… a single pie hut in the whole of Normandy, from what I can see. This afternoon I was down at the Stade de la Plage in Donville les Bains for their second team’s match against La Brehalaise’s first team, and there wasn’t one there either.
Unbelievable!
So falling asleep in the middle of yet another film last night, I was awake at 06:00, even though it was a Sunday. I’ve not had a Sunday lie-in for quite a while, have I?
But I did take it quite easy this morning and didn’t do all that much – just mooched about on the laptop and eventually I had a shower.
You’ll remember that I’d bought some bread yesterday, and so I made some butties, and then I headed off.
Near one of the camp sites that I looked at a while ago, there’s another pile of dunes with a beach beyond it.
Negotiating the vipers (because there are signs warning us that they are about) I climbed over the dunes and found myself a cosy little niche in between a couple of dunes, relatively-well protected out of the wind.
And here I had my lunch – the usual vegan cheese, tomato and lettuce sandwiches with that salad dressing that I bought the other day
There’s a beautiful view from here right down the beach, past that miserable building that I visited a few weeks ago, and down to Granville and the head of the promontory.
That’s a walled city by the way, up there on the promontory. The old town of Granville. And there are some barracks over there dating from the 16th or 17th Century, long-abandoned and now being converted into apartments.
That’s another place where I’ve tried to contact an estate agent but, as you might expect, no-one ever called me back.
There’s an even better view from here across the bay to the Iles de Chausey. And what I’ve done is to mess about with the colours and the contrast to enhance the differences in the topography, and you can see everything so much more clearly.
The islands are inhabited, as you can probably tell from the buildings that you can see out there. A couple of hundred, if that, in the winter, but several thousand in the summer when all of the grockles arrive.
A couple of sailings each day out there in the summer, but in the winter you are lucky if there are a couple each week.
Now when was the last time that we featured a “ship of the day” on here?
It’s quite a regular occurrence when we are in Canada or near a main shipping lane, but this is the first time that I’ve ever seen anything worth recording in the Bay of Mont St Michel.
No idea what it is, of course, but it’s an impressive sight all the same. I only hope that there are more of them as time goes by.
Anyway, that’s enough of the excitememnt for just now. It’s the time of the year when the tide is going out further and further, and this is the first time that I’ve been able to see the oyster beds as they emerge from the sea.
And people down there working on them too.
But don’t believe anything that anyone tells you about oysters. It’s a myth. I had 12 on my wedding night, but only 9 of them worked!
There’s a weird building here at the foot of the cliffs. It’s a block of apartments that dates probably from the 1980s or thereabouts and it looks as if they ran out of money before they had quite finished it.
There’s an apartment for sale in there, and I had a look at the photos in the estate agent’s window a couple of days ago. It’s quite cheap for what it is, and that’s what is worrying. I’ve heard about buildings like this all over the holiday resorts of France.
One advantage of the apartments though is that they overlook the Stade de la Plage, the home ground of the Union Sportive des Mouettes de Donville.
Today’s match is their Second XI against the First XI of La Brehalaise, whose Third XI we saw yesterday evening. It’s in the Second Division of the Manche District League so I’m rather hoping that it’s going to be better than what was served up last night
And indeed it was. La Brehalaise were much better than the Union Sportive des Mouettes de Donville – in fact it took the latter about 20 minutes to get out of their own half after the kick-off.
La Brehalaise won at a canter, 3-0, with a beautiful header from a corner that would have graced the televisions of the Premier League, a hopeful lob into the penalty area with the bounce and the wind deceiving the the Union Sportive des Mouettes de Donville goalkeeper, and a speculative shot from about 25 yards out that swerved into the corner of the net on a gust of wind.
There was a penalty awarded when the the Union Sportive des Mouettes de Donville goalkeeper tripped a la Brehalaise attacker who was clean through on goal. A red-card offence certainly, but the referee didn’t even brandish a yellow card, much to the astonishment of everyone in the crowd. And to run salt into the would, the keeper saved the penalty.
And, as I said, no pie-hut either!
After the game I headed back to the beach for an hour to sunbathe as it really was quite warm. And then back here for coffee and tea.
Now it’s an early night. I wonder what film I’ll fall asleep in the middle of tonight.
