Monthly Archives: March 2021

Tuesday 16th March 2021 – HAVING SAID …

… yesterday that it looks as if the big yachts are going to be in the chantier navale for a while yet, one of them has now gone back into the water and we already have a replacement.

It seems that I’m not much good at this prediction lark and I ought to pack it in. It’s not the first time that I’ve had to abandon my fortune-telling. The first time, I had to give it up because although I had a crystal ball, there was no future in it. The second time, I had to abandon my studies due to unforeseen circumstances.

So yesterday we should have been saying “goodbye” to La Granvillaise and instead, this afternoon we are saying “hello” to the trawler Hermes I who has now come to join in the (af)fray. There she is sitting on her plinth in between Charles Marie and Lys Noir

And had you been around here round about 06:00 this morning you would have been saying “hello” to me too because once again I arose from the dead just after the first alarm went off. And that’s after my night last night wasn’t as early as it might have been either. I had another play on the guitar before I went to bed.

Having made yet another major effort to rise from the dead, I went for my medication and then afterwards I listened to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night.

Last night I was with Birmingham Corporation and some woman was giving a talk on something or other to tourists using slide displays and so on. Down in the basement was someone with some old films who was busy showing them. When the woman finished her presentation someone else came in to take over his turn. It was a doctor and she recognised him. They started to chat about old times because they had known each other. But somewhere out on an outside broadcast was another guy who was related by marriage to this woman – I don’t know if he was her husband or something. I was half-expecting him to put in an appearance while this woman and doctor were being so friendly because that really would have stirred up the pot as far as their relationship went. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember it now.

From then on I had something of a rather busy morning. Between then and 09:00 I had tidied up the apartment, taken out all of the plastic, glass metal and paper that had built up over the last few weeks (and you have no idea just how much there was) and dealt with the 20 photos from Greenland 2019 that I was planning to edit today.

There are now less than 300 to edit for the month of July, and many of those relate to my voyage around North America in the Kia Soul.

Round about 09:00 I made myself a coffee and then sat down to revise my Welsh for this week’s lesson. And somewhere in all of that time I managed to fall asleep as well. And that’s hardly a surprise given the hectic morning that I’d had so far.

Nevertheless, by the time that our lesson started at 11:00 I was at the computer with my hot chocolate and slice of sourdough fruit bread to see me through until lunchtime.

The lesson passed quickly enough although I wasn’t as well prepared for it as I might have been. I made a couple of rather embarrassing elementary howlers. We over-ran yet again and that meant that I was even more late for my lunch than I might otherwise have been.

This afternoon I’ve been brewing. There was a batch of kefir to make and I’d bought a kilo of juice-oranges the other week that were now nice and ripe. Tons of juice in those and they’d made a good batch.

At Leclerc last weekend in the “reduced for quick sale” section there had been a litre of fresh orange juice too and I’d bought that. I’d seen a recipe for ginger beer that is made with orange juice and I wanted to see how that would come out.

And while I was at it, I made a couple of litres of ordinary ginger beer too.

In between all of this I went out for my afternoon walk around the headland.

Not that I could see very much out there today because the rolling sea fog that has been around and about on and off over the last few days was very much on today and it had rolled right in.

If there was anyone down on the beach today I simply wouldn’t know. And the same would go for anything out at sea as well.

With no-one else about today I was pretty much on my own as I walked down the path. There was nothing of any interest at all except for a bunch of schoolkids being taken for a walk by a teacher. That’s all that there was to relieve the monotony of the blanket of mist that had shrouded absolutely everything.

From the car park by the lighthouse I had a look out across the Jullouville to see how the view was today in the fog.

Le Loup was visible, and so was the rock upon which it stands. The fog doesn’t seem to be as thick out on this side of the headland and of course the tide is quite far out right now. But the fog is such that we can’t see anything much beyond that.

Out in the bay across to the Brittany coast the view was just as miserable so I carried on around the footpath and headed on along the path towards the viewpoint overlooking the chantier navale and the port.

Yesterday we saw a hive of activity over at the ferry port with the lorry and its crane doing some kind of work.

Today it seems to be quite a bit quieter. The lorry has gone and there isn’t a soul out there working. They still have their blue container that they seem to be using as a store and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen that before on several occasions around and about in the port in the past where they have been working.

So leaving the ferry port and Joly France down there on their own for the moment, I had a look over at the chantier navale to see what was happening there. And we’ve seen the results of that already.

Back in the apartment I carried on with my brewing activities and I now have quite a good collection of drinks brewing away.

On the far left, we have a large and small bottle of orange ginger beer. At the back from left to right we have the ginger mother solution and then the kefir mother solution.

The three other bottles with orange liquid are the three orange kefir bottles and the remaining two at the front are the ginger beer.

You can see the two bottles with the orange caps. They are the cheaper ones that I bought from NOZ. I’ve had a further tweaking around with them and the seals still aren’t satisfactory. When I can find a couple more bottles of better quality like the lemonade ones that I found in LIDL, these two will be retired to less-pressurised duty.

The hour on the guitar passed well enough and they I had a hurried tea with a curry from out of the freezer because there was football on the internet.

Bala Town, third in the League, were at home to Connah’s Quay Nomads, currently leading the league. This had the potential to be the best match of the season because on their day (which unfortunately isn’t often enough) Bala can be the best team in the League.

And Bala duly obliged, straight from the kick-off before I’d even sat down to watch it. Up at the other end the Nomads equalised after just 5 minutes. Ramsey punched out a long throw-in, the ball hit Michael Wilde on the back of the head and the rebound bounced of George Horan’s head into the Bala net and I don’t think that anyone knew anything about that.

Bala unfortunately were very quiet for the rest of the match and Will Evans was practically anonymous, snuffed right out of the game by the Nomads defence. The Nomads relied on their long ball game to the head of Michael Wilde and the two wingers running on, and their persistence and fitness paid off towards the end when they scored two late goals.

The three points tonight enabled the Nomads to stay at the top of the table but their rather lightweight attack, something from which they have suffered for the last few years, is going to cost them dearly yet again as the season draws on.

Now I’m off to bed and I’m hoping to have a good day’s work tomorrow, including booking my travel for next week, something that I overlooked to do today.

Monday 15th March 2021 – I’VE HAD A …

… much better day today.

Due without doubt to crawling wearily into bed at about 22:45 and sleeping right through until the alarm went off.

There was plenty of time for me to go off on a nocturnal voyage or two. I was out somewhere during the night. I went to see a house. I walked in there and walked out in disgust because it was pretty expensive. They wanted €16 per week until 2008. I thought that that was a lot but as someone pointed out, at least it’s a roof over my head even if it’s only temporary. Just then my personal manager guy who looks after me came past and we walked off together and were talking about things. It might have been a friend of mine from way back. We got into school and I’d had a can of drink on the way and this guy had paid for it. I said that I would give him the money back when we got to school so we got there and bumped into a girl who was in my year at class of all people. She’d had a bottle of drink and there had been a strange clip on the bottle that she had to hand back. I’d seen someone walking off with a clip of that sort but it didn’t really click for a minute what it was. After her drink she had a hunt around for this clip but couldn’t find it. She went to ask the girl at the till if she had seen it. They talked about this and she said something about “what have you done with your little friend?”. She looked up and saw me and went all red and blushed. This girl said something so I replied “it’s OK. I’ve had worse than that”. Then she came out with something about the school over the last couple of years has been really good because there’s been no-one foreign in it. No Irish and no foreigners. I replied that foreigners are more exciting and interesting so we had a talk about that.

Later we were on the THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR trying to go through the North West Passage but there had been an incident and we had lost our mast so we were proceeding with diesel engines. There was a port nearby but we didn’t know which one it was so we’d head there anyway. One of the guys with us broadcast a silly message about how well we were doing and so on. We came into this town along the road on the ship and it didn’t look right at all because it looked far too green, somewhere like the north of Scotland. We pulled in and I thought “this is a big town. It has a Co-op and loads of shops so this isn’t somewhere in the North-West Passage at all. The street signs were in English with Chinese writing as well and all of the accents were northern Scotland. We parked where we thought the port was and there was a ramp going up into like a pub. He wandered off, the guy who was with me and I wandered around for a bit. he went off looking in the shops and he started to complain about the rugby pitch that he had seen. I looked out of the window and we were quite high up. There was a big valley down below us with gas holders in it. I thought “well, this is nothing like a port at all”. I walked up this ramp but it turned out that it was into a pub. I thought “we’ll never be able to get our boat up to here. There were no boats or anything and I thought “where the heck have we arrived now?”.

After the medication I made a start on the radio programme for this week and having chosen the music and paired it while I was in Leuven, I’d finished and had it running to listen to by 11:15.

It’s a good jo that I had because while I was listening to it and trying to organise myself Rosemary rang and we had one of our lengthy chats. As a result I was quite late in going for my lunch.

After lunch I had something important to do – to make further enquiries about what I need to do to upgrade the big computer as I would like it to be. I’ll run the one that I repaired for 72 hours non-stop while I’m in Leuven next week and if it runs fine, I can use that while I have the big office machine in pieces.

The weather was fairly cold and threatening rain when I went out for my afternoon walk so I dressed accordingly when I went out for my afternoon walk.

Not as accordingly as this guy down here on the beach out by the Rue du Nord. I just had on my winter jacket and cap. This guy seems to be in his oilskins and waders, and he probably has his sou’wester in his pocket in case it comes on to rain, which it might well do at some point, judging by the sky.

Mind you, he was the only person down on the beach who was dressed to such an extent. There were three or four other people down on the beach at different locations but they were dressed more … errr … casually. I’ve no idea what they were all doing down there and I didn’t hang around long enough to find out.

There was plenty of activity in the air today too. While I was walking along the footpath I was overflown by a light aircraft.

Despite the poor quality of the photograph due to the distance that it was out at sea I could see her registration number. She’s F-GSBV, a Robin DR400/180 of unknown date. She’d taken off from Granville Airport at 15:53 and flew a figure-of_eight around the coast and landed back at the airport after just 11 minutes, her second flight of the day.

There wasn’t anyone else out there this afternoon so I had the path all to myself. I pushed along in the wind as far as the lawn near the lighthouse.

From here, there’s a good view back to the College Malraux where I could see what was going on with the roofing that they were doing.

They don’t seem to have advanced very far over this last couple of weeks. They’d had that corner of the roof stripped off when I came back from Leuven two and a half weeks ago. They need to be working quicker than that if they want to finish it sometime soon.

Nothing else was happening here, except for the Council grass-cutters, so I walked on across the car park to the end of the headland. There wasn’t anything happening in the bay and the Brittany coast was rather obscured by clouds so I headed off along the path on top of the cliffs.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a week or two ago we saw some workmen unloading a pile of builders’ bags onto the quayside over by the ferry terminal.

Those bags disappeared quite quickly and I never did find out what happened to to them, but today we have some more workmen over there. They seem to be doing something over on the far side of the wall and one of these days when I have a moment, whenever that might be, I’ll have to go over there and have a look for myself.

Down at the chantier navale there was no change in occupancy. The four large yachts and the trawler were still in there up on blocks and thy look as if they will be there for a while yet. And there’s not much room in there for anything else if the need arises.

One thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall noticing is that these days we seem to be having rather a plethora of NAABSA (not always afloat but safely aground) fishing boats over by the Fish Processing Plant.

It used to be very rare to see one – they’d all be taken inside to the wet harbour and moored there. But just recently we’ve seen a few abandoned over there to the mercy of the tide and I’m not sure why either.

Back here, I had my afternoon coffee and then tackled the photos from Greenland. Another 20 bit the dust in the time available. We’re still at the foot of the Sermitsiaq Glacier that runs off the into the Maniitsoq Ice Cap Evighedsfjorden or Kangerlussuatsiaq Fjord but all told, there is just 300 or so to be dealt with for the month of July 2019.

The guitar practice went OK and I finally managed to track down the chord arrangement for Al Stewart’s MODERN TIMES, something that I’ve been trying to find for quite a while, with one of the best guitar solos of all time right at the end.

With having a late lunch I didn’t fancy much for tea – just a baked potato with beans.

Now that my notes are written, it’s off to bed as I have my Welsh lesson tomorrow. Surprisingly, I haven’t crashed out today and that’s a surprise. That sleep must have done me some good.

Another one just like that would do me even better.

Sunday 14th March 2021 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day I have had today.

This morning I didn’t leave my bed until 11:45 and I even spent a couple of hours asleep this afternoon so it was something of a wasted day.

But on reflection (which I was able to do some time later) I realised that it wasn’t such a wasted day at all.

After I’d finished yesterday’s notes I went and made the sourdough dough for the fruit loaf that I was planning to make today. But by the time that I’d finished I somehow seemed to have lost any tiredness that I might have done.

Not being able to go off to sleep I switched the computer back on. There was someone whom I knew in Florida who was on line so we started to chat and by the time that I was finally ready to go to bed it was … errr … 05:45.

And during the time that I’d been chatting I’d been dealing with the Greenland photos. Another pile of those disappeared and right now we are inspecting a seabird colony at the foot of the Sermitsiaq Glacier that leads from the Maniitsoq Ice Cap into the Evighedsfjorden or Kangerlussuatsiaq Fjord as it’s known today.

After the medication this morning I gave the sourdough its second kneading and put it into its mould and then prepared two lots of yeast-powered dough, one for the loaf of bread that I need for this week and the second batch for the next supply of pizzas.

While that was proofing I made myself some porridge and toast for breakfast, or rather, lunch actually, given the time.

Back in here I made another start on tidying up the back-up drive and despite falling asleep half-way through, I’m now up to 1.11TB of free space and had I remained awake I might even have managed to clear out some more but that was something of a forlorn hope.

It wasn’t until about 16:00 that I awoke and it took me until about 16:30 to recover my composure. I kneaded the dough for the loaf a second time, shaped it and put it into the mould to proof a second time. And then I went out for a walk.

Being rather later going out than normal, the tide was well out by now – farther out than I was expecting it to be.

Considering that it was a Sunday, I was surprised to see that there were so few people out there making the most of it. While there was a fair bit of wind today, it was much less than yesterday’s wind and it wasn’t really all that unpleasant.

If the weather the other day had been such to have permitted a couple of people to go for a swim in the sea, as regular readers of this rubbish might recall, I would have expected them to have at least braved the weather that we were having today in order to have a picnic or two on the beach.

Anyway, having taken the photo of the beach I walked off along the path on top of the cliffs all the way down to the lighthouse at the end of the Pointe du Roc.

There were quite a few people out there on the lawn having a walk around in the nice weather, many of them with dogs. As an aside, taking animals for a walk is an acceptable way of being out in the streets after curfew here in France and according to stories that I have heard, the local animal shelters are now running out of dogs for adoption. So at least some things are benefiting from the curfew.

Across the lawn and the car park, I went down to the end of the headland but there was nothing going on out in the bay so I followed the path down on the other side of the cliff.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that after we had seen the two Joly France boats and Chausiais moored at the ferry terminal the other day, yesterday we saw one of the Joly France boats and Chausiais moored in the inner harbour.

We mused about the whereabouts of the other Joly France boats that was conspicuous by its absence.

But muse no longer, dear reader, because she’s now come back and is moored up in the loading bay in the inner harbour. Obviously we aren’t expecting the arrival of one of the Jersey Freighters right now.

Back at the apartment I had my coffee and carried on with sorting out the files on the computer. Right now I’m tidying up the directories on the big computer because some time in the near future I’ll be swapping a few hard drives around and I want to have everything sorted out for when I do.

In view of the kind of chaos that I’ve been in for so long in the past that’s taken me so long to sort out just now, I don’t want to repeat it.

Later on I knocked off and checked the dough over.

The two loaves in their moulds were ready – the sourdough had even risen a little, so I switched on the oven and when it was warm, I put them in to bake.

Meantime I kneaded the pizza dough, divided it into three, oiled two and put them into the freezer, and the third one I rolled out and put in the pizza tray.

When the pizza base had proofed I prepared the pizza and when the bread was cooked I took that out and put the pizza in.

hen that was cooked I had my tea and it was probably one of the tastiest that I have ever had. Definitely a success, this one. No pudding though because I’m not hungry. But there is plenty of apple pie in the fridge for pudding for the next few days.

Now that I’ve written up my notes I’m going to bed, regardless of how early it is. I need a good sleep because I have a radio programme to write up tomorrow and I want to be on form. I can’t afford too many days like I’ve had today.

But at least it wasn’t as total a disaster as I was thinking that it might have been had I not buckled down and did some photos while I was still awake earlier this morning.

Saturday 13th March 2021 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… the photos of today’s storm out at sea I’ll tell all you about my miserable day today.

And miserable it was as well too. It took me ages to go off to sleep, no matter how tired I was when I finally crawled into bed. at one stage I didn’t think that I would drop off at all.

And when I awoke this morning I had a pain in my left shoulder – one of the better-known side-effects of this vaccination. It’s not all that uncomfortable actually, and in any case, by all accounts it’s far better than what you have to go through if you actually catch the virus.

After the medication, I had a listen to he dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

I was transferring a load of stuff from one hard drive to another (rather reminiscent of what I was doing yesterday) but some of the files wouldn’t move. That was extremely disappointing. I tried a few little tricks but they still wouldn’t move. As I was passing through the data cable that ran between one and the other there were all these kids who were on holiday. There were 3 groups of kids, blond-haired boys and girls who were all different ages, probably 8 or 9 and I dunno 2 groups slightly older and different ages. I kept on confusing them because of the time difference that it was taking me to do this. I decided that I would be chatty so I spoke to the youngest group and said “hi”. This girl gave me a puzzled look and said something that I didn’t catch so I said “hi again”. She repeated what she had just said. I gave her a smile and a wave and walked on through the data cable to the other drive, sitting there wondering what it was that she said. Had she said that she didn’t speak English and I pretended not to hear it or didn’t notice that that was what she said.

Later on I was at a music festival, a huge thing and there were enormous crowds there. But it was all family stuff. We were wandering around the camp site and there was no social distancing whatever and there were arguments over pitches and who was going to camp where and whatever.

Just as that voyage was starting to get under way, the alarm went off and I awoke. And I was up and out of bed before the second one went off.

Before I went to have my shower I made a start on tidying up the back-up drive. As I expected, it’s slow progress from here on in and it’s going to be a long time before it’s done. Mind you, I did liberate another 40GB of free space sorting out the duplicates.

After my shower I went off to the shops. And I wasn’t out all that long and didn’t spend much money either. And what I did spend, a lot of it went on an industrial-size bottle of clothes-washing liquid from NOZ.

Back here I carried on with the sorting out of the duplicate files but at some point I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until 14:00. I’ve no idea how long I was out of it but it made me run a lot later than I intended.

After lunch I worked on the Greenland photos. I only did a few yesterday so I had a lot to do today to catch up. Right now we’re in the Kangerlussuatsiaq Fjord in Greenland going to look at the Sermitsiaq Glacier that drains off the Maniitsoq Ice Cap.

This was the last complete day on board the THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR. Tomorrow afternoon we alight at Kangerlussuak and take the aeroplane to Toronto where I push onwards deeper into North America.

At 15:45 I was ready to go out for my afternoon walk but we were in the middle of a torrential downpour and hailstorm. I wasn’t going to go out for a walk in any of that.

Round about an hour later the rain eased off a little so I nipped out.

It was only a brief amelioration in the weather too. As you can see, there’s a raging storm going on out over the Ile de Chausey and I hadn’t gone all that far before it caught me in the open. It was completely wild out there right now and I was soaked to the skin.

There had been one or two other people out there but by the time I reached the lawn and the car park, I was pretty much all on my own out there and that was hardly any surprise at all given the conditions.

Nothing going on out at sea today, either in the English Channel or the Baie de Mont St Michel so I pushed on along the path to see what was happening at the port.

And we have another change of occupant in the chantier navale today. Well, yesterday, actually, as I noticed it when I arrived back from Valognes last night but of course it was too dark to photograph.

Today, we have one of the bigger trawlers, Charlevy in there undergoing work. I’ve no idea what’s the matter with her and there was no-one around there to ask either. In fact there was no-one working on any of the boats down there today and I’m not surprised about that either. I wouldn’t be out there working in the kind of weather that we were having this afternoon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday, the ferry terminal was overflowing with boats – both of the Joly France ferries and Chausiais were moored over there. But they have all left the quayside today as you can see.

One of the Joly France boats, the older one, has disappeared completely but the other one and Chausiais are now moored up in the inner harbour next to the two Channel island ferry boats.

By now, I was a total drowned rat so I hurried on back to the apartment. A hot coffee and a slice of Liz’s cake from yesterday went down really nicely, and I had a quick bash at the notes from Central Europe last year until the football came on.

Haverfordwest County, one of the newly-promoted teams this season were facing perennial champions TNS

TNS are currently in second position in the table having over the last couple of weeks lost their ruthless streak. The owners of the club have, on the other hand, retained their ruthless streak and sacked the management team early in the week in an effort to climb back to the top.

TNS, although they showed plenty of skill, looked to be very lethargic today but Haverfordwest, although clearly not as skilful, were very well marshalled. TNS had the lion’s share of possession and Haverfordwest were content to let them run around and shepherd them into blind alleys.

To everyone’s surprise, Haverfordwest took the lead, from a breakaway upfield after 17 minutes, but when TNS equalised from a corner early in the second half we could see a familiar script being replayed.

Later in the match Haverfordwest tired and we were all expecting a couple more TNS goals, but instead one of the Haverfordwest attackers took them completely by surprise and combined well with one of his colleagues who scored a beautiful goal to restore Haverfordwest’s surprise lead.

And as the match played out to a conclusion, it was Haverfordwest who were still going forward and won probably the most surprising victory of the season so far.

For tea I just had some pasta and vegetables and then came in here to write my notes. Now that they are done I’m going to prepare some sourdough and then I’m off to bed. A nice lie-in tomorrow and I can’t say that I don’t need it. A good sleep will do me good.

Friday 12th March 2021 – I’VE HAD MY …

… first anti-virus injection today.

But let’s not go gettign ahead of ourselves here.

Last night was another bad night. Although I was in bed a little before midnight I spent most of the night tossing and turning and trying, not very successfully, to go off to sleep.

But I must have gone to sleep here and there at some point because there were several little trips recorded on the dictaphone.

We were off on the Spirit of Conrad last night going off to the Far North. This dream is all about getting ready, who we were going with, the stuff that we were taking. It was all very confusing. I didn’t really know where I was but at one stage e had to move the boat and I had to find a gallon of petrol from the stores to do that. Then we needed to manoeuvre the boat again. The guy who owned the boat was asking about petrol. I explained that we’d used a gallon so we had to hint for another gallon. They kept on finding things like oil but they weren’t sure whether or not it was petrol. I was dismayed because nothing was labelled, which was going to make life really interesting later on as we got further round. I remembered that one of the girls on board had brought 50 gallons of petrol with her. He said “yes, there was some confusion about that. She wouldn’t give us the petrol until we’d done something else” but I didn’t find out exactly what that something else was, or whether we actually got the petrol. It was just one confused thing whirling around all the time and I can’t remember hardly anything of it now.

There were issues with bus tickets and getting on board, having the passport and all kinds of things that made this trip really complicated. Add to this the fact that I was waking up regularly with attacks of cramp that didn’t help matters very much at all.

Later on we were given a lecture about suitcases and how the airlines would be banning all non-standard sizes. Someone asked for questions so I asked “how are we going to make sure that Strawberry Moose moves. Everyone else shouted the name of a little boy who was in this meeting. He travels with us to North America and he has a wheelchair. They reckon that maybe Strawberry Moose could be taken by him on board the ‘plane as a kind of hand-luggage kind of thing.

Once again I was up just after the first alarm even if I didn’t feel much like it, and after the medication I peeled, diced and blanched the rest of the carrots ready to freeze. And while they were draining off, I attacked a few of the photos from Greenland in 2019.

A little later I prepared myself ready for my day out, and then Caliburn and I set off for Valognes, stopping for fuel on the way. The first fuel since 6th August last year.

The drive out there was interesting. There was bright sunshine and around the next bend it was raining, and then over the next brow of a hill it was windy. And we went on and on like that all the way there.

Finding the Simone Veil hospital at Valognes was straightforward but finding the Vaccination Centre was something else. It was something of a treasure hunt all around the hospital site until I finally came across it.

And they took some persuading to make them give me the vaccine. One of the nurses didn’t think that my Spenectomy was “serious grounds” even though my doctor did, and then because I didn’t have a health card, another one of the nurses had a moan about that as well.

However in the end logic prevailed, especially as I’d just driven 100kms to be there, and I had my injection. They even gave me a date for the second vaccination – 10th April 2021. I can see that I’m going to be very busy travelling about for the next 4 weeks.

On the way home I called at Liz and Terry’s. Liz’s portable computer has been playing up for a while. Terry had had a look and told me that the Hard Drive was easily accessible, so we had ordered a new SSD. I fitted it into Liz’s computer this afternoon and with my little magic tool I was able to configure it and now it’s working fine.

So much so that Terry has now ordered one for his computer (his hard drive is easily accessible too) and I’ll be doing that one next time that I’m out.

Liz cooked tea and then afterwards I came on home, braving the curfew and thoroughly exhausted after my day on the road.

An early night is called for and then I have the shops tomorrow and I need to be on form. I need a really good sleep too, one of these days, and the sooner the better as well.

Thursday 11th March 2021 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

… miserable and depressing day again. And while you admire the force of the waves smashing down on the sea wall in the storm this afternoon I’ll tell you all about it.

It actually started off quite well and once again I was out of bed just after the first alarm went off despite the rather later night than I intended.

After the medication I had a listen to where I’d been during the night. One of my younger sisters – I can’t remember which one – had had an accident and was paralysed from the waist down. She was having to get all new stuff from school so I had to take her to the shop where the school uniforms were. While we were searching for the rooms we came across the right room for the blue and white pinafore skirts and grey tunics, that kind of thing. We started to make a list of things that she needed for next year. Then she got out of her wheelchair and very unsteadily went towards looking at the pens and papers, that kind of thing. I thought that she ought to go back in her chair because she wasn’t fit enough to be walking around. I had one or two words with her about going back to sit in her wheelchair again.

Later on, there was something strange happening in a big office. It was necessary to follow some people and record their movements. I’d been on the lookout for suitable people to do this. I’d been driving around the hospital in a tractor and trailer and came across a young boy and his mother – his mother had been visiting the boy. I thought of going to ask them if they could do this but I had the tractor stuck. It meant a lot of reversing around. I ended up back in the public area in the library and TOTGA was in. She’d already done this a few times for me so I waited until she turned up and I asked her if she would do it again. I asked if she had all of the paperwork. She replied that she had left it all at home. I said “never mind. We’ll have to start again from scratch”.

Later on Caroline put in an appearance too. This is the first time for quite a while that she’s put in an appearance in a nocturnal ramble.

There was much more to it than all of this too, but firstly I’ve forgotten most of it and what I didn’t forget, it’s not the kind of thing that you would be interested in hearing, especially if you are having your tea right now.

First task after I’d finished my dictaphone notes was to attack the day’s quantity of photographs. Another 20 went the way of the west today and I’m now wandering around Nuuk in Greenland looking at the sculptures.

There’s only another 360 to review for July and then there are … gulp … 2500 or so for August and then a pile for September and October too. Then 2019 will be up to date.

When all of that is done, then I have to update all of the blog entries for that period, and I still haven’t worked out how I’m going to write about the three missing days in September when I was having … errr … certain issues.

Once I’d organised myself properly I wandered of and had a shower to make myself look pretty. That is of course a job that takes a darn sight longer than it ought to do as you can imagine.

The last thing that I really felt like doing was to go to the shops this morning. I really wasn’t feeling like it. But I hauled myself out and set off in the gale.

There was a trawler out there in the harbour, just pulling away from the Fish Processing Plant. At first, I thought that it was going to be heading back out to sea but instead it headed off across the harbour and went to tie up over there.

She’ll be in good company over there too. Tied up over there where she has been for quite a while just recently is La Grande Ancre. It’s not like her to be moored up for very long without moving.

There were some guys up there on the top of the quayside and by the looks of things they were unloading that red van. I wonder if they are going to be loading up one of the fishing boats ready to go out on a voyage.

Thursday is usually the day that we see Normandy Trader in the port. At the moment though the harbour gates are closed and she isn’t in there as yet.

But there’s a lot of activity going on down there right now with the unloading of a lorry and a pile of timber. I suppose that this means that she’ll be in here at the earliest possible opportunity.

From there I pushed on to LIDL for the shopping. I didn’t really need all that much but I bought what I thought that I needed. They had some more of these mis-shapen carrots at €1:59 for 2kg (1kg of normal carrots cost €1:29) so I bought a pack. I’m getting rather low on carrots right now.

On the way back I was caught in a rather dramatic shower and was soaked to the skin. But luckily the rain didn’t last for too long and the sun came out quite quickly afterwards.

Back here I had my hot chocolate and sourdough fruit bread, and then I came in here and … errr … fell asleep. I don’t know how long I was out but by the time I’d gathered my wits together after I awoke, it was 14:25. I made it about 2.5 hours that I was out, all told.

After lunch, I came back in here and shame as it is to say it, I fell asleep again and was late going out for my afternoon walk.

Taking the correct camera with me today, I wandered off outside.

The storm that had been blowing up this morning was now raging outside. You can see from the whitecaps on the waves that we were having our money’s worth this afternoon. With the tide being well in, there wasn’t much beach to be on but even so, there wasn’t anyone at all down there picking their way around the rocks. It wasn’t the kind of weather to be down there.

For a change just recently, the view along the coast and inland was fairly clear today and you could see a good way into the distance although it was hazy yet again out at sea.

With the tide being well in, all of the fishing boats were on their way home.

Coming in from the English Channel braving the wild water was one of the smaller shellfish boats. That’s not the kind of boat in which I would like to be out there in all of this.

There were just two or three people walking around the headland today so there was no issue about social distancing. Apart from the boats that we have seen, there wasn’t anything happening out there at sea.

My route took me over the lawn and through the car park to the end of the headland but there was nothing exciting happening there either so I headed off along the path on top of the cliffs.

The storm was totally wild out here, as you have seen from the photos that I posted earlier. The waves were crashing away over the sea wall and the poor people out there were being soaked.

Over at the ferry terminal this afternoon there seems to be quite a lot of activity.

Both of the Joly France boats are over there right now, presumably making use of the ferry terminal, and that means that Chausiais has had to move out. She’s been obliged to moor up against the outer wall of the inner harbour.

Down at the chantier navale there was a hive of activity with people wandering around working on the boats that were down there. Still the same four boats though. We haven’t had any change in occupancy for a week now.

When I went out to the shops this morning there were five refrigerated lorries parked at the Fish processing Plant.

That means that despite the heavy storm and high winds, they are expecting a good catch coming into port. And sure enough, there were plenty of fishing boats down there this afternoon unloading at the wharf.

As well as the crowds on top hauling the stuff off to the Fish Processing Plant, there are several vehicles on the lower level belonging to private enterprises such as local seafood shops taking away the shellfish from the boats that they charter.

Back here, I had my coffee and the last of my coffee cake, and then I peeled, diced and blanched half of the carrots that I had bought this morning. As well as that, I fed the sourdough and the ginger mother-solution.

The guitar practice went OK and then I had tea – taco rolls with the remainder of the stuffing from the other day. The apple pie was delicious too.

During the day here and there while I’ve been doing other things, I’ve been doing some more of the file duplicates. I’m now up to 1.05TB of free space. From here now, it’ll be a very slow crawl file by file.

But I won’t be doing any more tonight. I’ve had a bad day and I’m exhausted. I’m off to bed early because tomorrow I have a lot to do. I have to go to Valognes near Cherbourg to have my first vaccination and on the way home I have to stop off and repair a computer. Such are the exciting things that I get to do.

Wednesday 10th March 2021 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

… nautical afternoon this afternoon with plenty of activity out at sea.

Not so much activity in here though because I’ve had a really difficult day today. I’ve spent most of it in a semi-somnambulant phase which is quite a surprise seeing as I was once more up and about just after the first alarm.

After the medication I had a listen to see if I’ve been anywhere during the night. I can’t remember very much about it but I was in Canada. my niece’s husband was definitely around and so were a few other people but I can’t remember who they were and I can’t remember what it was that we were doing. But later on I was in London and it was Christmas Eve or New Years Eve. I’d been with a family having some kind of informal celebration but the father had to go off and do something so that seemed like the time for me to leave as well. I got myself ready to go. I was asking about the shops in the neighbourhood because I needed to do some shopping on my way home. These people were going away the next day and I remember talking to the boy of the family and telling him to keep out of mischief. He said something like he’s not going to have too much chance now as they were travelling early the next morning. But I can’t really remember all that much about this at all

While you admire the storm and the waves crashing down on the sea wall yet again today, I spent a few hours on the back-up drive clearing out more duplications

And by the time that I lost interest (because I do if I do anything too long) another 30-odd GB of space. I’m at 965GB and not too far off my target of 1TB, and I’ll get there in the end.

Rosemary rang me up as well during the course of the morning. She’s in the middle of having a kitchen fitted and needed some advice. This was one of our shorter conversations – it only went on for half an hour or so, not one of our usual couple-of-hours conversation.

That wasn’t the only phone call that I had either. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a couple of weeks ago I sent off all of the paperwork for my new post-Brexit identity card. Today the prefecture phoned me up to ask me to go round on 18th of March at 11:00 with my passport and a couple of identity photos.

It looks as if things are moving rapidly in this direction whereas in some départements, some people who applied in October have still heard nothing.. But I’m glad that I changed my driving licence when I did because there’s all kinds of backlogs there.

After lunch I did another pile of photos and we are now pulling into the harbour at Nuuk in Greenland ready for our walk around the city and meeting all of these Nuukie types that inhabit the place.

As well as that, I’ve been working on the arrears of my Central Europe trip. There’s now ANOTHER DAY GONE ON LINE and I’ve started working on the following day.

That’s not going to be quite so easy as there are 29 photos to deal with for that day.

We had a break of course to go out for my afternoon walk and talking of photos, I remembered to take the correct camera, the NIKON D500 with me, and it was fully charged too.

It’s hardly a surprise that there was no-one around today. There had been a message on the internet about the storms and we were in the grip of one right now.

The tide was right in too so there wasn’t all that much beach to go at either.

There was quite a bit of hazy mist too despite the wind so the sky wasn’t all that clear as you can see. There’s quite a bit of fog hanging around down there beyond that strange former hotel where I saw that awful apartment when I first came here. I can’t believe that they had let that building get into such a state.

In the shelter of the College Malraux the wind wasn’t as bad as it was once I stepped out into the open air.

As the tide was quite far in there were plenty of the larger trawlers about heading in towards port. They were making quite heavy weather of the journey back too with the wind against them, as you can see in this photo.

You’ll also notice something else in this photo too, down at the bottom of the frame.

One of the phenomena that we encounter on a regular basis is the layering of the water, with these different bands of brown, silty water. There was another good one out there today which was rather surprising in view of the rough seas and I’d still love to know the explanation for this.

There was no-one around on the lawn or on the car park so I wandered around to the viewpoint overlooking the port, just in time to see Thoraslip her moorings.

What was more interesting from my point of view was watching the waves breaking onto the harbour walls. Unfortunately the wind was blowing the waves obliquely on to the walls rather than full ahead so we weren’t having the full effect that we sometimes have.

While I was here, I had a good look down into the chantier navale to see what was happening down there. And the answer was “nothing special”. There were still the same four boats in there as there had been since last Thursday.

By now Thora was well out of port and into the bay. As she passed Le Loup she also passed one of the trawlers coming into port.

You can see how the storm is affecting her sailing this afternoon. And this is while she’s in the shelter of the bay as well. Can you imagine how she’s going to behave in the weather that she will experience when she’s right out at sea. It’s going to be a rough ride back home to Jersey.

And talking of going back home, by now I was ready for my hot coffee and cake so I headed for home and the warmth. And to finish off the work that I’d been doing.

Guitar practice was strange. I was so absorbed in what I was doing with the bass that I overran by miles my hour’s worth of practice. That was rather strange. I ended up playing a long bass solo to “Cocaine” by JJ Cale and “Down On The Corner” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Tea was a burger on a bap with baked potatoes and vegetables, followed by my delicious apple pie.

Now, rather later than usual yet again, I’m off to bed. Shopping tomorrow of course and I want to make more progress with my work. And for that I need to be on form. I’m fed up of spending all of my life being half-asleep.

Tuesday 9th March 2021 – WE’VE BEEN HAVING …

… a nautical afternoon this afternoon. It seems that every man and his dog were out there doing some kind of maritime activity this afternoon.

So while you admire the yacht that went sailing by the headland at the Pointe du Roc this afternoon, I finished writing my notes last night, only to find that I couldn’t go off to sleep. In the end I gave it up as a bad job and carried on working on clearing duplicates out of the back-up drive.

It was after 01:30 when I finally went off to bed, which was not what I was planning on at all with an alarm call at 06:00 and a Welsh lesson on Zoom later in the morning.

And while you admire another image of a trawler sailing past the headland towards the harbour in the wake of the yacht that we have just seen, I went to find out where I’d been during the night.

And a very welcome return to Zero who a couple of years ago used to accompany me on my travels on quite a regular basis but hasn’t been around for a while.

Last night I was taking her to a football match but it was the middle of the winter so we were putting on layers of clothes. She was dressed in a big heavy coat. When it was time to go I found that I was dressed in some kind of yellow thermal tights but I’d forgotten to put on my trousers so I had to go back. That was annoying because I’d been urging her to hurry up and now she was ready, I wasn’t. Her father wasn’t all that keen on her going – I don’t know if it was because of me or because of the football but her mother was fine with the idea.

This morning, I wasn’t feeling anything like working. It was all that I could do to keep awake and I was really surprised that I’d even managed to crawl out of bed. As a result I was totally unprepared for my Welsh lesson and it didn’t pass very well at all. Most of the time was spent trying to keep awake.

It was a very late lunch too. Our Welsh lesson overran. I was ready for my sandwiches too by the time that we stopped. And to my dismay, the apples that I’d bought the other day haven’t survived.

After lunch I came in to start work but I fell asleep instead. And I was out for about an hour, comfortable on the chair in the office. That was disappointing but it wasn’t a surprise.

My afternoon walk wasn’t disturbed by neighbours or shopping too, but by a flat battery in the NIKON D500. As I went to take a photo of the people out on the Plat Gousset it just petered out.

And so I had to dash back into the apartment where I grabbed hold of the old NIKON D3000 and swap over the camera lens and then dash back out again for my photos.

And when I say “old” NIKON D3000 I do mean “old” as well. It was an end-of-series discontinued range that I bought in a hurry in QUEBEC IN MAY 2012 after I dropped the NIKON D5000 on a concrete floor and cracked the casing.

And to my surprise, it’s kept on going after all this and still producing some kind of acceptable results.

As I mentioned earlier, we were having a nautical afternoon today.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last summer we were seeing here and there a bright yellow zodiac roaring around offshore. We seem to be in luck, or maybe it’s a sign that the summer is here, because the zodiac is back out there offshore.

There are two guys in there fishing – or, at least – one of the two guys is fishing. The second one is fixing his fishing line ready to cast off out to sea.

And I suppose that we’ll be back as we have been every year since I’ve been living here, watching hundreds of people fishing and catching nothing whatever at all.

There was nothing else doing out to sea off the end of the Pointe du Roc, so I walked around the corner to the viewpoint over the port.

You have probably noticed that the tide was quite a way in so the outer harbour is flooded.

We saw earlier one of the trawlers coming back into port and here is another one coming into the port, one of the crustacean boats with the roof over the hold to keep the seagulls from stealing the catch. There’s already one of the boats there at the Fish Processing Plant unloading its catch.

The two fishing boats that have been moored there for the past couple of days here seem to have moved on today, but the same four boats in the chantier navale are still there, and look as if they are going to be there for a while as well.

A new arrival in the port today though is Thora, one of the two Jersey freighters.

They seem to be finding plenty of work going on right now and that’s good news for the port. We need all of the business that we can find.

Back here at the apartment I had my coffee and coffee cake and finally settled down to do some work. I’ve managed to edit 20-odd photos this afternoon, some of which involved doing some research and involved the help of a few people in a Group on a Social Networking site who were able to identify a twisting pile of metal as a Bedford JSL.

Such is the power of the internet.

During a few pauses here and there I’ve been going through the duplicate files on the back-up drive and what with last night’s “overtime” and the bits and pieces that I’ve done today, I now have 927GB free. But of course, the farther ahead that I advance, the slower the work becomes.

There was the hour on the guitars of course, and then a hurried tea – stuffed peppers with rice and the last of the jam pie- because there was football on the internet again – Barry Town v Penybont in the JD Cymru League.

It’s easy to see why there seem to be three clubs – TNS, Bala Town and Connah’s Quay Nomads – way out in front of the League because this match was really pretty aimless.

These two teams are fourth and fifth, and Penybont won the match with a deflected shot out of nothing from 20 yards, but apart from that neither team ever looked like doing anything. Long, aimless balls out of defence and plenty of misplaced passes, quite a contrast to the skill that was clearly evident on Saturday when TNS played Bala Town.

There’s a huge gap in skill between the top three and those following on behind at quite a distance.

Right now though I’m off to bed. I won’t have a long sleep tonight, thanks to the football, so I probably won’t be on form tomorrow either. But we’ll see how we go. At least the backlog of photos seems to be shifting and that’s something to appreciate, I suppose.

Monday 8th March 2021- A NOT-SO-UNEXPECTED …

… Brexit dividend reared its ugly head this afternoon.

Amongst my friends is a woman in the UK who had a daughter who is a keen and accomplished junior ballerina (she’s danced at the Royal Ballet) and is hoping to come to France for an audition in the summer. And when I was in NOZ at the weekend I found a kids’ novel about a girl who was a ballerina.

It’s full of all of the technical-speak in French for a ballerina as well as all of the current kids’ slang and as it cost only €1:99 I bought it for Evie to give her something interesting and useful to read before she comes over.

This afternoon I took it down to the post office to send it off to the UK.

For a product that weighed just about 300 grammes and cost €1:99 and being sent non-commercially as a gift between friends, it took me half an hour to do all of the paperwork, involving the completion of four forms, and the postage came to €15:90.

And I’m still recovering from the shock.

And as well as that, I’m still also recovering from the shock of being up and about once more long before the third alarm went off. I wonder how long I can keep this up.

After the medication I made a start on the radio programme, this time doing the programme that I should have done last week. With having done all of the music already, it was all up and running properly by 11:30, all hours-worth of it. And I found a really belting final track to finish it.

The rest of the morning was spent working on the Greenland photos and by the time that lunchtime arrived, I’d done just over 40 of them and we are now in Arsuk Fjord in a zodiac cruising around looking for THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR which had moved off from where we had left it and then been lost in the fog.

After lunch I started off by listening to the dictaphone. I had been in France during the night. I’d gone there from Dunkirk and I’d met up with two people while I was there. I had to escort them back to the port of Calais in order to catch the ferry back to the UK. I was able to retrace my steps in reverse on most occasions although we did lost the way once or twice particularly when we were in buildings having o work our way through buildings. There was one particular part where someone was rather nasty to me so I was rather nasty to them. One of these girls was shocked. She didn’t really want to walk the way that I went – she wanted to find another way. I said “yes I understand your predicament but really there was a war on”. She was the one who found the lift down in one of these buildings. It had some luggage in it but we squeezed in anyway. The weight was such that the lift cable broke and it hit the ground with quite a thud. We eventually made our way into Calais to find out that our boat hadn’t arrived yet so we had to wait around for a couple of days. We were there when there was a huge ship that crushed a small one as it came into port and one or two other little things.

Later on I was living in some kind of digs and right outside them I was talking to some Pakistani girl. We’d started off talking in a café somewhere. I’d been in to order a glass of kefir. I’d had one of one type and later on I’d gone in and ordered another one. We were chatting inside this cafe place. She was serving and telling me all about how she’s graduated from University and how she’d done this and done that and it hadn’t really worked out for her. She was going to get a gang together and go off and do some work. We were discussing different places in France where this worked and I told her about all of the British people in the Combrailles who worked as a team when necessary. We finished off by talking outside a house in a run-down area, a terraced house at the end of a cul-de-sac. While we were talking a guy pulled up on a motor scooter and drove it right up against the wall, almost crushed me. After she went I had a speedway motor cycle type of thing, an old Jawa and I pushed it towards Caliburn – I was going to put it in the back of Caliburn. I realised that I needed a ramp so I went round to fetch my tools. They were all underneath a van, a trolley jack and a box of tools. I thought “how come I’ve left these there and they haven’t gone?”. I picked up a plank of wood. These kids were watching me wondering what I was going to be doing. I knew what I was doing because the plank of wood was going to be the ramp to put this speedway bike into the back of Caliburn. I pushed it towards Caliburn but then the alarm went off.

For the rest of the afternoon I’ve been working my way through the duplicate files that I’ve been backing up onto the back-up disk on which I’d uploaded all of the external drives and memory sticks and so on. Another 83GB of memory space has now been created and there will be much more to come.

In fact I was so engrossed in this project that I missed my evening meal completely and it was 21:30 when I finally noticed the time.

Having spent some time wrapping up the present for Evie and writing out a little note for her, I went out for my afternoon walk.

We didn’t have the sea fog that we have been having for the last few days, but instead there was quite a haze out there.

And we had some traffic sailing around outside as well. Out in the distance heading into port was one of the larger trawlers, presumably with today’s catch. At first I thought that it might have been Le Coelacanthe or else her sister ship Le Tiberiade, the big green and white trawlers with the gold stripes.

But back here at the apartment afterwards when I examined the photograph I noticed that she was actually pale blue and white and I didn’t recognise which trawler she would be.

There was another trawler out there too, only this one was heading out to sea, rather later than the rest of the fleet.

By what is presumably a total coincidence, whereas the homeward-bound trawler is white with a blue stripe, the outward-bound trawler is blue with a white stripe.

While I was admiring the two trawlers and hoping to catch a photo of them both crossing each other out in the English Channel, one of my neighbours put in an appearance and we ended up having a good chat instead of concentrating on the local shipping.

She needed some advice about booking her vaccinationcara

appointment. Apparently I must be the local expert or something.

For the last few days we’ve been looking at the crowds of people wandering around on the beach at the foot of the steps in the Rue du Nord.

Today we didn’t have so many people down there, and certainly no-one going out for a swim. There was however someone sitting comfortably on a rock reading a book – the very epitome of deep and intense relaxation. Mind you, she didn’t look as if she was very warm.

Clutching my parcel for the post I wandered off around the footpath, across the lawn and the car park. There wasn’t a great deal of activity out there of course. After all, the kids are now all back at school starting today so there were just the old fogeys wandering around.

Nothing new down in the chantier navale, just the same four boats that we’ve seen for the last few days.

But on the edge of the quayside down in the inner port there’s a whole pile of plastic pipes. They are far too long to be transported by one of the little Jersey freighters, so I’m wondering what they are doing here and how they’ll be moved onwards to wherever they might be going. I’ll have to watch this space.

Down in the town I went to the Post Office to post off my parcel to the UK, and then round to the Carrefour to but a lettuce that I had forgotten on Saturday. And there I bumped into yet another one of my neighbours and we had another lengthy chat. I seem to be in demand right now.

While I was down in the town I had a little wander around to see what might be happening down there.

And it looks as if we are preparing for the summer season already because the sweet and candy floss caravan has now turned up and parked in its usual spot ready to snare the holidaymakers and day trippers. That’s definitely a sign of the times. I wonder if the Big Wheel will be back in the town too this year.

From there, I went back to the steps at the Rampe de Monte à Regret and climbed back up to the Rue des Juifs ready to head for home and my coffee.

Having a look down into the port to see what was going on, something that I hadn’t seen before caught my eye.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, they spent a lot of time installing new pontoons, ladders and walkways in the port 12 months or so ago. But it seems that there’s a new pedestrian ramp of the same style of the rest of the equipment of the port that now leads down onto the deck of Marité.

That’s certainly quite new, as far as I can tell. I don’t recall having seen it before. But what interests me even more is how the deal with it when Marité is ready to sail away from the quayside. That should be a complicated manoeuvre.

One final thing caught my eye while I was out there.

Just as I started back up the hill I heard the bells to indicate that the harbour gates were closing. By the time that I had the camera ready they were almost closed. You can see the red traffic light indicating that the passage is now closed, and a couple of pedestrians on the walkway waiting to be able to complete their passage to the other side.

Back here I had my coffee and my slice of chocolate cake and then carried on with the editing of the back-up hard drive.

At 18:00 I remembered to stop for my guitar practice but I missed just about everything else.

Tomorrow I have my Welsh lesson and then I need to make some more enquiries about updating my big computer. I need to make more extra space and while I’m at it, make it work faster too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday 6th March 2021 – SOMETHING RATHER UNUSUAL …

… happened this morning. The alarms didn’t go off and I’ve no idea why.

Not that this is a surprise in itself, but the surprising thing was that despite something of a late night again, I was wide-awake at 06:08. And I don’t understand that at all.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone. I was working the radio for someone last night. They couldn’t come. I was having my rock show but was doing it live. There was no power and everything was being generated by wind and solar. It was going OK but it was a shop at the same time and I was having to sell stuff and I didn’t know where half of the stuff was. Someone came in and asked for a certain brand of tobacco but I couldn’t see it and I couldn’t sell it to them. They were all lounging around the wrong side of the counter anyway. When the programme finished the Chinese Embassy just threw out a pile of cakes from their window into the ground. I sat down to do the cashing up but I couldn’t concentrate. There was a Peter Hammill album playing in the background, one that I hadn’t heard before. I just couldn’t get the maths and the additions right about the profits and loss of the day. In the end I decided that I’d unplug everything and go home and do the working out at home but I couldn’t get this record to stop. When I finally did manage to stop I couldn’t find the stuff that I’d set aside by the record turntable to bring home with me. This was all extremely frustrating.

Later I’d been in a pub in Crewe, the Duke of Bridgewater where I’d bumped into a well-known guitarist. We jammed together and and decided to do this again. For the next occasion I wanted to bring a drummer and I knew exactly who I wanted but try as I might I couldn’t get hold of him. The only drummer I could find was one who wasn’t as good and I was worried that if he came, the guitarist wouldn’t be interested in doing anything further but if I couldn’t find the one that I wanted, what else could I do?

This was the usual scenario of doubt that goes through my mind every so often during the night. We’re back here again, aren’t we?

Part of the day has been spent dealing with merging the old back-up disks and the like and at long last I have integrated everything into just one archives. Tons of stuff went into the bin although there wasn’t enough to free up the space that I need to move the back-up files from the main disk in the computer. But once I get to reviewing the directories and files in the archive, there will be much more room to be going on with.

There were several breaks in all of this.

Firstly there was a shower and a general clean-up, and then I went out to the shops. Nothing very special in Noz and nothing really special in LeClerc either. In fact I wasn’t really out there all that long

back here I carried on with what I was doing but unfortunately I crashed out yet again. Probably one of the longest spells that I’d had too – about 90 minutes or so. That was extremely depressing.

As a result, instead of having my lunch at 13:00 it was 14:30 or thereabouts when I finally went to make my butties.

There was the afternoon walk around the headland as usual.

The weather was really nice out there. It was quite cold – very cold in fact – but bright sunshine. This kind of weather had brought the crowds out and we could see plenty of people wandering around and playing about on the beach, even if the tide wasn’t that far out.

Once again, there was plenty of haze about out to sea so I couldn’t see as far as Jersey or down the Brittany coast, but in the other direction down past Donville les Bains and inland towards Cerences and that way it was reasonably clear.

It wasn’t just down on the beach that there were crowds.

The path along the headland was swarming with people too. There were crowds of them out and about swarming around on the path and on the lawn round by the Pointe du Roc in the beautiful weather that we were having. Not a cloud in the sky this afternoon.

And as you notice, the wearing of facemasks was definitely optional. I really don’t understand what goes through the minds of some people. This last week or two has shown a plateau of between 20,000 and 25,000 people with no sign of reducing. And it won’t ever reduce to anything like reasonable numbers if people don’t take this pandemic seriously

There was no change in occupancy in the chantier navale today. Still the four boats that were there on Thursday.

But there’s yet another change in the boats that are grounded over by the Fish Processing Plant. The little old shellfish boat that was there yesterday is still there today, but she’s now been joined by another one that has been left to settle into the silt.

They aren’t quite aground just yet. When they overhauled the harbour a couple of years ago they dug out a channel alongside the wharf at the Fish Processing Plant in order to prolong the amount of thime that the Plant was accessible. It’s still holding water right now even though the surrounding harbour bed is drying out rapidly.

A few of the fishing boats were out at sea but several others are still moored in the harbour.

Amongst others, we can see La Grande Ancre and, on the right, what looks like Le Pearl. Also down there is Anakena, the boat that was on its way to Northern Europe but which was caught in the Covid lockdown and hasn’t moved since.

Back here I had a coffee and a slice of my cake and then made a start on the arrears of my journey to Central Europe. I’m just pulling in to Lech right now, where I spent two or three happy days relaxing after my long drive from France and my efforts back at my old house in Virlet.

There was football tonight on the internet – top-of-the-table TNS against Bala Town. Despite it finishing 0-0, it was an extremely exciting match. Bala had the best of the play at the start although TNS gradually took control of the match. But right at the end it was TNS with their backs to the wall as Bala Town pushed forward to grab a winner.

Exciting it was, but it would have been even more exciting had the referee given Bala Town a penalty for a handball by a defender. It’s all very well if the referee hadn’t seen the action but in this case he indicated “shoulder” when it was quite clearly the lower arm, well extended from the body.

And had he sent off the TNS player who deliberately elbowed the Bala Town winger Will Evans in the face, right in front of the linesman, it would have been more exciting still.

What with the sending off of Disney a few months ago for Connah’s Quay, it’s no surprise that many people in Welsh football are of the opinion that there are more than God and the Angels looking after TNS.

Tea was taco rolls, made with the left-over stuffing from Thursday, with jam pie for pudding.

Now that my notes are finished, I’m going to make my kefir for the next batch and then I’m off to bed. A nice lie-in on Sunday and then I need to catch up with the photos that I hven’t had time to do today.

Friday 5th March 2021 – I’VE HAD ONE …

… of those days where I seem to have been in great demand.

All of the afternoon has been spent talking to different people either on the telephone – first Terry, then Ingrid, then Rosemary and then Liz, one after the other from not long after lunch until all the way through to teatime and I even missed my guitar practice.

It all makes up for the night that I had last night where about 5 minutes after going to bed I had one of the worst attacks of cramp that I have ever had. I was out of bed four or five times trying to ease everything off, something that wasn’t easy for at one stage I had cramp in all four of my limbs at once.

Most of the night was spent not in sleep but in agony, although I must have gone off to sleep at one stage because I remember going on a voyage. We’d been to Dublin for a day out and we were on our way back on the train, a multiple-unit and there was a chance to get out and go to walk around a little village for an hour and then get back on the following train. Our train pulled into this station and we alighted, and I’m not sure what happened and I was ordering the configuration of it, but instead of ending up with 4 carriages I ended up with 45 so I went to delete some. I ended up back with 4 carriages but I’d lost the power car. We had to wait anyway for the next train to come and when that pulled up I explained to the driver what I’d done. He quite simply put his card into the slot and tapped out a couple of things and we ended up back with a power car so we could move off.

Despite everything I was up again quite smartly after the first alarm and after the medication I kneaded the two loads of dough that I had prepared before going to bed last night – one of the sourdough with fruit and the second with the wholemeal bread.

Most of the morning was spent going through the hard drive to remove another pile of duplicated files from the back-up drive. Another 19GB of rubbish bit the dust this morning. Of course, the further you go into this, the slower it becomes, but I’ll get there.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this I broke off to put the bread in the oven and then again round about 10:30 when the oven had switched itself off

The wholemeal bread was cooked to perfection but the sourdough was another failure – a soggy mass of whatever without a trace of having risen at all. My sourdough doesn’t seem to be working at all.

But nevertheless, as a nice moist fruitcake it was something of a success from that point of view and with my hot chocolate it tasted quite nice and made a very good breakfast. But I really need to improve my sourdough technique if I’m to get anywhere with it.

Later on in the morning I crashed out for about an hour on the office chair. Not much of a surprise after the night that I’d had but it was still very annoying and I wasn’t very happy. Especially as it took much longer than usual to come round.

After lunch I fed the sourdough and the ginger beer mother solution and then I had my stream of phone conversations.

But one thing leads to another and these calls didn’t stop me working. While I’d been tidying up the other day I’d found a headset that must have come with a mobile telephone. While I was talking to Ingrid and Rosemary I plugged the headset into the telephone which meant that my hands were free and during the conversations I edited almost 60 photos and I wish that I’d thought about this before.

Now we’re on board a zodiac on our way back to THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR after having visited Brattahlid.

In between everything I went for my afternoon walk around the headland.

But first I went over to the sea wall to see what was going on. Later than usual but even so the tide was quite far in and there weren’t all that many people down there walking around. And that was something of a surprise because for once just recently there was very little wind and there was plenty of sun.

The view along the coast past Donville and into the area was extremely clear today but there was plenty of haze out at sea. The Ile de Chausey was clear enough today, but I couldn’t see as far as the island of Jersey.

There weren’t all that many people walking around today either so I had the path pretty much to myself today.

As I walked round onto the lawn near the lighthouse I had a reall good view of Le Loup, the light that’s on top of the rocks just outside the harbour entrance.

You can see the usual high tide mark on the light – the line just below the lower of the two red rings. Of course at the Grande Marée the tide is higher than that.

In the background across the bay the town of Kairon-Plage is standing out quite nicely in the sunshine. And on the right-hand side of the photo just below the skyline is that mystery tower that we saw in a photo the other day and which one of these days I’ll take myself off out to see exactly what it is.

Yesterday, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw the workman painting the lettering on the seafarers’ memorial at the Pointe du Roc

While I was out there this afternoon I went to have a look to see what kind of job he’s done. And it’s not turned out quite too badly at all and we can actually read what’s written on the memorial now without straining ourselves.

From there I walked along the path down to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour. There weren’t any more changed of inhabitant in the chantier navale. Still the four boats that were there yesterday and no others. No sign of spirit of Conrad as yet.

There’s a change of boat at the Fish Processing Plant.

The big trawler that was moored there in a NAABSA position has now gone back out to sea but there’s one of the smaller shellfish boats now settled down in the silt.

And they seem to be expecting a bumper load of shellfish and aquatic life today. As I watched, one refrigerated lorry pulled away and another one was manoeuvring around ready to reverse into position. A third lorry as already there in the course of being loaded up.

Back here I had my coffee and cake and then carried on with my series of phone calls.

When I finished I went to tea. With plenty of potatoes around here I made some chips in the microwave along with some beans and a burger, followed by more jam tart.

Now I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed. Despite my long sleep at lunchtime I’m exhausted and can’t wait to go to sleep. I’m surprised that i’ve kept going this long.

But shopping tomorrow, more football and then a day of rest on Sunday. And I think that after this week, i’ve earned it too.

Thursday 4th March 2021 – YOU HAVE TO ADMIT …

… that the standard of graffiti that we have around here is far superior to anything that you’ll find anywhere else.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day on our way to the railway station we saw some banners stuck in the windows of a few of the bars and restaurants, made by someone with some kind of skill in calligraphy. It seems that our phantom calligrapher has been out on his travels elsewhere too.

The town is now littered with more of the same kind of notices talking about all kinds of different subjects. I wonder where he’ll be going next.

As for me, I’ll probably be going back to bed next because once again, I’d been up very early. Just after the first alarm again this morning.

Plenty of time to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I’d killed some woman and I’m not sure how and I’m not sure why. I didn’t admit to it. This woman was a friend of someone who was something of a tough character and he was trying to find out who did it. I was quite confident that I would be particularly safe. He was talking to me one day and the subject of minivans came up in the conversation. He asked me if I knew what a minivan was. Seeing as we were in North America at the time I said that it was something like an F250 or an F350. He immediately said “it’s you, isn’t it? You’re the one who killed these people. I’m going to make you suffer as much as these other people suffered”, grabbed hold of me and went to put me in this car, to take me to pick up the rifle and the books I’d been reading at the time and 1 or 2 other things.

Later on some woman in a block of flats where I was living had had a row with everyone, I don’t know what about but she got into her car and drove it around the car park. She’d bumped into 1 or 2 cars while she was doing it and ended up rolling down the steep bank and ended up with her car in the pond. I’m not sure what else had happened but my yellow estate car MMB was in the pond as well and a couple of motorbikes and so on. I asked my father “what are we doing tomorrow? Do you think we could rescue my car from out of the pond?”. He said “yes, I suppose we could” so I asked “what time? Morning? Lunchtime? Afternoon?” and he didn’t really give me a definite answer. I was just chatting saying “I really hate working in water” which I do. I was loitering around because I was half-expecting someone to come along to call a breakdown truck and winch this woman’s car out of the pond. I was thinking that if they were going to do that I may as well slip them £50 or something and winch MMB out of the pond as well at the same time so I was loitering around waiting for something to happen.

There was plenty of time to have a shower and set the washing machine off on a cycle (a clever washing machine, mine) before I went off out to the shops.

Not that I had gone very far before I had to start to brandish the camera about.

Although the harbour gates were closed, there was a big yacht coming sailing into the port. With her sails not being up I didn’t recognise her at first as she was so far out but as she sailed in deeper to the port I could se the number – G90 – painted upon her bow.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recognise her as being La Granvillaise, another one of the charter yachts that plies for hire from the port. And with the harbour gates being closed, I couldn’t work out why she’d come round here right now from her berth in the yacht harbour, although I did have my suspicions.

There was actually quite a lot of activity in the port this morning.

Marité is still in there tied up in her little corner, and while we don’t have a gravel boat (we haven’t seen one of those in here for a good few months) we have Normandy Trader coming to pay us a little visit. She always seems to be here on a Thursday morning.

Once more she’s fully loaded, and I’ve heard a little whisper here and there that her owners are contemplating buying a bigger ship as they are actually having to turn away freight. It’s one of the very few upsides of Brexit that rather than export their goods to the UK and then into mainland Europe, all of the difficulties that this is presenting means that it’s easier for them to send them direct to here first rather than last.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the pointing of the wall on the Rampe du Monte à Regret ground to a halt a few weeks ago and nothing more was done to it since.

Today, the workmen are back and the work has recommenced. They aren’t working particularly fast of course, but the fact that they are here is something.

My walk up to LIDL was quite energetic and while I wasn’t quite at the “invading Poland” speed I made it all the way up the steep bank without stopping for breath and that’s rather better than it has been of late.

At LIDL I loaded up with tons of stuff and had I been able to carry it, I would have come away with more. But I wasn’t going to turn down 3kg of potatoes at just €1:69 even if I have to live on potato curry for the next couple of weeks.

So loaded up like a packhorse I staggered out into the fresh air (because I’ve never seen LIDL as crowded as it was today) and headed for home.

A little earlier we’d seen them pointing the wall at the Rampe du Monte à Regret – the face that looks down onto the Place Pelley.

But it looks as if they are going to be doing this face too – the one that looks out onto the Rue des Juifs. That’s all been raked out and cleaned out They’ve left a few weeds growing in there, I have to say, but I imagine that they are hoping that the lime in the mortar will do for them.

That’s horrible, nasty caustic stuff as my hands will testify when I was pointing the wall of my house in the Auvergne.

Back here I had a hot chocolate and came in here to work – but fell asleep. It was a short night, an early start and an exhausting visit to the shops so what do you expect?

For most of the afternoon I’ve been clearing out the back-up drive on which I copied all of the data from every single hard drive or memory stick that wasn’t actually connected to the big machine. Little by little I’ve been eating away at it and now there are just 4 items to examine.

Even more interestingly, there is now 715GB free on it and I need for that to be over 1TB so I can start to back-up onto it from the big computer – although a lot of stuff on the big computer will over-write some of the older stuff.

And talking of older stuff, I’ve been finding files dated 1997 and 1998. It won’t be long before I find the stuff from 1992 when I first bought a PC. Stuff from the 80s when I had the Apple II – I think that Nerina might still have that.

There was the usual break for lunch of course, and also the walk around the headland in the afternoon.

Mind you, I’m not too sure about the walk around the headland because it was another one of those days where had the fog been any thicker, I would have had to grope my way around the path.

It beats me what the matter might be the weather just now. We’re going from gale-force winds to this thick oppressive calm that’s letting the fog bank up against the cliffs here and we can’t se a thing. That might explain why there were so few people out and about on the beaches.

The strange thing about this is that around the corner, the fog isn’t anything like as thick.

This is the lower footpath that goes right round the end of the headland and as you can see, that’s comparatively clear. Clear of fog, and clear of people too, which was surprising because up here on top in the car park it was heaving with all kinds of young families going walkabout. No-one braving the lower footpath though.

And nothing to see out to sea either. All of the fishing boats that were going out have gone out and they will be well out to sea by now.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there’s a seafarers’ monument here on the path – in honour of two crews of lifeboatmen who lost their lives going out to sea to rescue distressed mariners.

All of the writing on the monument is very hard to read as it’s long-since faded away but today we had a guy from the local council with his fine paintbrush and pot of black enamel paint busily painting back into the monument all of the names and the details of the events in which they lost their lives.

It’s about time that they started doing things like this to make the place look as if people live here. Everything has become just a little run-down just recently.

And if that’s not enough to be going on with, I’m not quite sure what all of that is over there.

Joly France is moored up at the ferry terminal. It doesn’t look as if she’ll be going anywhere anytime soon. There’s nothing doing over on the Ile de Chausey right now and while sometimes the ferries will do little trips with tourists all around the bay, there are no tourists particularly right now.

But I’m more interested in the rather large red builders’ bags that are being unloaded over there. They are dropping off a couple of dozen from that lorry and trailer so it looks as if there’s something really serious going to be happening there sometime soon and I wonder what it will be.

While we’re up here on the cliffs we can look down and see what’s going on in the chantier navale today.

And I was right about my little thought this morning. We’ve yet another change of occupancy down there today. As well as Aztec Lady, Lys Noir and Charles-Marie down there on blocks, La Granvillaise has now come in to join them. That was why she sailed into the outer harbour when the harbour gates were closed – she wasn’t going that way but coming over here for an overhaul.

As I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … with no possibility of any yacht charters at the moment the owners may as well take their boats out of the water and have them overhauled ready for whenever the season might start. I shan’t be surprised to see Spirit of Conrad, the boat in which we went down the Brittany coast last summer, in there next for an overhaul.

Just now we’d seen Joly France in a NAABSA (Not Always Afloat But Safely Aground) position over at the ferry terminal but here we have a trawler also in a NAABSA position by the firsh processing plant.

And being a catamaran, she is of course even more safely aground than the others.

Back here I had a coffee and some of my vegan coffee cake and then carried on with my work. I’ve done another 20 photos from Greenland 2019 and some more work on the arrears from Central Europe.

All of that took me up to guitar practice time, which passed quite enjoyably this evening.

Tea was a stuffed pepper followed by jam pie ad ice cream, all very nice and delicious.

But now I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to mix some sourdough before I go to bed. I have nothing to eat for my mid-morning breakfast so I reckon that it’s time to make a sourdough fruit loaf. I need some real bread too so if I make that in the morning they’ll both be ready to be baked in time.

No point in having the oven on just for one thing when there are two things to be made.

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

… if today has been a good day or not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday 2nd March 2021 – WHAT I SAW …

… out to sea this afternoon.

Somewhere in that sea fog out there are the Iles de Chausey but you can’t actually see them this afternoon. After all of the nice weather that we’ve had over the last couple of days, we are now having a change of weather. It’s still warm and bright outside, but as for whether or not there were any clouds in the sky, that’s a completely different story.

What isn’t a completely different story is that once more I managed to stagger to my feet shortly after the first alarm went off at 06:00, and by the time that the third alarm went off I was already sitting at the computer working.

We were all on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR last night, heading off on a cruise somewhere and TOTGA and her 2 kids came to see me off. This was very nice of them of course and I was hoping that it would lead to something further but we’d have to see (and not for nothing is she known as “The One That Got Away). There was still a couple of hours before our ship sailed. Then I had to leave the group with which i was in order to go to the bathroom. This meant stepping off the ship. As I walked down to the bow there were all these people from the restaurant standing around at the front of the ship having a cigarette, people who worked there, so I made a cheery kind of comment which they took in good heart and I walked off down the corridor of the port to try to find the bathroom, all the time thinking that in 2 hours time something might develop with TOTGA if I’m lucky – but just at this point I fell asleep again. And my apologies to Percy Penguin whose word I doubted when she told me that I snored.

Incidentally, just before I went to bed last night I was having a long chat with TOTGA about her daughter. It just goes to show …

Later on, a lady who worked in the OU said that she would do a drawing of me in pen and ink or something so I went to see her. I ended up staying. She was only down the road from Nina’s so I’d been to see her and then gone down to see this woman. She lived just on the border between Wales and England in Wales, 1 mile from the border. We were chatting and she had some shopping to do so we set out and walked along the old railway line that ran past her house into the UK and got to Ashbourne although it wasn’t the Ashbourne that I knew. She did a few bits and pieces and I was trying to go to the toilet but everywhere that I was going was full or there were cars going past or something and in the end we ended up walking back to her house. She had loads of stuff all over the place that she was drawing for people I knew from the OU. I was saying that that was the area where I’d like to live, on the border there. It always struck me as being an extremely romantic type of place and there were places like Tamworth and so on within easy reach. It all seemed so historical and all so interesting compared to Crewe.

That’s something else we were doing too. We’d been to Virlet at one point too, I don’t know why. I had a tiny solar panel there with a USB type of plug on it that you could plug things like telephones that kind of thing into it which would charge up off the solar panel. Quite a few people were interested in that and I was telling them all about it.

Once I’d organised myself I sat down and ran through about 20 photos from my Greenland 2019 trip, making sure that they were edited properly. I’m pressing on with these

Next, I turned my attention to the preparation for my Welsh class. That involved reading through the notes that I made during last week’s lesson, going through it all, and then looking through the course book for the text for this weeks lesson.

The lesson itself passed fairly well, I suppose. I was in a slightly better mood then last week and feeling much more like it.

After lunch I spent some of the time dealing with a few outstanding issues. Now that the new ID cards are coming through the system and being issued, it’s clear that the enormous backlog is being cleared. This is the moment to make my application to convert my ID card to the new type to reflect our revised status on the Mainland.

We now have no more rights over here than any refugee from Somalia or Syria.

Another thing that needed doing was to go through my bank accounts and see how the land lies. I still have my Canada money kicking around and it’ll be two years’ worth soon. With no prospect of going back until at least 2022 and maybe not even then, I need to make it all work for me in the meantime. It’s doing no good in a deposit account.

Unfortunately, the guy whose number I was given wasn’t the correct person and he couldn’t think of anyone who might help me. So it’s back to the drawing board as far as this is concerned.

Later on I went out for my afternoon walk around the headland.

Once again, as you might expect, the tide is miles out at sea again. These are the highest and lowest tides of the year right now of course and the public areas of the fishing beds are exposed. There were crowds of people on the beach down there by the steps underneath the Place d’Armes but from up here on the cliffs it didn’t look as if they were actually doing the peche à pied

Maybe they were just enjoying the good weather because despite the rolling sea fog that we were having, it wasn’t cold and it wasn’t all that windy.

The schools are still out on half-term this evening so it was fairly quiet around the College Malraux this afternoon. No hordes of schoolkids and no parents parked up where they shouldn’t be.

But there was something going on at the Gymnasium Jean Galfione at the back of the school. These kids all seem to be dressed in some kind of corporate outfit so maybe there’s been some kind of team sport going on there this afternoon.

They were sitting there quietly, presumably waiting for Godot so I left them to it and carried on with my walk along the footpath.

How long is it since we’ve seen an old car on these pages? Quite a while, isn’t it?

My route took me over the lawn and onto the car park at the back of the lighthouse and there sitting quietly is a rather elderly Renault Voltigeur.

We all know about these vehicles and their heavier brothers, the Renault Goelettes. These were the vehicles used by all of the authorities for a 20 year period from the end of the 40s to the end of the 60s and were the typical paniers à salades, “salad baskets”, used by the Police to carry away detainees, although salade is a more polite way of of expressing what they were usually called.

High ground clearance and short wheelbase, they were ideal for the poor state of the roads in France after the war and with a traditional rear-wheel drive and cheap, basic and simple to assemble, they were much more common than the rival Citroen H “garden sheds” but never acquired the same cult status or lasted as long as their Citroen rivals.

It’s very, very rare to see one on the road these days.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve been following the adventures of the roofers on their scaffolding at the College Malraux.

They have spent several months working on the side of the roof facing my building and about a fortnight ago they moved their scaffolding round to the side. While I’ve been away they seem to have moved their scaffolding round to the other side of the building and I noticed that they are now busy attacking that slope.

With all of that do do, that’s probably going to take them up to summer, given the speed at which they have been working so far.

Round at the viewpoint overlooking the port there was nothing much going on, and there were just the two boats in the chantier navale.

But I did notice one of the two diggers that have been working in the port seems to have retired from the fray and is now clanking on its tracks up the ramp.

It was difficult to see what was going on with it over there but there was a workman round at the front of the machine, so maybe they are going to change her bucket for one of a different size, or maybe even fit a grab onto the end of the arm. But there wasn’t anything down there to fit it with.

Meanwhile, out in the port, the other digger is hard at it with the tractor and trailer.

It seems to have dug up a pile of rocks from the bed of the port and is busy tipping them into the trailer to be taken away. And why they would be doing that I really don’t know because they’ll have to go down extremely deep in order to make it into a wet harbour at all states of the tide.

And that gives me an idea. Maybe they are going to fit a breaker attachment onto the other digger so that it can break up some more of the rock.

After watching them for a while I came back here for coffee and some of my delicious vegan cake and then carried on with my arrears of my journey to Central Europe. And once again I crashed out completely for a good half-hour and felt pretty dreadful again when I came round.

The hour on the guitars was quite enjoyable and then I went for tea. Burger on a bap followed by my nice jam pie with the last of the soya coconut dessert.

The good news was that the football is back. Y Drenewydd were playing Penybont and it was a good match. Despite Y Drenewydd being at the foot of the table they were far too good for mid-table Penybont and fully deserved their 2-0 win, and even missed a penalty. Despite the long pause in the season they’ve obviously kept themselves fit as the game was played at 100% for the whole of the 90 minutes. I quite enjoyed watching the game.

Now I’m off to bed, later than usual. But the football is always much more interesting than sleeping. Tomorrow I have a pile of correspondence that needs my attention, some tidying up, and then I need to crack on. There’s plenty to do.

EPIC HALL

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

Monthly Archives: March 2021

Tuesday 16th March 2021 – HAVING SAID …

Monday 15th March 2021 – I’VE HAD A …

Sunday 14th March 2021 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

Saturday 13th March 2021 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

Friday 12th March 2021 – I’VE HAD MY …

Thursday 11th March 2021 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

Wednesday 10th March 2021 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

Tuesday 9th March 2021 – WE’VE BEEN HAVING …

Monday 8th March 2021- A NOT-SO-UNEXPECTED …

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

Saturday 6th March 2021 – SOMETHING RATHER UNUSUAL …

Friday 5th March 2021 – I’VE HAD ONE …

Thursday 4th March 2021 – YOU HAVE TO ADMIT …

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

Tuesday 2nd March 2021 – WHAT I SAW …

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