… in the chantier naval for very long.

When I went past there this afternoon on my afternoon walk, she was no longer there. It looks very much as if it had been a quick “in and out” yesterday in between the tides, presumably to fix a minor issue.

All of the other regular suspects are in there as usual. No change there. I even managed to have a better view of the unidentified trawler and while I was still unable to identify her, I’m certain that she’s another one of our usual suspects whom we have seen a few times before.

We’ll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, in other news, if you are waiting to see how I’m progressing with the photos of my walk around St Helier a couple of weeks ago, you are going to be waiting a very long time.

What has happened is that i’ve run aground in one of the Squares. I took a few photos of some old buildings thinking that I’ll be able to identify them when I return home.

However they aren’t named on any internet maps and out of the several hundred photos that I’ve surfed through so far, I’ve seen different photos of the same buildings calling them all different names.

This is going to require more research than I can do at the moment so I’m going to pass on them and push on tomorrow. In the meantime, I shall approach some “official channels” for a more definite answer.

But knowing the speed at which people respond these days to enquiries on the internet, we’ll be here for ever.

However, that’s for another time. Let’s talk about today.

For a change, I was in bed just a little late but I had a really good sleep for a couple of hours before going off on my travels again. I was at work last night. It was announced that the boss wanted to see everyone at 17:00. With being an early starter I usually went home early but I decided that I’d stick around until 17:00 for this meeting. 17:00 came and there was no sign of this boss. It ended up being 18:00 and at 18:00 I’d had enough so I went to leave in a bad temper. I picked up my bag with my library books in it and went to the door, checked them and found that they weren’t actually mine so I left it by the door and went to pick up another bag that was mine. Just then I bumped into 2 other people looking for a bag of library books. We walked over to the door together and they picked up the other bag. They had a little tiny electric car that was so difficult to manoeuvre out of the car parking space in which they’d parked it that I wondered why they didn’t have the kind of car that had a rotating cab so that you could swing the cab round 180° like on a digger and drive it in the other direction. I went down the stairs onto the ground floor. I was told that one of the directors was looking for me and he was in the garage. I went into the garage which was like British Salt and asked around. Eventually someone came over to me. He said that they were so busy in here. I certainly could see that. They had all kinds of vehicles and lorries on which they were working, doing bodywork as well. They wanted to know if I wanted to start to work down here from now on in the offices on the garage. It meant working with my father and a few other people. Basically I said “why not? Here’s a job for which I’m qualified at last”. I started to have a look around, check on everything and find out what was going on.

Later on I went into work again. I was extremely early but I had a wander round to do a few things etc. It wasn’t until 07:30 that I went to the office. That was just as someone else was turning up as well. They had a key to open the office door so that they could let me in which was lucky because I couldn’t find mine although I did later. I went to where the desk at which I used to sit used to be but it wasn’t there. Now there was a filing cabinet. I had to look around and found it in a different corner of the garage so I went over there to put down my bag and coat and take off my jacket before making plans about what I was going to do during the day

And then we were out somewhere. There was something going past and I flagged it down and managed to have a lift. However I ended up in a Prisoner-of-War camp and everyone was being processed. We ended up in a room, 100 people, the size of a small bedroom. Eventually someone came in and started to hand out these sugar cubes. He said “there’ll be plenty more of these”. I replied “no there won’t. I bet that this is something just to soften us up and the real punishment will start in another week or so. Then we’ll all regret it”. Some little girl in this room started saying “yes, I saw a file”. She said “on Friday there will be 3000 of us taken to an extermination camp in Flossenberg, so many on Saturday, none on Sunday and 110 more on Monday”. She started to reel off these numbers very matter-of-factly so it looked almost certain that our Prisoner-of-War period is going to end in our death even if we survived the mistreatment. I started chatting to this girl, a nice, friendly little girl. I felt really sorry that someone like her is going to be swept away in a pogrom

When the alarm went off I was chatting to this little girl again on a boat going to Ireland. We were chatting about a woman where I used to work years ago. What had happened was that I’d had to stay in a guest house overnight because I’d missed my ferry to Ireland. The ferry next morning was quite early so it was quite a scramble to be ready. We swarmed aboard and it was pretty busy. There were very few trays in which to put our possessions. Someone found an empty one and gave it to me. I grabbed hold of it amid this powerful scramble. Someone else asked if they could pu ttheir things on it too but I replied that I had mine and my girlfriend’s. We put our things on this plastic tray thing then we sat down and started to talk, this little girl from the Prisoner-of-War camp and me who was now on board my ship going to Ireland. When we disembarked in Ireland there were plenty of cars around. It was cold and damp and raining just like any other day in Ireland. We were wandering around aimlessly

So not only did I step back into a dream twice last night, I was off again with a young girl. The paternal instinct is rearing its ugly head again, isn’t it? Maybe I really ought to have kidnapped that cat.

The nurse came around too and gave me my injection. He tells me that his next visit will be in 10 days time, on a Sunday, so we agreed that he’ll postpone his visit until the Monday. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I don’t do Sunday mornings.

After a late breakfast I made a start on the photos and as I said, I didn’t make much progress. At the rate that I’m going, with 94 to do that survived the cut, I’m going to be here for ever. But there is certainly a lot of excitement going on in respect of what I was doing over there and I’m certainly learning a lot.

Soon enough, it was time for me to go for my afternoon walk.

And I wasn’t the only one out there going for an afternoon walk either. The area where I live is quite historic so there are all kinds of guided tours around the place. There was another bunch of tourists out there this afternoon.

This was probably the end of their trip because at this point several people broke away from the crocodile and wandered aimlessly around for a while. They wouldn’t be doing that if they’d paid for a guided tour.

A few of them followed me over to the wall at the end of the car park to check on the beach.

There were plenty of people down there this afternoon although I’m not sure why. It was a nice sunny day but there was a biting wind that was as strong as many that we have had around here in the past.

Now that the tourists have gone home it looks as if the dogs are now allowed back on the beach. Rover is down there taking his master for a walk.

No-one brave enough to go in the water this afternoon though and I’m not surprised. It might look nice but having reopened the window the other day, I closed it again this morning to try to keep the heat in.

The views out to sea were excellent this afternoon

Way out in the English Channel behind the Ile de Chausey was a sailing ship. She’s not Marité because she’s in port and although Shtandart was out at sea this afternoon, the masts and rigging aren’t right for her.

So really she could be anyone, but back home I had a quick look on the radar where I saw that there was a sailing ship called Etoile Molene that departed Saint Malo aat 09:42 this morning, did a lap around out there during the day and came back at 17:03.

Her silhouette is not dissimilar to the ship that’s out there.

There was something else out there too this afternoon.

At first I wasn’t sure that it wasn’t a small island with the sun reflecting off it in a different way, but when I was looking at the radar earlier I could see that the ferry Condor Voyager was out and about this afternoon.

She left St Malo at 15:07 and returned at 18:21, having just been for a loiter around in the bay. That sounds quite unusual to me but if there’s anything bizarre about her little trip out it’ll probably be in the newspapers tomorrow.

Just now I mentioned that the views out to sea were really good this afternoon.

This is one of the best views of Le Loup that we have ever had. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there are rocks just outside the harbour and Le Loup is a marker light that sits thereupon to make sure that people don’t run into the rocks.

The colours were really tremendous today though and we’ve never seen them looking so good.

There were quite a few people on the car park admiring the scenery this afternoon but strangely, there was no-one sitting on the bench at the cabanon vauban either. They must have heard me coming or something.

So with no-one down below me when I arrived at the end of the headland, I cast my figurative net a little wider to see what was going on.

And while this guy didn’t have a net, figurative or otherwise, he seemed to have every other piece of fishing equipment, at least as far as the peche-à-pied goes. And he was scrambling over the rocks with a great deal of determination too.

Leaving him to it, I wandered off down the path on the other side of the headland. And the way down is a steep path covered in loose stones and dirt and I do have to say that it’s 50 metres or so of path that I really don’t enjoy doing, the way things are right now.

We saw the goings-on down at the chantier naval just now and with no-one moored up at the Fish processing Plant playing “musical ships” I had a look down into the inner harbour.

The situation with the two large ships is as I mentioned a little earlier. Marité is down there moored at the bottom of the harbour and Shtandart has gone out to sea. Unfortunately I can’t tell you where she is because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, she’s switched off her AIS transmitter so my radar isn’t picking up her signals.

Chausiaise was down there at the bottom of the harbour yesterday, underneath the crane. But now she’s moored over at the side of the harbour and you can see her over on the right.

She must have been loading up yesterday when we saw her because she set sail this morning at 08:55 to go out to the Ile de Chausey and was back at 12:01

And while I was checking the radar just now, I noticed that Victor Hugo was back in town.

Here’s a trawler that you haven’t seen before.

However, I have, and if I’d been rather more diligent with the photos from my trip to jersey you would have seen it before now. She’s called Notre Dame de Foy and usually loiters Fécamp but when I was on my way back from Jersey we overtook her as we came into port and I have some good photos of her out at sea.

Interestingly, she’s a catamaran and you don’t find many trawlers like that. There are one or two like that in here but most of them are traditional single-hull vessels.

Back here I had an ice-cold chocolate drink and then had a desultory stir about with my photos from Jersey.

Tea was a burger on a bap with potatoes and veg. I’m having a little clean through the fridge and trying to use up the fresh chilled food that’s in there. The fridge needs a sort-out and I’ll do my best to do it. Mind you, seeing just how successful I was with the freezer, I hope that you aren’t holding your breath.

Tomorrow I’ll push on with the photos where I haven’t run aground and deal with the other issues as and when. Stuff is building up again and I really need to achieve something before I become irretrievably bogged down.

The injection of Aranesp might do me some good but that’s the kind of thing that’s clutching at straws.

Rather like when Fish tried to resurrect his career by teaming up with Rick Wakeman and the ghost of Sandy Denny. That was what I would call “Clutching at Strawbs”.

I’ll get my coat.