Tag Archives: lie in

Saturday 26th December 2020 – I’M HAVING …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday 25th December 2020 – I HOPE THAT YOU …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday 22nd December 2020 – IF ANYONE THINKS …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday 18th December 2020 – AS YOU PROBABLY …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After lunch, I had a look at the kefir.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday 6th December 2020 – JUST FOR …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday 4th December 2020 – JUST FOR A …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Straight from the sea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday 1st December 2020 – I HAVEN’T …

… had a very good day today. Not at all.

In fact I haven’t done anything at all that was productive and even managed to pile up another load of arrears, like today’s dictaphone notes which I have yet to check, never mind transcribe.

Mind you, if I don’t awaken until 08:30, what was I expecting? After doing so well on Monday morning too. It’s enough to fill anyone with dismay.

So once I finally managed to sort myself out this morning, I had to crack on with my Welsh preparation and revision and that took me straight up to the start of class without any time to think about anything else.

And there, we overran. And not just by 5 minutes too. So that put a brake on a few more things that I needed to do.

After a very late lunch, I had an urgent phone call to make. This was, well, not a matter of life and death, but pretty darn close as there’s a deadline for this and I couldn’t afford to let it slip. I knew that it involved a long and complicated matter and would take some time so after lunch I made the ‘phone call.

As I said, I knew that it would take quite a while but what I wasn’t prepared for was the length of time for which I had to wait for my call to be answered. I was queued for hours and I couldn’t let my place go by hanging up and ringing back again.

Eventually my call was answered and while the situation is, shall we say, “disappointing”, it’s not the end of the world by any means. And had I had a decent life expectancy instead of this couple of years that I have left, I would have won out by it anyway. So “spend spend spend” has been put on hold for a little while longer and with a little less money.

Had I rung up yesterday it would have been a little better, but had I left it another 4 weeks it would have been much worse.

By now it was long after walkies time but that wasn’t going to prevent me from going out. I took to the streets.

There were several people wandering around outside, the workmen were still on the roof of the College Malraux and there was plenty of activity out at sea with several of the fishing boats in the Strait between the Pointe du Roc and the Ile de Chausey, as well as a larger boat way out to sea that despite what I tried, I couldn’t identify.

It’s not been this busy out at sea for quite a while, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. maybe the fog of yesterday kept them all in port.

The brats weren’t out there orienteering tonight, which is hardly a surprise in view of the time so I walked on across the lawn, undisturbed, to the headland to look out across the Baie de Mont St Michel to the Brittany coast.

And you can tell just how late it is this afternoon by how low the sun is in the sky. We’ve been out at 22:00 in summer and it’s been higher than this. But we are now in December (only just) and there’s merely three weeks to go before the days start to lengthen again so I suppose we can expect this.

But it really did look beautiful out there in the Bay this afternoon with the sun behind the clouds. A nice red sky too. Probably because St Malo is on fire or something like that, I suppose.

Over the last few days or so the wind has died down considerably, although it was blowing quite hard last night.

Not a raging storm like the kind that we have had so often, so I was really surprised to see a heavy, rolling sea out there this afternoon with the waves coming in with some force against the harbour wall, especially with the tide well out.

There must have been a storm blowing quite strongly out at sea somewhere, I reckon. There’s nothing out at sea to the west of us except the open Atlantic and then the North American coast so the waves can reach quite a speed if they are whipped up by a storm out there somewhere, with nothing to break their flow.

We mentioned fishing just now … “well, one of us did” – ed … and you can see what I mean about the boats being out today.

They are still out there where we saw them earlier but there are quite a few that have already come in and are busy unloading at the fish processing plant. All of the vans are there to take away the catch for the local market and there’s a refrigerated lorry that’s there to take the produce to the main wholesale market, presumably in Paris.

But see what I mean about how late it is? The street lights are on and reflecting off the water. That wasn’t what I was hoping for today. Not at all.

Back here I just about had time for a coffee and then it was guitar practice time for an hour. And being all adrift as I was, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I have been doing which was a shame.

Tea was more of my fresh cauliflower with vegan cheese sauce and veggie balls followed by apple pie, which all told was a really delicious tea.

Just as I was about to go out for my evening run, Rosemary rang for a chat with some good news. And by the time we finished chatting, it was 2 hours and 40 minutes later. So I could forget going out.

So no evening run, no dictaphone notes, no baking a cake, no catching up of any arrears. All in all, what a disappointing day. And to make matters worse it’s now almost 01:00 so I’m going to have another bad day tomorrow and the internet seems to be down right now.

It’s just not my day, is it?

Sunday 29th November 2020 – JUST BY WAY …

… of a change, I’ve been working today.

Yes, even though Sunday is a Day Of Rest around here, it became a necessity when I failed to show a leg this morning until about 11:30. By then it was way, way too late to start off the sourdough (you’ve really no idea just how long this process takes) mix and as I have no bread in the house and shall be needing some for Monday lunchtime, I’ll have to swap my hours around a little.

Plenty of time in bed therefore to go off on a whole series of nocturnal rambles but not having had time to transcribe them, you’ll need to check back in here in a couple of days to find out where I went. I’m curious to know too.

So after a rather desultory start while I pulled myself together I made myself a mug of hot chocolate and with a slice of my chocolate cake, sat down and chose the music for the next radio programme. And then I had to edit it, remix it all, reformat some of it and then combine them all in pairs.

What didn’t help matter is in this respect was that I had “computer issues”. One of the files that needed reformatting was a *.mkv file and is regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it makes my window explorer “hang”.

In the end I had to save all of my work (which is not easy with a dozen different programs and “alt-tab” doesn’t work) and then reboot the computer.

Finally I made a start on writing the text notes.

It’s not a lot for an afternoon’s work but it will save me a couple of hours in the morning while I deal with the bread and make a pie for pudding.

of course, there was a break in mid-afternoon for my usual walk around the headland.

The weather was really nice outside and the sea fog that had been lingering around on and off had lifted slightly. In fact there was a view farther down the coat today as far as Hauteville-sur-Mer. Although there wasn’t much that you could see beyond there.

There were a few people wandering around there this afternoon too, and not all of them wearing their face masks despite the Préfet having announced that the compulsory wearing of facemasks has been extended to 21st January next year.

While I was looking out to sea, I’d seen a fishing boat approaching from the direction of the Ile de Chausey so I walked on up to the headland of the Pointe du Roc to intercept it.

And I’m glad that I waited until then to take a photo because I managed to catch it in company with a pleasure launch that was heading out to sea. It made quite a good photograph, the two of them combining like that.

But that was all that I could see going on out there today. The rest of the sea was quite quiet today. And so I wandered off around the footpath to the chantier navale to see what was going on.

Having seen a few different boats on the fringes of the chantier navale just recently, I was wondering whether there might be another new arrival today.

No boats today, unfortunately, but nevertheless I’d swap all of them for this gorgeous machine. A Van Hool-bodied coach of what looks like the early 1960s, but as for what chassis it might be, I couldn’t see. It’s a beautiful machine of course although it’s not really comparable with the Volvo-engined Van Hool Alizées that I drove for years all round Europe.

According to the nameplate, it’s owned by a local bus company so I can always make enquiries. But I’m more interested right now in knowing why I cut off the rear of the coach. That isn’t like me at all.

And the coach? it’s a Fiat 314 of 1965 – one of the earliest of the integrals.

Having satiated my interest at the chantier navale, I had a look around to see what else was going on.

That small fishing boat that I had seen just now wasn’t the only one that was about. There was another one that had arrived earlier in port with a huge load of shellfish. They were busily being unloaded by the crane on the trailer on the back of the tractor and the crane on the stern of the boat.

Being loaded onto the tractor and trailer, I wouldn’t have thought that they were destined for the public market in one of the big cities. It’s more likely to be one of the local shopkeepers who harvests his own stock of crustaceans.

One of the things that I wanted to do was to check on a boat that I understand was moored in the harbour.

We can see Aztec Lady in this photograph here but behind her is a boat called Anakena. There was a brief mention of her in the local newspaper over the weekend but I wasn’t able to read the full article.

From what I read, I understand that she was en route for the Far North to spend the winter out there and the family on board had even gone as far as to register their kids in the French “distance learning” programme.

However the confinement due to Covid has seemed to have trapped them in the harbour and they are unable to leave for their destination.

Back here I continued on somewhat with my notes for the radio programme, but even managed to fit in a quick 15 minutes on the guitar – the electric 6-string too.

Earlier on during the day I’d taken out the last pizza dough from the freezer and it had been thawing out in the living room. I rolled it out and put it in the pizza tray and left it to rise for an hour or so.

When it was ready, I assembled my pizza and put it into the oven to cook. And while this was going on, I made the sourdough.

having found that 400 grammes was not sufficient last week I used 500 grammes of flour and adjusted the quantities accordingly, and when it has settled in, I tipped it out and began to knead it. And now that I know what I’m doing with the sourdough, I could feel when it “turned” and it ended up really nice and smooth.

Halfway through the mix, I realised that I’d forgotten the sunflower seeds so I had to add them in. And it all turned out quite nicely. It’s now sitting in a bowl quietly festering where it’ll stay all through the night, and it’ll have its second kneading tomorrow morning.

By now my pizza was ready and I attacked it with gusto. It had turned out really nicely too and I do like how the edges, where I roll them over, swell up quite nicely as they do.

No pudding tonight, firstly because I don’t have anything and secondly I’m rather full. These pizzas are very filling.

And so running rather late yet again, I set off for my evening walk and runs. No-one about at all so i could run around for as much as I liked. And I quite enjoyed that idea too because for some reason tonight, I was able to go around without really putting any effort into it.

It’s true that I was often out of breath but that’s normal these days. I didn’t feel as if I’d been stretched in any way. And doesn’t that sound revolting?

By the time I ended up walking around the walls, the fog that had kept away for most of the day was rolling in rapidly and there were wisps of it now blowing across the harbour.

It was a beautiful night though. The sky was clear and there was a cold breeze blowing but for some reason it was quite nice to be out there.

But it didn’t look as if many people would agree with me. There was no-one else out for a walk tonight, and the fish processing plant was all closed up and in darkness, indicating that none of the bigger trawlers are expected to come in on the next tide with a catch.

From there I ran on home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow I have my radio programme to finish of course, but early on I have the sourdough bread and a pudding to make. I’m going to be busy tomorrow so I need an early night. I’m not sure that I’m going to get one though.

Wednesday 25th November 2020 – THIS IS NO …

… good at all.

Never mind the three alarms this morning. I didn’t wake up until about 10:00.

This is a really sad situation to be in. But then, it’s probably my own fault. I was distracted after finishing off my notes and didn’t go to bed until 01:30. And so I was thinking that I would be lucky to be up at 06:15. Even so, I didn’t think that it would be this late and waste half a day.

Plenty of time to go on a walkabout during the night too.

By now things were advancing with TOTGA and we were definitely a couple. She was definitely living in Gainsborough Road with me. She had brought her animals with her, a couple of cats and a couple of dogs. The cats were very stand-offish as far as I was concerned. One night she went to bed and I had a few things to do so I stayed up. I was wondering about going to bed, and I thought “no, I have a few things to do and I can make the most of it doing them while it’s quiet”. We’d done a furniture removal and we could have removed all of the stuff out of my house with this van but it didn’t quite work out like that with people not being able to keep to a timetable and likely to run off or something like that. I ended up having to take the van back without moving my stuff but I’d removed the other person’s. It was 01:00 or 02:00 and I didn’t feel particularly like going to sleep so I’d done some some more stuff. But I’d made a mistake. I went to press the button on something but ended up pressing the doorbell and thought “God, I’ve awoken everyone in the apartment building now”. I carried on doing what I was doing. For some unknown reason a heavy lorry started up and drove away. I thought “I’m glad that’s not me waking the neighbourhood even more”. Then TOTGA came down and asked “are you going to come to bed or what?”. I had a little laugh and smile to myself and off I went upstairs. She’d changed all of the bedding in the bedroom so I made a remark about it. There was no room for me in the bed because of all these dogs and cats fighting their way around. Suddenly the alarm went off. I looked and it was only 05:00 instead of 07:00. I couldn’t remember how to switch off the alarm. In the end she had to come and do it for me and it was all. That was all very well – I’d lived in this place and she’d only been here half an hour, something like that. I went to get into bed and some of her cats were all curled up with my cats and it all looked like one big happy family until I got into bed when hers started to move. I thought “that’s just typical, isn’t it? It’ll take them a while to get used to me”.

So it wasn’t all bad then during the night. Not ‘arf it wasn’t.

First thing this morning (or what was left of the morning, should I say) was to make the booking for my trip to Leuven. And that’s not going to happen now either. All of the train across the border are cancelled and there’s just the repatriation trains. The one out is on Sunday and costs €155, which costs more than I usually pay for a return ticket. The one back is on Friday but I didn’t even check that.

In theory I suppose that I could drive there in Caliburn but it’s a long way and a lot of organisation so in the end I decided not to go.

They weren’t impressed when I rang them up to tell them but the way I see it, it was fine for them to annul my 4-weekly appointments for 9 months when it suited them so there’s no reason why I can’t annul a 4-weekly appointment for 4 weeks.

Time for hot chocolate and chocolate cake and then I could press on with work. And I’ve been doing another load of stuff of the arrears for my trip to Central Europe in the summer.

There were the usual interruptions during the day. Firstly of course there was lunch. And I do like my sourdough bread. I’m pleased with how it’s turned out although the shape leaves something to be desired. I need it to be taller and not as wide. But it’s no big worry – it’s all about learning as you go along and I’m doing plenty of that.

There was also the pause this afternoon to go for my walk around the headland

It’s Wednesday of course so no brats out playing or orienteering this afternoon on the field at the back of the sports ground of the school. I can therefore take a photograph of the lawn and also of one of the bunkers of the old Atlantic Wall that are dotted about here.

That’s the one that they opened up about 18 months ago and about which there is some talk of transforming into a museum of the Atlantic Wall and, presumably, of the Resistance Fighters here.

Whether it will ever be a project that gets off the ground remains to be seen of course

With nothing else of very great importance going on I walked on around the headland and then ran all the way down the path (seeing as there was no-one about) to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour.

And it looks as if there is going to be a change of occupant in the chantier navale today. We have one of the little inshore seafood harvesting boats being winched up out of the sea by the portable boat lift.

You can see that it’s only just come up out of the sea, with all of the water that’s dripping off it. And yet there’s a van parked by it and workmen who look as if they are inspecting something on the port side. So maybe it’s been in a collision with a rock or a mermaid or something.

And that reminds me. A short while ago I asked one of the local fishermen if he knew the ideal vital statistics of a mermaid. He replied “36 – 24 – €9:99 per kilo”

And that’s not all of the excitement going on down there this afternoon either.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I mentioned the other day that there was a pile of equipment down on the quayside in the loading bay for the Channel Island freighters and so I expected one of them to be putting in an appearance some time soon.

And so it looks as if today is the day because Thora is down there this afternoon and by the looks of things she’s not long come into port. And I’m glad that I got to see her because with the rapid turnover that we’ve been having just recently I might otherwise have missed her.

And then you lot would be moaning on at me to improve my aim.

While I was there looking at Thora into port came another one of our old favourites.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the trawler Cap Lihou was up on blocks i the chantier navale for what seemed like eternity this summer. But here she is today, just having unloaded at the fish processing plant and now heading into the inner harbour.

But I headed off back home for a hot coffee and to carry on with some work. But my friend with Covid (or who had Covid, should I say) was on line so we had quite a chat again.

Anything to keep up her morale. It’s very important that she keeps a positive outlook. And in any case, I happen to like her.

My hour on the guitar was another one that was very enjoyable – playing along on the bass and singing to a few Hendrix numbers that I used to play in a group in which I played all those years ago, and then later playing lead guitar solos to “Riding The Waves” and “Whisky In The Jar”. I’m still rubbish at bar chords though.

Tea was an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit out of the freezer followed by more raspberry and custard tart. And this worked so well that it’s going to be added tot the menu for future reference.

Just as I was about to go out for my evening runs Rosemary rang up and we ended up chatting for 2 hours and more yet again. By now it was far too late to go out, what with the curfew and all of that, so I’ll have to write that off tonight. I can’t rely on the coppers turning a blind eye too often.

So I’l lgo to bed, still later than I intended. Shopping tomorrow and there’s quite a list so I need to make an early start. But late as it is, I’m not relying on a 6:15 start. I really need to do better than this.

Sunday 22nd November 2020 – I KNOW THAT …

… Sunday is a Day of Rest, but I do have to say that 12:30 is taking this to absurd lengths. So much so that I’m giving serious thought to setting an alarm for 10:00 on a Sunday morning just to remind myself that I have plenty of other things that need doing during the day too.

I could easily understand it if I hadn’t gone to bed until 05:00 or 06:00 (which has sometimes been the case) but going to bed at 23:30 is early by my standards. All I can say is that I must have been tired.

Plenty of time for me t go on a variety of travels, and so it comes as something of a surprise to learn that last night I didn’t go all that far. I’d been in France with Terry and we had to come back to the UK. Terry had his motorbike so we decided that we would go back on his motorbike. I remember that for some reason I was sitting on the front seat but he was sitting on the rear but he was driving. We made sure that we had absolutely everything and we set off. In no time at all we ended up back in Crewe and I don’t remember anything about the journey back except for tiny bits here yet we must have gone on the ferry, we must have stopped for fuel, all this kind of thing and surely did I fall asleep on the motorbike? He replied “yes, it took up 5 hours to come back”. I thought that that was absolutely astonishing. Anyway I ended up at home and had a few letters to post. I thought “I can do that tomorrow” so I went to the Bridge Inn at Audlem to see Alan Findlay. He wasn’t there so I thought that I’d take Liz Ayers with me there because there’s a woman in the bar who was her spitting image and it would be interesting to see their reactions if they were to see each other. But she didn’t come and this woman was looking more like Liz all the time. Then I met another couple of women who looked like her as well. I thought “God, if only Liz had been here this ould have been great”. I eventually tracked Alan Findlay down at his house and did what I had to do. That was when Liz had committed suicide and that was totally astonishing and the thought came over that she had had such a good time in France that to go back to the UK was bound to be an issue particularly with the health problem that she had.

But all of this is certainly weird. Liz Ayers popping up during the night and also Alan Findlay, a name from the past about 45 years ago and about whom I haven’t really thought all that much (if anything) ever since then.

So having wasted half a day there wasn’t really all that much to say about today. By the time that I’d sat down by the computer it was 13:00 and by the time that the paperwork was done it was about 14:00. That didn’t leave me much time because at 15:00 I had a Zoom meeting.

One of my friends, Jem Stuart, is an established poet and it was the launch of his latest book of poetry “No Limericks Left Overnight In This vehicle” today and he was having a “Zoom” party to celebrate. His sister has been a friend of mine for about 50 years ever since she was dating a friend of mine at school and so I’ve been following his career with some interest since we made contact again about 5 years ago. There were about 20 of us there and we had a good chat while he read some of his poems and told us a little story about them.

That took me up to walkies time. Rather later than usual, but never mind.

There were several people out there walking around, and a group of them were pointing at something out on the rocks. At first I thought that it was a cormorant or a heron perched upon a rock but in actual fact, having enlarged the photo on returning home, I could see that it was someone quietly contemplating the state of the nation.

Not that I have too much time to do anything like that of course. If I’m not sleeping I’m working and I don’t really have the time to sit and relax. There are only so many hours in the day, and so many days in the year. And as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I don’t have many of them left. I want to get up-to-date before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

And so accordingly I continued on my way along the path on top of the cliffs.

It was so late when I went out that the sun was on the verge of setting. A far cry from the days when I’d be out at 21:30 and 22:00 and the sun was still visible in the sky. The sun was so low in the sky that it had plunged the reverse side of the lighthouse into pitch-black.

There’s a project simmering away in the back of my head right now and I need a photo like this to illustrate a point that I will be making. So no time like the present.

Round at the end of the Pointe du Roc on the headland overlooking the Baie de Mont St Michel and the town of Cancale over on the Brittany coast, the view was even better.

What was really nice was seeing the church at Cancale (on the horizon on the left of the image) and the Ile des Landes (on the right) silhouetted right in the full light of the sun as it was shining through the hole in the clouds over there.

In actual fact, the whole effect was quite pleasing, in a different way from the other day when the sun was higher in the sky.

From there I tried a little run along the path on the clifftop on the other side but encountered only too soon a group of other people so I slowed down to a sedate walk and came on home.

Back here, it was time for baking and I do have to say that it was not a success. In fact, probably my first culinary disaster. The pie base worked well enough, and so did the apple turnover with the rest of the pastry. But the Chocolate brownie mix that I tried went totally wrong. it said “bake for a maximum 30 minutes” but I’d only made about 3/4 of the mixture and as the oven is rather unreliable I put the time at 35 minutes and 15°C over. Even so, when I pulled out the cake mould to check it at the end, I poured half of the liquid all over the floor.

Even 70 minutes didn’t bake it thoroughly so I dunno. I know that my oven isn’t up to much but I would have expected it to have been better than this. I’ll have to write it off to experience.

It goes without saying that, once more, there wasn’t time to make a sourdough loaf. I might start that tomorrow after I finish my radio recording if there is time.

Tea was a vegan pizza of course. I attacked that with gusto and it was good enough, and so I checked the pie base into which I had added the fresh raspberries and agar-agar before tea. And that hadn’t set either. In the end I resorted to some very thick custard to complete the task.

All in all, not a very good cookery day today. Instead I went out for a run, far later than usual as I was running really late, what with one thing or another.

What was good about this was that there was no-one else around so I could run to my heart’s content, at least, as far as my health will let me. And my fourth leg brought me as usual to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch. We’ve seen a few photos from here just recently, but I don’t think that we’ve seen the back of the square.

On the immediate left is what I think might have been an old hotel but is now a Convalescent home (in which, apparently are several Covid patients brought from elsewhere) and to the right is the Rue Jules Michelet, probably the steepest street in France I reckon.

Just imagine what it must have been like trying to take a horse and cart up there 150 years ago. Today, traffic goes up the serpentine Avenue de la Liberation to the right and cover three times the distance to arrive at the same spot.

My route home includes a trip through the Square Maurice Marland.

By the memorial to Maurice Marland, which regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing on numerous occasions, there’s a solitary tree which has some lights set in the ground around it. Today those lights were actually illuminated and the effect was so eerie that I stopped to take a photo of it.

No-one about calling their dogs tonight so after I finished my walk around the walls I ran on home, rather late.

So despite it being still a little early and that I had a late start to the day, I’m off to bed. Back to work tomorrow and I really must press on instead of idling about like I seem to be doing these days.

There’s a radio show to do of course, and I need tocheck on another one that is due to be broadcast because I think that I need to make some changes to it.

And bread to bake too, and maybe something else if my chocolate cake has turned out to be a total failure.

It’s all go around here, isn’t it? When was the last time that I sat down to read a book or watch a film? I really can’t remember, it was so long ago.

Sunday 15th November 2020 – I DIDN’T GO …

… to bed until about 2:00 this morning. But even so, not awakening until 11:15 is a bit extreme nevertheless, and the least said about not getting out of bed until 12:00 the better.

So while you admire the photos that I took tonight of the storm and the waves smashing into the promenade at the Plat Gousset in the storm, I was listening to the dictaphone

I could hear that I had been been on my travels during the night. But I’ll spare you all of the gory details seeing as you are probably having your tea right now. But interestingly, at some point I must have stepped right back into wherever it is that I had left off because I was talking to a guy about the first part of my voyage. He asked “how did you know that she was telling the truth? Which Government would allow that kind of thing?”. I said that there is only one Government in the whole wide world that would do that kind of thing and that’s the British Government. They are employing all of their wives and mistresses as aides and sleeping with all of their aides who aren’t their wives and mistresses”. We had a talk about all of their morals in the UK after that.

And that wasn’t all either. Later on there were more things happening but unfortunately it was just a jumbled mishmash and I can’t remember it. Which is probably just as well.

After my medication I switched on the computer. My Covid friend was on line so we had quite a lengthy chat to keep up her morale and then I went off for something to eat. A nice piping hot bowl of porridge.

After my porridge I’ve spent all day baking as I mentioned yesterday. Supplies are running low round here. There isn’t enough bread for my sandwiches tomorrow and I’m not going to have the time to bake any in the morning with a radio programme to prepare.

For a start, I needed some more bread and it was far too late now to make a sourdough loaf which needs a lot of standing, so I made a yeast loaf as I have done in the past with a couple of handfuls of sunflower seeds.

There was no pizza dough left in the freezer so I had to make some more. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’d bought a 2 kg bag of prepared bread flour “just add water” from Belgium the other day for just €1:00. It’s white flour, which is not much use for bread baking, but it would be ideal for pizzas.

And so I made a pile of dough, 450 grammes, to see how it would perform. If it works out well I might look out for some more for my pizzas.

Taking a pause from my baking activities I went out for my afternoon walk while the dough was proofing, straight into the teeth of the howling gale that seemed to have whipped up in intensity from last night.

Clutching hard to my hat, I went over to the sea wall to look at the waves that were breaking on the shore over there. And the whitecaps out there bear full testimony to the force of the gale.

The other people around (there were three or four out there) were just as impressed as I was and so after watching them for quite a while as I did, I set off around the headland on my walk.

It was certainly interesting to watch the waves on the north side of the headland, so I was intrigued to see what they might be like on the south side in the bay by St Pair sur Mer.

And I wasn’t to be disappointed either. As i reached the peak of the headland the wind was thoroughly wicked and there was a veritable gale blowing straight into my face. As I walked around the headland I could see that the storm raging down there was even more wild that it had been round on the north side.

The contrast between the sea out there in the open and the sea in the sheltered lee of the harbour’s outer wall is quite impressive. You could almost draw a straight line between the two.

The tide is still well out right now but with the force of the waves being driven onshore by the wind I was expecting to see something rather impressive with the waves against the sea wall.

And unfortunately it wasn’t as wild as I was expecting it to be. The waves and the spray were not flying up over the sea wall as I was hoping, but there was still something to see. The waves were giving me something of a little performance.

The guy out there walking around on the sea wall was not going to be in any danger of a drenching when he comes round to this side. But he was the only person other than me involved in the scene.

From there I pushed on along the footpath down to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour.

The tide was out as we had seen in the earlier photo, and there was this beautiful dry patch there which the seagulls had decided to colonise for the moment.

What caught my eye particularly about it was the fact that this looked very much like a representation of a map of the United Kingdom. You can see the mainland of Great Britain and over to the upper left, something that looks as if it might be Northern Ireland. The resemblance was quite uncanny.

And so I headed on for home in the wind to carry on with my baking.

The dough had risen really nicely for both the bread and the pizza dough. This flour stuff from Belgium seemed to work quite well.

The pizza dough I separated into three. Two of them I kneaded and rolled in oil, and then put them into greaseproof paper into the freezer. The third one I kneaded, greased and then rolled out and put into the pizza tray, rolling over the edges to remain in the tray and not overhang.

The bread dough, I kneaded and shaped and put into the mould and left it on one side with the pizza base on the tray to proof again.

The baking apples that I had bought a few weeks ago were on their last legs so I washed them and diced them and prepared an apple crumble. Some cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar, desiccated coconut and raisins will do all of the apple some good, especially when washed in with some lemon juice.

While the crumble and the bread (which was now ready) were baking in the oven I prepared the pizza and once the bread and crumble were baked I could put the pizza in. I must buy a bigger oven one of these days.

And here are the finished products. The pizza came out really well and the edges where I’d folded them over were nice and spongy. As for the bread and the crumble I’ll tell you about them tomorrow. I was too full for any pudding tonight.

later on I went out for my evening walk and runs, some of which were chasing after the lens hood of my camera that rolled off down the street in the wind. And wind there was too. It was extremely difficult to open the door of the building with the wind holding it closed.

At the viewpoint there was nothing much going on so I ran on in several legs down to the viewpoint where you saw the photos of the waves crashing down on the Plat Gousset.

No-one about at all again so I ran on across the Square Maurice Marland, walked around the rest of the walls and then ran on home to write up my notes for the day. By now the wind had picked up even more and I had to abort my final run halfway through as the wind brought me to a dead halt.

Tomorrow it’s back to work. I have a radio programme to prepare.

When that’s done I need to enquire about Caliburn and then swot up my Welsh for our next lesson on Tuesday. Not that I’m going to have an early night now, but I’ll do the best that I can.

Friday 13th November 2020 – AFTER EVERYTHING …

… that I wrote yesterday evening about an early night and an early start? it was … errr … 10:30 when I finally crawled out of bed.

If you think that that is devastating, just let me say that after finishing my notes, I started on a little project of no significance, a project that I dip into every now and again, and by the time I started to feel tired enough to go to bed, it was after 04:00.

So 10:30 isn’t really all that bad, I suppose, and at least there was some work of a sort being done.

During the night I’d been on my travels again. I was going somewhere laat night on a bus or something so I had to leave my car, the mk V Cortina NMP parked up at the side of the road. I was going to be away ages so I was worried about leaving it there for so long but as the bus passed by I could see two of the guys from the taxis opening it and climbing in Obviously they needed it for things so that was OK. I ended up round at my mothers where suddenly I had some kind of panic attack – what about all my personal stuff that I’d left in the car? What was going to happen if the people at the taxis got their hands on it? But anyway I got dressed, in a pair of grey trousers that I wore when I was at Shearings. And as I pulled the belt tight, it went two notches over where it usually went which was strange. As I was setting off to visit the parents of a friend my mother shouted “make sure you ring them to tell them that you are coming. Don’t just turn up unannounced”. I thought that that would be difficult to arrange but I said nothing. However my mother said it twice so I wondered what was happening here.

My Covid friend was on line so we had a chat while I finished off what I’d been doing last night. And with the late start that took me right the way up to lunchtime. Something of a waste of a morning, really.

After lunch, fighting off the temptation to go back to sleep, I made a start on amending one of the journal entries from my voyage around Central Europe but I ran aground half-way through.

There was enough time however for me to go off on my afternoon walk around the headland.

The tide was well on its way in when I went out, and I noticed the effect of the waves breaking on the rocks that were there on the beach and which by now had disappeared beneath the waves near the marker light for the rocks.

They were actually submerged but only to a very minimal depth so although you couldn’t see them, you could see the waves breaking on them.

It was something that held my interest for a couple of minutes and then I pushed on, passing three or four others who were out there this afternoon.

There was very little going on out at sea this afternoon – no boats of any description in the English Channel or the Baie de Mont St Michel.

But there was an exciting phenomenon occurring down the bay round by Carolles. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing the sunlight reflected off the windows of St Pair sur Mer in the late afternoon earlier in the year. Of course, the sun has moved round in the sky and we now have the windows in Carolles picking up the glint of the sun.

You wouldn’t credit just how dark it’s starting to go now, even though it’s only about 16:00. Winter is going to be upon us a darn sight sooner than we think.

Still no change in the occupants of the chantier navale. The yacht is still there, as is the vessel Ceres II

But it was interesting out in the tidal harbour though. The gates must have been on the point of opening and boats were queueing up to go into the inner harbour. Here we have one of the Joly France boats, the older of the two, and also one of the two trawlers, either Coelacanthe or her sister La Tiberiade.

There were a couple of other boats in the queue too, and as I watched, the harbour gates opened and the boats went steaming … “dieseling” – ed … into port

I came to the conclusion that the trawler that I had seen just now was Coelacanthe, and I concluded that for a very good reason too.

Moored up at the Fish Processing Plant was her sister and I could clearly see her name on the side of her superstructure. She’s Le Tiberiade, and one of these days I’ll be able to tell them apart. I’ve noticed a couple of little differences between them when they have been next to one another.

She’s busy unloading her catch right now. There’s a van with an opening cargo door that looks as if it might be taking away some of the seafood, and the tractor is busy negotiating the loading ramp with a full trailer.

While I was there, I watched Coelacanthe pass through the gates and into the harbour.

Once inside she began to perform a little nautical danse macabre as she made for her mooring at the rear of the two Channel Island Ferries. And I noticed that Thora was still in port this afternoon. It seems that for one reason or another, she’s not benefitting from these rapid turnrounds that I’ve mentioned before.

But one thing that I did notice from the image that I couldn’t see with the naked eye is that she has steam … “diesel” – ed … up, so it does look as if she’s actually on the point of heading out to the open sea.

And it all was turning out to be quite interesting in there this afternoon.

As Thora “cast off forr’ard, cast off aft” in the inner harbour, Le Tiberiade did likewise and as the one headed for the harbour gate so did the other from the other side, out of view of each other. Half expecting a “Greek meets Greek at the Hull Paragon, Valentine’s Day 1927” moment, I gripped the edge of my seat in eager anticipation.

However le Tiberiade just about made it into the harbour without a collision, Thora

While I’d been wandering around, I’d noticed that the sea was becoming rather rough. And with the tide being well-in right now I was keen to see what was happening down at the Plat Gousset.

And it was a good move too because even with 90 minutes to go before high tide, the waves were coming in with something of a powerful force and smashing into the sea wall over there.

There weren’t very many people out there enjoying the spectacle from close to, but I imagined that they would all be out there a little bit later at high tide when they really would be treated to something of a spectacle.

By now I imagined that Thora would now be rounding the headland on her way out to sea, so I retraced my steps of earlier up to the viewpoint next to the College Malraux to see how she was doing.

And eventually she came a rattling around the headland into the teeth of the wind and the waves and set course for St Helier. It’s not going to be an easy ride for her in this kind of sea.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I keep on saying that one of these days I’ll hitch a ride on her when she has a couple of trips in rapid succession and see how she does. Luckily I’m in a good position in that I hold a British passport and a Permanent Residency Card for France so there needs to be little in the way of border controls to ease my passage.

But that’s not going to be for a while with all of this Covid going on. No-one will be going anywhere for quite a while yet.

And so I watched Thora battle her way through the waves for a while and then headed for home.

On the way across the car park I’d seen Gribouille, the big ginger cat, sitting on his windowsill so I went to give him a stroke. And there I fell in with his owner, and learnt some pretty sad news. She’s had a couple of falls just recently, during one of which she fractured her had and it had to be stapled together. But as she doesn’t seem to be able to cope particularly now, she’s moving into sheltered accommodation

Of course, she’s taking my mate with her, but regardless of that, it’s another convivial soul from the building who is moving away. Nothing stays the same for long, and rightly so, but it’s a shame when people move away like this and break up a happy little circle.

Back here I caught up with a few notes and then went to make some kefir. This morning, I’d started on the last bottle and there was another batch brewing nicely.

The four kiwi fruits that I had bought three weeks ago were now nice and ripe so I peeled them and threw them in the whizzer, followed by a generous handful or two of grapes.

Having whizzed them around for quite a while to extract as much juice as possible and then passed it all through my network of meshes and filers into the big jug.

Having done that, I drained off the brewing kefir through a very fine-mesh filter and added it to the juice, stirring it well in, leaving an inch or two of liquid in the bottom to keep the kefir grains covered.

Several slices of lemon, a fig bisected and 40 grammes of sugar went into my big jar, followed by 2 litres of filtered water. That’ll brew now for a few days while I wonder where I’m going to get some figs from for the next batch after that as I’ve now run out.

The mixed kefir and juice was then strained through a mesh coffee-filter into the various flip-top bottles that I use. They’ll be put into a cool place out of direct light now to complete the second fermentation and in a couple of days they will be ready to drink.

But I made a bit of a boo-boo here. Remember the pineapple slices that I’d had the other day? I’d put the syrup on one side to use in my kefir today but I’d forgotten it. I don’t know whether it’ll keep for four or five days now.

All of that took so much time that I didn’t have my guitar practice, which was disappointing.

Instead, I ended up with some of the best taco rolls that I’ve ever made. That chick pea and couscous stuff that I used in error instead of the bulghour certainly made a difference. And my defrosted apple pie was delicious too

later on I went out for my runs around the walls.

No-one else was out there, everywhere else was quiet, not even the Pizza van in the Place Czmbernon tonight with the lockdown. No-one down in town either.

I had a look to see if the Christmas decorations had gone up in the Rue Paul Poirier but while there is certainly something or other, and several thereof, strung up across the street, there’s nothing illuminated yet.

All of this is to come very soon, I imagine. But I’ll find out more in due course. I ran on home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow it’s shopping day, and I have to track down some figs. That’s not going to be easy because I’ll still without Caliburn so wherever I go and whatever I buy, I’ll have to carry it home and I’m not looking forward to that.

Luckily the freezer is pretty well stocked up and that should keep me going for a week or so but I really do need to organise myself better. I don’t know what it is that I’m doing right now but whatever it is, I’m doing it all wrong.

7th November 2020 – THIS WEEK IS …

… International Polar Bear Week apparently so I feel that I ought to join in the fun by posting a photo of a couple of mine.

In case you are wondering, this photo was taken last August in the North West Passage, in the Victoria Strait between the Royal Geographical Society islands and King William Island and is just one of the … gulp 2,500 or so exciting photos that I took while I was out there in the High Arctic and with which I shall regale you in due course.

That is, of course, my long-term project for the coming winter – to sort them all out, edit them and upload them to the internet. I’m hoping that once I clear out the arrears back to June, I can crack on with the High Arctic photos, although I’m not sure when all of that might happen.

At least, I didn’t actually fall behind even further today. Even if I slept through the three alarms and didn’t wake up until long after 10:00. It’s always like that when I return home, after all of the effort that I go through, and even more so when I didn’t return home until late.

Being in bed for as long as I was, there was plenty of time to go on several nocturnal rambles, and I must have travelled miles during the night.

I started off in the USA. I can’t remember exactly what we were doing but it involved my father and a whole group of other people whom I knew. There had been some big kind of political debate. Some politician had made a disgraceful affair and all the other politicians were standing up for him. Someone went to get into their car but found that the locks had been changed. This eveil politician had gone around changing everyone’s locks on everything. At that stage I became quite simply fed up and beat both of them into a pulp. I had to sell someone about something or other and I can’t remember what. It was to do with a car needing work or something. I got into my car which was a very new one. I managed to get in and drove away from the scene. As I came up to a set of traffic lights a police car pulled out of a side road right in front of me, blocked the road and put his stop lights on. When the traffic lights changed he went off presumably to drive round the block to come up behind me. But it was a really inconvenient place to stop. There was an abandoned fuel station just across the traffic lights so I pulled over there, of course bitterly regretting what was going to happen next – I was in no illusions. There were a couple of guys there getting petrol out of this abandoned fuel station. They said something about parking there. I said “that’s all right. I’m waiting here to be arrested”. They looked at me a bit wide-eyed so I said to 1 of them “yes the police are coming to arrest me”. He thought that he had better get a move on and do what he’s doing quickly and get out of the way. Just then I saw a group of my friends coming along. They were carrying an engine lift, tools and everything as if they were going to lift the engine out of a car somewhere after what I’d said to them. I thought “this policeman is taking his time isn’t he? I could nip off if I wanted to leave my car there.” But did I want to leave my car there? Did I want to nip off? Did I want to go? There was a cheap Honda Acty microvan things parked up and I was having a look at that.

Later on I was a kid, a teenager doing something with a house. We’d all been working on bits of it and I’d been painting the bedroom. The 1st coat hadn’t worked properly because some filling needed doing on it. I’d done most of that and painted what I’d already done. It hadn’t appeared too badly and I was reasonably pleased with it. Then the tutor came in and started to give me instructions about what he wanted me to do next but I reckoned that in view of the time factor it would be a good idea just to fill the rest of the wall where it needed filling and paint one coat over it to see where it was low. We could fill it again to make it up in the meantime and the coat of paint would be on it ready for the top coat. We had a lengthy discussion about that and in the end he agreed to let me do it as I wanted. He told me that I would have to put a curtain up somewhere over one part where the walls were uneven but I thought that that was going to be a silly idea – it would just draw people’s attention to it but he was pretty adamant so in the end we agreed that we would talk about this again. I did the calculations that by the time I had finished this room putting these coats and this filler on I would have had my A levels by then in which case no-one would be in a position to contradict me at all and I really could then do it as I liked.

There was something where I was doing something with a pile of musicians – it might have been a certain Welsh rock group friends of mine or something like that. We were just sitting around talking about drugs, all this kind of thing. One of them was saying that he hadn’t shot up for a whole 15 concerts but was quite busy taking the weed – the same with a few of the others. I said that I didn’t even know whereabouts to go to get it. I wouldn’t have a clue. They said “that girl who came to your party in your building. She sold us a bag”. I thought that was a bit if a shame because I liked her. Then we ended up at someone’s house after this – it might even have been this girl’s. It was a much nicer apartment than mine, on the floor below from where I was living. We were all getting ready to go places and were sorting through a pile of things and having to tidy everything up. I was sorting through these stones, I’ve no idea why. Some were precious and some weren’t and I was getting it all wrong. There were 3 gear lever knobs from a vehicle in there. It was a really confused thing that I had to sort through. Someone came over to give me a hand. He clearly knew what he was doing. I had to resort what i’d already done because it wasn’t right. I ended up going for a walk around and having a look at her garden which was really nice. On the way back I saw everyone else coming for a walk around the garden. I thought that I might as well have waited until they decided to come rather than go out on my own

Subsequently I was taping a concert of the aforementioned group, trying to get that organised but it was again something that I was only doing half-heartedly and missing most of the joins, thinking that I would have to go back and check it over again. The question of London came up, the question of a restaurant in the basement of a hotel that we go to near the railway station but it had moved down to South London. A girl I was with suggested that we should go there and have a meal. I thought ” that’s a long way to go for a meal and come back. It’s not as if it’s at the railway station where it used to be where we could be in and out in an evening. With this we have to hike most of the way across London to get to it and it’s not going to be the same, particularly with only another two weekends to go…

From there I was walking along Crewe Road into Sandbach and as I was passing the houses at the end of Park Lane I was thinking that I had to go to the bank. But the bank wasn’t where it is but in the street that runs about half a mile to the south, Hassall Road, so I had to find my way around like a deviation. In the end I got to 3rd Avenue and I remembered that I could walk through there that way. I walked down there – there were some kids playing netball in the school plating area there and a couple of boys playing football. I went on and came to a set of steps that I had to walk down. There were two young girls there who were rolling balls down it. Obviously whose ball rolled furthest down the most stairs won. They had a rake that they were using to pull the balls back up. One of them was pulling a ball back up and the rake swung back over her head and nearly impaled me as I was waling past so I made some kind of light hearted remark about it and they laughed. Then I noticed in one of the swimming pools in the back garden of a house round there was a skeleton so I asked “is that your last victim?”. They laughed again. By this time a woman had come down. She thought that it was funny as well so we had a chat. We got to the bottom and there was a really deep puddle. She was talking about the gypsies who lived in Sandbach and how they ahd sometimes washed their clothes in it. When we reached th bottom she said which way she was going, and I thought that this was the other direction so I said goodbye to her. I turned left and she went a little further on and she turned left too. We bumped into each other again. I said “I thought that you were going the other way”. She said “no, this way. I have to fetch some money from the bank”, a different bank. She started to ask “where shall we go from here?” so I said “hurry up and get your money” so she dashed inside the bank.
Later on I stepped back into this dream. I was walking back to the bus. I got on the bus by the centre door and for some reason I didn’t want to sit down at the front so I chose a seat right opposite the centre door where I didn’t have to go very far. Then this woman appeared, the one with whom I’d walked just now. I was hoping that she would get on the bus and come to sit next to me but that was when I awoke.

There was plenty of other stuff too but I can’t remember them. I know that at one time I caught myself dictating into my hand, but I can’t remember what it was that I was saying.

One thing that was rather disappointing was that I wasn’t joined by any of the usual suspects who I like to accompany me. With all of this and the distance that I travelled, I would have expected at least one of them to be there at some point. Instead, I end up with people from whom I spent 38 years trying to escape. It’s just my luck, isn’t it?

By now it was well into the early afternoon and so I ate the half-baguette that was left from yesterday evening. No chance of going out to the shops now – it was far too late.

Not having done much throughout the day, I reckoned that I ought at least to go out for a walk this afternoon.

But no matter how little I had done and how much I thought that I ought to be doing, I wasn’t going to emulate this woman down here on the beach at the foot of the steps in the Rue du Nord. As I watched her, she marched slowly out to the water’s edge, peeling off her outer garments one by one.

And then she looked for a safe place amongst the rocks where she could leave them and her towel.

Having done that, she continued on her way out to the water’s edge, bent doan and soaked herself in seawater.

Once she was thoroughly wet through, she took the plunge and dived into the water, swimming away from the shore and out to sea.

It’s not the kind of thing that I would want to do. Even on a hot day I’m not all that interested in going into the water, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, even if in the past I have been swimming in the Mediterranean in November. But I’ve no intention of going into the water around here at any time of the year.

So instead, once my water baby, I wandered off along the Rue du Nord.

With the number of people who were around, many more than I was expecting in the middle of a lockdown, I didn’t feel like showing myself up by breaking into a run. And it’s just as well because during my gentle walk, my eyes probing out to sea picked up something yellow bobbing about on the waves in the sea off the shore of Donville les Bains.

Closer examination reveals that there are in fact two of them, in a nice line across the bay. We’ve seen all kinds of buoys out there in the past, for all kinds of different reasons, and it’s not immediately clear exactly what their purpose is.

Further along the footpath under the walls, I had a look down onto the beach round by the Plat Gousset.

And amongst the people wandering around down there were three young people in something of a state of undress. It looks as if we have had a few more water babies this afternoon, but I was too late to actually see them in the water.

But one thing that I did notice was the absence of face masks on the people down there. I know that it’s the policy on the promenade for the compulsory wearing of face masks, and I would have thought that now, seeing as we are in lockdown, that the compulsory wearing of masks would have extended further out from where it was before

With crowds of people around, I wasn’t able to go for a run across the Square Maurice Marland this afternoon. Well – not with any sense of pride, at least.

But at the top of the Square I had a look at one of the houses in the Rue LeCarpentier. Just before I left, they had erected some scaffolding up around it. But now, the scaffolding is sheeted in a protected netting and it looks as if work has begun.

Interestingly, the company doing the work advertises itself as a “restorer of the country’s patrimoine – a word for which there is no obvious translation but which means basically the intrinsic cultural values and artefacts, whether it’s song, dance, old machinery and buildings, that kind of thing.

One thing that is of course a compulsory activity is to check on what’s happening down at the chantier navale, seeing as I’ve neglected it for over a week.

The yacht that we saw in there the last time we looked is still present and it’s been joined by another boat. It’s not easy to tell from here what kind of boat it is. I shall have to sneak out later tonight for a closer look.

It goes without saying though that the huge mountain of gravel that was on the quayside has gone, and likewise has Neptune, the gravel boat that came into port as I was leaving town. She fetched up a couple of days later in Whitstable where she unloaded, and the last that I heard of her she had picked up a load of something in Dordrecht in the Netherlands and was on her way to Ridham, just down the road from Whitstable.

Back here this evening there was football. TNS were away at Bala Town in the Welsh Premier League, first away at second. It was a good, exciting match and while TNS were clearly the better team, Bala looked extremely dangerous at times and hit the woodwork twice with the keeper beaten and had Chris Venables had a decent touch on a ball in front of goal with Paul Harrison well out of position, Bala could have taken the lead.

As it was, TNS went into the lead after about 75 minutes only for Bala to equalise 5 minutes later. 1-1 was how it ended, a result which was about right altogether.

Tea was pasta with a couple of the burgers that I brought back from Leuven, followed by pineapple rings with chocolate vegan ice cream. No chance of going for an evening walk as there is apparently a curfew and it’s too late now.

Tomorrow will be really busy. I have bread to make – both “normal bread” and banana bread, as that which remained from last time didn’t survive. I have some kefir to make too, and for that I’ll probably use oranges this time.

The sourdough will need reanimating and feeding too, and then next week I’ll have a go making sourdough bread. I can’t use it this time because, having been in the fridge for a week or more, it’s still asleep.

Just like I’m going to be in a few minutes, I reckon. It takes me a couple of days to recover from my efforts in Leuven and I have plenty of work to do.

Wednesday 7th October 2020 – MEANWHILE, BACK AT …

… Castle Anthrax I had my check-up. Blood count is down to a mere 8.2, just 0.2 above the critical limit. They didn’t keep me in, but they didn’t give me a blood transfusion either. They are trying a new treatment on me again, something called Octagam.

One thing that I did was to check on the side effects and symptoms. And to my surprise, I have many of the symptoms that are flagged, a couple of which have even seen me hospitalised. But I assume that they know what they are doing.

Having said that, I’m not convinced that I do. I couldn’t sleep last night and it was long after 02:30 when I finally went to bed. Quite obviously there was no chance of my leaving the bed at the sound of the alarm. I was surprised that I managed to be out of bed by 07:20.

First job was to have a shower and a clothes wash. I need to make myself pretty. And then to make some sandwiches. I’d no idea how long this session was going to last.

And then I hit the streets.

When you have been away for a while from a place that you know, it’s very interesting to see the changes that have taken place since your last visit.

ON OUR TRAVELS AROUND LEUVEN in the past we’ve seen the start of a whole system of changes to the city, starting with the demolition on the Sint Pieter’s Hospital Building where I stayed for a week or two when I first came here in 2016. They are making a considerable advance in dealing with the matter but it looks as if it’s going to take an age.

It’s a shame that A FORMER NEIGHBOUR and customer of my taxis is no longer with us. He would have had that building down in a twinkle of an eye and at much less cost too.

While I was watching some of the demolition, my interest was caught by this machine and I was wondering what it might be.

It took me a while but I think that I know now what it might be. It looks like some kind of water atomiser powered mainly by compressed air, I suppose, that’s blasting a pile of water over the heap of rubble that has been knocked down from the building. I imagine that its purpose is to keep the dust down.

You would never have had precautions like that 20 years or so ago. It seems that Health and Safety Regulations have even arrived over here.

My route continued along the Brusselsestraat to the corner of the place where I lived for 6 months, and then round the corner into the Sint Jacobsplein.

When we’d been away for a couple of months last year, we came back here to find a great big hole in the middle of the Square. It was all fenced off so we never had the opportunity to look into it, and even though it’s been at least a year since they made a start on it, they still haven’t finished.

This is turning into a really long job and I’m wondering if I’ll still be here to see the finished product. At least, I hope that they will make a better job of it than they did of that deplorable patch of asphalt in Granville.

at the side of the Sint Jacobsplein is the Biezenstraat, and when we were last here IN JULY they were busy making a start on digging it up

Since then, they seem to have made a great deal of progress. And now that I can see the big concrete pipes down there, I can tell now that it’s all to do with replacing the sewer pipes in the street. That makes me wonder if they’ve installed something like a subterranean holding tank or something underneath the Sint Jacobsplein.

And as for the Frittourist, the fritkot on the edge of the Square to the left, the roadworks can’t be doing them much good in the way of passing trade. It’s a good fritkot too, one of the best in the City.

When I turn around to look behind me the other way to face the direction of the Hospital, I’m admiring the Sint Hubertusstraat.

When we came here last time, in early July, there was a huge hole in the middle of the crossroads and we had to walk miles around in order to proceed without falling down a great big hole in the road.

But now, it seems that they’ve filled in that part of the street now and while the surface isn’t finished, and not by a long way either, we can still walk past it on our way up the hill towards the hospital.

Just after the corner there’s a big block of flats on the left that we always walk past.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a while ago all of the residents were turfed out and once they had gone, the building was completely gutted right back to the framework. They have gradually been rebuilding it and it looks as if they are on the point of packing away their tools.

You can see all of the “For Sale” signs on the windows of the apartments. Most of them that I could see are “sold” and that presumably means that the new inhabitants will be moving into their homes very soon. It’s taken them long enough.

My struggle up the hill continued, through all of the roadworks that were there last time. The trench has been filled in and they are reworking the pavements and the cycle track right now.

The actual heavy work is now taking place on the way up between the by-pass overbridge and the roundabout at the foot of the car park. And just as I arrived, they obliged me by picking up a large concrete pipe and dropping it into the hole that they have dug.

For a change, I was early and was quickly logged in. And I found the reason why there had been such a delay in my treatment. In the waiting room there are no longer 40 seats but just 10. and in the communal treatment rooms where 20 people can sit and have their treatment, there are just two seats. There are about a dozen or so confidential treatment rooms where you go for your tests on admission, and now patients are left in these rooms throughout the whole of their treatment.

So Instead of about 50 patients at a session, there are now just maybe a dozen. Hardly a surprise given what’s going on right now.

A nice nurse took care of me and I had a nice young trainee doctor. There have to be some benefits of having this illness. Even nicer, Kaatje came to see me and we has a nice chat. She’s nominally a Social Worker but in reality she’s a psychiatrist, although they don’t let on. Every terminally-ill patient has a psychiatrist allocated to them, and Kaatje can come and administer to my needs any time she likes.

While I had her attention, I mentioned the issues – or lack of them – about not having had my compulsory 4-week treatment since January this year. Not that it will do any good but it’s something that one has to do.

While I was sitting there having my perfusion, I attacked the dictaphone. Last night I was a girl, would you believe? And I was living at home. I’d been downstairs for a meal and tried to talk to people and be interesting but no-one was listening or interested in the least with what I had to say. They were always cutting my speech, that kind of thing. In the end I threw something of a tantrum and stormed upstairs to my room. There was a record player in there and a record on and playing but the needle wasn’t advancing. It was just going round and round he edge again. Sooner or later there was a knock and the door opened. It was my father coming in. I thought that he might have come in to talk to me about things. But no. He just handed me a pair of my gloves that I’d left downstairs and said “you’ve forgotten these” and turned round and went out. I was so disappointed.
Later on there was one of these American sleuths – a Philip Marlowe type. He was renowned for helping his clients in all kinds of ways, many of which were illicit, to escape detection. This came at a price of course. One day he was being interviewed by a gangland boss who he didn’t particularly like. The gangland boss said something like “I understand that you can help people out of certain kinds of difficulties. Well I need a little help – that kind of thing. This private detective taunted him a little bit then said “yes, I’ll do that, $5,000”. To which the mafia type guy, the crook erupted into a rage. He grabbed this guy by the lapels and started to shake him like a dog. Just then, two warders came in to try and sort it all out.

Round about 14:00 my treatment was over and I could leave, having picked up next month’s supply of medication.

Here’s something that I’ve not noticed before, although that isn’t to say that it wasn’t there.

In the middle of the roundabout at the bottom of this car park is this large concrete pillar. And I’ve no idea why it’s there and what it’s supposed to represent. My opinion of modern art IS VERY WELL KNOWN so I won’t waste your time in repeating it. But seriously, I can’t see any attraction whatever in a concrete cast-off like this.

It reminds me very much of one of Albert Speer’s flak towers in Berlin, or something designed by someone from the Donald Gibson School of Wanton Vandalism, as I once mentioned IN MY UNIVERSITY THESIS

While we’re on the subject of wanton vandalism … “well, one of us is” – ed … after my hospital wisit I wandered on down the hill to see what was going on on the Kapucijnenstraat.

When we had walked past there the last time that we were here, they had started on the demolition of the annexes to the Sint Rafael. It’ always very interesting to see how they are doing and it seems to me that right now the whole lot have been swept away. They are even starting to build something on the site, but I bet it won’t be anything like as attractive.

At least the magnificent Flemish-style main building is there, but I may well go for a wander around tomorrow with the camera to record it for posterity because the cynic inside me HAS VERY LITTLE FAITH in modern developers. A suspicious fire could break out at any moment.

There is however a good side to all of this demolition, even if it might not seem like it.

There are loads of old houses from the glory days of the city that have been obscured by new development. There’s a little Close off the Brusselsestraat that I haven’t yet explored but with the demolition of a newer building in the Kapucijnenstraat a couple of the houses down at the bottom end of the Close have been revealed.

When I’m out and about next, I’ll have to go to have a closer look, to see whether it is an original or whether it’s a simple modern reproduction.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is that last time I was here I made a note about the lamentable state of the city walls in certain places.

It’s quite clear that the good Burghers of the City are keen and regular readers of the rubbish that I write because they now seem to be fenced off and there is scaffolding up in certain places. So maybe they really are going on to do something about it all.

It was round about here that I found a set of keys lying in the road. As it happens, a couple of Municipal Police were walking in the immediate vicinity so I referred the matter to them. I went on to Delhaize for a bit more shopping to take home.

After Delhaize I went to Origin’O for some grated vegan cheese for my next supply of pizza and then headed for home.

In the Tiensestraat I came across my favourite sweet shop. Or at least, it was when I was allowed to eat animal products, because as far as I know, all of their products contain pork gelatine. It’s the kind of place where you put your sweets into a bag and weigh the bag to work out the price.

The first time I encountered one of these shops was when I was in Bruges getting on for 40 years ago. It’s quite a large chain of shops with branches in most of the towns. in fact, some might say that sweets in Belgium are nothing but a load of Bollekes.

Back here, I had a few things to do and that took some time to organise.

Later on, it was time to go out. Alison and I had arranged to meet in the town centre.

And now I have seen everything I reckon. In the past we’ve seen pizzamats, potatomats and, a few weeks ago, a soupomat. Plenty of other mats too. But today is the first time ever that I’ve seen a Bloemenomat – an automatic flower-vending machine – here at the florist’s on the corner of the Brabanconnestraat.

It makes me wonder whether or not it shouts “violet, get your luvverly violets” at passers-by. That remains to be seen.

Having inspected the Bloemenautomat, I headed off down the Tiensestraat into the town centre.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that one of my favourite photography subjects is to take photographs of other people taking photographs. Whilst that’s not the case in this photograph, I surprised a group of photographers marching actoss the Rector de Somerplein and it was too good an opportunity to miss.

Alison was waiting for me at our usual meeting place. It was nice to meet up again because it’s been a couple of months since we’ve last seen each other.

There seems to be a new place opened, the Wasbar in the Tiensestraat, and it was advertising vegan food. We decided to go there to see what it was like. It was certainly different and overpriced, but if you don’t go, you won’t know.

After we’d eaten out meal we headed off back down into town.

At the bottom of the Tiensestraat is the magnificent St Peter’s Church – the Sint Pieterskerk. It’s least the third church on this site – the first known church being first recorded in 986. Made of wood, it was destryed by fire in 1176 and replaced by a church in the Romanesque period.

This one was in turn replaced by the present one, began round about 1425 and, surprisingly, still to be finished. Probably a British construction company was involved somewhere in the proceedings.

Here at the western end, the twin towers of the Romanesque church were to remain but in 1458 they were destroyed by fire.

There was a design proposed to replace them with some really impressive towers but firstly the foundations were not solid enough, then they ran out of money, and then there were a couple of collapses of whatever of the towers had been built. Had the plans been properly completed, it would have been the tallest building in the world at the time.

During the Sack of Leuven in 1914 the church was set alight and the roof was destroyed. And then in 1944 it suffered a direct him on its northern side from a bomb

While we’d been walking around on our way to our meal we’d noticed some lights down at the end of one of the streets. On the way back we decided to go and have a look to see what as going on.

Here in the Mathieu de Layensplein where they have the brocantes at weekends, one of the bars here has decided to bring a little gaiety into the area by stringing up some very nice lights.

The whole Square looks quite nice and interesting like this and it would have been nice to see more people try this kind of thing in their neighbourhood. With everything that’s going on right now, we could do with some brightening up.

On the way back home, someone stopped me in the Tiensestraat and asked for directions.

While I was talking, I was having a look round and having the subject of lights going round in my head, I noticed just how nice the lower end of the Tiensestraat looked with all of the lights on the buildings. It’s another subject that seems to be crying out for a photograph.

Having done all of that, I headed home and missed my short-cut, so I had to go the long way round.

And now I’ve written up my notes (and that was a labour of love) I’m off to bed. No alarm tomorrow because the medication usually takes a lot out of me and I don’t know what this new stuff will be like.

And, of course, I have a 05:30 start on Friday so I need to be at my best.

Sunday 27th September 2020 – IT’S SUNDAY …

… and a day of rest is called for today. Which is just as well after my late finish last night.

So while you admire tonight’s moon over the bay, I lay in until just after 10:00. That’s a good idea as far as I’m concerned, especially when you’ve travelled as far as I had during the night.

This was a big, long dream last night but I can only remember a little of it. It was in a fish and chip shop and I was waiting for my meal. Someone in front of my had ordered a chinese cabbage and a girl very similar to Marie Warke (what’s she doing making a dramatic appearance in my nocturnal voyages after 35 years?) was serving behind the counter. She prepared this Chinese cabbage absolutely, really nice. I thought that it was an absolute work … “or warke” – ed … of art how she prepared all of this. Beforehand we were talking about football. The question of women’s football came up. In the Puy de Dome they had 5 or 6 womens football teams. That had me remembering the time a few years ago when I tried to start up a women’s football league. The first one, I went to Gouttières to the football club there (which there isn’t) and asked them if anyone think that it’s a possibility to start a women’s football league and does anyone want to join? The guy there drew on a blackboard the addresses of the mairie at Pionsat, St Gervais, Teilhet, somewhere in the Allier and then somewhere else in the Puy de Dome but a long way away – no, not Pionsat, somewhere else fairly local. Pionsat were quite strong in this women’s league so I was surprised that he hadn’t actually thought of Pionsat when he made out this little list for me.
A short while later there we were back in the Auvergne. There was a big group of us and we’d set out on foot walking from Gouttières (Gouttières again?). The guy in charge was leading this big party. We were all to do with the football team on tour, like the Ireland under-21s. I’d just seen them playing at Gouttières. There was one boy, dubbed “the new Pélé” who quite impressed me. Off we set and we walked into the mountains. This guy leading, something like Thierry, was very dynamic and determined ane eventually we found what he was looking for, a whole series of names that had been carved into the ground. If we stood on a certain viewpoint we could look below us and see all of these names carved out. He was told that his name, Meaux, had been carved on there so we had a look at all these names carved into the ground but couldn’t see it. There were hundreds of names in these rolling hills but there was nothing. Only half had been uncovered so maybe it was in the half that was still covered. he was bitterly disappointed after coming all this way that he couldn’t find his name. Then we ended up talking about the team and the Ireland under-21s. This boy came up and I said “Oh I’ve seen him. I thought that he was pretty good”. They asked when I had seen him so I mentioned some ordinary match in which he might have appeared. I didn’t want to say that I had seen him at Gouttières because that was supposed to have been behind closed doors. Again there was still a lot more to it than this

A little later on I was with Nerina at a family party (and knowing my family, this was probably a fête worse than death). It started at 19:30 and we all had to be at this hall by then but we were all still messing around at home. A huge group of us, all different members of the family. It wasn’t until about 09:15 or something that we decided that we had all better go. They were handing out all of the parcels to take and put a lot of stuff in my mitt and I couldn’t manage it all. In the end I just had to take the ones that had handles. I staggered with those and there was my vehicle which was a pickup, something like a Morris 1000 pickup. I put everything in the back of it, but it was looking strange. I knew that I had some trouble with the suspension on it so I thought that the suspension had collapsed. Meanwhile someone else had put some more stuff in the back of my pickup. He had a look and said something “you can’t get this type of S engine any more, can you? It’s getting to be as rare as a big Morris”. I didn’t want to tell him that it was just an ordinary standard engine in here but that got me thinking “why don’t I fit a big Morris engine in it, one of the 1622cc engines?”. Nerina got into the vehicle with me and I let the cluthch out. There was a mighty crash and bang and the vehicle swayed around. I suddenly realised why the vehicle was looking so peculiar. I’d had it up on a set of wooden ramps and I hadn’t realised. I’d just driven right off the end of the ramps. There the ramps were, and chains that held it, all bent and sprawled out in the street. I had to get out and pick them up. There was traffic behind that couldn’t get past me while I was doing it.
Somewhat later still we’d all been to a party. There were dozens of people around here and there were all kinds of things going on. While I was there the bathroom was in a hell of a state so I decided that I would tidy it up and throw away a load of stuff that was in there in this person’s house. I had an ulterior motive in that there was a washing machine there and I had a bag of dirty clothes so I stuck all of my washing into their machine while I was doing it. everyone else was doing something. Then I heard a couple coming back up, absolutely fuming and furious. “That’s the last time I ever come to this house and the last time I ever speak to this guy again. I was looking closely at the die he was using with this card game and it had ‘left hand’ on it. You don’t normally have dice with right and left hand written on it unless there’s something crooked going on with them”. So they were watching and he’d been cheating. Slowly the party broke up and my washing was still going and I still had this bathroom in a terrible state, even worse than it was before I’d started tidying it. I had to get this organised and the washing was still going and they were saying “why do people do this kind of thing?” I said “it’s the power, isn’t it? It all comes from having a repressed childhood, all of this kind of thing”. Some guy was standing there saying “oh, absolutely. Totally! I agree with every word you say”. Of course it didn’t dawn on me until later that he was the guy they were talking about. Someone else came in, a nice woman, and I wanted to go and have a chat to her, but someone else was chatting to her saying “so this is Claire’s mother” pointing to a young girl I’d met before. There were all kinds of other people chatting to me saying “let’s go and find a quiet corner for a chat”. In the end my washing was ready so I got it out of the machine and stuck it in a bag and just put the toilet back, stuck it in its socket. Then we were all ready to go. But the topic of this conversation was this guy’s cheating when he was playing.

Is it any wonder that I needed a lie-in after all of that?

First task this morning was to write up my notes and that took me almost until lunchtime. I’d had quite a lively day yesterday.

After lunch I made the dough for my pizza bases and while I was at it, I also made a pie base. There was some pastry left over from that so I made a strawberry turnover with a couple of my frozen strawberries.

While the pizza dough was proofing I came in here and attacked the dictaphone notes – and that was a labour of love too.

There was the break in the afternoon’s activities such as they were, so that I can go on my afternoon walk.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday I mentioned that the diving platform at the Plat Gousset has been removed. As I walked around the path underneath the walls I could see what they have done.

The post is still there – it would need some decent equiment to move that – but the crown, where all the kids congregate, has been taken away for the winter. They won’t have too many people swimming out there now until the late Spring, especially if the weather is as cold and windy as it is today.

We’re used to seeing crowds of people promenading up and down the Plat Gousset regardless of the weather.

However, today there were very few people taking the air down there. the little vertical-axis wind turbine was going round like the clappers this afternoon in the gale that was blowing. It’s not as windy as it was yesterday but it’s still pretty impressive.

The wind turbine was apparently installed to provide the electricity for the street lighting on the Plat Gousset but I’ve not heard if it’s actually in working order and performing its task.

Across the Square Maurice Marland I went, where I was hit by the full blast of the wind and had to struggle to reach the other side.

There were a couple of brave souls out there in yachts this afternoon and they were canting over impressively in the onslaught. They were the only ones out there and that is hardly any surprise.

As a result I didn’t hang around there very long. I headed off back to the apartment and the warmth and to carry on with my culinary activities for the rest of the afternoon.

By now the pizza dough had risen nicely so I divided it into three, greased two of them and put them in the freezer.

The third one I rolled out and put in the greased pizza tray, folding the edges back over again to make a nice compact edge. That I put on one side.

While I was making the pastry, I noticed that a football match was starting on the internet. A JD Cymru Ladies Premier match between Swansea and Cardiff.

The last ladies’ football game that I saw, leaving aside the kids’ game in Granville a few years ago, wasIN BURLINGTON, VERMONT in 2015 and I was quite impressed by that.

This game was even better than that. Swansea were excellent value for their 3-0 victory and some of their players, especially the two attackers, would fit in with a couple of the mens’ teams. Granville could certainly do with forwards like that.

If SGORIO decides to continue to broadcast the ladies’ matches, I’ll probably make the time to watch them.

Back in the kitchen I quickly made the pastry for my pie case and bunged it in the oven to cook, along with a strawberry turnover that I’d made with the left-over pastry.

My attention then turned to the pizza base. I made my pizza with what was to hand (I’d forgotten to buy any peppers at the weekend) and when the pie base was cooked I put the pizza in the oven.

30 minutes later, it was cooked to perfection and it tasted absolutely delicious. Quite filling too, and I didn’t need any pudding after that. The rice pudding can wait until tomorrow.

Next was the kefir.

The fig had risen to the top – the sign that fermentation had worked correctly. I decanted the liquid off and filtered it and put it into a stoppered bottle that I’d disinfected, making sure that the kefir grains went back into the mother solution.

The frozen strawberries that I’d bought on Thursday, they had been defrosting all day so I drained off the juice and added it to my kefir along with three or four strawberries. That’s now having its second fermentation

Back outside for my evening walk and , having forgotten that I’d been around the walls this afternoon, I went that way again.

The wind was still quite strong but not as strong as it was earlier, so I was able to fit in all of my runs. I was quite on my own too because there was no-one else out there.

That meant that I had the moonlight all to myself. The clouds were scudding across the sky quite quickly in the wind and when the moon was clear the reflection off the sea was even more impressive than it had been yesterday.

By the time I’d finished running into the headwind across the Square Maurice Marland I was pretty exhausted so I stopped to catch my breath.

The leaves are falling rapidly from the trees already and so the lighting effect on the trees was even more beautiful that it has been in the past.

On the way home I bumped into the itinerant. he’s still wandering around the town so I told him that really he ought to be talking to someone in the Mairie. He reckons that he’ll be fine, but I’m not convinced.

But it’s his decision, not mine.

Back at the apartment I took the pie case and filled it with the strawberries.

Then I mixed some agar-agar – quite strong because strawberries are quite acidic – and poured it over the top to make a kind of gelatine.

Being a strong solution, it set quite rapidly and now it’s in the fridge where I’ll be eating lumps off it for the next week or so, along with some of the coconut soya dessert.

But now it’s quite late – I’ve done a lot of work today and hardly stopped. It’s not like me to be working like this, especially on a day of rest like this.

Now I’m going off to bed, later than I was hoping. And I’ll be back at work tomorrow where I’ll be hoping to have a rest from the relaxing Sunday that I’ve just had.

EPIC HALL

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