wind I could see the familiar “G90” on her sails.
The Ile de Chausey in the background is looking magnificent too today.
It wasn’t just the Ile de Chausey that was looking nice today.
The view out to Jersey this afternoon was magnificent and you could see everything on the island with the naked eye even though it’s 58kms away from where I was standing. I’ve not enhanced this photo at all.
There are even a couple of speedboats right out there in the bay just off the Channel Islands and the camera has picked them up really well today.
We could do with a few more days like this.
Retuning to our moutons as they say around here, the new Belle France is having another run-out this afternoon.
She’s taking a boat-load of tourists for a quick lap around the bay while the tide is in the correct position.
As for why all of these boats are out and about this afternoon, this morning has been what they call the Grand Pardon, the religious procession when they bless all of the boats and the seafarers.
Last year we were there taking a few photos but today I was in bed while all of this was going on.
There are still more interesting boats out there in the English Channel behind the Ile de Chausey. I haven’t finished yet.
This one isn’t one of our local boats and it’s too far away for me to be able to identify it correctly.
However, a glance at the radar when I returned home showed me that somewhere over there at the time that I took the photo was a 33-metre sailing boat called Le Renard that resembled that boat.
She left St Malo at 13:52 and returned to port at 17:59 so the timing would seem to be correct anyway
Before I left the area I had a look at the repointing of the medieval city walls to see what was happening down there.
Not that I can see everything everything from here, but by the looks of things they seem to be on the point of finishing. So where will they be going next?
Having shown a few tourists where the steps down to the beach were situated, I walked off across the Place du Marché aux Chevaux and through the arch to walk along the path underneath the city walls.
Having taken a pile of photos of the kids leaping off the diving platform, I carried on to the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset.
There were crowds of people down there this afternoon. Imagine being sandwiched somewhere in that lot while confronting the issues presented by some of the highest tides in Europe.
It’s not really the place to be if you aren’t of a sociable turn of mind so it wouldn’t be doing me any good at all. I’m not even tempted by an ice-cream these days, due to a “certain photograph” that was published by someone looking down on a delivery vehicle.
Instead I wandered off around into the Square Maurice Marland.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the last few weeks we have been keeping an eye out on three young seagull chicks. They weren’t there this afternoon but what we did have was a mother seagull teaching her chick to fly.
If her chick had already made it this far, then it’s doing pretty well and won’t need a great deal more teaching. But it was crying for its mother in that weird little chirping noise that baby seagulls make although its mother wasn’t taking much notice and was busy chirping away to herself.
She was probably trying to warn us that there were something else going past us in the air.
This aeroplane is F-GTJC and that tells me that she’s a Cessna 172S. My photo was taken at 16:36 (adjusted) but she wasn’t picked up on radar until 16:51. She was obviously keeping a low profile.
She was near Avranches when she was first observed, and from there she flew westwards along the coast for a while until turning round and flying back diagonally across the bay towards Granville when she disappeared off the radar again at 17:17, presumably going in to land.
And while all of this was going on, there was a hooting from the ferry terminal.
All of the boats there hoot away when they start to reverse out of their berth, just in case they might collide with something coming into port. But today I was lucky to see Belle France, who had presumably been into the ferry terminal to drop off the passengers who had been around the bay with her just now, reverse out.
She then pulled forward to pull into the inner harbour but was obliged to give way to a trawler that was on its way out to the fishing grounds this afternoon.
There were plenty of trawlers out at sea this afternoon, fishing in and out of the paths of the pleasure boats.
One of them was La Bavolette II. She was in the bay not too far offshore having a good fish around.
Back here I had a cold drink with ice and then went through to catalogue today’s photos. and to try to find the name of that sailing boat that we had seen out off the coast in the English Channel near St Malo.
And then I had to think about tea tonight. As usual, Sunday night is pizza night and I’d taken a lump of dough out of the freezer earlier this afternoon.
When I came back from my afternoon walk I gave it a good kneading and then rolled it out and put it on my pizza tray to proof.
When it was ready and had risen quite nicely I assembled the pizza and had it ready to bake.
After it had cooked I sat down to eat it for tea and it really was delicious. After the one last week that didn’t turn out too well, this one was back where it ought to be.
Slightly overcooked but there’s not a lot that I can do about that right now until I can have some help to bring up those kitchen units. Those people who were going to help me never turned up, so no surprise there.
Off to bed early now. I have an early start in the morning and a radio programme to prepare, and I would like it to be finished before it’s too hot to work.
There was a trawler out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel heading down towards the end of the bay.
