Tag Archives: rainstorm

Sunday 24th November 2019 – YOU’VE NO IDEA …

… just how right I very nearly was about this morning either.

As it happens I awoke at … errr … 06:25 this morning but no chance whatever of me leaving my stinking pit at that time of the morning.

When I awoke at 09:00 I didn’t feel like leaving the warmth either, but I had to get up, for reasons which any man my age will very well know. And while I was sitting there riding the porcelain horse, the telephone rang!

Had I not been up and about it would really have disturbed my reverie and no mistake.

Although it was a late night too, there was plenty of time to go off a-wandering. And no mistake this time. I pinched myself this time to make sure that I was awake before I dictated this particular dream. The front door rang and it was Brigitte outside with all kinds of stuff for me to make muesli with. She’d heard that I wasn’t feeling too well and shop on my own so I thought at least I could have breakfast. This was as far as it got. I was with Liz and Terry by the way and we were possibly going to see Nive Neilsen I don’t know. Anyway this is what happened, but Brigitte turned up and I don’t remember the rest of the dream because there wasn’t one. As soon as I consciously knew that I was having a dream I woke up so that I could dictate it and there didn’t seem to be much point in that!
A little later on, we were much more involved. I was with a girl who reminded me very much of Sue Cassell although it wasn’t her – she was much smaller than that. We were hanging around together and going places and doing things but we weren’t particularly a couple. But as time went on and we were walking aorund this housing estate type of place that might have been Baron’s Road in Shavington but wasn’t and some waste land with a stream and trees and a high earth bank. Somehow the conversation turned round a bit towards the obvious and I made a move. She seemed to be quite receptive to the idea. I didn’t know what was going through her mind but she was quite interested in this. Anyway, I stopped and the conversation came round to her place and we ended up back at her house where she lived with her mother. She wanted me to go and put something in the rubbish. But where was the rubbish? It was upstairs in one of the bedrooms of all places. I had to take the rubbish upstairs and look in all the bedrooms to find out which room the rubbish was in and put the rubbish in there. It was actually a bedroom that someone would sleep in, bed all made up and everything where you put the rubbish in and I thought that this was really strange. Later on we went out and we were at this outdoor bar-type place and I had to go and get some her some food. I got her three bread rolls and I can’t remember what I got with them now but it was something like jam or tomato sauce but it was stuff that you would never ever eat with bread – puree or something I have no idea, that kind of thing but I took it back to her and she said “great, thank you”. There was nowhere for me to sit so I had to go and scrounge a seat. The table we were at was already crowded so I had to scrounge a seat and sit somewhere nearby her. I was thinking that I should have sat down and got her to sit on my knee and that would have been much more fun but somehow it didn’t quite work out like this. Again it was another one of these dreams that I’ve been having quite recently where “I had the bird right on my plate and when was I going to get my fork stuck in it” type of dreams.
And if you don’t know what I mean by that, it’s probably because the dreams that I was having back in August and September haven’t yet made it onto the blog.

For some reason this morning I wasn’t hungry so I did without breakfast and settled for coffee instead. Then I sat down and had a blitz through the music. I finished the first pass through of the LPs and by the time you read this I’ll have made inroads into the cassette tapes.

The good thing about this is that I’m finding long-forgotten stuff that I never realised that I had. It’s like an Aladdin’s cave in here. And with music going on all throughout the day i’m feeling in a much better mood.

And that’s important too because the events of the last few days have made me realise that if something is meant to be, it will be. No matter how long you have to wait, it will all come right in the end.

I’m thinking specifically of an event that was spread out over a couple of days 14 months ago and which reached its climax one day in September. And how, all of a sudden with no effort from me and no input from anyone, it all fell quite by accident into my lap.

This can only be encouraging news for Castor. Just ride out the storm and it it’s meant to be, it will be.

No bread in the house again so a walk down into town for a dejeunette.

The first thing that caught my eye was the sunlight piercing through the gloom. We’ve seen over a few days the strange effect that the sunlight i having, shining through the tiny gaps in the clouds and illuminating objects as a stage spotlight would (unless it’s at the Archipel Theatre where the stage lighting manager couldn’t even light a match).

Today there was a brilliant glow of light right on the centre of the Baie de Mont St Michel and it all looked extremely eerie.

The tide was out and so I took the long route down past the fish processing plant and across the walkway on the harbour gates and round the back of the dock.

Not a soul about. It was all really quiet in tow today.

Down at the boulangerie I bought my dejeunette and as I was leaving, my attention was drawn to this advert.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m a vegan and that France is about 100 years behind the times when it comes to vegan food.

But it seems to be slowly catching uo. The boulangerie does snacks of various kinds, and here it is proudly announcing a “100% vegan” option. So hats off to La Mie Caline

Back at the apartment I carried on with editing the photos and I finished that job, even though it took me an age. My heart wasn’t in it today, but I’m not too bothered because it is Sunday after all

As usual, I broke off for my afternoon walk. It was windy and raining but nevertheless I stuck it out.

There were other people out there braving the weather besides me too. This intrepid yachtsman was out there doing his bit in the English Channel, having a great time by the looks of things.

And I spent quite some time admiting his wind turbine too. Ohh happy days, hey?

Further on around the walls I stopped to see what was happening down on the promenade above the sea wall at the Plat Gousset.

Quite a few people out there enjoying the air despite the miserable weather and watching the sea as the tide was coming in.

A nice heavy rolling sea heading in to shore with the waves crashing up against the sea wall.

There was a better view from a little further round. And I imagine that it would be even better when the tide was further in. But I wasn’t going to hang around that long.

Instead, I turned for home and as there was only a couple of people further on down the path, I took the opportunity for a discreet run of a couple of hundred meters.

Before leaving the scene however, I took a photo of it, only to find that I had been photo-bombed once again by a blasted seagull

When I returned home, I treated myself to coffee and a slice of Liz’s gorgeous cake that she had brought me

Tea tonight was a delicious vegan pizza and then I headed out again – into the howling gale that’s raging outside.

Nothing at all of anything going on whatsoever so I didn’t photograph anything. And I had a really good run too and even managed to breast the rise at the end – but came to a dead stop when I was hit by a vicious headwind.

So that’s it for today. Back to work tomorrow so I’m hoping for an early night if I can.

But back here I suddenly seem to have developed a raging thirst. And that can only mean one thing. And that is that I’m heading for another relapse.

Ohhh God!

Friday 22nd November 2019 – WHAT ODDS …

… would you have given on me walking into a social centre here in Granville on the West Normandy coast and bumping into three young girls who I have met before … in a small town called Uummannaq in the far north of Greenland?

Yes, it’s true that it’s “Greenland week” here in Granville, but even so, it’s a pretty long shot, isn’t it?

We’ve all seen this smile before, haven’t we?

It’s the smile that I have as the background to the desktop on my little old laptop and the girl to whom it belongs is my friend Heidinnguaq, she who spent half an hour or so posing for me last year when I was there.

And here she is in Granville too, with a few of her friends.

After my marathon session the other evening, last night I was in bed at something like a realistic time last night. Plenty of time to go on a travel or two. And who should I meet last night was my friend Ric. I’m not sure exactly how it had come round to this but I’d come to the town where he lived. I’d been round to where there were shelves and books and like cupboards and so on and it was some kind of description about what I was going to be doing and what I was going to be. Anyway, I knocked on his door, and he came out and we had a little chat. I told him that I was going out with someone later that evening. In fact I was going out with a lot of people but I was hoping that one particular person would be there. He stepped off his door and came in and said “what’s all this about?” and said something like a tree – an oak or a sycamore or something like that. It turned out that that was an euphemism that I had been using on this piece of paper stuck on this wall about the person that I was hoping to see that evening. So I said “yes, I’m going on a date”. I didn’t tell him too much – just enough to get his appetite interested. And that was when I awoke. It goes without saying that the person whom I was hoping to meet was Castor.

The alarms went off as usual and I leapt out of bed (and I did too!) ready for an early start. And after breakfast I did another magnum opus from the pile on the dictaphone. Only one (and half another) but it was certainly one of the longest.

And having transcribed it, I can see why it was one of the ones that affected me so much. It was very similar to one that I had back in May where the world was coming to an end and I was the last survivor. There I was, all alone on the beach watching the world come to an end just like in Neville Shute’s novel On The Beach, and as the narrator brings the story to a close, his prose breaks, in perfect time and perfect scan, into a speech that runs into a slightly amended version of the final couple of lines of the lyrics (which he speaks) of “The Bonnie Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond”.

Well, the night in early September that I transcribed this morning was just like that, and it was such a surprise not just because of the event, but because of the fact that I’d been there a short while earlier in almost identical circumstances. And the narrator’s hypnotic speech added a certain amount of tension to the whole thing too.

But I couldn’t hang around doing that all morning. There were plenty of other things to do, such as to prepare my speech and select about 25 photos from my visit to Uummannaq.

That took me up to about 13:00 – usually that’s lunchtime but there’s only frozen bread here so I went down to the boulangerie for another dejeunette down in the town to make my sandwiches.

The tide was well in by now and all of the fishing boats were coming into the harbour to bring their catch to the fish-processing plant.

You can see all of the equipment lined up on the quayside.

And the turn-round in the port was pretty rapid. I’ll tell you that.

It takes me about 5 minutes or so to walk from the top right down the stairs – the escalier des noires-vaches – to the rue du Port. And by the time that had reached the bottom, the yellow and white boat that we saw arriving was just on its way back out to sea.

They don’t hang about in the harbour when there are other fish to fry, that’s for sure.

In fact, it was so busy in the inner harbour today that we had something of a traffic jam.

There was La Grande Ancre waiting to leave port, but she was unable to because there was another fishing boat on its way in. La Grande Ancre had to wait a good few minutes for the other boat to make its way through the gates before she could make her way out.

Of course, that’s no reason to complain. A busy fishing port is an important asset to the community.

After lunch I made a decent adapter cable for the new laptop out of a cut-down North American extension lead that was hanging around in Caliburn. I cut it down so that there was about a foot or so on the socket end, and added an old European plug on the bare end.

And it works to perfection too. Nothing wrong with that! And then I uploaded Paint Shop Pro and made a slide show out of the photos that I had chosen.

While I had Pint Shop Pro and the external DVD dive out, I reinstalled it onto the laptop that broke down in North America and which I managed to restart. I’m going to see if I can make it run again, although I’m not sure why I would want to.

At 15:45 the guy from the Education Department came to pick me up and took me to the Sports Hall at the local High School, and that was where I met Heidinnguaq and her friends.

First thing that I did was to scrounge a huge television and couple up my laptop to it, and then set my slideshow in motion.

It would provide a little ambience to the meeting.

We had a little talk, that didn’t last too long, and having done their drum dance, throat singing and polar bear dance (the one that Jena did for me last year in Uummannaq), Heidinnguaq was prevailed upon to produce her guitar.

She’s an excellent guitarist and singer, and has written quite a few songs of her own. She played a couple and then did a number by Amy Winehouse.

Mind you, having English as her third language, I hope that she didn’t understand the significance of what she was singing. The lyrics, to a native-English-speaking person, are full of innuendo that a foreigner will probably not understand.

There was a question and answer session afterwards, which I translated, and then in the best tradition of the News of the Screws, I made my excuses and left.

Back here, it was tea-time. I had a rummage around in the freezer and found some lentil, pepper and potato curry from 24th August … errr … 2018. That was just as nice today as it was back then, especially as it was followed down by more rice pudding.

Later, I took out the rubbish and braving the wind and rain, made a hurried circuit of the headland, including a brief run for a few hundred metres. Short of my target unfortunately but there you go.

When I returned, there was football on the internet. Barry Town v Penybont (Bridgend to the uninitiated) in the Welsh Premier League.

For the first 15 minutes you wouldn’t have believed that Penybont were at the bottom of the table and Barry at the top. From the action up until that point you would have said that it was the other way round.

However, as the match progressed, Barry began to exert themselves and they ran out 3-0 winners. The result was right, but the scoreline was rather unfair. Barry’s goals were

a well-worked routine from a corner
a screamer from 25 yards that could have gone anywhere
a defensive error where the full_back slipped on the wet surface and lost control of the ball, with a Barry Town player the quickest to react to the loose ball

All they need is to get the run of the green.

It’s quite late now but I’ve been spending all the evening editing photos. All of the photos that I took of the girls I’ll post on a separate page when I get round to it.

Just one more special event, and that’s tomorrow evening. And then I ca get back round to the usual busy stae without any of these extra jobs cropping up.

I could do with a rest.

la grande ancre waiting to leave port de granville harbour manche normandy france

fishing boat entering port de granville harbour manche normandy france

Thursday 21st November 2019 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about the situation down in the harbour.

Thora has indeed moved over to the side out of the loading bay, and there in her place is Normandy Trader who has indeed come into town on the early morning tide.

And as usual, I didn’t really have time to go down for a coffee and a chat because I have a lot of things to do and I’m running terribly late as usual.

In fact I didn’t leave my bed this morning until gone 09:00

Mind you, there is a genuine reason for this and it isn’t a case of idling about or lounging around either.

In fact, after I’d finished my notes for yesterday I did as I mentioned sit down and update a few web pages, 11 in fact. And when I’d finished, not feeling in the least tired despite my very long day, I started to think about what I was going to say for my next project, which will be numbered D001 for reasons that will soon become clear.

Needing to find 3:40 worth of speech, I started to have a good muse about and dropped one or two ideas down on paper and rather than expand them in that format, I began to dictate them using the recording equipment that I have here.

And by the time that I’d finished, with various Umming and Aaahing and a few corrections, I ended up with 5:20 worth of notes – and all in French too.

Next step was to sit down and edit it. Cut out all of the pauses, the Umms and Ahhs, and that brought it down to about 4:15. So then I hacked out a few phrases here and there and after some jiggery and not a little pokery, there I was with my 3:40 or thereabouts.

Next stage was then to merge it onto the front of the music that I’ll be using – or, rather, merge the music onto the end of the speech.

One hour is what I’m allowed, and there I was, came to a dead stop at exactly 1:00:00. And I came to a dead stop too, seeing as it was gone 03:30 and I wasn’t even prepared for bed. But at least that’s one job that’s finished and complete and one less job to worry about.

Surprisingly, I heard the alarms go off at 06:00 etc and I felt that if I exerted myself I could have risen from the grave. But instead I went back to sleep again until the kids going past my window on their way to school awoke me.

A late breakfast, followed by an even later shower and then I headed out to town in the rain.

First stop was the Centre Agora to take back the recording kit. Someone else needs it for a task.

So up the hill in the Avenue Leclerc I went, not quite storming up it as I have done recently, and I stopped to see what they were doing with the HIAB.

It looks as if they are either taking away or installing an advertising signboard. I don’t know which because I can’t remember if there was one there before or not

At the Centre Agora the guy in charge of the equipment wasn’t there and no-one wanted to take charge of the recording kit. But I’ll be badgered if I’m going to take it back home with me so in the end we managed to find someone connected with the service, and we persuaded him to take it.

The rain had calmed down somewhat now so the walk back wasn’t too difficult.

There was a slight diversion into te Allee des Sycomores. I hadn’t noticed this stone edifice before and I was intrigued to know what it was.

There wasn’t much evidence of any particular function but to me it seemed as if it might have been a well or something similar. If it had been of no use at all it would have been demolished instead of causing an obstruction in the road like this.

Seeing as I was going past LIDL and it was Thursday I called in for some shopping. It’s the ski wear season so I reckoned that I might be able to pick up a woollen hat seeing as mine is in the pocket of my jacket in a hotel in Calgary, but no luck. It seems that everyone wears helmets these days when they are skiing.

Nevertheless I did spend a fair amount of money seeing as supplies are low.

The walk back here wasn’t as lively as it has been just recently, and carrying about 10 kilos of food didn’t make it any easier either.

On the way past the port I stopped and looked over the wall to see what was goign on. It looks as if they have just opened up the harbour gates. There was quite a procession of trawlers coming into port.

And when I had climbed a little further on, I could see that there were one or two that had just left the harbour too. So I reckon that I might be right.

After lunch (I bought another dejeunette too seeing as I was passing the bakery) and a little tidying-up I sat down and thought about the talk that I have to give tomorrow.

Eventually I managed to cobble together some notes and now I’m going through selecting some photos to accompany them. And that’s a hard task because that day that I was there I took 178 photos in all.

There was a brief pause while I went out fior my afternoon walk.

The rain had now stopped falling and there was a shaft of sunlight through the clouds that was illuminating the seafront at Bréhal Plage just like the other day at Jullouville.

And how I wish that it would go for the middle and illluminate me some time soon

Continuing on my path around the headland I came to the spot where the headstone or whatever had been.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that they had removed it the other day and taped it off with a couple of bollards and some of that site tape stuff.

But even that has gone now and it looks as if they have filled in the hole. So i’ve no idea what was going on there at all.

No idea what is going on here, but it’s fun to speculate.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the past year or two they have been digging up all of the streets in order to lay the trunking for the fibre-optic cable.

But now a huge cable reel has arrived with a load of cable upon it. The optimists among us will be thinking of only one thing.

The rain might have stopped this afternoon, but the wind hasn’t.

The flowers that I mentioned the other day – most of them have gone. And the trail of flowers all the way up the footpath suggests that they may well have Gone With The WInd too.

That is, unless someone has been really careless about moving them all.

There was plenty of action in the Chantier Navale today too.

They seem to be quite busy down there. The regular suspects, Spirit of Conrad and Aztec Lady are still there, and so is the fishing boat. But they’ve now been joined by Pecheur de Lys whose stay in the water was remarkably brief, and Omerta.

And I’m rather worried by the latter. Everyone knows that Omerta is used in Italian so signify “silence”, but it’s also the name that is given to the oath that members of the mafia have to take.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m well-impressed with the devotion and courage that the local fishermen display on a daily basis, going out in some of the worst storms.

There was another one out there today, a small one, fishing away and you can see by the rigging that he has his nets out.

As I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … I could do it once in a while but it would depress me having to go out there every day regardless of the weather.

Carrying on with Uummannaq took me up until tea time. And having been to LIDL I was able to offer myself a stuffed pepper with rice, followed by rice pudding.

It was pouring down with rain while I was making tea but it had stopped later on so I went out for a walk.

Another bright light out there in the direction of Donville-les-Bains, but I was ready for it tonight. And it’s yet another fishing boat trying its luck out on that side.

It seems that a search for a new catch is definitely continuing. Fishermen casting their nets further, you might say.

In the absence of any people loitering around I went for my run. But I only managed about two-thirds of my route tonight. Lost my form completely.

But now I’m off to bed. I’ve had a chat with TOTGA this evening and downloaded tons of digital album tracks, including several that have some very distinct memories from my time living in Chester in 1972-74.

There are web pages that need updating of course and I’ve done no dictaphone notes today either, but I’m in no state to do them.

I’ll just have to catch up with them some other time

Monday 11th November 2019 – WE ALMOST HAD …

… another day like yesterday.

No alarm of course so I was banking on a good sleep. Especially as it was about 04:00 when I finally wandered off to bed, such is the exciting life that I lead here.

And so awakening at 08:30 was no part of the plan whatsoever.

Just like yesterday I turned over to go back to sleep by by 09:30 I gave it up and raised myself from the dead.

Somewhere during the night I’d been off on my travels too. And it all had a very familiar ring when I compare it with what usually happens in my life too.

I was up getting things ready for a party and this involved doing all of the organising, the paperwork and the tickets and so on. I’d folded up a pile of tickets to put in my pocket and so on – my pockets were full of stuff and now I had to sit down and start to do the paperwork. First thing I needed to do was to find my pen – a highlighter pen – and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I emptied out all of my pockets and put the tickets in a nice pile and they all fell over and fell on the floor. I had a really good hunt around and in the end I found my pen – my highlighter pen – and then I had to go and get the letter to pick it up and highlight it and I couldn’t find the letter and I’d only had it in my hand a minute ago and I had to hunt around for this letter and I couldn’t find it and I could hear all people outside and I don’t know whether they had started to ocme to the party early or something like that but I was nowhere near ready at all and I still couldn’t find this paper and I’d only had it just that minute before.

Doesn’t all of that sound familiar?

We had the usual medication and breakfast, and then I spent an hour or two updating some pages on the website. I’m now somewhere on the north-west coast of Newfoundland in 2010 which means that I’m about a third of the way through – and that’s just doing the active pages too. When I look at all of the pages in the queue, it makes me shudder.

Another thing that I’ve been doing is working on my little project. This involves the help of Youtube and the Allman Brothers Band and a considerable amount of research. And I’m still at it even now.

There has also been some considerable excitement here.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the strap on my fitbit broke a few weeks ago and I ordered a new one.

It never arrived, so I complained. And it turned out that according to the supplier “it was delivered and signed for on 29th October”.

Well, not here it wasn’t, so I complained again. This morning they sent be a copy of the delivery receipt from the carriage company, and asked me about the signature.

My reply was that it certainly was not mine, and I could say that with confidence because the address on the delivery receipt is wrong. For some unknown reason about which I know absolutely nothing at all, they seem to have sent the bracelet to an address in Italy.

Nevertheless, we now have to go through some stupid claims procedure with the freighter, when the reason is there right before everyone’s eyes.

What will inevitably happen will be that it will take a year to sort out, by which time they will tell me that the product is now out of stock and I can’t get one anyway.

So in the meantime, I’ve found a generic one on eBay at a quarter of the price, and that should be on its way here now even as we speak. I can’t be doing with all of this.

With a late start I had a late lunch, and then I went out for another long walk – and then had to come back because I’d forgotten to put the memory card back in the camera.

And, even more strangely, there are 25 steps from the ground floor up to my apartment – and I ran all the way up. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there have been days when i couldn’t even crawl up.

So armed with a memory card, it was back out into the howling gale (when is it ever going to stop?) and along the rue du Nord.

There was another really rough sea rolling in from the Atlantic and the waves breaking on the beach were quite impressive.

The tide is still quite far out right now.

And with the tide being quite far out right now, there was a large crowd out there on the Plat Gousset looking as if they were waiting for something.

Not that I might know what it would be, but if it’s waiting for the waves to come in and crash over the sea wall, I reckon that they have about another hour.

They could have gone for a coffee or two and come back with plenty of time rather than waiting out there in the wind.

My route this afternoon was longer than usual seeing how I’d missed my morning walk.

Instead of the habitual route I went down the steps, through the lower town and out to the port de plaisance – the yacht harbour – to see if there was anything exciting going on there.

And here tied up at one of the pontoons is one of our old favourites, the Lys Noir. I’ve no idea what she’s doing moored up out here, but she’s not doing very much right now.

Something else that I will have to do is to check her itinerary for the near future and see where I can go.

She wasn’t the only one of our old favourites in port today either.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that Pecheur de Lys was taken out of storage earlier this year and put afloat in the harbour. And she’s still there too, riding out the waves.

But I wonder if she’ll ever get to see the open sea?

It was busy in there too. One of the ferries from the Ile de Chausey had just come in and it was disgorging its passengers and cargo out onto the quay.

However, my attention was elsewhere. Right now we were in the middle of one of these flash rainstorms that we have ever now and again. And a heavy one too.

And right there over the town we were being blessed with one of the most beautiful rainbows that I have seen in a long time.

We’ve had a few just recently and I’ve photographed a couple, but this one this afternoon takes the cake. And look how black the sky was too.

Meanwhile returning à nos moutons as they say down there, the inner harbour was very busy too.

The harbour gates can’t have been open for all that long because there was a regular procession of trawlers coming in to tie up at the fish-processing plant.

And also smaller trawlers too, with all of their family and friends lined up at the quayside ready to catch the catch as it’s thrown up by those down below in the boat.

There are two of our regular boats that weren’t in the water today.

Here up on blocks in the Chantier Navale is our old friend Aztec Lady that appeared in port the other week. There didn’t seem to be much evidence about the work that might be being undertaken and there was no-one with her to ask.

Mind you, I doubt that they would tell me anyway. Commercial charter companies are very reticent to talk about defects in their equipment.

Next to her up on more blocks is our other old friend Spirit of Conrad. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve been for a birthday party on board about 2 years ago.

Her owner, one of my neighbours, was down there so I had a chat to him. Apparently she has a hole in the hull caused by some kind of impact damage and she’s going to be patched up.

He showed me the hole and it wasn’t really all that big and it seemed to be above the waterline too. So it won’t take long to fix.

On the way back, I walked all around the headland, in the teeth of a howling gale.

Out at the Pointe du Roc where we turn into the English Channel, the seas were quite heavy and this little trawler here was having something of a rough time of it turning her beam to the wind.

It’s the kind of thing that makes you think about the real cost of the lump of fish that goes onto your plate on a Friday. How would you like to work out there in conditions like that?

Coming into port in a storm like this is one thing, but how about going out to work in it?

When the other trawlers were coming in, there was one just setting out. And here she is ploughing her way out through the waves in the doom and gloom on her way to her fishing station somewhere off the coast of the Channel Islands.

It’s not something that I mind doing once in a while, but to be out there in weather like that all the time is not for me.

My mega-walk is now one hour or so later than when I started and the tide is now well in.

The waves are giving the sea wall at the Plat Gousset a real pounding and as you will probably notice, the crowd has diminished considerably.

And seeing as it’s rather late, I shan’t be joining them either. I’m going inside for a coffee, some warmth and to do a little more work.

In fact, I’m going to make tea. Stuffed pepper with rice followed by the last of the rice pudding. Bearing in mind last week’s problem, I gave the pepper an extra two minutes (one minute on medium and one minute on high) and it was done to a turn.

Delicious.

Back outside for my evening walk around the walls and I was all on my own, which was no surpise given the wind.

The tide was on its way out too so the crowds on the Plat Gousset have dispersed. I carried on with my walk and to my surprise not only did I run all the way up the ramp at the end, I ran on a few more paces.

What with running up the steps, and running here like this, I’ve no idea what is happening. But I’m going to make the most of it while I can.

And my fitbit tells me that I’ve done 104% of my daily activity too.

If I’m not very careful, I’ll be getting myself fit, and where will I be then?

Rather like the guy who decided that he was going to run 4 miles every night. By the end of the week he had to run 28 miles back home again.

I’ll get my coat.

fishing boat rough seas granville manche normandy france

rough seas bricqueville sur mer granville manche normandy france

rough seas plat gousset granville manche normandy france

rough seas place marechal foch plat gousset granville manche normandy france

chausiais granville manche normandy france

fishing boat port de granville harbour manche normandy france

seagull port de granville harbour manche normandy france

fishing boats baie de mont st michel port de granville harbour manche normandy france

trawler rough seas english channel granville manche normandy france

Saturday 9th November 2019 – CALIBURN IS BACK.

But he won’t be back for long.

Although he passed his controle technique, and with ease too, the garage owner and I had quite a chat about him.

He’s now not far short of 13 years old and several areas of corrosion on his bodywork have been brought to my attention and need to be looked at before the next full controle technique in 2 years time.

As a result of our discussion, I’ve been provided with the name and address of a good body repair place in Gavray that the garage owner recommends and I’ll be going off to have a chat with him in due course as soon as I find out what I’ve done with the paper.

It might cost me €1000 or so to put him right, but I know every nut and bolt on the vehicle and apart from the very odd little bit here and there, no-one else has ever driven him. If I move him on and buy something else, I don’t know what it is that I’ll be buying and that could be fraught with danger.

The kind of vehicle that I want – another van of the same or similar size – could have been doing anything and being driven by everyone. So in the circumstances I’m going to stick with Caliburn

It was a nice walk out of the apartment this morning. The weather was coo and overcast – an ideal day for a good walk.

Passing by the harbour I gave my usual glance over the wall to see who was in there today. Granville and Victor Hugo are there, and so is Charles Marie. But there’s a new boat down there that I haven’t seen before.

It’s some kind of landing-craft type of freighter and I can’t see her name from up here. I shall have to go for a walk down to the harbour tomorrow for a closer look

With it being Saturday, it was market day. And as well as all of the stalls in the Market Hall, there’s something of a street market too.

One of the attractions of the market is the woman who has got crabs. There’s always a large crowd around her as she is selling her wares and se seems to be doing quite well.

Mind you, I have enough problems of my own without adding crabs to them.

There’s definitely something going on that I don’t understand because I stormed up the hill to the top in the kind of fashion that I would use as if I were invading Poland, even singing to myself as I strode out.

And I kept on going all the way out to the garage with just one or two little deviations (and if its deviations you want, then in the words of the late, great Bob Doney “I’m your man”).

I don’t know if I mentioned it but the last time that I was out this way on foot I’d noticed a big red double-decker bus being used as a restaurant. And so I went for a closer look.

Regular readers of this rubbish in one of its long-disappeared guises will recall that that was my plan with Laurence – to have a mobile restaurant. And I actually encountered one once on Cape Breton Island in Canada.

One of the places that I called in at was the motorbike shop to see what they had on sale. There was only one bike that I liked – a Yamaha 4-cylinder. But it was too heavy for me to manoeuvre easily so I’ll have to forget that idea.

The second-hand shop, Happy Cash, had a few things in there that looked interesting, including a couple of decent bass cabinets. But my eye was caught by an electric piano on sale at €25:00 and I’m still wondering about it now.

That wasn’t all the excitement either.

It seems that the gilets jaunes are back demonstrating again. Both of them in fact. They must find it a pretty lonely vigil standing out there like that.

It’s not as if they serve any useful purpose either. They can stand on that roundabout for as long as they like and it won’t change anything one single iota.

Talking of changing things … “well, one of us is” – ed … just for a change, I didn’t have another early night either. I was playing on the guitar again until some silly time of the morning.

And yet again I managed to beat the third alarm to the draw. And that’s not like me at all.

Not enough time to go on a nocturnal ramble either last night. I was doing something with a couple of this big briques – the two and three-litre ones the kind that milk and so on comes in and just as I was getting myself organised and about to pour some orange juice or something into them the alarm went off.

So I’ll never get to know what happened about that.

After the medication I sat at the laptop and dashed off a few dictaphone notes – 9 to be exact. There’s a lot to be said for making an early start.

Another thing that I did was to go back to a project that I started a while back in Canada and look on the internet for digital recordings of “complete albums” that I own on vinyl. Over the course of the day I found 6 and they are all now downloaded and coverted to *.mp3 ready for splitting into individual tracks.

having picked up Caliburn I went to NOZ for the first time in months and although there was nothing special, I spent €16:00 in there.

For the benefit of my new readers (of which there are many) NOZ is a shop that sells off bankrupt stock, near-shelf-life items, overstock and that kind of thing. Occasionally you can pick up bargains in there and I’ve had a lot of good stuff from there.

The near-shelf-life products can be interesting too. And there are always some surprising things on offer that make quite a nice surprising change to my diet.

At LeClerc I stocked up with stuff that I hadn’t been able to carry while I had been on foot, although I forgot to buy any water. I’ve decided to cut out completely the sugar-laden fizzy pop stuff and just go for water instead.

Tap-water is always a possibility of course but here it’s held in a storage tank on the headland so I don’t know what its quality will be like.

By now the heavens had opened and I was soaked walking to Caliburn. And back here I was drenched as I ran down the road chasing the papers that had blown out of my hand.

Lunch was a baguette with salad and my home-made hummus. And it really is wicked too. I shan’t be bothered by vampires, that’s for sure.

This afternoon I did another pile of upgrading of the website but ran aground when I found a half-completed web page that I must have uploaded by mistake. To rectify the situation I had a go at that, and it will take much longer than I anticipated.

To have a little rest and to fight off the fatigue here and there, I had a play on the guitar too. I must keep on keeping on.

Suddenly though, I noticed the time. 17:20. Kick-off was at 18:00 and it had stopped raining.

That was the cue to leg it off up town to the Stade Louis Dior.

On the way through town though I stopped at the Place General de Gaulle because there was some kind of ephemeral air about the kiddies’ roundabout tonight, all lit up as it was in the damp and doom and gloom.

And then I sailed off back up the hill that I had climbed this morning.

By the time I reached the football stadium I was in great form, which is surprising, and also just as well because we were drenched by the torrential rainstorm that suddenly opened up.

This was a match that I hadn’t wanted to miss because I hadn’t seen Entente Sannois Saint-Gratien – the Entente SSG – before.

They had been relegated from Division 2 last year and were still struggling to find their feet at this level. It’s a tough league.

In view of the rainstorm, they allowed those of us brave souls out in the open to come along and sit undercover in the grandstand, which was nice of them.

We could then settle down and enjoy an exciting match, although some of my fellow spectators didn’t think it as exciting as I did.

Granville had the better of the first half without anything to show for it despite the several good chances that had fallen to both teams – mainly down to the unusual formation that they had adopted. They were playing a kind-of 4-5-1 lineup with a centre-forward who hasn’t been getting much game-time, and probably the club’s best attacker playing in central midfield.

It clearly wasn’t working and so at the start of the second half he pushed Sullivan Martinet up front. And almost straight away the match transformed itself into one-way traffic towards the ESSG. For about 15 minutes the goal was bearing a charmed life as Granville peppered it from all directions.

And eventually it paid off for Granville and Martinet who broke the deadlock.

Granville were still pressing forward and threatening the goal, but the trainer pulled off his two attackers and went to shore up the defence.

A strange decision to me because Granville lost their momentum and allowed ESSG back into the game.

And they could have equalised too but for some wretched luck in front of goal, but Granville held on for the win.

Back here in the rain without a pause for breath, and I even ran up the slope at the top of the hill just to get my heartbeat racing. It’s been an excellent day from that point of view and I notice that I’d walked 16 kms and done over 21,000 steps today.

Tea was a frozen aubergine and kidney bean whatsit followed by rice pudding. And once this posting is finished, I’m off to bed. I’ve had a long, exhausting day, I’ve done a lot of things and, surprisingly, I’m feeling so much better.

And it’s Sunday tomorrow too. I can have a lie-in.

Thursday 7th November 2019 – FATHER CHRISTMAS …

… has been today.

They say that he only comes once a year, and when he does, he fills your stocking. Well, he certainly filled one of mine with what he brought today and he’ll be coming again because this is parcel n°1 of 5 … “actually parcels n°s 1 and 2 of 6” – ed.

What is happening is that I’m fed up of saying that I’m going to be doing something and then for one reason or another not doing it. I want to be pushing on … “or pushing off” – ed … and getting these things done, and having the correct equipment to do it too.

The acoustic guitar that I have here is a cheap £25 guitar that was left over from a music festival years ago and isn’t up to very much. This guitar is actually reasonably cheap but it has a good spec and that’s important.

This, and the concert ukelele that I bought too should keep me out of mischief for quite a while, if that’s going to be ever possible.

Talking about being kept out of mischief, I must have been kept out of mischief last night because I don’t remember a thing. It was a late night again, due to listening to music of course, and once more I managed to make it out of bed before the third alarm went off.

With no dictaphone notes to transcribe from the night, I had a quick go at one or two of those until the medication worked and I went for breakfast.

When I woke up this morning it was raining pretty heavily but by the time that I’d finished having a shower, the rain had stopped so I headed off to LIDL.

For a change I didn’t buy anything exciting there and the bill was quite reasonable for a change. But there was something that I ought to mention. Regular readers of this rubbish will remember the blackcurrant sorbet that I bought the other week. They had some raspberry sorbet today, in a larger container and cheaper than the blackcurrant. There’s some of that in the freezer here now.

O the way out to LIDL I’d had my usual glance down in the harbour to see what’s going on.

And we have a visitor here today. A regular visitor in fact – our old friend Thora. She’s come in from the Channel Islands presumably with a load of something to drop off, and she’ll be picking up stuff to take back with her when she leaves.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had a conducted tour around her predecessor, the Grima but I’ve not managed to set my foot on board Thora yet.

One of the … “many” – ed … things that I have forgotten to mention is that yesterday on one of my walks I surprised a group of tourists being shown around the old town.

Today, there’s yet more of them. I encountered this party in the rue des Juifs admiring the architecture.

And so with all of these people around, I wonder what’s going on. I’m not used to crowds at all.

Back at the apartment after LIDL, I was treated to the most glorious sight of this magnificent rainbow just offshore.

A couple of my fellow residents were admiring it too, and just at that moment the heavens opened so I fled inside.

But that’s quite unusual for me, isn’t it? Usually the weather waits for me to leave and then soaks me all the way to the shops.

And talking of going all the way to the shops … “well, one of us is” – ed … I strode out there, strode all around the shop and then strode all the way back without stopping for a rest.

And so I’m not quite sure what’s going on. Maybe it’s with having lost this weight and maybe it’s with starting to go running again, but I’m feeling much more like it these days than I did before.

Up until (a rather late) lunch I cracked on with the dictaphone entries and by the time I stopped for my butty I had done 13 of them. Some of them were admittedly quite short but one or two of them weren’t.

After lunch I had a good play with my new toys and then attacked the web page updates. And by the time I was ready to go for my afternoon walk I’d amended 19 of them.

Mind you, I might have been ready to go for my walk, but I don’t think that the walk was ready to go for me.

There was a huge rainstorm going on out there that had totally enveloped the Ile de Chausey and knowing my luck, it would normally be heading in my general direction to have a go at me too.

But for some unaccountable reason it stayed put over there and treated the Ile de Chausey to a good dreanching.

The wind has died down now. It’s merely gale force.

We still have the heavy seas rolling in off the Atlantic, although nothing like as impressive as the heavy rollers that we saw the day before yesterday.

They were nevertheless still crashing down with some kind of fury on the rocks down here at the foot of the Pointe du Roc. It looks as if this storm is here to stay.

Back at the apartment yet again, and this evening I busied myself making a huge load of hummus. Basically, its 50% chick peas, 25% sesame seed paste, and 25% everything else like chick pea liquid, olive oil, garlic, black pepper, sea salt, and all whizzed up into a purée in the whizzer.

Finally, add a pile of olives and some fenugreek, and whizz it just enough to break up the olives, not to totally liquidise them. And then stick it in little pots one of which went in the fridge for use and the rest went in the freezer.

And it’s wicked.

But beforehand I’d peeled the carrots that I’d bought the other day, diced them and put them on to boil with some ginger, coriander and bay leaves.

When I’d cleaned the whizzer after the hummus, I put the carrots in (taking out the bay leaves of course) with some of the liquid, added some coconut cream and then whizzed that up into a delicious carrot soup.

That’s in the fridge now and that’s going to be lunch for the next day or two, with the leftovers going in the freezer.

Tea was the rest of the curry from the other night and it was delicious too. Even better than the night that I cooked it.

On my evening walk this evening the sky was perfectly clear out to the north, and you could see for miles.

There was a red light out there on the horizon flashing occasionally. It’s probably a marker light on the Channel Islands but I took a photo of it anyway and enlarged it.

You can’t see too much on the photo but cropping it out and enhancing it a little, it’s either a multiple light, I’m picking up the reflection off the sea, or else it’s that the camera was shaking around.

Not shaking as much as the guy who I surprised though. He was muttering about this “lousy sh**ty weather” so I crept up behind him and said “i quite agree”.

I bet that he went home to change his underwear.

It was such a good night that I had a good mess around with the camera taking a few night shots.

Nothing particularly serious – just messing around to have a little fun and games while I was at it. I didn’t have the tripod with me, just the monopod, so the images aren’t anything like as sharp as they might be.

To see what the quality was like, I’d left the ISO setting fairly low and was using a very slow shutter speed.

The view around the other side of the walls looking out across the town was pretty good too so I took a few photos of out there too.

What I’ll have to do is to wait for the wind to die down (if it ever does) and on a clear night like this, come out with the tripod. There were some good images that I took last year when i was practising.

And I managed my run too. I made it to my marker just about, and my lungs were bursting but I’ve got to push on and do somethign about my activity level.

Today I’ve done 110% of my daily activity and in the first week of November I’ve run for 26 minutes. I don’t think that I’d managed that much in total since my illness so things are looking up.

So it’s another late night and I’m listening to (and playing) music. I hadn’t realised just how bad that acoustic was until I started to play with this new one and I’m quite happy. But it got me going, I suppose and learning on a bad machine makes it so much more interesting and exciting to play on something much better.

So on that note, seeing as we are talking about music, I’ll leave you all alone.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring?

thora port de granville harbour manche normandy france

night donville les bains granville manche normandy france

night brehal plage granville manche normandy france

night place d’armes granville manche normandy france

night granville manche normandy france

Wednesday 6th November 2019 – I DIDN’T …

… go anywhere special today as I predicted. I spent the day in a gentle orbit around the apartment.

But that’s not to say that it’ll stay like that. Foolish me had to open his mouth on Monday, didn’t he? And say that he’d been to Uumaannaq, had taken plenty of photos and had friends there.

And so someone rang me up. Something to do with the local High School. “It’s Greenland Week here next week and we’ll be discussing Uummaannaq. Are you free on Friday afternoon the 22nd?”

Ahh well! That’ll teach me to open my big mouth, won’t it?

Despite being a little later in bed than I would have liked, there was time to go off for a ramble or two. Again this is another dream that I can only remember a bit of. I was with someone who might have been Castor and we were helping me get myself organised (that’s going to be a long job isnt it? Something like the Augean Stables). There was a cupboard that was open and you could see everything in it. She asked what I was going to do about it and I replied that I wasn’t going to do anything – it was all going to stay in there so she was working out how to close the cupboard. You could see all files and all that kind of things that were on there. I don’t remember very much more about this dream but there was plenty to it. In this cupboard was all kinds of office stuff, files, binders, computer ink and I had a vague recollection that it belonged to something to do with the ship but I don’t know.
And it was certainly vivid because I remember distinctly in my dazed state going to get out of bed to go to tidy it up and close the door
A little later there were four young people playing outside on the deck right in front on the bows of The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour. Don’t ask me what they were doing though because I was only asleep for a second.

There was a mad panic to fall out of bed. I’d vaguely heard the two earlier alarms but I desperately wanted to continue my run of early starts so having almost gone back to sleep, I just about managed to launch myself into consciousness just before the alarm.

After medication and breakfast I attacked the dictaphone notes. And up until lunchtime I had managed to transcribe only three. But when I tell you that the running time of those three is just short of 29 minutes, you’ll understand why.

I told you that there were some mega-files in that lot but that’s nothing to what’s coming up. There’s one of over 4 hours and another of over 3 hours.

And I managed to fit in my three walks today.

At about 12:45 I went out for a walk around a new circuit, down all the steps, along the rue du Port and back up the rue des Juifs.

But a racket coming from down in the harbour disturbed my reverie before I’d gone very far at all. We had a trawler coming into the harbour.

And it was probably fully-laden with fish too. You could tell that by looking at the large flock of gulls all around it. They are presumably waiting for the fish-heads to be thrown overboard.

Yesterday, you’ll remember that we had a lovely photo of Carolles all bathed in the most gorgeous and warm sunlight.

The situation today though is completely different. No sunlight at all – in fact it’s bathed in the most enormous raincloud.

And just in case you are wondering, you needn’t. 5 minutes later I got the lot right down the back of my neck, as regular readers of this rubbish may well have anticipated.

A rather dripping wet me came back to the apartment for some lunch.

And afterwards, I sat down to complete Project 002. Yes, I’m anticipating that this might run for more than 99 editions.

And straight away we had a problem – in that the audio mixer couldn’t be picked up by the big computer.

After a great deal of trial and error I managed to make one of the laptops pick it up, and I dictated my notes onto that. And it’s awful. It sounds as if I have my head in a bucket.

But I’m not going to go around like this. My friend Hans modernised his recording studio a while back so I got onto him. And he has an old PC mixing desk that is surplus to requirements. It seems to have every function on it that you could wish for and probably brews the studio tea while it is at it.

We negotiated a democratic price for it and tomorrow it will be winging its way here, I hope. As I said, it’s time for me to organise myself and do things properly.

For the afternoon walk I changed my route and went for a walk around the walls.

The reason for that was that I wanted to see how they were doing with the house renovations in the rue du Nord.

As you can see, the one on the corner seems to be finished. They’ve extended the garage which is interesting, and the balcony that they have built over the extension does look quite nice.

I wonder what their plans are for it.

There was another house under construction further down the rue du Nord as regular readers of this rubbish might recall.

That’s all finished now too, and I know what their plans for it are because as I’ve walked past it on many an evening walk, I’ve seen the lights burning in the window.

Someone is already living in it and I wish them luck. The view must be terrific from up top and I’m somewhat jealous.

But never mind the view from the top floor of the house. The view from down here is pretty good today too

For a change, now that the wind has died down somewhat, the atmosphere is a lot cleaner and there was a really good view out and up the coast. The seaside resort of Montmartin-sur-Mer was looking particularly attractive.

At least, I think that it’s Montmartin-sur-Mer. I lose count of which town is which all the way up there.

I case you haven’t gathered, the rain had stopped this afternoon and so there were people out and about.

There were even a few of them wandering around up and down the beach at the Plat Gousset by the Casino. But then again it is Wednesday afternoon so the kids are not in school. No reason why they can’t have a run about.

Talking of having a run about, there was no-one around by the time I got to my little running track, so I had a nice little run. Mind you, although I made it to my marker I was pretty much out of breath.

I have a feeling that I’m not going to see much improvement in my distances.

And talking of distances, out there in the distance close to the Brittany coast I noticed a dark speck that seemed to be moving very slowly.

With the big Nikon and the long zoom lens, I took a somewhat speculative shot of it with the intention of cropping it and blowing it up (he image, not the object) to see what it might be.

And it looks like some kind of naval patrol vessel out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel. And I’ve no idea why they would want to patrol out there. It seems strange to me.

Having finished the recording (for now) I could deal with tea. Some stuffing left over from the other night so I had taco rolls with rice and vegetables. Best ones that I’ve made too, although I’m not sure why.

And I finished off the last of the rice pudding too. That was nice as well

For the evening walk I went around the headland, totally alone. And I ended up running another few hundred metres along the footpath. I’m determined to do something about getting fit and keeping the weight off. So even on a quiet day I’ve done 64% of my daily activity and walked 5.0 kms.

So tonight I’ve done some web pages and I’ll listen to some music for a while, and then go to bed. Shopping at LIDL tomorrow, I reckon.

The walk wil ldo me good.

Monday 4th November 2019 – I’M BACK …

… in business!

This morning I took my completed project up to the weekly meeting of this organisation. I mentioned that I didn’t think all that much of what I had done but they were delighted, saying that it’s better than they expected.

And so I have the green light to go.

But go where? I hear you say. And I reply that you’ll find out on Friday evening at about 21:00 CET, 20:00 UK time, 15:00 EST etc etc.

Last night was a pretty late night and I’m not quite sure why because it wasn’t if I had anything special to do. Nevertheless, I still staggered out of bed before the third alarm, for which I am grateful.

Even so, there was plenty of time to go off on a nocturnal ramble. Back on board a ship again last night with two certain people who might (or might not) have been representing Castor and Pollux. We were having some kind of drawing thing, we had to draw something and label it. I was drawing something about the cliffs and the sea, that kind of thing and I was wondering about other people – like these two for example, I was wondering about what what they were doing because theirs didn’t seem to bear any resemblance to what was being asked at all. They had some strange figures that looked like girls and I wondered why they had included those in the drawing when there was no real need to. And it was all in blue too in this dream and I’ve no idea why, everything was in the colour blue (like some of my photos on that trip).

After the medication and breakfast I had a shower and cleaned myself up somewhat, then added yesterday’s photos to the blog and transcribed some dictaphone notes before heading off for my meeting.

On the way back, I called at LIDL and spent a lot of money. Mostly on a thermal ski undershirt seeing as the ski gear is now in the shops. If ever I get back to the Arctic (which is unlikely) it will come in handy.

They had carrots at a give-away price of e0:69 per kilo so I bought a kilo and I’m going to make some more carrot soup. But with less ginger this time.

And I learnt something exciting today too.

Last year in September I was in a town in North Greenland called Uummannaaq and I met a couple of people there. Subsequently I met two others when I was on my travels.

And to my surprise, a couple of them will actually be in Granville in a couple of weeks’ time, playing some music on stage at the local theatre. There were a few tickets left too, so I roped in Liz and Terry and bought some tickets.

It’s been a while since I went out for an evening.

After lunch, I finished off today’s load of dictaphone entries and then went off for a walk.

First thing that I noticed was some weird lighting effect on the sea over to the Ile de Chausey.

It’s difficult to know what’s going on with that. It could be just the way that the low autuln sunlight is shining through a few holes in the clouds.

But it gave the whole thing a really surreal vista, as if we are about to be visited by something from Outer Space.

That is, if we haven’t already had visitors therefrom. I’ve no idea where they find THESE people.

At first I thought “you cannot be Sirius”, but on reflection I’m not ruling this out completely. After all, I’ve always said that anyone supporting Brexit must be living on a different planet to the one on which the rest of us are living.

And while I was musing on the foregoing, I really DID think that I was about to be visited by beings from Outer Space

But the noise that I heard coming from the air behind me was in fact from a helicopter. Someone has got their chopper out by the looks of things and they were flying pretty low round the headland.

Whatever they might have been looking for, they didn’t find it. Instead, they flew off down the coast in the direction of Mont St Michel

Beaten and battered by Storm Amelie, I staggered on around the headland and, for a change just recently, there was a really good view across to the Pointe de Carolles.

Such a nice view in fact that I went to photograph it and was the victim of a delightful photo-bomb from a seagull.

It’s not the first time that I’ve had an intruder in one of my photos, but it’s certainly one of the best and closest encounters that I’ve had. I hope that he doesn’t want royalties.

As I said just now, the storm is raging just as violently as it has done these last few days.

The tide is a long way from being right in, but nevertheless you can see what the waves are doing – sending their spray right up and over the sea wall into the tidal harbour.

It’s surely no coincidence that there are no pedestrians out there strolling around on the wall. The wouldn’t need a shower at all.

On that note I went back to the apartment and much to my surprise I actually ran up one of the flights of steps. And I haven’t done that for years. I must be doing a little better than I have been, and I wonder if this new medication might have anything to do with it.

The time until tea was spent working on this project and trying to organise myself (a hopeless task). I have to focus myself much more now that people are expecting things from me and relying on me to do things. They clearly don’t know me very well yet.

Tea was a stuffed pepper (with plenty of stuffing left for taco rolls) and spice rice followed by rice pudding. The pepper was sourced from a different supplier today and was thicker-skinned, so it hadn’t cooked as well as they usually do, which was a shame. But the stuffing was delicious.

This evening I was on my own for my walk around the walls. Hardly surprising seeing as the rain, which had held off for most of the day, decided to let go about 30 seconds after I put my foot outside.

Brigitte was just coming in so we had a little chat.

And as for my run, I fell well short tonight. Like 100 metres short. I blame all the rice myself, but trying to run headlong into a howling gale didn’t help matters much.

Now before going to bed I’m going to listen to some music and do some web page updating before I’m going to bed. I haven’t done any today yet and I really must crack on.

storm high winds tempete amelie port de granville harbour manche normandy france

Saturday 2nd November 2019 – I REALLY MUST …

… get myself organised.

I know that I have been saying this for several weeks now, but I don’t seem to have made much of an effort to progress in the correct direction.

Listening to music again last night, it was well after 02:00 when I crawled off to bed and that’s no good at all.

What’s even worse (or better, depending upon your own point of view) is that I made a valiant, determined effort to beat the third alarm call out of bed.

And what’s more, I made it too … “will you make me one like it?” – ed … even though I felt like death.

So less than 4 hours sleep.

Not very much, you might think, but plenty of time to go off on my travels. Something was all closing down last night and people were having some kind of session where they were singing songs and reading poems about everything that they had been through. I did a little presentation but I hadn’t realised that it was closing so I hadn’t said anything about it so when I found out I wanted to go back and re-do it and do different stuff so but no-one was listening to me while I was saying all of this and no-one was really interested in listening to what I had to do or got to say or got to play on the subject.

It seems to me that during the last few days ago I’ve been making a habit of being ignored by other people. I really must change my deodorant.

Talking of deodorant … “well, one of us is” – ed … I had a shower after breakfast. I weighed myself too and found that I had gained 100 grammes. Must do something about that, like go for a brisk walk.

First though, I put a couple of weeks’ worth of dirty clothes in the washing machine and set it do a lap around while I headed for a brisk walk.

Outside, we were in the middle of a hurricane. I had heard of an “adverse weather report” for the area for today but I wasn’t expecting this at all.

You can see what the waves are doing here – and that’s in the harbour too inside the outer wall. I don’t think that I’ve ever in the past seen it as rough as this out there

Not the kind of weather that I would want to be going out for a sail on the high seas.

I was tempted to go for a walk across the path across the top of the harbour gates to have a closer look but they were closed.

However by the time I got down to ground level they were just on the point of closing them. I should have waited for another 5 minutes.

And even in the shelter of the inner harbour you can see that the water is churned up somewhat

My trip this morning took me to the indoor market hall for some fruit, carrots and mushrooms. But there was nothing there that interested me too much so I didn’t buy anything.

Neither did the Super-U but the Carrefour came up trumps with some reasonable mushrooms – many of which will go on my pizza tomorrow night. And they had some more of the cheap baguettes too.

Back here I pushed on with this project that I have to do. And with a short break for lunch (the rest of the carrot soup and some of the baguette) I managed to finish it in time for the afternoon walk.

It’s not as good as I would like it, but improving it is beyond my capabilities. I’m having to do it in French and with having to think about what I need to say, it’s robbing all of the spontaneity and that’s probably the most vital ingredient of what I’m trying to do.

And as a result it took me a lot longer than it might have done and there’s so much editing that needed doing to edit out the pauses, the “umms” and the “ahhs”.

But be that as it may, I do have to say that the editing and the sound mixing is excellent and I’m really pleased from that point of view.

That was the cue to go out for my afternoon walk.

And there had been a change in the weather.

It was much worse.

So I struggled around the headland with the other brave souls out there – all of us wrapped up to brave the wintry weather. And that reminds me – all of my winter gear is in my blue jacket which even as we speak is somewhere between Calgary and Centreville in Canada. I shall have to make “other arrangements” this winter.

Back here I did a pile of website amendments to keep the momentum going, and attacked a few blog entries. I’ll do some more this evening too.

Tea was a slice of vegan pie (from last April and it was just as delicious) with potatoes, peas, carrots and gravy. Followed by rice pudding (seeing as I had the oven on).

And then a huge washing-up session, including the oven to clean off all of the milk that had overflowed from the aforementioned rice pudding.

The rain was falling when I went out for my evening walk. And the wind was so strong that it was falling horizontally.

For my run tonight I was about 50 yards short of my distance from the last time. I blame the strong wind but really it’s a disappointment. When I started back running in Brussels in 1994 I could push out the distance every night and I ought to be able to do something like that here.

It’s not as if I’m running 5 miles or 10 miles like I used to – here I’m measuring it in hundreds of metres and I should be able to do it, even though I am an old fogey long past my sell-by date.

Another thing is that for the past week or so I’ve been plagued by a fly that has been flying around my room, and I’ve been wondering how to dispose of it. I don’t need to worry about it now – although I do feel sorry for it. It should never have alighted on that sheet of paper on the floor when I was above it with a large book in my hand

So I’ll do some more work for a while and then go to bed. It’s Sunday so I can have a lie-in. I deserve it

Friday 1st November 2019 – I FOUND …

… the fitbit after all that. On the passenger seat in Caliburn where I must have left it when I was fitting the battery yesterday.

And I’d got up nice and early this morning specially to look. Even managed to beat the third alarm – and by a country mile too – and that’s not something that happens too often these days.

It was a reasonably late night too – mainly due to listening to some good music on the computer. And there’s nothing wrong in that as long as I’m working – which I was. In fact I updated some more of the web pages.

And so it was a short night too – but still plenty of time to go off on a ramble or two.

I started off back in the UK last night. I was in Cornwall walking around a headland and it was something (I don’t know what) to do but it was Marc Bolan and camping and he’d written the final verse of his song “Elemental Child” (… which I had been listening to just before going to bed …). They were broadcasting it over the radio and getting everyone to join in so anyone who was walking past or walking in the area they went and asked them if they would join in. This girl – she joined in too and did all of the song and to play it on the guitar or banjo or something. She asked about the lyrics so we pointed to where the lyrics were and she was brilliant. She had a really good go at it, this girl did. It really was a shame that I awoke.
A little later on, we were on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour again last night and it was time to go home. There were a couple of coaches come to pick us up. They had already been and we’d packed but then we had to go off on a lecture or something so the buses were put back and were to turn at at 12:00. This lecture finished at about 11:55 and it was all about book-keeping, this kind of thing, and the guy who was giving the lesson afterwards went to print off some stuff and I went to help him but he didn’t need me. he was talking to some other guy and the other guy was saying that in Accountancy they were still using BBC Micros but they no longer dominate anything so they don’t actually see anything of what they do. The other guy said that he learnt his Accountancy on a BBC Micro. I said that I did my Finance First Part on pen and paper – but no-one took the slightest bit of notice of me whatsoever which seems to be normal procedure these days on board that ship. Then I had to get to my cabin and it was 11:55 and there was already a bus on board and people getting on so I had to fly throught the crowds and the ship like lightning to my cabin. Luckily I had packed before hand but there were still a few things out that needed putting away. I reached my cabin which was right at the back of my ship and the porthole was open so I could see the second coach pulling up and feel a nice cool breeze blowing through the porthole. The first thing I did was to grab a drink – some of my orange Vitamin B12 drink. There wasn’t much left but I took a swig of it and thought “Gid this is warm, this drink but it will do me until I get to wherever it is that I’m going and then I can think again”. At that moment the alarm went off.

10 minutes later I was up and about and tackling the notes from the night while I was waiting for the medication to work so that I could have breakfast.

Once it started to become light I went outside with the purpose of retracing my steps from my afternoon walk to see if the fitbit was anywhere about. But as I said, I didn’t get any farther than Caliburn.

Back in the apartment I attacked the 20-minute dictaphone entry from 30th July. And miles of it there was too, starting from when I left the motel in Lamoure all the way across North and South Dakota.

By now it was midday so I headed of for my morning walk. Down to the Super U for some garlic and a lettuce. The lettuce is exhausted and I have no garlic at all and I need to deal with that issue. And as I left the apartment and headed off down the street we were hit with a torrential rainstorm. Luckily I went in my rain jacket and so I managed to keep something-like dry. But there were plenty of others who weren’t so fortunate.

For lunch I had half of the carrot soup (which wasn’t so bad after all) and then attacked my little project. What I did the other day, I’ve undone it and started again because I could do better than that. And it’s all turning out rather nicely, although doing it in French is rather challenging.

There was an interruption in my activities when I went out for my afternoon walk. And I was not alone for even though the weather was miserable this afternoon there were still plenty of people on the beach.

It’s that time of year when we’e having the highest tidal range – the grand marée – and the lower beaches are uncovered.

These areas are beyond the limits that are leased out as commercial fisheries so anyone can go out there for the peche à pied – fishing on foot – to scavenge what molluscs they can.

And I was right about the miserable weather too. Just look at the storm clouds.

But all of a sudden there was a hint of sun and we had the most magnificent rainbow. I managed to take a really good shot of it too.

It seems to be ending down in the town somewhere and I was tempted to back to my apartment to search for a spade.

There was an interruption after that. I received a text message “are you in?” to which I replied in the affirmative.

A few minutes later Terry and Liz turned up, with Darren, kate and the two kids. It was pouring with rain again so we went for a drink and a good chat. When the rain stopped (which it did for half an hour) we went for a good walk all the way around the walls and the headland and then they went home. I told Robyn to take good care of Strawberry Moose and she gave me a hug.

For tea I had two more taco rolls with the rest of the stuffing from the other night. Not enough though so I added a small tin of lentils so there was too much. No good for me, seeing as I’m supposed to be cutting down.

Football tonight on the internet. Not been too many of those this season. Connah’s Quay Nomads v TNS in the pouring rain in the Welsh Premier League.

In the first half, the nomads were dreadful and I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times they made it into the TNS half. Meanwhile TNS were rampaging upfield at will and could have had a hatful. As it happens, one goal disallowed for offside and a good save from Lewis Brass the Nomads keeper was all that they had to show for it.

Connahs Quay made three substitutions early in the second half and after that we had much more of a match, with the Nomads taking the game much more to TNS.

And so it goes without saying that TNS finally scored with a breakaway goal after all of that.

We then had bizarre incident where the referee gave a penalty to TNS for a handball, spotted the ball, and just as Greg Draper was about to run up to take the kick, he changed his mind and gave a dropped ball which Brass smothered.

From that, the Nomads raced upfield and with Insall (who should have been on from the start) having a shot saved, Michael Wilde running in fastened onto the rebound and scored – his first shot on goal in the whole game.

So 1-1 it finished, and it leaves me shaking my head. I’ve seen many more much batter games than this one, and I’m totally bewildered by that weird first half.

So not having done too much I’m going to bed and I’ll start again tomorrow. I must get myself going.

rainbow arc en ciel granville manche normandy france

Wednesday 30th October 2019 – YET ANOTHER DAY …

… where I didn’t manage to fit in my morning walk. And you wouldn’t have gone either if you had had the rainstorm that we were having.

And for a change, I actually did manage to see the morning. Because while I didn’t actually manage to beat the third alarm, it was pretty close.

So with an early rising and an early breakfast, we had an early start to work. And by the time that I knocked off for lunch I had amended 38 pages of my website to bring it up to date with the newt coding.

That’s some going, I’ll tell you.

After lunch, I took the opportunity to book my accommodation and travel for Leuven. And to my surprise, there has been a change of horaire for the departure. Instead of 09:05 it’s now at 08:24.

And what with one thing and another, because of that I can arrive in Brussels half an hour earlier on a train via Lille.

So something good has come out of it.

But the journey back is going to be a little … errr … tight. I shall have to run.

Accommodation in the usual place at the back of the nick. I must practise.

The afternoon walk in the wet around the headland and much to my surprise there were a few others out there too. Nothing much going on, although there’s a new boat in the harbour. I shall have to go down to the port tomorrow to see who she is.

And I have to go to the bank tomorrow too and pay some money. I’m spending my dosh again and I’ll tell you what on in due course. But the new me is treating himself to a few important things, including something that he has been promising himself for years.

Later on, I hit the dictaphone notes and did no fewer than 11. “Impressive stuff” you might say, but that’s being rather disingenuous. Some of them were only quite small, and there’s one of 20 minutes in the pipeline for tomorrow and it looks as if most of it is actual talking too.

So that’s my work cut out for the afternoon. I’m glad that I’ve been getting ahead.

Tea was some of the remaining pepper stuffing, mixed with kidney beans and rolled into some tacos. With rice and vegetables, it was delicious.

There’s more for tomorrow too but I think that I’ll go for something different like a burger on a bap and have more tacos on Friday.

Still raining tonight but I went for a walk – and a run too seeing as there was no-one about. I’m going to try to keep this up. I may not be able to run the miles as I used to, but I ought to be doing more than I am and not throw in the towel.

And I won’t now either. It’s early so I’m going to carry on working on the web pages.

And a big “hello” to both Castor and Pollux who were there or thereabouts at some point during the night.

Tuesday 29th October 2019 – CALIBURN WOULDN’T …

… start this morning as I discovered when I went to give him a whirl while I was taking the rubbish outside.

The other day when I started him and ran him for a while I mustn’t have done it for long enough to recharge the battery properly because it was pretty low this morning.

Having hunted down a 10mm socket I managed to disconnect the battery and drag it up to the apartment. According to the multimeter, there’s just 11.9 Volts in the battery. Luckily a while back I bought a new small battery charger so I was able to couple it up and even as we speak, it’s simmering away nicely at 13.4 volts with 2 of the 5 bars illuminated.

By tomorrow morning it might be ready.

Mind you, it’s not a surprise. He’s well over 12 years old and he’s had just two batteries in that time. When the second one failed earlier this year, Terry gave me the one off his old van but it had stood around for a couple of years so I wasn’t expecting too much.

So I’ll have to see if this battery holds its charge when it’s done. If not, a new battery might be on the cards.

And Caliburn wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to start today either. I certainly didn’t. In fact it was about 08:45 when my sooty foot I put on the floor.

Mind you, I have a good excuse. And that was that I was still up and about working until long after 03:00.

Anyone would have thought that after my marathon hike across half of Normandy yesterday I would have been stark out flat on my back from round about teatime until the next Preston Guild. But not a bit of it. I kept on going – and working too, right until the small hours, even taking some time out to have a play on the guitar.

Mind you, I felt like death this morning and that’s really no surprise. It took me a good while to find my bearings and that’s not a five-minute job either.

Plenty of time though during the night to go for a wander around and I found myself back on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour. And in the company of Pollux too, so welcome back to you. And when I finish scratching my head trying to decipher the incoherent ramblings on my dictaphone, I will tell you all about where I went and what I did.

When I awoke I found that I had run out of muesli so I had to make some more. And in my deadened state I managed to spill half of the contents of the cornflakes packet all across the floor.

After breakfast I reviewed the e-mails and found one relating to the meeting that I had yesterday. That involved doing some work.

Such as dictating a text in French (i had about 9 takes before there was one that satisfied me) and then editing it. And then adding a pile of music and editing that.

And while the music part was no problem, the dictation was – for the rather prosaic reason that I don’t have a microphone here. I had to dictate it onto the dictaphone, upload it and then edit it to remove the crackles.

It’s a good job that I spent all of that time a few years ago mastering “Audacity”.

So that was the morning taken care of – and there will be a few more days like this now until next Monday. And we’ll see where we go from there.

After a rather late lunch I went for a walk in the rain around the headland. There were a few people – only the foolhardy – out there desperately trying to negotiate the lakes that had appeared along the footpaths. I didn’t stay out long.

The historic dictaphone entries that needed deciphering today were all rather on the short side so I did 8 today. I’m trying to get ahead because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there are some marathon ones to come from the time that I was in an emotional whirlpool.

There was also time for me to do some file updating too. But talking of my website … “well, one of us is” – ed … it has been trawled for the last few days by a Microsoft bot with an IP address in Washington State, “Microsoft Way” to be precise, but with a physical presence in Chicago.

I solved the mystery of the New Jersey visitor but this one from Chicago is bizarre.

Tea tonight was an aubergine-and-kidney-bean whatsit. Aubergines were cheap the other day so I bought one with the intention of making a whatsit this week. And it’s delicious too, except that I might have been somewhat extravagant with the chili powder I’ll need to put the toilet paper in the fridge before I go to bed.

No walk though. It’s teeming down outside and after a few hundred yards I gave up and came back inside.

I’ll just have to go for a longer walk tomorrow.

Monday 28th October 2019 – FOR PUDDING TONIGHT …

… I had some tinned fruit salad with some of that coconut cream stuff that I like.

And that can only mean one thing – and that is that today I went to the LeClerc supermarket.

And how did I do that seeing as Caliburn isn’t as yet mobile? The answer is rather simple. I walked.

But let’s not go getting ahead of ourselves here. Let’s put things in their correct order.

We started off with the three alarms as usual and I fell out of bed about 20 minutes after the final call. That’s not bad going these days, although I really would like to be out of bed maybe 20 minutes before the last call rather than 20 minutes after.

Even though the night hadn’t been as early as I would have liked, there was still plenty of time to go on a little ramble or two during the night.

I can’t remember now exactly where I was when I started off but it certainly was somewhere, and I needed to get home. I had to buy a lot of things and I was wondering how I was going to spread my money out to do this sort of thing. One of the things that I could do would be to leave my monthly ticket on the tram until the very last thing. So I was walking over to somewhere to do something or other and I saw a tram that went halfway around the ring road. I thought “God I need to get on that”. But then I thought “never mind. I can always get on the next one”. I ended up back in the office again and went down into the administration area to check on something, and noticed that the map on the wall was no longer there. Where has the map of the city gone? How am I supposed to know my way around without any reference to the map of the city? Someone else came in so I asked them “where has the map of the city gone?”. This person replied that it hadn’t been there for a while. I said that it was here earlier this morning. They replied that it wasn’t, so we had a “yes – no interlude” until I awoke.
Back asleep two minutes later I was getting ready to go on holiday and I got one of my cars ready. First of all I had to go and pick up Alison from her market stall. So off I went. She was selling cloth and was ready to pack up so I started to pack up for her, got everything ready and drover her back home. I went home again and started to get all my stuff ready and had to pick her up at about 22:00 when she finished her next market stall that night. So round about 21:45 although hadn’t finished packing, but it was only a 5 or 10 minute job that needed doing. So I said to the person with me that I’d go and pick up Alison and then come back and have 5 hours sleep, then I can get up and arrange everything and we can get off. This girl was astonished that I had got ready so quickly and I was quite pleased as well. She asked if five hours sleep would be enough, and what about the heavy stuff? I replied that I could get that into the car myself. She asked if anything needed working, to which I replied that I could do that when we are on the road – it’s no big deal. She was pleased and would tell Hans that we were ready. From there I went to work and parked my car somewhere and what I had to do – I went in a different car to pick up Alison as I probably needed the space and I could come back to the office afterwards, park this car and take mine home, and take the third car away in the morning. But when I got to the market stall Alison wasn’t there, and there were four women in her place selling tea and biscuits. Without thinking, I went to clamber over the stall, but it suddenly occurred to me, by the way that they were shouting and waving, that it wasn’t very strong and I might break it. So I had to climb back again. But they asked this boy a really weird question, and he actually got it right. That made me think about Champollion (…I’d been reading about him during the day as it happens …) the 11 year old genius. Everyone was pleased that this boy had got it right and he was beaming. Suddenly Alsion appeared again, so I told her that I was nearly ready but she said that she had a lot to do so we started to pack up her stall and that was when the alarms dragged me into the daylight.

First port of call was the medication of course and then it was breakfast time. And once I’d dealt with that and doe a few things that needed doing, I went off for a shower, a change of clothes and a clean-up.

At 09:00 I hit the streets in the rainstorm (and luckily I haven’t managed to lose my yellow rainjacket quite yet) and headed off all the way across town to the Centre Agora in the Quartier St Nicolas. That’s the building where people go when they don’t have access to the internet, so they can use the computers and internet there, and it’s a kind of social centre and advice bureau.

Quite a few years ago now, I was involved in a project in the Auvergne and it was one of the things that was abandoned when I became ill. But the world is far too small for my liking, as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … and when someone formerly from Clermont-Ferrand and now living in Granville came across my name and the fact that I too am now living in Granville and may be able to help him out, a meeting was inevitable, I suppose.

But as for what it might be, one must jamais vendre le peau d’ours avant de l’avoir tué as they say around here, and there will be more of this subject anon.

Seeing as I was about halfway there, I decided to trudge on in the rainstorm and make my way to LeClerc. I had a good lap around the supermarket and bought some stuff to make more meals. They had the burgers that I like and also some of that thin brick pastry. I’d seen Rachel using that to make some vegetable samosas which were pretty good, so no reason why I can’t have a go.

Back in the rain all the way home where I made myself a coffee and my and sat down to relax for a good while.

This afternoon I made more inroads into the dictaphone notes and that’s another 7 transcribed, including the two during the dictation of which I went back to sleep – in mid-dictate.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with spicy rice and I do have to say that it was the best stuffed pepper that I have ever made. And I’m not sure why it’s different from any other stuffed pepper that I have made because it was made in exactly the same way.

And then the walk around the headland in the cold and wind. And another run too, although I didn’t manage as far as last night but that was because I was running up hill, I reckon. I need to learn to walk before I run, don’t I?

But the fitbit tells an interesting story (it’s still working despite the strap, lodged firmly in my trouser pocket). I’ve done … errr … 194% of my daily activity today and walked a total of 16.4 kilometres. That’s not bad for someone who is at death’s door with but a short time to live, is it?

What shall I do to follow that, I wonder.

Saturday 26th October 2019 – NO CHANCE …

… of goign for my evening walk tonight. We’re having a torrential rainstorm to match the gale-force winds that we’ve been having all day.

And I know about them storming away all day too, because just for a change these days I was up and out of bed by 06:35 – and that’s something that hasn’t happened in a long time.

Quite a disturbed night too by the looks of things. There is miles of stuff on the dictaphone. I’ll have to make a start on that one of these days, won’t I?

An early awakening means an early breakfast, and that means an early start at work.

And I was right about one thing – that the problem of using Javascript to link to external files was resolved in a matter of 10 minutes. The simple method again, of course.

Building a vertical menu wasn’t quite so easy. It took about an hour and a half and quite a few goes to make it work properly and the text isn’t quite as I would like it, but that’s a detail that I can correct in due course when I work out to do it.

That was the cue to wander off out to LIDL for a pile of shopping. All the way on foot and all the way back again with two bags full of stuff. I’m not going to pretend that I have everything that I need but it’s enough to keep me going.

Back here, I did some research. Apparently the issue with iframes is when they link to external sources. No reason at all (apparently) why you can’t run an iframe from your own site. And so I simply prepared another web page, added into it all of the advertising blocks and the hit counters, and then went and did some research about formatting it as an iframe insert.

Much to my surprise, it seems to work – to a certain degree. I wan’t set the width of the frame or remove the frame border in my stylesheet, but have to format each page in which the iframe sits.

So in the end I had to oversize the height of the frame so that it gives me the facility to add in anything else. Its optimal size is about 1600 pixels so I’ve set it to about 1800.

One big problem though is the width.

There’s a hit counter on there that is too wide for the frame and even widening the frame to the maximum won’t fit it in. And so I’m stuck with a scroll bar on the width until I can find a smaller counter. I’m not happy with that, but I don’t see a way round it until I can give it some more serious thought.

This afternoon I was trying to find someone on line who would check it for me to make sure that the public can see what I can see. There’s no-one around so if anyone reading this wants to check it for me, the page to look at is THIS ONE, and here are four screenshots of what I can see

Whether you can, or whether you can’t see the same as me, please let me know, along with the details of the browser(s) that you used and the operating system that you have.

That led me nicely up to my afternoon walk, and it was horrendous out there. blowing a gale something rotten it was.

All of the people walking along the harbour wall were receiving a total drenching as the waves crashed up and over into the harbour. It really was a fierce day and I was glad to make it back home.

By the way – don’t get too excited about seeing an image. This is merely temporary as I have about 4,000 in the backlog and it will be some time before I deal with them.

I’m going to start afresh on 1st November and deal with the backlog over the course of time

Back here, seeing as how the revised website looked good to me on another laptop, I decided to proceed. So this evening I’ve been doing that.

I’ve had to upload about 8 javascript files and a new *.css file for the iframe, and that lot comes to about 20kb. But each file that I’m converting is saving me 4.6kb and that’s quite impressive. I should have bitten the bullet and done this ages ago. But still, better late than never I suppose.

Tea was one of these burger things that I buy in hermetically-sealed packets. I cooked some rice and veg and then fried the burger with onions, mushrooms, garlic, rosemary and sage. When it was cooked, I made a thick gravy in the frying pan and then poured it over the rice, veg and burger.

And do you know what? it was absolutely delicious.

So now I’m off for an early night. I’m hoping for a good lie-in tomorrow as it’s Sunday.

And that reminds me.

For those of us living on the mainland, we put our clocks back one hour tonight. But if you are living in the UK, you put them back 200 years – back to the days of slavery, workhouses and stuffing kids up chimneys.

You don’t really understand what’s coming your way, do you?

Thursday 24th October 2019 – THAT VEGAN PIE …

… that I made just before leaving on my Trans-Atlantic voyage back in June, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, well, it’s absolutely delicious. I had my first slice of it today.

With jacket potatoes peas and carrots too, followed by a real and proper rice pudding, complete with skin. Yes, I had the oven on today so I may as well fill it, hey?

I went to the shops to buy some more stuff like carrots, of which I have run out. But not this morning though. Ohh no!

And for two reasons, the second of which was that this morning it was teeming down with rain and I wouldn’t send a dog out in that kind of weather, never mind myself.

But the first reason was much more realistic. In fact, I slept right through the alarms and didn’t stock my leg out of bed until about 10:30. That didn’t leave me much time.

Mind you, there’s a very good reason for the late awakening. I was wrestling with a rather knotty problem in Javascript and I was determined that I was going to crack on and resolve it regardless.

By the time that I was in a position to shout “Eureka” it was … errr … 03:10 and I didn’t even go to bed them but had one or two other things to do.

Nevertheless I was pleased that I had broken the back of the Javascript issue. That has cheered me up no end and I can move forward.

This morning after a very late breakfast I attended to a few issues on here.

The first issue is that with my dramatically-increased readership, most of whom come from the other side of the Atlantic, I seem to have fallen foul of the Federal Trade Commission in the USA.

Apparently I have to make a formal statement that I receive commissions from Amazon when someone purchases something using the links from my site.

Last year, I earned a total of about $30:00, which doesn’t even pay for two months’ worth of web hosting but nevertheless, there are no exceptions on small amounts.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that every few weeks I make mention of it on these pages to remind everyone to help me out by using my links to order stuff, but apparently that’s not sufficient. A formal statement is required.

So if you look carefully, you’ll notice that there’s an extra link above the title bar and the little yellow box to the right has increased somewhat in size, with extra text

Having dealt with that issue, it was time to stop for lunch.

No tomatoes and no hummus either, but there was some carrot soup in the freezer, left over from about two years ago, and it doesn’t keep for ever. So into the saucepan it went with a little extra water and some small pasta elbows.

And it was just as delicious as it was when I made it.

After that, I walked on up to LIDL. And the new keen, lean me strode out up the hill with no real effort. Losing that 8kgs has made me feel so much better and I’m pleased about that.

With no Caliburn for at least another fortnight I had to do a big shopping and maul it all by hand back home again. Two large bags full and although it was something of a struggle I made it home with no real complications. And as a reward I allowed myself a second coffee.

But I’ll stride out on Saturday to LIDL too for more goodies. I’ll keep on doing that every couple of days for now.

One thing that I should have mentioned is that I’ve had a letter from the hospital. My next appointment is on 15th November. That accords with the four-weekly routine which, while inconvenient and I wish that they would stretch it out, means that they didn’t find anything in all of these extra tests to worry them unduly.

But AT LAST I seem to have been able to arrange my appointments for a Friday. That’s much more interesting for me, not the least reason being that I can go to the shops and buy food for breakfast and the like when I arrive on Thursday which I couldn’t do when my appointments were on Monday so I arrived on a Sunday.

It was killing me, having to pack all of my food in on the train.

I mentioned to a few people that I would be there for the whole of that weekend and it looks as if a few of my friends are going to be coming along to Leuven for that weekend. If you happen to be free for that weekend and can make it to Leuven (an excellent rail service from Brussels National Airport 20 minutes away) let me know.

Now that I have a “contact me” button down in the bottom right corner of the screen you don’t even have to post a comment!

Tea was, as I mentioned, pie and potatoes followed by rice pudding. And then a very lonely late-night walk (because I was very late with tea) around the headland.

So what was I doing that was making me late?

Wrestling with yet another knotty Javascript problem. But I did keep at it until I was able to achieve the breakthrough. Now, I’m just a couple of inches away from being able to make a simple javascript menu that I can transport onto each of my web pages rather than having to make a menu for each individual page.

I’m not sure how it’s going to work, but I’ll tell you tomorrow. That’s because I’m going to crack on and work on it.

Chocks away!

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: rainstorm

Sunday 24th November 2019 – YOU’VE NO IDEA …

Friday 22nd November 2019 – WHAT ODDS …

Thursday 21st November 2019 – I WAS RIGHT …

Monday 11th November 2019 – WE ALMOST HAD …

Saturday 9th November 2019 – CALIBURN IS BACK.

Thursday 7th November 2019 – FATHER CHRISTMAS …

Wednesday 6th November 2019 – I DIDN’T …

Monday 4th November 2019 – I’M BACK …

Saturday 2nd November 2019 – I REALLY MUST …

Friday 1st November 2019 – I FOUND …

Wednesday 30th October 2019 – YET ANOTHER DAY …

Tuesday 29th October 2019 – CALIBURN WOULDN’T …

Monday 28th October 2019 – FOR PUDDING TONIGHT …

Saturday 26th October 2019 – NO CHANCE …

Thursday 24th October 2019 – THAT VEGAN PIE …

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