… the worst day that I have had today for a couple of years.
It didn’t get off to a very good start either. I eard the three alarms go off but I was in no real mood to make a hurried exit from the bed seeing as I was going out for the day.
07:35 was rather later than intended, but nevertheless …
During the night I’d been on my travels too. I was in some kind of Institution and the virus was taking a grip. I was interested in learning how to do different stuff from different people like bread making, that kind of thing. And this continued on and on and you don’t really want to read the rest of it because you probably are eating your meal right now.
For a change I had some breakfast and then a shower, and headed off to LIDL for the mid-week shopping.
Despite being in Caliburn, there wasn’t any heavy stuff that needed buying or anything really exciting in the special offers either. Mind you, there was quite a queue to go into the shop – just 20 people at a time being allowed in.
Having done the necessary I drove off to Laurent’s place at Bréhal Plage and we went off together for a drive.
Not as many photos as I would have liked to have taken. But that’s because, quite simply, when someone else is doing the driving you’re pretty-much dependent upon them and their time more than anything else.
Our first stop was at Flamanville right up the coast near Cherbourg.
But before I say anything about it, I was distracted … “as usual” – ed … by something offshore. It’s been an absolute age since we’ve had a “ship of the day” on these pages and so the presence of a large one sailing by about 10 miles or so offshore immediately caught my eye.
Of course at this kind of distance it was impossible to see its name, but its silhouette bears a great reemeblance to that of Commodore Clipper, the shuttle ferry that runs between the Channel islands anf the Uk mainland and ideed she did leave St Peter Port in Guernsey about 20 minutes before I took this photo.
As for where Guernsey might be, the answer to that is that it’s right there. The island of Sark is there too, but that’s lost in the background of the larger island.
Where we are is at the head of a peninsula right up near the top of the Cotentin Peninsula, very close to the port of Dielette and it’s from here in the summer that there’s a ferry service over to the Channel islands.
Not right now, of course, because everything is postponed while we all recover from the virus.
It’s usually Granville that provides the summer service over there, because judging by the look of the port at Dielette, Victor Hugo is too large to go a-manoeuvring around in there.
The ferries run a shuttle service from here to the various Channel Islands. That’s Jersey over there, a mere 40 or so kilometres away, much closer of course than it is to the port of Granville.
So it looks as if Dielette is the place for me to come in the summer to go on a nautical excursion if I can’t hitch a lift on Normandy Trader or Thora
The weather was pretty grey and miserable today, which was a shame. Not the ideal day for photography.
Nevertheless, down there on the horizon in a faint grey wisp is the coast of Brittany, which according to my calculations is a very improbable 90 kms away. But there’s no other land anywhere else out there in that vicinity so I can’t even begin to think what else it might be.
It could, I suppose be wishful thinking, the same kind of thinking that led the sailors of Christopher Columbus to believe on a couple of occasions that they had seen land before they finally espied San Salvador, but it looks pretty realistic to me
There was a floating buoy just offshore, but I reckon that I know the reason for this.
Where we are (although you can’t see it) is at the side of the big nuclear reactor at Flamanville. This is France’s equivalent of New Brunswick’s Lepreau Reactor, in that no matter how much money they throw at it and how many technicians then send in to wotk at it, they still can’t make it fire up correctly.
To be fair, the original two reactors from the 1980s seem to work fine and at one stage they were producing as much as 4% of the total amount of France’s electricity without any major problem. A third reactor was commissioned in 2007, with an on-line date of 2012 and a cost of €3.3 billion.
However one catastrophe after another has pushed the start date further and futther back, with a latest date being 2022 and with costs now rising to €12.4 billion. And none of that is certain to be the final position either.
It makes people wonder at just what stage will these people finally throw in the towel and stop throwing good money in after bad money.
We drove from there all the way along the coast on the “Route des Caps” as far as it was possible to go by car – to the harbour at Goury La Hague at the Cap de la Hague.
This is another place that I will add onto my list of places to come another time when I have visitors because even in the most miserable weather it was really nice. This little harbour here would look beautiful when the tide is in and all the boats ar bobbing about on the waves.
But I couldn’t help thinking that that is a massive wall to protect such a small harbour.
Regardless of the despressing weather, this woman here seemed to be njoying herself.
She had her notebook out and was busy painting a scene of the local landscape while her dog sat patiently close by.
This is a beautiful building just here on the quayside and Laurent asked me if I could guess its purpose. After a few moments thought I had to donner ma langue au chat as they say around here
Apparently it’s the local lifeboat station.
And what is interesting about it is that it’s a roundhouse. There are two slipways, one behind the harbour wall and the other one straight down into the sea.
The lifeboat is on a turntable on the inside and depending on what the weather is doing and where the tide is, the turntable is moved round so that the lifeboat is launched down the most appropriate slipway
And it’s hardly surprising that you need a lifeboat in a location like this.
This is the view down the slipway that goes directly into the sea. There are enough rocks just offshore to put the wind up anyone. And talking of wind there was plenty of that today too.
The green and red posts in the water tothe left are, I reckon, to mark the entrance to the little harbour there. “Green” has five letters so that means “right” – you keep that to your right as you are coming in. “Red” is the same colour as “port”, which has the same number of letters as “left”, so you keep that to your left.
Had the weather been better, the view from here would probably have been better as well.
Nevertheless we could see a long way down the coast all the way past “La Roche” down to the Falaise – or cliff – de Jobourg. And looking at that cliff answered a question of mine – namely, why would there have been the signs of the école d’escalade – the School of Climbing – that I had noticed as we had driven throught the town of Jobourg to reach here.
Well, now we know, of course. One look at that rock face right down there tells us everything.
That’s the Cap de La Roche and behind it to the left is another industrial complex of eerie significance.
It’s the site of France’s answer to Sellafield, and where all of the country’s nuclear waste – altogether more than half of the World’s capacity – is stored ready for whenever they discover a method of disposing of it.
Laurent had always wondered why they had chosen that particular site, and of course I was able to tell him. The prevailing winds in this area come up the English Channel from the south-west, and there is no French land whatever anywhere in the direction to which they will be blowing.
Any leak of radioactive material whatsoever will be blown out to sea by the prevailing winds and make landfall somewhere over the south-east coast of the UK.
There are some more rocks out there in that direction too, with that beautiful marker light perched on top of them to warn shipping.
The island behind it is the island of Alderney, the most northerly of the Channel Islands. These of course are British possessions which remained in English hands after the English were expelled from Normandy in 1204 for the simple reason is that the French King at the time didn’t have a fleet handy at the time to go along and invade them.
By the time that subsequent French Kings had arranged a Navy, the opportunity had been passed by and the islands had been reinforced ready to repel any invader.
The French Kings might have been forestalled, but others were not. In one of the most shameful incidents of World War II the British Government surrendered the Islands and their population to the Germans in 1940 without even firing a bullet in their defence.
Furthermore, even though the fighting had long-since passed them by, the British did not go along and claim them back from the Germans until after the end of the war. Hundreds of British citizens had died in the Concentration Camp on Guernsey or had been deported to places like TITTMONING, WHICH WE HAVE VISITED, Buchenwald or even Auschwitz, and the starvation of the citizens during the winter of 1944-1945 when the island was blockaded by the British caused hundreds of deaths.
Anyone who talks about hos “The British Won The War” needs to be reminded that without the help of the Americans they didn’t even dare to fight the Germans on their own soil until any danger of the German fighting back had been removed.
This here is a symbolic photograph.
It’s basically the final point of French territory around here – the lighthouse at the end of the Cap de la Hague. And a lighthouse is needed here too because of all the rocks that we have seen littering the area that will catch many a mariner totally unawares.
And shipwrecks just here are legion too – even big ships like the 10,000 tonne Button-Gwinnett that ran aground on the rocks on 19th December 1947 as well as any number of smaller vessels and pleasure boats that round the headland straight into a contrary current.
As well as shipwrecks on the shore, there have been innumerable accidents just off the coast too with collisions in the narrow navigable seaway.
This cross commemorates the crew of the French submarine Vendemiaire. She was built in 1910 when sumarines were in their infancy and submarine tactics were relatively unknown and untried.
On the 8th of June 1912 the three submarines of the Cherbourg flotilla were sent out to practise an interception on a few ships of the French navy that were steaming up the Channel. For some unknown reason the ships failed to co-ordinate their manoeuvre and the warship Saint Louis struck Vendemiaire amidships, sending her straight to the bottom taking all of hercrew with her.
Her wreckags was discovered in 2016 about 70 or so metres down, off the north-east coast of Alderney and the gash in her side was clearly visible, exposing her interior.
This photo was one that I took for my friend Louise.
She has a “thing” about useless gates, and while this isn’t a uselass gate it’s one of the next best things – a useless stile. I’m not sure at all why this would be there.
By now I was feeling really ill and the drive back to laurent’s was extremely uncomfortable for me. When we reached his house, I simply said my goodbye and drove home
Back here, I crashed out on the chair, and was gone for several hours. When I awoke, I was feeling even worse so I did something that I haven’t done for a couple of years and which I vowed that I would never do again, and that was to go and crash out on the bed.
And off I went on a long, confusing voyage. I was on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour again. I was friendly with a couple who had come on board ship – a young couple. They had been on all of the yoages and were making a season of it but what had happened was that after the first couple of voyages they’d moved to the other side of the ship. When I encountered them later on they had had to move back. I asked them why and they told me “well the steward on the first side of the ship they were on was not very friendly so they wanted a nicer steward so they had moved across but they had no idea why it was they they had had to move back. We were chatting and by this time I was in Montreal and there I was wandering around in this shop like a big restaurant place. They had all these foods and sweets laid out where you could help yourself. I was wandering around trying to find something there to eat but there was nothing to eat for me. I was having a look at the sweets as well but there were no mint sweets of any kind that I could eat. I felt really bad about that. Then I was off again wandering around Montreal looking at an apartment. When I saw the rent, which was about 24,000 per year I thought that maybe I wouldn’t do that. But it was a nice lovely place down by the river. I was wandering around through the town and there was this abandoned car. The rear end was missing off it and the front end had been smashed and the engine was missing – a red one. I was wondering about the logistics of how I was going to stay – whether I could get a car, whether I could get a drivers’ licence, how much it would cost to get a driver’s licence on the Black Market, all kinds of stupid things like that
There was one instance where something was involved with firearms. I had a firearm which was not like me. Someone else had one and an issue came about that. I showed my firearm and this guy asked me all kids of weird and wonderful questions about it so I took the bullet and showed him the bullets. I quickly grabbed his and pulled his bullets out of his gun. They were a different type so I said something like “you have no room to talk about bullets” but this guy then turned to start talking about hunting which was not what I was trying to do at all.
Someone called me at sometime – I’ve no idea who because I didn’t answer. I was dead to the world and that was that.
No danger of me ever moving again.
