… a change, there has been no excitement in the local area today.

The rest of the body that goes with the foot wasn’t washed up on a beach anywhere in the vicinity. And neither was the Loch Ness Monster or Godzilla. In fact, we were all back to normal again.

Plenty of excitement during the night though. I’d been asked if I’d do a lorry-driving job driving a tanker somewhere. I said that I would and set out from the UK in this artic towing this tanker. We reached the docks and I drove my lorry on board. They said that they would park it so I let them park. When the ship docked I went down below to the hold and found that they’d uncoupled my lorry from the trailer. I though that this is going to be an absolute bitch for me to couple up because I haven’t driven a lorry for 30 years. I have to line everything up, mate it up, connect it up, connect all the cables. I drove round there but thought that this doesn’t feel like my tractor. For a start, my music wasn”t playing and it was a lot rougher to drive than mine. I wondered if I’d got the wrong tractor but they keys all fitted and everything. When I arrived round at the other side I noticed that the tractor had had a couple of its wheels taken off so I had to hunt for a couple of wheels which wasn’t easy. There was a big inspection pit there full of snakes and all kinds of other obnoxious reptiles (and we had this the other day). Eventually I found 2 wheels but on one the tyre was really thin on it. There was another new tyre there ready to put on. I thought “I have to put these 2 wheels back on, change this tyre over, reverse this tractor unit in underneath this trailer and so on. I’ve already been at it for about 6 hours and the ferry has probably done 2 trips back and to to the UK while I’ve been doing this and I’m never going to get away at this rate as I keep on finding more and more problems with this flaming tractor. This continued confusion and frustration is another regular feature.

Something else that is a regular feature is about me being back in work and planning on leaving. My last day should have been a Monday but I left instead on the Friday and was heading to the South Atlantic. However they were overrun with work so they asked me to come back on the Monday. I was really disappointed, firstly because I wanted to be in the South Atlantic and secondly because I’d left behind a whole pile of messy cases that I didn’t want to do. When I finally made it into the office on Monday morning there were a whole pile of cakes and everything on my desk and people making comments about “ohh your appetite’s back as well Eric” – all that. There was also something about a family with a young girl. They had been doing something with the town, some kind of course. The young girl hadn’t been there for the first couple of days because she was ill but she had come back after I’d left and was being very impolite and very awkward. A few people had had words about her behaviour. I don’t know where that fitted in but by now I was back at work with all of these tyres to change (as in the previous voyage) and a whole pile of paperwork and stuff that we were doing and reordering. I was completely fed up with having to come back and if they thought that I would come back the day after, they were very mistaken.

Later on I did step back into that dream where I left off, the one where I was back in work the day after but convinced that that was going to be my final day. I spent a lot of the time looking in hedgerows for orienteering clips that were supposed to be there.

Finally I was in an Inuit settlement in Nunavut. In a gap between a couple of houses was a river but when I looked it was a really long cascading waterfall with about 4 or 5 different drops. I took the camera out to take a photo but it was a really difficult one to photograph. Just as I took the photograph 4 or 5 girls came past on bikes saying “that’s a strange thing to photograph”. I told them to come here and look, which they did. When I showed them the photograph it consisted of them on their bikes obscuring my photograph.

After all of that excitement it was a struggle for me to leave my bed when the alarm went off. When I eventually did struggle to my feet I went off for my medication feeling rather unsteady on my feet.

After checking the mails and messages I sat down to revise my Welsh for the lesson and to write up my notes from last week too. And all of that took longer than it ought to have done as well.

The lesson passed quite quickly and for a change it passed off quite well too without me, for once, making a fool of myself. But I’m really struggling with this teflon brain of mine. Nothing seems to stick to it

After lunch I had a few things to organise that took me right up until it was time for me to go for my afternoon walk.

As usual, my first port of call was going to be at the beach – or, rather, at the wall at the end of the car park where I can look down onto the beach.

It was the kind of day where I didn’t expect to se anyone down there, and I was right too. It was fairly windy today but more relevantly, we’d been having rainstorms on and off all throughout the day

At the moment it had stopped raining but 10 minutes ago and at various times during the rest of the day we were having it coming down in buckets.

In fact, no sooner had I taken the photo of the beach it all came down again so I put away the camera on the inside of my rain jacket and trudged off down the path.

That will explain why there are no photographs until I arrived at the car park at the end of the path – it was too wet to take out the camera.

However by the time I reached here the rain had diminished somewhat so to celebrate the occasion I took a photograph of Le Loup – the marker light that sits on the rock at the entrance to the port.

It looks quite nice framed through the trees like that and the rain that was falling down was giving it something of a surreal effect. We’ve seen plenty of photos of it when it’s been beautifully illuminated by the sunshine so it’s nice to have a photo that is somewhat different.

Talking of the sunshine, we’re having another one of these beautiful sunsets.

Over towards the Brittany coast there’s a gap in the clouds and the sunshine is streaming down and lighting up a little patch on the sea in the centre of the bay.

As I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … this time of the year is always good for this kind of effect and it was rather a shame that I was the only one out there enjoying it this afternoon.

With nothing else going on I wandered off down the path towards the port.

And there is something going on down at the chantier naval this afternoon. The first thing that I noticed was that the wheels of the portable boat lift have now disappeared. I wonder where they have gone.

There’s a guy down there too, going back and to between the ladder on the side of the boat lift and his van. He’s the only one down there this afternoon – everyone else who has been working down there recently seems to have cleared off.

Probably something to do with the weather, I reckon.

And this afternoon we have a boat over at the fish processing plant this afternoon.

It’s not any of the usual suspects such as L’Omerta but one of the larger trawlers – Jade III in fact, as I was to find out as I drew closer – and as I’m useless at drawing, it was a pretty poor likeness.

Her registration number tells me that she’s from St Brieuc, although we’ve seen her here a few times, and it’s a good job that she has a catamaran hull so that she can settle down in the silt without too many problems.

The problem that I was having now was that it had started to rain fairly heavily so I headed off back home quite quickly.

Before I went inside though, I was distracted by the goings-on on the car park outside.

There was a fork-lift truck racing around on there, heading back on its way out again. he drove off towards the medieval walled city again, the wrong way down the one-way street.

He’s presumably working on the Rue St Michel and that reminded me that tomorrow, if I have time, I’ll have to go that way and see what they are up to. It’s been a while since I’ve last checked and I imagine that they’ve made some progress since then.

So this is what the fork-lift truck has been up to.

It looks as if there has been a load of material delivered in those large sacks to what used to be the workmen’s compound and the fork-lift truck has been lifting them on to the back of the pickup over there, which is now heading off in that general direction as well.

The skip is back as well, having been gone for a few days. Things must be hotting up over there.

Back here I had a nice hot coffee and then transcribed the notes off the dictaphone for today, which I posted earlier.

This evening’s mean was a curry made of all of the left-overs in the fridge, lengthened with a tin of lentils. There’s enough there for a meal tomorrow as well and that’ll save me having to think of a meal. I’m not sure what’s happening but I seem to have lost all of my enthusiasm for everything just now.

So later than usual, and later than intended, I’m off to bed. Tomorrow I need to make a start on editing the sound-file that I recorded on Sunday morning. I’m hoping therefore to have a decent night’s sleep. It’s been a while ….