Tag Archives: lie in

Thursday 21st May 2020 – I HAVE EMULATED …

… my namesake the mathematician today and done three-fifths of five eights of … errr … nothing.

And quite right too, because it’s a Bank Holiday today here in France and I missed the two previous ones, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

So while you admire yet another sunset, I shall explain to you my day. Or, rather, half a day, because it was about 10:00 this morning when I finally showed a leg, what with no alarm.

During the night I had been driving a bus into Audlem last night and it was down the road one house to the left a little further down than the Post Office. I had to drive down there and when I drove down there Nerina was already there. She was there with her aeroplane. She was working for this aeroplane company and they had given her this really old wrecked aeroplane like an 80-seater thing but with no seats in it. All the kids just played around in there while the flight was taking place. There was no way to dim the lights or brighten the cockpit lights and the sun was streaming in – there was no sun blind or anything. She was telling me about all her difficulties and i was coming up with all kinds of ways and suggestions to make things work, all that sort of thing. In the end I got to the stage where I said “do you want Terry and me to come and wire in some lights, that kind of thing?”. She said no, she’d manage. I looked in and I could see one of my curtains being used across the front of the ‘plane. I said “you have one of my curtains in there, haven’t you?” to which she gave a little embarrassed smile. Not that I’d been to Audlem Road Garage before – I dunno.

And if you want to know what any of that means, you’re out of luck I’m afraid because I don’t have a clue either.

Later on I was with my father and we’d gone to Hightown to where Chatfield’s garage was, but it was across the road from Chatfield’s. I had my yellow Cortina Mark III, VBH, in there having some work done on it and we’d gone to pick it up. The guy there was quite friendly and I used him a lot. I asked him if it was ready and he said “yes, round the back” – which was actually across the road down Samuel Street. I’d also mentioned something about tyres – I’d asked him about getting tyres for the van – winter tyres. I paid him and it came to driving the car away. he asked me about the black Escort that I was thinking of selling. I said “yes but at the moment it’s in having some electrical work done”. I thought “God, it’s been in that garage having the work done for over a month now and they must have thought that I’d forgotten all about it or something”. So i went with my father and there was the Cortina. I was in the Transit so I said to him “do you want to drive the Cortina home?” Father said yes but he didn’t really want to drive the Cortina so I let him drive the Transit. By this time the Cortina had mutated into a Triumph motor bike so I had to kick-start it to get it going but I couldn’t kick-start it. I noticed that there was a bright yellow new Triumph motorbike right by and and I was looking at this bright brand new Triumph motor bike and how nice it was. Then realisation suddenly hit me that I was going to have the Transit, about three Cortinas, I was going to have this Escort and this motorbike and they were all going to be back home and not a single one had any road tax on it and what was I going to do about that? I thought that when I get back I’d better get organised. There will be massive queues at the Post Office so I thought that I’d better investigate some idea of getting the road tax paid on line.

At some point during the night I had the distinct impression thaT Cecile was there too but I’ve no idea why or how.

With the late start, everything else was running really late and I spent much of the day chilling out and talking to people.

For lunch, I tried the new loaf of bread. It’s still not light enough but it’s a vast, dramatic improvement on what has gone before and I have a feeling that I’m slowly getting there. I shall hit the supermarket tomorrow and see if they have any fresh yeast because mine’s getting to be a little old in the tooth.

As is customary these days now that detention à domicile is over I went out for my afternoon walk.

There wasn’t really very much point, especially if sightseeing was what I had in mind, because there weren’t very many sights to see in this kind of claggy weather.

We’ve been hit by one of these rolling sea fogs that makes its way in every now and again. And on a Bank Holiday too. Still, the police won’t be able tos ee who is socially distancing and who isn’t.

And so I continued my walk around the walls to go and have a look over at the house repairs in the Place Marechal Foch – assuming that I could see that far.

It’s Bank Holiday today as I have said before … “many times” – ed … and so the workmen aren’t there. But they have put a cover over where they have ripped off the slates and battened it down so that the wind won’t lift it off.

But will they be back tomorrow to carry on? It’s the unofficial custom here in France chen the Bank Holiday falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday to faire le pont – “Make the bridge” – and take the day nearest the weekend as an additional day off.

Further on around the headland and down the other side of the walls into the Square Maurice Marland.

What I was doing here was looking for any signs of movement on the new floating pontoons. And while there was no-one moving around down there, I noticed that a pile of equipment of some sort has been dumped down there at the end.

This looks interesting. I wonder what they are going to be doing with it. I suppose that we’ll all know i due course so I’ll keep my eyes peeled fpr any action.

But this was interesting.

At the top of the ramp out of the Square Maurice Marland, it looks as if someone has abandoned their personal possessions. There was no-one at all about in the vicinity – I had a good look.

So whatever it was all about, I wouldn’t know. I hope that whoever they belong to managed to recover them quickly enough. Just imagine doing this in the UK – leaving your stuff lying around like this.

While I was in the Square Maurice Marland I’d seen a few things further on down the road that made me prolong my walk to go along and investigate.

This was one of them. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen the bright yellow zodiac that’s been going round the harbour and the bay over the last few days.

Here it is again, skilfully negotiating a fishing boat that is on its way out of port. I still haven’t worked out who they are or what they are doing aboard her. There’s been nothing in the newspaper.

This was interesting too.

Every so often we’ve seen the big fishing boats tied to the quayside wall so that they ground out when the tide goes out and the owners can inspect them. There’s another one here today, although I couldn’t see anyone around her working.

So on that note I came back home.

A day without doing anything is pretty difficult so I decided to show willing and attack a web page. The one that I started is half-completed, simply because there was a whole pile of stuff that needed doing to it.

As I remember it, I merely dashed it off in a few minutes simply to get it on line and it had a subsequent amendment, again in a hurry, in 2013. But I want to do it properly this time

There was the usual hour on the guitar of course, and then tea. An aubergine and kidney-bean whatsit out of the freezer followed by the last slice of redfruit pie. A good decision, that.

Tomorrow I can start on the apple crumble. I should also mention that my lemon and ginger cordial is excellent too.

For some unknown reason, my run tnoight seemed to go a lot easier than just recently. I don’t know what I’m doing differently.

Having recovered my breath I ran on down to the clifftop to witness the crowds of people gathered there partying and picknicking. The sea fog had cleared a long time ago.

No thought of social distancing of course, and I suppose that with just 251 new infections and 83 new deaths today, people are becoming complacent. I note these figures because I’ll check back on them every now and again and see what the curve is doing.

The USA and the UK are still posting horrendous figures and I’m really glad that I don’t live there. How are 96,000 deaths and 36,000 deaths anything to be proud of?

The harbour gates here in the port mush have just opened because there was a very long line of fishing boats slowly chugging out into the English Channel.

There was a yacht coming back over from the Ile de Chausey so I waited for a while until I had the pose that I wanted. The sun off to the right of the photo silhouetting the ships against the surface of the sea gave the image some kind of supernatural, eerie effect.

And these ships weren’t alone either. You probably noticed in one of the sunset pics the crowds of boats of one kind or another out there this evening.

There were still more fishing boats on their way out of harbour too.

Why this one caught my eye more than any othe others is because if you look closely at the image you’ll see a line running out from the boat off astern.

That looks to me very much as if it has its fishing tackle out, but it seems to me that the boat is going rather too fast for that.

The design of these boats is very interesting. We’ve seen plenty of them in the chantier navale. Short and squat but wiht a very deep hold for the catch.

We’ve seen plenty of groups of people out partying in the evening just recently, but these girls brought on a smile.

They are sitting on one of the old concrete bunkers for the Atlantic Wall right on the end of the Pointe du Roc where they’ll have an excellent view of the sunset. I was thinking that one of these days that would be an ideal place for me to set up my tripod and camera.

But not today though. I carried on with my run.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day we saw Normandy Trader in port.

Today it’s the turn of Thora to be here. She’s the other small freighter that runs the shuttle service to the Channel Islands and was formerly a Shetland Islands car ferry.

But will she be here tomorrow? We’ve seen some pretty rapid turnrounds of these ships just recently coming in as the gates opened and leaving before they close again. I wonder if Thora

While I was musing over this, another boat hove into view.

This was the yacht that we had seen coming over from the Ile de Chausey. It had caught me up while I was perambulating around. There was a speedboat going past too and when I enlarged the image for a look, I could see that he was loaded up with fishing gear.

As usual these days I completed all of my six runs. The young people weren’t picnicking where they had been for the last few days – the tide isn’t all that far out as yet. And so I ran on home

Back to work tomorrow, I have a blood test, and I need to go shopping at some point too. It’s all go here. So i’m going to have an early night.

Wednesday 13th May 2020 – THE LEAST SAID …

… about this morning the better.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I was saying the other day that I’d had certain symptoms that were suggestive of a health setback sometime soon

Well, I didn’t have long to wait. This morning when the alarms went off I awoke feeling like death. I hadn’t felt as bad as that for quite some considerable time.

And to such an extent too that it was long after 10:30 when I found the energy to haul myself out of bed and it took another couple of hours before I was anywhere in touch with anything else.

And you can tell what kind of night it had been too because I’d been on the kind of travel during the night that you wouldn’t want to hear, seeing as you are probably eating your tea or something right now. Even more interestingly, I was accompanied on my voyage by someone really astonishing who is making her debut on these pages. Whatever she was doing making an appearance during the night I really don’t know.

With being in no fit condition to start work again until mid-afternoon I missed a good chance to catch up on stuff. But it can’t be helped, I suppose. Ill-health is something for which no-one can plan.

As a result all that I’ve managed to do is to write out the notes, dictate them and edit them. And it’s an achievement to get that far with how I was feeling.

There was a quick break for a sandwich (and that loaf of bread that I made yesterday is excellent) and also for my afternoon stroll, now that it’s permitted.

My perambulations took me around the medieval city walls today and I wasn’t half surprised when I looked down over the outer wall. There were hordes of seagulls down there sitting on the rocks and I’ve no idea why.

The first thought that I had was that they were fishing for shellfish amongst the rocks but they were all sitting there doing nothing at all.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that we have been watching the excavations at the old abandoned tidal swimming pool over the last few days.

There was no-one around right now so they may well have finished, but the pool seems to be holding water for the first time since I’ve no idea exactly when, for I’ve never seen it with water like this with the tide so far out.

And if you have a look just below the steps you’ll see the drain with the water emptying out. It’s hard to believe that they are going to call it finished, but the proof of the pudding will be in seeing the amount of use that it will have once the beaches are open.

Talking of seagulls … “well, one of us is” – ed … they seem to have taken to their nests. There’s a seagull on a nest on almost every roof in town.

It must be that time of year when the eggs aren’t too far off hatching although how many will or will not remains to be seen because there has been some kind of campaign to sterilise the eggs.

What this actually involves, I really don’t know but it sounds interesting.

So back here, I carried on with work and then had a play on the guitars for an hour. I was obviously feeling a little better.

Tea tonight was a vegan burger with rice and vegetables, followed by apple pie and coconut soya dessert stuff.

Out for my evening run tonight and … you wouldn’t believe it.

What do some people not understand about

essential travel only
a 100 kilometre limit
not going out of your home département

You clearly can’t tell some people anything. Is it any wonder that the virus is spreading so rapidly and so far as it is?

My run was difficult tonight as the howling gale is back again. I struggled up the hill and after I’d caught my breath, ran down to the clifftop.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen the fishing boats out exploring all kinds of different areas that I don’t recall them fishing. Here’s a boat that’s been in the bay off the coast at Bréhal-Plage.

There are no seagulls hovering around her so it’s not easy to say if she has caught much.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing is that they put some flags up at the new Resistance war memorial that they installed last year.

With all of the high winds that we’ve ben having, one of the flags is disintegrating rapidly and it looks as if it’s about to be blown away in the next gust of wind.

No prizes for guessing that it’s the British flag that’s about to be torn to shreds. That’s obviously some kind of symbolic gesture from Mother Nature.

And this is impressive over at the fish processing plant.

That’s three refrigerated lorries and possibly a fourth one behind waiting to load up over there. Obviously there have been some really good catches just recently to entice all of those vehicles here.

Business certainly seems to be booming in the port and I have to say that the detention à domicile doesn’t seem to have had too much effect on business.

My pause for breath was on the lookout point over the chantier navale.

Sill the same four boats that have been there for a week or wo – we don’t have a fifth one yet to replace the one that left recently.

But going back to the question of fishing boats, you can see two of them queueing up outside the harbour. No room at the inn, or even at the wharf just now so they can’t come in to unload. They have to wait for another one to go out.

What with the howling gale blowing right into my face I eschewed my long run down the Boulevard Vaufleury.

Once out of the wind though, I picked up the pace and ran down to the viewpoint in the rue du Nord where I witnessed a TORA TORA TORA spectacle – the sun streaming through gaps in the clouds.

Eben more interestingly, I was the only one there witnessing it. Dunno where the crowds are who gathered there when they weren’t allowed to. It’s the kind of thing that defies logic.

And so I ran on home.

Here’s hoping that tomorrow will be a better day. I have to go shopping, I have to make more cordial and I’m way behind with the stuff that I need to do. I can’t let ill-health get in the way.

Sunday 10th May 2020 – FOR THE FIRST …

… time since I really don’t know when, I haven’t put my sooty foot outside the door today.

And that’s no surprise because right now we’re in the middle of a howling gale the like of which I have rarely seen, with torrential rain lashing down everywhere.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve been out in all kids of weather but I ain’t going out in this one.

With it being Sunday, I had a nice lie-in without being disturbed and it was a very reasonable 09:45 when I finally hauled myself out of bed.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out if I had been anywhere during the night. And I wasn’t disappointed. I was actually told off last night! I’d gone to watch the football at Granville and Granville were winning so we were all chanting. We were making a lot of noise and it sounded really good but the manager came over to speak to us and to thank us for coming but said that it’s going to be a bit peculiar for everyone at the football club that all that they can hear are applause and cheers and people shouting in English. He said that that was giving the wrong impression of the club. “We’re not an expat club, we’re a French club” and gave us a bit of a lecture, although I don’t know what he expected us to do about it.
Anyway a little later I was off with a girl – I can’t remember who it was now which is a shame because I always like to know who I’m with – and we were walking in the countryside. We saw a road sign and I’d seen a road sign going to the same place, something like Pound Hill, somewhere else so i wondered if these two roads connected with each other. “So let’s go and find out”. This road or track petered out after about 50 yards and went through a field. In this field was a cow and I wasn’t sure if it was a cow or a bull so I was a bit wary. The animal didn’t really do all that much attacking – it just nuzzled a bit. Then a dog appeared and was quite wild – a medium-sized dog he jumped and grabbed hold of my jacket by the back of the neck and pulled my jacket. In the end I had to get this dog and drag it off my back, put it on the floor and stamp on it a few times until it calmed down. It was a strange thing.

With there being something of a late breakfast and with it being a Sunday anyway, I haven’t done too much today.

Some of the morning was spent sorting through the music to prepare in advance some kind of playlist. That’s a project that I started half-heartedly while I was digitalising the record collection and I’ve been expanding it as I go along. Today I started adding into the playlists the tracks that have already been played, but that’s not an urgent task.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I mentioned that I would be reviewing a past web page every day and rewriting it. Today I’ve done the first page but there wasn’t an awful lot that needed doing.

The other web site needed a revision in the same way that the first one has had. It took me an age to design the template and then the home page that I was going to use (it was superseded by events in 2010 that have in turn been superseded) was so out of date that I had to rewrite all of the text.

But having done that, I now want to redo the template into another, more logical fashion, so I’ll have to start again. But the thing about all of this is that it takes hours to set it up correctly but then once it’s correct it take minutes to deal with it.

There was even time left to spend an hour or so working on the photos of July 2019 and right now I’m standing on the edge of a lava field on the island of Heimaey.

There was the hour on the guitar of course and I was quite enjoying what I was doing this evening – not the least of which reason being that I reckon that I have got the hang of this 6-string guitar business, although I’ve a long way to go yet before I’m going to be any good, if I ever am.

Sunday night here is pizza night of course.

Just one more ball of dough left from the batch that I made a couple of weeks ago and I’d left it out of the freezer to thaw overnight so that it was ready to use.

So I flattened it out onto the baking roll, dusted it with flour and then rolled it out.

As I mentioned last week there wasn’t really enough pastry mix so it ended up being quite thin and wouldn’t lift off safely from the baking roll, so I simply picked up the baking roll and flopped it over onto the pizza tray.

All of the usual topping of course and then into the oven. And there’s nothing wrong with this whatsoever.

For pudding there was of course a slice of that delicious apple pie that I made, with the almond soya dessert stuff. And that was just as good

While I was waiting for the pizza to cook I went to check something on the internet and found, much to my surprise, that the missing football match that I had mentioned yesterday (Bangor City v TNS, not Rhyl as I had thought) had just started and I had missed the first 100 seconds.

So while I had my pizza I watched the football.

It was the championship decider for the season 2010-11. TNS were in front by one point but Bangor had home advantage. And they duly made it count in the 68th minute. But both teams had a couple of chances to have added to the score during the 90 minutes.

Heady days, of course, which Bangor City will never see again of course, having been sold a few years later to a bunch of crooks (and I use the term in full confidence in view of the nature of the criminal convictions, which include inter alia Defrauding the Exchequer, of the new owners) who promptly added the club to the long line of sports clubs that they have trashed during their ownership.

So no walk or run this evening, but it’s still late. I’m off to bed ready to start work. I’m interested to see how much time this “sorting of my music” will save me when I come to start the next radio project tomorrow.

Wednesday 6th May 2020 – THE LEAST …

… said about this morning, the better.

It was quite a late night last night as a pile of good music came onto the playlist just as I was thinking of going to bed, so that was that. I stayed up to listen to it.

And even though I heard the three alarms, ask me if I cared. 08:15 when I finally exerted myself and that’s no good to anyone at all.

To make things worse, there was nothing on the dictaphone either. That’s always a disappointment because I have said on many occasions … “indeed” – ed … as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that I have more excitement on my little nocturnal voyage than I ever do in real life, and meet far more interesting people

In fact, apart from a brief bonjour to two women walking their dogs together while I was out, I haven’t spoken to anyone else today.

After a very late breakfast I had a knotty problem to resolve. For some unknown reason, none of my mice (or mouses, I dunno) want to work on my big computer, except one that isn’t up to much.

As to why that might be, I’ve no idea. They work fine on other machines and the USB ports work fine with other appliances so it beats me.

After a good rummage around the apartment I eventually found an ancient radio mouse and, to my surprise, that seems to work for the moment.

The rest of the morning was therefore spent editing photos from July 2019. There wasn’t much time to do many and right now I’m on a sandbank in South-East Iceland admiring a bunch of harbour seals.

That loaf of bread that I made seems to improve with age because it was totally delicious – even better than yesterday.

But I was thinking about that at lunchtime. There’s too much of it and it’s going to mean that there will be some left by the weekend. So what i’m going to do is to make a smaller amount (maybe 400 grammes of flour instead of 500 grammes, always assuming that I can find some tomorrow) and make two small loaves.

Smaller loaves will also mean that it will bake quicker too and that’s always a good plan.

After lunch I took out the 10x4GB memory sticks from their quarantine and set about reorganising the music. It took two of them and there was still about 3.5GB left on the computer, mostly of incomplete files that need looking at. But they’ll receive “the treatment” in early course once my hi-fi arrives, whenever that might be.

For the rest of the afternoon I carried on updating the web pages and there’s another 16 or so now done. I’ve no idea how many are left to do but I have to go back and do the earlier ones again – the first batch that I did – as I missed something off.

As for my hour on the guitars, I’m not sure what happened but I couldn’t find the enthusiasm. It was a very long, weary but not very productive time.

It’s probably a sign that that the spirit must be quite weak these days and that usually means that I’m due a bout of ill-health any day now.

And that’s not surprising because it’s now three and a half months since I’ve had my four-weekly cancer treatment and I remember how I was feeling when I was in the High Arctic. The last couple of days out there, I was running on pure adrenaline and I well remember the counter-reaction that I had while I was waiting for the aeroplane in Kugluktuk and my two days in that hotel in Calgary.

Tea was falafel and steamed vegetables in a cheese sauce followed by the last of the rice pudding. I might bake a small apple pie for pudding for the rest of the week, and if there is plenty of flour in LIDL I might have a go at making my own pastry to see where that takes me.

The other day I mentioned that they had been planning last week to repaint the white lines in the car park at the back here.

So off I went on my evening run tonight and sure enough, the painters have been past. They’ve done the car park, right enough, but they’ve also repainted the yellow lines here in the rue du Roc for the area where buses and coaches are allowed to park.

Judging by the signs that have now appeared on the other side of the road, it looks very much as if they are going to be back to paint those lines there sometime in the near future.

Having recovered my breath, I ran on down to the clifftop to see what was happening out there in the English Channel.

For a change just recently, there weren’t so many clouds in the sky so we had this beautiful sunset out there over the Ile de Chausey.

There were a few people out there enjoying the evening, including a couple with a dog. And they were disturbed by the arrival of these two women with their mutts who wanted to play.

No social distancing for pooches of course but there are for owners and they were amm rather tangled up for a while.

What I did was to ignore them and concentrate on what was going on out to sea. There were the usual trawlers and other fishing boats out there and this one here was on its way out to join them.

This evening I could see about five in total, working away a little farther out to sea this evening.

I USED TO BE A WEREWOLF!
But I’m all right nooooooooooooooooow!

Yes, it’s full moon again and with there being no clouds to speak of in the sky I had a really good view of it tonight.

Again, it’s a hand-held shot so it’s not as steady as it might be with a tripod.

And that reminds me – I need to set up one of the function buttons on the NIKON D500 to work a “delayed action” shot sequence

This photo was interesting because it shows that Chausiais has moved over to the harbour wall by the harbour offices.

And in the foreground is another trawler-type of fishing vessel, the Cap Pilar. I’ve no idea why she might be here or what she’s doing, because she’s actually a boat from St Malo.

So pondering over that, and also the fact that there’s still no change of occupant in the chantier navale I carried on with my run down the Boulevard Vaufleury.

Halfway down along my run I noticed that Cap Pilar had “cast off forr’ard, Mr Phillips” and was turning round.

So having reached my marker (the second pedestrian crossing up the hill) I walked back to see what was happening. So off she goes out into the evening sunset.

As an aside, when I returned home, I checked on my AIS detector beacon to see where she might be going. And to my amusement her destination was signalled as où je veux – “where I like”.

It’s all very amusing, that kind of remark, but it’s not very much help if she fails to arrive anywhere. No-one can report her missing if they don’t know where she’s supposed to be.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw the first lot of new pontoons put out and fastened to the support pillars that they have installed.

Parked up here down in the rue du port is an articulated lorry with a couple of new pontoons on it. So they are pushing along with this plan to finish the port as soon as possible.

And we saw the road-painting earlier. It looks as if they have been down here too because there are white lines painted on the new car park.

And that’s a disappointment, that car park. They could have done so much more than a squalid slab of tarmac with just a little imagination.

But we can see why Chausiais has moved, and why the pontoons are on the back of the lorry just here.

First of all, Marité is now moored where Chausiais had been, so that means that there’s something going on down in her corner. I’ll have to check that tomorrow when I go out shopping.

But you can see that the line of pontoons has extended now, but they are still a couple short. So they’ll be taking those off the back of the lorry tomorrow, I imagine, and installing them.

Nothing doing at the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord tonight. I’d missed the sunset and the crowds were dispersing. And so I ran home.

The notes are finished now so I’m off to bed. It’s not as early as I would have liked but I’m hoping for a decent sleep (such as it is) and an early start tomorrow. I must crack on.

Monday 27th April 2020 – FOR ONLY THE SECOND …

… time (if my memory serves me well, as Julie Driscoll once sang) since this detention à domicile began, we’ve had proper rain today

And I should know because I was out in it this evening, attired in yellow rain jacket and black cap to keep the water off me.

And although there were only two or three other people walking about out there, there was plenty of other movement too. It doesn’t look like very much but deep in the rainstorm out to sea is one of our fishing boats and it’s looking as if it’s heading into harbour.

So they are still out there working.

But talking of movement, there wasn’t much movement in here this morning. I ended up last night doing some things on the computer and it was past 02:00 when I ended up going to bed.

Consequently, even though I heard the three alarms go off I paid no attention to them whatever and it was after 08:00 when I finally arose from the dead.

No-one I knew had come with me on my travels last night which was a disappointment. But I’d been out. There was a row of terraced houses somewhere like Edleston Road in Crewe round about where the old Christian Science church was, a row of terraced houses set well back from the road. They had been derelict for years and there was some scandal about money this sort of thing and I couldn’t quite understand what it was. Tere the protesters protesting about the waste of money being spent on renovating them, whether fraud had been committed in renovating them, something like that or whether the council was goign to charge an awful lot of money to let them out but they were in a dreadful condition. This whole group of protesters had got together and got hold of the front of the building through the window frames and were shaking the building about. In the end they pulled the whole front off it. This demonstration was being policed by the Navy of all people and of course the Navy charged in and arrested dozens and dozens of these protesters and dragged them off. All of the others went streaming home carrying their banners. The banners were all written in German so I couldn’t really understand what they were saying.

A late breakfast and then I attacked the digitalising of my record collection.

Another two albums bit the dust – 40 or so tracks in all and that was a marathon. Some of the tracks were extremely difficult to find and, much to my dismay, one of my more reliable sources had some of the old stuff for which I was looking, but in *.mkv format, which is black-listed on my computer.

Eventually though I managed to track down everything, and in the amount of time that it took I was able to edit over 50 photos from July 2019. I’m now at the Skálanes nature reserve, still in Iceland and STILL on the 11th July. Will the 12th never come?

The bread was something of a disappointment. One of the main problems was that the tray in the oven was too low so while the top is slightly overcooked, the bottom was almost burnt and had it stayed in there much longer, I would have needed an axe to cut through it.

But it was edible and tasted quite nice too, so i’m certainly not discouraged. It’s all part of a learning process and what I have learnt is

put the shelf two rungs higher up
turn the oven down a little so that the cooking is more even

A couple more efforts and I might get there yet.

This afternoon I sat down and chose the music for the next radio project. That was all done (except for the last track of course) and the tracks were joined together in pairs as usual.

And then the hour on the guitars. And I do have to say that I can’t think that I have ever felt less like it. Whatever is the matter with me just now?

Tea was an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit out of the fridge with pasta and vegetables. And that reminds me that tomorrow I have to freeze all of the carrots that I bought on Saturday. I should have done that at the weekend but one thing leads to another and once you start you’ve no idea how many other things there are.

Pudding was the apple turnover and because they had no soya coconut whatsit, I had to buy the almond stuff.

After the washing up I stuck my nose out of the building, saw the rain and then went back for my rain gear.

Despite the weather I ran all the way up to the top of the hill and then down to the clifftop. We’ve already seen one fishing boat just now, but he wasn’t alone. There were several more out there, like this one here.

And that one has certainly been working and is coming home to unload its catch. You can tell that by the flock of seagulls that is flying around it. There’s at least 30 birds, and maybe more.

having recovered my breath and walked for a little way I could run on along the clifftop on the other side of the headland.

And it’s certainly busy in port tonight. There are a couple of fishing boats coming in, to be sure, but there are also others going out, like this one.

That report that I read about French fishermen being prevented from fishing – I’ve no idea about where that came from because it’s manifestly untrue, as we have been seeing

And as if to underline the point, there’s a full complementof fishing vessels unloading at the fish processing plant.

Fishing vessels of all sizes too, small, medium and large. And with a few others on their way in, the fish processing plant seems to be just as busy as it was before the crisis.

And quite rightly so too, because people still have to eat. Not me though – you won’t catch me eating shellfish. And not just because I’m a vegan too. I couldn’t stand the things even when I did eat meat.

But hang on a minute! There’s a change going on here in the port right now.

That big crane there on the slipway is the big bluey-green crane that’s been living on top of the floating pontoon for the last few months while they have been busy putting in the new supporting pillars for the floating pontoons.

Does this mean that they have finished all of that now? The next few weeks should be interesting over there.

Nothing new in the chantier navale just now, still the same three boats, so when I had gathered my breath I ran on down on run n°4, the longest one of the batch.

Having run past and up the hill, I went for a walk back fown to see how things where in the harbour. There was no visible change down there that I could see, although the big stationary crane is certainly on dry land and no longer on the floating pontoon.

So how are they going to lower the new floating pontoon walkways into the water then? That’s an interesting question.

But in the meantime we can turn our attention to the floating pontoon.

Ther eit is, completely dismantled. Nothing on it now and I imagine that the mobile crane is there to lift it out of the water. That will be the next step I suppose.

We’ll doubtless find out tomorrow.

So I continued with my little extra run from a standing start right up the hill.

Round to the rue du Nord. Just one or two people out there but I was more interested in the machine that I’d seen in the Place du Marché aux Chevaux.

My stroll took me down there to inspect the beast. It’s a JCB pallet lifter but as for what it’s going I really have no idea because there was nothing evident.

And so I ran back home to the apartment.

No matter what happens, I’m going to bed as soon as I’ve done this. I don’t want another morning like this morning. There’s so much to do and not much time left to do it.

One of these days, things will catch up with me. But not any time soon, I hope.

Sunday 26th April 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall that yesterday I mentioned that I was going to have a baking day today.

And so I did too – and here’s the result.

There’s

a loaf of bread (thanks to Catherine for the recipe)
a vegan pizza made with my own dough (and credit to whoever gave me the recipe – I forget now
a blackberry pie (pastry out of a roll
an apple turnover (to use up the remains of the two rolls of pastry)

In fact I made enough pizza dough for three pizza and as I’m told that it will freeze well, it’s in the freezer and I’ll find out next week if it really does.

The bread didn’t really work out. It certainly rose, although nothing like as much as I hoped that it would, and I’m going to need a pneumatic drill to get through the crust.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating and we’ll see tomorrow at lunchtime how it went. I shan’t be too disappointed if it doesn’t work out – it’s my first ever go and you can’t win a coconut every time.

However, the pizza did, and I was impressed by that.

What else I was impressed with was that I was actually up and about at a more reasonable 10:15 this morning rather than the near-midday of just recently. Much as I like – and enjoy very much – a good lie-in, there’s no need to take it to extremes.

Unless, of course, there was someone else, young and nubile of the female, lying in with me, and then that would be a completely different matter entirely.

Ohh yes – I can still chase after the women at my age. I just can’t remember why.

And that reminds me of when i was chatting to Rosemary the other day saying that I haven’t seen that mystery girl since we crossed each other’s path while out running a couple of weeks ago.

Rosemary asked my why I didn’t turn round and run after her. My response was that if I had managed to catch her, I wouldn’t have been in any fit state to do anything about it.

After the meds I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night and who had been there with me. So hello to you again, Castor.

I was back playing guitar again, playing bass for someone. We hadn’t rehearsed or anything. Castor was involved in this. But it wasn’t really Castor but some other group of girls a bit like those two in that Agatha Christie Poirot play about the cruise ship in the Eastern Mediterranean. But when we came to leave The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour we were almost the last to leave and I walked up to the top – I must have been somewhere and seen a lot of people – but I walked up on the top deck ready to come off and there were kids “where’s so-and-so?” their friend or father or someone. “He’s waiting for you. You’ve been downstairs since 08:30”. They said “he’s gone down for a sleep”. I said “no, he’s waiting for you ready to go” so they all piled into grandfather’s car ready to leave. They invited a few of us round to their house afterwards so we were allowed to go. They had even invited me which was a surprise so I set off there as well with a couple of other people. There was much more to it than this but I really can’t remember it now and in any case, you’re probably eating your tea now or something.
Some time later I’d been packing up ready to leave The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour last night. I had a load of tinned food stuff and was getting a carrier bag ready to carry it out. I thought that this would be much easier in plastic bottles than metal tins isn’t it to move it. And then some of the product, I can’t remember what, dated back to 1970 from Chile and the time when Allende was making a secret treaty between the Chileans, the Russians and the Americans and no-one ever talked about the sell-out by Allende at all.
Later still I was at a quiz show on the television and the call went out for all of the studio to be evacuated so everyone ran out except for me. We’d been examining bottles of fizzy water and one of the bottles swelled up dramatically and was about to burst. I just put it on the floor and put a wooden box on the top and stood on the wooden box. When it burst it burst inside the box and shook me around a bit but there was no damage done to anywhere. People came back in and I told them what had happened.

Yes, that was a pretty comprehensive voyage or two or three during the night.

With the time that it took to deal with all of the foregoing it was a late breakfast. More like an early lunch if the truth is known. And afterwards I attacked the digitalised file project. Two more albums went the Way of the West today. A couple of complications but in the end I managed to sort things out.

There wasn’t a great deal of time though for editing photos. Only 25 or so but many of them today were cropped out of larger images and I imagine that only about half were actual original images.

As an aside for this, I’m currently on image 0860. A similar image from my first run through on a one-for-one basis was image 0723 so it shows just how many croppings there have been.

Incidentally, that’s for the 11th July. One-third or so of the way through the month.

There was a break for a snack at about 14:30 and then I had my culinary session. Like I say, the bread could be better but for a first try I don’t think that it’s too bad. I shall have to work on it and maybe have better luck with the next loaf, because I’m intending to keep on trying if I can.

Tea was, of course, the pizza (delicious) followed by the last of the apple crumble. Tomorrow’s pudding will be the apple turnover and then after that I’ll start on the pie.

There’s absolutely no doubt about it – I’m eating so much better these days than ever I have been (except for those three months when Liz and Terry took me in).

After the washing-up (three loads of it of course this evening) I went off for my evening runs.

No-one about at all on my travels and that’s hardly a surprise as it wasn’t the kind of day that you would be expecting to see people. It was a cool evening but cloudy and overcast with a heavy sea mist.

It wasn’t the day for photography at all so there are very few photos of this evening’s activities.

Having recovered my breath from my runs up the hill and then down to the cliffs, I had my third run along the clifftop on the south side of the headland overlooking the town.

Nothing much happening down there at all. The place was as dead as a do-do. I could see right across the port, past the hotel and out up the street alongside the beach. All that I could see was just one person walking along the quayside.

Who knows? maybe people have realised that the solution to this problem is in their own hands. The number of new cases of this virus is falling dramatically and we might even be on target for Liberation on 11th may if this keeps up.

But there was someone else out there whom I missed but slamming his van door like that, it drew my attention to him.

He was unloading equipment from that fishing boat just there, putting it in his van and driving away.

At the viewpoint at the rue du Port there was a small group of people hoping to see the sunset. No-one whom I recognised, and not keeping their “social distance” either.

But there was no chance of them seeing the sunset. The heavy cloud and mist obscured everything.

There was however a piece of machinery parked higher up the rue du Nord in the Place du Marché aux Chevaux.

It crept into a photo while I was photographing something else and I didn’t take much notice of it until I returned home.

No idea what it is so I’ll have to go tomorrow for a proper nosey and make further enquiries about it.

But not now. I have a couple of thing to do and then i’m off to bed. I can’t wait to try my loaf tomorrow and see how it went. I’m not too optimistic but we shall see.

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.

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.

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.

Sunday 5th April 2020 – THAT WAS ANOTHER …

… wasted day today. And it’s my own fault too.

It all started to go wrong last night. As I was preparing to go to bed, some decent music came on the playlist. One thing leads to another, and once you have started, you’ve simply no idea how many other things there are.

It was one good piece of music after another, all kinds of nostalgia came flooding back (this is what happens when you start to listen to music that you haven’t heard for 40 years and more) and in no time at all I was in the depths of a depression.

So much so that, believe it or not, it was 04:00 when I finally went to bed. And I still wasn’t able to sleep.

At some point, I must have dozed off, because I awoke at 11:00. That was a good start to the day – having missed half of it. And even worse, it was 11:45 when I finally hauled myself out of bed.

Nothing on the dictaphone, which is hard to believe after the exertions of just recently, so after the medication I attacked the digital sound files.

That’s another four albums out of the way, reasonably straightforwardly. Only a couple of tracks that weren’t readily available and which took some tracking down. And while I was at it, I disposed of some more photos from July 2019. I’m not up to 19070400 or thereabouts, which means that there’s only about another 1200 from that month to deal with.

And then there are August’s (of which there are so much more) and September’s and October’s too.

That meant that breakfast was at the rather democratic time of … errr … 13:45, which is a late time even for lunch. And the apple purée is running low and I don’t have enough apples to make any more. I sense that a supplementary trip to the shops is on the cards some time soon.

After breakfast – or lunch, or whatever you might like to call it – I buckled down to the 2 radio projects on which I have been working.

They are both done now except for the speech for the last tracks which needs to be recorded, edited and merged into position. And they could so easily have been finished had I not … errr … closed my eyes for a while.

Unbelievable, isn’t it?

It’s just some more stuff to do tomorrow, isn’t it?

There was the hour or so on the guitars and I spent much of the time working out the rhythm and bass parts to U2’s “In God’s Country” and David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream”.

Tea was another vegan pizza with the last pizza base, followed by one of the best rice puddings that I’ve ever made.

My daily exercise was after tea of course.

It was going dark now because I was so late, but I took a photo of one of my running spots in the rue du Roc. I start way back there beyond the farthest street light, and you can see the rise that always brings me to a halt.

The usual spot where I run out of steam is just by where the hedge begins but just recently I’ve been pushing on to the point at which I took the photo.

“Nothing much to shout about” I hear you say, but it is at my age and in my state of health. And it’s just one of four running tracks that i’m using

Feeling in something of a good form, I ran across the lawn to the top of the cliffs where the lighthouse looked really good, silhouetted as it was against the darkening evening sky.

That was well worth a photo too, and it’s come out rather well.

And so it should, because I’m back in business again.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had had an issue with the big NIKON D500 CAMERA. It wasn’t reading any memory card.

However, there is a second slot for XQD memory cards, an obsolete but much better form of memory storage.

So even though it’s much more expensive than SD format, I ordered a card to see whether the fault lay in the camera or simply in the SD card slot.

As you can see from the quality of the photos, like this one of the Pointe de Carolles, the XQD memory card seems to be functioning perfectly well.

The fault must therefore be in the SD card slot and I don’t know what to do about that. It’s probably going to be an expensive repair and unnecessary too as long as I can obtain XQD cards.

But one thing that I won’t be doing if I can help it is to take out the cards to upload the photos to the computer.

It’s only a passing thought of course, but I wonder if the regular removal of the card is what has caused the card slot to fail.

So once the card is in, it stays in and I’ll upload it using a cable, like I’ve been doing for the last few weeks with the NIKON 1 J5 and the old NIKON D3000

With the new card, I took a photo of the port with Chausiais and Joly France moored up over at the ferry terminal, and then carried on.

A poor woman had the shock of her life as I came round a corner at something rather less than a canter – but not as much of a shock as I had.

But anyway, 5 runs tonight and a good bit of distance too. This is starting to be a bit more like it.

But for how long? It’s well over an hour since I came back in and i’m still out of breath. But I must push on. Keeping fit, losing weight and watching my health is how I’m going to keep on going, not to mention an improvement in my diet.

But hard work tomorrow. There’s still plenty to do and less time to do it of course.

And the weather has changed. In the space of two days we’ve gone from being far too cold to having the heat switched off and the windows opened.

Has Spring finally arrived?

Sunday 29th March 2020 – AND IF YOU …

… were wondering whether today was any better than yesterday, the answer is “I don’t know. I missed half of it”.

And that’s no exaggeration either. It might only … “only, he said” – ed … have been 11:00 when I awoke, but it was 12:05 when I finally heaved myself out of bed this mor … errr … afternoon.

So that was basically the day ruined.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have said … “on many occasions” – ed … that everyone should have one day each week when they can do nothing and not be ashamed of the fact, but as far as I’m concerned that was yesterday. I was hoping to be much more focused today.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone. And I’d certainly been much more focused during the night, that’s for sure.

Last night I had started off with Laurence and Roxanne when Nerina put in an appearance and wasn’t very happy to see me. It was an evening when I was on my own. The next morning along came Laurence and Roxanne and they had come to see me too. Nerina had turned up by accident by the way. As it happened there was some kind of swimming regatta so we got Roxanne to take part in this. It was like a swimming obstacle race. Of course she leapt in the water and went right round this obstacle race but something happened on the very last section and she had to be lifted out and whatever happened was put right and she had to jump back in. But they wouldn’t let her do the underwater somersault but we were urging her on to go back and do it. In the end she turned round and swam back but they wouldn’t let her do it so she swam away. Laurence went to fetch her. As we were walking back to our little spec of seats and Nerina walked past us with a scowl on her face and said “we met yesterday” and just walked off. Laurence came back and Roxanne was crying, really disappointed and we put her on a shelf. In the end she got off this shelf and went to stand up where we were sitting. These two girls who were using this shelf were having a bit of, well, not a moan but going on about how Roxanne had got their shelf wet but Roxanne said “I was sitting on the one above where there were just things” and not where they were sitting.
Some time later I was doing one of these extraordinary exploration things that come on the TV every now and again about phenomena. There had been a helicopter crash in a small village and it had been one of these normal things but suddenly a white stain had appeared on the parapet of a bridge and people wanted to know what it was. They were all so suspicious about it being the sign of the Gods or something. We went to track it down, a woman and I, and I had a look round and I could see that there was some kind of watercourse where rain water had been flowing out of a field discreety onto the road. This had changed its course since the accident. You could see that there was some discolouring in the earth of this little watarcourse that had made the earth go a lot whiter than the earth of the soil. Se we suspected that the crash had changed this watercourse slightly and it was just a natural phenomenon that the water was now flowing through where it never flowed before and was percolating up some kind of hidden fissure in the bridge. Then we were prowling around a churchyard. Someone else in Cheshire had observed a fire in the sky that went on for weeks in the direction of the Gobi Desert and the Sahara Desert about 150 years before any explorer had actually been there. We were walking around this churchyard and there was someone’s visitor book there and a page had blown off it that was a report about “St Anne’s Day” or a diary page for St Anne’s Day. It had blown onto the floor so I picked it up and put it back on the lectern and put a kind of embossed stone on top to hold it on. The woman with me said something like “we haven’t come here to change things around, have we?” all this kind of thing. I said “no, I’m just putting things back where they had blown from”. She was going on about changing things round and taking things away. Of course we weren’t doing that at all.

Breakfast at 13:15 is a much more reasonable way to go about things on a Sunday, and then I attacked the music.

Another four albums split up and filed without two many problems – just one album where a couple of tracks wouldn’t work and I had to hunt them down elsewhere which took some time.

While they were doing, I was catching up by working on the photos for July 2019. I’m now in Rif setting out on my walk to the Svodufoss waterfall and I remember that walk very well. The waterfall looked as if it was just a couple of fields away and it was too, but no-one said that there was a big river in the way so we had to walk in large figure “Z” shape to reach it. My fitbit at the end of the day showed 12.4 kms and I felt every step of the way.

Another thing that I did was to join up all of the speech files for the Grande Marée broadcast and intersperse the joins with beach ambience soundfiles. As for the speech, I’ve asked Laurent if he will do an introduction and a conclusion and he’ll get back to me. When he replies, I’ll see what he has to say and I’ll do a brief text for the other intervals.

Then of course, there was the hour on the guitar. Mustn’t forget that.

For tea tonight I had something of a bake-in.

With needing the oven for the pizza I’ve been baking desserts in there every Sunday evening and tonight, having remembered the cooking apples yesterday, I made an apple pie.

And with the left-over pastry and left-over apple, I rolled out the pastry and squared it off, added the apple and desiccated coconut, cinnamon, nutmeg and brown sugar, and made an apple turnover.

The pizza was delicious of course, and so was the apple turnover with the soya coconut. I shall be attacking the pie as from tomorrow evening and I have high hopes.

With being distracted by the time and all that, it was very late when I went outside for my exercise.

And my first run was a dismal failure. There was a gale blowing out there that was the equal of some of the best that we have had and trying to walk around in many places was impossible. If you wonder why this image was so blurred, the fact is that I was being blown around in a Force 10 gale at the moment that I pressed the shutter.

Liz had told me earlier that the wind was coming from Greenland and that I ought to complain to Heidinnguaq. Well, I dunno about where it was coming from but I know exactly where it was going and it wasn’t exactly pleasant.

Finding a spot that was out of the wind I managed a run in the end.

And that led me down a new alley that I hadn’t walked before. The rue des Degres. So at least all of this stuff is broadening my horizons.

Back here, I wrote up my journal as I listened to some music. It didn’t take me long because of course there wasn’t much to write.

It’s still late though so I’m heading to bed. It’s a busy week next week because I have two rock music projects to do, an audio diary to write and then to finish off this Grande Marée thing when Laurent lets me have his notes.

No matter what I do, the work still keeps on piling up, doesn’t it?

Sunday 22nd march 2020 – AND JUST HOW …

… did I celebrate the first Sunday morning of my enforced confinement?

No idea at all. I slept right through it.

Well, almost. It was about 10:45 when I awoke and just after 11:00 when I finally arose. And seeing as I was in bed fairly early last night – like before midnight – that was a rather impressive lie-in.

So after the medication, I had a look at the dictaphone notes. I was in my van last night, a Transit the same as Caliburn but the bulkhead was one row further back so there was space behind the driver’s seat and passenger seat. While I was sitting in my van suddenly the back door opened and my brother and someone else came into the van and started to try to make themselves comfortable so I threw them out and told them to clear off. So they went out but didn’t shut the back door properly so I shouted at him to come and close the back door. he replied “no, that’s how it was before. I’m not closing that properly so I got so enraged so I put Caliburn – the van – into reverse and drove backwards, scattering all these pedestrians who were in the way until I caught up with him. As for the “what happened next”, well, I found myself back where I was on the final days of The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour at the end of August and beginning of September in the same circumstances that alarmed me so much and which prevented me writing up my notes for those final three or four days. Things are clearly getting to me again.
But later on I was somewhere in South London at a railway station waiting for a train. There was a girl on this patform with me. She was a nice girl and we were waiting for a train. A train pulled in at the station, an old 1950s first-generation (… it was much older than that and like an early Southern Region Commuter Electric from the late 1930s …) multiple-unit thing painted red and cream. It pulled in on the platform across from where we were standing and we had to go down – a dark dingy corridor and set of steps to go down, not like anything modern. As we were going down this girl said to me “can you see where you are going?” I said yes and she said “oh” (scintillating dialogue, isn’t it?). As we got down to the level below there was another platform and she just wandered off onto this platform so this left me all on my own. I ended up walking out through the ticket barrier – you had to hold your ticket up to this reader thing. I did but I wasn’t sure if it had read it but the gate opened anyway so I walked out. As I walked out I was thinking that as I’m spending all this time in London why don’t I get a bike? A pushbike. It would be a lot cheaper than travelling on the train. Then I thought to myself “I wouldn’t get to meet all these nice girls will I, if I’m on a bike”. There was also something going on about being in a boat. The only thing that I remember about that is that we had a pile of stuffed penguins and two fell overboard so we had to do a U-turn to go back and pick them up, but I don’t remember anything else about that.

Breakfast at 12:15 is definitely the right way to go and then I came back to look at some file-splitting. I managed to track down another digital sound file which I could then split up at my leisure, but as for the three other albums that I chose today, I had to do that track by track by track.

But I managed to solve a little mystery as to why I could never find one album anywhere at all. The album that I have was picked up in a secondhand shop somewhere in Europe all those years ago and I’ve never been able to trace its provenance.

But searching more deeply into this and comparing track listings on a music-business site to which I have access, I discovered that the album that I bought was a German limited edition budget release of an album much more well-known.

So that resolved that issue and I was able to proceed.

Having dealt with these issues, I turned my attention to the photos from July for what was left of the afternoon (which wasn’t much).

By the time that I had finished I had finally managed to leave Reykjavik and it’s the next morning as I’m watching the sun rise over Snæfellsjökull in North-West Iceland. And I remember it well and just how pleasant it was too.

There was the customary hour on the guitar, all of which was spent on the bass. As it happened, “Old Admirals” by Al Stewart and “Tangled Up In Blue” by Bob Dylan came round on the playlist so I spent half of that time working out a bass line to each one.

But like anything else, I can always think of something better a little later on.

This evening I had a little bake-in.

The half-baguette that was left over from Belgium was beyond stale so I made myself some garlic butter and treated myself to some garlic bread, seeing as I hadn’t had any lunch today.

But with it being Sunday evening and pizza night, I reckoned that I ought to make a dessert as well. I had rice pudding last week and I had no cooking apples left, but I did have a jar of jam that I had bought in Belgium and another one that was opened here.

That was the cur to make a jam tart but it ended up as being a jam pie – strawberry jam with desiccated coconut.

And the pastry that was left was rolled out flat and was used to make a jam and coconut turnover. No sense in wasting anything.

And I now know that the new 16cm pie dish that I bought needs just one roll of pastry to make a pie, and there will be a little pastry left over.

The pizza was delicious as usual and the jam turnover went down a treat with some of the coconut dessert stuff.

Despite the quarantine regulations, I went out for my evening run or two. I have to keep up my health and going out in the evening I’m not likely to encounter anyone else.

My first run was quite good except for the path which was rather waterlogged. It looked as if there had been some rain during the day that was responsible for all of that.

My path brought me round to the lookout over the town round about where the escalier du moulin a vent – the Windmill Staircase – comes down onto the little flat piece of land at the landward end of the rocky outcrop.

Just there is a concrete bunker or two, part of the Atlantic Wall from World War II and the inner row of ramparts from the medieval town.

It’s really quite amusing in a way to see two relics of two different times and two completely different types of warfare so close to each other like this. And in the end, neither of them did the job that they were supposed to, being as they were, completely by-passed by events elsewhere.

The view across to the Eglise St Paul was very impressive tonight so I took a photo but I still have to work hard on my night-time technique to make any improvement.

So I turned my attention to my second run and made it all the way up to the second ramp and a good half-dozen paces up that slope. That’s something that I couldn’t have done a few weeks ago.

What’s important to me is that I can tell how my health is holding up by how far I can run and how I feel afterwards. And in the absence of any medical follow-up from the hospital, I have to self-check and this is the best way that I know how.

Hence my evening walks and runs.

Despite my long lie-in today, I’m feeling quite tired so I’m off to bed. And wondering what tomorrow is going to bring. Here in Granville we seem to have been lucky right now but of course that can change at any moment.

Thursday 12th March 2020 – I WAS ALMOST …

… right about the pontoons. So almost right in fact that I’m going to give myself 9 out of 10.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I counted the pillars on the quayside and decided that they were going to install two rows of four, and then they went yesterday and put a fifth one in the row on the north side of the harbour that confounded all of my expectations?

Anyway, to cut a long story short … “thank goodness” – ed … they might have installed five n one row, but today they are indeed starting on a second row, just as I reckoned that they would.

But that’s going to be bad news as far as I can see for the shipping in here, where they are installing that second row.

Here’s Tiberiade, a sister ship to Coelacanthe, and I watched her for a good five minutes struggling to negotiate her way around the pillars in order to find a berth to which to tie up.

And that’s just a fishing boat. We have both of the Joly France boats, Chausiais, and then the two Channel Island ferries, Granville and Victor Hugo, that tie up more-or-less where they will be fitting that pontoon. I’m not sure how that’s going to work for them

And while you admire the photos of the storm that we had tonight, let me tell you about my totally miserable day. A day when everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

And we started off my oversleeping. Not by five minutes or ten minutes but a good hour and a half. Staying up and listening to decent music might be a good plan from that point of view, but 01:30 is being rather optimistic when I want to be up by 06:15

That got me off on the wrong foot and things disintegrated from there on.

The medication was no problem, and then I came back and looked at the dictaphone.

And no wonder that I was exhausted this morning. I’d been miles during the night.

There was a whole group of us discussing some guy’s application for something or other. It was an unusual application – it turned out that he had an eagle on a ring not too far away and he wanted something to control this eagle but no-one would take him seriously about this. Everyone was saying that if he had an eagle living there it would be fantastic. But no-one could quite get to grips with the seriousness of the thing because eagles can even carry off people. This all came about I think when someone was getting married, I’m not quite sure, and there was a fear of this eagle but this sighting was dismissed and they never saw it again. People were saying “ohh well, there you are, it must have been a false report, this kind of thing, but this whole thing was based on the fact that an eagle had reappeared and been seen at a different place entirely so maybe it hadn’t actually gone away but had just basically moved nest into somewhere else.

Later on, three kids were staying at our old house in Vine Tree Avenue. We were there and there was a hell of a lot going on in this dream. One of my things to do was to go round and check on the flies. For some unknown reason, the flies were of interest. I’d read a book on flies and the life-cycle of the flies, the family of the fly, all this kind of thing and it was interesting to see how much the families of the flies around our house actually bore to it. So I used to do my rounds and check on things while everyone else was out and I still kept on doing my rounds. And on one of my rounds I walked into my parents bedroom and there was one of my sisters. “So what are you doing here?” I asked her “I’m looking for a quiet place to study and write some letters and people wouldn’t leave me alone so I came in here”. I said “the easiest thing to do to be left alone is to not make any noise and people won’t remember about you. You should really be in here and shut the door and that would be better still” and I gave her some more advice like that as well. But it was something about the life cycle of the fly and the family of the fly that interested me.

I was in the area of Shavington last night, (…Rope Hall Lane…). I was on a motorcycle and I was following someone in a car. This motorcycle thing went past us, grey but with an orange-painted tank on it. As I went round a bend the guy in the car was busy turning the car round to come back the other way towards me. I asked him what was up. Apparently the motor cycle had hit him and driven off. A crowd of people came round, someone on a police motor bike but it wasn’t a policeman. The guy with me was telling a story about how he had hit him and said a few impolite things and driven away. I suddenly realised that I knew this guy, and I bet that I knew his name as well as he sounded like the kind of person whom I’d met. I mentioned it to him, that he’s a regular on this road and we can find him again at some other time.
But then I was in Shavington (… Rope Lane by the Vine …) with someone else, someone from Canada but not Josée I think. We were talking about my childhood as we drove through Shavington so I took her down Vine Tree Avenue and showed her the house where we lived as kids. Of course it’s much different now than it was in those days. We were having a chat about it when some woman came up and asked me if I knew the area. I said that I had lived here. She replied that she had lived here since the 50s and she knew this street – pointing to Edwards Avenue – by some other name. I said that if she had been here in the 50s she must have known me then so we had a chat. I don’t think that we actually got to mentioning my name, who I was, but we were talking on about Edwards Avenue and Vine Tree Avenue and I was pointing out some garages (… which don’t exist …) that still bore some kind of resemblance to how our houses looked at the time

As I said, no wonder that I was exhausted.

After breakfast, there wasn’t much time before I had to go to the shops, so I looked at the digital soundfile that I’d downloaded yesterday. And one brief listen to that, and that one followed the previous version into the bin as well. The first couple of minutes of the opening track are missing, and that’s no good to anyone.

What I’ll have to do is to download yet another version if I can find one.

Before I went out I grabbed a quick shower and then headed uptown, stopping to watch Tiberiade perform her nautical danse macabre around the harbour.

At LIDL there was nothing of any particular interest, although I did watch in mild amusement as someone came into the shop in plastic gloves and a face mask to do his shopping. I think that some people need to get a sense of proportion. More people died in the 2003 heatwave, and more people will die of influenza in a normal winter. The trouble is that because those things are so normal, the Press never mentions them so people don’t realise.

Talking of journalists, I have a journalist friend in the USA who is currently having a hysterical panic about this virus. So I asked her how the tally of deaths and illness from the virus compares with the amount of firearm-related deaths and injuries in the USA.

She didn’t reply, but kept on having her hysterics.

Yes, never mind this virus. There are people walking the streets in the USA with enough firepower to wipe out a small-sized district at the drop of a hat, yet that causes these silly Americans no concern whatsoever. But then again, I suppose that the USA is such a violent bloodthirsty country that they are accustomed to the idea of violence.

And that’s a dreadful state of mind to be in.

Several weeks ago, I posted a photo of what I considered to be the first buds of the year. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that at the time I expressed my scepticism.

But there’s no doubting whatsoever about these. here in the rue de la Houle there are definitely buds here on this creeping plant that’s growing up the wall.

Yes, we can definitely now say that Spring is on its way quite definitively. That put a little spring into my step, although I wish that I knew what happened to winter.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that we’ve been keeping an eye on the new building that’s going on on the corner of the rue Charles Guillebot and the impasse de la Corderie.

Being in an energetic mood today, I went to have a closer look at it today. It is indeed a new house. But the people who are building it don’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to finish it.

It’s one thing that I’ve noticed here with the local builders. They don’t seem to be in any rush whatever to actually complete anything and we’ve seen projects like this go on for ever.

Just by way of a change, seeing as I’d never come this way, I went down into town via the rue Charles Guillebot.

That takes me down the north side of the eglise St Paul, a side of the church that we haven’t seen before. I’ve probably mentioned this church in the past. It was one of the earliest concrete structures built in modern times (the Romans were well-advanced with the use of concrete) but like most things, was never maintained.

As a result, there are bits dropping off it and there are notices all over the place telling the public to keep well clear.

At La Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette and headed back home.

But once more, I stopped half-wau up the rue des Juifs to admire the view. We saw them earlier knocking the support pillar into the floor, but that was a photo that I had taken later this afternoon.

What we are seeing in this photo is the floating pontoon setting out from its mooring with that support pillar in its evil clutches and being shunted into position by the little boat.

It’s actually quite an exciting procedure watching then manoeuvring about the harbour with all of their equipment. All of this free entertainment that we are having.

Back at the apartment, I had a little surprise. I bumped into one of the more energetic owners here, and he invited me to come with him on a little guided tour.

Underneath this building are several big man-made caverns which had been bricked off and a year or so ago they had found the entrance and smashed their way through the wall to the inside.

There were apparently the water tanks for the old city in the days before there was the mains water supply. All of the rainfall from the roofs of the houses and from the street was channelled into here.

And it’s certainly an impressive sight to see. Apparently, it was full of all kinds of things before they started to clean it out. The plan was to divide it up into private cellars for the owners of the apartments, but it’s hit a major snag.

And he showed me what was the snag.

One of the underground caverns was well-blocked off and took some smashing down. And when they finally broke their way in, they could see exactly why it was so well sealed.

If the story that I was told is correct, and I would gladly learn otherwise, the building was divided into rooms by all kids of ad-hoc partitions that had accumulated over the centuries. When it was converted into apartments, the old partition walls had to be smashed down and taken away.

Included in the contract for the work was a large sum for “hire of containers and transport away of the waste” and this was duly paid. However it seems that the waste was never transported away at all but thrown down the lift shafts into one of the caverns and the cavern was then sealed off so that no-one would see it.

Of course, this is just one person’s view of the matter and there is very likely another, but one inescapable fact is that m’learned friends have been called in by the building’s management committee.

We shall see how all of this develops over the next few months. But nevertheless, it was exciting being down here and seeing all of this that I had never seen before.

After lunch I boiled up some ginger and then started to make my orange and ginger syrup.

I peeled 5 large juice oranges, gave then a quick whizz in the whizzer and poured off the juice, which I put into a bottle that I had sterilised. That went into the fridge.

The left-over pulp was whizzed down finely and then, after the ginger had simmered for an hour or so, I added the left-over pulp, brought it to the boil again and then left it to simmer.

While that was happening, I made a start on the sound files that we had recorded at the Grande Marée yesterday.

There were a few people out there this afternoon but I didn’t loiter very much.

My route took me round to the chantier navale where I could see that La Granvillaise and one of the fishing boats have gone back into the water. But Charles-Marie is still in there, minus a good few of her planks. This is going to be a long job

There was another classe decouverte out there today too, but no-one whom I recognised so I headed for home. I’m still shaking my head about that unexpected encounter yesterday.

Back here, I had a look to see how my orange and ginger was doing.

Nicely simmering away so I took it off the heat, added a couple of tablespoons of manuka honey (that’s how I make it into syrup), poured it all into the whizzer and gave it all a really good and lengthy whizz around.

The syrupy mass was then poured into the orange juice that I had put in the fridge earlier and it was all shaken up to mix it in. It all went into the fridge where over the course of the next week or so I’ll be using it up as my morning drink.

Back at my desk, I carried on with the sound file but I didn’t get very far as I drifted away with the fairies. And I also had my half-hour on the bass.

Tea was a burger on a bun with potatoes and veg. And I forgot the veg until the very last minute and had to rush them. The apple pie and ice cream for pudding was delicious too. I really am living well these days.

There was quite a wind blowing outside this evening.

Not one of the strongest winds that we have had and not really enough to knock me out of my stride either. And so i was astonished to see how the waves were roaring in to the Plat Gousset.

It is the period of the fullest moon and the highest tides, but even so, I hadn’t expected to see waves like this coming into the Plat Gousset with such incredible force. I stood there for quite a while to watch the show.

Windy it might have been, but not enough to frustrate my two evening runs. I managed to fit them in without too many problems and managed to push the distances on again. For my second run, I even made it up to the top of the ramp and I haven’t done that for a while.

But there was a lot of activity in the port and at the fish-processing plant. With it being nearly high tide, the gates are open so the big fishing boats can come in and unload.

For my part, I went and had a little play with the NIKON 1 J5 and the f1.8 18.5mm lens

The photo above was taken with the shutter speed at 1/20 at f1.74 with ISO 900

This photo here was taken completely manual with speed of 1/125 at f1.74 and ISO 2800.

They have both come out rather well and I’m quite pleased with them. Still plenty of room for improvement but I’ll just keep on working away at it until I improve.

So back here I’ve written up all of my notes and now, a lot later than I hoped, I’m going to bed. I hope that I have better luck trying to drag myself out of bed tomorrow morning, but who knows? It’s really driving me to despair

Sunday 8th March 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

… whose idea it is to ring that cacophony of church bells at 11:00 on a Sunday morning but it’s almost as if they don’t want you to have a decent lie-in on a Sunday morning when they go around awakening the dead like that.

It certainly put paid to my morning reverie and I was obliged to leave the comfort and warmth of my beautiful bed.

It wasn’t the first time that I had had to leave the bed either. Round about … errr … 04:00 or something like that, I had to go for a ride on the porcelain horse. I thought that I had passed beyond that, but apparently not.

So I went off and had my medication.

While you admire the high winds that we were having and the storm that was raging somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, let me tell you about my morning.

First thing that I did of course was to check on the dictaphone. And sure enough, I’d been on a little voyage. I was with someone last night who resembled a girl with whom I had worked for a while although it wasn’t her I’m sure, someone like that. We were discussing languages. Something weird had come up and we had a reply to do which we had done in French or Flemish or something. This led to some kind of discussion about languages and what do we do, how did we behave, all this kind of thing. I made the point sometime during this discussion that what we did is that we’d have the radio on if we were at home and just listen to a French programme or a Flemish programme. It didn’t really make any difference to the two of us what we were listening to. Any of the languages were usually pretty good for us.

After that, I carried on with the project that I’m undertaking – of digitalising my collection of LPs.

On thing that I’ve been able to do is to find about 120 digitalised sound files of albums that I own, and I downloaded them all. I’ve then had to split them into individual tracks.

It isn’t easy because many of them are studio master tapes where the tracks are recorded in “recorded order” of course which is quite often very different than the order in which they are published on CDs and LPs

Another issue is that some of the tapes include tracks that were never ever published – rejected for one reason or another – and which I don’t have a clue what they are.

And sure enough, one of the sound files on which I was working was one of the latter.

Eventually, after a great deal of effort, I tracked it down. It seems that I have somehow managed to lay my hands on a rare Swedish-only version of a master-tape with one additional track that was only available in a couple of countries and a second additional track that was only available in Sweden.

That should be quite a curio when it comes to playing it on the radio programmes.

13:30. That’s a very civilised time to have breakfast, I reckon. And the last of the home-made apple juice from when I made the apple and pear purée. It’s certainly quite interesting when I am responsible for the making (within certain limits of course) of almost every product that I eat for breakfast.

After breakfast I didn’t really do all that much. After all, it is Sunday and I’m entitled to a break one day a week when I don’t do much.

Nevertheless, round about 15:30 or thereabouts I decided that I would have lunch. I wasn’t all that hungry, and there was an end of a baguette from yesterday hanging around in the kitchen.

Luckily, I had remembered to fetch some hummus out of the freezer yesterday. Roasted pepper hummus too, made with my own fair hands.

So I had a hummus, tomato, cucumber and lettuce butty for lunch, followed by the usual apple, pear and banana for afters.

And that reminded me (although I’ve no idea why it would) that the lemon and ginger syrup that I make for my medication is running low. Sometime later this week I’ll have to make some more. I’ve plenty of ginger but I bought some juice oranges so I’ll go for orange syrup this time.

Whatever happens, I mustn’t forget my afternoon walk. I’m only on 3% wandering around the apartment.

Mind you, sticking my head out of the door, I wasn’t too impressed about the idea of going out.

By the looks of things, there was a huge storm brewing away across the baie de Mont St Michel over there on the Brittany coast. And knowing my usual luck, I would probably end up finding myself right in the middle of it before I’d gone too far.

But anyway, in for a penny, in for a pound. I set off out.

And I wasn’t alone either. Despite the wind there were crowds of people milling around enjoying the weather and I was determined to join them.

My route took me right around the headland and down the steps at the end. And the farther on my travels I advanced, the more I didn’t like the look of the weather. It was just looking worse and worse

Mind you, my luck was in, for once.

The storm was advancing quite quickly but as I rounded the headland at the Pointe du Roc I could see that it was going to miss me by a good few miles.

It had found shore down by the Pointe du Carolles and places like Carolles-Plage and Jullouville were taking something of a pounding. I’m glad that it wasn’t here, because it did look particularly nasty over there.

My perambulations brought me further around the headland and here I was greeted with a sight that made the walk all worthwhile.

As I have said before … “many times” – ed … there’s nothing between that harbour wall and the eastern seaboard of the USA and here we have the highest tides in Europe.

Consequently the power that can build up in the water whenever there is a major storm anywhere in the North Atlantic is really impressive and the sea walls here catch the lot of it full force.

regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen some really impressive seas come roaring in just here.

And today is no exception to that. I stoop and watched it all for a good 10 minites even though I had other things to do, just because it was so impressive.

Strangely enough, there were several people passing by here, but no-one else seemed to be interested in staying to watch the free show.

So instead, I had a wander down to the port. The harbour gates were closed as, believe it or not, the tide is well out (although you might not think so) so I could cross over to the other side of the harbour.

One thing that has been interesting me is the story of the new pontoons that they have been installing in the harbour. We’ve seen the pontoons on the north side of the harbour alongside the rue du Port but I wanted to look at the new ones on this side

That is, assuming that I can get close enough to them, because they are crowded out with fishing boats right now. There can’t be too many out at sea today.

Another thing that we’ve been looking at as we have been on our way around is the scaffolding that is bolted to the side of the harbour wall here.

Being a Sunday and with no-one around, I took the opportunity to have a closer look, trying not to fall into the harbour while I was doing it.

And the result is that I’m still not too sure of its purpose and the OSB boards here fixed to the wall don’t seem to be able to throw any light upon the subject.

All that I can think of, as a wild guess, is that it’s a set of steps for the crew of the floating pontoon to descend to their little boat.

We’ve also seen them installing steel pillars in the harbour in order to extend the row of pontoons out perpendicularly from the harbour walls.

Three have already been installed in the harbour and I was sure that there were others although I couldn’t remember how many. Consequently I went to have a good look aroud and eventually came across them.

And I was correct. I had seen them and here they are – five of them by my reckoning. That seems to indicate two lines of four each and that’s not going to be good news for the commercial boats that come here and need the open space to manoeuvre.

And that’s going to be interesting even sooner than we imagined, because Neptune, one of the gravel boats, has just left Shoreham Harbour – “next stop Granville”. I was right about the heaps of gravel.

As you probably saw in the previous photograph, the storm has passed, the clouds are now all gone and the sun is now out.

That made me decide to push on and have a marathon walk all the way along the Quai Hérel all the way down to the new block of flats (and how I would love to live here!) and the Pointe du Roche Gauthier.

That’s as far as you can do around here. The path comes to a sudden stop and you have to retrace your steps 100 metres or so until you come to a flight of steps that go back up to the road.

So, retracing my steps, I can show you the big modern building over there on the left.

That’s the CRNG, the Centre Regional de Nautisme de Granville, and it’s also where the Youth Hostel and the Salle Hérel are.

The Salle Hérel was quite interesting today – or should have been – because they were having a “Free Market” where everyone takes the stuff that they no longer want so that others may help themselves.

However I was too late because anything that might have been of interest had probably long-since gone.

My walk brought me up past the Tax Office and it was round about here that I had an exciting encounter.

It’s not so much the car, but what the owner was using as a bulkhead to stop whatever was in the back sliding forward into the passenger seat.

It’s an old freight pallet cut down to size and trimmed to be an exact fit. I was well-impressed by this and wished that I had thought of it in the past when I had the Passat.

My walk took me onwards down little alleys that I had only glimpsed in the past.

My aim was to do down past the station and down into the Park de Val es Fleurs to see what was going on around there but in the distance I noticed a flight of steps that I hadn’t seen before.

That made up my mind to go and follow my star wherever it was going to lead me and see what was at the other end – stopping for a glance backwards at the railway engineering depot in the background where the trains are stored and repaired.

My little climb brought me out into a little housing estate where a small path led to the main Avenue de la Liberation.

This path in turn led me past a nice modern block of flats in the chemin de Choisel. And nice though the flats might have seemed, it wasn’t my cup of tea because someone was playing some music full-blast with the windows in one of the apartments.

Where I live, I have solid stone walls 1.2 metres thick so I can play music as loud as I like without disturbing the neighbours. That wouldn’t work here at all.

Out on the avenue de la Liberation and here’s a thing.

Ever since I’ve been in Granville, and probably for many years prior to that, there were some old, abandoned houses that were fenced off from the road.

It’s been a good while since I’ve been past here on foot and to my surprise something seems to be happening to them right now. We have a crane, a new roof and all other kinds of exciting things.

That will be a nice place to live when it’s all finished.

While I was here, I could have carried on down the road into town, gone down another footpath and the steps to the Park de Val es Fleurs, or else through the gardens of the Musée Christian Dior and down the steps to the Plat Gousset.

Obviously the latter will bring me closer to the sea and with me being a Pisces, being close to water is one of my aims, so I made my way down the side of the tennis club.

Last time I was out here, I saw a big cruise ship out to sea, so I had a look to see if I was going to be lucky again.

Not quite. No shipping out there today but we did have one of these mysterious buoys bobbing around in the sea down there. I still haven’t worked out what they are four but my suspicion is that they are something to do with fishing gear – nets or lobster pots, that kind of thing I reckon.

There were crowds of people out there today and a long, continuous line of people coming up the steps.

The steps are quite narrow and there isn’t much room to pass anyone so I had to wait for a while while they came up. That gave me an opportunity to take a photo of the nice archway down there that leads to the final flight of steps down to the promenade.

And the sea was looking pretty rough down there too. This could be very interesting.

And i wasn’t wrong either.

It’s now 17:40 which means that there’s still an hour or so to high tide, and the sea is totally wicked out there, smacking into the sea wall here with an incredible force and sending spray everywhere.

It’s lucky that the promenade s quite wide otherwise I could easily end up marooned down here and that wouldn’t be very pleasant, having to climb all the way back up the steps again..

And I wasn’t alone here either.

This was a show that you would have to pay a fortune to watch in some places, but we were having it for free. There were probably a couple of hundred people down here this afternoon making the most of the entertainment and we were all having more than our money’s worth.

So impressive was it that I stayed down here for half an hour taking photos when one of the very big waves came in

We’ve had quite a few storms down here so far this year, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and we’ve seen plenty of areas that have been fenced off due to the damage that the wild seas have caused.

There’s some more over there and apparently this needs to be fixed before the Grand Marée, the very high tide, comes in on Wednesday. They’ve engaged some workmen to do the job and they have erected some scaffolding to work from, but I don’t fancy their chances out there today.

It’s a good job that it’s a Sunday – a Day Of Rest – today when they can have a day off.

While you admire a few more photos of the storm on the Plat Gousset, I climbed back up all of the steps and walked home via the square Maurice Marland.

There was still about 40 minutes or so before teatime, so I busied myself with another pile of photos from July 2019 and my trip to Iceland. I really need to press on with that before i’m much older.

The trouble is, though, that with having no internet out there, I wasn’t able to do any research into the photos. Consequently every one that I am editing, I need to research to find out where it is and what’s in the image.

Sunday is vegan pizza night of course, but it’s also pudding time seeing as I have the oven on already.

It’s usually rice pudding or some such, but last week we had a delicious apple crumble. Apple pie has been on the menu too in the past and that was what I intended to try today, using the new pie dish that I bought.

These pastry rolls are the business. The cheap ones from LeClerc are vegan of course so I always have a stock of those on hand. And I’d picked up some backing apples too on Sunday.

So, grease the pie dish and unroll one of the pastry rolls and put that in, gently pressing down so that it’s in at the seam at the bottom.

Thinly slice a couple of the apples and lie the slices in on top of the pastry, making as many layers as you can fit in, so that the pastry is completely covered.

On every layer, a think coating of desiccated coconut, brown sugar and lemon juice (and some cinnamon and nutmeg, which I completely forgot, for some reason or other that I can’t explain).

Unroll another pastry roll, cut out a top for the pie, with an overhang of about 2 cms.

Wet with some mile the part of the pastry that is on the lip of the pie dish, then put the top on and press it down really hard with a fork to the pastry underneath on the lip. Then trim off the excess pastry.

Put a few slits in the top of the pie to let out the steam, brush with milk and sprinkle with brown sugar. Then bung in the oven.

With the excess pastry, coast it on both sides – and your rolling pin – with flour to stop it sticking, and roll it out with your rolling pin. It won’t be square, so keep on trimming it off and adding the trimmings into appropriate places so that it’s as square as you can make it

Grease a flat oven tray and gently with a couple of spatulas, pick up your flat pastry and put on the tray. Add the leftover apple slices into the centre, with desiccated coconut, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg (which I remembered this time) then fold over all of the pastry and press it together to seal it.

Prick it with a fork to let the steam out, brush with milk and sprinkle with brown sugar, and bung that in the oven too.

And here’s the end result. It all looks pretty impressive and I bet it tastes even better even without the spices in the pie. I won’t be trying it this evening though because there’s still some apple crumble left.

Instead, the turnover was cut into 2 and put in the freezer, and the pie went in the fridge ready to start on tomorrow.

Rather like the time that I made a meat and potato pie when I was younger. I left the eyes in the potatoes so that it would see me through the week.

I’ll get my coat.

One thing that I mustn’t forget is my evening walk. I’m already up to 95% so i don’t intend to go far.

The NIKON 1 J5 and f1.8 18.5mm lens came with me so that I could have a little play around. I reset the ISO to “MAX 3200” rather than “MAX 6400” as the graining is too much, and stopped down a couple of stops to see what I could produce with that.

And f1.74 at 1/50 second and ISO3200 gave me this image. And for a hand-held shot, it’s quite reasonable. Joly France looks quite nice out there at the ferry terminal.

There have been much worse shots than this.

I’m wondering what else I can produce with this camera if I show some patience. Some good might come out of the enforced deprivation of the big NIKON D500

While you admire the rest of the photos of the storm there is something else that I mustn’t forget – and that is to go running.

And it’s a good job that I did those two-and-a-half runs yesterday because I only managed one and a half today. Not because of lack of willingness or lack of fitness, but because my first run down the rue du Roc was right into the teeth of a howling gale.

When I hit the slope of the hill about half-way or so along my course, it stopped me dead in my tracks and that was that. Luckily the return run along to boulevard Vaufleury was with the wind so that was a lot easier and I managed an extra 20 metres or so.

So now I’m back home and in the warmth.

There are tons of photos to edit and lots to write, so i doubt that I’ll be able to finish it tonight. But I’ll do what I can before I go to sleep and whatever remains to be done, I can finish it all off tomorrow.

Not that I’m complaining of course. This was a good day out and a really good walk around – more than enough to tire myself out. If I do fall asleep while writing out my notes, it will be for a very good …

ZZZZZZZ

Sunday 1st March 2020 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… day without a single photograph. And, eve, worse, the first day for a month that I’ve done less than my 100% daily effort.

And one of the main reasons for that was that there wasn’t much of a day today to have a go at.

What with one thing and another, I ended up not going to bed until 03:30 this morning. I had things to do, I was on something of a roll and there was good music on my playlist. No alarm on a Sunday either.

And so consequently when I awoke at 07:50, and was even out of bed at one stage, there was no chance of that ever continuing. A much more reasonable time after a late night like that was …errr … 11:50.

Consequently, breakfast was … errr … somewhat late and then I had a look at the dictaphone. And I rather wished that I hadn’t.

Because what a nightmare that was! I was in West London and I’d fallen in with a family a bit like one that I knew once in Scotland, pretty undisciplined and wild with loads of kids. When we got to their house there were dogs overrunning the house – 20 or 30 dogs. Absolutely terrible. You coudn’t do anything for dogs barking and jumping up at you, all this kind of thing. In the middle Keith Emerson came in for a piano lesson as the guy who was running the house was teaching him to play the piano. That just made the whole thing wilder. I don’t think that i’ve ever been in a house so dirty and disgusting, especially when I’ve been in a dream, something like that. An old school friend was there. There was a TV going in the background and the woman came down and told Liz off about turning on the TV, quite bossy about it and switched off the TV. And on and on went this dream
A little later last night I was walking with one of my nieces through London. She was having a row with her mother about doing something about estate agents. There were a lot of properties that needed some kind of descriptive sheet drawn up. She was saying that some kind of things were not needed but her mother was saying that she did and there was this talk about it. The girl came out with this “well I don’t care what Northern people have to say. It’s not how it’s done”. We were walking over this huge railway arch overbridge type of place. We could see railway lines that kind of thing below us heading towards London docks. We were walking through the streets and somehow she and I became separated, I was on my own. Someone touched me on the shoulder, a young guy. He said “you know all about this agency thing don’t you?” I said yes so he said “do you know what it is that the mother wants?” “yes, it’s like ‘this apartment is in a sunny situation, one bedroom, fitted kitchen’ that kind of thing of descriptive”. So he handed me a couple of forms and said “could you write them out for these places?” I noticed that there were three or four other people near me who were doing the same thing so I had to write out a descriptive for these flats. The first one was at the address where my aunt lived, a flat in her building. I said “God, how strange” but no-one seemed to pick up on that so I said it again and again but no-one seemed to pick up on it so I made a start. Someone else was writing something and saying “I wonder if she’s going to get much work done on her place?” I replied that I knew the apartment because my Aunt lives in the building there. They are allowed to work on the interior but not on the exterior. A guy said “yes, that’s right. That’s how I had my place – it was like that as well”.
One of the people in the previous dream came out with the old Kenneth Williams “I’m Alan Watermain and I’m bursting with indignation at having to do this”
I was in Granville again later on and it was the Carnival parade and everyone had to interview the owners of the floats. I’d interviewed a few and one or two other people but someone was having no luck at all. In the end he just stopped broadcasting so he had to fill in all of the events. One of the questions that we asked was “what brought you to Canada?” and they recited a bit of their history and that sort of thing. Anyway this drifted on into the night. Next minute I was up early and started to ring people again. They were looking for me on the radio – they had a TV monitor that they used to zoom into the crowds. Eventually they picked me up and used various hand gestures as I was having to take things easy myself otherwise I’ll be creating these people with all their health issues. They asked me what I was doing, so I told them that I was still hunting for people to talk to the radio.
I fell asleep again while I was dictating a dream, this one about the circus procession thing. I probably mentioned about how the French were no good at building up the tension – they were good at reporting on the actual events but didn’t have very much idea about setting the scene or building up the tension, anything like that.

So I don’t have a clue about any of that.

There was still time for me to attack one of the digital files to split that into its components, and that’s one that will have to be done because the tape seems to have been damaged – there’s a frequent blip that appears at regular intervals right through it as if the tape has been pierced at one point.

Caliburn and I hit the streets and headed for Brehal-Plage. One of the guys from the radio lives there and we had some things to talk about – making plans and all of that. Just because things aren’t going our way right now, that’s no reason to down our tools. I have plenty of ideas and if the loud-mouth in the “team” (a phrase which I use very carefully) doesn’t like our ideas then we quite simply won’t seek his approval and by-pass this selection “committee” upon which he sits. We’ll just plough our own lonely furrow.

From there, I went to Roncey. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last Sunday it was my birthday and I had been invited for a birthday tea to Liz and Terry’s. However, I had to skip it because of this debâcle in which I was involved and so I was invited today instead.

We had a really good chat and I discussed one of my projects, which will (hopefully) involve Liz and STRAWBERRY MOOSE – but that’s not going to happen any time soon unfortunately, due to various things getting in the way.

Tea was delicious. We had a dahl – a lentil curry with garlic naam bread followed by apple crumble and custard. Even better, there was plenty left for a doggy bag to bring home.

And best of all, Liz produced a chocolate and orange cake as a special birthday treat and I shall be trying that as soon as I can.

On the way home, the heavens opened and Caliburn was drenched. And if that wasn’t enough, I went over a speed bump and the passenger-side mirror glass fell out of its surround and broke.

So bed-time now, and tomorrow I shall be back at work. I have my travel arrangements to make and a few other bits and pieces to do too, as well as organising the music for the next series of music programmes.

It’s all go here, isn’t it? But at least there is cake.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: lie in

Thursday 21st May 2020 – I HAVE EMULATED …

Wednesday 13th May 2020 – THE LEAST SAID …

Sunday 10th May 2020 – FOR THE FIRST …

Wednesday 6th May 2020 – THE LEAST …

Monday 27th April 2020 – FOR ONLY THE SECOND …

Sunday 26th April 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

Sunday 19th April 2020 – I’VE HAD A …

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

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

Sunday 5th April 2020 – THAT WAS ANOTHER …

Sunday 29th March 2020 – AND IF YOU …

Sunday 22nd march 2020 – AND JUST HOW …

Thursday 12th March 2020 – I WAS ALMOST …

Sunday 8th March 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

Sunday 1st March 2020 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

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