Category Archives: Nerina Hall

Monday 12th April 2021 – I WAS NOT …

… alone this afternoon when I went out for my afternoon walk.

While I was out this afternoon I was overflown yet again.

Whenever we’ve had clear days in the past it’s been aircraft, whether main-line stuff flying at impressive altitudes over my head or else it’s been light aircraft, autogyros and Birdmen of Alcatraz (who, incidentally, we haven’t seen for quite a while) going past at head height.

But none of that today. It was the local bird of prey, whatever species he (or she) might be, buzzing around over my head looking for food, and then swooping down to the ground to capture something, all of which takes place a darn sight quicker than I can follow it with my camera.

Something else that was different this afternoon was the situation in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

For the last I-don’t-know-how-long I’ve been down there on the path to the end of the headland to look out across to the Brittany coast to see what was happening and, as Bob Dylan once famously sang on THE BASEMENT TAPES there was “too much of nothing”.

But today was rather different. We had the fleet of local inshore fishing boats out there in the bay doing what they are good at. There was probably about half a dozen of them all told presumably setting their traps and the like.

They rotate from one fishing area to another and it looks as if today is the turn of the inshore waters to receive their attention.

My attention this morning was focused hauling myself out of bed this morning. And seeing that I didn’t go to bed this morning until 01:30 that was rather a complicated matter. I’ve had worse mornings than this, but I can’t remember when.

First task after the medication was to deal with the radio programme on which I was going to work this morning. Having already chosen the music and paired it all off it was a simple matter of writing the text, recording it, editing it, cutting it into segments and using the segments to join together all of the pairs of songs.

Then I had to choose a closing song and write the text for it, edit that and then join it all together.

It ended up being 23 seconds over but in the speech that I write, there are all kinds of little bits that can be edited out and so weeding out 23 seconds of recorded superfluous speech is not as complicated as it might sound.

It was all done and dusted and up and running by 11:30.

That left me with plenty of time to book my transport and accommodation for my trip to Leuven next week. And while I can understand that there is only one train out of Granville per day when there’s a pandemic and movement is severely restricted, just WHY does it have to be at 05:55?

At least I’ll get into Leuven with plenty of spare time to recover from the voyage, but on the other hand it means that if there’s an issue with just one of the trains that I need to catch, I shall be well and truly up a gum tree.

After lunch (and my bread from yesterday is really delicious) I had a go at the photos from August 2019 and I’m now caught up with my plan of a minimum of 30 a day. I’m now patrolling the “south skirmish line” of last Stand Hill at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

But while some might think that it’s a “south skirmish line” it look to be very much like the route of a panic -stricken flight to me. You don’t dig yourself in at the bottom of a steep ravine when the place to dig yourself in would be at the top of the slope where your adversary would have to struggle up towards you slowly and you’ve have plenty of time to fire at them to push them back.

The fact that there are so very few memorials to the Native Americans on this side of the battlefield when the whole area is littered with memorials to American soldiers tells its own story. My opinion is that the natives were firing into the backs of the fleeing soldiers rather than face-to-face in a firefight.

All of this took me up to the time for my afternoon walk so I grabbed the NIKON D500 and headed off out.

First thing to do today was to go to the wall at the end of the car park and look down onto the beach to see what was going on down there.

The tide is quite far out this afternoon so there was plenty of beach to go at. And there were quite a few people down there this afternoon making the most of it. Not as many people as we have seen on occasion – no schools playing rounders or anything like that – but I would have thought that with all of the holidaymakers around right now, they would have been there.

After all, it was a pleasant, sunny day if you could find some shelter out of the wind, because once more we seem to be having a bucket-full of wind and I’m rather fed up of that right now.

But as we all know, it’s an ill-wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good.

There’s always going to be someone who would take advantage of it and we have one of those out here this afternoon – the yacht that’s out there somewhere between the Channel Islands and the French mainland.

At the distance that it was from here – probably about half-way across, I couldn’t make out whether it was coming or going and I know exactly how it feels after everything that I seem to be going through right now. And the whitecaps on top of some of the waves will indicate that it’s not having the best of it out there in this weather. The wind must be even stronger offshore.

While I was looking out at the yacht that I saw just now, I noticed something just offshore outside the harbour at St Helier so I took a photo of it to enlarge when I came back so that I cn see what it might be.

Having done that, I have to say that unfortunately, I’m still none-the-wiser. It’s big and white and my first thought was that it might be a cruise ship anchored outside the harbour. But there’s no trace of any large ship of this size anywhere in the vicinity so I’ve no idea what it might be.

But I’m impressed with the weather this afternoon because I can see St Helier so clearly this afternoon. We can even see the medieval tower that guards the entrance to St Helier harbour, never mind all of the other buildings there.

It was round about now that the famous bird of prey flew past overhead.

It took up station, hovering around over the edge of the cliffs round about 50 yards from where I was standing. And then suddenly, as I looked it swopped off down to near the foot of the cliffs. Presumably it had seen something edible but it was so quick that I couldn’t see what it was.

At least it’s having more luck that the local fishermen.

So from there I set off along the path on top of the cliffs. The people were there on top of the bunker again clearing off the dirt and dust but I carried on past them. There weren’t too many people this afternoon to get in my way.

Here’s the lighthouse at Cap Fréhel once more

With the weather out to the Channel Islands being so good this afternoon, I was wondering how the view would be out along the Brittany coast. So I climbed up on top of one of the other bunkers where there’s a good view.

Once again, the lighthouse was clearly visible even with the naked eye and we could even see the headland behind the lighthouse today. It’s not every day that we can see that much of the coastline. I’ll really have to crack on and finish the notes of my trip around Central Europe so that I can get on and show you the photos of the Brittany coast that I took on board the Spirit of Conrad

Off along the path I went and then across the car park to the end of the headland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that just off the headland at the Pointe du Roc we’ve occasionally seen something that might be interpreted as a marker buoy for a lobster pot are something similar.

Seeing this boat here make me even more certain that it is a lobsterpot and its marker or something like that. If you look closely at this little boat you’ll see that it has its lines out on the starboard side so it’s possibly engaged in either lowering down or raising up a lobster pot.

However, as you can see, there are so many boats out here working away in the Baie de Mont St Michel, all over the place this afternoon.

From there I pushed off along the path towards the port.

Crossing over the pedestrian crossing in the Rue du Cap Lihou I was almost squidged by a passing motorist.

But if I’m going to be run down by a passing motor vehicle, I wouldn’t mind so much it being one of these. This is a Panhard 24 2+2, one of the very last of the vehicles built by the Panhard Motor company before they closed their doors in 1967.

The Panhard 24 was the car that was designed to replace the famous Panhard 17 and was built between 1963 and 1967. It contained many features that were considered to be “luxury items” at the time such as 3-way adjustable seats, adjustable steering wheel and the like

They must be beautiful to drive but unfortunately I have never ever had the chance to find out.

Down at the viewpoint overlooking the harbour, there was some kind of excitement going on over at the ferry terminal.

Both of the Joly France boats, the ones that provide the ferry service over to the Ile de Chausey, are over there this afternoon. The tide is well out so they are in a NAABSA – Not Always Afloat But Safely Aground – situation over there.

This would seem to indicate that at the next high tide, probably later on towards the evening, they’ll be going back out to rescue the perishing wo are stranded out there right now.

We also have another fishing boat tied up over there too. It’s bewildering me why so many of them are no longer going into the inner harbour to tie up in there.

Further on along the path there’s a good view down into the inner harbour and the loading bay where the little Jersey freighters Normandy Trader and Thora tie up.

And have you ever seen such a large pile of freight lined up on the quayside waiting to be taken away? It’s enormous. They must be expecting one of the freighters to come in pretty soon because they wouldn’t otherwise leave all this much stuff lying around.

It’s no surprise that they are talking about buying a larger ship to deal with all of the freight. It’s quite an unexpected Brexit dividend that rather than having freight sent to and from the UK for onward trans-shipment to and from Europe, it’s sent directly to the European mainland

That’s not the end of today’s excitement. either. We had some men rooting around in the outer harbour.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve had diggers out there working in the harbour dealing with the issues of installing more mooring chains. They are a long way from finishing, so I imagine that these men are either inspecting the work that has been done or else surveying it for further work.

But I wasn’t all that interested in what they were doing. With nothing else going on, I headed on for home and my mug of hot coffee. And I certainly needed it today because I’m still feeling quite cold.

Armed with my coffee I listened to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I was living with Nerina and we had the house at Gainsborough Road and all of the kids were living there as well. I kept on coming back from away and the place was an absolute mess so I started to tidy up the kitchen. I started to collect together all of the things for the microwave. There was a lot of stuff that I didn’t use regularly so I thought that I’d take them to France so I put it on one side ad carried on emptying these boxes to see what there was in there and stacking it up. When I reached the final box it was full of water as it had been left out in the rain. There was one of my electric drills in there. I drained it off but the sound of the running water awoke Nerina as it was 02:00. It also disturbed someone walking down the side of the house so Nerina asked what was going on. I told her. She asked if I was going to take all this lot to the Cheshire Cat. I asked her what she meant and she said “to put it all in a line”. I replied “I’m not selling anything, I want to keep it all. I can keep some of it in my garage but I’ll have to find a place for the rest”. This was another dream where I had these imaginary lock-ups that I had but I couldn’t remember where they were.

Having done that, I did some Welsh revision but unfortunately I crashed out in the middle of it.

The hour on the guitar passed quickly and then I went for tea – veggie balls with steamed vegetables with vegan cheese sauce followed by more of my really delicious jam roly-poly.

Now I’m off to bed. I have my Welsh lesson tomorrow and then I REALLY MUST deal with my Central Europe trip and finish it off. I’m fed up of it lying around like this. There’s plenty of other stuff that I need to be doing, even installing the kitchen that I bought before Christmas.

There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

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Friday 26th March 2021 – THE LAST THING …

… that i was expecting to be doing today s going back to the hospital.

So while you are admiring the photo of a furniture removal with a Belgian furniture lift the Monseigneur van Waeyenberghlaan, I was busy answering a telephone call.

And at 08:30 too – nothing like the early bird catching the worm, hey?

Believe it or not, they actually awoke me too because with no alarm this morning I was flat out in bed fast asleep. A really deep sleep too – that thing that they gave me for my cramps seemed to have worked because I didn’t awaken once during the night, not even for 10 seconds.

Nothing on the dictaphone to say if I had been anywhere during the night. However I did have this weird feeling that TOTGA came to visit me during the night. She told me that she had changed her address and was living somewhere else. That took me completely by surprise because I couldn’t imagine her going to live anywhere else without taking her daughter with her.

While I’ve been here today I’ve selected the music for four radio programmes for the future and I’ve paired the music for three of them.

One thing that’s important though is that I must remember to keep a free week in the middle of September.

That’s the weekend of the Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival and while I was back home last July I found all of the promotion disks for the three years that I did the photography for the festival.

Those disks contain samples of the music of the groups who played there for those years so I am planning on making my own Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival on the radio for that week.

After lunch I went out and hit the streets, in the direction of the hospital. But not the hospital itself but the pharmacy at the side. They had made a mistake with the dispensing yesterday and given me the wrong medicine. I had to take back what they had given me and collect the correct medicine.

Just for a change I went a different way towards the hospital, right down the Brusselsestraat.

There had been a sign saying “road closed -diversion” that I’d noticed yesterday so I was interested to see what was going on there. And sure enough, they have the road all dug up around here too.

These road works all around the town are causing chaos and I remembered Alison telling me yesterday that she had been held up by roadworks on her way into town to meet me.

From the roundabout in the Brusselsestraat I cut down the Goudsbloemstraat towards the junction between the St Hubertusstraat and the Monseigneur van Waeyenberghlaan.

This is where the roadworks have been going on for as long as I can remember. We’ve seen plenty of photographs of these roadworks including a couple from yesterday, but we have never seen them from this angle before.

The cyclists had a bit of a struggle to pass through the roadworks, and the clouds of dust being generated by the guy with the concrete cutter cutting the kerbstones didn’t help matters much. I’m glad that I was wearing my facemask.

A little earlier we’d seen a photo of a furniture removal being undertaken in the Monseigneur van Waeyenberghlaan.

Because of all of the apartments in Belgium, every furniture removal company has a furniture removal lift and they always excite the attention of people from other countries who probably haven’t seen them before.

You can also see how they are advancing with the street repairs here. The people on the pavement to the left, and the cycle track that they are building at the side. The cobbles are where people will be permitted to park their cars and then of course the roadway in the centre of the photograph – whenever it will be completed.

They were cracking on with that pipe that they had started yesterday.

There was a big pile of pipes around where they were working yesterday and they have now laid a line almost as far as the ring road. Maybe the digger is for digging the trench into which they will eventually drop the pipework.

At the pharmacy I handed back the medication that they had given me yesterday and took the correct medicines and walked back down to the centre of the town.

The ice cream stall was open so I treated myself to the first one of the year. It wasn’t all that warm outside today but I had certainly felt the strain of the walk. My knee isn’t hurting as badly as it did on Wednesday but occasionally there is a twinge just to remind me that it isn’t all that happy.

In the past I have spent a lot of time talking about birds and birdwatching.

The usual place to sit and carry out some birdwatching is close to a tree and to watch them as they start to build their nest. And here today in the Sint Donatuspark we find half a dozen birds busily making a nest in a tree.

And these are much more like the species of bird that I am interested in watching. And I’m very knowledgeable on this subject, having had many lectures on the subject of birdwatching in the past, mainly from Nerina.

The Sint Donatuspark is one of my favourite spots in Leuven.

It’s roughly the site of part of the old medieval walls and the vacant space in front of and behind. We can see one of the towers here that formed part of the city defences back in those days.

The park is very popular as a place to hang out and there us always a crowd of students relaxing in here. Regular readers of this rubbish will in fact recall that Alison and I came for a walk through here late in the evening last time I was here and there was quite a crowd of people in here partying

In the background over on the right is the stage where they have occasional outdoor performances. And I particularly like the whale painted on the wall on the back.

On the way back I went past the house that they have been rebuilding in the Dekenstraat for the last however long.

It seems that they are almost on the point of completion after all this time and it won’t be long before they move away the security fencing.

Back here I carried on with my radio work until it was time to stop for tea. Pasta and veg with a nut burger, and it was all delicious.

Having finished now my notes I’m going to do my packing and then I’ll do the washing up and then I’m off to bed. I have a very early start in the morning and I do hope that all of the trains will be running on time. There’s a football match on the internet at 15:30 and I don’t want to miss it.

Thursday 18th March 2021 – HERE’S CALIBURN …

… sitting waiting patiently for me in a little car park in the Rue des Noyers at St-Lô this morning.

And he didn’t have to wait very long because I was in and back out again even before the time of my appointment, and it isn’t every day that that kind of thing happens when you are dealing with French administration.

What does seem to be happening every day though (so just watch it not happen tomorrow) is that I’m leaving my stinking pit pretty quickly these days – just after the first alarm. This morning I was actually sitting at the computer working, having already had my medication, when the third alarm went off.

First thing that I did was to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been. We started off with Doc Holliday, a third person and Yours Truly riding a freight train escaping from a crime that we’d committed. We were happily going on this train doing OK. There was a low branch across the railway lines. The locomotive somehow managed to avoid it but Doc Holliday who was standing up was hit by this branch and knocked off the train. We all had immediately to leap off the train. 2 guys on a horse had seen this incident and gave chase. They followed the train, found in the end that we weren’t on so they came back and found the 3 of us. They held us at gunpoint while we explained some of our story – not everything. The sheriff of the county agreed and told us that we could go. he told us the story of a couple of other outlaws who had been here. Someone showed us the house where they had lived which was now an old metal barn. All very interesting. Something happened that we were unmasked so we had to flee. As it was me and the other guy, not Doc Holliday, we had to scramble our way through this industrial estate climbing over fences, this kind of thing. One place where we had to climb over the fence had some bird netting on it and of course the more you climbed up it the more you pulled it off. It meant that the 2 of us had to climb this bird netting simultaneously moving our hands and legs at the same time so that the net would stay in place and we could scramble up it otherwise we would just pull it out of where it’s tied.

A little later TOTGA came to see me. She was telling me about a problem that she’d had. The people for whom she’d worked had gone bankrupt and they had found loads of drawings and missing assets and so on that had presumably been misappropriated by one of the previous directors. Now they were making enquiries about her and her wealth – an in-depth enquiry and what should she do about it? I made a couple of suggestions. At that moment Nerina shouted me – she was also around doing something in a different room, something like that or whether she came later. So I went to her and happened to mention this story about TOTGA. Nerina said “why don’t you talk to her and see what we can do?”. Just at that moment TOTGA shouted up something from downstairs so I replied, saying “come up here a minute”. She came up and I said “just sit there on the bed a minute”. She said “I’ll need a chaperone”. I replied “ohh no you won’t” to which Nerina and TOTGA burst out laughing. We explained the problem again to Nerina and she came up with a few suggestions that didn’t seem quite right to me but I don’t know what else to expect. Then I awoke with an attack of cramp.

Later still I was at Virlet busy tidying it up and decorating it. It wasn’t Virlet but one of these 2-up, 2-down terraced houses in Crewe. I was getting ready to do one of the living rooms. A friend of mine turned up with a kind-of interior designer. They had all kinds of ideas for everything on the inside so I left them to it as he was going to pay for this. There was a girl here as well and we were talking to her. She was wondering what to do, whether she was getting in the way so we told her to make the coffee. Luckily there was some running water at the place so she started on that. I went to empty the sink but the sink had been blocked and a whole pile of dirt and filth came into the sink before it all evacuated again. I said “thank God for that” then I had another attack of cramp.

This cramp thing is really getting on my wick now and I must remember to speak to my doctor at Castle Anthrax next week.

First job after the dictaphone notes was to attack the Greenland photos. Another pile of them are done and we are just about to get up steam ready to sail off down Kangerlussuatsiaq Fjord on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR. And considering that we are on a diesel-powered ship, if we can get up steam and sail off, it will be something quite astonishing.

Later on I had a shower and then Caliburn and I hit the streets. And we were half-way to Liz and Terry’s before I remembered that I was actually going to St-Lô so we had something of a sight-seeing trip.

15 minutes early I was when I arrived in St-Lô and having found a parking space at the foot of the city walls underneath the Prefecture, I then found a set of steps up through a sally port – steps that I hadn’t noticed before.

Consequently I was there 10 minutes early. And with no-one in front of me, I was seen straight away and was standing on the steps outside the building, all done and dusted, when the town clock struck 11:00

And I would have been out even earlier had I not signed the form in the place reserved for the chef de service instead of the interessé so she had to start all over again.

One thing about which I wasn’t very happy was that she took my current carte de sejour. So what I did was to make her photocopy it and put on it the Prefecture’s official stamp. One thing that I have learnt with living in Europe is that people like to see lots of paperwork all covered in official stamps and the more you have, the better it is for the various officials whom you encounter on your travels. And I’ll be travelling a lot just now.

Back down the steps to Caliburn and at the sally port I took a photo along the walls.

One thing that you notice about St-Lô is that much of the construction is “modern austerity” because after D-Day in 1944 the Germans dug themselves in here and the city was repeatedly bombed, with the deaths of hundreds upon hundreds of French civilians. Not for nothing was it known as “The Capital of the Ruins”.

Because of the devastation, rebuilding had to be quick without any regard for aesthetics and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the cathedral here is half-built of breeze blocks, such was the state of things.

Caliburn and I drove to the railway station where we awoke a booking clerk who found my name in the database and was able to issue me with my rail tickets for next week as there is no automatic retrieval machine here. It’s important that I have my tickets in my hand before the day of my travel because the train leaves before the booking office in the station opens and if the ticket retrieval machine is out of order then I’ve had it.

Next stop was to the new LIDL on the edge of town and while the range of goods on offer was larger, there wasn’t all that much more in there that would have suited me and my diet.

LeClerc was pretty much the same. Bigger and more choice, but not for me. I did strike lucky in the sense that they had a special offer going on their litre-bottles of traditional lemonade – glass bottles with mechanical tops that I need for my brewing. Two bottles of that stuff worked out at €3:20, which is cheaper than buying two empty bottles from the housewares section.

While I was there I rang up Liz to see if Terry’s hard drive had arrived. No such luck, so I headed on home for a rather late lunch.

Having been rushing around like this all morning, it’s no surprise that I ended up crashing out for a while on the chair in the office. I can’t last the pace.

But I picked myself up for my afternoon walk and went outside, where I said “hello” to the seagull that seems to have taken residence on the first floor window of the next block.

The weather this morning had not been too unpleasant but it seems to have deteriorated while I was indoors because the wind has increased, the temperature has dropped and while there’s not as much fog around as there has been just recently, there is still more than you would expect given the strength of the wind.

So gritting my teeth and hanging on to my hat I set off along the path around the headland. There were only a couple of other people out there, and that wasn’t a surprise given the way things are right now.

Looking out across the bay towards the Brittany coast there wasn’t all that much going on over there.

And neither was there all that much more going on across towards St Pair and Jullouville.

Well, maybe there was, but if so, I couldn’t see it. We can see the seafarers’ memorial and then Le Loup, the light that sits on the rock at the entrance to the harbour. But the coast across there is nothing more than a misty haze.

From there I walked on down the path at the head of the cliffs. After all of the activity at the chantier navale just recently, it’s quietened down with just the same boats that were there yesterday. Plenty of people working on them, including my neighbour Pierre labouring away on Spirit of Conrad.

But I’ve given up predicting when they might be going back into the water. I’m not having much luck with that right now.

On the other hand, they seem to be racing away with the roof on the College Malraux right now.

Apart from having almost finished the part of the roof that they stripped off a couple of weeks ago, they have now stripped off a neighbouring bay and they are busy replacing the laths on that part. I wonder what has caused the acceleration.

Back here in the apartment I had my coffee and then made a start on the arrears of Central Europe. And that seemed to be somewhat productive because I managed to research and write some text for about seven or eight photos in the time that I was working. With a bit of luck, I might finish this before the end of the decade.

Guitar practice was enjoyable – on the bass I was messing around with a solo for “Jumping Jack Flash” again and also Neil Young’s “Like A Hurricane”.

Tea was a burger on a bap with veg followed by apple pie again. And then a couple of things came up while I was trying to write up my notes. Firstly, Rachel rang me from Canada with some bad family news. Secondly, I won’t be making orange ginger beer again. I now know what a shrapnel attack looks like and I need another bottle with a mechanical stopper. At least I know that the stoppers on those bottles are stronger than the bottles themselves.

Tomorrow is going to be a day of cleaning up and washing down the walls of the living room and I’ll be doing the next lot of brewing in the bathroom.

Sunday 7th March 2021 – AFTER I’D FINISHED …

… finished writing up my notes last night I went off and made my kefir. There were a pile of kiwis that were on the verge of going off so I used four of those. Whizzed up in the whizzer and then pressed through the filter system and the brewed kefir mixed in.

While it was seeping through I set another batch of kefir on the way and then the stuff that I’d mixed, I filtered through the filter stack into the bottles and left it to brew.

When I’d finished I came back in here but I wasn’t in the least bit tired so I sat down and did some work. I finished ANOTHER PAGE OF THE ARREARS FROM CENTRAL EUROPE and then I went on and bashed out 30 or so photos from Greenland 2019 and I’m now sailing down Tunulliarfik Fjord.

It was about 01:45 when I finally went to bed so it was something of a disappointment to be awake at 07:50 when I awoke. But there’s no chance whatever of me being up and about on a Sunday at that ridiculous time so I turned over and went back to bed.

10:15 is much more like it on a Sunday.

First task after the medication was to deal with the sink. I went to do all of the washing-up from last night but the water simply didn’t drain out at all.

In the end I dismantled all of the pipework under the sink and found a nice piece of cable to ram down the pipe that I couldn’t dismantle. Judging by how far the cable went down the pipework it was well into the communal lengths before it found the obstruction.

It took quite a while of furkling about with the cable before the obstruction suddenly moved. And then I had to reassemble everything. It wasn’t exactly how I intended to start my Sunday but at least I could crack on.

After all of that I couldn’t concentrate on the blog entry that I’d started and didn’t seem to make any progress so I had another go at the photos. That’s a huge pile of those that I did today and I’m now in a zodiac in Arsuk Fjord heading for a close encounter with a musk-ox.

Despite it being a Sunday, I remembered to go out for my afternoon walk around the headland.

The sky was absolutely beautiful once more with not a cloud in the sky today. But there were plenty of other things in the air instead. None of the bird-men because there wasn’t enough wind but we did have one or two people up in the air in their powered hang-gliders or whatever they are called.

Several light aircraft were flying past overhead too, but they were too far away for me to photograph with any kind of clarity.

On the other hand, something else went flying by quite clearly enough for me to photograph this afternoon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have some kind of bird of prey flying around the edges of the cliffs. There’s a colony of rabbits somewhere in the cliffs and I imagine that it targets the very young of the colony together with whatever else it can find in the way of small mammals.

As for the details of its species, I have to say that I have no idea. Despite all of the lectures on birdwatching that I’ve had in the past from Nerina, they weren’t about this kind of bird.

But retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, we were talking about the gorgeous weather today.

Nice though it might have been, it wasn’t all that warm at all and so I was surprised, if not astonished, to see a couple of women emerging from the sea like a couple of 21st-Century sirens. I would have expected the water to have been cold enough to freeze the barnacles off a brass dinghy right now.

When we were in the Arctic we had people throwing themselves into the sea even as the surface was freezing over but they were Canadians and it’s the kind of thing that you might expect from them but it’s not the thing that I would normally expect French people to do for pleasure.

There were quite a few people out there this afternoon, not as many as there were yesterday for sure, and with nothing going on out at sea I walked round to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour.

There was no change in occupancy in the chantier navale today, the same four boats that have been there since Thursday are still there on their own today, but also, surprisingly, the two boats that were grounded over by the Fish Processing Plant yesterday are still there today.

Every now and again we see the odd boat left there overnight or in between tides but to see them there for this long is quite unusual. It prevents others coming in to unload from reaching the wharf and they can’t be too happy about that.

It’s not as if there isn’t any room in the inner harbour for them to tie up. There is plenty of space in there since they installed the new pontoons.

As I mentioned earlier, there wasn’t a great deal of wind this afternoon, but there must be some kind of strong wind blowing from somewhere as you can see from this photograph.

The sea was quite calm this afternoon without any high waves, as you can tell by the wake of the cabin cruiser going past but there was a really powerful current rolling in. It’s about every seventh wave that is the strongest and this seventh waves was smashing in and sending spray right up to the top of the sea wall.

There were several people standing around here at the viewpoint watching the spectacle. I’m not quite sure why because there were no shipwrecks, nobody drownding, in fact nothing to laugh at at all.

Another indication of how calm the sea really was today was the behaviour of the yacht out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

All of that looks perfectly calm out there and the boat looks perfectly stable regardless of all of the waves beating up against the harbour wall. It seems to be such a really nice day to be out and about on the water.

In the background, the road that leads into Saint-Pair sur Mer is all bathed in sunlight and the chateau d’eau looks particularly prominent today. There’s also some building work going on in St Pair sur Mer too, judging by the crane on the extreme right of the image. I’ll have to go and have a look at that one of these days too.

Back here I made another attempt at rewriting the notes of one of my pages from Central Europe and this time, I made some progress. But I broke off to have a chat with TOTGA and then I had to go to attend to the cooking for the following week.

The pizza dough I had taken out of the freezer this morning and now that it had defrosted I kneaded it again, rolled it and put it on the tray to proof again.

There was a roll of flaky pastry left over in the fridge since Christmas so I used it this afternoon and made myself an apple pie with it. And while the pie was baking I assembled the pizza and that went into the oven when the pie was finished.

And here we have the finished products from today’s baking session, along with the kefir from last night. That’s already fermenting so it seems to be a very good batch today. I hope that it tastes as good as it performs.

The pizza was delicious but as for the apple pie, I’ll tell you another time – there was no room for any this evening as the pizza was, as usual, quite filling.

Having done a little tidying up, I’m now off to bed as it’s Monday tomorrow and I’m radioing again. I remember saying at the beginning of the week that I was quite optimistic about the week that was to come and I seem to have accomplished a fair amount for a change. I wonder how this week will turn out.

Wednesday 3rd March 2021 – I DON’T KNOW …

… if today has been a good day or not.

It started off as a good day anyway because despite the late night I was up very shortly after the first alarm yet again.

And even though I didn’t have much sleep last night there was still plenty of time to go off on a wander around.

I’d been out looking for cars to use as taxis and I’d been out at the auctions. I’d come back with not one but 2 Cortina either Mk IV or V but they were 2-litres. They needed some work doing to get them ready for the road. I remembered the issues that we were having in Gainsborough Road about the local council not liking me working on cars there and how we were going to cope. My initial reaction was to build a high fence halfway down the garden so that no-one could see over it. Nerina thought that we would be in trouble with the planning permission people but I pointed out that quite a few of their Council houses had high fences halfway down the garden where people couldn’t see over. I thought that if the Council took proceedings against me I could bring them into disrepute because of the story about their fences. There was the issue of wheels and tyres with these 2-litres having slightly wheels we’d have to go through the collection to make sure that we had enough tyres, that kind of thing. It meant swapping over one or two that were already on one or two vehicles that we were using.
As an aside, all Cortinas (except the P100) used 13″ wheels but 1.3 and 1.6 models used 165/80 tyres whereas 2.0 and 2.3 used 185/70 tyres. Even so, when I had the taxis, as long as the four tyres were the same size I didn’t usually pay too much attention to what went on where

Later on there were 3 tough cowboys last night, 1 of whom was black. They were riding together and came into this town. There was a lot of racism in the old Wild West of course and the owners of the livery stable where they were going to leave their horses weren’t very keen on the idea of this black cowboy and were going to make a great deal of trouble about it. Next day the 3 cowboys assembled to ride off and went down to fetch their horses. The 2 white guys rode off first. The black guy had some trouble getting onto his horse so he was a good few hundred yards behind the other 2 and when he rode out of the livery stable the guy who ran it simply drew his gun and shot him 3 times. A passer-by came to investigate but the livery stable owner fired a gun in the air to frighten him away.
And it’s not very often that there’s a voyage without me in it anywhere, is it?

Having deal with the dictaphone first job was to unblock the sink. The water was taking about a week to disappear. While I was at it I cleaned out and tidied the cupboard under the sink.

That’s all cleaned and the sink unblocked but the water isn’t going out all that much quicker. I’ll have to buttonhole one of my neighbours and see if they are having problems too. But it started all of a sudden yesterday evening and I’ve no idea why.

The rest of the morning has been spent in dealing with a mountain of correspondence that had built up over the last few weeks, as many regular readers of this rubbish will recall, having received a reply from me this morning. I think that I’m up-to-date now so if you are expecting a reply from me and you haven’t had it, let me know.

After lunch I’ve been tidying up – some bits and pieces in the bedroom but also on the computer. I’ve come across another raft of stuff that I’ve overlooked on a memory stick so I’ve been organising that. As well as that, I had a phone call to deal with and also an important e-mail to do.

And then, rather sadly, I crashed out for half an hour. Another really deep one too.

There was quite a lot of excitement as I set out for my afternoon walk today.

The seagull was up on his or her windowsill talking to the china or plastic bird on the inside. But it was also tapping on the window with its beak in a kind of morse code. It was quite insistent too. One of the neighbours had told me that the bird did this, but I don’t recall ever having seen it in action.

Having watched it for a couple of minutes, I headed off on my little wander around the headland – in the rain because while it might be dry at the moment the ground was quite wet and there were heavy dark clouds all around.

This is a pretty miserable photo, heavily enhanced, and ordinarily it would be discarded but it’s here to serve a purpose.

Just now I mentioned that the weather has changed. The really nice weather that we were having over the weekend has gone and it’s taken the sea fog with it too, so we can have our view back. Right out there on the horizon we can, if we strain ourselves, just about make out the coast of Jersey

Unfortunately the image isn’t clear enough to see any of the buildings

Down on the beach, the crowds of the last coupe of days have dispersed. The tide isn’t right out yet and in any case, the Grand Marée is over for the next few weeks. The tides won’t go low enough to make it worthwhile.

Another photo that I took today, simply because I could, was of the Ile de Chausey.

That’s a lot clearer today and with the photo being heavily enhanced you can see the buildings on the island. But there’s not a single boat in the image today. It was very quiet on the water. I walked around the headland to look out across the bay but there wasn’t even a boat around there on the water.

No interesting old cars today on the car park either which was a shame but the change in the weather seemd to have kept everyone indoors. I pushed off along the path in comparative quiet.

We have a change of occupant in the chantier navale today.

As well as Aztec Lady and Lys Noir, we have another one of the charter yachts, Charles Marie in there today up on blocks.

I suppose that it’s the right time of year to be overhauling them. No-one has the least idea of when things are going to reopen and the infection figures are not encouraging so they may as well be overhauled when there is nothing else going on so that they will be ready (if and) when things start to get back under way.

Back here in the apartment I had my coffee and coffee cake and then attacked another 20 photos of the Greenland expedition. I’m now ashore at Brattahlid, the goal of my voyage, and the home of Leif Erikson, the original Norse settler of Greenland.

Following in the footsteps – or the wake, rather – of the earliest Norse settler/voyagers was my ambition and we reached as far as Hvalsey and Brattahlid, but the third site, that of Gardar, eluded me. I was making tentative enquiries about going there when the virus hit and Greenland closed its borders

There was time for a half-hour or so on the arrears of Summer 2020 before knocking off for guitar practice.

Tea was veggie balls with steamed veg and vegan cheese sauce followed by jam pie and vegan ice cream seeing as I’ve run out of soya coconut stuff. I was going to make custard but I was running rather late.

At the moment I’m listening to a few concerts that I have up my sleeve. I need to find three live concerts to take me up to the summer. I’ve a couple in mind including another one that is extremely rare but it does no harm to listen through them all and make a few editing notes about where they can be improved.

When I listen back to some of the very first ones that I did 10 years ago now, it makes me wince. I must have learnt something, I suppose, after all that time. As for “Strife”, I had some feedback from, would you believe, California. It had been played in a RV Showroom and by all accounts had gone down really well.

So I’m off to bed in a minute. Shopping tomorrow and I’m low on supplies so I’m going to be loaded up like a packhorse on the way home. I need to gird up my loins and gather my strength.

Monday 1st March 2021 – DYDD GWYL DEWI HAPUS.

It’s Saint David’s Day today so Happy St David’s Day to everyone from Wales who is a regular reader of this rubbish, Rhys.

When she came to visit me yesterday, Liz brought me some daffodils that she had plucked from her garden. They weren’t open but I’d left them in a glass of water overnight and this morning I was greeted with this gorgeous sight.

In fact, I have quite a lot of Welsh blood in me – more than you realise – because it’s only because of Welsh bedroom practices that I’m here. Like most people back in the 1950s, my father was a great believer in the use of Welsh letters.

And if you don’t know what a Welsh letter is, it’s a French letter with a leek in it and you need to say that out loud in order to understand it.

This morning, to my own surprise as well as to yours, I actually beat the second alarm, never mind the third alarm, to my feet. Mind you, I was in bed before 23:00 for the first time for ages so I suppose that that might have had something to do with it.

First thing that I did was to vent the gases out of the kefir that I made yesterday.

You can see the bottles on the right here with the new batch that I’m brewing in the large jar at the back. And if you look very closely you can see what I mean about the stoppers on those two cheap bottles that I bought. I’ve replaced the washers with some that are more substantial and while they are certainly working much better than the cheap plastic washers that were on them, the stoppers still aren’t fitting correctly.

On the left is the remaining bottle of ginger beer. That’s definitely a success and I’ll be making more of that. I’ve seen a reference to orange ginger beer and I have some orange juice loitering around that I shall try.

After the medication I attacked the next radio programme and having done some of the work while I was in Leuven I’d completed the work aby about 11:40, only to find that I’d done the wrong programme. But it’s not a big worry because I’m several weeks ahead of myself so I can do the one that I missed next Monday.

For the rest of the morning I did some work on the photos from Greenland. Not very many of those because having now arrived in Qaqortoq in Greenland I needed to find a map of the town in order to identify some of the places that I had visited as I walked around the town.

But even if I do just 20 per day, it’s still going to be decent progress.

One thing that I ought to mention as well is that having edited some of the photos on the little travelling Acer and then on the laptop that I’d bought in North Dakota, the results were pretty dismal because of the poor quality of the screens and the graphics cards and I had to start again with them on this big machine.

But the ones that I’d done while I was in Leuven on the machine that I had repaired were just as they are supposed to be and look quite good on this machine.

All of this is making me think again for the moment about repairing one of the small laptops. This one that I fixed seems to be doing the business and with the CD drive that’s in it, I think that the extra 0.6 kilogramme won’t be such of an issue when I compare the advantages of the machine.

After lunch I had a form to fill in about my Welsh exam, the next radio programme to send off to the tech team and then to carry out some research into the big desktop computer.

The big machine is running with a 256GB solid State Drive as a C drive, a 1TB drive as a data drive and a 4TB drive as a back-up drive. Space is starting to run out on the C drive and the data drive so I’m planning to replace the 256GB SSD with a 1TB SSD, take out the data drive, convert the back-up drive to be the data drive and then add the largest possible drive as a back-up drive.

Or even add more drives in if I possibly can if there are more SATA slots on the hard drive.

It’s also running 8GB of RAM and I’m thinking of upgrading that to 16GB or even 32GB.

All of this means that I have to contact the manufacturers for some further information.

There was also the dictaphone to deal with.

I was up in Canada last night. Darren, one of his daughters and I were in an Artic heading down to somewhere in Maine with a tanker on the back. I was saying how good it was to be back in Canada after all this time. Darren was telling me what he needed me to do. he had a plate off a vehicle and was going to put it on another and I had to block something with this other vehicle so that he could do something with the lorry without having other vehicles inconveniencing him and getting in his way. I didn’t quite understand it but it would all become very clear in due course. We pulled up at a transport café and went in. While we were queueing up in there for something someone pulled up with a Mk I Cortina with British plates on it. I thought that this was really surprising. I had a look at the vehicle and it had some publicity on the side. I went to take a photo with the NIKON J1 but it wouldn’t photograph. We’re back to this thing about photos again and they aren’t working with the J1 (not another occasion with the failed camera!). I was trying for ages. When I looked again it had gone and another vehicle was there with French plates on it, a kind of flatbed mini lorry or something. A couple of minutes later this Cortina was back but with a different number on it now. Someone was playing around because the number ended with “40 G” and someone had written something to do with a lady’s anatomy after the G. Again I tried to photograph it but again the camera wouldn’t work. Those two wandered off out there and I was still trying to make this camera work. One of the guys at the till said something like “they’ve rung up and you have to go”. I made myself a quick coffee but the kettle wouldn’t boil. In the meantime I put milk in the wrong mug so after a couple of minutes and nothing was happening I just tipped it all away and ran off to go back to the lorry to join them again.

Later on I was working in an office and I was being sent on a mission to Germany somewhere. I’d been allocated a room on my own more by accident than design but then we found out that one of the people coming was a woman and they were wondering how best to accommodate her. I suggested that she could have my room and I’d share with someone else. I wasn’t really happy about sharing but there was nothing much you could do in a situation like this. For some unknown reason I couldn’t get them to hear what I was saying. They said “yes that’s the first thing we thought of” but started off on some other rambling explanation that I didn’t understand at all. it seemed such an obvious thing to do so I couldn’t understand why they were going through such a performance and rigmarole and ritual to try to think of another way round this solution. Then I returned home and told my partner whoever i was with that I was off on a mission to Germany. She asked “where in Germany?”. I replied “I don’t really know”. “What do you mean?” she asked. I replied “they are just sending me to Germany, that’s the important thing, that I’m going on a mission and it’ll all work out”. She was surprised that I wasn’t really interested in knowing which town it was that I was going to.

Today was another gorgeous, summer day with a bright blue sky and not a single cloud up there to obscure the view.

The kids are still out on half-term holiday by the looks of things as there were plenty of people around. The beach was swarming with people out and about this afternoon and I can’t say that I blamed them.

While I was out there, I bumped into one of my neighbours and we had quite a little chat about this and that. She told me about the new tenants on the ground floor and one or two other things besides.

However I couldn’t stay out there chatting all day, I had to carry on with my walk.

When I reached the end of the headland by the lighthouse I discovered why there were so many people out there on the beach today.

The tide is miles out today so of course it must be the Grand Marée, the highest, and hence also the lowest, tides of the year when the water drops below the level of foreshore that are let out to commercial exploitation. And so everyone swarms onto the sands and the rocks for the peche à pied, scavenging about in the sand and the rocks for whatever they can find there that’s edible.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we did a radio report on the Grand Marée last year that went down really well.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is the situation in the chantier navale.

Yesterday we saw it down from street level but today I’m up on the cliffs on top where I can look down into the yard. We can see Aztec Lady over there on the right-hand side where it’s been for several weeks now without very much happening to it, and over on the left is Lys Noir up on the blocks where it’s been for a while too.

But that’s all there is today. The fishing boat that has been there for several weeks has gone and while I was in Belgium the yacht that has been there for months on end also left the yard.

But where it’s gone to, I really have no idea.

There’s plenty of excitement going on down in the outer tidal harbour today.

While I’d been walking round the top of the cliffs I’d noticed all of the tracks of heavy machinery out there in the silt and I wondered what was going on down there today. But here, there are several heavy diggers down there together with several workmen in attendance and a tractor with a large trailer attached thereto.

There was nothing about that would give any indication of what they were doing, but if anything were to be done in the tidal harbour, the time of the lowest tide of the year would be the right time to be doing it.

There was other work going on in the vicinity this afternoon too.

At the weekend I’d seen “no waiting” signs up on the car parking spaces in the Boulevard Vaufleury and so I suspected that something would be going on there this week. It seems that we’re having a pile of topiary on the trees right now.

It’s quite possible that they are leaving it rather too late though. We’ve already noticed that the birds are starting to build their nests and I can easily imagine that they’ve trimmed out the odd nest or two from the outer branches of a few of these trees.

Back here I made myself a hot coffee and unwrapped the birthday present that Liz had brought me yesterday.

A gorgeous vegan coffee cake made with her own fair hands and so I cut myself a slice to see what it was like. And here’s another one that receives 10 out of 10. It’s absolutely delicious.

The rest of the afternoon, such as it was, was spent working on the arrears of my voyage around Central Europe. But shame as it is to say it, I fell asleep. And how! I was out like a light for a good hour or so and I’d even managed to go off on a ramble while I was out.

I was doing some work at home when Nerina suddenly announced “We’ve forgotten Lil (one of the staff at the Oddfellows Club whom we used to take around in our taxis)”. I said I’d go straight away but she said there’s no real rush. Finish what you are doing. So when I’d finished what I was doing I leapt into a car and set off. I turned up at the pub, the Ash Bank, in Minshull New Road on the Badger Avenue roundabout but it was actually a mirror image of the pub on the other side of the road. When I arrived it was in total darkness and the last two people were getting into a car which then drove off. I looked at the time and it was 00:12 – I was almost 45 minutes late. I followed the car up Minshull New Road where it turned right into West Street. I was quite annoyed that we’d lost a passenger. Had I checked the time I would have dropped everything and gone out straight away. Nerina should have had more of a sense of urgency and I should have paid more attention to the time.

When I awoke, I was totally unsteady on my feet for a good while. I even missed my guitar practice.

Tea tonight was the rest of the pizza with a baked potato, followed by the apple turnover that I’d baked yesterday. And it was all quite delicious. And now I’m off to bed. Welsh class in the morning so I need to be on form.

I wasn’t really feeling much like it last week and I’m hoping to be in a better mood and more enthusiastic about it tomorrow.

Sunday 21st February 2021 – THAT GINGER BEER …

… that i made the other day isn’t ‘arf fiery stuff! I tried half a glass of i this evening while I was making my pizza and it almost blew off my head. It tastes just like shop-bought stuff and I’ll be making more of this when I return from Leuven, that’s for sure.

Definitely a success, that it!

What else was a success today? We can start by talking about the 8GB Acer laptop that I bought about 3 years ago and which the hard-drive failed 2 days after the guarantee expired. I’d had a look at this a while back and found that the hard drive is relatively accessible.

Consequently this afternoon, I fitted the second of the Solid State Drives into that. And not only is it working fine except for the touchpad (so I’m using an external mouse for now) I’m actually using that machine to type out my notes for today.

In fact, it was such a straightforward operation that I have made an executive decision. And an executive decision is, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, one where if it goes wrong, the person who made the decision is executed.

The third little Acer laptop, the one that accompanied me on my travels everywhere for five years until it died on me in North Dakota in 2019, is basically a functioning unit. Everything works fine on it except the hard drive. Unfortunately, it’s like most modern laptops, assembled upside-down with the motherboard on the bottom so you can’t access the hard drive (or the memory) from underneath.

So when I’ve finished my radio work, I’m going to take off the bottom and have a go at taking out the motherboard. If it’ll come out, I’m going to take the Solid State Drive that I installed in the second little Acer laptop and if I can, fit it into the third one. And if the memory that I upgraded is compatible too, I’ll fit that in as well.

If I make a dog’s breakfast out of it, I can salvage the keyboard at least and fit it into the second.

Last night I had one of the best sleeps that I’ve had for ages. I awoke at round about 08:00 having been flat out for almost 9 hours. But that’s not good enough for me. I turned over and went back to sleep. 11:05 when I finally surfaced and that’s good enough for me.

After the medication, I had a listen of the dictaphone.

I was living with Laurence and Roxanne and working at the Auchan supermarket in Lille last night. Roxanne and Laurence were goign somewhere and one of the neighbours asked if he could use the car to go into work and back. He said that he would pay so much per week for it. She asked if that was a good deal and I replied that it was. The first day came and he took it – it was a Sinclair C5. Later he phoned up and said that he had a problem so I walked into town to see it. He said that 1 or 2 of the lights were out, a side light and a brake light. I asked him what he was going to do. he said that there was someone coming to fix it. He had this thing about wanting it to be fixed so he could use it. I couldn’t understand the problem because I’ve driven cars for months without half the lights working, that kind of thing. In the end I had a look. I had a bulb with me and I tried it but that didn’t work. he had this Sinclair C5 on one side and basically wasn’t going to move until it was fixed. I walked back home and got two small 5-watt bulbs. As I started to go back I suddenly realised that one of them was a stoplight and needed a bigger bulb. I asked Laurence to get one but she started to look in all the wrong places for it. I thought that i’d better go and find it. Somewhere along the line while I was there I was talking to a girl. She came from France apparently, the Dordogne, but she was a refugee in Belgium and I have no idea where this fitted into the story.

Later on we were all in a coach. I was driving and we were talking about travel abroad, the cars on the road and how the cars on the road multiplied due to the effect of the war and European travel and so on. We were actually waiting to go to Waterloo Station with a coach load of passengers. Boris Johnson (what on earth is HE doing here?) was on the coach holding everything up so I shouted at him “Johnson, can we go yet?”. I suddenly realised that I didn’t know the way but I thought that I would do what I would usually do which was to follow the road signs into the centre of London and then follow the ones out again that I needed.

Even later on I was back working in General Accident in Manchester, and it’s been a long, long time since I’ve thought about them, isn’t it. Nerina was working in Manchester too so we used to walk to work and walk home afterwards. It didn’t take us all that long. It certainly didn’t seem like 30 miles. One particular day, I don’t know what happened but I ended up walking well ahead of her, a lot quicker than she was. I got to the office and Dave Herring was larking around a bit, I’m not quite sure why. And then his was telling disgusting jokes with Brian Horton about this and that, and probably the other too and I wasn’t really all that amused. Our office was actually a portacabin in the middle of the street and thinking on, there was no toilet or anything. I arrived early-ish and there was a whole day ahead of me and I had to think about what I was going to do if I wanted to go to the toilet, which was going to be more-than-likely during the course of the day.

And there was much more to it than this but you’re probably eating a meal right now so I’ll spare you the gory details.

The rest of the day I’ve spent dealing with the rebuilding of the laptop. It’s working fine and all of the programs that I need for travelling are now installed.

As for the data, that’s on its way. The back-up disk that I keep was in such a mess that I’ve been through, sorted out the most important files, copied it all ono a portable hard-drive and it’s currently undergoing a duplicate file deleting process.

That’s why there are no photos of my afternoon walk as yet. The USB 3.0 port on the front of the big desktop machine, whch I would ordinarily use for uploading the photos from the camera, has a portable hard drive plugged into it. How long does it take to delete 79,907 files at about 130 per minute?

But I did manage to go out and stretch my legs as usual, along with about half a million other people.

Tea was, as usual on a Sunday, a vegan pizza. One of the best that I’ve ever made, and you’ll get to see a photo of that too in due course.

So now, back to the grind and see what other damage I can do while I’m at it. I have a feeling that this is going to be a long, long night.

Friday 19th February 2021 – I WONDER IF ANY …

… of my highly knowledgeable and well-informed readers might have a go at recognising this long-legged bird that I saw down on the beach by the Rue du Nord this afternoon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I am a very keen birdwatcher and have spent a lifetime studying long-legged creatures of that type. But not unfortunately birds of this type.

In the past I have had plenty of lectures on birdwatching, mainly from Nerina, and perhaps I ought to have paid more attention when she was lecturing me. But you can’t teach an old dog new tricks unfortunately, and old dogs don’t come much older than me these days.

So if you have an idea of what it might be, please click on the button down on the bottom right of the screen and send me a message.

Today started off somewhat surprisingly. Not only did I beat the third alarm – and beat it by a country mile too – I actually beat the new alarm that I’ve set in between the second and third alarms. That’s certainly keenness, and I’ve no idea at all where that has come from. It’s not like me of late, is it?

After my medication I mixed up the dough for today’s batch of bread, remembering to add in the sunflower seeds while I was at it, not like last time. Plenty of minerals and vitamins in them, including selenium, of which I may have a deficiency.

When the dough was ready for proofing, I went off and had a listen to the dictaphone. I was driving a bus around last night – a coach, and Lindi Duplessis and her friend Danielle were on board and quite a few other people. For some reason we’d all become separated. I was still on the coach but one or two other people who belonged to us, we could see on the radio that one or two people were wandering around trying to find the right channel to be on to speak to us. We tried to patch them through into our channel so at least they could talk and tell us who they were, and if they were our missing passengers we could direct them back to the coach

Later on there had been a bottle of gin left behind in a taxi. A girl who had travelled in the taxi, something like a girl who stayed with me for a while in Belgium, had left something behind. I’d found something to do with her mobile ‘phone although it wasn’t hers, a memory add-on or something that she was entitled to have. So I bought that, or got it, and got in my taxi and the SatNav brought me all this strange way from Haslington down some side roads that I didn’t know existed and we ended up in the north of Stoke on Trent. It guided me all the way up to her house, a big posh house but with subsidence it was leaning over. I took my things and went round. I was standing by the gate wandering where I went now and suddenly a voice said something to me. I looked and she was down there cutting the hedge. I asked if she had found her mobile phone and she said “no”, which was hopeful so I told her about what I had, the present that I had for her. I gave it to her and we were talking about this bottle of gin. I could see her parents looking at me, wondering what was happening but I didn’t care.

There was more to it than this as well during the night but as you are probably eating your evening meal or something I’ll spare you the gory details. The new computer drives came yesterday in the Post so today’s task, once I’d gathered my wits, was to deal with that.

That involved stripping down the old laptop, taking out the old hard drive and putting in the new one. And then start the initialising, configuration and uploading process. And that took far longer than it ought to have done too.

After a while I was able to identify the reason – one of the buttons on the mouse pad wasn’t working – the left one in fact. In the end I managed to configure an external mouse (despite there being no data on the drive) and then the procedure went so much easier.

That is, until it ground out again. Only half of the keyboard is working. So with the missing mouse button, it sounds like the data ribbon has become detached at one end or else a pin has broken off on the motherboard. I’ve checked the data ribbon as far as I can but this is going to end up being a dismantling job.

But at least, it’s working about 10 times quicker than it ever did when it was new and so now I’m sold on the idea of Solid State Drives. I’ve been checking to see what else I have in the way of laptops where the hard disk is easily accessible.

We had the usual pause for mid-morning hot chocolate and sourdough fruit bread, and then I gave the bread dough, which had risen tremendously, a second going over, shaped it, and put it in the mould before resuming my attack on the laptop.

Round about midday I broke off work to put the bread in the oven and there it cooked for a good 70 minutes.

And when it came out, it was done to perfection. I had a couple of slices with my lunch and I can safely say that it’s the best loaf that I’ve ever made. I’ll do more like this one.

Another hour on the laptop and I called it a day after that. It’s up and running, working well, has an anti-virus on it and a real web browser. On the internet I’ve found a new-old-stock keyboard for the laptop at a decent price and I’m engaged in consultation with the suppliers about the perils and pitfalls of fitting it.

But there’s another job that’s actually finished after all of the time that I’ve spent doing it. Yes, the page for the visit to Oradour-sur-Glane and the Chateau de Chalus HAS FINALLY STAGGERED INTO THE DAYLIGHT.

There are bound to be a few more corrections needed but I’ll go through it all again some other time. I’m just pleased that I’ve finished and can push on with other things. It’s been a while since I’ve done a Magnum Opus like this

And not forgetting our afternoon walk either. I managed that today too.

Although I didn’t go very far before I had the camera out. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the windowsill on the first floor of the building where the seagulls sit – possibly because of the artificial seagull on the interior. There was another seagull there talking to the imitation one.

But there were other things to do too. We’ve seen the long-legged bird on the beach and from there I headed off along the path.

Nothing happening out at sea and nothing in the bay either. The clouds were such that there wasn’t even any sun reflecting off the sea.

Le Loup was looking all lonely this afternoon too.

The light on its pillar on top of the rock just outside the harbour entrance is still surrounded by water right now but the tide is well on its way out. And the grey dismal background round by Jullouville didn’t make things look any better. It was a miserable, grey day outside even if it was quite warm.

But if you look on the crest of the hill in the background just to the right of Le Loup there’s an interesting vertical structure there. And over to the left there’s an interesting circular stone tower. One of these days I’ll go for a drive out that way and make further enquiries.

As I was on my way back I had a look over to the port to see if there was anything but instead, I happened to glance at what might possibly be a kite surfer.

It’s difficult to say where he or she actually is. Probably on the Plage d’Hacqueville behind that lump of rock – that’s my best guess.

Anyway, I came on back home to my coffee and to carry on to finish my web page. While I was at it, I tried to resurrect the old hard drive out of the laptop that I’ve been fixing, but that’s going to be a long-term piece of work. But while I was at it and I had my equipment out, I had a play with the other external drive that failed back in 2013.

With a bit of jiggery and rather a lot of pokery, I’ve now managed to make it fire up without stalling the machine, which was what was happening when I plugged it in before. It’s currently doing a repair but in 6 hours it’s managed about 15%. This is going to be another long job so I might leave the machine running overnight while it does its best to carry on.

There was the hour’s guitar practice and then just as I was going for tea, Rosemary rang. One hour and ten minutes later I started to cook. In a hurry I had pasta and veg with bulghour in a vegan cheese sauce. followed by apple crumble

So now, later than intended and with nothing like as much done as I intended, I’m off to bed. Shopping tomorrow, but I don’t need all that much. I wonder what catastrophe awaits me this weekend.

Friday 5th February 2021 – I’M NOT GOING …

… to tell you about what time I awoke this morning.

Just let me say that I would have been dismayed if I had awoken at this time on a Sunday, never mind a day when I’m supposed to be working.

What was even worse was that I’d made every effort to have an early start, even down to going to bed as early as 22:30. But it just didn’t seem to work. However, it did mean that there was plenty of time to go walkabout during the night. And that I most certainly did.

I was having to go to Court for something or other and a friendly accountant said that he had come to help me so we arranged to meet at 17:30 in a local pub. Some solicitor said that he would help me first as well. I was talking to the solicitor and we arranged that he would come round and photograph all of my cars to prove that I was just driving around in old bangers “as long as you don’t photograph the fact that not a single one is taxed” because things really were tough and all these vehicles that I had weren’t taxed. Nerina and I were doing some cleaning or tidying up and I had sat down for a breather and in walked this accountant. I’d completely forgotten about him. He’d brought a pile of forms from the Musicians Union – apparently to be a musician you needed a licence and it cost £55,000. Of course there was no chance whatever of me paying that. He started to ask me questions all about the group – what songs did we play? Where did we practise? How often did we perform? He gave me a huge list of songs “do you play any of these?”. I made some facetious remark “these must be the only members of the Musicians Union then, the groups in this list”. All the time Nerina was wandering around – we were in the Rockwood in Alton Street by the way at the time and I’m sure that she was totally bewildered as to who this guy was and what I was doing and why I wasn’t helping with the tidying up or anything. This conversation continued more on the lines of filling in these Musicians Union forms than any help that he was going to give me for the issues that I was having.

Later on I’d gone to meet TOTGA – she was working for another taxi company in Crewe but in the old Up The Junction building. I went into her office but she was actually downstairs and I could hear all of the talk that was going on through the radio monitor. They were talking about all the financial affairs of the company going wrong. Basically they had committed to buy a new fleet of taxis right at the time of the Miners Strike when there wasn’t much money circulating around and people in Aberystwyth who had undertaken to buy the previous taxis let them down. I ended up talking to a guy who had been a driver for me, a young guy. He’d written a book and was going through the book with me telling me all the issues that this taxi company was having. The boss of the company came up. he came up with Derek Guyler who had been some kind of office manager. Guyler was arguing for a pay rise for the drivers and a taxi to take the kids to school. The guy running it was extremely angry and laying into Guyler verbally about all kinds of stuff so I thought that this was the moment to leave before he turned on me. I went downstairs but lost my way and ended up in the basement. I had to climb out through a window onto the track. There were 2 boys who were very keen to find out what I’d been doing so I explained and they wandered off in their direction and I wandered off in mine.

Later still we were all off to Blackpool or some seaside resort – it wasn’t Blackpool. I was with an old couple and we rented a room and another small room for me. She cooked a meal which was disgusting but I ate some but not all of it. They went off to buy some tickets for a performance but I stayed behind to try to clean up everywhere because it was really dirty. I was doing fine and I had my 3 cats there. A little girl came in to give me a hand. We were laughing and joking and I had a close look at her – she was a lot older than she ought to be, a bit like a Jimmy Clitheroe kind of character. We were laughing and joking while I was cleaning this up. Then my partner turned up – I can’t remember if it was Cécile or Nerina. A while before this I’d been talking to a guy who was a bit of a singer – we’d been in a club somewhere preparing things for a concert and he was telling me about his stage performances. I thought “yes, well I’ve heard all this before”. When this couple came back they brought piles of people with them, all an extended family. My partner was there. We all had to go outside because this guy was going to give a concert. We all had to wait and we waited for hours. In the end they brought up some vehicles so that we could sit in these vehicles, American-type minibus things. He came out eventually and announced that he didn’t have a licence for the concert to take place on this particular stage so he was only allowed 2 minutes. In this 2 minutes he just told us about his future concerts and his career. I thought “yes, well, I’ve heard all of this before” and I wasn’t particularly impressed.

So welcome back to TOTGA who has been conspicuous by her absence for the last few weeks or so.

As you can imagine, with this really late start and all of this to type out, there wasn’t any time to do anything else before lunch. But there was still something to do – a friend of mine who is the “panicky” type has just learnt that her boyfriend has come down with Covid. She’s panicking about this so it’s been necessary to do something about it.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had another good friend who went down with Covid along with her husband and son, although her daughter who shares the same facilities didn’t, and the infected ones all made a good recovery. I spent some time putting the two of them in touch with each other so that the one can reassure the other.

After lunch (more of my leek and potato soup with home-made bread) I caught up with a pile of correspondence. I’ve had a pile of e-mails hanging round here that needed answering and it was the plan to deal with them today and I really can’t postpone them any longer. And a couple were extremely lengthy too.

As well as that, two other issues reared their heads.

Firstly, Canada has closed its borders to cruise ships of over 100 passengers until Spring 2022. I’d been offered a place on an expedition for this Summer but I hadn’t said anything much about it because I thought it most unlikely that it will travel this year. And now, of course, I’m proved right – although it really was an odds-on certainty, this. I imagine that the cancelled people from 2020 and now 2021 will be offered first dibs at the voyage for 2022 so I wrote to the organisers to stake my claim for 2023, along with the necessary information. I’ll get to Axel Heiberg Island yet!

Secondly, I’ve sold another one of my photos. I used to sell a lot of them at one time and even had one on the front cover of an issue of “Now Toronto” 20 or so years ago but I’m being pushed further and further down the rankings by the more established agencies. The last one that I sold was of THE MEMORIAL TO GEORGE CARTWRIGHT 6 or so months ago which is used as a still IN A FILM.

This photo that has been bought today is of AN OLD COMMUNITY ON THE “FORGOTTEN COAST” OF QUEBEC.

In case anyone thinks that I’m blowing my own trumpet unnecessarily, I’m under no illusions. It’s not the quality of the images that is the selling point – it’s the fact that I’ve been to places where few other people have been and that my photos are easy to find.

And when they are found, they have my contact details on them. I’m very particular about that.

That all took me up to my afternoon walk

It was a really beautiful afternoon – it really was, and you can see from this photo of the rock just offshore here that there were a number of people enjoying it.

Not humans because, surprisingly there were very few taking advantage of the warm, sunny Spring-like day that we had today. I was dressed up for midwinter yet I could quite comfortably have gone round in my shirt sleeves had I so desired.

There was very little wind too and at long last the paths had dried out sufficiently so that in most places you could walk around without too much discomfort and mud.

Just now I did say that there were no humans out and about in the lovely weather. That’s not particularly accurate because there was someone out there offshore in his cabin cruiser having a little swan around.

He swanned off and so did I, because there wasn’t anything of any importance or note happening anywhere else.

However I did bump into the guy who organises the radio and we had quite a chat about this and that and a couple of little projects, one of which was particularly appealing to me because it involves one of my favourite musicians.

Back here I managed to drink my coffee without falling asleep, and I attacked the photos from Greenland in July 2019. I really must push on with those as much as I can.

Guitar practice was interesting because I found a better way to play the bass line to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Down on the Corner” and with the acoustic guitar I worked out the chords to Tom Petty’s “Too Good To Be True” that I am keen to add to my little repertoire.

Tea was veggie balls with pasta and veg followed by apple pie and now having written my notes, I’m going to go to bed. “Must do better” is the phrase that comes to mind, although I wish I knew how. It’s all very well having some kind of problem and knowing that you have some kind of problem but when you don’t know what it is, it’s rather difficult to deal with it.

Wednesday 3rd February 2021 – I REALLY AM …

… eating quite well these days. I really am.

This afternoon I have had one of the nicest lunches that I have ever had.

For a start, I fried two rather large onions in a very large saucepan. To that, I added several cloves of garlic and an assortment of herbs. When they were browning nicely I added the four leeks that I had bought and which I had peeled and sliced, and stirred them in, along with a variety of herbs and ground black pepper.

Four small potatoes followed them into the pan, washed and cubed. They were stirred into the mix too.

Once everything was all mixed in, I added a couple of stock cubes, just enough water to cover the contents, and then a box of soya cooking cream. When it was all in the pot, I stirred it well in and left it to simmer for 45 minutes.

Once it was all well-cooked, it was all whizzed up and I ended with probably the finest vegan cream of leek and potato soup that I have ever eaten. I was really pleased with this.

And that wasn’t all of it either, not by a long way. I have made this morning the most perfect loaf that I have ever made after all of these attempts and with my leek and potato soup it was absolutely delicious.

It goes without saying that I was pleased about all of this because my day didn’t start off like that.

Never mind the first alarm, or the third alarm for that matter, it was 08:30 when I finally found the strength to leave the bed and that filled me full of dismay because it made me run so late for everything that I had to do during the day.

First task was to give the sourdough dough a second kneading, and then I shaped it and put it in the smaller of the two silicone moulds and left it for its second proofing.

Second task was to make a 500-gramme wholemeal loaf using traditional years. And I do have to say that for some unknown reason for which I really have no answer, the dough turned out to be absolutely perfect – exactly as it ought to have been – nice and rubbery and elastic and smooth.

It was then left for an hour or so to proof in a mixing bowl and I came in here to make a start on transcribing the dictaphone notes that have been building up over the last few days.

After a break for my hot chocolate and cake for breakfast I gave the dough its second kneading, shaped it and put it into the larger silicone mould and while it was proofing again, carried on with the dictaphone notes.

When the bread went into the oven I made my soup so that it was all ready for eating. It was a rather later lunch than usual but it was well-worth waiting for because everything was exactly as it would have been – especially as I finally seem to have managed to have made a loaf that came out exactly as it should have done after all these attempts.

Once lunch was over, I attacked the form for my registration with the Securité Sociale. Filling in the form was reasonably straightforward but finding the accompanying documents took rather more time than it ought to have done. And when the scanner function on the printer didn’t work and I had to photocopy some of them instead, that took longer still.

By the time that I’d completed everything I was ready for my afternoon walk.

It was quite cloudy outside and windy too and things hadn’t dried up that much. But I pushed on around my little circuit.

There was nothing whatever happening out there this afternoon. The only thing of any interest whatever was the fact that Chausiais and Joly France were moored up in the mud over by the ferry terminal and don’t look anything like moving within the foreseeable future.

And the only reason that I took the photos, I suppose, was for the sake of having taken a photo while I was out.

Back here, just as I sat down with my coffee, the telephone rang. Ingrid phoned me and we had another one of these very long chats that took me right up to guitar-playing time.

Tea was pie and veg with gravy followed by apple pie. Like I said right at the very beginning, I am really eating rather well these days. I have never in my life had such good food as I’ve been having since I’ve been living here.

The net result of all of this is that the blog entries for SUNDAY, MONDAY and TUESDAY have been amended to include the dictaphone notes, if you have the patience to read them because during those three nights I travelled miles, as well as taking a couple of old and welcome regulars with me.

Last night though I was with one of the Welsh rock bands and the story gradually evolved as we were trying to work our way between several concerts last night – I hadn’t actually got up on stage but I’d been jamming away in the background while they were there and one of the Man offshoots picked me up and we went off to perform a few gigs. There was a photo that they had passed around of Strawberry Moose playing the drums at some resort in North West England. They’d made some kind of remarks about the Vikings who had come along to conquer that country and were busy beating it up with rock and roll songs because Strawberry Moose still had on his helmet from our voyage with Adventure Canada on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour. One of the couples had a daughter who was about 4. She was a very precocious kid and was actually playing and singing on one of the numbers on stage. Surprisingly she wasn’t doing a bad job at all and everyone seemed to be enjoying it. When we got off the stage at the end she stayed on the stage to do something and her mother had to go and fetch her back. Everyone was making a joke about her being 4 and doing all of this, and I thought that that was most unfair because what she was doing was nothing to laugh at at all. It was quite serious stuff and quite good and enjoyable. I thought that she was getting the rough end of this.

A little later on our coach pulled in to Audlem although it was nothing like Audlem. As we climbed up the hill which doesn’t exist of course we had to stop to let some people out. I asked about the toilets and they replied that they were in the Market Hall. They showed me where it was and I ran off. It was miles, absolutely miles, and on the way back running past this guy I came to a set of stairs and there was an archway over the top every 4th or 5th stair or something. rather than running through the archway I ended up on top of it running from one top of an arch to another down these stairs. I eventually reached the bottom and went outside, and the coach was there. One of the guys who had a toilet cistern said “it’s ok, there’s no hurry. This toilet cistern is no use to me – I’ve just found out that it’s made in Spain, not the UK. We’re just making 1 or 2 phone calls about how to deal with a certain thing” and the coach doesn’t seem much like moving at the moment so I just loitered around outside. This was a hot sweaty dream again.

Later still, we were coming into Shavington via Dodd’s Bank, Nerina and me. I asked if it was OK if we go to a pub – I mentioned the name of a pub – it was one in Crewe somewhere to go and see Jon Dean because he had my bank credit card and one or two other things that I needed for my journey. I could see as she answered back that she wasn’t very happy. As we got into Shavington there was someone (I couldn’t decipher who) who could see the 2 of us together and he smiled a bit because he probably heard that our relationship was just a little rocky but we were still together I suppose which cheered him up.

Somewhat later Jackie and Alison were round at my house revising. I’d been out the previous day to go to Manchester to fetch some car parts and had to go again today because some were missing. I went round to the wholesaler’s first to check and he said it wasn’t there and i’d have to go myself to Manchester to fetch it. I think that I’ve dictated (which I apparently haven’t, so I wonder what it is that I’ve missed out) a lot of this about going with Percy Penguin and having to go and pick her up from her home where she was living. There were loads of other people living in this home as well which which was overrun with cats. I had to find her – she was busy doing something and I couldn’t work my way back downstairs again. A woman told me where to go and I had to climb down a load of pipework which was very awkward as there were no stairs. She was at the bottom and was pleased to see me so I had to get ready to go. I wanted to go to the toilet but a cat kept on getting in the way. And then I realised that I wasn’t going to the toilet in the right place so I found that. Percy Penguin took so long messing around that it was now about 11:30 znd we’d never get to Manchester before the place closed for lunch. I wanted to be back for lunch as I was going to take Jackie and Alison somewhere. We got in the car ready to go and she was talking about driving lessons and how she’d taken a few but Covid had closed it down and when they reopened they had forgotten all about her. I wanted to put “Traffic” on the car radio but for some unknown reason their live album wasn’t on my playlist and I had to select some tracks which was pretty awkward while I was trying to drive. It turned out that they were tracks from some kind of play or something. There was an advert of some kind or other and the music of “Traffic” was used as the background so while I had that on there was some other music coming from somewhere and I couldn’t hear it properly. That was starting to annoy me and all in all I was becoming quite annoyed about everything that was going on.

And so the obvious question is “where am I going to be travelling tonight”.

Sunday 31st January 2021 – WITH IT BEING …

… Sunday, I had a nice lie-in this morning. All the way up to 11:10 as well.

And despite the late rising from my stinking pit I’m thoroughly exhausted and I’m going to bed in a moment. There’s tons of stuff on the dictaphone too but I didn’t have the energy to transcribe it until a couple of days later, so having now done that I may as well add it in here and now in its rightful place.

The night started with another rambling dream where I was having all kinds of photography issues. I can’t remember much about it at all but I was in Canada travelling with someone and we had been up a kind of mountain, driven up the side of it and taken a load of photos from up at the top and then carried on on our voyage. Somewhere during that I’d taken an exam for the Open University’s Environmental Degree and had to write out an essay or thesis. I wrote out pages and pages of stuff basically off the top of my head which I’m sure was good enough and sent it off but it wasn’t until later that I realised that I hadn’t done a word count. I hoped that I had done enough and not too much and then again with having written it off the top of my head I wasn’t sure how much of it would be identified as plagiarism with me simply having remembered text word-for-word from someone else’s postings. So we ended up in a great big city in Canada somewhere. I was walking around taking photos but again I was having these issues with the camera not taking these photos properly. At one point it was late afternoon near rush hour and the moon had just come up over the end of the town. It was a beautiful setting and I thought that it would be rzally nice in 10 minutes time so I went to get on a bus and work my way around there. I went and stood in a bus queue but then I thought “I don’t know which bus to get on that will take me in the right direction” so I decided that I won’t go on a bus – I’ll walk back. As I walked back I came across a bar and above it was a notice saying that Aerosmith were going to perform here. I went to take a photo of this notice with the bar in it but I couldn’t get the right view or the right perspective and then I had the sun in the lens and the camera wouldn’t work. I tried about 4 or 5 different times. I walked away because it wouldn’t work, very disappointed. Then I took a photo of some woman playing golf. That worked fine except that it was on multiple shot which I didn’t realise until I deleted the one that I had just taken and found another 9. Then I walked back to this place again and found a good perspective and took a good photo with all of the people bowing down to this sign. Then I found that the viewfinder on the camera was broken and all looked very cracked and I hadn’t got it in the photo part of the notice that I wanted so I had to try to take it again. But then the camera malfunctioned again. In the meantime the guy with me was telling me about a guy who was planning a photography trip to the Middle East and asked if I was interested so I had this guy talk to me. He said that they were planning to go some time in November but where we would be going would be up to the people who travelled.

Later on I’d bumped into Nerina again somewhere. I was sorting through a whole pile of Christmas cards. She was looking at them and at the envelopes as I was spreading them out somewhere. She said that i’d forgotten to play with those 6 there an I could see that she was keen to know who they were from. After she had made a few more comments about them I threw them over to her and said “you open them and look for yourself” and carried on with what I was doing. In the meantime there was a little girl there. She was putting all kinds of packs of playing cards into order in a display window. Nerina asked her “what will you be doing for cards when (I think she said) George Bernard Shaw dies? Will you be printing more different cards?” This girl looked totally bewildered so I had to explain to her that the drawings on the back of the cards were by whoever it was whom Nerina had mentioned. This girl still didn’t understand and I thought that it was rather mean of Nerina for teasing the girl like this. I had to go into an office to see someone. I had to climb these flights of stairs, went into this office and noticed that there were skylights in there so for that reason I assumed that we were on the top floor of this building. I had this interview and I can’t remember what it was about, and walked off back downstairs and outside. I carried on walking and came to the town centre. It was the same town as earlier on in the evening but all laid out differently and I couldn’t really remember where I was for a while. There was this brand-new square in this medieval town that didn’t look too awful and trying to find a perspective to take some photos was difficult. In the end I had to have the camera above my head and look at the viewfinder from a distance to get the right photos. Even then they weren’t coming out as I was wanting. There was a huge tower in the centre of this square. I thought “how am I going to get all this into one single shot?”. That was going to be the challenge. I can’t remember any more.

After the medication I sat and vegetated for quite a while, not doing anything at all. It was even a struggle to stand up and make myself a hot chocolate and a bowl of porridge at lunchtime. Whatever it was, it ended up being much later than my usual lunchtime too.

No walk this afternoon. Admittedly I was really tired, but in fact it’s teeming down with rain and not the weather to go out for a walk.

Some time later I attended to the important and urgent cookery issues. I have some bread left over from Leuven so there’s no need to bake a loaf quite yet. But I’ve run out of kefir so I needed to make myself a batch of that.

There are plenty of oranges around here and kiwis too so I made an orange-and-kiwi batch and we’ll see how that comes out.

The jam roly-poly is almost exhausted so I needed to make a pudding too. With some pastry rolls in the fridge left over from Christmas I made myself an apple pie with the apples left over from before I went away.

And with the left-over pastry I made a small jam turnover – and I remembered to put the desiccated coconut in it this week, having forgotten last time.

And here we are – here are some that I made earlier, as the old story goes. It looks absolutely delicious and I can’t wait to try it all

After the kefir and the dessert it was pizza time. Sunday is always pizza time, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

There was no pizza dough left over so I had to make some more. Enough for three bases. Once the dough had proofed for a couple of hours it was divided into three and two of them were rolled in oil and put in the freezer. The third was rolled out and put in the pizza tray.

When that had proofed again, I assembled the pizza and cooked it for eating. That was delicious too. No pudding again as it was extremely filling.

So, tired as I am, I’m off for an early night. A very early night too. I can’t concentrate right now so it’s pointless trying. Here’s hoping I feel better tomorrow.

Friday 8th January 2021 – TODAY WAS …

… the worst day so far of this little bout of ill-health that I’m having.

The alarms went off as usual and even though they awoke me and I was wide awake, I didn’t have the physical strength to leave the bed. It took me until about 09:15 before I could find the energy to leave the bed and for the next hour or two I was right out of everything.

When I finally pulled myself together I sat down and had a play with the dictaphone. And it seemed that I’d travelled miles during the night. Including one trip with one of my sisters, although I shan’t elaborate as you are probably eating a meal right now and I don’t want to spoil your appetite.

Somewhere along the line my wife and I had got back together and were living together. Things weren’t going too well and I had to be very careful about checking my post to make sure that no unexpected letters were being slipped in somewhere that I might have missed. I had to regularly keep an eye on the pile of paperwork for filing that nothing had been slipped in there. This caused one or two raised eyebrows when people started to work out what it was that I was actually doing. I had plenty of things to do the following morning but my brother was around living there I think talking about what we were going to do. He said that he needed some help to put some silencer paste on an exhaust and change a wheel over on his car. He showed me a wheel and the tyre had split. I had plenty of things to do myself that were pretty important but I would give him a hand for 10 minutes. One of the things that I needed was a new tyre for my car. I had a look at one that I had just taken off. It was completely perished and there was a huge split right across the canvas. I showed it to my brother and said “I wet down to London on this on Monday.

In the middle of all of this there was a story about me being in a lorry, a lorry driver and we were filming or rather watching a film of a route that someone had driven and I was trying to have some kind of indication or hints from this video about driving, a Youtube camera shot thing.

The third part of this was when I’d been working with something like Shearings or Adventure Canada and we were going on our Christmas Holidays. We’d each been given a place to go to. I’d been given a place that was only about 3 or 4 miles away from where we were which I thought was a bit miserable. I wasn’t very happy. I was sitting at a table with 3 or 4 old people and they were making jokes about Russian spies. One of them asked me a question “was I a Russian spy?”. I made some kind of sarcastic remark so he started to make a real issue out of this kind of thing. An old guy, Admiral of the Fleet or something. In the end I’d had enough of this. I stood up, threw down my napkin onto the table and said “I’ll tell you what. When I go from here I’m going to become a Russian spy and what I’m going to do will make you look a total and utter fool, and that’s not going to be difficult”. He went apoplectic. I stormed out. One thing that I’d noticed over the last few days that no-one was really speaking to me or giving me anything to do. Even a couple of girls whom I knew walked past. I said “hello girls” but they didn’t respond so I shouted “hello girls” and then they waved to me. 1 of the girls was coming with me. We were in the room where we were working and there was such a racket going on and suddenly one of the chairs caught fire. It had been right up against the heater and the heat had set it off. She switched a few switches and the noise immediately died down to just a noise. It was still annoying but a lot less than it had been. I realised that it had been the air conditioning or the heater fan or something that was blowing and making all of this noise. She was talking about the trip that we were going to go on, asking how long it was going to take us to get there and when would we be ready. I said that I’d be ready in half an hour because I’m not taking very much and if I’ve forgotten anything I can always come back here because we’re only round the corner anyway. I remember saying that the first thing that I’d be doing when I come back before I do anything else is to weld a sill on the red Cortina. That has its MoT very shortly.

As you can imagine, it took me an age to transcribe all of this and I haven’t really done all that much else. I did make the telephone call that I needed to make, only to find that with the Covid situation their office is only open Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

The only other thing that I’ve done that can be classed in any way productive was something on the principle that if you can’t think of anything to do, or don’t have the energy to do anything, then just do something – anything – so I edited another pile of photos from Greenland in 2019. That’s not a productive day by any means, but I’m struggling with ill-health right now and I have to do what I can.

There were the usual interruptions today. Lunch of course with my delicious bread – and I forgot to mention that the fruit bread that I had with my hot chocolate this morning was delicious.

Another thing that I did was to peel, dice and blanch another kilo or so of carrots. They are in the freezer now freezing away to themselves.

There was the afternoon walk too, in the freezing weather. The temperature had dropped to 1°C overnight and had risen to about 3°C by this afternoon.

Not too many people out there today but one person who was there who I hadn’t seen for a while was our bird of prey – hovering around over the rocks at the headland looking for a tasty snack. He didn’t catch anything while I was there watching – perhaps I had disturbed the prey, I dunno.

So after a while, I cleared off and left him to it. I walked down along the path overlooking the chantier navale as usual but there was nothing going on there at all that hasn’t been going on before.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few days I talked about the new door on the public conveniences here.

Previously it was a kind-of roller shutter door, quite lightweight and it looked as if someone had kicked it in. And so they other day they came out and fitted a really heavy-duty sliding door instead. I’d love to see someone try to kick that one in.

However, as I mentioned earlier, there’s a design fault in it and they’ll be out to fix it again, sooner than you might think actually because there are already signs that it wont last long.

What they have done is put the staple for the padlock when the door is closed (on the right-hand side of the door itno the wall and cemented it. That means that any reasonably-sized iron bar can prize it off and there are signs that someone has already had a try. It needs to be in an L-shaped backing plate and screwed to the frame on the inner profile, so that no-one can get behind the screws to prize them out.

Back here I had a coffee and then carried on with some photos in rather a half-hearted fashion. I stopped for guitar practice of course, and that went somewhat better than last night.

Outside again in the freezing weather I set off for my walk – and four runs tonight. I’m slowly pulling myself up again.

It was too cold ro loiter around outside so I just took one photo of the Plat Gousset to say that I was out, and then I came back home – at a run again.

But to tell you the truth, there wasn’t anything else much to photograph tonight. It was singularly quiet, as it has been all day.

While I’d been out I’d turned on the oven again and was cooking a potato. When I came back I put a slice of pie in there and while I was at it, a frozen apple turnover. I cooked some veg and gravy too, and had pie with baked potato and veg and gravy, followed by apple turnover for tea. I’ll finish the apple crumble tomorrow.

Now that I’ve written my notes, I’m off to bed. Which is more than … gulp … 68,000 British people will be doing tonight. One person in every thousand in the UK has been diagnosed with Covid today. And apart from the 1325 who won’t be waking up tomorrow – a disgraceful record for a developed nation, my friend Erika from Atlanta and I were working out that in the USA the Death Rate from Covid is 1/59, yet in the UK, with its much-vaunted and magnificent NHS, the death rate is 1/37.

There’s something dreadfully wrong in the UK.

Friday 20th November 2020 – DOESN’T CALIBURN …

… look smart with his new bodywork all finished off?

Mind you, he ought to at the price that it cost me for the work. Before he gave me the bill, the garage proprietor asked me if he should fetch the defibrillator, and when I saw the cost, I wished that he had.

But there’s a 5-year guarantee on the body repairs and that will see Caliburn and I go out together. No-one has ever lived longer than 11 years with this illness and although it was only 5 years ago that I was diagnosed with it, I reckon that I had it for a good while before then. I remember CLIMBING UP TO THE CHATEAU DE MONTSEGUR in early 2014 and being totally wiped out in a situation that I would have run up without any problem a couple of years previously.

There’s no reason to dispose of Caliburn and have something else for whatever time remains. A new vehicle wouldn’t be worth it at all and if I were to buy something second-hand, who knows what I’d end up with?

What I need to do now is to attend to the wheels. He’ll need two tyres on the front sometime soon, and I have two old wheels in the back. I’ll clean those up and paint them and have winter tyres fitted, and then with the two that I take off, I’ll clean and paint them and have new tyres fitted on there too.

But I’m not impressed with the broken mirror though. That’s “disappointing” to say the least.

Something else that’s disappointing is that I missed the third alarm. What makes me feel even worse about that is that after the second one had gone off I remember saying to myself that I’ll beat the third one easily seeing as I’m so wide awake.

Oh Folly! Folly! As the late-lamented Stanley Unwin would have said.

First thing to do was to listen to the dictaphone.

There was a whole group of us looking at a map of the Far North of Russia. One of my friends was there and we were pointing out where we’d been on our famous trip to the North, although she was getting it wrong so I was having to show her on the map a lot better than she was guessing where we’d been. Another friend was there as well having a good look. We were talking about our journey, all this kind of thing very much in the same sense as we did about a dream quite a while ago when we were out in the High Arctic. I went to get my things. I had a tray with coffee and a jug of tomato juice, a few other bits and pieces. As I picked up the tray off the table the jug brushed the kitchen cupboard overhanging it and knocked it over. The tomato juice went everywhere. I just put the tray down in despair because I knew that this had really happened to me before and it’s going to happen to me again. It’s always the case when I’m in a rush – I have to do 3 jobs instead of 1. There was much to it than this but I can’t remember now – something to do with the taxis as well. I was having to go out on the taxis later but it was getting late and no-one had rung me. We were bound to be busy because it was a Saturday night and I’d have to go out. But I thought “who was going to take over on the radio?” This kind of thing. Then I thought that Nerina isn’t here either. She’s still away somewhere but she’ll be coming back and be stuck in the office. Maybe she could do the radio but I don’t know anything more about that.

Some other time during the night I had a computer and I was trying to do something. We were looking at this home video of someone’s bedroom and marvelling at the old selection of electronic and electrical appliances that there were back in the 70s and 80s that we don’t see now. Later on I had my computer coupled up to a reel-to-reel tape recorder. I was recording tracks that I was picking up on the internet radio onto that with the idea of editing them afterwards with Audacity or something. The idea was that once everything was stored onto master tapes it can be copied onto CD and filed away. I was having to work out how this was going to work

After the medication I carried on with a task that I started yesterday and hadn’t mentioned. There were almost 250 unread e-mails in my mailbox, some of which were going back to the early summer, as well as a whole pile of ones that I’d already read and which were now serving no useful purpose except to waste space.

Consequently I’ve been going through them yesterday and today, dealing with a pile of stuff that I should have dealt with a long time ago and there is still some to do. And a few more people will have a surprise over the next few days when they start to receive replies to messages that I sent out months ago.

Something else that required attention was to ring up a certain telephone number in the UK. Between 1972 and 1974 I worked for an Insurance Company in the UK and I was wondering whether I might be entitled to a pension payment in this respect. It took me ages to track down who I should speak to because the company has changed hands a few times since then but I eventually managed to speak to someone who reckoned that he could help me.

In the end it turned out that because I

was under 30
worked there for less than 5 years

There was nothing for me at all. But still, it was worth the phone call simply to find out.

It’s hardly a surprise that after all of this I crashed out on the chair for half an hour. And a really deep one too, just like the ones that I was having a week or two ago. Just recently, if I have crashed out at all, it’s just been drifting off for 5 or 10 minutes or so.

After lunch I headed off to pick up Caliburn – yes, I’d telephoned the garage too to see if he was ready.

Down in the harbour there was a trawler that I don’t recall seeing (although I must have done, I suppose) before. She’s registered in Cherbourg and she’s called “Le Pearl”, and proudly displays on her superstructure the fact that she comes from Granville

She’s quite a pretty craft, and by the looks of things she’s fairly new too so maybe she really is new and has replaced an older one that has been put out to grass somewhere. She’s only been mentioned in shipping records since 20th October this year.

We’ll have to see if there’s anything in the papers about it.

Further along in the harbour, there are signs of activity at the loading bay underneath the crane.

A whole pile of builders’ material is now there ready for loading. It looks as if one of the Jersey freighters is going to be coming back into port very shortly to take it all away.

The next question is not “which one will it be?” but “will I get to see it?”. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen just recently a really rapid turnround of the ships and we’ve probably missed more than we have seen since they have begun to extricate their digits

I pushed on … “pushed off” – ed … into town on my way to the garage, but I only got as far as the Cours Jonville before I stopped again.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that we’ve seen the Christmas decorations pushing up like mushrooms all over the town. Here I was lucky enough to stumble upon a couple of Council workmen with a cherry-picker who were busily stringing up a collection of fairy lights around a few of the trees down here.

Leaving them to it, I pushed on along the Boulevard Louis Dior (and forgot to take the photo of the alley yet again) and up the steps at the end, past the railway station and out of town.

It’s a long, weary trudge all the way out of town but I was determined to do it on foot as a form of good exercise, and I’m glad that it wasn’t very warm.

Past the centre of St Nicolas and into the countryside and here at the roundabout on the edge of town is the water tower that we have seen in the background of so many photos. I quite like this water tower. usually they are simply slabs of dull-grey concrete but with this one they have made an effort to try to make it blend into the environment.

By now, I’m well in the countryside and still a kilometre or two to go.

However I wasn’t alone on my travels.

There is a housing estate on the very edge of the town beyond the roundabout and here standing on the corner watching the world go by is a chicken. What he’s doing here I really don’t know but seeing as he near to a pedestrian crossing he might be trying to cross the road.

And as for why he would want to do that, it’s anyone’s guess.

At the garage they clearly have more faith in me than I have because they had left Caliburn parked in the street Had I had a spare pair of keys I could simply have driven away.

And I made rather a fool of myself in here by complaining that they had set the Controle Technique to expire in July, before I realised that I had been looking at the insurance sticker.

Having paid the bill and recovered from the shock, I went down to Leclerc for the weekend shopping, where I spent a fortune.

One thing that I like about the end of the grape season is that it’s the start of the clementine season and I can polish those off just as quickly as I can polish off grapes.

With not having bought any heavy stuff for ages the bill was somewhat elevated but a lot of that can be blamed on the soya milk that was in three-packs on special offer. My mid-morning hot chocolate gets me through a lot of that.

And interestingly, when I arrived at rhe checkout I found that I had a pile of ham in my trolley. Somewhere along the line I had picked up the wrong trolley and had to retrace my steps until I found mine

Ohhh! The exciting times that we lead these days!

Back here I made a start on the arrears, still getting nowhere rather fast. This isn’t doing me any good at all.

The hour on the guitars was successful again – I enjoyed it just as much as yesterday – and for tea I had a burger that needed eating with some pasta followed by apple crumble.

Just as I was about to go out on my run, Rosemary phoned for a chat. And 2 hours and 48 minutes later we stopped. We had a lot to say.

23:15 is far too late to go out for a run so I was glad that I’d had the marathon walk this afternoon.

Tomorrow I’m going to try my hand at baking seeing as I’ve finished off the banana bread. See what damage I can do to a chocolate cake. But that’s for later. I’m off to bed.

Thursday 12th November 2020 – I DIDN’T …

… beat the third alarm this morning either – no surprise there, is there?

Probably something to do with my very long day yesterday and the fact that after I’d finished my notes I was editing some photos from the High Arctic and chatting to a young lady friend of mine – she of the corona virus – until the small hours, giving her my moral support – although whether anything that I can do which involves young ladies can be classed as “moral” is a matter for conjecture.

07:30 it was when I raised my ugly head, and when I listened to what was on the dictaphone I wished that I hadn’t gone to sleep. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that occasionally I don’t publish some stuff that I do during my voyages because, believe me, I can have some pretty gruesome dreams at times, but last night was gruesome for a very different reason.

I was working for a Government department last night and was in Montreal – I’d been seconded to work in the office in Montreal. I was staying at a friend’s, someone who had actually found the position for me. I’d gone over there and she had a beautiful flat, a really nice one about 5 stops away on the Metro from where the tax office was. There were lots of people staying there too including my various nieces. It was a pretty crowded apartment with all these people staying in it. So I arrived there and stayed the night and next morning I had to get ready. I was getting ready but there was all kinds of strange stuff going on outside – a huge stampede of cattle in the streets leaping into the river and swimming across to get to the other side on the island, the side where we were. So we walked out to see what was going on. It was due to a food shortage and they were all going off to another Province to be slaughtered. I went back in and had to get dressed. I put some clothes on and then thought “where are the rest of my clothes?” My friend said that she’s tidied away my suitcase and it was stuck right away in a corner under a huge pile of stuff and I couldn’t get at it. I didn’t have a tie but a guy who was there said “your brother has left a few ties here. You’ll have to fill in a form to pay him and you can have this green tie”. So I bought this green tie and there was a long white scarf with it as well that was dragging on the floor. I rolled it up and put it somewhere. “Do you want that?” I replied “it’ll probably come in use for the winter”. I noticed that everyone else was dressed and said “ohh look we’re all in green this morning”. Zero was there and she burst out laughing and said “yes”. Off I set and turned up at the building which was a crummy kind of building in a run-down area. There were crowds of people willing around outside. A guy came over and there were about 4 of us. He gave us a bit of an introduction chat and said that we have to report through door 13B. At 10:00 prompt the doors opened to this office and it was like a huge stampede as thousands of people swarmed in, obviously trying to get a good ticket so they could be in there first. We were swept in in the rush but couldn’t find this doorway. We had a look and there were loads of doors but none was the door that we wanted. In the end one guy I was with, a very tall, very thin guy found like a slit in the wall. He said “go through here and see”. He slipped through this slit and said something like “this is it”. “How the hell am I supposed to get through there?” I asked. He might get through there but I certainly couldn’t. I didn’t think that anyone of any particular size would either. Where our other two people had gone I really didn’t know. I was now pondering about how I was going to get through this slit. If I started I would be wedged in with so many people around me that I wouldn’t be able to extricate myself. That was when I awoke in a sweat.

A little later there had been another instance of me trying to catch a bus. I was scrambling around at a roundabout with cobbles and it had been raining. All these people on motorbikes kept on colliding with each other and falling off. But this was before this particular bit. The only bus coming in was this red bus that wasn’t a local bus at all. I got on and said “take me to a metro station”. he replied “there isn’t one where we are going. I suppose we could drop you off somewhere where you could get another connection”

So later on we were back again in my friend’s apartment a while later. I’d stepped back into this dream where I’d stepped out. This time things were better-arranged and when I got up this morning I could find my clothes and get dressed. I realised that I had the wrong clothes on so I went to look for my clothes. I found dozens of dirty clothes and thought that I was going to have to do some washing now. I’d only been there a day. I got dressed and there was some good music going on. I said to my friend “you have some really good music here and good books”. She said “I’ll tell my son about that”. Presumably he had chosen them all. I started to put the food out but suddenly realised that I was putting out things like vegetables and gravy. That must have been stuff for the evening meal, not breakfast. In the end we all went out and got on the bus. There were 3 of us, me, Nerina and another guy. She sat next to this other guy and started to talk to him in this really friendly involved conversation about going to football matches and discussing her ex-boyfriends, whatever. All the time I was thinking “she ought to be sitting next to me discussing this kind of thing and I was getting extremely jealous. We pulled up at a roundabout and we all got off the bus. Nerina asked “you know which bus you’re getting on, don’t you?”. “No” I replied. She explained to me about the roundabout and said “as long as you get on a bus there and it goes any distance you’ll be fine”

But in connection with the bit about the motorbikes falling over I was telling my brother about my journey and told him a cock and bull story about how I took a taxi because I’d missed all the buses but the taxi could only take me so far and he threw me out at a roundabout where I could get a bus.

Things were certainly happening last night, and I’m reminded of the doctor in THE CANNONBALL RUN who said “I’d really like to probe his case”.

Having written out the dictaphone notes, I had a shower and a weigh-in. And I’ve now gone back over my higher target weight which is a shame. But one of the side effects that I have is “weight gain” and it seems pretty pointless me battling to keep the weight off if they give me all of this that puts it straight back on.

Having had my shower, I set out for the shops, having forgotten to switch on the washing machine.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw Normandy Trader in port the other day, and then she disappeared again. But she’s back now doing another freight lift to and from the Channel Islands. Apparently she is really busy right now and there is “some talk” – although how serious it is, I don’t know – of buying a bigger ship.

There’s also the delivery of a new pleasure boat – the shrink-wrapped thing on the trailer behind the red and yellow lorry. It looks as if things are hotting up in the harbour.

Considering that there’s a lockdown on, there are more people about than I would have imagined.

But certain shopkeepers are taking full advantage of the pause well enough. There’s a café there in the Rue Paul Poirier and it looks as if, while it’s closed under the lockdown procedures, that they are ripping out the old front and fitting a new one.

That’s good news if you ask me. It’s nice to see the town slowly being redeveloped as time and funds permit. All we need now are a few more commercial freighters in the port and we’ll be well away. It’s all very well talking about increasing the pleasure boat traffic but what’s the good of the town being packed to the gunwhales 2 months of the year and dead as a dodo for the remaining 10?

One of the reasons why I came here was because of how lively it is throughout the year.

At LIDL I didn’t buy all that I needed, for the simple reason that I couldn’t carry it. I had to buy an extra carrier bag while I was there for what I had already selected.

Pride of place though went to a set of stainless steel mesh sieves. The one that I use for straining my kefir etc is really too big and cumbersome to wield about.

On the way home, I took a little detour.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that quite recently I’ve talked rather a lot about the Eglise St Paul. One of the things that I have mentioned is the sad state of the building and how bits are dropping off it rather too rapidly for comfort.

It seems to me that I did mention that there was a ban on walking around or parking near to it, so here’s a photo of the perimeter of the church all roped off and a warning sign “falling rocks” just to illustrate the point that I was making.

It’s a real shame that the building is crumbling away like this.

The real reason why I’d come up here is because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we’d seen the War Memorial here from across the valley a while ago and I’d mentioned that one of these days we’d come to see it.

And sure enough, here we are. There’s no time like the present. And rather disappointingly, there is no mention of any casualties on the Memorial, just a note “To Our Glorious Dead”. I was hoping to see a list of names of local soldiers who had lost their lives.

But interestingly, it mentions “our matelots”. And that set me thinking because I don’t recall any naval engagement during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the war to which this monument relates. I can see that I shall have to go off and do some more research.

So after struggling up the hill laden with shopping, I made myself some hot chocolate and a slice of my fruit bread I went to talk to my friend who was now back on line. And we had a lengthy chat that took me up to lunchtime and more of my delicious bread.

This afternoon, I remembered to switch on the washing machine and even with the racket that that was making, waltzing around in the bathroom I managed to fall asleep for half an hour or so. I realise now why I usually set it to go when I’m out at the shops.

Next task was to peel a kilo of carrots – I’d bought two kilos at the shops today because I was right out. So peeled and diced, I blanched them ready for freezing. And while the water was coming to the boil, I fed the sourdough. There’s now 400 grammes of that happily fermenting away (and I do mean fermenting too – it’s bubbling really well) and as I need just 200 grammes of starter for a 500 gramme sourdough loaf, I reckon that my next loaf will be a sourdough one, and see what damage I can do with that.

Somehow I also managed to find the time for amending the two missing journal entries, THURSDAY’S and FRIDAY’S to incorporate the missing bits. I was going to look for the details of that aeroplane that crashed near Leuven in 1944 and I will do that one day, for sure, but there was something else that I needed to do.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have another friend stricken with Covid too, and I wanted to ask her how she was. And a quick 10-minute ‘phone call turned into a phone call of 1.5 hours.

People reading this will be thinking that maybe I begrudge the time that I spend talking on the ‘phone and on the computer because I’m always on about it, but it’s very far from the truth It interferes with my plans of course, but that’s what plans are for and I think very highly of my friends. I don’t have many friends but those I do have are the best friends in the world that anyone could have and I’ll speak to them any time of the day no matter where I am and what I’m supposed to be doing.

Except of course, to certain people to whom I’ve confided my innermost secrets only to find that they have become a subject of discussion in a certain Land Rover news group. No friendship can withstand that, but I digress.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, what with one thing and another (and once you get started you’ll be surprised at how many other things there are) it was after 17:00 when I finally set out for my afternoon walk and by now the light has gone. So much for trying to keep a constant time in order to compare lighting situations.

As I stepped out of the apartment building I noticed a movement out to sea so I went to investigate.

And it looks as if we are having yet another trawler heading for home today too. Whatever else is happening, there’s still fishing to be done and they are out there hard at it.

But anyway, I pushed on with my walk around the headland to see what else was going on.

And the answer to that was “nothing at all”. I had to walk all the way round to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour before I noticed the next object of interest.

Normandy Trader has left port. That was a very brief visit – the turnround times are getting shorter and shorter. But in her place is Thora, the other little Channel Island freighter. She’s come in to do a quick sea lift from and to the Channel Islands.

These two seem to be hard at it without a moment’s rest and so it won’t surprise me if they do end up with a larger boat each before much longer.

Unless, that is, everyone is stocking up prior to Brexit (not that it will have too much of an effect on the Channel Islands) and it will all go very quiet afterwards.

As I was watching Thora the trawler that I had seen out at sea was coming round the headland towards port.

And at that moment, another one was heading out to sea. So in anticipation of a mid-channel collision, I stayed and watched them for a while. However, there were no shipwrecks and nobody drowndin’, in fact nothing to laugh at at all. So I headed for home as the sun started to sink down towards the horizon.

My hour on the guitar was something of a disappointment because I went to play the Steve Harley song “Riding the Waves”. I’d worked out the chords to the chorus but I couldn’t find my piece of paper with the notes on. And when I finally did find the paper, it sounded all wrong again.

The reason why I like the song, apart from the fact that it reminds me of someone who I’ll talk about at some time in the future, there’s a rapid series of chord changes involving the “F” chord and I need to improve that.

And before anyone says that there’s no “F” chord in it, I play it in a different key to suit my voice. My singing isn’t that good.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper. While I was tidying up the food to put everything away, I came across one that was left over from the other week and it still appeared to be in good shape. So followed down by the last of the pineapple rings, it was delicious. Tomorrow I’ll have to take some frozen apple pie out of the freezer.

Later on, I went out for my evening walk and runs around the walls.

There was no-one around tonight so I broke into a run almost as soon as I left the building and ran all the way through the Porte St Jean to the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord. But I went back to take a photo of the gate nevertheless because it looked so nice, all illuminated now that they fixed the lights the other week.

Nothing at all going on out at sea – or, if there was, I couldn’t see it – so I ran on down the Rue du Nord to the steep incline that always beats me.

Having recovered my breath, I ran down the footpath underneath the walls, being lured ever onwards by the lights of the promenade at Donville-les-Bains.

With no-one about yet again, I stopped to take a photograph of the night scenery out that way, and then having recovered my breath, ran on down the footpath to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch.

There was no-one about down there or on the Plat Gousset either, and no-one in the Square Marechal Foch either for that matter, so I could run all the way across there to the other side. Tonight I was really enjoying myself. It was a beautiful night – not too windy, fairly cold and rather crisp.

Further on along the walls by the Eglise Notre Dame de Cap Lihou, I looked down to the Rue LeCampion and unless my eyes deceive me, they’ve put up the Christmas lights in the street.

That’s flaming early, I reckon. They must be planning something special right now. I don’t recall the lights being up this early before. Maybe it’s to take advantage of the fewer people wandering around in the streets during lockdown. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s something to do with that.

Back here, I carried on writing up my notes. There were plenty to go at tonight. I’m hoping for an early start tomorrow because I’ve plenty to do. Carrots to dice and blanch of course, and then I ned to start to organise myself about my trip around Europe earlier this year.

It’s not going to get done by me simply thinking about it.

Wednesday 11th November 2020 – JUST FOR A …

… change I managed to beat the third alarm to my feet. And that’s not something that happens every day these days.

And that’s not the best of it either.

Twice during the night I had to leave the bed – once to find the dictaphone that I had forgotten to put by the bedside as I went to bed, and the second time to look for the spare batteries when the batteries in the dictaphone went flat.

And considering that I’d had yet another late night consoling my friend on the internet, this is all pretty astonishing too, especially when you consider that today is a Bank Holiday and I don’t normally have an alarm call on a Bank Holiday.

With all of this going on, it’s even more surprising that I managed to find the time to go off on my travels during the night.

I was on a big cruise liner last night, an American one. There were loads of people on there and for some unknown reason I was feeling a bit tetchy and irritable like I normally do after a few days in other people’s company. These Americans were really getting on my nerves and it reached the stage where I could barely hide my contempt for them, something that regular readers of this rubbish will know about only too well. It reached the stage where on one occasion I had to go somewhere and the quickest way for me and a couple of other people with me was to unlock a kind of emergency door and step through that out to the other side. As we did that and stepped through we had to stoop down to do so there was a couple of other old guys there and they started to try to push us around. I spoke in some kind of derogatory term to them and this situation slowly started to escalate out of hand, if it wasn’t out of hand already.

This has quite a familiar ring about it doesn’t it? And even more so if you consider the events of early September last year that I’ll write about one of these days when I learn to moderate my language.

Later on we’d been out to the South Pole. It was the 19th Century and we had gone very far but hadn’t reached the Pole. We’d got onto the Antarctic continent and gone quite a way but couldn’t go any further so we turned round to go back to our base camp and set out back for the UK. We’d left Caliburn there and a few things had been left inside Caliburn including a book that belonged to Nerina. We sailed back. It was quite interesting by the way to see an aerial photo of the area a bit later on where a town had grown up etc and where we had been. We could see our route. When I returned to Gainsborough Road Nerina was being very sullen and offhand with me. What I did was to take her bookmark back that was in the book. She was extremely annoyed about this book. I said “don’t worry. We’re going back to get it next year”. There was some confusion about whether it was a library book. She’d had notice that it had already been renewed. I said “no, that was another one. This was such-and-such a book”. It had a duck-egg blue cover. She was just extremely offhand. Then she asked if I knew where a place called TK fasteners was in a certain town, a town where I was working. When she described what it was for – you could buy snowmobile bits there – I knew immediately where it was but it was very difficult to describe it. She’d been to the area once so I was trying to explain. “Which way did you come into the town?” because there were a couple of ways but she wasn’t really answering. Then she sat down and started to draw herself a map. “Oh, you’ve remembered, have you?” She replied “no, someone has sent me a photo and I’m copying it out”. When she finished that she stood up, picked up her coat and said “I’m going”. “Going where?” “Going home. i’m not staying here with you any more and you’re going to regret something”. “What?” “This 99”. “Regret what about 99?” “99 pence”. “Well, what about 99 pence?”. “You’ll find out” she retorted. “I suppose you’re going to be keeping the warmth, are you?” “I suppose so, yes” I answered. “That’s a shame. And it’s a shame about that lamp as well. I like that lamp”. “Well, take it with you”. “It was your friends who bought it for us”. “Well, take the lamp if you want it”. But she wouldn’t take it and just turned round and walked out of the house. I didn’t have a clue what was going on and what was the matter with her and what all of this was about. I was completely bewildered.

After this, I had an attack on the outstanding notes from my stay in Belgium. And now they are all transcribed and that’s that job finished. And right at that moment my friend came on line and we had a good chat while I soothed her fevered brown from this distance, poor kid.

With a few other things that needed doing, that took me up to lunch and more of my delicious bread (I’d had some of my wonderful fruit loaf with my morning hot chocolate).

This afternoon I sat down and finally made a start on finishing the radio programme that I had started in Leuven and by the time I knocked off for my guitar practice I’d just about finished it – another hour’s worth of music.

There was time for me to go out for my afternoon walk, and I remembered to go around the old medieval walls today as well.

There was quite a wind blowing out there today so there weren’t too many people out there this afternoon. There was a lot going on out to sea though, such as this trawler heading back home to port with today’s catch.

It was having quite a battle against the waves too. The wind had whipped up quite a storm this afternoon.

And something else that was interesting was that we had the different coloured streak of water out there again today that you can see in the foreground.

The weather might have been extremely windy and so keeping a lot of people indoors, but there were some out there taking full advantage of the solitude.

The tide was only just on its way out so there wasn’t much beach to talk about yet these people here were making the most of what beach there was.

Having observed them for a few minutes, I set off – at a run – along the Rue du Nord until I encountered a group of pedestrians coming my way so I slowed down to a brisk walk.

That caused me to look behind and see what there was going on behind me.

When I’d set out just now, I’d noticed a light moving about in the harbour so I suspected that there was a boat on the move in there. And sure enough as I watched, around the headland and out to sea came another trawler. I can’t tell at this distance if it’s Coelacanthe or her sister ship Le Tiberiade but it’s certainly one of them.

Doing her impression of Steve Harley, she went off riding the waves right past the streak of different-coloured water. And one of these days I’m going out to test the salinity of the streaky bits to see if it is indeed fresh water being discharged into the saline water of the sea. It’s a well-known phenomenon that’s been reported on on many occasions in the far north of Canada and places like this.

It’s another way of mariners being able to tell if they are near land when big rivers are involved, and I would love to prove this for myself.

From there I managed to break into a run again and push on a little way until I encountered another group of people.

Once they had gone, I broke into a run and went all the way down to the viewpoint over the Plat Gousset. The wind here on this corner really was wicked and I was surprised to see even a handful of people down there.

There were several people in the Square Maurice Marland too, so that put paid to any plans that I had to go for a run across there. But there was nothing else whatever of any importance or note going on so I walked on home to warm up with a nice hot mug of coffee.

Having finished the radio programme I had my hour on the guitars, which wasn’t as successful as it has been of late and then went for tea – steamed vegetables and veggie balls in a nice vegan cheese sauce, followed by pineapple and ice cream.

When I stuck my head out of the door, I was glad that I’d had a few goes at my running this afternoon because the wicked headwind put a stop to anything in the Rue du Roc.

But I made it around as best I could to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour, even managing a couple of legs of my running. No change in the chantier navale today, and nothing special going on in the harbour either – quite probably because the tide was right out by now.

One of the Joly France boats – the older one – was moored up over there at the ferry terminal, and it looked as if Chausiais was tied up in front of her. But that was about it really.

There was nothing happening in the inner harbour either tonight. None of the Jersey freighters had paid us a visit today.

But by now the rain and started and with the wicked wind out here it was as if I was being lashed by a rather vigorous cat-o’nine tails. And seeing as I was the only one daft enough to be out here right now – not even any kids on the car park, I took a photo of the Rue du Port and then ran all the way home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow I have to go shopping. With no Caliburn here I don’t have much in the way of fresh stuff so I can see me making two trips to LIDL – one tomorrow and the next on Saturday.

It’s rather inconvenient but it’s all in a good cause.

And then I can push on, update the journal for when I was in Leuven just now and then, hopefully, push on and catch up with yet more arrears from my trip around Central Europe earlier this year.

It’s high time that I put that to bed and got on with the real stuff.

EPIC HALL

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