… of neighbourly interaction. That’s where all the time has gone.
Coming back from my lunch upon the wall overlooking the harbour, I noticed one of my neighbours out weeding the gravel in front of the building. It’s not right to be impolite … "it’s never bothered you before" – ed … so I went over to chat with her and was there for over half an hour.
A little later, coming back from town, I bumped into another neighbour on his way to run an errand, so we had another half-hour chat during which we put the world to rights.
But the French say, jamais deux sans trois and sure enough, on my way out for my afternoon walk, there was Gribouille the ginger cat. And he actually came running across the gravel to me so that I could pick him up and stroke him. About 10 minutes this time.
It was yet another effort to haul myself out of bed this morning, but at least I managed not to fall asleep after breakfast, which makes a change for just recently.
And today, it’s been a tidying-up day. Although first, I had to start to pack ready for my trip to Belgium tomorrow. And something is very wrong because I don’t seem to have very much that I’m taking.
Another thing that I need to do is to work out a route to the Prefecture de Police in the rue des Morillons. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the wallet that I lost in December has turned up at the Police Station and I have to go to pick it up.
It’s something of a hike and I can see me being very pushed for time. If the train is late I shall be snookered so I can’t afford to hang around looking for streets, especially with the perturbations on the Metro.
Tidying up, I said. That involved some (but not by any means all) of the papers that are hanging around here. There’s still plenty to do but if you don’t start, you won’t ever finish. So at least we’ve set off.
And then another task.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve spent about a year looking for some images on a missing hard drive, and that I finally found it the other day. Back in the winter I bought a huge new 4TB external hard drive with the aim of putting all of my images on them – all … errr … 2.5TB or so of them. I’ve been a busy little bee over the last 20-odd years.
And so I finally made a start on it. But have you any notion of how long it’s going to take? I started at about 11:30 this morning and 11 hours later I’ve moved 755GB. In other words, I’m going to be here for the Duration while this project organises itself.
As well as the usual walks this afternoon and this evening, I’ve been into town for a baguette for tomorrow’s lunch. I need to organise that too as I won’t have time tomorrow. And I had a little … errr … relax. But then 71% of my daily activity, I’m entitled to a brief 10 minutes.
Tea was the Bombay potatoes that I mentioned yesterday. And I’m getting good at these because they were delicious
I was going to finish off by having a really early night, but now Aqualung has just appeared on the playlist. That means that we are in for another Jethro Tull muisicfest and the last time that this occurred, I was still wide awake at 05:40.
But I hope not. Much as I love Jethro Tull I can do without it tonight. I have a lot to do tomorrow and it’s an early start.
