… forward to tomorrow. Not at all. I’ve just found out that our buses are leaving at 07:30, not 08:00, and we are expected to be at the football ground by 07:00.

It looks as if an early night is on the cards, and an alarm at about 05:30 too.

And I’ll have to do better tomorrow morning than I did this morning. Despite hearing all of the alarms, it was still 06:35 when I finally crawled out of bed after a night that was later than I was hoping.

Still, there was time to go off on a couple of travels during the night. One of them featured the welcome return of Zero – someone who has accompanied me on many a voyage but has been conspicuous by her absence for quite some time. But seeing as you are probably eating your tea right now or something like that, I’ll spare you the gory details. But later on, I was at the football and it was something to do with the managers of one particular football club where we were. They had all been fired for some reason or other but I’m not quite sure why now.

After the medication I attacked the dictaphone notes from the night and after breakfast I began to write up the notes for the Project that I had done yesterday.

Not that I got very far though because bang on cue at 10:00 Laurent came round.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last Sunday we went to Donville les Bains to watch the bathers take to the water and we interviewed a few of them. Laurent had listened to the recording and today was the plan to start to edit it.

One problem with a lot of this live stuff is that the interviewees often ramble off on monotonous monologues, and the secret of good radio technique is to let them, because quite often you uncover some unexpected pearls of comment that you would otherwise have missed.

And then, you edit it to cut out the useless bits that you don’t need.

The complicated bit is to listen very carefully to what you have left, and you’ll find that quite often the interviewees have answered questions that you haven’t actually asked. What you need to do then is to recreate exactly the same atmosphere and ambience in the comfort and safety of your own surroundings and then ask (and record) the questions.

That’s what Laurent and I were doing all morning – reviewing the recording and recording an extra … gulp … 24 questions.

After Laurent had finished asking my dictaphone the questions, he went home and I walked down into town for my dejeunette at La Mie Caline. A very late lunch today.

And today was my lucky day. I went round the back of the harbour to see if the gates were closed, but they were open so I couldn’t go across.

But regular readers of this rubbish will remember a few weeks ago when I arrived at the gates and they were closed, but just as I went to put my foot on the footpath the alarm went off, the barrier went down and the gates opened.

Today though, we had exactly the opposite. Just as I was about to turn round and go back, the gates swung closed.

Absolutely perfect timing to the second that was.

Not that I was loitering about (it was raining by now) but I had a look to see who was about in the harbour.

This is a boat called L’Omerta, which is Italian for the mafia code of silence. We saw a boat called Omerta in the chantier navale for quite a while a few weeks or so ago, but I wouldn’t like to speculate that it was the same one as this.

At la Mie Caline I picked up two dejeunettes. With an early start tomorrow I need to make some butties before leaving, otherwise I’ll starve to death.

Making my butties, I discovered that I’d almost run out of hummus. That big batch I made ages ago is almost gone.

Not wishing to be without hummus I made another big batch, one lot of which went in the fridge and the rest in the freezer.

And here’s my recipe.
For any given weight, you need
50% of chick peas
25% of tahini (sesame seed paste)
sea salt and pepper to taste
garlic
olive oil
chick pea juice.
You should find that you have about 95% of your given weight
Stick that lot into a whizzer and whizz it round until it gives a really nice creamy mixture the consistency of cement. It might take a few minutes.
Now you add your extras to bring it up to the given weight. I used olives today, sliced thinly. I’ve roasted some finely diced tomatoes or red peppers in the past.
Add these into the mix and then whizz them around GENTLY. You don’t want to whizz them around so much that they are pulverised – you just want to whizz them around enough to disperse them through the mix.

Today I ended up with about 850 grams – so that was 4×250 ml ice cream tubs that I had collected from my old housemates in Leuven. Three in the freezer and one in the fridge.

While I was at it, I made another batch of muesli and filled up the coffee container.

All of that took me up to my afternoon walk and so I trotted off out.

And here was an astonishing sight. Unless I’m very much mistaken, this plant has its first spring buds already.

They talk about global warming and climate change, and the proof is out there if you look for it. It’s really early this year. We’ve not even had a proper winter as yet.

The rain had died down and it had brought the crowds out again.

But although the wind might have abated somewhat, we’re having a really heavy rolling sea coming in from the Atlantic.

As you can see in this photo, the tide is still quite a way out but there is enough power in the sea to send it slamming into the sea wall with some incredible force

For a few minutes I stood and watched it, and then I headed for home. There was plenty of work to be done.

This afternoon’s task was to begin to edit out of the rubbish from the interview and to cut and splice into it our supplementary questions.

By the time I’d finished for the day, I’d edited down 12 minutes into a very snappy 2:30 and it’s come out rather well.

What was disappointing though was that I could have done much more.
1) I … errr … had a little relax for about 15 minutes
2) the sound balance was all wrong (I must teach people to talk to the microphone and not to the people) and it needed to be adjusted.
3) You could clearly hear all of the differences in tone and sharpness in the different segments of the interview and so I had to manufacture a “work-around” and that took time.
I ended up working in 6-track (questions, answers and background, each one in stereo) which is pretty phenomenal for the set-up that I have and it’s worked rather well.

The rest of the weekend I’ll have to work at the remaining … GULP … 18 minutes (although I know full well that about 6 minutes of that is ambience recording)

Tea was falafel in cheese sauce with steamed vegetables, and then the evening walk – and run, and I made it halfway up the ramp. I was on 98% of my daily activity too so I did another lap around the block to finish off.

Now I’ve finished my blog, I’m off to bed. I need my beauty sleep if I’m to be anything like it tomorrow.