Monday 16th November 2020 – PHEW! THAT WAS HOT!

With having a pile of left-over mushrooms from the weekend, this evening I made a curry with some lentils, a pepper and the leftover mushrooms.

And into it I tipped a jar of the Vindaloo sauce that I’d bought from NOZ.

All I can say that tonight I’ll be putting the toilet roll in the fridge and I shall be doing so again and again etc., as there are four more helpings for the freezer. I hope that they will actually freeze and not defrost the rest of the stuff in the freezer instead.

So while you admire the photos of a much calmer sea tonight, this morning I missed the third alarm – but only by five minutes. I was up and about pretty promptly.

After the medication I attacked the Radio programme that I had promised to do. And by 14:20 I’d finished – all done and dusted. And I could have finished earlier too had I made up my mind much quicker to save 11 seconds rather than to add in an additional 3 seconds. And there was even a pause for lunch too with some of my beautiful new bread.

Next task was to listen to the dictaphone. And it’s no surprise that I overslept this morning. It just amazes me that I returned home from my travels as quickly as I did.

I was at home again last night. It was about 04:00 in the morning and I had to go to the bathroom. When I went in there our bath had been transformed into a bed and someone had set up a little camp table with computer on it working away in the bathroom as if we had visitors for the night. So I did what I had to do and later I had to go for a walk uptown to do something, so off we set, me and some other guy. He was some high official of the European Union, something like that. We had a chat and he gradually eased out of his shell, I eased out of mine and we did what we had to do. On the way back we had problems crossing the road. I had to stick my head round a corner, tell him when it was clear then we’d both run for it, which was what we did. We walked on a little further and there was this beautiful view over what looked as if it might be Stoke on Trent right across the city centre. I said to him “I wish I’d brought my camera with me”. We walked on back towards the office and by now this guy had changed into a girl a bit like Malou only it wasn’t Malou but that type of girl. We were having a chat and she came out with a quote while we were chatting that I immediately recognised. I said something like “it’s not every day that I get to go walking around with another Emerson Lake and Palmer fan”. She smiled and we started talking about music and life when we were probably both the same teenagers in the early 70s. Then it drifted on to I was about to get on stage and perform with my group. I awoke in a feverish sweat again.

The room that we were in was very bare and spartan and my friend made a comment about it so I replied with something or other and he or she replied again (and what that was all about I really have no idea)

I was reading a book talking about new all kinds of different things, a transport book and there was a photo of a bus going through through the streets of Dublin. When I looked it was a peculiar pink colour with grey writing and I thought “I’ve seen that livery before” – in fact I have some AAA batteries like it. I suddenly realised that I’d done some work for someone in Conwy once. He ran a night club and there was a rumour going around that he’d bought a coach and it was that colour and we’d seen coaches in two other places on the North Wales coast like in Saltney and somewhere else that might have been Rhyl. I showed it to a couple of people and we had a chat about it. We thought “well, maybe he’s going to start some kind of big bus service. I thought “he might have told me when I was working there. I might have been interested in staying to deal with that

I had to go out and I took this girl with me. We were in a MkV Cortina estate. We reached the sub-post office and I parked in the street. She went to do her task but came out and said that she had to wait hours for this so I had to loiter around. I suddenly realised that I was parked right outside the door of someone whom I wanted to see and the door was opening. Some guy walked out and walked off. Then another guy walked out, the one whom I didn’t want to see but I was hiding in the car so he wouldn’t see me so I didn’t see where he went. I realised that the car was parked about 3 feet from the kerb so I put it into the kerb nicely, which meant that the car behind me was now sitting 3 feet out in the road. I waited, and the next thing that I remembered, I was right down the far end of the street about a mile away. I thought “she’ll be wanting to go home soon so I set out to walk. At the traffic lights at the top of Broad Street there were some kids playing around on like a shop from there. 3 kids in heavily-laden pickups squealing the tyres and doing handbrake turns much to the annoyance of a couple of neighbours. Then an old BAS motorbike went past with a boy and girl on it. He did a wheelie then flipped it as if he was going to perform a somersault but the wheel came off it and flew off down the street. They landed in a heap in the road and I couldn’t help bursting out laughing. “Serve them right”. I reached the car but there was no sign of this girl now. 1 thing that I had noticed was that in this street there was about a dozen MkIII Cortinas. “This is strange”. There was no sign of this girl so I went to telephone her but I couldn’t make my telephone work. There was a pile of soup in it. Every time I pressed the switch to wake up the battery nothing happened. I wondered how I was going to contact this girl now.

We’d been all over Crewe, a group of us and it’s been a long time since we’ve done this during the night. There was me, and certainly Jackie and Alison. We’d been checking out all of these student houses on Underwood Lane. Jackie decided that she needed to go home for something so we’d all meet up in some kind of café. I went with her. She had this bright yellow van pretty similar to Caliburn. They’d all asked me if they could view where Caliburn was, and I was trying to think of it, apart from leaving a telephone active in the van I couldn’t think. A variety of suggestions came up but this telephone was the best but I didn’t have a modern up-to-date 3G telephone spare. So we set off and pulled in on this car park. Hans was there at a table with a girl from school. I said her name but it wasn’t her and I couldn’t think of her real name. The girl I was with – it could have been either Jackie or Alison said something like “she used to live with a guy” and mumbled his name “but now she’s back with her parents”. I asked “who was the guy” so she mumbled the name again but I still didn’t get it. Then she said that she had to visit the bathroom so off she went. I was thinking that I ought to have a word with Hans for if that girl is free I wouldn’t mind a date with her. Just then he came past so I said “hi”. He said “ahh, I have a couple of friends in here today then have I?”. In the meantime I was waiting for this girl to come back from the bathroom in this café place. There was a woman rattling on the door – she’d obviously been quite a long time and I wondered “had she fallen in?”. It was all becoming rather confused. I could hear voices but they weren’t hers. I was wondering “what on earth is happening now?”

In between all of this I went for a walk around the headland

Just for a change there wasn’t anything at all going on this afternoon, either on the sea or on the land.

The only thing of any note was these people out on the rocks at the Pointe du Roc for the peche à pied. And it’s a surprise that they are there because with the confinement there’s a ban on the peche à pied right now.

And that was that, really. Not even anyone parking illegally in the vicinity of the College Malraux. In fact I even managed to fit in a run along the path on top of the cliffs overlooking the port.

And then I came on home to carry on with the dictaphone notes.

Throughout the day I’ve been talking to my friend with Covid. She’s now out of her time but still having to isolate as other members of her family are still affected. And that’s probably the hardest part of her life right now. It’s enough to make anyone depressed.

And Liz too. She and Terry are in Lanzarote right now, trying to work out whether they ought to come home or to stick out the virus where they are. I know exactly what I would do if it were me.

What with one thing and another I only had half an hour on the guitars and then I went to make my vindaloo, followed by some lovely apple crumble and vegan ice cream.

rather later than usual, I went out for my evening runs and walks around the walls.

There was no-one about at all so I could carry out my runs in relative comfort. I stopped off at the viewpoint halfway along the walls to take a photo of the lights of Donville les Bains in the distance, and then ran on all the way to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch to see how the sea was doing now that the storm had died down. I’m definitely doing my best to keep fit.

Having dealt with that, I ran off across the Square Maurice Marland and then walked along the walls towards home.

There was a really nice view across to the fish processing plant tonight, and we had a trawler down there unloading.

There’s a refrigerated lorry parked there in the loading bay too. He’ll be buzzing off to Paris tonight in time to be on the wholesale market for the restaurants in the small hours of tomorrow morning. Round to the other side, the door to the plant was wide open and the lights were reflecting quite brightly from the water down there.

From there I ran on home to write up my notes for the day and then go to bed ready for my Welsh course tomorrow.

And I have to make some more cordial because I’ve just this evening finished off the last of the lemon and ginger. I’ve plenty of oranges lying around so I’ll make an orange and ginger one for a change.

So now, later than I would like, I’m off to bed. I wonder where I’ll end up tonight.

Sunday 15th November 2020 – I DIDN’T GO …

… to bed until about 2:00 this morning. But even so, not awakening until 11:15 is a bit extreme nevertheless, and the least said about not getting out of bed until 12:00 the better.

So while you admire the photos that I took tonight of the storm and the waves smashing into the promenade at the Plat Gousset in the storm, I was listening to the dictaphone

I could hear that I had been been on my travels during the night. But I’ll spare you all of the gory details seeing as you are probably having your tea right now. But interestingly, at some point I must have stepped right back into wherever it is that I had left off because I was talking to a guy about the first part of my voyage. He asked “how did you know that she was telling the truth? Which Government would allow that kind of thing?”. I said that there is only one Government in the whole wide world that would do that kind of thing and that’s the British Government. They are employing all of their wives and mistresses as aides and sleeping with all of their aides who aren’t their wives and mistresses”. We had a talk about all of their morals in the UK after that.

And that wasn’t all either. Later on there were more things happening but unfortunately it was just a jumbled mishmash and I can’t remember it. Which is probably just as well.

After my medication I switched on the computer. My Covid friend was on line so we had quite a lengthy chat to keep up her morale and then I went off for something to eat. A nice piping hot bowl of porridge.

After my porridge I’ve spent all day baking as I mentioned yesterday. Supplies are running low round here. There isn’t enough bread for my sandwiches tomorrow and I’m not going to have the time to bake any in the morning with a radio programme to prepare.

For a start, I needed some more bread and it was far too late now to make a sourdough loaf which needs a lot of standing, so I made a yeast loaf as I have done in the past with a couple of handfuls of sunflower seeds.

There was no pizza dough left in the freezer so I had to make some more. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’d bought a 2 kg bag of prepared bread flour “just add water” from Belgium the other day for just €1:00. It’s white flour, which is not much use for bread baking, but it would be ideal for pizzas.

And so I made a pile of dough, 450 grammes, to see how it would perform. If it works out well I might look out for some more for my pizzas.

Taking a pause from my baking activities I went out for my afternoon walk while the dough was proofing, straight into the teeth of the howling gale that seemed to have whipped up in intensity from last night.

Clutching hard to my hat, I went over to the sea wall to look at the waves that were breaking on the shore over there. And the whitecaps out there bear full testimony to the force of the gale.

The other people around (there were three or four out there) were just as impressed as I was and so after watching them for quite a while as I did, I set off around the headland on my walk.

It was certainly interesting to watch the waves on the north side of the headland, so I was intrigued to see what they might be like on the south side in the bay by St Pair sur Mer.

And I wasn’t to be disappointed either. As i reached the peak of the headland the wind was thoroughly wicked and there was a veritable gale blowing straight into my face. As I walked around the headland I could see that the storm raging down there was even more wild that it had been round on the north side.

The contrast between the sea out there in the open and the sea in the sheltered lee of the harbour’s outer wall is quite impressive. You could almost draw a straight line between the two.

The tide is still well out right now but with the force of the waves being driven onshore by the wind I was expecting to see something rather impressive with the waves against the sea wall.

And unfortunately it wasn’t as wild as I was expecting it to be. The waves and the spray were not flying up over the sea wall as I was hoping, but there was still something to see. The waves were giving me something of a little performance.

The guy out there walking around on the sea wall was not going to be in any danger of a drenching when he comes round to this side. But he was the only person other than me involved in the scene.

From there I pushed on along the footpath down to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour.

The tide was out as we had seen in the earlier photo, and there was this beautiful dry patch there which the seagulls had decided to colonise for the moment.

What caught my eye particularly about it was the fact that this looked very much like a representation of a map of the United Kingdom. You can see the mainland of Great Britain and over to the upper left, something that looks as if it might be Northern Ireland. The resemblance was quite uncanny.

And so I headed on for home in the wind to carry on with my baking.

The dough had risen really nicely for both the bread and the pizza dough. This flour stuff from Belgium seemed to work quite well.

The pizza dough I separated into three. Two of them I kneaded and rolled in oil, and then put them into greaseproof paper into the freezer. The third one I kneaded, greased and then rolled out and put into the pizza tray, rolling over the edges to remain in the tray and not overhang.

The bread dough, I kneaded and shaped and put into the mould and left it on one side with the pizza base on the tray to proof again.

The baking apples that I had bought a few weeks ago were on their last legs so I washed them and diced them and prepared an apple crumble. Some cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar, desiccated coconut and raisins will do all of the apple some good, especially when washed in with some lemon juice.

While the crumble and the bread (which was now ready) were baking in the oven I prepared the pizza and once the bread and crumble were baked I could put the pizza in. I must buy a bigger oven one of these days.

And here are the finished products. The pizza came out really well and the edges where I’d folded them over were nice and spongy. As for the bread and the crumble I’ll tell you about them tomorrow. I was too full for any pudding tonight.

later on I went out for my evening walk and runs, some of which were chasing after the lens hood of my camera that rolled off down the street in the wind. And wind there was too. It was extremely difficult to open the door of the building with the wind holding it closed.

At the viewpoint there was nothing much going on so I ran on in several legs down to the viewpoint where you saw the photos of the waves crashing down on the Plat Gousset.

No-one about at all again so I ran on across the Square Maurice Marland, walked around the rest of the walls and then ran on home to write up my notes for the day. By now the wind had picked up even more and I had to abort my final run halfway through as the wind brought me to a dead halt.

Tomorrow it’s back to work. I have a radio programme to prepare.

When that’s done I need to enquire about Caliburn and then swot up my Welsh for our next lesson on Tuesday. Not that I’m going to have an early night now, but I’ll do the best that I can.

Saturday 14th November 2020 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… the way things have been recently, I actually managed to beat the third alarm this morning.

Well, sort-of anyway. I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet on the floor waiting for the world to stop spinning round before I stood up.

Mind you,with not having gone to bed until almost 01:00 this morning I did realise that it was going to be a very long day.

There was a sale onlast night and there were one or two things that I wanted so after I’d finished writing my notes I went to make my purchases.

Only to find that Paypal now has this weird system like my French bank does, that in order to make a purchase they will send a numerical code to your phone number for you to enter into a box on the vendor’s website. It’s a system that has never troubled me previously with Paypal so I’ve never had occasion to use it. So when I didn’t receive the text message I found to my dismay that it had been sent to my old number in Virlet which has of course been out of commission for well over 4 years.

Now you can change your ‘phone number, but only if you log in. And to log in, you need the four-figure number that they send to your phone. Which is still in the Auvergne.

The next step is to send Paypal a message. But to do that you need to log into your account, for which you need the four-figure number.

There is of course the option to telephone them, for which you don’t need to log in. But you can only call them between 09:00 and 19:30 Mondays to Fridays.

In the end, having exhausted ever other avenue, I created a new Paypal account, which was not easy, and thanked my stars that there was a one-hour time difference between here and the UK and for having an on-line access to my bank statements.

It just goes to prove a point doesn’t it? If something is going to go wrong, it’s going to go wrong with me.

With what little sleep I had, I still found time to wander off.I was in Nantwich last night. I had a little house there in Welsh Row that used to be an old shop at one time. I had all kinds of various friends and acquaintances. Two of them were people like Walter Billington used to be. They had been to visit me and I’d shown them out but I’d suddenly discovered them back in my house again searching for something. I went to grab them both but one got away. The other one I managed to grab hold of him and got him in an arm lock and stuck his head under a cold tap to cool him down, and phoned the police. It was a sergeant who knew me so I explained exactly what had gone on and where I was. He asked me “are you drowning someone?” I replied “yes”. In the end a black policewoman turned up outside in a Ford Anglia panda car so I dragged this guy downstairs, not caring if he was bumping along the floor or anything, let her in and told her the story. She made him sit in a corner while we went through the kind of things that he might have been looking at.

After the meds and transcribing the dictaphone notes I found some time to do some work on the outstanding blog entries, which makes a change. And then I went for a shower. At least my weight has stabilised – albeit at 100 grammes over one of my target weights. It’s not gone up any but it hasn’t gone down either.

And then I set off for the shops, in a howling gale. And I bumped into the itinerant who is still sleeping rough. I urged him to go to the Mairie to seek help, but he says that he will be OK. I’m not too sure about that but I’ve learnt from bitter experience, as I’m sure you have too, that trying to persuade people to do things, even if you think that it’s in their best interests, quite often rebounds.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when we were on our way to the shops the other day we saw some workmen busily starting to rip out the front of the cafe on the corner in the Rue Paul Poirier.

In just two days, they seem to have really gone to town with it, for not only have they completely ripped it out, they’ve erected a temporary facade around it to protect the building while they set about installing a new shop front.

It would be nice to think that they would replace it with something nice and aesthetically pleasing rather than something that is simply utilitarian. We can always live in hope, I suppose. It’s better than dying in despair.

Talking of utilitarian, this is what I was talking about.

Regular readers of this rubbish will call that we saw a similar temporary structure across the front of a shop in the Rue Couraye when we were out picking up our rail tickets the other day. That’s all been swept away and we’ve been left with this.

But whatever you might say about “utilitarian”, it’s a vast improvement on the cheap and dated 1960s aluminium shop front that was here before.

However there’s a singular lack of imagination around here because there have been three or four new shop fronts in the town since I’ve been living here and they all look like this. Here’s hoping that the one they are doing in the Rue Paul Poirier will be a little more individual.

No figs at the fruit and veg shop, La Halle Gourmande, and none at the Health Shop, La Vie Claire either. It’s the end of the season. So I asked the guy there what I should use in my kefir instead of figs and he gave me a bizarre look and said “dried figs” – the look being the kind of look that means “why aren’t you using dried figs to start with?”.

At LIDL they had a packet of dried figs and they had tons of other stuff too. But I was limited by what I could carry away. It’s a long walk home and the final climb is long and steep. I wish that they would hurry up and fix Caliburn.

Back here I put away the frozen food and one or two other things, made myself a hot chocolate and grabbed a slice of my banana bread, and then came in here to do some work. I was doing all right too up to a certain point, and then the next thing that I remember was that it was 13:45. 90 minutes I’d been out for, I reckon.

It took me a while to come round to my senses and then I ended up with a very late lunch.

That confused all of my timing and I was running well behind after that.

Later on in the afternoon I took myself off for a walk around the headland in the gale force wind that was blowing out there.

Although it was dry at the moment, there was plenty of rain about and the strong winds were blowing it all about at a ridiculous speed. The clouds were so thick and heavy that we were having some really unusual lighting effects in the sky like this one across the bay over the Brittany coast.

And with the wind, everything was changing so rapidly too. I’d go to take a photo of a particularly impressive scene and by the time that the camera had focused it had changed considerably.

Anoher thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we mentioned the other day is the phenomenon of different colours in the sea – this layering effect that we see every now and again.

There was another beautiful example this afternoon in the sea just off the Pointe du Roc. I’d struggled around the headland in the wind but when I saw this I considered it to be worth the effort.

We’ve seen plenty of photos of this point when the tide has been out and there’s nothing on what is at the moment the sea bed to cause this dramatic change in colouring. It’s not even the effect of the clouds obscuring the sun either because you can see what the weather is like.

With there being no-one about I had a little run down to the viewpoint overlooking the port and then had a slow walk the rest of the way home.

It didn’t turn out to be all that slow though because the rain that had been loitering around just offshore came in and got me and I ended up having to run for it. Not before I’d taken a nice photo of the harbour with the two Channel Islands ferries, Victor Hugo and Granville down there along with Spirit of Conrad and Aztec Lady.

The harbour gates can’t have long opened because we can see the trail of sediment flowing into the harbour from outside. It’s quite a dramatic contrast when you see it in this context.

Back here I played with a few photos, chatted on the internet with Rosemary and then it was time for the football. TNS v Barry Town.

And regrettably, Apart from the first 5 minutes, Barry didn’t start to play until there was 15 minutes to go by which they were already 2-0 down. They pulled back a goal pretty quickly but it was too little far too late.

One thing that I noticed though was that the Barry defenders were giving the attackers of TNS far too much time and space instead of closing them down. With the space that TNS was being gifteg, it’s no surprise that they were running the defence ragged and they really ought to have had a couple more, including what I considered to be a stonewall penalty.

But I really do wonder what Kayne McLaggon had to do to be awarded a free kick in his favour. The TNS central defenders were kicking lumps out of him and when he fell over the outstretched leg of a defender (no penalty, and quite right too) he was booked for diving, which was probably the most extraordinary decision that I noticed.

Tea at half time was out of a tin, followed by another slice of defrosted apple pie.

And then I went out walkies on my evening circuit.

As it happens, I didn’t go far. It was much later than usual, there’s a curfew too and the gale is still howling away like mad but I needed the exercise. The Rue du Nord was looking quite pretty in the streetlights and as that’s one of the bits that I run, I set off down there, to the surprise of a couple of small dogs and their owners.

At least it’s in the shelter out of the wind so that it didn’t bother me too much. I could run down there quite comfortably until I reach the incline, which brings me to a shuddering halt.

There’s an alleyway that cuts through there and leads to the Place Cambernon so I nipped down there instead of going all the way around the walls.

And it looks as if the Christmas decorations fairy has paid here a visit too. They might not be illuminated yet but they have certainly been installed. This is looking quite good, I reckon.

But the Place Cambernon isn’t. The bar La Rafale and the restaurant La Contremarche are closed. The place is like a ghost town. But then again, it would be even more of a ghost town if everyone caught the virus and died. I cleared off too, back home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow is a day of rest but I have carrots to freeze, bread to bake and pizza dough to make. My work is never completed, is it?

Friday 13th November 2020 – AFTER EVERYTHING …

… that I wrote yesterday evening about an early night and an early start? it was … errr … 10:30 when I finally crawled out of bed.

If you think that that is devastating, just let me say that after finishing my notes, I started on a little project of no significance, a project that I dip into every now and again, and by the time I started to feel tired enough to go to bed, it was after 04:00.

So 10:30 isn’t really all that bad, I suppose, and at least there was some work of a sort being done.

During the night I’d been on my travels again. I was going somewhere laat night on a bus or something so I had to leave my car, the mk V Cortina NMP parked up at the side of the road. I was going to be away ages so I was worried about leaving it there for so long but as the bus passed by I could see two of the guys from the taxis opening it and climbing in Obviously they needed it for things so that was OK. I ended up round at my mothers where suddenly I had some kind of panic attack – what about all my personal stuff that I’d left in the car? What was going to happen if the people at the taxis got their hands on it? But anyway I got dressed, in a pair of grey trousers that I wore when I was at Shearings. And as I pulled the belt tight, it went two notches over where it usually went which was strange. As I was setting off to visit the parents of a friend my mother shouted “make sure you ring them to tell them that you are coming. Don’t just turn up unannounced”. I thought that that would be difficult to arrange but I said nothing. However my mother said it twice so I wondered what was happening here.

My Covid friend was on line so we had a chat while I finished off what I’d been doing last night. And with the late start that took me right the way up to lunchtime. Something of a waste of a morning, really.

After lunch, fighting off the temptation to go back to sleep, I made a start on amending one of the journal entries from my voyage around Central Europe but I ran aground half-way through.

There was enough time however for me to go off on my afternoon walk around the headland.

The tide was well on its way in when I went out, and I noticed the effect of the waves breaking on the rocks that were there on the beach and which by now had disappeared beneath the waves near the marker light for the rocks.

They were actually submerged but only to a very minimal depth so although you couldn’t see them, you could see the waves breaking on them.

It was something that held my interest for a couple of minutes and then I pushed on, passing three or four others who were out there this afternoon.

There was very little going on out at sea this afternoon – no boats of any description in the English Channel or the Baie de Mont St Michel.

But there was an exciting phenomenon occurring down the bay round by Carolles. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing the sunlight reflected off the windows of St Pair sur Mer in the late afternoon earlier in the year. Of course, the sun has moved round in the sky and we now have the windows in Carolles picking up the glint of the sun.

You wouldn’t credit just how dark it’s starting to go now, even though it’s only about 16:00. Winter is going to be upon us a darn sight sooner than we think.

Still no change in the occupants of the chantier navale. The yacht is still there, as is the vessel Ceres II

But it was interesting out in the tidal harbour though. The gates must have been on the point of opening and boats were queueing up to go into the inner harbour. Here we have one of the Joly France boats, the older of the two, and also one of the two trawlers, either Coelacanthe or her sister La Tiberiade.

There were a couple of other boats in the queue too, and as I watched, the harbour gates opened and the boats went steaming … “dieseling” – ed … into port

I came to the conclusion that the trawler that I had seen just now was Coelacanthe, and I concluded that for a very good reason too.

Moored up at the Fish Processing Plant was her sister and I could clearly see her name on the side of her superstructure. She’s Le Tiberiade, and one of these days I’ll be able to tell them apart. I’ve noticed a couple of little differences between them when they have been next to one another.

She’s busy unloading her catch right now. There’s a van with an opening cargo door that looks as if it might be taking away some of the seafood, and the tractor is busy negotiating the loading ramp with a full trailer.

While I was there, I watched Coelacanthe pass through the gates and into the harbour.

Once inside she began to perform a little nautical danse macabre as she made for her mooring at the rear of the two Channel Island Ferries. And I noticed that Thora was still in port this afternoon. It seems that for one reason or another, she’s not benefitting from these rapid turnrounds that I’ve mentioned before.

But one thing that I did notice from the image that I couldn’t see with the naked eye is that she has steam … “diesel” – ed … up, so it does look as if she’s actually on the point of heading out to the open sea.

And it all was turning out to be quite interesting in there this afternoon.

As Thora “cast off forr’ard, cast off aft” in the inner harbour, Le Tiberiade did likewise and as the one headed for the harbour gate so did the other from the other side, out of view of each other. Half expecting a “Greek meets Greek at the Hull Paragon, Valentine’s Day 1927” moment, I gripped the edge of my seat in eager anticipation.

However le Tiberiade just about made it into the harbour without a collision, Thora

While I’d been wandering around, I’d noticed that the sea was becoming rather rough. And with the tide being well-in right now I was keen to see what was happening down at the Plat Gousset.

And it was a good move too because even with 90 minutes to go before high tide, the waves were coming in with something of a powerful force and smashing into the sea wall over there.

There weren’t very many people out there enjoying the spectacle from close to, but I imagined that they would all be out there a little bit later at high tide when they really would be treated to something of a spectacle.

By now I imagined that Thora would now be rounding the headland on her way out to sea, so I retraced my steps of earlier up to the viewpoint next to the College Malraux to see how she was doing.

And eventually she came a rattling around the headland into the teeth of the wind and the waves and set course for St Helier. It’s not going to be an easy ride for her in this kind of sea.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I keep on saying that one of these days I’ll hitch a ride on her when she has a couple of trips in rapid succession and see how she does. Luckily I’m in a good position in that I hold a British passport and a Permanent Residency Card for France so there needs to be little in the way of border controls to ease my passage.

But that’s not going to be for a while with all of this Covid going on. No-one will be going anywhere for quite a while yet.

And so I watched Thora battle her way through the waves for a while and then headed for home.

On the way across the car park I’d seen Gribouille, the big ginger cat, sitting on his windowsill so I went to give him a stroke. And there I fell in with his owner, and learnt some pretty sad news. She’s had a couple of falls just recently, during one of which she fractured her had and it had to be stapled together. But as she doesn’t seem to be able to cope particularly now, she’s moving into sheltered accommodation

Of course, she’s taking my mate with her, but regardless of that, it’s another convivial soul from the building who is moving away. Nothing stays the same for long, and rightly so, but it’s a shame when people move away like this and break up a happy little circle.

Back here I caught up with a few notes and then went to make some kefir. This morning, I’d started on the last bottle and there was another batch brewing nicely.

The four kiwi fruits that I had bought three weeks ago were now nice and ripe so I peeled them and threw them in the whizzer, followed by a generous handful or two of grapes.

Having whizzed them around for quite a while to extract as much juice as possible and then passed it all through my network of meshes and filers into the big jug.

Having done that, I drained off the brewing kefir through a very fine-mesh filter and added it to the juice, stirring it well in, leaving an inch or two of liquid in the bottom to keep the kefir grains covered.

Several slices of lemon, a fig bisected and 40 grammes of sugar went into my big jar, followed by 2 litres of filtered water. That’ll brew now for a few days while I wonder where I’m going to get some figs from for the next batch after that as I’ve now run out.

The mixed kefir and juice was then strained through a mesh coffee-filter into the various flip-top bottles that I use. They’ll be put into a cool place out of direct light now to complete the second fermentation and in a couple of days they will be ready to drink.

But I made a bit of a boo-boo here. Remember the pineapple slices that I’d had the other day? I’d put the syrup on one side to use in my kefir today but I’d forgotten it. I don’t know whether it’ll keep for four or five days now.

All of that took so much time that I didn’t have my guitar practice, which was disappointing.

Instead, I ended up with some of the best taco rolls that I’ve ever made. That chick pea and couscous stuff that I used in error instead of the bulghour certainly made a difference. And my defrosted apple pie was delicious too

later on I went out for my runs around the walls.

No-one else was out there, everywhere else was quiet, not even the Pizza van in the Place Czmbernon tonight with the lockdown. No-one down in town either.

I had a look to see if the Christmas decorations had gone up in the Rue Paul Poirier but while there is certainly something or other, and several thereof, strung up across the street, there’s nothing illuminated yet.

All of this is to come very soon, I imagine. But I’ll find out more in due course. I ran on home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow it’s shopping day, and I have to track down some figs. That’s not going to be easy because I’ll still without Caliburn so wherever I go and whatever I buy, I’ll have to carry it home and I’m not looking forward to that.

Luckily the freezer is pretty well stocked up and that should keep me going for a week or so but I really do need to organise myself better. I don’t know what it is that I’m doing right now but whatever it is, I’m doing it all wrong.

Thursday 12th November 2020 – I DIDN’T …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the way home, I took a little detour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday 11th November 2020 – JUST FOR A …

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

And that’s not the best of it either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday 10th November 2020 – WHAT A …

… bad day this was today.

But I could console myself (although it isn’t appropriate to do so) in the fact my day was nothing like as bad as that of some people.

And therein lies the root of it all. Just as I was going to bed last night, one of my dearest friends came on line for a chat and to tell me the news that she has contracted Covid, and is in isolation in a separate room in her own home away from her family.

We ended up talking to each other until about 03:00 about this and that until she decided that she needed to go to sleep. And so no chance of my waking up at 06:00. 09:20 was a bit more like it, and then I would have stayed in bed until later had I had the choice.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I don’t have too many friends – I go for quality, not quantity – but that’s now two of them, in widely separated parts of the World who are suffering. These are probably going to be the first of many. This virus is coming too close for comfort and I’m not sure how the rest of us are going to escape.

And as I write this, I discover that another two friends of mine suffered from it too, but right at the beginning of the outbreak and so they didn’t really publicise it like people would subsequently.

Anyway, with my running late, I had to prepare for my Welsh class, which took longer than it ought, and when the computer, when I switched it on to connect to the Zoom site decided to perform an upgrade. I had a feeling that it was going to be one of those days.

Our teacher didn’t help much either. She took us all the way through the course, all 2.5 hours of it, without a single break and my head had turned to jelly a long time before the end of the class.

After lunch, and more of my delicious bread, I had a listen to the dictaphone.

During the night we had been watching some kind of report on the economy in north-east France, an industrial town, about the father of a family who worked on a railway siding that served a couple of factories and how things had already been difficult when they had closed the line for a while to replace everything but now they were talking about the factories closing down with people changing habits by buying from abroad etc. They were saying what a hard time people like this father were going to have, yet there he was. He had 8 children and living in some sort of primitive conditions with a tin bath. he was saying that by the time the 8th child got into the bathwater it was pretty black. It would be even worse by the time all of this work had been going on with the dust and everything that it was creating. My friends and I appeared to have very little sympathy for him because he seemed to be one of these people who was stuck in a routine and had a total lack of imagination. All he could do in his spare time was to just breed children

With one or two other things that needed some attention, it was soon time to go out for my afternoon walk

Looking out across the bay I saw what can only be described as a “mariner’s delight”. And any ancient mariner – and, indeed, a few modern ones too – will tell you about these.

A clear but moisture-laden air is blown across the sea by the wind and then hits the coastline. To cross the coastline the air has to rise up and the change in temperature and pressure causes the moisture to condense.

It’s a sure sign of land ahead and mariners throughout the centuries will have their eyes glued to the horizon looking for these cloud banks as they cross vast expanses of water.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that WE SAW A BEAUTIFUL ONE when we were in Labrador in 2010.

While I was peering out to sea I saw movement on the water over by the Ile de Chausey and it was heading my way.

And so I carried on walking, knowing that it was drawing even closer to me as I advanced along the footpath. Of course I had a really good idea of who it might be but nevertheless I took a photo of it for closer examination

Sure enough, I was perfectly correct, not that there was ever any doubt. Our old friend Joly France is on her way back from the islands accompanied by a squadron of birds of some description.

Round on the point at the headland and I had a look out to sea westwards towards the Brittany coast.

The weather is completely different here as you can see. It’s almost completely overcast. There are a few obvious gaps in the cloud cover and the bright sunlight is coming streaming through them onto the surface of the water.

This is the kind of thing that is well-worth a photo. It has produced quite a surreal effect over there and that kind of view would be almost impossible to reproduce artificially. Nevertheless it would have been nice to catch a trawler or something in the sunlight.

By this time, Joly France had caught up with me and had come around the headland into the Baie de Mont St Michel.

It’s the older one of the two Ile de Chausey ferries. You can tell that bu the fact that the upper deck superstructure is larger than on the other one and the windows on the main deck are more square than deep-rectangular.

But even with confinement it seems that the ferries are still working. As yet I’m unconvinced of the wisdom of that decision as it will merely entice second-home owners and tourists out to the island, taking the virus with them.

With this virus, which has a shelf-life of two days, the only hope of beating it is for a complete lockdown for a couple of weeks. Half-hearted measures aren’t going to be of any use whatsoever.

Leaving Joly France aside for the moment, I wandered off along the footpath to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour to see what was going on.

And we have a visitor in port today. Normandy Trader is here on one of her runs from Jersey and back again. But she’s not moored in the usual place for loading and unloading. She should be underneath the crane that’s round to the left out of shot.

All that I can think of is that maybe Thora was in port too and had needed the crane for loading and unloading but I must have missed her. It can’t be because of Chausiais as she was moored up at the ferry terminal.

Back here there were still a few things to do and so I never did get round to doing what I had planned to do today. But I had a good and enjoyable session on the guitars his evening – more Bowie stuff again on the bass followed by some Creedence Clearwater Revival, and then another 30-minute concert with the acoustic 6-string.

And my singing is improving too. But before anyone gets excited about it, just let me say that it couldn’t get any worse.

Tea was an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit out of the freezer, followed by pineapple and vegan vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. There’s actually some room in the freezer now too, which is a surprise.

Just as I was about to go out for my walk, the telephone rang. It was Rosemary who wanted a “quick chat”. And we excelled ourselves tonight with a ‘phone call that ran on for a grant total of 2 hours and 50 minutes. That must be a new record, especially as during the chat I was also conducting two discussions, one with Liz and the other one with TOTGA, on the internet at the same time.

Not that that’s a problem, because no-one ever knows what I’m talking about so it doesn’t ever make any difference however many people I’m talking to.

But having sorted everyone out, no matter how late it is, I’m off to bed. But I can’t go to bed without mentioning one final thing.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, the question of Brexit has affected many of us who left the UK to seek our fortunes in the Real World. It’s caused all kinds of distress and dismay and we are all having to cope with it as best we can, jumping through all kinds of hoops to ensure that we can keep our homes and our livelihoods here.

Between us all, some of my friends and I have been obliged to apply for (and be granted) Permanent Residency in France. Others of my acquaintance from the UK have now obtained Canadian, Irish, Belgian and German nationality, and probably a few other nationalities too.

And so today it’s “hats off” to Grahame, a regular reader of this rubbish who has proudly told me that he is now an official Austrian citizen. Well done you.

When I think of the talent that the UK is losing, just among my own circle of friends, by this stupid, reckless decision no wonder the country is in such a mess.

And that reminds me – if you want to say tell me something, exchange points of view or simply say “hello”, there’s a contact button on the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

Send me a message and let me know that you are here.

Monday 9th November 2020 – I DIDN’T …

… manage to beat the third alarm this morning. But nevertheless I managed to tear myself out of my stinking pit fairly quickly so it wasn’t too much of a problem.

So while you look at some photos of the rather dramatic air-sea rescue that took place this afternoon out in the Baie de Mont St Michel I’ll tell you something about my day today.

First thing after the medication was to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. And, more importantly, who had come with me.

And there was actually something there, so I must have been away at some point. And what I heard about my voyage took me quite by surprise because it’s quite a rare event, what happened during the hours of darkness.

Last night I dreamt that I had gone to the local Council offices to talk about getting a French nationality. The woman had sent me into a room which was where I would have to wait but my appointment would be something like 09:30. After a while I noticed that they had been calling through people who had come into the room after me and I was starting to become a little concerned about this. I went back to the reception and told them. The woman there said that there were a lot of people to see of course but she could absolutely guarantee that I would be seen before 11:30 that morning. I thought to myself “OK, I’ll have to wait” so I went back. But then I awoke in this dream and found that I was actually inside an old van with a load of other people. I had a look at my watch and it was 10:45. I thought that I have to go and make this appointment. How long have I been away and what have I been doing in the meantime? So I shook myself out, climbed out the van which was something like a CA Bedford or J4 with sliding doors. Someone else wanted to come out behind me so I had to help them out, then the curtain in the doorway was getting in the way. Then I thought “should I take a book with me or something? But them I thought that I don’t really have time. I have to get all the way back to the Council offices and hope that I haven’t been called in the meantime and that I’ll be there before 11:30.

It was really weird, this waking up in a dream and finding myself still in a dream.

Once I’d organised myself with the dictaphone I had a radio prgramme to prepare.

It’s the 69th issue of my programmes and now I’m deep into the obscure tracks, which was always the plan. Groups like Amazing Blondel, Brian Auger’s Trinity, Eyes of Blue and the Swedish musician Bo Hansson will be making their debuts when this programme is broadcast and there are plenty more of the same to follow.

And so round about 07:30 or so I sat down to make a good start.

It took me less than 90 minutes to choose the first 10 tracks, remix them, combine them in pairs and add on the introduction.

Then I had to research the groups because with so many new groups, I didn’t have much in the way of prepared notes, and then I had to write out the texts and then dictated them.

Once I’d dictated them I had to edit them, split them into segments and then link all of the pairs of songs together with the segments of text in between.

That left 4:20 so knocking 45 seconds off for a closing speech, that meant a final track of 3:35. Having chosen one of the right length and remixed it, I then had to dictate a closing speech which I unfortunately overran and ended up having to trim down the programme by 19 seconds.

Nevertheless, buy 14:20 it was all done and dusted, despite having a break for hot chocolate at 10:30 (and my fruit bread buns were perfect) and for lunch (and my hone-made bread was pretty good too).

First task when I finished was to ring up to enquire about Caliburn. And, as I expected, the time limit that I was given was … errr … somewhat optimistic. They’ll ring me up when he’s ready, but I can see that it’s not going to be any time soon.

Second task was to sort out the rest of the radio programme that I’d started. I even started to type out the notes but I’m afraid that my early start proved somewhat too much for me and I ended up asleep on the chair for a while.

Consequently my walk outside this afternoon was rather later than planned, but I went out just the same.

For a change I forgot myself and ended up going off around the headland instead of around the walls. The tide was well in and out there sitting on a rock was a colony of what looks like cormorants.

They were just sitting there not doing very much, except one of them that was flapping its wings as if it was going out of fashion. The birds posed quite nicely for a good few minutes and then I pushed off to find out what the racket was all about out to sea in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

And out there, hidden in the spray kicked up by the rotor blades of a helicopter, was our local lifeboat Notre Dame de Cap Lihou.

As I watched, the helicopter made two or three practice runs towards her and then on the next one, she hovered quite close and as I watched, she lowered a person down on a winch.

By the looks of things it may well have been nothing more than a practice exercise but it was still exciting just the same.

With nothing else going on out there this afternoon, I wandered off back home again to do a bit more work.

Later on, I had a really enjoyable hour on the guitars. One of the things that I did with the bass guitar was to work out the bass line to David Bowie’s “Heroes” and I found, to my immense satisfaction, that I could sing it at the same time.

Back 40 years ago I could sing and play the bass but it wasn’t all that easy. Despite the fact that I still haven’t manage to recapture whatever skill I might have had, I’m finding singing to be so much easier and I don’t understand that at all.

With the acoustic guitar, I selected half a dozen songs and then had a little concert. As I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … I need to spend more time concentrating on maybe just a dozen songs and knowing them very well rather than dissipating my efforts over a hundred or so.

But one track that I’ve found that I can play and sing quite easily is Counting Crows’ “Recovering the Satellites”, although that song and “Heroes” that I mentioned just now remind me rather too much of a certain night back at the beginning of September last year and one day I might even write about it.

There wa san old burger in the fridge that needed eating so I had that for tea. And being fed up of pasta, I had a baked potato with tinned veg seeing as I have run out of carrots. And the veg was peas, peppers and sweetcorn from a tin that I had bought ages ago at NOZ. As I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … rummaging around in the food mountain at NOZ does provide me with a varied diet.

Both Rosemary and TOTGA wanted a chat on the internet so I was rather late going out for my evening walk and run.

And to my surprise, not only did I manage 6 runs, I ran them without any effort too and I reckon that I could have pushed on even further had I wanted.

In between a couple of the legs I stopped for a breather at the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen plenty of photos of the Place Marechal Foch during the night, but it occurs to me that you may not have seen the view looking behind me

There’s the nice little flat level ground which is disfigured by a small bunker or two of the Atlantic Wall, and then the stairs – the Escalier du Moulin a Vent that leads up to the Place de l’Isthme. And while there is indeed a “Windmill Staircase”, there’s no windmill. although there used to be and I have seen an old postcard that shows a view of it.

No-one about so I had a good run across the Square Maurice Marland.

It was all looking quite nice, the trees all illuminated by the lights and with no leaves to hide the effect.

And from there I continued around the walls and then ran on home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow I have my Welsh lesson so I need to do some revision in the morning, and then in the afternoon I hope that I’ll be able to finish off the radio programme that I started in Leuven.

Then there are plenty of other things to be doing and who knows? One of these days I might be able to see some light at the end of the tunnel. Just don’t hold your breath.

Sunday 8th November 2020 – TODAY I HAD …

… a baking day today and I’ve been hard at it today.

That is, such of the day that I saw because I had another long lie-in today. In fact, it was something like 10:20 when I finally saw the light of day.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone.

We were in Regency times last night, having a lecture about all of the dandies of the Regency days, how they set out to go gambling, womanising, all these other vices that they could have, how they had dissipated their fortunes and had to marry or seduce young girls who were heritees, all this sort of stuff. In the end it ended up with how the aristocracy amused themselves in the winter. We had like a game of darts with snowballs that they threw at a board and how they threw bowls at targets, all this kind of thing. We were well into these aristocratic winter sports when I awoke suddenly.

A little later on I was round at Stoke on Trent last night and met up with a former friend of mine. I was in a J4 van and we had a bit of a good chat. We ended up going back to his house, a big chalet-type place. We got back there and went in. I’d come down from London on the motorway. On the way down to London I would usually go all the way down the A5 but for some unknown reason I’d got on the motorway near Luton or Dunstable, somewhere like that, doing down the M1 a bit and off round the M25 anti-clockwise. But I’d always go home on the motorway. I’d stopped to buy a few things like a big bag of apples – I remembered this. I collected everything up and went to pay for it. I had to go into a little annexe type of place to pay for it. I went to pay with a credit card but it didn’t take cards so I had to pay cash which was a shame. I opened my wallet and there was loads of stuff in there like old ferry tickets, everything, so I took them out and binned them as I didn’t really need them. Then I got in the van and drove back to Stoke on Trent, parked up the van, went into this guy’s house and we could see out of the back. There were a few big hangars at the back. There was a load of old buses in one of them, double-deckers. Every time we turned away and turned back again there would be another double decker in it. In another hangar a bit further down was an old Duple coach from the 1960s. My friend was talking about this duple coach for I was extremely interested in it. The guy just did car repairs but that coach had been there for ages. Thinking on, he hadn’t seen the guy there for several weeks and was wondering if he was OK or something. These double deckers that were appearing were intriguing so we went out and started to talk to these guys about them. They told us a bit of a story. Just then my friend’s wife came and stood on the balcony of one of the bedrooms looking out, accompanied by Zero. I waved, and suddenly Zero came running out down the garden and leapt into my arms, saying “hi darling” so I swung her around for a bit. I thought “God I’m lucky. My lucky day here, isn’t it?”. We went inside and said hello. Someone wanted something and I realised that I had that in the van so I thought that I would go and fetch it. As I was about to go out, my friend’s wife asked “have you started to cook in your flat?” I replied “yes, I have”. “I was going to ask you to bring some fruit or something like that because I’m fed up of having just potatoes”. I thought “hang on, I have this huge bag of apples in my van. I’ll bring that”. I went out and I couldn’t see the van. It was like a no parking area in front of where he was living so I walked a little further down the street but couldn’t see it so I walked a little further up the street and couldn’t see it so I rang him up on the mobile phone “where the hell did I put the van?” “You parked it in the usual place” “Where’s that?”. By now it was pouring down with rain and I saw someone come out of his house. He started to run so I went towards him but it wasn’t him but another guy. Then he came out and he ran off up a completely different street so I set out to follow him.

As well as that, I transcribed a few of the arrears from when I was away and there are just two that remain. They will be done sometime later in the week and then I can bring them up to date.

After a bowl of porridge I prepared the dough for the bread. 250 grammes of plain flour with a banana, some desiccated coconut, sultanas, ground brazil nuts, dried fruit and a pile of sultanas.

Then 500 grammes of cereal flour mixed with several handfuls of sunflower seeds.

All of the dough, having been mixed with the yeast and water and kneaded together, was put on one side to proof.

Next was the sourdough. I took it from the fridge, strained off some of it and discarded it, prepared an equivalent amount of flour and water to what was left and mixed it all together. It didn’t take long to reignite either and by the end of the day it was bubbling away nicely.

Four oranges were then whizzed round in the whizzer and the juice extracted and put in my very large jub. Then the orange pulp was whizzed up again for several minutes and then strained through a fine mesh filter so that any remaining juice would then be added to that which I had separated just now. The remaining pulp was discarded.

The kefir that had been brewing for 10 days was then strained through my filter stack and added to the orange juice, and well stirred in. I then prepared another load of kefir with a fig, several slices of lemon, 40 grammes of sugar and about 2 litres of water. That will need to ferment for a few days.

The mix in the jug, I mixed it again thoroughly and then strained it through my filter stack and bottled it. That needs to ferment for 48 hours or so.

Taking a break from my baking activities I took myself out for my afternoon walk;

Once again, there ere people down there on the beach drying off as if they had just been in the water for a swim. Had I gone out a little earlier I might even have caught them in the water like I did with that woman yesterday.

But as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … they can go into the water all they like but they wouldn’t get me in there joining them. It may have been a beautiful, warm afternoon but it wasn’t that warm. The water would need to be about 35°C before I would want to go into it.

With too many people wandering about to burst into a run, I walked down the path underneath the wall and round the corner to the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset.

Plenty of people out there walking around this afternoon, both on the promenade and down on the beach too. And I’m not surprised in view of the beautiful weather.

From there I wandered slowly across the Square Maurice Marland and then round the walls back home where at the door I bumped into one of my neighbours who had gone out for a walk but was obliged to come back as she had forgotten her mask.

That’s two of my neighbours I’ve met today. I bumped into another one of them earlier on my way out of the building.

By now the bread had risen quite nicely so I gave it a good kneading again, shaped it and put it in the moulds. There was far too much fruit bread for the mould so with the excess I made three small fruit bread rolls. They should make a nice snack at some point during the week.

With some spare time on my hands I edited a few more photos from July 2019. I need to keep up with this project that I have let go for several months. They won’t be completed if I don’t do anything about it.

By 18:00 it was time to put the bread in the oven for cooking. I brushed the fruit bread and the little buns in milk and dusted them with brown sugar first. They’ll take an hour or so to be ready and so in the meantime I had a rather pleasurable session with the guitars.

Anyway, here’s the “after” photograph. The main loaf didn’t rise as much as I would like but apart from that it looks very nice.

On the other hand, the fruit bread looks really nice and I can’t wait to get stuck into that in due course. The little buns especially, with some strawberry jam as a mid-morning snack with my hot chocolate.

Earlier on, I’d taken the last remaining pizza dough out of the freezer and left it to defrost.

I’d been kneaded it on and off during the afternoon and now I rolled it out and put it on a pizza tray. I prepared my pizza and when the bread was cooked I took it out and put the pizza in.

And when it was cooked, my pizza was delicious. One of the best that I’ve made, even if I had to use tinned mushrooms instead of fresh because I hadn’t been to the shops at the weekend.

With a few minutes to spare before curfew I took myself out and about for my evening run. It was a really beautiful if windy evening and I had a really good session tonight.

At the very end of the Pointe du Roc I had a good look out to sea across to the Brittany coast. It was one of those evenings where you could see for miles and the Brittany coast over there looked really beautiful.

Despite the wind, in the shelter of the bunker there was a good little spec to take a photo and even without the tripod the photo came out really well considering everything.

From the end of the Pointe du Roc I ran along the path at the top of the cliff down to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour.

There, sitting on the ramps in the chantier navale is the yacht that has been there for the last couple of weeks. And alongside her is the second boat that we saw from a distance the other day. Now that I can see more clearly, I can see that she is the Ceres II, an offshore installation maintenance vessel of 11 metres in length.

Her presence here may be something to do with the proposed offshore wind farm that they are talking about around here and which there has been some commotion across the bay, some of which we were sucked into when we were out there on Spirit of Conrad a few months ago.

Mind you, whatever she is doing here, her AIS transceiver seems to be still in St Vaast around the other side of the Cotentin Peninsula

While I was here at the viewpoint, I scanned the port to see if there was anything else of note going on there tonight.

Nothing, in fact. It was totally dead everywhere. Not even a cat was out there tonight. The port looked quite tranquil, bathed as it was with artificial light. And that reminds me – with lockdown and curfew, I would have expected that they would have turned off most of the street lighting to save a few bob. But apparently not.

Having seen what was going on – or wasn’t, as the case may be, I turned round and ran for home, a darn sight easier than I have done and I reckon that I could have pushed on a lot more than I did.

Tomorrow I’m back at work again. I have two radio programmes to complete this week. I’m hoping that this time, for once, I could pull myself out of bed by the time that the third alarm goes off, pleasant voyages and pleasant companions notwithstanding.

Another thing is to find out how things are doing with Caliburn and hope that he hasn’t gone into lockdown for the foreseeable future. That will be a catastrophe and no mistake.

7th November 2020 – THIS WEEK IS …

… International Polar Bear Week apparently so I feel that I ought to join in the fun by posting a photo of a couple of mine.

In case you are wondering, this photo was taken last August in the North West Passage, in the Victoria Strait between the Royal Geographical Society islands and King William Island and is just one of the … gulp 2,500 or so exciting photos that I took while I was out there in the High Arctic and with which I shall regale you in due course.

That is, of course, my long-term project for the coming winter – to sort them all out, edit them and upload them to the internet. I’m hoping that once I clear out the arrears back to June, I can crack on with the High Arctic photos, although I’m not sure when all of that might happen.

At least, I didn’t actually fall behind even further today. Even if I slept through the three alarms and didn’t wake up until long after 10:00. It’s always like that when I return home, after all of the effort that I go through, and even more so when I didn’t return home until late.

Being in bed for as long as I was, there was plenty of time to go on several nocturnal rambles, and I must have travelled miles during the night.

I started off in the USA. I can’t remember exactly what we were doing but it involved my father and a whole group of other people whom I knew. There had been some big kind of political debate. Some politician had made a disgraceful affair and all the other politicians were standing up for him. Someone went to get into their car but found that the locks had been changed. This eveil politician had gone around changing everyone’s locks on everything. At that stage I became quite simply fed up and beat both of them into a pulp. I had to sell someone about something or other and I can’t remember what. It was to do with a car needing work or something. I got into my car which was a very new one. I managed to get in and drove away from the scene. As I came up to a set of traffic lights a police car pulled out of a side road right in front of me, blocked the road and put his stop lights on. When the traffic lights changed he went off presumably to drive round the block to come up behind me. But it was a really inconvenient place to stop. There was an abandoned fuel station just across the traffic lights so I pulled over there, of course bitterly regretting what was going to happen next – I was in no illusions. There were a couple of guys there getting petrol out of this abandoned fuel station. They said something about parking there. I said “that’s all right. I’m waiting here to be arrested”. They looked at me a bit wide-eyed so I said to 1 of them “yes the police are coming to arrest me”. He thought that he had better get a move on and do what he’s doing quickly and get out of the way. Just then I saw a group of my friends coming along. They were carrying an engine lift, tools and everything as if they were going to lift the engine out of a car somewhere after what I’d said to them. I thought “this policeman is taking his time isn’t he? I could nip off if I wanted to leave my car there.” But did I want to leave my car there? Did I want to nip off? Did I want to go? There was a cheap Honda Acty microvan things parked up and I was having a look at that.

Later on I was a kid, a teenager doing something with a house. We’d all been working on bits of it and I’d been painting the bedroom. The 1st coat hadn’t worked properly because some filling needed doing on it. I’d done most of that and painted what I’d already done. It hadn’t appeared too badly and I was reasonably pleased with it. Then the tutor came in and started to give me instructions about what he wanted me to do next but I reckoned that in view of the time factor it would be a good idea just to fill the rest of the wall where it needed filling and paint one coat over it to see where it was low. We could fill it again to make it up in the meantime and the coat of paint would be on it ready for the top coat. We had a lengthy discussion about that and in the end he agreed to let me do it as I wanted. He told me that I would have to put a curtain up somewhere over one part where the walls were uneven but I thought that that was going to be a silly idea – it would just draw people’s attention to it but he was pretty adamant so in the end we agreed that we would talk about this again. I did the calculations that by the time I had finished this room putting these coats and this filler on I would have had my A levels by then in which case no-one would be in a position to contradict me at all and I really could then do it as I liked.

There was something where I was doing something with a pile of musicians – it might have been a certain Welsh rock group friends of mine or something like that. We were just sitting around talking about drugs, all this kind of thing. One of them was saying that he hadn’t shot up for a whole 15 concerts but was quite busy taking the weed – the same with a few of the others. I said that I didn’t even know whereabouts to go to get it. I wouldn’t have a clue. They said “that girl who came to your party in your building. She sold us a bag”. I thought that was a bit if a shame because I liked her. Then we ended up at someone’s house after this – it might even have been this girl’s. It was a much nicer apartment than mine, on the floor below from where I was living. We were all getting ready to go places and were sorting through a pile of things and having to tidy everything up. I was sorting through these stones, I’ve no idea why. Some were precious and some weren’t and I was getting it all wrong. There were 3 gear lever knobs from a vehicle in there. It was a really confused thing that I had to sort through. Someone came over to give me a hand. He clearly knew what he was doing. I had to resort what i’d already done because it wasn’t right. I ended up going for a walk around and having a look at her garden which was really nice. On the way back I saw everyone else coming for a walk around the garden. I thought that I might as well have waited until they decided to come rather than go out on my own

Subsequently I was taping a concert of the aforementioned group, trying to get that organised but it was again something that I was only doing half-heartedly and missing most of the joins, thinking that I would have to go back and check it over again. The question of London came up, the question of a restaurant in the basement of a hotel that we go to near the railway station but it had moved down to South London. A girl I was with suggested that we should go there and have a meal. I thought ” that’s a long way to go for a meal and come back. It’s not as if it’s at the railway station where it used to be where we could be in and out in an evening. With this we have to hike most of the way across London to get to it and it’s not going to be the same, particularly with only another two weekends to go…

From there I was walking along Crewe Road into Sandbach and as I was passing the houses at the end of Park Lane I was thinking that I had to go to the bank. But the bank wasn’t where it is but in the street that runs about half a mile to the south, Hassall Road, so I had to find my way around like a deviation. In the end I got to 3rd Avenue and I remembered that I could walk through there that way. I walked down there – there were some kids playing netball in the school plating area there and a couple of boys playing football. I went on and came to a set of steps that I had to walk down. There were two young girls there who were rolling balls down it. Obviously whose ball rolled furthest down the most stairs won. They had a rake that they were using to pull the balls back up. One of them was pulling a ball back up and the rake swung back over her head and nearly impaled me as I was waling past so I made some kind of light hearted remark about it and they laughed. Then I noticed in one of the swimming pools in the back garden of a house round there was a skeleton so I asked “is that your last victim?”. They laughed again. By this time a woman had come down. She thought that it was funny as well so we had a chat. We got to the bottom and there was a really deep puddle. She was talking about the gypsies who lived in Sandbach and how they ahd sometimes washed their clothes in it. When we reached th bottom she said which way she was going, and I thought that this was the other direction so I said goodbye to her. I turned left and she went a little further on and she turned left too. We bumped into each other again. I said “I thought that you were going the other way”. She said “no, this way. I have to fetch some money from the bank”, a different bank. She started to ask “where shall we go from here?” so I said “hurry up and get your money” so she dashed inside the bank.
Later on I stepped back into this dream. I was walking back to the bus. I got on the bus by the centre door and for some reason I didn’t want to sit down at the front so I chose a seat right opposite the centre door where I didn’t have to go very far. Then this woman appeared, the one with whom I’d walked just now. I was hoping that she would get on the bus and come to sit next to me but that was when I awoke.

There was plenty of other stuff too but I can’t remember them. I know that at one time I caught myself dictating into my hand, but I can’t remember what it was that I was saying.

One thing that was rather disappointing was that I wasn’t joined by any of the usual suspects who I like to accompany me. With all of this and the distance that I travelled, I would have expected at least one of them to be there at some point. Instead, I end up with people from whom I spent 38 years trying to escape. It’s just my luck, isn’t it?

By now it was well into the early afternoon and so I ate the half-baguette that was left from yesterday evening. No chance of going out to the shops now – it was far too late.

Not having done much throughout the day, I reckoned that I ought at least to go out for a walk this afternoon.

But no matter how little I had done and how much I thought that I ought to be doing, I wasn’t going to emulate this woman down here on the beach at the foot of the steps in the Rue du Nord. As I watched her, she marched slowly out to the water’s edge, peeling off her outer garments one by one.

And then she looked for a safe place amongst the rocks where she could leave them and her towel.

Having done that, she continued on her way out to the water’s edge, bent doan and soaked herself in seawater.

Once she was thoroughly wet through, she took the plunge and dived into the water, swimming away from the shore and out to sea.

It’s not the kind of thing that I would want to do. Even on a hot day I’m not all that interested in going into the water, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, even if in the past I have been swimming in the Mediterranean in November. But I’ve no intention of going into the water around here at any time of the year.

So instead, once my water baby, I wandered off along the Rue du Nord.

With the number of people who were around, many more than I was expecting in the middle of a lockdown, I didn’t feel like showing myself up by breaking into a run. And it’s just as well because during my gentle walk, my eyes probing out to sea picked up something yellow bobbing about on the waves in the sea off the shore of Donville les Bains.

Closer examination reveals that there are in fact two of them, in a nice line across the bay. We’ve seen all kinds of buoys out there in the past, for all kinds of different reasons, and it’s not immediately clear exactly what their purpose is.

Further along the footpath under the walls, I had a look down onto the beach round by the Plat Gousset.

And amongst the people wandering around down there were three young people in something of a state of undress. It looks as if we have had a few more water babies this afternoon, but I was too late to actually see them in the water.

But one thing that I did notice was the absence of face masks on the people down there. I know that it’s the policy on the promenade for the compulsory wearing of face masks, and I would have thought that now, seeing as we are in lockdown, that the compulsory wearing of masks would have extended further out from where it was before

With crowds of people around, I wasn’t able to go for a run across the Square Maurice Marland this afternoon. Well – not with any sense of pride, at least.

But at the top of the Square I had a look at one of the houses in the Rue LeCarpentier. Just before I left, they had erected some scaffolding up around it. But now, the scaffolding is sheeted in a protected netting and it looks as if work has begun.

Interestingly, the company doing the work advertises itself as a “restorer of the country’s patrimoine – a word for which there is no obvious translation but which means basically the intrinsic cultural values and artefacts, whether it’s song, dance, old machinery and buildings, that kind of thing.

One thing that is of course a compulsory activity is to check on what’s happening down at the chantier navale, seeing as I’ve neglected it for over a week.

The yacht that we saw in there the last time we looked is still present and it’s been joined by another boat. It’s not easy to tell from here what kind of boat it is. I shall have to sneak out later tonight for a closer look.

It goes without saying though that the huge mountain of gravel that was on the quayside has gone, and likewise has Neptune, the gravel boat that came into port as I was leaving town. She fetched up a couple of days later in Whitstable where she unloaded, and the last that I heard of her she had picked up a load of something in Dordrecht in the Netherlands and was on her way to Ridham, just down the road from Whitstable.

Back here this evening there was football. TNS were away at Bala Town in the Welsh Premier League, first away at second. It was a good, exciting match and while TNS were clearly the better team, Bala looked extremely dangerous at times and hit the woodwork twice with the keeper beaten and had Chris Venables had a decent touch on a ball in front of goal with Paul Harrison well out of position, Bala could have taken the lead.

As it was, TNS went into the lead after about 75 minutes only for Bala to equalise 5 minutes later. 1-1 was how it ended, a result which was about right altogether.

Tea was pasta with a couple of the burgers that I brought back from Leuven, followed by pineapple rings with chocolate vegan ice cream. No chance of going for an evening walk as there is apparently a curfew and it’s too late now.

Tomorrow will be really busy. I have bread to make – both “normal bread” and banana bread, as that which remained from last time didn’t survive. I have some kefir to make too, and for that I’ll probably use oranges this time.

The sourdough will need reanimating and feeding too, and then next week I’ll have a go making sourdough bread. I can’t use it this time because, having been in the fridge for a week or more, it’s still asleep.

Just like I’m going to be in a few minutes, I reckon. It takes me a couple of days to recover from my efforts in Leuven and I have plenty of work to do.

Friday 6th November 2020 – AND THAT WAS …

… more difficult than it ought to have been too.

And when the TGV broke down somewhere in the wilderness I really did think that I’d had my chips too.

This morning I totally ignored the alarm yet again and had a lie-in until about 07:30. More stuff on the dictaphone of course that I transcibed after I returned home.

We were in the USA last night. I can’t remember exactly what we were doing but it involved my father and a whole group of other people whom I knew. There had been some big kind of political debate. Some politician had made a disgraceful affair and all the other politicians were standing up for him. Someone went to get into their car but found that the locks had been changed. This evil politician had gone around changing everyone’s locks on everything. At that stage I became quite simply fed up and beat both of them into a pulp. I had to sell someone about something or other and I can’t remember what. It was to do with a car needing work or something. I got into my car which was a very new one. I managed to get in and drove away from the scene. As I came up to a set of traffic lights a police car pulled out of a side road right in front of me, blocked the road and put his stop lights on. When the traffic lights changed he went off presumably to drive round the block to come up behind me. But it was a really inconvenient place to stop. There was an abandoned fuel station just across the traffic lights so I pulled over there, of course bitterly regretting what was going to happen next – I was in no illusions. There were a couple of guys there getting petrol out of this abandoned fuel station. They said something about parking there. I said “that’s all right. I’m waiting here to be arrested”. They looked at me a bit wide-eyed so I said to 1 of them “yes the police are coming to arrest me”. He thought that he had better get a move on and do what he’s doing quickly and get out of the way. Just then I saw a group of my friends coming along. They were carrying an engine lift, tools and everything as if they were going to lift the engine out of a car somewhere after what I’d said to them. I thought “this policeman is taking his time isn’t he? I could nip off if I wanted to leave my car there.” But did I want to leave my car there? Did I want to nip off? Did I want to go? There was a cheap Honda Acty microvan things parked up and I was having a look at that.

A little later I was a kid, a teenager doing something with a house. We’d all been working on bits of it and I’d been painting the bedroom. The 1st coat hadn’t worked properly because some filling needed doing on it. I’d done most of that and painted what I’d already done. It hadn’t appeared too badly and I was reasonably pleased with it. Then the tutor came in and started to give me instructions about what he wanted me to do next but I reckoned that in view of the time factor it would be a good idea just to fill the rest of the wall where it needed filling and paint one coat over it to see where it was low. We could fill it again to make it up in the meantime and the coat of paint would be on it ready for the top coat. We had a lengthy discussion about that and in the end he agreed to let me do it as I wanted. He told me that I would have to put a curtain up somewhere over one part where the walls were uneven but I thought that that was going to be a silly idea – it would just draw people’s attention to it but he was pretty adamant so in the end we agreed that we would talk about this again. I did the calculations that by the time I had finished this room putting these coats and this filler on I would have had my A levels by then in which case no-one would be in a position to contradict me at all and I really could then do it as I liked.

There was also something where I was doing something with a pile of musicians – it might have been Man or something like that. We were just sitting around talking about drugs, all this kind of thing. Deke Leonard saying that he hadn’t shot up for a whole 15 concerts but was quite busy taking the weed – the same with a few of the others. I said that I didn’t even know whereabouts to go to get it. I wouldn’t have a clue. They said “that girl who came to your party in your building. She sold us a bag”. I thought that was a bit if a shame because I liked her. Then we ended up at someone’s house after this – it might even have been this girl’s. It was a much nicer apartment than mine, on the floor below from where I was living. We were all getting ready to go places and were sorting through a pile of things and having to tidy everything up. I was sorting through these stones, I’ve no idea why. Some were precious and some weren’t and I was getting it all wrong. There were 3 gear lever knobs from a vehicle in there. It was a really confused thing that I had to sort through. Someone came over to give me a hand. He clearly knew what he was doing. I had to resort what I’d already done because it wasn’t right. I ended up going for a walk around and having a look at her garden which was really nice. On the way back I saw everyone else coming for a walk around the garden. I thought that I might as well have waited until they decided to come rather than go out on my own.

After that I was taping a Man concert, trying to get that organised but it was again something that I was only doing half-heartedly and missing most of the joins, thinking that I would have to go back and check it over again. The question of London came up, the question of a restaurant in the basement of a hotel that we go to near the railway station but it had moved down to South London. A girl I was with suggested that we should go there and have a meal. I thought ” that’s a long way to go for a meal and come back. It’s not as if it’s at the railway station where it used to be where we could be in and out in an evening. With this we have to hike most of the way across London to get to it and it’s not going to be the same, particularly with only another two weekends to go…

If that’s not enough, then later I was walking along Crewe Road into Sandbach and as I was passing the houses at the end of Park Lane I was thinking that I had to go to the bank. But the bank wasn’t where it is but in the street that runs about half a mile to the south – Hassall Road – so I had to find my way around like a deviation. In the end I got to 3rd Avenue and I remembered that I could walk through there that way. I walked down there – there were some kids playing netball in the school plating area there and a couple of boys playing football. I went on and came to a set of steps that I had to walk down. There were two young girls there who were rolling balls down it. Obviously whose ball rolled furthest down the most stairs won. They had a rake that they were using to pull the balls back up. One of them was pulling a ball back up and the rake swung back over her head and nearly impaled me as I was waling past so I made some kind of light hearted remark about it and they laughed. Then I noticed in one of the swimming pools in the back garden of a house round there was a skeleton so I asked “is that your last victim?”. They laughed again. By this time a woman had come down. She thought that it was funny as well so we had a chat. We got to the bottom and there was a really deep puddle. She was talking about the gypsies who lived in Sandbach and how they had sometimes washed their clothes in it. When we reached the bottom she said which way she was going, and I thought that this was the other direction so I said goodbye to her. I turned left and she went a little further on and she turned left too. We bumped into each other again. I said “I thought that you were going the other way”. She said “no, this way. I have to fetch some money from the bank”, a different bank. She started to ask “where shall we go from here?” so I said “hurry up and get your money” so she dashed inside the bank.

Later on I stepped back into this dream. I was walking back to the bus. I got on the bus by the centre door and for some reason I didn’t want to sit down at the front so I chose a seat right opposite the centre door where I didn’t have to go very far. Then this woman appeared, the one with whom I’d walked just now. I was hoping that she would get on the bus and come to sit next to me but that was when I awoke.

But back in Belgium I had a nice little relax instead (and I felt that I needed it after all of that) and then a really good tidy up before setting out for my journey home.

There was already a train in the station going to Brussels but as I wasn’t able to run for it with the load that I was carrying, I let it go and waited for the next one.

This one was pulled by one of the Siemens Class 18 electric locomotives that work the line from Eupen and Welkenraedt to Oostende. We travel on these quite often.

Unfortunately I wasn’t very lucky with this one because it was pulling a rake of older-generation carriages – the type with the old PVC seats, that sort of thing. It would have been really nice to have had one of the usual sets with the modern cloth upholstery.

But I’m getting greedy. At least it was on time both here and in Brussels.

There was an hour to wait, sitting on a draughty platform on Bruxelles-Midi but luckily this train, one of the PBKA units, came in early so having had our tickets checked, we could scramble aboard.

Even though there are only three trains per day between Brussels and Paris right now, this one was pretty empty. Fewer and fewer people are moving around. In fact, the railway station was like a ghost town.

There was a police patrol on the train too, and we all had our identities and movement forms checked. Luckily all of my papers were in order, and I’m glad that I went through all of that trouble 18 months ago to obtain a French identity card.

Then we had the engine failure. All of the lights and power on the train went out and we ground to a halt, down from 300kph. All hope of catching my connection – the only one to Granville today – seemed to vanish before my eyes.

20 minutes later, they managed to fire it up again and we limped into the Gare du Nord.

Leaping from the train I hared off through the station to the Metro where, luckily, there already was a train at the platform so I leapt aboard and we shot off to Paris Montparnasse, where we arrived with 25 minutes before my train was due to depart.

Just three people in the SNCF offices as well so I went in to see about organising a refund for the tickets for the trains that were cancelled And to my surprise, they cancelled the tickets for the current voyage (which was in fact more expensive) and endorsed the tickets for the cancelled train giving me authority to travel.

We were allowed on this train early too, which was very pleasant. In fact, it took me by surprise as I was in the middle of eating my butties.

Once the train set off, I curled up on my seat and slept for an hour or so. I’d already had a couple of dozes prior to this but this was a good ‘un. I didn’t feel a thing.

For some reason though, the seats didn’t seem to be as comfortable as they have been in the past. It reminds me of that really uncomfortable flight that I had back from Canada two or three years ago where I just couldn’t settle down comfortable.

Our train arrived early too, so I even had time to nip into the Coccinelle Supermarket for some bread seeing as I don’t have any here.

On the wat back I walked past the Place General de Gaulle.

You wouldn’t believe that it’s Saturday night right now. This lockdown is clearly working. I was picturing tumbleweeds and all that kind of thing coming blowing across my path as I walked by.

However I made it home without too many problems and made myself a bowl of soup out of the freezer, which I ate with the bread. And then I released the valves on the kefir and even though I took great care, I still ended up with a face full and a bath full. It wasn’t ‘arf lively after having been left alone for a week or so.

It’s good to be home anyway. I like my little apartment. I’ll have a good sleep and pleasant dreams (I hope) and then I need to go out tomorrow and buy some food. No Caliburn so that’s going to be an interesting trip.

Thursday 5th November 2020 – THIS COMPUTER UPGRADE …

… is taking its time yet again.

When I finally crawled out of bed this morning at about 08:00 it was still on 70%. I’ve no idea why it takes so long to upgrade – and why it should want to upgrade so often after I’d done a clean install.

Tons more stuff on the dictaphone which I transcribed when I returned home.

I was with a girl last night who might have been Ann, something like that. Previously i’d been out with another girl who was very similar to Ann and we hadn’t been on very good terms when we broke up. We were all in this kind of big classroom with long tables and benches doing our work. This other girl had got up to go to the bench for something or other, to fetch a drink of water or food or something. I was already up, wandering around doing something and seen this girl wandering around and thought that it was Ann so I went to wait by the door for her to come. But she didn’t come. Instead it was the other girl walking back to her seat for something and she gave me a bit of a glare as she went back to sit at her seat. I went back to see where Ann was, if it was Ann. She had a boy sitting next to her and the two of them were working on something together. I was waiting for one of them to budge up so that I could sit in the middle of them but she said something like “you aren’t going to need me after this, are you?” I asked “after what? Because after this illness I shan’t be needing anyone”. I was wondering what she was driving at.

Later on last night we were living out on the North Circular Road in London. I don’t remember who I was with now but we certainly had a Ford Cortina Estate. To reach our apartment was rather a complicated affair because there was a road bridge over a big dual carriageway road and the bridge had 3 lanes, the left hand lane of which was to turn left and the other 2 lanes turned right. Nevertheless we had to be in the left lane for turning right otherwise we couldn’t get into the parking area in front of our apartment. That always made for a few things to be extremely complicated. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember now.

Even later still I was with an Indian politician and 1 or 2 people treated him with a bit of respect and a few others were very patronising, calling him “so and so’s shadow”, that kind of thing. I mentioned to him that I thought that it was pretty awful as far as I was concerned. It turned out that he had actually been someone quite well-known in Government circles and had had a career mapped out for him but somehow it had all gone wrong and he’d been punted back into the wilderness again. We spent a lot of time talking and I realised after a while that what I was actually doing was trying to motivate him to start up again. This led to thoughts in my head that if he does fire up again and I’m there encouraging him, what’s that going to do for my own particular career? That was pretty much an afterthought really. I didn’t think about that at the time until I was well on the way towards doing this.

First thing that I did after my morning coffee was to sort out my rail tickets for going home. There’s just one train to Granville tomorrow – at 16:13 and which is taking almost 40 minutes longer than the usual one so I imagine that it’s “all stations” instead of a “limited stop”. But I don’t have any other choice. I’m not looking forward to not getting home until about 20:30.

From Brussels to Paris there are three trains. But the one that corresponds best with my timetable is at 13:13. There’s a wait of about 1:40 in Paris while I change trains but it’s the best that I can do.

At least I don’t have to have a ridiculously early start in the morning

There was an added complication to booking my ticket. Having to perform the operation on the mobile phone, I couldn’t see the part of the screen where I have to tap in the security number that I received to authorise the transaction. It took about 6 goes before I finally managed to enter it correctly.

And it’s not cheap either – not as cheap as the ticket that I can’t use. But there really is no other choice.

It was a beautiful day today despite being cold and frosty so I went for a nice long walk.

Alison had told me where the big cemetery was so I took a walk out to there this morning. And the first thing that I noticed was this extraordinary relic of a very unwelcome pasts.

The “Belgian Congo” wasn’t Belgian until 1908. Prior to that it was the personal property of the Royal House of Belgium, and it was during this period of the Congo’s history that the inhabitants were the victims of some of the worst atrocities committed by the colonisers.

This plaque on the wall of the cemetery here commemorates the names of Belgians (obviously white ones) who died in the Congo during the period of fhe private ownership of the Kings of the Belgians.

Having seen the plaque on the wall, I went for a walk around to see what else I could see of interest.

There were several mounds like this one with wrought-iron crosses set in them – each cross bearing the name of a street in Leuven apparently, from what I could tell. These appear, from what I could tell, to be the mass graves of people who died during the various cholera epidemics on the second third of the 19th Century.

A stark reminder of what awaits the Western World if they can’t bring this current virus under control. Here is clear evidence of the waves in which infectious diseases like this sweep around the World in the days before good sanitation.

But this is what I had come here to see – or one of the things to say the least.

It’s the Commonwealth Military Cemetery for British and Commonwealth Farces personnel who lost their lives during the two World Wars.

There are a handful of graves from World War I and about a dozen or so from World War II, including what looks like a crew of a multi-engine bomber who lost their lives on 12th May 1944. When I find a reliable internet connection and a reliable computer to take advantage of it, I’ll track down the aeroplane that was involved.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that WE FOUND CIVILIAN GRAVES from the wars in the Cemetery at ixelles a few years ago.

Accordingly, I was expecting to find a similar layout here in the cemetery in Leuven and sure enough, I tumbled on it. The wall in the background lists the names of people who were executed by the Germans during the war and who presumably have no known grave.

It would seem that the graves in front with the white headstones are for civilians whose identity was known.

Behind it are yet more civilian graves and other wall plaques.

The plaques seem to list the names of the victims who were deported to Greater Germany and who never returned – hundreds of them. There’s also a casket there that is said to contain the ashes of one of the victims from the extermination camp at Buchenwald.

The graves that surround it are also civilian graves but it isn’t clear as to the significance of their burial in that particular location. The headstones here are not as helpful as they are in Ixelles.

Of course, there’s a war memorial here in the cemetery.

Belgium was very quickly overrun in World War II but in World War I the Belgians hung on right the way through the war and fought to the bitter end. There were several major battles between the Belgians and the Germans in the vicinity of Leuven in the first couple of weeks of August 1914 as well as around Antwerp later and then for the rest of the war in West Flanders

The casualty list was enormous for such a small country and a great many Belgian soldiers were killed, many of whom have no known grave.

One of these days when I have time again,I want to make enquiries to find out what became of the civilians who died in the Sack of Leuven but there was no-one around right now.

And so I set out to continue my walk, but not without having a little smile at this arrangement.

There are taps scattered around the cemetery and watering cans lying around for people to use. But it’s like shopping trolleys here, where you have to put your Euro into the slot in order to withdraw the can.

Do they really have people who would want to take a watering can home?

From here I walked through the Phillips complex and then down the street to the railway line, and then followed the path alongside the tracks all the way to the railway station at Heverlee.

Then I threadedmy way through the maze of streets in a north-western direction and ended up at the Sint Lambertusplein where there was this beautiful church.

It’s actually the church of Sint-Jozef and Sint Lambertus and dates from between 1878 and 1880. There have been several previous churches on or near this site, one of which was said to be a wooden chapel dating back to the 8th Century.

The coming of the railway here led to a rapid increase in population so in 1876 plans for a new church were commissioned from the architect L.A.F. van Arenberg

There was a little park at the back of the church so I walked through there and along the street, eventually finding myself at the Stadion den Dreef, the home of OH Leuven.

Just recently we’ve seen several views of the River Dilje that had previously escaped our attention.

Here around the back of the football ground is another view that we haven’t seen before and it’s a really nice rural setting on the edge of town.

I followed the path along the river for a while to see what else I could see down there but there was no bridge to cross over to the other side, so I ended up having to retrace my steps back to the football ground.

Strangely enough, it was not possible to walk all the way around the football stadium either as a couple of the walkway gates were closed.

However I pointed the camera through the fence to take a photograph of the ground again and then wandered off to Carrefour in order to buy a few bits and pieces to make sandwiches for the journey home tomorrow.

No special offers today unfortunately so I came back to my apartment, to find out tha the computer upgrade was complete and, to my surprise, it actually worked.

After lunch I updated the journal entry for yesterday and that took most of the afternoon. This computer is crawling along slowly when the internet is working, so I’ll have to finish it all again once I’m at home.
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Tea was burger and pasta followed by fruit salad and sorbet. And then the journal entry for today.

having crashed out a couple of times this afternoon, I’m off to bed right now. It’s going to be a long and stressful journey home tomorrow and I’m not looking forward to it, particularly the arrival back home at some ridiculous hour.

But there’s no choice so I shall have to grin and bear it.

At least it will be good to be back home.

Wednesday 4th November 2020 – AS SEEMS TO BE …

… usual these days, I managed to miss the third alarm again. Not by much, I have to say, but enough to disappoint me yet again.

Plenty of stuff on the dictaphone, which I’ll transcribe in due course, but first of all I had things to do; And by the time that I was ready to go out, I’d chosen all of the tracks for the next radio programme (well, the first ten of course) and combined them in pairs.

Due to issues about the program that I use to prepare my notes, I couldn’t go any further than than right now. By now it was time to go out.

This morning I was to meet Alison in the Kruidtuin – the Botanical Gardens – so I headed off up into town.

My route went through parts of the town where I don’t normally do, and found another bridge over the River Dijle that I hadn’t noticed before, this time in the Minderbroerstraat.

Alison and I went for a good walk around and stopped off for a take-away coffee. The town was pretty deserted and gave me the impression of one of those bad B-movie westerns where you walk round a corner to find a tumbleweed blowing across your path.

We retraced some ofmy steps from yesterday where I’d seen bits of the city that Alison hadn’t seen and then went back to her car.

She dropped me off at Castle Anthrax where I went for my Appointment with Doom. And the little student nurse that attended to me can soothe my fevered brown anytime she likes, even if the did have to have a couple of goes to couple me up to my perfusion under the supervision of an experienced nurse.

She’s only been here a week, poor thing, but she won’t improve unless she has plenty of practice, and she can practice on me again

Kaatje came to see me too and we had a long chat. What with her and this new student nurse, after all there have to be some consolations with being ill.

One of the things that Kaatje and I talked about was this virus. She’s of the same opinion as me, in that the low death rate right now compared to how it was at the beginning is the fact that with more tests being carried out these days, more people are being diagnosed with the disease even though they aren’t suffering from it.

Previously, people would only to go seek medical attention if they were really bad and for a mild attack, they would just shrug it off.

However, one thing that they are noticing now in the hospital is a dramatic rise in the number of people with breathing issues. It seems that people who were infected with the illness who didn’t seek treatment at the time have now developed further symptoms several months further on down the line.

As for me, the treatment that I had last time must have done some good because my blood count went up over the last 4 weeks to 9:0. It’s been a long time since it’s been that high.

When they threw me out I headed back down the hill for the town and home.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the last few months thet have been replacing the sewers in the Monseigneur van Waeyenberghlaan and they had a digger working here last time we came past.

That’s another one of those tasks that seems to have gone on for ever and it’s far from finished as you can see. But the pile of roadstone that’s been deposited here at the top of the road by the roundabout looks optimistic.

Further down the street, beyond the ring road, they seem to have made even more progress.

They are now beginning to put in the kerbs and what I imagine will be the cycle track. And it will look so much better when it’s finished with all of the nice trees growing here. It’s a shame that they can’t put more trees in other places where they have been relaying the roads.

And it doesn’t look as if they are going to be too long in dealing with this bit too – and about time too, I reckon.

Ever since at least the new year thay have been digging up the crossroads at the junction of the Sint Hubertusstraat and the Goudsbloemstraat to install some kind of lmportant storm drain connection;

And that work is still under way too and it’s far from being completed. It looks as if it’s going to be going on for ever. The work has extended all the way down the St Hubertusstraat by now, as far as the Kapucijnenvoer.

It makes me wonder just how far they are going to extend this work. They would presumably have to dig up the Kapucijnenvoer in order to make a connection for the drains at least.

One task that looks as if it’s almost finished has been the big hole that they made in the car park in the Sint Jacobsplein.

We’ve been watchng that for the last year or so and I’ve been looking forward to going for a walk over there. Over the passage of time the surface was very uneven and it needed a good levelling out.

But that’s something for another time unfortunately. They might have finished the work but it’s still fenced off. It looks as if they are using it now as a compound for the storage of the equipment and machinery and won’t be accessible until the rest of the work is finished.

my little perambulation led me on into the Brusselsestraat and down to where Sint Pieter’s hospital is, or should I say “was”.

Regular readers of this rubbish will rcall that this immense construction was intended to be part of the French-language institutions that sould have been in Leuven but in a fit of pique after the Federalisation of the country 25 or so years ago, the French institutions moved out to the new town of Louvain-la-Neuve

Sint Pieter’s Hospital remained empty even though it had only just been built. It only ever received some casual use, such as visitor accommodation where I stayed when I fist came here, and for palliative care.

But now with all of the changes that are planned for the city over the next ten years, they have been pulling down the building.

They are taking their time about it too. It’s another thing that seems to have been going on for ever.MY OLD NEIGHBOUR would have had it down in an twinkling of an eye, and that’s exactly what they need to deal with this.

Our water sprayer is working flat out too even if they don’t necessary need it right now.

From there I came straight home and switched on the laptop – only to find that it had now decided to perform yet another upgrade. Last time, it was 55 separate upgrades but today it’s a mere 76.

This upgrading – I don’t know what’s the matter with this. After all it was a clean installation less than a week ago and since then it’s been upgraded twice. I reckon that it was a mistake to bring this laptop with me, what with all of this.

Instead I went and had tea – more burgers and pasta in tomato sauce out of the fridge followed by tinned fruit salad and sorbet. Then I spent the rest of the evening making use of the internet on the mobile phone.

By the time that I went to bed, the upgrade had reached 46%. So this is going to be another long session that will drive me to distraction. I’m not even sure that it will be fnished for tomorrow.

Tuesday 3rd November 2020 – I DIDN’T …

… accomplish very much of my plans today.

The plans all started to misfire last night when I listened to the radio for hours instead of going to sleep. And then I couldn’t doze off once the programme stopped.

Eventually I suppose it must have dropped off, and once I did, I went off on a little voyage.

I was in a psychological thriller again last night, on a couple of occasions too. There were five groups of us, all different colours and we were combining somewhere in some way in which to go off on a voyage but a few people were unstable and led to a few incidents. Everyone was watching closely everyone else until I became alone with someone who then exploded and hot me with a bottle, this kind of thing. Eventually he was overwhelmed and tranquilised. Then we drifted on again but it turned out that it wasn’t this person. He was someone who was suffering from the stress and I ended up alone with the other person who was manifesting allthe signs of everything, and I was hit on the head with a bottle again. This guy escaped through a window to run around the roof. They left him to it. I had to go to the top of the stairs and shout for someone and they came up. They all seemed to occcupy themselves with this guy, not me. I was in a bit of a state. In the end the guy came back in and basically admitted everything. he said “well I suppose that Igoing to be hanged now?” or something. They said “no. We’ll take you away and get you all patched up and cut a few bits out here and a few bits out there and you’ll be fine. All the tlme I was sitting on this sofa. I’d been hit over the head twice with a bottle but no-one was paying the slightest bit of attention to me and my wounds.

Although the alarm went off at 06:00 etc it was about 07:40 when I finally left the bed and after typing out the dictaphone notes, I prepared for today’s Welsh course;

That involved trying to make Zoom work on my mobile phone and for some unknown reason that wasn’t as easy as it might have been. But apart from the fact that it was difficult to see what the tutor was writing or displaying, it worked very satisfactorily on the phone. It’s a good idea that I obtained a digital copy of the course book and uploaded it to the laptop.

The course went quickly today too and I actually felt a lot more confident about it than I have done just recently.

But the bad news came during the course work. The ‘phone was pinging all the way through the lesson and when I looked at the end of the course, I found that my train from Lille to Paris and from Paris to Granville are cancelled. This is going to take some planning, I reckon, if I want to get home.

For lunch, I had finished off the last of the bread so I decided to go off and buy some more.

Seeing as it was daylight and quite a pleasant afternoon to boot, I decided to retrace my steps of last night, only this time being able to see where I’m going.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a month or so ago we say them ripping off the roof of one of the houses in the Dekenstraat and so I was interested to see how they had progressed with it.

And by the looks of things, it’s actually completed, the scaffolding has been dismantled and everyone has gone back home. And by the looks of it, they’ve done a pretty good job too.

Carrying on along the labyrinth I came to the corner of the Vlamingenstraat. As I said yesterday, I’ve not been down here during the day so I wasn’t aware of what there is to see here;

And here is one of the interesting buildings that I must have missed last night. It’s the Onze Lieve Vrouw Ter Koorts, the Chapel of Our Lady of the Sorrows. It’s another one of these places where originally there was a tree and then there was a statue in the tree, and then people came on pilgrimages to see the statue and so they started to build a chapel for the pilgrims and so on.

It was purchased by the University in 1986 and is now part of the research and archive centre of the university.

Across the road, the Sint Donatus Park was now opened so that I could go for a walk around there today.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve taken a couple of photos in here before in the distant past. There are quite a few relics of the city’s glorious past in here and the medieval defences are quite prominent here;

Leuven is much more lucky than many cities in Belgium where the medieval defences have been totally swept away. Here, we still have a few walls and towers and as we saw last month round by the River Dijle, they actually are taking some kind of care of them.

It’s not just the medieval remains in the park that are worthy of attention;

There’s this stage in here, down at the southern end of the park. I would imagine, not that I have any evidence to support it, that it’s the kind of place where they would have open-air concerts in the summer. That’s the kind of thing that goes on in mist parks.

The painting od the whale is particularly interesting and in fact, the rear of the building seems to resemble the scales of a fish.

Some of the gates in the park were locked so I found my way out into the Naamsestraat by way of the grounds of the Centrum Agrarische Geschiedenis Atrechtcollege.

This is the Centre for Agricultural History and the students here are studying the heritage and history of rural life, food and agriculture since the 1750s to the present day and have created a knowledge bank of more than 12,000 photos and documents relating to the last couple of centuries;

There’s also a large collection of artefacts but these are housed elsewhere in West Flanders which is a shame because that would have been somewhere that I would have liked to visit.

In the courtyard of the Centrum Agrarische Geschiedenis is this really beautiful bronze globe:

It’s a replica of the globe that was used by the Flemish missionary and astronomer Ferdinand Verbeist at the Chinese court in 1763 (the original is still in Imperial Observatory in Beijing) to try to demonstrate that western science was superior to that of the Chinese, something that apparently provoked a great deal of merriment.

Apart from that, Verbiest has a claim to fame in that some suggest that a design of a self-propelled steam-powered vehicle that he drew and about which he wrote in 1672 was actually a working model and this would have been the first “automobile”.

Down the road from the College is the Sint Michielskerk.

It’s considered by some to be one of the “Seven Wonders of Leuven” and was declared a National Monument in 1940. It dates from the third quarter of the 17th Century and designed by Father Willem Hesius for the Jesuit Order, who took his inspiration from Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s Il Gesu in Rome.

Many people have said that it strongly resembles an altar, an effect that Hesius managed to continue on the outside as well as on the inside.

After the Austrian occupiers dissolved the Jesuit Order, the church then became a Parish Church.

Round again through towards the Groot Begijnhof I had to take a little detour from my normal route due to roadworks.

Down the Redingenstraat, another street down which I have never previously set my sooty foot, I came across yet more historical relics, to wit – another length of the old city wall.

It seems that there is a great deal of this wall still standing and one of these days I shall have to make an inventory of what there is. But whatever there is left, it’s a real shame that more effort wasn’t made to retain more of it.

Finally finding my way through into the Groot Begijnhof I could have a little wander around to pass the time,

As I said the other day, this is a place where I would really love to live. Nice and peaceful in some wonderful medieval buildings.

From here I found my way to the Carrefour where I bought my bread and some stuff for pudding. And a few more vegan articles that were reduced for special offer. There was also a 2-kg sack of bread flour “just add water” for just €1:00. Not that I’m expecting it to be much good but at that price I’ll give it a try.

Tea was burger and pasta in tomato sauce followed by peaches and sorbet. And then my notes;

Bed-time now, and then Castle Anthrax tomorrow. They haven’t cancelled my appointment yet but there is plenty of time to go. And then I have to worry about getting home. That’s a job for after my appointment is finished. No need to do anything quite yet as they too are likely to change.

Monday 2nd November 2020 – I FORGOT …

… to set the alarms for this morning. And so waking up at 07:15 took me as much by surprise as it probably took you lot.

Mind you, that might have something to do with the pounding of the rain on the skylight above my head. It was absolutely wicked.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too but there was no point in doing anything with it right now for a look on the computer told me that this upgrade was now at 55%. This was going to be a very long day. Summoning up what energy that I could, I spent the morning trying to revise my Welsh for my lesson.

That took me up to lunch and then I had a look at the laptop. I’m not sure where it was going but it wasn’t going any further. The installation had crashed. After quite a little fettling I managed to take it back via a system restore to how it was immediately after I had it running again. And then it reinstalling a lot of the programs that had dropped off.

It made me think, and not for the first time too, that it was a mistake to bring this laptop with me.

When it finally fired up I was able to deal with the dictaphone notes

Apparently I had had a home invasion last night. A gang of teenagers entered my home last night and I couldn’t get them out. I even had one of them trapped inside a rubber glove and I ws swinging the glove around above my head although I couldn’t actually throw it. When I tried to phone the Police, there was no-one there. They said that they would take my number and call me back even on an emergency line. It had taken me a long time togo off to sleep after last night and this made me wake up in a feverish sweat again. One thing that I wondered was that are feverish sweats product of the dream or is the dream the product of the feverish sweats?

This was another long dream something like Saturday Night Fever, something like that but I can’t remember much because I awoke in the middle of it and it all evaporated. It was two boys having all these streetwise arguments and discussions about all kinds of people. They had been trying to roll some kind of guy from some other organisation but he was continually managing to outwit them. Once they cornered him and got him come with them in their motorbike and sidecar somewhere but somewhere on the way he escaped, but I don’t know where he escaped. One minute he was in the motorbike and sidecar, the next minute he wasn’t so I went to put my dream on “rewind” and it rewound but it didn’t actually go back so I couldn’t find out how it was that this guy had escaped. But it was something extremely weird trying to rewind a dream – not the usual kind of thing that you try to do during the night but it shows that it’s getting to me.

Tea was a vegan pizza from the pizza place -one of the vegan pizzas that I had seen last time that I was here. Luckily the rain had eased off so it was safe to go out. And that was a good job because it had really been awful during the day.

Instead of going down the ring road, I went for a wander through the edge of the town in the maze of little streets at the back here. Down at the end of the Dekenstraat I came across yet another building site where they are erecting a few terraced houses.

This isn’t a way that I come very often so I can’t say what there was here before. It’s another one of these places that I shall have to keep an eye on as time evolves and see how the work is progressing..

Eventually I worked my way through the labyrinth and into the Vlamingenstraat, one of the streets that leads off the Tiesesteenweg.

It’s a beautiful little street up at the Tiensesteenweg end, but I don’t ever recall coming this far down. lots of typical late-19th Century terraced houses, now mostly converted into student quarters.

And on the left of this photo behind the iron railings is the Sint Donatus park, with several remnants of the old medieval city walls, including one of the original towers. I wasn’t able to go in there to have a look round though as during this pandemic it’s locked up during the night, which is a shame

Here’s something else that is all locked up at night too.

Finally in the Naamsestraat where I could walk down to the pizza place, I came across the Sint Kwinten’s Kerk. I’ve taken a photo of this before, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but never at night. And it looks so much better in the dark when it’s illuminated.

Dating from about 1450, it was built on the site of a previous chapel like most churches of that era. The Dutch historian Justus Lipsius described it in 1605 as “the nicest church in Leuven”, a distinction with which the Belgian Government seems to agree, for it was declared an Ancient Monument in 1937.

Eventually I arrived at the pizza place, purchased my pizza and took it home. And the verdict? It was delicious.

The plan was now to have an early night as I’m exhausted and I’ve no idea why It’s not as if I’ve done too much. Tomorrow I have my Welsh lesson and then I’m going to try to be brave and choose some music for my next radio show. The show must go on regardless.

Instead however, an Agatha Christie play came around on the radio, one that lasted for 2:12:00 so that was the early night out of the window. But not that I’m complaining. I’m allowed to enjoy myself every now and again.

EPIC HALL

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