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Thursday 25th March 2021 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… night that was!

… while you admire the photos of the roadworks and demolitions that we have been following over the last few years, I’ll tell you all about it.

And if you want to know more about the photos as you pass by them, click on the image aside and a new window will open up with an enlarged photo and a caption.

But I spent most if not all of the night battling with cramp. I’ve had some bad nights just recently with cramp, and some worse nights too, but none were as bad as last night’s attacks.

In fact, even when it started to grow light I was still awake in agony having already hopped around the rom to free everything off at least half a dozen times

When the alarm went off I was in no condition to leave the bed and in fact i totally ignored all of the alarms. Instead, I stayed in bed until about 08:20 and it’s been a while since I’ve done that in the week.

But at least I managed to drift off to sleep at some point and I even managed to go off on my travels. And that reminds me – if you missed last night’s voyages they are on-line now too

Greenock Morton were playing in a football match last night and were attacking the opponents’ goal. The team that they were playing had a couple of old Morton players in it like Gregor Buchanan. They were attacking the goal and they should have scored three or four in this one particular movement. They were trying to force the ball over the line. One of the Morton players even managed to lift it over the bar from standing on the goal line, there were that many bodies in the way and he had to get the ball over them. Interesting though was that all of the players were just like wraiths, something that made me wonder if the opponents were not in fact Wraith Rovers, just a ghostly outline rather than actual real players whom I could see. I remember shouting encouragement from the terraces but funnily enough I was the only person doing it and it sounded terribly embarrassing

Later on there was a roundabout that had been built by Crewe and on this roundabout heading towards the town was my former friend from Stoke on Trent on a motorbike carrying a 5-gallon container of diesel. I was going the other way on a motorbike. Behind him on my old Honda Melody was Zero. She was only about 10 but she was riding this Honda Melody. I pulled up alongside the guy and we started to have a bit of a chat. The girl said “look here!” and she went off on this motor bike, did a couple of sliding turns, came back and slid to a halt. The bike toppled over and she got off and came to sit in between the two of us, telling us all about riding her motor bike. I asked “have you been taking Strawberry Moose out for a ride?”. she replied “yes”. The guy was saying that she’d held him tight while driving. She replied “ohh no! He’s been for a ride with me properly on it”.

And that brought back many happy memories of when I was living with Laurence and 8 year-old Roxanne 20-odd years ago and I taught Roxanne to ride the Melody

Coming downstairs was something of a stagger.

My knee was certainly better but it wasn’t that good and I still couldn’t put too much weight on it and I needed to grip onto something to haul myself up into a standing position.

But I did eventually reach the ground floor and I attacked the dictaphone to see where I’d been during last night and the night before. And to my surprise, I had travelled quite far as you have probably noticed if you’ve read all of my notes.

Later on, I took my courage in both hands and limped off down to the supermarket.

The Delhaize rather than the Carrefour because it was closer and I wasn’t up to going the extra distance. But I did what shopping I needed to do and staggered back.

Despite my injury and despite the load that I was carrying I made it back without too much of a problem, and then made myself some toast for a rather late breakfast.

There was time for a shower and some clothes washing, and then I headed off to the hospital.

It was a depressing walk down to the town because I really wasn’t feeling like it but I did it all the same.

As I passed through the Grote Markt I stumbled upon a young photgrapher doing her stuff.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, another one of the regular features on these pages is photographers taking photos. There’s usually one or two appearing every now and again.

Having seen that, I carried on with my walk past all of the building work that has been going on over the last couple of years that is progressing rather too slowly for my liking.

Up at the hospital there was yet more excitement.

It was not easy to see what they were doing but they had a digger out there digging a trench along by the lagoon over there and they have a great long length of large-diameter rubber pipe that I imagine that they will drop into the trench when they have done it.

But as to its purpose, I’ve no idea. And the guys were too far away to ask.

At the hospital I had a Covid-test and then they could treat me for my illness. The wired me up and plugged me in and gave me my intravenous drip.

The doctor came to see me and I told her about my “incident” yesterday and all of the cramps that I’ve been having.

As for the fall, there is no damage and all of the muscles and ligaments are working fine. As for the cramps, she doesn’t think that they are cramps but what her translation from the Flemish was “wandering leg” – she didn’t know its precise English translation and I didn’t understand the Flemish.

Anyway, she’s prescribed me a pill that will ease the cramps and help me have a decent sleep. It takes a while to work so I won’t see the results for a couple of weeks.

Kaatje came to see me too and we had quite a chat. She told me about her holiday plans for a cycling tour with her friends. When she came into my room I was listening to COLOSSEUM LIVE – one of the top five live albums ever and which always brings back memories of the High Arctic and THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR

She asked me about it and I told her that it dated from 1973. “I wasn’t even born then” she replied. I keep on forgetting how old I am, although the events of yesterday and today have aged me by 20 years.

The doctor came back with my test results – blood count down to 8.9 which is no great surprise is it? And then I cleared off to pick up my medication.

Outside the hospital there was a bright blue sky but some really filthy dark black clouds.

This was creating some really strange lighting effects so I took a photo of it. Unfortunately the camera was not able to reproduce the effect which is rather a disappointment so you’ll just have to imagine it.

But at least, the photo from this angle gives you an idea of how far out of town the hospital is and how far I have to walk to come here. As an aside, having gone to the shops this morning as well I’m now on 191% of my daily total according to my fitbit and that’s impressive for someone with a damaged knee.

Over the last couple of years we’ve been watching the slow rebuilding of the Monseignur Van Waeyenberghlaan and you have already seen the work that they have been doing.

The upper end of the avenue is now complete and the traffic is now able to circulate around there too part of the way down.

People on foot are able to circulate down there too so I continued on my way down the avenue and back towards town. In an hour’s time I would be meeting Alison for a chat and a coffee.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen the demolition of St Pieter’s Hospital, and I posted two new photos earlier.

The demolition work has also been taking place around the back so I went to see how they were doing with that little lot.

Whatever it is that they were demolishing, they have now demolished it and the rebuilding has started. That looks as if it might be a subterranean car park down there and to the left there’s a piledriver that will be sinking the foundations of whatever will be going on top.

Alison and I had a good chat and a little wander around and then we went back to the car park underneath the Ladeuzeplein.

Belgium temporarily relaxed its Covid restrictions a couple of days ago but now they are retightening them again.

There were plenty of people out and about making most of the warm weather and the end of the relaxed restrictions and they were having a little party on the Ladeuzeplein.

Just for a change, it seemed that social distancing was being respected. In fact we saw several stewards who were presumably enforcing them. And as we watched, a police car pulled onto the square and drove around to make its presence felt.

There was a really fine night tonight and I’m not surprised that so many people were out there.

The moon that was shining up above the University Library was particularly splendid. It was just the kind of thing that was crying out for a photograph so I obliged, even if the NIKON 1 J5 is not the most ideal camera for this kind of thing.

We picked up Alison’s car and she drove us back here to my little place. With not having had a coffee while we were out, I made one here and we had a nice long chat. And then I accompanied her to her car.

After she left I wrote up my notes of the day’s activities and now I’m off to bed. I’ll try one of these new pills to see where they gat me. No alarm in the morning – I’m going to have a nice lie-in. I always feel a little groggy after my treatment and the rest does me good.

Wednesday 24th March 2021 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day I’ve had today.

Everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong today and I’m thoroughly fed up. Instead of arriving at my room at round about 16:30 it was 20:45 when I limped miserably through the door.

The day started off OK with me being out of bed just after the first alarm and I even had a shower and fed the ginger and the sourdough. For some reason though I didn’t do any tidying up. I just didn’t feel like it and that was the start of the day going wrong.

But anyway I set off into town and the railway station.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday we saw a lorry at the loading bay in the inner port dropping off a pile of stuff.

This morning there was another one there dropping off another big load of stuff down there, as I noticed as I walked past. It’s almost a certainty that one of the Jersey freighters is on its way in and my money is on it being Normandy Trader.

Having observed it all for a few minutes I headed off down the hill and through the town, going the back way to the railway station again.

My train was already in the station when I arrived so I clambered aboard. Today, it was just 6 carriages, not twelve as usual, and it was pretty empty.

And then all our problems began.

We ground to a halt somewhere along the way and sat there for 50 minutes. It seemed that a car had tried to beat the barrier of a level crossing but failed. We had to wait until they had come along to drag the car away before we could proceed.

As a result, we were an hour late arriving in Paris Montparnasse and I had missed my connectons to Belgium.

And here things became even worse. As I was going down an escalator my legs simply gave way underneath me and I fell heavily to the ground. And I didn’t even have the strength in my legs to pick myself up. A couple of passers-by had to help me very shakily to my feet.

The pain in my right leg right now tells me that my right knee has collapsed.

Having missed the 13:15 to Lille, the next train was at 15:42 and that filled me full of despair. This is what happens when you try to travel in the middle of a pandemic.

It was necessary to wait almost 2 hours, two hours that I couldn’t really spare, before we could board our train.

It’s one of the TGV Reseau double-decker units on which we travel quite regularly to Lille. This train wasn’t particularly busy either and everyone had a seat to themselves. It left Paris a few minutes late but pushed on quite rapidly and we made up the time. We arrived in Lille Flanders railway station bang on time.

Now I had to walk across town to the Lille Europe railway station and in my state I wasn’t looking forward to that. It was something of a disreputable stagger down the street for my part.

This is the front end of the train that I was going to catch to Brussels. It was two units coupled together and I was in the rear one.

And I was really glad to see it because I discovered to my dismay at Lille Europe that my next train out of Lille Europe to Brussels was at 18:11. A wait of about 80 minutes. That wasn’t at all what I wanted to hear but there was nothing whatever that I could do.

When I was in Paris I’d looked to see if there was a “Thalys” direct to Brussels. Indeed there was but that meant waiting around at Paris even longer and an extra cost of €68:00 to save about 20 minutes.

Anyway, my train turned up on time.

Like the front end, the rear end is another one of the PBKA Reseau 38000 units. I suppose that they have been decanted onto this route seeing as much of the TGV network has closed down under the new Covid restrictions.

This train was quite empty too. Despite it being the only train for several hours, it was almost empty too. I had a nice little sleep on board for 20 minutes until we arrived in Brussels and I awoke with rather a start as we pulled into the Gare du Midi.

Being now hopelessly late I had a look in the tow supermarkets in the station for some food as I was in no state to walk all the way down to the ones in Luven later and they would probably be closed by the time that I arrive.

But with nothing at all that I could buy so I went up to catch my train the Leuven.

It’s another one of these disreputable AM 80 automotrice multiple units that must be the next sets to go for the chop, old, dirty and graffiti-ridden as they are.

But it was on time, such as it was, and brought me on time into Leuven where negotiating the steps in the station was not the easiest thing that I have done.

Luckily the chip shop around the corner was open so I grabbed a bag of chips and headed for my room. And here I had to wrestle with the door of the safe in order to extract my key. It was not easy as the combination did not accord with the one that they sent me.

But in the words of Marshall MacMahon, “j’y suis, j’y reste” – “here I am and here I’m staying”. I’m not up to going anywhere right now as I’m in agony and I’ll have to do better than this tomorrow if I’m going to make it to the hospital

There’s shopping to do to and I’ve no idea how I’m going to manage this. All will come clearer tomorrow after I’ve had a good night’s sleep and I’m going for that right now.

In fact I had to wait until the following morning before i could listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I started off with Marianne going to North America. I pulled up on the airport car park like we would do every 4 weeks when we went. The first thing that we noticed was that there were 2 cars, an MGB sports car and another one that were there the last time that we went. Marianne said “ohh look! There they are again”. “Yes, they are probably saying the same thing about us”. We went into the airport, sat down and had to wait. I noticed that there were a couple of other couples whom we knew by sight who had been with us on previous voyages there. Marianne asked for a breakfast so I went to find the cafe kind of place. They made some toast and a couple of other things and some coffee and I had a slice of toast as well. I took them back out and dropped them on the table but she wasn’t there. She was off doing something. I put the stuff on the table and went to the bathroom. In there I met 1 of the guys whom I’d just mentioned who’d been with us before, and we had a little chat. I looked in the mirror. My hair was overgrown, needed cutting and I was dressed so untidily, shirt and tie everywhere. I thought “God I really could have done with tidying myself up before I’d come away but it’s too late to worry about that now. I went back outside and Marianne had this huge fried breakfast, mushrooms, bacon and egg, beans, sausages, everything and I wondered where on earth she’s got that from. But she was there tucking into this breakfast.

Later I was in New York going to pick up THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR. The night before, I’d met a couple of people, I’d been staying in a …. and so on. We all had to bring our baggage around on board ship the next day. The next morning I was up early and I bumped into a young Japanese American boy who had flown in from South Africa. We had had a chat about the flights to South Africa, all kinds of things. There was a third person who was not actually going with us on this trip. The 2 of us, we set out to go somewhere. Off we went and walked around the town a little looking at the sights. We somehow became separated – he wandered off with this other person. I thought that I had better start back to the ship. I couldn’t realise or remember what time I had to be back. I had this feeling that I was going to be horribly late so I started o panic a little. I ended up in Crewe at the top end of Victoria Street thinking to myself that I would have to get to the boat. it was just them that Julie Driscoll started to sing “Wheel’s On Fire”. As I was walking down Victoria Street I could hear that song playing.

Before that there had been something about the Army. A couple of us had been in the Army and we’d been rounded up to go somewhere. We weren’t particularly military and the Sergeant-Major who was with us was a bit of a swine. It was quite obvious that we were rubbing each other up the wrong way with the way that we were behaving because we had no military precision whatsoever and he was extremely annoyed by this. The place was a total tip and we wanted it tidying up but it was one of those places that was so untidy that we didn’t know where to start. When we first got to this place there was a girl there and we helped her with one or two things and then she went. Then it came round to the time ready to go early in the morning so we started to tidy up. There was some kind of hoist or breaker that we had to bring upstairs. We went downstairs to look for it but down there was even worse with tools and machinery everywhere. We couldn’t find what we were looking for. There were a few things that might possibly have been it but he didn’t seem to think that they were. This ended up being rather a hunt for this rather than a tidy-up. This girl came in and asked if anyone could fix a light for her because the plug wouldn’t reach. The Sergeant and I went to do it. We managed to find an extension cable that we had to cut into 2. This place was just not being tidied up and it was now 17:00 and the next group of people would be arriving imminently. We didn’t have this place tidied at all and it was really looking a mess.

Tuesday 23rd March 2021 – WE’VE BEEN HAVING …

… something of a nautical day again today instead of the aviation day that we had at the weekend.

This guy out there in the English Channel in his little cabin cruiser with a couple of fishing roads hanging out over the back is just typical of what was going on out there this afternoon.

It’s quite possible that it has something to do with the arrival of the Parisians fleeing confinement at their main address and heading out to their second homes of whatever accommodation they have been able to hire at short notice, but the sea was absolutely heaving with people this afternoon in all kinds of water craft.

And when I say “all kinds of water craft” I really do mean that because this is yet another example of what was going on down below me in the English Channel.

Someone has decided to go out for a paddle on his paddle board and if he has paddled like that all the way around the Pointe du Roc from the port de plaisance, then he’s been doing really well because that’s not going to be an easy paddle, even when the weather is calm and the sea is smooth.

Actually the weather was quite calm this afternoon and it was rather warm, although not that warm that taking off your shirt was ever going to be any kind of option as far as I was concerned.

This on the other hand is more like the kind of maritime activity that we are accustomed to see around here these days.

The tide is well in and the harbour gates are open so every now and again a trawler will set sail and head out to the open sea for another bout of fishing activity.

Regardless of the effects of Brexit to date, fishing is still continuing out there in the English Channel and the Bay of Granville although with relations between the UK and the EU deteriorating rapidly as the UK breaches Law after Law and Agreement after Agreement, how long this situation will continue is anyone’s guess.

This morning, I was up once more just after the first alarm went off and after the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been but to my surprise there was nothing at all on there. I must have slept soundly all the way through until the alarm.

With nothing to transcribe on the dictaphone I attacked the photos from July 2019. Right now I’m just pulling into the Travel Inn Motel in Lamoure, North Dakota, and there’s only about 90 to do now before the end of the month.

That’s only part of the problem though. For the month of August having made an initial run-through of the photos, there are 2091 of those that survived the first run-through so bearing in mind that many of them will produce two or even more images, we are looking at probably 2500 photos that will be done. And about 20 videos too.

There was the Welsh lesson this morning too. Having completed my day’s supply of photos I did some preparation for my course and then armed with a mug of hot chocolate and a slice of my sourdough fruit bread, I went for my lesson.

In contrast to last week it went rather better although it’s sad that I have forgotten more than I seem to be remembering right now.

For the rest of the day I haven’t stopped for a meal as I started a project that is taking more time than ever I anticipated that it would and I can see the computer being left on all the time while I’m away in Leuven. I have a couple of computer drives that failed a while ago and as regular readers of this rubbish will recall I’ve been trying to get them to fire up.

A few weeks ago I managed to make one of them work and so this afternoon I started to access the sectors manually. It’s probably 20 years since I’ve done anything like this and while computers have speeded up dramatically in that time, using pseudo-DOS hasn’t and hard drives are measured in Terabytes these days not Megabytes.

Having started at about 14:30 this afternoon and it’s now 21:50 and it’s done 2.5%. I thought that it would be a slow, laborious process but not quite as slow as this. And that’s not to say that I’ll be able to salvage anything. If any individual item of the data has spread over a defective sector then that will not be recoverable for a start.

While the computer was doing what it could do on its own I nipped out for my afternoon walk.

Although there wasn’t all that much beach to be on right now because of the tide, it was proving to be quite popular this afternoon. The weather was really beautiful this afternoon with bright sunshine, bright blue sky and very few clouds in the sky.

There were plenty of people wandering around there on the paths too. Not much respect for social distancing and not as much respect for mask-wearing either. But I’m sure that you are fed up of me going on about all of this. It will become as obsessive as the pathetic parking that features on here when I’m having one of my moments.

Instead, I pushed off along the path down to the end by the lighthouse and across the lawn at the bottom.

And as I reached the end of the lawn by the car park I bounced into an enormous pile of excitement down there by the roundabout.

From this viewpoint I wasn’t able to understand exactly what was going on but there were a couple of police motorcyclists down there and they seem to have pulled over a motorcyclist and his female pillion passenger.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, while I’m not usually averse to going down and asking what is going on, there are moments when it is clearly inappropriate and this is one of them. I’m sure that they didn’t want me going down there intruding at a moment like this so I left them to it.

Instead, I concentrated on what else was going on all around me.

The most important thing that is happening right now is the reroofing that’s going on down at the College Malraux. As you can see, they seem to be making some reasonable progress since the last time that I had a good moan about it and they now have ripped off yet another bay on the roof.

They have almost finished putting the laths on there now too so it looks as if the fitting of the slates won’t be too far behind. It’ll be interesting to see where they will have reached when I come back from Leuven on Saturday afternoon, assuming that they let me out of Castle Anthrax.

A little earlier on I mentioned that there was all kinds of activity going on out at sea this afternoon and all types of water craft out there at sea this afternoon.

From my vantage point at the end of the headland I could see this zodiac roaring away into the bay down below. There didn’t seem to be any fishing rods on display but that isn’t to say that they are or aren’t fishermen. But the lifejacket that the passenger was wearing looked to be rather more substantial than you might expect for someone who would have to wield a fishing rod around.

Anyway they soon cleared off round the corner and out of sight towards the port so whatever it is that they were doing, they seems to have finished it and the tide has still a good while to go before the harbour is inaccessible.

While I was admiring the zodiac out in the bay I was overflown by a light aircraft. We’re having some aerial activity to day too.

This aeroplane is F-BUKK, which tells me that it’s a Wassmer WA54 Atlantic, a design of aeroplane that dates from as far back as 1966. They have a special place in aviation history as they are the first aeroplanes built of composite materials.

They are actually probably the only type of true passenger aeroplanes that we have seen flying out of Granville airport as they have seats for three passengers as well as the pilot.

This one is a WA54 rather that a WA 50-something else because it has the larger 180hp Lycoming “O-360-A1LD” engine rather than the 150 hp Lycoming “O-320-E2A” engine. 55 of this model were built.

She had taken off from Granville and gone for a good flight down the Brittany coast almost as far as lannion where she turned round and came back to Granville again.

Down at the chantier navale there was a surprise waiting for me.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday we saw the mobile boat lift hovering away over Hermes 1 and I speculated that it had come to load up the trawler and drop it back into the water at the following high tide.

Anyway, I don’t know what must have happened but Hermes 1 is still there and the mobile boat lift is back in its parking place. All that I can think of is that they needed to reposition her chocks so that she would sit in a different position so that they could work on another part of her hull.

There were things going on in the inner harbour this afternoon too. A large lorry seemed to be unloading its charge down by the loading bay.

Presumably this means that we are going to be having a visit from one or other or maybe even both of the two Jersey freighters in the course of the next couple of days.

From there I headed back to home and my hot mug of coffee and to see how my manual analysis of the disk was doing. And, as I said, it was very, very slowly. This is going to be a very long job.

While it was doing bits and pieces that I could leave it alone to do, I did a little more of the arrears of my trip to Central Europe and I’m now IN A HOTEL IN FÛRTH in Central Germany.

After the guitar practice I carried on with the disk analysis and then I wrote out my notes for the day. And now I’m off to bed. I have an early start tomorrow as I’m off to Castle Anthrax and there’s a lot to do before I go.

Sunday 21st March 2021 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about this fishing boats breeding or multiplying or whatever.

We started off with one moored at the Fish Processing Plant and abandoned to go aground as the tide went out and yesterday we ended up with four of them. That was when I mused that they must be multiplying and it looks as if I’m right because today there’s a fourth one down there that is going to be marooned by the tide in half an hour’s time.

The Fish Processing Plant seems to be all closed up so that fourth one hasn’t come along to unload and in any case it’s leaving it rather late to move.

So what’s all going on there then?

No prizes for guessing what’s going on here, is there?

There probably isn’t anyone who, having seen the beautiful weather that we had yesterday, would believe that it would continue for the rest of the weekend so nobody should be in the last surprised by the fact that the weather has closed in again today. It’s gone cold and the fog and mist are closing in.

So much so that I’m glad that I missed almost half of today. I might have been awake at 08:30 but no danger whatever of me leaving my stinking pit at that time on a Sunday. 11:15 is a much more realistic time for me to show a leg.

After the medication I attacked the dictaphone. I always like to listen to where I’ve been during the night and, more importantly, who has come with me. Even though I’ve been starved of good, pleasant, charming and erudite company just recently, what goes on on my travels during the night is usually much more exciting than anything that happens during the day when I’m awake, sad as it is to say it.

But not last night. I would really like to have some financial stability and I had some money invested in a company called Global Marketing. I’d had a whole pile of information from them that I was busy going through when suddenly the Chancellor of the Exchequer, not Sunak but someone else turned up on my door. He was telling me of all his bullish plans for this and that and I said quite frankly “I don’t believe very much of this at all”. he sat down, plugged in a tape recorder and played a speech back. I said “that’s you speaking, isn’t it?”. He replied “yes it is”. I replied that I’d be much more convinced if it was the EU or someone like that speaking to me. He noticed the paperwork and he went through it. “Is this what you’re doing in your retirement? organising items for these?” I asked “don’t you know who these people are?”. He replied “no. I’ve never seen them until I saw these papers” so I was about to tell him who they were when I awoke.

After I’d gathered my wits (which takes an awful lot longer than it ought to bearing the reduced amount of wits that I possess these days – but then I suppose that they have more empty space in which to roam around) I attacked the photos from July 2019.

By the time that I knocked off I’d arrived in East Forks, Minnesota, USA where I spent a couple of very ill days. However, I had had a little drive around Winnipeg and been to see MY GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE – or, at least, the house where she lived during her very short marriage.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my great grandparents emigrated to Canada in 1906 and my grandmother, who was a music hall singer, married a musician from Winnipeg in July 1918. Their marriage lasted barely 4 months as he died in the influenza epidemic in November 1918.

When my great grandfather died in 1923 (we went to SEE HIS GRAVE 20 YEARS AGO) my great grandmother returned to the UK bringing the unmarried children (including my grandmother) back with her.

The married children remained behind and that’s how come I have family in Montréal and Ottawa (and probably elsewhere too).

Anyway, you haven’t come here to hear all of that nonsense. It’s time that I was clearing off outside to see what was happening.

And the answer to all of that was that down on the beach there was nothing happening at all. Just one or two people walking around there.

And as I said earlier, I can’t say that I blame them either. You can see by how dark it is down there, just how depressing the weather was this afternoon.

Dark, depressing and gloomy. But that’s enough about me – the weather was just as bad. The mist is closing in yet again and it wasn’t very nice at all so I shrugged my shoulders and set off at a pace around the headland while the going was good and before the weather became any worse.

As you can see, I wasn’t alone out there this afternoon. There were quite a few people walking around on the footpath this afternoon braving the weather.

And they needed to be brave too. Just now I mentioned that I needed to push on before the weather deteriorated even more and if you look to the right of this image you can see a rainstorm approaching rather rapidly and I didn’t want to be caught out there in all of that.

So I pushed along the path, across the lawn at the end by the lighthouse and then across the car park to the end of the headland. There was nothing whatever happening out to sea as far as I could see (and I couldn’t see very far at that) so I wandered off along the path on top of the cliff.

Yesterday we were having something of an aerial day seeing as the weather was something of a plane-spotter’s delight. But no such luck today. The thick clouds that we were having put a stop to that.

But we did have one of these microlight powered hang-glider things floating around over my head as I walked along the path so I took a photo of it as it went by overhead, but that was my lot. I wanted to be home before the rain arrived.

No change in occupancy in the chantier navale and we saw earlier the fishing boats at the Fish Processing Plant so with nothing else going on, I headed back home again for my coffee. There were plenty of things to do.

One of the things that needed doing was the baking for today.

There isn’t much bread left right now so I needed to make a loaf. But not a big one because I’m off on my travels on Wednesday and there’s no room in the freezer. So just a small one would have to do. Consequently, immediately after lunch I’d made up 250 grammes of flour into a dough – using the wrong flour as you might expect.

At the same time, I’d taken a lump of pizza dough out of the freezer and that had been thawing out during the afternoon.

When I returned from my walk I have the dough its second kneading and shaping and left it to proof again this time in its mould. Then I kneaded the pizza dough, rolled it out and put it on the pizza tray and left everything to proof.

While I was doing all of that I carried on with the Central Europe stuff. There’s now another day finished and IS NOW ON LINE. Just 3 more days to do now, but one of those days is the one where I ran aground in the first place all those weeks ago so that isn’t going to be easy.

By now the dough was all ready so I bunged the loaf in the oven and assembled the pizza. When the bread was done I put the pizza in the oven to cook.

Here are the finished products. The loaf is small but it looks and feels quite good. As for my pizza, it was delicious yet again.

No pudding this week as I’m not here to eat it. I’ll be taking stuff out of the freezer for the next couple of days. There are plenty of frozen pies and so on in there that need finishing. It’ll make more room in there for other stuff.

While I was writing up my notes I was listening to music as usual. There are certain tracks that I can only listen to when I’m in the right mood to hear them and that, unfortunately, isn’t right now, for a whole variety of reasons with which I won’t bore you.

So of course, it goes without saying that Al Stewart’s MODERN TIMES came round on the playlist, didn’t it? Hard to think that I was working out the chords for this earlier in the week and I could play it then. But not today.

That’s because the track that came up on the playlist immediately before it was GRASSHOPPER by Man. What was I doing the night of 1st/2nd September 2019 that I can’t even now, 18 months later, bring myself to write about and which I probably never will.

One thing about it though and that was that I was never the same afterwards. Mind you, I was never the same beforehand so it doesn’t make very much difference anyway.

Anyway, on that note (well, we are talking about music) I’m off to bed. I need my beauty sleep of course, but I need much more than this. I have a radio programme to do and I’ve nothing prepared for it. And it’s a programme of fairly new stuff and thse ones are always the most difficult to write.

It won’t be an 11:15 finish tomorrow, that’s for sure.

Friday 19th March 2021 – AFTER ALL OF THE …

… excitement last night, I rounded up the surviving bottles and put them in a plastic box on top of the fridge in the bathroom where they won’t cause too much damage in the future if a similar eventuality were to arise.

But making the orange ginger beer is back on again, I reckon, because I don’t think that it was that which caused the problems.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve been using an assortment of various bottles here, mostly recycled lemonade bottles and the like as well as a few rather dodgy cheap bottles.

But I also have three new, expensive bottles that I bought from IKEA. Two are used as water containers and the third was a spare. That was pressed into service to hold the ginger beer and, unbelievably, it was that one that blew up. The recycled ones and the dodgy cheap ones are keeping going.

That was something of a surprise.

What else which was a surprise was that despite tempting fate last night, I did manage to crawl out of bed just after the first alarm. And after the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There was a huge murder mystery going on last night with about 20 suspects. There was a detective giving the final denouément right at the very end, going through each person in turn explaining why he would have done it and and finally saying that they didn’t because … and coming up with some reason. This went on for ever and I can’t remember it at all. At the end I was with a woman, someone whom I knew and I can’t think who it was now. We were discussing the radio system. We had half a dozen different aerials, half a dozen different things and we were all switching between the aerials automatically. We would expect a few problems with the automation and I was thinking about having the whole thing redone so that it would still be automatic but I could manually control the aerials so that I knew which aerial was transmitting what. And again this is another thing about which I remember very little.

After the dictaphone notes I made a start on the photos from Greenland. Another pile of those have bitten the dust now and I’m sitting on the deck of THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR watching them unload the zodiacs that will take us to the shore where buses will take up to the airport at Kangerlussuaq. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had to break off my Transatlantic voyage here because the ship had been chartered by a bunch of North American schoolkids and being from Europe, I didn’t have a valid police check record. I had to come back 3 weeks later when the ship returned so that I could board her and continue my journey across the Atlantic to the Canadian mainland.

By now it was light so I prepared to do battle with the living room, making myself some hot chocolate and cutting myself a slice of fruit sourdough bread. But just at that moment Rosemary rang with a problem and we ended up having a brief chat. One hour and three minutes to be precise.

The damage in the living room is not as extensive as I thought. One of the windows in the nice unit in the living room has been peppered with shrapnel that has made its marks upon the glass, and the TV screen that I use as a computer monitor has taken a bashing too.

The carpet is in the bath. I’ve scrubbed it, used soap on it, scrubbed it again and rinsed it thoroughly. Now it’s in there drying off. And it’ll have another go tomorrow afternoon after my shower. All of the ginger beer that wasn’t in the tray as soaked into the carpet. There wasn’t much anywhere else.

Tons of broken glass about the place and I’ve brushed up as much as I could. But anyone who comes here now will have to be careful where they sit. We all know what happened to the captain of the Good Ship Venus.

The floor has been washed and it will have another washing tomorrow. And I’ll wash down the furniture etc as well tomorrow.

But some good did come out of all of this. The mechanical stopper of the broken bottle was intact and it had obviously proved its worth by resisting the explosion. So I swapped it over onto one of the cheap bottles and now that makes a really good seal. So all was not lost.

Another task that I had to perform was to speak to a certain young Canadian girl whom I know to acquaint her with the news that I’d received from Rachel yesterday because I imagined that in the confusion she would have been left out. We had quite a chat for 15-20 minutes about the events of yesterday and also about lots of other stuff too.

By now it was time for me to go out for my afternoon walk.

And for something of a change just recently, we were having a really nice day today.

The weather was cool and windy but there was a bright blue sky and for once there wasn’t any fog or haze. The tide was quite far out and there were several people down there on the beach and amongst the rocks making the most of the nice afternoon.

One thing that I have noticed – or, maybe, it’s more correct to say that I haven’t noticed, is that there haven’t been any bird-men around for quite a while. Where they leap off the cliffs is just over there to the right near the cemetery – something that probably means that if they make a mistake on take-off they don’t have far to go.

But to be serious … “for once” – ed … I wonder what’s happened that means that they haven’t been taking to the air just recently.

With the weather being so much better today I had a good peer out to sea to see if I could seee Jersy on the horizon today.

And sure enough, with a GOOD LONG LENS and plenty of enhancement back at the apartment later, I was able just about to pick out the island. Not as clearly as I have done in the past, but the fact that we can see it at all today 58kms away shows you just what an improvement that we have had.

Not like in the Auvergne, apparently. Rosemary told me that she awoke this morning to a couple of inches of snow.

Just one or two people around today, so I had the place pretty much to myself. I pushed on along the path, across the lawn and across the car park down to the end of the headland.

The Memorial to the Missing Seafarers is still there – not that that’s any surprise – but you can actually see it today, which is something.

Yesterday we struggled to see much further beyond Le Loup, the light that sits on top of the rock just outside the harbour entrance, but today with it being clear, we can see the town of Jullouville quite easily across the bay, and right to the water tower on the ridge at the back of the town.

On top of the ridge just to the right of the right-hand flagpole is that mystery tower. I haven’t forgotten that one of these days I intend to go and see what it is

With nothing going on out in the bay across to the Brittany coast I pushed of along the footpath at the top of the cliff.

Down in the chantier navale we have yet more movement and change of occupancy.

Spirit of Conrad, Aztec Lady, Lys Noir, Hermes 1 and Freddy Land are still there, but the trawler Charlevy has gone back into the water. On the morning tide, apparently. So there’s now room for someone else to come in and join the (af)fray.

There might be room for more boats very soon too because the whole place was quite a hive of activity today. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen so many people down there working on the boats, from private owners in private cars to specialist companies with sign-written vans.

The racket that they were making was quite unbearable. It looks as if everyone is making ready quite rapidly in anticipation of an ease in the lockdown. That’s what I call optimism.

While we haven’t seen to many hang-gliders just recently, we have been seeing a lot of fishing boats abandoned to the tide at the jetty by the Fish Processing Plant.

It beats me as to why. We went for months, if not years, without seeing a one except for special reasons but this last few weeks we see them on a regular basis. Clearly something is up.

My time was also up so I headed off home where I bumped into one of my neighbours and we had quite a chat. And then I came up for my hot coffee.

There was no guitar practice tonight. I can catch up with that another time. But when I returned I attacked that page of my notes from my trip around Central Europe on which I’ve made very little progress just recently, and found that I was advancing quite rapidly. I decided therefore to stick at it until I finished it because I was fed up of it hanging around.

Round about 20:00 I finally finished it and now IT’S ON LINE at long last. I hope that it won’t take me long to finish off this exercise, although there is a page on which I’ve been stuck for a while and I don’t know what I’m going to do about that one.

Tea was taco rolls and rice. I wasn’t very hungry and half of it finished in the bin. No pudding either.

So after the exertions of yesterday and today and having already crashed out for half an hour (and instead of fighting it, I allowed myself to be carried away) I’m off to bed for a good sleep.

No shopping tomorrow. Instead I’ll catch up with the guitar and practice that I missed and wash the living room again.

There’s football tomorrow afternoon and I mustn’t miss that either.

And then I need to slowly thing about going to Leuven. Wednesday, that is. I wonder what they will tell me this time.

Monday 15th March 2021 – I’VE HAD A …

… much better day today.

Due without doubt to crawling wearily into bed at about 22:45 and sleeping right through until the alarm went off.

There was plenty of time for me to go off on a nocturnal voyage or two. I was out somewhere during the night. I went to see a house. I walked in there and walked out in disgust because it was pretty expensive. They wanted €16 per week until 2008. I thought that that was a lot but as someone pointed out, at least it’s a roof over my head even if it’s only temporary. Just then my personal manager guy who looks after me came past and we walked off together and were talking about things. It might have been a friend of mine from way back. We got into school and I’d had a can of drink on the way and this guy had paid for it. I said that I would give him the money back when we got to school so we got there and bumped into a girl who was in my year at class of all people. She’d had a bottle of drink and there had been a strange clip on the bottle that she had to hand back. I’d seen someone walking off with a clip of that sort but it didn’t really click for a minute what it was. After her drink she had a hunt around for this clip but couldn’t find it. She went to ask the girl at the till if she had seen it. They talked about this and she said something about “what have you done with your little friend?”. She looked up and saw me and went all red and blushed. This girl said something so I replied “it’s OK. I’ve had worse than that”. Then she came out with something about the school over the last couple of years has been really good because there’s been no-one foreign in it. No Irish and no foreigners. I replied that foreigners are more exciting and interesting so we had a talk about that.

Later we were on the THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR trying to go through the North West Passage but there had been an incident and we had lost our mast so we were proceeding with diesel engines. There was a port nearby but we didn’t know which one it was so we’d head there anyway. One of the guys with us broadcast a silly message about how well we were doing and so on. We came into this town along the road on the ship and it didn’t look right at all because it looked far too green, somewhere like the north of Scotland. We pulled in and I thought “this is a big town. It has a Co-op and loads of shops so this isn’t somewhere in the North-West Passage at all. The street signs were in English with Chinese writing as well and all of the accents were northern Scotland. We parked where we thought the port was and there was a ramp going up into like a pub. He wandered off, the guy who was with me and I wandered around for a bit. he went off looking in the shops and he started to complain about the rugby pitch that he had seen. I looked out of the window and we were quite high up. There was a big valley down below us with gas holders in it. I thought “well, this is nothing like a port at all”. I walked up this ramp but it turned out that it was into a pub. I thought “we’ll never be able to get our boat up to here. There were no boats or anything and I thought “where the heck have we arrived now?”.

After the medication I made a start on the radio programme for this week and having chosen the music and paired it while I was in Leuven, I’d finished and had it running to listen to by 11:15.

It’s a good jo that I had because while I was listening to it and trying to organise myself Rosemary rang and we had one of our lengthy chats. As a result I was quite late in going for my lunch.

After lunch I had something important to do – to make further enquiries about what I need to do to upgrade the big computer as I would like it to be. I’ll run the one that I repaired for 72 hours non-stop while I’m in Leuven next week and if it runs fine, I can use that while I have the big office machine in pieces.

The weather was fairly cold and threatening rain when I went out for my afternoon walk so I dressed accordingly when I went out for my afternoon walk.

Not as accordingly as this guy down here on the beach out by the Rue du Nord. I just had on my winter jacket and cap. This guy seems to be in his oilskins and waders, and he probably has his sou’wester in his pocket in case it comes on to rain, which it might well do at some point, judging by the sky.

Mind you, he was the only person down on the beach who was dressed to such an extent. There were three or four other people down on the beach at different locations but they were dressed more … errr … casually. I’ve no idea what they were all doing down there and I didn’t hang around long enough to find out.

There was plenty of activity in the air today too. While I was walking along the footpath I was overflown by a light aircraft.

Despite the poor quality of the photograph due to the distance that it was out at sea I could see her registration number. She’s F-GSBV, a Robin DR400/180 of unknown date. She’d taken off from Granville Airport at 15:53 and flew a figure-of_eight around the coast and landed back at the airport after just 11 minutes, her second flight of the day.

There wasn’t anyone else out there this afternoon so I had the path all to myself. I pushed along in the wind as far as the lawn near the lighthouse.

From here, there’s a good view back to the College Malraux where I could see what was going on with the roofing that they were doing.

They don’t seem to have advanced very far over this last couple of weeks. They’d had that corner of the roof stripped off when I came back from Leuven two and a half weeks ago. They need to be working quicker than that if they want to finish it sometime soon.

Nothing else was happening here, except for the Council grass-cutters, so I walked on across the car park to the end of the headland. There wasn’t anything happening in the bay and the Brittany coast was rather obscured by clouds so I headed off along the path on top of the cliffs.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a week or two ago we saw some workmen unloading a pile of builders’ bags onto the quayside over by the ferry terminal.

Those bags disappeared quite quickly and I never did find out what happened to to them, but today we have some more workmen over there. They seem to be doing something over on the far side of the wall and one of these days when I have a moment, whenever that might be, I’ll have to go over there and have a look for myself.

Down at the chantier navale there was no change in occupancy. The four large yachts and the trawler were still in there up on blocks and thy look as if they will be there for a while yet. And there’s not much room in there for anything else if the need arises.

One thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall noticing is that these days we seem to be having rather a plethora of NAABSA (not always afloat but safely aground) fishing boats over by the Fish Processing Plant.

It used to be very rare to see one – they’d all be taken inside to the wet harbour and moored there. But just recently we’ve seen a few abandoned over there to the mercy of the tide and I’m not sure why either.

Back here, I had my afternoon coffee and then tackled the photos from Greenland. Another 20 bit the dust in the time available. We’re still at the foot of the Sermitsiaq Glacier that runs off the into the Maniitsoq Ice Cap Evighedsfjorden or Kangerlussuatsiaq Fjord but all told, there is just 300 or so to be dealt with for the month of July 2019.

The guitar practice went OK and I finally managed to track down the chord arrangement for Al Stewart’s MODERN TIMES, something that I’ve been trying to find for quite a while, with one of the best guitar solos of all time right at the end.

With having a late lunch I didn’t fancy much for tea – just a baked potato with beans.

Now that my notes are written, it’s off to bed as I have my Welsh lesson tomorrow. Surprisingly, I haven’t crashed out today and that’s a surprise. That sleep must have done me some good.

Another one just like that would do me even better.

Saturday 13th March 2021 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… the photos of today’s storm out at sea I’ll tell all you about my miserable day today.

And miserable it was as well too. It took me ages to go off to sleep, no matter how tired I was when I finally crawled into bed. at one stage I didn’t think that I would drop off at all.

And when I awoke this morning I had a pain in my left shoulder – one of the better-known side-effects of this vaccination. It’s not all that uncomfortable actually, and in any case, by all accounts it’s far better than what you have to go through if you actually catch the virus.

After the medication, I had a listen to he dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

I was transferring a load of stuff from one hard drive to another (rather reminiscent of what I was doing yesterday) but some of the files wouldn’t move. That was extremely disappointing. I tried a few little tricks but they still wouldn’t move. As I was passing through the data cable that ran between one and the other there were all these kids who were on holiday. There were 3 groups of kids, blond-haired boys and girls who were all different ages, probably 8 or 9 and I dunno 2 groups slightly older and different ages. I kept on confusing them because of the time difference that it was taking me to do this. I decided that I would be chatty so I spoke to the youngest group and said “hi”. This girl gave me a puzzled look and said something that I didn’t catch so I said “hi again”. She repeated what she had just said. I gave her a smile and a wave and walked on through the data cable to the other drive, sitting there wondering what it was that she said. Had she said that she didn’t speak English and I pretended not to hear it or didn’t notice that that was what she said.

Later on I was at a music festival, a huge thing and there were enormous crowds there. But it was all family stuff. We were wandering around the camp site and there was no social distancing whatever and there were arguments over pitches and who was going to camp where and whatever.

Just as that voyage was starting to get under way, the alarm went off and I awoke. And I was up and out of bed before the second one went off.

Before I went to have my shower I made a start on tidying up the back-up drive. As I expected, it’s slow progress from here on in and it’s going to be a long time before it’s done. Mind you, I did liberate another 40GB of free space sorting out the duplicates.

After my shower I went off to the shops. And I wasn’t out all that long and didn’t spend much money either. And what I did spend, a lot of it went on an industrial-size bottle of clothes-washing liquid from NOZ.

Back here I carried on with the sorting out of the duplicate files but at some point I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until 14:00. I’ve no idea how long I was out of it but it made me run a lot later than I intended.

After lunch I worked on the Greenland photos. I only did a few yesterday so I had a lot to do today to catch up. Right now we’re in the Kangerlussuatsiaq Fjord in Greenland going to look at the Sermitsiaq Glacier that drains off the Maniitsoq Ice Cap.

This was the last complete day on board the THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR. Tomorrow afternoon we alight at Kangerlussuak and take the aeroplane to Toronto where I push onwards deeper into North America.

At 15:45 I was ready to go out for my afternoon walk but we were in the middle of a torrential downpour and hailstorm. I wasn’t going to go out for a walk in any of that.

Round about an hour later the rain eased off a little so I nipped out.

It was only a brief amelioration in the weather too. As you can see, there’s a raging storm going on out over the Ile de Chausey and I hadn’t gone all that far before it caught me in the open. It was completely wild out there right now and I was soaked to the skin.

There had been one or two other people out there but by the time I reached the lawn and the car park, I was pretty much all on my own out there and that was hardly any surprise at all given the conditions.

Nothing going on out at sea today, either in the English Channel or the Baie de Mont St Michel so I pushed on along the path to see what was happening at the port.

And we have another change of occupant in the chantier navale today. Well, yesterday, actually, as I noticed it when I arrived back from Valognes last night but of course it was too dark to photograph.

Today, we have one of the bigger trawlers, Charlevy in there undergoing work. I’ve no idea what’s the matter with her and there was no-one around there to ask either. In fact there was no-one working on any of the boats down there today and I’m not surprised about that either. I wouldn’t be out there working in the kind of weather that we were having this afternoon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday, the ferry terminal was overflowing with boats – both of the Joly France ferries and Chausiais were moored over there. But they have all left the quayside today as you can see.

One of the Joly France boats, the older one, has disappeared completely but the other one and Chausiais are now moored up in the inner harbour next to the two Channel island ferry boats.

By now, I was a total drowned rat so I hurried on back to the apartment. A hot coffee and a slice of Liz’s cake from yesterday went down really nicely, and I had a quick bash at the notes from Central Europe last year until the football came on.

Haverfordwest County, one of the newly-promoted teams this season were facing perennial champions TNS

TNS are currently in second position in the table having over the last couple of weeks lost their ruthless streak. The owners of the club have, on the other hand, retained their ruthless streak and sacked the management team early in the week in an effort to climb back to the top.

TNS, although they showed plenty of skill, looked to be very lethargic today but Haverfordwest, although clearly not as skilful, were very well marshalled. TNS had the lion’s share of possession and Haverfordwest were content to let them run around and shepherd them into blind alleys.

To everyone’s surprise, Haverfordwest took the lead, from a breakaway upfield after 17 minutes, but when TNS equalised from a corner early in the second half we could see a familiar script being replayed.

Later in the match Haverfordwest tired and we were all expecting a couple more TNS goals, but instead one of the Haverfordwest attackers took them completely by surprise and combined well with one of his colleagues who scored a beautiful goal to restore Haverfordwest’s surprise lead.

And as the match played out to a conclusion, it was Haverfordwest who were still going forward and won probably the most surprising victory of the season so far.

For tea I just had some pasta and vegetables and then came in here to write my notes. Now that they are done I’m going to prepare some sourdough and then I’m off to bed. A nice lie-in tomorrow and I can’t say that I don’t need it. A good sleep will do me good.

Wednesday 10th March 2021 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

… nautical afternoon this afternoon with plenty of activity out at sea.

Not so much activity in here though because I’ve had a really difficult day today. I’ve spent most of it in a semi-somnambulant phase which is quite a surprise seeing as I was once more up and about just after the first alarm.

After the medication I had a listen to see if I’ve been anywhere during the night. I can’t remember very much about it but I was in Canada. my niece’s husband was definitely around and so were a few other people but I can’t remember who they were and I can’t remember what it was that we were doing. But later on I was in London and it was Christmas Eve or New Years Eve. I’d been with a family having some kind of informal celebration but the father had to go off and do something so that seemed like the time for me to leave as well. I got myself ready to go. I was asking about the shops in the neighbourhood because I needed to do some shopping on my way home. These people were going away the next day and I remember talking to the boy of the family and telling him to keep out of mischief. He said something like he’s not going to have too much chance now as they were travelling early the next morning. But I can’t really remember all that much about this at all

While you admire the storm and the waves crashing down on the sea wall yet again today, I spent a few hours on the back-up drive clearing out more duplications

And by the time that I lost interest (because I do if I do anything too long) another 30-odd GB of space. I’m at 965GB and not too far off my target of 1TB, and I’ll get there in the end.

Rosemary rang me up as well during the course of the morning. She’s in the middle of having a kitchen fitted and needed some advice. This was one of our shorter conversations – it only went on for half an hour or so, not one of our usual couple-of-hours conversation.

That wasn’t the only phone call that I had either. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a couple of weeks ago I sent off all of the paperwork for my new post-Brexit identity card. Today the prefecture phoned me up to ask me to go round on 18th of March at 11:00 with my passport and a couple of identity photos.

It looks as if things are moving rapidly in this direction whereas in some départements, some people who applied in October have still heard nothing.. But I’m glad that I changed my driving licence when I did because there’s all kinds of backlogs there.

After lunch I did another pile of photos and we are now pulling into the harbour at Nuuk in Greenland ready for our walk around the city and meeting all of these Nuukie types that inhabit the place.

As well as that, I’ve been working on the arrears of my Central Europe trip. There’s now ANOTHER DAY GONE ON LINE and I’ve started working on the following day.

That’s not going to be quite so easy as there are 29 photos to deal with for that day.

We had a break of course to go out for my afternoon walk and talking of photos, I remembered to take the correct camera, the NIKON D500 with me, and it was fully charged too.

It’s hardly a surprise that there was no-one around today. There had been a message on the internet about the storms and we were in the grip of one right now.

The tide was right in too so there wasn’t all that much beach to go at either.

There was quite a bit of hazy mist too despite the wind so the sky wasn’t all that clear as you can see. There’s quite a bit of fog hanging around down there beyond that strange former hotel where I saw that awful apartment when I first came here. I can’t believe that they had let that building get into such a state.

In the shelter of the College Malraux the wind wasn’t as bad as it was once I stepped out into the open air.

As the tide was quite far in there were plenty of the larger trawlers about heading in towards port. They were making quite heavy weather of the journey back too with the wind against them, as you can see in this photo.

You’ll also notice something else in this photo too, down at the bottom of the frame.

One of the phenomena that we encounter on a regular basis is the layering of the water, with these different bands of brown, silty water. There was another good one out there today which was rather surprising in view of the rough seas and I’d still love to know the explanation for this.

There was no-one around on the lawn or on the car park so I wandered around to the viewpoint overlooking the port, just in time to see Thoraslip her moorings.

What was more interesting from my point of view was watching the waves breaking onto the harbour walls. Unfortunately the wind was blowing the waves obliquely on to the walls rather than full ahead so we weren’t having the full effect that we sometimes have.

While I was here, I had a good look down into the chantier navale to see what was happening down there. And the answer was “nothing special”. There were still the same four boats in there as there had been since last Thursday.

By now Thora was well out of port and into the bay. As she passed Le Loup she also passed one of the trawlers coming into port.

You can see how the storm is affecting her sailing this afternoon. And this is while she’s in the shelter of the bay as well. Can you imagine how she’s going to behave in the weather that she will experience when she’s right out at sea. It’s going to be a rough ride back home to Jersey.

And talking of going back home, by now I was ready for my hot coffee and cake so I headed for home and the warmth. And to finish off the work that I’d been doing.

Guitar practice was strange. I was so absorbed in what I was doing with the bass that I overran by miles my hour’s worth of practice. That was rather strange. I ended up playing a long bass solo to “Cocaine” by JJ Cale and “Down On The Corner” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Tea was a burger on a bap with baked potatoes and vegetables, followed by my delicious apple pie.

Now, rather later than usual yet again, I’m off to bed. Shopping tomorrow of course and I want to make more progress with my work. And for that I need to be on form. I’m fed up of spending all of my life being half-asleep.

Sunday 7th March 2021 – AFTER I’D FINISHED …

… finished writing up my notes last night I went off and made my kefir. There were a pile of kiwis that were on the verge of going off so I used four of those. Whizzed up in the whizzer and then pressed through the filter system and the brewed kefir mixed in.

While it was seeping through I set another batch of kefir on the way and then the stuff that I’d mixed, I filtered through the filter stack into the bottles and left it to brew.

When I’d finished I came back in here but I wasn’t in the least bit tired so I sat down and did some work. I finished ANOTHER PAGE OF THE ARREARS FROM CENTRAL EUROPE and then I went on and bashed out 30 or so photos from Greenland 2019 and I’m now sailing down Tunulliarfik Fjord.

It was about 01:45 when I finally went to bed so it was something of a disappointment to be awake at 07:50 when I awoke. But there’s no chance whatever of me being up and about on a Sunday at that ridiculous time so I turned over and went back to bed.

10:15 is much more like it on a Sunday.

First task after the medication was to deal with the sink. I went to do all of the washing-up from last night but the water simply didn’t drain out at all.

In the end I dismantled all of the pipework under the sink and found a nice piece of cable to ram down the pipe that I couldn’t dismantle. Judging by how far the cable went down the pipework it was well into the communal lengths before it found the obstruction.

It took quite a while of furkling about with the cable before the obstruction suddenly moved. And then I had to reassemble everything. It wasn’t exactly how I intended to start my Sunday but at least I could crack on.

After all of that I couldn’t concentrate on the blog entry that I’d started and didn’t seem to make any progress so I had another go at the photos. That’s a huge pile of those that I did today and I’m now in a zodiac in Arsuk Fjord heading for a close encounter with a musk-ox.

Despite it being a Sunday, I remembered to go out for my afternoon walk around the headland.

The sky was absolutely beautiful once more with not a cloud in the sky today. But there were plenty of other things in the air instead. None of the bird-men because there wasn’t enough wind but we did have one or two people up in the air in their powered hang-gliders or whatever they are called.

Several light aircraft were flying past overhead too, but they were too far away for me to photograph with any kind of clarity.

On the other hand, something else went flying by quite clearly enough for me to photograph this afternoon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have some kind of bird of prey flying around the edges of the cliffs. There’s a colony of rabbits somewhere in the cliffs and I imagine that it targets the very young of the colony together with whatever else it can find in the way of small mammals.

As for the details of its species, I have to say that I have no idea. Despite all of the lectures on birdwatching that I’ve had in the past from Nerina, they weren’t about this kind of bird.

But retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, we were talking about the gorgeous weather today.

Nice though it might have been, it wasn’t all that warm at all and so I was surprised, if not astonished, to see a couple of women emerging from the sea like a couple of 21st-Century sirens. I would have expected the water to have been cold enough to freeze the barnacles off a brass dinghy right now.

When we were in the Arctic we had people throwing themselves into the sea even as the surface was freezing over but they were Canadians and it’s the kind of thing that you might expect from them but it’s not the thing that I would normally expect French people to do for pleasure.

There were quite a few people out there this afternoon, not as many as there were yesterday for sure, and with nothing going on out at sea I walked round to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour.

There was no change in occupancy in the chantier navale today, the same four boats that have been there since Thursday are still there on their own today, but also, surprisingly, the two boats that were grounded over by the Fish Processing Plant yesterday are still there today.

Every now and again we see the odd boat left there overnight or in between tides but to see them there for this long is quite unusual. It prevents others coming in to unload from reaching the wharf and they can’t be too happy about that.

It’s not as if there isn’t any room in the inner harbour for them to tie up. There is plenty of space in there since they installed the new pontoons.

As I mentioned earlier, there wasn’t a great deal of wind this afternoon, but there must be some kind of strong wind blowing from somewhere as you can see from this photograph.

The sea was quite calm this afternoon without any high waves, as you can tell by the wake of the cabin cruiser going past but there was a really powerful current rolling in. It’s about every seventh wave that is the strongest and this seventh waves was smashing in and sending spray right up to the top of the sea wall.

There were several people standing around here at the viewpoint watching the spectacle. I’m not quite sure why because there were no shipwrecks, nobody drownding, in fact nothing to laugh at at all.

Another indication of how calm the sea really was today was the behaviour of the yacht out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

All of that looks perfectly calm out there and the boat looks perfectly stable regardless of all of the waves beating up against the harbour wall. It seems to be such a really nice day to be out and about on the water.

In the background, the road that leads into Saint-Pair sur Mer is all bathed in sunlight and the chateau d’eau looks particularly prominent today. There’s also some building work going on in St Pair sur Mer too, judging by the crane on the extreme right of the image. I’ll have to go and have a look at that one of these days too.

Back here I made another attempt at rewriting the notes of one of my pages from Central Europe and this time, I made some progress. But I broke off to have a chat with TOTGA and then I had to go to attend to the cooking for the following week.

The pizza dough I had taken out of the freezer this morning and now that it had defrosted I kneaded it again, rolled it and put it on the tray to proof again.

There was a roll of flaky pastry left over in the fridge since Christmas so I used it this afternoon and made myself an apple pie with it. And while the pie was baking I assembled the pizza and that went into the oven when the pie was finished.

And here we have the finished products from today’s baking session, along with the kefir from last night. That’s already fermenting so it seems to be a very good batch today. I hope that it tastes as good as it performs.

The pizza was delicious but as for the apple pie, I’ll tell you another time – there was no room for any this evening as the pizza was, as usual, quite filling.

Having done a little tidying up, I’m now off to bed as it’s Monday tomorrow and I’m radioing again. I remember saying at the beginning of the week that I was quite optimistic about the week that was to come and I seem to have accomplished a fair amount for a change. I wonder how this week will turn out.

Friday 26th February 2021 – IT SEEMS TO BE …

… quite the thing for me to feature on my pages photos of people taking photos, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

We’ve had people taking photos too many times to count, people taking photos of people taking photos of people and even, on one occasion if I remember correctly, people taking photos of people taking photoe of people taking photos of people. We’ve also had FILM CREWS while we’ve been out and about on our travels.

Today, it’s the turn of a TV cameraman to feature on these pages. Here he was, quite happily setting up his camera to do some filming down the Brusselsestraat in Leuven.

There wasn’t a van about, or anyone waving a microphone around so I couldn’t see where he’d come from or what the purpose of his filming would be, but as the Belgian Government was about to make an important public announcement, I imagine that it’s going to be something to do about people’s reactions to whatever news there might be.

And I’m not sure what your reaction might be when I tell you that I was up and about, wandering around my digs before the alarm went off, but I bet that it would be worth filming too.

Mind you, it was something of a cheat because the alarm wasn’t actually set for … errr … 06:00 or thereabouts this morning. Having my medication takes a lot out of me so this morning it was set for 08:00.

Even so, wandering around the place at 07:33 is something that I can’t always do even when the alarm is set for 06:00. It reminds me of the time when I used to arive late at school and the teacher used to ask me why. I used to reply that there were eight people in our house but the alarm was only set for seven.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been. I started off last night with a guy and girl, going round a back trail at the back end of Crewe. It was a muddy track, very steep and up and down with hairpin beds, everything like that. I was havng to coach them their way round. This woman was nervous. I was trying hard not to frighten her but make her aware of all of the dangers. At one point we had to ski up and down and back up a slope. I had to get my skis ready – this guy got his, the woman got hers. Mine were somewhere along the road. This incidentally evolved during this voyage into a place that we have visited several times on various nocturnal rambles, that high, narrow mountain pass where we’ve been skiing and walking a few times in the past.

And somewhere in this I was having some work do to. I wasn’t in the office and I was planning on doing it at home but everything was making me run late and my ‘phone was einging more often. At one stage it was a guy from the office asking me when I was intending to do this thing. I replied that I’d be back by 15:15 and I’ll get on with it then. He asked “what about … (and mentioned the name of another case I had to deal with)?”. I replied “don’t worry. That’s not quite so urgent. I’ll deal with that as well while I’m at it”.

Later on, we had an old Ford E83W van (actually when we were kids my father had two, KLG93 and XVT772 but that’s another story) in our drive and my father and brother were talking about breaking it for spares. I thought that it was far too good to break. We were all underneath it and getting all of the mud off from underneath but keeping it in shape as it came off so that it could be used as a profile to make repair panels for other vans. This involved picking these lumps of mud out from underneath and posting them off to him. In the meantime there was a very informal game of cricket taking place between some American kids so they didn’t really have a great idea about what they were doing and this was going on all around ths van. I’d been watching for a while and decided that I’d join in. I fielded somewhere and of course having played a lot of cricket I took up a rather professional stance. Someone said something and someone mentioned wicket-keeping. I said that I had my old wicket-keeper’s gloves somewhere (and I do too, but these days I couldn’t even begin to think where they might be) and then went on to say things like “I’m thnking of taking up cricket again and keeping wicket”. The girl who was in charge of this game told us to hush as we were disturbing everyone’s concentration. But the important thing was this van. I had a good look underneath it and thought that there was nothing much wrong with this yet they were all talking about breaking it for spares.

It took quite a while to type out all of that as you can imagine, and then I attacked last night’s notes. I’d fallen asleep in the middle of writing it and when I awoke I was too tired to finish them so I went straight to bed. Anyway, they are now all done and dusted. But I think that I’ll probably have to end up rewriting them at some point. They aren’t what I would actually call coherent.

From then on, it was the turn of the radio programme to receive my attention. Yesterday I’d chosen the music for the next three “studio” programmes in the sequence (the “live” ones are done separately). Today I combined them into pairs and added into the first pair for each programme the introductory notes. These are pre-recorded and I either fit them in over the top of a suitable quiet passage near the beginning or else prefix the music with it.

Combining the music in pairs isn’t as easy as it sounds either because you need to choose music that is roughly similar in beat and speed and merge then so that there seems to be a seamless joint. But sometimes it’s much more exciting and challenging, not to mention satisfying, to pair up two completely different tracks and try to make it sound good.

There was the usual pause for lunch, and round about 15:30 when I’d finished the music I went for a walk around the town.

This is the first time, by the way, for I don’t know how long, when I haven’t been seriously looking at computers in FNAC. With its 8GB of RAM and its new 1TB solid-state drive, at long last I have a travelling laptop fast enough to do the kind of work that I want when I’m out and about.

The processor isn’t very quick so it won’t do some things, but to replace it with anything much better, we’re looking at prices in the region of €1200. So that’s a non-starter.

At the Sports Shop I finally found a decent woolly hat to go on my woolly head. A proper insulated hat that will keep my head warm if ever I make it back to the High Arctic, which, at the rate that things are going, is highly unlikely.

In the Dienstestraat I noticed a huge queue of people outside a shop. It reminded me very much of Poland and the Soviet Union in the late 70s and early 80s when I used to travel around there.

However what was happening was that it’s the last week of this particular shop. It’s closing down at the weekend and everything in there is on sale at just €1:00, so people were queueing up there in the hope of finding a bargain.

It wasn’t the kind of thing that would have tempted me to go over and see if there were any. I’m not standing in a queue for ages like that. I had one or two things that I needed to do, like go to Delhaize and buy something to eat for tea otherwise I’m going to be disappointed.

Coming out of Delhaize, I noticed this bistro in the side street. We’ll have to go and visit it once everywhere reopens. It sounds to me like a pretty exciting place.

Back here I had an hour or so editing photos from Greenland 2019. We’re now at Hvalsey inspecting the remains of the Norse church that was the site of the last written record of the Norse in Greenland before the colony disappeared.

Now that I’ve had my tea, and done the washing-up, I listened to my live concert on THE RADIO.

Many years ago I had a sort-of girlfriend whose elder brother had a friend who was a drummer. His group had had a couple of albums but they weren’t ever really successful, but they were a phenomenal live act. I came across the drummer on the internet a few months ago and we started to chat. He sent me some tapes of his group playing live and I made up a live concert out of it.

Even though I say it myself, it came out really well and I was very proud of it. And you can hear it ON SATURDAY EVENING at 21:00 European time, 20:00 UK time, 15:00.

So I’m going to have a quick tidy up and then I’m off to bed. I have an early start tomorrow as I have to be in Brussels by 07:10

Saturday 20th February 2021 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… the waves that are crashing down on the sea wall at the port this afternoon in the gale that was blowing outside this afternoon, I was trying desperately to struggle out of bed.

The two alarms had gone off and I’d even heard the one that I’d set to remind me that the third one is about to go off and give me a three-minute warning to rise.

However I felt myself drifting away and I just about managed to pull myself up out of bed in time to beat it. I didn’t want to miss out on another complete week of beating the third alarm call. It’s not every week these days that I can do it and two complete weeks on the run was is a memorable achievement these days, not to be discarded lightly.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

There wasn’t anything on there but I have a completely vivid memory of watching through a window as two white dolphins were leaping up and down in the water, calling my brother to look but he didn’t have the least interest in coming to see the spectacle.

Now that my magnum opus is done for now, the next task is to continue with the subsequent entries and make sure that they are up to date. And I even managed to do NEXT DAY’S ENTRY.

After a shower, I headed off to the shops to stock up with stuff for the next few days and have a few bits and pieces left over for when I come back from Leuven.

Noz didn’t have very much worthwhile except for a new Sports Bag. I’d been looking for one to take with me to Leuven so I don’t have to struggle with a shopping back to bring back the supplies. Black and yellow too!

At LeClerc, no confrontations or anything like that on the car park this week, and inside there wasn’t anything exciting or interesting or useful on sale this weekend. All in all it was rather boring. There was however 20 cents off soya milk so I bought as much as I could carry away because the sell-by date is a year hence and I can certainly use it.

Such are the highlights of my life these days, hey?

One thing that I had done was to go to the techy bit of the shop to see if they had a travel keyboard that might work with the laptop that I repaired. It was a forlorn hope anyway.

Back here I had a mug of hot chocolate and a slice of my sourdough fruit bread and carried on with my work. However at some point I crashed out – crashed out good and proper too and it was another one of those “feeling really awful” ones from which I seem to take an age to come round.

As a result, lunch was rather late today.

One task that needed doing is to feed the mixtures here – the sourdough and the ginger bug. They both seem to be doing quite well and the ginger beer that I made earlier in the week, after a very slow start, is now fermenting nicely. I’ve been venting the pressure on the ginger beer and the kefir every half-day and at last, this afternoon the beer almost presented me with a gusher.

One more feed of those on Wednesday morning before I head off for Leuven and that will see them right for when I come back.

It was a beautiful afternoon today even with the gale-force winds that were blowing and it had brought out the crowds in force.

I went out dressed for the Arctic temperatures only to find that it was a balmy 14°C – or maybe that should be “barmy” given the fact that we are in the middle of winter. But the crowds down on the beach were enjoying themselves. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen so many people down there at this time of year.

It’s not as if they had a great deal of beach to go at either because the tide hasn’t gone all that far out right now. But there are still quite a few people having a go at the peche à pied, scrabbling around on the rocks.

Having satisfied my curiosity down on the beach I headed off along the footpath on top of the cliffs.

Considering that this is mid-February and there was a howling gale blowing, I couldn’t believe the crowds of people who were out and about. Everyone was jostling everyone else on the footpaths just like on an August Bank Holiday Weekend. The path down by the Gymnase Jean galfione was packed.

Despite how bright and sunny it looked this afternoon, there was quite a haze about. It wasn’t possible to see out as far as Jersey and it was just as bad down the Brittany coast this afternoon. Warm as it might be this afternoon, it wasn’t warm enough to burn away the haze.

Across the lawn and the crowded car park I went down to the headland. Nothing much happening there at the moment so I turned away to walk on down the path.

But just as I moved away I felt the sun come out from out behind a cloud so I turned round. And there was the sun streaming down right into the middle of the bay with another one of these TORA TORA TORA moments.

Having photographed that I pushed on past the waves roaring into the sea wall with quite a force considering how shallow the water is there right now, and had a look over into the chantier navale

There were a couple of guys clambering all over the yacht that’s been in there since time immemorial . And just as I went to take a photo of them, they dodged back down into the cabin.

“Obviously very shy” I mused to myself. It wasn’t my day today.

There were fewer people around here on this side of the headland so, taking my time, I went to see what was going on in the port.

Not many fishing boats out at sea by the looks of things this afternoon. There are plenty of them tied up at their berths. Granville and Victor Hugo, the Channel Island ferries, are there too as you might expect. Apart from a brief flurry of activity in June, they haven’t sailed on a paid voyage for almost a year.

The future is looking quite bleak for the Channel Island ferries right now, and the Joly France ferries to the Ile de Chausey aren’t doing all that much better. I know that I haven’t been out as regularly as I have been in the past, but it’s been a good while since I’ve seen one of those out and about with passengers.

Back here I had a hot coffee and then carried on with the work that I’d been doing and there are now several days’ worth of updates that I’ve completed. I knocked off at about 18:30 to telephone Ingrid for a chat and then went for tea.

Baked potatoes, veg and one of those breaded soya fillets of which I’d bought a large supply from Noz ages ago. And the last of the apple crumble. For the couple of days that I’m here next week, I’ll defrost some slices of apple pie from the freezer.

Having written my notes, I’m not going to be up for very long. That repairing a disk failed – overnight it reached 30% before the repair crashed. But the drive is still recognised so there’s hope for it. There’s a diagnostic tool that I can try to see if I can access the files but it’s very complicated so I need to be at my best to work it to make sure that I don’t make an error.

Friday 19th February 2021 – I WONDER IF ANY …

… of my highly knowledgeable and well-informed readers might have a go at recognising this long-legged bird that I saw down on the beach by the Rue du Nord this afternoon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I am a very keen birdwatcher and have spent a lifetime studying long-legged creatures of that type. But not unfortunately birds of this type.

In the past I have had plenty of lectures on birdwatching, mainly from Nerina, and perhaps I ought to have paid more attention when she was lecturing me. But you can’t teach an old dog new tricks unfortunately, and old dogs don’t come much older than me these days.

So if you have an idea of what it might be, please click on the button down on the bottom right of the screen and send me a message.

Today started off somewhat surprisingly. Not only did I beat the third alarm – and beat it by a country mile too – I actually beat the new alarm that I’ve set in between the second and third alarms. That’s certainly keenness, and I’ve no idea at all where that has come from. It’s not like me of late, is it?

After my medication I mixed up the dough for today’s batch of bread, remembering to add in the sunflower seeds while I was at it, not like last time. Plenty of minerals and vitamins in them, including selenium, of which I may have a deficiency.

When the dough was ready for proofing, I went off and had a listen to the dictaphone. I was driving a bus around last night – a coach, and Lindi Duplessis and her friend Danielle were on board and quite a few other people. For some reason we’d all become separated. I was still on the coach but one or two other people who belonged to us, we could see on the radio that one or two people were wandering around trying to find the right channel to be on to speak to us. We tried to patch them through into our channel so at least they could talk and tell us who they were, and if they were our missing passengers we could direct them back to the coach

Later on there had been a bottle of gin left behind in a taxi. A girl who had travelled in the taxi, something like a girl who stayed with me for a while in Belgium, had left something behind. I’d found something to do with her mobile ‘phone although it wasn’t hers, a memory add-on or something that she was entitled to have. So I bought that, or got it, and got in my taxi and the SatNav brought me all this strange way from Haslington down some side roads that I didn’t know existed and we ended up in the north of Stoke on Trent. It guided me all the way up to her house, a big posh house but with subsidence it was leaning over. I took my things and went round. I was standing by the gate wandering where I went now and suddenly a voice said something to me. I looked and she was down there cutting the hedge. I asked if she had found her mobile phone and she said “no”, which was hopeful so I told her about what I had, the present that I had for her. I gave it to her and we were talking about this bottle of gin. I could see her parents looking at me, wondering what was happening but I didn’t care.

There was more to it than this as well during the night but as you are probably eating your evening meal or something I’ll spare you the gory details. The new computer drives came yesterday in the Post so today’s task, once I’d gathered my wits, was to deal with that.

That involved stripping down the old laptop, taking out the old hard drive and putting in the new one. And then start the initialising, configuration and uploading process. And that took far longer than it ought to have done too.

After a while I was able to identify the reason – one of the buttons on the mouse pad wasn’t working – the left one in fact. In the end I managed to configure an external mouse (despite there being no data on the drive) and then the procedure went so much easier.

That is, until it ground out again. Only half of the keyboard is working. So with the missing mouse button, it sounds like the data ribbon has become detached at one end or else a pin has broken off on the motherboard. I’ve checked the data ribbon as far as I can but this is going to end up being a dismantling job.

But at least, it’s working about 10 times quicker than it ever did when it was new and so now I’m sold on the idea of Solid State Drives. I’ve been checking to see what else I have in the way of laptops where the hard disk is easily accessible.

We had the usual pause for mid-morning hot chocolate and sourdough fruit bread, and then I gave the bread dough, which had risen tremendously, a second going over, shaped it, and put it in the mould before resuming my attack on the laptop.

Round about midday I broke off work to put the bread in the oven and there it cooked for a good 70 minutes.

And when it came out, it was done to perfection. I had a couple of slices with my lunch and I can safely say that it’s the best loaf that I’ve ever made. I’ll do more like this one.

Another hour on the laptop and I called it a day after that. It’s up and running, working well, has an anti-virus on it and a real web browser. On the internet I’ve found a new-old-stock keyboard for the laptop at a decent price and I’m engaged in consultation with the suppliers about the perils and pitfalls of fitting it.

But there’s another job that’s actually finished after all of the time that I’ve spent doing it. Yes, the page for the visit to Oradour-sur-Glane and the Chateau de Chalus HAS FINALLY STAGGERED INTO THE DAYLIGHT.

There are bound to be a few more corrections needed but I’ll go through it all again some other time. I’m just pleased that I’ve finished and can push on with other things. It’s been a while since I’ve done a Magnum Opus like this

And not forgetting our afternoon walk either. I managed that today too.

Although I didn’t go very far before I had the camera out. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the windowsill on the first floor of the building where the seagulls sit – possibly because of the artificial seagull on the interior. There was another seagull there talking to the imitation one.

But there were other things to do too. We’ve seen the long-legged bird on the beach and from there I headed off along the path.

Nothing happening out at sea and nothing in the bay either. The clouds were such that there wasn’t even any sun reflecting off the sea.

Le Loup was looking all lonely this afternoon too.

The light on its pillar on top of the rock just outside the harbour entrance is still surrounded by water right now but the tide is well on its way out. And the grey dismal background round by Jullouville didn’t make things look any better. It was a miserable, grey day outside even if it was quite warm.

But if you look on the crest of the hill in the background just to the right of Le Loup there’s an interesting vertical structure there. And over to the left there’s an interesting circular stone tower. One of these days I’ll go for a drive out that way and make further enquiries.

As I was on my way back I had a look over to the port to see if there was anything but instead, I happened to glance at what might possibly be a kite surfer.

It’s difficult to say where he or she actually is. Probably on the Plage d’Hacqueville behind that lump of rock – that’s my best guess.

Anyway, I came on back home to my coffee and to carry on to finish my web page. While I was at it, I tried to resurrect the old hard drive out of the laptop that I’ve been fixing, but that’s going to be a long-term piece of work. But while I was at it and I had my equipment out, I had a play with the other external drive that failed back in 2013.

With a bit of jiggery and rather a lot of pokery, I’ve now managed to make it fire up without stalling the machine, which was what was happening when I plugged it in before. It’s currently doing a repair but in 6 hours it’s managed about 15%. This is going to be another long job so I might leave the machine running overnight while it does its best to carry on.

There was the hour’s guitar practice and then just as I was going for tea, Rosemary rang. One hour and ten minutes later I started to cook. In a hurry I had pasta and veg with bulghour in a vegan cheese sauce. followed by apple crumble

So now, later than intended and with nothing like as much done as I intended, I’m off to bed. Shopping tomorrow, but I don’t need all that much. I wonder what catastrophe awaits me this weekend.

Monday 8th February 2021 – I GIVE UP!

Never mind the third alarm. When the first alarm went off at 06:00 I was already at my desk working. And by the time that the 3rd alarm went off I was already working on the radio programme for this morning.

It wasn’t as if I’d gone to bed particularly early either. But judging by how much I was tossing and turning during the night, I didn’t have much sleep at all and by the time that 05:40 came round I gave up trying to sleep and decided that I may as well take advantage and make a really early start.

And by the time that lunchtime came round I had finished the programme, from start to finish too.

There had been the usual interruption for hot chocolate and sourdough fruitcake, and not only that, I had to deal with a couple of outstanding issues involving the radio. So in effect, I could have been finished earlier than I did.

After lunch I had some more radio work that needed attention. A radio programme was missed 2 weeks ago because the transmitter was down and they rebroadcast the programme 2 weeks later. That meant I had to shuffle the next set of programmes around, re-index them and move one or two so hat the sequence is maintained and I don’t end up out of order.

That took longer than it ought to have done, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that I … errr … dozed off twice during the afternoon. And that’s not a surprise, considering how the night had gone.

There was, of course the afternoon walk and I didn’t go very far before I took the first photograph.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve been watching them replacing the tiles on the roof of the College Malrauxx over the last few months, and then last week we saw then moving the scaffolding round to the side.

Now, we can see that the roofers have made it round to that side and are busy stripping off the tiles from there and replacing the waterproof membrane and the laths.

And the guys up there on the roof – I don’t envy them one little minute. There’s quite a gale blowing outside and threatening rain too. It’s quite rough down here on the ground – up there it must be very much worse.

The only people whom I saw out there was just one jogger struggling against the gale. There was a trawler out there too, coming back into port from a day out at sea.

The trawlers are back out there working, as we saw the other day as we watched them going out of port. It seems that an agreement has been reached with Jersey about fishing rights in the Bay of Granville.

And that’s no surprise. Not just me but I think that everyone else was of the opinion that once the ports started to turn away the Channel Island boats, it wouldn’t take long for Jersey to surrender and to issue the permits. It’s just a shame that naked greed and self-interest has led us to a situation like this.

The footpath was mostly dry so I had a comfortable walk around the headland to the viewpoint overlooking the chantier navale.

There’s some excitement down there this afternoon. There’s some kind of canvas cover over part of the hull of the yacht that’s been there since the dawn of time and there were a few people on the deck looking as if they were doing some work.

I’ve no idea what work it is that they are doing but the cover is quite suggestive of painting, although it’s not really the weather in which I would like to be doing any painting.

We’d seen a trawler out there at sea heading into port, and there were already a couple of them that had arrived earlier and were unloading at the fish processing plant.

As I watched, one of them, L’Arc En Ciel – “Rainbow” – pulled away from the quayside and headed off to moor in the inner harbour.

By now it was raining fairly heavily so I headed off back home to my apartment. A nice hot coffee would be just the thing to warm me up, and having drunk that I spent the rest of the afternoon with the Greenland photos from 1907. One of them needed identifying so I asked one of my friends from THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR and Adventure Canada who helped me out with the identification.

It was a strange session on the guitars this evening. The bass-playing part of it was really enjoyable and it’s definitely improving. I was adding in a lot more intricate stuff at the same time as I was singing, so my co-ordination is improving, I reckon.

But for some unknown reason I couldn’t get to grips with the acoustic guitar and seemed to have a couple of handfuls of thumbs this evening and my voice was off as well.

Tea was a stuffed pepper followed by rice pudding and it was all quite nice. Tomorrow I’m going to have a burger in a bap, I reckon seeing as there’s just one bap left. I can buy some more on Thursday and if I’m lucky, there might even be room in the freezer.

Before I go to bed now I’m going to have another half-hour on the photos. I’m just about to set foot on dry land on Cape Farewell in Greenland. Not much further to go on this leg of the voyage before I head off to Western North America.

Friday 5th February 2021 – I’M NOT GOING …

… to tell you about what time I awoke this morning.

Just let me say that I would have been dismayed if I had awoken at this time on a Sunday, never mind a day when I’m supposed to be working.

What was even worse was that I’d made every effort to have an early start, even down to going to bed as early as 22:30. But it just didn’t seem to work. However, it did mean that there was plenty of time to go walkabout during the night. And that I most certainly did.

I was having to go to Court for something or other and a friendly accountant said that he had come to help me so we arranged to meet at 17:30 in a local pub. Some solicitor said that he would help me first as well. I was talking to the solicitor and we arranged that he would come round and photograph all of my cars to prove that I was just driving around in old bangers “as long as you don’t photograph the fact that not a single one is taxed” because things really were tough and all these vehicles that I had weren’t taxed. Nerina and I were doing some cleaning or tidying up and I had sat down for a breather and in walked this accountant. I’d completely forgotten about him. He’d brought a pile of forms from the Musicians Union – apparently to be a musician you needed a licence and it cost £55,000. Of course there was no chance whatever of me paying that. He started to ask me questions all about the group – what songs did we play? Where did we practise? How often did we perform? He gave me a huge list of songs “do you play any of these?”. I made some facetious remark “these must be the only members of the Musicians Union then, the groups in this list”. All the time Nerina was wandering around – we were in the Rockwood in Alton Street by the way at the time and I’m sure that she was totally bewildered as to who this guy was and what I was doing and why I wasn’t helping with the tidying up or anything. This conversation continued more on the lines of filling in these Musicians Union forms than any help that he was going to give me for the issues that I was having.

Later on I’d gone to meet TOTGA – she was working for another taxi company in Crewe but in the old Up The Junction building. I went into her office but she was actually downstairs and I could hear all of the talk that was going on through the radio monitor. They were talking about all the financial affairs of the company going wrong. Basically they had committed to buy a new fleet of taxis right at the time of the Miners Strike when there wasn’t much money circulating around and people in Aberystwyth who had undertaken to buy the previous taxis let them down. I ended up talking to a guy who had been a driver for me, a young guy. He’d written a book and was going through the book with me telling me all the issues that this taxi company was having. The boss of the company came up. he came up with Derek Guyler who had been some kind of office manager. Guyler was arguing for a pay rise for the drivers and a taxi to take the kids to school. The guy running it was extremely angry and laying into Guyler verbally about all kinds of stuff so I thought that this was the moment to leave before he turned on me. I went downstairs but lost my way and ended up in the basement. I had to climb out through a window onto the track. There were 2 boys who were very keen to find out what I’d been doing so I explained and they wandered off in their direction and I wandered off in mine.

Later still we were all off to Blackpool or some seaside resort – it wasn’t Blackpool. I was with an old couple and we rented a room and another small room for me. She cooked a meal which was disgusting but I ate some but not all of it. They went off to buy some tickets for a performance but I stayed behind to try to clean up everywhere because it was really dirty. I was doing fine and I had my 3 cats there. A little girl came in to give me a hand. We were laughing and joking and I had a close look at her – she was a lot older than she ought to be, a bit like a Jimmy Clitheroe kind of character. We were laughing and joking while I was cleaning this up. Then my partner turned up – I can’t remember if it was Cécile or Nerina. A while before this I’d been talking to a guy who was a bit of a singer – we’d been in a club somewhere preparing things for a concert and he was telling me about his stage performances. I thought “yes, well I’ve heard all this before”. When this couple came back they brought piles of people with them, all an extended family. My partner was there. We all had to go outside because this guy was going to give a concert. We all had to wait and we waited for hours. In the end they brought up some vehicles so that we could sit in these vehicles, American-type minibus things. He came out eventually and announced that he didn’t have a licence for the concert to take place on this particular stage so he was only allowed 2 minutes. In this 2 minutes he just told us about his future concerts and his career. I thought “yes, well, I’ve heard all of this before” and I wasn’t particularly impressed.

So welcome back to TOTGA who has been conspicuous by her absence for the last few weeks or so.

As you can imagine, with this really late start and all of this to type out, there wasn’t any time to do anything else before lunch. But there was still something to do – a friend of mine who is the “panicky” type has just learnt that her boyfriend has come down with Covid. She’s panicking about this so it’s been necessary to do something about it.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had another good friend who went down with Covid along with her husband and son, although her daughter who shares the same facilities didn’t, and the infected ones all made a good recovery. I spent some time putting the two of them in touch with each other so that the one can reassure the other.

After lunch (more of my leek and potato soup with home-made bread) I caught up with a pile of correspondence. I’ve had a pile of e-mails hanging round here that needed answering and it was the plan to deal with them today and I really can’t postpone them any longer. And a couple were extremely lengthy too.

As well as that, two other issues reared their heads.

Firstly, Canada has closed its borders to cruise ships of over 100 passengers until Spring 2022. I’d been offered a place on an expedition for this Summer but I hadn’t said anything much about it because I thought it most unlikely that it will travel this year. And now, of course, I’m proved right – although it really was an odds-on certainty, this. I imagine that the cancelled people from 2020 and now 2021 will be offered first dibs at the voyage for 2022 so I wrote to the organisers to stake my claim for 2023, along with the necessary information. I’ll get to Axel Heiberg Island yet!

Secondly, I’ve sold another one of my photos. I used to sell a lot of them at one time and even had one on the front cover of an issue of “Now Toronto” 20 or so years ago but I’m being pushed further and further down the rankings by the more established agencies. The last one that I sold was of THE MEMORIAL TO GEORGE CARTWRIGHT 6 or so months ago which is used as a still IN A FILM.

This photo that has been bought today is of AN OLD COMMUNITY ON THE “FORGOTTEN COAST” OF QUEBEC.

In case anyone thinks that I’m blowing my own trumpet unnecessarily, I’m under no illusions. It’s not the quality of the images that is the selling point – it’s the fact that I’ve been to places where few other people have been and that my photos are easy to find.

And when they are found, they have my contact details on them. I’m very particular about that.

That all took me up to my afternoon walk

It was a really beautiful afternoon – it really was, and you can see from this photo of the rock just offshore here that there were a number of people enjoying it.

Not humans because, surprisingly there were very few taking advantage of the warm, sunny Spring-like day that we had today. I was dressed up for midwinter yet I could quite comfortably have gone round in my shirt sleeves had I so desired.

There was very little wind too and at long last the paths had dried out sufficiently so that in most places you could walk around without too much discomfort and mud.

Just now I did say that there were no humans out and about in the lovely weather. That’s not particularly accurate because there was someone out there offshore in his cabin cruiser having a little swan around.

He swanned off and so did I, because there wasn’t anything of any importance or note happening anywhere else.

However I did bump into the guy who organises the radio and we had quite a chat about this and that and a couple of little projects, one of which was particularly appealing to me because it involves one of my favourite musicians.

Back here I managed to drink my coffee without falling asleep, and I attacked the photos from Greenland in July 2019. I really must push on with those as much as I can.

Guitar practice was interesting because I found a better way to play the bass line to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Down on the Corner” and with the acoustic guitar I worked out the chords to Tom Petty’s “Too Good To Be True” that I am keen to add to my little repertoire.

Tea was veggie balls with pasta and veg followed by apple pie and now having written my notes, I’m going to go to bed. “Must do better” is the phrase that comes to mind, although I wish I knew how. It’s all very well having some kind of problem and knowing that you have some kind of problem but when you don’t know what it is, it’s rather difficult to deal with it.

Thursday 4th February 2021 – HAVING WAXED SO LYRICALLY …

… at great length about the epicurean delicacies for my meals yesterday, today’s evening meal was a much more plebeian beans and chips with a burger on the side.

For some unknown reason, I had a fancy for baked beans for tea – maybe my subconscious is telling me that I should have a bubble-bath tomorrow – and in the absence of anything else to go with it, I settled on chips, in order to dispose of some really old potatoes, and a burger out of the stock in the fridge.

Making chips here is not too easy because I don’t have – and I don’t want – a deep-fat fryer but my niece Rachel who is a Tupperware senior manager let me have an incredible heavy-duty thing that fries in a microwave. It’s something that I haven’t used much because actually it’s too big to rotate in my microwave oven, but I worked out that if I take out the turntable and put a ramekin dish in there upside-down to cover over the pivot (I’m nothing if not inventive), I can put the Tupperware thing in on top of the ramekin dish and it just about fits in.

It doesn’t rotate but you can’t have everything and while the results are not spectacular, it does what it’s supposed to do.

Talking of things doing what they are supposed to do, I didn’t exactly beat the third alarm clock to my feet today. Mind you, it was a close-run thing, as the Duke of Wellington said after the Battle of Waterloo, because by the time that the alarm stopped ringing, I was actually on my feet.

Only just, it has to be said, and it took the room a good few minutes to stop spinning round so that I could join in, but there I was.

After the medication I did a few bits and pieces and then had a shower ready to hit the streets.

All over town there have been all kinds of things springing up about Carnaval, the event that occurs here OVER THE MARDI GRAS WEEKEND.

No Carnaval this year, for obvious reasons, but there are still a few displays all over the town featuring what might have been on the carnival floats had they been permitted to parade, and we saw THE COW AND PENGUINS when we returned from Leuven the other day.

What is on this sign is a timeline that records the successful application for Carnaval to be registered as a UNESCO World Heritage site. After all of the preparatory work, a formal application was made in January 2014 and approval was given in November 2016.

It’s one of the claims to fame of the town and one of the reasons why I chose this place to come and spend my final years after I was released from hospital in 2017. There’s almost always something interesting and exciting going on here

Further on down the road I noticed that all of the trawlers were lined up at the harbour gates.

It’s the moment for the harbour gates to open (and indeed, they did open as I was watching) and all of the fishing boats in the harbour streamed out line astern into the open sea. Fishing seems to be back on the agenda for the moment, although for how long I don’t know with the Silly Brits threatening to revoke the agreement if they don’t get what they want, like the bunch of spoilt little brats they are.

But I mustn’t let myself become bogged down in politics, must I? I promised that I wouldn’t do that.

And we have a visitor in the harbour this morning too. Normandy Trader sneaked in on the evening tide and here she is, loading up in order to leave the harbour on the tide.

And I know now why she goes over to St Malo at times on her voyages over here. It’s to do with the shellfish that she brings from the Jersey Seafood Co-operative. They have to be unloaded at a port where there is a Health Inspector to give them a health check, and there isn’t one here at the moment.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there’s talk of having a full Customs Post here in Granville for the port and the airport, but as yet, it doesn’t seem to be in place.

At the Post Office I sent off my application for the Securité Sociale and we’ll see how that evolves. I have been more hopeful about other things, but if you don’t apply, you don’t get, do you?

LIDL wasn’t anything to write home about. There wasn’t anything at all of any interest on special offer today so I just bought a few things there and headed back home again.

They had been busy while I’d been away.

A trench has been dug right across the road at the corner of the Rue Lecampion and the Rue Paul Poirier and as I watched, and the traffic waited, a digger picked up a huge sheet of metal to use as a bridge for the traffic to cross.

Down at the far end of the Rue Paul Poirier I fell in with the friendly neighbourhood itinerant and we had a nice long chat for about 15 minutes about nothing much at all, and then I hurried on home in case my frozen peas were to thaw out

Clutching a slice of my delicious sourdough fruit bread and a mug of hot chocolate I came in here and sat down, and made a start on transcribing the remaining dictaphone notes. And there was so much to transcribe that it took me right up until afternoon walkies.

Yesterday’s notes ARE NOW ONLINE, all of them. And by that I DO mean “all”, because there were miles and miles of them. I must have had a really bad night.

Then I could turn my attention to today’s notes. A few prisoners had escaped from a prison and they were being pursued across this building site. 1 had been caught but the other 2 had got away, not without a great deal of difficulty. 1 of them, who reminded me of Kenneth Williams, was almost crushed by a railway locomotive as he ran across the shunting track. The locomotive pinned him up against another one and damaged his hip but he still struggled on. 2 of them ran down the east end of London and ended up in an old derelict market hall type of place that was now a café. The healthy 1 was well ahead and ran into this place. The other 1 running behind him was immediately stuck in some kind of ante-room where there were loads of kids hanging around sitting there drinking coffee. It turned out to be some kind of teenagers’ quiet coffee bar where they could go and watch TV and sit, run by the Church. They showed soap operas there on the TV and this was where the 2 men were going to lay low for a day or 2 where they could get coffee and sleep for a while until they worked out their next move.

Later on I was on a walking tour of Eastern Europe with someone and an old Morris MO went past. I went to grab hold of my camera but I suddenly realised that I didn’t have it with me. I thought “where had I left that?”. I had to wrack my brains all the way back to the start of the day at the hotel and I couldn’t remember having it with me at all during any part of the day. Had I left it at the hotel? Had I put it down when we stopped for a breather and not picked it up? Or had I lost it the day before? I didn’t really know so I had to retrace all of my steps. Obviously the other guy wasn’t all that interested in coming back with me. He preferred to sit and wait which I suppose was the correct kind of thing so off I set. I walked through this small town where a boy was kicking a ball up into the air and then getting underneath to head it as it came down. I carried on walking back to the hotel that was miles away, trying to look on the way back to see if my camera was anywhere

And I bet that you are just as intrigued as I am to know why I seem to be having all of these camera issues during my nocturnal voyages just lately. Who is trying to tell me what?

There was a break of course for lunch – more of my delicious leek and potato soup with home-made bread (there were still some epicurean delights during the day) and then when I’d finished my dictaphone notes I went out for my walk.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have been following the progress of the roofing job that’s being undertaken at the College Malraux across the car park from here.

The scaffolding has been slowly advancing ahead of the work, as they take it from a finished part behind them and erect it in front at a place that has yet to receive attention. Today, they have dismantled some more from the side and are now erecting it at the end of the building here.

As we suspected right at the very beginning, this is going to be a very long job and they will be here for a while yet.

The paths had dried out considerably and there wasn’t much water left to block my path. But there wasn’t anything much to see anywhere. All the fishing boats were way out of sight and Normandy Trader had long-since left port.

But earlier on in the day I’d seen a photo of the Cale de Radoub – the old dry dock here in the harbour.

Completed in 1888 it was used as a dry dock to repair the old wooden fishing boats that went out to the Grand Banks to bring in the cod and the photo that I saw was actually of a boat being repaired in there, but it’s been out of use since 1978 and has fallen into decay.

It was declared a Historic Monument on 28th March 2008 and every now and again there’s talk of recommissioning it, but the cost of restoring it to full working order has frightened off the town council.

Back here I had a phone call to make. I had a letter from the hospital arranging my next series of appointments … for Wednesdays, despite what the doctor told me. So I had to ring them back and change them all over again to a Thursday.

When I had returned I’d made myself a coffee but by the time I came to drink it, it was cold. Not simply due to the fact that I’d been on the telephone, but also due to the fact that I’d crashed out yet again.

For the rest of the afternoon, such as it was, I made progress on my little report about Oradour sur Glane.

There was guitar practice of course which for some reason I didn’t enjoy, and then tea which I have already mentioned.

Bedtime now, and a full day at home with (hopefully) no interruptions and I can press on.

Ever the optimist, aren’t I?

EPIC HALL

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

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Thursday 25th March 2021 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

Wednesday 24th March 2021 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

Tuesday 23rd March 2021 – WE’VE BEEN HAVING …

Sunday 21st March 2021 – I WAS RIGHT …

Friday 19th March 2021 – AFTER ALL OF THE …

Monday 15th March 2021 – I’VE HAD A …

Saturday 13th March 2021 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

Wednesday 10th March 2021 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

Sunday 7th March 2021 – AFTER I’D FINISHED …

Friday 26th February 2021 – IT SEEMS TO BE …

Saturday 20th February 2021 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

Friday 19th February 2021 – I WONDER IF ANY …

Monday 8th February 2021 – I GIVE UP!

Friday 5th February 2021 – I’M NOT GOING …

Thursday 4th February 2021 – HAVING WAXED SO LYRICALLY …

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