Tag Archives: place d’armes

Tuesday21st April 2020 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

… day when I haven’t really been able to make a start.

And there have been far too many of these just recently – although the point has been made that I’m now three months without any medical treatment and I remember how I was on the last couple of days of my transatlantic voyage in the High Arctic when I was just running on adrenaline – they body, the mind and the spirit having given up a good while before then.

Yes, scanning back through my journal, I see that I still haven’t put on line the notes of the last three or four days of that voyage. The things that were going on on that voyage about which I had … well, not complained, but … errr … mentioned forcefully to the organisers were expressed in my notes in a fashion that won’t bear repeating in any family entertainment.

It’s not my habit to go back and edit what I write either. And there is a very good reason for that. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m slowly dying and on my way downhill it’s rather like a sawblade with peaks and troughs, and it’s important that I am able to look back on what I write about how I feel so that I can measure my decline – to compare whether I’m in a temporary trough or a permanent downhill slope with previous occurrences.

And that goes for my state of mind as well as my state of health too.

But anyway, I digress. And not for the first time either.

Just for a change, this morning I beat the third alarm. Not by much, it has to be said, but beat it all the same. And then once the medication was dealt with, there was the dictaphone.

It had been a hot, sweaty night (i have to keep a note of my night sweats, apparently – it’s a symptom of this illness) and I was on a train I think, one of these American overnight trains and we were discussing serving food. We thought about sausages and bread, lots of things, but we decided that if there was too much of one kind of thing people would just help themselves to that, so maybe we should just have the sausages or just the bread and have an attendant on board to serve it all. The conversation went round there for a while. A little bit earlier I’d been to Chester and had a coach with me. I had to get and park it up. I’d parked service buses up but a coach is a different proposition and had to drag it all the way through the town centre, stopping off for some chips, something like that. I wasn’t sure actually where to park it and I was hoping that I’d meet a policeman on the way who would tell me where to stick it, if you aprdon the expression. This was when I met these people who were talking about these sandwiches and how we used to do it previously when we were on a train
I don’t remember much about this next one but we were on the beach in Granville and we were going through some kind of famous album, no Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out Of Hell”, something like that. There were a couple of acoustic numbers on it, and the reason why was that the musician wanted the record company to sit up and take note of his music so he thought that he’d do an acoustic number or two. This was going on, this discussion about this album and something to do with blood while we were rooting around in beach rock pools for something but I can’t remember what it was now.
There was something going on about musicians changing their nationality to Italian so a lot of people did so. Liz had got to Australia somehow but because of the quarantine she had to go back home with her children. She simply registered the children with Alitalia and they were flown home at the cost of the Italian government.
Somewhere in all of this there was also something about hanging some kind of vertical pocket-type of storage things inside a fridge but I’ve no idea what that was about now.

With all of that going on, it really was a surprise that I’d beaten the alarm, that’s for sure.

After breakfast I had a go at the digitalising of two “various artists” albums. That was a very long, very slow process that required a great deal of searching.

They were big albums too, more than 40 tracks in all and much of it involving a great deal of detective work. And we’re back at the “false attribution” thing as well in a few cases. For example, one track attributed to “Eddie Graham” just didn’t correspond with anything that he did in his solo career towards the end and eventually I tracked it down as an old “Eire Apparent” track. There were a few like that.

The thing that surprised me the most was that there was only one track that I couldn’t find. The album with most tracks on it, a double-album with 23 tracks on it, I found all of those and that was astonishing.

It took longer than I intended too, because I … errr … had a rest for half an hour during the morning. But even so, I managed to edit well over 40 photos from July 2019, including my famous “leaping whale” image for which I won a mention.

After lunch I had a rather desultory go at writing out the rest of the notes to the radio projects that I have on the go. That took longer than I was expecting too, even though I spent some of that time chatting to Liz. I’d barely finished by 18:00 – knocking-off time.

But I had to ring up the doctor’s. I need an appointment for a check-up and to order some mdication as I’m running out. That’s now fixed and the appointment is for 10:00 on Thursday.

My hour on the guitar was spent having another go at “Telegraph Road” and it’s not as straightforward as you might think. And on the bass it’s even more complicated, except that at the end I managed to identify a pattern. And I think that it took me so long because one of the chords might be wrong.

Tomorrow I’ll have another go at it. Another track that I want to have a play with is Fleetwood Mac’s “Behind The Mask”. In the late 70s with Jim Farrar and that lot in Manchester we played a lot of Fleetwood Mac but it was all stuff of the eponymous album and off Rumours and I want to do something different.

Tea was a wicked stuffed pepper with rice followed by apple crumble and soya coconut stuff.

And then it was off for my walks and my runs.

When I set my foot out of the building I’d seen this really beautiful red sunset in the distance so I struggled on up the hill to my point of rest at the end of the hedge. And then when I’d gathered my strength and recovered my breath I ran down to the clifftop to have a good look at it.

The sun hadn’t gone completely down and wouldn’t do so for another 15 minutes I reckoned, but I didn’t really want to spend the time waiting for it.

There was other fish that needed frying too, or other cats that need whipping, as they say around here.

Out in the distance way off shore I’d noticed a speck of movement so I was intrigued to see what it might be – whether it’s either maybe Thora or Normandy Trader heading into port.

But when I returned home and had a closer look, I was rather disappointed. Well, not really, because a boat is a boat is a boat. What I’d actually been seeing was one of the big trawler-type of fishing boats out to sea.

So taking my leave of the crowds out here tonight (I reckoned that all in all I’d seen about 20 people in total tonight) I headed off to the other side of the headland to see what I could see.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that quite recently we’ve seen fishing boats deep in the Baie de Mont St Michel. And while there were none out there last night, there was one working out there this evening.

All on her own she was too, but working she was all the same.

With nothing else to see round here tonight, I pushed on for my run along the clifftop.

The chantier navale still had the same four boats in there but there was a change across on the other side of the harbour by the ferry terminal. Xhausiais is no over there all on her tod, with no sign of Joly France who has been keeping her company for the last while.

So where has Joly France gone to? She won’t be over at the Ile de Chausey at this time of night.

That puzzle was quickly solved.

Running along the clifftop I’d seen a strange profile or two in the inner harbour and wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. But it turns out as it happens to be Joly France and her sister tied up alongside the quay at the rue du Port – not their usual mooring point.

And work hasn’t restarted on the surfacing of the new car park yet. Still a lump of sad-looking asphalt when they could have done so much with it.

Mind you, they have been working on the new pontoons in the inner harbour today even though I didn’t hear the piledriver (and I had the bedroom window open too).

Not only is the thrid pillar in place correctly at the correct height, it has its little white cap on, the cap that keeps out the rain, so whatever they have been doing to it is clearly finished.

It remains to be seen when they will start attaching the floating pontoons to it. That will be progress.

And on that note, I ran on home.

And here’s a thing! Yesterday I was wishing that my new memory sticks would hurry up and arrive. When I looked in my post box on my way back in, there was a packet …

It’s come from China of course so it’s gone into quarantine in a sealed plastic bag where it will stay for a couple of weeks, and then I can open it and deal with it as appropriate.

Tomorrow morning I need to do some tidying as there’s a blood test man coming round tomorrow. The apartment could do with a good clean and tidy.

So a good night’s sleep, I hope, and then I’ll be fighting fit for tomorrow. I don’t think.

Saturday 20th April 2020 – TODAY WAS THE FIRST …

… day for quite sone considerable time (and I’m talking weeks here, I’m sure) that we’ve had ay appreciable amount of rain.

You can see the view that they are having from the coastguard station – just a mass of heavy, very wet cloud hugging the surface of the sea and no-one can really see anything at all. All that I can say is that it’s a good job that they are equipped with a radar

As for me, I’m not quite sure what I’m equipped with, but whatever it is, it seems to be preventing me from leaving my bed when the alarms go off.

That’s right, another one missed this morning too. Not by much, it has to be said, about 10 minutes in fact, but a miss is as good as a mile.

After my medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been and to see if anyone had manifested themselves to come with me too.

I started off last night in hospital, in a waiting room. I was on my own at first but then someone else came and a couple more people came. In the end there were about 8 or 9 of us. One of the couples was a young couple and it was the husband who was being involved in the medical procedure. And as he was sorting himself out someone else put his head round the door. I thought that it was a video at first but it was a real person. He started to deliver a eulogy about these two people – this couple. It was really strange, almost like he was sending them off to their deaths rather than to have medical appointments. There were a couple of people who were strange as well. One guy who came and then left after 15 minutes but came back in the middle of this discussion, shaking his car keys about, which I thought was really interesting
Later on, I was in work and went to sit at my desk. I hadn’t sat at my desk for ages. The guy sitting at the desk opposite me, an Asian guy had his feet all across my desk and didn’t move them either when I sat down. We were chatting and Frankie Howerd came up in the conversation and he asked me about him so I told him who he was. We were looking at some new buildings that were being built opposite. One of them certainly wasn’t perpendicular judging by all of the others so we were making some remarks about that. Then the story drifted around to me and an apartment block where I was living, a new-ish one, very low, four storeys something modern in an L shape with a garden in front. People were coming to see me and were talking about my apartment. I had a garage in the basement and Caliburn wouldn’t go in there so I was going to put one of my Cortinas, the red Cortina estate XCL, in. I realised that I needed some help to get it started and the kind of guy who would come along and give me a hand – I had a certain person in mind here and I don’t know why – someone with whom I was no longer on friendly terms and no-one else would really know how to help me the best to get this vehicle moved.

After breakfast, it was a long, weary drag to sort out the music for a couple of “various artists” collections. One album ended up being one short, which was astonishing because there was really some obscure stuff on there and I was expecting much more than that to be missing.

But the second one, after a great deal of work, actually worked out and no-one was more astonished than me. Some of the tracks on it were wrongly attributed too, and that always causes a huge problem.

As an example, one track attributed to Leslie Harvey (much better known as Les Harvey and the brother of Alex Harvey of the Sensational band of that name and who died through being electrocuted live on stage in the middle of a concert) isn’t by him at all.

Well, he might be playing the guitar on it, but the singer is definitely Maggie Bell (she of the “Taggart” theme song). So if Les Harvey really is playing the guitar, that can only be an early “Stone The Crows” track from before Jimmy McCulloch’s time.

And it was all like that. A track attributed to “Eric Clapton and Duane Allman” is actually a “Derek and the Dominoes” track from the “Layla” recording sessions when Duane Allman looked in from next door to see what was going on. And there were many others that were far more obscure than that.

No wonder that it took so long to sort out, and no wonder that I only edited a handful of photos from July 2019 while I was doing it.

Having got to where I wanted to be (albeit rather loosely) I turned my attention to the radio projects, with a break for lunch of course.

And by the time that I had knocked off, I’d chosen all of the music for two of them (except the last tracks of course), edited them, combined them in pairs as I usually do and even started on writing the text.

In another departure from previous practice, I’ve been preparing a searchable text file of tracks that I’ve used, with the project number to which they relate. I found to my horror the other day that I’d used the same track twice within a couple of weeks.

With a memory like mine, I need to do so much more than I’m doing. And talking of memory, I wish too that the memory sticks that I ordered would hurry up and arrive so I can merge a pile of new stuff into the various runs and maybe even start off a new run or two.

This evening on the guitar I took up a challenge.

The Dire Straits song “Telegraph Road” – one of the most emotional songs ever ever recorded and on a par with Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” – came up on the playlist just as I was pulling out the guitar.

And so I sat down and spent some time working out the chords to it. At first I just couldn’t do the chord changes even though I’d managed to work out most of them.

But after a while, the light goes on in the head like it occasionally does, and I changed the key to Gmajor and it all fell into place.

Of course, the lead guitar solo is quite a different thing entirely and I don’t think that I’ll ever manage to work that out, but still …

There was some left-over falafel in the fridge that had been in there longer that was good for it so I finished that off with steamed veg and vegan cheese sauce, followed by apple crumble and soya coconut stuff.

Then off on my run all round the headland. Not that I was feeling like it (I’ve had a little chute in health this afternoon -I recognise the signs now) and I would gladly not have gone out, but that’s not going to help me one little bit if I let myself go, especially with all of this going on.

But the rain was pleasant. The first for ages as I said earlier.

And here’s a thing – have you ever noticed how fresh everywhere looks in the early morning after a rainstorm during the night? Reduced traffic on the roads at night means less pollution and what is there in the bigger particles, the rain can wash it out.

So with little traffic on the roads this last month or so, what will the first rainstorm for several weeks do to the atmosphere? I’m looking forward to seeing what it will look like outside first thing in the morning.

Having recovered my breath I carried on running along the clifftop on the south side of the headland.

Still our four boats in the chantier navale. And still the same four too. I thought that I’d better check.

But one thing that I didn’t see tonight was any fishing boats out working. I suppose that there must have been some out though, because the harbour wasn’t full of idle boats by any means.

The tide was quite a way out though too, so I wouldn’t have expected tos ee an loitering around the harbour entrance either.

While I’d been working this afternoon, I’d heard the piledriver going off so I reckoned that they had been working down in the harbour.

When I paused for breath on my way home, I went for a look to see what they had been up to, and sure enough, there’s a third pontoon support that’s been pounded into the harbour bottom.

This is starting to look serious now, isn’t it? It won’t be long before they are in a position to finish off and I wonder what it will look like.

Granville, the newer of the two Channel Island ferries, is still there. Services are suspended now until 11th May at the earliest and we shall see after that.

The old cold store, from when the port was a thriving “Newfoundlander” deep-sea fishing port, is still there looking quite sad.

Mme la Maire wants to sweep it away and install a casino and leisure facilities there, but that will be the death of the town. The commercial activities in the port keep the town active all the year round.

if they are swept away and leisure activities replace them, then it’ll be like most other seaside towns – crammed to bursting point for two months of the year and dead as a doornail for the remaining 10 and that isn’t why I came here.

So I’m off to bed, and I’ll attack the radio stuff tomorrow, given half a chance.

That is, if my file-digitalising goes according to plan. But that’s too much to expect.

Sunday 19th April 2020 – I’VE HAD A …

… cookery day today.

From left to right we have a bottle containing peach syrup and the liquid from a pile of cooking aples with coconut cinnamon and nutmeg. That will be the breakfast drink for the next few days.

The two – or, rather, one and a half – jars are apple and peach purée, with desiccated coconut, cinnamon and nutmeg. After the success of my apple purée with a tin of apricots a few weeks ago, I reckoned that I’d try it with a cheap tin of peaches to see how that works out.

At the front is another apple crumble. Not a great success, the crumble topping unfortunately, but that’s a matter of aesthetics really – personal taste more than anything else. I must put more oats in it.

There’s also a tub of muesli about somewhere. I made a load of that too.

No, one thing that needs to be understood. When I say “today” – that is being … errr … somewhat economical with the truth. It’s probably more accurate to say “this afternoon”.

And when i tell you that breakfast was at 13:30, you’ll understand why.

No alarm today of course, so I can stay in bed as long as I feel like it (staying in bed, that is). So awakening at … errr … 11:30 after a night that wasn’t all that late at all is rather comforting, even if it does mean that I’ve missed half of the day.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone. I was with a group of people on the The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour last night and a whole pile of gunmetal grey cabinets and I’d bought the lot. I had them in a storage hold there and people were wondering what i was going to be doing with them but I didn’t say anything. I had one of my mkIII Cortinas, a saloon, and I had it up on some ramps at the back – jacks, axle stands, things like that and I’d made a rear number plate – no, someone brought a number plate to me and asked me how it worked. So I told them how to fit it, where it goes, where the number plate light went and how the wires connected up, how it was fitted on with tivets, this kind of thing, and this girl said something like “I’m glad that I came and asked you because of all the other people I could have asked”. So I started to fix this number plate to the back of this mk III Cortina. Other people came by and started looking and could see it going on. We were talking about them. Someone asked “what was I going to do with all of these cabinets once I left the ship?” I told them about this big warehouse, 280 ft², not a lot of course (did I mean metres?) and I used to be a taxi proprietor and I had 5 Cortinas in there. I carried on fitting this number plate. I fitted it in a different place than usual and it actually looked quite good although the number plate light was off-centre. Some people came by and these Americans were chatting about rear number plates and the legal requirements, all of this kind of thing.

There was much more to it than that but you won’t want to know about it, seeing as you are probably eating a meal right now.

After breaKfast, or lunch, or whatever, I made a start on a couple of compilation albums. And i was perfectly correct yesterday when I said that I probably wouldn’t find all of the tracks for them. I did what I could but they have gone onto one side for me to deal with in due course.

And then the cooking and the muesli-making. Now I’m set up for another couple of weeks, although at some point I’ll need to make some more orange and ginger drink

After the crumble had finished cooking I made my pizza. Now, of course, the oven is stinking hot and the pizza cooked to perfection. I’ve come to the conclusion that even when the thermostat trips out, that doesn’t mean that the oven is warm enough. It needs much more time than that to reach the proper kind of warmth.

And then out for my walk – or, rather, my runs. Much, much later than usual

Here’s the rue du Roc again. I ran all the way up to there from beyond the last lamp-post that you see in the photo, right down at the bottom. My apartment building is the one to the left where you can see the three lights.

That’s really quite a steep climb and I’m impressed that I can get as high up the hill as I do.

Having recovered my breath, I run down from here to the clifftop for a good look out to sea to see what is going on.

With me being late, it’s going quite dark and all of the lights are on. Brehal-Plage is looking quite nice in the evening light and you can even see the lights on the wind turbines away in the distance.

From here I walk on up to the lighthouse, across the lawn and the car park and then down by the side of one of the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall for the view across the baie de Mont St Michel to Brittany

Nothing much doing there either so I carried on with my run along the top of the clifftop.

No change in the chantier navale so I had a look to see what was happening in the tidal habour. Chausiais and Joly France were still tied up to the ferry terminal, but there wasn’t a lot of anything else happening around there.

And so I carried on with my runs back to the apartment.

With having set out late, it’s later than usual so I’m not going to hang around. I’ll be off to bed in a minute.

Back to work tomorrow and another two radio shows and then I’ll have to turn my attention to some live concerts. I need to organise a few of those.

Saturday 18th April 2020 – SOME PEOPLE ARE …

… becoming very touchy as time goes on.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that quite often I’m posting photos here of interesting food articles and the like that have caught my interest when I’ve been out at the shops.

Today though, I was just taking a photo of something in leClerc when a couple of security men appeared, gave me a grilling and “asked” me to delete it. It seems that they are becoming rather nervous about what they have in stock and, presumably, their prices too – because, as I mentioned last week, they seem to be slowly going up.

And the fact that I was asked to either delete the photo or to go and do my shopping elsewhere tells everyone more than any photo ever could about what is happening in LeClerc right now

What else is definitely happening right now is that I didn’t hear the second alarm at all. That’s a surprise because it’s Billy Cotton going “Wakey WaaaaaaaaaaKEY” followed by the theme music to the Billy Cotton Band Show, and how anyone can sleep through that I really don’t know.

But I did

Consequently it was something silly like 06:30 when I awoke.

Nothing on the dictaphone so, even though it might have been a late-ish night, it was a complete one with no interruptions. So instead, I made an early start on the digital file stuff.

And today, I ran aground. I’ve reached the end of the first run-through of stuff that I can digitalise easily, and I shall be starting on part 2

That’s the compilation albums. There are quite a few of those that I have, for one reason or other, and I shall have to hunt them down track by track.

But some of the stuff is pretty obscure, like a demo single by Graham Gouldman and Kevin Godley long before 10CC ever became thought of, and another by Gordon Jackson, formerly in a group called “Deep Feeling” with half of “Traffic”. I wouldn’t have the first clue even where to begin searching for tracks like that.

But talking of 10CC – where are my 10CC albums? 3 of them, there should be, the early pre-commercialisation stuff? And “Angel’s Egg” by Gong, and “Caravanserai” by Santana? I’ve not found those yet and I’ve been through everything several times. I’m beginning to notice more and more stuff missing, the more that I think about it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Having done one or two albums I went for a shower and a weigh-in. And that weight I put on the other day – it’s gone again. Yes, I think that my bathroom scales are about as reliable as the blood machine at Castle Anthrax.

But no matter what I do, I can’t seem to drop below the 80kg barrier. Well, I did, just once, and it didn’t stick. I haven’t exercised like this for 20 years.

After the shower I set the washing machine on the go. I’ve changed the bedding, for the first time since I can’t remember when. I’ve been letting things slide just recently and I need to get myself back on track.

At LeClerc I spent more than usual – but a good proportion of that was on coffee. They had some decent stuff on special offer – not as good an offer as the last tme that I bought some and I wish that I’d bought more of that now, but enough to tempt me to have some luxury in the near future and I’m all in favour of that.

On the way back home, I saw the most amazing view.

With the market being closed, I’ve been coming back through the town instead of along the coast as I would normally do and as I came over the brown of the hill by the roundabout at the Avenue Marechal LeClerc I could see the Medieval Walled Town in the distance, all swathed in mist.

Consequently I did a U-turn around the roundabout by the station, drove back up the hill, another U-turn at the roundabout at the top, and pulled up at the side of the road to take a photo.

If you see the church right in the centre, you’ll see behind it the roof of my apartment building.

To the left of that is the building opposite mine. That’s the College Malraux, the local High School (and seeing as it’s up there on top of the Pointe du Roc, “High” Is probably right). And to the left of that is another old stone building that has also been converted into apartments like this one.

In case you are wondering, this complex is an old stone military barracks, lately for the 2nd and 202nd Regiments of Line, with a parade ground in front which is now a car park, part of which is fenced off for private use by the residents of these apartments.

The old sports field behind the College, with athletics track and all of that, is now the College’s playing field which we’ve seen a few times in various photos in the past.

Back here I put my frozen food away, made myself a coffee, sorted out another digitalised file and then went for lunch.

After lunch I started on the third laptop – the 8GB one with the failed drive that I can restart using an old trick that the Gypsies taught me (T223 was an amazing course!) and moved the contents of that hard drive over onto the new external drive that I have bought to use as a back-up. And during the course of the day I’ve started on the external portable drives.

Memory sticks and memory cards will be next, and then the desk-top external drives, followed finally by the two desktop computers. I’ll sort this all out yet! Then I can start to lay up some of the old equipment. I can remember when I thought that a 250GB external hard drive for a back-up would last me a lifetime.

While I was drifting about on the internet I came across yet another two albums that seem to have gone missing from my collection too so I attacked those too and digitalised them.

But, shame as it is to say it, I crashed out yet again.

On the positive side though, I had a really good and lengthy time on the guitars tonight all told and I’m at the stage now where I’m really enjoying playing a 6-string guitar. That’s progress, isn’t it?

Tea tonight was a burger with pasta and vegetables followed by the last of the apple pie and some coconut soya stuff. Tomorrow i’m going to make an apple crumble, I reckon.

Monday though, I’ll need to make some more apple purée, and bearing in mind my success with the tinned apricots a while ago, I bought a cheap tin of peaches and I’ll see what that does.

After the washing up and so on, it was the time to go walkies outside.

Or, rather, runnies, because I’m running quite a lot just recently. I was hoping for a really nice clear, sunny evening tonight but I was out of luck.

While the air was quite clear and there was a really good view out for miles, there was plenty of cloud in the sky and for that reason it was difficult, if not impossible to see the sunset.

TThe view out to sea was really good, as I said earlier so I had a scan along the Brittany coast to see what was going on.

From my vantage point high up, there was something that looked as if it might have been a ship leaving St Malo, 50kms away.

Not being too certain, I took a photo of it with the aim of blowing it up (the photo, that is, not the ship). My first thought was that it might have been Pont Aven, the big Brittany Ferries ship, but the superstructure didn’t look quite right to me.

What I did was to go to a different viewpoint and take a photo on a different bearing to see if that was any clearer, but if anything it confused the situation even more.

And so the jury is still out on this. Even enlarging the photos and enhancing them couldn’t give me any definite hint of whether it’s a ship or a large island. I’ll have to go again and see if whatever I saw is still there another time.

If it’s no longer there, it must be a ship, not an island of course.

But having said that, while you lot admire the beautiful red sky tonight over the ile de Chausey, I was doing some research.

And what I found was that there was a “Condor” freight ferry, the Commodore Goodwill in port at St Malo at 10:24 this morning. And 12 hours later, i.e. just now, when it sent out an AIS signal (I have an AIS detector and antenna in my apartment as regular readers of this rubbish will recall) she was somewhere to the north of Jersey, east of Guernsey and west of the Cotentin.

And her silhouette is not unlike that of whatever it is in the first photo.

But I dunno.

However, according to A PRESS RELEASE FROM BRITTANY FERRIES, Commodore Goodwill was taken out of service in Winter 2015 to be fitted with scrubbers.

That’s a ferry on which I’ll be sailing once normal service is resumed. Absolutely!

Crowds of people out here tonight. I think that this quarantine thing has had it.

For the first time since all of this started, there was a road block on the way into town where the police were checking motorists and as I drove back through the town on my way back from the shops, a foot patrol was checking papers of people at the bus stop.

But they should have been out here with me tonight because there were people everywhere, especially on the footpaths that are officially closed to the public.

One of the photos that I took was of the head of the baie de Mont St Michel and you can see that above.

But with nothing special to do, I had a play with it and cropped bits out to see what I could see, close-up. This is Carolles-Plage, about 20kms away, with the white beach huts and the old hotel that’s now converted into apartments where I saw a miserable-looking apartment for sale that had once been a shop.

But never mind the apartment, what wouldn’t I give for a room in that house there perched on the side of the Pointe de Carolles? That would do me quite nicely

Here’s another bit cropped off the photo above.

It’s not possible to see the Abbey of Mont St Michel and its island from here because the Pointe de Carolles is in the way, but we can see the hotels and restaurants and so on situated on the mainland. They are the white buildings at the head of the bay about 30 miles away.

And perched on the end of the Pointe de Carolles is the Cabanon Vauban, the old Customs observation post that we visited two years ago.

After that I carried on with my runs and stopped for a breather on the walls.

By now the sun was sinking rapidly and while the Ile de Chausey was obscured by clouds, there was enough of a gap in them to let some red glow seep though and reflect off the water.

While I was here, I was entertained by part of the choir from the local church who were przctising outdoors just here. They clearly believed more in the power of worship than they did in the power of Social Distancing, that’s for sure. I left them to it and ran home.

Tonight has been quite relaxing and much of it was spent playing the 6-string guitar. I’m really getting into that right now.

But I have new bedding tonight so I’ll be getting into that in a minute. Tomorrow is Sunday, no alarm so I can have a lie-in. A day of rest tomorrow and then back to work on Monday.

Friday 17th April 2020 – WE DIDN’T HAVE …

… a beautiful sunset tonight.

Instead, we had the distant, ominous rumblings of a major thunderstorm of the type that we are most used to having on a hot summer evening, but some really intense, heavy grey clouds.

It was impossible to even see the Ile de Chausey this evening beacuse of the rainstorm that, judging by the direction of the wind, was heading my way. And so i didn’t hang about too long tonight just in case I got the lot of it.

Mind you, I did hang about rather longer than I intended this morning. I heard all of the alarms go off but instead I told myself that I deserved an extra half-hour in bed. I’m not sure why, but anyway, I did.

The dictaphone was interesting this morning. I’d had an attack of conscience and released 11 hostages that were being held prisoner. There was one in particular who caused me a great amount of grief and when it was filmed they said that they would continue with the story of this particular relief next week. Bit it was all something like a Hobbitesque-Lord Of The Rings-type of situation with mysterious people in it and I know that this one – a lot had gone on prior to this and this guy was something of a late entrant into this scenario.

And if you can make any sense out of that, you’re perfectly welcome to it.

After breakfast I had a go at some more digital file-hunting. And I’m really getting down to the dregs now because I’m right in the middle of more obscure stuff which I can’t find anywhere at all.

There’s so much that I’m going to have to digitalise myself, and the music industry will owe be a big favour when I’m finished because I’ll upload them onto the databases. All kinds of obscure stuff.

And it took an age too. Hunting stuff down, trying to make it load up (which wasn’t easy), waiting ages for some really painful uploads. In the end it took me up to lunchtime to do it all.

And the sad part about it all was that there were only two or three tracks out of all of this that are suitable for playing on the radio.

But at least I managed to deal with a pile of photos from July 2019 in Iceland. I’m now back on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour heading out of Akureyri on our way to our next stop.

After lunch I unpacked the hard drive that had come in the post the other day. I’ve now uploaded all of the files from the laptop that I use as a DVD player in the dining room and I’m currently uploading the files from the laptop with the broken screen.

While all of this has been going on, I’ve tidied up all of the post that hasn’t been filed away for a while and, having stumbled across a power block and extension cord that I’d forgotten, I changed things around in the apartment so that all of the amps and guitars are now in the bedroom. That means that I can play properly and hear myself properly while I have stuff going on on the computer.

This actually meant SHOCK! HORROR! I had the vacuum cleaner out on the bedroom. And it needed it too.

After the hour on the guitars, working out a couple of Lindisfarne numbers, I went for tea.

It was another Anything Curry seeing as there were some mushrooms left over that I had forgotten to use yesterday. A potato and a pile of spinach with all of that, and some rice and veg and there we go.

Apple pie and banana sorbet for pudding. Delicious.

And then off for my evening’s exercise.

A rather dramatic run up the hill as I struggled for most of the way. but it was worth it because the storm was raging away in the distance. The Brittany coast round by St Malo was taking a real bashing and you won’t see very many storms like this in this part of the world.

And I saw just four other people this evening, with just one guy admiring the storm in the distance with his field glasses. So we exchanged pleasantries for a minute or so – at an appropriate social distance of course.

Having recovered my breath, I ran on back home again.

When I stopped for breath halfway along, I went to look to see what, if anything, had been going on down at the harbour with the new supports for the pontoon.

although it was lighter this evening, I couldn’t really tell if there had been any change in the work. I hadn’t heard any suspicious noise today.

And so I have it up as a bad job and ran on home

Having had a good run tonight, I was glad that I was back early because there was football on the internet.

Yes, someone had found a video of the final match at farrar Road on 27 December 2011 before Bangor City moved to their new stadium and so we had a watch party to see them beat Prestatyn Town.

But I don’t think that anyone realised the vast improvement in standards of play, of pitches, of grounds and of facilities until you watch a match like this. It really was antediluvian.

So an early-ish night tonight, sort-of. Shopping tomorrow, fighting my way through the queues of course and then a relaxing weekend. There’s nothing on the agenda so i’m hoping for a decent weekend for once.

We shall see.

Thursday 16th April 2020 – I COULDN’T KEEP IT UP …

… this morning, which id something of a shame.

Having done so well this last couple of days, I couldn’t beat the third alarm today. I missed it by about 10 minutes.

Mind you, I didn’t have the early night that I was hoping for last night. I was listening to music again and so enjoying myself, I split up a Louis de Funes soundtrack to extract some more soundbites for my radio shows.

Definitely my favourite French comedian, Louis de Funes, and he deserves to be my co-star on the radio.

So where did I get to during the night, After the medication I could go along and find out.

I was going some kind of post-dated ad for the end of the month – the old men wanted it for some project or other. I’d get them to sign in and anyone who sends me any connections will have a reward because of it. But I was with Nerina for some part of the time.
Later on, a group of us was going skiing. We were all sitting around waiting for the bus to come and pick us up. I had all of the stuff to hand out to everyone for them to take their possessions. But some of the stuff, some of the people couldn’t carry. My brother was lucky – he just had a suitcase there and a guitar. I said “there’s no guy ropes or anything with this”. he said “yes that’s fine, not a problem. It turned out that all the stuff like that was in my suitcase and I’d got tons and tons of stuff like this. Mine was just really really heavy. There was someone who might have been Nerina but I’ve no idea who it was who didn’t have very much either, and someone else who might have been one of my sisters who didn’t have plenty. We were all there with all of these things and there was tons of it all told. I was wondering how on earth we would manage to get all of this onto a bus or a train, however we were going. Each person was responsible for his own but that’s not going to be right with all of the stuff we have. It’s just escalating all of the time out of hand like this
Later still I was just about to go off on a trip with Stuart Graham, the Honda motorcycling racing specialist and tuning guy who lived near Nantwich but just as I was getting ready to go off the alarm rang and put an end to that.

There was much more than this going on too but as you are probably eating a meal right now, I’ll spare you all the gory details.

After breakfast it was digitalising the cassette collection time. Another four albums have bitten the dust this morning but, once again, they are four albums that I won’t beusing in the radio projects, for a variety of reasons.

And it made me realise that there are a pile of albums that I no longer have and I don’t understand that at all. And bearing in mind what they are, I have an idea where they might be. But I’ll never have them back now. Ahhh well!

But the splitting was reasonably comfortable and reasonably rapid, but somehow I’ve ended up with two *.mkv files, which is what I’ve been trying to avoid.

A shower and general clean-up was next. And I weighed myself too. And after all of this running and so forth I’ve … errr … GAINED 800 grammes. It looks as if my scales are as reliable as the blood machine in Castle Anthrax.

A shooping trip to LIDL was called for next.

And I was right about something else too. Starting on Tuesday earlier this week I’d been hearing strange noises coming from the port and I’d been thinking to myself that it sounds as if they have restarted work on the pontoons.

And that certainly seems to be the case. The big crane on the floating pontoon has one of the large supporting pillars in its evil clutches over there.

And when I came back from the shops later on, they were hard at work on the pontoon.

You can see the piledriver up there, supported from the big crane, pounding away at the pontoon support and driving it firmly into the bed of the harbour.

And just think how much easier it would have been to have done this work two years or so ago when the harbour was drained and they were reinstalling the new harbour gates. What an effort they would have avoided had they done it then.

But in the meantime, my attention was distracted by the excitement going on down at the bottom end of the harbour.

You can see Marité there of course, but you’ll also see a pile of large bags of building material. That would seem to indicate that either Thora or Normandy Trader is on her way to port.

We haven’t seen either of them for a few days, but that’s not to say that they haven’t been here. With us in detention à domicile like this and only being allowed out briefly, and with the rapid turnover that the ships seem to be enjoying these days, it’s not impossible that I’ve missed them.

Onwards towards LIDL and in the rue Couraye I came across something interesting.

There have been reports from all over the world about the disinfecting of the streets that receive heavy use. Here in Granville most of the banks and important local shops are situated in the rue Couraye and here they are out spraying the street.

It’s quite possible that the speech by the President the other day has galvanised them into action.

There’s also a story that the town council has ordered 20,000 masks from a local clothing manufacturer to distribute to the population. This ending of the detention à domicile on 11th May might actually be a possibility.

At LIDL tomatoes were in very short supply and those that they had were expensive. In fact I spent a lot of money there, but much of this was on new cooking supplies. They had some new tart cases and stuff like that today.

On the way back, I discovered that La Mie Caline had reopened, so I bought a dejeunette. Things really are slowly returning to normal, bit by bit.

There was an article in the local paper this morning that the amount of fish products landed here during the month of march had fallen by 30% or so.

That’s certainly some kind of clear evidence that fishing is continuing despite the crisis, albeit in reduced numbers. And as I walked up the hill in the rue des Juifs there was a delightful nautical danse macabre in the harbour.

One fishing boat was on its way in and another was on its way out, and they were having a nice little waltz around each other.

After lunch I started on the remains of the two radio projects that I hadn’t finished. I’d chosen the final tracks and edited them last night so it was just a case of writing the text, dictating it, editing it, merging it into place with the final track and then editing it all down to one hour for each project.

That took me up to about 16:15 to do them both, and I could have done it quicker too except that I … errr … relaxed for a while.

And then, until 18:00 I had some “me time”. I deserve some. And one of the things that I did was to order a new computer hi-fi system.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the one here has its problems and seeing as I spend so much time these days listening to and editing music and so on here, I ought to have some decent stuff.

And so I ended up in discussion with a musical equipment wholesaler and we’ve worked out a package. There won’t be much change out of €300 for what I’ve ordered, but I’ve had this hi-fi here for at least 18 years and it’s due for a change.

After the hour or so on the guitars, I made tea. Now that I had bought an aubergine I made myself an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit – and forgot to use the mushrooms that were left. I had some of that for tea and there are four helpings left for the freezer. I need to build up the supplies again.

The apple pie was delicious too, with the last of the coconut soya cream. But there’s that lovely banana sorbet for the next couple of days to take my mind off things.

Later on I went out for my evening activity.

There was a really beautiful red sky in the distance and by the time that i’d run up to the top of the hill (and that had me in agony) it was lookign even better, with the sun just peeking through the sky over the Ile de Chausey

It looked absolutely wonderful with the cloud just there like that, in exactly the right place.

And so I carried on with my perambulations while I recovered my breath.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have recently been discussing fishing activity deep in the Baie de Mont St Michel. There’s another fishing boat out there this evening – not the one to the left of the photo which seems to be heading into port, but the one to the right.

That one is farther out, deeper into the bay and has its workign lights switched on, so it would seem to be actively working out there.

But by the time that I’d gone round to the other side of the Pointe du Roc, the sun had sunk below the horizon.

And here I’m presented with one of the most extraordinary sights that I’ve ever seen, and I’m glad that I had the big NIKON D500 with me to photograph it. The way that the sun is reflecting on the cloud above it behind the Ile de Chausey is just like the light of a theatrical backdrop and I’ve never ever seen this effect in real life.

It was totally spell-binding.

And I wasn’t the only one out here tonight enjoying the sunset either.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve mentioned on previous occasions that we are seeing more and more people flouting the regulations about staying in and so on. We had a fair crowd out in the streets today, and here’s someone who has passed the security barrier to go down to the little cove there to watch the sunset.

Still, I suppose that the sight was well worth it.

With my usual two stops for a breather, I ran all the way home from here.

But in one of the breaks I had a little diversion to look at what they had been doing in the harbour today. And they have indeed stuck another pontoon support pillar into the ground.

Not all the way down, so presumably they’ll be back to finish it tomorrow and to install the rest. Obviously the local council isn’t worried too much about this virus.

So I’m off to bed, later than I intended. Tomorrow, with no radio stuff to deal with for the first time since I don’t know when, I can make a start of a few of the arrears that have been building up.

And aren’t I looking forward to that?

Wednesday 15th April 2020 – I’VE BEEN …

… a naughty boy today.

Yes, i’ve been out of the apartment twice!

Mind you, I don’t think that the first one counts, because I took out a pile of rubbish to the bins. But having said that, if I had left the rubbish alone for another day or so, it would have walked there on its own.

There has been a big pile of cardboard building up behind the door too so while I was on my way down I took that too. The dechetterie isn’t going to be open for the foreseeable future so I may as well start to move that into the disposable bins. I’ll take the rest of it down tomorrow when I go to the shops.

Yes – go to the shops. No baps for burgers (as I discovered this evening), no cucumber, no apples, no pears, none of the eucalyptus sweets that I like. I shall have to organise myself much better than this

But at least I managed to haul myself out of bed before the third alarm. And that’s certainly a little progress compared to just recently.

Once the medication was dealt with I had a listen to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night and, more interestingly or importantly, whether anyone we know had accompanied me.

This virus thing was still going on again last night but we were all allowed out keeping our social distances, this kind of thing. Tonight they announced that there would be a collection for the Health Services and everyone should be on the street. Of course the Government announced that there would be a fine of £30:00 for everyone caught out on the street so we don’t know where to go from there. In the end we were all out there and a guy from the local tax Office turned up with a folder. I went up to ask “were you collecting money for Live Aid then?” He gave me some kind of dirty look and said “no, some of us still have work to do” and went off to interview someone about their tax affairs.

So that was pretty exciting, wasn’t it?

As I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … anyone might think that I have a preoccupation with this virus.

But that’s far from the truth. When I take a close look at things, it’s not really affected me all that much, even though I’ve been told that I’m one of the most at risk. I can’t go out for my bread of course, but taco rolls are proving to be a very acceptable substitute.

And I can’t fit in my 100% of daily fitness routine, but instead I’ve started running again in the time that is allowed me and I’m pushing on with that.

There’s plenty of work here too so I’m not bored at all, and in the time that I would normally spend going for my afternoon walk I’m playing the 6-string guitar. And I do have to say that I can see quite an improvement there too. I was struggling to play barchords and couldn’t perform rapid chord changes when I started, but tonight, having a play around with Neil Young’s “Down By The River” I was changing over from Cmaj7 to Bm to D to Cmaj7 without even thinking about it.

But anyway, I digress.

After breakfast I attacked the digital files and, for a change, all four of them went off with very little problem at all – just one or two tracks that “stuck” when I was trying to deal with them. The unfortunate thing is though that they are four albums that won’t really figure in me radio programmes, for one reason or another, so it wasn’t really very efficient.

However, it didn’t require a great deal of effort so I was able to have a whack at the photos from July 2019 while it was a-doing. I’m now up to 0604, which might sound a lot, but I’m still stuck in Akureyri, and I reckon that I’ll be here for a while.

There were a couple of breaks in between all of this. One was for lunch of course and the other one was … errr … for a little pause, something that filled me full of regret.

However, despite all of that, the two radio projects that needed finished off are finished off, up and running, and the other two are all complete and assembled except for the final tracks, which can be finished off tomorrow.

Mind you it took me until 18:15, but I didn’t mind if it meant completing the job. That’s another good thing done and dusted. And I still managed my hour on the guitars, what the heck!

Tea tonight was a burger with pasta and veg followed by a slice of apple pie with coconut soya dessert. And it just tastes better and better.

After tea I headed out for my evening run. And for some reason or another it was a real struggle, the toughest so far, to make it all the way up the hill to the corner of the hedge.

But it was well worth it of course, as it always is, because there was another beautiful sunset. I had another play around with the camera settings and finally produced the photo that I wanted.

And I do have to say that it’s come out really well too.

However, there were a fair few people out there enjoying the sunset, more than I have been used to seeing. I think that more people are becoming fed up of this detention à domicile which is a shame because figures are going back up again. It’ll never be over at this rate.

While I was out there admiring the sunset, my attention was drawn to something moving around way out in the English Channel.

Out of curiosity I took a photo of it, with the aim of blowing it up (the photo, not the object) when I returned home to see what it might be.

And I was right about part of it. It is indeed a fishing boat out there. And its working light is on too. But what I want to know is what is the object in front of it. It’s much too far away for me to have a decent chance of seeing it clearly, but it’s certainly something interesting.

Once I’d finished speculating, I set off again on my voyage.

Around the corner and looking over the Baie de Mont St Michel towards St Pair sur Mer, I could see a couple of orange lights in the distance. That was the cue for another speculative shot to enlarge at home to see what it might be.

And it looks to me as if it’s the sun, very low in the sky, reflecting off some things on the roof of that house. But as for what, I really have no idea at all.

All five runs again tonight, despite the crowds of people around. Every evening now, there seems to be more and more people out and about.

Now, if I’m really lucky, I might have an early night. That might come in useful, just for a change. I have shopping to do tomorrow of course and I want to finish off these radio projects too, and they won’t be finished on their own.

Tuesday 14th April 2020 – WHAT A REALLY NICE …

… gesture.

One of my neighbours knocked on my door earlier.
“I haven’t seen you about for a good few days. I was wondering if you were Ok. Do you need anything?”

That’s what I call Solidarity. It’s what the world has been missing for the last 50 years. Let’s hope that if we learn anything from this world-wide dêbacle, it’ll be that Solidarity is a very important concept and that there’s always a place for it.

Not like – was it Ron Atkinson? – who said “there’s always a place for the Press. They just haven’t dug it yet”.

Even more surprisingly, I arose from my stinking pit as the first alarm went off at 06:00. I bet that you weren’t expecting that – I know that I wasn’t!

But the secret to that was that I had forgotten to put the ‘phone under my pillow and it was on the chair, making enough noise to awaken the dead. Rather like Peel’s “View Hulloo” I suppose.

Actually, I was already awake. I had awoken bang on the spot of 05:58 and I know that for a fact because I looked at the time on my fitbit.

So what all of that was about this morning, I really have no idea.

After the meds it was the dictaphone. I was with my father at a house and Claude had thrown away an old cooker but the cooking panel was better than the one in my house so I took the cooking panel out of the cooker and put it in the kitchen. It worked for a couple of days and then packed up, so we repaired it and it worked for another couple of days and then it packed up again, right in the middle of doing something, making a cup of tea I think. Of course it was a Saturday afternoon, wasn’t it? No chance of getting to the shops to replace it. And Bank Holiday Monday, so we were stuck. I had to get the old one out to put back in to last until the shops reopened. We were talking about it and I was thinking “yes, God, Claude never gave anything good away so that explains that. At the same time I had to take it out and dump it in my garden along with all of the other rubbish that was in there. It was really looking bad, my place and my father said that I ought to take some stuff down to the tip. I said that I would do as soon as the van’s empty but it’s full right now. He said “why don’t you take my van? Take some stuff in my van?”. I was surprised that he would let me because he was never really one for letting people take his vehicles. He started to remember the time that I’d borrowed his van in 1974 and I had a parking ticket, all that kind of thing. I was thinking “God, that’s 40-odd years ago and he’s still remembering that and still talking about it”.

After breakfast I started on the file digitalising again. And what a miserable session that was this morning. It took me ages to find four albums for which I could find everything that I needed. There were several where there were only two tracks, or three tracks or, in one case, nothing at all available and that was depressing.

Some of the stuff is pretty rare, I know, but I was expecting to do better than this. Like I’ve said before … “many, many times ” – ed … that fire at Universal Studios must have been devastating. I’m going to have my work cut out to deal with all of this stuff that I can’t find anywhere else, and I’ll certainly be doing the music industry a great favour when I’ve digitalised it all.

Despite the good start to the day that I had had, all of this nonsense took me almost up to lunchtime. What was even worse was that because of all of the issues I didn’t manage to do too many photos. I’m still inspecting the old Norse village at Gàsir just up the road from Akureyri. I’ll never be finished at this rate.

Nevertheless I cracked on and by the time I knocked off this evening (a somewhat later 18:15) I’d finished writing all of the notes for all of the radio projects as far as I could. That will be dictated tomorrow and I can crack on with editing it – I hope.

Tea was a falafel with steamed veg in a cheese sauce and it’s difficult to make a vegan cheese sauce when you’ve run out of the correct type of vegan cheese that you need.

No pudding tonight – simply because I made too much veg and I have to be careful what I eat.

When I’d finished the washing-up I went out for my evening run.

And with all of the vegetables that I had eaten, it was quite a struggle to run all the way up to the top of the hill and I was exhausted. Mind you, it was well worth it because there was a really beautiful evening sun.

There were quite a few people out there enjoying it. And no surprise either because it was slightly warmer tonight than it was yesterday evening.

The sun was going down quite nicely over the Ile de Chausey so I took another photo of it.

To try something different, I had a play around with the camera settings but it still didn’t give me the image that I wanted, which was a shame. It’s a bit of a disappointment really.

So on that note I exchanged pleasantries with another sun-watcher (from an appropriate social distance of course) and carried on with my run around the corner and along the cliff top.

Still the same four boats in the chantier navale so I had a look over at the ferry terminal.

Not that the ferry terminal will be doing much, but one of the Joly France boats – the older one, I think – and Chausiais are moored up there. Apparently, in answer to a question that I had posed a few days ago, there’s a freight service twice a week over to the Ile de Chausey.

No-one has said anything about passengers though, so I don’t know how they are moving about, if they are moving about at all, that is.

So I pushed on with my running. And while it was agonising tonight, I managed to complete all of my five runs.

One thing that I have noticed though, is that while I’m not pushing on the distances very much, my recovery time between each run (because I have to pause for breath) is reducing little by little.

And even when I don’t feel up to running, I find that I can still push on regardless and as long as it’s on the flat or downhill I can do it.

Just for a change, I thought that tonight I hadn’t seen a fishing boat out there and that they weren’t being allowed out.

However I did notice something moving right out to sea near the horizon so I took a speculative photo in order to blow it up (the photo, not the object) when I return home.

Sure enough, it’s one of the big fishing boats right out in the English Channel. So they are still going.

Anyway with a bit of luck I might be in bed before midnight. I’ve had a long day today and I haven’t even crashed out. That must be something of a record.

I wonder if I can keep it up.

Monday 13th April 2020 – IT WAS HARD …

… this evening going for my runs.

It’s a lot colder than it has been of late and a pair of gloves and a hat would have made a great deal of positive difference to my comfort this evening.

But really what was to blame for it all was the howling gale. A couple of my runs, including the longest one, was right into the teeth of the gale and while I managed to accomplish them all, including the little additional extra metres that I’ve been doing. But I certainly knew all about it by the time that I returned home and I don’t want to have to do it again in a hurry.

A Bank Holiday today, of course. Easter Monday. And so I celebrated by having a lie-in. And in a change from just recently, it was actually only about 07:45 when I awoke.

Even more interestingly, it was 08:15 when I left my bed too. Not the best lie-ins that I’ve had, but some of them just recently have been somewhat excessive, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Nothing on the dictaphone either, as I found when I went to check it after the medication. So it must have been a decent night’s sleep too.

After breakfast (and my last hot cross bun) I made a start on the digital sound files. I’m on the cassettes now of course and by the time that I’d finished, I’d dealt with another 4 albums.

Three of them went quite quickly and I didn’t have time to deal with many of the Iceland photos. But of course there’s always one that is a struggle and it took me an age to sort it out, to find the files that I needed, to get them to download and then to convert them to *.mp3.

But having done that, I could start (better late than never) on the next two radio projects.

Despite having a stop for lunch, by the time I came to knocking off at 18:00, I’d chosen all of the music for both projects, joined them up into pairs as I would usually do, and even made a start on writing the text. I don’t know where this sudden energy has come from.

For my hour on the guitars, I’ve made a start on writing another song. I’ve been a bit quiet on that front since November. I was warming up, just running through a few chords, and a certain chord pattern caught my attention. I had a little work on it and while I was doing so, a lyric pattern that fitted it came into my head too.

So half an hour on the 6-string and half an hour on the bass working around it to see where I finished. There will be a lot more to it of course, and then I have to work out the drumming to it now that I have my electronic drum kit.

Tea was a stuffed pepper followed by some of the apple pie that I baked yesterday, with soya coconut whatsit. And it was all really delicious too.

That was the cue for me to go outside for my evening’s exercise.

It was still quite light while I was out there and the sun was a good 20 minutes or so from setting. But there was a fishing boat out there, presumably having left the port and heading off to the fishing grounds somewhere out by the Channel Islands.

Here’s a nice photo of her, disappearing off into the sunset. And into the haze too.

Yes, nothing like as clear as it was yesterday which is a shame.

But regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last night there were the three (or four) lights of fishing boats down in the Baie de Mont St Michel where I wouldn’t really expect to see them. But there they are again tonight.

In the light and with the NIKON D500 and the 70-300mm LENS I could see them clearly. There are seagulls around them too so they are certainly out there working.

There were another few fishing boats out there too, but I suspect that these two are hovering around the harbour entrance maybe waiting for the tide.

Mind you, their working lights are on too and they are also surrounded by seagulls. So even if they aren’t actually working right now, they must have full loads and they are sorting the cargo.

Struggling against the headwind as I did, I finally made it back to my apartment, totally wasted. And Rosemarie rang me up so we had a lengthy chat about nothing in particular. But then that’s what friends are all about.

And that’s why I’m late doing this – not that I’m objecting of course.

So tomorrow, back at a full day’s work, alarms and everything. And who knows? I might even make progress. Stranger things have happened.

Sunday 12th April 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall a short while ago that we saw a fishing boat heading out deep into the Baie de Mont St Michel, and I expressed my surprise, because I didn’t recalls eeing a fishing boat that deep in there before.

But if yuo look at those white lights just there, you’ll understand that what we are seeing is actually three fishing boats down in thz bay somewhere off the Pointe de Carolles. They are stationary with their working lights on, and that would indicated to me that they are working.

There was a fourth one too, out way off to the left close inshore, but couldn’t fit the photo to include it.

So there you go. It seems that they are starting to look around for more places to fish, and I wonder if that is something to do with Brexit.

What isn’t surprising of course is the fact that I didn’t see the light of day until about 10:30 this morning.

Not that I’m complaining today either, because it’s a Sunday and also a bank holiday so in effect i’m allowed two lie-ins.

It was just as well because just as I was thinking of going to bed last night an interesting track came round on the playlist so I had a bash at it with the 6-string guitar.

And not just any old how either. I plugged in the VOX AMPLUG, turned it full up and put on the headphones.

It was just like being in a studio or on a stage, and I was so carried away that I ran through a pile of the repertoire until getting on for 03:00

And do you know what? I don’t regret it for a minute.

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

I was in Gainsborough Road last night and the place was an absolute tip with stuff everywhere, tons of stuff all over the place. There was an insurance guy who was trying to sell me some insurance policy so he could come round to the house and I could tell him to clear off. Then I got to thinking about the state the place was in but before I could do anything about it the front doorbell went – a strange doorbell like a couple of dogs barking. I went downstairs and there was this guy. Of course the two cats and a dog in my house went immediately rushing out. He made a remark about a mentally-handicapped person, having a couple turning around. He indicated a couple of people to me – one was a young girl with long albino blonde hair. He pointed to her.
A little later I was driving a lorry, a big artic with a trailer with an old van and a pile of wood on it. I was doing all right – even in a narrow road I pulled right over to let a Polish bus come the other way. Suddenly the road petered out and I ended up in the wrong section of the road. I’d been right about which was the main road but I’d taken the wrong turning at a really confusing junction because I wasn’t sure. I had to reverse around in some yard. I did it basically without looking at first and just missed a parked car by about a quarter of an inch. The guy in the house came out and was quite cheerful about it. He told me what I’d done. I said “well I’ll turn it round but the difficulty is that I can’t see what I’m doing”. He put a light on but it wasn’t what I wanted because of course you have loads of blind spots on artics. He said “do you want me to do it?”. I said “no, I’m going to do it” I don’t know why, because I wasn’t at all confident and it was really tigh but what I wanted was someone to watch me. But he wandered off. While I was sitting there examining this I noticed that the van had come loose on the trailer. I thought that this was probably just the awkward positioning that it’s in and it will straighten out when I have the trailer straight again. That didn’t look right to me. This girl came out for a conversation so I thought I’d get her to watch, but I’d still rather have the guy watching.

There was more to it than this too but you’re probably having your tea or something like that right now, so I’ll spare you the gruesome details.

After breakfast, which was well after midday, I made a start on the digitalised file splitting.

As I suspected, I seem to have run aground. I’ve started to come up against albums that for one reason or another I can’t do right now – mainly though because the digital sound files just aren’t available.

They will need a good sorting out to see what’s what and for me myself to digitalise them as necessary. But that’s for another time. In the meantime I made a start on the cassettes.

What with one thing and another it was a long, weary early afternoon trying to sort all of this out and I didn’t have much opportunity to edit many photos from July last year. We’re just pulling into port at Akureyri and photo 0542. That’s probably about a quarter of the way around my July voyages.

Finally I was able to deal with the two outstanding radio projects. They are both now complete as far as I can go right now, and the final two tracks have been timed and chosen. I just need to write and then dictate the text, edit it and merge it all together.

But I think that I’ll do what I did last week and that is to choose the music for the next two radio projects, and then write and record all of the text in one go.

And I’m not sure if I mentioned, but I had a really lovely note from someone about our outside broadcast for the GRANDE MAREE VIRTUELLE, and for those of you who understand French, you can download the Podcast at the link that I posted.

Having had a good play about on the 6-string guitar late last night and here and there today, I just had half an hour on the bass tonight.

One thing that I’ve noticed thought is that with having played a lot just recently on the 5-string fretless bass, I found today that the Ibanez acoustic 4-string just isn’t up to what I want it to do.

In my old age, I’m becoming spoilt. That’s for sure.

With it being a Sunday,as well as vegan pizza night, it’s also pudding for the week-making night.

having had rice pudding last week and having used a couple of the apple pie slices from the freezer during the week, I decided on a big apple pie and an apple turnover. What I don’t eat this week can go into the freezer to build up the stock again.

The pizza was delicious, and half of the apple turnover was equally nice. I shall have to make this again sometime.

It was really late tonight when I went out for my evening perambulations.

Once more, I ran all the way up to the end of the hedge and could have carried on, incorporating run n°2 down to the clifftop but I stopped to catch my breath.

Down at the cliff top, this fishing boat was going past on its way towards port. The fishing boats are still working out of Granville (as we saw in the first photograph earlier) whether they are working anywhere else or not.

They are even allowed to sell their fish directly off the quayside here, as I mentioned a while ago, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

But it really was a beautiful night and I regretted bringing the NIKON D3000 with me instead of the NIKON D500.

The sky was really clear and you could see for miles. The street lights of St Malo right across the Baie de Mont St Michel were reflecting beautifully from the sky and the extra versatility of the bigger camera would have done it much more justice.

What was sad about this was that I was the only person here enjoying it. There wasn’t another soul around at all.

And it was hard to say if there was even anyone manning the radar in the Coastguard station either.

There was certainly no shadow or anything moving around in there, so I continued on my merry, mazy way.

The same four boats in the chantier navale so I left them in peace, and carried on home. The usual 5 runs in total and although I’m totally wasted and sweating by the time that I return, I notice that I’m pushing on the distance, a couple of metres here, a couple of metres there

That’s quite important to me because I need to keep on top of my health as much as I can.

But it’s a Bank Holiday tomorrow, so no alarm and a lie-in. I hope that no-one comes along to spoil it.

Saturday 11th April 2020 – I’VE BEEN PANIC-BUYING …

… today.

Yes, at LeClerc, the pizza base rolls are back in stock. So seeing as I need to replenish the stocks having exhausted my spare one last weekend, I bought two rolls.

So shame on me!

And shame on me too for my morning. It’s no surprise that having not gone to bed until something silly like 01:45 this morning that I missed the alarms. But I had been hoping for something different than 07:55. That was rather an embarrassment.

After the medication I looked at the dictaphone – or rather, listened to it. And last night, Castor came to join me on an excursion. It’s been a couple of weeks since she’s come along, so hello again to you!

Once breakfast (including a hot cross bun of course) was out of the way, there wasn’t time for very much else.

A shower, and set the washing machine in action because I’m running low on clothes, and then I headed off into town and the shops.

and there are far more people out on the streets than there were a couple of weeks ago. It seems that the detention à domicile is getting on everyone’s nerves.

This is the queue going all the way around the Leclerc Hypermarket. And if you think that this is long, this is when I was leaving. When I arrived, it was reaching right down to the end there and a little further on.

It’s never been as long as that as far as I have seen. But in the absence of the panic-buying that we have seen in other countries, I suppose that people are running out of supplies.

But, anyway, this is the reason for all of the queues.

There must be the same kind of measures being applied here that we were seeing a few weeks ago in Belgium, with shops being obliged to restrict admittance, presumably depending upon the size in square metres of the sales area.

Not that it’s particularly effective of course, because it still doesn’t stop people congregating in confined spaces in one corner of the shop.

This is quite an interesting sign too.

Apart from the couple of tips and hints, people are being limited to one shopping trolley person. That’s still a lot of food and so on for someone. It made my paltry load look quite pathetic.

But I was astonished at the price of tomatoes. They have doubled in price this last week or two and that’s a sign of the times.

Another sign of the times is that while the range of flour on offer has reduced dramatically (no pizza flour, for example), leClerc is now selling flour in generic 5kg sacks.

They are clearly confident that these will sell, so this must mean a big rise in the number of people who might be contemplating making their own bread. In fact I know a few people who have resurrected their old breadmakers.

But I do have to say that – 5kg bags of flour. I’ve seen these in places like rural Canada but I never ever in my life expected to see them on sale in an urban environment like this.

But there was one thing that I did stock up. And it isn’t really panic-buying either because I would have done this regardless of the circumstances.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall a couple of months ago that they had some frozen beanburgers on offer – a pack of 4 for €3:99 and they were quite nice too. Today, they were reduced to 40% off, and so I bought two packs.

Not that I need them because I have plenty of burgers, but at that price and now that there’s some room in my freezer I couldn’t turn them down.

Back here, one task that I’d been saying for a week or so that I would do is to clean out the freezer. I did a drawer yesterday so I did the other two just now. It’s a lot tidier in there now and things are much better arranged.

And I found a slice of apple pie from … errr … June 2018 so I left that out to defrost for pudding tonight.

Once I’d organised all that, I made myself a coffee and had a start on digitalising some more albums, with a pause for lunch of course at about 13:30.

Three albums went quickly – so quickly that I only had time for half a dozen or so photos. But the fourth album wouldn’t download at all for some reason and I tried two or three locations too.

It’s a pretty rare album too so in the end I abandoned that particular one and chose another. But I’m building up a pile of rare albums that will need me to digitalise them all on my own.

Once that was done I set about the four radio projects that I had on the go. All of the text files are now edited and the first two are now complete, mixed, edited down to 1:00:00 and ready to go.

What was disappointing though was that I could have done much more again, except that I crashed out on the chair for half an hour or so (no surprise there after last night).

There was the usual hour or so on the guitars, much of which was spent having a play with Lindisfarne’s “City Song” as well as “Carey”, “Military Madness” and “Suffragette City”.

Looking at my playlist, it’s all heading off into a certain direction, which is no surprise. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, you know.

A few weeks ago, I’d sorted out the fridge, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. All of the vacuum-packed burgers were arranged in date order and i’d caught up with the expiry dates there.

And so as a special treat I had pasta and vegetables with a lentil-and-curry burger with an expiry date of 20th April. Ohh the luxury!

Followed by the apple pie and some of that coconut soya dessert stuff.

having done the washing up, I went outside and headed off for my evening runs.

Much to my surprise, I made it all the way up to the top again – the second time in successive evenings. i’m clearly improving and I just hope that I can keep it up.

And it was work the run because I witnessed a really beautiful low sun tonight over the Ile de Chausey and so i took a photo of it for future reference.

I ran on down to the clifftop and took another photo, this time having a play around with the camera’s light settings.

And I managed to come up with this really good shot. It can, I suppose, go a stop or two darker but this is how it came out of the camera with no post work. I’m quite impressed with this.

having done that, I pushed on around the headland. And I was right about there being more and more people out there on the streets. Probably a dozen or so altogether enjoying the evening sun, the most that I have ever seen since the emergency began.

And one person who was out there again tonight was my mystery girl from the other day. We said “hello” to each other but we couldn’t say any more than that because she was running one way and I was running the other way.

I wish that I knew who she was.

My run took me past the fish processing plant and there was another fishing boat there being unloaded and its catch being stowed onto the trailer that was being pulled by that tractor.

So having had my five runs tonight, I ended up back in the apartment to write up my notes.

It’s a bank Holiday again tomorrow, and a Sunday to boot, so it’s another lie-in. But I really must put my back into dealing with these outstanding radio projects.

There are two more to do next week of course and I don’t need to be falling behind like this when there isn’t any real pressure on me.

This lethargy is something of a problem though – in fact, it’s the major problem. I know that it’s a symptom of this illness and the medication that I’m taking to try to stabilise it, but it’s still not any comfort to me.

It has been explained to me on several occasions that I’m never going to be any better and more than just a couple of people have expressed their surprise that I’ve been going on for as long as I have at the speed at which I’ve been going. Most people with this illness have long-since given up the ghost.

It’s not going to get the better of me quite yet and i’ll still be in here slugging it out.

But it would be nice to see some return from my efforts.

Friday 10th April 2020 – WE HAVE HAD …

… a calamity!

Opened the fridge door this morning, the top shelf fell off, dropped on the one beneath it and broke that off too. At the moment they are wedged in position but at this rate I can see the fridge becoming the first major item in here to be replaced once the shops reopen, if they ever do, that is.

At least my morning went as planned. It wasn’t particularly early when I went to bed, but I slept right through until about 09:30.

And it was more like 10:15 when I arose. That’s what a Bank Holiday is all about, anyway.

After the medication, I had a look at the dictaphone to see where I’d been. I’d actually been in London during the night and on my way back I’d had to go a long, mazy, merry way round by Newport, the one in South Wales, to reach home. I ended up back in Stoke on Trent where someone whom I know and his family were living. I was in a Mk III Cortina Saloon and I had to drive into their drive but usually I reversed in so that I could swing round into their garage. For some unknown reason I drove down this morning and I didn’t have anywhere to turn to drive back out. It was a really steep hill as well. Down at the bottom you could see that there was all new concrete so I wondered what had been going on there. I’d heard that they had had a water leak of some description but there was a torrential river that was flowing down their driveway with all of this rain that was happening. I had to climb my way back up there and it wasn’t easy with the force of the water. When I reached the back door I knocked and a voice said “come in”. I recognised the voice – it was the voice of Zero, who at one time used to accompany me quite regularly on my little nocturnal voyages but has been conspicuous by absence just recently. Anyway I said “hello beautiful”. There was another similar person in there so I said “hello and called her by her name”. The guy’s wife said “hello” but with a “why aren’t you speaking to us” kind of “hello”, so I said “hello” and tpld them about the weather and told them about the rain. She went to look and saw this torrent of water and made some remark. Something to the effect that we were supposed to be going out for a meal that night but how were we going to do that with this torrent of water cascading down the drive? I had already realised that there was far more water coming down the slope than could have possibly come with the rainfall that we were having.

What was so sad about all of that is that the batteries must have gone flat in the dictaphone because it simply petered out to a dead stop. and so I wonder what happened after that and where it all went to. It was starting to become quite interesting.

It’s Good friday today, one of the Easter Holidays of course. And i’m lucky in that last year I bought two packets of vegan hot cross buns and froze one of them. That came out of the freezer yesterday and defrosted overnight, so I had a toasted hot cross bun with my breakfast.

We then had the digital file splitting process, and another 4 albums have bitten the dust today. Not so many now to go at that can be done in a short time. Probably this time next week I’ll be into the cassettes.

There was a break for a taco roll in the middle of all of this but really things went so quickly that there wasn’t a great deal of time to do too many photos and I only reached 0506, which isn’t a great deal of progress.

Later on I made a start on the dictated notes for the radio projects for the rock music. I ended up yesterday with 4 audio files and now, three of them have been edited and i’m working on the fourth.

At 18:00 I came to a dead stop and had a good play around on the guitars for an hour.

Tea tonight was a falafel with vegetables and what should have been a vegan cheese sauce but the grated vegan cheese was off. And, of course, with not having gone to the Health Food shop in Leuven last time, I have no more.

The rice pudding was off too – I thought that it tasted rather peculiar yesterday – so that went into the bin and I had an apple turnover out of the freezer. On Sunday I’ll make a big apple pie and freeze some of it.

After the washing up I went outside for my evening runs.

And you can see from this photo that I’ve pushed on the finish of my first run right up to the corner of the hedge where I usually start my second run down to the clifftop.

So, in other words, I can link up two of my runs – well, in theory because I’m well out of breath by the time that I reach here.

Anyway, having recovered my breath I ran on down to the top of the cliff and arrived just as all of the lights were coming on over in Bréhal-Plage.

It was well worth a photograph. And when I enlarged it back at home later, i could see other lights up and down the coast.

That’s one thing about this f1.8 50mm lens, that it does have a good resolution when it wants to. And that’s quite handy in this kind of light.

So having recovered my breath again I carried on with my walk.

This evening there was a beautiful view right across to the other side of the bay round by St Pair sur Mer and I caught a glimpse of the lights of the town through the War Memorial

That was another one of these “must-have” photo moments, even though the focusing on something like that was a bit hit-and-miss. Still, I did my best.

Despite what it looked lke in the previous photo, it wasn’t as dark as all of that.

The view of the old sentry cabin on the Pointe du Roc and the surrounding sea came up very nicely in the dusk light.

And it really was a beautiful evening too. For the first time this year I didn’t have a jacket on at all for my evening walk. It was 18°C outside when I went out so I’ve no idea what it must have been during the day.

There was yet another nice view across the Baie de Mont St Michel too down towards Jullouville and Carolles.

It was going dark quite quickly now and the light at the entrance to the harbour was flashing quite brightly. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen it look quite like this – it’s probably something to do with the very high tides that we are having right now.

And the lights on the coast in the background have come out quite well too. It was a good night for photography, I reckon.

There’s yet more excitement in the chantier navale tonight.

There were four boats in there on Wednesday night, then last night there were three. But today we are back up to four again, with the one on the extreme left.

And it’s not keeping its social distance either. That’s risky behaviour in these times.

So I ran back to the apartment – in two stages of course, to make sure that I had all of my five runs. And they are slowly but surely prolonging themselves, which is something for which I had been hoping the more that I run

It’s not going to be much better than this but we have to remember that four years ago I couldn’t even walk. And since then I’ve had all kinds of bits taken out of me, with not very much success.

So having spent most of the evening talking, it’s really late now. I’ll feel like death tomorrow and it’s shopping day too.

Still, you only live once.

Thursday 9th April 2020 – TODAY WAS A …

… better day than some that I’ve had just recently. Mind you, that’s not to say that it was a good day. Just better.

It didn’t have the makings of a good day though. I’ve no idea what happened to the evening at all or where it went, but when I looked at the clock thinking that I ought to be going to bed soon, I noticed that the time was 00:40.

Obviously, leaving the bed at 06:00 or thereabouts was going to be rather difficult. But once again I slept through the alarms and it was 06:50 when I finally arose from the Dead.

After the medication, I looked at the dictaphone as usual. I had a new little girlfriend last night and she was ever so sweet. She was younger than me and I was a teenager. It was basically all about that and trying to make progress with a relationship. She lived a long way away from where I was staying so I had to travel quite a distance. I eventually found her house. I had seen something in the papers about a film in the cinema in a nearby town and I wasn’t sure if she wanted to go there but this way my plan. It was my plan for every week too – once a week take her to the cinema and just see how things developed. It all seemed really nice and lovely and warm and calm and relaxed and sweet and it was a dreadful shame that I had to spoil it all by waking up.

It wasn’t quite on a par with the “Worleston” dream that I had a few years ago and that I won’t forget in a hurry, but it was in that kind of ballpark area.

The digital file-splitting was straightforward this morning, although there were a couple of interruptions. Breakfast was one, and a phone call was another and I can’t remember now with whom it was that I was chatting.

The file-converting took up a good deal of time, and I was able to edit about 40 or so photos from Iceland in July 2019 while all of this was going on. I’m now up to photo 482 – just coming up to dock at Siglufjördur. And that’s day 8 of 31 and there’s a long way to go yet.

One task that I had been meaning to do for a while is to review the freezer and see what’s in there. The answer to that conundrum, having emptied out one of the shelves and given it a really good clean, is “not a lot”. The stocks have been going down nicely and the curry that I made yesterday is the only bulk-type of food in there now. It must therefore be time to make another aubergine and kidney-bean whatsit.

After lunch (more taco rolls of course) I carried on with the radio projects. And by the time that I knocked off at 18:00 I’d finished all of the text, dictated it and saved it to the computer. I could have done much more too except that I had a major crash-out at some point in the proceedings.

And that shouldn’t have been any surprise to anyone after last night’s late night.

And it means that I’ll have to carry on for longer than I intended, which means that this next project of mine will be delayed. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in my apartment are two desktop computers, 5 laptops, about a dozen different external hard drives, a pile of memory sticks and an even bigger pile of memory cards.

What I’ve done is to buy a big 4TB external drive, and absolutely EVERYTHING from every data storage device in the house will be transferred onto it. I’ll then go through and weed it down so that there’s just one major back-up copy with everything and then retire a whole load of obsolete stuff.

Having different loads of data scattered all about the place is proving to be a distraction that I can well do without so I want to tackle that task as soon as possible.

After the customary hour on the guitars, spent mainly working out Al Stewart’s “Valentina Way” and Joni Mitchell’s “Carey”, I went for tea.

Spoilt for choice, I didn’t know what to make so I ended up with pasta and vegetables with tomato sauce and the left-over stuffing with a couple of handfuls of peanuts thrown in for good measure.

Once I’d had the rice pudding and done the washing-up, I went for my evening runs.

Moving a lot easier today, I covered a bit more ground than usual which is always nice. I was at the end of the headland in no time and out there in the Baie De Mont St Michel, nicely framed between the bits of Atlantic Wall, was something moving out to sea

That bit of the wall is interesting though. When the war was over, they tried to move one of the bunkers. The put enough dynamite inside to shatter every single window withn a radius of 50 kilometres, yet moved two lumps of concrete about 20 feet.

They gave up after that.

Further on round the other side, I was able to take a much better photo of it.

It’s actually one of these trawler-type of fishing boats, and what that’s doing down there I really don’t know because we don’t normally see them fishing so far down the Baie de Mont St Michel.

But what it probably means that with there being such a high tide right now, there’s much more to go at that hasn’t been got at any time in the past.

Further on round the headland I was able to see over the wall down into the chantier navale to see what was happening there tonight.

There’s been a continual shange of occupant down there just recently and last night, there were four ships in there. But they’ve obviously been doing some sort of work there today, because one of the ships has disappeared and they are now down to three again.

It’s just like a game of “Ten Green Bottles” in the chantier navale.

So carrying on with my run down to the other end of the wall, there was a lovely view across the outer harbour tonight.

And there’s been some excitement in there tonight, and quite a lot of it too.

The first thing that you will notice is that Chausiais and Joly France have changed position. In fact I had noticed that yesterday but I had forgotten to mention it.

What this presumably means is that Joly France has gone out on a mission – presumably to the Ile de Chausey. Let’s hope so anyway.

But even more interesting is what is actually leaving the harbour.

There’s a fishing boat on its way out, but that’s not really much of a surprise, but there’s also a Customs launch going out behind it.

“Going ou” implies of course that it has “come in”, right enough, but why would it want to come in here anyway? There’s no-one in the harbour who doesn’t belong there and no-one apart from the fishing boats has been anywhere just recently.

So that’s an interesting one. And on that note I came back to the apartment. Another 5 runs, and I’m working up a sweat now. That’s a good sign.

It’s extremely late now – and that’s because when I came in, Rosemary rang me up and we had a chat for an absolute age. But it doesn’t matter because toMorrow is Good Friday. And in accordance with usual practice there’s no alarm.

In theory I can sleep as late as I like. But you just watch someone come along and spoil it.

Wednesday 8th April 2020 – I DONT KNOW …

… what kind of day it has been today, because up until this evening I haven’t set foot out of the door to the building.

But if it was anything like the night sky suggests that it was, it must have been truly wonderful. There’s a beautiful red tinge to the sky over there on the horizon very much reminiscent of the old phrase “Red Sky At Night, St Malo is on fire”.

And being somewhat considerably later than usual for my evening walk, I was lucky to actually see it

Something else that I was lucky to see was the morning. It was another one of those mornings where I missed the alarm. And I’m not sure why either because although it wasn’t an early night last night, it wasn’t anything like as late as some have been just recently.

After the meds I looked at the dictaphone notes. I was with someone from the radio station and another guy with a very thin face and we were discussing the radio. It was in a cafe somewhere at the bottom end of the Chaussée de Wavre near the Boulevard du Souverain in Brussels but there was no coffee being served because of this scare going on. We were talking about all kind sof things and there was a quartier where there was some events taking place and there was no-one covering it. I said that I would go for a wander around and at least I would make a few contacts there because I was moving to this area in due course. So we had a talk about that, contacts, getting people to sign in and get people to be watchers for us to tell us what’s going on, all this kind of thing. At this moment my tea was ready so I asked everone else what they would like to eat as I’d cooked myself a meal. The two women said “a Boskoop” (an apple). I thought “do I have enough?” so I asked “is that all that you wanted?”. Then I heard a shout from outside and it was a former schoolfriend of mine who was my son, would you believe. I thought that I wouldn’t introduce him as my son to these women because I wasn’t sure that they realised that I was old enough to have a son his age. I had to get out my sieve, a plastic conical one. It had been in dirty water for about a week and was all stained and all horrible. That was when I awoke, wondering about my nice cooked meal and was it appropriate to eat it when these people were just going to have an apple each, always assuming that I actually had one for them.
A little later, we were discussing groups. There were three of us – me, a guitarist and someone else jamming. Only for about 30 seconds and someone had recorded it on video. They were starting to make copies of it and pass them all around which I thought was crazy – just one of these 30-second-type jams that you have every now and again. Some guy was there saying “yes we’re going to do our best to help you and do our best to get you somewhere”. I thought that that was just absolutely crazy. They started to pass these CDs and DVDs around. They were taking all of my white CD sleeves. I thought “hang on a minute this isn’t on” because my CDs are colour-coded – red for this, white for that, black for that, blue for that and they would disturb my system and that wasn’t really on. Then I thought that having a DVD of me actually playing would be interesting. At one moment he was talking about a tricycle, a Honda 750 that had been turned into a tricycle called a Queen Bee or a Queen Mary or something. The rear single-wheel bit was extremely complicated and he’d never seen one properly but he had found one in a scrapyard and was trying to negotiate to buy it to put it on his bike but the scrapyard wanted to sell the whole unit, not just the bits. He asked me if I’d ever seen one close up and I said “no, and to be honest, I’ve never seen one from a distance either”

After breakfast I made a start on the digital file splitting. You can tell that we are getting down to the bottom of the pile right now because these last few are proving to be difficult.

Long-gone are the days when you would pick up an album to find that it would be Tangerine Dream and consist of one track that was 51:20 in length or something like that. Instead I’m coming across albums of 15 tracks of 2:00 each, something like that.

There are plenty of tracks that are not so easy to find either so I’m having to hunt around more than maybe I ought. And in error I rather regrettably downloaded an *.mkv file, with all of the problems that that entails.

As a result of all of this, I was somewhat late finishing everything this morning.

But by my reckoning, there are maybe another 20 albums at most that I can do things with in the immediate future. The live albums and the obscure compilation albums will be done another time and the untraceable ones that I shall digitalise myself, that’s for even later.

The next thing that I intend to do is to start on the cassettes. Dozens of those from my “Winsford” days and I’m surprised that after almost 40 years I still have them.

A few of those are quite obscure too and I will need to digitalise those. I had made a start on that in … errr … 2004 but that was a project that ran aground quite quickly. I’m hoping for more perseverence this time.

After lunch, with taco rolls again of course, I had to make some orange and ginger cordial.

Not as much ginger as I would have liked because, for some unaccountable reason, I only had an old piece of manky stuff. I’m convinced that I had two or three pieces, but I’ve no idea whatever became of them.

And even worse, I’ve run out of Manuka Honey. Not having had the chance to go to a health food shop when I was in Leuven last time I couldn’t pick any up.

What I’ll have to do is to go to the Health Food shops here – if they are open – and see what they might have.

Eventually I could attack the text for the radio shows and once again I’ve come up short. There was a break to listen to our “Grande Marée Virtuelle” of course, and the hour on the guitars, but I wasn’t even in much of a mood for that either.

It makes me wonder if it’s something to do with the full moon, this lethargy.

For tea tonight, I made that potato and lentil curry that I had been promising myself. And this new diet thingy means that instead of there being enough for 5 helpings, there was actually enough for 7.

The other 6, which I didn’t eat tonight of course, are now freezing nicely in the freezer ready for another time.

After the rice pudding, I went out for my evening’s exercise, rather later than usual.

And surprise! Surprise! I wasn’t the only one out there tonight. I mentioned the other day that the fishing boats here are still going out and there was one just there heading off into the wild blue yonder.

And there was an article in the newspaper this morning that direct sales to the public from the quayside may commence, but only under certain quite strict conditions.

It’s better than nothing, I suppose.

Another thing about which I am not sure is going on is down in the chantier navale

It looks as if the fishing boats are breeding or something like that becase we had a third yesterday and today we have a fourth one. And it’s not keeping its social distance either, but is rather cuddled up to the one on its right.

So I left it to its own devices and carried on. I’ve managed my five runs this evening but I ended up feeling like something that the cat has dragged in through the cat flap

Back here I had a little chat with Liz. She likes to make sure that i’m still OK, which is very nice of her.

So having finished my journal for tonight, I’m off to bed. Here’s hoping for a better day tomorrow.

Tuesday 7th April 2020 – BRAIN OF BRITAIN …

… strikes again!

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that for the last few weeks I’ve been complaining about the stereo hi-fi system that’s attached to the big desktop computer and how the right-hand channel has given up the ghost?

Having tried this afternoon to assemble a series of tracks that were heavily dependent upon the right channel and impossible to synchronise otherwise, I set about dismantling the computer to see what I could do.

So I disconnected a pile of cables from the back of the computer and pulled the machine out of its cupboard to check the connections to the amplifier and …. “where’s the output cable from the sound card?”

All I’d been pulling out had been USB cables and the like – no hi-fi cable at all.

So I went to the amp and traced the cable backwards, to find that it is actually plugged into the input socket on the screen. And, furthermore, the socket is loose in the mounting panel.

So, doing what I should have done in the first place, because there’s nothing as permanent as a temporary solution, I threaded the cable through the little holes here and there and plugged it into the sound card.

AND I HAVE A STEREO!!! And even the bass box on the floor that houses the amp is working now too, and all of the horrible buzzing that was driving me to distraction has gone.

But the system is still going to be replaced. The left speaker (I swapped them round) is still bouncing as if the speaker has blown. And I’ve seen an amp that will do a good job, as well as a pair of decent speakers.

The amount of time that I spend in my little office in the bedroom means that I ought to be able to treat myself to a little luxury.

And I’m spending more time in my bedroom than you might imagine, because I missed the alarm yet again. 07:15 when I finally arose from the dead.

My own fault too. I was listening to music yet again and engrossed in a non-productive task, when I noticed the time. 01:35. Yes, I was rather carried away, what with one thing and another. And once you make a start, you’d be surprised at just how many other things there are.

After the medication, I had a look at the dictaphone.

Last night it was back to school again and it was lunchtime. We were all sitting on different tables having our lunch. I was talking to a few people on a different table about music. They were in a different rock group to me and there was some kind of competition taking place and all the groups at school were going to appear in it. So we kept on talking to each other about things like this during this meal. Then the competition started. I was talking to these other guys and they said something like “well where are you sitting?” I said something like “I was sitting on the front …” but they said “well where were you?” and I replied “well I was here”. So they said “well where was your group?” “On a table on the next row over to the left”. “No you aren’t” they replied. “You’re here”. It was a really strange conversation like that. They called for votes like ‘if you’re this group sitting from here to here then you want to vote for this”. Of course I wasn’t there. I was sitting round at this other table or standing at this other table and this was getting all confused about the groups because there was no-one in the right place where they were supposed to be
And if you can make any sense out of that, then you are welcome.
A little later, we were busy trying to make a cherry pie but it was all going wrong. Someone had made a start and then left it, and we had to start to do it all over again, roll it out for it had lost all of its shape so we had to mould it and sieve the flower and so on. We could have done a really fine job but we were really stuck for time because we were supposed to be going out as well. In the end we just put the pastry in the pie mould and whoever it was who had put it in, they hadn’t wet it enough and it wouldn’t stick to the mould, wouldn’t fold round the mould all this kind of thing and I ended up having to dab it with water and a brush to get it to stick better. Someone else was having a go. In the end an alarm went off somewhere and brought this to a sudden end.

After breakfast I had a go at the digital file splitting. For yet another album, there was absolutely nothing at all. I must have one of the most exclusive record collections in the world. All of these albums that I own and there isn’t even a trace of them anywhere. The fire at Universal Studios must have been more devastating than anyone could have imagined, and more devastating that anyone ever admitted, with so many albums with no other master tapes held anywhere else.

Nevertheless, I ended up with another four albums split and the pile is decreasing. But before I start on the complicated stuff (because, believe me, there is going to be a lot of that when I arrive near the end) I’ll do the cassettes.

A shower was next, and I also weighed myself. This new fitness regime that I’m doing seems to be doing the work because that weight that I put on just now, that has gone and more besides.

Off next to LIDL now.

As I was going past the quayside I stuck my head over the wall to see what was going on. There seems to be a load of builders’ material lined up there on the quayside.

That can mean only one thing – or, maybe, two things – that we are about to have a visit from either Thora or Normandy Trader, or maybe even both.

We’ll find out soon enough.

At LIDL I bought my apples and lettuce, as well as a few other things. And forgot the bananas, orange juice and soya milk for good measure.

Still no pizza bases, and they seem to have stopped carrying the taco rolls which is a shame. I’ll have to buy the rolls from LeClerc and have a go at making my own pizza bases.

There weren’t too many people in there, but it was one of those days where there were people with enough shopping to last Dr Barnado’s for a month or else someone who couldn’t find his wallet or so on. It took ages to leave the shop.

There was a nice young black and white cat sunning itself on a car roof on the way home, so I stopped for a while and we had a chat, and I gave him a good stroke.

After lunch I had a go at the apples that I had bought and the old pears from last week, and made another pile of apple and pear purée.

9 apples and four pears in that lot, as well as some cinnamon, nutmeg and desiccated coconut. All boiled up nicely (so well boiled in fact because I forgot about it for a hour or so) and the liquid drained off to make a breakfast cordial.

The solids bunged into the whizzer and then put into the sterilised jars ready fir use as of tomorrow morning.

Following that, I started to deal with the music for the next radio project, but that was where I ended up being distracted by dismantling the computer.

Eventually I was able to make a proper start on the radio project, but not for long as my bad night caught up with me for half an hour or so. But at least the music is all assembled and I’ve made some kind of start on writing the text.

Music was next of course an I ended up playing “Moonage Daydream” on the bass in a completely different way to how I was playing it yesterday. That’s the kind of thing that comes with practice.

And instead of on the acoustic bass, I had the 5-string fretless out with the VOX AMPLUG and headphones.

It’s confusing having more than four strings, and even more confusing having no frets. But it will improve with practice.

Having mistakenly eaten my nice vegan burger in error on Saturday and fancying a burger on a bap today, I had a rummage around in the freezer and found one that would do.

So burger on a bap with potatoes and veg followed by rice pudding. Yes, I’m really eating well.

When I went outside for my evening exercise I found that I had ended up with a flat battery in the NIKON D500, so I had to go back for the NIKON D3000.

And as you can see, I was right about the builders’ equipment lined up on the quayside this morning. Thora has sneaked in this afternoon, on the tide just now, I imagine, and she’ll be taking all of that stuff back to Jersey in exchange for whatever it is that she’s brought in.

The quarantine regulations and Brexit don’t seem to have done too much harm to Thora and Normandy Trader. They still seem to be coming here quite frequently.

It was trying to rain too – the first that we’ve had for a while. That storm cloud over there on the Brittany coast looks as if it means business.

So I didn’t hang around. I managed my five runs although I really didn’t feel much like it. But I have to keep it up no matter what if I want to look after myself.

Once I’d finished, I came in to write up my notes, and to look at just how disappointing another day has been.

Tomorrow is of course another day, and I have cordial to make and digital files to dissect. But I want to push on … “or push off” – ed … and finish these radio projects before I’m much older. For one reason or other, for which I don’t know the answer, they are taking me much longer than they ought to.

So I’ll clear off and go to bed. Not as early as I would like, but it’ll do for now. Here’s hoping that I’m feeling better tomorrow.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: place d’armes

Tuesday21st April 2020 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

Saturday 20th April 2020 – TODAY WAS THE FIRST …

Sunday 19th April 2020 – I’VE HAD A …

Saturday 18th April 2020 – SOME PEOPLE ARE …

Friday 17th April 2020 – WE DIDN’T HAVE …

Thursday 16th April 2020 – I COULDN’T KEEP IT UP …

Wednesday 15th April 2020 – I’VE BEEN …

Tuesday 14th April 2020 – WHAT A REALLY NICE …

Monday 13th April 2020 – IT WAS HARD …

Sunday 12th April 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

Saturday 11th April 2020 – I’VE BEEN PANIC-BUYING …

Friday 10th April 2020 – WE HAVE HAD …

Thursday 9th April 2020 – TODAY WAS A …

Wednesday 8th April 2020 – I DONT KNOW …

Tuesday 7th April 2020 – BRAIN OF BRITAIN …

Your reactions

Excellent

Useful

Interesting

Weird

Surprising

Boring