… my notes last night I went and kneaded my sourdough mixture. 6 hours it had stood and it certainly hadn’t doubled in size, but there it was.

After kneading it for a good 10 minutes I could feel the change in texture so something was definitely working but I carried on nevertheless and after about 15 minutes of so I wrapped it in a well-floured tea towel and put it in a pyrex bowl to leave it overnight.

And after all that excitement I ended up going to bed at about 00:30 which is bad news as far as I’m concerned, but good news is that I actually managed to beat the third alarm to my feet. I’m not quite sure what’s happening here at all.

Stuff on the dictaphone too. Despite just 5.5 hours sleep I’d managed to find the time to go off on my travels. However, I know that many of you are of delicate sensibility and the rest of you are probably having a meal right now, so I’ll spare you all the gory details. Some of this stuff is colourful, to say the least.

So off to check on the sourdough as soon as I’d had my medication.

It hadn’t doubled in size through the night either but anyway, it’s had all of the resting that it’s going to have. I switched on the oven, put the lid over the pyrex bowl, turned it upside-down so that the dough fell into the lid (having well-floured the lid beforehand), removed the tea-towel, put the bowl back on (with the unit still upside-down) and put it in the oven full-on.

After half an hour I took off the bowl so that the bread remained in the lid (and it had risen somewhat too), scored the top of the bread to let out the steam and put it back into the oven for another half hour.

It wasn’t properly baked by then so I gave it another 15 minutes and when I took it out, it looked and smelt delicious.

One thing that I’ve learnt is that the bread is too small. It’s possibly the pyrex bowl that I’m using because the bread is not tall enough to be of much use. But the exciting part about all of this is that the bread was thoroughly delicious, light as a feather and completely aerated, and I wish that my normal bread would turn out this good.

It looks as if I’ll have to use 500 grammes of flour for the next week and see where that takes me. But it’s a lot more optimistic than it was last night and I’ll be trying this again.

While the bread was baking, I copied out my notes for the Welsh and then revised for my course this morning.

The course passed quite quickly today but I’m still very dissatisfied with myself here. Stuff is going in one ear and right out of the other. I must have a teflon brain because nothing seems to stick to it.

Once the course had finished I had to track down a book. We’re going to start reading a novel and although the tutor offered to send it to me page by page in a *.pdf I really could do with a version of my own. And eventually I managed to find one at quite a democratic price, and also a copy of our course book. Maybe it’s someone who did the course last year who doesn’t want to carry on or who wants to release some cash.

That meant a rather late lunch. I couldn’t wait to attack my bread and as I have said, it really was excellent and I’ll be doing that again, I reckon. But in a different mould to make a better shape.

With that out of the way it was time for me to go for my afternoon walk, bumping into one of my neighbours on the way out.

It was cold outside this afternoon, and I do mean cold. It won’t be long before I have to start to put my woolly hat on my woolly head when I go out. But the air was really clear and we could see for miles today. The view of the lighthouse at Cap Fréhel on the right of the image has never been clearer.

It’s very difficult to believe that it’s about 70 kms away when you see it in a photo like this.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the last couple of days we’ve spent some time round at the Seafarer’s Memorial.

There have been a few changes there since I came back from Belgium, and there have been a few more today by the looks of things. The flowers that we saw there last time have all been swept away and there are a few wreaths now that have appeared this morning.

At first I thought that it might be something to do with the anniversary of one of the tragedies that are commemorated thereupon, but they are dated December and January – I did check as I said that I would.

So I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s clearly significant

We’ve seen a photo of the Brittany coast right down as far as Cap Fréhel and how clear things were looking today in that direction.

We’ve also seen just recently a couple of photos of the reflection of the sun shining onto the sea over on the Brittany coast round by Cancale. So today, we had the lot. It’s not as impressive as the view that we had a week or so but the colour of the sky is especially interesting. It brings out really well the silhouette of the skyline if Cancale way in the distance.

And so I moved on. Next stop was the chantier navale

Another thing that we saw yesterday was the mobile boat lift in the Chantier Navale in position round by Ceres 2 as if it was about to pick her up and drop her into the water.

But clearly not. The lift has now gone back to her usual position and Ceres 2 is still where she was on the blocks. So I don’t know what was happening there either now.

Nothing else worth talking about this afternoon. I’m sure that you aren’t interested in seeing any more photos of the pathetic parking at the school. Rather later than usual, I came on back for a coffee.

Liz was on line when I returned, and so was my friend who had the Covid, so we ended up having a good lengthy chat for a while. Liz gave me a few pointers about cooking and told me how to cook my butternut squash in order to make a decent soup (that’s Thursday’s task) and my other friend and I had a good chat about Chester, where I lived for a couple of years in the early 70s after I ran away from home.

This evening I was carried away on the bass guitar and ended up having a big bass session for my hour’s worth of playing around. Not like me, but I was enjoying myself so much with the numbers that I was playing.

Tea was a burger on a bap followed by my custard tart. And I’m impressed with how that turned out for an ad-hoc thrown-together dessert. I’ll have to do that again some time, only properly.

All of this was followed by a mega-washing-up session. There was plenty to do and now that the draining board is full, I’ll have to finish off tomorrow morning.

And later than usual (very much later in fact) I was able to go for a run. And even though it was way past curfew time and I was the only one out there, the police car that drove past me totally ignored me.

And so in stages as usual I ran down the Rue du Nord and then along the footpath underneath the walls. The sky was still quite clear and Donville les Bains was looking very bright in the distance, so taking my time, I took a photo of it.

It needed about 3 or 4 shots to take the photo that I wanted, but all the same it’s ended up coming out quite well. And once I’d taken it I carried on with my run.

Nothing much happening at the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch either.

To take a photo of something interesting I had to walk round to take a photo of the Place des Corsaires and take a photo of what there is down there, with the Rue Lecampion in the background. I’m getting to the stage where I’m running out of interesting things to photograph.

Mind you, the problem is the lack of light, because I would have loved to have had a photograph of the look on the face of the woman talking on her mobile phone in the Square Maurice Marland when I ran past. I took her completely by surprise and she must have least three feet into the air.

After my walk around the rest of the walls I ran on home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to have a good day’s work. But as well as that I have to book my next journey to Leuven. I’m going on Monday but nothing is arranged as yet. I can see me walking to Leuven and sleeping under a bridge if I’m not careful.