… slow start to the day, it’s actually gone quite well and I’ve done a fair bit of work, which is always a surprise on a Saturday.

So while you admire a few photos of the waves smashing into the sea wall, I’ll tell you all about it.

Firstly, the alarm might well have gone off at 07:30 but I didn’t. My back was still stuck to the bed rather badly and it took me 20 minutes to extricate myself.

But at least I’ve worked something out.

One of the (many) why I’ve been sleeping so badly is a strange pain in the big toe on my left foot and I had no idea why that might be. It only happens when I’m lying down in bed.

Last night, I tried a little experiment. Before going to bed I took off the elasticated stocking from that leg.

And to my surprise, there was no pain at all in my toe. I was awake a few times for other reasons, but not for that. And that’s rather surprising. Especially as I’ve no idea why it might be that it only happened when I was in bed and not during the day.

After the medication I came back in here to check my mails and messages. Having done that, it took me an age to start work because I just couldn’t summon up the energy. A large mug of strong coffee put that right eventually and I could crack on with work.

First task was to edit the photos from yesterday, post them on line and then bring up-to-date yesterday’s journal entry.

Regular readers of this rubbish will have noted that I only wrote out something briefly last night before going to bed. I’d done a lot of work yesterday, and I was feeling extremely weary.

The rest of the day has been spent working on radio stuff. I’ve chosen all of the music for the Christmas radio programme that I’m preparing and paired off all of the tracks. And I
‘ve written out all of the notes too.

As well as that, I’ve finished off writing the notes for the radio programme that I didn’t finish on Monday when I had to go off with Caliburn and have his windscreen fixed.

And so on Monday instead of writing out the notes I’ll just have two loads of notes already completed to dictate and edit.

Tomorrow I won’t be pairing off any music – I did that today with the Christmas programme – because I’m going out radioing tomorrow. Laurent telephoned me this afternoon to say that an interview has been arranged for tomorrow.

As for where I’d been during the night, When an alarm went off somewhere (which it didn’t, of course) I was carrying a large tray of eggs and I nearly dropped the lot

Later I had to go to an airport, Schiphol, but it was nothing like the Schiphol I ever knew. I arrived in Caliburn and parked him and had to find my way to my gate. I couldn’t see it but I looked around and there was some girl standing on top of Caliburn pointing the way to the gate. I followed the crowd and suddenly realised that I didn’t remember where I’d parked Caliburn so I had to go nack and make a note of where he was parked. There was some woman giving the instructions “you go through this particular gate then you phone for a taxi to take you’. I had no idea what this was all about so I went and waited where I was supposed to wait. There was a view of the countryside in front so I took a few photos. Then I noticed that there were these little electric buggy-type cars flying around. They would pull up and take people. I thought that these must be the taxis so i’d wait for one that someone else was taking to my gate and leap aboard with them. Then I looked at my ticket. The boarding time was 09:10 and it was now 10:10 so it looked as if I’d missed my flight. Thumbing back through my papers I found that there was a flight on 4th April that I’d booked and it was now October so I’d missed this flight by about 6 months as well

Just as I was about to go out for my afternoon walk the heavens opened and we had a terrific rainstorm the like of which I hadn’t seen in quite a while.

When it quietened down a little I nipped out for my afternoon walk and went over to the wall at the end of the car park to look down onto the beach.

It was so dark that I couldn’t see very much at all and I can’t tell if there was anyone down there or not. At least I can tell you without any fear of contradiction that I was the only person up here on the path. Everyone else has far more sense than to be out in this weather.

It wasn’t just the rain either. There was quite a wind blowing too.

You’ve already seen the waves breaking over the top of the harbour wall – something that looked quite impressive but the wind wasn’t that strong. What we were having was one of those heavy, rolling seas that we have every so often

It’s probably something to do with Storm Arwen and thz amount of built-up kinetic energy in the sea as a result. You can see how much power there is in the waves and how silly it is not to make more of an effort to capture it.

If anything, the weather was worsening as I was walking around.

The Ile de Chausey was completely lost in this huge raincloud that was coming my way and I didn’t want to have to hang around to wait for it.

There won’t be anything of interest out there at sea in this and even if there were, I wouldn’t be able to see it. And so I carried on along the path down to the car park, and down to the end of the headland instead.

There wasn’t anything at all happening down at the end of the headland

And that’s no surprise with this really impressive rainstorm blowing in off the Brittany coast and the Baie de Mont St Michel. Whoever is underneath all of that will certainly know about it

In fact, thinking about it, today was one of the foulest days that we have had for quite a while. And it was so nice earlier on – to such an extent that I was planning on going out and preparing the two front wheels on Caliburn.

But this weather put a stop to any thought of that.

One of the many phenomena that we have around here is the colour of the water. We can have whole patches of it that are a different colour than the rest.

There’s a beautiful example this afternoon and it can’t be because of the reflection of light off the clouds because right over where I’m standing the cloud is a nice thick dark grey.

It doesn’t go any darker until much further out in the bay, as you can see with the rainstorm cascading down on the Pointe de Carolles.

But that rainstorm is slowly catching up with me so I’m going to clear off home and have a hot coffee before I’m soaked to the skin.

Back here I carried on working for a while and then went for a shower. I need to be pretty and smell nice for tomorrow,.

By now it was time to make tea. Seeing as I’d bought some peppers yesterday I had a stuffed pepper and it was delicious as usual.

And now I’m off to bed. There’s an alarm set (again!) for a Sunday as I’m being picked up at 10:30 so I need to check my equipment before I go. And there’s some tidying up to do too. If I have people coming round I have to pretend to be respectable, even if I’m not.