… saying that I failed to beat the third alarm this morning, much to my chagrin.
So while you admire of the waves crashing down and over the sea wall down at the Plat Gousset in the storm that was raging this evening, I can tell you that I was lying in bed trying desperately to summon up the energy to leave the bed. And it was about 08:10 that I finally managed to haul myself out of my stinking pit.
And that’s a far cry from yesterday where, to my own amazement I actually managed to beat the third alarm to my feet. That was rather a flash in the pan, wasn’t it?
According to the dictaphone I’d been on my travels too. I was with a group of people on a train journey. We set out from a place on the Underground and reached the main station but had to change Metros and there wasn’t many minutes between the two trains. Then there was only about 8 minutes between our train arriving and the next one departing. We installed ourselves in the train and it took off. After a while a ticket collector appeared and asked for everyone’s tickets so I gave him mine. He said “no, this isn’t the correct ticket” so I had a look and it was the ticket around France so I had a look through my pile of tickets that I had but couldn’t see one. It suddenly occurred to me that in all of the confusion I hadn’t actually stopped and picked it up. I asked whoever I was with and they couldn’t remember me picking up the ticket either. I was about to explain it to this ticket collector when suddenly he had to dash off somewhere elsse I was wondering what was going to happen now. This drifted on for 5 or 10 minutes then a woman came back and said to me in one of these stage whispers “you are going to complain about the lack of time between the trains, aren’t you? You are going to say that you didn’t have time to do anything in between the arrival of one and the departure of the next, aren’t you?”, explaining to me what I ought to do.
The kefir that I made yesterday – that was rather far too volatile to use this morning with my medication. I ended up having to open a carton of soft drink that I had bought in NOZ a couple of weeks ago. I hope that it settle down by tomorrow.
After the medication I had to sit down and revise my Welsh. I’d been doing quite well with the revision over the Christmas period bu with the cancellation of last week’s lesson I’d somehow lost the thread.
And in fact it was pretty hard going because I’m finding it extremely difficult to concentrate these days, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. And I’m not sure what I can do about that.
As for our Welsh class, it’s grown in size. One of the teachers of our course has left, and her students have been passed on to swell up our group.
What’s interesting about this course from a student point of view is that previously it’s run with about 100 students per year. But a combination of three factors, namely
- the current rise in Welsh nationalism
- the move of the courses to an on-line Zoom platform
- the start of lockdown, working from home and people having more free time with flexible working hours
there was a record total of 1038 students who enrolled for this course back in March. I’m in France and one of my classmates lives in Dubai. Even more interestingly, there’s a Polish girl living in Connah’s Quay who is in our class too.
So grabbing a slice of home-baked sourdough fruit bread and a mug of hot chocolate, I signed myself in to my course. It was painfully slow to start with as we all struggled to come up to speed but by the end we were doing OK.
We had a mock test paper at the end and I had 80% in the oral comprehension.
This afternoon I had a couple of ‘phone calls to make. For one of them, I was disappointed as the office wasn’t open this afternoon. I must get through tomorrow as there’s a time limit on this.
The second ‘phone call that I had to make was something of a speculative enquiry. And if it works out, it’ll be something of a rather silly thing to be doing at this stage in my life, but if there’s an opportunity going, I need to find out more about it.
But that was enough about that for the moment. There will be more to say about this I imagine.
It was now time for me to go out for my afternoon walk. Braving the rain I set off to see what was happening. And the answer to that is that if anything was happening out there, I wouldn’t be able to see it in this weather. This is another one of these white stick / guide dog days, even worse than the weather yesterday.
But never mind. I have to make the most if it. It is the middle of January after all.
It’s no surprise to anyone to learn that there were very few people out there taking the air this afternoon.
As I picked my way around the puddles on the churned-up path at the top of the cliff I could hear the distant throbbing of a long-stroke diesel engine out there in the fog. And as I approached the end of the headland one of the trawlers from the port loomed out of the gloom and disappeared around the far side.
It was all extremely eerie, like something out of a horror film with ghost ships and all of that.
From the path I walked across the lawn and then across the car park down to the end of the headland to see what was happening out to sea.
While I was standing there, a couple more trawlers went happily sailing … “dieseling” – ed … past me where I was standing, and it’s a good job that they were close inshore because I would never have seen them had they been any further out.
Over the past couple of weeks we’ve stood in this spot and seen some really beautiful sunsets with the sun reflecting off the water but as you can see, in this wind and rain it would be a waste of time waiting to see it today.
Having waited there and watched a few of the trawlers and other fishing boats come back into port I moved away from my viewpoint, walking along the path on top of the cliffs on the other side of the headland.
Previously, I mentioned the rain that was falling down in a very fine mist, there was also a raging gale going on as you might have noticed from the photos of the boats out at sea. You can see it even better in the couple of photos here of the waves breaking over the sea wall.
It’s a good job that there wasn’t anyone walking around on the sea wall in all of this. They would have known all about the storm down there.
Further on along the clifftop there’s the viewpoint over the chantier navale from which we’ve seen dozens of boats in the past.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday we saw Joker, having unloaded her catch at the fish processing plant, perform an interesting nautical danse macabre in the harbour in the vicinity of the portable boat lift, and I speculated that she was indicating that she needed to be hauled out of the water.
And sure enough, there she is up on blocks down there, presumably about to have some kind of work undertaken on her. The other two boats that have been there for a while, the yacht and the trawler, are still there too.
While you admire another photo of the waves crashing over the harbour wall, I came on home for a mug of hot coffee and a warm-up.
Later on, I had my hour on the guitars and I seemed to enjoy it a little more today. On the acoustic guitar I’ve been trying a new way to play the G chord and the Bminor chord and I seem to have managed to improve on that. But I have to keep it up and keep on improving.
For my evening walk tonight I ran off down the road and despite the weather and the rain and the wind I carried out my usual (for these days) course around the walls.
We’ve seen the photos of the storm and then I carried on for home and tea.
Tonight it was stuffed peppers followed by a slice of the delicious jam pie.
Now I’m off to bed, ready for a day on the arrears and hoping to bring at least some of them to a conclusion as quickly as I can.
