… many photos today. And when you see the weather that we were having, it’s hardly any surprise.

When I went out for my afternoon walk today I was in sou’wester, oilskins and gumboots and had to battle my way along the coastal path in the teeth of a howling gale. Of course I stuck my head over the wall at the end of the car park as you might expect, but as you also might expect, there wasn’t a soul down there this afternoon. The place was totally deserted.

But anyway, back to this morning. I awoke with the alarm at 06:00 and was up and about quite promptly. First thing that I did after the medication was to add all of my secret ingredients to my fruit loaf and give it all a second kneading, shaping, and put in the bread mould.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I started off on board a ship again. We’d gone up to the quayside and the captain said “you’re in for a surprise with all these changes”. Anyway we went aboard and there was some kind of meeting so we went to participate in it. There was this yellow dick running around called Donald. Someone said “right, we’re going to talk about photography. I want you to imagine that you are sticking your head outside your tent in the morning” – something like that and he stuck his head outside the tent and said “we’re going to take a photo of it”. In the meantime this duck had come to me. There was a little 3 year old girl sitting next to me. She saw this and said “ahh, Donald”. I said “no I’m Eric actually”. She started talking to this duck and I has a feeling that there would be lots more of this to come.

Later on I was reporting to a ship at the harbour side and came on board. The captain said something like “things are changing now. You’ll find things the other way round” or whatever. Then he said “the task for today is to work out how you would get from x to y”. Of course this was quite easy because I used to do this thing with taxis and underground trains pushing me around. So I planned a route from the Strand to Underwood Lane without going anywhere near Gordon. he said “that’s maybe OK but what would God say if he came along and saw it” but I supposed that I’d been doing my good story here on the scene and … I fell asleep here

Incidentally, I was surprised by the similarity between the way the two dreams started, and I wonder where I would have ended up in the second dream had I not gone back to sleep.

By the way, when I say “fell asleep” – what I mean is that my speech descends into a slur and I stop talking. And you can tell by my breathing that I’m in a deep sleep. When I dictate these details I’m usually unaware of what I’m doing – it’s an automatic reaction to grab hold of the dictaphone even if to all intents and purposes I’m asleep.

Having done that I put the fruit bread in the oven to bake and, armed with a mug of coffee I attacked the Welsh revision and also took advantage of the possibility of booking myself onto a week’s course at the end of July. There’s so much going on in July now that I’ve actually started a calendar.

When the lesson began I armed myself with my hot chocolate and a slice of fruit bread which was now ready, and attended the lesson. It passed quickly enough, and I only fell asleep once. All in all, it was quite good today. And my fruit bread was perfection. Putting the fruit in at the second mix rather than the first seemed to do the trick.

After lunch and a little clearing up I came in here to do some work but unfortunately I hadn’t gone too far before I crashed out. And it was one of those occasions where I hadn’t realised that I’d been asleep until I awoke.

And that had actually taken me up to walkies time. A look outside this morning had made me fear the worst and nothing had changed at all as the day had progressed so it was the rainwater gear.

We’ve already seen the beach and the absence of people thereupon, but that wasn’t much of an indication of what the weather was doing. This photo sums it up quite nicely.

That’s the Spirit of Conrad, the boat on which we went up and down the Brittany coast last year, coming back from the Ile de Chausey. You can see that the wind is catching it beam-on and even with such a small amount of sail, it’s careening right over under the force of the wind.

It’s the kind of weather than makes me glad that I’m on dry (well, not exactly dry in this weather) land right now. I bet that it was really wild out there this afternoon.

As I went round the corner at the end of the headland there was another boat battling hard against the headwinds.

It was quite a distance out at sea and so thinking that it might be Black Mamba I took a photo with the aim of cropping it out and blowing it up (the photo, not the boat) when I returned home so that I could have a closer look.

But it’s not Black Mamba unfortunately. It’s another unidentified yacht that’s sailing around in the bay and I’ve no idea where it has come from. There’s no chance of reading her name.

So I pushed on into the gale and headed off down the path to the viewpoint overlooking the port to see what was going on there.

Even though there’s a howling gale out there people still have to eat, and I think that too many people take the fishermen for granted.

They’ve all been out there this morning and now the tide is well in, the larger boats are coming into harbour to unload their catch at the fish processing plant. There are quite a few of them at the quayside with several more in the queue waiting for a space to moor up and unload.

And that’s an indication of what happens when boats are left at the quayside – the room for unloading is smaller and the queue is longer.

With no change in occupant at the chantier navale I headed off for home and my hot coffee to warm me up.

The rest of the afternoon was spent tidying up stuff on the computer and I was so engrossed that I forgot my guitar session. I’ll have to do that tomorrow morning.

Tea was one of those breaded burgers that I bought in Noz ages ago, with baked potato and veg, followed by apple pie. And wasn’t it all delicious? I really enjoyed that. And now I’m off to bed. I’ve had a tiring day and I need my beauty sleep.

As much of it as I can get.