Category Archives: Nerina Hall

Tuesday 20th October 2020 – AFTER ALL …

… of the exertions over the last few days I failed miserably this morning.

Never mind the third alarm – it was 07:20 when I left the bed – more than an hour of the day wasted.

And when I listened to the dictaphone I recoiled somewhat too. All of these notes to transcribe. I was running the taxis and there was Doreen, Nerina and mme running the taxis on Saturday night. A job came in to go somewhere way up north and I Do mean way up north. In the end they decided that I should go, and go on a motorbike and that some other driver should come in. I went on my motorbike all the way up to the far north of Scotland to drop off this package and came all the way back. By now it was starting to get light next morning. I’d arranged to pick up Percy Penguin up after work so I guessed that she would still be asleep in her shop. I tried to ring her but my mobile phone wouldn’t work so I just went on round there anyway and she let me in. By now she had transformed into an old black woman who was going to come home with me to the taxi office. She had a couple of big bags of shopping and it ended up with me having to carry them. I was pretty much weighed down. When I got home Doreen was still there. She said that she was glad that she sent me on the motorbike because they’d been really busy throughout the night and had a really good night working non-stop. I had a quick glance through the sheets and saw that there was some ROF work there. I thought “did we have a contract with ROF these days? We used to”. She said “oh no, that’s some tuition that Nerina and I have been doing. We’ve been teaching some people from there”. Later on I was walking home through the streets of Brussels. There was a motorbike shop. It was pretty late at night/early in the morning type of going home but this place was open so I went in. I had a little sit on a Honda 50, a play-around and it transformed itself into a big motorbike. We ended up a group of us talking about motorbikes. Someone prepared some kind of soup and someone drank it. But someone warned “no, no, don’t drink that soup” but she drank it and transformed into soe kind of evil persona. We had to be very careful about what we’d do. But then a couple there said to another woman “come on, we have to go down to the Isle of Thanet to do something”. So they took her away. When she came back she was about 12 feet tall and her upper part was like a metal rod with a metallic design like a hollow shield for a head and also quite evil. It turned out that almost every one of these people had been transformed into some kind of evil thing through a drink or through a soup. So I started throwing the soup on the floor and drinks on the floor to break the bottles so they wouldn’t have to drink it but these people were laughing saying “Oh God it’s far too late now. You’re all going to be absorbed”. It led to a bit of a chase around this place. There was something too about a cake in an oven. I was eating a cake, the type of fruit loaf bread that I make. Meantime I was putting something else in the oven. People were wondering about that and having a laugh but someone else said “Eric? Ohh yes he really does bake and his baking is really quite good” which shut a few people up. But this battle thing with these weird people carried on until in the end there was only me and I couldn’t find anyone else who was sane. It was going to be a really stressful kind of situation. It’s no wonder that I awoke in a feverish sweat yet again.

But there was much more to it but I can’t remember any more now. And after all of that it’s probably just as well.

It left little time for any revision of my Welsh and as a result the lesson was something of a disaster. And I wasn’t the only one either. We were given part of a sample test paper for our exam and we all made a right mess of it. Mind you, we went 1 hour 50 minutes before we stopped for a break and my head had long-since turned to jelly by then.

Mind you, that’s not a surprise. There’s something – and someone – on my mind today. And it brings back memories of three late night evenings in, of all places, on the deck of a ship in the High Arctic where I changed the habits of a lifetime.

As Kris Kristofferson once wrote, “I’ll give all my tomorrows for a single yesterday”. And I will too!

But enough of my being all maudlin now of all moments. I won’t get anywhere dwelling on the past like this.

At lunch I finished off the last of the bread and the last of the hummus so it looks as it it’s going to be another food-making day too tomorrow morning. One thing that has also finished a long while ago is the ginger and lemon drink. That’ll have to be something else on the list too.

This afternoon I’ve had an exciting task.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I bought a new computer in something of a hurry in North Dakota last August when the little travelling Acer gave up the ghost. It was a sale item from Walmart heavily reduced but it came with Walmart’s splash screen and everything else on it that annoyed me but which I didn’t have the time right them to fix.

As I went along, I patched it here and there but it still wasn’t satisfactory so being fed up and having nothing better to do I did a “system restore” to “factory settings” and that involved deleting everything off the hard drive and starting again to reinstall everything.

And when I say “reinstall”, I say that advisedly because after about 6 hours of work it’s done about 88% of the operating system, never mind anything else.

In the middle of all of this, while the computer was festering away, I went out for my afternoon walk.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago in the Place du parvis Notre Dame we saw them set up a series of scaffolding in order to repair a roof on a house there. Today, they are attacking the side of the house that’s in the Rue St Jean.

And they aren’t using any scaffolding either apparently down the side of the house. All of the material seems to be being lifted up by the big machine there and that’s going to cause a few problems if something big comes down there.

Wednesday and Thursday we’ve been promised storm-force winds here (as seems to be usual these days). I don’t fancy being up there on a roof when they are lashing about. And I don’t fancy walking underneath where the guys are working either when there’s a wind blowing all of their stuff away.

There were crowds of people wandering around today taking in the air and I ended up chatting to one of my neighbours at the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord.

After he had gone I had a look down onto the beach to see what was going on. The peche à pied is still in full swing as far as the tourists go. There were several more out there in amongst the rocks scavenging for what they could find.

As well as that, we had people milling around, walking their dogs, playing sports or even just taking in the air. After all, although the weather was cold and windy, it wasn’t unpleasant.

The crowd had thinned out by the time that I reached the Square Maurice Marland so I had a good run across to the other side to rack up a bonus run.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday the harbour was empty – of water and of boats. Today though we have the water back, and also the boats. Marité has returned and is moored in her little corner again.

So I carried on along the walls and as there was no-one in the street I ran on home again. I may as well clock up some extra metres on my way around when I can.

Back here I carried on with the laptop and then had a break when Rosemary rang me up. While I was in the Auvergne in July I had set “certain steps” in motion and, much to my surprise, they had actually come to fruition . That means some more outlay and I have to do it because it involves several other people.

Tea tonight was veggie balls with steamed veg and vegan cheese sauce – thoroughly delicious. And the other half of my apple turnover was even better. It’s the best one that I have ever made and I’m really impressed with that.

My walk this evening was something of a surprise.

Well, not my walk, but my run. I was feeling much more like it tonight, much looser, and I ran on past my mark on my first leg with some comparative ease. Down to the clifftop and there was a trawler way out to sea with its bright lights blazing. Too good an opportunity to miss even though it won’t come out well.

It’s probably 5 miles out to sea as well so all in ill it’s not bad at all seeing as it was the f1.8 50mm lens. I’ll settle for that.

No-one around at all, except for a couple of kids on the car park so I could do my third leg in peace.

At the viewpoint over the harbour where I stop to recover my breath, I could see all of the activity going on at the Fish Processing Plant. The fishing boats are starting to come back into harbour and there were already two of them down there unloading, with a couple more on the way.

One had carried on into the harbour but I missed her. Presumably she’s going to unload at the other side. But never mind. This one has come out OK so I’m not disappointed.

If I turn my head to the right I can also see into the Chantier Navale.

And here we have a change of occupant yet again. The new little boat that arrived a couple of days ago has now gone but we have been joined instead by a large yacht that bears a striking similarity at this angle to Spirit of Conrad, the boat on which we went down the coast a few months ago.

Of course in this light, it’s not possible to say with any certainty. I’ll have to wait until it’s light and have another look.

And so I ran on the rest of the way home, doing it in two legs as usual but even did an additional lap of honour round the building to push up the total even more.

Now that my notes are written and I’m off to bed. But before I do, just a quick “hi” to someone who made a dramatic reappearance this morning. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can organise myself, whenever that might be.

IMPORTANT NOTE: From 1 September 2026 this blog has a live blog feature for the latest news. Click any post title with "LIVE" in it to see live updates. Comments are welcome from logged-in users and must be approved before they appear.

Saturday 17th October 2020 – WE CALLED IT …

… a draw this morning. I’d just thrown off the bedclothes and was on the point of sitting upright ready to crawl out of bed when the third alarm went off. Just one second earlier would have been a glorious victory.

And seeing that I was in bed by 22:30 last night I ought to have done better too.

And during the night I’d been on my travels as well. I was with Nerina and we were in Gainsborough Road. I don’t remember too much about this but we’d been doing a lot of sorting out. I’d been to see a lock-up garage somewhere near Manchester which would be ideal for me to use as a store to store a lot of stuff that was lying around that I didn’t need but didn’t want to dispose of. Then we were back at the house and I don’t remember a great deal but I seem to remember that I’d bought a house in Winsford – it might have been Plantagenet Close – years ago and I was wondering what on earth I was still doing with it. I couldn’t find the keys so I wondered if the estate agent still had them, or if Nerina had them – I’d given them to her to look after, or her mother, something like that. In the end I went to ask her but each time I started to ask, she interrupted me and said something else. We ended up in the Post Office in Crewe. I was going to go to Winsford the next afternoon but it was a Saturday afternoon and the Post Office wouldn’t be open. The aim was to ask someone in the Post Office about delivering letters – where do they go to, who had a key? All of that kind of thing. I got myself into a queue by a counter but there was no-one there at the time, just a customer but no member of staff so I was idly loitering around. One member of staff came and started to deal with it. When she had dealth with this person, a young guy and his father walked up in front of me straight to the counter. Nerina said “those two guys have pushed in front of you. I said “yes, they haven haven’t they?”. The younger of the two turned round and made a smart remark to me – in Dutch. I turned round to Nerina and said “yes, Ne’erlandssprekers” so this guy made another comment and strolled away. Then I got to the window and the cashier, and that was that..

But it seems that dreaming about a new house elsewhere that I own is becoming another recurring feature of my nocturnal rambles. So what’s going on here?

For an hour or so this morning I tracked down some more photos of my trip around Central Europe at the beginning of August. And one or two of those took some tracking too. German road signs are not the clearest, especially when viewed on my low-resolution dash-cam through a bug-infested windscreen but in the end I managed to do some good with them and they are all properly labelled.

One or two in Munich were likewise difficult but reference to Hans, my friend there, soon resolved that issue.

After a shower and a clean-up (and a weigh -in, and I’ve lost another couple of hundred grammes) I went off to the shops. NOZ came up with one or two things, but nothing to get excited about, and it was the same at LeClerc.

No figs though, but luckily the Fruit and Veg shop, la Halle Gourmande, had a few. The lady there told me that they are seasonal, so I’m going to have to think of a substitute for my kefir.

Back here, I put some of the stuff away and then sat down to continue the photos but ended up falling asleep on the chair after my exertions. A whole hour or so I was out, and that’s good for neither man nor beast, especially when it means a very late lunch.

After lunch I attended to the kefir that had been fermenting away for the last few days.

Four juice-oranges were whizzed up, strained and filtered and put in a large jug. Then most of the kefir liquid was strained and filtered (always leave an inch or two in the bottom of your jar to cover the grains that you are making) into the orange juice.

The whole lot was then mixed together and then poured through a filter into a few stoppered glass bottles, and I hope that this batch is going to be as good as my lime-flavoured kefir from last time, which was excellent.

Finally, I set another lot of kefir en route for later in the week.

By now it was time to go for my afternoon walk

The other day I mentioned the Peche à Pied – the local pastime of scavenging amongst the rocks and the beach during the very low tides when the public areas below the commercial concessions are exposed

It seems that I may well have been right when I mentioned that it looked as if we are having another very low tide – a Grand Marée – this weekend because, sure enough, the crowds were out on the beach with their buckets and rakes, and whatever else they bring with them.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the Peche à Pied at the Grand Marée in April was forbidden due to the virus, so two of us from THE RADIO broadcast a “virtual Grand Marée instead.

and there weren’t just crowds of people on the beach either.

There were the veritable hordes swarming around in the sunshine too, but also plenty going on in the air. As I watched, I saw a couple of light aeroplanes take off from the airport at Donville-les-Bains. One of them obligingly headed my way but before I could take a decent photo of it head-on, it veered off out to sea.

While we’re on the subject of the airport at Donville les Bains … “well, one of us is” – ed … there’s some talk about allowing international flights to land there again, mainly from the Channel Islands. This will mean that a permanent Police and Customs presence will be required.

All of this can only be a good thing.

Back here, a few more photos, and that leaves just 75 to do. But at the rate that I’m doing them, they are going to take forever to finish off.

Then it was time for the football. An early evening kick-off on the Internet for Barry Town v Connah’s Quay Nomads.

It was a game that finished 0-0 which is hardly a surprise because Connah’s Quay are still missing four of their star players – Danny Holmes, George Horan, and their two star attackers Jamie Insall and Mike Wilde. Chris Curran who normally plays on the wing, had a really good game up front for them but he was never likely to score.

Barry Town had a solid central defence for a change after their debacle the other week, but they too were missing their star attacker Kayne McLaggon and they still haven’t recovered from losing Momodou Touray at the end of last season so they were never really likely to trouble Connah’s Quay’s makeshift defence without Horan and Holmes.

The match though turned on a decision made after just two minutes. A Barry Town attacker burst through the defence and broke clear, only to be fouled by a Nomads defender. Certainly a foul, no doubt about that, but a red card for “denying a player a goalscoring opportunity”? The ball was only just beyond the centre-circle in the Nomads area, about 50 yards from goal with another two defenders bearing down on him and with the ball about 10 yards in front of him that the keeper might even have reached first? To call that a “goalscoring opportunity” is rather stretching things a bit in my opinion. I didn’t agree with that at all.

In fact the referee seemed to have a pop-up toaster in his top pocket because it seemed to me that there was always a yellow card popping up. I think that I counted 8 all told, many of which I wouldn’t have given myself. And the red card given to Barry’s David Cotterill, the former Welsh International, in the dying seconds of injury time for “kicking an opponent” was likewise somewhat exaggerated.

So Connah’s Quay played for 88 minutes with just 10 men and you wouldn’t have noticed because Barry never really had a serious shot on goal. A powerful header right into the arms of keeper Lewis Brass is all that I could think of.

Tea was out of a tin at half-time, and after the final whistle it was time for my evening walk

For a change I went around the headland tonight and over some of the runs that I used to do.

The first leg was along the Rue du Roc for some of the way – not as far as I used to go, and then a second leg across the lawn down the side of the hedge to the clifftop where the lighthouse was busy sending out its beam.

Something that not many people know is that each lighthouse has its own individual sequence of lights, to distinguish it from another lighthouse somewhere in the vicinity. Here at Granville it’s four short pulses of light followed by a long pause.

There’s a rotating shield inside the light with bits cut out for the light to shine through which is responsible for that.

There were a few people out there tonight so I wasn’t as alone as I might otherwise have been.

There was even someone inside the Coastguard Station because there was a light on outside and when he saw me about to take a photo he switched it off just to confuse the issue and I had to take the photo again.

At least everyone had cleared off by now so I could run my third leg, along the clifftop. And that wasn’t as good as it might have been because the car park has now become the centre of assembly for all of the adolescents in the town with their motorbikes and music.

But who am I to complain? At their age I was doing just the same. And probably getting into more mischief too while I was at it.

On my way back from the shops this morning I went past the chantier navale and I could see that it really is Les Epiettes in there.

There was also a new arrival, to make the total now three in there, so while I was catching my breath in the viewpoint at the top of the cliffs I could take a photo of it for the record.

And from there I ran on home – two extra legs of my fitness regime runs to make up five.

Back at the apartment I encountered one of my neighbours coming back home so we had a lengthy chat about putting the world to rights. And then I came up here to write my notes.

Having done that, I’m off to bed. Sunday tomorrow and a lie-in, but I also have pizza bases to make as well as some kind of dessert. It’s been a while since I’ve made an apple pie so I might have a go at that – either that or a crumble.

It might be a case of waiting until tomorrow to see how I feel.

Saturday 3rd October 2020 – I ONCE STARTED TRAINING …

… as a fortune teller, but I had to give up my studies due to unforeseen circumstances.

That is just as well because I would never have made the grade. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last weekend I mentioned Y Fflint – a football club from Deeside that has just been promoted to the JD Cymru League I mentioned that “They are no mugs, and certainly not cannon-fodder like some promotees have been.”

Today they played TNS – and TNS put 10 past them. That’s the heaviest defeat that I recall in the JD Cymru League for quite some considerable time … “August 2016” – ed …. although in fairness, Flint’s keeper was carried off after 23 minutes and they had to put a substitute in goal.

But anyway, I’ll stop predicting and shut up. Except to ask the same question as I did last weekend – “just how good are TNS this season?”.

They are obviously better than I was this morning because once again I had trouble hauling myself out of my stinking pit. Only by a few minutes, but a miss is as good as a mile.

But it seems that I have a lot on my mind right now, judging by what was happening last night.

There was a boat last night and a few of us were on it. It was called the “Son Derwyn”, something like that it was called. There was some woman on there but I can’t remember what she was doing. In fact I can’t remember anything about it at all apart from that.

Later on I’d been seconded onto a job to go to work in the South Atlantic (that’s a coincidence, isn’t it?). There was a group of us and three of us were leaving on the same flight so we were waiting around at the ferry terminal (don’t ask me why). I was with Nerina. We were sitting there talking to each other and there were these two other people talking and making a couple of phone calls. It turned out that they were indeed two of these people. They’d been told to look out for a third so I was wondering whether to introduce myself but I couldn’t be bothered. Nerina and I sat there and carried on talking then we got on this plane and flew to wherever we were going. We ended up in the hostel where we were staying, all sitting around but these two other guys hadn’t come. We weren’t saying too much about anything to anyone. In the end it was time to go to our rooms to get ready for dinner. We went off to our rooms but ended up in the wrong one. We’d all been waiting in one of the rooms so we went off to ours. All it consisted of was two divans, sofas, wickerwork type bamboo things. We thought “this is strange. It’s not going to be very comfortable. We’re not going to be able to get up to much good in here”. We realised that we’d left all of our stuff in the other room. One of the other guys had been for a shower. He came out and said “God you don’t want to go in that shower. It’s freezing cold”. I said “I’m not a penguin. I don’t fancy that idea”. He said “it’s all there is”. We went down into the communal bar place. Apparently there was some bread and jam somewhere so Nerina asked one of the waiters or staff or someone where the bread and jam was. They replied “you have to do things for yourself you know here. You’re expected to work on Saturdays”. I explained that we were quite happy to go and get stuff for ourselves – that’s not a problem. We just wanted to know where it was because we were new. We didn’t get our bread and jam but nevertheless Nerina went off to try to find some and I went to find some tables. It was pretty crowded and in the end I found a couple of chairs and we tagged ourselves on to some other group we were with. Then I realised that I needed some names of people who did things in the town – tradesmen and I’d left the telephone directories that I’d pinched from the library in this guy’s room so I thought that I’d better go and find some more. I walked out into town and found a few. On the way back I was being harassed by this little boy and I almost picked him up and thumped him one but I restrained myself just in time. As I got to the traffic lights – we’d been passed by buses and whatever – I thought “this is a bigger city than I expected. Much more modern”. An ambulance came out of a junction and was rammed by a little white van. A few people piled out of this little white van and another vehicle pulled up as well. They started dragging people out of this ambulance. I noticed that the people in this little white van had police jackets on. One of them gave this gorgeous right hook on one of the passengers in the ambulance. i’ve no idea what this was all about. The ambulance guy was radioing through that he’d been hit by this van and that there was a fight going on with some of his passengers but he had a woman who was seriously ill who he was taking to hospital. Could they send another ambulance to pick her up and take her on while he sorted everything out here. I was making my way back to where I was staying. I do remember thinking “how the hell am I going to be expected to keep the peace in a town like this if this is the kind of behaviour that goes on and it’s such a busy place anyway?
Somewhere along the line was a pizza that had to be put in the fridge so we went to arrange the slices so we could but found that it was all too big for the fridge and there wasn’t the room to put it so what would we be doing about that? I had some ribald comments from my father and my brother about all of this while I was doing it to so I thought that if I can’t find a solution to a little problem like this how am I going to manage doing anything major?
And what was this next bit all about? “This train was crowded with people. Everyone was crammed in and no-one dare move in case someone took their seat. I was handed a telegram which when I opened it said that there was a mumbled something that I couldn’t decipher. immediately. I thought that this was a reference to this new job or else they’d found out something about me that I hadn’t wanted anyone else to know.

With a reasonably early start nevertheless I managed to edit about 15 photos before I went for my shower. And today I had the heater on in the bathroom. The first time this back-end. And I needed it too.

Next step was to empty out the fridge and switch it off. It’s frozen up again and needs to defrost. It can do that while I’m out at the shops.

NOZ had nothing exciting and Centrakor couldn’t supply a new bread mould.

In Leclerc I spent very little – most of which went on things like a box of 2kg of grapes. I bought three fresh figs too and when I reached home, I set another kefir mix en route. Mind you, I needed a boat to come home in, not Caliburn. It was raining hard when I set out but by the time I made it home we were having a torrential downpour of the type that you don’t see very often.

Brigitte had left the window open on her car too so I rang her and told her. But it was rather too late to do any good.

Having set the kefir going, I alternated between the photos and hacking lumps of ice out of the fridge. That latter is now done – all nice and clean and defrosted (but for how long?) and I’ve done almost 70 photos today. And some of them needed quite a lot of editing too. That took some time.

By the time that I was ready for my afternoon walk there had been a dramatic improvement in the weather.

By now not only had the rain ceased but we were having a beautiful afternoon – one that had really brought out the crowds. And the views were splendid too. You could see for miles and miles – all the way to St Helier in Jersey 58 kilometres away. In all the years that i’ve lived here, I’ve never ever seen the Channel islands so clearly with the naked eye, and with the BIG NIKON D500 and the 18-300mm ZOOM LENS it all looked even more clear

It’s tempting me, if I remember, to go out with the tripod tonight if the wind has dropped to an acceptable level

and it wasn’t just on the footpaths and the lawns around here that there were plenty of people either this afternoon.

The severe storms that we have had just recently, such as Storm Alex and what went of before it have certainly shaken up the sea bed and who knows what they have unearthed? And so that’s another reason for the people doing the peche à pied to be out there this afternoon, over and above the beautiful weather and the very low tide today.

And I hope that they share the catch with all of their friends and neighbours. After all, one shouldn’t be selfish with one’s shellfish.

And so I left the viewpoint overlooking the beach and walked on along the Rue du Nord, and down the footpath underneath the walls. Too many people about today to go for my run so I shelved that until this evening.

There was quite an assortment of items to note going on this afternoon on the beach at the Plat Gousset and down all the way past Donville les Bains.

In the foreground we have the medieval fish trap (at least, I’m assuming that it’s medieval). The water flows over the walls when the tide is coming in and when it retreats it leaves behind a large pool of water in which, in theory, there should be fish trapped which the inhabitants can then pull out with their hands.
Plenty of people out there too, including more pecheurs à pied
The bouchot farm. These are mussels that instead of growing in the sand, somehow manage to grow on the strings that are attached to those poles. These are supposed to be something of a delicacy because with not having been in the sand, they aren’t anythign like as gritty. I once talked to one of the ropes and asked him about the affair. He told me that at first he didn’t like the bouchots but then after a while they began to grow on him.
More pedestrians
The caravan park, with the airfield behind it
The Church of Bréville sur Mer

It beats me sometimes where all of these people come from because as well as the crowds milling around on the footpaths etc., there are also quite a few loitering around on the promenade at the Plat Gousset.

You can see that all of the beach changing cabins on the promenade are no longer there, having been taken away for winter storage a couple of weeks ago. And that’s just as well because had they still been there the other night they would have been smashed to matchwood with the force of the waves that were sweeping up over the wall onto the promenade.

There are one or two people on the beach as well, but not as comfortably-installed as they were last weekend with their folding chairs.

Anyway, I left them to it and wandered off through the Square Maurice Marland where I was engaged in conversation with a boy about three years old.

At the viewpoint overlooking the port, I could see that one of the Joly France ferries to the Ile de Chausey, the newer one with the smaller upper superstructure, is there whereas the other one looks as if it might be out at sea.

But it wasn’t that which caught my eye, it was the seaweed in the dock. The storm has clearly devastated the sea bed, as I suspected that it might, and the tidal current has been so strong that it’s brought the seaweed right into the head of the harbour.

That must have been some storm.

Football tonight on the internet tonight again. And Sgorio is still having problems with its service. Apparently the English-language stream stalled and while they were fixing it they transferred the viewers over to our Welsh language stream. And the presenter apologised to the English-speakers – IN WELSH.

As for the match itself, it was Cardiff Metropolitan v Caernarfon Town.The Met had 60% of possession, 15 corners compared to the 5 of the Cofis and a dozen shots on goal compared to the 4 of the opposition. When the Met were awarded a penalty early in the game those of us who were watching were saying “here comes the first of many”.

However Josh Tibbetts in the Cofis goal saved it, and from then on the result was predictable. The Met could still be playing out there all alone right now on an empty pitch and they would still be unable to score. As for Caernarfon, three of their four shots went into the back of the net, to produce one of the most unlikely results that I have ever seen.

The Met had a right-winger out there – a young lad called Liam Warman. I’ve not seen him before but he impressed me considerably tonight and I’ll be looking out for him again.

Despite what I said earlier, I didn’t get out with the tripod tonight.

When the weather brightened up earlier this afternoon as it did, I reckon that it must have simply been the eye of the storm, because it’s back, and with a vengeance too. So well wrapped up and in my waterproof jacket (and how I wish I’d taken my waterproof trousers too) I went out to take a photo or two of the storm.

And if you are wondering about the dreadful quality (because they really are dreadfully blurred and over-exposed) there was a wind blowing at over 100 Km/H and a driving, torrential rainstorm right into the lens of the camera and I had to do the best that I could.

While I was out there, I noticed that there was no-one else whatsoever taking advantage of the view tonight.

That’s hardly surprising because I don’t think that I’ve ever been out in such dreadful weather. There was no chance whatever of going around the headland so instead I went back around the walls. It was impossible – absolutely impossible to run down the path as I usually do. Not only was this absolutely awful headwind and driving rain, but the path was about two inches deep in water.

That meant that I had to pick my way gingerly around, which wasn’t easy as I had the hood of my raincoat pulled firmly down and I couldn’t really see where I was going.

Eventually, after many difficulties, I reached the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset.

Here, I was being battered and buffetted by a blinding blizzard of rain and I could hardly see a thing. But I’d caught glimpses of the spray as I walked around the path and you could hear the noise of the waves smashing down on the promenade for miles, so I knew that it was going to be a good one.

Basically, it was just a case of waiting for a really loud crash, counting to three to give the spray enough time to make it high into the air, and then pressing the shutter blindly, hoping that something would work out. And, quite frankly, it was something of a failure altogether but you can’t have everything. Ideal conditions and nothing to photograph – miserable and depressing conditions and lots of excitement.

isn’t it always like that?

Having stuck it out for as long as I could and with rivers of rain running down the back of my jacket and soaking my legs through to the bones, I headed off for home, thanking the heavens that there had been no football in the area tonight that I might have gone to see.

The Square Maurice Marland was pretty well sheltered so I managed to run all the way across there and even halfway up the second ramp. I need to try my best to keep my heart working. But the final run that I do – from the church back home, there wasn’t any possibility of attempting it tonight in that wind. And I was right yesterday about the wind tunnel. The howling gust coming up there as I walked past almost bowled me over.

Back here I’ve written up my notes and that’s that. Sunday tomorrow and a day of rest too. No cooking or baking either (except for the usual pizza) because I shan’t be here for a few days. I might stretch myself and, having defrosted the fridge today, defrost the freezer tomorrow.

In this weather, it’s not as if there’s any danger of anything defrosting, is it?

Tuesday 29th September 2020 – I’VE BEEN REALLY …

… busy today, for a change.

And it started off quite early too when I was up and about long before the third alarm wet off. Mind you, I’m not quite sure how because when I listened to the dictaphone, I was amazed.

While you admire the photos of the tide coming in onto the Plat Gousset I’d been off on my holidays somewhere around the north-west of England but my holidays were over and it was now time to go back to work. Instead of going back to work I set off for the Welsh coast. People started to talk “well, the THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR is coming in there, isn’t she? It looks like you’re going off on another voyage with her”. Although I hadn’t booked anything, that was indeed my plan to get down there, speak to the people and see where they would end up taking me – hopefully get a flight out from there to the High Arctic. But the closer I got to the coast I began to realise that the question of payment – it’s not cheap and most of my money is in my English bank account and I can’t remember the number or the contact details and I don’t have the little machine with me, so how was I going to pay for all of this? But I was still looking forward to going. I was within a couple of days of my retirement. I was planning on retiring soon in which case the question of getting any extra time off didn’t really matter very much. This latter part is a dream that i’ve had so many times – being at work and being retirement age and for one reason or other I could just get fed up, turn round and walk away.

Some time later I was at work and the question of some kind of qualification came up. We all trooped round to my sister’s house. It was overrun with kittens, totally untidy. everywhere you tried to sit you had a kitten on you, something like that. In the end we hardly dare do anything. We had to take a photo of a particular page in a booklet with this woman’s identity – she had a ring with a special seal on it. We needed this ring in view on top of the image and we could use that as proof that we’d done this course and had this qualification although we hadn’t. When it came to my turn to take the photo I couldn’t get my camera to work. Everyone was becoming quite impatient. In the end someone took the form and took this woman off so they could photograph it for themselves.
At another point we were in the army, a big group of us. We were slowly on the advance through this town. There wasn’t very much pressure – it seems that we’d had quite a clean sweep of this. We were pushing on through and came round a bend. A couple of groups in front of us had disappeared round this bend. We came round this bend and as we did so a couple of soldiers came over a railway bridge or something. Their uniforms didn’t look like ours. Suddenly the commander said “God, these are Russians!”. They saw us as we saw them. They opened fire and we ran, we lost a couple of men. In the end we got back to the little square where there were barricades erected. We got in behind the barricades. I sent two soldiers off down a side street because it was possible that we could be outflanked down this street. I sent these soldiers off with a machine gun and told them to dig themselves in and if anyone came just send them a stream of machine gun fire. They seemed very reluctant to go and I had to shout at them to get them to move. They still didn’t move with any kind of enthusiasm. I ran back to find that our compound had been under attack but we had pushed them back. They’d gone and they hadn’t come back as yet. The commandant was giving orders about this and that. We were talking about being supplied by sea in which case this little post that I’d set up needed some kind fof reinforcement for that was between us and the sea. We started to discuss all of this and I awoke in a fever.

We were all in this compound (this was later, by the way) and there were people milling around downstairs in this kind of open-plan office type of place on a floor below. It turns out that they were selling tickets for something – it might have been a Connah’s Quay football match. I was going to ask if the people at the desk wanted a cup of tea for I was going to make a pot. I had to wait my turn in the queue before I could get to see them as there was a big queueing arrangement. When I got there there were 5 of them working there but I’d only seen 2. They all said “yes we want tea” and how many sugars they wanted. I thought “I don’t have much chance of remembering all of that”. But I asked them again to make sure. There was too much water in my kettle so I tipped some out. That brought some kind of strange look from some of them but I went off to make this pot of tea. There was some kind of headlines on the radio about it but there was a huge discussion about the outpost. they were suggesting that this outpost be pushed further south and they were poring over maps for it. Out technical in command said that we already had one. It was called Preston Central and explained about the Preston railway station, how it had been relocated in the past to allow a junction for a few lines and how it had been reinforced, how lots of industry and so on had started to congregate around it. he seemed to think that this was vitally important for this industry and laid claim to the fact that Preston Central should be our outpost

From there I was somewhere around Knutsford/Manchester Airport with my brother of all people. We’d been to some kind of exhibition or village fete or something like that. We were all in this huge hall. Who should we bump into but Nerina. The 3 of us ended up having quite a lengthy chat and it all came to be quite a friendly situation. We all then had to go and get some breakfast next morning so we went down to this place where all these people were congregating, hordes of them, but somehow we lost Nerina. She must have gone to get some breakfast. We’d seen a stall with all fruit buns and things like that on it but there was a proper breakfast place. In the end I said that I’d stay where we are. He can go off and get breakfast and I’ll wait here and we’ll all meet up here again. Off he went and I was on my own, and waited for hours! We’d been given some complimentary glasses of tea and we’d had a few sips out of them. They were on the table but I got up to stretch my legs. When I came back my tea had gone – someone had cleared it away. I said something pointed about this and a guy at the table next to me was one of the organisers. He didn’t really take much notice so I had a good moan about this, saying “it’s a good job that it’s free or I’d make a fuss about this”. Eventually, after a very long wait, my brother came back with a plate with about half a dozen potato crisps on it. I asked “what’s happening now?”. he replied “they’d run out and I wasn’t going to wait any more. I had to wait long enough as it was”. I asked “have you seen Nerina?” “No!”. I started to mention this stall with all this bread on it but he didn’t seem to be particularly interested. I said “we can get some chips on the way home”. He said” what? Round by the airport?”. I replied “we’re going Knutsford, Holmes Chapel Sandbach, Crewe way home, aren’t we?” so we set off. I found that I had Nerina’s phone number on my phone so I phoned but there was no answer. I left it for a minute and phoned again – still no answer. In the end there was no other solution but we had to go home and hope that she would make it home OK without any problems. We set off, the two of us, on foot. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember it now. We ended up in some kind of square and there were loads of people milling around. Someone we knew there said something like “let’s have a coffee”. There was a huge urn of tea or something and he went to get the ladle out but we couldn’t find a clean mug – no clean mugs anywhere. Someone said “God, yes. The mugs gave out ages ago”. I thought “I’m not having much luck today!”

It’s surprising that I managed to awake as early as I did. In fact, the more that I think of it, I must have caught myself as I was on my way back home.

Even more so, last night I didn’t go to bed as early as I expected. I wasn’t tired so in order to profit from my lack of fatigue I pushed on and finished off the radio programme before going to bed, so that at least there was something out of the way.

First thing after I’d finished transcribing the dictaphone notes (which took longer that you might think) was to revise my Welsh and then have a quick tidy around ready for my lesson. That’s the problem with these Zoom meetings – when you’re on the screen everyone else can see all about you.

After lunch I decanted the latest batch of Kefir. That’s all that I’m doing for now – simply because I don’t have any more figs. When I’d decanted it I whizzed up a couple of oranges, extracted the juice and then ran everything through a series of sieves and filters.

That’s now having its second fermentation, and the first batch made with the strawberry juice is now in the fridge ready for use.

All of that took me up to the afternoon. Time to go out for my walk.

There was plenty of wind, although not as much as there has been, and it was quite cold too. There were a few things going on out at sea too. Here we have a yacht battling hard against the wind, with a speedboat roaring past showing just how efficient modern technology can be at times.

It’s not the same as sail, that’s for sure, but you don’t run much risk of being becalmed, except if you run out of fuel. At least, with a steam engine, you could burn bits of the boat.

Further along the path, I was pretty much alone. Just the odd person here and there out on the path.

Out on the sea, there were a few more boats dotted around in the English Channel between the Ile de Chausey and the Pointe du Roc. We have one of the trawler-type fishing boats on its way back into the port with today’s catch.

As well as that, there’s a speedboat coming back over from the Ile de Chausey.

There were probably a few others out there too but the low cloud and mist prevented me seeing right out to the horizon.

There were no brats out there this afternoon – looks as if the orienteering classes have now finished. I was enjoying watching them, remembering my own childhood experiences in orienteering.

But round the other side of the headland, I had a good look at what was going on in the chantier navale. From the heady days of as many as eight of the boats in there up on ramps, we’ve now come down to just two.

A couple more seem to have gone back into the water today, including the one that had been on the blocks by the portable lift.

And we have another visitor in port today, someone whose arrival I have been expecting for a couple of days.

Having come in on the high tide today, Normandy Trader is now moored up at the quayside underneath the unloading crane. There is nothing actually going on there right now so it looks as if she’s been unloaded and loaded back up already.

All of this points to a rapid getaway on the evening tide. One thing that I’ve noticed is that these days, with no passenger ferries operating, the two little freighters have plenty of work and they don’t hang around for long.

We can’t go for too long without a photo here or there about the bad parking that goes on round about the College Malraux – the local high school.

Here in the Boulevard Vaufleury we have someone parked up on the pavement right by the pedestrian crossing at the bottom of the road that leads to the college.

The Boulevard Vaufleury is a service-bus route and coming in the other direction is the fleet of school buses that pick up the kids to take them home.

Furthermore, there is a public car park across the road, not even 20 yards further on from where the car is parked.

As well as the kefir, I’d made some bread dough that had been proofing. I shaped them into small buns and left them to proof again while I did some more photos of the Spirit of Conrad.

When they were ready I bunged them into the oven and left them to cook while I cleaned up the mess that I’d made.

When I took them out, I noticed that they had been overcooked. 25 minutes seems to be far too long for them and I shall have to refine my technique for my next batch, whenever that might be.

After the hour on the guitar, I went for tea. A burger with pasta and vegetables with tomato sauce, followed by the strawberry turnover that I had made.

Then it was time to go out and about for my evening walk.

The wind had dropped and the sun had long-since set, but from the viewpoint overlooking the Rue du Nord I could see a beautiful sky right over the Ile de Chausey and it looked absolutely magnificent.

We could see the light of the lighthouse shining quite brightly, and also several lights of boats that are anchored off the island. Whether they are there for the night or whether they are fishing boats out there at work, it’s impossible to tell

From the viewpoint I ran on down the path underneath the city walls. One or two other people were around there so for a part of my travels I wasn’t alone.

The lights of Donville-les-Bains were glittering very brightly and their reflection in the sea looked quite wonderful. And from there I walked on around the corner to the viewpoint over the Place Marechal Foch to have a look at how the tide was doing.

No-one else about now so I ran on down across the Square Maurice Marland. I can get all the way down there and all the way up the first ramp at the end.

Mind you I have to stop and catch my breath at the end, and from there, there’s a nice view over the harbour.

There’s a trawler-type of fishing boat anchored over there on one of the pontoons that the commercial yachts use, and I’ve no idea why it would be tied up over there. It has all of its work-lights on too and that is bizarre too.

And I was right about Normandy Trader too. As you can see, the loading berth is empty. The harbour gates haven’t been open long but nevertheless she has made a smart getaway.

Yesterday, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I mentioned that I hadn’t seen Minette, the old dark tortoiseshell cat, for quite a while.

And so it goes without saying that tonight, here she is sitting on the steps outside her front door. She let me stroke her for a few minutes and then she wandered off.

And me? I wandered off too – ran the final length back home to clock up the metres and the percentages on my fitbit.

Back here, I had a surprise with the kefir. The instructions say that on the second fermentation, the bottles need to be opened regularly to let out the excess gas that’s been created.

Accordingly, I opened the bottle of strawberry kefir, and the fountain that was produced would have put Vesuvius to shame and would have launched the Space Station.

Perhaps I ought to open the bottles more regularly that once every day, or maybe it’s because the first fermentation isn’t complete

Whatever it was, I ended up having to wash down the kitchen and I’ll have to change my clothes in the morning.

Sunday 27th September 2020 – IT’S SUNDAY …

… and a day of rest is called for today. Which is just as well after my late finish last night.

So while you admire tonight’s moon over the bay, I lay in until just after 10:00. That’s a good idea as far as I’m concerned, especially when you’ve travelled as far as I had during the night.

This was a big, long dream last night but I can only remember a little of it. It was in a fish and chip shop and I was waiting for my meal. Someone in front of my had ordered a chinese cabbage and a girl very similar to Marie Warke (what’s she doing making a dramatic appearance in my nocturnal voyages after 35 years?) was serving behind the counter. She prepared this Chinese cabbage absolutely, really nice. I thought that it was an absolute work … “or warke” – ed … of art how she prepared all of this. Beforehand we were talking about football. The question of women’s football came up. In the Puy de Dome they had 5 or 6 womens football teams. That had me remembering the time a few years ago when I tried to start up a women’s football league. The first one, I went to Gouttières to the football club there (which there isn’t) and asked them if anyone think that it’s a possibility to start a women’s football league and does anyone want to join? The guy there drew on a blackboard the addresses of the mairie at Pionsat, St Gervais, Teilhet, somewhere in the Allier and then somewhere else in the Puy de Dome but a long way away – no, not Pionsat, somewhere else fairly local. Pionsat were quite strong in this women’s league so I was surprised that he hadn’t actually thought of Pionsat when he made out this little list for me.
A short while later there we were back in the Auvergne. There was a big group of us and we’d set out on foot walking from Gouttières (Gouttières again?). The guy in charge was leading this big party. We were all to do with the football team on tour, like the Ireland under-21s. I’d just seen them playing at Gouttières. There was one boy, dubbed “the new Pélé” who quite impressed me. Off we set and we walked into the mountains. This guy leading, something like Thierry, was very dynamic and determined ane eventually we found what he was looking for, a whole series of names that had been carved into the ground. If we stood on a certain viewpoint we could look below us and see all of these names carved out. He was told that his name, Meaux, had been carved on there so we had a look at all these names carved into the ground but couldn’t see it. There were hundreds of names in these rolling hills but there was nothing. Only half had been uncovered so maybe it was in the half that was still covered. he was bitterly disappointed after coming all this way that he couldn’t find his name. Then we ended up talking about the team and the Ireland under-21s. This boy came up and I said “Oh I’ve seen him. I thought that he was pretty good”. They asked when I had seen him so I mentioned some ordinary match in which he might have appeared. I didn’t want to say that I had seen him at Gouttières because that was supposed to have been behind closed doors. Again there was still a lot more to it than this

A little later on I was with Nerina at a family party (and knowing my family, this was probably a fête worse than death). It started at 19:30 and we all had to be at this hall by then but we were all still messing around at home. A huge group of us, all different members of the family. It wasn’t until about 09:15 or something that we decided that we had all better go. They were handing out all of the parcels to take and put a lot of stuff in my mitt and I couldn’t manage it all. In the end I just had to take the ones that had handles. I staggered with those and there was my vehicle which was a pickup, something like a Morris 1000 pickup. I put everything in the back of it, but it was looking strange. I knew that I had some trouble with the suspension on it so I thought that the suspension had collapsed. Meanwhile someone else had put some more stuff in the back of my pickup. He had a look and said something “you can’t get this type of S engine any more, can you? It’s getting to be as rare as a big Morris”. I didn’t want to tell him that it was just an ordinary standard engine in here but that got me thinking “why don’t I fit a big Morris engine in it, one of the 1622cc engines?”. Nerina got into the vehicle with me and I let the cluthch out. There was a mighty crash and bang and the vehicle swayed around. I suddenly realised why the vehicle was looking so peculiar. I’d had it up on a set of wooden ramps and I hadn’t realised. I’d just driven right off the end of the ramps. There the ramps were, and chains that held it, all bent and sprawled out in the street. I had to get out and pick them up. There was traffic behind that couldn’t get past me while I was doing it.
Somewhat later still we’d all been to a party. There were dozens of people around here and there were all kinds of things going on. While I was there the bathroom was in a hell of a state so I decided that I would tidy it up and throw away a load of stuff that was in there in this person’s house. I had an ulterior motive in that there was a washing machine there and I had a bag of dirty clothes so I stuck all of my washing into their machine while I was doing it. everyone else was doing something. Then I heard a couple coming back up, absolutely fuming and furious. “That’s the last time I ever come to this house and the last time I ever speak to this guy again. I was looking closely at the die he was using with this card game and it had ‘left hand’ on it. You don’t normally have dice with right and left hand written on it unless there’s something crooked going on with them”. So they were watching and he’d been cheating. Slowly the party broke up and my washing was still going and I still had this bathroom in a terrible state, even worse than it was before I’d started tidying it. I had to get this organised and the washing was still going and they were saying “why do people do this kind of thing?” I said “it’s the power, isn’t it? It all comes from having a repressed childhood, all of this kind of thing”. Some guy was standing there saying “oh, absolutely. Totally! I agree with every word you say”. Of course it didn’t dawn on me until later that he was the guy they were talking about. Someone else came in, a nice woman, and I wanted to go and have a chat to her, but someone else was chatting to her saying “so this is Claire’s mother” pointing to a young girl I’d met before. There were all kinds of other people chatting to me saying “let’s go and find a quiet corner for a chat”. In the end my washing was ready so I got it out of the machine and stuck it in a bag and just put the toilet back, stuck it in its socket. Then we were all ready to go. But the topic of this conversation was this guy’s cheating when he was playing.

Is it any wonder that I needed a lie-in after all of that?

First task this morning was to write up my notes and that took me almost until lunchtime. I’d had quite a lively day yesterday.

After lunch I made the dough for my pizza bases and while I was at it, I also made a pie base. There was some pastry left over from that so I made a strawberry turnover with a couple of my frozen strawberries.

While the pizza dough was proofing I came in here and attacked the dictaphone notes – and that was a labour of love too.

There was the break in the afternoon’s activities such as they were, so that I can go on my afternoon walk.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday I mentioned that the diving platform at the Plat Gousset has been removed. As I walked around the path underneath the walls I could see what they have done.

The post is still there – it would need some decent equiment to move that – but the crown, where all the kids congregate, has been taken away for the winter. They won’t have too many people swimming out there now until the late Spring, especially if the weather is as cold and windy as it is today.

We’re used to seeing crowds of people promenading up and down the Plat Gousset regardless of the weather.

However, today there were very few people taking the air down there. the little vertical-axis wind turbine was going round like the clappers this afternoon in the gale that was blowing. It’s not as windy as it was yesterday but it’s still pretty impressive.

The wind turbine was apparently installed to provide the electricity for the street lighting on the Plat Gousset but I’ve not heard if it’s actually in working order and performing its task.

Across the Square Maurice Marland I went, where I was hit by the full blast of the wind and had to struggle to reach the other side.

There were a couple of brave souls out there in yachts this afternoon and they were canting over impressively in the onslaught. They were the only ones out there and that is hardly any surprise.

As a result I didn’t hang around there very long. I headed off back to the apartment and the warmth and to carry on with my culinary activities for the rest of the afternoon.

By now the pizza dough had risen nicely so I divided it into three, greased two of them and put them in the freezer.

The third one I rolled out and put in the greased pizza tray, folding the edges back over again to make a nice compact edge. That I put on one side.

While I was making the pastry, I noticed that a football match was starting on the internet. A JD Cymru Ladies Premier match between Swansea and Cardiff.

The last ladies’ football game that I saw, leaving aside the kids’ game in Granville a few years ago, wasIN BURLINGTON, VERMONT in 2015 and I was quite impressed by that.

This game was even better than that. Swansea were excellent value for their 3-0 victory and some of their players, especially the two attackers, would fit in with a couple of the mens’ teams. Granville could certainly do with forwards like that.

If SGORIO decides to continue to broadcast the ladies’ matches, I’ll probably make the time to watch them.

Back in the kitchen I quickly made the pastry for my pie case and bunged it in the oven to cook, along with a strawberry turnover that I’d made with the left-over pastry.

My attention then turned to the pizza base. I made my pizza with what was to hand (I’d forgotten to buy any peppers at the weekend) and when the pie base was cooked I put the pizza in the oven.

30 minutes later, it was cooked to perfection and it tasted absolutely delicious. Quite filling too, and I didn’t need any pudding after that. The rice pudding can wait until tomorrow.

Next was the kefir.

The fig had risen to the top – the sign that fermentation had worked correctly. I decanted the liquid off and filtered it and put it into a stoppered bottle that I’d disinfected, making sure that the kefir grains went back into the mother solution.

The frozen strawberries that I’d bought on Thursday, they had been defrosting all day so I drained off the juice and added it to my kefir along with three or four strawberries. That’s now having its second fermentation

Back outside for my evening walk and , having forgotten that I’d been around the walls this afternoon, I went that way again.

The wind was still quite strong but not as strong as it was earlier, so I was able to fit in all of my runs. I was quite on my own too because there was no-one else out there.

That meant that I had the moonlight all to myself. The clouds were scudding across the sky quite quickly in the wind and when the moon was clear the reflection off the sea was even more impressive than it had been yesterday.

By the time I’d finished running into the headwind across the Square Maurice Marland I was pretty exhausted so I stopped to catch my breath.

The leaves are falling rapidly from the trees already and so the lighting effect on the trees was even more beautiful that it has been in the past.

On the way home I bumped into the itinerant. he’s still wandering around the town so I told him that really he ought to be talking to someone in the Mairie. He reckons that he’ll be fine, but I’m not convinced.

But it’s his decision, not mine.

Back at the apartment I took the pie case and filled it with the strawberries.

Then I mixed some agar-agar – quite strong because strawberries are quite acidic – and poured it over the top to make a kind of gelatine.

Being a strong solution, it set quite rapidly and now it’s in the fridge where I’ll be eating lumps off it for the next week or so, along with some of the coconut soya dessert.

But now it’s quite late – I’ve done a lot of work today and hardly stopped. It’s not like me to be working like this, especially on a day of rest like this.

Now I’m going off to bed, later than I was hoping. And I’ll be back at work tomorrow where I’ll be hoping to have a rest from the relaxing Sunday that I’ve just had.

Tuesday 8th September 2020 – THIS EVENING …

… I have seen something that has caused me a great deal of disquiet.

There was an ambulance and police car in the rue Cambernon here and about half a dozen people, ambulancemen and police, were struggling with a hysterical adolescent girl to put her into the ambulance.

There was no clue as to what had caused the incident, but her hysteria was way beyond the norm and quite suggestive of some kind of stupefiant-ignited issue although of course from the distance at which I was observing the affair and the fact that it was in the dark, there was nothing other than the audible indication to promote this idea.

But whatever it was, my hat goes off to the police and ambulancemen. It was a very stressful event, quite a battle to put her inside and strap her in, and they showed far more patience and discipline than I ever would have done.

It goes without saying that it’s not the kind of incident that one photographs, but it’s still bad news when the affairs of the banlieux of Paris come to, quite literally, our own doorstep.

As for me, much to my and everyone else’s surprise, I was out of bed before the third alarm went off. At least – I was sitting on the edge of the bed trying to summon up the courage to take some kind of drastic action, like moving.

Once I’d gathered my wits, I had a listen to the dictaphone.

I was on a galleon last night, one of these Spanish galleon things with crowds of people on it, a big tourist attraction. I was there with a certaib lady of my acquaintance. Something happened, me being careless I think, and she ended up with a sea-full of face – or, more likely, a face full of sea. I said that I was sorry but she started to whine on and on and on in this silly voice that she had, mimicking what I was saying so on that point I’d had enough so I just turned round and walked away. She changed her tune afterwards, apologised and asked me to come back but I’d really had enough so I just walked off. There was someone climbing up a ladder into the rigging of this ship. He was carrying a tray with about 10 different drinks on it. I thought that that was adventurous. I wouldn’t even do that with two. I was wandering around this ship, trying to find my way around and try my best to totally ignore her while she was still having one of these tantrum display things. There were some people sitting down – I was wondering whether to go to sit with them but I thought “no. I really want to be somewhere quite a way from this end of the ship somewhere on my own”.
Somewhat later we were having a look at some photos last night about all of the abandoned properties around Crewe and Nantwich, places like the old Co-op brewery and so on, a lot of them with photos of abandoned cars on them. There were several in Nantwich, three of them being churches close together in Hospital Street and their congregations transferred to the main parish church there. These churches, one of which was called St Werburgh’s, were all very eerie but very magnificent, Victorian Gothic-type but in terrible states of disrepair and decay. Even though I don’t remember them as a kid (because they weren’t there) we were having a good prowl around these places last night in this dream. It was really quite interesting. On one occasion we ended up being at a church service. They came along and asked for a collection. The girl I was with said she didn’t have anything and I just had a few copper coins that I gave them. later, we were on a railway station watching the trains come in. We moved away but a train had pulled in so I prepared my camera to take a photo. As it pulled out another one, a magnificent really big powerful locomotive pulled out of this station hauling an express train so I went to take a photo of them with the NIKON 1 J5 as it pulled out of the station but it wouldn’t work at first. I had to press the shutter a couple of times for it to work. While I was doing this there was some woman standing nearby. She was excited because she could see the main railway station from here. I thought that she meant the one at Manchester which was quite some way away and you can’t see with the naked eye, but bathed in fog anyway. But she said “no, it’s Denton station! Look over there! So I looked over there but I couldn’t see it at all with my naked eye.

Having dealt with all of that, I finally got round to having a look at Sunday’s effort. And after a good deal of listening, of thought and of transcription I managed to sort something out and you can READ IT HERE.

Surprisingly, even though I had the strongest impression that Pollux was one of the people with me, there was no mention whatever of her name at all, so I’ve no idea where this impression comes from. Mind you, there are several minutes missing here and there, either because

I didn’t dictate it (there seems to be a hole in the middle of the story somehow).
I didn’t transcribe it because I couldn’t decipher it (there was some of that too)
I didn’t type it out because there was a significant part of the voyage that would put you off your tea. And there seems to have been quite a bit of that just recently. I’ve been having some really disturbed – and disturbing – nights just recently.

As I was finishing everything, which had taken me long enough, someone with whom I wanted a chat appeared on the internet. We ended up having a lengthy chat and that was, basically, the morning finished.

After lunch I set about the radio programme. All of the tracks have been paired and combined and the text is written. Not dictated though because I ran out of time.

There had been a few interruptions during the afternoon.

First of all, there was the afternoon walk in the beautiful pleasant if not slightly windy afternoon.

There wasn’t all that much activity out there at sea this afternoon. Whatever that big ship was yesterday, that’s cleared off and there was only a speeedboat roaring past out at sea.

They are clearly going far too fast for fishing and I can’t think of any other good reason why they would be out there this afternoon. It’s not as if there’s anywhere to go in that direction.

In theory I suppose that they might be heading towards shore because there is something exciting going on over there on the beach by the looks of things.

We saw the other day that the bouchot harvesters were out there on the mussels beds at Donville-les-Bains. Over there on the beach bear Breville-sur-Mer they seem to be gathering again.

They are quite possibly waiting for the tide to go out so that they can access the mussels beds over there too. I doubt that the cabin cruiser there has any involvement in the activity.

They are probably local fishermen, because there have been quite a few of those out there over the last week or 10 days. There are plenty of mooring buoys and pot markers out there right now.

And plenty of other fishermen too. While I was walking along the path on the north side of the promontory a boat came around the headland. They are clearly intent on fishing as they have rods and fishing nets clearly on display.

It beats me why, because I have yet to see anyone out there ever catch anything.

My route arounf the headland took me past the viewpoint overlooking the chantier navale.

And there was plenty of activity in there once again. The usual seven boats of course – nothing has changed that much. But the fishing boat from which they had been stripping the paint the other day, that’s now in the process of being resprayed.

Give it a week or two and we may well find that boat back in the water. And one or two others because there was a considerable amount of work being carried on on the other boats too.

Back here, another interruption was to deal with the question of Strider’s insurance. That expires in a few days and needs to be paid, even though I won’t probably have the pleasure of going over to Canada to drive him this year.

So this involved several e-mails, a ‘phone call to Canada, a complicated series of transactions with the bank and then a discussion on the internet with Rachel.

That took much longer than I expected and meant that my third interruption, my session on the guitar, was somewhat curtailed.

Tea was my burger on a bap with potatoes and vegetables, followed by a slice of my delicious apple pie and soya dessert.

When I went out for my evening walk it wasn’t quite dark outside.

In the distance out in the English Channel there was a yacht looking as if it was heading towards port. Of course it was far too far out for me to be able to identify it.

There were also plenty of other lights out to sea on the horizon. It wasn’t possible to say anything whatever about those.

Instead, I carried on and ran all the way along the footpath underneath the medieval walls. And, having recvered my breath again I ran across the Square Maurice Marland

During my walk across the Place Cambernon I observed the incident that I related earlier and by the time that I moved on, it was now quite dark.

We’ve seen a couple of fishing boats here and there just recently – not as many as we saw three or four months ago. However there was one coming into port and performing a U-turn to tie up alongside the fish processing plant, presumably to unload its catch.

From there I walked down to the road and then ran all the way home to write up my notes.

And having done that, I’m now ready for bed. A nice early night, finish off the radio programme (which might take all day) and then do some tidying up

There is still plenty of work to be done and I’m not really catching up with very much at all. That needs to be changed, and rapidly too.

Thursday 3rd September 2020 – YOU CAN TELL …

… that the nights are getting longer right now. Summer seems to have left us a long way right now and we are in a slow downward spiral towards winter.

Out on mt stroll tonight, around the city walls tonight, it was quite dark by the time I’d gone around and the street lights across the Baie de Mont St Michel on the Brittany coast were shining quite brightly.

It won’t be long now until i’m out with the tripod, I reckon. It will be the cue to be taking more photos of the night so I’ll have to learn how to use THE NIKON D500 with the delay action shutter.

This morning, much to everyone’s surprise, including my own, I was out of bed before the third alarm went off. Sitting on the edge of the bed in a dazed condition trying to gather my wits together in order to stand up and do something constructive.

I’d been on my travels too. I was out with Nerina again last night. We were looking at a couple of houses that she’d seen on the internet that she was interested in buying. They were round about the £76,000 £78,000 mark in Crewe and were semi-detached but of the smaller type. There was one that was particularly nice and she was looking at it. We found to our surprise that it had three bedrooms which was already something. There was a load of stuff included in the sale, including four kiddies’ bikes and a couple of kiddies’ scooters. She was wondering about those – going to make sure that they were written in the sale. I said “basically if they are there you make sure that they are written in”. She asked “what do you think I’m going to do with a kiddie’s bike?”. There was a pregnant pause as I was trying to work out whether or not I ought to tell her that I knew that she’d had a child or something like that. We had a good look at this house and it looked to be really good value for what it was, one of these 1920s types of small semi-detached houses the type that you would see around Bedford Street, that area, with a drive and a garage. There was a van parked there, like a Ford Escort van only a little bigger parked outside the garage door.
Had I not awoken with a severe attack of cramp at this particular moment, I wonder where this would have gone.
Somewhat later I was teaching some Russian girls gymnastics in the water. It was an established class but it had been allowed to go to rack and ruin, people forgetting to bring their gym clothes with them, forgetting this, forgetting that. I decided that we would have a tidying up of discipline so as soon as the girls came in I made them perform their handstands for me in the water in their uniform, and if they didn’t have their uniform with them they were to go home and fetch it. If they didn’t have a uniform they weren’t to come back until they had one. There were a few other things as well that I wanted cutting out as well. it provoked quite a few sullen disputes but I was insistent on doing this. And I was well on my way to doing it when the first alarm went off.

Once again there was much more to it all than this but as you are probably eating your meal right now, I’ll spare you the miserable details.

After my shower I went out to go to the shops.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the other day that we saw part of the Rue Des Juifs fenced off, and I said that I’d go down and see what was going on.

And as luck would have it, there was a notice on the fencing. Basically, there is an archaeological survey going on right now involving the building and grounds in which the museum is situated.

They seem to think that it dates back to the founding of Granville and the building of the fortifications by the English during the Hundred Years War.

Myy walk up to LIDL was pretty uneventful but I spent quite a lot of money in there, even though there wasn’t anything particular extra that I bought, except for a set of compasses thet I need for measuring precise distances.

And not only that, some of the stuff that I wanted wasn’t available either, so it’s on the list for Saturday and LeClerc.

On the way back, my load was rather heavy and it was a struggle up the hill, that’s for sure.

And as I stopped for breath at the viewpoint overlooking the harbour, La Grande Ancre set sail out of her berth and out of the harbour.

So having recovered my breath I carried on back here. I was too tired to unpack the shopping though. I sat down on my chair and that was that until 13:30. About 2 hours, I reckon that i was right out of it altogether, and it felt like it too.

After lunch there was some more paperwork to do and then I went out for my afternoon walk.

There were plenty of people out there today but as far as photography went, there was nothing particular going on at all.

What there was though was some kind of yacht out there just off the coast of the Ile de Chausey. That looked interesting to I took a photo of it for future reference.

My walk carried on around the headland rather aimlessly and then I came back here.

At my desk I cropped and enlarged the photo that I had just taken. It looks as if it has the same kind of sails and rigging as a boat like la Granvillaise or her sister across the bay, but there is another yacht with a similar rig that sails around here occasionally and it might be her.

After my slice of banana bread, I had a go at the photos from my trip around Europe. I didn’t do too many of those because much of the time was spent doing some research into some of the items that I had photographed.

At 18:00 I knocked off and had an hour on the guitars. And I do like my new acoustic guitar.

Tea tonight was taco rolls with the leftover stuffing, with rice and vegetables followed by rice pudding

For my evening walk today, I went for my trip around the walls.

Looking over towards the Ile de Chausey, I could see a light shining just offshore, not too far away from where that strange yacht was moored this afternoon.

Of course I can’t say that it’s the same boat, but whoever it is seems to be bedded down for the night over there.

A strange cat came up to me tonight for a stroke, and then I set off on my run along the footpath.

This took me to the viewpoint from where there’s a good view over towards Jersey and the Channel Islands.

The view was really good tonight and we can see the light of some kind of boat – probably a fishing boat – working just offshore. What else we can see is a series of red lights just to the right of the white light.

You probably can’t see it in this photo but in an enlarged photo you can see that it’s actually the warning lights on the big radio mast that we have seen in photos of Jersey taken during the day.

Before I went home I did another couple of runs. One across the Square Maurice Marland and the other one down the hill back home. The three runs in total work out at about 850 paces, which equates to about 500 metres.

So now I’m going to have an early night, as much as I can. I’m not going anywhere tomorrow so I’m hoping that I can have a good sleep and then a good day doing a pile of work.

It’s about time too. I’m just falling farther and farther behind.

Wednesday 2nd September 2020 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S …

… little fit of zeal and energy, it goes without saying that today was something of a contre-coup. I felt every ache and pain when I awoke, and I couldn’t get out of bed until 08:10.

Plenty of time to go off on a nocturnal ramble or two, and how!

I had a girlfriend last night and we had gone skiing or mountaineering together. There were four of us in total . It was quite clear that the two of us were together but we hadn’t known each other long. She was just explaining how difficult relationships were because she wasn’t the kind of person to just accept any kind of relationship. She explained how difficult it was to make her laugh and all that kind of thing, how she liked to have someone who was attentive towards her. I thought “that sounds like me actually” but for some unknown reason I couldn’t actually get her to laugh or whatever. We escorted each other on this trip and I got her down the mountain safely. We ended up somewhere just coming into the town and we were told that some old guy whom we knew was at the bar but he’d had the wrong beer so he was rather differently drunk than usual and it wasn’t a pretty sight. We thought that we’d better go over there and see what was going on. We ended up over there to see this old guy but by that time he’d gone. The barmaid asked us if we wanted a drink. I really fancied a drink but she said no she didn’t so I thought that I won’t have one. I won’t drink on my own. There was another girl there and for some reason I wanted to be a little show-offy with the girl I was with but she wasn’t the kind who would be particularly emotional, which was one of the things she had said to me. She said “the barmaid is obviously thinking that we are going to be having a drink so maybe we ought to move away” so reluctantly I agreed to move away with this girl.
Somewhat later on, I went on a voyage concerning two of my mother’s aunts. They had been engaged to work as matrons in some exclusive boarding school place. The small boys in the Preparatory school had been taken away from their fathers and so they weren’t bonding with them and the girls were just left there by there parents. The aunts were very unhappy about the entire situation and they wanted to leave to go into some kind of religious establishment that was there but they decided that they couldn’t leave these children at this very vulnerable time. It was all very sad and all very depressing.
There was another thing too about an island off the coast of Australia or New Zealand, although it looked like Northern peri-Arctic to me, right at the far north. It was all very isolated and there was only a boat every so often that went to the island. It was very isolated. Someone whom I knew was a driving test examiner who came over to give everyone a driving test. It was Nerina, and she was very busy doing all of this. I eventually caught up with her and she pointed out that some had passed and some had failed and she was rather disparaging towards the people who had failed. We were talking about death and she said that when she died she wanted a certain photo to be placed in her memory. It was a photo of her with another boy – someone whom she knew in University. Of course that upset me rather a lot because I expected to be the one on the photo with her when she went but apparently not. There was all kinds of talk. I had had a Reliant three-wheeler van which had long-since gone but I still had the papers for it. I was thinking that with this not being taxed I could get into a lot of trouble with this even though the van was no longer extant. There was some talk as well about getting Ryanair to provide a flight service to the airport, how they were going to arrange it. At one time they were talking on the island about a storm that was heading their way. It had already devastated the south of New Zealand and how were they going to cope up here when the storm finally hit? This was a strange thing as well.
Later still there were two red double-deck buses that appeared on the front of a restaurant or car park of a pub where Terry and I were sitting. One of then was an AEC which might have been a Regal V but it wasn’t – did I mean a Regent V? and the other one was more like an RT although i’m sure that I meant Routemaster from London. Terry wondered what on earth they were doing here so I said that I could soon find out by taking a photo and posting it on the Abandoned Buses group and I’ll have a reply in 5 minutes. But as I went to take a photo, in the time that it took for me to get my phone out and my camera on the phone ready, these buses had disappeared again. I said something to a woman who seemed to be with them but she just blubbered some kind of nonsense and walked away. Terry and I walked to the end of the car park to see if we could see where these buses had gone but we couldn’t see a thing.

It took ages to transcribe the dictaphone notes, as you might expect with all of this, and then I attacked the radio programme. That’s now completed and ready to go.

After lunch I sat down and dealt with a load of correspondence that had built up. I also tried to order a SSD hard-drive for my little Acer laptop but the effects of Brexit are biting already, for the company concerned now no longer delivers to the mainland.

So I made another start on the photos from early August but instead I crashed out completely for a couple of hours. On awakening, I felt absolutely awful again, just like I have done for this last while (apart from yesterday of course)

It was thus rather late when I went out for my afternoon walk and once again I went around the headland.

And I’m glad that I did too, because there was this lovely scene unfolding before my eyes, down on the beach. A young couple strolling casually hand-in-hand down there lost for all the world in their own amorous attachment.

It was all very nice and romantic and made me feel quite envious, as it happens.

That wasn’t all the people out there either. There were hordes of people strolling along on the paths around the clifftop.

The sea was quite busy too. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall from yesterday that there were quite a few people out there having a good fishing session. They were still out there today, like these in the zodiac down here.

There was also someone out there having a paddle around in a kayak. I could see his paddles but I couldn’t see if he had a rod with him.

And of course, you mustn’t light a fire in your boat. As you all already know, you can’t have your kayak and heat it.

And if the crowds on the beach, crowds on the paths and crowds in the sea aren’t enough to be going on with, we had crowds in the air too.

As I was walking around, I counted no fewer than four light aeroplanes flying over me. This one here came the closest and so presented the best photographic shot. I’ve no idea what type of aeroplane it is, and the serial number that I could see didn’t come up with anything.

The other aeroplanes were too far away for me to take a clear photograph which was a shame. All that I needed to see was the autogyro fluttering past overhead and the day would have been complete.

It was quite a nice day outside today. It was quite sunny and there was very little wind for a change.

The view was quite clear today too. We’d seen the Brittany coast yesterday, so today we had a good look down towards the bottom of the Baie de Mont St Michel. We can’t see the Mont and the abbey but we can see the white buildings down at the foot of the bay that are the hotels on the shore.

What is extremely interesting is whatever might be there just to the right of centre. It seems to be a very small, low cloud having a rainstorm but I’m sure that it isn’t.

My walk continued on round to the viewpoint overlooking the chantier navale.

There’s been a change in occupancy in there too today. Over the last few days there have been seven boats in there but today we’re down to just six. One of the little chalutiers is missing – presumably having gone back into the water.

It’ll be interesting to see over the next few days whether we’ll be having a new arrival to make up the numbers, or whether it’ll be like 10 green bottles and they’ll be disappearing one by one as everyone slowly goes back to work.

Back here I continued with the photos for a while, and then went back to having an hour on the guitars before tea. And I do like my new acoustic guitar.

Tea tonight was a burger with pasta and tomato sauce, followed by rice pudding. Quite a delicious tea, I have to say.

Running rather late tonight, it was going dark when I went outside for my evening stroll.

The sun had gone right down of course, but there was still a beautiful red glow through the clouds in the sky over by the Ile de Chausey in the English Channel.

Surprisingly, I was the only person out there admiring it. There were no more than half a dozen people out there this evening and they were all walking dogs and the like, taking no notice of the beautiful evening.

From the viewpoint in the rue du Nord I walked along along the walls to the footpath.

And once on the footpath and there was no-one about, I broke into a run and ran down the footpath again, regardless of how I was feeling. The tide was well in this evening and we can see the diving platform practically submerged by the water.

We’ve seen plenty of photos of the diving platform totally out of the water when the tide is well out. This gives you some idea of how far the tide comes in and how high it is. One of the highest tides in Europe, so they say.

having spent a few minutes watching the sea, I walked on round to the Square Maurice Marland.

No-one about at all so I broke into another run and went all the way across the square and up the first ramp at the end. And as I ran along the square, suddenly the lights came on and lit up all of the trees.

It lit up everything just as if it was on the stage in a theatre.

After that I headed off home, running the final 100 metres back to the apartment. I’ve written up all of my notes now and I’m off to bed in a minute.

Tomorrow is shopping day and it’s a long walk to LIDL so I need to be on form, regardless of how I’m feeling, as there’s a few things that I need to buy.

And maybe I’ll have a series of voyages just as exciting as I’ve had for the last couple of nights.

Sunday 9th August 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve had a ship of the day on here?

This time of year we are usually posting one or two every day as we stroll up and down the St Lawrence in Canada. This unfortunately is not the St Lawrence but it’s the best that I can do right now. Right outside the window of tonight’s hotel the River Danube is flowing by and it’s making me quite homesick for the mighty Canadian river.

When I download all of the photos from the camera, edit them and upload them again, you’ll see an enormous cruise ship – a kind of luxury barge – sailing past. Not a 100,000 tonne container ship but it will have to do.

In my really comfortable hotel, the Hotel Minerva in Mosonmagyarovar I had a really good sleep and even though it was Sunday with no alarm, I still awoke at about 05:50.

There was tons of stuff on the dictaphone again. It had been a really busy night

At one point during the night I was somewhere in Eastern Europe in a car, a Sunbeam Alpine convertible. I was driving through the mountains at a really rapid rate of knots but the headlights were set far too high and on main beam you could only see clouds. Dipped beam was set too high as well. I’d been driving around like this doing my best to avoid an accident at night. I suddenly realised that the windscreen was wrong. It was too far sloping back and I was sitting in the wrong position. I organised myself sitting properly and carried on driving. I eventually ended up somewhere where there was a girl. My brother was chatting her up obviously. I had a bit of pastry left so I started making some pastry for a pie and it gradually evolved into a crumble when I added sugar to it although I didn’t actually add any oats. This girl was very interested and came over to talk to me about it. She said “if you have any more interesting recipes let me have them”. I told her that I had dozens, and we had a huge intellectual discussion about my pastry and apple crumble and so on.

Later on, I was away on another voyage but i’ve forgotten half of it. We were .. I’d been out somewhere taxi driving. I had my old Ford Anglia and I dropped some people off in the mountains. I was coming back but I couldn’t get round one of the bends. I had to get out and push the car round. Three guys came to help me so I offered them a lift. They were going all the way to Shavington so I took them there and they booked a taxi for a couple of days time going from Wybunbury to Shavington. I went home and all of the papers were everywhere. My brother and Nerina were going through trying to sort out some kind of system with the paperwork, looking for vehicle records. They had a really good sort through it. I was thinking “I ought to be doing some sorting out while they were doing all of this but I decided in the end that I would start to look at my clothes. I had 2 chests of drawers but I only found 1 drawer with my clothes in it so I wondered where the rest of my things are. I had 2 more chests of drawers somewhere so I went off to have a look through those. While I was doing that there was a young girl, obviously nothing to do with our family having a play around and there were some people admiring some clothes belonging to this girl that were hanging up. I half-expected them to engage me in some kind of conversation but they didn’t. In the end I got on the bus and went to Chester, and walked from Chester towards Wrexham and came to a housing estate of modern terraced houses with a garage on the groud floor, then a first floor and then a second floor. For some unknown reason I thought that this was Brickfield. I was wandering around this estate looking at things and thinking that it would be nice for me to come and live here. Then I heard people talking about how they lived here and the winds and how cold it was so I decided maybe I won’t. I carried on walking a little further but lost all the signposts and I was on a modern 1930s semi-detached type of estate place. I saw a sign for Flint but I thought that i don’t want to go there – i want to head back towards Wrexham so I tried another road. I heard people talking about the Nobel Prize for Literature and how all the people who had entered for this year, and they were saying that if they don’t enter for next year we’ll know that they were just one-hit wonders and not really significant. There was a primus stove and it had been a long time since I’d seen one so I got it and pumped up the pressure and went to try to light it but I couldn’t get the nozzle to work. A guy saw me and came running over the road. It turned out to be his and he was one of these authors. We talked about his live stove thing and he said yes, that he uses it for heat mostly rather than lighting. We had a talk about it aand he went to pump it up, found that it was pumped up and went to light it as well but he couldn’t. he had a kind of Piazzo lighting arrangement where he clicked on the button to light it. I chided him about that. “You really ought to do it with a match”. Someone came along. He had something else and said “you light it with that” but I can’t remember what it was. It turned out that it was all kinds of things like cabbage leaves and so on. I knew exactly what it was and I told him but I can’t remember now. They lit it and started to smoke it and said “yes! This is really good. We had a good chat about that as well.

Going back to sleep, I found myself back in the same dream. So where was I? All the time that this was going on I was thinking that I’d caught the bus to Chester and now I was walking down the road to Wrexham and I’d missed the last bus back by a long time. The only way home for me now was to carry on walking towards Wrexham and then back to Crewe that way. That was going to take me all night at the very least to do all that but I hadn’t even given it any thought about what I was going to do about getting home.

But when I really do get home I’m really going to be having a lot of fun editing all of these photos and transcribing all of the dictaphone notes.

Unfortunately I’m afraid that the days when I could do that during the evening when I arrived at a place of repose are long-since over. Usually now, when I arrive at somewhere for the evening I simply crash out on the bed for an hour or two.

But I digress.

Breakfast was quite nice – not as nice as I had in Lech but nevertheless it was something to be going on with. I didn’t like the coffee but that’s probably more to do with the fact that I couldn’t understand the Hungarian instructions on the coffee machine.

Later on, I headed off for the border in the heat. 09:30 and it was already 31°C. I shudder to think how hot it’s going to be later in the day.

The scenery around this part of Hungary is very flat and monotonous and there wasn’t all that much to see. There were some delightful little Osterreich rural cottages along the way and In the village of Hegyshalom, not far from the Austrian border, there were some splendid examples in the shade of the trees.

The big BMW lets the show down unfortunately. It seems that even in Central Europe the price of a rural cottage is way beyond the means of the average rural-dweller and now the province of the big city-slicker.

But I was surprised at the border. There was all new security fencing with razor wire, a full and complete border patrol and interrogation, and a Romanian lorry being slowly dismantled over on one side.

It reminded me just like the old times pre-1992. Although, interestingly, the old Hungarian border installations from the Cold War days, including the watchtower, were all still there but abandoned, empty and closed up. All of the excitement was on the Austrian side.

This just goes to show you just how much the world has turned round on itself over the last 30 years – something about which I have commented ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS in the past.

Photography is of course not allowed at border crossings but rather unfortunately, I seemed to have forgotten to switch off the dashcam in Caliburn. So when I finally get round to editing the video recordings, we can see my border crossing.

A mere cockstride from the border in Austria I came to the village of Zurndorf, where my attention was drawn to this rather impressive war memorial.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have a great interest in war memorials in Central and Eastern Europe. The political situation here has varied greatly over the centuries as the Austrian Empire dealt with waves of Muslim invaders, grew to its greatest extent with the annexation of Bosnia in 1908 and then disappeared completely in 1938 with the Anschluss.

Consequently, different regions found themselves fighting different wars as well as quite often being on different sides in the same war, so it’s interesting to see all of this reflected on some of the memorials.

This one unfortunately is quite banal – with just a mention of the two World Wars and nothing about the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 or any other conflict in which Austrian troops were involved.

But these monuments in Axis countries are quite different from the monuments in Western countries in a very significant way. In the West, the number of casualties in World War I vastly exceeded the casualties of World War II. But here in Austria, this War memorial shows something quite different as we have seen in many Axis countries.

The upper photo shows the casualties from World War I, and it’s known that the casualty figures of the Central Powers were in a similar region to those of the UK and France. But in World War II when Allied casualties were much less than in the previous war, the caualties of the Axis powers were enormous. The bottom photo shows the casualties from that war, so just compare the two and see what I mean.

There are no dates of death unfortunately, but we have seen on many others that the greater part occurred in the final couple of years of the war. It just goes to show the horrors that were taking place on the Eastern Front in the second half of World War II when the Axis Powers were on the run from the Soviets.

Anyone who denies the overwhelming efforts of the Soviet Union in defeating the Axis Powers unfortunately somewhat misinformed.

In the heat I carried on across Northern Austria. But not too far. Only to the town of Parndorf.

If someone were to ask me whar car I would really like, from anywhere in the world, then if I couldn’t lay my hands on one of Erich Ubelacker’s Tatra 77s, i’d have to go for something like a GAZ M21.

And sure enough, to my surprise, here parked up by the side of the road in Parndorf is a rather sorry-looking M21. Where’s my trailer just when I need it?

GAZ stands, of course for the Gorki Avto Zavod, the Gorki Auto Factory in the Soviet Union, and they were the cars to own if you were anyone in the Soviet Union in the 1960s

Many people have suggested that this was because they were the only car available in the Soviet Union, but that’s doing them a great disservice because they really were a much better car than anyone ever gave them credit with a great many modern features and, unlike cars from the West, were built to last for ever.

One very happy owner of an M21 was the astronaut Yuri Gagarin who often spoke kindly about his car

This particular one is a Series III GAZ M21 Volga – known as the baleen or “whale”. You can tell that by the radiator grille.

They were nominally made from 1962 to 1970 but that’s only half a story. So popular were they with taxi drivers and the like that there was an outcry when the model was withdrawn and a flourishing aftermarket set up where “new” vehicles were assembled from factory spare parts combined with other bits salvaged from scrap yards. I once met someone who had a “new” one that was first registered as late as 1988.

For a short while they were on sale in Belgium, where a diesel conversion was quite popular, but I never found one for sale when I lived there.

So yes, I would bring this one home with me in a heartbeat.

Having satiated my interest for the moment I continued on my way westward.

Not being a fan of big cities when I’m in a hurry, I gave the centre of Vienna a wide berth, even if it is one of my most favourite cities in Europe. But away in the distance I could see it from a suitable vantage point on a low hill to the south so I took a photograph.

It’s a shame though that the photo showed nothing of the city’s magnificence from here. Nothing of the really classical buildings – just more banal late 20th Century high-rise architecture. One of these days whenever its possible to do so, I’m going to catch the overnight train to Vienna and spend a week here.

Through the southern suburbs of Vienna I pushed, and onto St Polten.

For lunch I found a nice shady spot on the edge of a forest and settled down in my comfortable chair in the shade to eat my butties.

I stayed there for a couple of hours too as the heat passed me by. A good book was quite a help, although I ended up drifting away with the fairies at one point.

A little later I picked up the Danube and followed it for a while. And here I ended up in the town of Melk, another place where I would have been happy to spend several hours wandering about had I had the time.

Although the Benedictine Abbey dates from the early years of the 18th Century, it replaced one from the latter part of the 11th Century which in turn replaced a castle owned by Leopold II of Austria. The family of Leopold, the Babenburgs, ruled Austria for another 150 years or so until 1246 and several of the rulers are buried in the Abbey, as is the Irish Saint Colman.

It became a great centre of learning in the Middle Ages and had a magnificent library, although several fires throughout its history have caused irreparable damage to some of the collection. Because of its academic stature, it survived several attempts at dissolution, including the persecution by the Nazis after the Anschluss.

Regular readers of this rubbish will know what this is because you have seen one often enough. There’s ONE SITTING IN THE BACK OF MY WORKSHOP in the Auvergne.

Taking photos of a moving vehicle from another moving vehicle is always a challenge , and I seem to have managed to catch a road sign right in the middle of the photo that obscures half of the car. But what I reckon is that it’s a Traction Avant Lght 7, and with the curly bumpers rather than the straight ones.

And that’s confirmed by the design of the boot lid. Although you can’t see it in this photo, it did indeed have the shape of the spare wheel on the boot lid, being an early model.

For a few miles I followed the Citroen until we crossed over the Danube where he turned right and I turned left.

Having seen the barge on the river – the one that I showed you earlier, I pulled up in a small town further along the river. Behind me up on a hill is the Basilica of Maria Taferl, one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Austria where it is said that a couple of local people made a miraculous recovery from serious illness and injury by praying to Mary.

The current church was built in the second half of the 17th Century to replace an earlier one, and It’s said to contain all kinds of important relics and souvenirs left by pilgrims who have come to visit the site over the centuries

Further along the road I stopped off at one point to put some fuel in Caliburn and shortly afterwards my journey brought me into the small town of Au An der Donau where there’s a luxury hotel, the Donauhotel Lettnerhof, on the banks of the Danube. There are some cheaper rooms down in the basement and one of those was available.

No air-conditioning down there but they supplied a portable fan for me and that works fine. There’s also an ice-cream stall on the river bank with a fine selection of vegan sorbets. Banana and coffee went down really well.

So far I’ve had a shower and washed my clothes, which are currently drying on the fan here. I’m off for an early night and hopefully a good sleep. I’m slowly heading homewards, which is a shame. But I have to go home sometime, I suppose. I can’t drift around for ever.

But interestingly, leaving Eastern Europe filled me full of depression. It always used to do that back in the old days and once again when I WENT TO ZATEC a few years ago.

I’m surprised that it still does make me feel like that. It’s the kind of thing that makes me think that I didn’t make the most of my Freedom of Movement and Freedom to Live Anywhere when I had the chance.

It’s too late now.

Sunday 2nd August 2020 – TONIGHT, I’M IN …

… Munich in Germany.

It’s Sunday today but even so, I set an alarm. Only for 08:00 though as I need to be up and about, breakfasted and gone by 10:00 today.

And despite the later alarm time and the fact that it’s Sunday, I still awoke bolt upright at 06:03. No chance of gtting up at that stupid time. I turned over and went back to sleep until a more reasonable and respectable time.

All of this meant that there was plenty of time for me to go off on my travels again last night and I started off at Rosemary’s. We were discussing kitchen arrangements, cooking, that kind of thing. I ended up swapping slow cookers and letting her have mine in exchange for one of hers because one was a bigger size than the other and I can’t remember now which way round was which. But it suited me to have the one she had and it suited her to have the one that I had so I proposed a swap

Later on I was with Nerina and we were on our travels. We came to a freighter that was going to take us on to somewhere but we suddenly realised that we didn’t have any insurance and there was no security patrol or anything on board this ship so I had to set off leaving Nerina with the car in this queue to run down the road and came to some kind of insurance place. I went in and it really was a dive. The people there were dirty and certainly weren’t clerical types at all but I explained what i wanted. They went away and came back with a green form. I gave them a £20 note and they gave me £12-something back and a box of chocolates. I had to run back to the car because they would be loading by this time. I’d told them in the insurance what was happening about this and what I wanted. So I ran back and came to these steps and had to run all the way up these steps, stone narrow steps and i was counting them as I went up. I got to 60 but I was still running up these steps and still going and I came round the corner and a couple of kids were playing right by the edge of this cliff drop which I thought was a bit strange. There were still more steps and I had to keep on running up here to try to get back to where Nerina was with the car, carrying the change in my hand, this green card, this box of chocolates

Finally, I was a bit loaded up last night. I had all of my holiday gear with me including the camera. I ended up with a guitar and I had a long way to walk. I was hoping that I would find somewhere where I could leave the guitar and come back for it later. My first idea was the church so I went there but it was all locked up. I was wondering what to do and someone else told me that there was another church further on downtown. I walked down there and came across some kind of building and the church was built on the back of that. I went round the back there just as the policeman was locking up the door ready to go away. I thought “forget that” and continued walking. I suddenly had this thought “what have I done wiht my camera?” I had a search among the stuff that I was carrying and in the end found that the camerz was slung around my neck but for some unknown reason it was underneath my jumper. At least I had it. I had to carry on walking towards where I was going to go and that was where this voyage broke off.

After breakfast it didn’t take too long to pack and tidy everything up, and by 10:00 I was on the road heading northwards.

The weather had started off as a gloomy morning and that didn’t help my mood. And neither did all of the grockles driving around at about 20mph admiring the scenery. They might have had nothing better to do, but I did.

There were several roadworks and diversions too. Because of the winter weather there’s only a short timescale in which to do road-mending so of course it has to be in summer.

The closer I came to Munich the greyer the weather became and by the time I came out of a tunnel on the Munich ring road I was in the middle of a torrential downpour.

One thing that I have noticed is that this Satnav is not using the same program as the previous one. Despite setting the preferences to exactly the same as the previous one, it brought me into Eching in a completely different way and I drove past Hans’s apartment building before I had realised where I was.

It’s nice to see Hans again. We had a coffee and then despite the showery weather we climbed into Hans’s jeep and headed off to the nearest metro station to catch a train into Munich.

Hans knew of a little vegan restaurant so we headed there for a drink and some banana cakeand then wandered off in search of excitement.

Our first port of call was the Wittelsbacher Brunnen, or fountains.

The Wittelsbachs were the royal family of the Kingdom of Bavaria until the political upheaval at the end of World War I. Munich was their capital and the eplendour that survived the bombing of World War II gives some kind of indication of their wealth.

The fountain was designed by Adolf von Hildebrand, a famous German designer of fountains, and sculptor Erwin Kunz and was built between 1893 and 1895.

Its purpose, bizzarely enough, was to celebrate the arrival in the city of the new high-pressure water pipeline from the Mangfall, a river in Upper Bavaria that is a tributary of the river Inn.

A site was chosen at the junction of the Karlsplatz and Lenbachplatz where the old city walls had been, and it was unveiled on 12th June 1895. We are told that the design consists of all kinds of allegories connected to the power of water

The fountain suffered damage during the bombing raids but was restored by one of Hildebrand’s pupils and reopened on 3rd October 1952.

From there we pushed off down the road to continue our little exploration of the north-west corner of the inner city.

Our little stoll brought us to the Karolinenplatz. This is named for Princess Caroline of Baden who married Maximilian Joseph, Duke of Palatine-Zweibrucken and became Queen Caroline II of Bavaria when her husband became King in 1806.

When Napoleon set off for his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, he took 36,000 Bavarian troops with him, but only 6,000 returned home. The column, designed by Leo von Klenze, is a monument to those 30,000 Bavarian soldiers who disappeared.

The Square was designed by Karl von Fischer (who died in 1820) who based his design upon that of the Place de l’Etoile, where the Arc de Triomphe is, in Paris.

The big building to the left of the column is the Palace of Prince George and you might have expected it to have been easy for me to tell you all about Prince George, but instead I’ll merely mention that so far I’ve been able to trace about a dozen Prince Georges so you can take your pick.

Our next stop is going to be the the Konigsplatz so we walked down the Briennerstrasse, another part of von Fisher’s great design.

On the corner of the Arcisstrasse are two very large and heavy plinths that I didn’t photograph, because there are the bases of a couple of temples erected to the memory of thse supporters of Hitler who were killed in the Munich Putsch of 1923.

There was no summer festival in Munich this year because of the virus, which was a shame although it was quite understandable, but what we had instead were little festival sites scattered around the city, like the one here at the Konigsplatz.

This is another part of Karl von Fischer’s masterpiece. He had been charged with organising an orderly expansion of the city beyond the old city walls at this point.

The Propylaea Gate that we can see in this image though isn’t by him but by Leo von Klienze and dates from 1862. It was originally intended to be a commemoration of the accession of King Ludwig’s son Otto to the throne of Greece in 1832 but it took so long to build that in effect it became a monument to the overthrow of King Otto from his throne by the Greek people after 30 years of rule.

The whole area is bedecked with “Summerin the City” banners as people make the most of whatever entertainments there are in the area.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying the fun, even if there wasn’t all that much of it. It’s a far cry from the traditional Munich summer festivals but we are living right now in extraordinary times.

Having wandered around loking at the sites and being unable to go to either of the two museums here, we went off for a wander around to look for a metro station because we were going to be heading from here into the town centre. We eventually found something in the Louisenstrasse and from there we ended up in the Marienplatz.

One thing that I like about the German language is the name that is given to the local town hall and civic administration offices in the towns – the Rathaus. I can’t think of anything more appropriate.

This is the Altes Rathaus, or Old Town Hall. The building was known to be in existence in 1310 and underwent a reconstruction, the first recorded of very many, between 1392 and 1394.

The spire beside it is actually the old Talburgtor gate in the eary city walls. As you can see, the gate is quite narrow and so in the 1870s they actually tunneled through the ground floor, with a second tunnel being put through in 1935. And in 1938 in the Great Hall Josef Goebbels made the speech that launched the Kristallnacht – the destruction of Jewish property in Germany in 1938.

It was badly damaged by bombing in World War II and not restored until the early 1970s. Somewhere in my ancient collection of photos I have a photo taken of it in 1988 when I was here with Nerina and when I get back to the farm, whenever that might be, I’ll dig it out.

This building here looks absolutely magnificent so it’s very easy t lose sight of the fact that this is a much more modern “Gothic Revival” building.

In the second half of the 19th Century it became apparent that the old town hall was becoming too small for modern needs so in 1867 construction of a new building, designed by Georg Hauberrisser, began.

The Town Council offices moved here in 1874 but as the building was still too small, further enlargements took place. The building was not finally finished until 1906. It has 400 rooms and covers an area of over 9,000m²

Somewhat surprisingly, it escaped severe destruction during the bombing attacks of World War II and was very quickly, if simply, restored

One thing that was nice to see here was a group of musiciens entertaining the crowd of people.

Although masks are not compulsory in the open air, it’s pretty much a waste of tie to just wear one over your mouth and not over your nose. And I would have loved to have seen the flautist play the flute wearing a mask. That would have been interesting.

Having finished our wandering around we ended up in the Munchener Freiheit at a little Indian café that I know, rather like the one in Montreal. A bowl of curry was delicious – it’s been a long time since I’ve had a decent one of those.

By now the heavens had really opened and we were being pasted in a torrential downpour. Walking from the metro to the car, we were drenched.

A couple of films and a good chat finished off the evening and then we all went our separate ways.

The sofa here is really comfortable so I’m settled down for the night. We’ll see what tomorrow will bring me.

Saturday 1st August 2020 – I BIT THE …

… bullet today and finally galvanised myself into action for a change.

But more of that anon.

Despite still being awake at long after 03:00, I was actually sitting on the edge of the bed ready to get up when the third alarm went off at 06:15. But nevertheless it was still a struggle to rise up from that position.

Plenty to do this morning, despite my late night. I might not have been tired enough to sleep last night but I was too tired to do any work. After breakfast (more fruit salad and delicious bread) I finally managed to finish the notes from last night.

There was something on the dictaphone too. It was all about Crewe Alexandra winning promotion. They scored a really good goal. Jordan Bowery scored it – he fought his way through the defence to kick home. The commentators were there congratulating the team. It meant that several others didn’t have the chance to play off as the team coming out straight afterwards for another game were going to be extremely disappointed by the results and so on.

To clean myself off I had a good shower, a shave and a clothes-washing session and then I hit the road.

Yesterday when we’d been down in the town we’d seen a Blower Bentley parked up at the hotel.

Today there’s another old and interesting vehicle parked up in the town and in case you haven’t recognised it, it’s an Aston Martin DBR2.

Well, that’s what you might think but it actually isn’t. According to the UK’s Driver and vehicle Licensing Authority it was first registered in 1971 and a little research reveals that when this vehicle was offered for sale in 2007 by Bonham’s the Auctioneers, it was described as a “1971 Aston Martin DBR2 Recreation”.

It wasn’t sold cheaply either by Bonham’s. Including the Buyers’ Premium, it went for almost £78,000.

That price might sound expensive for a replica but an original sold for over £9,000,000 so the price of the replica is pretty small beer. And according to the guy who built a few Aston Martin replicas, even the £78,000 represented “a considerable premium to my build prices” so we’ll all have to go along and order one.

But they aren’t really the same as the original ones unfortunately because with being built to modern standards they have modern engines and a different style of chassis that doesn’t flex as much as the older one did and so takes away much of the excitement of driving it.

It’s easy to see why this town is the favourite town of Strawberry Moose.

He’s not been here for 48 hours and he has started his own taxi company here. And as you might expect, he’s chosen a most appropriate name for his business. I’m sure that he’ll pick up plenty of work over the period that he’s going to be here.

It’s a shame that he wasn’t here for a photo opportunity but he had plenty of other things to be doing to set his business off on the right foot.

Not only is it the height of the tourist season it’s also a Saturday and so there are crowds of people around iin the town this morning

To entertain them, there were a few alpine horn players standing on the bridge over the river and I’ve no idea why they were taking such an intense interest in me as I was taking their photograph. I wasn’t making half as much noise as they were and I wasn’t blocking the traffic either.

The lederhosen that they were wearing didn’t impress me all that much either The didn’t look particularly interesting. And they all should be wearing their little felt hats with feathers in.

But it did remind me of the time that I was chatting to Lee Jackson, bassist/vocalist of The Nice, who told me that the only cure for an Alpine Horn was an Alpine maid.

Today, I’m going to be doing what I really wanted to do yesterday had I been on form.

What I had wanted to do was to go for a tramp in the woods, but he got away so I was going to walk up into the mountains along the side of the river to see if I could make it as far as Zug. First I needed some supplies, so I went to the supermarket that I had visited yesterday.

Now that i’d organised food for the journey, I set off up the hill

Yesterday we saw at the side of my hotel the cables of a gondola lift going up into the mountains to the east side of the town.

From up here where I’m standing, we can look right across the town and see the cables climbing right up into the mountains, the cable pylons on top of the first crest and then the station at the top way over to the right on the second crest.

One of these days when I’ve saved enough money (because it isn’t cheap by any means) I’ll take the gondola right up to the top because I imagine that the views would be totally spectacular. But knowing my luck, there would be a fog, a low cloud or a heat haze.

As you saw in one of the previous photographs, there were two ways to go.

One of the ways was by the ordinary road that climbed its way up through the mountains, or the second way, which was the footpath that wound its way along at the side of the river.

The road looked all hot and bothered and not very inspiring but the path along the river went through a load of shade from the trees that were growing along the banks. And so as far as I was concerned that was the only way to go.

As you can see from this photo, I wasn’t wrong about the road.

You can see it up there where all of those cars are driving. It’s right out in the open there, in the sun and not the place to be in weather like this.

The town of Zug is out of view behind the crest of the ridge that you can see over to the left of the photo. I imagine that the river will wend its way around there and the path that I’m on will follow the river round to the town.

Where I took the previous photo was from the bridge just there across the river.

Hidden in the trees back there is a large open-air swimming pool and leisure centre that seemed to be very popular with all kinds of people. It was pretty busy. One of the things that I noticed here was an open-air café where I could conceivably buy a coffee on the way back because I had a feeling that I would be needing it.

But not right now because I was rather hot. I sat on a convenient bench and had a drink of the water that I’d remembered to bring with me.

The longer that I sit around doing nothing, the longer it will take me to reach Zug so I decided to press on along the trail.

It seemed that it didn’t matter which was I was going to do. Every path or road north-westwards up the valley seemed to lead into the hot sun. There was a really big clearing here round by this cabin and if they didn’t already have enough sunshine there were signs that there was tree-cutting taking place here.

There wasn’t anyone around attending to the timber so I carried on along the path.

Not too far though because something interesting along the way had caught my eye.

On top of the mountains over there are some buildings and what’s exciting is wondering about how the occupiers get up their with their supplies. But seeing as over there is really the back of Lech I imagine that the buildings are some way connected to the ski lift and gondola system so people might come up that way.

But looking at that slope over there, I imagine that the way down on skis to the main road at the foot of the slope would be quite exciting too.

In one of the earlier photos you might have noticed some people at the side of the river and also the start of some rapids.

The elevation into the mountains is a lot steeper than you might think by looking at the photos and the water is running quite fast down the river. And with there being different strata of rocks around here and some rocks wearing quicker than other, the presence of rapids is assured

Not the kind that you can shoot in a raft unfortunately – there isn’t enough water for that at this time of the year.

Nevertheless it’s still quite magnificent and powerful, and I’d love to see it in the spring when there is all of the meltwater flowing down the valley.

There has been so much water in the river at times that there have been some impressive flash floods lower down in the valley. There was a catastrophic flood in June 1910 when the flow of water reached 300 cubic metres per second. A church tower 52 metres high in Lechhausen was badly damaged and 5 million marks worth of damages was caused in Augsburg.

As a result in 1911 they started on building flood defences downriver.

The town of Lech hasn’t been spared either. In August 2005 a considerable amount of damage was caused due to a sudden flash flood.

But returning to the river itself, its source is in the Formarinsee, a lake higher up in the mountains, and then flows a distance of about 250 kilometres, draining about 3900 square kilometres before feeding into the River Danube near Donauworth where we visited IN 2015.

It’s not a navigable river, due mainly to the shallow depth and the gravel beds. And also due to the fact that there are 33 power stations along its route.

But it’s certainly the place to be in the summer, especially on a hot, stifling day like today.

There was rather a large family group of people sitting on one of the gravel beds having a picnic and a paddle about in the water. And I must admit that I was sorely tempted to go and join them and dangle my feet in the water for 10 minutes or so.

But instead, I pushed on along the path towards Zug. At least there was some shade here amongst the trees as I scrambled up and over some of the undulations in the path

Over there is the town of Zug, a lot farther away than it looks in this photograph, thanks to the wonders of good long-distance ZOOM LENSES. A couple of minutes further on from where I’d seen the people paddling in the pool I burst out into the sunlight and there it was through the trees.

But now it’s lunchtime and having found a handy bench in the shade, I have my book and my lunch – another half of a small melon and another can of that energy drink that had lifted my spirits yesterday, both of which I had purchased from the supermarket earlier.

And here I sat for a good half hour, in the middle of a golf course apparently judging by all of the people passing by with their golfing trolleys and so on. Not that I could see anything of it through the undergrowth and shrubbery from where I was sitting.

After having sat down and relaxed for about half an hour I pushed on towards the town.

Yesterday I mentioned that we are in the middle of one of the most extensive skiing areas in Europe and so, as you might expect, there are gondolas, ski lifts and drags all over the place.

Here at the side of the river is the bottom station of one of the ski lifts – the Zugerbergbahn – that goes up to the top of the mountains to the north. Up there on top at an altitude of 2100 metres is the Balmalp Lech am Arlberg ski lodge. Tha represents a rise of over 600 metres from my current 1488 metres, according to my telephone.

And avid skier as I was in my younger days, I would have to say that it would have been quite exciting skiing back down from there again through all of those trees. It reminds me of Erma Brobeck who once famously said “I’ve no intention of participating in any sport that has ambulances waiting at the bottom of the hill”.

The next stage of my route was comparative easy because for about 5 minutes we actually had a path that was flat, level and comparatively smooth.

Over there ahead of us is presumably the car park for the chairlift and also for people going a-walking around in the vicinity too because it really is a nice area to be walking around.

In the background are some of the most splendid mountains that you have ever seen, still with a couple of vestiges of snow upon them. We actually drove past them, but on the other side on our way to Lech from Dornbirn on the Bregenzerwald Bundesstrasse Highway.

This is probably one of the finest glaciated valleys that I have ever seen.

You can usually tell a glaciated valley from a river valley because of its shape. A river valley is more likely to have a “V” shape whereas a glaciated valley is more likely to be a “U” shape. And this one speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

The ridge going across from left to right in the photo looks at fist glance as if it might be a moraine – a bank of gravel left behind by a glacier as it retreats. But it’s not possible to say without excavating it, and it looks a little too unnatural to me.

From the bottom of the valley down by the river up to the village was a climb of about 30 metres, but it looked and felt like a darn sight more than that to me.

Halfway up the path I stopped to recapture my breath and had a look around. There’s a complex of about three or four guest houses on the edge of the village somewhere to the east and I imagine that those buildings over there must be it.

Behind them is the valley up which I walked, and the town of Lech is right down at the bottom somewhere near the left-hand edge of the photo where you can see that cleft between the mountains.

Eventually I arrived in the centre of the village, such as it is, and found myself standing in a little square outside the church.

The church is the Filialkirche St. Sebastian and it’s an impressive structure for such a small place. There’s quite a story behind it too, in that in the early 17th Century there was an outbreak of the plague here and someone made a vow in connection with the plague.

Unfortunately I’ve not discovered who it was, and what exactly was the nature of the vow, but one of the attributes of Saint Sebastian is that he’s the patron saint of protection from the plague, so I would imagine that it’s due to people praying to Saint Sebastian that if they survive this outbreak they would build a church in his honour in thanks for their safe deliverance – that kind of thing.

Apart from the church, there’s little else here to talk about. A couple of hotels, such as this one and that’s your lot.

At least they had some entertainment for us this afternoon, and that’s always welcome. No alpine horns unfortunately, but we do have a guitar, a double bass and a kind of hurdy-gurdy. I was tempted to buy a coffee in order to stop and listen for half an hour, but then I saw the prices.

There isn’t really anything else to do around here, and I suppose that, being so isolated, they can hardly nip to the shops next door for a pint of milk if they run out.

One thing that I was also going to add is that there isn’t really any passing trade, because this road is actually a dead end that comes to a stop in the depths of the mountains.

But just as I was about to say it, around the corner came a tourist bus full of passengers. There isn’t very much to see except the scenery. And I was reminded of Betty Marsden, the English comic actress who when asked what she thought about the Alps, replied “it was terrible. The mountains hid all of the view”.

And I was extremely interested to see that even though it’s advertising an Austrian service, the bus has German number plates.

One thing that did catch my eye while I was here was that track down there heading over the mountains to the south.

Had I been 20 years younger and in better health, because it’s much steeper than it looks in this photo, I’d have been tempted to have gone for a walk over there. There’s a waterfall, the Wasserfall Zug a kilometre or so up there, and then a long and difficult walk takes you to a lake, the Spuller See.

From there, you can turn right and head to the Bregenzerwald Bundesstrasse or else turn to the right and follow the valley of the Spreubach down to Dalaas in the Voralberg valley.

Having had a good look around, I retraced my steps back to the path that I climbed up to the village

So that was Zug then. I’m sure that I’d been here once with Nerina when we passed through in 1988 but I didn’t remember anything at all about it and nothing that I saw had rung a bell with me. It had that kind of effect on me.

But from here I was able to have a better look at that bank while I was up here, and that looks definitely man-made to me from here. There’s a road that runs across it so maybe that’s the reason for the bank. I imagine that it must be quite wet down there in the snow melt.

On the way up here I missed this – I can’t have been looking down there in that direction.

This is some kind of leisure facility complete with its own lake, and it had me wondering if it might have been anything to do with the golf course across which I stumbled on the way up because despite seeing the holes, the greens and the golfers, I hadn’t seen a clubhouse.

But that’s something about which I can worry some other time. I’ve had a really good walk up here and now it’s time to go back downhill for a rest. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve been going downhill for years.

On the way back I simply retraced my steps for half of the way.

At that cabin where there was all of this new timber, the lumberjacks were busy cutting down another tree so I stood and waited, filming it on my camera. But just when they reached the crucial moment when I expected the tree to come crashing down, they knocked off for a cuppa and that was that.

For a while, I waited around but they didn’t come back so I wrote it off as a bad job and carried on towards home.

When I reached the bridge that we saw in an earlier photo there was another path going straight on down the southern side of the river and as there were a few people following that path, I followed them to see where I would end up.

Over there is the River Lech down in the bottom of the valley.

After scrambling over a couple of stiles and squeezing my way through a couple of narrow gates, i have now found myself back in civilisation, as you can see. The road along which I walked out of Lech earlier today is just the other side of the river where that car is driving

On the left-hand edge of the photo is the little path down which I walked to reach the river so that I could follow the river up into the hills. There’s a little path down there by the waterside that is out of sight.

Here’s a view looking further down into the town. Over there is the river with the waterfront houses and the road behind up which I walked on my way out

The path down which I had walked, called apparently, the Lechuferweg, has transformed itself into a very chic residential street called the Omesberg at the southern end of the town. This would seem to be the place to be around here, where you would live if you were ever to win the lottery.

But I wasn’t going to hang around and enjoy the view or lap up the atmosphere. I was ready for a good, hot mug of coffee and a little relax back at my digs after walking all of this way.

And have you noticed how the sky has dramatically changed colour over the last few photos?

All the way down the path I was hotly pursued by a low cloud and thunderstorm. Not only the sky but the weather had changed while I was out, and changed quite quickly too. That was another reason to be back in my room as quickly as possible because that lot looks quite nasty..

I just about made it back to the hotel before the heavens opened and drenched the town in a storm of epic proportions. You can understand how come they have these severe flash floods around here with weather like this.

Back here, looking at the storm, I actually crashed out for a while, which was no surprise given the bad night that I had had and the fact that I’d walked almost 10kms today into the mountains and back in the lovely, fresh alpine air.

Tea was a tin of potatoes, a tin of mixed veg and a tin of lentils with some mustard sauce, and it was delicious.

An early night tonight because it’s my last night here. I’m pushing on tomorrow as I still have plenty of places to go and plenty of people to see. Unfortunately June is not available. Her husband is not too well and she’s afraid that any non-urgent meeting might expose him to risk – something that I quite understand.

But still, I’ll be sorry to leave. Lech is one of my most favourite places in Europe and I struck gold with this hotel – I really did. We’ll have tu see what the next 10 days or so will bring.

Friday 31st July 2020 – I’M NOT SURE …

… what happened yesterday. It was rather strange.

Having crashed out really early and woken up to find the radio still playing, I settled back down to sleep and missed all 3 alarms.

07:30 when I awoke and I couldn’t hang about long as breakfast had already started, so I dashed downstairs.

Downstairs, I couldn’t let pass the opportunity to stick my head out of the door to see if there was any snow around. And I wasn’t to be disappointed because up on the top of the mountains, sure enough, there were some traces of the stuff.

Not enough and not low enough down the mountain to be interesting, unfortunately, but snow nevertheless.

While you admire a few more photos of the view from the front door of the hotel, I was sitting down having my breakfast.

And a good breakfast it was too. I had fruit salad and bread – nice German bread – with jam, but I could have had almost anything. And the coffee was really good too.

After breakfast, I went back upstairs. There was plenty of work to do but not as much as I was hoping as there isn’t enough processing power in this laptop to convert my dashcam files to * mp4. That will have to wait a while until I’m home, I reckon.

But with all of the sleep that I had, it’s hardly a surprise that I went off for quite a wander during the night.

We were at a ferry port last night and I was working for a coach company. We were putting passengers on board this ferry and waiting for the next one to come so that we could unload them again. The trips out were really busy and there was a lot of work to be done which meant running around here and there. Coming back, there was hardly anything on the ships coming back. The ships going out were proper cross-channel ferries and the ones coming back were more like lighters with half a dozen cars and a pile of machinery on there. I’d been working for this company for a few years and wasn’t particularly successful – I hadn’t had too many promotions so i was still doing some of the labouring, donkey work about getting these things loaded up while others were doing the more glamorous stuff. When this next ship came in it had about half a dozen cars on it and some heavy machinery. They made a few remarks about the machinery and told me to go down to get it off. I walked down and ended up being stuck in this queue with these people who were climbing off it. To climb off it you had to go down and then up and then there was a gangplank that walked all the way down again. These girls were talking to me about the voyage and asked if I’d sailed on it which of course I hadn’t done but I had to go and supervise the unloading of the machinery

Later on I was with a friend of mine and we were discussing schooldays. I asked him about his A levels and he said that he was expelled from school so he never did them. I asked about where did he do them. Did he go to Dane Bank or somewhere like that. He said no, he just didn’t do them. I thought “how did he get into University?” but he didn’t say too much about that. We were cooking something and it was turning into a bit of a mess. The scene drifted on here and I was with a family, a large family of youngish people really I suppose or at least very active people. We’d been wandering around London or at least what I took to be London south of the city and we ended up in a pub. We were chatting away there about all kinds of different things and the scene suddenly changed to the Shropshire moors round by Prees Heath aerodrome was. We were having to clamber our way through this series of walks and wondering how they were getting the cars onto these car parks because it seemed to be like all rows of steps and you had to drive down these rows of steps that didn’t seem right to me. In the air at one point were some helicopters and some balloons. I mentioned the word “balloonatics”. We were talking about breaking wind. I said that if anyone cornered the market my brother would have done that a long time ago because of the amount he produces. Someone else said “oh yes I can get a big cardboard box and can fill it quite easily”

Later on in the morning after I’d finished my work I went for a nice long walk.

The street where the hotel is situated is a dead end – I’ve driven down it a few times looking for hotels. That’s not my hotel but another one. What’s interesting me is the cable car wires in the background.

The valley here is quite steep at the sides and to walk up to the top is something not for the average hiker. And of course, we have all of the winter sports. This area is not one of the more famous ski areas but it is nevertheless very well-regarded and counts the Dutch Royal Family among its more famous visitors.

Down into town I walked, to see what has been going on here.

There are plenty of artefacts to remind us of the area’s glorious past, such as this one here. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve been to see a great number of covered bridges in the past, mainly in Eastern North America, but very occasionally in Europe too.

Lech has its own covered bridge just here. There’s the new modern bridge beside it but the covered bridge is still in fairly good condition and we can walk through it. According to the plaque, if I’ve read it correctly, it was built in 1665 and taken out of use in 1976

Here’s another artefact, one that I don’t remember seeing before.

Just like every other country in Europe there was a thriving postal network in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the 19th Century and of course the nature of the terrain rendered railway traffic rather difficult, if not impossible, in many places.

Until the arrival of the internal combustion engine in sufficient numbers, the postal horse-carriage was really the only way for people and mail to move around

This one has the dates 1900-1925 written on it, suggesting that it was one of the final ones to be issued before the motor vehicle took over.

While I was out on my travels, I came across this impressive machine.

This is not unfortunately one of the fastest lorries in the world as described, with some derision, by no less a person than Ettore Bugatti. This is something much more exciting than that.

Bentley’s “fastest lorry in the world”, the Bentley 3-litre, was replaced by a 4.5 litre version in 1927. Walter Bentley was a great believer in increasing engine capacity to increase power.

His opinion wasn’t shared by everyone. Certain people such as Tim Birkin believed that a lighter vehicle fitted with a supercharger would be much more successful. There had been experiments with a supercharged 3 litre engine but Birkin carried out developments with fitting a Roots Supercharger to the 4.5 litre engine.

Only 55 were built because, while they were fast, they weren’t reliable enough to finish races such as the Le Mans 24-hour race, in which the normally-aspirated engines were more successful. Nevertheless they are of tremendous interest and value and Birkin’s car was sold at auction in June 2012 for over £5,000,000.

Finding a Blower Bentley here in Austria is quite astonishing.

The church is the Church of St Nikolaus and dates from round about the end of the 13th and beginning of the 14th Century – a date of about 1380 has been mentioned.

It’s quite a beautiful building that I have admired on many occasions, but each time that I’ve been here in the past, THE CHURCH WAS SWATHED IN SCAFFOLDING – even when Nerina and I came here in 1988.

Today though, I was in luck. All of the scaffolding has gone. But unfortunately, I’m still not able to go for a look around inside. However I was told that the interior dates from the 1790s but if I were to look carefully, I’d find some frescoes even older than that.

Despite being a rather touristy old-world town, it’s the kind of place where there is always redevelopment taking place.

When I WAS HERE LAST, IN 2018 I have a vague recollection of some building work going on in the town centre but I didn’t pay too much attention to it at the time. This time though, I went to make further enquiries and there was a handy chink on the fencing for me to post the lens of my camera.

We have a nice big hole in the ground that looks as if it might become a subterranean car park and also a cement silo at the side. It’ll be interesting to come past here next time and see what’s grown up on the spot.

Seeing as it was almost lunchtime I went to the local supermarket and picked up slice of melon and went for a walk at the side of the river

The effect of the altitude and the effects of the heat were telling on me, that’s for sure, because I was struggling for breath. I couldn’t get far out of the town along the river before I had to sit down for a rest. This seemed like a pretty good place to have my lunch.

It was a good job that I’d bought a can of energy drink too while I was in the shop because that went down a treat too. I needed that right now.

The river that runs through the town is called, unsuprisingly, the River Lech.

And it’s quite true to say that the town is named after the river because in the historical past it was known as Tannberg. Its name evolved into Tannberg am Lech, then into Lech and today the town is officially known as Lech am Arlberg.

There’s no record of any habitation here prior to the 14th Century although, on looking around, I could easily imagine that Transhumance practices would have taken place here.

Transhumance is the name of a farming activity that was, and still is in certain circumstances and locations, practised in these areas.

In the winter, all of the animals would be taken down to the lowest valleys and in the worst weather, housed indoors. As the Spring advanced and the snows melted higher up the mountains the animals would be taken up to the fresh grass and would basically follow the snow line. A herdsman would live with the animals in the mountains, bringing them back down as the weather closed in later in the year.

A similiar practice is undertaken in fishing communities like Coastal Labrador where families would follow the spawning salmon to the sea and then stay on the coast for the season to harvest the cod.

But returning to Lech, its modern importance is due to the Winter Sports activities that take place here. Several World Cup skiing events have taken place here.

Combined with the neighbouring villages of Zurs, St Christoph; St Anton and several others, it has one of the largest interconnected ski areas in Europe, all accessible by ski lift and ski drag, one of which we can see in the background.

In the summer, it’s host to the hordes of tourists, Yours Truly included, who come here to take the mountain air and to relax. I first came here in 1988 with Nerina and I’ve been back ON SEVERAL SUBSEQUENT OCCASIONS.

In the end, the fatigue got the better of me and I came back to the hotel and sat in the sun with the rest of my melon and a good book to enjoy the atmosphere. However it wasn’t long before I became overwhelmed with sleep so I went to my room to sit down for a while.

Next thing that I knew, it was 17:00 and the afternoon had gone just like that. I did some more work, seeing as it was rather too mate to go for a walk in the hills as I had intended.

For tea it was another session with the slow cooker. Pasta, veg and chick peas, followed by soya dessert.

But having crashed out so decisively earlier, now I can’t sleep again. It’s going to be another long night for me.

Thursday 30th July 2020 – STRAWBERRY MOOSE …

… and I have arrived at his favourite holiday resort. And we had to stop so that Strawberry Moosecould have his usual photo opportunity

We’re staying for a couple of days while we get our respective heads together, and we need to do that too because of the dreadful night that I had last night. Never mind what time I went to bed – I was still wide-awake as late as 03:05 with no sign of ever going off to sleep.

But I must have done at some point because not only did the alarm awaken me at 06:00 (and I even beat the third alarm to my feet) there was something recorded on the dictaphone too.

A girl whom I know from Crewe put in a visit last night. She was going off home and I’d lent Caliburn to her to tow a caravan. I walked back through Shavington to Vine Tree Avenue where Caliburn was parked. We could see my brother and father in the distance – my father was getting ready to come home from work – it was 06:00 and he was getting in his vehicle. As we went past, down the street was a policeman who was interrogating a couple over a book which was something like a book by Kerouac or something. He saw the two of us and made some kind of remark to which I made some kind of remark back and mentioned the book that I was reading. He clouted me with a book so I clouted him back with a book. By this time I noticed that this girl was actually holding my hand as we were walking down the street. One thing that was going through my mind was that the tax on Caliburn had run out and I had vehicles without tax parked all over the place. I was wondering if ever it came to the push that they might be towed away where was I going to put them. I got to wondering what my father would have to say about me lending someone a vehicle that didn’t have any road tax. And more to the point what would a person say, where would she be parking it or leaving it and the closer I got to home the more I was thinking about this.

There was plenty of other stuff to do this morning and then I went to breakfast.

My room is over there in the annex so I had to cross the garden to reach the main part of the hotel. On the way over I passed the postman delivering the mail. What cought my eye was not the postman or the post that he was delivering but the machine on which he was delivering it.

50 or so years ago everyone laughed at the Ariel 3, and yet here we are today, which just goes to show what proper publicity and marketing could have done for the British motorcycle industry had they put their minds to it. But being stuck in a timewarp of the early 1950s, british industry totally failed to move with the times.

I had to decline the cheese and the ham but the rest of the breakfast (included in the price) was very acceptable and despite the cost of the night’s accommodation, it was all pretty good value for Switzerland.

Collecting all of my stuff together I headed off – as far as the local Co-op. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that there had been an issue at the Hotel last night in that the Swiss plugs are different from the rest of Europe. The hotel had lent me an adapter but I had to hand that back this morning.

It’s not the first time that i’ve been caught out by the lack of a Swiss adapter so I reckoned that I may as well buy my own while I was here.

While I was here, I bought a baguette. In France it had cost me €0:45 but here in Switzerland where there is no Common Agricultural Policy it cost me €1:90. The silly Brits are going to be in for quite a surprise once the Transition Period is over.

Most of the day was spent driving all the way through Switzerland in the sweltering heat. Slightly north of east towards the Austrian border at Dornbirn.

Stuck behind slow-moving grockles for most of the day, and roadworks after roadworks after roadworks, it took ages to cross the country. It really got on my wick.

With the temperature at 35°C and feeling like every degree of double that, I was driving along the side of Lake Lucerne from Luzern north-east when I came upon a scenic viewpoint at the side of the road.

The views from here were tremendous. For example, down at the end of the lake I could see the town of Kussnacht where I turn off eastwards and head eventually for the Austrian frontier.

There wasn’t any shade at all here unfortunately, not even in the lee of Caliburn, but having been stuck behind all kinds of traffic in the streets of Luzern and Merlischachen, I was running much later than I wanted to and I had been ready for lunch for ages.

Chewing on my sandwich I had a good look around at my surroundings.

Across the lake from me is actually a “seaside” resort, the Strandbad Seeburg. That would have been a great place to go for lunch had I had the time. A nice relax on a sandy beach would have done me the world of good and I might even have gone for a paddle.

There are also bound to be several good hotels over there too, because the town is the birthplace of César Ritz, the founder of the “Ritz” hotel chains. He died there in the town in October 1918.

It’s a shame that we aren’t going that way.

That’s the spine of the Alps down there, on the border between Switzerland and Italy and it would seem to be the place to be right now because it wil be much cooler up there at those kinds of altitiudes. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that WE’VE BEEN IN THE SNOW UP THERE WTH CALIBURN in July.

If there hadn’t been as much haze around today, we might have been able to see snow. But as we’ll be pushing on into the Tyrol we might be lucky in finding some snow ourselves – or at least some cooler weather.

With that in mind, we pushed on into the town and then headed east.

In between Lake Lucerne and Lake Zurich we pass over a high range of mountains heading north-east, climbing out of one valley into another.

As we climbed up the pass, there was quite a distinctive mountain away to our right in the east that seemed to dog my viewpoint. I’ve no idea what mountain it might be but it piqued my interest. Eventually I cane to a place somewhere in between Steinerberg and Sattel where I could pull off the road and take a photograph it.

And it wasn’t just the mountain there either. There’s a modern concrete viaduct of either a road or a railway over there too, and there is some type of large bird, maybe an eagle, flying around over there too. And I didn’t notice that until I returned home.

The views were just as interesting to the south as well.

That’s the town of Steinen down there, I reckon, with Seewen in the distance, all of them in the valley of the Lauerzersee. We can see the spine of the Alps in the distance and just imagine how spectacular this view would be in cold weather when there would be no heat haze. But then again we wouldn’t have been able to climb up here in Caliburn as easily as this in the middle of winter.

Having taken our couple of photos, we headed off north-eastwards in the direction of St Gallen and the Austrian border.

A little further on we pick up the railway that has been following us through the mountains much more precariously that we have been travelling on the road.

As we drive through the Sattel Pass through Rothenthurm and out of the other side on the way to Biberbrugg the railway line makes another one of its regular level crossings across our path and I’m in luck at this one because as I approach it, the barriers come down and a couple of minutes later a train rattles past.

This is one of the 11 Sudostbahn, the South Eastern Railway FLIRT RABe526 trains made by Stadler, a model of train that works on the railway networks of many countries all over Europe and North Africa and even in North America, the city of Ottawa having purchased 7 for the upgrade of its “Trillium” Line and its new link to Ottawa Airport.

Eventually I reached the border and crossed into Austria.

Just outside Dornbirn I fuelled up with diesel. €1:06 a litre which is a relief after the prices that I saw in Switzerland and I subsequently saw it even cheaper too.

From Dornbirn there are two ways on into the interior of Austria. The first, and most common way, is along the main road, past Bludenz and either through the Arlberg Tunnel if you have plenty of cash or over the Arlberg Pass.

But there is another way – the Bregenzerwald Bundesstrasse Highway, the modern-day L 200, over the mountains. Despite it only being 63 kms long from Dornbirn to Warth, It took an unbelievable 75 years to build, construction having been started in 1879.

The final section, from Schrocken to Warth, despite being only about 10kms, took 25 years to build and was not finally completed until 1954.

It’s quite narrow, especially at the older Dornbirn end and not possible to take a coach over it which is why I’ve never been that way before. But Caliburn, Strawberry Moose and I managed it quite comfortably.

It’s a spectacular road and one of this days I’ll post the dashcam footage. You’ll find out why a 53-foot touring coach wouldn’t ever come this way

At Warth we turned off towards the Fern Pass and after a good hour in the mountains from Dornbirn, we ended up in Lech. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE and on several occasions too, including once with Nerina. It’s a place that Strawberry Moose, Caliburn and I really like.

Once we’d taken our photograph, we had to hunt down my hotel.

And it took some finding too. House numbers in Austria don’t follow any logical sequence and someone once told me that they are numbered in the order in whcih they are built.

Considering that it was one of the cheapest hotels in Lech, this is one of the best places where I have ever stayed and I’ll let you know tomorrow about the breakfast. If it’s anything like the rest of the hotel, it’ll be tremendous.

Having smuggled my slow cooker into the hotel I was able to make some tea.

While it’s cooking, I can tell you about my room It’s quite small but very comfortable and a nice view looking north-west. With it being the height of summer it’s staying light pretty late and we have a beautiful red sky at night- a sure sign that Zug is on fire, I reckon.

And having had my tea now, I’m going to bed. After that dreadful night and the fact that I haven’t crashed out at all today, I’m ready for it.

A few days here to recover my strength and then I’ll see where we go from there.

Tuesday 28th July 2020 – I’VE BEEN RELIVING …

… a photo that was taken 50 years ago, almost to the very day.

But as you admire a few photos of the glorious views from today’s lunch stop, I’ll start off by putting things in their proper order.

To start with – or, more to the point, not to start with – I missed the alarms this morning as usual and it was more like 07:30 that I finally ended up crawling out of bed.

No breakfast this morning either. In view of the virus situation it’s a bag already made up and deposited outside your door and that’s not really very much good to new as there is nothing really in it that I could eat.

Instead I carried on with some paperwork for a while.

Nerina had been off doing something or other during the night and the first person to come back was Hans complaining that the collection had been absolutely nothing. I carried on waiting but as I walked away I had Nerina’s coffee with me and her white tag so I had to go and put her coffee back at the foot of the stairs into the cellar. Someone made the remark that that coffee was ruined. I said “it was only made 10 minutes ago” but they said that it had all skin and everything all over the top of it as if it had been made a day or two. I brought it down to show them but Nerina came down. I told her what hans had said about the collection and she replied that it was pretty miserable. There weren’t all that many people there. We carried on walking and she asked “is there any possibility that you can do something about your language courses, especially July and August as it’s going to clash with something here with the choir?” She told me all about it. I wasn’t sure that the language courses ran through July and August – they only do through the school term time. I said “that’s so far ahead that we don’t really need to see about that right now”. We went for tea and tea was porridge. People were making their porridge up and burning it. Mine was quite reasonably good and I was eating it. This Chinese waiter came past and saw one of the porridges on someone’s table which was burnt. he said “you’re just ruining that porridge here”. I asked “how would you go about doing it?” He said “you start off by making a tower of cereal and then you and then he started rambling and I couldn’t follow or understand so I asked him to repeat it. I couldn’t understand it again so he said it a second time.

And there was far more to it than this but as you are probably eating your tea right now i’ll spare you the details.

Having finished my notes I packed my things, I headed off out to the van with my luggage. On the way past the reception desk in the hotel I did pick up a coffee on the way out of the hotel. At least it was free and I had a free hand to carry it.

Having forgotten once more to take a photo of my night’s lodging I found my way around the industrial estate to the LeClerc where I picked up a few more travel essentials to ease me along on my journey to wherever it is that I’m going (which I still haven’t decided yet).

Including a new SatNav.

The one in my van is a cheap thing, about 7 or 8 years old, well out of date now and apart from that, the connection is loose. So you’re driving along and you suddenly notice that it’s switched off and you missed a turning or two a long way back. It takes a while to make another connection and then it drops again and we repeat the process.

In Leclerc though, they had a decent mainstream one with free updates and because it was the last one – the display item, they knocked me something off it.

There was some excitement there too. Someone wandering around without a facemask was being given a PV – a Procès verbale or on-the-spot fine by a Gendarme.

Back on the road again I headed on eastwards along the big dual carriageway towards the Rhone valley.

A little later on during the morning I stopped again in a suitable lay-by near Charolles. We had arranged to have a Welsh lesson this morning.

Determined not to miss it, I’d configured Zoom on my telephone and I attended that lesson accordingly. It wasn’t very convenient but at least it worked, which goes to show just how useful modern technology can be. This opens up all kinds of possibilities for the future.

view of church butte de suin 71220 saone et loire france eric hall For lunch I found a beautiful spot on a butte overlooking a village called Suin.

The N79 is a road that i’ve travelled on several occasions and each time I’ve been along it, I’ve seen a sign for a scenic viewpoint, the Butte de Suin. That seemed to be a suitable place to stop for lunch

It took quite a bit of finding too, for although it’s only a couple of miles as the crow flies from the N79, it’s a long and tortuous route to arrive at the summit and I was starving by the time that I reached the top of the butte

My butty with its assorted fillings was all the more delicious because of the wait and the view was even more delicious. It enticed me to spend a good hour or so having a wander around.

If the altimeter on my telephone is correct, I’m an 592 metres right now, on a bluff overlooking a couple of river valleys right on the watershed between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean river system. You’ve seen in several of the previous photographs the kind of view that there is from up here on top, but I’m not sure what that is on the horizon over there.

It could be a broadcasting aerial I suppose, or else it could be a water tower. But it’s far too far away for me to identify it clearly.

We are so high up here that away in the distance when the weather is clear you can see all the way to Mont Blanc in the Alps.

It’s over there in that direction towards the right but unfortunately you can’t see it today which is a shame. If you peer through the gloom and the haze you can just about see the outline of the Alps on the far side of the Saone Valley.

That’s probably 100 or so kilometres away and Mont Blanc is a long way further off beyond there on the border between France and Italy. And that reminds me – it’s been years since I’ve put my sooty foot in Italy. It’s high time I went over there again but I don’t have time right now.

On top of the Butte de Suin is a statue of the Madonna.

The design of this statue is said to be inspired by the statue of the Golden Madonna that can be found in the Basilique Notre Dame on the top of the Fourvières Hill, the eminence that overlooks the city of Lyon.

That statue was designed by Joseph-Hugues Fabisch and erected in 1852. The one here at Suin dates from 1884 and from what I’ve seen, the two do look pretty similar.

There’s quite an interesting story that’s often told around here about the positioning of the Madonna on top of the hill here.

Elderly people talk of how many pairs of oxen and the hordes of men who were required to drag the statue to the top of the hill, even though it’s many years before their time. And each time you talk to someone, it’s always a different number of oxen and people involved in the work. It’s just like some of these Chinese whispers

And don’t ask me why she has what looks like a radio aerial stuck behind her because I don’t know that either. I suppose that it might be a lighning conductor.

Apart from the statue of the Madonna that we have already seen, ther ehave been a considerable number of curiosités built here on this summit in the past but unfortunately there are little if any visible remains.

The first recorded object up here was a temple that the Romans built to honour the dod Mercury, one of the 12 major Roman gods and was said to be the god of commerce and also of travellers, and it’s for this latter reason that I imagine that his temple was erected in such a prominent spot because from here he would have had a really impressive view of all of the traffic travelling up and down the valleys at the foot of the rock.

That might also explain why in medieval times there was a castle built up here. In the lawless days of the 13th and 14th Century any nobleman bent on on improving his financial situation could see the travellers too from miles away and send out a war party to exact a toll from them.

And the existence of the medieval castle might also explain the presence of the village here.

There had been a settlement of sorts here for a good many years and known to have been in existence in the 11th Century but the castle would have required all kinds of ancillary staff – farmers, millers and the like – who would not live in the castle but would want to live close by for protection and their presence would attract other tradesmen.

There was a church known to be here in the 10th Century but the present church has been altered and modernised so much that it’s impossible to say whether there are any vestiges of the original church

The castle was demolished as a consequence of the Wars of Religion

What we’re seeing here is not part of the medieval castle but the site of an orientation table. That was installed here in 1963 and renovated in 2008.

Something else that we can’t see either is a rather large medieval cross on the summit that was known to be here in the 10th Century and which I imagine (but I don’t know) would have been swept away when they built the castle up here.

What we can see, apparently, are 52 church towers. But I didn’t stay to count them all. I have things to do, places to go and people to see.

Back in Caliburn I set off to drive to Leynes and the house of my friend Jean-Marc and his wife.

My route through the back lanes of Burgundy took me over the Col des Enceints on the D212 between Bourgvilain and Pierreclos. it’s 529 metres high, but a climb up of 242 metres. Plenty of hairpin bends and at one point there’s a climb of 12%. That’ll warm up Caliburn ready for his visit to the Alps in a couple of days time.

20 minutes later I turned up the house of Jean-Marc. He was a boy with whom I had a school exchange back in 1970. We had lost touch after that but a casual meeting with a relative of his 6 or so years ago had enabled us to re-establish contact.

We’ve seen each other a few times since then and it’s nice to be in touch and exchange news.

We had a good chat and then we went round to see his mother. She’ll be 90 very shortly but I’ve seen 70 year old people much older than she is. She’s in the peak of health both physically and mentally which is astonishing.

50 years ago it was the birthday of Jean-Marc’s sister and we had taken a photo of the party. Today the three of us (without Isabelle) arranged ourselves as we had done back then and re-took the photo.

Back at Jean-Marc’s, Jacqueline had already prepared a meal. Stuffed courgettes, which brought back many happy memories of living in the Auvergne when courgettes would be on everyone’s menu at this time of year.

Our conversation continued, as we had a lot to say, for quite some considerable time until bed time. They had very kindly offered me a bed for the night which was very nice of them, and I took myself off there and that was that.

Tomorrow I’ll be moving on because there is still plenty to see and to do that must be done while I’m still able to do so and, more importantly, before we have this second lockdown which I am anticipating once the holiday season has finished.

Saturday 25th July 2020 – I’M WHACKED PART III

We’ve been hard at it again today.

And still suffering the effects of yesterday because no matter what, I still couldn’t rouse myself out for the third alarm. 06:40 it was when I finally crawled out of bed.

There was the usual cup of tea brought to me, and then I carried on with paperwork and the like.

There was a group of us last night in a hotel, a conference or something like that. I ended up sharing a table with someone who resembled a girl from the radio. It seemed that at every meal I was sitting next to her which pleased me enormously of course. This slowly developed over the period that we were there. We were all on our own in a group, a lot of us, talking about spices and herbs. She had a huge collection of spices that she bought and she told us where to go to get them. She said that anyone who would like to could buy her a spice as a memento. I was immediately keen to go along and do this. In the end I found where she indicated the spice shop was but is was a 2nd hand record shop. I was looking in there at the records and found loads of obscure American records of the type that I’ve been recording of my own collection but this isn’t really getting my thing advanced. At some point I’d been talking to a couple of guys. This girl and another girl had said that they had been friends for 22 years and they can’t possibly have been work colleagues for 22 years because they weren’t much older than that so we were wondering if they had been friends or something. I made some kind of remark “it doesn’t matter if they are 22 years old I could still keep up”. I was with her friend at one particular point when a Ford Cortina Estate mark III gold came by, covered in patches of underseal and rust preventer, that kind of thing. I told her that I had a vehicle like that. She expressed surprise but wasn’t very interested. That reminded me that somewhere along the line I was with Nerina at one point talking about getting a new car for the taxis but for our own private vehicle would we be tempted to get something decent that we could use for a taxi if necessary and was that really a good idea. I thought that I’d like my taxi business to be bigger but only in a bigger town where there is room and scope without treading on people’s toes. But back to this story with the girl from the radio – I remember that they went off on an expedition somewhere leaving some of us behind. I was left behind and feeling very disappointed about this.

At another point in the night there was a question about scaffolding – being on scaffolding and what happens if a pole breaks or someone cuts one while you are on it. Terry told me about a system that he had where there was always a couple of wires to attach the scaffolding to various points somewhere so that if it did break the wires would snag somewhere and at least give some kind of temporary support while you scrambled down.

This yacht thing – there was more to it than that, including me buying a yacht for some reason. And I would love to know what “this yacht thing” was all about and what did I forget to record during the night.

After breakfast we collected our wits and the like and then headed off to Ingrid’s with the trailer. I managed to reverse that all the way down the drive at Daniel’s and drop it off there although the socket would benefit from a pile of easing oil.

Ingrid was pleased to see us and we had a long chat – to such an extent that Ingrid made lunch for us. We were there for quite a while.

Later on we went to Les Guis. I found a few things that we needed either for Rosemary’s house or for the barn and did a little more clearing.

One thing that I did was to place the pane of glass in the frame above the door in the bathroom. I bought that just before I was taken ill and I’d never had the chance to fit it. Rodents had been getting into the shower room and I wanted to keep them out.

That was actually the first constructive thing that I’d done down there. The ret of the time I’ve spent either clearing up or weeding. Having inspected the hole in the attic I injected a pile of expanding foam into it to block it up and I’ll see tomorrow if that has done the trick.

With the van all loaded up we went round to say goodbye to my neighbours but they were busy so we didn’t spend any time there.

Back here we crashed out for an hour or so and then I unloaded Caliburn.

After tea I had a look at a chair that needed fixing. I managed some of it with the aid of an electric drill that had a jammed trigger which was something of a complication, but the project failed because the sunken nut that I had found was too large for the hole. That’s a job for a wood file in due course.

Having had a shower and a clothes washing session, I’m now off to bed. Sunday tomorrow so a lie-in. And I’ve earned that too after this week’s efforts.

EPIC HALL

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