… what kind of day we’ve been having today by looking at these people here on the Beach.

For the month of July this is totally ridiculous and I was about to say that I can’t ever remember a summer like this but then I did, back in Belgium one year when I was living at my apartment in the Avenue de l’Exposition and everyone who went on holiday to the Costa Stella, in July came back after just a fortnight.

There is one thing to be said for it and that is that little kids like that one down there will be having just as much fun dressed in a plastic mac as it would in a swimming costume and wouldn’t care at all whether the weather was raining or not. It’s only the old and crabby adults like me who complain.

What was ironic about all of this is that the torrential rainstorm that we were having this afternoon was only dropping on our heads and not on anyone else’s. All around us was blue sky and sunshine.

It reminded me very much of that old poem –
The rain falls down upon the just
And also on the unjust fella
but mostly on the just because
the unjust steals the just’s umbrella.

THis morning I staggered out of bed as the first alarm went off and went off to have my medication. And if I have any more medication I’ll rattle. I hope that when I go to Leuven and give me a good once-over they can decide to stop some of it and maybe I’ll feel much better.

Back in here I sat down and attacked the radio programme – the next one in the queue to do. And to my surprise I put my back into it and worked hard. And had I not had a couple of interruptions I’d have had it done at about 11:20 as well. Even so, 11:45 was pretty good going.

That included a couple of pauses, such as going for a coffee.

And while I was out there making coffee there was some excitement going on outside. As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … one of the perils of living in a medieval walled city is that if you are having a delivery, the lorry that delivers it won’t be able to come to your house.

As a result, regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing all kinds of different forms of trans-shipment taking place at he Porte St Jean.

There was breakfast too with hot chocolate and fruit bread. And all of the smoothie mix that I’d bought earlier in the year for the summer looks as if it’s not going to be used this year and that’s a shame.

The rest of the day was spent doing a major back-up of the computer (apart from a little half-hour curled up on my chair, to my regret) and to copy all of the files to the portable computer. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, when I come back I’ll be performing a major upgrade on the big computer and fitting the new hard drives, so I’ll be working with the portable computer for a while.

As usual during the afternoon I went out for my afternoon walk. And having put a sooty foot outside I went back upstairs for my raincoat.

And almost as soon as I set foot outside the front door of the building again I was overflown yet again.

And one thing that I do wish is that if people are going to be getting heir choppers out, that they give me proper warning and then I can be ready for it instead if ending up taking a photograph of a lamp post with a helicopter behind it.

Incidentally, the colour suggests that this is a military machine, not the yellow and red air-sea rescue one that flies around here.

So having gone off to inspect the beach, about which I spoke earlier, I headed off along the path in the howling wind and torrential rain that was lashing down.

Out at sea, emerging from a raincloud was a rather large sail.

Marité was still out at sea somewhere and so I wondered if it was she. But back home in the apartment later I cropped out the image, blew it up (which I can do these days despite modern anti-terrorism legislation) and enhanced it, only to find that it was the sail of a large yacht.

Anyway, I didn’t know that at the time.

So I pushed off along the path on top of the cliffs towards the port to see what was happening down there.

And we seem to be in luck this afternoon as there has been yet more excitement taking place in the chantier naval.

We have the yacht Rebelle of course, which still hasn’t gone back into the water, and also the trawlers L’Alize 3 and, Black Pearl who have been there for a while, and Galapagos which we saw on Saturday on our little trip around.

But where Philcathane used to be, we now have another trawler. Unfortunately I couldn’t read her name from here, packed tightly in between the others as she was.

Thinking that I’ll have to go down there for a closer look when I return from Leuven, I carried on along the path.

Mind you, a little bit further along the path I could see things from a different angle and I noticed that I could see some writing on a prominent place on her superstructure.

Consequently I took a photo of the writing with the idea that back in the apartment later I could do what I did with the photo of the boat – namely, crop it and blow it up (the photo, not the trawler) and see if I could read the writing.

And it was much easier than I was thinking too. She’s a trawler called Charles Marie II out of Granville. And I suppose that I was rather lucky about this. I was half-expecting to see something like “hard hats must be worn” or “no diving from this deck”.

That’s how things usually pan out whenever I do things like this.

A little further along there’s a good view of the wharf underneath the Fish Processing Plant.

And once more we have a boat here that’s been left to go aground as the tide has gone out. This is becoming far too much of a habit.

She isn’t one of our usual suspects like L’Omerta and her friends. They must be all out at sea this afternoon. Instead its a smaller boat, one that we’ve seen a few times before.

The presence of the round buoys on board seems to suggest that she’s involved in the fishing trade. As we saw when we were out at sea on board the Spirit of Conrad, those buoys are tied to lobster pots so that when they drop the pots into the sea, the buoys bob up to the surface so that the fishermen know where the pots are.

But while we’re on the subject of fishing, this is something that I don’t really understand.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, the peche à pied is something of a local sport here. Most people are at it one way or another, scratching around in the sand and amongst the rocks in the most unusual of places.

But probably the most unusual place that I have ever seen anyone scratching around it right at the entrance of the port. Never mind the fact that the sand is disturbed regularly by the passage of boats that ground out as they enter the port, I hate to think what has been dropped there by boats as they go past.

Whatever he is harvesting down there isn’t anything that I would ever want to eat, even if I did eat seafood.

In the meantime, with all of this going on, I was overflown yet again. Not by a helicopter this time but by a small aeroplane.

She’s another one of these aeroplanes from the Aero Club de Granville that we see quite regularly. She is F-GBAI, the Robin DR400/140B.

To my surprise, she’s been picked up on radar this afternoon as she was flying around. She took off at 16:10 from Granville and flew a pattern of concentric circles out at sea before doing a lap down to Avranches and back.

And I wish that all of the Flying Club Aircraft were as obliging as F-GBAI and allow themselves to be picked up on radar when they are out and about.

Before I head back home I had a glance down at the Fish Processing Plant, seeing as I have already mentioned that this afternoon.

And while it doesn’t look as if all of the fleet is out as sea this afternoon, they still look as if they expect to be busy down there later. We have three large articulated lorries down there as well as a whole fleet of refrigerated vans.

Back in m apartment I made myself a coffee and came back in here to carry on with backing up the computer and all of that took me up to guitar practice time when I had a good session on the bass guitar.

On the acoustic guitar I added another couple of songs to my repertoire, despite having said the other day that I’m planning on cutting down my repertoire . I can see myself having to make a second playlist for the acoustic guitar at this rate.

As I was going through the photographs and thinking about what I ought to have for tea, the telephone rang.

It was Rosemary who wanted a chat and we ended up with one of those chats that went on for three hours and the question of what I was having for tea never arose.

Instead, I did the washing up, cleaned the worktops and went to bed. I need to be on form for my rail journey tomorrow.