… exploits and editing all of the photos etc it was … errr … 03:30 when I noticed the time and decided that I’d better go to bed.
And I’m glad that I did as well because apparently I wasn’t in it all that long. It’s been a while since I’ve been off on such a voyage or two or three or four.
We started off with one of these cold, clammy wake-up-panicky things. I’d not been asleep long and in my sleep I’d been making a list of things that I had to do over the Christmas period, one of which was to go up the North Wales coast to see someone near Rhyl. Suddenly I had a horrible flash – God, I’d promised the mother of someone I used to know that I’d take her to the Nick to see her son who had been remanded in custody over the Christmas period. I went to find my mother and asked “has Mrs X rung you up?”. She had a look through a few papers and said “no”. “God!” I said “I’d better give her a ring and see what she wants doing about this”. But how do you broach the question of “ohh do you want a lift to the nick to see your son in a cell?. I’m going to have to think carefully about how I’m going to approach this. That was when I awoke in one of these cold clammy moments because all of this sounded so real to me. It was certainly a realistic voyage
I’d gone back to sleep and I wasn’t asleep for very long because I awoke again. I’d been in my house which might have been Davenport Avenue although it was my house at the time. My father stuck his head up from downstairs and said that it was high time that I tidied up my house, that kind of thing. Previously Nerina’s mother had been doing it and when we had had our bit of a dispute Nerina’s mother stopped coming and the place was getting rather untidy. I was busy trying to do something and I had a whole load of things going on and was so confused that I just shouted “if you don’t like the way my house is then you f**k off somewhere else”. He became really annoyed by that so I told it to him again. He went away and tripped over something and fell through the banister – broke it off but he didn’t fall so he picked the banister up and threw it downstairs and said “that’s the first thing that can go out of this house”. I didn’t care because I was trying to sort out some clothes out to go to work. I couldn’t find any and I hadn’t any znd those on the clothes rail were sodden and damp and wet, and there was a howling gale blowing which flattened the clothes rail once. I was really annoyed and angry about this and said “if you don’t like my house the way it is then you f**k off out!” and that was when I awoke again with another one of these brusque sharp awakenings.
A short while later, I awoke to find the dictaphone in my hand all ready with a file open ready to dictate. So I’ve no idea what I was trying to say, but I didn’t manage to say anything at all. What a shame.
Later on though, I had an address for my father, which was 172 “Something” Road, Alpraham. I can’t remember the girl with whom I was, which was an extreme disappointment but off we set to find it. We couldn’t find it in Alpraham at all so in the end we turned round towards Tarporley (we had this all wrong because Alpraham is the “other” side of Tarporley, the Nantwich side and i was looking on the far side) but there was Alpraham and we came back and eventually found the place after much searching. It was two brick and white low-rise blocks of flats on either side of the road, connected by a kind of bridge of flats over the top of the street. His name was on the wall, on a blackboard, room n°20. So we parked up to get our things organised. She had some decent clothes and some stuff in a bag and I had some stuff in a box. We decided that we would take up some of the stuff and leave the rest of the stuff in the car,but it was a convertible so we went to look for a cloakroom or something. One of the members of staff sitting at a table in the common area said that there was absolutely no cloakroom here whatsoever. We thought that we had better take our stuff up with us and that’s what we were doing – organising our stuff to take u to my father’s room when I awoke.
Somewhere along the line though Rowan Atkinson had turned up. He made some kind of extremely offensive remark about the disabled and I was appalled. I thought to myself that I wished that he could be in the place of one of these people and go through what they were going through and see what kind of reaction he would have at his comments
Then we all had to queue to get back on our aeroplane in the High Arctic to wherever it was that we were going. People were taking off their winter boots and throwing them in a huge pile underneath the steps to the aeroplane and the Filipino crew guy was there saying “you want to keep those in case you come again” and they were saying “we don’t need to come again”. They were taking photos of him as a souvenir and climbing up the ramp onto the steps. I remember saying to one of the guys getting on “Ohh I don’t want to go home again!” and that was when I awoke yet again, and I think that I awoke definitively that time.
Well, actually it wasn’t. I must have gone back to sleep yet again because it was 11:00 when I awoke. I reckoned that I had better get out of bed at that point and look as if I mean business.
After the medication, I attacked the dictaphone notes to see where I’d been during the night, and that took longer than it should have done too.
And then it was breakfast.
Despite the late morning, I still had to think about lunch so I went off to la Mie Caline in search of my dejeunette.
And I wasn’t the only one out there either. Away out there in the baie de Mont St Michel over towards the Brittany coast was this beautiful yacht with a gorgeous red sail flapping away in the breeze.
It actually made me quite envious and i wished that I could be out there with him.
And that’s not all either.
Coming round the Pointe de Roc is this cabin cruiser or speedboat or whatever. That’s an impressive-looking piece of kit and the owner can’t be short of a bob or two.
He’s travelling at some speed too and it’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder whose it is, and where he’s come from.
The harbour gates were open so I had to come into town by the rue du Port.
Having admired the various water craft, I carried on down into town and picked up my bread. And then the long walk back to here again.
The rest of the day has been spend doing the radio programme for the Bain des Manchots. It’s almost finished too – just the final 90 seconds to edit so that’s probably an hour or so’s work.
But to date, I’ve crammed about 35 minutes’ worth of speech into just over 8 minutes and it actually makes some very good listening. Hardly anything is repeated and everyone had something interesting to say (well, that’s how it ended up after I’d finished chopping everything up).
There were the usual breaks of course. Lunch was one of them, and my afternoon walk was another.
Back outside, I had a good look around.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago we were having a series of some really unusual light effects, but they have nothing on the light effect that we could see over there on the Brittany coast over Cancale today.
It’s probably the best bit of floodlighting that I have ever seen, and all done by nature too.
Round the corner, I could see that Spirit of Conrad still there up on her blocks in the chantier navale.
But there are two more sets of blocks out there today. I’m not sure that they were there last time I looked, so it might well mean that we’ll be having some more visitors in there in early course.
Watch this space!
Tea was a vegan pizza – one of the best that i’ve ever made – and then the evening walk all alone in the freezing cold. I did my run too – but again only half-way up the ramp.
The day’s journal is finished to now I’m going to finish off the radio programme before I go to bed. I want it done and out of the way and the soon er I start, the sooner I finish.
