Tag Archives: lie in

Sunday 24th january 2021 – I’M NOT DOING …

… very well with this idea of getting up early, am I?

Obviously it’s Sunday so we don’t really expect all that much but nevertheless 11:30 is rather exaggerated and it doesn’t bode very well for my 04:30 start. At this rate I can see myself not bothering to go to bed and sleeping on the train on the way to Paris.

And it wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve done that either as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

So after the medication, the first thing that I did was to listen to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night.

To my surprise, there was something on there FROM YESTERDAY so I transcribed that and added it into the entry, and then turned my attention to last night’s voyage.

And this was confusing because I was watching this action exactly as I would have done had I been watching a film – in fact it was a film although I’ve no idea as to the circumstances under which I was watching it – whether in a cinema, on TV or something like that. But it was certainly a film that, in my dream, I’d seen before.

It was something like a scene from The Great Escape or La Grande Vadrouille last night with 2 men and a woman escaping from the Germans. They ended up hiding in a forest and next morning they set out again. I remembered this film in my dreams – a film that inspired me about the Auvergne (although how I ended up in the Auvergne is nothing to do with any film at all) because the forest where they had been hiding was just like what I thought the forest in the Auvergne would be. It’s all very confusing. So they set off. The woman and a man set off together and another man walked on his own. he must have found a lift because he disappeared off the scene. The man and a woman went on walking and an old grey Albion lorry went past, one from the late 60s with an early Mandator TG4 cab actually and nothing to do with World War II, a left-hand drive one as well. Eventually they were picked up by some old woman who led them into town. They walked past a café and there sitting in the window was their friend who bore a very strong resemblance to Michel de Berg (and what’s he doing putting in an appearance here?). He left the café and followed them into the town centre. They went into a place and a fight broke out, I’m not quite sure why. The old woman was immediately suspicious of the two people whom she had brought in but anyway she went downstairs and the two people, the man and the girl whom he’d taken with her, they were already downstairs with the 3rd guy and were sitting at some tiny table tucked into the corner somewhere right by the toilet. When the girl came out of the toilet there was a whole rush of people trying to go in. The 3 people sat down and tried to order something. They had ordered a coffee but they were trying to order something to eat as well.
But somewhere along the line I remember myself with other people and I had two jars, one half-full of instant coffee and the other half-full of brown sugar. To save on the jars I suggested mixing the two together and I said that surely no-one will mind as they all take sugar in their coffee. And then I realised that I myself don’t take sugar.

There was a break in the middle of all this for a bowl of nice hot porridge, and then I didn’t do very much at all except attend to some outstanding paperwork.

There was the usual afternoon walk of course so out I went. And I rather wish that I hadn’t.

A long while ago I’d read a report on the Tay Bridge Disaster which said that the gusts of wind were so strong that men had to walk along the bridge on their hands and kneed to avoid being blown over, something that I didn’t take seriously at the time.

But having been out in the wind that was blowing this afternoon I can well believe it. I was being lifted off my feet and pushed along in any direction other than that in which I wanted to travel, so strong was the wind. I had never experienced anything like it.

That’s the reason why there were no photos from the northern side of the headland. It was just totally unsafe with a cliff edge nearby in a gale like this.

Instead you had to wait until I went around the south side of the headland before I could unleash the NIKON 1 J5.

You might not think that this is nothing about which to become excited but actually we are in the lee of the strongest blasts of the gale. And while the sea is only “moderately wild” it’s still impressive enough but doesn’t do justice to the actual conditions that we were experiencing.

If the wind were to shift round a few degrees and the tide were to come in any more, then we would be having some really interesting scenery down there on the harbour wall.

You’ll have more of an idea of what we were up against in this image here.

You can just about make out Carolles and Jullouville in the distance through the heavy clouds and the rainstorm (did I mention that it was pouring down with rain too?) but you can’t see very much further beyond there. And, of course, the farther out you go, the rougher the sea becomes as it’s out of the shelter of the headland.

It was one more haggard, drowned rat that made its way back to the apartment and the mug of hot coffee was extremely welcome. And while I was drinking it, I prepared my pizza base for tonight’s tea.

While the pizza was cooking I tidied up, backed up the computer and packed my bags. I’ve probably forgotten loads of things but that’s just too bad.

The pizza was delicious of course and then I had a shower and changed my clothes. I’m going to bed tonight fully-clothed in the hope that I can just fall out of bed and hit the road tomorrow morning. I am not looking forward to this one little bit.

Friday 22nd January 2021 – JUST TO PROVE …

… that Ireland doesn’t have a monopoly on this sort of thing, I thought that you might be interested in a telephone conversation that I had this morning

“Hello Mr Hall. This is the hospital at Leuven”
“Hello”
“You have your appointment with us on Wednesday afternoon”
“That’s correct”
“Well there has been an important change. Before you come to the hospital on Wednesday you need to have a Covid test on Monday or Tuesday”
“No problem. Where can I go for that?”
“Well I don’t know. I don’t know how the system works in France”.
“But I’ll be in Belgium from Monday afternoon”
“Then you need to be tested in Belgium”
“Where can I go for a test in Belgium?”
“Wait a moment”
… lengthy pause …
“You can have an appointment here on Tuesday afternoon at 14:30”
“At the hospital?”
“Yes”
“So if I can have an appointment at the hospital on Tuesday afternoon, why can’t I have one on Wednesday prior to my appointment?”
“Because you can’t come to the hospital without having had a test”
“But the test is at the hospital?”
“Yes”
“So I can come to the hospital without a test in order to have the test?”
“Yes”
“So why can’t I do that on Wednesday?”
“Because you can’t come to the hospital without having a test”.

And I promise you – I am not making this up.

Mind you it’s a good thing that the hospital did ring me because that was what awoke me. I’d slept through all of the alarms and it was now 09:45. So that was another morning wasted and I’m becoming quite fed up of this. It serves me right for not going to bed until late.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone.

There had been some kind of issue with the Ranger in Canada. I was working on it but I was making no progress at all and no-one seemed to be giving me very much of a hand. I was pretty much resigned to being without the Ranger for quite some time. I’d been given a rail warrant to go off on the train to fetch some parts but I was in no way ready to do that so I didn’t use the warrant. One of the daughters of my niece came back with a big fire extinguisher thing. Apparently it used to be full of old tar but she had gone and bought some paint for my Ranger. She said that her dad was unhappy about it being put in that container but she’d done it all the same. I was in pyjamas – I’d been in pyjamas all week and it was time for me to go home so I said to my niece “I’ll let you have these pyjamas back”. She replied “no, no, keep wearing them”. I said “I’ll let you have them back on Sunday when I return home” so that was fine. Then her husband turned up. “That railway warrant that you didn’t use – you’ll have to see your sister’s husband about that. It came from him”. I replied “I’ll sort it all out. It’s not a problem”. I noticed in his work bag – he had a huge work bag/holdall kind of thing that there was all kinds of food in it and there was food in other places. I thought that this place was becoming untidy now. I wouldn’t leave food lying around like that, not even me. Things need to be tidied up around here because it’s really in a mess. I asked about the paint – what paint they had bought. He said that it was a dark green but it should have been red. I replied “no, it should have been yellow like Caliburn if it was going to be anything”. He said that he had to go somewhere to see someone about the Sky cards so I asked “may I come with you for the drive?”. So we agreed on that. he took the Sky cards out of the machine to read the passwords and off we set. At a certain point someone came haring down the driveway towards the road in an old green and white Consul Mk II. For some unknown reason I had it in my mind that it was a Cortina. They came down there and just got to the end and stopped so I had a smile. He asked what was the matter. I replied “nothing really. I was just having a smile at that car”.

As well as the phone call from the hospital, I made several other ‘phone calls today, all of which were to do with my potential Covid vaccination.

Having been given a prescription by the doctor and also at the same time a letter of introduction listing my illness and other health issues, I rang up the Covid centre at St-Lô. I explained that with being a foreigner with a private health insurance I’m not registered with the Sécurité Sociale and as it’s they who are dealing with the Covid injections, I’m afraid that I’ll slip through the cracks and be missed.

She replied, after presumably consulting a few colleagues, that if I have a prescription and a doctor’s letter I would be added to the list but at the moment there aren’t too many vaccines here in the département. We aren’t a high-risk area.

The next batch of vaccines is due to arrive on 8th February so if I ring back then, they will add me onto the list.

While I was speaking to them I also had the idea that maybe it might just be a good idea to be registered with the Sécurité Sociale here even if I’m not liable to be covered by anything that they can offer me.

Having made a few false calls (because it’s not clear to whom you need to contact) I eventually managed to speak to someone who seemed to know what he was talking about. And the net result of this that if I send them a pile of information INCLUDING proof of my own private health insurance, they will register me into the system.

So that’s some good news anyway, although I’m not expecting it to be a speedy solution. The straightforward appointment at St-Lô seems to be the best. But I’m not going to the shops tomorrow seeing as I’m off on my travels on Monday, so I’ll deal with this form them and there.

Apart from that, the rest of the day, such as it was, has been spent dealing with the siege of the Chateau de Chalus and the death of Richard the Lionheart. And I’m not making very much progress.

Although there was no pause for breakfast, there was still a pause for lunch and more of my nice bread.

And there was the pause of course for the afternoon walk around the cliffs.

First stop was just outside the door to see how they were getting on with the relaying of the gas pipes in the Rue St Michel. But I don’t have to worry about that any more these days as there is an eminently qualified inspector on the job as you can see if you enlarge the photo.

So leaving him to carry on with his good work, I cleared off down the path which was now starting to dry out somewhat.

But it’s not going to remain like that for long, I reckon.

As you can see out there in the distance over the sea there’s a storm cloud and a pile of heavy rainfall and the wind is blowing it in our direction. It won’t be long before we have that lot dropping on our heads.

So not wishing to hang about any and wait for it, I headed off across the lawn and the car park to see what was going on across the bay. And today, there was nothing to see. A few clouds but the sun was quite bright and we weren’t having any special effects on the water.

The huge puddle in the path on the southern side of the headland had receded somewhat so it wasn’t as awkward as it was to pass by there yesterday. And as there was nothing going on at the chantier navale I turned my attention to the port.

There hadn’t been any fishing boats out at sea this afternoon as far as I could see, so I imagined that they were all in harbour. There were certainly plenty of them in there. It seems that they haven’t resolved this dispute with the Channel Islands yet.

Nothing else of note so I turned my attention to the mug of hot coffee that was waiting for me back at home.

The hour on the guitar passed quickly enough and after all of this time I’ve suddenly found myself able to play the bass again with 2 fingers like I used to back in the early and mid-70s. Having struggled along playing with just one finger (I never ever used a plectrum on the bass) since I started to play again a couple of years ago, it came back just like that.

I need to work on the timing because my synchronisation seems to be out on one or two tracks, but I’m sure that it will come. But I can’t sing and play with two fingers – well, not yet anyway. I’m working on that.

Tea was taco rolls with the rest of the stuffing, and then a ‘phone call from Rosemary to finish off the evening.

Now that my notes are written up, I’m off to bed. Last night was a disaster and I need to do much better than this, especially as as I have a 04:30 alarm call on Monday morning.

What a way to start the week, hey?

Tuesday 19th January 2021 – IT’S BEEN …

… another bad start to the morning today.

As you might expect, I missed the third alarm again. When it went off I thought to myself “I’ll just have another quick 5 minutes” and then it was 07:51. And so with my Welsh class due to start and a pile of homework to do, it was rather a mad scramble.

In the time that was available I did what I could (which wasn’t all of it) and then I grabbed some hot chocolate and a slice of my sourdough bread, and we began.

Surprisingly, it was a better lesson today and I quite enjoyed it. I even managed to bluff my way through the missing homework which was quite something, I suppose. But I need to be more disciplined. I keep on saying that I learn to be more self-disciplined – unless I become a Tory MP and pay one of these women in Soho to do it for me.

No time to stop for lunch. I needed a good clean-up and that took up my spare time.

Then it was time for me to go for my doctor’s appointment.

But first I have to take a photo of the guys playing boules or petanque or whatever down on the Place Pléville at the foot of the Rampe du Monte Regret. No social distancing, not a facemask in sight, right next door to the Police Station. No wonder the virus is soaring out of control.

Yes, that’s right. We’ve just had a Christmas holiday with tourists arriving from Paris, haven’t we? And cases of Covid in the département have gone up 250%.

Just what is going through the minds of these people? It’s unbelievable.

At the doctors I had one of my two injections. Now that I have no spleen, and hence nothing to vent, I have to have a series of vaccinations every 5 years and the time is up for the renewal.

Just one today, and the next one in two months’ time.

There’s a problem though wit my Covid injection – I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it. I’m a foreigner with a foreign comprehensive medical insurance and so I’m not registered with the Social Services here in France. In Belgium it’s the GPs who do the vaccination apparently but as I’m not registered with a Belgian GP I can’t have it done there.

In France it’s the Social Services who do it. Everyone agrees that I’m a priority case but if the Service doesn’t know about me, there’s nothing that anyone can do. So my doctor rang them up today for a chat. They didn’t know either but they’ll call him back (so they say) and then he’ll call me.

But what he’ll call me, I can only imagine.

Next stop was the Police Station to have my certificat de vie from the Belgian Pensions Service signed to prove that I’m still alive. Not that I’m convinced that I am, but there you go.

There are two police stations in Granville – the Municipal Police and the National Police (and also the Gendarmes but that’s another story). Of course, given a choice of two, I went to the wrong one and so had to go back to the other.

On the way home, instead of walking along the top of the cliffs I cut through the Medieval town to see what they were doing in the Rue St Michel.

They are still digging it up and it looks as if they are going to be there for the Duration. But at least you can see all of the strange hieroglyphics and markings on the roadway. I’ve mentioned them a couple of times.

When I arrived home, very late as you might expect, I stopped and finally had my lunch. And the bread that I made the other day really is good too and I’m proud of this loaf.

It was so late that by the time that I’d finished it was time for my afternoon walk.

If it had been windy earlier, it was now even winder and I was being blown around by the storm. The other day we saw a fishing boat out in the English Channel having a bit of a fish. Today, it’s still there – at least, I think that it’s the same one

And she has some friends out there with her today. I can see two others fishing not too far away from her. But it’s rare to see them fishing so close to shore. The fishing ban seems to be having an effect and I’ll be interested to see what happens when Normandy Trader tries to unload the shellfish from the Jersey< Fishermen’s Co-operative.br clear=”both”>

Regular readers of this rubish will recall the huge firt that took place here last year when we were lost in the billowing clouds of smoke.

There always seems to be the odd fire or two of some sort or another taking place, and we have another one today. That’s out behind the Holiday Camp on the way to Breville sur Mer and round about where the airport is.

At least, I think that it’s round by the airport so I hope that there’s nothing serious going on over there. The last thing that we need is an air accident.

Anyway, I pushed on … “he means ‘pushed off’ ” – ed … along the footpath along the cliffs, which was now drying out somewhat in the wind after the heavy rain.

Just a few people around but no-one got in my way this afternoon although a dog took more of an interest in me than I would have liked. But I made it unscathed to the end of the headland to look out across the bay to the Ile des Rimains that was even clearer than it was yesterday.

Unfortunately, the sun is now so high in the sky that it’s not illuminating the water in the bay. And give it a couple of weeks and it won’t even be illuminating the water at all when I go out.

Yesterday, we saw Courrier des Lies – or some of her at least – up on blocks in the chantier navale.

Today though, we can see much more of her because Joker who was obscuring our view, now seems to have cleared off and gone back into the water. It’s not clear what is being done to her. And, of course, the big yacht is still there. I think she’s put down roots and become a permanent fixture.

It’s not for me to put down roots either. I cleared off too only back home, where I made myself a nice hot coffee and sat down for 5 minutes quietly.

And the next thing that I remembered was that it was 18:15. About 90 minutes or so I was crashed out, I reckon. This is becoming really bad.

Although I managed an hour on the guitars, I was in no fit state to move – hence I had a very late tea of just pasta and veg in a cheese sauce, and I’m going to have a very late night tonight.

One of these days I’ll break out of this vicious circle – but I’ve no idea when that will be. But in the meantime while I ponder on that, I’ll just append the dictaphone notes of my voyages during the night, which I didn’t have the time to transcribe earlier

I was staying with friends and in the apartment building where we were living there was all talk of the supernatural and everything like that. Everyone was panicking because the demons were going to visit the earth – the graveyard or something. They were all going to come down to look for the humans and kill them all off. I suggested that a couple of us went out to confront the demons taking crosses and holy water, things like that, on the grounds that cowering in our attics and rooms, they are going to find us anyway. We’ll be locked in and we won’t have any room to manoeuvre whereas if we are outside we have a chance of taking them by surprise, taking the initiative and with plenty of room to manoeuvre it will take them by surprise and we might be able to actually achieve something. In the end I convinced one person to come with me so I thought that I’d go upstairs and find Marianne’s cross and holy water etc so I went, and found that the door to my apartment was open so I burst in and there was a family sitting there eating a meal. I’d heard that there was a family who had had some accommodation difficulties and had some problems about their kitchen but here they were borrowing mine. There were a couple of cats and dogs running around my apartment and I was most unhappy to say the least, as you can imagine. I started to look for Marianne’s cross and holy water but I couldn’t find them anywhere. Then I realised that Marianne’s cross had been buried with her. We began to run out of time and we needed to be getting off. I wasn’t in the least bit ready for this but it was a case of having to go as you were.

This is another voyage where I awoke and it immediately evaporated. We ended up walking through a town and I suddenly realised that I didn’t have my camera with me. I remembered putting it on the seat of the car and putting my coat over it so that no-one can see it and we walked away, so I couldn’t take any photos. We went for a meal – there was one place open – and had something to eat. Then we came out and walked back to the car and reached a place where there were a couple of old American vehicles. Someone had sculpted the bodywork of one so that it was like a kettle. I went to take a photo and had this horrible feeling that I’d left the camera in the place where we’d had lunch. Of course that place would be closed now. I realised now that I hadn’t brought it with me so we nipped back to the car and I fetched my camera and nipped back to the place where this old American car was. By now about 30 kids had all piled into it and in it and around it. The engine started up and it started to set off. I went to take a photo but once again I couldn’t take a photo – the shutter just wouldn’t let me photograph it.

Later on last night I was in one of these great big coffee places. I ordered a coffee and had a bunch of grapes but I had to hunt to find a table or a sofa to sit on. I found myself a table and sofa and sprawled out on there and realised that I didn’t have my coffee yet. In the meantime the place was filling up rapidly and a family with 2 kids came to sit at the table next to me. I stood up to go and fetch the coffee and reached the island in the centre of the place where all of the coffee was. I had to walk around it and did two laps round but couldn’t see where the coffee was. There were all kinds of different things, teas, chocolate and so on, desserts, ice creams and everything but I just couldn’t find the jugs with the coffee in it.

Friday 15th January 2021 – LET’S NOT TALK …

… about this morning. It wasn’t 05:45 when I left my stinking pit – and neither was it 06:45, or 07:45, or 08:45, and while I might have been awake at 09:45, it wasn’t then that I left my bed either.

So that was the whole morning ruined.

It’s my own fault though. It was already a late night when I was planning on going to bed, but just as I was about to retire, onto the playlist came LA GAZZA LADRA, and if I ever have to make a list of the 10 best live rock albums of all time, this one would be well in there.

And so I need not continue.

Much to my surprise I’d been off on my travels during the night – or rather, the morning. We had a French exchange student staying with us – it was actually one of my little nieces – who was very uncomfortable as she had a different approach to life than some of the other kids so she didn’t socialise easily but she fitted in well where I was living with my friends from on the Wirral as the mum and dad. I don’t know what i was doing there but anyway it was now time for me to leave. The father, who has now turned into my niece’s husband was working on the car that would take me back into town to pick up my bus and he had to get the car out and give me time to be washed and ready but the time went so quickly that the mother had to call me. As I was going downstairs she said “do you want to go back upstairs? There’s some suntan oil in my bathroom cupboard. I replied “there’s no need for any of that”. She explained to our exchange student, who really WAS our exchange student from Summer 2019 by now, that in between living in the Wirral and where we were living today she’d lived in the USA for a while. Then we started to get the car ready for me and I thought “well, I’m being rushed a bit here and they are running me out of the house a bit”. This was making me a bit wary about what was happening and I don’t know why.

And at some point in all of this, Castor appeared in this dream – playing cards or doing a jigsaw with someone in a room upstairs, something that filled me with dismay and has more of a significance than any casual reader might realise.

So another exciting night and having had a shortage of pleasant nocturnal companions for quite some considerable time, I end up with a plethora thereof, all at once. I wish that my real life was this exciting.

What was exciting was that I actually managed to finish the magnum opus that is my account of the history of Chateau Gaillard. Well, it’s not finished – it’s merely the rough first draft and although it’s on line it’s going to be edited quite considerably before I publish it.

There was of course the afternoon walk around the headland. And in the beautiful weather too because although it was cold, the wind had dropped and we actually had a bright sunshine.

What surprised me about that was that many of the fishing boats were tied up in port this afternoon. Having seen the weather through which many of them had struggled over the past few days, I would have expected them to have made the most of the good weather today and been out there in droves.

But there must be someone out at sea because the tractor and trailer that hauls the shellfish around the local area is parked on the ramp, implying that they are waiting for someone to arrive.

There was no change in the chantier navale either – the same four boats.

And over at the ferry terminal, there was nothing happening either. Chausiais and one of the Joly France boats that provide the ferry service over to the Ile de Chausey are still there, moored up and aground with the low tide.

But no Channel Islands ferries. They are moored in the inner harbour where they have been since services were suspended with the virus. And it’s unlikely that we’ll be seeing them up and running, because I’ve heard a story that unless the Channel Islanders dip their hands in their pockets to subsidise the service, something that they have so far failed to do, then the ferry service won’t be restarting.

Back here I had a hot coffee and, fighting off the waves of sleep that were somehow overwhelming me despite the long lie-in that I had had, I finished off the Chateau Gaillard and then had a very depressing hour on the guitars. I wasn’t there with it at all.

There was then the evening run of course after I’d finished the guitars.

Here’s a view that we’ve seen on several occasions, but not quite like this. This is the Rue du Nord looking back towards the Place d’Armes in the background over to the right. But tonight we had a beautiful sliver of crescent moon to light up our path a little.

From there I disappeared down through the gate and along the path underneath the walls, part running and part walking. There was no storm tonight whipping up the waves down at the Plat Gousset so I pushed on … “pushed off, he means” – ed.

My route took me at a run across the Square Maurice Marland on the way home.

having seen everything that was going on with the machinery yesterday I reckoned that I would go and investigate the Rue St Michel to see how they were doing. And they haven’t been hanging around either. They’ve dug quite a trench already so they won’t be long in doing this.

Unfortunately the alleyway was closed off at the other end so in order to make it to the walls I had to turn round and go the long way around.

It was all quiet at the fish processing plant this evening. But I was lucky enough to catch La Grande Ancre (for it is indeed she) moving away as if she has just unloaded her catch.

Once she’d moved away I moved away and ran for home and for tea.

Tonight I took a frozen aubergine and kidney bean whatsit from the freezer and ate that with pasta and frozen vegetables, followed by more of my jam pie. That was a really good invention, that was. I’m pleased with how that turned out.

Although it’s not early, it’s earlier than it has been just recently so I’m off to bed. I really must try to do better than I have because this is all beginning (well, not beginning – well-advanced, actually) to bring me down and the last thing that I need to do is to bog myself down in a depression with all of this going on.

Look for the positives! And who knows? I might even find one one day.

Sunday 10th January 2021 – IT WILL BE …

… of no surprise to anyone that I slept right through until about 11:00 this morning. Furthermore, it was 11:30 when I finally fell out of bed.

But then again, I do have to say that because of the deep sleep that I’d had earlier during the day, it wasn’t until about 02:30 that I went to bed this morning. And so the sleep wasn’t as deep and as long as it might otherwise have been.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. We were off on another coach trip. We were leaving from some kind of stately home and there were 2 coaches there. Ours was pretty much full – there were only about 3 or 4 seats so we were all waiting around. One of the coaches pulled up. It happened to be ours so we all scrambled aboard and the driver set off. I had a look round and there were more empty seats on this coach than I remembered but I couldn’t see anyone running after the coach. We reached the end of the driveway and had to cross the traffic and turn – we had to wait for a gap. I looked around and there was still no-one running after the coach. Well, it must be right but there were more empty seats than I remembered. We set off but by now we were on foot, walking. We had a load of giant dolls with us, about 3 feet tall. They were walking. One doll was a female and another was a male. The male was about 40 and the female doll looked as if she was in her late 20s. Someone made a joke about what a good couple they would make and the female doll said “we’ve already had a kiss and he didn’t seem all that interested” and she started ordering him about, this doll, to give her another kiss. It was really funny, this doll giving these orders like this. We were walking up West Street and one of the girls with us was spotting golf balls so we were making jokes about her and her golf balls. There was one that we went past but she didn’t bother to pick it up so we had a few jokes about that. But while we’d been on the bus some people had lapel badges about something or other. Someone had done a deal but hadn’t let on – he’d passed an order around and people had ordered and paid him for these but instead of sending off to buy them he pocketed the money and had some cheap substitutes made. One of the people on the coach actually belonged to this organisation and he could tell straight away that these badges were false so he made the people buy the right ones and pay the money for it. I was keeping a low profile about this because although I wasn’t involved, I knew what had gone on and I was afraid that my name would be mentioned in this connection by someone or other.

That brought me all the way round to lunchtime and so I went off and had a bowl of porridge

After lunch, I went off on a cookery afternoon.

First task was to mix up a pile of dough for the next three pizza bases as I have now run out. That flour mix stuff that I found in Belgium when I was there in November is really good and did a great job. I’ll be sorry when it runs out.

Next stop was to deal with the next load of kefir as I’m running low.

When I was in LeClerc on Saturday I noticed that they had a pile of juice oranges so I bought a bag of a couple of kilos so I took four of them and whizzed them in my whizzer. I strained them through my filter stack into my large jug and then added most of the kefir that had been brewing for a few days.

Leaving an inch or so in the jar, I made up another batch for a few days later.

Having mixed the kefir and the orange juice in the large jug, I filtered it back through the filter stack into the bottles. And this will keep me going for the next 5 days.

By now it was time to go off for my afternoon walk around the headland.

There were quite a few people walking around too because although it was cold and windy, it was quite nice and sunlight. The wind was such that there were several yachts out there on the water having a good sail around. This one here was out in the English Channel on its way back presumably from the Ile de Chausey.

For some reason that I didn’t understand, the path was al churned up and muddy so I had to pick my way around the mud on my way along the top of the cliffs.

Across the lawn and down the path across the car park, I ended up at the end of the headland looking out to sea.

There was nothing going on out there to sea as far as boats go, but there was yet another example of a really nice sunset this afternoon. The rays of the sun was pouring through the gaps in the clouds and illuminating the sea right in the middle of the channel.

There were quite a few people out there admiring the sunset and this view this afternoon, and I left them to it as I walked on around the headland and down the path on the other side.

At the viewpoint overlooking the chantier navale, I had a look down to see how they were getting on.

The trawler was still there up on its blocks and the yacht was still there too. But there were some people on board in protective uniforms and it seemed to me that they were painting the boat. It certainly looks better than it has done from that point of view, although this isn’t really the weather to be out there painting.

There was nothing else going on in the harbour so I came on back home and made myself a nice hot mug of coffee and prepared to start work on some more cookery items.

First of all I fed the sourdough – mustn’t forget that. I need to keep that going even if I’m not having much success right now.

The pizza dough had risen nicely so I needed it again and split it into three. Two of them I rolled in oil, wrapped in baking paper, put in a plastic bag and bunged them in the freezer.

The third one I rolled out and put it into the pizza tray and put it on one side.

Next off I made some pastry and having rolled it, I lined a pie dish with it. There are plenty of half-open jars of strawberry jam around here so I tipped some into the pie dish and put a pastry lid on top and sealed it down and brushed it with milk and water.

With the pastry left over I made a jam turnover and then put the pie and turnover in the oven to bake.

While that was cooking, I prepared a vegan pizza and when the pie and turnover were cooked I took them out and put the pizza in.

While the pizza was cooking I headed off for my evening walk around the medieval walls.

Once again, I was all on my own out there except for a couple walking their dog, so I could do my running bits quite happily. At the viewpoint overlooking the town I took a photo of the Rue Pau Poirier just to prove that I was out there and then I turned for home and ran across the Place Maurice Marland.

It was so quiet out there and there was so little going on that I don’t really remember anything about the trip home. However I did run the last length back home again just to keep going.br clear=”both”>

By now the pizza was cooked so I took it out of the oven. And here we are – doesn’t it look delicious? The jam pie and the turnover look really nice.

The pizza was delicious too, although the tomato sauce wasn’t as I would have liked because having forgotten to buy any tomato sauce I’d ended up with a jar of tomato and aubergine purée to use as a base. And as for the jam pie and turnover, I’ll tell you about that tomorrow as I wasn’t hungry after my pizza.

Now I’ve written my notes, I’m off to bed. I’ve had a short day but if I’m not too well I don’t want to push my luck. I need to take it easy until I’m feeling better, whenever that might be.

After all, I have to start back to work in the morning with a radio programme to do.

Saturday 9th January 2021 – TODAY HAS BEEN …

… another depressing, dismal, miserable day as far as my health has gone.

But more of this anon

Today has also been the first day that I’ve had to scrape the ice of Caliburn’s windscreen before I could take him out for a drive to the shops.

Overnight the temperature had dropped to -0.5°C – the first time that it’s been below freezing, and we had had a heavy frost as you can see in this photo of the grass down the side of NOZ. It’s not quite the -16°C of the Auvergne of course through which I lived for 9 years, for the first couple of years at least in the most primitive of circumstances, and there was no snow either.

But winter is here with a bang and although it’s still above freezing even as I type, this brilliant clear sky outside fills me full of misgivings. I’ve turned the heating up.

But retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, it was another horrible day for me. Once again I heard the alarms but I couldn’t get out of bed and it was just after 08:00 when I finally tore myself from underneath the covers.

And it took me quite a while to find enough energy to go and find my medication too. It was definitely one of the worst starts to the day that I’ve had.

However I did manage to have a shower too and then I wandered off to organise Caliburn so that I could go to the shops.

NOZ came up with a few odds and sods of this and that but nothing worth shouting about so I wandered down the road to LeClerc.

Excuse the extremely blurred photo but the camera has focused on some dirt on the windscreen of Caliburn instead of the car over there.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that pathetic parking features quite often in these pages, and here’s another fine example. Of course, it’s an Audi, as you might expect, and the driver has just abandoned (I won’t say “parked”) his car like that in two spaces and cleared off inside.

As for me, I had my own parking issues. With Caliburn being wider than a standard car, I always park at the end of a row and park right over so that there’s a good gap up the side. That was what I did today, so the person in the next bay parked right over on the white line which meant that it was a struggle to put my shopping into the side door.

And talking of the shopping, I bought loads of fruit and some other bits and pieces but there was nothing in the sales that caught my fancy.

Back at the apartment I put the frozen food away and then made myself a banana smoothie with plenty of ice – I really did have a fancy for that this afternoon.

And then, regrettably, I fell asleep on the chair and that was that until 14:00. Just going to the shops had totally exhausted me. And I felt totally dreadful when I awoke. I know that I’ve had some bad re-awakenings but I don’t think that I’ve ever had one quite like this.

After a rather late lunch I went for my afternoon walk – into town and the chemist’s to pick up the medication that they didn’t have on Thursday.

At the foot of the Escalier des Noires Vaches there was one of the shellfish boats unloading its catch into a fish shop van – presumably there’s some kind of connection between the two. But I didn’t stop to enquire. I pushed on along the quayside where I bumped into the itinerant and we had a little chat.

Having picked up my medication I came on back home and sat down to listen – at long last – to where I’d been during the night.

At some point during the night I ended up in Accrington, although it was nothing like the Accrington that I know, and as I’ve only ever been to Accrington twice in my life I wondered why I would suddenly find myself there on a nocturnal voyage.. I ended up in a big office building and I was looking through all the stuff that was on sale in the Oxfam shop there. There were 2 Oxfam shops and I’d gone from one to the other in these 2 big skyscraper buildings and I hadn’t found anything that I wanted. I ended up in the living room of one of these shops. There were 2 people in there so I asked them if they could tell me the way to the railway station. They said “it’s only a few minutes walk away from here, but really you aren’t supposed to be in here”. I apologised and said “just point me in the direction of where the railway station is and that will be fine”. Some other guy said “we’ll have to get someone to take you”. “Why’s that?” “Well, you aren’t qualified to do that”. I looked at this guy and could see that he’s a foreigner but I could see the first bit clearly that he was talking about the other 2 guys had hushed him up. One of them said that he would sort something out but I shouldn’t really be in that room where they are. It’s a private room.

Later on I was working in a nursing home in the UK. We’d started to organise holidays and I’d been based in Dover. I had to pick up a group of people and they were all elderly and infirm, on crutches and in wheelchairs, that kind of thing and I had to meet them at the station. when they came off the train I was staggered at my lot which wasn’t much good. I had to take them into town, so I pointed out a few things to them. After we’d set off for a couple of minutes someone made me aware that there were 3 people missing. I knew about 1 who had gone off to do her own thing but another couple had apparently gone off to visit a fort in the vicinity. That left me with 15 instead of 18. I told them about an anecdote – how I’d met a hotel keeper down here when I was travelling back and to to Europe but I didn’t have the chance to finish it as I was kept on being interrupted. Eventually I had to tell them about the area where we were and took them to a corner of a street basically. This was the street where my newsreader lived and at that moment my newsreader suddenly decided to update and started to pump out loads of information going back a couple of years. With my newsreader 99% is rubbish and you have to sift through to try to have the 1% that’s good. I thought “how am I going to explain to people that they are going to be seeing news 5 years old that we already know what has and hasn’t happened and how are they going to act when they start to get it again.

Later still I was with 1 of my regular girls but I can’t remember who it was now – something that really fills me with dismay as I’m sure you can imagine. We were talking about cars. I had my collection of vehicles, a Cortina, a couple of others and a BT estate from Italy that I had that I was quite happy showing off. It came to the question of doing them up, and I decided that I would sell everything except the one that I really liked and I’d spend all my money restoring that one. Then off we separated and a short while later she was sitting at a table with a couple of people who had kidnapped her. I walked over and said “hi”. I was breakfast time so I mouthed that I would fetch a loaf and bring it back. I brought it back to the table and these 2 guys were still sitting there. They wouldn’t take a hint about going and leave the 2 or us on our own. I cut a couple of slices off this bread and put them in the toaster but it jammed the toaster and 1 piece just wouldn’t come free and wouldn’t switch off. All smoke started to come out as if the toast was burning inside it.

But this thing about kidnapping (which thing? Have I missed something?) relates to something else that happened earlier where there was a young girl who had to be home at something like 22:30 but it got to 22:15, 22:20, 22:25 and she still hadn’t turned up. I ended up going to a night club and she was sitting on 1 of the tables there. There were a couple of people with her so I gave her a wide berth although I kept an eye on the proceedings. Round about 02:30 her mother stormed in, grabbed hold of her and they had this really intense discussion and I don’t know what happened after that, which is disappointing.

There was more stuff too, but as you are probably eating a meal right now, I’ll spare your stomachs. But it seems that the really disturbing dreams are back again. They went away for a while so I wonder what has summoned them to return.

For my evening walks I had a quick dash around my circuit – four legs of my run tonight as well.

There were a few people out there tonight but nothing else much going on at all. I took a photo of the Christmas lights in the shop in the Rue Georges Clemenceau just to prove that I was out and that I wasn’t the only one still with Cristmas lights illuminated, and then I ran back home for tea.

There was some stuffing left over from my stuffed pepper so I added a small tin of kidney beans and a mushroom and then had taco rolls with rice and veg followed by the last of the apple crumble.

So now I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed. A lie-in tomorrow of course and I hope that it’ll do me some good. I can’t go on like this. It’s getting on my wick.

Friday 8th January 2021 – TODAY WAS …

… the worst day so far of this little bout of ill-health that I’m having.

The alarms went off as usual and even though they awoke me and I was wide awake, I didn’t have the physical strength to leave the bed. It took me until about 09:15 before I could find the energy to leave the bed and for the next hour or two I was right out of everything.

When I finally pulled myself together I sat down and had a play with the dictaphone. And it seemed that I’d travelled miles during the night. Including one trip with one of my sisters, although I shan’t elaborate as you are probably eating a meal right now and I don’t want to spoil your appetite.

Somewhere along the line my wife and I had got back together and were living together. Things weren’t going too well and I had to be very careful about checking my post to make sure that no unexpected letters were being slipped in somewhere that I might have missed. I had to regularly keep an eye on the pile of paperwork for filing that nothing had been slipped in there. This caused one or two raised eyebrows when people started to work out what it was that I was actually doing. I had plenty of things to do the following morning but my brother was around living there I think talking about what we were going to do. He said that he needed some help to put some silencer paste on an exhaust and change a wheel over on his car. He showed me a wheel and the tyre had split. I had plenty of things to do myself that were pretty important but I would give him a hand for 10 minutes. One of the things that I needed was a new tyre for my car. I had a look at one that I had just taken off. It was completely perished and there was a huge split right across the canvas. I showed it to my brother and said “I wet down to London on this on Monday.

In the middle of all of this there was a story about me being in a lorry, a lorry driver and we were filming or rather watching a film of a route that someone had driven and I was trying to have some kind of indication or hints from this video about driving, a Youtube camera shot thing.

The third part of this was when I’d been working with something like Shearings or Adventure Canada and we were going on our Christmas Holidays. We’d each been given a place to go to. I’d been given a place that was only about 3 or 4 miles away from where we were which I thought was a bit miserable. I wasn’t very happy. I was sitting at a table with 3 or 4 old people and they were making jokes about Russian spies. One of them asked me a question “was I a Russian spy?”. I made some kind of sarcastic remark so he started to make a real issue out of this kind of thing. An old guy, Admiral of the Fleet or something. In the end I’d had enough of this. I stood up, threw down my napkin onto the table and said “I’ll tell you what. When I go from here I’m going to become a Russian spy and what I’m going to do will make you look a total and utter fool, and that’s not going to be difficult”. He went apoplectic. I stormed out. One thing that I’d noticed over the last few days that no-one was really speaking to me or giving me anything to do. Even a couple of girls whom I knew walked past. I said “hello girls” but they didn’t respond so I shouted “hello girls” and then they waved to me. 1 of the girls was coming with me. We were in the room where we were working and there was such a racket going on and suddenly one of the chairs caught fire. It had been right up against the heater and the heat had set it off. She switched a few switches and the noise immediately died down to just a noise. It was still annoying but a lot less than it had been. I realised that it had been the air conditioning or the heater fan or something that was blowing and making all of this noise. She was talking about the trip that we were going to go on, asking how long it was going to take us to get there and when would we be ready. I said that I’d be ready in half an hour because I’m not taking very much and if I’ve forgotten anything I can always come back here because we’re only round the corner anyway. I remember saying that the first thing that I’d be doing when I come back before I do anything else is to weld a sill on the red Cortina. That has its MoT very shortly.

As you can imagine, it took me an age to transcribe all of this and I haven’t really done all that much else. I did make the telephone call that I needed to make, only to find that with the Covid situation their office is only open Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

The only other thing that I’ve done that can be classed in any way productive was something on the principle that if you can’t think of anything to do, or don’t have the energy to do anything, then just do something – anything – so I edited another pile of photos from Greenland in 2019. That’s not a productive day by any means, but I’m struggling with ill-health right now and I have to do what I can.

There were the usual interruptions today. Lunch of course with my delicious bread – and I forgot to mention that the fruit bread that I had with my hot chocolate this morning was delicious.

Another thing that I did was to peel, dice and blanch another kilo or so of carrots. They are in the freezer now freezing away to themselves.

There was the afternoon walk too, in the freezing weather. The temperature had dropped to 1°C overnight and had risen to about 3°C by this afternoon.

Not too many people out there today but one person who was there who I hadn’t seen for a while was our bird of prey – hovering around over the rocks at the headland looking for a tasty snack. He didn’t catch anything while I was there watching – perhaps I had disturbed the prey, I dunno.

So after a while, I cleared off and left him to it. I walked down along the path overlooking the chantier navale as usual but there was nothing going on there at all that hasn’t been going on before.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few days I talked about the new door on the public conveniences here.

Previously it was a kind-of roller shutter door, quite lightweight and it looked as if someone had kicked it in. And so they other day they came out and fitted a really heavy-duty sliding door instead. I’d love to see someone try to kick that one in.

However, as I mentioned earlier, there’s a design fault in it and they’ll be out to fix it again, sooner than you might think actually because there are already signs that it wont last long.

What they have done is put the staple for the padlock when the door is closed (on the right-hand side of the door itno the wall and cemented it. That means that any reasonably-sized iron bar can prize it off and there are signs that someone has already had a try. It needs to be in an L-shaped backing plate and screwed to the frame on the inner profile, so that no-one can get behind the screws to prize them out.

Back here I had a coffee and then carried on with some photos in rather a half-hearted fashion. I stopped for guitar practice of course, and that went somewhat better than last night.

Outside again in the freezing weather I set off for my walk – and four runs tonight. I’m slowly pulling myself up again.

It was too cold ro loiter around outside so I just took one photo of the Plat Gousset to say that I was out, and then I came back home – at a run again.

But to tell you the truth, there wasn’t anything else much to photograph tonight. It was singularly quiet, as it has been all day.

While I’d been out I’d turned on the oven again and was cooking a potato. When I came back I put a slice of pie in there and while I was at it, a frozen apple turnover. I cooked some veg and gravy too, and had pie with baked potato and veg and gravy, followed by apple turnover for tea. I’ll finish the apple crumble tomorrow.

Now that I’ve written my notes, I’m off to bed. Which is more than … gulp … 68,000 British people will be doing tonight. One person in every thousand in the UK has been diagnosed with Covid today. And apart from the 1325 who won’t be waking up tomorrow – a disgraceful record for a developed nation, my friend Erika from Atlanta and I were working out that in the USA the Death Rate from Covid is 1/59, yet in the UK, with its much-vaunted and magnificent NHS, the death rate is 1/37.

There’s something dreadfully wrong in the UK.

Monday 4th January 2021 – THAT WAS A …

… horrible day today again.

It is a fact that the day after I come home from Leuven, exhausted by the travel and by the effects of the medication, I find it difficult to do anything the next day while I recover my strength. And when I’ve had no sleep the night before and I’ve been carrying heavy shopping around as well, it simply amplifies the effect.

When I’ve slept through the alarms in the past, at least I’ve heard them somewhere in the distance but I’ve taken no notice. This morning though, I didn’t hear a thing. Nothing in the night disturbed me. There wasn’t even anything on the dictaphone so it must have been one of the deepest sleeps that I’ve ever had.

Mind you, I didn’t go to bed until 02:30. Despite the heavy couple of days that I’d had, I wasn’t tired at all for some reason and I don’t understand that. And so it’s no surprise that I didn’t awaken until about 09:30, and didn’t leave the bed until about 10:20.

After the medication then, with nothing to transcribe from the dictaphone. I could make a start on the radio programmes. But while in the past I’ve been able to dash off a programme in a couple of hours, by the time that I knocked off at 18:00 to play the guitar I had just about finished writing, neve rmind dictating and editing, the notes for just one programme.

Fighting off sleep (unsuccessfully a couple of times), and not having the same energy that I’ve had just recently, it’s clear that I can’t keep going like I could previously. I hope that I can pick up in due course.

Lunch was some of my delicious vegetable soup, even nicer than it was yesterday, and later on this afternoon I went out for my afternoon walk.

The temperature had dropped to about 3°C and it was damp and miserable out there. There were a few people nevertheless walking on the beach out by the Plat Gousset this afternoon, something that surprised me.

There was quite a mist out there too and it wasn’t possible to see any distance particularly. So haven’t taken a photograph of the beach I headed off along the path on top of the cliff

Across the lawn and across the car park I went until I reached the end of the headland looking out over the bay.

As I mentioned just now, it was pretty cold this afternoon and so I was surprised to see a couple of people sitting on the bench by the old sentry cabin right out on the end. They can’t have been enjoying the view in this weather.

With nothing else going on out there that I could see, I walked off along the path to see what was going on at the chantier navale. And the answer to that was “nothing”. The trawler and the yacht were still there, in exactly the same position that they where before they left.

Not too far away from the viewpoint overlooking the harbour is a set of public conveniences. There’s a roll-up lightweight door that rolls down when they are closed but before I went away, that had been damaged.

Today there were a couple of workmen there. They’d taken away the roll-up door, or what was left of it, and they were fitting a heavy-duty metal sliding door instead. I watched them for a while and then headed home for a nice hot coffee and a slice of Christmas cake.

What with chatting to Liz and dozing off a few times I didn’t do much work, and I knocked off for a very enjoyable session on the guitars.

Later on I went out for my evening walk. Walk, not run. I wasn’t feeling up to running around tonight. I must be feeling under the weather.

It was now 2°C outside and trying its best to rain. Not the best weather to be out there at all. The view along the coast had improved slightly and down the coast to Donville the street lights stood out clearly. The image though, taken with the NIKON 1 J5 didn’t come out as clearly as I liked though. I shall have to have the big NIKON D500 repaired pretty quickly.

As you can tell, I’m down on the footpath underneath the walls tonight. Despite the weather today, it must have been dry while I was away because the path was no longer flooded.

Further along the coast, the lights on the promenade at St Martin de Bréhal were quite bright this evening. The view was nothing like as clear as this earlier today

From here I carried on walking along the footpath and eventually ended up at the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch. There wasn’t anything else going on around there either so I pushed on across the Place Maurice Marland – again at a walk.

The rain was starting to fall a little heavier now so I wasn’t going to hang around. I might not be able to run today but I can walk pretty quickly.

Now that the scaffolding has gone from the house on the corner I could walk down the alleyway and into the Rue Notre Dame.

No black cat to greet me tonight, and no Christmas lights in the Place Cambernon either. I’d noticed from my viewpoint earlier that all of the Christmas lights in the town had been switched off so I suspected that that would be the case here.

The lights are still there though. They haven’t actually got around taking them down yet. And so it wouldn’t have heurt to leave them illuminated to add a touch of gaiety to the place in these difficult times.

While I’d been walking around the path earlier I’d seen all of the fishing boats out at sea heading home to unload.

By the time that I’d walked around my circuit, the first ones had started coming into port. The tide can’t be far off coming right in.

Back home I made tea. Rice with veg and a vindaloo out of the freezer followed by Christmas pudding and custard. That was a really nice tea.

While i’d been out Rosemary had rung so I called her back and we discussed this and that. for a whole hour and 38 minutes. This is why I’m just dashing off my notes – because it’s late and I’m tired. Tomorrow it’s the Welsh lesson and then hopefully I can push on with this work. And I haven’t forgotten that I didn’t do my Welsh homework today. That was disappointing.

Must do better.

Sunday 27th December 2020 – WITH IT …

… being a Sunday, I had a nice long lie-in this morning.

There are lie-ins and there are lie-ins, but 12:30 is stretching something of a limit. My excuse is that I didn’t go to bed until about 02:30 this morning, and the time wasn’t wasted anyway because I’d ben choosing the music for the next radio programme and remixing them ready for use. Not as much as I would like to have done, but it’s progress of kinds all the same.

And then, when you see where I’ve been during the night, you’ll understand why I was in bed for so long. Last night there was a Russian industrialist who had a huge factory. He was very disillusioned about having to turn out stuff for the Russians during the Winter War against Finland in 1939-40. They had surveillance on him because of course he was a very important cog in the wheel and they couldn’t really work out at one time whether it was in fact him or a plant from another country but no-one knew the right kind of questions to ask him and when they did ask him something he came back with the correct answer anyway. Then the was ended and he got down to doing some more usual stuff and then the war erupted against Germany. They ended up with a triumvirate of 3 people who would control the Russian industrial production, at least through the plants in which he had a say about the Russian Army. But it was this lack of trust that was the thing and at 1 point in this dream we were wandering through the streets of Moscow just wondering what on earth was going on and who was doing what to whom and such

I was with someone last night, a cross between a certain girl of my former acquaintance and my Greek friend from Brussels. We were together somewhere and I had to go along and take the van but Caliburn started squeaking again from the wheel bearing so I asked someone at the local garage if they could have a listen to it to see what they thought. The girl there said “yes, fine”. She’d fetch someone and it turned out to be the mechanic from the building where I was living. I didn’t really want him to look at it because I didn’t really like very much of his work but he said that he’d look at it, and of course I’d need a spare vehicle, wouldn’t I? So we made some arrangements to look at it. This girl and I wandered off somewhere and I ended up having to stay in a temporary room in my hotel place where I was staying while Caliburn was being fixed so I asked this girl if she would like to stop with me but she didn’t give me a definite answer on that. From there a few things happened that I had forgotten and I had to head off and walk somewhere alongside a river but the river was probably 200 yards away from the edge of the road. So I walked and at a certain point on my right, down from the highest part of the land was this really steep railway line and this steam locomotive and coal train came down it. I looked over the other side of the road to see where it was but it was so steep that it went into an underground tunnel so you couldn’t see the train. But then this train emerged near the river and swung round to the right to follow the river in the same way that I was walking

But going back to that dream with my Greek friend again – I must have stepped right back into it when I went back to sleep – I was off, picked up to go back to the hotel and I’d had to drop off somewhere at my old place but I crashed out and went to sleep. It was about 17:15 when I awoke in a real panic and had to get dressed and get ready, and I wondered what she had been doing all of this time and whether she was still waiting for me. Of course I couldn’t find any clothes, the clothes were wrong, the oranges – I went to eat an orange but they were all bad. Every time I went to peel one it was bad, rotten. Later on I ended up at another hotel and they gave me the bill and I thought “God, this is half as much again as where I’m staying at the moment” but I had a look round at the hotel and all of the facilities they had and thought “€60 isn’t all that bad for this place”. I went to find myself my room but instead ended up in the dining room. I fetched a coffee and went to sit down at a table. There was all piles of EU stuff all over the place including the new chauffeurs’ arrangements. For some unknown reason I hadn’t had a copy of this but there was a copy on display so I rooted round in a cardboard box for one. When I went back to my table someone was sitting in a seat very close to it so I excused myself wanting to sit near to them and sat down at another chair at the same table. All this time I was wondering about this girl. What was she doing, would she still be waiting etc?

I’d been off to a jumble sale and I had the Minerva and a trailer and a whole pile of other stuff that I was going to sell at this car boot sale. I’d arranged to meet Nerina a little later on. I’d been to this sale and it wasn’t particularly successful and I had loads of stuff left over so I started to get ready to go round to Nerina’s house. Going down Middlewich Street with this trailer but there was loads of stuff on here that belonged to other people. A group of kids had put a pile of flip-top bottles on board. I was trying to tell them that they aren’t mine and I had to explain to them in detail that they’d paid a deposit on these bottles and they wouldn’t have the deposit back if they didn’t take the bottles back. Eventually I found the adults who were with them and told these adults. I stopped my Minerva and said “take them off the trailer”. I went for a stroll down to do something – I can’t remember now and that took me far longer than I thought it would take me. Again I was worried if Nerina would still be there. What was happening about her? When I went back I found that the Minerva had been completely stripped and there was just the bodyshell. Everything else had gone. The trailer had disappeared and all that I was left with was my handcart with a couple of really heavy objects on it. I thought “God, I have to push this all the way home. I can’t pull it with the Minerva”. I was trying to work out which would be the best way home. In the end I worked out to go back up Bradfield Road, past Leighton Hospital and down Middlewich Road and past Wistaston Green home. Then I thought “why don’t I ring up Nerina and get her to come and pick me up, or at least explain what’s happened”. But try as I might, I couldn’t get my phone to work then, switching it on and off, it was still not working when I switched it back on. It came up as if I had a new account and I had to register myself, all this. I was in this narrow lane and there were these 2 tractors coming. They had to drive over the fence and into a field in order to get round me. I was in all kinds of states here about this and I awoke in another cold sweat. But quite often in tis dream I was calling the Minerva a Marina. How strange that was. There’s obviously some kind of Freudian slip involved here.

And all of this missing appointments and anxiety too. There’s been too much of this going on just recently.

What with the late start, transcribing all of that took up most of the early afternoon, especially with a pause for hot chocolate and a mince pie for a break.

Later on I was able to go off and about, armed with the little NIKON 1 J5, fitted with the NIKKOR 30-110mm LENS, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been out like that.

The first thing that I did was to take a photo of the moon with the zoom lens at its fullest extent, and then cropped it to see what it would do and how it compares with a photo taken with the NIKON D500. And while the quality is less than that of the big Nikon, it’s certainly good enough, all things considered.

And the moon isn’t all that far away from being full. I shall have to give consideration to shaving the palm of my hands in a day or two’s time.

As you might expect, I wasn’t alone out there this afternoon either. You can see all of the people out there taking a stroll in the afternoon.

There are plenty walking around on the Plat Gousset away in the distance, but you can also see the Rue du Nord to the right, the little postern gate through which I run, and the path that goes long underneath the walls.

I can’t imagine why the people would be walking around on the path underneath the walls. I would reckon that they might need a snorkel and flippers to go around the path.

And in case you are wondering why, just have a look out to sea from at the English Channel just now where I’m standing in the car park.

We are in the grip of a severe storm last night and for most of the day, even earlier in the morning when I was still working, it’s been pouring down and with really high winds for most of that time. I even had to postpone my walk this afternoon for half an hour.

We can’t see any ships or anything like that out there and that’s not a surprise at all, given everything that was going on out there.

From my viewpoint on the car park I pushed on a little further along the track on the top of the cliffs.

And the further along the path that I walked, the more the weather deteriorated. You can see in this photo here just how much it has deteriorated too. In the background, that’s not land at all. There is no land out there at all. That’s the force of the spray of the rain off the surface of the sea.

This is not the moment to be hanging around right now. I need to push on and complete my circuit because if I don’t, I’ll catch the lot of it.

And it seems that I wasn’t the only one out there taking advantage of the weather to take a few photographs.

This guy was enjoying himself out there taking a photo or two or three of the approaching storm. And I wasn’t convinced by the idea of doing it with a lightweight tripod without a ballast weight securing it. The wind was extremely strong here, blowing everything about and a camera and tripod would soon be gone with the wind in all of this.

And look at all of the puddles lying around here. You can see what I mean about the miserable weather that we have been having and why I wouldn’t be on the path under the walls right now.

So instead, I walked across the lawn and then across the car park down to the point of the headland to have a look out across the Bay to see what is going on over there.

There is nothing whatever going on as far as boats and shipping were concerned but we were having another brilliant sunset evening out there. Not just the heavy clouds and the sunset streaming through the gaps, but also the effects of the rainstorm as it tumbles out of the clouds.

It’s certainly something special today as you can see. But I’m not going to be here admiring it for too long

And I was right too, because the wind was quicker than I was.

By the time that I reached the viewpoint overlooking the cliffs on the south side (having dodged the flood on the footpath I was soaked to the skin. and whipped by the hailstones. And over there underneath the crane in the loading bay in the port, Joly France and Chausiais are moored there and I’ve no idea why they would be moored over there at all.

Particularly Joly France because she’s not able to carry the type of load for which they would need to use the big crane to load her up. If it were Chausiais moored under the crane, I could maybe undertsand it a little better.

You will have noticed that there were plenty of fishing boats moored in the harbour this afternoon.

But not for long. Despite the miserable weather, they were all preparing to go out to sea. One of them, our old friend Le Coelacanthe was making her way out of the harbour being photobombed by a seagull on her way out to sea, her crew all decked in rain and wet gear for what they are about to receive and will be receiving any minute now.

As for me, I’d already been receiving it and I was in a rush to return home to the warm and dry.

When I returned home, I rolled out the pizza dough and put it in the tray ready to rise for the next hour or so.

While I’d been away, Rosemary had telephoned me so I called her back and we had a chat for an hour or so, meaning that I had missed my Welsh homework. I’ll have to do two lots on the train to Leuven tomorrow and that wasn’t part of the plan.

By now it was time to assemble my pizza – with tinned mushrooms unfortunately as I didn’t have fresh.

And when I put it in the oven I set out for my evening walk. But there was no possibility of going out anywhere in what was awaiting me outside. This was the kind of rain that I was hoping not to see and it will be disappointing if it’s like this when I go out tomorrow morning.

Instead I came back in and did the washing and tidying up while the pizza was cooking.

Delicious it was too, and no pudding either because it was quite filling.

And now, my notes are written so I’m off to bed. No matter what, I have to be up early tomorrow for my train. I can’t afford to hang about.

Saturday 26th December 2020 – I’M HAVING …

… a few technical issues right now. If the computer causing me a few upsets isn’t enough, it’s now the turn of the NIKON D500 to start to give me grief.

Since the computer blew a fuse the other day, uploading photos from the camera to the computer has been a long, laborious process. The USB sockets on the front must be USB 2.0, not 3.0 because it takes an age and quite often it’s stalled and I have to upload them 1 by 1.

The other day in fact it wouldn’t upload any at all and so I had to open them from the camera with the computer and then save them to the Hard Drive. This evening, I went up upload today’s and yesterday’s and nothing happened at all. Wondering if I were to use the XQD card reader I plugged that in, put the card in and waited …. and nothing happened at all.

And so I put the card back in the camera and “please format this card”. So I plugged the card reader and card into the USB 3.0 port on another computer, and sure enough “device not recognised”. So I put the card back into the camera and plugged that into the machine and although it identifies the camera, it can’t read the card.

So that’s that then. It looks as if I’ll be having to make do with the little NIKON 1 J5 for a while until I can organise the solution to this problem.

I’m not having a very good time, am I?

Especially not as I didn’t get up until about 10:45 this morning. But considering that I was still awake and working at 03:30 this morning that’s not too bad.

After the meds I finally sorted out the dictaphone. There were lots happening through the night but I could only remember a bit of it. They were dealing with some important issue at a Government Office and they had asked someone to bring in a huge pile of paperwork relating to his unexplained wealth. It was an enormous stack of stuff that he had brought in. The husband of one of my sisters was sorting the post and some of it he was actually filing away and I didn’t want him to do that as he was having to present it all to the person who was looking at the file and wanted to make sure that it was all there. I left and was walking down this terraced street in London, a really nice modernised terrace and this guy was living there in one of these terraced houses and they were on their way to move house. So I went to have a look round at their old premises. Just across the road were more houses of this type and 2 guys were walking down there. They decided that they would go into this house to deliver a package. When these boys saw what was inside, one of them let out a really camp expression. I walked on round the corner and almost fell down this enormous hole at least 40 feet deep. At the bottom were a dozen workmen trying to clear some slurry away because there was a huge water leak down there. They were presumably trying to get at it to block it. But all the local kids had somehow managed to jump in and were sitting on the edge of this water waiting to get their bath for a swim. As I was taking a photo another young boy in a swimming costume pushed past me ready to jump in and it was very much a busy kind of place. But there was much more to it than this and I can’t remember a thing now.

A bit later they (who did? Have I missed something here?) dressed a girl up as a mermaid and she came out with these bright red vivid clothes and that took everyone by surprise

Later on that night my sister and I went off and came to a restaurant. She ordered her meal but I had to wait though while they organised a few tables, things like, that, washing the floors. It occurred to me that I could have ordered mine and waited for it so I went to order it. I asked what was on the vegetarian menu. The girl said that they had vegetarian food but no menu, and she told me what there was. There was one dish that I didn’t recognise at all. I asked what it was and she said that “it’s only been on the market since yesterday. I’ve no idea what it is either”. I said “yes, OK I’ll try that”. She decided to serve that for me and put it all ready on a plate. I went back to the table. Before I’d gone away we’d sat to talk to someone who lived in Shavington and when I came back there was someone else there, one of the boys of a family who had several of them. I said “God, has everyone else who has been to Shavington come here?”. My sister was chatting away to this boy then off he went and my meal still hadn’t turned up at this time, hardly a surprise as I’s only been away from the counter 30 seconds.

Apart from that, I’ve not done a great deal today either. Mostly just messing around here and there. But I did do two weeks’ worth of Welsh homework to make up for yesterday. And I did have lunch too – my usual Christmas lunch a day too late of toast and vegan butter and vegan mushroom pate.

Two trips outside today too, my afternoon walk with the massive crowds and my evening run when I was practically all alone. And this evening I seemed to be running a lot easier than I have been for quite a while. The weather wasn’t at all bad either – not what you might think for the middle of winter.

Tea was exactly the same as yesterday, listening again to my Christmas rock concert. I hope that those of you who heard it enjoyed it as much as I did.

Despite being tired, I’m not ready for bed yet. I’ll hang around for a bit, add yesterday’s dictaphone notes to the blog, that kind of thing. A day of rest tomorrow but I have packing to do ready for Leuven on Monday.

Friday 25th December 2020 – I HOPE THAT YOU …

…. all had a really wonderful Christmas and that Santa was very kind to you, and brought you everything that you deserved.

As for me, he brought me a Day of Rest. And I really do mean that because I really have done absolutely nothing at all today. I haven’t edited the photos today for a start. In fact until I made tea at about 20:00 tonight all I’d had to eat was a clementine and a boiled sweet.

Mind you, with not leaving my stinking pit until about 10:20, what do you expect? I had a really good lie-in.

Despite all of that though, I did go out for an afternoon stroll around the headland in the crowds, and for the photos, as I said you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for all of those.

Back here, I had a slice of my Christmas cake (I forgot to mention that just now) with my coffee. It’s an old-fashioned spiced ginger cake with nuts, and I iced and marzipanned it. It’s a bit sickly and sweet but the lemon icing works extremely well and for a first go, it’s not bad at all.

Eventually though I did manage to listen to the dictaphone. This was another James Bond film and I’d been sent to catch someone. I’d gone to this magnificent 5-star hotel, an enormous place, and I came down for breakfast. I’d had a really bad night with virtually no sleep and a long day before that with nothing to eat. So I came down and eventually found a table sitting enxt to a guy. I asked “do you have any objection if I sit here?”. He said “not legally, no” so I could see that he was something of an amusing character and I thought that that would cheer me up. I noticed that it was a buffet breakfast so I went over to the buffet and started with 2 glasses of orange juice which I downed straight away and filled uo. I went to get some coffee and then to sort out some bread. The 1st thing that I noticed here hot cross buns and I have a thing about them so I immediately grabbed 2 to stick on my plate thinking to tell Liz “you’ll never guess what I had for breakfast this morning”. It was in the middle of this queue to get my breakfast together that I awoke.

Tea tonight was seitan slices with veg and roast potatoes – really nice, it was too, followed by Christmas pudding and custard. And while I was eating it, I was listening to my Christmas concert on the radio. There are plenty of imperfections in it, but if you didn’t know about them, you wouldn’t notice and it all went down really well. If you missed it today And that reminds me – if you missed it, you can hear it on Saturday 26th December at 21:00 CET, 20:00 UK time, 15:00 Montreal/Toronto time at HERE. And if you miss it then, it’s downloadable on a podcast – look for “A La Pointe du Roc 59”.

That’s about it, really. I’m not doing anything else. I’ll come back and add in the dictaphone notes and the photos when I feel like it, but I think that I deserve a rest, especially as I’m off on my travels on the 28th.

As I said earlier, I hope that you all had a wonderful day and I wish you all the best for the season. Have a nice day tomorrow too.

Tuesday 22nd December 2020 – IF ANYONE THINKS …

… that I’m feeling cocky, firstly I’m not in China and secondly it’s a disgusting habit anyway.

And thirdly, to put a complete dampener on everything, it was 09:40 when I finally arose from the dead, thanking my starts that I didn’t have a Welsh lesson today otherwise I would have been seriously incommoded. Yes, that’ll teach me to crow about how well I’m doing.

But I can’t understand it. I was in bed long before midnight and I should have leapt out of bed with alacrity, even if alacrity wasn’t anywhere near me at the time.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. And to my surprise, there was some stuff on there from yesterday that I must have forgotten to transcribe. So first off I attended to that and put it all on line.

After that I turned my attention to the voyages of last night. And it is hardly any surprise that I was so exhausted after the distance that I must have travelled during the night

There was one of these tribal dance things going on in Europe. I can’t remember too much now but I’d had a lot of difficulty going off to sleep what with one thing or another and I remember saying “just wait until i do my tribal dance before I go off to sleep and I’ll be fine”. Of course there were so many different foreign words in the English language at that time but they were all to do with this tribal dance stemming from all kinds of different countries where every country had one to celebrate or commemorate going to sleep, something like that

Later on there was something happening about a bunch of girls who were travelling around in medieval times and fighting their way through to success or whatever. On one occasion they were being led to storm this citadel. When they got up the steps to what I suppose you might call a landing where there were windows that looked out of this building they were all there ready with their spears and arrows ready to repel whatever it was that was coming along behind them

Some time later I was back in this big Czech castle again and we were attending an auction of paintings. There was a painter I had my eye on – he had a painting exhibited at this auction that was coming up for sale and I really fancied it. I’d drawn out a couple of hundred Euros for it. The auctioneer was selling at a hell of a speed and I was running after him trying to keep up while he was auctioning everything. He eventually reached the painting that I wanted and the bidding he started at €900 and it went up and up and up. I thought that I was totally wasting my time here. No matter how much I liked these pictures I’m never going to be able to afford them. A few people were making disparaging comments about how the lights are going out in the Czech Republic now that all of the treasures are being sold off. It was a real gothic montrosity kind of night and I awoke in a cold sweat.

After that I’d been to see someone in mid-Wales – it might have been Nina or someone like that and to come back I’d got on the train. The line was old and in bad condition and unfit but the price of the ticket was peanuts. I saw that they were having an offer every Sunday that you could go on the Mid Wales line for almost nothing. So the next Sunday I went down to see Esi in Cardiff. We met and she took me back to the University. She was amazed that I’d come and even more amazed that I’d brought my Welsh stuff with me. She went through my bag and laughed at some of the food that I’d brought and wondered what I was doing with it. Then she started to engage is some Welsh dialogue with me and said later on that we’ll go through a student-teacher exchange and we can ask each other questions all that kind of thing based on the text and I could send my answers to her before Wednesday. It was Sunday afternoon now. All in all it sounded pretty good.

While I was in Cardiff Louise and I went for our driving tests. We both took them simultaneously and ended up back at the Driving Test Centre. She returned a little before me. I sat in the car and waited. I didn’t realise that you had to enter the building and queue. By the time that I realised this and went in the queue was enormous. It took hours and hours to get to the front, people pushing past me and fighting their way to the front. I was really unsure about what I was supposed to be doing but everyone else seemed to know. Eventually I reached the window and someone took my details and typed it into the computer. he told me about a roundabout. They had changed a roundabout and they hadn’t marked the street yet and I’d driven straight through it. I ought to know that it’s a roundabout. But I explained that I didn’t know the town at all. he said that I had all the temperament required so he gave me a kind-of green sticky thing like a shamrock. I asked him what I was supposed to do with it but I didn’t get an answer.

The alarm went off instead and I turned over and went back to sleep. But I didn’t get back in touch with where I had been.

Writing all of that out took up most of what was left of the morning and then I had another job to do. I’d been playing the three concerts that I’d done yesterday and there was a join in one of them that I didn’t like at all. And so before lunch I had a closer look

And in fact, I could see on closer examination that there were three or four that weren’t very good. This is one that I joined together but never used when we were working with Radio Anglais and while I suppose that I was really pleased with it back then it shows just how much I’ve learnt since then. Anyway, I did the broadcast again – at least, I overdubbed a couple of joins and rejoined the other couple, and it’s much better.

So this is basically telling me that the ones that I have on the back burner for later (there’s three more from that period, I reckon) are no good and need to be done again. But strangely enough, editing them together is the bit that I like the most.

This meant a rather late lunch (yet again) and I’d missed my morning break too.

After lunch there wasn’t much time to do very much so based on the theory that “it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you do something – anything” I spent an hour or so editing more photos of the trip in 2019 to Greenland. And there are some pretty good ones in there too and I’m impressed with a few of them.

There is the usual afternoon walk of course and despite the weather I set off on my route.

For the past I don’t know how many weeks there have been seagulls, either adults or juveniles, sitting on one of the window ledges and on more than one occasion seen them tapping on the window with their beaks. And today, with this juvenile here, I could see exactly why.

It seems that the owners have put on the inside of their window a model of a bird and it might possibly be that that has something to do with why the seagulls seem to like to visit that window ledge.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in the other building there was a window ledge that the seagulls liked to frequent. The owner cured them of the habit – by buying a cat.

So I pushed on along the path, dodging the puddles because once again it was a grey, miserable and depressing day.

Across the lawn, across the car park and down to the headland to see what was going on out in the Bay. And if there was anything going on in the Bay I wouldn’t have seen it anyway. That, dear reader, is not fog or a low cloud but a good and proper rainstorm.

It was raining where I was standing of course, but out there it was pelters and with the wind blowing my way, I reckoned that it wouldn’t be long before I got the lot. This was not the time to be hanging around admiring the view.

And so I pushed off along the path on top of the cliffs, a path that in places was well under water and I had to scramble up the bank in a couple of places.

We’ve had rain, cloud, and all hat kind of miserable weather but one thing that we weren’t having very much of was wind. But there must have been plenty of it blowing around somewhere out in the Atlantic because we were having some really heavy rollers coming into the Bay and colliding with the sea wall right now.

Eventually I managed to struggle on as far as the viewpoint overlooking the port, and in the chantier navale I could see that the trawler that had moved to a position by the portable boat lift was still there. Obviously, my thinking yesterday that it would soon be back in the water was somewhat optimistic.

But one thing that I wasn’t over-optimistic about is the state of the fishing industry.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that for the last few nights we’ve seen the fishing boats in their hordes out in the cruel sea of the bay of Granville having a swansong. I made sure that I had a good look around the port this afternoon and there is not one single fishing boat of any kind at all in the harbour.

There’s only Marité and Joly France and the commercial sailing boats in there now. As I said yesterday, anything at all connected with the town’s fishing fleet that will float is currently out at sea catching what it can.

The market is even more vibrant right now with the British being excluded from the Continent, their catch rotting away in the back of a lorry on a deserted and abandoned airfield somewhere in Kent, something about which I have no sympathy whatsoever.

Back here I had a coffee, had a long chat with Liz on the internet, did some more Welsh revision and then attended to a few tasks before having an enjoyable hour or so on the guitars. But if only I could ease some of the pressure by finishing off a few of the arrears I’d enjoy myself so much more.

On the way out for my evening runs I bumped into a neighbour and we put the world to rights, and then I headed off into the wind and rain for my run.

The fishing fleet was too far out to photograph tonight and in any case there was too much cloud and rain about so I ran on and took a photo of the Rue du Nord and the Place d’Armes. And I’ve taken many better photographs of here too during my time.

With all of this rain I reckoned that there would be far too much water about down on the footpath underneath the walls
so I pushed on along the road at a run and then went down the steps to the bottom.

One of the things with which I’ve been experimenting is, with the delayed timer switch, taking few photos of the same object using different settings to see if there’s much of a difference in the output.

From down on the path underneath the walls, on a dry bit, I set up the camera on yet another handy stone to take a few photos of the Plat Gousset to see how they would come out. This one here came out quite well, I suppose and I was reasonably satisfied with that.

And so I fiddled around with a few settings and set the camera up again to take a few more photos.

This next one came out … errr … differently as you can see, slightly darker but the resolution and sharpness are slightly better.

The others that I took weren’t up to all that much and were thus filed under “CS”. But one day sometime soon when the wind dies down I’ll be out there with a tripod and the 70-300mm LENS and see what damage I can do with that.

From there I had a good run home ready to make tea. It was stuffed pepper last night so with the left-over stuffing it was taco rolls tonight. And delicious they were too, followed by apple crumble yet again. I’m getting to be quite good at that.

Having written out my notes, it’s now time for bed. And I’m hoping for a better day tomorrow. I can’t keep on losing hours like this. I won’t every accomplish anything at this rate.

Friday 18th December 2020 – AS YOU PROBABLY …

… might have guessed – after yesterday there was no hope whatever of my beating the third alarm to my feet. Not a hope.

In fact it was 09:35 when I finally shook off whatever it was that I was suffering from and arose from the dead.

After the medication, I had a listen to the dictaphone. And while I might not have been here in body, I was certainly out and about in spirit.

We started off in the living room in Shavington and there were piles of us there – we’d got ourselves into little groups. Suddenly another 11 children arrived and we had to add a couple of children to each of the groups. Not being able to find anything and not being able to think of a good way of doing it I cut up a paper into 8 with 8 squares because 2 of the kids were quite well known to us and one of the leaders of one of the groups immediately bagged them as soon as they walked in. That left 8 or 9, maybe there was 1 left over. The idea was that someone would call out say 1 and 2, or 7 and 4 or 3 and 1 or something and that way have these kids allocated. This took so long in doing, for reasons that I don’t understand – there was a dog asleep on the sofa and I couldn’t find half my paperwork, I’d lost my keys and there was something that I knew before I went to bed that I couldn’t find. And everyone had crashed out to sleep in a heap anyway so it wouldn’t make any difference whose group anyone went to.

Later, we’d been off on a University field trip. Again, we’d been divided into groups and we’d been to visit all of these particular sites. Our group came across a particular site where there was a destroyed statue or cairn or something and the remains of what was quite classed quite clearly as an Iron-Age fort. We reckoned that there had been a battle here maybe and that the fort had been overwhelmed by the Romans and they had built a Victory cairn. of course, time had weathered everything away. The tutor came to see how we were doing and we showed her this and explained our theory. She was immediately all excited and said “there’s a Mr so-and-so coming round with another group. Make sure that one of you grabs hold of him and show him all of this”. Of course I had the short straw so I had to stay behind while they all moved off but I forgot his name so that wasn’t any good. When I tried to ask each group that came along, no-one would actually identify themselves as being this special person doing this special research. By then it was almost time to go home and everyone was congregating down at the bottom so I went down to the bottom and there were 1 or 2 more groups that I hadn’t seen who hadn’t made it round yet so I asked them. Someone stepped forward but this person didn’t correspond with the description that I’d been given. I don’t think that I ever solved that particular problem about finding that person and showing them that sight.

Still plenty to go at yet. I was next somewhere around the Crewe Road in Nantwich. I was looking in a driveway and there was a shoot of what looked like one of these ground alder trees pushing up. I took hold of it and pulled it to pull it up but off shot this root. I had to follow this root and it went for a couple of hundred yards all the way down Crewe Road pulling it up out of the tarmac. In the end I thought “this is going to go on for ever” so I cut it off with a pair of sharp scissors, making sure that I did it behind a bud. Then I had to go and wash my hands that were filthy so I went into a garage of a house – the door was open. I had a look but there was no water in there but the drain was like a drain down from the house above the garage went off in a 90° elbow but the pipe that it went into wasn’t a tight fit at all – just something pushed over and was dripping away. I pulled it apart to clean it but I lost a piece, the drain plug underneath the elbow. I had to reassemble it but still it wouldn’t go on correctly – there was this piece missing too. In the end I found the piece and put it in but the junction was no better and probably even worse than it was before I’d started messing with it. In the end, after having been there for about 10 minutes I just left it and thought that the occupier will have to deal wit it when he realises that he has a really bad leak worse than he had before.

Finally there were 2 of us inside this hospital ward, me and a woman or girl. I can’t remember how this started now but we were in there talking away and I thought “I’d better go and put some clothes on in a moment” so I looked around for a dressing gown but thought “no, I may as well go down to my bed” which was a few floors below. Off I set down the stairs but someone accosted me going down the stairs and asked “do you think that there ought to be separate stairs for patients?”. I couldn’t be bothered about that so I said “yes, absolutely right” and trotted off down these stairs and ended up at my bed on floor Minus 2. it was really early in the morning and a lot of people were still asleep even though the alarm had gone off a long while ago. I had a chat with a few people while I made my bed and then went to make myself a coffee in the put but it turned out that I made soup instead – I must have opened the wrong sachet and there were these dehydrated vegetables everywhere. The lid of the pot was on wrong and that wasn’t going to help matters any. I was having a bit of a moan about this. I noticed that there was a little girl in bed, about 4 or so, asleep in one of the beds, fast asleep with her arms open really wide as if she was hugging something. I remembered that she has her big teddy bear in the cupboard underneath her bed so I thought “wouldn’t it be nice if I got her teddy out and put it on her bed so she could put her arms round it and cuddle it while she was asleep?”. Then I had another thought that I’d better get dressed, but how was I going to remember where this room was that I’d just come from that I’d go back and meet this woman? Then I realised that with it being to common day room of our particular ward it should be written on a piece of paper somewhere on a list so I ought to go and find this list and check to see which room it was that I had just come from.

With all of that going on, it’s hardly surprising that I didn’t leave the bed until 09:35, is it?

And it goes without saying that it took me all of the morning to type out all of that.

Next task was to book my few days in Belgium. Much to my surprise, the trains are actually running according to the timetable (although there is still plenty of time for all that to change of course) and in view of the fact that I had a Christmas bonus voucher from the SNCF the price of the return ticket to Brussels – 1300 kilometres of which about half is undertaken on a TGV – came to just €121:00. I reckon that that’s about the cheapest that I’ve had.

My departure is on Monday 28th December and my return will be on Sunday 3rd January, so I’ll be celebrating New Year in Belgium.

After lunch, I had a look at the kefir.

This morning I finished one of the bottles which mean that the last bottle of Kiwi Kefir went in the fridge. The next batch is ready and so I attended to that. 4 of the clementines went in the whizzer and were whizzed up nicely to extract the juice which was then passed through my nest of filters into the large 3-litre jug.

The kefir was then poured through the nest of filters into the jug, leaving about an inch of the mother solution behind. 40 grammes (7 large lumps) of sugar, half a lemon cut into slices and a dried fig cut in half went in too, and then the bottle was filled up with 2.5 litres of water and the top sealed.

The clementine kefir was then run back through the fine filter and funnelled into the various bottles that I use, and here’s the finished solution.

That’s enough for about 5 days of medication in the morning and if it works properly (and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t) it will be delicious. I like my Clementine kefir, but I’m going to have to experiment with other varieties.

Next step, which I mustn’t forget, is to feed the sourdough. As I said, my next batch of bread is going to be a standard batch of yeast bread, just to see whether it’s my technique at fault, but I’m not going to completely abandon the idea of sourdough.

Despite still not feeling very well, I wasn’t going to let it prevent me from heading out to my afternoon walk around the headland.

And while it wasn’t as yet raining, I could see that at any moment it was about to, and I’m glad that i’d donned my raincoat.

You can see from here that the Ile de Chausey is shrouded in a rainstorm and quite luckily at the moment the wind is blowing out to sea. The moment the wind drops we’ll be getting all of that on our heads.

And you’ll notice that other weird phenomenon that we have sometimes over here too. The different colours in the water there. And I wish that I had a tame oceanographer handy who could explain it all to me.

The high winds and damp weather were keeping most people indoors this afernoon. There can’t have been more than half a dozen folk out there this afternoon.

But there was at least one brave soul out there this afternoon. After I’d walked around the headland and started back on the other side I came across this guy out there having a go at the peche à pied to see what he could find.

And while we don’t usually see much marine debris around here, and I’ve never known for sure why, there’s some in this photo. What looks like a concrete block to his right and a sheet of moulded composite board further over.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday we saw a little cabin cruiser in the chantier navale.

You’ll remember that I speculated that it wouldn’t be around here for very long, and it seems that I was right on that score because here she is today, gone. Conspicuous by her absence.

As for the big yacht that’s been in here since time immemorial, it looks as if she’s having a new coat of paint. So here’s hoping that the rainstorm is going to keep well away until it’s dried. It’s really not the kind of weather to be out there painting anything right now.

As for me, it wasn’t the kind of weather for me to be out there either. I came on back home for a coffee.

After the coffee I spent an hour or so working on the arrears of the summer, and then knocked off for guitar practice, which went much better. I discovered that I could even play the bass to “White Wedding” while I’m singing it, which would have astonished me three months ago.
“Hey little sister, what do you think about that?”
“It’s a nice day to start again.”

Putting down the guitar I was back out again quite quickly for my evening runs.

And it seems that I’ve started a trend. I had a letter put through my letter box by one of my neighbours to thank me for brightening up the place with my lights, and it seems that the guy who lives in the house by the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord has decided to follow suit.

There were plenty of fishing boats out there tonight but I imagine that you are pretty sick of seeing substandard photos of blurred boats beating a retreat across the Bay back to port, so I left them alone. Instead I ran on all the way round to the viewpoint over looking the Place Marechal Foch, a rund that I do in three legs, rather lake Jake The Peg.

Nothing happening there but seeing as it was before 19:30 all of the lights on the shops in the Rue Paul Poirier were illuminated.

We’d missed them by a tiny fraction of a second yesterday and I was determined not to miss them today to make up for it.

The run across the Square Maurice Marland was totally painful. I wasn’t feeling so good and the runs up to this point had been difficult, but trying to run into the teeth of a gale was agonising. I really struggled to make it across to the other side and had to stop for a few minutes.

Nothing much happening anywhere else so I ran on home from the walls and started to make tea.

And tea was very pleasant tonight because I had company. Not physical company, I hasten to add, but my friend Esi who lives in Brussels was having a Zoom party so while I was eating my tea I joined in. Curry and rice with convivial chat for an hour or so was very nice indeed and made a pleasant change. There were about a dozen or so of us all told.

But I had to leave after a while because there’s football on the internet. Caernarfon v Y Drenewydd, with the latter badly in need of some points.

But you can’t play football in a monsoon with a howling gale blowing the ball anywhere except where you want it to go. The Cofis, playing with the wind in the 1st half scored the first goal even though Newtown had the better of the chances, but in the 2nd half the boot was on the other foot as the wind helped Newtown move up the field.

And after about 75 minutes, you could se the light go on in the head of Chris Hughes, the manager of Y Drenewydd. Sitting on his bench was Jake Phillips, who probably has the longest throw in professional football right now. And with the wind behind him, he should have been on from the restart.

But onto the field he trotted – and his first task before he’d even entered the pitch was to take a throw-in. He heaved a really long throw right into the penalty area, helped by the wind. It was headed on by a Newtown attacker to a colleague who slotted it into the net to equalise.

And that’s how the game ended – one goal each. It could have been more but Tibbetts in the Cofis goal had an excellent game to keep Newtown out, but this match was never going to be entertaining in the weather that they were having and I was glad to be undercover in my apartment.

Bed now and shopping tomorrow, if I can remember to wake up in time. There’s so much that I need to buy for my Christmas cooking and it isn’t going to be easy. I’ll have to scan through my recipes before I set out and see what I need.

Sunday 6th December 2020 – JUST FOR …

… a change today I’ve been working. even if it is a Sunday.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve not been feeling too good this last couple of days and today was no exception. I didn’t feel like doing anything at all but then I have a theory that whenever one is feeling like this, it doesn’t matter what one does, as long as one does something.

And so, for some of the day I’ve been selecting the music for the next radio programme, editing it, remixing it and merging it into pairs.

When I say “some of the day”, I do have to say that there wasn’t much of a day to have some of. Not when one doesn’t wake up until 12:15 and doesn’t leave one’s bed until 12:30. And that’s something of a surprise when I actually made it into bed as early as 00:30. All that I can say is that I must have needed the sleep.

And sleep I did too, although there were a few travels involved in it all too. I was running a bus company last night and some of my buses were doing a shuttle service around town. I pulled up to where these shuttle buses were parked and ready to to and one of the guys with one of the coaches was someone who shouldn’t be driving for some particular reason. I asked him where the driver was and he looked panic-stricken and flustered and said “ohh he must have been here. He’s probably gone. He’ll be back in a minute”. We waited for a couple of minutes but he never showed up so I asked again “where’s he gone? Tell me where he’s gone”. he was becoming even more flustered. In the end I said that I wanted to see the tachograph disc that’s in the coach. Reluctantly he opened the tachograph. I couldn’t see it fairly well but the guilty look on this guy’s face made me believe that it was his tachograph and he’d been driving the bus despite not being allowed to. I said “right, get everything on board. We’re going”. We picked up all of the luggage that was lying around and got ready to set off. I don’t know whether I was going to drive it back or not but we were ready to go back and sort this out back at the depot.

And later on during the night there was something going on with my family. I had to take my father into work in the morning that meant that I would be late into work again. As I’d already been late getting into work the previous day, not getting in until 09:50. I was up early as usual doing a few things and I was getting rather impatient thinking that he’d better get a move on”. One of my sisters came out. “Dad says to tell you that he’s getting up. He’ll be up in half an hour’s time and you have to take him to work when he gets up”. I said “this is just stupid because I’m going to miss an entire morning’s work now, having done this”. I was extremely annoyed. She said something like “there’s been 5 coffees waiting for you already this morning”. I dismissed that. He finally did get up and said something about responsibilities, all that kind of thing. I said to him “are you going to take responsibility for telling work why it is that I’m so late this morning?”. He brushed off the question so I was really annoyed about this yet again.

I’d had a couple of job interviews lined up anyway so later on I was walking through the streets still in a totally foul mood about this but who should be coming the other way but Doctor Chaker. I couldn’t even bring myself to give him a cheery greeting. I just mumbled “hello” at him and walked on past. As for the 2nd interview this was taking place at a football ground in Belgium, either Mechelen or Beveren. It involved getting the train. I got the train to the railway station and could see the ground quite clearly close by so I set off to walk to the ground. I was looking at houses seeing if there were any rooms to let. I’d rent a furnished room for a while and put my furniture in store. I suddenly realised that I’d gone miles from the football ground. I could see the football ground away in the distance and I remembered now that I’d dne exactly the same thig when I’m come to watch a football match here – that I’d taken a wrong turning and gone miles away and been late for the kick-off. And then I thought “I only have 10 minutes before this interview starts. I’m going to have to run like hell”. I could see the floodlights of the football ground illuminated in the distance. I thought “if I can get there in 10 minutes I’ll be doing really well” so I set off to run down this dirt path past this startled pedestrian thinking to myself “I am never ever going to get there in time”.

But I seem to be spending a considerable amount of time travelling around with my family during the night, something that is totally strange seeing that I don’t spend any time at all thinking about them during my waking time. I’d love to know what’s churning up in the back of my mind and, more importantly, why.

Having recovered my composure I made a start on the music for the radio programme but them knocked off to make the dough for my pizza.

And putting it on one side, I then went out for my afternoon walk.

Just for a change recently, the sky was quite clear. Plenty of heavy cloud about but visibility was really good today. There was an excellent view right across the English Channel to the island of Jersey 38 kilometres away.

Unfortunately the sky wasn’t quite clear enough to make out any of the individual buildings over there today. In the past they have on occasion stood out really clearly and we could even see the radio mast at the back of St Helier, but not today.

Whilst the skies over the English Channel were grey and cloudy in the vicinity of the Channel Islands there was quite a different kind of sky looking over to the west.

The clouds in that direction were even heavier but there were a few gaps in the clouds that were giving us another TORA TORA TORA as the rays shone through and reflected off the sea.

No lights on the semaphore masts this afternoon though. I’m intrigued to know what that was all about yesterday and that was something to think about as I walked around the path.

From the Point on the headland there’s a good view across the bay towards the Brittany Coast so I walked across the lawn and the car park and made my way there where I joined someone else taking a photo.

There was even a better view of the rays of the sun here than in the previous photo. The sun is hiding behind the heavy cloud and shining through the gaps. The town of Cancale is standing out really well in silhouette over there on the clifftop in the centre of the photograph.

From there I moved on down the footpath on the cliffs down the southern side of the headland, where a dog tried to bite me. I hope that its ribs aren’t too badly bruised.

At that particular moment the sun came out of another gap in the clouds and lit up the town of Carolles as if it had been floodlight. The reflection in the sea over there was extremely interesting too.

But I couldn’t hang around all that long to admire it. I had things to do and so I headed for home. There was nothing in the chantier navale or the port to detain me for very long.

Back here I carried on with the music in some kind of desultory way and even crashed out for 10 minutes too, something that surprised me considering all of the sleep that I’d had this morning.

Round about 18:00 I went to look at the pizza dough and see how it was doing.

It had risen incredibly but was far too wet still to do anything with it. In the end I had to add more flour to it, I ended up with four helpings of dough rather than the usual three. Three of those went into the freezer and the fourth I rolled out and put on a pizza tray, folding the edges over, to proof some more.

After about an hour or so I went to check on it. It had risen quite nicely again so I prepared my pizza and put it in the oven to cook. 30 minutes later I pulled it out of the oven, cooked to perfection.

It was delicious, especially when followed down by a banana with banana sorbet and chocolate sauce.

later on I went out for my evening run around the walls of the city

There was only a slight little drizzle this evening but even so I didn’t go around the footpath underneath the walls. Everywhere else is flooded so the footpath is bound to be, so I carried on along the Rue du Nord. I took a photo back down the way that I came and if you look to the right-hand side of the photo you can see the postern gate that I would usually take when the weather permits.

Right in the background you can see the Place d’Armes, and to the right there’s also a light out to see as if a fishing boat is going past.

It’s a bit of a climb up the hill for someone like me but I broke into a run as soon as I could and ran all the way around the corner.

Regular readers of this rubbish will have seen several photos of the Rue St Jean down at the end near the Place d’Armes, and also round by the Place Cambernon. But this is the bottom end of the street at the Place d’isthme.

And here I was surprised by a police car that came round the corner. For a change, they must be carrying on a night patrol, although I’m not sure why they would be doing it around here. I was half-expecting to be asked to produce my documents and my laissez-passer but they just drove straight past me.

On the same corner is the end of the Rue Notre Dame. We’ve walked down this street dozens of times but I don’t recall having photographed this end before.

Down the steps from here to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch. The tide was was still an hour or two from being right in and with the sea having calmed down from how it has been over the last couple of days, there was nothing in the way of waves breaking onto the sea wall of the Plat Gousset.

With no-one about to disrupt me, I ran all the way across the Square Maurice Marland down to the far end.

At the end of the Square there’s a ramp that goes up through another postern gate onto the walls again, but there’s also a kind of lower garden with stairs that lead down to the Rue des Juifs.

In the past it’s made a nice pleasant walk but today the stairs are all closed off due to the deteriorating state of the city walls above. It’s one of the things that I’ve talked about in the past – the fact that the city walls are deteriorating rapidly and since I’ve been here there have been three areas that have been roped offas unsafe without any any attempt being made to repair them.

It makes me wonder where this lack of maintenance is all going to end.

Back here I wrote up my notes and now I’m ready for bed. I’ll finish off the radio programme tomorrow and then try to plan what I have to do for the rest of the week. There’s plenty to do and I have to organise myself better than I am doing at the moment

Friday 4th December 2020 – JUST FOR A …

… change I had a lie-in today and didn’t leave my bed until about 07:30.

And it wasn’t necessarily through oversleeping either. When the alarms went off I was regaled by the sound of a torrential rainstorm and all kinds of wicked things going on outside and they certainly weren’t the kind of conditions conducive to constructive thought.

When I finally arose, I had my medication and then set a pile of lentils on the go in the slow cooker.

Back in the bedroom, I had a listen to the dictaphone. I was back at school last night. I had a girlfriend but one of my friends from school started dating her. After the first time he told me that he was going to be taking her out again. I told him that I wasn’t going to let that happen if I could. I would be taking her out. He started to turn all violent saying that he had all of the weapons arranged, all the oil and everything like that and he’d be dealing with it. But I stuck my ground and we ended up having this fierce argument.

Later on there was something to do with a dog. We’d come into possession of a dog for some reason. My brother, father and I were coming down Underwood Lane in Crewe and were talking about going to get some dog biscuits. We turned left into West Street but it wasn’t out of Underwood Lane but out of Minshull New Road. There was a pet shop right on the corner there so we stopped. But I couldn’t believe West Street. It was like the Blitz had hit it. Everything had been demolished and there was just the odd house here and there on the south side sticking up and a little Sprite 400 caravan with people living in it parked there with a washing line and a load of washing outside. We went into this shop and the woman asked what we wanted. My brother said that we were looking for dog treats. My father took out some money and it must have been a couple of hundred quid he brought out. I said “dad, what are you trying to do? Buy the shop or something?”. This woman put a pile of dog biscuits into a bag, this kind of thing and then a few packets of sweets, saying “this will do you right for Christmas” and charged I dunno about £20 or something for it. He took it and went outside but then started to give my brother a lecture about buying stuff. “What she’s probably done is given all kinds of stuff that aren’t suitable for the dog, stuff that’s past its sell-by date, all this kind of thing. We should have taken much more care about what we bought”. he started to go through it and found loads of stuff that wasn’t suitable. he decided that he would go back into the shop and renegotiate the deal. I was outside, looking at the road, how it went further on and zigzagged up this spectacular cliff like a wild west mesa or whatever. There were birds flying over there and a couple of dogs flying around. I thought that this was a really idyllic setting here but my brother and my father were in such a deep discussion about these dog biscuits that they failed to notice it.

By now, the weather had cleared up so I rinsed the lentils, put them back in with fresh clean water and flavouring, and then fried some onions, garlic, tofu and beans with more flavouring. When it was all cooked properly, I added it all to the slow cooker and left it in there to fester on “low”.

Grabbing my rain jacket and the rest of my equipment I headed off outside for the shops.

And you can see here what was going on this morning. I thought at first that it was snow but in actual fact it was a mega-hailstorm that had descended upon us from a great height. Most of it had melted now but there were still a few vestiges left.

So leaving it at that, I set off into town. And before I’d gone a quarter of a mile the heavens opened again and I was absolutely, totally and thoroughly drenched. This was not what I was expecting at all. There had been blue skies 15 minutes earlier.

How long is it since we’ve had an old car on these pages? It must be a while, I reckon, so here are two for the price of one.

The red one is a Porsche 924, a model made from about 1976 to 1988. About 150,000 were made which was no surprise because for a Porsche, they were relatively affordable. However, it was its affordability and popularity that were its downfall because many people who bought one were mocked for being “nouveau riche” arrivists. Although the vehicle handled well, its actual performance was lamentable for a top-end sports car until they began to be fitted with turbos. And the turbos brought with them their own problems.

The blue one is much more like my car of course. A Ford Capri from the early 1980s, this one. It’s described as a “280” by which I imagine that it has the 2.8 litre V6 “Cologne” engine in it (Strider has a 4.0 litre Cologne engine in it). Of course, if I were to own such a car, which I wouldn’t turn down, it would be a black one and the V engine would be binned and replaced with a 2-litre Pinto engine

having done a lap around LIDL, then loaded up like a packhorse I headed for home. As well as the immense shopping list that I took with me, they also had a few Christmas dainties that I could eat and so as they won’t be there for ever, I grabbed a few.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the last few weeks we’ve seen them demolishing the facade of a bar, La Civette, in the Rue Paul Poirier, and then building a wooden wall around it while they worked inside.

It looks as if they’ve had the unveiling of the new facade since I last passed this way. It’s a big improvement on what was there before and, thankfully, it doesn’t resemble too much the other new facades going up around the town that all look the same.

And you can tell how the weather is doing right now. Teeming down with rain and it’s really dark. all of the lights oare on in the street, despite it being 11:00.

Of course it’s Friday, not Thursday, so there are different things going on in the street that I wouldn’t normally see when I’m out and about usually.

We’ve talked … “at great length” – ed … about the fishing industry in the town and all of the lorries and vans that go to the fish processing plant to cart away the catch. But some of the produce is sold locally and every Friday morning there’s a stall on the harbour where one of the local fishermen sells his catch.

Straight from the sea.

It’s a far cry of course from the fish market in Oostende that we have seen before but nevertheless it’s an interesting venture. Seafood doesn’t get any fresher than this.

Back here I had a hot chocolate and a slice of my chocolate cake, and then had to speak to Rosemary. She’d rung me up to say that she was having computer issues. So I had to talk her through a remote session in order to fix it.

My Diploma in Computing does come in handy some times even though it was 20 years ago since I obtained it.

After lunch I had a look at the pie filling that was simmering away in the slow cooker. Far too liquidy and so to bind it and make it nice and glutinous, a couple of handfuls of porridge oats went in and were stirred around. That should stiffen it up somewhat.

Once that was organised I went and carried on with some of the arrears from Central Europe.

Later on it was time for me to go for my afternoon walk. And it was just as well that it had stopped raining.

But just look at the sky over there down the Brittany coast. When you consider just how nice it has been at times, this is rather depressing, isn’t it? This is what they call around here un ciel de plomb – a leaden sky. And you can see that it lives up to its description.

All that I can say is that I’m glad that I’m not out there at sea in all of that. The Brittany coast must be taking quite a pasting at the moment.

Over towards the Ile de Chausey it’s somewhat brighter, but there is still a terrific rainstorm cascading down on the population over there.

And the wind is blowing it my way so I don’t want to hang around here. I’m the only person out here walking and I can understand why if all of this weather suddenly arrives. So I clear off around the headland to see what’s on the other side.

And nothing of any significance over there either, except for more of the same. Nothing of note, apart from the usual, in the chantier navale. But by now the rain has arrived and it’s starting to fall quite heavily so I don’t want to hang around.

But there’s something bizarre going on down in the loading bay in the port.

Those two lorries shouldn’t be there unless they are delivering, and if they are delivering, we are going to be having an interesting nautical arrival down there pretty soon. I wonder what it might be. Still, we’ll find out in de course I suppose.

Musing on that for a moment, I turned and headed on home and a nice hot mug of coffee. And I can’t say that I didn’t deserve it. By now the rain was teeming down once more and I was soaked to the skin again.

Back here, I switched off the slow cooker and emptied the contents out to cool. A nice glutinous sticky filling. Just what I wanted.

So I made my pastry and put it in my mould. And when the filling had cooled down properly, I filled the pie base and made a pie lid out of some of the remaining pastry. With the pastry that was left, I made a quick apple turnover.

Now it was time for my session on the guitars. And I spent much of the time trying (and eventually succeeding) in working out the chords to Richard Thompson’s “Keep Your Distance”.

I’ve been feeling quite nostalgic for certain events that occurred over three nights on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour that one day I might talk about when I’m in the mood. There are a couple of lines in that song that really are quite relevant.

Half way through the proceedings with the guitar I’d switched on the oven and started off the pie and the apple turnover. Now, having finished the guitar, I came in and did a huge mound of washing up.

There were some potatoes left so I had put those in the oven too so I sorted out some veg – sprouts, carrots and runner beans, and put them in a small pan and cooked them in some gravy with some herbs.

Eventually the pie was done – at least on top. I wished that I had cooked it lower down in the oven and not on a metal tray as I had done. It’s a mistake that I always make, cooking too high in the oven and having a heat deflector underneath doesn’t help anything either.

But it actually tasted delicious and there are another 7 slices for the freezer for a later date. The apple turnover was impressive too. That worked really well.

It was time for me to go out on my evening walk and runs so I hit the streets, straight into the biting wind that made running almost impossible.

Nevertheless I pushed on as well as I could but I eschewed the route down on the footpath under the walls due to the bad weather. And as it was by now raining quite heavily I carried on the route that I took yesterday.

From up on the Place de l’Isthmus I could hear the waves crashing down onto the promenade at the Plat Gousset so I wandered down the steps of the Escalier du Moulin a Vent to have a look at what was happening.

It was certainly wild out there. And it’s hard to believe that we are still a fair way away from high tide. What this is going to be like in an hour’s time will be anyone’s guess, but it certainly would be something to see.

But not for me, unfortunately. By now the rain was coming down in sheets and I was being soaked to the skin.

Braving the weather, I stuck it out just long enough to take a second photograph and then ran all the way across the Square Maurice Marland in the general direction of home.

Just for a change, I took the shortest route possible. I’d had my walk out to the shops and back, my afternoon stroll and now my evening runs so I was quite confident that I’d done enough today.

Coming back the short way, I ended up in the Rue St Jean. And I reckoned that I haven’t taken a photo down here at this end for quite some considerable time. I’d better put that right.

And you can see the weather in this photograph. teeming down with rain and everywhere soaking wet. Including me.

And the Place Cambernon just down there with the Christmas lights peering around the corner.

having done that, I ran on home to write up my notes. 147% on the fitbit is good enough for me today.

Shopping at LeClerc and Noz tomorrow. And there will probably be other things that I need but which I’ve forgotten that I’ll remember when I return home. That always happens to me.

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality